“It isn’t like your French idea of home. We are all tremendously devoted to each other but the thing you mean—the family tradition—the standing for one definite idea—that doesn’t exist.”
“Are you a happy race, I wonder?”
The question surprised me.
“I had never thought of that. I should say we are—yes—and yet—I don’t know: perhaps we are not. We are a nation of individualists, full of driving energy and ambition. We all want something we haven’t got. I’m afraid it’s rather a material ambition, usually. I’d like to believe it makes for the greatness of the country,—this restlessness, this discontent, this wanting to push up: but perhaps we do sacrifice a good deal to it. I haven’t thought over that much.”
“I think that what makes my nation truly great is that we are the happiest people in the world.”
“I don’t think I quite understand you.”
“Everything is so well ordered with us,” she said, and her voice softened as she spoke of loved things. “Just as our beautiful land is so well ordered: the fields so well laid out, the trees so well disciplined, the little, red-topped villages so clean and so prosperous, so in harmony. Just so in our family life: it is so well ordered. We have real grandmothers and real grandchildren, and our fathers are real heads of the family. I don’t think a Frenchwoman would want to have a husband who didn’t have authority, to whom she didn’t look up. And our mothers—you can never know the affection, the deference, the respect that surrounds them.”
“Yes, I know that: it’s a rare and beautiful thing.”
“We have such pride in what the family has stood for. We live as one, we surround the family life with so many quaint little customs. There is much beauty and simplicity in it, for we are willing to be happy as our grandfathers have been happy; and that happiness is not selfish; it means many, many sacrifices often, but that makes it true happiness because we cannot be happy unless we keep our pride in our ideals.” She stopped. “I don’t know if you understand me, but I think we study how to live more than you do. And, because we French are so happy together, we can give everything to keep that happiness undefiled and pass it down to our children.”