Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/266

 established an excellent lay institution for girls at Fontenay-aux-Roses, and M. de Vogüé's cowardly attack upon a dead man of whom the world knew nothing but good, by implying that a woman is impure because she has been brought up in his college, aroused the just indignation of every fair-minded Frenchman. If the theme were not too unsavoury M. de Vogüé would deserve that I should retort by revealing the tales of scandal and vice I have learned of a fashionable convent near Paris,—and these stories do not reach me from outsiders, but from four women who were educated therein.

It is a source of astonishment to me how inventive the French "little people" are in the matter of domestic stores. In Ireland, certainly, you will see nothing like it, but perhaps it may be different in England. Here all sorts of things are made at home: wines, spirits, liqueurs, and essences; jams, jellies, oil, vinegar, linen, bread, and honey. Everything in nature is turned to useful account, and the housewives are never idle. They have fruit and vegetables in abundance, and live, on the whole, well, if frugally. Their lands produce flax, hemp, cloves, colza, wheat, maize, every kind of flower, according to season and soil; and such is the elasticity of their temperament and their unsleeping industry, that they have been able to float above that tidal wave, the phyloxera, as great as any