Home Fires in France

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

"No, oh no," answered the town notary reasonably. "The streets of Crouy were paved in comparatively recent times, not earlier than 1620."

"Oh, the Pilgrim Fathers!" cried the boy from Connecticut.

"And nothing ever happened here all that time?" queried the boy from California incredulously.

"Nothing," said the notary, "except a great deal of human life."

"Gee! what a lot o' that!" murmured the thoughtful boy from Virginia, his eyes widening imaginatively.

After the fact that it had been there so long, they were astonished by the fact that it was there at all, existing, as far as they could see, with no visible means of support beyond a casual sawmill or two. "How do all these people earn their living?" they always asked, putting the question in the same breath with the other inevitable one: "Where do the people live who care for all this splendid farming country? We see them working in the fields, these superb wheat-fields, or harvesting the oats, but you can drive your car for mile after mile and never see a human habitation. We thought Europe was a thickly populated place!"

Of course you know the obvious answer. The people who till the fields all live in the villages. If you inhabit such a settlement you hear every morning, very, very early, the slow, heavy tread of the big farm-horses and the rumble of the huge two-wheeled carts going out to work, and one of the picturesque sights of the sunset hour is the procession of the powerful Percherons, their drivers sitting sideways on their broad backs, plodding into the village, both horses and farmers with an inimitable air of leisurely philosophy; of having done a good day's work and letting it go at that; of attempting no last nervous whack at the accumulated pile of things to be done which always lies before every one; with an unembittered acceptance of the facts that there are but twenty-four hours in every day and that it is good to spend part of them eating savory hot soup with one's family. According to temperament, this appearance, only possible, apparently, when you have lived a thousand years in the same place, enormously reposes or enormously exasperates the American observer.

You do not see the cows going out to pasture, or coming back at night through the village streets, because those farmers who have a dairy live on the outskirts of the town, with their big square courtyards adjacent to the fields. The biggest farmhouse of this sort in Crouy is lodged in the remnants of the medieval castle of the old seigneurs (symbol of modern France!) where at night the cows ramble in peaceably through the old gate where once the portcullis hung, and stand chewing their cud about the great courtyards whence marauding knights in armor once clattered out to rob.

Of course this arrangement whereby country folk all live in villages turns inside out and upside down most of those conditions which seem to us inevitable accompaniments of country life; for instance, the isolation and loneliness of the women and children. There is no isolation possible here, when, to shake hands with the woman of the next farm, you have only to lean out of your front window and have her lean out of hers, when your children go to get water from the fountain along with all the other children of the region, when you are less than five minutes' walk from church and the grocery-store, when your children can wait till the school-bell is ringing before snatching up their books to go to school.

You do not have to wait for your mail till some one can go to town or till the R. F. D. man brings it around six hours after it has arrived in town. The village mail-carrier brings it to you directly it arrives, just as though you lived in a city. You do not have to wait for your community news till it filters slowly to your remote door by the inaccurate medium of the irresponsible grocery-boy. The moment anything of common interest happens, the town crier walks up your street. At the sound of his announcing drum or bell you drop your work, stick your head out of your door, and hear at once, hot off the griddle, as soon as any one, that there will be an auction of cows at the Brissons on Saturday next, that poor sick old Madame Mantier has at last passed away, or that school reopens a week from Monday and all children must be ready to go. And if one of the children breaks his arm, or if a horse has the colic, or your chimney gets on fire, you do not suffer the anguished isolation of American country life. The whole town swarms in to help you, in a twinkling of an eye. In fact, for my personal taste, I must confess that the whole town seemed only too ready to swarm in, on any friendly pretext at all. But then, I have back of me many generations of solitary-minded farmer ancestors, living sternly and grimly to themselves, and not a thousand years of really sociable community life.