Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/59

 avarice and meanness, it deserves our respect because of its national significance. To it do we owe the exterior neatness of person and home, the tidiness of the poorest interior of Paris. Where else but in Paris will you find a concierge living with her family in one small room and a kitchen just large enough to turn in, and able to preserve that space scrupulously clean, inoffensive to sight and smell, with not so much as an article of clothing hanging about, nor a speck of dust visible, nor an ornament or chair disturbed? I have not penetrated into the ragpicker's City of the Sun, about which Maxime du Camp wrote so eloquently in the Revue des deux Mondes some years ago; but I have no doubt that even in that elemental nest of humanity I should find orderliness, as far as it is compatible with the ragpicker's trade, to be the general law. Does not M. de Haussonville, in his Enfance à Paris, assure us, after repeated visits to the doss-houses of London and Paris, that the striking difference between these fugitive shelters for the refuse of mankind in both capitals is a certain dim striving towards cleanliness and taste noticeable in the Parisian outcast, and utterly lacking in the London pariah? The impartial traveller, who knows little of France and French characteristics, will have no difficulty in believing this when he crosses the Channel, and the first thing his eye encounters