“For breakfast she gave me tea with good milk, excellent bread-and-butter, accompanied either by a rasher of broiled bacon or fresh eggs. For dinner there were often ‘ragouts avec force oignons’ (Irish stew?), boiled mutton, or sometimes a beef-steak ‘très-dur,’ potatoes and boiled cabbage, with a glass of good beer and a bit of cheese. No dessert, but occasionally a pudding. On Sundays, roast-beef and plum-pudding were apparently the rule without exception, for they never failed to appear. The tea in the evening was much the same as the breakfast. If I had wished for supper, I might have had cold meat, bread, a lettuce, and a glass of beer.”
If Mrs Jones be not as entirely fictitious as Mrs Harris, and would enclose us a few cards, we think we could undertake that her lodgings (with a countess and a pet village, too, close by) should not be untenanted for a week in summertime. We feel sure, however, that the good lady is not a creature of mere imagination: when we read the description of her, we recall her as an old acquaintance, though we cannot remember her address:—
“As for this good woman’s personal appearance, she had nothing attractive about her except her scrupulous cleanliness. Her age belonged to that mysterious epoch comprised between forty and sixty. She had an intelligent countenance; but what was most marked about her was a slightly military air, and a black silk bonnet which, planted on the top of her head, tilted forward over her face, and usually concealed half of it. The two strings were carefully pinned back over the brim, and the ends fluttered on each side the bonnet, like the plume of a chasseur de Vincennes. That bonnet, she never left it off for a moment; and my indiscreet imagination went so far as to speculate what could possibly become of it at night.... Though I had begged her to consider herself absolute mistress in all domestic matters—and though, moreover, I should have found considerable difficulty in ordering my own dinner—she never failed to come in every morning at breakfast-time ‘for orders,’ as she called it. It was a little ruse of hers to secure a moment for the active exercise of her somewhat gossiping tongue. I was enabled to endure the torrent of words of which good Mrs Jones disburdened herself on such occasions the more philosophically, inasmuch as she was nowise exacting in the matter of an answer, and now and then gave me some interesting bits of information.”
The contrast which follows is drawn from a shrewd observation of national characteristics on both sides of the Channel:—
“This respectable dame possessed in a high degree the good qualities and the defects of her class of Englishwomen. In France, the manners of women of her order are full of expansion and sympathy; and a small farmer’s wife, however ignorant she may be, will always find means to interest you in her affairs, and to enter into yours. In England, on the contrary, with all her gossiping upon trifling subjects, she will maintain the strictest reserve, so far as you are concerned, upon matters of any importance. She serves you much better than a Frenchwoman would, because she looks upon you in the light of a master—a guest whose rank and character she makes the most of, because that rank and character raise her in her own estimation; but it is only in some very exceptional case that she will talk to you about anything which touches her personally, or that she will venture to confess that she is thinking about your concerns—that would be, in her eyes, a breach of proper respect.
“This is the peculiar feature in the relations between the different classes of society in England. Society there is profoundly aristocratic; there is no tradesman, be he ever so professed a Radical, who does not become a greater man in his own eyes by receiving the most commonplace act of courtesy from a lord; no servant who does not feel an additional satisfaction in waiting on a master whose manners have a touch of haughtiness, because such manners strike him as a mark of superiority. It is just as Rousseau says: ‘Clara consoles herself for being thought less of than Julia, from the consideration that, without Julia, she would be thought even less of than she is.’ The singular feature is, that this kind of humility, which would seem revolting to us in France, is met with in England amongst precisely those persons who are remarkable for their moral qualities and for their self-respect. It is because in them this deference becomes a sort of courtesy, a social tact, of which only a gentleman can understand all the niceties—which, besides, implies in their case nothing like servility—the respect paid to superiors in rank is kept within the limits of the respect due to themselves. This peculiarity in English manners struck me the more forcibly, because it offers such a remarkable contrast to what goes on among ourselves.”
There follows, at some length, a truthful and well-written exposition of the healthful influence exercised upon a nation by an aristocracy like that of England—which we must not stop to quote. ‘Revenons‘—as the author writes, asking pardon for so long a digression—‘Revenons à Madame Jones.’
That excellent landlady is careful not only of the diet and other creature-comforts of her new lodger, but of his moral and religious wellbeing also. A week of wet weather—which the foreign visitor finds sufficiently triste—is succeeded by a lovely Sunday morning. The Frenchman sallies out after breakfast for a morning walk, with his book under his arm—we are sorry to say it was a ‘Tacitus’—with the intention, we are left to suppose, of worshipping nature on the common. But Mrs Jones, though totally innocent as to her lodger’s heretical intentions, takes care to lead him in the way that he should go.
“‘Church is at eleven,’ Mrs Jones called out to me, not doubting for an instant that I should go there. I went out; she followed me close, locked all the doors, and, stopping for a moment at the cottage next door to call for a neighbour, continued her way. I was taking another path, but was very soon arrested by the hurried approach of Mrs Jones, who, fancying I had mistaken my way, came after me to show me the road to church. Such perseverance on her part made it evident that I should risk the loss of her good opinion if I did not profit by her instructions; so I walked down the hill with her by a road which wound between broad verges of green turf overshadowed by lofty trees.”
Thus fairly captured and led to church in triumph, his behaviour there was on the whole very decorous. The impression likely to be made on the mind of an intelligent and well-disposed foreigner by the simple and yet impressive service in a well-ordered village church is very nicely described. It is true that Mrs Jones’s prisoner, according to his own account, mingles with the very proper reflections natural to such a place “those inspired by the volume of Tacitus which he held open before him for decency’s sake” (and which, we fear, must have imposed itself upon the good lady as a French prayer-book); a little touch which, whether written by a Frenchman or not, and whether meant for truth or satire, is very French indeed. He finds time also to notice the features of the building itself, and its arrangements. The “tribune” in the gallery where the Countess performs her devotions, and the high enclosure with drawn curtains—“a sort of petit salon”—which protects the family of Mr Mason, the squire, from the more vulgar worshippers, do not strike the visitor, we rejoice to say, as happy illustrations of the aristocratic feeling in Englishmen; and it is evidently with a quiet satisfaction that he learns subsequently that “puséisme” is trying to do away with such distinctions.