BOOKS.
"TERRE DE FRANCE."*
A BOOK which has been crowned by the French Academy, and whose author has been adjudged the Prix Monthyon of 2,000 francs, ought only to need a few words of introduction to make it as popular in England, relatively, as it is in France. It is a charming story, high and pure in tone, written in an easy, spirited style ; but light as the author's touch is, he makes us feel that he is very much in earnest too. " 0 mon pays, sois mes amours !" is the motto of the book ; and the love, amount- ing to a passion, of his own country and his own people, shows itself as much in the vivid, life-like description—this is not said ignorantly—of the old Chateau de Rochebelle and its in- habitants, as in that part of the story which has to do with the French war of 1870.
Of course, as the years go on, as railways and science and so-called civilisation spread themselves everywhere, such house- holds as that of Rochebelle will come to exist no longer, even in France, which, in the home arrangements of its best people, is so many years behind England. This is not said in any dis- paraging sense, far from it; no one who knows anything of French chateau life can fail to love and admire it. The authority of the old, the submission of the young, are made so easy and delightful in France by the playful high spirits of the old, and the affec- tionate politeness and good-humour of the young. Perhaps the Teutonic race, even a hundred years ago, had not much of this grace of living ; but we fear it is too true that rudeness and selfishness advance with time, and that the breath of Paris only breathes upon the Aveyron to scorch and wither its old-fashioned charm. "The most uncivilised and the most cultivated people in the world," said somebody who was well acquainted with such families as these ; and she went on to describe the genera- tions who peopled one of those old castles, getting up at 6 in the morning, making liqueurs and covfitures, sitting on rush chairs in a circle, composing the most charming and correct verses, treating each other with courtly politeness, dancing all the evening in the polished salon, from the old chevalier of eighty to his great-nephews and nieces, seventy years younger. Thirty years ago this war, a tree picture of life in the Aveyron. Seventeen years ago, when Solange de Bozonls came back from four years spent in Paris to her grandmother at Roche- belle, things had not changed very much. In the chateau, standing like an armed knight on its great rock between the mountains and the Tarn, where whole families and generations used to live like the tribes of Israel, there were now only three households left,—that of the Baronne de Bozouls, the widowed grandmother of Solange; that of her nephew, M. Laonce, his wife and children ; that of her old brother and sisters-in-law, the survivors of the former generation. Nothing can be more delightful than the picture of these old people. M. Elie, one of Charles X.'a officers, eighty years old in fact, but hardly sixty in appearance, a soldier, courtier, man of the world, but of an older world than ours, a preux chevalier in fact; Mademoiselle A gathe, a kind, agreeable, narro w-minded old lady; Mademoiselle Jacqueline, always known as Jacquette, the girl of the house at sixty, with a small mind occupied in small things, but charmingly amusing in spite of that. Then there are the little dogs of Mesdemoiselles de Bozouls, 1 Amant ' and Sylvie,' little white frizzed dogs with black noses, and knots of ribbon on their necks.
Among the wild roads and mountains and woods of the Aveyron, in the stern simple life of this chateau and its neigh- bours, scorned a little by her clever cousin LOonce, criticised severely by her great-aunts, expected to sit upright without cushions, and to marry Amadae de Gores, a grave young man, the son of an old family friend, who has been in love with her from her childhood, and whose old house is still more stern and dismal than Rochebelle, Mademoiselle Solange finds herself at first very much out of place. For most of her tastes—at least, she thinks so—are Parisian ; she is also ambitions, thinks a good deal of money, is rebellious, and does not appear to have much heart. But none of these failings are so serious as they would be in an English girl. Her relations shrug their shoulders amiably, and take her as she is ; she lounges on cushions in the very presence of Mademoiselle Jacquette, she refuses Am edee —this, to be sure, is very hard to forgive :—" C'etait le premier affront des Bozonls anx de Gores. Il fallait Bien qu'une Bozouls
• Tcrre de France. Par Pratcols de Jultot. Paris Ca'mann Levy. 1985.
eat eta elevee is Paris pour faire ce scandale dans l'Aveyron." But Solange has her own way ; and by-and-by, riding among the woods, keeping as far as possible from Bernard, the grey- haired coachman, whose horse Pegase has a terrible way of hammering with his feet, she meets a real hero in the shape of the Marquis de Cheroy, who has lately been restoring an old chateau in the neighbourhood, and has come to live there with his mother. And then, as time goes on, Madame de Cheroy proposes to the Baronne de Bozonls a marriage between her son and Solange ; and, in spite of Mademoiselle Jacquette, the mar- riage would have come off, if the war with Germany had not broken out, in a fortunate moment at least for Solange. Now we begin to find out what we had expected all along, that she was a true Bozouls after all; as proud, as brave, as generous, as self-forgetting, as any of her ancestors. Even from that remote part of France, all the young men go to the war,—Amedee de Gores, Arthur de Bozonls, Laonce's boy of eighteen, the peasant lads from the village ; one flame of enthusiastic heroism lights up the country ; each one catches it from another ; the only man who fails in patriotism is Solange's lover, Robert de Cheroy. He cannot be made to see that it is his duty to volunteer, even when the winter comes, and things are desperate, and the hope- less struggle has been driven to the Loire ; when Arthur de Bozouls is dead, and Amedee wounded, and his brother, Petit- Jean—who is almost the hero of the book—cries because he is not old enough to take his place. It is a good touch in the story when Robert comes to Rochebelle, and Solange believes he has come to say good-bye before going off to the war, and finds that be does not think it his duty to go : —" Les yeas comme tout-a- l'heure errants sur la pendnle, elle semblait encore attendre Robert."
It is impossible in a review to give much idea of this charm- ing story, which, with all its French grace and lightness, has none of the faults that to English taste disfigure so many French novels. In praise of the book one may use a word of French slang,—c'est v4cu —it is real life ; these things have happened ; these people have lived ; and in the hearts of their descendants will long be found treasures of patriotism, courage, self-sacrifice, to be poured out for France when she comes to herself and asks for them. It is not only in the wild beautiful Aveyron that you have faithful children, Terre de France !
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