Читать книгу East of Paris: Sketches in the Gâtinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne - Matilda Betham-Edwards - Страница 9

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I will now say something about my numerous acquaintances at Bourron. After three summer holidays spent in this friendly little spot I can boast of a pretty large visiting list, the kind of list requiring no cards or ceremonious procedure. My hostess, a Frenchwoman, and myself used to drop in for a chat with this neighbour and that whenever we passed their way, always being cheerily welcomed and always pressed to stay a little longer.

The French peasant is the most laborious, at the same time the most leisurely, individual in the world. Urgent indeed must be those farming operations that prevent him from enjoying a talk. Conversation, interchange of ideas, give and take by word of mouth, are as necessary to the Frenchman’s well-being as oxygen to his lungs.

“Man,” writes Montesquieu, “is described as a sociable animal.” From this point of view it appears to me that the Frenchman may be called more of a man than others; he is first and foremost a man, since he seems especially made for society.

Elsewhere the same great writer adds:—“You may see in Paris individuals who have enough to live upon for the rest of their days, yet they labour so arduously as to shorten their days, in order, as they say, to assure themselves of a livelihood.” These two marked characteristics are as true of the French peasant now-a-days as of the polite society described in the “Lettres Persanes.” In the eighteenth century cultivated people did little else but talk. Morning, noon and night, their epigrammatic tongues were busy. Conversation in historic salons became a fine art. There are no such literary côteries in our time. What with one excitement and another, the Parisian world chats but has no time for real conversation. Perhaps for Gauloiseries, true Gallic salt, we must now go to the unlettered, the sons of the soil, whose ancestors were boors when wit sparkled among their social superiors.

Here are one or two types illustrating both characteristics, excellent types in their way of the small peasant proprietor hereabouts, a class having no counterpart or approximation to a counterpart in England.

The first visit I describe was paid one evening to an old gardener whom I will call the Père A—. Bent partly with toil, partly with age, you would have at once supposed that his working days were well over, especially on learning his circumstances, for sole owner he was of the little domain to which he had now retired for the day. Of benevolent aspect, shrewd, every inch alive despite infirmities, he received his neighbour and her English guest with rustic but cordial urbanity, at once entering into conversation. With evident pride and pleasure he watched my glances at premises and garden, house and outbuildings ramshackle enough, even poverty-stricken to look at, here not an indication of comfortable circumstances much less of independent means; the bit of land half farm, half garden, however, was fairly well kept and of course productive.

“Yes, this dwelling is mine and the two hectares (four acres four hundred and odd feet), aye,” he added self-complacently, “and I have a little money besides.”

“Yet you live here all by yourself and still work for wages?” I asked. His reply was eminently characteristic. “I work for my children.” These children he told me were two grown up sons, one of them being like himself a gardener, both having work. Thus in order to hoard up a little more for two able-bodied young men, here was a bent, aged man living penuriously and alone, his only companion being a beautiful and evidently much petted donkey. I ventured to express an English view of the matter, namely, the undesirability of encouraging idleness and self-indulgence in one’s children by toiling and moiling for them in old age.

He nodded his head.

“You are right, all that you say is true, but so it is with me. I must work for my children.”

And thus blindly are brought about the parricidal tragedies that Zola, Guy de Maupassant and other novelists have utilized in fiction, and with which we are familiarized in French criminal reports—parents and grandparents got rid of for the sake of their coveted hoardings.

Thus also are generated in the rich and leisured classes that intense selfishness of the rising generation so movingly portrayed in M. Hervieu’s play, “La Course du Flambeau.” No one who has witnessed Mme. Réjane’s presentment of the adoring, disillusioned mother can ever forget it.

On leaving, the Père A—— presented us with grapes and pears, carefully selecting the finest for his English visitor.

At the gate I threw a Parthian dart.

“Don’t work too hard,” I said, whereupon came the burden of his song:

“One must work for one’s children.”

This good neighbour could neither read nor write, a quite exceptional case in these days. Our second visit was made to a person similarly situated, but belonging to a different order.

Madame B——, a widow, was also advanced in years and also lived by herself on her little property, consisting of walled-in cottage and outhouses, with straggling garden or rather orchard, garden and field in one.

This good woman is what country folks in these parts call rich. I have no doubt that an English farmeress in her circumstances would have the neatest little parlour, a tidy maid to wait upon her, and most likely take afternoon tea in a black silk gown. Our hostess here wore the dress of a poor but respectable working woman. Her interior was almost as bare and primitive as that of the Boer farmhouse in the Paris Exhibition. Although between six and seven o’clock, there was no sign whatever of preparation for an evening meal. Indeed on every side things looked poverty-stricken. Not a penny had evidently been spent upon kitchen or bedrooms for years and years, the brick floor of both being bare, the furniture having done duty for generations.

This “rentière,” or person living upon independent means, did not match her sordid surroundings. Although toil-worn, tanned and wrinkled, her face “brown as the ribbed sea-sand,” there was a certain refinement about look, speech and manner, distinguishing her from the good man her neighbour. After a little conversation I soon found out that she had literary tastes.

“Living alone and finding the winter evenings long I hire books from a lending library at Fontainebleau,” she said.

I opened my eyes in amazement. Seldom indeed had I heard of a peasant proprietor in France caring for books, much less spending money upon them.

“And what do you read?” I asked.

“Anything I can get,” was the reply. “Madame’s husband,” here she looked at my friend, “has kindly lent me several.”

Among these I afterwards found had been Zola’s “Rome” and “Le Désastre” by the brothers Margueritte.

Like the Père A—— she had married children and entertained precisely the same notion of parental duty. The few sous spent upon such beguilement of long winter nights were most likely economized by some little deprivation. There is something extremely pathetic in this patriarchal spirit, this uncompromising, ineradicable resolve to hand down a little patrimony not only intact but enlarged.

“Our peasants live too sordidly,” observed a Frenchman to me a day or two later. “They carry thrift to the pitch of avarice and vice. Zola’s ‘La Terre’ is not without foundation on fact.”

And excellent as is the principle of forethought, invaluable as is the habit of laying by for a rainy day, I have at last come to the conclusion that of the two national weaknesses, French avarice and English lavishness and love of spending, the latter is more in accordance with progress and the spirit of the age.

In another part of the village we called upon a hale old body of seventy-seven, who not only lived alone and did everything for herself indoors but the entire work of a market garden, every inch of the two and a half acres being, of course, her own. Piled against an inner wall we saw a dozen or so faggots each weighing, we were told, half a hundredweight. Will it be believed that this old woman had picked up and carried from the forest on her back every one of these faggots? The poor, or rather those who will, are allowed to glean firewood in all the State forests of France. Let no tourist bestow a few sous upon aged men and women bearing home such treasure-trove! Quite possibly the dole may affront some owner of houses and lands.

As we inspected her garden, walls covered with fine grapes, tomatoes and melons, of splendid quality, to say nothing of vegetables in profusion, it seemed all the more difficult to reconcile facts so incongruous. Here was a market gardener on her own account, mistress of all she surveyed, glad as a gipsy to pick up sticks for winter use. But the burden of her story was the same:

“Il faut travailler pour ses enfants” (one must work for one’s children), she said.

All these little farm-houses are so many homely fortresses, cottage and outhouses being securely walled in, a precaution necessary with aged, moneyed folks living absolutely alone.

A fourth visit was paid to a charming old Philémon and Baucis, the best possible specimens of their class. The husband lay in bed, ill of an incurable malady, and spotlessly white were his tasselled nightcap, shirt and bedclothes. Very clean and neat too was the bedroom opening on to the little front yard, beneath each window of the one-storeyed dwelling being a brilliant border of asters. The housewife also was a picture of tidiness, her cotton gown carefully patched and scrupulously clean. This worthy couple are said to be worth fifty thousand francs. The wife, a sexagenarian, does all the work of the house besides waiting on her good man, to whom she is devoted, but a married son and daughter-in-law share her duties at night. Here was no touch of sordidness or suggestion of “La Terre,” instead a delightful picture of rustic dignity and ease. The housewife sold us half a bushel of pears, these two like their neighbours living by the produce of their small farm and garden.

I often dropped in upon Madame B—— to whom even morning calls were acceptable.

On the occasion of my farewell visit she had something pretty to say about one of my own novels, a French translation of which I had presented her.

“I suppose,” I said, “that you have some books of your own?”

“Here they are,” she said, depositing an armful on the table. “But I have never read much, and mostly bibelots” (trifles.)

Her poor little library consisted of bibelots indeed, a history of Jeanne d’Arc for children, and half a dozen other works, mostly school prizes of the kind awarded before school prizes in France were worth the paper on which they were printed.