French Perspectives

ar has marooned in Topsbridge, I have recovered my sense of proportion. The Merciers are not plain bourgeois. They are bourgeois-bohemian, a species that looks very queer in New England, or any other Anglo-Saxon portion of our country. It is alien even in New York. M. Mercier is a musician, a 'cellist of international reputation, and you at once perceive in him the artist's passion and zest for life. His face, heavy and plebeian in outline, fairly flickers with humor: a spicy Rabelaisian humor, emphasized by a brush of tawny hair and a pair of startling bronze mustaches. Yet the most solid, and rural, and domestic, and endearing of the French bourgeois virtues stand out all over his protuberant person. He is built on a large plan, and when I meet him walking on our country roads, between Madame, his equally monumental wife, and Mademoiselle his daughter, it is literally impossible to believe in shells that fall like express trains into ancient Gothic towns; in heartbroken women dragging back from concentration camps with newborn babies wrapped in newspaper In their arms. This genial family group suggests the lesser cafes of the boulevards, the Concert louche, the Bois on a Sunday. It suggests a little rose-arbor where, after a day spent in digging his ancestral acres, in counting the apples on the trees, and the bunches of grapes on the vines, a man may sit in his shirt-sleeves in the midst of his embroidering and admiring women-folk, drink sirop and contemplate ...