Fifth Series, Volume XXXVII. } No. 1962. January 28, 1882. From Beginning, CONTENTS. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Kemittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. From The Contemporary Review. opening into an inner court, where, on the flights of steps and balustrades and " rus JOTTINGS IN FRANCE IN SEPTEMBER AND tic" masonry, stand pots of large olean OCTOBER. PARIS looked grey and dull this year in the last days of August and the first week of September. Indeed, we have seen an amount of bad weather there at different times, wet, cold, windy, snowy, such as would have ruined the reputation of any English town. But it is always useful as well as agreeable to praise oneself, and Paris has done this to such good effect, that the world at large believes that her climate is as pleasant as some other of her characteristics. ders and pomegranates. Every house has its own physiognomy instead of being turned out by the gross; but, then, there is the consolation (or the reverse) that each street can now be swept by cannon in case of a great row or a revolution, and that a gun planted at the Hôtel de Ville can command the whole line of the Rue. de Rivoli down to the Place de la Concorde! Two hundred miles of dead flat (with the exception of the pretty hills round Fontainebleau) carried us through the The town looks less picturesque at every centre of France from Paris to Dijon, that fresh visit, for the piercing of new streets 'ugly picture in a beautiful frame," which increases yearly, and they are all built in must always be traversed, in whatever the true boulevard style, with high man-direction the country is crossed. sarde roofs and gables in them, all of the We passed much undrained ground, same height and pattern, the long lines of with bulrushes and coarse grass, much windows and mouldings running straight ragwort and weeds of all sorts, tracts of through from end to end, without a break, frowsy land, low lying and marshy, or high with monotonous regularity, evidently lying and bare, evidently not worth culticonstructed by the acre. Old Paris was vation by the small proprietors when it a triumph of individualism even five-and-lay far away from their dwellings. The twenty years ago; every house had been melancholy-looking villages stand a good built at some time by somebody accord- way apart on both sides the line, quite ing to his own taste and fancy to live unaffected by the railroad; their one-stoin, not to sell. It had an idiosyncracy of ried houses, with deep brown, almost its own, resulting from the individual black, tiled roofs, looked like barns, with thought and requirements of the owner, hardly any chimneys, dilapidated, wretchdiffering in each. A few old streets re-ed, with no new constructions of any kind main of the old picturesque fashion, and we passed through one or two on our road to the Lyons Station. Here is a house, two stories high, red brick, with a great deal of color in the lower half, grey stone ornaments over each window, and an arched doorway with some rich old ironment or even a gable was to be seen, and work in it. Alongside stands a lofty the houses grow, as it were, out of the neighbor of five stories, with balconies at bare ground, without a scrap of flowerthe top, full of trailing nasturtiums and garden, or so much as a path up to the scarlet geraniums, a bower of green doors. There were hardly any by-roads, wreaths showing against a dark brown only the one chaussée, so that everybody roof, and pignons sur la rue with round- must cross everybody else's land to culti. headed windows set in blunt triangular vate their own plots. In the excessive gables. Next comes some good plaster subdivision these plots lie very separate, work in panels between the pilasters of and one owner will often possess ten or the architraves, while opposite rises the twelve pieces of half or even a quarter of pediment of the old Hôtel de Sully, with an acre, each of which has to be ploughed boldly carved entablatures and emblazon- and harrowed, planted and manured sepments in stone, the great porte-cochère arately. The enormous amount of labor to be seen, except at the railway stations. There are no “bettermost" houses among them, but all of one low-level character, with a miserable little church in the midst, generally hardly bigger or better than the buildings round it. Not an atom of orna sometimes at Christmas in the towns, but none of the old dancing on Sundays, only hard work. Yet, I remember, as a child, hearing a peasant ditty C'est demain dimanche, que les filles dansent Les garçons vont les prier, Mademoiselle, voulez-vous expended, and the small return of grain is | dancing in one place. "O! on a aboli very striking, less than half the crops tout ça ! was the answer; there is a ball which are gathered in England, according to Mr. Caird. And this though the climate is so much better than our own, as might be seen by the maize and the vines, while the average of the soil is certainly as good. The women were carrying great weights, working bare-headed in the fields, washing bare-legged in the streams, driving the rude ploughs, etc., which always shows a low ebb of civilization. Not a machine was to be seen the whole way, except one for making hay, half-way to Dijon; indeed, such small owners cannot afford them. The supply of firewood was very scanty, and came from afar — faggots and trunks of trees, of which the largest meas. ured about eight or ten inches in diameter. The peasants cannot afford to keep forest land, which entails long waiting for the profit of the produce, and the woods belong to the few large proprietors at great distances apart. Indeed, these are few and far between, for after passing Fontainebleau we only saw two châteaux from the railway. They both stood high, with some terraces and ornamental trees about them and their dépendences. Else the excessive monotony of the open flat country, unbroken by a single division or hedge, and without a tree, except the rows of miserable polled black poplars, was extremely depressing. When once we came upon a group of three large horse-chestnuts and elms, the first and last we saw in one hundred and fifty miles, their beautiful rich round outlines were a joy to the eye, wearied with the sight of green brooms in long lines. Thousands of French peasants can never have seen a real tree in their whole lives. The look of the houses, with the persiennes of the one best room always closed, is very dismal, and the holes left for scaffold-poles in the walls when building, not filled up, gives them an unfinished, gaunt appearance. Altogether the country looked grave, grey, dull, decaying, and the population is everywhere stationary, in some places diminishing. A dreary life "Jacques Bonhomme seems to lead in central France. I asked about the Une contredanse, danser? le pied sur la planche. En avant, chasser croiser, un tour de main et balancer which showed a different state of things. We have not seen a gate for nearly three hundred miles, and although hedges in the north of France and walls in the south are left to mark out the divisions (often into the smallest of fields), great gaps are left to pass from one to the other, so that the cows require a guardian to keep them to their duties. A cow, indeed, is a fine lady, who never goes out without her man or maid, by whom she is taken for a browsing of a couple of hours or so, in the morning and afternoon, and no one seemed to mind any beasts but his own. A flock of sheep, with a shepherd and two wolf-like dogs watching them, was a new sight. The last time we had noticed it was near Amiens. The scene changed when we came near Dijon. "France" is a big word, and to talk as if any generalization held good from the Manche to the Mediterranean is, of course, even more absurd than to speak of Kent and Caithness as alike, because they are both British. Vineyards cover the rounded hills of the Côte d'Or, the red and black loam of which produces the valuable Burgundy wines. The crop, however, is a very ex"9 one. chancey pensive and " Ten or twelve per cent. is made in a good year, but in a bad one hardly anything, while occasionally it is a positive loss; then the small owner must borrow or beg. The best growths are in the hands of large proprietors, chiefly wine-merchants, but there is a great deal of common Burgundy grown on little patches of ten to twelve journaux.* The bad years of late have been many and trying, the phylloxera * A journal is three-quarters of an acre. has invaded the country, although it is | olution, to satisfy the instinct for getting not so bad as in some parts; two and rid of all that differs from the color of the a half per cent. was all that could be prevailing opinion of the moment. There counted upon, taking everything into con- is no reason why in a dozen more years a sideration. The men who work for hire succeeding wave will not have washed are paid generally in kind; if in money, away all the handiworks of the present about four francs a day in the vineyards generation of busy workers, like the sand at this season. forts and gardens of children on the seashore, or rather there is every reason to expect it. Each, however, is equally fierce in its conviction that it has hold of the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and that all who differ are either scoundrels or fools, probably both at once. The lilies of France can be traced on the scutcheons, under the red cap of "Liberté, égalité, et fraternité" of 1793 - the bees of Napoleon again over the signs of the republic-more lilies, Louis Philippe's cocks, more "fraternités," more bees, more republics, red and other, carved or painted over doors of national monuments, at the corners of squares, in frescoed ceilings. Everywhere may be traced crumbled idols, dead enthusiasms, extinct beliefs, emblems of rallying-cries that rally no longer. "Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse," is a truly French feeling. Dijon, the capital of the old civilization of the south-east of France, is full of old memories and old monuments of "les princes des bons vins," as her sovereigns were called; but everything was defaced at the Great Revolution, and grievously mutilated. The Chartreuse has been levelled to the ground, where were the magnificent monuments of the dukes of Burgundy, altar tombs on which lie grand colossal figures of Philippe le Hardi, 1404, and his son, Jean sans Peur, with his wife, Margaret of Bavaria, 1419, called "the finest specimen of medieval art north of the Alps." They lie with their hands raised to heaven, "in their habits as they lived," and colored like life. The heads are very fine, individual, and full of character; they were only saved by being pulled to pieces and buried. They have now been stuck together and placed in the museum, and the tearing them out of the associations for which they were designed, the breaking-up of the setting of which they were the centre, has so spoilt the poetry and sentiment of the tombs, that they have nearly lost their savor and sunk to the level of the "curios" which surround them "dried head of a cannibal from the Feejee Islands," "fetish of an African king," etc.; and when we came to the "cast of the skull" of the fierce old Jean himself, taken out of his grave, the force of disenchantment could no farther go. When a tree or a constitution has roots in the soil and gradually grows and develops, the changes may be great, but there will be a certain harmony in its whole character, it is possible to calculate the course it will take; but if it is cut down and another planted every twenty years or so, who can say what the next tree of liberty may turn out to be? The waste of energy is enormous in this perpetual reconstruction. History has no lessons for a people which has thus deliberately broken with its past, whose sole idea of improvement is to make terre rase and build from the foundation. "Aucun de nous connaît son père, nous sortons tous de dessous le pavé," said Cousin one evening at Madame Mohl's, in despair at the want of continuity in French politics, ideals, and institutions. The ancient Palais de Justice has nearly been improved away. The rage for destruction in France has been greater than in any other country: to wipe out the past, to begin again from the very bottom of the edifice, seems to be the chief object of the national existence. The old dynas- The elections were just over, and the ties, the old institutions, the buildings, papers full of skits upon them. A conare levelled or improved out of all knowl-versation between an elector and his repedge; the very names of the streets in resentative began with, Paris must be changed in each fresh rev "Are you going to diminish the taxes? |