What would have happened had Juliana declined the honour, I simply dare not conjecture. For that damsel did precisely as she pleased. Her mother's passivity, fatalism, call it what you will, was the mainspring of all her relations with her children. "Que voulez-vous? She wishes it." Or quite simply, "Juliana does not wish it," closed the door against all remonstrance. Madame was a strong-willed woman, she never yielded an iota to us, but her children ruled. When the elder girl, aged fourteen and well-placed with a good family in Paris, came to Bar for a fortnight and then refused to go back, Madame shrugged. Some one in Paris may have been, indeed was, seriously inconvenienced, but "Que voulez-vous?"
"Don't you wish her to go back, Madame?"
"But certainly. What should she do here? It is not fit for a young girl, but que voul——" We fled.
Parental authority seems to be a negligible quantity in France. So far as I could see children did very much as they liked, and were often spoiled to the verge of objectionableness. Yet the steadfastness, courage, thoughtfulness and whole-souled sanity of many a young girl—or a child—would put older and wiser heads to shame.
A puzzling people, these French, who refute to-morrow nearly every opinion they tempt you to formulate about them to-day.
If English women struggling with "chars" and "generals" knew the value of a French femme de ménage there would be a stampede across the Channel in search of her. She does your marketing much more cheaply than you could do it yourself, she keeps her accounts neatly, she is punctual, scrupulously honest, dependable and trustworthy. She may not be clean with British cleanness, her dusting may be superficial (her own phrase, "passer un torchon," aptly describes it), but she understands comfort, and in nearly twenty months' experience of her I never knew a dinner spoiled or a dish unpalatably served.
Of course it is arguable that Madame was not a femme de ménage, nor of the servant class at all. Granted! But there were others. There was the bonne à tout faire (general servant) of the old curé at N. who ruled him with a rod of iron and cooked him dinners fit for a king. And there was Eugénie, the Abbé B.'s Eugénie, who, loving him with a dog-like devotion, was his counsellor and his friend. She corrected him for his good when she thought he needed it, but she mothered and cared for him in his exile from his loved village—French trenches run through it to-day—as only a single-minded woman could.
Yes, Madame—whether ours or some one else's—is a treasure, and we guarded ours as the apple of our eye. There were moments when we positively cringed before her, so afraid were we that she might leave us; for she hated cooking, hers having always been the life of the fields, and though no self-respecting Frenchwoman regards herself as a servant or as a menial, there must have been many hours when the cruelty of her position bit deep. Nevertheless she bore with us for a year, and then the air raids began. And the air raids shattered the nerves of Juliana—a brave little soul, but delicate (we feared tainted with her father's malady); and flight in the night to the nearest cellar, unfortunately some distance away, brought the shadow of Death too close to the home. So the elders counselled flight. Juliana begged to be taken away. Madame wished to remain. The matter hung in uncertainty for some days, then eight alarms and two raids in twenty-four hours settled it.
The alarms began on Friday morning; on Saturday Madame told us that the old people would stay in Bar no longer and she had applied for the necessary papers. They were going south to the Ain on the morrow. Not a word of regret or apology for leaving us at a moment's notice, or for giving us no time in which to replace her. Why apologise since she could neither alter nor prevent? She went through no wish of her own, went at midday, just walked out as she had done every day for a year, but came back next morning to say good-bye and ask us to store some odds and ends. When she had a settled address would we send them on?
So she went away, and our memory of her is of one who never fought circumstances, never wrestled with Fate. When the storms beat upon her, when rude winds blew, she bowed her head and allowed them to carry her where they listed. I think the spring of her life must have broken on that August day when she turned her cattle out on the fields and, closing the door behind her, walked out of her house for ever.