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Updated: June 30, 2025
We have some Frenchwomen at the hospital, the servants who keep us in running order the dear cook whom we love not only for her baked meats, proud of her soldier son once a professor, now a sergeant, and she a woman of property, with two houses in the little town; patient, kind, very stubborn about her dishes, which have in them the essential juices and savours which characterise all things really French.
That business capability and thriftiness runs through almost all Frenchwomen of a certain class, and when I hear, as of course I often do, the frivolous, butterfly, pleasure-loving Frenchwoman spoken of, that energetic, hard-working bourgeoise comes into my mind. We all who live in France know the type well. The whole nation is frugal.
While fanatic Frenchwomen on the battlefields cut the noses off wounded Germans, and mutilated them when they could, and while the Germans were burning villages and killing their peaceful inhabitants, if one of them had so much as fired a shot, in all quietness the great societies for the care of the wounded were doing their work. And in this Switzerland especially bore the palm.
And I should like to get your rooms fitted up for you, too, before you arrive. I am anxious to do all in my power to meet your wishes. I will make every arrangement with that end in view; and if you can suggest anything yourself that does not occur to me I shall be glad. You had better bring an English maid out with you, or a German. Frenchwomen are flighty."
Frenchmen and Frenchwomen only deserve to be massacred or starved if they are so lost to all sense of what is just as to venture to struggle against the dismemberment of their country, and do not understand how meet and right it is that their fellow-countrymen in Alsace should be converted into German subjects.
Therefore all that has been said about her on this score must be restricted, alike as to the defects of her education and the brilliancy of her genius. With those Frenchwomen who have written at once largely and loosely, it is pleasant to contrast their contemporaries, Madame de Sévigné and Madame la Fayette, both of whom always wrote well.
Frenchwomen, as a rule, are perhaps less instinctively "courageous," in the elementary sense, than their Anglo-Saxon sisters. They are afraid of more things, and are less ashamed of showing their fear.
An Englishwoman forces everything into form; though in her case the love of form does not produce the sentiment of art. No matter what may be said against it, Protestantism and Catholicism explain the differences which make the love of Frenchwomen so far superior to the calculating, reasoning love of Englishwomen. Protestantism doubts, searches, and kills belief; it is the death of art and love.
Whatever the Frenchman about town may be, he seems by no means typical of the many millions of Frenchmen who are not about town. And if Frenchwomen, as I have heard Frenchmen say, are légères, they are the best mothers in the world, and their "lightness" is not vulgarly obtruded. They say many domestic tragedies will be played at the conclusion of the war.
I spoke to you just now about a fire of straw: now we have a fire such as Frenchwomen make in their chaufferettes, or foot-stoves. A handful of charcoal-dust, and a few live embers between two layers of ashes, is enough for the whole day; which is economical, is it not? but then it throws out only just warmth enough to keep one's feet comfortable. And so it is with reptiles.
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