Holidays in Eastern France by Matilda Betham-Edwards (best free ebook reader TXT) 📖

to discuss art, music, literature, and politics, over ices and other good things despatched from the town. We had looked forward to a superb moonlight night with poetic effects of river, chateau, and bridges flooded in silvery light--we had torrents of rain instead, being threatened with what is a phenomenon of no rare occurrence here, namely, an inundation. Situated on the confluence of two rivers, the Allaine and the Lusine, Montbeliard is a quaint, and homely little Venice in miniature, sure to be flooded once or twice a year, when people have to pay visits and carry on their daily avocation in miniature gondolas.

It takes, however, more than minor misfortunes such as these to damp French geniality and good nature, and when our soiree came to an end, everyone returned home well fortified with umbrellas, cloaks, and goloshes in the best possible humour. Sometimes these veillees will be devoted to declamation and story-telling, one or two of the party reading aloud a play or poem, or reciting for the benefit of the rest. In the bitter winter nights this sociable custom is not laid aside, even ladies with their lanterns braving the snow in order to enjoy a little society. Music is the chief out-of-door recreation during the summer months, the military band of the garrison largely contributing to the general amusement.

It is astonishing how French good-humour and light-heartedness help to lighten the hardest lot! We find the hours of toil enormously long here, and economies practised among the better classes of which few English people have any conception. Yet life is made the best of, and everything in the shape of a distraction is seized upon with avidity. Although eminently a Protestant town, shops are open all day long on Sundays, when more business seems to be done than at any other time. The shutters are no sooner put up, however, than everyone goes out for a walk or a visit, and gets as much enjoyment as he can.

Only the rich and exceeding well-to-do people keep servants, others content themselves with a charwoman who comes in for two hours a day, and is paid ten or twelve francs a month, many ladies, by birth and education, living on small means, doing all the lighter household work, marketing, &c., themselves, whilst the small shopkeeping class, who with us must invariably have a wretched drudge, called a maid-of-all-work, never dream of getting anyone to cook or clean for them. As a matter of course, all this is done by the family, no matter how well educated may be its members. We must always bear in mind that the general well-being and easy circumstances of the French middle classes is greatly owing to their freedom from shams. Toil is not regarded as a degradation, and the hateful word "gentility" is not found in their vocabulary. Thus it comes about that you find a mixture of homeliness, comfort, and solidity of fortune, rarely the case in England. Take my landlady as an example, a charming person, who keeps a straw-hat and umbrella shop, whose sister is a repasseuse, or clear-starcher, and whose married brother has also a hat-shop next door. These people do all the work that is to be done themselves, yet in similar circumstances in England would be sure to have maids-of-all-work, nursery-maids, and the rest of it. They have plenty of good furniture, supplies of household and personal linen that would set up a shop, and the children of the brother receive the best possible education he can obtain for them. The elder girl has just returned from Belfort with her first diploma, and is to be sent to Germany to learn German. She has, nevertheless, acquired a knowledge of what all women should know, can cook, clean, cut out and make clothes, &c., and, when she becomes herself a wife and mother, will doubtless exercise all these accomplishments in order to give her children as good an education as she possesses herself. All the family have laid by ample savings.

More might be said about the easy intercourse and geniality of this little town, did space permit. I will pass on to add that though extremely picturesque, with its flower-gardens running down to the water's edge, tiny bridges, hanging roofs, curling rivers, and lastly circling green hills and superb old chateau crowning all, there is little here to detain the tourist. The case is very different with those travellers who are bent upon studying French life under its various aspects, for they will find at Montbeliard a wholly new phase. Much in domestic life reminds us of South Germany, yet no place is more eminently French. The type of physiognomy is frank and animated, fair, and even red hair is common, whilst the stature is above the average, and the general physique gives an idea of strength, character, and health. The Montbeliardins are courteous, but proud and prone rather to bestow than accept favours. Amiability and real goodness of heart especially characterize them.

As a seat of some special manufactures, musical-boxes and clocks being among the chief, it possesses importance; there are also cotton mills, tanneries, foundries, &c. The fabrication of clocks by machinery is a curious process, the precision and apparent intelligence of the machines being as agreeable to contemplate as the reverse is humiliating: namely, the spectacle of men, women, and children being converted into automatons by unremitting mechanical labour. The length of the day's work here is prodigious, consisting of twelve sometimes fourteen hours, and the occupation extremely unwholesome, owing to the smell of the oil and the perpetual noise of machinery. The pay is low, beginning at three francs and reaching to four or four and a half a day. We may blame the artizan class for improvidence, insobriety, and many other failings, but none who calmly compare the life of a clock-maker, for instance, condemned to spend twelve hours of the twenty-four in this laborious, unwholesome, and ill-remunerated labour, with that of the better classes, can wonder at his discontent. If he seeks to better his position by means of strikes, socialistic schemes, or other violent means, at least we must grant that it is only natural, till some other should offer themselves.

It is to be hoped that the hours of labour will soon be shortened in a part of France so advanced in other respects, and meantime artizans here are better off than elsewhere. All round the town you find so-called cites ouvrieres, built on the model of those of Mulhouse; little streets of cheerful cottages, each with its bit of flower and vegetable-garden, where at least the workman has something to call a home after his day's labour. These artizan quarters are well or ill-kept, of course, according to the thrift or slovenliness of the tenants; some are charming, but at their worst they are a vast improvement upon the close, ill-ventilated quarters to be found in towns. They are also much cheaper, about L5 a year being charged for both house and garden, whereas, even in a little town like Montbeliard, accommodation is dear and difficult to be had. In fact, without these villages the question of house-room would be as much of a problem here for the workman as among our own rural population; no doubt the heads of firms who have built cheerful and ornamental little rows of English-like cottages for their workpeople were actuated at the same time chiefly by philanthropic motives, but they found it absolutely necessary to take some steps in the matter.

Various efforts are being made to raise the status of the mechanic by means of lectures, reading-rooms, and recreation, but, whilst the hours of labour remain what we find them, little good can be effected. A devoted lady, who has spent her whole life in her native town, has done much for the female part of the manufacturing population by means of free night-schools, free library, chiefly for the young, Sunday afternoon classes for the teaching of cutting-out and needle-work, and recreation combined, gratuitous laundries, and other philanthropic schemes. These efforts of Mademoiselle Rosalie Morel, a lay-woman, have been seconded by those of a Protestant deaconess in another direction, the latter devoting herself to nursing and the teaching of hygiene and sanitary science. In the matter of cleanliness, therefore, these good people are not left in the dark as in benighted Brittany, where dirt is not preached against as it ought to be in the pulpit. Mademoiselle Morel's free laundries, in other words a scheme set on foot for the purpose of teaching the poorest classes what clean linen should be, have doubtless effected much good, and on the whole cleanliness is the rule here, and the public hot and cold baths much frequented by all.

In spite, however, of the animation and bonhomie of this little town, there is a dark side to social life, and in the train of intemperance and unthrift among the manufacturing population, we find squalor and immorality. After several weeks' sojourn in that Utopia of all socialistic dreamers--a land without a beggar!--I found myself here, once more, in the domains of mendicity, though it is not to be found to any great extent. The custom of putting out infants to nurse is, fortunately, unfrequent in these parts, and, as a natural consequence, infant mortality is not above the average. The cites ouvrieres are to be thanked for this, and the nearness of the home to the factory enables the baby to be brought to its mother for nourishment, and in our visit to the clock manufactory before spoken of, we saw mothers nursing their infants on the spot. Nearer Paris, you constantly encounter infants three day's old being dispatched with their foster-mother into some country place, there to be brought up by hand, in other words, to die; but here it is not so. We find on a small scale at Montbeliard that contrast between wealth and poverty seen in England, but wholly absent from the rural districts of France. The aristocracy of the place here is composed of the wealthy manufacturing class, and by little and little Parisian luxuries are finding their way into this remote region. Until within quite recent date, for instance, there was no such thing as a stand for hackney carriages here; now it has become the fashion to take drives in fine weather. In our walks and drives in the neighbourhood, we encounter handsome waggonettes and open carriages with a pair of horses, rarely seen in the purely agricultural districts.

In every way, habits of life have become modified by the rapid rise of a commercial aristocracy; and, as a natural consequence, we find much more social distinction than in those parts of France where no such class exists. Yet a stranger, who should study French manners and customs for the first time, would find the principle of equality existing in a degree unknown in England. Can anything be more absurd than the differences of rank that divide the population of our provincial towns? The same thing is seen in the country, where the clergyman holds aloof from the village doctor, the farmer from the shopkeeper, both these from the village schoolmaster, and where, indeed, everybody thinks himself better than his neighbour.

We have, in English provincial towns, schools for the professional classes, schools for the children of farmers, of wholesale shopkeepers, of small retail tradesmen; lastly, schools for the "people," and you no more expect to find a rich man's child attending the latter than a chimney-sweep's son at the Grammar School. In French country towns all this is simplified by the Ecole Communale, at which boys and girls respectively, no matter what their parents' calling or means, receive precisely the same education; after the Ecole Communale, comes the College, where a liberal education is afforded to boys, and pupils study for the examination of Bachelier-es-Lettres