to find these excellent French "little people" all that Lever told us the Irish were but have ceased to be—cordial, delightful, intelligent, and simple. For that is the great, the abiding charm of the French middle class—the absence of vulgar pretension. Every man to his trade, and an artist at that—such is the wise French motto. I begin to suspect the late Felix Faure, the tanner of France, must have had some Irish blood in his veins, for he was well worthy to play the sovereign to that mock prince of the blood, the Irish tradesman.
The home of the French middle classes, I have already said, is not, in the Anglo-Saxon conception of the word, an abode of comfort. Small economies are too rigidly practised therein. The salon, or sitting-room, is apt to be shut up all the week in the interest of the furniture, and only opened on the single afternoon the lady of the house is supposed to be at home to her friends. Then in winter, just before the hour of reception, the meagre wood-fire is set ablaze, and sometimes tea is prepared, along with biscuits far from fresh. You may be thankful—if tea is to be offered you, a rare occurrence—should the tea be no staler than the biscuits, I have known a Frenchwoman, the sister of a professor at Stanislas College, who admitted to me naïvely that she changed the leaves of her tea every four or five days. She informed me
