Henri Lavedan shows us, in that detestable play, _Le Vieux Marcheur_, a country teacher, Mademoiselle Léontine Falempin, all that she ought not to be; and M. de Vogüé, to be true to the modern traditions of the French aristocrat, when he makes the base heroine of his dull novel, _Les Morts qui Parlent_, go wrong, jeeringly says, “So acted the pupil of the good M. Pécaut.” M. Pécaut, a respected and popular citizen who died lately, established an excellent lay institution for girls at Fontenay-aux-Roses, and M. de Vogüé’s cowardly attack upon a dead man of whom the world knew nothing but good, by implying that a woman is impure because she has been brought up in his college, aroused the just indignation of every fair-minded Frenchman. If the theme were not too unsavoury M. de Vogüé would deserve that I should retort by revealing the tales of scandal and vice I have learned of a fashionable convent near Paris,—and these stories do not reach me from outsiders, but from four women who were educated therein. It is a source of astonishment to me how inventive the French “little people” are in the matter of domestic stores. In Ireland, certainly, you will see nothing like it, but perhaps it may be different in England. Here all sorts of things are made at home: wines, spirits, liqueurs, and essences; jams, jellies, oil, vinegar, linen, bread, and honey. Everything in nature is turned to useful account, and the housewives are never idle. They have fruit and vegetables in abundance, and live, on the whole, well, if frugally. Their lands produce flax, hemp, cloves, colza, wheat, maize, every kind of flower, according to season and soil; and such is the elasticity of their temperament and their unsleeping industry, that they have been able to float above that tidal wave, the phyloxera, as great as any of the Egyptian plagues, as they floated above the national disaster of “’70.” The hero of M. René Bazin’s most charming novel _La Terre qui Meurt_, is a _métayer_; and _métayage_ is land worked on the half-profit system, a midway position between labourer and freeholder. The sermon preached by this mournful little story is that the French land is dying for want of cultivation, as the peasants are swarming into the big towns, where they are not wanted, and leaving to waste the land that needs them. Each name in France is selected with a regard for the dignity of mankind. The cook and the barber call themselves “artists,” and thereby efface any menial touch from their calling. The retired servant calls himself a _rentier_, and the retired labourer decks himself in the gentlemanly title of _cultivateur_. You may be a _cultivateur_ with “lands and proud dwellings,” like the earl in the song, or you may modestly cultivate a single acre.