Public ledger. [volume] (Memphis, Tenn.) 1865-1893, 1874-02-19

which seem to remain unvaried in so
many French families of the upper class,
and which may almost be said to belong
to them as their names do. The same
qualities and the same defects are repro
duced among the old nobility from gem
Grafton to generation. When wife
comes in from another origin, she may
try perhaps to introduce new elements I;
but they get effaced, or, at all events,
weakened, by the old traditions with
which they have to contend; so that the
main features of the house continue to
be recognizable; the child appropriates
them, and hands them on again when
she, in her turn, becomes a mother.
This is, however, true only Of the highest
classes, where pride of race, and the
supposed obligation to maintain precon-
ceived notions, still exist with wonder
full vigor. In the middle and lower
stages of society no such religion can
be found. There, the operation of mod
ern leveling is seen in its fullest force;
there, no ancestral theories compete with
nineteenth-century tendencies; there,
the modern woman and the modern
child are fashioned as the modern man
requires, but always, though in varying
degrees, with emotional hearts and un-
checked sympathies.
The general result is that, wherever
we look throughout France, in chateaux
and in cottages, in the hotels of fParis,
and in workmen's lodgings, we see the
girl-children echoing their mothers.
sometimes with merely approximate re-
semblance, but always with a sort of out
bursting natural truth, which is singu-
larly winning, and which inspires very
thorough confidence in the honesty Of
their hearts. Such beginning indi-
Gates pretty clearly that the girls will
grow into women capable of feeling in
most of its ardent shapes; and though
the tone of the society into which they
may be thrown may deviate them from
their first track, and may make them
worthless instead of worthy they will
none the less retain their early read
mess of sensation, and their faculty of
expressing it. Ii we look out of Paris,
if we take the mass Of the country pop
ulation, we recognize that a very small
minority of the girls grow up to abandon
their first teaching; we see how difficult
tits to eradicate the stamp which the
mother put upon her child; and we own
that these French women, according to
their lights, know how to do their duty
to their young. Europe, perhaps, does
not believe one word of this; Europe
measures France by the little that it
sees of IL, by few hundred Parisiennes
who stand forward in fragrant radiance,
and who damage their country in the
eyes of the entire world for the satisfac-
ton of their own vanity. Those women
are not France; those Yomen's children
are not real French children. The
poor little creatures who are sent
dressed up to the Tuileries Gardens to
play in public their mothers parts are
what travellers look at, and what they
not unnaturally imagine to be the nor
NAL type; but the error is as great as to
take coarse novels as the expression of
national literature. Furthermore. it
should be remembered that, for the last
thirty years, Paris has become the home
of large number of foreigners with
money, and that a good many of the
girls who make a moralist mourn when
he looks at them in the Champs Elysees
do not belong to France at ALL The
nation has faults. enough, in all con-
science; but it is not fair, either to at
tribute to it what it does not deserve, or
to ascribe to the entire people the sins
of special few. If there be one un-
doubted indisputable merit of French
woman, it is her devotion to her girls
and her resolute effort to keep them
pure. The remarkable young person
often that an Englishman contemplates
with stupefaction under the chestnut
trees round the obelisk, and in whom he
observes variety of precocious defects,
is no more sample of real French chill
dren than peacock is an ordinary
specimen of birds, or the Vie Parisienne
an example of everyday newspapers.
She is a product of the period, an acci- |
dent of the epoch; she is not the repre-
sentative of her country. She may or
may not be as impudent as Gaveroche,
as dictatorial as Napoleon, and as bump |
tious as Louis XIV-that depends on
her temperament and her mamma; bat,
whatever the degree Of her premature
fastness, she is but member of little
.ainted hock-she is not France. We
ind real France elsewhere.