French life in town and country

by Hannah Lynch

There are, as well, a considerable number of these establishments under the direction of private persons and charitable societies. The boys are taught a trade and are classed according to their antecedents, if brought up in town or country. They work seven hours a day, and the money they earn is placed to their account in the Savings Bank. The colony at Belle-Ile-en-Mer receives the pick of this corrupt young world, and trains them for marine service. They are taught reading, writing, history, geography, and arithmetic, while Sunday is given up to gymnastics and long walks with their professors. The rewards for good behaviour are—praise, additional food, good-conduct stripes with pecuniary remuneration, gifts, a grant of three francs a month, confidential employment, and weekly leave of absence, provisional freedom, and military service. The Maison Darnetal for girls, near Rouen, has excited such admiration that the Italian Government has ordered its nuns to imitate it. Young girls here, when they leave the correctional school, are trained as farm wives, to grow fruit and vegetables, to make butter and cheese, to rear fowl; and they themselves carry to market the produce of their labour and learn to make excellent bargains. When they have earned their freedom, they are independent young women, capable of directing a farm, with all the thrift, the natural, keen intelligence and unsleeping industry of that most admirable portion of the French race, the hard-working, good-humoured women of the people.

For years past there has been raging in France a bitter war between the Catholics and the Radicals on the subject of hospital nurses. The Republic, which mistrusts the Catholic party, has sought to limit their power in every direction. It was a mistake, I think, to attack them at hospital beds, for if there is a place which belongs by divine right, if I may say so, to the nun, it is the side of a sick-bed. With their guimps and coifs, their life of religious meekness, their cheerfulness and self-abnegation, they make ideal sick nurses. Then, the patient feels that with them it is not a profession, the means to an end, that money is not their object, nor are they likely to forget their duty in a flirtation with the doctor. In England and France I have had, unfortunately, experience of both kinds of nurses, and I unhesitatingly give my preference to the French nun. She is softer, kinder, gayer, and more delicate and modest in her handling of a patient than the average lady nurse of England. She nurses you for love of nursing, or for the good of her soul, and she has the secret of a boundless sympathy and untiring good-will. Yet many scientific Frenchmen and doctors, while praising her disinterestedness and purity of motive, allow her unsatisfactory peculiarities. For instance, they complain of her indocility to the doctor and surgeon, and state that when a difference of opinion between them and the mother superior arises, the religious sick nurses will obey the latter rather than those in whose hands lies the fate of the patient. Dr. Fauvel, of le Hâvre, stated before the International Congress of Assistance, relative to the laity of the new hospital of that town: “As regards primary instruction and professional education, the nuns are in no wise superior, quite the contrary; with an incomplete professional education, the lay staff has shown special knowledge ignored by the nuns, nursing the sick with greater intimate skill, preparing instruments, baths, helping the doctors and pupils more efficiently, being more docile in taking the thousand precautions ordered in operations and the dressing of wounds.... It is a mistake to regard as false all the accusations made against the sisters; and I declare emphatically that I have found in lay nurses an equal and often a more spontaneous devotion.” This is quite possible, but I maintain, upon personal experience of both methods, that the religious atmosphere brings a refinement and delicacy into the sick room by no means to be despised. Whatever throws a charm, a grace, a sweetness over the sick-bed carries an inappreciable value, and Frenchwomen, at least, however religious, have that delightful tact of their race to prevent them from worrying a recalcitrant patient on the subject of her faith.

At Lyons, as early as the fifteenth century, a medium was found between congregational and secular sick-nursing. It appears to work excellently, though the persons in this state affair who deserve our pity are the unfortunate sick nurses, whose sole reward for a life of unceasing labour is the precarious value of fifty low masses after death. I cannot, for the life of me, see why these poor women, so wretchedly paid in life, should not at least enjoy the glory of fifty high masses and a monument. But women who devote themselves to public service are, in all lands, and under every régime, ancient or modern, gallantly exploited. It is a recognised duty to overwork them, underfeed them, and pay them next to nothing, and then expect gratitude from them for permitting them to waste their lives in the service of their ungrateful fellow-men. In mediæval times the town of Lyons decided to profit by the repentance of loose women, and ordered them to attend the sick for the good of their souls. They took no vows, but little by little they adopted a uniform, and, in 1598, a meeting of Lyonese doctors resolved that this lay order of sick nurses should be known as servants of the poor. There is such a pretty mediæval twang about this name, that we salute it, still existing in these modern days, with respect. This lay order has existed throughout all the storms of French history, and works as well to-day as when it was founded four centuries ago. True, it is now recruited from quite a different class, and is divided into three terms of service: novices, prétendants, sœurs croisées, or decorated sisters. When a young girl wishes to become a “servant of the poor,” she is severely catechised as to the reasons of her choice, is compelled to furnish proofs of her capacity for her chosen task, and the consent of her parents or guardians. Inquiries are made about her, and if she is accepted, her novitiate lasts a year, during which period she wears no uniform. Then she becomes a prétendant, and wears a uniform, receiving in payment of her incessant service the sum of eighty francs a year, out of which she must pay for her uniform and linen. She can leave when she likes, or the hospital committee can discharge her for any reason whatever. She obeys a superior nurse, who in turn obeys the administration, and her period of service lasts from twelve to fifteen years. Imagine her, then, wishful of rest, far away from lint and bistouries and hospital odours. Her £3 4s. a year will not have afforded her much chance of putting anything by. But if, happily, her vocation for unrewarded service lasts, she is decorated with a silver cross; and though she still takes no vows, and can leave when she wishes, she is regarded as having a life-claim upon the administration. They cannot now turn her into the streets, and there is no fear of her dying of hunger. In return for this assurance her salary is reduced to forty francs a year. But she is titled Cheftaine, with also its pretty ringing sound of the Middle Ages; she has seventeen days holiday every year, and she has her silver cross and fifty low masses! There are eight hundred of these disinterested creatures in the city of Lyons; and it will be admitted that the great silk centre of France knows how to manage its affairs with prodigious economy.

It would be impossible, in a short chapter dealing with organised philanthropy in France, to mention even a tenth of the private institutions and associations that abound. In Paris alone there are thirty orphanages for boys and a hundred and twenty for girls, the deficiency on the side of the boys being supplied by innumerable patronages, or boys’ clubs. There are forty-three societies for infancy, eighty-seven crèches,—an excellent institution invented nearly fifty years ago by M. Marbeau,—two hundred and ten infants’ schools, first established by a Protestant clergyman in the Vosges, and now spread all over France. In 1895, 37,253 children were placed in the country, entailing an expense of 9,336,711 francs, and every year the number increases.

Each denomination has its private and organised charities, and the late Maxime du Camp awards the palm of incomparable perfection in this path to the children of Israel. The Rothschild hospital, the Rothschild asylum for old ages of both sexes, the children’s school, and school for girls of Madame Coralie Cahen, are the best of their kind in Paris. When one reads the story of Jewish charities in Paris, one is stupefied by the senseless outburst of mad and wicked anti-semitism which rages in France to-day. The Baron Henri de Rothschild has instituted a sort of mothers’ refuge up in the poor and populous quarter of Belleville, where he gives advice to mothers, and supplies them with a litre of sterilised milk daily. Believe me, when you dive below the surface of Paris, you will find it to be something nobler than a city of pleasure. Poverty and misery abound because, alas! they are inseparable from existence; but there is no city in the world where poverty is more endurable than in Paris, none where it is sweetened with a surer and more efficacious fraternity. Between the classes there is not that intolerable arrogance and impertinence which constitute the blight of British philanthropy. In England I have seen charitable women go into poor men’s cottages with the air of tamers entering a menagerie. They ask unendurable questions, fling open windows without consulting their victims, pooh-pooh everything said to them, order this, command that, till I have marvelled at the long-suffering of the poor, and wondered that they restrained themselves from flinging their torturers out of the window. And I have remarked that these busybodies, under the guise of philanthropy, rarely brought the victims of their implacable sense of Christian duty anything but their arid advice. Now, whatever the failings of the French are, I can confidently assert that tactless spiritual arrogance is not among them, still less an impertinent interference in private matters. They will not open their purse as freely as the English do—the French themselves are the first to admit it—and the secretary of the Academy of Medicine, speaking to me of English private charities, and the vaster scale on which they are managed, said, with delightful gaiety of admission, “In England, you know, you always find a benevolent old lady or gentleman, who will give you for a charitable project £20,000, as I might give you two sous”; but they will not thrust their advice upon the poor with wounding contempt as the English do.

If you would obtain the most striking possible contrast of the hospital workings of the old and new régimes, comparison should be made of the authentic plan of the old hospital under the kings of France, and the new hospital of the Institut Pasteur under the directorship of M. Duclaux. Under the old system, patients suffering from various maladies, all more or less contagious, lay four in one bed, two with their heads above, two with their heads below, the legs of the four touching. We may imagine the rest of the details in keeping with this frightful situation—sanitary details not improved between the eighth and eighteenth centuries—food, attendance of doctors, surgeons, and nurses of the worst and coarsest kind, sickness not other than a filthy and hideous visitation of destiny, the inevitable precursor of the common ditch of burial. One wonders what degree of physical despair and disgust it was necessary to reach in those days to face the horrors of a public hospital. The courage such awful contact entailed means, to me, greater far than any involved in fronting the vicissitudes of battle. To die untended and forsaken on the bloodiest field of history, with unchanged linen, unwashed and unbound wounds, the visible prey of vultures, without hope of decent burial, were surely an end more honourable and less nauseous than illness and death in a public hospital of Paris in the much lauded and poetised days of the ancien régime.

A well-known charitable institution of France is the order of the Little Sisters of the Poor. These Little Sisters are highly popular, and whenever anyone bien pensant (as the Catholics call themselves) dies, his or her relatives hasten to send all the wardrobe of the defunct to the Little Sisters. A branch house is almost beside me, and I see cartloads of clothes driven off frequently for sale from its door. I visited the establishment once, and cannot say that I was much impressed with the spirit of charity revealed to me. To enter this asylum, men and women must have attained the age of sixty. The old men are better cared for, better treated, by the Little Sisters than the old women. The best side of the house is theirs; they have a handsome covered terrace to walk along when they are not in the gardens, have a smoking-room, and can spend their days playing cards. Their quilts are of silk and velvet patchwork, while the old women must be thankful for cotton, and the nun who showed me over the establishment reserved for the men all her smiles and pleasant greetings. The poor old women got nothing but sour looks and silence, and while the men amused themselves, these were condemned to hard work in the big laundry and kitchen. “As we have no servants,” said the nun, “the old women must work.” To enter a charitable institution over sixty, having worked hard all one’s life, in order to stand over a wash-tub, seems a dubious advantage. A very devout Catholic friend, with whom I discussed this fact, has told me of a lasting grievance she has against these Little Sisters of the Poor. A broken-down gentle old washerwoman, near seventy, in whom she took an interest, was recommended to them, a friend paying four hundred francs to the asylum. The nuns are not supposed to take money, but it is never refused, and in this case the generous donor meant to secure a little extra comfort for the hard-worked old soul. She was put in there to rest from the wash-tub, but the excellent nuns understood it differently, and placed her at once before it. Within a year she died from overwork. Whenever you penetrate below the surface of conventual charities, they will always be found profitable for the order and never for the individual. The hearts of nuns seem implacably steeled against human suffering, steeled against pity and generosity. They are among the worst paymasters and taskmasters in the world, on the pretext that, being hard to themselves, nobody has the right to expect that they shall be soft to others.

The Mont-de-Piété is a civil institution, which exists for the benefit of the needy. It is not in the least like our pawn-offices, for here no usury is practised, and the town benefits by any profits that accrue. The central house is in the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, and there are four large branch offices. Money is advanced on the objects offered, and when the sum is brought back, interest is charged, and the objects are restored. If no claim is put in at the end of eighteen months, the objects are sold, and the profits are handed over to the Assistance Publique. All classes of society in straitened circumstances have recourse to the Mont-de-Piété which is a most useful institution.

Turn now to the latest public edifice for the poor under the Third Republic. The late Baroness de Hirsch, a Jewess, was one of the several founders—all of them women—of this splendid hospital, attached to the Pasteur Institute. Here each patient has a room to himself free on the raised ground-floor or on the story above. Below there are bath-rooms and douches; there is a workshop for the carding of mattresses, each patient sleeping on a new mattress, each mattress passing through an immense steriliser. To improve upon the old method, by which doctors and surgeons visit the patient at stated hours, a private house of handsome dimensions has been built expressly for the doctor, who must be always on the spot. In the case of contagious sickness there is the process of purification in the lower cells, while ordinary cases of illness are, after the consultation à la hâte, despatched to one of the bright, clean, little sick rooms on the ground-floor. Here the rooms are divided by glass partitions, which are muffed or not, as may be required. Grown patients are more likely to wish for the privacy of muffed-glass panels, whereas it is preferable that the panels should be transparent when the patients are children and need constant supervision. During convalescence, the patients, weary of solitude, can seek change by transportation to a public ward, and there is a long glass gallery, or winter garden, well located, and gay with green seats and tables, where they can walk up and down, and receive their friends among the palms and India-rubber trees. This part of the establishment has more the air of a convalescent home than a public hospital. As deaths may occur even in the best regulated hospitals, there is a subterranean passage constructed for the service des morts, by which means the living are spared all contact with lugubrious eventualities. M. Duclaux calculates that the yearly expenditure of this admirable institution will reach £20,000. Let us hope that those who profit by this foundation will prove not destitute of good feeling towards those who have spent so much time, labour, money, science, and thought on their behalf. But, alas! the poor are essentially mistrustful of public charities. I know not why, but it is, nevertheless, a fact that they seem to labour under the impression that such edifices exist mainly to exploit and defraud them in some mysterious fashion. One would approve of a sentiment of independence, and the conviction of a sacred claim in their usage: but the feeling of distrust of them is ever to be deplored.