"Don't you like flowers, Madame?" we asked, and she turned resigned eyes to ours. These English! Perhaps the good God who made them understood them, but as for her, Odille Drouet ... With a shrug she consigned us to the limbo of the inscrutable. A garden was the place for flowers, why should we bring them into the house?
French logic. Why, indeed?
Madame never understood us, but I think she grew to tolerate us in the end, and perhaps even to like us a little for our own queer sakes. Once, when she had been with us for a few weeks, she exclaimed so bitterly, "I wish I had never seen the English," we wondered what we could possibly have done to offend her. Agitated inquiries relieved our minds. We were merely a disagreeable incident of the war. If the Germans had not pillaged France we would not have come to Bar-le-Duc. Cause and effect linked us with the Boche in her mind, and I think she never looked at us without seeing the Crown Prince leering over our shoulder.
A woman of strange passivity of temper, a fatalist—like so many of her countrymen—she had a face that Botticelli would have worshipped. Masses of dark hair exquisitely neat were coiled on her head (why, oh why, do our English women wear hats? Is not half a French woman's attraction in the simple dignity of the uncovered head? I never realised the vulgarising properties of hat till I lived in France), her eyes were dark, her brows delicately pencilled, her features regular. Gentleness, resignation, patience were all we saw in her. She had one of the saddest faces I have ever seen.
No doubt she had good reason to be sad. Her husband, a well-to-do farmer, died of consumption in the years before the war, and she who now cooked and scrubbed and dusted and tidied for us once drove her own buggy, once ruled a comfortable house and superintended the vagaries of three servants. In her fine old cupboards were stores of handspun linen sheets, sixty pairs at least, and ten or twelve dozen handspun, handmade chemises. Six lits montés testified to the luxury of her home; on the walls hung rare pottery, Lunéville, Sarréguemin and the like.
A lit monté is a definite sign of affluence, and well it may be so. The French understand at least two things thoroughly—sauces and beds. Incidentally I believe that the French woman does not exist who cannot make a good omelette. I saw one made once in five minutes over a smoky wood fire, the pan poised scientifically on two or three crosswise sticks. An English woman cooking on such an altar would have offered us an imitation of chamois leather, charred, toughened and impregnated with smoke. Madame the wife of the Mayor of Vavincourt offered us—dare I describe it? Perhaps one day I shall write a sonnet to that omelette; it must not be dishonoured in prose.
Yes, the French can cook, and they can make beds, and unless you have stretched your wearied limbs in a real lit monté, unless you have sunk fathoms deep in its downy nest and have felt the light, exquisite warmth of the duvet steal through your limbs, you have never known what comfort is.
You gaze at it with awe when you see it first, wondering how you are to get in. I know women who had to climb upon a chair every night in order to scale the feathery heights. For my own part, being long of limb, I found a flying leap the most graceful means of access, but there are connoisseurs who recommend a short ladder.
Piled on the top of a palliasse and a mattress are a huge bed of feathers, spotless sheets, a single blanket, a coverlet, and then the crimson silk-covered duvet, over which is spread a canopy of lace. The cost must be fabulous, though oddly enough no one ever mentioned a probable price. But no refugee can speak of her lost lits montés without tears.
Madame had six of them, and cattle in her byre, and horses in her stable, and all the costly implements of a well-stocked farm. Yet for months she lived with her little girl, her father, and her mother in a single room in the Place de la Halle, a dark, narrow, grimy room that no soap and water could clean. Her bed was a sack of straw laid upon the ground, and—until the Society provided them—she had no sheets, no pillow-cases, indeed I doubt if she even had a pillow. Her farm is razed to the ground, and no doubt some fat unimaginative sausage-filled Hausfrau sleeps under her sheets and cuddles contentedly under her duvet o' nights.