PAGE
THE PEASANT AT HOME—THE CANDIDATE[Frontispiece]
Michelena.
BLESSING THE WHEAT[16]
J. A. Breton.
THE PARDON OF SAINT ANNE (BRITTANY)[42]
Guillou.
A REVIEW AT LONGCHAMP[88]
CONSECRATED BREAD[114]
Dagnan-Bouveret.
THE REFECTORY[120]
A. Bouvin.
THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES[130]
THE FRENCH ACADEMY[148]
THE FOYER OF THE OPERA-HOUSE[170]
A SEASIDE SERVICE[190]
Edelfelt.
AN OUTDOOR MEAL[206]
Zimenez.
GLEANERS[262]
J. A. Breton.

FRENCH LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY

CHAPTER I
FRENCH RURAL AND PROVINCIAL LIFE

Among the nations of the earth there exists no more striking contrast than that between the people of Paris and the people of France. While the capital is a political furnace, where all sorts of conflicting ideas and opinions are continually boiling with such a rage of effervescence that the inhabitants, unaccustomed to the sense of calm and security, work, dance, and rest on the brink of an ever-menacing revolution; in the provinces town life drags through its monotonous days, absorbed in dull provincial interests, and rural life knows no other changes or menaces than those of the seasons. We distribute to each race certain broad characteristics, and trace out for them in all circumstances an ideal of conduct from which, if they will be true to their blood, they must not deviate. And so we are all decided upon the general French characteristic, excitability, forgetting the immense provincial differences that are to be found in the people of France as well as elsewhere. The heavy Flemish natives of Picardy, large eaters, deep drinkers, hard workers, slow of speech, somewhat coarse and unperverted, are as French as the natives of Latin Provence, garrulous, sober, alert, and exuberant. They are not less French than the wily, hard-bargaining Norman, who eats and drinks as much, but brings a clearer brain into business, and may always be relied upon to get the better of his neighbour in all transactions; or the dreamy Celt of the Breton coast, the thriftless slave of superstition, with brains to spare as well as prejudices, but not intended by nature as a pillar of the Temple of Wisdom. Not less French the rich green midlands than the white and sunburnt south, the champagne vineyards eastward, and the rocky Cévennes rolling southward. Could anybody differ, more from the morose and inhospitable Lyonese, in whose eyes every outsider is the enemy against whom he sedulously barricades his doors, in whose esteem the pick of humanity is the prosperous silk-merchant, than the pushing, loud-mannered Marseillais, with what he would fain have us take for his heart so aggressively upon his sleeve, emotion so transparently transient ever on the surface, subtly disguising self-interest and calculation?

For every diversity of character equal diversity of scenery—from the Alpine grandeur of the Dauphiny land to the beautiful lagoons of the Marais; the Vendean plain washed by the long blue roll of the Atlantic; Provence, land of salt lagoons and dead old cities of Greece and Rome; the central provinces, with their lovely rivers and chestnut woods; Celtic Brittany, half English; Normandy, with its glorious capital, one of the fairest of France; the radiant cities of the Loire, French river of romance; the bright and witching little kingdom of Béarn, exquisite Roussillon, with its old hum of wars and troubadour songs, its delicate sweetness of herb and leaf and bloom, its quaint old towns breathing of Spain, and its high air of legend; the east, with its mountains and dense pine forests, up to sunnier Ardennes. And the patois of these so different districts are not less distinct than the scenery, the note of town and province, and the characteristics of each race. Shelley most seriously wrote that there was nothing worth seeing in France. Even the tourist will find more to delight his eye in going from one department to another than he will find place to record in the most voluminous note-book. Let him only content himself with such a province as Touraine, with its rich and pleasant landscape, its castles of undying interest, its river of thrilling associations. Or let him wander in summer amid the cherry orchards of the Jura country, with the rampart of mountains above the pine-tops and the touch of Swiss beauty around; or dream away the present in musing upon forgotten Mediterranean glories among the ruins of dead Provençal cities between the grey-green silver of the olive and the sapphire waters beyond the broad grey river bends.

It is true that the townsman all over the land is largely governed by a need for excitement, and having, as a rule, no personal initiative to enable him to minister to it, he contents himself with looking toward the capital with envy, and devours the newspapers from Paris in eager expectation of the “something” he is in daily hope of happening. But whatever does happen in Paris rarely makes itself felt in the intellectually sleepy, industrious provinces; thanks to which wide-spread spirit of commercial and bucolic denseness to the inflammatory influences of the capital, France thrives now as she throve before the war, when at a word she could produce funds to pay off an enormous indemnity, without flinching or hesitating.

When you travel in the country or through small French towns, you are struck with the gaiety, intelligence, and good-will of the people and of the little shopkeepers, and with a certain unintelligent stiffness, pretension, and moroseness of the middle class, whose ambition it is to pass for the aristocracy, or at least for des gens de bonne famille. As these pretensions are rarely in keeping with their actual fortunes, these ambitious provincials, the victims of the political follies born of hostility to the Third Republic, think fit to garb themselves in the unbecoming vices of ill-humour, rancour, and idle pride. These they conceive to be the adjuncts of noble birth. If the fathers have refrained, the sons are certain to announce themselves, sooner or later, by titles of their own choosing. The general preference runs to count and viscount, though baron is not despised. I have known of a respectable middle-class family in the provinces, where the eldest son, a lawyer, is content to remain a republican, and the second son, an officer, a gentleman of aristocratic instincts, eager to profit by the present enthusiasm for the army in anti-governmental circles, calls himself a count. The humorous part of the situation lies in the fact that the wife of the plain Monsieur is not satisfied with her lot, since destiny, ruled by her brother-in-law’s will, has given the latter a title; and so at the recent marriage of that military worthy, the newspapers spoke of M. le Comte giving his arm to his sister-in-law, Madame la Comtesse, while the disgusted republican elder brother stayed in the country, indifferent to the self-appointed glories of his relatives.