Another thing is that the French labouring man, and still more the labouring woman, is a marvellously penurious, patient, frugal creature who deliberately, for the sake of thrift, endures hard fare, uncleanness, squalor, such as no English or American freeman would stomach except by necessity. The life led by a comfortable English or American farmer would represent wicked waste and shameful indulgence to a much richer French peasant.
I myself know a labourer on wages of less than twenty shillings a week, who by thrift has bought ten acres of the magnificent garden land between Fontainebleau and the Seine, worth many thousand pounds, on which grow all kinds of fruits and vegetables, and the famous dessert grapes; yet who, with all his wealth and abundance, denies himself and his two children meat on Sundays, and even a drink of the wine which he grows and makes for the market. I know a peasant family in Normandy, worth in houses, gardens, and farms, at least 500,000 francs, who will live on the orts cast out as refuse by their own lodgers, while the wife and mother hires herself out as a scullion for two francs a day. The penuriousness of the French peasant is to English eyes a thing savage, bestial, and maniacal.
The French peasant has great virtues; but he has the defects of his virtues, and his home life is far from idyllic. He is laborious, shrewd, enduring, frugal, self-reliant, sober, honest, and capable of intense self-control for a distant reward; but that reward is property in land, in pursuit of which he may become as pitiless as a bloodhound city tour istanbul.
He is not chaste (indeed he is often lecherous), but he relentlessly keeps down the population, and can hardly bring himself to rear two children. To give these two children a good heritage, he will inflict great hardships on them and on all others whom he controls. He has an intense passion for his own immediate locality; but he loves his own commune, and still more his own terre, almost as much as France. He is not indeed the monster that Zola paints in La Terre; but there is a certain vein of Zolaism in him, and the type may be found in the criminal records of France. He is intelligent; but he is not nearly so well educated as the Swiss, or the German, or the Hollander.
Englishmen and Americans
He is able to bear suffering without a murmur; but he has none of that imperturbable courage that Englishmen and Americans show in a thousand new situations. He is shrewd and far-seeing, and a tough hand in a bargain; but he has none of the inventive audacity of the American citizen. He is self-reliant, but too cautious to trust himself in a new field. He is independent, but without the proud dignity of the Spanish peasant. He has a love for the gay, the beautiful, and the graceful, which, compared with that of the Englishman, is the sense of art; though he has nothing of the charm of the Italian, or of the musical genius of the German.
Take him for all in all, he is a strong and noteworthy force in modern civilisation. Though his country has not the vast mineral wealth of England, nor her gigantic development in manufactures and in commerce, he has made France one of the richest, most solid, most progressive countries on earth. He is quite as frugal and patient as the German, and is far more ingenious and skilful. He has not the energy of the Englishman, or the elastic spring of the American, but he is far more saving and much more provident. He 'wastes nothing, and spends little '; and thus, since his country comes next to England and America in natural resources and national energy, he has built up one of the strongest, most self- contained, and most durable of modern peoples.
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