A French crowd (I am not the first to notice this) always _appears_ cleaner than an English crowd. This is due to the self-respecting habits of the French lower classes. In England the poor people in towns will wear old and dirty things that have belonged to middle-class people; in France they wear cheap things of their own and take care to have them clean, especially on Sunday or a fête-day. Peasants’ and workmen’s wives look as clean as ladies; in fact, their washed caps, prettily ironed, have a fresher appearance than ladies’ bonnets. The men, too, in their new blouses, appear cleaner than a _bourgeois_ in a black coat. In summer, all the young peasants look as if they put on a new straw hat every Sunday. [Sidenote: Effects of Coal-smoke.] [Sidenote: English Towns.] [Sidenote: Paper and Paint.] [Sidenote: The old-fashioned French Way.] [Sidenote: Carpet and _Parquet_.] Much of this external cleanliness is due merely to the absence of coal-smoke. In London and Manchester it is difficult and expensive to be clean. The cheery and bright external appearance of French houses is due to the same cause, and now the common use of coal is spoiling it in some places. As for English houses in large and smoky towns, the melancholy dinginess of the outer walls is accepted as a matter of course, but cleanliness has its revenge in the interior and even on the whitened doorstep. There is one point as to which the English are greatly superior to the French, especially to middle-class provincial families,--they renew paper and paint. The good old-fashioned French way was to neglect papering and painting till further neglect could make it no worse, and then to think no more of the matter. There is a strong conventionalism about these subjects everywhere. In the inside of a room English people are more particular about the walls and ceiling, French people about the floor. There is many a middle-class French dining-room where the only beauty is the extreme cleanliness of the bare boards. The English like carpets, which are more favourable to comfort than to cleanliness, the French prefer the healthy waxed oak _parquet_, and often content themselves with a deal _plancher_ or red tiles. [Sidenote: English Love of Whitewash.] [Sidenote: Whitewash unknown in French Farm-houses.] The humbler classes in England have a great superiority in their love of whitewash. The passion for whitewash which has been so disastrous in churches is excellent in farm-houses, and I have known many a farm-house in Lancashire that was kept fresh and pleasant by the use of it. In French farm-houses it seems to be perfectly unknown; and although their interiors are admirably adapted for pictorial treatment, and have been charmingly painted by Edouard Frère and others, the rich browns of the coarsely-plastered walls are really nothing but dirt, though delightful in colour and texture from an artist’s point of view.[55] [Sidenote: French Bedding.]