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Matilda Betham-Edwards - Holidays in Eastern France
visits, but they omit their devotions.
Some of these tenant-farmers, many of the farms being hired on lease, possessors of small farms hiring
more land, are very rich, and one of our neighbours whose wealth had been made by the manufacture of
Brie cheese lately gave his daughter a 100,000 francs, L40,000, as a dowry. The wedding breakfast took
place at the Grand Hotel, Paris, and a hundred guests were invited to partake of a sumptuous collation.
But in spite of fine clothes and large dowries, farmers' wives and daughters still attend to the dairies, and,
when they cease to do so, doubtless farming in Seine et Marne will no longer be the prosperous business
we find it. It is delightful to witness the wide-spread well-being of this highly-farmed region.
"There is no poverty here," my host tells me, "and this is why life is so pleasant."
True enough, wherever you go, you find well-dressed, contented-looking people, no rags, no squalor, no
pinched want. Poverty is an accident of rare occurrence, and not a normal condition, everyone being able
to get plenty of work and good pay. The habitual look of content written upon every face is very striking.
It seems as if in this land of Goshen, life were no burden, but matter of satisfaction only, if not of
thankfulness. Class distinction can hardly be said to exist; there are employers and employed, masters
and servants, of course, but the line of demarcation is lightly drawn, and we find an easy familiarity
wholly free from impoliteness, much less vulgarity, existing between them.
That automatic demureness characterizing English servants in the presence of their employers, is wholly
unknown here. There are households with us where the servants might all be mutes for any signs of
animation they give, but here they take part in what is going on, and exchange a word and a smile with
every member of the household, never dreaming that it should be otherwise. One is struck too here by the
good looks, intelligence, and trim appearance of the children, who, it is plain, are well cared for. The
houses have vines and sweet peas on the wall, flowers in the window, and altogether a look of comfort
and ease found nowhere in Western France. The Breton villages are composed of mere hovels, where
pigs, cows, and poultry live in close proximity to their owners, a dung-hill stands before every front door,
and, to get indoors and out, you have always to cross a pool of liquid manure. Here order and cleanliness
prevail, with a diffusion of well-being, hardly, I should say, to be matched out of America.
Travellers who visit France again and again, as much out of sympathy with its people's institutions as
from a desire to see its monuments and outward features, will find ample to reward them in Seine et
Marne. On every side we have evidence of the tremendous natural resources and indefatigable
laboriousness of the people. There is one point here, as elsewhere in France, which strikes an
agriculturist with astonishment, and that is the abundance of trees standing amid cornfields and
miscellaneous crops, also the interminable plantation of poplars that can be seen on every side,
apparently without any object. But the truth is, the planting of apple and pear trees in fields is no
extravagance, rather an economy, the fruit they produce exceeding in value the corn they damage, whilst
the puzzling line of poplars growing beside canals and rivers is the work of the Government, every spare
bit of ground belonging to the State being planted with them for the sake of the timber. The crops are
splendid partly owing to the soil, and partly to the advanced system of agriculture. You may see exposed
for sale, in little towns, the newest American agricultural implements, whilst the great diversity of
products speaks volumes for the enterprise of the farmers.
As you stroll along, now climbing, now descending this pleasantly undulated country, you may see
growing in less than an acre, a patch of potatoes here, a vineyard there, on one side a bit of wheat, oats,
rye, and barley, with fruit-trees casting abundant shadow over all; on the other Indian corn, clover and
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