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Matilda Betham-Edwards - East of Paris
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.
Rejane's presentment of the adoring, disillusioned mother can ever forget it.
On leaving, the Pere 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
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