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Matilda Betham-Edwards - East of Paris
"And Freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell."
Some time or other the Russian Imperial pair may visit Fontainebleau, whilst an English tourist with
The Daily Mail in his pocket would naturally and sheepishly look the other way.
Another half hour's stroll and we find ourselves in an atmosphere of art, fashion and sociability. Only a
mile either of woodland, field path or high road separates Bourron from its more populous and highly
popular neighbour, Marlotte. Here every house has an artist's north window, the road is alive with motor
cars, you can even buy a newspaper! Marlotte possesses a big, I should say comfortable, hotel, is very
cosmopolitan and very pretty. Anglo-French households here, as at Bourron, favour Anglo-French
relations. In Marlotte drawing-rooms we are in France, but always with a pleasant reminder of England
and of true English hospitality.
CHAPTER V. BOURRON - continued.
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 coteries 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 Pere 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
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