BOURRON--_continued._
I will now say something about my numerous acquaintances at Bourron.
After three summer holidays spent in this friendly little spot I can
boast of a pretty large visiting list, the kind of list requiring no
cards or ceremonious procedure. My hostess, a Frenchwoman, and myself
used to drop in for a chat with this neighbour and that whenever we
passed their way, always being cheerily welcomed and always pressed to
stay a little longer.
The French peasant is the most laborious, at the same time the most
leisurely, individual in the world. Urgent indeed must be those
farming operations that prevent him from enjoying a talk. Conversation,
interchange of ideas, give and take by word of mouth, are as necessary
to the Frenchman’s well-being as oxygen to his lungs.
“Man,” writes Montesquieu, “is described as a sociable animal.” From
this point of view it appears to me that the Frenchman may be called
more of a man than others; he is first and foremost a man, since he
seems especially made for society.
Elsewhere the same great writer adds:--“You may see in Paris individuals
who have enough to live upon for the rest of their days, yet they labour
so arduously as to shorten their days, in order, as they say, to assure
themselves of a livelihood.” These two marked characteristics are as
true of the French peasant now-a-days as of the polite society described
in the “Lettres Persanes.” In the eighteenth century cultivated people
did little else but talk. Morning, noon and night, their epigrammatic
tongues were busy. Conversation in historic salons became a fine
art. There are no such literary côteries in our time. What with one
excitement and another, the Parisian world chats but has no time for
real conversation. Perhaps for _Gauloiseries_, true Gallic salt, we must
now go to the unlettered, the sons of the soil, whose ancestors were
boors when wit sparkled among their social superiors.
Here are one or two types illustrating both characteristics, excellent
types in their way of the small peasant proprietor hereabouts, a class
having no counterpart or approximation to a counterpart in England.
The first visit I describe was paid one evening to an old gardener whom
I will call the Père A--. Bent partly with toil, partly with age,
you would have at once supposed that his working days were well over,
especially on learning his circumstances, for sole owner he was of the
little domain to which he had now retired for the day. Of benevolent
aspect, shrewd, every inch alive despite infirmities, he received his
neighbour and her English guest with rustic but cordial urbanity, at
once entering into conversation. With evident pride and pleasure he
watched my glances at premises and garden, house and outbuildings
ramshackle enough, even poverty-stricken to look at, here not an
indication of comfortable circumstances much less of independent means;
the bit of land half farm, half garden, however, was fairly well kept
and of course productive.
“Yes, this dwelling is mine and the two hectares (four acres four
hundred and odd feet), aye,” he added self-complacently, “and I have a
little money besides.”
“Yet you live here all by yourself and still work for wages?” I asked.
His reply was eminently characteristic. “I work for my children.” These
children he told me were two grown up sons, one of them being like
himself a gardener, both having work. Thus in order to hoard up a little
more for two able-bodied young men, here was a bent, aged man living
penuriously and alone, his only companion being a beautiful and
evidently much petted donkey. I ventured to express an English view
of the matter, namely, the undesirability of encouraging idleness and
self-indulgence in one’s children by toiling and moiling for them in old
age.
He nodded his head.
“You are right, all that you say is true, but so it is with me. I must
work for my children.”
And thus blindly are brought about the parricidal tragedies that Zola,
Guy de Maupassant and other novelists have utilized in fiction, and
with which we are familiarized in French criminal reports--parents and
grandparents got rid of for the sake of their coveted hoardings.
Thus also are generated in the rich and leisured classes that intense
selfishness of the rising generation so movingly portrayed in M.
Hervieu’s play, “La Course du Flambeau.” No one who has witnessed Mme.
Réjane’s presentment of the adoring, disillusioned mother can ever
forget it.
On leaving, the Père A---- presented us with grapes and pears, carefully
selecting the finest for his English visitor.
At the gate I threw a Parthian dart.
“Don’t work too hard,” I said, whereupon came the burden of his song:
“One must work for one’s children.”
This good neighbour could neither read nor write, a quite exceptional
case in these days. Our second visit was made to a person similarly
situated, but belonging to a different order.
Madame B----, a widow, was also advanced in years and also lived by
herself on her little property, consisting of walled-in cottage and
outhouses, with straggling garden or rather orchard, garden and field in
one.
This good woman is what country folks in these parts call rich. I have
no doubt that an English farmeress in her circumstances would have the
neatest little parlour, a tidy maid to wait upon her, and most likely
take afternoon tea in a black silk gown. Our hostess here wore the dress
of a poor but respectable working woman. Her interior was almost as bare
and primitive as that of the Boer farmhouse in the Paris Exhibition.
Although between six and seven o’clock, there was no sign whatever of
preparation for an evening meal. Indeed on every side things looked
poverty-stricken. Not a penny had evidently been spent upon kitchen or
bedrooms for years and years, the brick floor of both being bare, the
furniture having done duty for generations.
This “rentière,” or person living upon independent means, did not match
her sordid surroundings. Although toil-worn, tanned and wrinkled, her
face “brown as the ribbed sea-sand,” there was a certain refinement
about look, speech and manner, distinguishing her from the good man her
neighbour. After a little conversation I soon found out that she had
literary tastes.
“Living alone and finding the winter evenings long I hire books from a
lending library at Fontainebleau,” she said.
I opened my eyes in amazement. Seldom indeed had I heard of a peasant
proprietor in France caring for books, much less spending money upon
them.
“And what do you read?” I asked.
“Anything I can get,” was the reply. “Madame’s husband,” here she looked
at my friend, “has kindly lent me several.”
Among these I afterwards found had been Zola’s “Rome” and “Le Désastre”
by the brothers Margueritte.
Like the Père A---- she had married children and entertained precisely
the same notion of parental duty. The few sous spent upon such
beguilement of long winter nights were most likely economized by some
little deprivation. There is something extremely pathetic in this
patriarchal spirit, this uncompromising, ineradicable resolve to hand
down a little patrimony not only intact but enlarged.
“Our peasants live too sordidly,” observed a Frenchman to me a day or
two later. “They carry thrift to the pitch of avarice and vice. Zola’s
‘La Terre’ is not without foundation on fact.”
And excellent as is the principle of forethought, invaluable as is
the habit of laying by for a rainy day, I have at last come to the
conclusion that of the two national weaknesses, French avarice
and English lavishness and love of spending, the latter is more in
accordance with progress and the spirit of the age.
In another part of the village we called upon a hale old body of
seventy-seven, who not only lived alone and did everything for herself
indoors but the entire work of a market garden, every inch of the two
and a half acres being, of course, her own. Piled against an inner
wall we saw a dozen or so faggots each weighing, we were told, half a
hundredweight. Will it be believed that this old woman had picked up
and carried from the forest on her back every one of these faggots? The
poor, or rather those who will, are allowed to glean firewood in all the
State forests of France. Let no tourist bestow a few sous upon aged men
and women bearing home such treasure-trove! Quite possibly the dole may
affront some owner of houses and lands.
As we inspected her garden, walls covered with fine grapes, tomatoes and
melons, of splendid quality, to say nothing of vegetables in profusion,
it seemed all the more difficult to reconcile facts so incongruous. Here
was a market gardener on her own account, mistress of all she surveyed,
glad as a gipsy to pick up sticks for winter use. But the burden of her
story was the same:
“Il faut travailler pour ses enfants” (one must work for one’s
children), she said.
All these little farm-houses are so many homely fortresses, cottage and
outhouses being securely walled in, a precaution necessary with aged,
moneyed folks living absolutely alone.
A fourth visit was paid to a charming old Philémon and Baucis, the best
possible specimens of their class. The husband lay in bed, ill of an
incurable malady, and spotlessly white were his tasselled nightcap,
shirt and bedclothes. Very clean and neat too was the bedroom opening
on to the little front yard, beneath each window of the one-storeyed
dwelling being a brilliant border of asters. The housewife also was a
picture of tidiness, her cotton gown carefully patched and scrupulously
clean. This worthy couple are said to be worth fifty thousand francs.
The wife, a sexagenarian, does all the work of the house besides
waiting on her good man, to whom she is devoted, but a married son
and daughter-in-law share her duties at night. Here was no touch of
sordidness or suggestion of “La Terre,” instead a delightful picture of
rustic dignity and ease. The housewife sold us half a bushel of pears,
these two like their neighbours living by the produce of their small
farm and garden.
I often dropped in upon Madame B---- to whom even morning calls were
acceptable.
On the occasion of my farewell visit she had something pretty to
say about one of my own novels, a French translation of which I had
presented her.
“I suppose,” I said, “that you have some books of your own?”
“Here they are,” she said, depositing an armful on the table. “But I
have never read much, and mostly _bibelots_” (trifles.)
Her poor little library consisted of _bibelots_ indeed, a history of
Jeanne d’Arc for children, and half a dozen other works, mostly school
prizes of the kind awarded before school prizes in France were worth the
paper on which they were printed.