NINETTE.*

EVERY book written by the author of Vera possesses distinc- tion and charm in a greater or less degree, and to this rule Ninette is not an exception. If it does not altogether carry out the idea suggested by its second title, "An Idyll of Provence," this is because a certain atmosphere of unreality, a world of perfect sweetness into which only poets know the way, seems to be the proper environment of the sort of life we can "idyllic." And in Ninette's story, happily as it ends, we have stem realities of hard life and pain. The surroundings,

it is true, are sweet and poetic enough. One does not easily find room for vice, cruelty, and misery among violets, oleanders, orange-blossoms, and roses; but one has to remember that these are simply articles of trade, and touch those who live among them no more than corn and cabbages touch an Englishman. Not that the beauty of country and flowers, the clear air, the brightness which suggests life in old Greece more than any- thing modern, has no human expression in this story. Little slender Ninette, brave, spirited, and faithful, her eyes "like pools in a forest," and her young soldier, Noel Cresp, full of romance and daring, determined to marry his penniless love, even if he has to make lea trois sommations respectueux to his enraged and respectable parents,—creatures like these are the growth natural to Provence: brilliant sunshine, scent of violets, sparkling springs and seas, strawberries, roses, must, in spits of human degradation, sometimes produce a Ninette and a Noel. Old France and old religion, too, have their expression in such a touching figure as the grandmother, Petronilla, lying patient and helpless in the outhouse, where her son's wicked wife has thrust her, never compinining, ready with love and comfort for ' Ninette, with sympathy and advice for her miserable sou, when he comes to her in his trouble.

This son, Hugues Firmin, Ninette's father, is a small farmer, of the canton of Le Bar, and it is on his misfortunes, and his eventual ruin, that the story chiefly turns. The poor man had tried to stave off ruin by marrying an odious woman called Eugenie Sube, but is dragged still lower by her and her wicked cousin Pierre. We need not go into a description of the farm, squalid among its beautiful surroundings. Grapes, olives, fruit, wheat, violets and roses for the perfume-factory at Grasse,—these were Firmin's chief crops ; but with all his various efforts, the peasant-proprietor could not keep his head above water. To any one who cares for the subject, all this part of the story is painfully interesting. The author has

evidently studied her facts at the fountain-head, and they are heavy in the scale against any advantage to be derived from this system of small holdings. There may, of course, and the

author of Ninette does not deny it, be circumstances in which the petite culture does not ruin the peasant who undertakes it. The wealth of some of these French peasant-farmers is well known. But then, it is also true that they are almost as miserable as if they were poor. The squalor is the same ; they live on the edge of starvation, working themselves and their families to the bone. Money is the only god their teachers have left them, and they worship it with a whole-hearted devotion. Poor Firmin, however, at his farm of Le Rouret, saw nothing but the darkest side of peasant-proprietorship :—

"In the Maritime Alps, under the present drawbacks of foreign competition, enormous taxation, high-priced labour, and dying olive-trees, the system is imremunerative I am obliged to mention here some of the most prosaic details, so as to explain the pressing expenses which a peasant-proprietor has to meet. In the first place, there is a capitation-tax of two francs seventy-five centimes per head; this is personal. Next, we have the mobiti6re, or tax on the furniture ; then the inspot fancier, which is followed by the road-tax for the rural roads, which has to be paid in labour. If the man has any other occupation besides that of farming, he must further pay his patents (which is assessed as a sixth of his rent) ; and if he possesses a share in any company (irrigation, or the like), he has eight per cent, to pay. On making a mortgage he pays between one and two per cent., and when he takes his meat into market, the octroi stands him in ten centimes on every hundred kilos. The window-tax shuts up the outlets of his house, and, owing to bad seasons, the land really costs him more than he can pay.'

At the head of the chapter are quoted the words of the Comte de Fallout, "Si Pon pouvait former un choir en matiere de

* Ninctte an Idyll of Provence. By the Author of " Vera," "Blue Roses," dm. London: Hurst and Blacken, Limited. 1888.

destinee, c'est probablement la vie des champs qui tromperait le moms l'esperance ;" but in Provence, at least, with all its beauty of scenery and richness of Nature, they do not seem to come very near the truth.

In this book, the whole picture of life among the peasants and tradespeople in Provence is certainly a dark one. Sordid, squalid,—these are the words that seem to snit it best. No faith, no love, except among the very young and the very old, a sooiety whose chief features are grasping avarice and utter immorality :—

"The French peasant . . . . . . is free, but his new friends have taken away his Lord, and the world beholds that most horrible thing, an impious peasantry. The poor are at present flattered, and also in a great hurry, running about with tickets in their hands to vote for their so-called friends. These friends are of a peculiar sort, for they take the Catechism from the children, the nurses from the sick, and the priest from the dying, and teach the poor to demand instant and sensible value for their time and money. A mass of men, either corrupted by this new teaching, or easy to be corrupted, constitutes society, and it is difficult to see upon what basis a society so educated, and so composed, can be said to rest. If it has not yet broken up, it is because France is still living on the remains of her old capital, on the Christian education of children, the Christian devotion of religions women, and the Christian resignation of the poor. But this will all be exhausted some day, and then, when the peasantry have seen• through their present flatterers, it is not pleasant to think of what kind of reprisals a generation brought up on the Catechism of Paul Bert may be capable."

Some statistics given in a note further on are worth quoting, with the remarks which lead to them. France in her " disen- chantment " seems likely to become more and more a warning to other countries, a sorrow to those who have loved her and admired her greatness, while she breaks the hearts of all truly patriotic Frenchmen :— "Let it never be forgotten that France is not only a land of liberty, but also of equality, so that the one thing most ardently coveted in it, most contested, and most dearly bought, is the right or the means of domineering. To find a system where everybody shall command, but where no one shall be obliged to obey, is the problem which tacitly or openly occupies all the politicians of all the pot-houses in France The one in Le Bar differed in no way from its neighbours. There was the same waste of health, time, and money, as in any of the other 400,000 public-houses of what

used once to be considered a temperate country (Nora.) —In 1885 there were 400,000 public-houses in France, without counting the 30,000 drinking-shops of Paris. There are 600,000 distillers under the law of 1880 . . . . . . and it is estimated that one milliard of francs (.610,000,000) in intoxicating liquors is spent annually by the working classes. The privilege enjoyed by the distillers diverts annually from the Treasury more than 150,000,000 of francs. Since the laicisation of the hospitals in Paris, the consumption in them of brandy has risen from 4,000 litres to 16,000 per annum ; ruin is drunk to the amount of 32,000 litres (instead of 5,000) ; and the litres of wine, formerly 1,893,000, is now 2,648,000. The Journal Officiel of 1885-6 reports that the number of suicides (double that of thirty years ago) comprises 1,608 women and 398 minors. There were 3,542 more tramps and vagabonds than in 1884-5."

All this is hardly the stuff of which an idyll is generally made, and any one who enjoys horrors will find them especially towards the end of the book, where the earthquake of two years ago audits terrible consequences are described realisti- cally. However, in this case the earthquake is a true mes- senger of God, as in old times it would have been believed to be, and leaves Provence richer by the loss of two of her wickedest children.

But as the blue sky is behind the storm-clouds, so behind this scene of debt and -vice and painful struggle there is the sweet, bright world of Ninette and Noel, Petronilla, the saintly grandmother, Nerta, the good aunt. These may be only the "remains of the old capital;" yet one cannot help hoping that some future beau jour tie Dieu, such as these may redeem_ France.

We have spoken much of the darker side of the book, and have hardly done justice to the charm of its beautiful Nature background, and the love-story which is only shadowed by misfortune, never by sin. The book is full of charming bits of description; the scene where Ninette gives Noel her promise is one of the prettiest, though among the rose-hedges, the violet-beds, the valleys full of purple and white iris, the hill- sides covered with broom, it is indeed difficult to choose :— " The first love-tale was told in a garden and since then many a garden has heard the same simple story Provence is the land of flowers, but a trim garden, that 'box where sweets compacted lie,' is only a toy for rich foreigners ; for the poor the garden lies everywhere ; and certainly for my poor Ninette, sometimes beaten, often an-hungred, and generally bare- foot, a garden shaved and swept as we understand it, would not have been an appropriate frame. And so it came to pass, more suitably, that Ninette's happiness was brought to her on the breezy hill-side, where the shepherds pass to the sheep-folds. It was high up above the level of the olive-trees, of the roses, sword- lilies, and the hyacinths ; up among the junipers, and the thorny broom, and the thyme ; on the edge of the forest, and on a level whence the eye plumbs the depths of the roads and of the water- courses far beneath, and where the light lingers long after the valleys are full of trailing vapours As the lovers sat together, there stretched away below them these far-reaching breadths of landscape; low, rolling hills over-smoked by the olive woods, and over which there now brooded a faint mist. Beyond them was the expanse of the sea, cut by dark-blue headlands, and rounded by a sky in which the moon had not yet risen."

There they sit in the twilight and watch the stars coming out ; " Jehan and his bastoun," and " Margarido ; " we know Jehan as Orion. It is idyllic enough, after all; and the writer may

say, like her well-known Mistral :— " Cante uno chats de Prouveneo-- Dins Us amour de sa jouveneo Ian la vole segni.

Poor little half-starved Ninette ! " Ren qu'uno chats de la terro ;" but truly "a woman, with a faithful woman's heart."