Another time I obtained a glimpse of the home of a bankrupt widow of a “little burgess” who had had to vacate a house with grounds to take up her residence in a more modest dwelling. Such a woman in France would be content to live and die a very plain and simple person, and, having had to compound with her creditors, would have considered herself bound to lay out her new existence upon lines of the most rigid economy, above all, as there was a large family of sons and daughters not yet of an age, nor having the requisite education, to provide for themselves. The house I visited was one of a row, a poor, mean quarter, where no sane person would look for any appearance of affluence. Over the fan-light the house rejoiced in an imposing Celtic name in three words in raised white letters, not the cheapest form of house nomenclature. A gardener was engaged trimming the infinitesimal garden front; the youngest girl, of twelve, was mounting her bicycle to career off with a companion; in the hall were three other bicycles belonging to different members of the family. The furniture of the drawing-room was new and expensive, and a young lady was playing up-to-date waltzes on the piano, without a trace of concern or anxiety; no sign anywhere of economy, of sacrifice, of worry. Yet I knew I was entering a house where there was practically nothing to live upon, and where the proceeds of a sale that should have gone to the woman’s creditors had been squandered on unnecessary things. One may criticise the meannesses to which thrift drives the frugal French, but I never felt more near to falling in love with what is to me an uncongenial vice than I did on leaving my native land after this visit, to have commercial dealings once more with people not above their business, instead of trading with the spurious descendants of kings, whose sole anxiety is to make you feel their social superiority and extraordinary condescension, to find these excellent French “little people” all that Lever told us the Irish were but have ceased to be—cordial, delightful, intelligent, and simple. For that is the great, the abiding charm of the French middle class—the absence of vulgar pretension. Every man to his trade, and an artist at that—such is the wise French motto. I begin to suspect the late Felix Faure, the tanner of France, must have had some Irish blood in his veins, for he was well worthy to play the sovereign to that mock prince of the blood, the Irish tradesman.