In and out of Three Normandy Inns Part 6

It was a moving picture. Yet we remained strangely unaffected by this tale of woe. Madame Fouchet herself, the woman, not the actress, was to blame, I think, for our unfeelingness. Somehow, to connect woe, ruin, sadness, melancholy, or distress, in a word, of any kind with our landlady's opulent figure, we found a difficult acrobatic mental feat.

She presented to the eye outlines and features that could only be likened, in point of prosperity, to a Dutch landscape. Like certain of the mediaeval saints presented by the earlier delineators of the martyrs as burning above a slow fire, while wearing smiles of purely animal content, as if in full enjoyment of the temperature, this lady's sufferings were doubtless an invisible discipline, the hair shirt which her hardened cuticle felt only to be a pleasurable itching.

"_Voila, mesdames!_" It was with a magnificent gesture that madame opened doors and windows. The drama of her life was forgotten for the moment in the conscious pride of presenting us with such a picture as her gay little house offered.

Inside and out, summer and the sun were blooming and shining with spendthrift luxuriance. The salon opened directly on the garden; it would have been difficult to determine just where one began and the domain of the other ended, with the pinks and geraniums that nodded in response to the peach and pear blossoms in the garden. A bit of faded Aubusson and a print representing Madame Geoffrin's salon in full session, with a poet of the period transporting the half-moon grouped listeners about him to the point of tears, were evidences of the refined tastes of our landlady in the arts; only a sentimentalist would have hung that picture in her salon. Other decorations further proved her as belonging to both worlds. The chintzes gay with garlands of roses, with which walls, beds, and chairs were covered, revealed the mundane element, the woman of decorative tastes, possessed of a hidden pa.s.sion for effective backgrounds. Two or three wooden crucifixes, a _prie-dieu_, and a couple of saints in plaster, went far to prove that this excellent _bourgeoise_ had thriftily made her peace with Heaven.

It was a curious mixture of the sacred and the profane.

Down below, beneath the windows overlooking the sea, lay the garden.

All the houses fronting the cliff had similar little gardens, giving, as the French idiom so prettily puts it, upon the sea. But compared to these others, ours was as a rose of Sharon blooming in the midst of little deserts. Renard had been entirely right about this particular bit of earth attached to our villa. It was a gem of a garden. It was a French garden, and therefore, entirely as a matter of course, it had walls. It was as cut off from the rest of the world as if it had been a prison or a fortification.

The Frenchman, above all others, appears to have the true sentiment of seclusion, when the society of trees and flowers is to be enjoyed. Next to woman, nature is his fetish. True to his national taste in dress, he prefers that both should be costumed _a la Parisienne_; but as poet and lover, it is his instinct to build a wall about his idol, that he may enjoy his moments of expansion unseen and unmolested. This square of earth, for instance, was not much larger than the s.p.a.ce covered by the chamber roof above us; and yet, with the high walls towering over the rose-stalks, it was as secluded as a monk's cloister. We found it, indeed, on later acquaintance, as poetic and delicately sensuous a retreat as the romance-writers would wish us to believe did those mediaeval connoisseurs of comfort, when, with sandalled feet, they paced their own convent garden-walks. Fouchet was a broken-down shopkeeper; but somewhere hidden within, there lurked the soul of a Maecenas; he knew how to arrange a feast--of roses. The garden was a bit of greensward, not much larger than a pocket handkerchief; but the gra.s.s had the right emerald hue, and one's feet sank into the rich turf as into the velvet of an oriental rug. Small as was the enclosure, between the espaliers and the flower-beds serpentined minute paths of glistening pebbles. Nothing which belonged to a garden had been forgotten, not even a pine from the tropics, and a bench under the pine that was just large enough for two. This latter was an ideal little spot in which to bring a friend or a book. One could sit there and gorge one's self with sweets; a dance was perpetually going on--the gold-and-purple b.u.t.terflies fluttering gayly from morning till night; and the bees freighted the air with their buzzing. If one tired of perfumes and dancing, there was always music to be enjoyed, from a full orchestra. The sea, just the other side of the wall of osiers, was always in voice, whether sighing or shouting. The larks and blackbirds had a predilection for this nest of color, announcing their preference loudly in a combat of trills. And once or twice, we were quite certain, a nightingale with Patti notes had been trying its liquid scales in the dark.

It was in this garden that our acquaintance with our landlord deepened into something like friendship. Monsieur Fouchet was always to be found there, tying up the rose-trees, or mending the paths, or shearing the bit of turf.

_"Mon jardin, c'est un peu moi, vous savez_--it is my pride and my consolation." At the latter word, Fouchet was certain to sigh.

Then we fell to wondering just what grief had befallen this amiable person which required Horatian consolation. Horace had need of rose-leaves to embalm his disappointments, for had he not cooled his pa.s.sions by plunging into the bath of literature? Besides, Horace was bitten by the modern rabies: he was as restless as an American. When at Rome was he not always sighing for his Sabine farm, and when at the farm always regretting Rome? But this harmless, innocent-eyed, benevolent-browed old man, with his pa.s.sive brains tied up in a foulard, o' morning's, and his _bourgeois_ feet adorned with carpet slippers, what grief in the past had bitten his poor soul and left its mark still sore?

"It isn't monsieur--it is madame who has made the past dark," was Renard's comment, when we discussed our landlord's probable acquaintance with regret--or remorse.

Whatever secret of the past may have hovered over the Fouchet household, the evil bird had not made its nest in madame's breast, that was clear; her smooth, white brow was the sign of a rose-leaf conscience; that dark curtain of hair, looped madonna-wise over each ear, framed a face as unruffled as her conscience.

She was entirely at peace with her world, and with heaven as well, that was certain. Whatever her sins, the confessional had purged her. Like others, doubtless, she had found a husband and the provinces excellent remedies for a damaged reputation. She lived now in the very odor of sanct.i.ty; the cure had a pipe in her kitchen, with something more sustaining, on certain bright afternoons. Although she was daily announcing to us her approaching dissolution--"I die, mesdames--I die of ennui"--it seemed to me there were still signs, at times, of a vigorous resuscitation. The cure's visits were wont to produce a deeper red in the deep bloom of her cheek; the mayor and his wife, who drank their Sunday coffee in the arbor, brought, as did Beatrix's advent to Dante, _vita nuova_ to this homesick Parisian.

There were other pleasures in her small world, also, which made life endurable. Bargaining, when one teems with talent, may be as exciting as any other form of conquest. Madame's days were chiefly pa.s.sed in imitation of the occupation so dear to an earlier, hardier race, that race kings have knighted for their powers in dealing mightily with their weaker neighbors. Madame, it is true, was only a woman, and Villerville was somewhat slimly populated. But in imitation of her remote feudal lords, she also fell upon the pa.s.sing stranger, demanding tribute. When the stranger did not pa.s.s, she kept her arm in practice, so to speak, by extracting the last _sou_ in a transaction from a neighbor, or by indulging in a drama in which the comedy of insult was matched by the tragedy of contempt.

One of these mortal combats it was my privilege to witness. The war arose on our announcement to Mere Mouchard, the lady of the inn by the sea, of our decision to move next door. To us Mere Mouchard presented the unruffled plumage of a dove; her voice also was as the voice of the same, mellowed by sucking. Ten minutes later the town was a.s.sembled to lend its a.s.sistance at the encounter between our two landladies. Each stood on their respective doorsteps with arms akimbo and head thrust forward, as geese protrude head and tongue in moments of combat. And it was thus, the mere hissed, that her boarders were stolen from her--under her very nose--while her back was turned, with no more thought of honesty or shame than a----. The word was never uttered. The mere's insult was drowned in a storm of voices? for there came a loud protest from the group of neighbors. Madame Fouchet, meanwhile, was sustaining her own role with great dignity. Her att.i.tude of self-control could only have been learned in a school where insult was an habitual weapon. She smiled, an infuriating, exasperating, successful smile. She showed a set of defiant white teeth, and to her proud white throat she gave a boastful curve. Was it her fault if _ces dames_ knew what comfort and cleanliness were? if they preferred "_des chambres garnies avec gout, vraiment artistiques_"--to rooms fit only for peasants? _Ces dames_ had just come from Paris; doubtless, they were not yet accustomed to provincial customs--_aux moeurs provinciales_. Then there were exchanged certain melodious acerbities, which proved that these ladies had entered the lists on previous occasions, and that each was well practised in the other's methods of warfare. Opportunely, Renard appeared on the scene; his announcement that we proposed still to continue taking our repasts with the mere, was as oil on the sea of trouble. A reconciliation was immediately effected, and the street as immediately lost all interest in the play, the audience melting away as speedily as did the wrath of the disputants.

"_Le bon Dieu soit loue_," cried Madame Fouchet, puffing, as she mounted the stairs a few moments later--"G.o.d be praised"--she hadn't come here to the provinces to learn her rights--to be taught her alphabet. Mere Mouchard, forsooth, who wanted a week's board as indemnity for her loss of us! A week's board--for lodgings scorned by peasants!

"Ah, these Normans! what a people, what a people! They would peel the skin off your back! They would sell their children! They would cheat the devil himself!"

"You, madame, I presume, are from Paris." Madame smiled as she answered, a thin fine smile, richly seasoned with scorn. "Ah, mesdames!

All the world can't boast of Paris as a birthplace, unfortunately. I also, I am a Norman, _mais je ne m'en fiche pas!_ Most of my life, however, I've lived in Paris, thank G.o.d!" She lifted her head as she spoke, and swept her hands about her waist to adjust the broad belt, an action pregnant with suggestions. For it was thus conveyed to us, delicately, that such a figure as hers was not bred on rustic diet; also, that the Parisian glaze had not failed of its effect on the coa.r.s.er provincial clay.

Meanwhile, below in the garden, her husband was meekly tying up his rose-trees.

Neither of the landladies' husbands had figured in the street-battle.

It had been a purely Amazonian encounter, bloodless but bitter. Both the husbands of these two belligerent landladies appeared singularly well trained. Mouchard, indeed, occupied a comparatively humble sphere in his wife's _menage_. He was perpetually to be seen in the court-yard, at the back of the house, washing dogs, or dishes, in a costume in which the greatest economy of cloth compatible with decency had been triumphantly solved. His wife ran the house, and he ran the errands, an arrangement which, apparently, worked greatly to the satisfaction of both. But Mouchard was not the first or the second French husband who, on the threshold of his connubial experience, had doubtless had his role in life appointed to him, filling the same with patient acquiescence to the very last of the lines.

There is something very touching in the subjection of French husbands.

In point of meekness they may well serve, I think, as models to their kind. It is a meekness, however, which does not hint of humiliation; for, after all, what humiliation can there be in being thoroughly understood? The Frenchwoman, by virtue of centuries of activity, in the world and in the field, has become an expert in the art of knowing her man; she has not worked by his side, under the burn of the noon sun, or in the cimmerian darkness of the shop-rear, counting the pennies, for nothing. In exchanging her illusions for the bald front of fact, man himself has had to pay the penalty of this mixed gain. She tests him by purely professional standards, as man tests man, or as he has tested her, when in the ante-matrimonial days he weighed her _dot_ in the scale of his need. The Frenchwoman and Shakespeare are entirely of one mind; they perceive the great truth of unity in the scheme of things:

"Woman's test is man's taste."

This is the first among the great truths in the feminine grammar of a.s.sent. French masculine taste, as its criterion, has established the excellent doctrine of utilitarianism. With quick apprehension the Frenchwoman has mastered this fact; she has cleverly taken a lesson from ophidian habits--she can change her skin, quickly shedding the sentimentalist, when it comes to serious action, to don the duller raiment of utility. She has accepted her world, in other words, as she finds it, with a philosopher's shrug. But the philosopher is lined with the logician; for this system of life has accomplished the miracle of making its women logical; they have grasped the subtleties of inductive reasoning. Marriage, for example, they know is entered into solely on the principle of mutual benefit; it is therefore a partnership, _bon_; now, in partnerships sentiments and the emotions are out of place, they only serve to dim the eye; those commodities, therefore, are best conveyed to other markets than the matrimonial one; for in purely commercial transactions one has need of perfect clearness of vision, if only to keep one well practised in that simple game called looking out for one's own interest. In Frenchwomen, the ratiocinationist is extraordinarily developed; her logic penetrates to the core of things.

Hence it is that Mouchard washes dishes.

Monsieur Jourdain, in Moliere's comedy, who expressed such surprise at finding that he had been talking prose for forty years without knowing it, was no more amazed than would Mere Mouchard have been had you announced to her that she was a logician; or that her husband's daily occupations in the bright little court-yard were the result of a system. Yet both facts were true.

In that process we now know as the survival of the fittest, the mere's capacity had snuffed out her weaker spouse's incompetency; she had taken her place at the helm, because she belonged there by virtue of natural fitness. There were no tender illusions which would suffer, in seeing the husband allotted to her, probably by her parents and the _dot_ system, relegated to the ignominy of pa.s.sing his days washing dishes--dishes which she cooked and served--dishes, it should be added, which she was entirely conscious were cooked by the hand of genius, and which she garnished with a sauce and served with a smile, such as only issue from French kitchens.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE QUARTIER LATIN ON THE BEACH.

The beach, one morning, we found suddenly peopled with artists. It was a little city of tents. Beneath striped awnings and white umbrellas a mult.i.tude of flat-capped heads sat immovably still on their three-legged stools, or darted hither and thither. Paris was evidently beginning to empty its studios; the Normandy beaches now furnished the better model.

One morning we were in luck. A certain blonde beard had counted early in the day on having the beach to himself. He had posed his model in the open daylight, that he might paint her in the sun. He had placed her, seated on an edge of seawall; for a background there was the curve of the yellow sands and the flat breadth of the sea, with the droop of the sky meeting the sea miles away. The girl was a slim, fair shape, with long, thin legs and delicately moulded arms; she was dressed in the fillet and chiton of Greece. During her long poses she was as immovable as an antique marble; her natural grace and prettiness were transfigured into positive beauty by the flowing lines and the pink draperies of her Attic costume. Seated thus, she was a breathing embodiment of the best Greek period. When the rests came, her jump from the wall landed her square on her feet and at the latter end of the nineteenth century. Once free, she bounded from her perch on the high sea-wall. In an instant she had tucked her tinted draperies within the slender girdle; her sandalled feet must be untrammelled, she was about to take her run on the beach. Soon she was pelting, irreverently, her painter with a shower of loose pebbles. Next she had challenged him to a race; when she reached the goal, her thin, bare arms were uplifted as she clapped and shouted for glee; the Quartier Latin in her blood was having its moment of high revelry in the morning sun.

This little grisette, running about free and unshackled in her loose draperies, quite unabashed in her state of semi-nudity--gay, reckless, wooing pleasure on the wing, surely she might have posed as the embodied archetype of France itself. So has this pagan among modern nations borrowed something of the antique spirit of wantonness. Along with its theft of the Attic charm and grace, it has captured, also, something of its sublime indifference; in the very teeth of the dull modern world, France has laughed opinion to scorn.

At noon the tents were all deserted. It was at this hour that the inn garden was full. The gayety and laughter overflowed the walls. Everyone talked at once; the orders were like a rattle of artillery--painting for hours in the open air gives a fine edge to appet.i.te, and patience is never the true twin of hunger. Everything but the _potage_ was certain to be on time.

Colinette, released from her Greek draperies, with her Parisian bodice had recovered the _blague_ of the studios.

"_Sacre nom de--on reste donc claquemure ainsi toute la matinee!_ And all for an _omelette_--a puny, good-for-nothing _omelette_. And you--you've lost your tongue, it seems?" And a shrill voice pierced the air as Colinette gave her painter the hint of her prodding elbow. With the appearance of the _omelette_ the reign of good humor would return.

Everything then went as merrily as that marriage-bell which, apparently, is the only one absent in Bohemia's gay chimes.

These arbors had obviously been built out of pure charity: they appeared to have been constructed on the principle that since man, painting man, is often forced to live alone, from economic necessity, it is therefore only the commonest charity to provide him with the proper surroundings for eating _a deux._ The little tables beneath the kiosks were strictly _tete-a-tete_ tables; even the chairs, like the visitors, appeared to come only in couples.

The Frenchman has been reproached with the sin of ingrat.i.tude; has been convicted, indeed, as possessed of more of that pride that comes late--the day after the gift of bounty has been given--than some other of his fellow-mortals. Yet here were a company of Frenchmen--and Frenchwomen--proving in no ordinary fashion their equipment in this rare virtue. It was early in May; up yonder, where the Seine flows beneath the Parisian bridges, the pulse of the gay Paris world was beating in time to the spring in the air. Yet these artists had deserted the asphalt of the boulevards for the cobbles of a village street, the delights of the _cafe chantant_ had been exchanged for the miracle of the moon rising over the sea, and for the song of the thrush in the bush.

The Frenchman, more easily and with simpler art than any of his modern brethren, can change the prose of our dull, practical life into poetry; he can turn lyrical at a moment's notice. He possesses the power of trans.m.u.ting the commonplace into the idyllic, by merely clapping on his cap and turning his back on the haunts of men. He has retained a singular--an almost ideal sensitiveness, of mental cuticle--such acuteness of sensation, that a journey to a field will oftentimes yield him all the flavor of a long voyage, and a sudden introduction to a forest, the rapture that commonly comes only with some unwonted aspect of nature. Perhaps it is because of this natural poet indwelling in a Frenchman, that makes him content to remain so much at home. Surely the extraordinary is the costly necessity for barren minds; the richly-endowed can see the beauty that lies the other side of their own door-step.

CHAPTER IX.

A NORMAN HOUSEHOLD.

There were two paths in the village that were well worn. One was that which led the village up into the fields. The other was the one that led the tillers of the soil down into the village, to the door step of the justice of the peace.

A good Norman is no Norman who has not a lawsuit on hand.

Anything will serve as a pretext for a quarrel No sum of money is so small as not to warrant a breaking of the closest blood ties, if thereby one's rights may be secured. Those beautiful stripes of rye, barley, corn, and wheat up yonder in the fields, that melt into one another like sea-tones--down here on the benches before the _juge de paix_--what quarrels, what hatreds, what evil pa.s.sions these few acres of land have brought their owners, facing each other here like so many demons, ready to spring at the others' throats! Brothers on these benches forget they are brothers, and sisters that they have suckled the same mother. Two more yards of the soil that should have been Fillette's instead of Jeanne's, and the grave will enclose both before the clenched fist of either is relaxed, and the last _sous_ in the stocking will be spent before the war between their respective lawyers will end.

Many and many were the tales told us of the domestic tragedies, born of wills mal-administered, of the pa.s.sions of hate, ambition, and despair kept at a white heat because half the village owned, up in the fields, what the other half coveted. Many, also, and fierce were the heated faces we looked in upon at the justice's door, in the very throes of the great moment of facing justice, and their adversary.

Our own way, by preference, took us up into the fields. Here, in the broad open, the farms lay scattered like fortifications over a plain.

Doubtless, in the earlier warlike days they had served as such.