EAST OF PARIS.*
SONE people, among whom is the present writer, find few things more enjoyable than travelling in the byways of France, and to such Miss Betham-Edwards's new book will be delightful. At first sight, it must be confessed, the mind of an experienced reader is touched with suspicion. As we turn over the book, admiring its pretty illustrations, the printed pages do not look interesting. This is because there is absolutely too little in them. Width of spacing, even more than of margin, has been indulged in to such an extent, with the view of spreading a small quantity of matter over a handsome volume, that a large page does not contain more than a hundred and sixty words; and this is disheartening, even to a lover of good print. Then in this first slight view one's eye is caught by various mistakes and misprints, and by such sentences as the following, which suggest either that the book was written in a very great hurry, or that the proofs were insufficiently corrected : "Next, let me say a word about the jugs de paix in France, as I presume most readers are aware, a modest functionary, yet better paid than that of a priest." There are seVeral other instances of this kind of carelessness, and also of that want of good • Awl of Paris: Sketches tit the Gdtinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne. By Nies Betham•Edwards, °dicier de PLatruction Publique de France. With Coloured Illustrations from Original Paintings by Henry E. DetmokL London : Burst and Blackett. [7s. ad. net.]
punctuation which so greatly injures the artistic effect of a book. Miss Betham-Edwards is too clever to torment us in this way To make an end of fault-finding before we turn to the brighter side of things, is it possible that Miss Betham- Edwards, after years of life in France, really believes that old maids, agreeable old maids in society, do not exist there, and that all unmarried women are driven into convents as soon as they have passed what is considered the marriageable age ? Happening, to her astonishment, upon a small colony of unmarried women at Arcis-sur-Aube—a place hallowed for her by the memory of Danton, that "friend of humanity "—she greets them with : "I thought there were no single women out of convents in France." The remark might have been taken as a joke, but was not : the lady addressed was quite ready to account for her existence and that of her friends : "We are all socialists, radicals, fibres penseuses, and the rest." But this left Miss Betham-Edwards in possession of her illusion as to French society, properly so-called. "Society," she could still feel, preju- diced, narrow-minded, old-fashioned, will not endure the presence of an unmarried woman; or if she succeeds in saving herself from a convent--" an unmarried French lady belonging. to genteel society cannot cross the street unaccompanied till she has passed her fortieth year, nor till then may she open the pages of Victor Hugo or read a newspaper." The absurd sxaggeration of such a statement as this needs no demonstra- tion to any one who knows anything of good society in France in the present day, and we must say that, coming from the pen of Miss Betbam-Edwards, a familiar friend and lover of France, it is simply amazing. It shows, perhaps, how well one may know a country without knowing its people.
Putting aside the shock of such strange observations, the book, as we have said, is delightful. We have always appre- ciated the author's feeling for France, though we cannot always agree with her political opinions. Since writing Franca of To-day she seems to have somewhat modified her admiration for the peasants and their thrift. Though she sees the one excuse for the miserly scraping of their money- grubbing lives—" I work for my children "—she not only realises that such penurious self-denial in the parents is bad for the children, educating a generation of selfish materialists, but that "of the two national weaknesses, French avarice and English lavishness and love of spending, the latter is more in accordance with progress and the spirit of the age."
The scene of the book is mostly laid in the neighbourhood of the Forest of Fontainebleau and on the upper waters of the Loire. In these neighbourhoods Miss Betham-Edwards finds plenty of material for that lively description of little-known plates in which she is so successful. Many people know Fontainebleau, Barbizon, &c., without being familiar with such small towns and villages bordering on the Forest as Bourron, in the valley of the Loing, with its asparagus gardens; Larchant, an old pilgrimage place with a wonderful ruined tower, a treasure fir artists, but scarcely known, we think, to anybody but the happy cyclists who range the Forest of Fontainebleau ; Reoloses, its farmhouses each a little fortress, marvellously picturesque both outside and in, its church con- taining the celebrated wood-carvings which were shown in the Paris Exhibition, but are now, we suppose, replaced in their own surroundings. All this country, the Forest and the valley of the Loing, has the features of that characteristic France which inspired Balzac, and to a certain extent Zola; the peasants here have the salient faults and merits of their kind ; the soil is rich, not only in timber, but in fruit, flowers, vegetables, and with all this there is a poetic beauty of atmosphere which, different as. they are, suggests that the Fontainebleau country might dispute with Touraine the title of "the Garden of France." We must not forget to mention specially Miss Betham-Edwards's charming account of Nemours, which appears to be very, little changed since the days when Arthur Young was fleeced by the most knavish innkeeper he had met with in France or Italy, and not at all changed since Balza° wrote Ursula Minnie& Grass-grown streets, enchanting riverside views, plenty of centenarians, no museum, no bookseller's shop, and —strange inconsistency—a lady dentist who draws a tooth for two francs.
'Another delightful centre for the leisurely traveller is
Nevers, with its beautiful Cathedral little known to the English, and lovely situation on the Loire. Within easy reach is Pougues-les-Eaux, one of the many French watering. places never heard of in England ; but visited, tradition says, by Julius Caesar, and later by French Kings and by Madame de Sevigne. Miss Betham-Edwards is not fond of Madame de Sevigne because she disliked the Huguenots, which seems carrying religious prejudice rather too far ; but if history is to be trusted, the Huguenots are responsible for the destruction and pillage in 1560 of the abbey and churches of La Charite, the most old-world, icturesque, and fascinating place which ever wound itself round the heart of a traveller.
But we cannot here follow the author through all her wanderings east of Paris, which included Sens, Arcis-sur- Aube, Rheims, Nancy, &c., and many a EU% town famous in old days, connected with great names and the scene of fierce fighting, now with all the charm and profound peace of pro- vincial France at her best. St. Jean de Logue, for instance, drove back the Imperial armies from Burgundy and saved France in 1636. Its inhabitants, in consequence of this, were set free from all taxation, and continued so till the Revolution. No town in France has a nobler record,—but who ever hears now of St. Jean de Losne ?
In thanking Miss Betham-Edwards for opening such doors as this to the English tourist, we must express our sympathy with her love for travelling by slow trains in France. If one cannot aspire to a bicycle or a motor-car, it is the best way of seeing the country and the people.
The saddest, the only sad part of this agreeable book is to be found in the last two chapters, which are concerned with Alsace and Lorraine. The picture is drawn by a true lover of France, and a clear-sighted, generally fair-minded writer; and her conclusion is that "an insuperable barrier, the fathomless gulf created by injustice, exists between con- querors and conquered." "I found," she says, "the clinging to France ineradicable as ever, nothing like the faintest sign of reconciliation with Imperial rule."
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