Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/22

 *stances an ideal of conduct from which, if they will be true to their blood, they must not deviate. And so we are all decided upon the general French characteristic, excitability, forgetting the immense provincial differences that are to be found in the people of France as well as elsewhere. The heavy Flemish natives of Picardy, large eaters, deep drinkers, hard workers, slow of speech, somewhat coarse and unperverted, are as French as the natives of Latin Provence, garrulous, sober, alert, and exuberant. They are not less French than the wily, hard-bargaining Norman, who eats and drinks as much, but brings a clearer brain into business, and may always be relied upon to get the better of his neighbour in all transactions; or the dreamy Celt of the Breton coast, the thriftless slave of superstition, with brains to spare as well as prejudices, but not intended by nature as a pillar of the Temple of Wisdom. Not less French the rich green midlands than the white and sunburnt south, the champagne vineyards eastward, and the rocky Cévennes rolling southward. Could anybody differ, more from the morose and inhospitable Lyonese, in whose eyes every outsider is the enemy against whom he sedulously barricades his doors, in whose esteem the pick of humanity is the prosperous silk-merchant, than the pushing, loud-mannered Marseillais, with what he would fain have us take for his