FRANCE IN 1789 AND 1889.1
The year of centenaries has brought us no memento more significant than the timely reissue of Arthur Young's Travels in France in 1787-89.2 Europe has seen in this century nothing more striking, and hardly any single thing more entirely blessed, than the transfiguration of rural France from its state under the ancient monarchy to its state under the new republic. By good luck an English traveller, with rare opportunities and almost a touch of genius, traversed every province just on the eve of the great crisis, and left to mankind a vivid picture of all he saw. 'Vehement, plain-spoken Arthur Young,' says Carlyle, who, in his lurid chapter on the ' General Overturn,' has made household words out of several of Arthur's historic sayings. 'That wise and honest traveller,' says John Morley, perhaps, with rather excessive praise, 'with his luminous criticism of the most important side of the Revolution, worth a hundred times more than Burke, Paine, and Mackintosh all put together.'
And now a lady who has seen more of France than even Arthur Young, Miss Betham-Edwards, has given us an excellent edition of the famous Travels, so long practically Travels in France, by Arthur Young, during the years 1787, 1788, 1789, with an Introduction, Biographical Sketch, and Notes, by M. Betham- Edwards. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1889. Bohn's Standard Library, N.s.; also France of To-day, a survey comparative and retrospective, by M. Betham- Edwards. London: Rivingtons. 2 vols. 1892-94 private tour istanbul.
Vignette picture of rural France
Inaccessible, with notes, illustrations, references, and a vignette picture of rural France in 1889 such as old Arthur himself might have limned, had he returned to earth and to France to see the great Exhibition. The contrast, as we look first on this picture and then on that, is the transition we find in a dream or a fairy tale. It is as though one rose from the dead. We see the sombre, haggard, crushed French peasant of Languedoc, Poitou, or Franche Comtd, that Lazarus whom the old system swathed in cerecloth and entombed, starting forth into life from his bonds, and returning to his home, to activity, and to freedom. It is the Revolution that has worked this miracle. This is the only work of the Revolution that is wholly blessed. Here, at any rate, it has destroyed almost nothing that was good, and has founded little that is evil. 'The Revolution,' says the editor of these Travels, 'in a few years metamorphosed entire regions.'
What life, what heart, what ring there was in the racy sayings of the fine old boy ! Every one knows that sharp word wrung from him even while he was the guest of the Duke de la Rochefoucauld: 'Whenever you stumble on a grand seigneur, you are sure to find his property a desert.' The signs of the greatness of a. grand seigneur are ' wastes, deserts, fern, ling.' ' Oh ! if I was the legislator of France for a day, I would make such great lords skip again.' ' The crop of this country is princes of the blood; that is to say, hares, pheasants, deer, boars.'
Schoolboys in France can repeat the historic passage about the woman near Mars-la-Tour, aged twenty-eight, but so bent and furrowed and hardened by labour that she looked sixty or seventy, as she groaned out: ' Sir, the taxes and the dues are crushing us to death ! ' No one, says he, can imagine what the French peasant woman has come to look under grinding poverty. He tells of ' some things that called themselves women, but in reality were walking dunghills'; 'girls and women without shoes or stockings.' ' The ploughmen at their work have neither sabots, nor feet to their stockings. This is a poverty that strikes at the root of national prosperity.' And then comes that scathing phrase which rings in the ears of Englishmen to-day: ' It reminds me of the misery of Ireland.'
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