MIDDLE-CLASS FRANCE.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXI, Issue LXII, 14 May 1912, Page 2

MIDDLE-CLASS FRANCE.

In spite of all that has been written by competent authorities about French life, the idea is probably pretty widely entertained by Anglo-Saxons still that the French as a nation are frivolous and immoral, fond of risky plays and books, and addicted to the habits of Bohemia. The Paris correspondent of the Melbourne Age, who is doing two countries an excellent service in trying to make Australians understand France, deals some shrewd blows at this idea in his (or her,l latest article. Middle-class life in France is described as "utterly unlike the tumultuous, dissipated, and decadent existence that the French novelist describes 'ad nauseaum,' to the virtuous horror of a gullible public in ether countries." It is decorous and conventional to a degree that cannot be realised by a colonial unless he sees it for himself. Save when a member of a family dies suddenly and unexpectedly, the members of a middle-class household may never do anything out of the way during the whole oi their lives. It is a serene, methodical existence, run on lines that preclude anything startling happening. The resorts that have given Paris an unenviable notoriety are not typical of the French character, for "nothing is further removed from the calm sedateness of a French household than the artificial Bohemiauism of the cafes of Montmartre-" The middle class have deeply rooted virtues, including an absolute rectitude in money matters. A French family will suffer the greatest privations rather than run into debt. They live in a narrow self-centred world, where the breath open spaces, the longing for adventure, and the spirit of independence seldom or never enter, but if the Briton has an advantage in these respects, he can learn several things from these neighbors of his. Simplicity and absence of pretence are two of them. The Frenchwoman does not maintain a sitting-room for use once or twice a month when visitors come. A virtue pushed to an extreme length is seen in the fact that except among the wealthy, meals are coarsely and carelessly served. Everything is clean, and the cooking is first-class, but the appointments are rough. But against the amazement a Briton feels on seeing a French meal served so crudely, may be set the astonishment of a Frenchman when he finds that the snowy linen, glistening silver, and beautiful flowers of an English dinner-tablel are the setting, not for an elaborate menu, but merely for cold mutton and cabbage.