CHAPTER VIII
PEASANT AND ARTISAN
From earliest youth I had been accustomed to the trim and pleasing aspect of the French peasant, but lived long in Paris without ever having had occasion to examine this class more closely than a walk in the country permits. I chanced to summer one year in the Saintonge, and friends made me acquainted there with an excellent miller and his wife who dwelt upon their lands. I published in the Speaker something about these delightful people afterwards, and I cannot do better than quote from that forgotten source:
“In the Saintonge, as elsewhere, the local mood is ruled by politics, and private friendship gives way to public rivalry. I learnt all about these feuds from my friend the miller of La Pellouaille. Intellect was not his strong point, but there was a cheerful cynicism about him to lend flavour to his commonplaces. While others affected the heroic or patriotic, he was content to accommodate himself to circumstances. In reply to my query—to which party he belonged—he said, with a humorous smile, ‘Dame, I go with the strongest, naturally,’ which did not prevent him from giving his own sly hit at the Government. I give his views for what they are worth—neither brilliant nor original, but expressed with a certain geniality of tone and temper that kept him from bucolic dulness. If the Republic kept France out of mischief for the next twenty years, and carried her into fair prosperity, he believed, by that time, neither Bonapartist nor Legitimist would be remembered. For the moment the land was in a state of ferment, and he thought it a pity such excessive use should be made of those big words, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. These three republican assurances be qualified as mere blagues; and told me of a jocose tobacconist who wrote them on the sign-board of his shop, with an empty tobacco-pouch suspended from each, the pouches in France being called blagues. But the miller’s wife was certainly his pleasanter half. It was a delight to look upon a creature so human and wholesome and resourceful. She was a large, handsome woman, with a smile as fresh as new milk, and hazel eyes as clear as daylight, beaming with good-will, with vitality, and interest in her fellows. The kine browsing in the fields were not more mild. Such a woman has you right at nature’s heart—big and broad and bountiful. She is peasant in the best sense, proud of her spotless cap and apron, free and independent in her carriage, with shoulders that know no cringing stoop and voice that cannot whine.”
This good creature took me rambling through the woods, she picking the nuts, and I devouring them; and I found her talk ever sensible and entertaining. Thanks to the natural good manners and intelligence of the French people, there is far less difference than in England between the uneducated and educated classes. My friends of the mill honoured me once with an invitation to dinner. The sky was menacing, and, as I entered the long park avenue whence the mill was visible, I saw the miller and his son anxiously scanning the heavens and the green-roofed aisle of walnut and sycamore by which I came. They hailed me with vigorous welcome, and, as I rested in their beautifully clean kitchen, with broad and generous fireplace, where the wood crackled pleasantly, and shone upon polished brass dogs and gleaming bronze pots, with the high French bed in the deep recess, the miller’s wife mixed me some cassis and water. A more excellent dinner I have never eaten than that cooked, without fuss, or haste, or delay, by the miller’s wife. In a twinkling, as it seemed to me, she had savoury tomato-soup on the table; and while she laid the cloth, the miller sat in front of the capacious mouth of flames, and saw that the browning chicken was kept moist with grease. I told them the story of Alfred and the cakes, and the miller’s wife cried, “She struck a king—a peasant just like myself!” “Dame,” laughed the miller, “it doesn’t make much difference, when it is a woman, whether she be queen or peasant!” And I thought the remark one that an English peasant would have been incapable of making. He would have been incapable of such a point of view.
The French peasant has not the charm of the Irish peasant—the women, above all, lack the lovely complexion and beautiful eyes of the Irish—and he has less of the grand air. He is much more the son of the soil and less of the gentleman. The writer, wishing to be true to life, could never make such enchanting “copy” out of him as Jane Barlow made of the Irish peasant in her delightful Idylls. There is too little poetry about him, and he is too evenly balanced and cool-headed to offer us many of the adorable surprises of humour. I have heard it said, by French persons who live in the country, that Zola comes nearer to truth and reality in his presentment of the peasant than George Sand in her exquisite pastorals, or M. René Bazin in such a tender and lovely story as La Terre qui Meurt. But Balzac himself did not weave us tales of romance and delicate feeling when he touched upon the theme; and so it is very likely that the fellow is more of a brute than he seems to be in casual intercourse, without, however, sinking to the loathsome depths of the realism of La Terre. I, when I recall him to mind, own that I ever see him a dignified, well-mannered figure in blue blouse, generally clean, sometimes incredibly patched by his thrifty wife, frugal, sober, hard-worked, not too garrulous, and yet not resentful of easy speech, nor suspicious of the stranger who accosts him with courtesy. I find him in all things, as he presents himself to the eye and offers himself for observation, the superior of his British brother Hodge, neither so gross nor so unintelligent, with a look in his eye much resembling humour. He has his demands upon life, too, which are not those of the clownish brute, the inarticulate rustic. Not for nothing was the Revolution made, since by it has he learnt that he has his own share in the joys of civilisation, and that if he work hard enough his sons may aspire to such a measure of education as a harsher lot denied him. When business brings him into a little town or a great city, his eye alights on beautiful objects, placed there as much for him as for the owners of seigneurial dwellings. Flowers, trim parks, legends in stone, splendid cathedrals, every gracious blending of line and colour, combine to train his eye in beauty and refine his nature. He need thread these quaint and lovely streets with no slouching step, for he, and such as he, are too conscious of their stable efforts in the general work of order and national prosperity. He need touch his forelock to no great lord for permission to breathe the free air of heaven, for does not he, too, possess his bit of land, his little dwelling, from which none can oust him? And, on feast-days and Sundays, are there not always public museums at hand for his instruction and entertainment? No country in the world takes such care to provide museums for the people throughout all the provinces as France. Every year the State purchases pictures at the annual exhibitions of Paris to add to these provincial collections; and in every little town you pass through you are personally urged by some native to visit the Musée. This fact may have something to do with the astonishing intellectual superiority of the French peasant over Hodge beyond the Channel. For the fact remains that you can talk to the blue-bloused son of the soil and hope to learn something from him, when the absence of loquacity and ideas and manners in Hodge will leave you discouraged and in despair. The French peasant loves so many things that educate and refine—flowers and pictures and military bands, spectacles of all kinds, and independence.
AN OUTDOOR MEAL
Zimenez
His standard is by no means an exalted one. His frugality is practised in the interest of his old age. His honesty is chiefly, I suspect, a shrewd protection against the probable dishonesty of others, for the simple law of comradeship demands that you shall treat fairly the man who treats you fairly. And his religion does not go down as deep as his soul, or whatever may serve him as such. It is with him merely a material influence, since it furnishes a serviceable plank for getting safely across the perilous abyss into a better world, and enables him to be decently baptised, married, and buried as a member of a Christian community. All other phases of religion—its emotions, exactions, penalties, and devices—he leaves to the foolish women-folk. Indeed, this seems to be the conviction of the average male Catholic the world over, if I may except Ireland, the one Catholic country in which I have found men to take their religion seriously, and the little Celtic corner of France, where the blue-eyed Bretons so closely resemble them. When I have visited at a French country-house in the shooting season, I have never known a male guest to attend mass, the explanation given being that la chasse had begun before the hour of mass. But if a woman stayed away from mass she would create a scandal. In Spain I have seen acquaintances of mine, while their women-folk knelt and prayed with fervour, stand throughout the Sunday service with a bored and perfunctory air, only looking towards the altar and the priest at the moment of the elevation of the Host in a casually respectful way, as an officer might salute the passage of a military chief, and seemingly relieved to be able to examine again the faces and dresses of the women about them. Children barely in their teens, young lads going to school, carefully imitate this attitude of merely tolerant recognition of religious form, and their elders never dream of encouraging them to use a prayer-book, or kneel, or show any sign that the weekly mass is to them more than the bored attendance at an official ceremony.
What is a moral influence with them? High above religion is their sturdy passion for independence. It is this passion that enables them to scrape, and serve, and suffer privation with dignity and patience. However meagre their resources may be, they are content with their lot, provided the roof they sleep beneath is their own, the land they till their own, the goat, the pig, the poultry, theirs to do with what they will. This is no mean standard, and it works miracles in France. Would they were by nature and instinct kinder to their beasts! but this, too, is not a Catholic characteristic. I am assured that the Bretons and Provençals are the worst offenders. However, they do not sink so low in cruelty to animals as the purely Latin races, like the callous Spaniards and the Italians; and even in France the condition of animals is considerably ameliorated, though horses and donkeys are still often maltreated, and geese are killed in the cruelest fashion, their prolonged agonies, in peasant esteem, lending flavour to the cooked flesh.
What should, however, be a source of perennial admiration is the extraordinary absence in this class of anything approaching snobbishness. The eternal simplicity and unpretentiousness of the race are my constant wonder and delight. You will see a man in blue blouse, his wife in spotless cap and coloured kerchief, the man in appearance and fashion of speech and manners a gentleman, the woman educated, with her brevet supérieur, not destitute of music or art, working and living like peasants because they are working their own land, and receiving on lines of perfect equality their humbler neighbours, without any thought of giving themselves the vulgar airs so common in my own land and in England. When they take their well-earned holiday at the seaside or among mountain waters, you will rarely find them seeking to pass for other than they are, or talking loudly of their advantages of fortune or station. Their natural dignity is such that they are content to abide by it and be judged accordingly. This class of the French race may be described as the least vulgar, the least boastful of the world. With these cleanly and self-respecting toilers there is no insane aping of the idler, no cheap imitation of the bourgeoise in dress, no awful spectacle of girls with hideous feathers and hats the grossest assertion of ill-placed ambition. Finery of any kind is recognised as the advertisement of something worse than bad taste,—of the bonnet gone clean over the mill and morals gone after it. The peasant woman’s vanity is to dress as her mother dressed before her, her pride is to belong to her land and her people. And it is because of this wholesome vanity and this noble pride that France is France, and the land is such a pleasant one to travel over.
This hard-working race is not without its amusements. It must, as I have said, have its share of the joys of life. They are never too tired after a day’s work to dance to the music and measure of song, which they love; and whenever you chance upon them congregated for diversion, whether at a fair, on a moonlit sward, over a hilarious meal, you will always find their behaviour seemly and their gaiety attractive and measured. If the feathers and hats of holiday trim of Great Britain are lacking here, so also are the repulsive giggles and the hateful love-making of those latitudes. The French, we know, are not patterns of virtue, but they certainly are patterns of deportment abroad. In that clever little book, The Island, Mr. Whiteing depicts the love-making of this class in England as certainly the worst enemy of the French could never write with any semblance of truth of the same portion of the race in France. “Like their North-American sisters, fond of feathers and bright hues. No gaudier thing in nature than the coster-girl in her holiday dress of mauve, with the cruel plume that seems to have been dyed in blood. Relation of female to male, singular survival of primitive state. Love-making always, in form at least, an abduction of the virgin. A meeting at the street corner in the dusk for the beginning of the ceremony; then a chase round the houses, the heavy boots after the light ones, with joyous shrieks to mark the line of flight; after that the seizure, the fight, with sounding slaps for dalliance that might knock the wind out of a farrier of the Blues. In the final clutch skirts part in screeching rents, feathers strew the ground. Then the panting pair return hand in hand to the street corner, to begin again.” Of the meeting of these dreadful lovers later in the public-house Mr. Whiteing adds—and here, too, he paints a picture exclusively British, that never could be seen in France: “Nightfall brings them together at the universal rendezvous from every near or distant scene; men and those that were once maidens, mumbling age and swearing infancy, stand six deep before the slimy bar, till the ever-flowing liquor damps down their fiercest fires, and the great city is once more at rest. The imagination of him that saw hell could hardly picture the final scene.” And yet you will read such things printed of the French not immediately under your inspection that make you ask yourself if the rowdy love-making and public-house bars constitute the worst possible degradation of humanity. The most obvious, the most offensive assuredly, but not the least innocent. M. Octave Mirbeau has recently done me the honour to send me his latest book, Le Journal d’une Femme de Chambre. Not even Zola could conceive a more terrible indictment against his own race. All classes are therein depicted as equally corrupt, shameless, brutalised by irrepressed and irrepressible vice,—nobles, bourgeoisie, servants of both sexes, city and country folk, artisans and peasants. The book has an air of sincerity, of being the truthful record of a lady’s-maid’s career in Paris and in the country, so that one cannot discuss it as mere vicious raving, and every character introduced is worse than the one that went before. I question if humanity has ever been dragged into such infamous depths with such a singular display of enjoyment in its degradation. I read such charges, and I am stupefied with their divergence from my own personal experience. The French servants I have known have all been excellent creatures, devoted to their mistresses, grateful for any kindness or interest shown them, surprisingly intelligent, honest, sober, of lives of conspicuous virtue. They have the national failing, which is a tendency to insolence on slight provocation—for you cannot reason with French people. They fire up angrily at the least hint of an opinion that displeases them, and their very independence of character makes them sin on the other side of servility. But those monsters of their fiction—where are they to be met with? How do they manage to hide themselves so cleverly from daily scrutiny, if they are, as we are assured, so persistently around us? Have any of the sweet-mannered Eugénies, the Irmas, the Marguerites, the Louises, I meet at the different houses of my friends, who greet me with such cheerful welcome, who take my umbrella or cloak with such suggested sympathy, and put fresh flowers in my room with such graceful pleasure, anything in common with M. Mirbeau’s unspeakable wretch, Mlle. Celestine?
The same admiration I am compelled to entertain for the French peasant, I feel for the French artisan, whether in town or country. Yet he, too, has been depicted as a creature of loathsome perversity; but I can only speak of him as I have found him. Some years ago, going from Cognac to Angoulême, I decided to abandon the dull, incommunicative travellers of the second class and try my chances among the loquacious third-class voyagers. Here I fell into the very midst of good-humoured, general conversation, and learnt more about the stirring local events of Cognac and Angoulême than I should have known after a week’s residence in either town. A young girl with a round, baby face addressed me in excellent English, so evidently beaming with the joy of being able to do so that I lavished my congratulations instantly, and learnt that she had been for two years a nurse in Warwickshire, where she had picked up fluent English and met with so much kindness and innocent pleasures of all sorts that she adored the name of England ever afterwards. Certainly not a sister of M. Mirbeau’s ineffable Mlle. Celestine, this dear, sentimental little maid of Angoulême. It was a case of attraction at first sight, for she begged of me to use her room instead of going to a hotel, and be her guest at her father’s, a little watchmaker, during the three days I projected staying at Angoulême. I accepted, enchanted at a proposal that offered me such an out-of-the-way and original glimpse of a French town. “Sweetness and light” are words that best describe this delicious little creature. She was like a round, innocent kitten, all gaiety and brightness, and sparkled and danced along the streets beside me, crazy with the delight of talking English again. Girls, she moaned dejectedly, were most unhappy creatures in France; they had no pleasures, no freedom. She could not take her beautiful big dog Tom, given her as a puppy in Warwickshire, out for a walk because it is not proper in France for a young girl to be seen out-of-doors with a dog. Poor little martyr, she did not look much of a victim, and missing and yearning for the larger ways of England had not thinned or paled her rosy, vivacious, round visage. Here she was, as happy as a queen because she was going to sleep on her grandmother’s sofa that a stranger from whom she would take no money might sleep comfortably in her bed. She insisted on carrying my bag, too, as if that were another beaming source of satisfaction; and as we trudged blithely up from the valley of the station to the quaint street in which a quaint, dim-eyed old man lived and made and mended watches in an altitude rivalling the stars, I saw that Jeanne was a popular personage. Not this the timid French girl who slips in and out of life unnoticed, and says, Oui, monsieur; Non, monsieur, to the trousered wolves. The station-master cast her a cordial nod; the doctor, climbing into his gig, heard her speak English, and turned with a big, gruff laugh as he waved his hand to her. “There’s Mlle. Jeanne, happy at last. She is able to calumniate us all in good English to an insolent foreigner. Pauvres de nous!” and wherever we went together those three days, I saw that the townspeople in shops, down by the river the boatmen and boys, the women who showed us over the museum and over the town-hall, the Alsatian manager of Laroche Joubert’s huge paper factory, whither Jeanne and I drove next day, the servants at the Duc de la Rochefoucauld’s castle, all knew, admired, and respected Jeanne, the artisan’s daughter and Warwickshire nurse. She was not pretty nor distinguished, she dressed like a dowdy nurse, and wore cotton mittens, but I would I knew anybody in her position who could attain such popularity in a town like Angoulême out of France. And all with the utterest simplicity, and an excellent breeding. A heart-broken shoemaker, a melancholy widower, who wanted her for wife, came to me and begged me to use my influence in his behalf. He confided to me the tale of his love, and felt sure that if Jeanne were urged to marry him in the language of Shakespeare she would consent. She brought in to be introduced to me a soldier to whom she was teaching English, a nice, mild young fellow, who told me with gravity that in order to keep himself abreast of English literature he had subscribed to Pick Me Up for himself and Jeanne, getting this luminous organ from Bordeaux. The doctor and his wife invited Jeanne to take her foreign lion over one evening, and we were made much of, and given syrup and water to drink. We stayed out shockingly late of nights, for there was a splendid moon and I could not be torn from the river. But when we entered on our upward toil along the dark and silent streets, Jeanne would say: “Talk English very loud. It is a woman’s best safeguard in France.” She called the English tongue “a coup de pistolet in French ears.” So whenever she saw a silhouette in uniform, she fired off an aggressive shot of British vocables, and when midnight, or later, found us under the watchmaker’s roof the old man lifted his hands in horrified astonishment at our staying abroad so late. It was another evidence of English eccentricity.
When I bade Jeanne good-bye at the station, I with difficulty prevailed upon her to name a sum at least for my excellent board, if not for the pretty bedroom I had used for three delightful days. Judge of my amazement when at length she said, to put me at ease, and quite reluctantly, that she would accept three francs for my three days’ board. This I regarded as so ludicrous that I laughingly told her I would rather discharge my debt from Paris, for I preferred to be remembered by a present than take out of my purse three miserable francs in return for all I had enjoyed. I declare there were tears in the child’s eyes, and she sorrowfully assured me her holiday was over. She had never had such a time at Angoulême since her birth: rows on the river by sunset and moonlight, she steering, I rowing, and all the boatmen looking on and cheering lustily; walks here, drives there, and Tom, the glorious Tom, in honour of my nationality, permitted to walk with her, free beneath the free heavens.
I saw many artisans at Jeanne’s, and never in one of either sex a hint of grossness, of boorishness, of stupidity. Jeanne, I admit, was the pearl of her set, speaking with polished diction, of manners gentle and urbane, only a nurse, and yet a perfect lady in everything. Her bedroom denoted her own charming refinement, with its blue and white curtains, its spotless prettiness, the flower vases, and little bookcase not ignobly filled. She spoke continuously of herself, of her wishes and dreams. Well, never once did I get a suspicion of a flirtation in her life. She spoke of men with dignity and simplicity, without simper or giggle, and made no effort to lead me to believe that she was pursued by lovers. When she referred to the shoemaker’s addresses, it was simply to express her judicious fear of the immense responsibility of the post of stepmother. Her dreams were not sordid or vulgar. She wanted more liberty as a young girl, freedom to walk about with Tom, and not be hampered with so many unwise and unwritten laws. For the rest, she seemed content with the modest place she had in the world; and I have known many a wealthier woman who might with reason have envied this bright little French nurse,—an honour to her country, her sphere, and her sex. I have seldom parted with a roadside friend with keener regret.
My next friend of the working class, and she, I am proud to say, is a friend of several years’ standing, is my Parisian washerwoman. But here, I am bound to confess, I am fronted with an exceptional character,—witty, brilliant, of a liberal and bountiful nature, and original almost to the point of genius. My washerwoman comes every Tuesday, and brings gaiety and delightful wit along with her. She is all sorts of odd things together: a fierce Nationalist, a hard politician, a violent atheist, a hater of Jesuits and freemasons, inclined to Protestantism, if, unfortunately, the English were not Protestants already; intelligent enough not to have been dazzled by the Russian alliance, even when all France went mad on the Czar’s visit. “He wants our money, mademoiselle,” she said to me in those mad times, “and we are fools enough to believe in his friendship.” Whenever you mention the Russian alliance to her, she promptly asks who has seen that alliance written out on paper, stamped, and signed. And at the time of the Dreyfus Affair she could tell me to a centime the sum the Jews and the English had paid the Czar, the Pope, and the Emperor of Germany. I was used to an excellent, witty, and extravagant lecture on the intricacies of the Affair every Tuesday which delighted me, as she always had some ineffable monstrosity on the part of the Jews, the English, the Germans, or the crowned heads of Europe to impart; and took my joking with such delicious good humour that I did not know how to fill up the gap after the verdict of Rennes, for she is a very seemly, dignified little woman, my Parisian washerwoman. She stands upon her manners, and says nothing more than “Good morning, mademoiselle,” if you give her eloquence no opening. And what an eloquence it is! What a flow of admirably chosen words, so expressively enunciated, with fitting gesticulations and the most wonderful grimaces of the wittiest and ugliest face I have ever seen! Then came the Transvaal War, and here she shone. Indeed, I have repeatedly begged her to abandon the obscure calling of a washerwoman, and betake herself to public speaking. I have never known a woman more astonishingly fitted for the part.
With her, too, as with the peasant, the distinctive characteristic is an indomitable spirit of independence. I have never seen her anything else but gay and charming, but two Englishwomen to whom I recommended her complained of her insolence, because, being the soul of honesty and an excellent washerwoman, she will stand no “observations” either about her washing or her prices; nor will she tolerate anything like airs. She maintains that she is quite as good as the Czarina, quite as useful, and probably more intelligent, as, if they changed places, she is convinced she would make a better hand at sitting on the throne than the Czarina would make with her washtub. The Englishwoman, I suppose, made some remarks that wounded this susceptible pride, and the fiery little washerwoman neatly tied up her bundle of soiled linen, and with a magnificent and haughty gesture laid it at her feet. “Madame can wash her own linen or look elsewhere for a laundress; I decline madame’s custom,” and walked out. The race have an eye, an unerring instinct, for the drama, and know how to render even the rejection of soiled linen picturesque and effective. They will cheerfully wash your linen for you and black your boots; but, as well as payment in coin, they demand that you shall recognise their right to consideration and courtesy as human beings. With the ancien régime, servility was swept away, and when your boots are blacked you are expected to give thanks for the service instead of lifting the toe of contempt in your servant’s direction. A Scottish woman who married a Frenchman used to convey her opinions and wishes to her servants by means of a horsewhip, and, though some years dead, is still a legend in Paris for her domestic difficulties and interior wars. She belonged to the earlier period, now happily ended, when a kick was administered for a pair of clean boots, and servants were supposed to swallow strong language with a grin. Slave-driving, too, is restricted here, for I have never caught a glimpse of the poor London “slavey,” overworked almost to disease and insanity. This may be due to the system of flats, which saves labour, and does away with the necessity for carrying cans of water up several flights of stairs, but I am inclined to think that French character goes for much in the suppression.
Domestic service is despised by the average peasant, the girls looking forward to marriage, the men to peasant proprietorship, which works so admirably in France. And in many provinces very young children of both sexes go out as servants. At the different houses and châteaux I visited in the Saintonge it was always little girls and boys between seven and ten who served at table, answered bells, and helped in the house-cleaning. I cannot say I found the houses particularly clean, which may be a consequence, but it was interesting and amusing to see a tiny lad enveloped in a blue working bib sweeping the stairs, and little creatures at table removing the plates with not an excessive clatter. One of the good results of this infant service was the indulgent and maternal attitude of master and mistress. Such wee, willing creatures could not be scolded seriously when they broke plates or glasses, and you could not take in their regard the high, impersonal air of England, where servants are mere instruments, not accepted as flesh-and-blood humanity. Here you must, if human yourself, smile and thank and pat a curly head or diminutive shoulder as the quaint creature offers you a course, with, oh! such a stern determination to hold it steady and not accomplish disaster in the neighbourhood of your garments.
The standard of comfort, especially in the matter of sanitary appliances, has in France made an enormous progress during the last ten years. Ten years ago in the country even the better classes were little, if at all, in advance of Spain. I have seen such things in châteaux as would not bear description, and could not be credited except upon personal experience. So I ask myself what must be the state of peasant homes and of artisans’ dwellings. With, however, the advance in schooling, comes an appreciation of domestic improvements, and the kitchen is rapidly ceasing to be the best bedroom. Under the Third Republic, so much maligned, public schools for peasant girls have increased, which are considerably an advance on the old convent system of education. Nuns are the worst teachers in the world and the least conscientious. We have the exposure by the Archbishop of Nancy of the method of the nuns of the Bon Pasteur, who train orphans, and instead of teaching them, merely exploit them, and keep up a flourishing institution on the hard labour of children and girls, and, when the time for leaving the convent arrives, cast them out without an outfit or a farthing of all the immense sums they have earned for the convent when they ought to have been learning lessons. Of course, these republican schools are thwarted and vexed by every kind of petty persecution on the part of the clerical party. The French Catholics detest the lay teachers, whom they regard as the rivals of the Christian Brothers and the nuns, and make them suffer accordingly. Their writers of predilection make a point of holding them up for public scorn and ridicule, and so M. Henri Lavedan shows us, in that detestable play, Le Vieux Marcheur, a country teacher, Mademoiselle Léontine Falempin, all that she ought not to be; and M. de Vogüé, to be true to the modern traditions of the French aristocrat, when he makes the base heroine of his dull novel, Les Morts qui Parlent, go wrong, jeeringly says, “So acted the pupil of the good M. Pécaut.” M. Pécaut, a respected and popular citizen who died lately, established an excellent lay institution for girls at Fontenay-aux-Roses, and M. de Vogüé’s cowardly attack upon a dead man of whom the world knew nothing but good, by implying that a woman is impure because she has been brought up in his college, aroused the just indignation of every fair-minded Frenchman. If the theme were not too unsavoury M. de Vogüé would deserve that I should retort by revealing the tales of scandal and vice I have learned of a fashionable convent near Paris,—and these stories do not reach me from outsiders, but from four women who were educated therein.
It is a source of astonishment to me how inventive the French “little people” are in the matter of domestic stores. In Ireland, certainly, you will see nothing like it, but perhaps it may be different in England. Here all sorts of things are made at home: wines, spirits, liqueurs, and essences; jams, jellies, oil, vinegar, linen, bread, and honey. Everything in nature is turned to useful account, and the housewives are never idle. They have fruit and vegetables in abundance, and live, on the whole, well, if frugally. Their lands produce flax, hemp, cloves, colza, wheat, maize, every kind of flower, according to season and soil; and such is the elasticity of their temperament and their unsleeping industry, that they have been able to float above that tidal wave, the phyloxera, as great as any of the Egyptian plagues, as they floated above the national disaster of “’70.”
The hero of M. René Bazin’s most charming novel La Terre qui Meurt, is a métayer; and métayage is land worked on the half-profit system, a midway position between labourer and freeholder. The sermon preached by this mournful little story is that the French land is dying for want of cultivation, as the peasants are swarming into the big towns, where they are not wanted, and leaving to waste the land that needs them. Each name in France is selected with a regard for the dignity of mankind. The cook and the barber call themselves “artists,” and thereby efface any menial touch from their calling. The retired servant calls himself a rentier, and the retired labourer decks himself in the gentlemanly title of cultivateur. You may be a cultivateur with “lands and proud dwellings,” like the earl in the song, or you may modestly cultivate a single acre.
With such a fine name in prospect, I wonder any peasant lad is lured from the country to the big, unsatisfactory towns, as M. Bazin laments in his tale of the métayer and his sons. In the métairie system the partnership between landlord and métayer is worked in this wise. The landlord supplies stock, land, and implements; the métayer brings the labour, and the profits are equally divided. The métayer boards his labourers, and their wages vary, according to season, from seventy-five centimes to two and a half francs per day. The agent, on this system, is done away with, and the landlord and his partner stand as man to man. The artisan, too, in the country enjoys a pleasant independence. He builds his own house, he makes and maintains his own home with thrift and ambition. The standard of honesty is high. There is little beggary or drunkenness, and early marriages are frequent.
Of course the peasant is grasping,—it were idle to hide this, even in praising his frugality. He is close-fisted and hard-headed, and would rather part with his blood than with a franc; but he and his brother, the artisan, have made, and help to keep, France where she is. However deplorable the pictures of their land which French novelists and story-tellers may offer us, we may believe, without fear of error, that it is not La Terre which represents the French peasantry, so human and so lovable, despite its lack of disinterestedness and generosity; and it is not M. Octave Mirbeau’s appalling heroine who represents the great hard-working, honest, and intelligent artisan class. Both of them have qualities above and beyond any to be looked for in the same classes elsewhere; and if there were nothing else to admire, surely we must find admirable their rectitude and their love of independence.
