French life in town and country

by Hannah Lynch

Edelfelt

But she was not the first to initiate me into the economical mysteries of the French home. Before this I had been the “paying guest” of a native of Burgundy with an Alsatian title as long as an Alexandrian verse. She professed to have known Lamartine in her youth, and when I spoke of the poet by his name, she corrected me with a grand and reproving air: “Mademoiselle, we of Macon say Monsieur de Lamartine.” Here the same mysteries of locked salon all the week round, open only for a few hours on the famous reception day of Madame la Baronne; the same absence of plenty at the board—lunch for three persons invariably three boiled eggs, three tiny cutlets and three boiled potatoes, three little rolls and three small apples. Never a fourth of anything, should one of the three happen to be a little hungrier than the other two. Only, as I had to do with a broken-down aristocrat, there reigned, instead of the beaming cordiality of the bourgeoise, an awful, desperate, glacial reserve. The baroness’ attitude to life may be described fitly as resembling her attitude to the late lamented poet, whom she apostrophised stiffly as Monsieur de Lamartine. She was frightfully dignified, even in starving her unfortunate paying guest on twelve pounds a month. It is true, paying guests are not infrequently regarded by ladies as creatures predestined to starvation and prompt payment in their hands, and in business matters I can safely say, from singularly sharp experience, that there are no more heartless and rapacious landladies on the face of the earth than needy and educated women. The greed of the common woman runs to pence, while that of the lady runs to shillings; and whereas the former, when she is dishonest, has a lingering consciousness of it, and flies into a wholesome rage on detection, the latter is armoured in the brass of breeding, and looks cool and surprised that you should object to being fleeced by her. Upon any approach to complaint, instead of excuses, she shows you cynically that she took you in in order to fleece you. A French “woman of letters,” in the lowest acceptance of that unpleasing term, the old, semi-extinguished type of bluestocking, once told me that she always calculated on making a clear profit of two hundred francs a month on the board of her “paying guest,” otherwise she did not regard herself as having made a good thing out of it. As she charged a hundred francs a month for a bedroom, twelve pounds a month was the sum she counted upon as legitimate profit. Her terms were sixteen pounds a month—light, fire, afternoon tea, and wine extras—so that the unfortunate fleeced one had exactly the value of four pounds for the sixteen disbursed. Needless to say, this literary hostess only found stray fools from perfidious Albion, recommended by amiable folk over-seas, who guilelessly believed the young ladies despatched to her would enjoy the benefit of exalted social relations, since titles were never out of her mouth, and upon her own description of herself she entertained daily the highest of the land. She traded upon the British weakness for titles, but took care to conceal from these gulled ones the fact that French doors, whether of nobles or of commoners, are not easily opened to foreigners, and never to “paying guests,” whom the careful French fear as possible adventurers.

I have heard English people criticise the parsimony of the first French breakfast, because you generally find a couple of lumps of sugar on the side of your saucer instead of a sugar-bowl, and a pat of butter and a single small roll instead of the domestic loaf and a butter-basin. I own I give my preference altogether to the dear, neat little French tray. When I go on visits to friends in France, I find nothing so charming as to be wakened every morning by a beaming Frenchwoman of the people, whose manners are always so perfect, who is a human being, and not, like the well-trained English servant, a machine; who opens the shutters and lets in light with her fresh, soft “Good-morning,” and approaches the bed with a small, dainty tray, exquisitely laid; such coffee or chocolate as you will get nowhere else, and everything so trim and minute—the two lumps of sugar, the tiny pat of butter, the hot roll—what ogre could demand more on returning from the land of dreams? Naturally, the English fashion calls for a more liberal supply, because there you are cleansed, combed, and buckled in the shackles of civilisation downstairs, perhaps after a morning run—and the scent of bacon and eggs is refreshing to the keen nostril. But more than this neat little French tray contains would be too much in a bedroom, and nobody but that Irish girl I referred to, with morbid taste, could clamour for a sugar-bowl to sweeten a single cup of coffee.

Then mid-day, when the sun is high in the heavens, gathers the family round the second breakfast-table. Amongst the well-to-do this is a meal to shame the frugal British luncheon. It consists of an entrée, a roast dish, vegetables, a cold dish, a sweet, dessert, and cheese. No need to mention the cooking. That is sure everywhere to be excellent, though even among French cooks there are grades. Here you will of a surety not be struck by the pervasion of economy, but that of plenty. You will understand why the comfortably-off French, when they lunch at British tables, lament that they are starved. Indeed, when you have the good luck to partake of French hospitality, you will find it the best in the world. At no tables will you eat so well and so plentifully as at the tables of your French friends, and in no land on earth will you enjoy such delightful conversation as theirs, where they know how to speak and have something to say. In England people are always on their guard, are often afraid to talk their best, lest they shall prove bores or eccentrics. In France the bore is the person who has nothing to say, and the eccentric is thanked for frankly revealing himself as such. Only be intelligent, be individual and interesting, and then you may rattle on to your liking, and provided you tumble with glory, you may choose between the devil and the deep sea with equal unconcern. The people around you, the most susceptible and sympathetic to individual value, will be far too busy listening to what you have to say—provided it is worth the saying—to give a thought to picking you to pieces.

In spite of the romancers and all the twaddle they talk in the interest of the psychological novel, there are no women capable of warmer and more generous friendships than Frenchwomen, none capable of a deeper, discreeter, more abiding loyalty. They are astonishingly indulgent, too, which is part of their great sense, and even their intolerance, where it exists, they have the grace to clothe in the suavity of tact. If they talk, as they too often do, a great deal of nonsense about the English, and cherish vast illusions about their own nation, this is only in the nature of things, seeing that there is no race in the world brought up in more astonishing ignorance of every other race, and more trained to cherish denser prejudices. At school they learn only French geography, French history, French grammar. The rest of Europe comprises mere congested districts round France; and while it takes several volumes to learn the history of France, the history of other peoples may be told in a few paragraphs. Boys may fare differently, but in my time this is how French girls were taught. England, as the traditional enemy, must necessarily expect rough treatment at the hands of the French; and in a country where the Press is a blatant monument of misrepresentation, the women cannot be wiser than their country, led by such a disastrous influence. French prejudices against England are as substantial and impenetrable as the walls of Pekin; you may ride round them, marvel at them, but never hope to demolish them. But the French mind that manages to keep outside these walls becomes surprisingly enlarged, and then you need ask for no finer or more generous judgment. It needs this finish of magnanimity to so sympathetic a character, rare though it be in France,—for magnanimity is the last quality we may allow the race in general,—to show us how delightful the French can become. For this you must look among the cultured workers of France, the thinkers, the teachers, and men of science. These alone—and they are not loved for it—can recognise and tell the truth about even the mediæval enemy, perfidious Albion.

Frenchwomen of all classes live much more in their bedrooms than Englishwomen do. Of a morning they study, read, work there, give orders to their servants, write letters. These bedrooms are generally very pleasant places, with dressing-rooms off, and clothes closets, so that intimate friends of either sex may pass in and out without indiscretion or awkwardness. The bed itself is a handsome piece of furniture, with curtains to match the big bed-cover, which hides every atom of white, and sometimes, with the pillows in the middle and silk or satin-covered bolster at either end under this covering, it resembles those imposing mediæval couches we see in the Cluny Museum. On the other hand, the sexes in family life are more apart than in England. They meet at table, but their amusements, interests, and work are accepted as widely different. The relations of husband and wife are based upon a more intelligent understanding than elsewhere; and those of parent and child are the nearest approach to perfection with which I am acquainted, if only a higher moral training were added to the tenderness and incessant care, for the French wife and mother is undoubtedly the best of her kind; and if her mate is less worthy, at least he is a kinder, more considerate, and courteous mate than his Anglo-Saxon brother. His sins, when he is volatile and bad, run to the cabinet particulier or the foyer of fast theatres, while the other flies to perdition on the fumes of alcohol, and sins against home in public bars, upon race-courses, in the hostels of fugitive dalliance. The Frenchman will tell you that he is the better man of the two, for he brings a little sentiment into his infidelities, while the Anglo-Saxon, when he turns his back upon home and the domestic virtues, is brutal and gross.

I think there is something to be said for the erring Frenchman in his frailty. Lisette, while her reign lasts, is somebody for him whom he must study and consider, to whom he is bound to be kind, until he makes up his mind to leave her, or until she leaves him. But this is not a point I need dwell on. In the matter of virtue, the Britishers make themselves out to be such honest, invulnerable fellows, unlike the chattering, bragging sinners on the other side of the Channel, that it is only the state of the public streets of Great Britain at nightfall that fronts us with the universal charge against them of Pharisaism. And so I come back to my contention, that since infidelity to the marriage vow does exist, the light-headed sons of France choose the more open way of sinning. Their view of the case, as expressed in their fiction, is frankly odious, and, on his own showing, there is something essentially unclean in the Frenchman’s mind, though I have always found his conversation fastidiously correct and inoffensive, and it is sad to think of such a fine and splendid race of women playing the unsavoury rôle they are made to play by the dramatists and novelists of their land. The women, of course, must be greatly to blame for the misesteem expressed in their regard by their fashionable and popular writers. Too fearful of displeasing, and too sensitive to Gallic ridicule, they do not understand that it rests with them to claim and obtain the respect due to them. They applaud and admire the writers who most persistently degrade them under the flattering guise of a passionate interest and concern. They, who so wisely dominate at home, have seemingly little or no objection to play the animal on paper. Of course there is a cultured and distinguished class who detest the modern fiction and plays of their country, who protest against them at home and in the Press, who will tell you they read only foreign novels, to avoid being dragged through the mire of their own.

This brings me to the consideration of woman’s rôle in France. The foreigner who only judges that rôle from the novels he reads, mostly pornographic, and from the drama, increasingly gross and immoral, will be all at sea as regards the part woman plays in French life. He will conceive her first playing the hypocrite up to the time of marriage, and then living without restraint ever afterwards. He will wonder what time is left her for domestic duties, and judge her social duties merely as convenient stages along the downward path. If he enjoys that sort of thing, she will amuse and interest him, but he will underestimate her position in reality. For no one plays a more important rôle in the ranks of humanity than the Frenchwoman. She it is who rules the home, and in what an admirable way she rules it can never be sufficiently extolled. She it is who trains, fashions, guides man in every step of his career, from his boyhood into his first love-affair, and makes of him the courteous and indulgent creature he proves in matrimony. As mother, aunt, sister, wife, and daughter, the Frenchman relies on his womankind throughout his whole career. She is, in the best and fullest sense of the word, his helpmeet; assists him in his business, enjoys his entire confidence, because he knows so well that she is the better part of the institution, bears more than half of his troubles. As a mother, she knows how to efface herself, and in acting to her sons as their best friend and confidant, keeps her sovereignty stable. It is because she is such a sensible and dignified ruler, indulgent where indulgence is needful, that the men around her rarely feel the impulse to break from her sway. She moulds the politicians, takes the poets and novelists by the hand, holds the social sceptre with ease and charm, pulls the academical wire-strings, aids youth to success and triumph, names the fashion in literature,—and here she does less wisely and less well,—makes and mars reputations, is responsible for more of the commercial prosperity of the land than her mate, and brought, of her own thrift and labour, a bigger share to the millions that went to Germany than he. An England without her women could be conceived as still standing, so effaced is their rôle; but France may almost be said to exist by hers. If the women would only consent to go to the colonies, the French would, I am convinced, turn out capital colonists.