CHAPTER VIII
PEASANT AND ARTISAN
From earliest youth I had been accustomed to the trim and pleasing aspect of the French peasant, but lived long in Paris without ever having had occasion to examine this class more closely than a walk in the country permits. I chanced to summer one year in the Saintonge, and friends made me acquainted there with an excellent miller and his wife who dwelt upon their lands. I published in the Speaker something about these delightful people afterwards, and I cannot do better than quote from that forgotten source:
“In the Saintonge, as elsewhere, the local mood is ruled by politics, and private friendship gives way to public rivalry. I learnt all about these feuds from my friend the miller of La Pellouaille. Intellect was not his strong point, but there was a cheerful cynicism about him to lend flavour to his commonplaces. While others affected the heroic or patriotic, he was content to accommodate himself to circumstances. In reply to my query—to which party he belonged—he said, with a humorous smile, ‘Dame, I go with the strongest, naturally,’ which did not prevent him from giving his own sly hit at the Government. I give his views for what they are worth—neither brilliant nor original, but expressed with a certain geniality of tone and temper that kept him from bucolic dulness. If the Republic kept France out of mischief for the next twenty years, and carried her into fair prosperity, he believed, by that time, neither Bonapartist nor Legitimist would be remembered. For the moment the land was in a state of ferment, and he thought it a pity such excessive use should be made of those big words, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. These three republican assurances be qualified as mere blagues; and told me of a jocose tobacconist who wrote them on the sign-board of his shop, with an empty tobacco-pouch suspended from each, the pouches in France being called blagues. But the miller’s wife was certainly his pleasanter half. It was a delight to look upon a creature so human and wholesome and resourceful. She was a large, handsome woman, with a smile as fresh as new milk, and hazel eyes as clear as daylight, beaming with good-will, with vitality, and interest in her fellows. The kine browsing in the fields were not more mild. Such a woman has you right at nature’s heart—big and broad and bountiful. She is peasant in the best sense, proud of her spotless cap and apron, free and independent in her carriage, with shoulders that know no cringing stoop and voice that cannot whine.”
This good creature took me rambling through the woods, she picking the nuts, and I devouring them; and I found her talk ever sensible and entertaining. Thanks to the natural good manners and intelligence of the French people, there is far less difference than in England between the uneducated and educated classes. My friends of the mill honoured me once with an invitation to dinner. The sky was menacing, and, as I entered the long park avenue whence the mill was visible, I saw the miller and his son anxiously scanning the heavens and the green-roofed aisle of walnut and sycamore by which I came. They hailed me with vigorous welcome, and, as I rested in their beautifully clean kitchen, with broad and generous fireplace, where the wood crackled pleasantly, and shone upon polished brass dogs and gleaming bronze pots, with the high French bed in the deep recess, the miller’s wife mixed me some cassis and water. A more excellent dinner I have never eaten than that cooked, without fuss, or haste, or delay, by the miller’s wife. In a twinkling, as it seemed to me, she had savoury tomato-soup on the table; and while she laid the cloth, the miller sat in front of the capacious mouth of flames, and saw that the browning chicken was kept moist with grease. I told them the story of Alfred and the cakes, and the miller’s wife cried, “She struck a king—a peasant just like myself!” “Dame,” laughed the miller, “it doesn’t make much difference, when it is a woman, whether she be queen or peasant!” And I thought the remark one that an English peasant would have been incapable of making. He would have been incapable of such a point of view.
The French peasant has not the charm of the Irish peasant—the women, above all, lack the lovely complexion and beautiful eyes of the Irish—and he has less of the grand air. He is much more the son of the soil and less of the gentleman. The writer, wishing to be true to life, could never make such enchanting “copy” out of him as Jane Barlow made of the Irish peasant in her delightful Idylls. There is too little poetry about him, and he is too evenly balanced and cool-headed to offer us many of the adorable surprises of humour. I have heard it said, by French persons who live in the country, that Zola comes nearer to truth and reality in his presentment of the peasant than George Sand in her exquisite pastorals, or M. René Bazin in such a tender and lovely story as La Terre qui Meurt. But Balzac himself did not weave us tales of romance and delicate feeling when he touched upon the theme; and so it is very likely that the fellow is more of a brute than he seems to be in casual intercourse, without, however, sinking to the loathsome depths of the realism of La Terre. I, when I recall him to mind, own that I ever see him a dignified, well-mannered figure in blue blouse, generally clean, sometimes incredibly patched by his thrifty wife, frugal, sober, hard-worked, not too garrulous, and yet not resentful of easy speech, nor suspicious of the stranger who accosts him with courtesy. I find him in all things, as he presents himself to the eye and offers himself for observation, the superior of his British brother Hodge, neither so gross nor so unintelligent, with a look in his eye much resembling humour. He has his demands upon life, too, which are not those of the clownish brute, the inarticulate rustic. Not for nothing was the Revolution made, since by it has he learnt that he has his own share in the joys of civilisation, and that if he work hard enough his sons may aspire to such a measure of education as a harsher lot denied him. When business brings him into a little town or a great city, his eye alights on beautiful objects, placed there as much for him as for the owners of seigneurial dwellings. Flowers, trim parks, legends in stone, splendid cathedrals, every gracious blending of line and colour, combine to train his eye in beauty and refine his nature. He need thread these quaint and lovely streets with no slouching step, for he, and such as he, are too conscious of their stable efforts in the general work of order and national prosperity. He need touch his forelock to no great lord for permission to breathe the free air of heaven, for does not he, too, possess his bit of land, his little dwelling, from which none can oust him? And, on feast-days and Sundays, are there not always public museums at hand for his instruction and entertainment? No country in the world takes such care to provide museums for the people throughout all the provinces as France. Every year the State purchases pictures at the annual exhibitions of Paris to add to these provincial collections; and in every little town you pass through you are personally urged by some native to visit the Musée. This fact may have something to do with the astonishing intellectual superiority of the French peasant over Hodge beyond the Channel. For the fact remains that you can talk to the blue-bloused son of the soil and hope to learn something from him, when the absence of loquacity and ideas and manners in Hodge will leave you discouraged and in despair. The French peasant loves so many things that educate and refine—flowers and pictures and military bands, spectacles of all kinds, and independence.
AN OUTDOOR MEAL
Zimenez
His standard is by no means an exalted one. His frugality is practised in the interest of his old age. His honesty is chiefly, I suspect, a shrewd protection against the probable dishonesty of others, for the simple law of comradeship demands that you shall treat fairly the man who treats you fairly. And his religion does not go down as deep as his soul, or whatever may serve him as such. It is with him merely a material influence, since it furnishes a serviceable plank for getting safely across the perilous abyss into a better world, and enables him to be decently baptised, married, and buried as a member of a Christian community. All other phases of religion—its emotions, exactions, penalties, and devices—he leaves to the foolish women-folk. Indeed, this seems to be the conviction of the average male Catholic the world over, if I may except Ireland, the one Catholic country in which I have found men to take their religion seriously, and the little Celtic corner of France, where the blue-eyed Bretons so closely resemble them. When I have visited at a French country-house in the shooting season, I have never known a male guest to attend mass, the explanation given being that la chasse had begun before the hour of mass. But if a woman stayed away from mass she would create a scandal. In Spain I have seen acquaintances of mine, while their women-folk knelt and prayed with fervour, stand throughout the Sunday service with a bored and perfunctory air, only looking towards the altar and the priest at the moment of the elevation of the Host in a casually respectful way, as an officer might salute the passage of a military chief, and seemingly relieved to be able to examine again the faces and dresses of the women about them. Children barely in their teens, young lads going to school, carefully imitate this attitude of merely tolerant recognition of religious form, and their elders never dream of encouraging them to use a prayer-book, or kneel, or show any sign that the weekly mass is to them more than the bored attendance at an official ceremony.