2

The English Victorians were like that about Italy, the early nineteenth
century Americans were like that about Spain, the middle nineteenth century
Americans were like that about England, my generation the end of the nineteenth
century American generation was like that about France.

Of course sometimes people discover their own country as if it were the
other, a recent instance of that is Louis Bromfield discovering America, there
have been a few English like that too, Kipling for instance discovered England
but in general that other country, that you need to be free in is the other
country, not the country where you really belong.

In San Francisco it was easy that it should be France. Of course it might
have been Spain or China, but really in San Francisco as a child one really
knew too much about Spain and China, and France was interesting while Spain
and China were familiar, and daily. France was not daily it just came up again
and again.

It came up first in such different books, Jules Verne and Alfred de Vigny
and it came up in my mother's clothes and the gloves and the sealskin caps and
muffs and the boxes they came in.

There was the smell of Paris in that.

And then for quite a long while it was very easy to forget France.

The next thing I remember about France were the Henry Henrys and Sarah
Bernhardt, the Panorama of the Battle of Waterloo and Millet's Man With The Hoe.

The Panorama of the Battle of Waterloo.

One of the pleasantest things those of us who write or paint do is to have
the daily miracle. It does come.

I was about eight years old and it came with the Panorama of the Battle
of Waterloo.

It was painted by a frenchman, I wonder if it would not be interesting to
have one now, one of those huge panoramas, where you stood in the center on a
platform and all around you on every side of you was an oil painting. You were

3

completely surrounded by an oil painting.

It was then I frist realis-ed the difference between a painting and out
of doors. I realised that a painting is always a flat surface and out of doors
never is, and that out of doors is made up of air and a painting has no air,
the air is replaced by a flat surface, and anything in a painting that imitates
air is illustration and not art. I seem to have felt all that very intensely
standing on the platform and being all surrounded by an oil painting.

And then there was Sarah Bernhardt.

San Francisco had lots of french people in it, and a french theatre and
one naturally knew little girls and boys who talked french at home quite nat-
urally. And so when a french actor or actress came to San Francisco they al-
ways stayed a long time.

They liked it there and of course when actresses or actors stay anywhere
they always act, so naturally there was a great deal of French spoken in the
theatre.

It was then that I found out wuite naturally, that french is a spoken
language and English a written one.

In France whenever anybody writes anything and wants anybody to know what
it is like they read it out loud. If it is in English it is natural to pass
the manuscript to them and let them read it but if it is in french it is nat-
ural to read it out loud.

French is a spoken language English really is not.

Sarah Bernhardt made me see the thin arms of frenchwomen. When I came to
Paris and saw the little midinettes and Montmartoises they all had them. It
was only many years later when the styles changed, in those days they wore
long skirts, that I realised what sturdy legs went with those thin arms. That
is what makes the french such good soldiers the sturdy legs, thin arms and
sturdy legs, if you see what I mean, peaceful and exciting.

4

That is what makes all men the french able to ride up hill on bycicles the way they do, no hill is so steep but that slowly pedaling up and up they go, men and girls and little children, the sturdy legs and thin arms.

The other thing that was french there in San Francisco were the family of Henry Henrys. That was their name.

There was a father and mother they were known as Monsieur and Madame Henry and there were five children the oldest Henry played the violin. We used to go there in the afternoon and stay to dinner and then we used to dance the Henry children and ourselves, to the french music of the violin.

And we always for dinner had a roast of mutton, a gigot they called it, cooked the same way as when I went to school in Paris and potatoes in the fat around it, clean looking potatoes, not so dark as when they were cooked American. But the thing that was most exciting were the knives and forks. The knives had been sharpened so much that the blade was as thin as a dagger with a slight bend on top and the forks so light that when you pressed on them they bent. These knives and forks were the most passionately french things I knew I might say I ever knew.

Then there was Millet's Man With The Hoe.

I had never really wanted a photograph of a picture before I saw Millet's Man With The Hoe. I was about twelve or thirteen years old, I had read Eugenie Grandet of Balzac, and I did have some feeling about what french country was like but The Man With The Hoe made it different, it made it ground not country, and France has been there to me ever since. France is made of ground, of earth.

When I managed to get a photograph of the picture and took it home my eldest brother looked at it and said what is it and I said it is Millet's Man With The Hoe. It is a hell of a hoe said my eldest brother.

But that is the way french country, it is ground like that and they work at it just that way with just that kind of a hoe.

All this was all the Paris France I really knew then and then for a very

5

long time I forgot about Paris and about France.

Then one day when I was at college at Radcliffe in Cambridge Massachusetts, I was on a train and sitting next to me was a frenchman. I recognised him as a visiting lecturer and I spoke to him. We talked about American college women. Very wonderful he said and very interesting but and he looked at me earnestly really not one of them, now you must admit that, not one of them could feel with Alfred de Musset that le seul bien qui me reste au monde c'est d'avoir quelque fois pleuré. I was young then but I knew what he meant that they would not feel like that. That and a certain interest in Zola as a realist but not as much interest as in the Russian realists was all that Paris meant to me until after the medical school when I settled down in Paris France.

6

PA RT II

Alice Toklas said, my grandmother's cousin's wife told me that her daughter had married the son of the engineer who had built the Eiffel Tower and his name was not Eiffel.

When we were having a book printed in France we complained about the bad alignment. Ah they explained that is because they use machines now, machines are bound to be inaccurate, they have not the intelligence of human beings, naturally the reason why all of us naturally began to live in France is because France has scientific methods, machines and electricity, but does not really believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of living. Life is tradition and human nature.

And so in the beginning of the twentieth century when a new way had to be found naturally they needed France.

Really not, french people really do not believe that anything is important except daily living and the ground that gives it to them and defending themselves from the enemy. Government has no importance except insofar as it does that.

I remember so well it was during the war and they were talking about women voting and one of the women who was listening said oh dear I have to stand in line for so many thing coal and sugar and candles and meat and now to vote, oh dear.

After all it does not make any difference and they know it does not make any difference.

When I was first in Paris and for many years I had a servant, we were very good friends her name was Heléne. One day quite accidentally I do not know how it happened because I was not at all interested I said to her, Heléne what political party does your husband belong to. She always had told me everything even the most intimate troubles with her family and her husband but when I said that what party does your husband belong to her face grew rigid. She did not answer. What is the matter with you Heléne I said, is it a secret. No Mademois-

7

Mademoiselle she answered it is not a secret but one does not tell it. One
does not tell the political party one belongs to. Even I have a political
party but I do not tell it.

I had been in France many years but I was surprised and I began to ask
around and they were all like that. They all had that same expression of it
is not a secret but one does not tell it. A son did not know what party his
father belonged to nor the father the son's.

It is because of this that the recent front commun had such a short life.
They told they all had to tell and to tell all day long what their political
party was and so of course it could not last long. It just could not.

No, publicity in France is really not important, tradition and their private life and the soil which always produces something, that is what counts.

Mrs. Lindberg was in Paris and she and I were talking. In America of
course she had suffered they had suffered from publicity. In England they had
payed no attention to them but they knew and England knew that they were there.
In France they pay attention to you when you meet, but they do not bother you
because in between they do not know that you are there.

When Fania Marinoff came to Paris she said she would like to meet so and
so. Sorry I said I do not know them. But you know they are, oh yes I said
vaguely. Then she mentioned others. Some I knew and some I did not. She could
not understand, in New York, she said, if I knew you I would know them. Yes
yes I said but not in Paris. Not to know the well-known in Paris does not
argue yourself unknown, because nobody knows anybody whom they do not know.

Now for some if not for all these reasons, Paris was where the twentieth
century was.

It was important too that Paris was where fashions were made. To be sure
there were moments when they seemed to dress better in Barcelona and in New York
but not really.

It was in Paris that the fashions were made, and it is always in the great

8

moments when everything changes that fashions are important, because they make up something go up in the air or go down or go around that has nothing to do with anything.

Fashion is the real thing in abstraction. The one thing that has no practical side to it and so quite naturally Paris which has always made fashions was where everybody went in 1900. They needed the background of tradition and profound conviction that men and women and children do not change, that science is interesting but does not change anything, that democracy is real but that governments are useless. Unless they tax you too much or get you defeated by the enemy are of no importance, that is the background that everybody needed in 1900.

It is funny about art and literature, fashions being part of it. Two years ago everybody was saying that France was down and out, was sinking to be a second rate power, etcetera etcetera. And I said but I do not think so because not for years not since the war have hats been as various as lovely and as French as they are now. Not only are they to be found in the good shops but everywhere there is a milliner there is a pretty French little hat.

I do not believe that when the characteristic art and literature of a country is active and fresh I do not think that country is in its decline. There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic product which has nothing to do with its material life. And so when hats in Paris are lovely and French and everywhere then France is alright.

So Paris was the place that suited those of us that were to create the twentieth century art and literature, naturally enough.

So many things. They change occupations so easily, they are very conservative very traditional and they change occupations easily. They may start as baker and then they become agent for an estate and they then become a banker all one man and all in ten years and then they retire.

It is also amusing that it always taken about seven men to do anything,

9

to build a whole road or to put up three telegraph poles or to build a fair
or to take down one tree. It does not make any difference seven are always
there at it, it takes several to talk several to look and one or two to work,
is
so whatever there is to do it always takes about the same number. Now this
is
very important because once again this made a background of unreality which
was very necessary for anybody having to create the twentieth century. The
nineteenth century knew just what to do with each man but the twentieth century
inevitably was not to know and so Paris was the place to be.

And then the way they feel about the dead, it is so friendly so simply
friendly and though inevitable not a sadness and though occuring not a shock.
There is no difference between death and life in France and that too made it
inevitable that they were the background of the twentieth century.

Naturally it was foreigners who did it there in France because all these
things being French it made it be their tradition and it being a tradition it
was not the twentieth century.

There are always so many foreigners everywhere but particularly in France.

One day Gerald Berners and I were walking and he suggested that it would
make a nice book to take all the aphorisms which were not true.

We thought of a great many and among them, familiarity breeds contempt
and no man is a hero to his valet. We concluded that in fully ninety persent
of the cases it was the other way.

Familiarity does not breed contempt. On the contrary the more familiar it
is the more rare and beautiful it is. Take a quarter in which one lives, it is
lovely, it is a place rare and beautiful and to leave it is awful.

I remember once hearing a conversation on the street in Paris and it ended
up, and so there it was there was nothing for them to do, they had to leave the
quarter. There it was, there was nothing else to do they had to leave the most
wonderful place in the world, wonderful because it was there where they had always lived.

IO

Paris quarters were like that, we all had our quarters, to be sure when later we left them and went back to them they did look dreary, not at all like the lovely quarter in which we are living now. So familiarity did not breed contempt.

And then not being a hero to one's valet. Is there anybody in the world even yourself who is as pleased with your publicity as your servant certainly your French servant is pleased there is no doubt about that, past present and future servants all of them are pleased with that.

So then which quarters of Paris were important and when.

From 1900 to 1930, Paris did change a lot. They always told me that America changed but it really did not change as much as Paris did in those years that is the Paris that one can see, but then there is no remembering what it looked like before and even no remembering what it looks like now.

We none of us lived in old parts of Paris then. We lived in the rue de Fleurus just a hundred year old quarter, a great many of us lived around there and on the boulevard Raspail which was not even cut through then and when it was cut through all the rats and animals came underneath our house and we had to have one of the vermin catchers of Paris come and clean us out, I wonder if they exist any more now, they have disappeared along with the horses and enormous wagons that used to clean out the sewers under the houses that were not in the new sewerage system, now even the oldest houses are in the new system. It is nice in France they adapt themselves to everything slowly they change completely but all the time they know that they are as they were.

Belley the little country town now even all summer long eats grapefruits, they have concluded that grape fruits are a necessary luxury.

Out old servant Helene who was with us before the war for many years, learned from us that children should be raised differently and more hygienically and raise them in that way she did but all the same one day I heard her talking to her six year old little boy and saying you are a good little boy,

II

yes mother he said, and you love your mother very much, yes mother he said,
and you will grow up loving your mother she said, yes mother he said and then
she said you will be grown up and you will leave me for a woman will you not,
yes mother he said.

I always remember too when the Titanic went down and everybody was so
moved at the heroism and the saving of women and children, I do not see any-
thing sensible in that said Helene, what use are women and children, alone in
the world, what kind of life can they lead, it would have been lots more sens-
ible, said Helene, if they had drawn lots and saved a certain number of com-
plete families much more sensible, said Helene.

And that is what made Paris and France the natural background of the
art and literature of the twentieth century. Their tradition kept them from
changing and yet they naturally saw things as they were, and accepted life as
it is, and mixed things up without any reason at the same time. Foreigners
were not romantic to them, they were just facts, nothing was sentimental they
were just there, and strangely enough it did not make them make the art and
literature of the twentieth century but it made them be the inevitable back-
ground for it.

So from 1900 to 1930 those of us who lived in Paris did not live in
picturesque quarters even those who lived in Montmartre like Picasso and
Bracque did not live in old houses, they lived in fifty year old houses at
most and now we all live in the ancient quarter near the river, now that the
twentieth century is decided and has its character we all tend to want to live
in the seventeenth century houses, not in barracks of ateliers as we did then.
The seventeenth century houses are just as cheap as our barracks of ateliers
were then but now we need the picturesque the splendid we need the air and
space you only get in old quarters. It was Picasso who said the other day
when they were talking about tearing down the insalubrious parts of Paris but
it is only in the insalubrious quarters that there is sun and air and space,

I2

Familiarity does not breed contempt, anything one does every day is im-
portant and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful. And
that is all as it should be.

So it begins to be reasonable that the twentieth century whose mechanics,
whose crimes, whose standardisation began in America, needed the background of
Paris, the place where tradition was so firm that they could look modern with-
out being different, and where their acceptance of reality is so great that they
could let any one have the emotion of unreality.

Then there is their feeling about foreigners that helps a lot.

After all to the french the difference between being a foreigner and being
an inhabitant is not very serious. There are so many foreigners and all who are
real to them are those that inhabit Paris and France. In that they are differ-
ent from other people. Other people find foreigners more real to them when they
are in their own country but to the french foreigners are only real to them when
they are in France. Naturally they come to France. What is more natural for
them to do than that.

I remember an old servant invented a nice name for foreigners, there were
Americans because she was our servant and then there was something she called a
creole ecossais, we never did find out where that came from.

Of course they all came to France a great many to paint pictures and nat-
urally they could not do that at home, or write they could not do that at home
either, they could be dentists at home she knew all about that even before the
war, Americans were a practical people and dentistry was practical. To be sure
certainly she was the most practical because when her little boy was ill, of
course she was awfully unhappy because it was her little boy but then also it
was all to do over again because she did have to have one child, any french
person has to have one child, and now after two years it was all to do again
money and everything. And still why not of course why not.

So all this simple clarity in respect to seeing life as it is the animal

I3

and social life in human beings as it is, the money value of human and social
and animal life as it is, without without *bute* or without simplicity, what
is it to-day a french woman said to me about an American writer, it is false
without being artificial.

It did not take the twentieth century to make them say that as it has taken
the twentieth century to make other people say that.

Foreigners belong in France because they have always been here and did what
they had to do there and remained foreigners there. Foreigners should be for-
eigners and it is nice that foreigners are foreigners and that they inevitably
are in Paris and in France.

They are beginning now at last cinemas and the world war have slowly made
them realise that nationality the foreigners are. In a little hotel where we
stayed some time they spoke of us as English, no we said no we are Americans,
at last one of them a little annoyed at our persistence said but it is all the
same. Yes I answered like the french and Italians all the same. Well before the
war they could not have said that nor felt the unpleasantness of the answer.
Then we had a Finnish maid here in the country, and once she came in all beam-
ing, it is wonderful, she said, the milk woman knows Finland, she knows where
Finland is, she knows all about Finland, why, said the Finnish maid, I have
known very educated people who did not know where Finland was but she knew. Well
did she know. No but she did have the ancient tradition of french politeness
and that was that. They do, of course.

But really what they do do is to respect art and letters, if you are a
writer you have privileges, if you are a painter you have privileges and it is
pleasant having those privileges, I always remember coming in from the country
to my garage where I usually kept my car and the garage was full more than full,
it was the moment of the automobile salon, but said I xxx what can I do, well
said the man in charge I'll see and then he came back and said in a low voice,
there is a corner and in this corner I have put the car of Monsieur the academ-
ician and next to it I will put yours the others can stay outside and it is

I4

quite true even in a garage an academician and a woman of letters takes precedence even of millionaires or politicians, they do, it is quite incredible but they do, the police treat artists and writers respectfully too, well that too is intelligent on the part of France and unsentimental, because after all the way everything is remembered is by the artists and painters of the period, nobody really lives who has not been well written about and in realising that the french show their usual sense of reality and a sense of reality a belief in a sense of reality is the twentieth century, they may not have it but they do believe in it.

They are funny even now they are funny, all the peasants of the village, well not quite but a number of them were eating their bread and wine, they do quite nicely now have jam on their bread, nice jam made of a mixture of apricots and apples, just how they happen at the same time I do not quite know, yes perhaps late apricots and early apples, it is very good.

So we were talking and they said to me, now tell me, why does the french chamber vote itself two more years of existence, and we, well of course we never do have anything to say but why do they not tell us so. Well I said why not, you know it they know it, and beside if they are there why should not they stay there. Well said they laughing let's be like Spain. Well said I what is the use, after all, after all their shooting each other up they are going to have their king again any way the king's son. Then for a change said they, why do not we have their nephew.

That is the way they feel about it, the only thing that is important is the daily life, and so the gangsters, so the twentieth century had really nothing to teach the French countryman therefore it was the proper background for the art and literature of the twentieth century.

The Impressionists.

The twentieth century did not invent but it made a great fuss about series production, series production really began in the nineteenth century, that is natural enough, machines are bound to make series production.

I5

By the way there is another nice story.

We were having a book printed in France and we were complaining about the
printing. But of course said the printer Maurice Darantiere, it is printed by
machine, of course it must be full of faults of errors, if it had been done by
hand there would have been no errors because the human mind corrects the faults
of the human hand but with a machine there is no corrector and so of course any-
thing done by machine is inevitably badly done.

That from a french point of view is reasonable enough.

So although there was more fuss made about machines and series production
in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth of course it was a nineteenth
century thing.

The impressionists and they were nineteenth century had as their aspirat-
ion and their ideal one painting a day, really two paintings a day, the morning
painting and the afternoon painting actually it might have been the early morn-
ing and the early afternoon and the late afternoon. But after all there is a
limit to the human hand after all painting is hand painting so actually even at
their most excited moment they rarely did more than two more frequently one,
and very often not one a day, most generally not one a day. They had the dream
of a series production but as Monsieur Darantiere said after all they had not
the faults or the qualities of machines.

So Paris was the natural background for the twentieth century, America
knew it too well, knew the twentieth century too well to create it, for America
there was a glamor in the twentieth century that made it not be material for
consciously
creative activity, England was increasingly refusing the twentieth century, knowing
full well that they had gloriously created the nineteenth century and perhaps
the twentieth century was going to be too many for them, so they were quite self
consciously denying the twentieth century but France was not worrying about it,
what is dead and what was it, was their point of view of which they were not very
conscious, they were too occupied with their daily life to worry about it, beside
the last half of the nineteenth century had really not interested them very much,

I6

since the end of the romantic movement, they had worked hard, they always work
hard, but the last half of the nineteenth century had really not interested
them very much. As the peasants always say every year comes to an end, and they
like it when the bad weather does not keep them from working, they like to work,
it is a good pastime for them work is, and so although the last half of the
nineteenth century did not interest them they did work. And now the twentieth
century had come and it might be more interesting, if it was to be really in-
teresting of course they would not work quite so much, being interested does
sometimes stop one from working, work might then be even somewhat disturbing and
distracting. So the twentieth century had come it began with 1901.

I7

PART III

An American who had read as far as this as far as it had been written said to me, but you do not mention the relation of french men to french men, of french men to french women, of french women to french women, of french women to french children, of french men to french children, of french children to french children. No I have not and for a very simple reason, there is no relation between them, all the contact between them all is so fixed and inevitable, so definite and so real that there is no question of either nature nor choice nor mistake. There can be no mistake and they cannot be mistaken.

Once in talking to the Baronne Pierlot a very old french friend she said about something when I said but Madame Pierlot it is natural, no said Madame Pierlot it may be nature but it is not natural. She is eighty-six and her granddaughter eight and it is difficult at times to know whether they are both eighty-six or whether they are both eight.

I once wrote and said what is the use of being a boy if you are to grow up to be a man what is the use and what is the use. But in France a boy is a man of his age the age he is and so there is no question of a boy growing up to be a man and what is the use, because at every stage of being alive he is completely a man alive at that time.

This accounts for the very curious relation of every french man to his mother. Just as he is always alive all the time and every moment of the time as a man so he is all his life continually a son dependent upon his mother. There is no break in that dependence even if a man is sixty years old and that in France very often does happen, the man is always dependent upon his mother, and so a frenchman is always a man because there is nothing inevitably different between being a boy and a man in a frenchman's life and he is always a son because he is always dependent upon his mother for his strength his morality, his hope and his despair, his future and his past. A frenchman always goes completely to pieces

18

when his mother dies, he is fortunate if another woman has come into his life who is a mother to him.

And now it is once more an August and September and there is once more a circus and once more the farmers the gentle farmers talk about life as it is.

One of the gentliest said to me the other day. We used to think not we but everybody used to think that it was kings who were ambitious who were greedy and who brought misery to the people who had no way to resist them. But now well democracy has shown us that what is evil are the grosses tetes, the big heads, all big heads are greedy for money and power, they are ambitious that is the reson they are big heads and so they are at the head of the government and the result is misery for the people. They talk about cutting off the heads of the grosses tetes but now we know that there will be other grosses tetes and they will be all the same.

He shook his head sadly and went back to his harvesting.

And so there is no we going on except that the seasons follow one after the other and the fashions go with the seasons.

If you like fashions you get tired of crises, and the french like fashions they do not like them they naturally create them and crises are occasionally a help to fashions, an occasional crises is, but not many of them, many crises in succession interfere with fashions and so a workman said to me yesterday, We have had enough of what they make us do we are tired of crises. And he was right, the season and the fashions that exist with the seasons are the things France lives by, the earth has its seasons and the people who live on that earth have fashions and that is all.

Fashions are so natural, we were all together at a house here in the country and somebody said something of Madame Pierlot's father, what was he. Ah was the answer, Madame Pierlot is eighty-six and so all who are young have naturally forgotten about her father, but oh some one answered, when we go up to the attic and find clothes in which to dress up we always find a piece of ermine and on this

I9

ermine is written the name of Madame Pierlot's father. What kind of ermine asked some one, and the ermine was described, ah yes was the answer in that case he was the judge of the Cour d'apel. There are fashions that change and fashions that do not change or fashions that change slowly but there are always fashions. But fashions as the workman said cannot live while there are interferences from the outside an occasional crises but not many of them.

It is because of this that the American married to a frenchwoman remarked my American sister rises wonderfully to a crisis but my french wife sees to it that a crisis does not arise.

There is also another matter, once long ago there had been a summer of earthquakes and a servant of a friend of ours living in the avenue Victor Hugo said we must have an earthquake in Paris very soon, but why said my friend indignantly, ah because Madame of course we must suivre le mouvement, follow the fashion.

But the thing to remember is that the french know the difference between a fashion and something that is being done that is not a fashion, some people follow everything but the french have a delicate sense, they know what is a fashion and what is not a fashion, and just following, the way some nations do, is not following a fashion, and of course they do not wait to feel any sense of obligation or obedience, the death of fashion and therefore my workman said we have had enough of what they make us do.

And so all this may be only a fad, by all this I mean war and thought of war, the french say if you can remember three generations it is enough, you remember your father, he ate horse's heads in the war of '70, you remember your husband he was killed in '17, and your brother who was prisoner in Switzerland and it cost a good deal of money and your son and he was home on leave and he was called away before his leave was over by a telegram to go back to his regiment, a thing like this including a daughter who was a schoolteacher and had obly been married 15 months and was called back to evacuate the school children,

20

all this was enough to make any one's head go right away.

But after all it might only be a fire drill, it might only be a make believe, any frenchman knows that you really ought not to know the difference between danger and no danger.

I was on the boat once going to America. Abbé Dimnet was there too and they talked about a fire drill, they had one, everybody was supposed to put on safety belts and a boat was lowered but nobody got into the boat, Abbé Dimnet was indignant, he said to me they should get into the boat, tell the saptain said I, I will say he, he came back, what did the captain say, he said, *we are so furious*, he said that you could not get into the boat unless the ship was stopped it would be too dangerous and to stop the ship was too costly and took too much time, The Abbé Dimnet was furious he said yes that is the way it is they prepare they prepare and they never know whether they can do what they are prepared for.

The french are polite, they naturally are, they never believe in having a surprise inspection, they always believe in announcing it before hand, so that everything can be ready to be inspected and so that no one will have any unpleasant feelings, and why not, it is always pleasanter to be polite and as the french are completely frank, they really cannot lie, if you let any *unpleasant* plumber any anybody talk long enough they will always tell the truth. They have so completely the sense of reality that they cannot really lie, they cannot really eventually not tell the facts as they are, and therefore they can be as polite as they want at any time, because politeness does not interfere with facts, politeness is just another fact.

We once had a chimney-fire and so we decided to heat by electricity. We had had several chimney-fires and we had had enough of them and it was in the winter and we wanted the new system put in quickly. A Frenchman who came to talk about it said he would, but not very quickly, but you must do it quickly we said but he said that he would do his best but it would not be as quickly as we thought it would be done, finally he said alright it would be done quickly, you see he said

21

reflectively it is atavism, your being ladies and your asking me to do it quickly, I cannot help myself I must do what you ask, it is, said he, with a helpless smile, it is atavism. And it was and he did it very quickly indeed.

Ah yes the village is sad, the men are all gone and one of the women passing said ah yes and now once again it is evening, well yes once again it is it is evening.

And so France cannot change it can always have its fashions but it cannot change. And this brings me to dogs.

The french dogs which are native are useful dogs beautiful dogs but dogs that work. They are shepherd dogs and hunting dogs.

It is funny about dogs. Dogs resemble the nation which creates them at least we suppose so. Dogs are certainly like the people that own them and have them with them all the time. I like the word pasetime as the french use it it sounds so like the English word and yet the french make it a completely their own, who had it firstthis I do not know, but they certainly use it perhaps best. Dogs which are not useful dogs are a pass time, as one woman once said to me, one has a great deal of pleasure out of dogs because one can spoil them as one cannot spoil one's children. If the children are spoiled, one's future is spoilt but dogs one can spoil without any thought of the future and that is a great pleasure.

So the french dogs which are useful are native, the various shepherd dogs and the various hunting dogs, they are beautiful and they are useful, they are companions but they are not pets, they cannot be spoiled with pleasure to the sp戶er as dogs that are pets, beside the useful animal is never a thing which is in or out of fashion, I always like the story of the shepherd near Aix-en-Provence, he was taking his dog to kill him he used to kill them by hanging, When they are eight years old they no longer interested themselves in sheep, and as bread is dear you cannot keep a dog who is not interested in his trade. They know that at eight years of age he will stop being interested in tending sheep and so

24

the twentieth century was to be found and celebrated in the arts they still call them the Mere Mollard, or the *pere* Mollard or the Fils Mollard and they call a painter who is old cher maitre. They will do, I cannot write too much *abaut* how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free. And so France is and was. Sometimes it is important and sometimes it is not, but from 1900 to 1939, it certainly was.

War is more like a novel than it is like real life and that is its eternal fascination. It is a thing based on reality but invented, it is a dream made real, all the things that make a novel but not really life.

And that makes one think a great deal about music, war naturally does make music but certainly this war with everybody really everybody listening to the radio, there is nothing but music. There used to be a song that was sung called Music In The Air, but when that song was written nobody really thought that there would be all this music in the air.

After all really civilised countries do not continuously make music, and that is the reason that France and England are the most civilised countries. They are not everlastingly making music.

And therefore France was so important in the period between 1900 and 1939, it was a period when there really was a serious effort made by humanity to be civilised, the world was round and there really were not left any *unkenommen* on it and so everybody decided to be civilised. England had the disadvantage of believing in progress, and progress has really nothing to do with civilisation, but France could be civilised without having progress on her mind, she could believe in civilisation in and for itself, and so she was the natural background for this period.

The relation of men to women and men to men and women to women in a state of being civilised has to be very much considered. Frenchmen love older women, that is women who have already done more living, and that has something to do with civilisation, they do not *makin'* in comradeship really not with any

25

then
one, they said in the revolution Equality Fraternité Liberté, but these qualities
are only *they are* not human, Humanly speaking, French women nor
Frenchmen do not really interest themselves in intimacy, intimacy is something
essentially uncivilised, civilisation makes young men interested in a woman
of thirty and an interest in a spirit of equality with a very young woman is
more or less a sign of senility, and senility is of course not civilised.

A soldier at the front from this village worte a letter, he was seeing
the evacuation of the German villages and he writes, it is sad to see farms
evacuated, to see animals leaving the places they are used to, it is very sad,
you my father and I, we understand this thing but my mother she will not un-
derstand.

Well that is one way of feeling and we had made a sudden visit to
Paris and were back here in the hills far away, and one of the farmers, he is
a tall bearded farmer who drinks a great deal of wine but is for all that a
most excellent farmer, he asked me what the people in Paris were doing. They
were all carrying gas masks, I answered, ah yes he said, pour remplaces les
mugels. A farmer naturally says such things in France but he is not intimate,
he is not intimate with man, woman or child or animal, he is not intimate, it
is not civilised to be intimate and the French need to be civilised and in
order to do so he must have tradition and freedom and with tradition and free-
dom one cannot be intimate with any one.

This too was very necessary in this twentieth century, when the present
was so completely dominating.

The only thing any Frenchman minds in war is sleeping on straw, nobody
sleeps on straw, no French vagabond no French soldier, they must have a roof
over them and something that is built like a bed. The only thing any French
soldier ever complains about is when that awful thing happens to him, he has
to sleep on straw. Once more, it is not the discomfort, it is the destruction
of civilisation that he resents, and he is right.

Otherwise war is full of fashion and Frenchmen although they want peace,

26

realise the quality of fashion profoundly inherent in war.

A woman in the village, that was before this war began said to me one day, they used to laugh gayly before the war she meant 1914 war and since then they have not laughed, they seem to enjoy themselves but they do not laugh, she wondered was it that they had forgotten or that you did not laugh, perhaps she said of there is a whole generation that never heard of war they will laugh. Perhaps not, she said, she realised that it might never again be that one would really laugh.

making
fashions.

Fashion is in everything except in the working of war, but war makes fashions.

Back again to 1900 when there were fashions but no war.

Well not exactly because there was a war, there is always mostly always a war somewhere but not a general European war.

It is hard to believe that there is always going to be a general European war and yet it does make something that there always is going to be a general European war, it makes logic.

I was in the country here in France last September when there was not a war. I live in the French country in the summer in a little village where there are perhaps twenty families and I know them all and their oxen and cows and dogs, I know them all and they know me and my car and my dogs. Well it was that September when there was no war and I felt as we all did and I went out on the road walking with my dogs, and I had just heard that one of my neighbors Monsier Lambert had been mobilised as they were all mobilised because there might be going to be a war. He is a tall thin man, a gentle soul, a good farmer and a good soldier, forty-five years old. I met him with his wife and oxen. And I said you are leaving to go, Monsieur Lambert. Yes, he said, and my wife is crying. Is there going to be a war, I said. No, he said, my wife is crying but there is not going to be a war. Why not, I said. Because, said he, it is not logical. You see I am forty-five

27

years old, I fought the whole of the last war, my son is seventeen years old, he and I would fight this war. It is not logical mademoiselle that I at forty-five who fought the war, with a son of seventeen, should believe in a general European war. It is not logical. Now said he, if I were sixty and my grandson was seventeen, we might both believe in a general European war and there might be a war, but I at forty-five and my son at seventeen, no Mademoiselle. It is not logical. But, I said, that is alright for you, the French are a logical people, but the Germans and the Italians. Mademoiselle, he said, they talk differently but they believe the same.

Well he went away and then in almost ten days he came back and there he was on the road with his wife and his oxen, and he was walking with my dogs met him. I said, Monsieur Lambert you were right there was no war. No he said no Mademoiselle it is not logical.

To-day and now there is a war I met them and I said I was noticing how tall the boy was, he is bigger than his father. Alas yes said the mother, he is eighteen and will the war last and take him. She was not crying, she was thinking. Monsieur Lambert is right, therefore logic is logic and perhaps after all it will not be a general European war, and not a real war.

So there are the two sides to a Frenchman, logic and fashion and that is the reason why French people are exciting and peaweful.

Logic and fashion.

Then they also say it is war and we must help each other, in France they must not help each other, in peace, the joy of peace is that everybody can take care of themselves that is their unit as a family.

That is another interesting thing about French people, that they know that.

It is difficult to go back to 1901 now that it is 1939 and war-time.

But at that time, one day at dinner everybody was talking about war, it was war-time then only it was a Russian Japanese war. The servant who was waiting at table certainly heard some one say that the enemy had just won a battle and she was carrying a large platter and she dropped it and cried out oh is

29

and is part of their culture because it is based on latin Roman cooking and
has been influenced by Italy and Spain. The crusades only brought the mater-
ial, they never introduced into France the manner of cooking and they changed it a lot.
*and they changed it by making it*

French cooking is traditional, they give up the past with difficulty in
fact they never do give it up and when they have had reforms so called in the
seventeenth century and in the nineteenth century, they only accepted it when
it became really a fashion in Paris, but when they took something from the
outside like the Polish Baba brought by MEXICAN STANISLAS LECZINSKI, the father-
in-law of Louis XIV or the Austrian croissant brought by Marie Antoinette,
they took it over completely so completely that it became French so complete-
ly French that no other nation questions it. By the way the Austrian crois-
sant was hurriedly made at the seige of Vienna in 1686 by the Polish soldiers
of Sobieski to replace the bread that was missing and they called it the
crescent the emblem of the Turks whom they were fighting.

Catherine de'Médici in the sixteenth century brought cooks with her and
made desserts fashionable, complicated Italian desserts, before that there had
been nothing sweet in France except fruits. It was in 1641 that at a ball she
introduced these desserts into Paris.

During the time of Henry the Fourth they went back to simple foods as he
called himself the king of Gonesse where the best bread in France was made.

The French did though have ideas that one is apt to think of as American
and Oriental, roasted ducks with oranges, and stuffed tukeys with raspberries,
they ate the turkeys young, and a salad with nuts and apples in the time of
Louis XIV.

Cook books were best sellers in France through the seventeenth century
and in the introduction to the Dons de Comus, 1739, it was said that " the
modern kitchen is a kind of chemistry, so it is evident that cooking in France
always was logic and fashion and tradition, which is French.

30

The ice-creams that came from Italy were water-ices that were soft but they the French with that mmixxxm basis made a solid ice-cream which afterwards they themselves called Neapolitan, which is their way.

The logic of the French cooking is that they used all their material in as complicated ways as they knew and this was refined by soperein- fluces which became the fashion until the death of Louis the fourteenth and

complète

under the Regency they had a full burst of inspired French completely French cooks and cooking, the regent himself had a set of silver casseroles and he did his cooking with his courtiers and it was said that the silver casseroles were not more valuable than the things he put in them. More than half the present great cooking of France to-day were created by the court, the men and the women, the great mistresses of that period were either very religious or very great cooks and sometimes both, the great men around the court were all interested in cooking.

The dishes created by them were named after them, to be sure frequently
it was their cooks who really created them but it was the courtier who got
the credit and made them the fashion.
his

Louis XV made his own coffee, he never allowed any one else to make his

his
Louis XV made his own coffee, he never allowed any one else to make his
coffee.

The thing that was particular about all the dishes of that period was the sauces, these dishes practically all were famous because of their sauces, the cooking of the dish was important but the sauce was its creation. The material for the forcemeat of these dishes was developed enormously at this period.

Another thing they discovered then was the use of yokes of eggs for thick-
ening their sauces instead of bread crumbs, and this as is easily seen *révolu*
cooking and sauces. This was a purely French invention.

The Revolution of course stopped cooking and under Napoleon who did not know what he was eating, he rarely expressed a preference but he asked his

31

cook to give him some flat sausages, his cook so disgusted prepared an elaborate dish of finely chopped ingredients, Napoleon ate it without knowing they were not sausages.

But at that moment to save French cooking, Antonin Careme began cooking and he is the creator of present French cooking, but of course much simplified now because then neither material nor work was of any importance.

He made a juice, an essence to use in sauces, of beef, veal and five turkeys and that only should produce a quart of juice.

Traditional again, he went back to the elaborate set dishes really almost of medieval France and the Renaissance, but their flavor was elaborated and refined by all the material for cooking that had come into the country since.

Under Louis-Napoleon the writers and poets became the appreciators and critics of cooking as well as the financiers and the court, so Dumas wrote a cook-book, and this went on until the seige of Paris by the Germans and there in the cellars they prepared as elaborately as they knew how as a disguise the queer things they had to eat.

When the restaurants became fashionable in the middle of the seventeenth century anybody who had money enough went and in that way learned how to eat, the restaurants had great cooks and really it was through the restaurants that good cooking and fashion in cooking was always diffused throughout France.

The restaurants continued the tradition of popularising complicated and fine cooking that could hardly be done in a simple kitchen and all this until the beginning of the republic after the seige of Paris when everybody more or less at some time even the smallest of the middle classes would be conscious of the great dishes of the French cooking even if not greatly cooked. But in many places they still did cook greatly as well as make the great dishes and that brings me to the Paris I first knew when the Café Anglais still existed.

At the Café Anglais their just pride in French cooking expressed itself in the perfection of simple dishes, a saddle of mutton so perfectly and so

32

delicately roasted that in itself it became peaceful and exciting, a roast chicken at Voisin's of the same perfection, sauces instead of being elaborate in these places became simple and perfect, this was in the beginning of the nineties twentieth century.

At the same time as there existed these restaurants which had turned perfect elaboration into perfect simplicity there were the restaurants for the middle classes whose simplicity was beginning to be rather heavy, and the cooking for the lower classes, where simplicity was beginning to be a little too plain and everybody naturally did still talk about cooking.

The hush that always falls when a French dining-room or in a French restaurant when a new dish is presented no matter how poor how rich how simple or how complicated the dish is did still always come but Paris did a little disappoint the provincials when they came to Paris.

I remember being told by a French woman that she could remember when she was a child and they lived in the provinces, the wonder and the awe when Parisians came and brought with them some food from Paris, Now she said the Parisians buy everything they can in the shape of cake or a dish to take with them to Paris. The provinces had a higher standard of cooking than the capital.

So cooking was decidedly falling off in that period just before the war, they still talked about it, the hush before the new dish was still there, the provinces still had good food, but Paris food was not delicate and perfect any more. And then there was the war.

After the war, the Americanisation of France after the war, automobiles which kept them from staying at home, cocktails, the worry of spending money instead of saving it, because spending money is always a worry to French people, if they can save life is interesting, if they spend life is dull, and then the introduction of electric stoves and the necessity of not cooking too long, in short French cooking went out and there were very few houses and practically none in Paris where cooking was considered an art.

35

it.

To be Latin was to be civilized, to be logical and to be fashionable, and the French were and they knew it. They explained it in so many ways that it took a long time to realise it, and perhaps it was in their description of their education that I understood it best.

The relation of the French to Napoleon is perhaps the most curious thing in them, because Napoleon was only Latin insofar as he was a soldier, he was not civilized he was not logical and he was not fashionable. It is really the only time in their history that they have not been completely French, but that was natural enough, the revolution had sentimentalised them and strangely enough it was not until the romantic movement came that they once more became French. Napoleon because he was not French had a glamor for them and beside they then had for the only time in their history an idea of propaganda of trying to make other people think as they were thinking. Propaganda is not French, it is not civilized to want other people to believe what you believe because the essence of being civilised is to possess yourself as you are, and if you possess yourself as you are you of course cannot possess any one else, it is not your business. It is because of this element of civilization that Paris has always been the home of all foreign artists, they are friendly the French they surround you with a civilised atmosphere and they leave you inside of you completely to yourself. And their logic too makes it impossible to be propagandists. If there is one thing in the world that is not logical it is propaganda, and also it is the one thing in the world that has nothing to do with fashion. The difference between propaganda and fashion is very interesting.

I like to listen to French people tell about their education. Everybody in France naturally tells about their education, because after all education inevitably has to do with civilisation. They tell you, I remember René Crevel telling about his education, what the effect of the lycée is upon them, it

36

does not make them a type in character or in manner as similar schools do
with the Northern peoples but it has to do simply with the mind. Francis
d'Aiguys says lycées because they were founded by Napoleon stamp your mind,
the college or the boîte the catholic schools because they form your charact-
er do not form your mind. So which will you have. The discussion of this
matter is unending and it always comes back to the question of latinity. At
the same time you have the pride in being of peasant stock and the pride in
being always in their youth ripe for revolution. I remember Lolo whom we
loved very much. I am a peasant, he said, well I suppose he might have been
but was he. He was a peasant so he said he was young and so he was a revolut-
ionary so he said, and whatever he admired he called with a fine rolling
voice, royale. He explained a great deal about revolutions.

He said all French men had to be revolutionary, that is they had to be
in revolution, no matter what it was, they had to be revolvin for
civilization. How could you be civilised if you had not passed through a
period of revolt, and then you had to return to your pre-revolt stage and
there you were you were civilised. All Frenchmen know that you have to be-
come civilised between eighteen and twenty-three and that civilixation
comes upon you by contact with an older woman, by revolution, by army dis-
cipline, by any escape or by any subjugation, and then you are civilised and
life goes on normally in a latin way, life is then peaceful and exciting, life
is then civilised, logical and fashionable in short life is life.

That is one of the troubles for Frenchmen of the post-war generation
what was called the epoch. It was a Frenchman who said it to me, he said war
is not civilising and the men who were eighteen to twenty-three in the war
missed their time for becoming civilised. War can not civilise, it takes
private life to civilize, and of course publicity has the same effect as war
it prevents the process of civilization.

That was really the trouble with the sur-realist crowd, they missed their
moment of becoming civilised, they used their revolt, not as a private but as

38

snowed in for long months.

It surprised us but it did not surprise the French.

And back again to the twentieth century.

The characteristic thing of the twentieth century was the idea of production in a series, that one thing should be like every other thing, and that it should all be made alike and quantities of them. As I said the impressionists had the idea that a painting should be painted every day indeed preferably two a day, morning and afternoon. That was the nineteenth century, and then the twentieth century, believed to be completely subjective and not objective, that thought should be painted and not things seen. And so naturally even more than one painting a day or two or even four could be painted because complete thoughts come all the time and each time any of them thought, they thought a thought, and this thought, being painted was complete.

The twentieth century was not interested in impressions, it was not interested in emotions it was interested in conceptions and so there was the twentieth century painting.

These conceptions all have to do with the world being round and everybody knowing all about it and there being illimitable space and everybody knowing all about it and if anybody knows all about the world being round and all about illimitable space the first thing they do is to paint their conceptions of these things and that the twentieth century painting did.

But, and this is very important the French background never did dissociate itself from the earth, the world is all round and everybody knows all about it, but even if they do, there it still is, it is still there.

They were the only ones who really knew it was still there, even though it was there in France that twentieth century art and literature is made.

I was very pleased one day when the wife of the local doctor, he and she are fond of digging a bit and here when you dig a bit, beside making things grow, there is a Roman, and Gallo-Roman, and even earlier things to be found.

39

Well one day we were out in the car and she said one day when the workmen were first cutting this road through there on that ledge were the ancestors' lots of their bones. It is always there life and death death and life and the earth and never wnything to be remembered or even talked about, and that is the reason the French do not make much lyrical poetry. They do not get away from the earth enough to look at it, they paint it, but they do not poetise it.

As always art is the pulse of a nation. I was just thinking of a good title for an art book. From Bismark to Hitler, any one can see that since has been the case since 1870 to 1939 Germany had no art. When a country is in a state so that people who like to buy things can find nothing to buy there is something wrong.

Once when I was crossing the American continent, years and years ago and we were caught in the praries without an engine to take us anywhere, the newsagent who sold things on the train came and offered you ten bananas for ten cents and then added, when a newsagent offers you ten bananas for ten cents you know there is something wrong.

That is the state of a nation when there is no art that is natural to that nation you know there is something wrong. Ever since Germany has been an empire there has been nothing anybody wanted to buy and after having bought wanted to leave to a museum, neither music nor pottery nor poetry, and so there is something wrong. The state of being an empire was not a healthy state.

There is a very interesting thing in this connection.

France naturally was never interested in English painting and only very recently there was a collection shown of Blake and Turner. The French were astonished, they felt that somehow here was something that the later twentieth century needed. The painting of the young Englishman Francis Rose affected a good many of us the same way, after all if you know that the world is round and that space is unlimited well why don't talk about it any more. Facts are facts. It is a fact and so let us know it but not remember it. All great facts should be known but not remembered like the earth to the French, and

40

so for the first time for a long time the phenomena of nature, thunder and
storms and mountains and birds were things to live among and the English who
naturally do live in among these things but in the confusion of refusing the
twentieth century had lost their vitality in this relation they the English
were once more finding the new thing in their old thing, in the thing that
was natural to them and so in this war 1939 they are coming into their own,
ideas are not important but light and loveliness is important.

The French with their feeling for fashion know that the English have
found themselves again and they say this time we have a new style, a new
English.

4I

PART IV

I like words of one syllable and it works out very well in the French order for general mobilisation. It gives all the detail and then it said the army de la terre, de la mer et de l'air. That is very impressive when you read it in every village.

It could be a puzzle why the intellectuals in every country are always wanting a form of government which would inevitably treat them badly, purge them so to speak before anybody else is purged. It has always happened from the French revolution to to-day! It would be a puzzle this if it were not that it is true that the world is round and that space is unlimited. I suppose it is that that makes the intellectual so anxious for a regime which government which they could so ill endure.

And so war comes and it has its advantages, it does make a concentration of isolation, there are so many more people, animals and fowls and children in war-time than in peace time, but it does all make for a concentration of isolation and this is interesting.

Our old French friend, Madame Pierhot once said to me she is now eighty-six and she said that she is so much more flattered now than when she was a fascinating young woman. Fitzgerald once said to me it is easy to charm the old. But that is not the whole story it is easy for the old to charm.

Perhaps this war will make ages reasonable again, the last war completely destroyed ages, and I suppose life inevitably is calmer if there are ages.

Which makes this war real again. Uniforms say the French makes every one younger and then when you take the uniform off it makes everybody just that much older. In the last war uniforms were worn so long that that consciousness was lost but now more uniforms come off and on, mobilisation and demobilisation.

42

takes place more frequently, as Bernard Faj just wrote I have come back to Paris and so many of my friends have been demobilised and it makes them feel rather sheepish.

And so ages have come into existence again.

But then there was the mistake about Kiki Vincent.

Madame Chaboux told it to me. It is she who cooked jugged hare better than anybody else in the region, and it was she who told how she and her husband and a friend went to an inn for dinner where they made a specialty of jugged hare and as the dish was presented to them and the hush fell upon them the hush with which French people always receive a dish, the friend half crying said but they have not left us any morceaux ronds, there was nothing there but shoulders and legs and heads, there were no round pieces, the round pieces that so delicately are made by the center of the animal. So now we never see a jugged hare without thinking of the morceaux ronds whose non-appearance is a poignant grief.

We met Madame Chaboux coming out of the barracks, what said we are you doing there, ah she said I went to see the captain about Kiki, Kiki Vincent.

So when we wanted to know she told us.

The woman at the market who sells butter and cheese always used, before the 1939 war, always used to come in a wagon drawn by a white horse. And now there was war, horses had been requisitioned and she came in an old automobile. Madame Chaboux bought her butter and cheese and asked if all the family were well, and the butter woman began to drop tears on the cheese. All she said except Kiki. But they have not taken Kiki said Madame Chaboux, oh but they have was the answer, he was twenty years old the good horse Kiki but he did not look his age, he always appeared youthful and so when they were taking horses, we had no proof he was twenty but he was twenty and he used to put his head out of the stable just opposite to my kitchen and we used to talk together and my husband says ok it is nothing but he is suffering and the children when we go out they say where is Kiki Vincent, will he come back and of course although he looked so young he was

43

twenty and of course he will not come back, Madame Chaboux said that if she had his number she would see if he could be found perhaps he had not gone far, so she went to see the captain with the number, 735726 and underneath written Kiki, on a piece of paper, and there were two horses there that had not gone yet but they had different numbers and she had these numbers too on a piece of paper, 72943 and 74056, but they were not Kiki. The captain said if he had only known in time he could have saved Kiki but now Kiki was gone.

I have the two pieces of paper with the numbers but Kiki is gone, and army life is hard on horses so Kiki Vincent is gone.

The French like to call beasts up-to-date names, children's names do not change much but they like to follow the fashion in animal's names.

It always pleases me that French boys are often called Jean-Marie, you can use a female name to go with a man's name, it hallows the male name to add the female name to it, and that is civilised and logical and might be fashionable, it has always existed.

But the animal's names are a different matter, there are all the regular names and then there are other ones. I remember the pleasure in hearing a farmer call one of his oxen Landru, is it really his name I asked oh yes, he said, but not because he is a murderer, oh no, he said, just to like it. Of course most female dogs are called Diane, that is inevitable, but all the terriers have English names, they are called Jimmie and Tom and one is known as Nicky boy de Belley.

Our dog's name is Basket and the French like that, it sounds well in French and goes very well with Monsieur, the children all call Him Monsieur Basket more or less to rhyme with casquette.

That was the first Basket.

We did love the first Basket and he was shaved like a real poodle and he could fait le beaux and he could say how do you do and he was ten years old and last autumn just after our return to Paris he died. We did cry and cry and finally every one said get another dog and get it right away.

45

And now this Basket being a way dog, that is living in the country with us
all the time in war-time is very much a village dog and although the village
spends a great deal of time discussing whether he is more or less beautiful than
the last one, whether he is bigger and whether he is more affectionate the child-
ren like him but they treat him with less respect, they call him Basket familiar-
ly they do not call him Monsieur Basket, there is that difference in their char-
acter, I mean the character of this Basket and that Basket. But for all that he
is a very sweet Basket, any dog one loves is a very sweet dog and poor Madame
Pierlot has just lost her Jimmie, and he was just the same age as the other
Basket.

Names are always interesting, and in this morning's local paper I found
that Mademoiselle Pierrette Davignon, ex-modiste, has just died at eight-one
years of age.

It is a very wonderful name that, Mademoiselle Pierrette Davignon.

It really takes a war to make you know a country, I had only known Paris
until 1914 and then I learned to know France, and now once again living here all
winter in a provincial French town I once more realise that a war brings you in
contact with so much and so many and at the same time concentrates your isolation.
Undoubtedly that is what a war does and is it normally one of the things that
makes wars happen, this thing.

After all human beings are like that. When they are alone they want to be
with others and when they are with others they want to be alone and war in a
kind of way concentrating all this destroys it and intensifies it.

Well war does make one realise the march of centuries and the succession
of generations.

The nineteenth century wars were invented by the citizens of the first
French republic. They invented a nation in arms, Napoleon rather spoiled it all,
he went back to pre-Revolutionary fighting did it very well but after all it was
eighteenth century and not nineteenth century fighting, Wellington as a matter

46

of fact was more nineteenth century that Napoleon, his Spanish campaign was
much more nineteenth century warfare than anything Napoleon did. And so the
French having invented nineteenth century warfare and then lost it, it was
completed by the Americans in their civil war, they developed and fixed it as
a thing definite and complete and the 1914-1918 war was as one might say just
the end of the series. It was just at the end of that war that Trotzky discovered the twentieth century war, which is neither war nor peace, it was he that
said he invented it as the French republicans invented the nineteenth century war but in inventing it they lost it. The Nazis like Napoleon lost the
thing that was found and now England and France as the Americans in the civil
war, in 1939 have recreated and realised the twentieth century war.

It is very interesting. They have found the secret of not war and not peace
but with it they will have found the way to victory and to peace. And a new
Europe. Anyway that is the way I feel about it.

It is very interesting about England and France, they have been completely
conscious of each other for such a very long time, sometimes in one way sometimes in another way but always completely conscious of each other.

Now it is war-time and the families who usually spend their winter in cities
are all spending them in the country. We too.

Naturally they all study at home particularly the young girls because at
this time the French family prefers that the young girls are under their own
roof and so everybody studies as best they can. They naturally all want to learn
English just now and quite naturally we all talk about that. Some of these girls
have already passed their first Baccalaureate and are now preparing for their
second and in this second they must translate a whole English thing into French.
They are given a choice of Hamlet, Paradise Lost, some of the essayists and
Emerson, and they all without any hesitation chose Hamlet. They like it best and
they think it is the easiest to do.

I was looking over Hamlet with one of them and I was very much struck par-

47

ticularly in the ghost scene, that all the words which are no longer in use are French words completely French words and I could see why they all felt that it was easy to translate because there they were all those completely French words which were there for them and which the English language to-day no longer uses.

I have often thought a lot about the words that make the English language, and much as I have thought about it, a war makes it even more definite, as in this Hamlet.

Of course it was pure French and pure Saxon and then less pure French and more Latin than French until in the nineteenth century one quite has ceased to feel the French in the English.

All this time of course the French and English have always been keenly conscious of each other until the nineteenth century. After the Napoleonic wars they for quite a long time were not conscious of each other, each one conducted the nineteenth century in their own way until toward the end of the nineteenth century, when France did not find the century particularly interesting and England was beginning to refuse the twentieth century which was on the way, France and England once more became lively conscious of each other which then culminated in 1914-1918.

Up to that time France was still uninterested in either the nineteenth or the twentieth century and England was still clinging to the nineteenth and refusing the twentieth.

One might say that America which represented the twentieth century and Russia did not interest either France or England very much and the twentieth century as conceived by these two countries did not please them, did not please either the civilisation the logic or the fashion of the French and did not please the civilisation, the idealism, or the rationality of the English and so neither France nor England were really interested in the twentieth century. The 1914-1918 war changed all this. These two countries realised that the twentieth century should not get out of their hands, that they had to make of it for the French a thing logical civilised and fashionable and the English had to manage

48

it in their fashion, for after all civilisation was in their hands and without them the world would not be civilised and so they had to come into the twentieth century and make it civilised and here we are now.

You can see that the long line of English writers every nine years a man of genius suffered during this period when England refused the twentieth century and that is most interesting because one must never forget that the characteristic art product of a country is its pulse and in England it is prose and poverty.

I never get over the pleasure of the use of French as it is used by anybody French. In this village we have all shades of opinion and there is the Rosset family very catholic very conservative, not royalist because they are republican but great believers in tradition.

I remember one day it was the fourteenth of July and just the year of the front commun, and I happened to meet Monsieur Rosset and I said are you going in town, and he said and why should I go in town. Well, I said I meekly it is the fourteenth of July.

The fourteenth of July he said, the fall of the Bastille, quelle masquerade. I can give no impression of the word masquerade as it came out of him. I realised what a feeble word the English word spelled just the same really was.

And now Georges is aux armées, and the father who adores Georges is very severe about how inevitably you have to kill a million men to win a war.

Georges writes to me. I hear just at this moment that we are leaving tomorrow for the front that is for a destination unknown. Let us guard our courage and hope that very soon we will be again in Bilignin and with out friends.

These are the typical French farmers.

And in the village of Bilignin we have had several alerts. And there are two schools of thought.

Madame Votarey says that we are among mountains, actually they are very high hills, we are in the foothills of the French Alps and she says that it is

49

easy to lose your way in among mountains particularly if you are in the air, so
how could they find Bilignin. Beside anyway she had made up her mind not to be
evacuated, and Madame Chanel says that since airplanes must necessarily go here
and there they may easily sometime come here. At any rate adds she reflectively
men are fond of fighting. They are unreasonable, if it rains too much they want
to fight, anything will make men fight. Anyway she adds we are free in France.

Madame Pierlot is very much interested in the way the men come back on
leave looking so very large and so very fat. She says in her eighty-six years
it is the first war she has ever known that men on leave come back looking so
very large and so very healthy and so very fat. The women whether it is by con-
trast or because they have to work so hard look very thin beside them.

The twentieth century wars might easily make men healthy and fat because
certainly the twentieth century has made a great difference in the French country,
ours is a mountain village but there are no poor, they are all comfortable and
they all have some luxuries, they all have by-cycles they all have good clothes
for Sunday, they all have jam to put on their bread, they all have plenty of
chickens and ducks which they do not sell but eat themselves and they all have
money in the bank which they call argent liquide. In the country here they say &
the milk pays their current expenses, their calves pay taxes and extra things
like birth marriage and deaths and the wheat they eat and the wine makes the
money they put in the bank and the potatoes they eat. In this way they say any-
body can be comfortable and you have plenty of wine and meat and butter and bread
to eat. In this whole country-side there is only one family not completely com-
fortable and they are not poor but they are neglected there are four small child-
ren in the family all the same size but different ages which happens when child-
ren are neglected. The war brought them new clothes, the chancine at Belley want-
ed to do something and he gave them a complete outfit, to go to school, they al-
ways go to school of course but this time they went completely new, even as they
told me, to their underclothes, they seem to think new clothes naturally come
when there is a war.

Even in Belley which comparatively a city, it having a population of about

50

five thousand and it is an important place, even there there are no poor. They have a bazaar de charité once every two years and the money they gather goes to general things, rather than specific aid, there is a very large home for the aged for the region but there are not many in it. I was talking about this the other day to the Duke of Clermont-Tonnerre, he was staying with Mada me Pier-lotykhax across the valley and he said yes it is true. He said in the part of the country he lives in, which is quite a different kind of country it was also true. He could well remember when he was a boy that it was not so when they were very poor in the country. I asked him if he thought the U9I4 war had something to do with the change, a little he said, it did certainly accentuate it, but actually it had commenced before I9I4. So it was the twentieth century all alone that did it.

We have had here in the village a little girl and her name is Helene Helen Button and I have been kind of wondering just what a child's feeling about war-time is. It is very interesting!

This is the way I have been feeling this, because after all this war is not war, it is war-time.

Helen Button was her name and she lived in war-time. She lives somewhere but the thing that is important is that she lived during war-time.

There is a great deal of war-time in history and Helen Button lived in it.

In this war-time the sun did shine it does do that but Helen Button always knew that it was going to rain before evening and it did do that, she knew it by signs, she did not know what the signs were but she knew by signs that it was going to rain.

In war-time children dogs and chickens are either frightened or they are naughtier than usual, either one or the other. And there are rather more of them more of chickens dogs and children than before. Helen Button knew this. And a dog was more likely to kill a chicken in war-time than in peace-time. Helen' Button's dog did not kill one but he did find a dead one and he brought it to her and layed it down in front of her. Helen was worried that they might think

5I

that he had killed a chicken, so she and the cook secretly cooked and ate the chicken so no one would suspect the dog. This could only have happened to Helen in war-time.

Of course children do go in and out as they like a great deal more in war-time than in peace-time for there is not much use in just staying at home while it is war-time.

Helen Button started out with her dog William. As they were walking along suddenly William stopped and was very nervous. He saw something on the road and so did Helen. They neither of them knew what it was at first and at last as they approached very carefully they saw it was a bottle, a bottle standing up right in the middle of the road. There had been something in the bottle but what, it looked dark green or may be blue or black, and the bottle was standing up in the middle of the road not lying on its side the way a bottle on the road usually is.

William the dog and Helen the little girl went on. They did not look back at the bottle. But of course it was still there because they had not touched it.

That is war-time.

When

Helen went out there were a great many little boys on large bycicles about. The bycicles were so tall that they could not get on the seats at all but they were all over the country wiggling from side to side to have their ride and when they saw any water and some of the roads were under water they went forward and back through the water to make it splash. That was because their big brothers and their fathers were gone away and that made so many more little boys able to play.

Then Helen did know it was war-time.

Helen and her dog William were out every day and almost every evening and they always saw some one. They knew a boy named Emil who was a big boy with very large eyes and a dog named Ellen. Ellen the dog had been born in the country against which they were fighting. Emil looked at his dog and wondered if he could love

52

him. The dog loved Emil but could Emil love him.

As Helen and her dog William came along Emil's dog Ellen was niffing along the side of the road in the sand and finally went sniffing up the bank. Helen's dog William went sniffing too. Perhaps there was game there, very likely because in war-time men did not go shooting nobody hunted anything, but dogs and cats did hunt.

Emil the boy with large eyes sighed about this. He said dogs hunt in war-time but they do not get much, anybody could see two or three dogs going together to hunt and waiting to see if anybody saw them because in peace-time of course they could not go hunting. Then Emil said but cats in peace-time or in war-time, they sit and watch and prey.

It was getting darker and beginning to rain and Helen went one way and Emil went another way and each one of their dogs went with the one who owned him.

Helen had a grandmother and when she had been the age of Helen there had been war-time. She told Helen how one day she had a slice of bread and there was very little bread to be had, but she did have a good big slice and she was just commencing eating it. A soldier came along an enemy soldier on a horse, he stopped and got off his horse and not roughly but he did, he took the slice of bread out of her hand, she had just had one bite and he gave it to his horse who ate it and he went away on his horse and he did not say anything.

It was war-time now but Helen had bread whenever she wanted it and butter on it and she had jam and honey and yet it was war-time.

School did not commence as soon as usual, it always did commence as the days were shorter and now the days were shorter and everything was darker and darker and there were no lights and Helen and her dog began to walk in the dark and she could see the road in the dark and she knew it was war-time. She did not think about its being war-time but she knew it was.

Helen Button thought that in war-time there was not any difference between day and night. And she was right. The nights were black and the days were dark and there was no morning. Not in war-time.

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So said Helen Button to herself, she did not talk to the cook nor to her mother, she did not talk to Emil, the boy who had eyes that were so large, she talked to herself. You do in war-time.

You talk to yourself about chestnuts and walnuts and hazelnuts and beech nuts, you talk to yourself about how many you find and whether they have worms in them. You talk to yourself about apples and pears and grapes and which kind you like best. You just go on talking to yourself in war-time. You talk to yourself about caterpillars but you never talk to yourself about spiders or lizards, you talk to yourself about dogs and cats and rabbits but not about bats or mice or moths.

There are falling stars in war-time and Helen Button saw them. Would stars come tumbling and frighten every one. She saw some stars be blue and some red, she said to herself one star is very red and when that red star turns blue there will not be any more war-time.

Helen knew that Emil's dog was born in the enemy country. It had been given to Emil by some one who came from there long before it was war-time.

One day, it was not at night it was in the morning, Emil was not there but his dog Ellen was there and Helen saw him. It was not true of course it was not true but Helen said to herself, I was watching and the dog Ellen was changing and her fur turned into large baggy trousers and her head turned into a large shaggy head and it was a man, an enemy man, yes it was said Helen to herself and I saw him and he went down the road and I knew that it was a man, who was an enemy and it was and I saw him.

She met Emil shortly after and his dog was with him but it was not any longer morning and Helen did not look at the dog Ellen, she looked at her own dog William as if she knew him and she did and she knew her own dog would come when she called him.

It was not long after that every dog had to have a mumble on him. They used to talk about that on the road. The men had mumbles on dogs in the country before and now it was war-time and the dogs had to have them.

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Helen Button listened to everybody and everybody said something different about the reason why but Helen did not say anything but she knew that she knew the reason why.

Emil was just facing it but so was Helen.

She knew just what was going to happen at least her aunt Pauline did, her aunt was what they called extra-lucid, that meant that she knew what was going to happen, she always had but now in war-time it was much more important. In peace-time nothing much did happen so there was no use in knowing what was going to happen but in war-time anything might happen so it was very necessary to know it.

What Helen Button liked best was about the cure d'Ars, she liked all about him, she liked him not knowing having learned his lessons very well when he studied, she liked his being kind to every one and she liked his being a saint and she liked it that her grandmother could remember him. But most she liked that he had said that the day would come when the women would turn the ground the wheat but the men would do the harvesting. And the women she saw them they were sewing the wheat and the men because the cured Ars had always known everything they would be back again to do the harvesting, it was war-time but they would be back again. And then she was a little strange when she heard that the nuns in the cities did not wear coiffes any more, they could not and get gas-masks over them, so they could not wear them any more and the cured Ars had predicted that too. He had said the time would come when the sisters in the hospitals would not wear their coiffes, and of course but still nobody really believed him but now the time had come, they were not wearing them, but and this was consoling every one, he had said that all this would only last for a time a very short time just long enough to turn an omelette. And that was comforting.

Helen Button loved to listen to her aunt Pauline, they called her The Pauline and a good many people did believe her, but really Helen never thought about whether it was so or not. She liked to just say it to Emil when she saw him and

55

she knew saying it made her fascinating.

So Helen knew when the war was going to end and when there would be no morr war-time and Helen knew that this did make her fascinating.

Her aunt Pauline did really know everything. She knew when any enemy was going to be dead, she knew how often a clock would strike, she knew who was not going to eat eggs, she knew who was going to buy a hat, she knew everything.

Helen Button went out with her dog and the moon was shining.

Helen should not have been out when the moon was shining, she knew she should not. She should only have been out when it was dark because if the moon shone it was night not just dark. There she was though and automobiles came quickly in the bright moon-light, they came slowly in the dark because their lights were green and blue not white.

The automobile came on and it went over William and Helen screamed and William was down and then he was up and then away he went, oh how he did go. Helen went on calling and William came back crawling.

Oh dear where was Emil with eyes so big that he could see everything.

Helen and William did get home and that after all was something.

So war-time just went on being war-time and after that William the dog had a stiff neck but it did not last long he was soon very well but he was always light nervous when he saw a bright and particularly nervous when he suddenly saw the moon through the mist and it does look green.

Emil was not an orphan. He had a horse. There were not many of them, most had of them not been taken to go to the war. Emil's horse was a heavy one the kind that pulled things, that is perhaps the reason they did not take him, he went ahead too slowly even for war-time.

So it was left to pull things and one day Helen met it, it was pulling a wagon and on the wagon was an animal, nobody had ever seen any animal like it before, it was enormous and it was dead.

The horse pulling the wagon did not mind nor Emil not Emil's dog Ellen mind-ed very much, very much indeed.

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The enormous animal did not have a tail and it did not have any ears. It was an enormous animal and it was war-time.

Helen did not really see it but she told herself about it. She said, dear me.

Nobody knew where the wagon and the animal went, nobody ever does in war-time.

When Helen Button went to sleep she did not dream. Then all of a sudden she began to dream. She dreamed that it was war-time.

When she woke she did not get up, it was war-time and nobody just said to her get up but bye and bye she did get up, and she went out. After a while she stood perfectly still and listened.

She thought she heard it but did she.

She listened and listened. It was war-time and so she listened and listened.

She heard weather, she heard water she heard snow, she heard water everywhere, it was that kind of weather. She heard snow around and she very nearly heard the moon and she heard the rain and she heard the mountains.

There might be school and Helen might go to school but she did not. Nobody said she should and indeed so few went that any day there might not be a school and so any day and it was war-time. So every day she went out and the snow came and the snow melted and water was everywhere and dogs hunted game not Helen's dog but other dogs and these dogs stood and waited until everybody was out of sight and then they hunted game. Men could not go hunting but dogs could. That is war-time.

One day Helen and her dog and Emil and his dog met going up and up a hill.

They went up and they saw a man there. He was not an old man, he was a young one and it was war-time and seeing a young man in ordinary clothes was startling. This man up there on that hill, there was snow and water there, had spyglass a snygkant and he was looking way off through it.

Is he said Helen. Yes he is said Emil.

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And he was and they saod, Helen and Emil, shall we and Emil said yes. Now
said Helen. Yes said Emil. And how said Helen. I know how said Emil.

Emil went up to the man. He said to him. You are an enemy. I am not, said
the man. If you are not what is your name said Emil. My name is Henry said the
man.

There they stood and the snow in the fields and the water splashing and the
man in wooden shoes, looking through his spy-glass at something.

What should they do.

It was really war-time.

They all went away always looking behind.

Very soon then there was nobody anywhere.

This is war-time.

Helen did not know why but this was the first thing in war-time that had
made her cry.

It was not long after that Emil went away and his dog too. Whether to the
war or not Helen never knew.

There are so many people who go away in war-time and there are always so
many everywhere in war-time here there and everywhere.

XXXXXXXX So now it was still war-time and Helen began to g to school too.

So for her war-time was over.

So this is the twentieth century. I have been thinking a lot about centuries.
I think centuries are like men, they begin as children begin simple and hopeful
then they go through that period that Doctor Osler used to call the senseless
age, boys of eleven to seventeen, and then they go through their period of be-
coming civilised and then the century more or less settles down, becomes as the
French say Rangé that is civilised and the work worst is over.

I have a kind of feeling that every century is like that, certainly the
nineteenth century was and the twentieth, the other centuries probably were too.
What is true in one century is pretty certainly true of all of them.

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So here we are in the twentieth century at the moment when the century begins to be ready for civilising.

In the early part of the century, the century like all adolescents and sometimes it last considerably longer, long to get away from the family, the real family and the idea of the family.

Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.

In France, well the dream even among the adolescent intellectuals, the violent revolutionaries, the ardent communists, it really is not very real. After all every Frenchman knows that he is destined to be a pere de famille a father of a family, even if he has neither wife nor child being a pere de famille is his manifest destiny. And every Frenchman will inevitably speak of himself and his comrades, nous peres de famille, it is really the only way that a Frenchman can realise life and so although adolescence and intellectualism demand that he believes in a world not based upon a family unit, in his heart every Frenchman knows that that is all there is to it, a family and himself a father of a family.

It is interesting that in the country in almost every village there is a man who has not married. Either his mother lived too long and he never got married or he just did not get married because he was off somewhere and did not get back, anyway for one reason or another not uncommonly in a village there is one man who never got married. Usually even if the mother did live so long and so possessed her son that he grew quite old unmarried, nevertheless when his mother dies some widow married him but every now and then and very often one in almost every village is an unmarried.

Nobody can really take him seriously, they very often call him familiarly, a hen, and most of the time he does go a little funny, he stands sadly around and looks at the women who never become his wife and once in a while he goes quite quier, as recently in a village not far from here, one day he was about

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like the flute, it is to be hoped.

That is the French way, no conviction a hope and that is all.

The French do love to say a thing and say it completely.

That is the reason that once a thing is completely named it does no longer
worry them. Now the word une guerre des herfs has become a part of their speech,
it has no longer any effect upon their nerves. That is their logic fashion and
Civilisation.

So naturally although the French do have as every century seems to need
to have that adolescent intellectualism of the negation of the family in their
hands it is not so. That is one of the reasons that French people are not snobs.

No matter what is the origin of any man, no matter what he has achieved, it
never enters his head not to return to the family, they, the simple countrymen can
have children in any walk of life and there is no complication, the well-dressed
man comes to his home where his people are roughly klad and as they were
and nobody feels that there is any discrepancy, never at any time.

It is of course also true of the army, anybody can be a simple soldat as
anybody can be an officer. It is a question of metier, of a profession, and not
of class.

Here in the town, the notary, the lawyer, the banker are all simple soldiers, the son of the butcher is an officer, it is all a question of profession, it is not a matter of class.

Pierre Leyris a young writer and neighbor of ours in the country here was
speaking of that the other day. He is not very strong and so he is an auxiliare
and not in the active army but during mobilisation they were mobilised as a com-
pany of auxiliare to be used in helping in the machinery of mobilisation. He
enjoyed his short military career, he enjoyed his comrades they all had a good
time together, and the mobilisation over, they were demobilised. He said that
was a dreeful day. When they put on their civilian clothes it was all different,
they looked at each other differently they knew what each other one was and when

6I

they had been all together, nobody knew or cared.

I remember a French sister in a convent speaking of that too. She said the costume and the coiffe, the coiffe that the curé d'Ars said they would take off for only long enough to turn an omelette and which mary of them have had to take off to put on the gas-masks, well she said we never know what any sister comes from and what her background is unless by accident we are in the parloir seeing our relations and she is in the parloir seeing hers. Then they could know but I imagine they are not supposed to notice.

We saw the Pere Abbé of the abbaye XEXXY royale d'Hautcombe yesterday, sixteen of this twenty-six monks are mobilised, and most of them are simple soldiers. One of them one of the older ones is an aumonier, a priest to an aviation division. He is immensely pleased with himself, he not alone has an automobile and a chauffeur at his disposal but he also has an airplane and an aviator. There was a charming twinkle in the Pere Abbé's eye when he told us that.

Madame Giroud, herself the widow of a general, told us about her family, every ten years they reunite all the family that is in existence and at the last the two most striking members were one of the great judges of France and the driver of a country hearse. But they were all family and they had a good dinner a most excellent dinner all of them together.

Madame Giroud told us of her great-aunt, she was one of the beauties of this country and a very important person. One day not very long ago Madame Giroud was in the country where they all came from and she met an old woman and they talked together. Ah said the old woman Madame you do remember your great aunt. Ah yes said Madame Giroud well said the old woman, I know something about her that nobody else knows. When she was young quite young and very beautiful a soldier passed by. And your great-aunt gave birth to a pair of still-born twins very little ones and she buried them under a pear tree the two of them.

Madame Giroud admitted that ever since a pear tree did give her a funny feeling.

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This year as every year they gather the grapes and make the wine, they always think there will be none as in this country everything is against them, the late frosts, hail, mildew and not enough late sunshine, but they always have a crop all the same. This year as always they had one, quite a large one and the French, like their land, are economical and generous, everything has to go into it and a good deal comes out of it, and they always have to celebrate it, faire part, as it reads in their announcements of funerals wedding and births, in this country they always celebrate it by something called ramkin, it is like a welsh rarebit, only instead of beer and cheese, it is made of white wine and cheese, and everybody keeps stirring it with their very large piece of bread.

In the neighborhood here the other day they had not agreed about something so one of the neighbors was not invited. All the others were gathered together to make the ramkin, it is the only cooking any Frenchman who is a father of a family and not a professional cook ever does. The men were making the ramkin on the stove, it was a dark night, the neighbor climbed on the roof and sat on the chimney and so the smoke went back down the chimney and smoked the ramkin, the cronies thought it was the wind and began again, the man on the roof lifted himself until he heard them say now it is on and then down he sat again upon the chimney, and spoiled the ramkin, it was not until some time after that the unfortunate cooks found out why.

So the most striking thing about France is the family, and the terre, the soil of France. Revolutions come and revolutions go, fashions come and fashions go, logic and civilisation remain and with it the family and the soil of France.

They are so reasonable about that land, of course it has no value without men, and of course men cannot exist without family.

The family, any family has naturally the quality of the concentration of isolation. That is what makes a family, that is what makes war, so much war, is that concentration of isolation. And the French who do not want war live through

66

So the twentieth century did need France as a background. France might play with the idea of the destruction of the family as the beginning and end of everything but it could never really convince any Frenchman, and so France was a background for the beginning of the twentieth century, it had had its one real effort to believe that the family and the things the family holds in its hands and walks on and eats and drinks and which belong to that family, they had their try-out of trying not to believe in this in the beginning of the nineteenth century in the first revolution, but it really was not interesting. Wars yes and excitement yes, but really not interesting. There is no logic to it, no civilisation to it and no fashion.

So when the twentieth century was going to start in to try it out all over again, the Frenchmen were very content to be in it but not of it.

In France the family life is never so much a family life as in vacation. The family is always the family but during vacations it is an extended family and that is exhausting.

A Frenchman once told me that he was haunted it was his obsession that he called vacation weather. I said it is just summer weather, no he said it has a kind of weight to it that is not summer but vacation weather.

In every country house all the in-laws come and all their children and all their servants, in-laws only visit each other in winter, they visit a great deal and they all eat together somewhere at least once a week but in the vacation they live together.

Then came the twentieth century with its automobiles, particularly after the war, the French family lived less together in vacations because they naturally moved around more. They all pretty well concluded that this was even more exhausting than all living together and not as healthy for children as every one. Getting in and out of trains was better, because trains are always stopping but automobiles just keep going. Now in this new war all the country is filled with all the relations living together but it is not vacation weather, it is not

67

even vacation so everybody is happier, beside that they cannot move around even
in trains so it is not so exhausting. It is a permanent residence and that changes
everything. In-laws are now a permanency and so except for the very often repeat-
ed statement that some cousin is a woman really utterly wearisome, and a French
family is always of the same mind, they all find the same person the most tire-
some, and there are always the certain amount of trouble about mother-in-laws,
and daught-in-laws, but all this is very much softened by the son and husband be-
ing away at the war. And many financial arrangements which were inevitable be-
cause of troubles between daught-in-laws and widowned mother-in-laws rest in ab-
eyance. And that makes everything easier.

In France letters are not shared. Each one has their own letter. Any member
of any class in France will say I have had no news but my mother has, or I have
had no news but my son has. Well said I once in astonishment do they not read you
is in their letter, I was going to say do they not show you the letter but I knew
intinctively that that would not do. Oh yes is the answer, he or she read me what
he or she chooses.

Everything is private and personal in France and at the same time a family
is always together. Even in the midst of the war letters are not shared. As my
old servant Helene once said, no Madame it is not a secret but one does not tell
it.

I really have never known Paris in the midst of a declaration of war. Wars
always take place in vacation time and in vacation weather, so one is not in Paris.
Paris is always there, at least we in the country suppose so although at such a
time we are not very conscious of its existence, the beginning of war is so oc-
cupying where you are, that even Paris is not there. Such is the concentration
of isolation which is war.

Paris is there and gradually even here quite far away one begins to know
that it is there.

I have never known Paris is the beginning of a war, I have known Paris dur-

68

ing the war not this time but the last time, this time I only knew it for half a
day.

I have known Paris since the beginning of the twentieth century until now,
known it pretty well.

When I first knew Paris again since childhood in 1900 and then only on vaca-
tion France meant Paris to me. Then as I lived in Paris, France meant Paris and
its immediate surroundings. The Paris which was France as I knew it then was com-
pletely republican.

I knew an American Mrs. Dawson, I met her in England and she said she had
abandoned Paris after 1870. She said the manners of the French as republicans
were not the delightful manners of Paris as an Empire. To be sure everybody in
the republic was addressed as Monsieur and Madame. Even the butther boy quite
young would say bon-jour Madame to our servant and she would equally suavely say
bon-jour Monsieur to him, although he was only fifteen. I do not know wheth-
er during the empire this was true. At any rate although there are always monar-
chists and imperialists in France, most unexpected ones sometimes, actually they
in their hearts pretty much all of them are republicans and want a republic, be-
cause they know that the family is so strong in France that the hereditary prin-
ciple should be kept out of the government, it just should.

Beside the republic so far has pretty well done what they all think a gov-
ernment should do, let them alone, protected them, on the whole, from the enemy,
and though it costs a good deal, this government, it might cost more if it were
another government, and no piece of it gets so well established that it can go
too far in any direction. And so as governments go the third republic is not so
bad. It might be worse, it might be better, but it is not too bad.

In Paris around 1900-1914 the men were elegant and had almost more beauty
of elegance than the women. When we came to Paris the men wearing their silk hats
on the side of the head and leaning heavily on their cane toward the other side
making a balance, the heavy head the heavy hand on the cane were the elegance of

69

Paris. The women were plain, fashionable more than elegant in contrast with the men. As the century progressed the war came. The horizon blue and the black uniforms of the aviators continued the tradition of French elegance among the men. The women for a while did lose fashion and slowly then the men lost their elegance and the women regained their fashion and then they were no longer plain they were pretty and fashionable, it was another ideal. After this war the men very likely will regain elegance and the women fashion and elegance. It is all very exciting.

Flowers and fruits were very much rarer in the beginning of the century than now. In those days flowers and fruits were rare and being rare were very elegant.

They were very carefully cultivated to look well and be well in relation to the thing near which they were to be placed, either people or things, they had nothing to do with out-of-doors, they had entirely to do with indoors, and the arrangement of the fruits and the flowers were traditional elegant and fashionable.

I can remember the horror of our Bretonne servant in Palma when we used to bring in armfuls and put them all over the house. Now any French person can bear flowers anywhere and in any quantity with equanimity but not then. It was also true of fruits. Fruits were a wonderful size, almost always with a design stencilled upon them when they were in the act of growing and very expensive. No one was ever allowed to touch them. There were only these very wonderful fruits and ordinary apples practically nothing else and these ordinary apples were always wormy. Since then fruit in the smallest provincial town are to be found in great abundance, everybody eats fruit and fruit is really no longer a thing to admire or to have as an effect to an elegant table. The same is true of flowers. Flowers are now bought in great bunches and anybody within reason can have all they want. So now flowers are almost arranged in many homes in the English manner lots of flowers everywhere and the new interest in flowers is to arrange them, to give the effect of violence, of activity, of strangeness. Gradually that is producing its own elegance.

70

I was talking to Madame Giroud, she remembers everything and I asked her what seemed to her the most striking difference between the France of her youth the nineteenth century and the France of to-day. She said undoubtedly the difference in dress of the people living not in cities but in the country. Not alone the girls but the women in villages and country towns all dress well, all clean themselves very much more.

I knew that I was much taken with the short sleeves short dresses as being an enormous incentive to personal cleanliness. There was a very great difference between before and after the war about that. It was true of the younger women and even true of the older women.

On the other hand except the introduction of electric light the inside of the homes in the villages and in the country have not changed much. Of course the existence of electric light in itself made things different because one can see everything more clearly. The young men have changed and are athletic and clean but as they grow older they tend to be more as they were. The women keep up the standard and that has its great influence upon the children. The men less. I am now speaking of the country and not of the cities. One of the most important things in the city was the introduction of central heating. The houses, the shops suddenly in Paris and in the other large cities suddenly became very hot. That had to do naturally with the change in fashion of the women the short sleeves the short skirt the lack of underclothes the thinness of the stockings, and as France makes the fashion for everybody the central heating just created in the cities in France made the styles. The styles went with the Americanisation of Europe so pronounced immediately after the war, hygienics, bath tubs and sport.

Later on and until just now there have been persistent attempts to get back or forward to styles that cover more, and until now they have been reintroduced because the conditions that produced the postwar fashions more or less persisted. Gradually through the desire to spend money slackened, it was more difficult to make money and therefore there began a tendency to save it. In the old nineteenth century France you were always upended to live on your last year's income never on

XI

your current income. And now every one was living in France on this year's income or next year's income, they were buying on the instalment plan, in short they were not being themselves. And slowly they were beginning resenting this tendency, it came from all classes this resistance and the fashions went with it the effort to re-establish more covering/ so the body longer skirts more durable clothes.

are
Now there is war, the houses in Paris and not centrally heated any more. In many apartment houses you heat yourself as you can. Many people like ourselves are staying in the country with the bouquets of fire/s of France which I have not seen since 1900 and wood fires to help and naturally woolen stockings and other things accompany this and fashions are changing. Then darkness has a great deal to do with everything. Madame Giroud always tell me you do not know what these villages were in the old days and even now although the roads are dark the houses and the barns are lighted electrically inside, and all the streets are dark the shops are bright inside. So then although they look medievally outside they do not feel medeval inside. So even when it is black outside in the twentieth century it is brightly lighted inside. Which was not true of the nineteenth century.

The boulet fires of France the round walnuts of pressed coal that were in all homes in the beginning of the twentieth century quite entirely ceased to exist even in the country, the grates that were put in to the fire-places and balanced by a bit of brick and filled with the walnuts of coal that gave out a steady small heat and never really seemed to change night or day were not seen any more. And now there is 1989 and war and everybody wants their boulet's fire back again. We have one. We found the grates still in the local shops with the same curly design as one we found in the garret of this house which dates from we do not know when. Those in the shops are exactly the same design which shows how dead boulet fires had been.

And so a century is made of one hundred years and a hundred years is not so long. Anybody can know somebody who remembers somebody else and makes it go back

72

one hundred years. If it cannot be done in two generations it can be done easily
done in three. And so one hundred year is not so long.

It is rather a worry that our civilisation if you think of it in the form of
three generations making a century does not take many generations to begin.

A century is one hundred years. Every century has a beginning and a middle
and an ending. Every century is like the life of any one, the life of any nation,
that is to say it begins that is it has a childhood it has an adolescence it has a
an adult life, it has a middle life an older life and then it ends.

The nineteenth century did all this the twentieth century is doing it. I
imagine any century does.

It begins as a child begins trailing its clouds of glory from the century
which has just been. Of course the twentieth century did that. Only a small part
of those in the commencing of the twentieth century started it as a twentieth
century and not a left over nineteenth century. It began in uncertainty, yet it
walked with difficulty, it rather just crept along.

And then slowly it went through its adolescence and then the world war came,
and that made everybody know it was not the nineteenth century but the twentieth
century.

I asked Madame Pierlot, she had been raised in the country, she was a provincial, she had never been to Paris, she had been the wife of a military attaché at various capitals and then just in the beginning of the century she went to Paris as a woman of forty. I said to her how did you feel about it. Well she said I was disappointed in it. But why, well she said I thought it was not as concentrated as ambassadorial circles in other countries, I found French people in Paris, sophisticated and not very exciting. And then, she added, I found that Parisians were much more interesting when you had them in the country. I ceased to see them in Paris I had them come to stay with me in the country, and then I knew that Parisians were interesting.

She then went on to tell me of when she first went to Paris she went to a

73

dinner and sat next to Anatole France. After a little while he said Madame you are not a Parisian you have always lived in the provinces. Yes she said. That he said is admirable, continue, live in Paris but always remain provincial.

And so the century only slowly began to come of age, the war was a struggle and it made the twentieth century self-couscious. Everybody in it knew the twentieth century for what it was.

France had not really been interested in the twentieth century England had refused the twentieth century, and now the world war made them both make up their minds that the twentieth century wasklusively it was going through the agony through which all adolescence adolescents have to go, it was suffering as all adolescents suffer and there it was it was the twentieth century.

And France and England after the war began to feel a little that the twentieth century would have to get civilised. It would have to go through that period of revolution that every young person goes through, when they think that systems will not be systems but something else, when every one is certain that they can reform everybody if they only go the right way to work at it.

This was the post-war period, a period of fashion without styles, of reforming everybody which is persecution, and of violence without hope. All this is natural after adolescence before the period of civilising of reorganising the right of every one not to be reformed which comes when people become adult.

And now and France and England are hoping to do this thing now it is almost forty years old the century and it was time it was becoming civilised time it was beginning to be grown up, time to settle down to middle age and a pleasant life and the enjoyment of ordinary living.

So this book is dedicated to France and England.

France who was the background of all who were excited and determined and created by the twentieth century but who herself was not at the time enormously interested. France really prefers civilisation to tumultuous adolescence, France prefers that the adolescent learns reserve and logic and civilisation and fashion.

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ion as he emerges out of adolescence, France who thinks that childhood and adolescence should be felt instinctively as not an end in itself but as a progression toward the state of being civilised. And England who like a boy who has not gone to school because his people did not believe in any of the schools that were then existing and who then considerably older does go to school and very quickly catches up and passes the others who have been at school from the beginning because England did refuse the twentieth century, did not believe it was really there thought everybody had made a mistake except themselves, they who knew it was still the nineteenth century.

And now they know.

And so,

This book is dedicated to France and England who are to do what is the necessary thing to do, they are going to civilise the twentieth century and make it be a time when anybody can be free, free to be civilised and to be.

forty

The century is now nearly forty years old, too old to do what it is told.

It is old enough to like to live quietly and well, to go to heaven or to hell as they like, to know that to live as they please is pleasanter than to be told.

So this is what England and France are going to do and this book is dedicated to them because I want them to do what they are going to do. Thank you.