The Cafés.
The great want in French provincial life is amusement of a cheap and innocent kind, that might bring people together. The men have their cafés, but they are only frequented by one sex, and not universally by that. The clergy, of course, avoid them, and so do the gentry who pretend to some degree of rank. They are frequented by the middle, including the professional, classes; and the very existence of cafés is evidence of the small amount of intercourse going on in private houses. They are at the same time an effect and a cause of the separation of the sexes. So far as I know, the upper classes are more sociable in the sense of having more intercourse amongst themselves than the middle, but they are exclusive, and even amongst the richer nobles I doubt if there is as much hospitality as in England.
Balls and Theatres.
Rarity of Public Amusements.
An idea is prevalent in England that Frenchwomen are constantly going to balls and theatres. In Paris, no doubt, rich women have these amusements, but in the provinces, where most French people live, there is very little of them. The provincial town that is best known to me is situated in an aristocratic neighbourhood, and although the theatre is very pretty and very well kept, the gentry will not patronise it at all, and are never to be seen there. Even the middle classes are by no means regular in their attendance, for the actors often play to empty benches. There are never any public balls, and those in private houses are very rare. The only public entertainments patronised in any way by the upper classes are the charity concerts, which occur perhaps twice in three years.
Lunch.
The Formal Call.
The English institution of lunch, to which any friend may come uninvited, is a great practical help to social intercourse in the country. It is pleasant from the absence of state and pretension, both in host and guest, and it gives a convenient excuse for paying a long call in the middle of the day. There is nothing answering to it in France. You must be very intimate indeed with a French family before you could venture to “demander à déjeuner;” in fact, that is hardly possible without relationship. It is astonishing, to an Englishman, how very much of French social intercourse is absolutely limited to the formal call between three and six in the afternoon. People go on calling upon each other in that way for all their lives without an invitation on either side.
Invitations to sleep.
Another great difference between France and England concerns invitations to sleep. In England, all your friends’ houses are open to you. It would not occur to an Englishman to go to the hotel in a town where he had intimate friends. In France the narrowness of town lodgings acts as an effectual preventive to this kind of hospitality, except amongst the very rich, and so the habit of it is lost. This is one of those small matters which have great consequences. The most unrestrained social intercourse in England takes place when guests are staying in a house, and the most valuable moments for the interchange of masculine confidences occur very late at night.