A Padre in France

by George A. Birmingham

I have always wondered why Madame took English officers to board in her house. She did not want the money we paid her, for she and Monsieur were well off. Indeed she asked so little of us, and fed us so well, that she cannot possibly have made a profit. And we must have been a nuisance to her.

In England Madame would have been called “house proud.” She loved every stick of her fine old-fashioned furniture. Polishing of stairs and floors was a joy to her. We tramped in and out in muddy boots. We scattered tobacco ashes. We opened bedroom windows, even on wet nights, and rain came in. We used monstrous and unheard-of quantities of water. Yet no sooner had one guest departed than Madame grew impatient to receive another.

On one point alone Madame was obstinate. She objected in the strongest way to baths in bedrooms. As there was no bathroom in the house, this raised a difficulty. Madame’s own practice—she once explained it to me—was to take her bath on the evening of the first Monday in every month—in the kitchen, I think. My predecessors and my contemporaries refused to be satisfied without baths. Madame compromised. If they wanted baths they must descend to le cave, a deep underground cellar where Monsieur kept wine.

I, and I believe I alone of all Madame’s guests, defeated her. I should like to believe that she gave in to me because she loved me; but I fear that I won my victory by unfair means. I refused to understand one word that Madame said, either in French or English, about baths. I treated the subject in language which I am sure was dark to her. I owned a bath of my own and gave my servant orders to bring up sufficient water every morning, whatever Madame said. He obeyed me, and I washed myself, more or less. Madame took her defeat well. She collected quantities of old blankets, rugs, sacks, and bed quilts. She spread them over the parts of the floor where my bath was placed. I tried, honourably, to splash as little as possible and always stood on a towel while drying myself.

After all Madame had reason on her side. Water is bad for polished floors, and it is very doubtful whether the human skin is any the better for it. Most of our rules of hygiene are foolish. We think a daily bath is wholesome. We clamour for fresh air. We fuss about drains. Madame never opened a window and had a horror of a courant d’air. The only drain connected with the house ran into the well from which our drinking water came. Yet Madame had celebrated her golden wedding and was never ill. Monsieur and Marie were even older and could still thoroughly enjoy a jour de fête.

Madame had a high sense of duty towards her guests. She and Marie cooked wonderful meals for us and even made pathetic efforts to produce le pudding, a thing strange to them which they were convinced we loved. She mended our clothes and sewed on buttons. She pressed us, anxiously, to remain tranquille for a proper period after meals.

She did her best to teach us French. She tried to induce me—she actually had induced one of my predecessors—to write French exercises in the evenings. She made a stringent rule that no word of English was ever to be spoken at meals. I think that this was a real self-denial to Madame. She knew a little English—picked up sixty years before when she spent one term in a school near Folkestone. She liked to air it; but for the sake of our education she denied herself. We used to sit at dinner with a dictionary—English-French and French-English—on the table. We referred to it when stuck, and on the whole we got on well in every respect except one.

Madame had an eager desire to understand and appreciate English jokes, and of all things a joke is the most difficult to translate. A fellow-lodger once incautiously repeated to me a joke which he had read in a paper. It ran thus: “First British Soldier (in a French Restaurant): ‘Waiter, this ’am’s ’igh. ’Igh ’am. Compris?’ Second British Soldier: ‘You leave it to me, Bill. I know the lingo. Garçon, Je suis.’”

I laughed. Madame looked at me and at W., my fellow-lodger, and demanded a translation of the joke. I referred the matter to W. His French was, if possible, worse than mine, but it was he who had started the subject. “Ham,” I said to him, “is jambon. Go ahead.” W. went ahead, but “high” in the sense he wanted did not seem to be in the dictionary. I had a try when W. gave up and began with an explanation of the cockney’s difficulty with the letter “h.” Madame smiled uncomprehendingly. W., who had studied the dictionary while I talked, made a fresh start at “je suis.” “Je suis—I am. Jambon—ham, c’est à dire ‘’am’ à Londres.’” We worked away all through that meal. At supper, Madame, still full of curiosity, set us at it again.

We pursued that joke for several days until we were all exhausted, and Madame, politely, said she saw the point, though she did not and never will. I do not believe that joke can be translated into French. Months afterwards I had as fellow-lodger a man who spoke French well and fluently. I urged him to try if he could make Madame understand. He failed.