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“MARIE CLAIRE’S WORKSHOP."

By

Jessie Mackay.

Every now and then a book appears which seems to turn a searchlight on the life of a nation through a single cranny of it. Such a book was “Marie Claire/’ the work of a poor Parisian dressmaker, Marguerite Audoux. It was a sad and simple story without an end, showing the struggles and sufferings of a young French orphan. Now, nearly a decade after, a sequel has appeared, “Marie Claire’s Workshop,’’ told as limpidly, as sweetly, as the first, but with a new body of maturity in it. Fame and fortune came to gild the grey life of Marguerite Audoux. It is said that with true French “forehandedness” she went on living in the work-quarters much in the old way, only the frugal soup-pot was fuller now, and a young hired girl helped to boil it. What she did in the war years I know not, but last year the book, translated by F. S. Flint, was issued from Chapman and Hall’s, London. A public wearied to death of fruitless reparation and indemnity talk, of strikes, lock-outs, and Big Unions, may well take refuge in this dateless story, the most human and the least political it is possible to imagine. “Marie Claire’s Workshop” oozes romance, and yet it is almost a stretching of the word to call it a novel. It is not the history of one heroine, but screened flashes of the life-stories of seven or eight women more or less heroine-like, and all ringing true to the multifold genius of French environment. So intimately do we know these toilers, from the sweetfaced and silver-tongued patronne, Madame Daligac to her youngest assistant, little feather-brained Duretour, that they stand out in all tlieir angularities and tendernesses, their hard bravadoes and their pathetic camaraderies, each perfect in drawing. The big, bouncing Breton girl, Bergeounette, who, like Pauline Bonaparte, hated no one but her husband, a bully one degree ; hove an Apache; Sandrine, gentle, dc.fc, and gay, till the crown of fate and sorrow bears down all that made the joy of her little world; Bouledogue, rough and buxom, sharp as a quince in the tongue, and stormy in her moods, but straight as an arrow in her dealings; the handsome, commanding Gabielle, from Ardennes, born also to tragedy, like the fading Sandrine, but a tragedy not unto death; Mademoiselle Herminie, the little old mender from the rich Burgundian wine-lands, nursing a 50-year-old love and sorrow that still kept the lips young in her little wrinkled apple of a face; Duretour, the laughing petite, Parisian to the finger-tips, dancing equably through life where others trod on thorns; the gawky Roberte, and the wiry Feiicite—ali these live and move in the panorama of Madame Dalignac’s workshop. One hears the whirr of the machines, the carrying voice of the patron, Madame’s husband, the one Adam in this garden of trial and toil, faultless lover to his Eve, and good friend to the girls, despite the sudden tempests of wrath that bespoke his Pyrenean blood. A gallant soul is this man-embroiderer, fighting his death from the first page, the common death of these dwellers in airless workshops, heavy with lung-destroving dust and fluff of fabrics. So perfect is the art that the reader hardly grasps till the end the elusive, dove-like, receptive personality of Marie Claire herself, the medium through which these sharply-defined characters express themselves. Why is the book so ineffably French, and yet so harmonious with the British taste that winces at stray touches even of \ ictor Hugo’s giant and virile genius? In the first place, the humanities are so translucent. I he veil of reserve in which the British genius wraps itself for o-ood and ill alike does not exist in French art, and therefore presumably not in French life. The men weep openlv, and the women, all but Marie Claire and the patronne, discuss quite comfortably and quite frankly disasters and conditions that British art handles in a whisper with gloves on. No one sees Sandrine for a moment less lily-like than she is because of the two children whose parents mav not marry and defv the social economics of the “dot!’’ Her love for them and the melancholy booby Jacques hallows to martyrdom the death of over-work and under-feeding that removes the dearest of the workshop sisterhood. When undeserved disaster brings the high head of Gabielle down to the dust she is helped up with a kindness rough and talkative but fully effective. Ugly things are here named in the light as whitelv as by an angel, and put by: the lingering touches of a Frenchwoman’s genius are kept for little illuminations like this, when Marie Claire regards her sister-in-law to be : It was to her eyes that I returned especially. They were so calm and gentle that you turned your own away from them with some reluctance. The light entered deeply into them, and you might almost have said there was daylight behind them. Then the dialogue is so simple, so clearcut —no lengthy talking as in the intimate places of English romance; but every syllable falls into the picture with that economy which is France’s pride. Mademoiselle Herminie, the ‘Title old Burgundian whom Marie Claire mothers like a baby, speaks often of the man whose love of money wrecked her life:— There was some rancour in the sound of her voice, and I dared then to ask her, “What did you do on the day of ' your sweetheart’s marriage?” To my great surprise, she replied simply, “I went to the church, and I prayed a long time for his happiness.” And thus our Sundays followed one another, filled with the open air and gentle words. And as I listened to Mother Herminie, I seemed to receive from her the precious gift of a very long life made up of love and courage, of wretchedness and regrets. Tho story keeps to its orbit. Digressions

only throw up the singleness of the object, to project Mai’ie Claire’s workshop in sun and shade, laughter and tears, on the reader’s mind. It is Marguerite Audoux’s theatre, and self-sufficient to her, also her textless sermon, this establishment which is to the finely-strung, vibrative Madame Dalignac the epitome of resonant charities and sounding social experiments across the Channel. When her lover-husband dies she puts by temptations towards the ways of other costumieres and falls into a morass of debt trying to carry on and pay her girls a living wage. When at last misplaced and ill-requited family affection forces her to enter into a loathed partnership that meant the ruin of her ideals, merciful death calls in her own debts to outraged nature—those days and nights sacrificed to the whims of capricious customers, the strain of busy seasons and empty seasons, of paying off and signing on, felt by herself no less than by the scattered girls. Yet how jollily French is the camaraderie between patron, patronne, and work girls. It is the only salvage out of the economic wreck here depicted without one word of polemic or propaganda. “Paris, Paris, Paradise of women,” as little Duretour sings, how long will your queenship last built on foundations 'like these ? Marguerite Audoux’s art, as we have said, is so free of polemic that no one could tell whether she is a feminist or not. Yet either her bent is that way, or the Code Napoleon, which ground women every way to the dust under the feet of men, has brought some boomerang revenges. The women are so strong ; the men are eo futile. The patron is the only likeable man in the book. The spinelesk Jacques, whose marriage with a dowered bride breaks Sandrine’s heart, expiates his crime in floods of tears, and is finally picked up, dried, and elevated to honourable domesticity and a state of grateful ‘ adoration by Gabielle. after another lover ! jilts her for fear of Grundyan gossip. The young Frenchman who weds a dowerless bride is nearly as roundly framed by the finger of scorn as he who shoots a fox in England. Worse than these supine jelly-fish is the actively unpleasant Clement, who works on Marie Claire’s affection for Ids aunt, Madame Dalignac, to make her accept him. The Marie Claire sequence must become atrilogy to let us know what happened when the Aunt Clement, snubbed and exploited, died three_ days before the date fixed for the wedding. “Marie Claire’s Workshop” is a book of charm, sweetness, strength, and sadness. Nowhere do its lines work for happiness on earth, save in the home which should have been Sandrine’s. But we have not seen the last of Marie Claire.

Permanent link to this item

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/OW19210125.2.223

Bibliographic details

Otago Witness, Issue 3489, 25 January 1921, Page 62

Word Count
1,445

“MARIE CLAIRE’S WORKSHOP." Otago Witness, Issue 3489, 25 January 1921, Page 62

“MARIE CLAIRE’S WORKSHOP." Otago Witness, Issue 3489, 25 January 1921, Page 62

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