French life in town and country

by Hannah Lynch

J. A. Breton

And yet, while laughing at himself, and at all things round him, the Frenchman offers us the ideal of an indefatigable worker in whatever road he has elected to run his career. If he can talk well, he can work hard, and no race seeks so strenuously as his to achieve perfection in every path. The alacrity and precision of his speech he brings into all he does, and I know no men who have won renown able to wear it so simply, with such a delightful absence of pompousness, as distinguished Frenchmen. Victor Hugo was, of course, the big exception indispensable for the proof of the rule, for Victor Hugo sat in pontifical state on his Throne of Letters, and posed as a sort of Napoleon. But that was a part of his flamboyant genius, which had to make a life apart for itself. Renan, with his delicate scepticism, his good-humoured tolerance, was a much more convincing figure of French genius; he was more in keeping with the urbane, gentle traditions of his race. The French language lends itself to such a daily dignity of existence, that this may partly be the reason there always seems to me something peculiarly and indescribably harmonious about intimate life in France, as well as in its larger social phases. Everybody about you, beginning with your servant, speaks so well, that long intercourse with them unfits you for latitudes where speech is less admirable and less choice.

CHAPTER XI
THE “LITTLE PEOPLE” OF PARIS

The “little people” of Paris are not confined to any particular quarter of the city. They are to be found everywhere, in spacious avenues, in streets of heraldic renown, in the sinister neighbourhood of La Roquette, through the noisy length of St. Denis. Opposite the palace of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld in the Rue de Varennes will you see an old curiosity shop, and close by work a mild-eyed cobbler and his wife, a little sempstress. Excellent types, both of these indefatigable little people of Paris, living in two tidy attics of this aristocratic street, with an air of quiet independence. The little people are of all sorts: beginning with the “little” bourgeoise and ending with the rag-picker and the marchand de quatre saisons. The little bourgeoise is a curious study, and to penetrate into the precincts where she breathes and thrives, the foreigner must be her boarder. Else will he obtain none but a superficial view of her; and as her aspect is generally cheerful, her manners pleasing, he will be disposed to think better of her than she altogether deserves. The thrift of the little bourgeoise must be given its real and ugly name, avarice, for it is nothing else. It has turned its back upon the virtue of economy, and has assumed the coarseness of a vice. And so when she furnishes a spare room, it is that she shall exploit mercilessly the stranger at her gates. The traveller in search of experience may drop in upon her, but those not supplied with patience, with fortitude in the endurance of cynical imposition and lucre to meet complacently exorbitant demands upon their purse, should avoid this interesting creature, and go to a hotel. In the first place, the opening of private doors to the traveller or over-seas student is so foreign to the habits and instincts of her race, that once she has allowed the brilliant idea of “taking in” a foreign boarder to enter her narrow mind, she starts immediately by magnifying her legitimate profits, and in her ardour to amass francs on ground where she is practically free from all commercial or professional restrictions, she is not beset by any paltry fear of overstepping the limits of honesty. Her sole conception of that homely virtue lies in its rigid application in her own regard, in an austere resolution to see that nobody on earth shall cheat her of the value of a single farthing. I know not which is the more astounding: her inflexible insistence on the honesty of her bonne, or the flexibility of her conscience when she comes in contact with alien claims upon her own honesty.

Her favourite boarder is the young American or English art student. Young women she naturally prefers, because it is easier to fleece them, and they are shyer of monetary disputes than men or experienced women. She will not scruple to demand for the poorest table imaginable and the perfunctory service of a single maid-of-all-work, the terms of a first-rate pension or a comfortable hotel, where there are servants in plenty and the table is varied and excellent. Her excuse is that, not being a boarding-house keeper or a hotel keeper (“Would that she were either!” dejectedly moan her victims), she is entitled to relatively higher prices for the privilege of a seat at a private table. In the region of bills she is altogether her own mistress, for she has no commercial reputation at stake to balance her notions on the subject of profits, which are colossal, and so she enters every extra she can think of with gaiety of heart, and a smiling conviction that all is fair that puts cash into the big pocket of the rapacious little bourgeoise. Not that she will risk frightening off a possible boarder by a revelation of this view beforehand, and no mention of those formidable trifles called “extras” will be made in the preliminary treaty. Then it will be all beguilement and blandishment, allurement and promise, with a hint of paradise through the open door of her modest establishment. Within there, seems to say this cheering creature, will you find the warmth of home, maternal care and tenderness when you are ill, and intelligent sympathy in all hours. Ten pounds a month seems a small sum to pay for this, and you enter gratefully, not disposed to criticise, on the contrary, eager to see everything through the rose hue of satisfaction, to find another fifty or seventy francs added to your bill at the end of the month for wine, light, coffee, service, linen, and baths. When fire comes to be included, you discover that you might have boarded, with comfort, independence, and good living, for the same price in one of the hotels of the Rue de Rivoli. For independence is the very last thing the little bourgeoise is disposed to allow her “paying guest.” It needs a quality of brain of which she is destitute, to recognise a single woman’s right to liberty.

The foreign boarder’s days under her roof constitute a march through surprises. Here no gleaming glass and shining damask at table; no flowers, no silver, no tasteful arrangement of desert; for tablecloth a coarse sheet and cloths to match for napkins, sometimes patched, and invariably sewn down the middle. There is nothing to please the eye or the palate, but the disappointed boarder must stoically hold her tongue if she would maintain agreeable relations. The hostess is an arbitrary as well as a parsimonious and dishonest housekeeper. The exactions, the arrogance, must be allowed to remain all on her side and the malcontent has nothing to do but pay a month’s board and lodging in advance and pack up her things. If she stays, a hushed civility is expected from her, and all payments rigidly in advance. Why, the little bourgeoise should have instituted this singular law, that a month’s food should be paid for before it has been consumed, I have never been able to understand: but I confess I have never been able to master the complicated ethics of this interesting woman. She is a fervent Catholic, attends church regularly morning and evening, confesses, teaches Catholicism and morality to the outcast infant, and never seems to suspect that honesty is one of the virtues incorporated in the Christian doctrine. When she orders anything for you she will pay one price in the shop and charge you another; yet, good, consistent creature, she goes to market on market days after Mass to take note of the prices, in order to calculate to a farthing what the day’s purchases will cost, so that the bonne shall not cheat her of the value of a sou. This is hard on the bonne, whom she pays as little as she can, and underfeeds, and overworks, and who is thus defrauded of one of the acknowledged perquisites of the servant in France,—le sou du franc. When a Parisian servant makes a purchase over a franc, each tradesman returns her a sou on every franc paid in cash. The avid “little bourgeoise” usually insists on having this sou back, and if the bonne is meek and afraid she gives up the sou, for her mistress understands the question of perquisites only in her own right. She watches her servant closely, though there is nothing of a shrew or a Sally Brass about her. She victimises her through the attendant vice of avaricious, unsleeping suspicion. And so she visits the kitchen when the girl has left, to see if a lump of sugar or a piece of bread, or anything else, should be secreted anywhere. Perhaps once a week she will give the domestic martyr a half-dozen rotten strawberries or cherries when these can be had for next to nothing, or the last spoonful of rice or stewed prunes when the enraged boarders have turned their eyes from nauseous remains of these choice dishes three or four days old.

Her cuisine is a thing to gape at. You forget you are in France, the land of good, inexpensive living, and pronounce it frankly execrable. The dinner usually consists of vegetable water or greasy water with pieces of bread floating about, of ragged bouilli (the meat used in the boiling of this insipid liquid), a tasteless dish of sorrel and of stewed prunes that will be served no less than four or five times successively until the very last of the dish has been consumed, or a dish of rice which will also in its half-finished condition make its successive appearance until the last grain has vanished, and the dish, presumably on the score of economy, on which these luxuries are served will not even be changed. In the same quaint spirit the remains of cold vegetables are reheated and served again, with such result for eye and palate as no pen can describe. Whatever you find at her table you may know beforehand will be of the worst and cheapest of its kind, and there will be as little as possible of it. When fruit outside, in the markets, along the streets in barrows, in the shops, is plentiful, excellent, and absurdly cheap, she will assure you it is far too expensive for her table, and treat three art students, each paying, exclusive of extras, ten pounds a month, to musty biscuits and dried figs that taste like caked sawdust. As for sweet dishes, creams, sauces, varieties of well-cooked vegetables, all the thousand little kickshaws we associate with the dainty French term cuisine, these you are as likely to find at her table as ice-cream or champagne.