In America we have the phrase living-room, in France they have it. In this one high-ceilinged room the daily life of the family is complete. Here is the kitchen stove and the dinner table, here are the beds of Madame and Monsieur, Madame’s in one corner hung with dim flowered chintz, Monsieur’s in another brave with a beautiful old red India shawl. Here is the broad stone sink under the window, with the drain running out into the street, where the family makes its morning toilet. Here are the great dark armoires which hold clothing, china-ware and stores of all sorts. Here is the littered desk where the family correspondence is carried on; and here is the larder, a huge slab of pork and a ham hanging from the beams over one’s head, while on a stick in front of the fireplace a row of little fishes hang by their tails in dumb expectation of a Friday. And here too is the family shrine, a little wooden Madonna in red and blue, found as Madame tells us in the ancient city of La Mothe, which, destroyed in 1645, now exists as a wonderful ruin crowning a hill some two miles to the west.
If the stove-wood is found lacking at meal-time, Monsieur rises from his chair and saws an armful beside the dinner-table. If Madame decides while we are eating our soup that a piece of ham will improve the menu she stands upon her chair and cuts a slice in the air over our heads. On wash days one picks one’s way to the table past the pails which hold the family linen in soak, and later eats one’s soupe à pain under a brave array of drying garments slung from wall to wall.
The family, which consists of Monsieur, Madame and Mademoielle, the two sons being in service, are the most hospitable souls alive. Continually they urge, “Mangez, mangez!” and then, “Vous êtes timide!” Their feelings are dreadfully hurt if each one of us refuses to eat enough for two. They seem somehow to have acquired the idea that Americans need a vast deal of sweetening, so they offer you sugar, commissary sugar, with everything, and they are gently but definitely disappointed when you decline to heap it on your mashed potato.
Mile. Jeane, clear-skinned, bright-eyed, capable, energetic yet possessed of a warm charm withal, is forewoman of the little glove factory in town.
“Are there many employees?” I asked.
“But no. Eight only. Since the Americans came to town all the women have deserted the factory in order to wash the Americans’ clothes.”
Monsieur, it appears, is a wood-cutter by profession. He comes home from a hard day’s chopping looking like a genus of the woods himself with his worn brown velour suit, his wrinkled brown skin and his ragged brown beard which resembles exactly those bundles of fine twigs which the French burn in their fireplaces. When Monsieur was ten years old the Germans occupied the town and sixteen of them slept in this very room. They were perfect pigs, he says, and ate everything they could lay their hands on; “But,” he adds, “they didn’t like our bread!”
Sunday mornings all the men in town, including the Man With One Leg, and all the dogs start off together, the men armed with guns and each carrying a musette bag or knapsack. Papa puts on his shooting coat with the fancy buttons each depicting a different bird or beast of the chase, takes down his old shot-gun from the wall, and joins them. At dusk they come back again, empty-handed, but seemingly well content. Their modus operandi, I gather, is to proceed to a comfortable spot in the woods, then all sit down, drink vin rouge and wait for the game. Indeed one doughboy declares, that passing by one of those open alleys which intersect the forests here, he once saw an old Frenchman standing with his gun in a drizzling rain, patiently waiting for a shot while by his side stood another “old frog” holding an umbrella over him.
Goncourt, February 14.
The woman who lives in the House of the Madonna is an unconscionable old scalawag. Not that you would ever suspect it to look at her, for with her round rosy face, her smooth parted hair and her comfortably rotund figure she resembles nothing so much as somebody’s genial and respected grandmother. Yet the facts in the case remain. She sells doped wine to the soldiers at ruinous prices and she sells at forbidden hours. Moreover we have reason to suspect that at odd times she carries on an utterly illicit commerce. According to our hostess, when the time from the last pay day grows too long, certain soldiers are not above smuggling in their extra shoes and shirts to her, and she pays them back in drinks.