Rough-Hewn/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
Round-robin Letter to Mrs. Horace Allen's Neighbors and Friends in Belton, New Jersey
Mes Chére Amies:
Je vous demande pardon for being so late with this letter, I know I promised to write just as soon as we got here. But, chére amies, I know you would forgive me if you knew how marvelous our new life is here in this old, beautiful, civilized world. I have just been letting myself go in it, just grabbing at its charm and wonder, and all I can tell you is that Europe is even more wonderful than I thought. I just wish every one of you could persuade your husbands, as I did, to take a position that will bring you across the seas to this "fabled old land of story and art." You owe it to your children to give them the culture which they would get here.
But let me begin first with the material things. Mr. Allen, you know, felt sort of badly because the position here didn't seem to be as important and have as big a salary as the job the Company offered him in Chicago—Chicago! Well, you cannot imagine anything like the cheapness of the life here. We have two flats of six rooms each, on the same floor, just the landing between them, twelve rooms in all, furnished elaborately down to the last little things in the kitchen even, and we pay about half the rent we paid in Belton for our unfurnished house. There is perhaps a little old-world dinginess about the wall-paper and the curtains and things, but that only adds to the delightful atmosphere and makes you realize that you are really in old Europe and not raw young America.
We have two maids for less than three dollars a week each, and such maids! In America we haven't any idea what it is to have good servants. I am not expected to lift my hand or think about the housekeeping. My old cook, the most fascinating creature, in a quaint peasant's costume, takes all the responsibility on her own shoulders. She gets up frightfully early in the morning, and goes off to market with a big, flat basket, and comes bringing it in on her head all filled with the loveliest things to eat you ever saw, and bought for almost nothing! But she buys just as closely for me as she would for herself. Servants identify themselves with the family of their masters here, and are glad to! I know the word "masters" sounds very un-American; but one so soon gets used to the vocabulary of the country. Pardonnez moi!
Jeanne—that is our cook—brings our breakfast to us in bed, all except of course for Mr. Allen, who can't seem to adapt himself to other ways of living. The first morning when she started to, he just jumped out of bed as though the house were on fire, and slammed the door shut in her face. He can't get over his Anglo-Saxon prudishness. But we have separate rooms now, and I have my tray in bed, and read my mail there, and between you and me, it makes me feel just like a heroine in a novel, to lie there in my pretty negligée—you know in America we don't realize what negligées are for. When do you ever have a chanc& to wear one except when you are sick? And then you don't care. Marise has hers—her breakfast I mean—in her room, too, as she dresses, and Jeanne always expects to help her dress, so I don't have to think at all about getting her off to school! Oh, mes amies, what a rest to one's nerves that is! Not to have that horrid, hurried hour trying to find clothes and books and get Marise off in time. I just lie in bed reading the mail or a book and Marise comes in, all fresh and combed (Jeanne is wonderful with her hair), and kisses me and says, "Au revoir, Maman." We always try to speak French together for the practice.
Then, as I am getting dressed, Jeanne comes in, with a clean apron to "take her orders," in the good old European way. And from that minute on, I have no more bother about it. Everything is set on the table at the right time, beautifully cooked, the house is kept clean and in the most perfect order.
Perhaps you are wondering why I call Mary, "Marise?" It is a quaint nickname for her that the servants have, and I have picked it up from them. Isn't it delightful? I never liked Mary, and I detest "Molly." Both the maids are devoted to Marise, and it is the European custom for the servants to do a great deal more for the children of the house than our girls ever dream of doing. Without a word, Jeanne has simply taken over the care of Marise's clothes as a part of her regular work, and she is always ready to go out with her, for it seems that no nice children go alone on the streets here. Every morning, Jeanne takes Marise to her school, and goes for her in the afternoon and brings her back. Marise is perfectly happy here, in a splendid school, and having wonderful opportunities. I am so happy about her advantages. It is not a public school (the "lay" schools as they say, because all the others are run by Catholic nuns). It seems the public schools are something quite new in France, and nobody sends children to them except the poor, or people who are queer in some way, with unbalanced ideas. I can easily believe this, since I had a call the other day from a school-teacher in the public schools, who also gives music lessons. She is a very queer and dowdy person, with the most awful hat you ever saw. Didn't you think that all Frenchwomen wore pretty, stylish hats? Not in the least. Quite the contrary. Her sister was with her, quite middle-class, both of them, and not at all like the other ladies who have called on me.
For they have called! Do you remember that little old French teacher who came to see me about getting a job in our High School, how discouraging she was about our coming to live in France, and how she said nobody would come to see me, at all? Well, if you ever see her, just tell her she is entirely mistaken. People are just as cordial as they can be, with the most beautiful manners you ever saw.
Do you wonder how I manage about the language? It is much easier to get along than I expected. Of course my thorough reading and writing knowledge of the language is a great help. And I have been making wonderful progress in speaking it. Being right in the midst of the language all the time it just soaks into you. No one here speaks any English; not from provincial ignorance, the sort we have in America, but from choice, because of their concentration on their own perfect language. They are all deeply cultured. It is wonderful to be in the midst of cultured people, to be able in casual afternoon calls to discuss De Maupassant with one lady and Gothic architecture with another.
For we have here in Bayonne—you notice that I already say "We,"—a simply splendid Gothic cathedral, the first one of my life. It is right up the street from where we live, and it is wonderful. Chére amies, think what it means for a town to have in its midst such a marvelous thing! Think what people must be like who live right close to it, go in and out of it every day, and feel its "beauty and puissant power" (as Matthew Arnold says). The South Portal is especially fine, starred by Baedeker, which means a great deal, as you know. I make a pilgrimage there every day, to just gaze at that South Portal. I have a life-time of arrears to make up, not having lived with it from childhood, as these fortunate people have. It is no wonder that you meet here people absolutely wonderful in their polish, like a lady who called on me the other day, the Marquise de Charmières. Her husband's family dates back to the days of Louis XII. I am ashamed to say I had to go and look up who Louis XII was, after she had gone. She had with her a nun, who lives with her, by special permission, the dearest old thing with her sweeping black robes and the quaint, quilled, picturesque head-dress. I suppose they used, in the old days, the Charmières did, to live in the wonderful old castle, just across the street from us, which is another of my great admirations. Think of living across the street from a real castle! It was constructed in 1100, on the remains of the old Roman wall, if you please, for Bayonne is very, very old. And it is right there, just the way it always was, with battlements and a real drawbridge and everything, just as it was in feudal times. Many famous people have lived there, Richard Cœur de Lion, Louis Quatorze, and others. It was there that Catherine de Medicis planned the St. Bartholomew massacre, and in a house on this very street that Napoleon took the Spanish crown away from the King, and gave it to his brother. Isn't it marvelous to think of?
I have had some of the curtains taken down in our salon (the French simply swathe their windows in curtains, simply swathe them!) and I often stand at the window and just gaze out at those old castle walls and try to imagine the splendid life that went on here then, the streets full of people in costumes and knights in armor and everything. I see the modern crowds coming and going under those massive walls, and I keep thinking how proud they must be of such an inheritance from the past, and how they must often wish the good old feudal days back again, when "life had color," as a writer said in a book I was reading the other day. No such inspiriting reminders of past glories in America! No such past glories! Nothing but what Ruskin calls the drab, dead level of democracy.
There is a fine Museum here too, with perfectly splendid works of art in it, pictures by Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Raphael, Rubens, Ribera, Murillo, Poussin, Delacroix, Ingres, Troyon, Meisonnier, Corot, Isabey, Bonnat, Bouguereau, Gervex, and many others. I am simply studying them, absorbing them, I go every day with a handbook on art which I bought here (in French, of course), and just gaze at them till their very spirit enters into me. I must tell you that Bouguereau is considered very much out of fashion here, and not at all admired any more. The Meissonier are simply marvelous. You could take a microscope to them, and still not see any brush-marks. Indeed it is said that he painted with a microscope. There is a perfect copy here of the Mona Lisa, which people who know say is just as good as the original. Mes chére amies, think what a privilege it is to sit there, right before her, with the book in my hand, looking up into that mysterious face, and reading those wonderful words of Pater's, which I have studied with you so often. "Here is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come, and the eyelids are a little weary. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as Ste. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands."
Mes amies, we have often read and studied this marvelous passage together, and now I can only say to you that it is true! But every bit of culture means so much more to me than it ever did before and now that I know what European life is, I can understand why they are more cultured than we are. It is because they have leisure. Here the working classes expect to work, as our American working class does not. And the material cares are just taken right off the shoulders of the upper classes. We are expected to occupy ourselves with higher things. I am reading, reading, reading as never before, and getting a closer knowledge of French literature, even than our studies together gave me. It all means so much more to me, now that I am right among the very people who are described in it. Think of looking up from a volume of Zola, and having a caller come in, who might be a character right out of the book. I often tell Mr. Allen, that the life around me illustrates and explains the literature, and the literature illustrates and explains the life. It is a wonderful, wonderful experience!
I have just finished De Maupassant's "Notre Cœur," and I am not surprised that we found it impossible to get hold of the French edition in America. Our strait-laced, old-fashioned. Puritanic America doesn't know enough to appreciate such a picture of this free European world, where relations between men and women are different from those between high school boys and girls. At home the girls rule the roost, if you will excuse a vulgar expression. But not here. Here they are put off in a corner, till they get a husband, and then they are allowed to blossom out. A woman of my age, so a French gentleman told me the other day, is considered just at the right age for being fascinating. And he assured me he didn't say that because it might apply to me, but because it is so. The men have temperament here. They really look at you, and are just as different as can be from the American business-man who never thinks of any woman but his wife, and never pays any attention to her! Here the men positively sparkle in conversation, and they all say they would hardly know I am an American, I have acquired the French manner so entirely. Here a woman is not expected to have become a mummy, because she puts on a wedding-ring. Quite the contrary, I assure you!
But this is a terribly long letter. I have poured out my heart to you in untrammeled spontaneity, such as comes to you in the free intellectuality of this finished civilization.
May you all be able some day to enjoy it!
Your devouée friend.
P.S.—Mr. Allen says the business part seems to be all right.