Home Fires in France

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

And, yes, the clothes are clean! I know it runs counter to all our fixed ideas and what we are taught in domestic-science classes. I don't pretend to explain it but the fact remains that clothes soaped and beaten and rinsed in cold water, boiled in a boiler over the open fire and dried on the grass, are of the most dazzling whiteness. It is just another wholesome reminder that there are all kinds of ways to kill a cat, and that our own, natural and inevitable as it seems to us, may not even be the most orthodox.

Another such reminder is the fashion in which they manage baths in Crouy. There are not (you can hear, can't you, the supercilious Anglo-Saxon tourist saying, "Of course there are not"?) any bathrooms in the houses, nor in the one little inn. And yet the people take plenty of baths, and in big porcelain bathtubs too, bigger and deeper and fuller of hot water than those we have in our houses.

Among the many curious little industries of the place is the établissement des bains. As you go down the main street of a morning you stop in and fill up a little printed card stating that you wish a hot (or cold) plain (or perfumed or sulphur or starch or what not) bath, at such and such an hour. The little old woman in charge (note that this is another way for a little old woman to earn an honest living) notes your hour, and stokes up her stove according to the schedule of the day. When you arrive you are shown into an immaculately clean tiled bathroom, with an enormous tub, lined with a clean sheet (it has been definitely decided by doctors that this precaution obviates any possibility of contagion) and filled with clear, sparkling hot water. You can rent your towels for two cents apiece, and buy a bit of soap for three cents, or you may bring them from home, if you prefer. Of course, being unused to this particular way of killing the cat, you feel rather foolish and queer to be taking a bath in a community bathtub instead of in your own. But the bath is a fine one; with a cold rub-down at the end, there is no danger of taking cold; and as you dress, glowing and refreshed, you cannot put out of your mind some such colloquy as this:

"Yes, of course I prefer a bathtub in my own house. Everybody would. But suppose I haven't money enough to have one? At home, in a town like this, you can only get a bath, or give it to your children, if you have capital enough to buy, install, and keep up a bathroom of your own. Here you can have an even better one, any time you can spare fifteen cents in cash. Which method produces the bigger area of clean skin in a given community?"

You usually end your colloquy by quoting to yourself, laughingly, the grandly American-minded remark of the boy from Illinois, whose reaction to the various eye-openers about him was thus formulated:

"Do you know, the thing we want to do at home is to keep all the good ways of doing this we've got already, and then add all the French ones too."

We laughed over the youthful self-confidence of that ambition, but, as the boy from Illinois would say, "Honestly, do you know, there is something in it."

In one of the few large, handsome houses in Crouy there is something else I wish we might import into America. Very simply, with no brass band of a formal organization, secretaries, or reports, the younger girls of the town are brought together to learn how to sew and cook and keep their household accounts. The splendid park which looks so lordly with its noble trees is only the playground for the little girls in gingham aprons in the intervals of their study; and the fine, high-ceilinged, spacious old salon, a veritable Henry James room, is employed in anything but a Henry James manner as the workroom where all the children from the poorer houses round about sit in the sunshine, setting beautiful fine stitches and chattering like magpies.

A large room at the side has been fitted up—oh, so long before domestic science "struck" America—as a kitchen, and here the little girls daily prepare their own luncheons, after having, turn by turn, done the marketing and made up their small accounts under the supervision of an expert teacher. Their rosy cheeks and bright eyes testify to the good training which their own mothers received in this very room, in these very essentials of life.

The gracious, gray-haired owner of the beautiful home has always been so busy with her school and workroom that she almost never runs into Paris, although she is not more than a couple of hours away.