These changes in the status of women are going to be very good for France and her people. Already one sees their broadening effect. In the old days the French showed a certain lack of hospitality to strangers. You had to be very well known to a French family before you were invited to visit the house. This is the real reason why the French have been so little understood.
It has been said of them that they had no word for home, hence they must be less domestic than other people. They have a word for home. It is “foyer,” which means literally hearth. The family hearth was to them so sacred that they couldn’t bring themselves to admit foreigners there.
That, too, is changing. Not only middle class people, but people of wealth are opening their homes, especially to Americans. I received the most unexpected invitations to the homes of almost strangers. One woman of prominence whom I met for the first time told me that she had a country house in Brittany which she wanted to place at the disposal of American soldiers this summer.
“I have lost several near relatives in the war,” she said, “and it would be a consolation to me to feel that I was doing something for the ally that came in time to save our France from perishing. I want to know the American young man. If your son should be so unfortunate as to be wounded I hope I can take him to my house for his convalescence. I would gladly receive him and any of the American soldiers.”
The kaiser’s atrocious war, meant to crush and alienate and enslave the English, French and Americans, has had quite another effect. It has brought us into new and noble friendship. It has forged ties that never will be broken.
CHAPTER XXIV
POUR LA PATRIE
In one of the most widely read of French magazines I came across a story which illustrates the wonderful spirit and loyalty of the French mother. She loves her children with a devotion unsurpassed anywhere. But more deeply and more deathlessly she loves France.
The story was contained in an article written by a French correspondent who witnessed the repatriation at Evian-les-Bains of a large number of women and children long held prisoners by the Germans. Among them was a woman and her two little boys, Jean, aged five, and Gilbert, three. The mother was in the last stages of tuberculosis, and she had just managed to live long enough to get her children to Evian. Then she died. But before she died she said to the French Red Cross representative who had promised to care for the little ones: “I want you to make workmen of them. The country will so much need skilled workers.”
This heroic mother, who with her last breath dedicated her children to the rebuilding of France, was a simple, plain woman of the people. It is hardly likely that she had ever said a single word about patriotism. She lived it, and so do all French women. And there, I verily believe, is the secret of the vitality and the unconquerable strength of the French nation. At their mother’s knee the men of France learn that the first love and allegiance of their hearts and lives are due their country. They never forget that lesson.
I do not know who ever invented the fiction that French women are not maternal. It is true that they do not, as a rule, have many children, but that is easily understood when one studies the French economic and social conditions. In all families outside the wage earning class the girl children must be provided with dowries. It is the custom, and a dowerless girl has a difficult time getting married. Also, under French law, all children inherit equally their parents’ estate. Land holdings, as a rule, are very moderate, and if there were many children it would be impossible to educate and equip them for life.