Round about Bar-le-Duc

by Susanne R. Day

I

Sermaize, however, was not to be the scene of my future labours. The honour was reserved for Bar-le-Duc, the captital city of the Meuse, the seat of a Prefecture, and proud manufacturer of a very special jam, "Confitures de Bar-le-Duc." The mouth waters at the very thought of it, but desire develops a limp when you have seen the initial processes of manufacture; for these consist in the removal by means of a finely-cut quill of every pip from every currant about to be boiled in the sacrificial pan. As you go through the streets in July you see white and crimson patches on the ground. They look disgustingly like something that has been chewed and spumed forth again. They are the discarded currant pips, for only the skin and pulp are made into jam.

This unpipping (have we any adequate translation for épepiner?), paid for at the rate of about four sous a pound, is sometimes carried on under the cleanliest of home conditions, but occasionally one sees a group of women at work round a table that makes jam for the moment the least appetising of comestibles. Nevertheless, if the good God ever places a pot of Confiture de Bar-le-Duc upon your table, eat it; eat it à la Russe with a spoon—don't insult it with bread—and you will become a god with nectar on your lips.

There were about four thousand refugees in Bar. That is why I was there too. And before I had been ten minutes in the town a hard-voiced woman said, "Would you please carry those seaux hygiéniques (sanitary pails) upstairs?" So much for my anticipatory thrills. If I ever go to heaven I shall be put in the back garden.

À la guerre, comme à la guerre. I carried the pails—a work of supererogation as it subsequently transpired, for they all had to be brought down again promptly, so heavily were they in demand.

For the sanitation of Bar-le-Duc has yet to be born.[2] One can't call arrangements that date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries sanitation, one can only call them self-advertisement. Until I went to Bar I never knew that the air could be solid with smell. One might as well walk up a sewer as up the Rue de l'Horloge on a hot day. Every man, woman and child in the town ought to have died of diphtheria, typhoid, septic poisoning, of a dozen gruesome diseases long ago. If smells could kill, Bar would be as depopulated as the Dead Cities of the Zuyder Zee. But the French seem to thrive on smells, though in all fairness I must admit that once or twice a grumble reached me. But that was when the cesspool under the window was discharging its contents into the yard.

The hard-voiced woman was hygienically mad. She imported a Sanitary Inspector, an ironic anomaly, who used to blush apoplectically through meals because she would discuss the undiscussable with him. "I hope you are not squeamish? We don't mind these things here," she said to me. "It is so stupid to be a prude."

Frankly, I could have slain that woman. She wasn't fit to live. The climax came on a broiling day when we were all exhausted and not a little sick from heat and smell. She pleasingly entertained us at dinner with a graphic description of a tubercular hip which she had been dressing. There was a manure heap outside the window of the sick child's room. It crawled with flies. So did the room. So did the hip.

She went back to the native sphere she should never have left a few days later, but in the meantime she had obsessed us all with a firm belief in the value of the seau hygiénique. Every refugee family should have one. Our first care must be to provide it. The obsession drove us into strange difficulties, as, for example, once in a neighbouring village where, trusting to my companion to keep the kindly but inquisitive Curé who accompanied us too deeply engaged in conversation to hear what I was saying, I asked the mother of a large family if she would like us to give her one.

"Qu'est que c'est? What did you say?"