Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/94

 Bois without a trace of envy in their looks, comment on dresses, horses, equipages, bearing, as if it were but a pageant got up for their benefit. I am not sure that this is not one of the advantages of Society—one of its objects—to minister to the kindly and generous vanity of the workers of a country. These, by their labours, maintain it, dress it, wash for it, build for it, manufacture for it, keep in order for it the public roads, give the best of their blood, brains, nerve, and force to its triumphs, and are content to see how well the result of all this gigantic travail of a race looks in the show hours of national existence. The big dressmakers are repaid when, sitting in their loge of inspection, they watch the effect of their several creations on Varnishing Day, at Auteuil or Longchamps. The artistic temperament is at the root of all this contentedness, of these subtle gratifications which the Philistine workman does not apprehend. The Frenchman brings this sentiment of art into all he does. The word "artist" is applied to cook, dressmaker, milliner, hair-dresser. In many ways M. Demolins has shown us that the race is inferior to the Anglo-Saxon races, but it has one essential superiority—the absence of vulgarity in the artisan and shopkeeping classes. You can hold converse with pleasure and profit with your washerwoman, who also will, in all probability, be something of an artist, with the