“Ten francs, Monsieur le Colonel,” replied the dame without a blush.
“Wrap it up and put it in my carriage,” was the reply, and it was done.
“Why did you ask him ten francs when you only asked me five to begin with, and intended to take two?” demanded my landlady, purely that I might hear the answer.
“Eh? Oh, the young man has plenty of money—it is for his little woman, I suppose. We poor must live, and I must make my profit. But here is one just like it—rather better. Shall I say three francs?”
“Two.”
“Well, it must be so. But I lose money.”
The old dame made a good hundred per cent. as it was.
As it was in lobsters so it was in everything. The price offered in every instance was about two-fifths of the price asked and even then it was not certain but that too much was not paid. But when a French market woman and a French housekeeper come together there is not going to be very much swindling. Both know their business and whoever gets the best in the encounter may congratulate herself upon possessing a great deal of acumen.
The servants in French families are now tolerably attentive and obliging, but their bearing depends very much upon the political condition of the country. Every Frenchman is a politician, and they have all the shades of politics down to the humblest, and the lower orders, as elsewhere, take their politics from their superiors. The retainers in the families of the old nobility are Monarchists to a man, and hate the Republic with a hatred that the dispossessed nobility themselves do not feel. The waiters at the cafés and those who entered domestic service latterly are all virulent Republicans, disagreeably so. Especially was this true just after the downfall of the Third Napoleon, and after the Commune. A lady of my acquaintance, who got out of Paris just before the Commune, returned and rearranged her household after order was restored. Her daughter had engaged servants, and the good old lady rang for one.
PARISIAN WASHING.