Woman and Artist

AUTHOR OF JOHN BULL AND CO. JOHN BULL AND HIS ISLAND JONATHAN AND HIS CONTINENT ETC.
LONDON FREDERICK WARNE & CO. AND NEW YORK
I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME TO MY WIFE
The English, whose knowledge of France consists in a fair acquaintance of that part of Paris lying between the Madeleine and the Faubourg Montmartre, affirm that family life is unknown on our side of the Channel, putting forward as proof the fact that the French language cannot boast of possessing the word home , that appeals so strongly to the British heart. Their conclusion is sublime: Since the French have no such word, they say, it is very evident that they have not the thing. As to the word itself, I am inclined to think they may be right; we have not, or rather we have no longer, a perfect equivalent for the English expression, as our pretty word foyer is only used in pretentious or poetical language. In ordinary conversation the Frenchman does not refer to his foyer . Il rentre à la maison, chez lui. M. Perrichon, alone, returns to his foyer . Our old French possessed an equivalent for the English word home . It was a substantive that is still with us, but we have it to-day in the form of a preposition—I mean the word chez , which is no other than the word case. The Frenchman of olden times said: Je rentre en chez moi.
But enough of philology.
I own that an apartment on the fifth floor, au dessus de l'entresol , would not suggest to the heart what the home does to every English mind. But the piquancy and humour of this malevolent criticism, founded, like all international prejudices, on the most crass ignorance and the narrowest patriotism, consists in the fact, that in all parts of London, at the present time, enormous barracks of eight and ten storeys, called flats, are being raised, where the English, tired of the tyranny of domestics, seek refuge, at the terrible risk of likening to Chicago, not only that part of the city devoted to business, but all the pretty, peaceful neighbourhoods, that made London, in summer, the most charming city in the world. They offend the eye, even in St. John's Wood and Hampstead, etc.