A writer in the _Nouvelle Revue Française_ drops a remark which it does
one good to read. He says that in the old French villages on the Picardy
front all that the English have taught the countryfolk in five years of
cohabitation is to eat pickles with their boiled beef. Very likely this
is a humorous perversion of the truth; but I should like to believe it.
Not from any personal interest in pickles, though that will seem odd, and
perhaps incredible, to my French friends, who seem to think that every
Englishman must be a pickle-eater—just as we English used to think every
Frenchman ate frogs. No doubt, however, this French generalization is
fairly accurate; we are a nation of pickle-eaters, and if any one asks
why, I guess the answer is cold beef. Anyhow, the idea has fascinated the
French mind. Among the English characteristics of which Jules Lemaître
once gave a list (from hearsay, which he thought, good, easy man, as
authentic evidence as coming to see England for himself) I remember he
mentions “Les _pickles_.” And it is the one English characteristic that
has infected the Picards!
My reason for rejoicing is that they have not been infected by more
than one, that in spite of all temptations, etc., they remain
(pickles excepted) true Picards. There have been times (particularly
in mid-eighteenth century) when the French have shown a tendency to
Anglomania. Let us be glad that these are over. Probably the French
Revolution settled that point, as it settled so many others, by isolating
France for the time being, and making her the common enemy. More than
one of the Terrorists were Picards by race, but you may be sure they
never ate pickles. But cohabitation may bring about the same result as
isolation, in a different way. Our armies have lived for five years with
the French; both natives and visitors have had ample opportunities for
observing each other’s characteristics; and I like to think that both
have parted with the profound conviction that, on either side, these
are inimitable. Condiments, of course, excepted. They have adopted our
pickles, and we have taken their _sauce bigarade_, which is excellent
with wild duck. Condiments, by the way, include the linguistic sort.
We have seen the delight with which Lemaître wrote down that strange,
abrupt, tart English word “pickles” in his French text. So some of our
own scribblers wantonly and wickedly flavour their writings with an
occasional French phrase, because it seems to them to give a piquancy,
a zest. These apart, let us by all means admire one another’s qualities
without seeking to interchange them. Let us jealously preserve our own
characteristics, our own type, like the Picardy villagers. National
peculiarities are the perpetual joy of travel (except when one side wants
the window down and the other up), the _bouquet_ of literature, the salt
of life.
Talking of travel, we have been having a correspondence in _The Times_
on the lavatories and the closed windows on the P.L.M. I am not using
that railway myself just now, and I confess I like to see that here again
the French remain obstinately French. France is endeared to us, like
any other friend, by its weaknesses as well as its virtues; it would,
for many of us, not be the old friend that we know and love without its
occasional stuffiness and its occasional smells. Louis Veuillot once
wrote a book called “Les Odeurs de Paris.” We have all smelt them, and
should hardly recognize our Paris without them—though they must have
had more pungency, a more racy, romantic flavour in Balzac’s Paris, the
Paris of our dreams. Nowadays for the rich Balzacian smells you will
have to visit some of the provincial towns of his novels, and so your
pilgrimage will combine a literary with all factory interest. I know
of one old Burgundian town—I will not name it, for obvious reasons—not
mentioned, I fancy, by Balzac, quite untouched by time, with pepper-pot
towers, a river in a deep ravine, and well worth a literary pilgrimage
if only for its associations with Mme. de Sévigné and the Président de
Brosses, where you have the added delight of the richest medieval odours
powerfully assisted by a tannery—an unrivalled combination! Why do so
many Englishmen grumble at these things instead of appreciating them
æsthetically, as accompaniments of the French scene, as part of that
varied experience which we call “abroad”? Or why do they explain them
on the illiberal assumption of some inherent inferiority in the French
character?
I find a typical specimen of this kind of explanation in Hazlitt’s
“Notes of a Journey through France and Italy,” made about a century ago,
when France was the very France (think of it!) that was being observed,
and about to be described, by Balzac. One would have thought that the
Londoner of 1824 (who must have been pretty well used to smells at home)
would have found some other explanation than the physiological and
psychological inferiority of the French. But hear him. “A Frenchman’s
senses and understanding are alike insensible to pain—he recognizes
(happily for himself) the existence only of that which adds to his
importance or his satisfaction. He is delighted with perfumes, but passes
over the most offensive smells and will not lift up his little finger to
remove a general nuisance, for it is none to him.” To which he appends
a note:—“One would think that a people so devoted to perfumes, who deal
in essences and scents, and have fifty different sorts of snuffs, would
be equally nice, and offended at the approach of every disagreeable
odour. Not so. They seem to have no sense of the disagreeable in smells
or tastes, as if their heads were stuffed with a cold, and hang over a
dunghill, as if it were a bed of roses, or swallow the most detestable
dishes with the greatest relish. The nerve of their sensibility is bound
up at the point of pain.... They make the best of everything (which is
a virtue)—and treat the worst with levity or complaisance (which is a
vice).”
Well, well. When this was written French and English had not long ceased
to be at war, and Hazlitt was never a sweet-tempered man. But you can
still find the censorious Englishman who is ready decisively to mark
off French characteristics into “virtues” and “vices,” according to his
own English standard. There may, for all I know, be some Frenchman who
gives us tit for tat. This type of critic is tiresome enough; but there
is another that seems to me quite intolerable, the critic who detests
all national peculiarities as such, and would level down all humanity to
one monotonous level of sameness. As though uniformity were not already
the plague of the modern world! We men all wear the same hat (despite
the efforts of the _Daily Mail_), women all powder their noses in the
same way, and the “cinema palaces” all show the same films, with the
same “Mary” and the same “Dug.” For heaven’s sake, let us cling to our
national peculiarities!
And that is why I welcome the intelligence that the Picards have taken
over nothing from us but our pickles, and that the French travellers on
the P.L.M. still insist on keeping the window up. Let our enthusiasts
for a uniform world ponder these facts. And it is a relief to think that
they can never unify national landscapes. The village green, the cottage
gardens, the chalk downs, the chines, the red coombs will always be
English. The long straight _route nationale_ and the skinny fowls that
are always straying across it, the poplar-bordered streams, the trim
vines ranked along the hill-side, the heavily-accoutred gendarme and the
fat farmer in the stiff indigo blouse hobnobbing at the _estaminet_,
these will always be French. Oh, but I would give something to see that
indigo blouse again, and have a morning chat with the farmer! “Hé! père
Martin, ça va toujours bien? Pas mal, m’sieu. Et la récolte? Dame! je ne
m’en plains pas ... à la votre, m’sieu!” They may take our pickles, if
they will, but let them remain themselves, our old French friends.