servants I have known have all been excellent creatures, devoted to their mistresses, grateful for any kindness or interest shown them, surprisingly intelligent, honest, sober, of lives of conspicuous virtue. They have the national failing, which is a tendency to insolence on slight provocation—for you cannot reason with French people. They fire up angrily at the least hint of an opinion that displeases them, and their very independence of character makes them sin on the other side of servility. But those monsters of their fiction—where are they to be met with? How do they manage to hide themselves so cleverly from daily scrutiny, if they are, as we are assured, so persistently around us? Have any of the sweet-mannered Eugénies, the Irmas, the Marguerites, the Louises, I meet at the different houses of my friends, who greet me with such cheerful welcome, who take my umbrella or cloak with such suggested sympathy, and put fresh flowers in my room with such graceful pleasure, anything in common with M. Mirbeau's unspeakable wretch, Mlle. Celestine?
The same admiration I am compelled to entertain for the French peasant, I feel for the French artisan, whether in town or country. Yet he, too, has been depicted as a creature of loathsome perversity; but I can only speak of him as I have found him. Some years ago, going from Cognac to Angoulême, I decided to abandon
