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Matilda Betham-Edwards - East of Paris
huge box for luggage. It would be interesting to know how much petroleum, electricity, or alcohol such a
vehicle would consume in a day. The manufacture of motor cars must be a very flourishing business in
France, next, I should say, to that of bicycles. Of these also there was a goodly supply in the entrance hall
of the inn, and the impetus given to travel by both motor car and bicycle was here self-evident. The Hotel
du Grand Monarque literally swarmed with tourists, one and all French folks taking their ease at their
inn. And our neighbours do not take their pleasure solemnly after the manner of the less impressionable
English. Stay-at-home as they have hitherto been, home-loving as they essentially are, the atmosphere of
an inn, the aroma of a holiday, fill the Frenchman's cup of hilarity to overflowing, rendering gayer the
gayest.
The invention and rapidly spreading use of the motor car in France shows the French character under its
revolutionary aspect, yet no people on the face of the earth are in many respects so conservative. We
English folks want a new "Where is it?" for social purposes every year, the majority of our friends and
acquaintances changing their houses almost as often as milliners and tailors change the fashion in
bonnets and coats. A single address book for France supplies a life-time. The explanation is obvious. For
the most part we live in other folks' houses whilst French folks, the military and official world excepted,
occupy their own. Revisit provincial gentry or well-to-do bourgeoisie after an interval of a quarter of a
century, you always find them where they were. Interiors show no more change than the pyramids of
Egypt. Not so much as sixpence has been laid out upon new carpets or curtains. Could grandsires and
granddames return to life like the Sleeping Beauty, they would find that the world had stood still during
their slumber.
Melun possesses perhaps one of the few statues that may not be called superfluous, and I confess I had
been attracted thither rather by memories of its greatest son than by its picturesque scenery and fine old
churches. The first translator of Plutarch into his native tongue was born here, and as we should expect,
has been worthily commemorated by his fellow citizens. A most charming statue of Amyot stands in
front of the grey, turreted Hotel de Ville. In sixteenth century doctoral dress, loose flowing robes and
square flat cap, sits the great scholiast, as intently absorbed in his book as St. Jerome in the exquisite
canvas of our own National Gallery.
Behind the Hotel de Ville an opening shows a small, beautifully kept flower garden, just now a blaze of
petunias, zinnias, and a second crop of roses. Long I lingered before this noble monument, one only of
the many raised to Amyot's memory, of whom Montaigne wrote: -
"Ignoramuses that we are, we should all have been lost, had not this book (the translation of Plutarch)
dragged us out of the mire; thanks to it, we now venture to write and to discourse."
And musing on the scholar and his kindred, a favourite line of Browning's came into my mind -
"This man decided not to live but to know."
Indeed the whole of "A Grammarian's Funeral" were here appropriate. Is it not men after this type of
whom we feel
"Our low life was the level's and the night's. He's for the morning"?
To my surprise I found the church of St. Aspais locked. A courteous hair-dresser thereupon told me that
all churches in Melun were closed from noon till half past one, but that, as noon had only just struck, if I
were brisk I might possibly catch the sacristan. After a pretty hot chase I succeeded in finding a deaf,
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