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if he does not demand two. And such wages as the creature gets twelve hundred and fifteen hundred francs a month, for something like four hours' work each day! Nor will this great man condescend to prepare the dessert or make pastry or confectionery; that is out of his line entirely. His business is with soups and sauces, with dainty entrées and delicate filets, with fish, and fowl, and game. In minor households, where his lordship is superseded by a female cook of less elaborate pretensions, his airs and elegancies are too often replaced by a system of covert thieving, which is extremely annoying, and against which it is impossible for foreigners to guard. A certain percentage is charged on every article purchased by the servants for the use of the household, which percentage is paid by the tradesman, and comes indirectly out of the pocket of the consumer. It is not unusual for servants to break glass and china intentionally, for the purpose of obtaining the percentage for replacing it. Nor does it at all avail the housekeeper to go to market herself, as the grocers, provision-dealers, etc., are in league with the servant, and will not fail to demand from the unhappy stranger as much as the cook had charged for her purchases, if not more. Besides, such a course of action will inevitably bring about a quarrel with the servants, who look upon the additional charges as their lawful perquisites. Sometimes a compromise is effected by the householder agreeing to pay the cook one sou on every franc expended for provisions or household utensils.

A gentleman who had kept house for some years, and who was very weary of this system of petty thieving, once called up his cook and asked her what sum she would charge additional to her present wages to act with perfect honesty in all matters. She named a fixed sum, which her employer agreed to pay. Matters went on very smoothly for a week or two, when the gentleman detected her again in some of her old practices. On being summoned before him, she did not deny the fact. "It has grown into a habit, sir-c'est plus fort que moi." The plea was allowed, and things were suffered to return to their olden channel.

ities, in the case of any dispute between the foreign master and the French servant, are altogether in favor of the latter. About a year ago a peculiarly flagrant case came under my own observation. The maid of an American lady was charged with having stolen a jeweled watch, which had mysteriously disappeared. A warrant was procured, and her trunks were searched. The watch was not found therein, but in its stead a quantity of the lady's fine embroidered under-garments and other articles which had been missing for a long time, whereupon the master of the house gave the girl into the hands of the police. When her trial came on, the line of defense adopted by her advocate was certainly a novel one. He took the ground that the American family was rich and the servant was poor, that she needed the articles which she had taken, and consequently took them; and, moreover, that the lady had no right to expose her servants to temptation by leaving her drawers and trunks unlocked. The girl was triumphantly acquitted, whereupon she turned round and sued her late employer for damages for false imprisonment !

The concierge is in all French houses an important and useful functionary. And if this class be civil, honest, and obliging (and they usually are so), they are not only useful, but eminently convenient members of the household. But woe betide the unlucky dwellers in a house that rejoices in the possession of a surly or exacting concierge! If he or she be not well feed, cards will disappear, invitations be lost, and parcels fail to reach their destination. The New Year's gift, always an oppressive tax, reaches really unpleasant proportions in the case of the concierge, who in a fashionable house expects something in the neighborhood of one to two hundred francs from the lessee of every suite of apartments in the building. On one occasion a lady of my acquaintance sent fifty francs on New-Year's-day to the concierge of the house wherein she lived, and the amount was returned with an intimation that it was not nearly enough. And they must be propitiated, these household tyrants. As they are hired by the landlord, it is impossible for the dwellers in the house to turn them away, and they are absolute masters of all cards, parcels, notes, etc., that are sent to the establishment for any of the residents of the different floors. The concierge usually lives, moves, and has his being in a set of rooms that, to American ideas, would seem hardly large enough each for a

When a large dinner-party is given in an American household in Paris, the remains of the viands disappear as if by magic. And it is generally a wiser course for the lady of the house to order in her dinner from some first-class restaurant than to undertake to have it cooked and served at home. The latter method, though apparently the least expen-china-closet, and from which light and air are almost sive, is almost invariably the most costly in the end. And nowadays French servants quarrel dreadful

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wholly excluded. In the new quarters of Paris, the accommodations provided for the concierge are superior to those in the older parts of the city, but still and Catholic Bridget in our kitchens pale into in- ventilation is too much neglected. In this small significance before the fights between Communist space the concierge and his wife, for he must be a Pierre and Bonapartist Armand, or between Legiti- married man-that point is imperative-contrive to mist Louise and Republican Jeannette. Knives are eat and cook and sleep, and sometimes to carry on a drawn, carafes and other heavy articles in glass and trade, such as shoemaking or clothes-mending. As china are used as missiles, and it is well if it is not ne- to children, there is no room for them, and so there cessary to summon the police to put an end to the con- never are any, or at most but one. A concierge with flict. And, speaking of the police, it is an unpleasant more than one child would be a curiosity. But the fact for Americans abroad that the law and the author-children of the domestic class in Paris do not trou

ble their parents much. With us, when John or Patrick marries one of his fellow-laborers in the kitchen, the bride straightway leaves her place, quits her home in the large, comfortable house of her employers, her soft bed, her three good meals a day, and goes to housekeeping, usually in two rooms, or perhaps in one. Then come children innumerable to diversify the scene. But when Jean and Jeannette are joined together in holy matrimony, the case is different. They engage with some family, she as femme de chambre or as cook, and he as garçon de service or as waiter. The birth of an infant makes no difference in their mode of life. The event takes place in a maison d'accouchement, the child is taken at once to the country to be reared in some peasantfamily, and in three weeks at the furthest the mother has returned to her duties.

Nor do these little incidents frequently diversify her existence. Sometimes the parents do not see their child again till it is three or four years old. One would think that such a course of proceeding would stifle every spark of parental and filial love in the hearts of both parents and children, and yet it is a well-known fact that such ties in France are far closer and more revered than any other. A Frenchman may mock at his God, and may ridicule faith, hope, and heaven itself, but he reveres and honors his mother, if no one or nothing else. The children of wealthy parents, on the other hand, are no longer sent to the country to be reared, as under the ancien régime. The dismemberment of estates and the breaking up of the feudal system deprived the great families of their herds of peasant - vassals, some healthy mother among which could always be selected as the foster-mother of a baby-noble. The nourrice has taken the place of the peasant-guardian, and now forms part of every grand household, magnificent to behold, in the gayest of caps and the grandest of gowns.

The best French servants are recruited from the provinces, your Parisian being too pleasure-loving and untrustworthy to give general satisfaction. Switzerland and Belgium also furnish hard-working and honest domestics. The Alsatians make generally admirable servants, honest, faithful, and industrious. But they are not nearly so clever as their quick-witted Parisian confrères. Some of the women are very pretty with a blond, Gretchen-like sort of beauty, but they are almost invariably of untemptable purity, which is more than can be said of those among their Parisian sisters who chance to be fair of face. In the immorality of the Frenchwoman of the lower orders lies another source of annoyance for the American housekeeper in Paris.

Yet, with all drawbacks, the servant-question in Paris is far less tormenting than it is with us. Skilled labor is far more abundant, and the departing domestic can usually be replaced at half an hour's notice. And servants in Paris ought to be better than they are with us, Heaven knows! They have infinitely less to do. There are no wash-days and ironingdays, with their steam, and heat, and general disorganization of the work, in Parisian households.

There are no baking-days, no cakes to be made up overnight and served from fiery ranges through a long breakfast. There are no halls to sweep, no stairs to sweep down, no front-door steps to be scoured. The concierge takes charge of the halls and staircases, which are the general property of the house. There is no preserving or pickling ever done on the premises. No house-cleaning day ever arrives to turn the house literally out of doors and windows. We pay heavily in America, both in money and trouble, for the sacred name of home.

The French servant is very apt to take undue advantage of the inexperience and ignorance of her American employer. In one instance, which came under my observation, a smart femme de chambre brought her sister every Saturday night, to stay with her until Monday; and, when remonstrated with by her employer, declared that such was the invariable Parisian custom. In another, a timid young bride commenced her housekeeping with a stout and strong-armed Normande as maid-of-all-work. She was a well-trained and indefatigable worker, but soon manifested a disposition to tyrannize over her inexperienced young mistress; and, after a series of overbearing and domineering proceedings, she capped the climax one morning by ending an altercation between the lady and herself, on some point of household duty, by taking her mistress by the shoulders and administering unto her a good, sound shaking. Being ordered to quit the house at once, she refused to go; and the intervention of the police was necessary to induce her to depart. But it must be confessed that much of the trouble that American employers experience from Parisian servants arises from the inability of the former to speak the French language. The American housekeeper, in consequence of this inability, is obliged to engage only such servants as can speak English. These, demoralized by a long course of service in American households and by the openhandedness and trustful dealing of our compatriotes, are too often bent only on making money, dishonestly as well as honestly-by every means, in fact, that comes within his or her power. Pierre or Fanchette will not take your money or your goods, it may be ; but they will rob you by every indirect method that their inventive genius in that line can devise.

The immorality of the lower orders in Paris, and even of the best class of servants, has already been alluded to. It is unfortunately fostered by the French system of placing all the servants' rooms belonging to the different suites of apartments in the building in the garret of that building-the servants' room scarcely ever forming a part of the suite to which it belongs. Thus the Parisian maid-servant, her duties for the day once ended, quits your premises, shuts the door behind her, and goes off, absolutely independent of all control. Why should she sit, indeed, in the tiny, brick-floored kitchen that is scarcely roomy enough for the discharge of her culinary duties, wasting her employer's fire and gas, with nothing in particular to do, when out-of-doors the streets are gay with gaslights, and she can go forth to make her purchases, or to pay visits, or to take a stroll

with her husband if she chance to have one? At home we know all of Bridget's outgoings and incomings, and, were she to stay out all night, the act would soon reach her mistress's ears. She leads, in fact, a life as sheltered, guarded, and protected, as does any female member of the family that she serves. But Fanchette is subject to no such rules, and is guarded by no such influences. Her time, from nine or ten o'clock in the evening till seven o'clock the next morning, is absolutely at her own disposal. Nobody in the family that she serves knows when she goes out, when she comes in, or where she spends her time in the interim; nobody can tell what visitors she may or may not receive in her little up-stairs room, which is as completely cut off from the home of her employers as is the flowershop next door. The system is a very bad one, and the only wonder is that it has left as many good, pure, and well-behaved girls in the ranks of domestic service in Paris as really do exist there.

For, after all, the "real treasure," that golden vision of housekeeping bliss, is far oftener to be met with in Paris than she is at home. If you do meet with a really good French servant, you have, indeed, found a treasure. Honest as steel, neat as a new pin, industrious as a bee, capable of taking on her unaided shoulders the work of a moderate-sized household, she soon sends your memories of devoted Dinahs and hard-working Biddies into the background. But be not unjust, O American denizen of foreign climes! Remember how much more poor Bridget and Dinah have to do. Your tiny appartement, each piece fitting into the other like the fragments of a dissected map or toy-puzzle, is more easily kept in order than is the three-story brick mansion, with its halls and its staircases, its unoccupied and useless rooms that must be swept, and dusted, and kept clean; its rows of windows that must be washed. Recollect how your chambermaid has to go from her bedmaking and pitcher-filling to the hard labor of the wash-tub; how your waiter-girl must leave the ironing-table to answer the bell and lay the cloth for dinner. Fanchette may, indeed, do all the work of the household, but how much work has she to do? Breakfast once dispatched, and the dishes put away, she proceeds to make the beds and brush up generally, usually having no bedroom-carpets to sweep, but only bedside- rugs to shake out and keep in order. Then she trips up-stairs to her own room, whence she emerges neat and smiling, and ready to lay in her stock of provisions for dinner.

A

dinner has to be cooked, it is true, but how?
little charcoal is lighted, or perhaps a gas-furnace
is used; there is a simmering of half a dozen
saucepans over tiny holes in the little range, and the
thing is done. Everything lies ready to her hand.
Her coal is stored in great drawers at either side
of the range, and is brought up and placed there at
so much a sackful. No panting up long flights of
cellar-steps with great hods of coal for her. Then,
the dinner once cooked, she proceeds to serve it.
Unflushed by gigantic fires, unwearied by a multi-
plicity of roast and baked and broiled, with no stair-
case to climb with her dishes, she brings on her
viands in due course, and serves them easily and
well. And one hour after the meal is ended the
kitchen will be shining and spotless as a new pin;
and Fanchette, her duties for the day ended, every
dish, fork, and spoon, in its place, will have gone
a-pleasuring. Nor does that fearful trial to Amer-
ican housekeepers-" a day out "-ever intervene.
Such an interruption to the strict routine of a well-
regulated French household is not to be thought of.

One evidence of the spread of republican ideas begins to make itself apparent: the French maid-servant now often objects to wearing a cap, once the universal insignia of her class. She does not, like Bridget, aspire to dress like her mistress, she has too much sense for that; nor does she even wish to put on a bonnet, that startling badge of emancipation and aspirations toward style. But she does wish to show off her profuse tresses, smartly and neatly braided, though generally undisfigured by rats" or false locks. Sometimes, out of patriotism, she will don the black ribbon-bow of Alsace, even though she has never set foot in that charming province in her life; but generally she prefers to go with her head uncovered. She never wears silk dresses or velvet cloaks; she would fancy herself insane did the idea of copying the toilets of the “ upper ten" ever cross her brain; and, indeed, she would not be considered respectable by her own associates were she to do so. Consequently, she will not borrow the gowns of her mistress to go a-pleasuring in, nor will she furtively cut paper patterns from them to try and make others like them, as the very best of American servants are apt to do. Take her altogether, a good French servant is a fine exemplification of the best virtues in the French character. She is industrious, economical, and civil

always, be it understood, when not spoiled by the lax rules, profuse expenditure, and wasteful inexpeThe rience, of an English-speaking American household.

KATRINA VAN TASSEL.

WITH AN ENGRAVING FROM THE PAINTING BY BENJAMIN F. REINHART.

THERE is perhaps no mr country than Wash

HERE is perhaps no more charming creation | fer an ideal of the character to canvas than that of

Mr. Reinhart, whose painting we have engraved ington Irving's Katrina Van Tassel. It has long been for the JOURNAL. It is a recent result of the painta favorite subject for the pencils of our artists, but we er's labor, not having yet, we believe, been exhibdo not recall a more successful attempt to trans-ited. The engraving does justice to the general

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