"Ridiculous," said Madame, "table wine is not alcohol."
"Yes," I continued, "but it is the first steps toward strong drink. You are going to order a fine champagne with your coffee. You cannot tell me that brandy is not strong drink."
"Here in France," said Madame, "everybody takes a drink and nobody gets drunk. You must understand, my dear child, that we have a different point of view."
"Maybe you don't get drunk," said I, "but how about what one sees in Brittany?"
"You lack respect," answered Madame. She ignored Brittany. In France, one is not accustomed to argue with a sixteen-year-old girl. Questioning the judgment of one's elders is impertinent. Since I have brought up my own children in France, I am more than half won over to French ideas. The strong individualism of the American child shocks me now in somewhat the same way as my "freshness" must have shocked Madame Raymond. I was ready to contest her belief that American girls had no manners. I have not taught my children to courtesy—for the simple reason that it is no longer the fashion in France. But I am far from believing now, as I told Madame Raymond, that courtesying is affectation. And I fear that my children have had the example of French children in regard to wine. I am trying to put down here how I was at sixteen. When, after years in America, I returned to France, my point of view was different.
But about some things maturity has not changed the opinion of a pert young American miss. French ideas of sex relationship between adolescents seem to me now as they did then, absurd and false. Nor have I revised my opinion about high heels and tight corsets, powder and paint.
It was Madame's duty to take me to the dressmaker's. Before my dress appeared in the fitting room, I was put into my first pair of corsets. When they were laced up, I rebelled, took a long breath, and stretched them out again. Madame Raymond and the fitting woman shook their heads and assured me that my dress would not fit. My governess sided with the girl, when she remonstrated against my stretching the lacings. I showed little interest, too, in Madame Raymond's suggestion concerning the purchase of a box and a pretty puff with a silk rose-bud for a handle, which was to contain pink powder.
"I never make up," I declared. "If you put powder and other stuff on your face when you are young, you are not far-sighted. Ugh! I loathe pink powder."
One day we went to a foire, one of those delightful open-air second-hand markets that never cease to fascinate Parisians. A man darted out from a booth and offered to sell me a wedding gown.
"How much is that dress?" I inquired.