There we paid a visit to a delightful little old lady, with a face, full of wrinkled sweetness and humour, which Denner might have painted. She insisted upon showing us all over her home, and a little miracle it was of thrift and neatness and order; from the spotlessly clean little bedrooms with the high Flemish beds, the crucifix hanging over the bed, and prints—not always devout—on the walls, to the sitting-room with its shining mirror, highly polished tin and brass candlesticks and platters, and abundant china. She was a staunch Imperialist, and had portraits of the Emperor, with prints of Solferino and of Sedan. 'There it was that they betrayed him!' said the little old lady, with deep indignation in her voice. I had not the heart to ask her who these traitors were. The garrets I found filled with new-mown hay. 'It keeps there till we sell it,' she said, 'and then it smells so sweet!' which was undeniable. Behind her house (her son and his wife were both absent at their work) she showed us the garden, very trimly kept and gay with the old familiar flowers, and an arbour, in which she took especial pride, none of her neighbours possessing anything of the sort.
At Thiers I talked with an officer of the company who had served for some time in one of the great mines of Southern France. The differences in the habits and character of the mining populations there and here he found very great, and, on the whole, he evidently thought the Northern miners much superior, in most essential points, to their fellows at the South. Certainly, according to him, they are neater in their persons, more cool and sensible, less credulous, less addicted to politics, and much more thrifty. 'The women, when they are well-behaved and good managers,' he said, 'have more influence with the men in the North. In the South and in Auvergne, I have sometimes thought the worst women had more influence with the men than the best.'
He had an odd theory as to the effect of great altitudes on human character. 'In Auvergne and in Savoy,' he said, 'the higher up you go the more excitable and quarrelsome you find the people. Here in Flanders the people are placid, like the plains.' He called my attention, too, to the prevalence among the miners here at Anzin of a peculiar type of blonds with a sort of ruddy russet hair and beard, not quite the glowing Titianesque auburn, and yet by no means red. It is certainly a marked and peculiar tint, and may be seen faithfully reproduced in a large picture of the Anzin miners exhibited this year at Paris. I had supposed it to 'hark back' to the Scandinavians, who made themselves so much at home in all these fat and accessible regions after Charlemagne passed away.
'No,' said my philosophic engineer, 'it is due to the potash. These miners are so addicted to washing themselves and use such quantities of strong soap, that it has permanently affected their hair.' Upon which another engineer, also familiar with Auvergne, broke in: 'That's all very well; but I have seen many miners in Auvergne with the same tint of hair and beard, and you know that there they wash their faces, at the most, once a week!'
This last speaker was an exceedingly shrewd man and, as I found, a strong Conservative. He had been asked to stand as a candidate for mayor in his commune, but had declined, though his personal popularity made his election almost a matter of form. I asked him why. 'Let myself be elected to a political office by my workmen!' he said; 'how can a sensible man think of such a thing? Ask men to give you their votes, and what authority will be left to you? No, I think I know my business too well for that. They tried that sort of thing, you know, during the war, and a beautiful business they made of it! I suspect it was the Germans who suggested it!'
What I am told of the morals of the people here reminds me of the traditional reputation of certain sections of Pennsylvania settled by the Germans in the last century, and of the Dutch in Long Island. There is a good deal of drinking. Buvettes are forbidden within the limits of the cités ouvrières, but in the communes they are very numerous, averaging, I am assured, as many as twenty to every 1,200 inhabitants. To open a buvette nothing is needed but a police permission, and the buvettes are kept, for the most part, by the wives of miners and other artisans, as a means of adding to the family income. Beer is very cheap, costing only two sous a litre. Wine and spirits are more costly, though a great deal of gin is made, and inexpensively made, in the country. There is much sociability among the people, and great practical liberality as to the conduct of young girls, the ancient practice known as 'bundling' in New England being still in vogue among these worthy Flemings. M. Baudrillart, who evidently inclines to a favourable judgment of these Northern populations, puts the truth on this point very considerately.
'Conspicuous historical examples,' he observes, 'prove to me that the flesh is weak in this province of Flanders. The severity of public opinion does not always make up for the laxity of the control exercised by principle. Unmarried mothers are numerous, and incidents of this sort are often regarded as simple errors of youth and inexperience, to be remedied by marriage. The marriage-tie when formed, however, is not less respected than among our rural populations in general, and cases of flagrant misconduct on the part of married women are rare.'
Offences against persons and property are not relatively numerous here. On the contrary, while the proportion of persons accused of crime is 12 to the hundred thousand, for all France, in this Department of the Nord it falls to 8⅓ to the hundred thousand, and this notwithstanding the numbers crowded into the great manufacturing towns of the department. In the Department of the Seine, which includes Paris, the proportion rises to 28 to the hundred thousand, and in the agricultural Department of the Eure, which is the champion criminal Department of France, to 30 to the hundred thousand. One might almost imagine that M. Zola must have gone to the Eure for his studies of French peasant-life.
Without being particularly devout, the people of this region, I am told, are fond of their religious observances, and much dislike the persecution of the Church and the laicisation of the schools.
At Thiers the church, which is a large one, fronting on an extensive Place Publique, was very handsomely decorated on Corpus Christi Sunday by the people of the commune. Flags and garlands were put up, too, all about the Place Publique. The Anzin Company are now building a large school for girls very near this church; and I visited, with M. Guary, one afternoon, the boys' school at Thiers. It is very well installed in a large building, with a playground and a gymnasium roofed in, but not walled. The teacher—a lay teacher, and a very quiet, sensible man—who lives in the school-building with his wife, told me he preferred to keep it thus, and the boys liked it better. They were at their lessons when I visited the school, and a very sturdy, comely lot of lads they were. Some of them were en pénitence, having slighted their lessons, as the teacher slily intimated, by reason of the great Church festival. This I thought not unlikely, and he did not appear to regard it as an absolutely unpardonable offence, while the juvenile criminals themselves were evidently quite cheery in their minds. In a room near the gymnasium were racks filled with wooden guns. These the teachers pointed out with pride. They were a gift from the company to his battalion of boys, who delighted in their regular military drill. He thought them, after only eighteen months' training, one of the best boy-battalions in the department, and would have liked to take them to Paris to compete for the athletic prizes. But to take up even a picked company of ten would have cost 400 francs, which he thought, and I agreed with him, might be better spent in Thiers. 'And then,' he said with a smile, 'what a life I should have led in Paris, with those ten boys to look after!'