French Ways and Their Meaning

by Edith Wharton

The universal existence of taste, and of the standard it creates—it insists on—explains many of the things that strike Americans on first arriving in France.

It is the reason, for instance, why the French have beautiful stone quays along the great rivers on which their cities are built, and why noble monuments of architecture, and gardens and terraces, have been built along these quays. The French have always felt and reverenced the beauty of their rivers, and known the value, artistic and hygienic, of a beautiful and well-kept river-front in the heart of a crowded city.

When industrialism began its work of disfigurement in the great cities of the world, long reaches of the Thames were seized upon by the factory-builder, and London has only by a recent effort saved a short stretch of her river front; even so, from the Embankment, whether at Westminster or Chelsea, one looks across at ugliness, untidiness and squalor.

When industrialism came to the wise old Latin cities—Paris, Lyons, Bordeaux, Florence—their river banks were already firmly and beautifully built up, and the factory chimneys had to find a footing in the outskirts. Any American with eyes to see, who compares the architectural use to which Paris has put the Seine with the wasteful degradation of the unrivalled twin river-fronts of New York, may draw his own conclusions as to the sheer material advantage of taste in the creation of a great city.

Perhaps the most curious instance of taste-blindness in dealing with such an opportunity is to be found in Boston, where Beacon Street calmly turned its wealthy back to the bay, and fringed with clothes-lines the shores that might have made of Boston one of the most beautifully situated cities in the world. In this case, industry did not encroach or slums degrade. The Boston aristocracy appropriated the shore of the bay for its own residential uses, but apparently failed to notice that the bay was there.

Taste, also—the recognition of a standard—explains the existence of such really national institutions as the French Academy, and the French national theatre, the Théâtre Français. The history of the former, in particular, throws a light on much that is most distinctively French in the French character.

It would be difficult for any one walking along the Quai Malaquais, and not totally blind to architectural beauty, not to be charmed by the harmony of proportion and beauty of composition of a certain building with curved wings and a small central dome that looks across the Seine at the gardens of the Louvre and the spires of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois.

That building, all elegance, measure and balance, from its graceful cupola to the stately stone vases surmounting the lateral colonnades—that building is the old "Collège des Quatre Nations," the Institute of France, and the home of the French Academy.

In 1635, at a time when France was still struggling with the heavy inheritance of feudalism, a bad man and great statesman, the mighty Cardinal Richelieu, paused in his long fight with the rebellious vassals of the crown to create a standard of French speech: "To establish the rules of the language, and make French not only elegant, but capable of dealing with the arts and sciences."

Think of the significance of such an act at such a moment! France was a welter of political and religious dissension; everything in the monarchy, and the monarchy itself, was in a state of instability. Austria and Spain menaced it from without, the great vassals tore it asunder from within. During the Great Assizes of Auvergne some of the most powerful of these nobles were tried, punished and stripped of their monstrous privileges; and the record of their misdeeds reads like a tale of Sicilian brigandage and Corsican vendetta.