In Paris to-day, you will meet educated Frenchwomen who are convinced that St. Anthony of Padua went to heaven and was canonised in the exclusive interest of their lost property. A friend of mine, witty, cultivated, a wide reader and traveller, accompanying me on a walk, dropped one of her gloves just outside the avenue door. She perceived her loss when we had gone a few paces ahead. “Oh, dear good St. Anthony,” she exclaimed fervently, “make me find my glove, and I will light a candle in your honour. And now I am reminded, dear St. Anthony, that I owe you already a candle for my note-book which I lost and found last week; I will pay both on the recovery of my glove.” I listened to the prayer in stupefaction. We turned on our heel, and there at the porte-cochère lay her glove. She pounced upon it, and cried, “Thanks, thanks, good St. Anthony, you will have your two candles this afternoon.” Now, this was not a peasant, a servant, an ignorant little bourgeoise. She was a woman of liberal education, a frequenter of the noble Faubourg, the friend, guide, and philosopher of several authentic counts and countesses and marchionesses and diplomats, a woman who had travelled in Russia, Poland, Germany, and England, and admired all these races; in fact, a charming old lady, a mass of pride and prejudice, yearning to-day for another St. Bartholomew, and yet devoted to several Protestants and to at least one freethinker; who professes an ancien-régime hatred and scorn of the lower classes, and treats her servant, her portress, her frotteur, the woman who sells her milk, and the woman who sells her vegetables as her dearest friends, from sheer largeness of heart and generosity of nature. She is not the first person of whom I can truthfully say, “Her virtues are all her own, her vices belong to her religion.”
In Brittany it is the custom to bless houses, and this ceremony is not always accomplished without some bluster; above all, if the spirit of the dead should be attached to it. When a Breton suspects his house to be under ghostly domination, he sends for a powerful fellow in sacerdotal raiment to dislodge the devil. The priest comes, clad in surplice, and, holding his stole in hand, takes off his boots, so that he “shall be a priest to the very ground.” We are told that the staircase and the floors are inevitably covered with sand as evidence of the traces of the ill-intentioned dead. The priest must follow those sandy traces as far as the chamber where they stop. There he shuts himself up, bursts into fervent prayer, and has a hand-to-hand fight with the evil spirit. His triumph is asserted as soon as he succeeds in casting his stole over the neck of the dead, who has taken the shape of an animal, usually a black dog. The beadle and the sacristan are told off to carry away the possessed animal. They lead it to a sterile marsh, or a forsaken quarry, or a meadow hollow, and the priest cries, “Here shalt thou henceforth dwell,” and lets the evil spirit go free; saying this, he makes a wide circle, and departs.[2]
[2] “Satanism” by Jules Bois.
Coming from a feverish centre like Paris, where, as a rule, lives are too crowded with interests, one wonders at the limited interests of rural and provincial life. Sometimes you will meet a country gentleman who dabbles in literature, writes a local guide or an historical essay on some personage or fact connected with his own particular town or village, and then you may count yourself fortunate. Depend upon his natural wit to make the place interesting to you. Such a pleasant squire once imparted a sort of glow and charm for me to Taillebourg, and that dullest of little towns, St. Jean d’Angély. He peopled the neighbourhood with great names, and the very pavements instantly grew sacred. His erudition went so far as to revive Blue Beard, an ancestral neighbour, and show me the Marquis of Carabas, with his immortal feline friend, getting married in the reign of Francis I., from the castle at which I was a guest; and though the life at that summer castle was frightfully monotonous, one forgot the monotony in romantic associations. But this is an infrequent blessing. Unless you form one of a hunting party, I know nothing that palls more quickly upon the outsider than the kind of existence led in French châteaux. There are no day or evening amusements. Ladies between meals sit under trees and talk. If they always talked brilliantly upon general topics, this would be pleasant enough, but as all roads lead to Rome, so do all topics to-day in France lead directly or indirectly to politics, and this is fatal. Literature is only a tepid discussion on the latest novel: and this does not carry one far. Then there is a solemn walk with your hostess about the grounds, or a drive outside, and in the evening after dinner a game of bezique with somebody, or the pleasure of watching somebody else play “patience,” and conversation of a not too thrilling kind. Should your hostess or any other visitor be exceptional, delight and pleasure can be extracted from notable talk; but in the case of ordinary men and women, it is very trying to meet together for the dismal satisfaction of being bored simultaneously. The proprietors naturally do not realise this. They have the excitement of receiving guests, whose arrival must be a change in the burthen of inalterable routine. But I have never left a French château without a feeling of sincere gratitude for not possessing one. The sensation of imprisonment, of futile chains, is oppressive. Here, as elsewhere, individuality is effaced by inexorable common law. To be original is to be amusing, no doubt; but, still more, unseemly and mad. You may be a little wild in speech, provided you walk the respectable step of your fellows without the slightest deviation. Your wit, if you happen to have any, will never be more appreciated, for on that ground the French are exquisite judges; but if you cross your knees, or pick blackberries, or dance a hornpipe, or climb a tree, or smoke a pipe, or whistle a tune (I mix up the offences of both sexes against French propriety), you are safe to go forth with a blighted reputation. Many years ago, before I knew these things, I shocked an amiable country gentleman and his son, a correct young officer down from St. Cyr, by breaking away from them to gather and eat lovely blackberries along our path. They told me it was considered extremely improper in France. They mentioned, upon pressure, so many other things that are regarded in rural esteem as improper, that I suggested writing, with their aid, the things a man and a woman (especially a woman) cannot do in France, but on consideration found it would make too large a volume. Here is exhibited the lasting charm of the French character. Had I said such a thing to an Englishman, imbued with a sense of his own correctness, he would have resented it as a foreign impertinence. My French host was charmed with a criticism which he understood to be meant good-naturedly, and added, “I have ever wondered at the reputation we give the English in France for excessive formality, for, personally, I have always found them to be a great deal more genial and easy than ourselves, and I readily recognise that we are much more formal.” When you read French and English newspapers, and see these two great races, the greatest of the world, showing their teeth like angry dogs, you might believe both nations incapable of a just or generous word of each other. Well, I, who am neither French nor English, can testify to the magnanimous recognition of national virtues of both to each other. A feeling of rivalry, of jealousy, of bitterness, may exist on either side, but I know none who have expressed more cordial admiration of British qualities than the French, none who have returned the compliment to them so generously as the English. I still remember the words of a gallant French officer to me one evening after dinner: “It is an unfortunate misunderstanding, exploited by infamous journalists of both countries, between two races made to sympathise with and admire each other. English and French, we complete one another, and as friends would hold the world.” And how true this is! There are faults on both sides, as there always are in a misunderstanding. The English are admirable, the French are lovable, and both have the defects of these qualities.
Even now, as I write these lines, feeling runs high in both countries, one against the other; higher and more aggressive in France, I admit, than in England, and yet I should fill a volume were I to attempt to repeat the splendid and noble things I have lately heard said of England in France, the proofs of regret for this lamentable and, I trust, fugitive state of affairs which I have received from various sources, beginning with cultured men of letters and science, then from Catholic women of the world, who see no reason to hate England because their newspapers tell them to do so; and lastly from workmen, women of the people, from my washerwoman, who once wisely said to me, “If we listen to the newspapers, French or English, we shall all become as stupid and degraded as the Boxers of China.”
What one first remarks about the French peasantry is the clean and comfortable aspect they present: tidy blue blouses, sabots, strong shoes, neatly patched trousers, and their air of natural breeding. Among the mountains they are of rougher build and manners; but in the plains of Berry, in the flat, green department of the Loiret, where the landscape looks like a little bit of Holland on the edge of the still and sedgy Loire where it ceases to be navigable, the very labourers more resemble well-to-do and well-bred farmers than the class to which they belong. Their breeding and neatness, if you come upon them in the wild solitude of the fields, are in keeping with the gracious silence of shepherd life, instead of being a blot upon it, and their civilised speech does not jar upon the banks of grey, flowing water, or among the warm, sunlit meadows.
Farther south-west the manners are less commendable. Mistrust of the foreigner is more visible; and if you ask your way, you risk falling upon the practical joker, who deliberately sends you wrong out of gaiety of heart. Landscape is decided by region, and local character is decided by religion. Volubility and Catholicism seem to go hand in hand; rigidity and sternness with Protestantism. La Rochelle and Rochefort are Protestant towns on the coast; the Cévennes territory is Protestant, also the towns of Nîmes and Montpellier in Provence. Speaking broadly, I should say the French Protestants are more intelligent, the Catholics brighter; the Protestants deeper in brains and sentiments, the Catholics more winningly vivacious. You esteem the Protestants, you like the Catholics; and your sympathy for each will be prompted by temperament, intellect, and instinct. Catholics will always regard Du Chayla, the Christian persecutor of the Cévennes, as a martyr; Protestants, more justly, will pronounce him a hateful persecutor. Religious persecutors, the world over, find their fervent apologists, and it may be said that a large proportion of the French race approve to-day of their St. Bartholomew, and yearn for a repetition of it; just as the good Catholics of the Spanish race find little to condemn in the horrors of the Inquisition. If there should break out a second Revolution in France (we have been living so long on the brink of it that I am constantly reminded of the story of the boy and the wolf, and ask myself in dismay, How long have we to run before meeting with the famous moral of the story?), be sure this time that religion will prove the provocation. I cannot predict on which side it will burst, but assuredly the red flag will be “anti-Semitism.” In the provinces this sentiment runs in a feebler, less aggressive channel, and the rural atmosphere seems to cleanse the air of it entirely. Here religious feeling is either stagnant because of the absence of religious rivalry, or it is a dull assertion of hostility in abeyance, only waiting for the occasion to break out in a torrential downpour. In provincial circles known as clerical, bicycling is regarded as improper, because it has been pronounced unfashionable. At Orleans you will see women and young girls punting as you wander out beyond the suburbs towards the source of the Loiret, in the charming demesne of the Polignacs, but you will not encounter a woman on a bicycle, for Orleans is a clerical town, and, consequently, all that is most fashionable and pretentious. France is aware of the ills which clericalism has brought upon Spain; yet, for the moment, she is deliberately walking backward, through the strenuous efforts of the snobs and of a defunct aristocracy. These reactionary influences are the work of a coterie of intriguing women and ambitious priests in Paris, and now even material and private interests are menaced by conspiring malcontents.
