Madame was immensely interested in food and we talked about marketing and cookery every day. I came, towards the end of my stay, to have a fair knowledge of kitchen French. I could have attended cookery lectures with profit. I could even have taught a French servant how to stew a rabbit in such a way that it appeared at table brown, with thick brown sauce and a flavour of red wine. The marketing for the family was done by Madame and Marie, Marie in a high, stiff, white head-dress, carrying a large basket.
On the subject of prices Madame was intensely curious. She wanted to know exactly what everything cost in England and Ireland. I used to write home for information, and then we did long and confusing sums, translating stones or pounds into kilos and shillings into francs; Monsieur intervening occasionally with information about the rate of exchange at the moment. Madame insisted on taking this into account in comparing the cost of living in the two countries. Then we used to be faced with problems which I regard as insoluble.
Perhaps a sum of this kind might be set in an arithmetic paper for advanced students.“Butter is 2s. 1d. a pound. A kilo is rather more than two pounds. The rate of exchange is 27·85. What would that butter cost in France?”
We had an exciting time when the municipal authorities of the town in which we lived introduced fixed prices. Madame, who is an entirely sensible woman, was frankly sceptical from the start about the possibility of regulating prices. Gendarmes paraded the market-place, where on certain days the countrywomen sat in rows, their vegetables, fowl, eggs, and butter exposed for sale. They declined, of course, to accept the fixed prices. Madame and her friends, though they hated being overcharged, recognised the strength of the countrywomen’s position. There was a combination between the buyers and sellers.
The gendarmes were out-witted in various ways. One plan—Madame explained it to me with delight—was to drop a coin, as if by accident, into the lap of the countrywoman who was selling butter. Ten minutes later the purchaser returned and bought the butter under the eyes of a satisfied policeman at the fixed price. The original coin represented the difference between what the butter woman was willing to accept and what the authorities thought she ought to get. That experiment in municipal control of prices lasted about a month. Then the absurdity of the thing became too obvious. The French are much saner than the English in this. They do not go on pretending to do things once it becomes quite plain that the things cannot be done.
Food shortage—much more serious now—was beginning to be felt while I lived with Madame. There were difficulties about sugar, and Monsieur had to give up a favourite kind of white wine. But neither he nor Madame complained much; though they belonged to the rentier class and were liable to suffer more than those whose incomes were capable of expansion. No one, so far as I know, appealed to them to practise economy in a spirit of lofty patriotism. They simply did with a little less of everything with a shrug of the shoulders and a smiling reference to the good times coming après la guerre. And, on occasion, economy was forgotten and we feasted.
One of the last days I spent in Madame’s house was New Year’s Day, 1917. I and my fellow-lodger, another padre, were solemnly invited to a dinner that night. It was a family affair. All Madame’s nieces, married and single, were there, and their small children, two grand-nieces and a grand-nephew. Madame’s one nephew, wounded in the defence of Verdun, was there.
Our usual table was greatly enlarged. The folding doors between the drawing-room and dining-room were flung open. We had a blaze of lamps and candles. We began eating at 6.30 p.m.; we stopped shortly after 10 p.m. But this was no brutal gorge. We ate slowly, with discrimination. We paused long between the courses. Once or twice we smoked. Once the grand-niece and grand-nephew recited for us, standing up, turn about, on their chairs, and declaiming with fluency and much gesture what were plainly school-learnt poems. One of Madame’s nieces, passing into the drawing-room, played us a pleasant tune on the piano. At each break I thought that dinner was over. I was wrong time after time. We talked, smoked, listened, applauded, and then more food was set before us.
There were customs new to me. At the appearance of the plum pudding—a very English pudding—we all rose from our seats and walked in solemn procession round the table. Each of us, as we passed the sacred dish, basted it with a spoonful of blazing rum, and, as we basted, made our silent wish. We formed pigs out of orange skins and gave them lighted matches for tails. By means of these we discovered which of us would be married or achieve other good fortune in the year to come. We drank five different kinds of wine, a sweet champagne coming by itself, a kind of dessert wine, at the very end of dinner, accompanied by small sponge cakes.
The last thing of all was, oddly enough, tea. Like most French tea it was tasteless, but we remedied that with large quantities of sugar and we ate with it a very rich cake soaked in syrup, which would have deprived the fiercest Indian tea of any flavour.