PICKLES AND PICARDS
A writer in theNouvelle Revue Françaisedrops a remark which it does one good to read. He says that in the old French villages on the Picardy front all that the English have taught the countryfolk in five years of cohabitation is to eat pickles with their boiled beef. Very likely this is a humorous perversion of the truth; but I should like to believe it. Not from any personal interest in pickles, though that will seem odd, and perhaps incredible, to my French friends, who seem to think that every Englishman must be a pickle-eater—just as we English used to think every Frenchman ate frogs. No doubt, however, this French generalization is fairly accurate; we are a nation of pickle-eaters, and if any one asks why, I guess the answer is cold beef. Anyhow, the idea has fascinated the French mind. Among the English characteristics of which Jules Lemaître once gave a list (from hearsay, which he thought, good, easy man, as authentic evidence as coming to see England for himself) I remember he mentions “Lespickles.” And it is the one English characteristic that has infected the Picards!
My reason for rejoicing is that they have not been infected by more than one, that in spite of alltemptations, etc., they remain (pickles excepted) true Picards. There have been times (particularly in mid-eighteenth century) when the French have shown a tendency to Anglomania. Let us be glad that these are over. Probably the French Revolution settled that point, as it settled so many others, by isolating France for the time being, and making her the common enemy. More than one of the Terrorists were Picards by race, but you may be sure they never ate pickles. But cohabitation may bring about the same result as isolation, in a different way. Our armies have lived for five years with the French; both natives and visitors have had ample opportunities for observing each other’s characteristics; and I like to think that both have parted with the profound conviction that, on either side, these are inimitable. Condiments, of course, excepted. They have adopted our pickles, and we have taken theirsauce bigarade, which is excellent with wild duck. Condiments, by the way, include the linguistic sort. We have seen the delight with which Lemaître wrote down that strange, abrupt, tart English word “pickles” in his French text. So some of our own scribblers wantonly and wickedly flavour their writings with an occasional French phrase, because it seems to them to give a piquancy, a zest. These apart, let us by all means admire one another’s qualities without seeking to interchange them. Let us jealously preserve our own characteristics, our own type, like the Picardy villagers.National peculiarities are the perpetual joy of travel (except when one side wants the window down and the other up), thebouquetof literature, the salt of life.
Talking of travel, we have been having a correspondence inThe Timeson the lavatories and the closed windows on the P.L.M. I am not using that railway myself just now, and I confess I like to see that here again the French remain obstinately French. France is endeared to us, like any other friend, by its weaknesses as well as its virtues; it would, for many of us, not be the old friend that we know and love without its occasional stuffiness and its occasional smells. Louis Veuillot once wrote a book called “Les Odeurs de Paris.” We have all smelt them, and should hardly recognize our Paris without them—though they must have had more pungency, a more racy, romantic flavour in Balzac’s Paris, the Paris of our dreams. Nowadays for the rich Balzacian smells you will have to visit some of the provincial towns of his novels, and so your pilgrimage will combine a literary with all factory interest. I know of one old Burgundian town—I will not name it, for obvious reasons—not mentioned, I fancy, by Balzac, quite untouched by time, with pepper-pot towers, a river in a deep ravine, and well worth a literary pilgrimage if only for its associations with Mme. de Sévigné and the Président de Brosses, where you have the added delight of the richest medieval odours powerfully assisted by a tannery—an unrivalled combination! Why do somany Englishmen grumble at these things instead of appreciating them æsthetically, as accompaniments of the French scene, as part of that varied experience which we call “abroad”? Or why do they explain them on the illiberal assumption of some inherent inferiority in the French character?
I find a typical specimen of this kind of explanation in Hazlitt’s “Notes of a Journey through France and Italy,” made about a century ago, when France was the very France (think of it!) that was being observed, and about to be described, by Balzac. One would have thought that the Londoner of 1824 (who must have been pretty well used to smells at home) would have found some other explanation than the physiological and psychological inferiority of the French. But hear him. “A Frenchman’s senses and understanding are alike insensible to pain—he recognizes (happily for himself) the existence only of that which adds to his importance or his satisfaction. He is delighted with perfumes, but passes over the most offensive smells and will not lift up his little finger to remove a general nuisance, for it is none to him.” To which he appends a note:—“One would think that a people so devoted to perfumes, who deal in essences and scents, and have fifty different sorts of snuffs, would be equally nice, and offended at the approach of every disagreeable odour. Not so. They seem to have no sense of the disagreeable in smells or tastes, as if their heads were stuffed with a cold, and hangover a dunghill, as if it were a bed of roses, or swallow the most detestable dishes with the greatest relish. The nerve of their sensibility is bound up at the point of pain.... They make the best of everything (which is a virtue)—and treat the worst with levity or complaisance (which is a vice).”
Well, well. When this was written French and English had not long ceased to be at war, and Hazlitt was never a sweet-tempered man. But you can still find the censorious Englishman who is ready decisively to mark off French characteristics into “virtues” and “vices,” according to his own English standard. There may, for all I know, be some Frenchman who gives us tit for tat. This type of critic is tiresome enough; but there is another that seems to me quite intolerable, the critic who detests all national peculiarities as such, and would level down all humanity to one monotonous level of sameness. As though uniformity were not already the plague of the modern world! We men all wear the same hat (despite the efforts of theDaily Mail), women all powder their noses in the same way, and the “cinema palaces” all show the same films, with the same “Mary” and the same “Dug.” For heaven’s sake, let us cling to our national peculiarities!
And that is why I welcome the intelligence that the Picards have taken over nothing from us but our pickles, and that the French travellers on the P.L.M. still insist on keeping the window up. Let ourenthusiasts for a uniform world ponder these facts. And it is a relief to think that they can never unify national landscapes. The village green, the cottage gardens, the chalk downs, the chines, the red coombs will always be English. The long straightroute nationaleand the skinny fowls that are always straying across it, the poplar-bordered streams, the trim vines ranked along the hill-side, the heavily-accoutred gendarme and the fat farmer in the stiff indigo blouse hobnobbing at theestaminet, these will always be French. Oh, but I would give something to see that indigo blouse again, and have a morning chat with the farmer! “Hé! père Martin, ça va toujours bien? Pas mal, m’sieu. Et la récolte? Dame! je ne m’en plains pas ... à la votre, m’sieu!” They may take our pickles, if they will, but let them remain themselves, our old French friends.