And yet there is much to be said in favour of French thrift, not only for the good it brings to the country, which is immense, but still more for the inappreciable advantages it affords the family, above all, the girls. Go to Ireland and observe with lamentation and indignation the havoc made of home-life, of family dignity, of the lives of unfortunate girls, by the miserable wastefulness of parents. On all sides you will hear sad tales of girls, obliged to work hard for shocking rates of payment, who were brought up in foolish luxury, whose parents “entertained” in that thriftless, splash, Irish fashion, drank champagne, drove horses, when the French of the same class would be leading the existence of humdrum small burgesses, depriving themselves of all that was not absolutely necessary for their position, and teaching their children the art of counting, of saving, and of laudable privation. The Irish way is the jollier, I admit, but it is a cowardly, selfish way, for it is the children who always have to pay the piper, and, more often than not, the unhappy trades-folk who supply these gay and festive spendthrifts.
We laugh at the counted lumps of sugar in France, forgetting that sugar here is sixpence a pound, and becomes an item to be considered. I remember once feeling some sympathy with the French carefulness of sugar. An Irish girl, whom I did not know, somewhere in the twenties, and consequently supposed to conduct herself like a reasonable being, thrust accidentally upon me for hospitality for a single night,—which, owing to unforeseen circumstances, was prolonged to ten or twelve days,—did me the honour to consume a pound of sugar a day at my expense. In every cup of tea she melted nearly a dozen large French lumps of sugar, and she drank many cups in the day; also she ate sugar continually as other women munch sweets, and as she disliked cold red wine, she insisted on heating it with quantities of sugar until it was turned into a syrup. When my grocer sent in his monthly account, with sugar at sixpence a pound in enormous excess, I felt it would be a singular advantage for Ireland if a little judicious thrift were practised in Irish homes. The young lady’s father went bankrupt shortly afterwards, and I cannot say I was at all surprised. He was an ordinary burgess, who worked hard to maintain a large and extravagant family, and my guest once told me that her sister frequently ran up a bill at the florist’s for boutonnières to the sum of thirty shillings a month, which her father had to pay. French thrift, if it does so often touch hands with meanness, at least implies the exercise of a quality we all should admire, even when we cannot practise it, thanks to taste, training, or temperament—hardness to ourselves, the capacity for voluntary self-suffering.
The first thing that strikes you as you enter a French beeswaxed flat in winter is the chill of it. Few but the very rich know the delights of generous fires, of well-carpeted houses, of warm, comfortable, and luxurious interiors. Silver appointments and splendid napery, which you will find nowadays in the commonest Irish homes, are here unknown, and people of the class who in England dress for dinner here wear the clothes they have lunched in, and are none the worse off for it. They have, along with their thrift, much less pretension, and are simpler and more intelligent in their home-life than we of the British Isles. In one way they live better, because their food is better cooked and is more varied, and for dinner you are sure to have brighter conversation. In certain rich and snobbish circles, above all in the shooting season, you risk being bored to death, for here nothing is talked of but titles, game, and fortunes. The wonder to me is how women, who themselves do not shoot, can sit placidly through a long afternoon and evening and listen to men who talk incessantly of their own bags or their neighbours’ bags—of how the prince shot this snipe, the count shot that partridge, and how many pheasants the marquis bagged. I suppose it is to keep the men in good-humour that these amiable Frenchwomen—against whom I can bring no other charge than vacuity and snobbishness, two parasites of wealth—feign the intensest interest. They are paid in the coin they desire, and if they are bored nobody is a penny the wiser, and they probably do not mind it.
I have said the lack of material comfort and plenty in middle-class French homes is striking. I, of course, refer to people who are not rich, where the husband is a state functionary on a modest salary in Paris, to small professors, to the wives of military officials, the widows of colonels and broken-down aristocrats. I have had a glimpse of all these classes of homes, and in winter found them unseasonably chill and frugal. Thirty years ago, I am assured, it was far worse, for then carpets were unknown, and fires less used than to-day. Such economies are practised here as in England would accompany only harsh poverty, but they must not be taken as the symbol of such. Your grocer and his wife, who eat behind the shop in a sanded and comfortless space walled off, and on Sunday afternoon go out, neatly arrayed in well-fitting but dowdy and serviceable garments, have tidy fortunes stowed away, while their flashy, splash-loving brethren of the British Isles, with their dog-carts, bicycles, and up-to-date attire turned out by fashionable tailors, dressmakers, and milliners, are pulling the devil by the tail and stupidly patronising their betters, who are contented with less display.
I retired lately to Ireland to write this little book, and was struck, after long residence in France, by the violent contrast between French and Irish character in these respects. I was used to the simple, courteous, willing, active trades-people of Paris, who give themselves no airs, dress dowdily, live modestly. I found the same class in Ireland, even in a small village, dressed daily as Solomon in all his glory never was, with tailor-made gowns worth ten and twelve guineas, and with haughty manners that would bewilder a princess of the blood; the one cutting the other, Heaven only knows on what assumption of superiority, and all hastening from their counters in smart turnouts, duly to subscribe their loyal names to the list of the Queen’s visitors. I felt like Rip Van Winkle—as if I had waked in my native land and found everyone gone mad with pride and pretension. When I ventured into a shop to make an insignificant purchase, a gorgeous dandy with a lisp condescended to attend to me, or a lady looking like a duchess, and most desirous that you should take her for such, dropped from the height of her grandeur to my humble person, and was good enough in her superior way to look after me. Everybody was seemingly so above trade or business or bread-winning of any kind that I was glad enough to pack up my papers and things and come back to a race more simple and less pretentious, where the people work with good-will, and sell you a yard of tape or a hat without insufferable condescension, and where tradesmen and their wives do not think it necessary to confer on crowned heads the honour of their call. In pursuit of my investigations on this subject I was taken to the house of a very small trades-person, who lived over her shop. The owner wore a twelve-guinea silk-lined gown trimmed with Irish point. I could well imagine what sort of residence hers would be in France. For Ireland it was a sort of Aladdin surprise. Majesty indeed might have sat in that sitting-room. It was furnished with faultless taste: beautiful old Sèvres, proof engravings exquisitely framed, buhl cabinets; everything—curtains, chairs, sixteenth-century benches and couches, quaint ornaments, the spoils of frequent auctions of gentlemen’s houses—was chosen with the best of judgment by an ignorant peasant woman, whose bringing up, surroundings, and life had been of the most sordid kind. I was shown the bedroom, and found it a no less pleasing and surprising vision, a nest of modern luxury and beauty, such a bedroom as in Paris you would see only along the handsome and expensive avenues.
Another time I obtained a glimpse of the home of a bankrupt widow of a “little burgess” who had had to vacate a house with grounds to take up her residence in a more modest dwelling. Such a woman in France would be content to live and die a very plain and simple person, and, having had to compound with her creditors, would have considered herself bound to lay out her new existence upon lines of the most rigid economy, above all, as there was a large family of sons and daughters not yet of an age, nor having the requisite education, to provide for themselves. The house I visited was one of a row, a poor, mean quarter, where no sane person would look for any appearance of affluence. Over the fan-light the house rejoiced in an imposing Celtic name in three words in raised white letters, not the cheapest form of house nomenclature. A gardener was engaged trimming the infinitesimal garden front; the youngest girl, of twelve, was mounting her bicycle to career off with a companion; in the hall were three other bicycles belonging to different members of the family. The furniture of the drawing-room was new and expensive, and a young lady was playing up-to-date waltzes on the piano, without a trace of concern or anxiety; no sign anywhere of economy, of sacrifice, of worry. Yet I knew I was entering a house where there was practically nothing to live upon, and where the proceeds of a sale that should have gone to the woman’s creditors had been squandered on unnecessary things. One may criticise the meannesses to which thrift drives the frugal French, but I never felt more near to falling in love with what is to me an uncongenial vice than I did on leaving my native land after this visit, to have commercial dealings once more with people not above their business, instead of trading with the spurious descendants of kings, whose sole anxiety is to make you feel their social superiority and extraordinary condescension, to find these excellent French “little people” all that Lever told us the Irish were but have ceased to be—cordial, delightful, intelligent, and simple. For that is the great, the abiding charm of the French middle class—the absence of vulgar pretension. Every man to his trade, and an artist at that—such is the wise French motto. I begin to suspect the late Felix Faure, the tanner of France, must have had some Irish blood in his veins, for he was well worthy to play the sovereign to that mock prince of the blood, the Irish tradesman.
The home of the French middle classes, I have already said, is not, in the Anglo-Saxon conception of the word, an abode of comfort. Small economies are too rigidly practised therein. The salon, or sitting-room, is apt to be shut up all the week in the interest of the furniture, and only opened on the single afternoon the lady of the house is supposed to be at home to her friends. Then in winter, just before the hour of reception, the meagre wood-fire is set ablaze, and sometimes tea is prepared, along with biscuits far from fresh. You may be thankful—if tea is to be offered you, a rare occurrence—should the tea be no staler than the biscuits, I have known a Frenchwoman, the sister of a professor at Stanislas College, who admitted to me naïvely that she changed the leaves of her tea every four or five days. She informed me that this economical hint was given her by a Scotchwoman, who assured her that in Scotland nobody was extravagant enough to make fresh tea every day. I hope this Scotchwoman was an invention of the Frenchwoman. It would be terrible to believe that all the families of Scotland drink their daily dose of slow poison. In winter also are the two meals of noon and evening consumed in a frigid atmosphere, for such a thing as a dining-room fire is unheard of in the class I refer to. The napery will be of the coarsest quality, and oftener coloured than white.
The house is generally run with a single maid-of-all-work, who receives a monthly wage of from thirty to forty francs, and her life is not an easy one. The lady already referred to had her bonne from the country, where existence is still harsher than in Paris, and paid her thirty francs a month. The unfortunate bonne for this sum had to wash, clean, scour, cook, market, make beds, and sew. The lady was pious, and a philanthropist, but pious and philanthropic persons are sometimes harsh taskmasters, and not infrequently dishonest. The bonne was obliged, out of her scant wages, to pay a hundred francs a year for her bedroom, which was merely a box under the roof, without ventilation or fireplace, so that in winter she froze, and in summer she was baked. She also had to buy her own wine and coffee, if she needed either, and never, from week’s end to week’s end, tasted of dessert or sweets, or knew what it was to dine off fowl, when by rare chance fowl was served at table. I was this lady’s “paying guest” for four or five months; and if my lot was a hard one, I could console myself with the reflection that the servant’s was infinitely harder. True, the servant did not, as I did, pay an exorbitant price for those discomforts, but we could both say that we had to deal with a singularly pleasant, affable, well-spoken, and agreeable woman, surprisingly intelligent, who kept her house in admirable order. She was secretary for several Catholic philanthropic works, and taught catechism, for a consideration, to poor children in some disreputable quarter of Paris. I thought of her, as I have thought of many another Christian philanthropist, Catholic and Protestant, how much more in keeping with the doctrine of Christ it would be to stay unpretentiously at home and practise the modest virtue of honesty, doing unto others as one would be done unto. On her way to her catechism class she would drop in to the woodman’s to order wood for me, as a favour for which it was my duty to thank her, pay the woodman three francs, and virtuously charge me five in the bill. I was ill, and in the same spirit of benevolence she ordered everything needful for me—for a consideration. For all that, she was the nicest, the cheerfulest, and most pleasing robber and humbug I have ever known. I defy any Anglo-Saxon to give the fleeced as much value in the way of agreeable speech and cordiality and beaming smiles as this religious Norman lady gave me. She broke the heart of a trusting friend, and, having gracefully beggared her, drove her to America ruined and embittered, yet went on her own confident way along the path of virtue, assured of nothing more than her indisputable right to a seat in Paradise.
A SEASIDE SERVICE