Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 June 1877 — The French Feasant. [ARTICLE]

The French Feasant.

The peasantry in France form a class, a world by themselves, full of prejudices, devoid of culture and very independent in their tone of feeling. The French peasant is inconceivably ignorant, and yet very intelligent ; his manners are good, and he can talk well; but he can neither read nor write, and his knowledge of geography is so small that he cannot comprehend what France is, much less any foreign State. Freed from the grinding oppressions of the past, he is still under bondage to the iron slavery of custom. Every other Frenchman may dress as he chooses, but the peasant must always wear a blue blouse, a brownish gray cloak, and a hat of a peculiar shape. Custom also prescribes to him the furniture of his house; he must have a linen press, a clock and a bed, and these must be all of walnut wood. Cookery, which is the national talent, par excellence, does not exist for him. In the morning he has soup, cheaply compounded of hot water, in which float a few scraps of rusty bacon, a handful or two of pease, and a few • potatoes; and if there is not enough iff soup to satisfy his hunger, he finishes his meal with dry bread and cold water ad libitum. At noon he dines on potatoes, followed (as an occasional variety in his perennial diet) either with a pancake, a salad, or clotted milk. He never tastes wine or meat, except during hay-making and harvest, when he has a little bit of salt pork and a modest allowance of wine with a liberal admixture of water. Among the peasantry many of the old superstitions are still prevalent. Between husband and wife there is little love, but there is also little wrangling or disputing, and they are mutually true and helpful to one another. The children grow up in this cold home, under a rigia patriarchal discipline, in which personal chastisement plays an important part, and is continued even to mature age. In peasant as in town life, however, the tendency is toward change; the children now are in course of being educated; and the young men, although frugal still, are not so parsimonious as their lathers were. They smoke, heedless of the expense, a piece of extravagance which their stoic ancestors woi'ld have most sternly denounced; and in die train of tobacco the common comforts of life are slowly finding their way into the homes of the peasants,—AT. F. Tribune.