Quite a number of changes came about with our annexation of an artist and his garden. Chief among these changes was the surprising discovery of finding ourselves, at the end of a week, in possession of a villa.

"It\'s next door," Renard remarked, in the casual way peculiar to artists. "You are to have the whole house to yourselves, all but the top floor; the people who own it keep that to live in. There\'s a garden of the right sort, with espaliers, also rose trees, and a tea house; quite the right sort of thing altogether."

The unforeseen, in its way, is excellent and admirable. De l\'imprévu, surely this is the dash of seasoning—the caviare we all crave in life\'s somewhat too monotonous repasts. But as men have been known to admire the still life in wifely character, and then repented their choice, marrying peace only to court dissension, so we, incontinently deserting our humble inn chambers to take possession of a grander state, in the end found the capital of experience drained to pay for our little infidelity.

[Illustration: A DEPARTURE—VILLERVILLE]

The owners of the villa Belle Etoile, our friend announced, he had found greatly depressed; of this, their passing mood, he had taken such advantage as only comes to the knowing. "They speak of themselves drearily as \'deux pauvres malheureux\' with this villa still on their hands, and here they are almost \'touching June,\' as they put it. They also gave me to understand that only the finest flowers of the aristocracy had had the honor of dwelling in this villa. They have been able, I should say, more or less successfully to deflower this \'fine fleur\' of some of their gold. But they are very meek just now—they were willing to listen to reason."

The "two poor unhappies" were looking surprisingly contented an hour later, when we went in to inspect our possessions. They received us with such suave courtesy, that I was quite certain Renard\'s skill in transactions had not played its full gamut of capacity.

Civility is the Frenchman\'s mask; he wears it as he does his skin—as a matter of habit. But courtesy is his costume de bal; he can only afford to don his bravest attire of smiles and graciousness when his pocket is in holiday mood. Madame Fouchet we found in full ball-room toilet; she was wreathed in smiles. Would ces dames give themselves the trouble of entering? would they see the house or the garden first? would they permit their trunks to be sent for? Monsieur Fouchet, meanwhile, was making a brave second to his wife\'s bustling welcome; he was rubbing his hands vigorously, a somewhat suspicious action in a Frenchman, I have had occasion to notice, after the completion of a bargain. Nature had cast this mild-eyed individual for the part of accompanyist in the comedy we call life; a r?le he sometimes varied as now, with the office of claqueur, when an uncommonly clever proof of madame\'s talent for business drew from him this noiseless tribute of applause. His weak, fat contralto called after us, as we followed madame\'s quick steps up the waxed stairway; he would be in readiness, he said, to show us the garden, "once the chambers were visited."

"It wasn\'t a real stroke, mesdames, it was only a warning!" was the explanation conveyed to us in loud tones, with no reserve of whispered delicacy, when we expressed regret at monsieur\'s detention below stairs; a partially paralyzed leg, dragged painfully after the latter\'s flabby figure, being the obvious cause of this detention.

The stairway had the line of beauty, describing a pretty curve before its glassy steps led us to a narrow entry; it had also the brevity which is said to be the very soul, l\'anima viva, of all true wit; but it was quite long and straight enough to serve Madame Fouchet as a stage for a prolonged monologue, enlivened with much affluence of gesture. Fouchet\'s seizure, his illness, his convalescence, and present physical condition—a condition which appeared to be bristling with the tragedy of danger, "un vrai drame d\'anxiété"—was graphically conveyed to us. The horrors of the long winter also, so sad for a Parisian—"si triste pour la Parisienne, ces hivers de province"—together with the miseries of her own home life, between this paralytic of a husband below stairs, and above, her mother, an old lady of eighty, nailed to her sofa with gout. "You may thus figure to yourselves, mesdames, what a melancholy season is the winter! And now, with this villa still on our hands, and the season already announcing itself, ruin stares us in the face, mesdames—ruin!"

It was a moving picture. Yet we remained strangely unaffected by this tale of woe. Madame Fouchet herself, the woman, not the actress, was to blame, I think, for our unfeelingness. Somehow, to connect woe, ruin, sadness, melancholy, or distress, in a word, of any kind with our landlady\'s opulent figure, we found a difficult acrobatic mental feat. She presented to the eye outlines and features that could only be likened, in point of prosperity, to a Dutch landscape. Like certain of the mediaeval saints presented by the earlier delineators of the martyrs as burning above a slow fire, while wearing smiles of purely animal content, as if in full enjoyment of the temperature, this lady\'s sufferings were doubtless an invisible discipline, the hair shirt which her hardened cuticle felt only to be a pleasurable itching.

"Voilà, mesdames!" It was with a magnificent gesture that madame opened doors and windows. The drama of her life was forgotten for the moment in the conscious pride of presenting us with such a picture as her gay little house offered.

Inside and out, summer and the sun were blooming and shining with spendthrift luxuriance. The salon opened directly on the garden; it would have been difficult to determine just where one began and the domain of the other ended, with the pinks and geraniums that nodded in response to the peach and pear blossoms in the garden. A bit of faded Aubusson and a print representing Madame Geoffrin\'s salon in full session, with a poet of the period transporting the half-moon grouped listeners about him to the point of tears, were evidences of the refined tastes of our landlady in the arts; only a sentimentalist would have hung that picture in her salon. Other decorations further proved her as belonging to both worlds. The chintzes gay with garlands of roses, with which walls, beds, and chairs were covered, revealed the mundane element, the woman of decorative tastes, possessed of a hidden passion for effective backgrounds. Two or three wooden crucifixes, a prie-dieu, and a couple of saints in plaster, went far to prove that this excellent bourgeoise had thriftily made her peace with Heaven. It was a curious mixture of the sacred and the profane.

Down below, beneath the windows overlooking the sea, lay the garden. All the houses fronting the cliff had similar little gardens, giving, as the French idiom so prettily puts it, upon the sea. But compared to these others, ours was as a rose of Sharon blooming in the midst of little deserts. Renard had been entirely right about this particular bit of earth attached to our villa. It was a gem of a garden. It was a French garden, and therefore, entirely as a matter of course, it had walls. It was as cut off from the rest of the world as if it had been a prison or a fortification.

The Frenchman, above all others, appears to have the true sentiment of seclusion, when the society of trees and flowers is to be enjoyed. Next to woman, nature is his fetish. True to his national taste in dress, he prefers that both should be costumed à la Parisienne; but as poet and lover, it is his instinct to build a wall about his idol, that he may enjoy his moments of expansion unseen and unmolested. This square of earth, for instance, was not much larger than the space covered by the chamber roof above us; and yet, with the high walls towering over the rose-stalks, it was as secluded as a monk\'s cloister. We found it, indeed, on later acquaintance, as poetic and delicately sensuous a retreat as the romance-writers would wish us to believe did those mediaeval connoisseurs of comfort, when, with sandalled feet, they paced their own convent garden-walks. Fouchet was a broken-down shopkeeper; but somewhere hidden within, there lurked the soul of a Maecenas; he knew how to arrange a feast—of roses. The garden was a bit of greensward, not much larger than a pocket handkerchief; but the grass had the right emerald hue, and one\'s feet sank into the rich turf as into the velvet of an oriental rug. Small as was the enclosure, between the espaliers and the flower-beds serpentined minute paths of glistening pebbles. Nothing which belonged to a garden had been forgotten, not even a pine from the tropics, and a bench under the pine that was just large enough for two. This latter was an ideal little spot in which to bring a friend or a book. One could sit there and gorge one\'s self with sweets; a dance was perpetually going on—the gold-and-purple butterflies fluttering gayly from morning till night; and the bees freighted the air with their buzzing. If one tired of perfumes and dancing, there was always music to be enjoyed, from a full orchestra. The sea, just the other side of the wall of osiers, was always in voice, whether sighing or shouting. The larks and blackbirds had a predilection for this nest of color, announcing their preference loudly in a combat of trills. And once or twice, we were quite certain, a nightingale with Patti notes had been trying its liquid scales in the dark.

It was in this garden that our acquaintance with our landlord deepened into something like friendship. Monsieur Fouchet was always to be found there, tying up the rose-trees, or mending the paths, or shearing the bit of turf.

"Mon jardin, c\'est un peu moi, vous savez—it is my pride and my consolation." At the latter word, Fouchet was certain to sigh.

Then we fell to wondering just what grief had befallen this amiable person which required Horatian consolation. Horace had need of rose-leaves to embalm his disappointments, for had he not cooled his passions by plunging into the bath of literature? Besides, Horace was bitten by the modern rabies: he was as restless as an American. When at Rome was he not always sighing for his Sabine farm, and when at the farm always regretting Rome? But this harmless, innocent-eyed, benevolent-browed old man, with his passive brains tied up in a foulard, o\' morning\'s, and his bourgeois feet adorned with carpet slippers, what grief in the past had bitten his poor soul and left its mark still sore?

"It isn\'t monsieur—it is madame who has made the past dark," was Renard\'s comment, when we discussed our landlord\'s probable acquaintance with regret—or remorse.

Whatever secret of the past may have hovered over the Fouchet household, the evil bird had not made its nest in madame\'s breast, that was clear; her smooth, white brow was the sign of a rose-leaf conscience; that dark curtain of hair, looped madonna-wise over each ear, framed a face as unruffled as her conscience.

She was entirely at peace with her world, and with heaven as well, that was certain. Whatever her sins, the confessional had purged her. Like others, doubtless, she had found a husband and the provinces excellent remedies for a damaged reputation. She lived now in the very odor of sanctity; the cure had a pipe in her kitchen, with something more sustaining, on certain bright afternoons. Although she was daily announcing to us her approaching dissolution—"I die, mesdames—I die of ennui"—it seemed to me there were still signs, at times, of a vigorous resuscitation. The cure\'s visits were wont to produce a deeper red in the deep bloom of her cheek; the mayor and his wife, who drank their Sunday coffee in the arbor, brought, as did Beatrix\'s advent to Dante, vita nuova to this homesick Parisian.

There were other pleasures in her small world, also, which made life endurable. Bargaining, when one teems with talent, may be as exciting as any other form of conquest. Madame\'s days were chiefly passed in imitation of the occupation so dear to an earlier, hardier race, that race kings have knighted for their powers in dealing mightily with their weaker neighbors. Madame, it is true, was only a woman, and Villerville was somewhat slimly populated. But in imitation of her remote feudal lords, she also fell upon the passing stranger, demanding tribute. When the stranger did not pass, she kept her arm in practice, so to speak, by extracting the last sou in a transaction from a neighbor, or by indulging in a drama in which the comedy of insult was matched by the tragedy of contempt.

One of these mortal combats it was my privilege to witness. The war arose on our announcement to Mère Mouchard, the lady of the inn by the sea, of our decision to move next door. To us Mère Mouchard presented the unruffled plumage of a dove; her voice also was as the voice of the same, mellowed by sucking. Ten minutes later the town was assembled to lend its assistance at the encounter between our two landladies. Each stood on their respective doorsteps with arms akimbo and head thrust forward, as geese protrude head and tongue in moments of combat. And it was thus, the mere hissed, that her boarders were stolen from her—under her very nose—while her back was turned, with no more thought of honesty or shame than a——. The word was never uttered. The mère\'s insult was drowned in a storm of voices? for there came a loud protest from the group of neighbors. Madame Fouchet, meanwhile, was sustaining her own role with great dignity. Her attitude of self-control could only have been learned in a school where insult was an habitual weapon. She smiled, an infuriating, exasperating, successful smile. She showed a set of defiant white teeth, and to her proud white throat she gave a boastful curve. Was it her fault if ces dames knew what comfort and cleanliness were? if they preferred "des chambres garnies avec go?t, vraiment artistiques"—to rooms fit only for peasants? Ces dames had just come from Paris; doubtless, they were not yet accustomed to provincial customs—aux moeurs provinciales. Then there were exchanged certain melodious acerbities, which proved that these ladies had entered the lists on previous occasions, and that each was well practised in the other\'s methods of warfare. Opportunely, Renard appeared on the scene; his announcement that we proposed still to continue taking our repasts with the mere, was as oil on the sea of trouble. A reconciliation was immediately effected, and the street as immediately lost all interest in the play, the audience melting away as speedily as did the wrath of the disputants.

"Le bon Dieu soit loué," cried Madame Fouchet, puffing, as she mounted the stairs a few moments later—"God be praised"—she hadn\'t come here to the provinces to learn her rights—to be taught her alphabet. Mère Mouchard, forsooth, who wanted a week\'s board as indemnity for her loss of us! A week\'s board—for lodgings scorned by peasants!

"Ah, these Normans! what a people, what a people! They would peel the skin off your back! They would sell their children! They would cheat the devil himself!"

"You, madame, I presume, are from Paris." Madame smiled as she answered, a thin fine smile, richly seasoned with scorn. "Ah, mesdames! All the world can\'t boast of Paris as a birthplace, unfortunately. I also, I am a Norman, mais je ne m\'en fiche pas! Most of my life, however, I\'ve lived in Paris, thank God!" She lifted her head as she spoke, and swept her hands about her waist to adjust the broad belt, an action pregnant with suggestions. For it was thus conveyed to us, delicately, that such a figure as hers was not bred on rustic diet; also, that the Parisian glaze had not failed of its effect on the coarser provincial clay.

Meanwhile, below in the garden, her husband was meekly tying up his rose-trees.

Neither of the landladies\' husbands had figured in the street-battle. It had been a purely Amazonian encounter, bloodless but bitter. Both the husbands of these two belligerent landladies appeared singularly well trained. Mouchard, indeed, occupied a comparatively humble sphere in his wife\'s ménage. He was perpetually to be seen in the court-yard, at the back of the house, washing dogs, or dishes, in a costume in which the greatest economy of cloth compatible with decency had been triumphantly solved. His wife ran the house, and he ran the errands, an arrangement which, apparently, worked greatly to the satisfaction of both. But Mouchard was not the first or the second French husband who, on the threshold of his connubial experience, had doubtless had his role in life appointed to him, filling the same with patient acquiescence to the very last of the lines.

There is something very touching in the subjection of French husbands. In point of meekness they may well serve, I think, as models to their kind. It is a meekness, however, which does not hint of humiliation; for, after all, what humiliation can there be in being thoroughly understood? The Frenchwoman, by virtue of centuries of activity, in the world and in the field, has become an expert in the art of knowing her man; she has not worked by his side, under the burn of the noon sun, or in the cimmerian darkness of the shop-rear, counting the pennies, for nothing. In exchanging her illusions for the bald front of fact, man himself has had to pay the penalty of this mixed gain. She tests him by purely professional standards, as man tests man, or as he has tested her, when in the ante-matrimonial days he weighed her dot in the scale of his need. The Frenchwoman and Shakespeare are entirely of one mind; they perceive the great truth of unity in the scheme of things:

"Woman\'s test is man\'s taste."

This is the first among the great truths in the feminine grammar of assent. French masculine taste, as its criterion, has established the excellent doctrine of utilitarianism. With quick apprehension the Frenchwoman has mastered this fact; she has cleverly taken a lesson from ophidian habits—she can change her skin, quickly shedding the sentimentalist, when it comes to serious action, to don the duller raiment of utility. She has accepted her world, in other words, as she finds it, with a philosopher\'s shrug. But the philosopher is lined with the logician; for this system of life has accomplished the miracle of making its women logical; they have grasped the subtleties of inductive reasoning. Marriage, for example, they know is entered into solely on the principle of mutual benefit; it is therefore a partnership, bon; now, in partnerships sentiments and the emotions are out of place, they only serve to dim the eye; those commodities, therefore, are best conveyed to other markets than the matrimonial one; for in purely commercial transactions one has need of perfect clearness of vision, if only to keep one well practised in that simple game called looking out for one\'s own interest. In Frenchwomen, the ratiocinationist is extraordinarily developed; her logic penetrates to the core of things.

Hence it is that Mouchard washes dishes.

Monsieur Jourdain, in Molière\'s comedy, who expressed such surprise at finding that he had been talking prose for forty years without knowing it, was no more amazed than would Mère Mouchard have been had you announced to her that she was a logician; or that her husband\'s daily occupations in the bright little court-yard were the result of a system. Yet both facts were true.

In that process we now know as the survival of the fittest, the mère\'s capacity had snuffed out her weaker spouse\'s incompetency; she had taken her place at the helm, because she belonged there by virtue of natural fitness. There were no tender illusions which would suffer, in seeing the husband allotted to her, probably by her parents and the dot system, relegated to the ignominy of passing his days washing dishes—dishes which she cooked and served—dishes, it should be added, which she was entirely conscious were cooked by the hand of genius, and which she garnished with a sauce and served with a smile, such as only issue from French kitchens.