Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/253

 infancy, stand six deep before the slimy bar, till the ever-flowing liquor damps down their fiercest fires, and the great city is once more at rest. The imagination of him that saw hell could hardly picture the final scene." And yet you will read such things printed of the French not immediately under your inspection that make you ask yourself if the rowdy love-making and public-house bars constitute the worst possible degradation of humanity. The most obvious, the most offensive assuredly, but not the least innocent. M. Octave Mirbeau has recently done me the honour to send me his latest book, Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre. Not even Zola could conceive a more terrible indictment against his own race. All classes are therein depicted as equally corrupt, shameless, brutalised by irrepressed and irrepressible vice,—nobles, bourgeoisie, servants of both sexes, city and country folk, artisans and peasants. The book has an air of sincerity, of being the truthful record of a lady's-maid's career in Paris and in the country, so that one cannot discuss it as mere vicious raving, and every character introduced is worse than the one that went before. I question if humanity has ever been dragged into such infamous depths with such a singular display of enjoyment in its degradation. I read such charges, and I am stupefied with their divergence from my own personal experience. The French