|
Matilda Betham-Edwards - East of Paris
upon kitchen or bedrooms for years and years, the brick floor of both being bare, the furniture having
done duty for generations.
This "rentiere," 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 Desastre" by the brothers Margueritte.
Like the Pere 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
|
