I only speak of these matters because they are much more in evidence in Paris than are the Statue of Liberty, or the Column of Vendôme, or any of the great places that the guide-books tell about.
The French are delightfully “natural” about many things. It is quite the proper thing for a man and woman to hug and kiss each other in public. At first this startled me and I felt that perhaps they were excited. But no, it is just the proper way to manifest their feelings at the time. Just imagine how it would be if the Frenchman across the table from you put his arm around the lady next to him and she snuggled up to him and patted his cheek with her unengaged hand. I felt like getting right up and saying, “Excuse me. Am I intruding?” But I soon learned that they didn’t mind us at all. Their idea of love is to let go all holds and l-o-v-e. Their theory of matrimony is that it is an arrangement based on family position, business and prospects. No young woman can get a husband unless she has a dot, so much capital. The parents arrange the matches, and usually do so carefully and thoughtfully. The girl, who has not even been allowed to go to school with the boys, has no idea of any other arrangement; and the man, who has never thought of matrimony in another way, considers it a part of his “career.”
A man in France cannot marry without the consent of his parents until he is 25 and a woman not till she is 21. This law is strictly obeyed, and there is no running off to some other state where the rule is different. I suppose French marriages arranged in this apparently cold-blooded manner by the parents turn out on the average as well as they would if they let the young people rush in and “marry for love.” But it doesn’t seem right to us, any more than our ways seem good to them. Of course a Frenchman does not insist that his “sweetheart” shall have a “dot,” so that kind of an arrangement is made by the parties themselves. All of which seems very wrong to English and Americans; and yet the French prove it is the best way by using the divorce figures, for divorce is practically unknown in France. The French woman is the business partner of her husband, and necessity makes them pull together just as they were taught to do from their youth up. She doesn’t belong to clubs any more than her husband does. She has a great deal of liberty, and in fact is often the head of the firm.
In Dover Town
Dover, England, August 22.
One of the strange things in this old world is a boundary line. You are on a railway in Germany, hearing no language but German. The train crosses the imaginary line and you hear an entirely different language, and if you try to use the words which were understood ten minutes before, the people do not understand you. They are French, and they not only speak a different language but they differ in custom, tastes and looks. It would be just like a traveler from Hutchinson to Kansas City being able to speak and understand what people said at Argentine, but on arrival at the union depot in Kansas City finding a different looking and different talking lot, who could not understand a word he said. And arriving in the Kansas City depot neither understanding nor being understood, would be something of an ordeal, especially if you were trying to change trains and make a sharp connection. It is no wonder that an ordinary Kansan traveling in this European land puts in much of his time figuring out his route and a lot more doing it.
Of course it is a joy to arrive in England and be able to talk and to understand everything that is said. Two hours after we left the fish-smelly Boulogne I was quarreling in right fair English with a railroad official because a train was late. In France we would have had to stand around and look pleasant, for the official would not have known whether we were cross about the train or the reciprocity treaty. It often relieves your mind to tell a Frenchman or a German what you think of him or his country in English, but it doesn’t cause him any discomfort.