Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/302

 roof. What will you? When a woman is not his own wife, a Parisian does not put any price upon her honour. True, he makes up for this laxity in regard to his neighbour's wife by arrogating to himself the right to murder his own faithless wife with impunity. By this legal ferocity he buys back the privilege of considering himself at times a model of Roman virtue.

The salon is all very well, so are the songs of Montmartre, the Théâtre Rosse, but there is just one little point, a solitary point, on which the Frenchman is in no mood to blaguer, not being Molière, and that is his wife's fidelity to the marriage vow, which vow, if we are to believe him (I confess I do not) he spends his own life in breaking. He laughs at most other things, but here he displays a desperate and unhumorous gravity. The law considerately assists him, by telling him that killing is no murder. But if he doesn't laugh, his neighbours round him laugh joyously for him. The infidelity of another man's wife is the best of all jokes in France, and public sympathy always goes with the wife.

And yet, while laughing at himself, and at all things round him, the Frenchman offers us the ideal of an indefatigable worker in whatever road he has elected to run his career. If he can talk well, he can work hard, and no race seeks so strenuously as his to achieve perfection in