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A Padre in France, a non-fiction book by George A. Birmingham |
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Chapter 12. Madame |
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_ CHAPTER XII. MADAME Madame was certainly an old woman, if age is counted by years. She had celebrated her golden wedding before the war began. But in heart she was young, a girl. I cherish, among many, one special picture of Madame. It was a fine, warm afternoon in early summer. The fountain at the lower end of the garden spouted its little jet into the air. Madame loved the fountain, and set it working on all festive occasions and whenever she felt particularly cheerful. I think she liked to hear the water splashing among the water-lily leaves in the stone basin where the goldfish swam. Behind the fountain the flowers were gay and the fruit trees pleasantly green round a marvellous terra-cotta figure, life-size, of an ancient warrior. Below the fountain was a square, paved court, sunlit, well warmed. Madame sat in a wicker chair, her back to the closed green jalousies of the dining-room window. Beside her was her workbox. On her knees was a spread of white linen. Madame held it a sacred duty visiter la linge once a week; and no tear remained undarned or hole unpatched for very long. As she sewed she sang, in a thin, high voice, the gayest little songs, full of unexpected trills and little passages of dancing melody. Madame was mistress. There was no mistake about that. Monsieur was a retired business man who had fought under General Faidherbe in the Franco-Prussian war. He was older than Madame, a very patient, quiet gentleman. He was a little deaf, which was an advantage to him, for Madame scolded him sometimes. He read newspapers diligently, tended the pear trees in the garden, and did messages for Madame. There was also Marie, a distant cousin of Monsieur's, herself the owner of a small farm in Brittany, who was--I know no term which expresses her place in the household. She was neither servant nor guest, and in no way the least like what I imagine a "lady-help" to be. She was older than Madame, older, I fancy, even than Monsieur, and she went to Mass every morning. Madame was more moderate in her religion. Monsieur, I think, was, or once had been, a little anti-clerical. Madame was the most tender-hearted woman I have ever met. She loved all living things, even an atrocious little dog called Fifi, half blind, wholly deaf, and given to wheezing horribly. Only once did I see her really angry. A neighbour went away from home for two days, leaving a dog tied up without food or water in his yard. We climbed the wall and, with immense difficulty, brought the creature to Madame. She trembled with passion while she fed it. She would have done bodily harm to the owner if she could. She did not even hate Germans. Sometimes at our midday meal Monsieur would read from the paper an account of heavy German casualties or an estimate of the sum total of German losses. He chuckled. So many more dead Boches. So much the better for the world. But Madame always sighed. "Les pauvres garcons," she said. "C'est terrible, terrible." Then perhaps Monsieur, good patriot, asserted himself and declared that the Boche was better dead. And Madame scolded him for his inhumanity. Our own wounded--les pauvres blesses--we mentioned as little as possible. Madame wept at the thought of them, and it was not pleasant to see tears in her bright old eyes. But for all her tender-heartedness Madame did not, so far as I ever could discover, do much for the men of her own nation or of ours. An Englishwoman, in her position and with her vitality, would have sat on half a dozen committees, would have made bandages at a War Work Depot, or packed parcels for prisoners; would certainly have knitted socks all day. Madame did no such things. She managed her own house, mended her own linen, and she darned my socks--which was I suppose, a kind of war work, since I wore uniform. The activities of Englishwomen rather scandalised her. The town was full of nurses, V.A.D.'s, and canteen workers. Madame was too charitable to criticise, but I think she regarded the jeune fille Anglaise as unbecomingly emancipated. She would have been sorry to see her own nieces--Madame had many nieces, but no child of her own--occupied as the English girls were. I have always wondered why Madame took English officers to board in her house. She did not want the money we paid her, for she and Monsieur were well off. Indeed she asked so little of us, and fed us so well, that she cannot possibly have made a profit. And we must have been a nuisance to her. In England Madame would have been called "house proud." She loved every stick of her fine old-fashioned furniture. Polishing of stairs and floors was a joy to her. We tramped in and out in muddy boots. We scattered tobacco ashes. We opened bedroom windows, even on wet nights, and rain came in. We used monstrous and unheard-of quantities of water. Yet no sooner had one guest departed than Madame grew impatient to receive another. On one point alone Madame was obstinate. She objected in the strongest way to baths in bedrooms. As there was no bathroom in the house, this raised a difficulty. Madame's own practice--she once explained it to me--was to take her bath on the evening of the first Monday in every month--in the kitchen, I think. My predecessors and my contemporaries refused to be satisfied without baths. Madame compromised. If they wanted baths they must descend to le cave, a deep underground cellar where Monsieur kept wine. I, and I believe I alone of all Madame's guests, defeated her. I should like to believe that she gave in to me because she loved me; but I fear that I won my victory by unfair means. I refused to understand one word that Madame said, either in French or English, about baths. I treated the subject in language which I am sure was dark to her. I owned a bath of my own and gave my servant orders to bring up sufficient water every morning, whatever Madame said. He obeyed me, and I washed myself, more or less. Madame took her defeat well. She collected quantities of old blankets, rugs, sacks, and bed quilts. She spread them over the parts of the floor where my bath was placed. I tried, honourably, to splash as little as possible and always stood on a towel while drying myself. After all Madame had reason on her side. Water is bad for polished floors, and it is very doubtful whether the human skin is any the better for it. Most of our rules of hygiene are foolish. We think a daily bath is wholesome. We clamour for fresh air. We fuss about drains. Madame never opened a window and had a horror of a courant d'air. The only drain connected with the house ran into the well from which our drinking water came. Yet Madame had celebrated her golden wedding and was never ill. Monsieur and Marie were even older and could still thoroughly enjoy a jour de fete. Madame had a high sense of duty towards her guests. She and Marie cooked wonderful meals for us and even made pathetic efforts to produce le pudding, a thing strange to them which they were convinced we loved. She mended our clothes and sewed on buttons. She pressed us, anxiously, to remain tranquille for a proper period after meals. She did her best to teach us French. She tried to induce me--she actually had induced one of my predecessors--to write French exercises in the evenings. She made a stringent rule that no word of English was ever to be spoken at meals. I think that this was a real self-denial to Madame. She knew a little English--picked up sixty years before when she spent one term in a school near Folkestone. She liked to air it; but for the sake of our education she denied herself. We used to sit at dinner with a dictionary--English-French and French-English--on the table. We referred to it when stuck, and on the whole we got on well in every respect except one. Madame had an eager desire to understand and appreciate English jokes, and of all things a joke is the most difficult to translate. A fellow-lodger once incautiously repeated to me a joke which he had read in a paper. It ran thus: "First British Soldier (in a French Restaurant): 'Waiter, this 'am's 'igh. 'Igh 'am. Compris? ' Second British Soldier: 'You leave it to me, Bill. I know the lingo. Garcon, Je suis.'" I laughed. Madame looked at me and at W., my fellow-lodger, and demanded a translation of the joke. I referred the matter to W. His French was, if possible, worse than mine, but it was he who had started the subject. "Ham," I said to him, "is jambon. Go ahead." W. went ahead, but "high" in the sense he wanted did not seem to be in the dictionary. I had a try when W. gave up and began with an explanation of the cockney's difficulty with the letter "h." Madame smiled uncomprehendingly. W., who had studied the dictionary while I talked, made a fresh start at "je suis." "Je suis--I am. Jambon--ham, c'est a dire ''am' a Londres.'" We worked away all through that meal. At supper, Madame, still full of curiosity, set us at it again. We pursued that joke for several days until we were all exhausted, and Madame, politely, said she saw the point, though she did not and never will. I do not believe that joke can be translated into French. Months afterwards I had as fellow-lodger a man who spoke French well and fluently. I urged him to try if he could make Madame understand. He failed. Madame was most hospitable. She was neither worried nor cross when we asked friends to dine with us. Indeed she was pleased. But she liked due notice so that she could devote proper attention to la cuisine. M., who was at that time with a cavalry brigade, used to come and spend a night or two with me sometimes. He was a special favourite with Madame and she used to try to load him with food when he was leaving. One very wet day in late autumn, Madame produced a large brown-paper bag and filled it with pears. She presented it to M. with a pretty speech of which he did not understand a word. M. was seriously embarrassed. He liked Madame and did not want to hurt her feelings; but he had before him a railway journey of some hours and then five miles on horseback. It is impossible to carry a brown-paper bag full of pears on a horse through a downpour of rain. The bag gets sopped at once and the pears fall through it. M. pushed the bag back to Madame. "Merci, merci," he said. "Mais non, pas possible." Madame explained that the pears were deliciously ripe, which was true. M. said, "A cheval, Madame, je voyage a cheval." Madame pushed the bag into his hands. He turned to me. "For goodness' sake explain to her--politely, of course--that I can't take that bag of pears. I'd like to. They'd be a godsend to the mess. But I can't." Madame saw the impossibility in the end; but she stuffed as many pears as she could into his pocket, and he went off bulging unbecomingly. M. used to complain that he ate too much when he came to stay with me. I confess that our midday meal--we ate it at noon, conforming to the custom of the house--was heavy. And Madame was old-fashioned in her idea of the behaviour proper to a hostess. She insisted on our eating whether we wanted to eat or not, and was vexed if we refused second and even third helpings. Madame was immensely interested in food and we talked about marketing and cookery every day. I came, towards the end of my stay, to have a fair knowledge of kitchen French. I could have attended cookery lectures with profit. I could even have taught a French servant how to stew a rabbit in such a way that it appeared at table brown, with thick brown sauce and a flavour of red wine. The marketing for the family was done by Madame and Marie, Marie in a high, stiff, white head-dress, carrying a large basket. On the subject of prices Madame was intensely curious. She wanted to know exactly what everything cost in England and Ireland. I used to write home for information, and then we did long and confusing sums, translating stones or pounds into kilos and shillings into francs; Monsieur intervening occasionally with information about the rate of exchange at the moment. Madame insisted on taking this into account in comparing the cost of living in the two countries. Then we used to be faced with problems which I regard as insoluble. Perhaps a sum of this kind might be set in an arithmetic paper for advanced students. "Butter is 2s. 1d. a pound. A kilo is rather more than two pounds. The rate of exchange is 27.85. What would that butter cost in France?" We had an exciting time when the municipal authorities of the town in which we lived introduced fixed prices. Madame, who is an entirely sensible woman, was frankly sceptical from the start about the possibility of regulating prices. Gendarmes paraded the market-place, where on certain days the countrywomen sat in rows, their vegetables, fowl, eggs, and butter exposed for sale. They declined, of course, to accept the fixed prices. Madame and her friends, though they hated being overcharged, recognised the strength of the countrywomen's position. There was a combination between the buyers and sellers. The gendarmes were out-witted in various ways. One plan--Madame explained it to me with delight--was to drop a coin, as if by accident, into the lap of the countrywoman who was selling butter. Ten minutes later the purchaser returned and bought the butter under the eyes of a satisfied policeman at the fixed price. The original coin represented the difference between what the butter woman was willing to accept and what the authorities thought she ought to get. That experiment in municipal control of prices lasted about a month. Then the absurdity of the thing became too obvious. The French are much saner than the English in this. They do not go on pretending to do things once it becomes quite plain that the things cannot be done. Food shortage--much more serious now--was beginning to be felt while I lived with Madame. There were difficulties about sugar, and Monsieur had to give up a favourite kind of white wine. But neither he nor Madame complained much; though they belonged to the rentier class and were liable to suffer more than those whose incomes were capable of expansion. No one, so far as I know, appealed to them to practise economy in a spirit of lofty patriotism. They simply did with a little less of everything with a shrug of the shoulders and a smiling reference to the good times coming apres la guerre. And, on occasion, economy was forgotten and we feasted. One of the last days I spent in Madame's house was New Year's Day, 1917. I and my fellow-lodger, another padre, were solemnly invited to a dinner that night. It was a family affair. All Madame's nieces, married and single, were there, and their small children, two grand-nieces and a grand-nephew. Madame's one nephew, wounded in the defence of Verdun, was there. Our usual table was greatly enlarged. The folding doors between the drawing-room and dining-room were flung open. We had a blaze of lamps and candles. We began eating at 6.30 p.m.; we stopped shortly after 10 p.m. But this was no brutal gorge. We ate slowly, with discrimination. We paused long between the courses. Once or twice we smoked. Once the grand-niece and grand-nephew recited for us, standing up, turn about, on their chairs, and declaiming with fluency and much gesture what were plainly school-learnt poems. One of Madame's nieces, passing into the drawing-room, played us a pleasant tune on the piano. At each break I thought that dinner was over. I was wrong time after time. We talked, smoked, listened, applauded, and then more food was set before us. There were customs new to me. At the appearance of the plum pudding--a very English pudding--we all rose from our seats and walked in solemn procession round the table. Each of us, as we passed the sacred dish, basted it with a spoonful of blazing rum, and, as we basted, made our silent wish. We formed pigs out of orange skins and gave them lighted matches for tails. By means of these we discovered which of us would be married or achieve other good fortune in the year to come. We drank five different kinds of wine, a sweet champagne coming by itself, a kind of dessert wine, at the very end of dinner, accompanied by small sponge cakes. The last thing of all was, oddly enough, tea. Like most French tea it was tasteless, but we remedied that with large quantities of sugar and we ate with it a very rich cake soaked in syrup, which would have deprived the fiercest Indian tea of any flavour. I think Madame was supremely happy all the evening. I think every one else was happy too. I have never met more courteous people. In the midst of the most hilarious talk and laughter a niece would stop laughing suddenly and repeat very slowly for my benefit what the fun was about. Even when the soldier nephew told stories which in England would not have been told so publicly, a niece would take care that I did not miss the point. Madame's drawing-room was very wonderful. At one time she had known a painter, a professor of painting in a school near her home. He adorned the walls of her drawing-room with five large oil-paintings, done on the plaster of the wall and reaching from the ceiling to very near the floor. Four of them represented the seasons of the year, and that artist was plainly a man who might have made a good income drawing pictures for the lids of chocolate boxes. His fur-clad lady skating (Winter) would have delighted any confectioner. The fifth picture was a farmyard scene in which a small girl appeared, feeding ducks. This was the most precious of all the pictures. The little girl was Madame's niece, since married and the mother of a little girl of her own. The furniture was kept shrouded in holland and the jalousies were always shut except when Madame exhibited the room. I saw the furniture uncovered twice, and only twice. It was uncovered on the occasion of the New Year's feast, and Madame displayed her room in all its glory on the afternoon when I invited to tea a lady who was going to sing for the men in one of my camps. I think that all Madame's lodgers loved her, though I doubt if any of them loved her as dearly as I did. Letters used to arrive for her from different parts of the war area conveying news of the officers who had lodged with her. She always brought them to me to translate. I fear she was not much wiser afterwards. She never answered any of them. Nor has she ever answered me, though I should greatly like to hear how she, Monsieur, Marie, Fifi, and Turque are getting on. Turque was a large dog, the only member of the household who was not extremely old. _ |
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