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16 travel Letter no.10: Manners and Morals ofthe French September 30, 1856 Berlin, Prussia In this letter from her travels, Rose compares French manners, morals, and behaviors with those she has observed in the United States and England. Consistent with her lifelong affinity for the French, she admires their politics, and their wholesome public recreation across class and generation, which she contrasts to countries that pass “Blue Laws” limiting activity on Sundays, a practice which she regards as discriminatory to working people. She views the French practice of linking wine-drinking with dining as preferable to the Anglo culture of drinking alcohol alone, which contributes to public drunkenness. The letter, sent during a subsequent stop in Berlin, appeared in the Boston Investigator on December 3, 1856. n Berlin, (Prussia,) September 30, 1856 . . . As to the character of the French, as a people, I have always liked them, and like them more now.—The English and Americans do not know them. The Frenchman has to be seen and studied at home, on his own soil. When he comes to England or America he cannot bend to the gloomy superstition of Puritanism. He is taken out of his element, and for want of the rational and refined recreation and amusements with which his own country abounds, he becomes noisy and at times dissipated. I wish our Maine temperance law and Blue Law people would come to Paris to learn their first lesson of temperance, sobriety, and good behavior. I have been fifteen months in Paris before, but I thought perhaps I was too young then to judge of such matters; but I found my ideas of the people were correct. They combine the finest elements in human nature. The Frenchman is frivolous on trifles, but he is the philosopher on any subject of importance. The mass of the people work hard and live still harder; but they have the arts, the sciences, the beautiful, the elevating. No country so abounds in these elements, and no people on earth enjoy them as much as the French. Even the most ignorant man, he who cannot write his name, visits and examines the various museums and inquires into the nature and meaning of things; he looks with rapture at a beautiful piece of sculpture, or painting of a philosopher or a patriot, and listens with delight to the 17 elevating strains of Beethoven, or Mozart. Take these elevating enjoyments from him, and you change his nature. In taste, natural grace, and a certain degree of refinement, all Frenchmen are alike. In other countries, there is an inseparable distinction and barrier between the educated and uneducated. The highly educated transcend so far in artificial refinement, that the mass of the people cannot reach them. There is no affinity, no sympathy between them. The high look with contempt at the low, and the low return it with envy, jealousy, and dislike. The rich Englishman or American is stultified by his pride; the poor by his poverty; both are rude and ill-mannered. This is the only equality between them. In Paris, (and Paris is France,) there is no overwhelming pride in the rich and the learned; no slavish humility in the poor and ignorant, for whatever his position or means, he is always natural, easy, affable, graceful, and generous , and therefore an equal. In the theatres, gardens, walks, museums, concerts, balls, they mix together, treat each other with becoming respect and fraternal civility. We were four weeks in Paris, went into all parts of the city, and wherever we knew the largest number would assemble; and during the whole time we did not see one single drunken man, or any rudeness, or impropriety . We were in Versailles on a feast Sunday, where about thirty thousand people were collected, men and women, old and young, rich and poor, visiting the palace, the museums, the gardens, looking at the fountains , and listening to the music, and during the whole day, by that whole mass of people not a rudeness was committed, not a harsh word spoken, and I looked with greater admiration on the people than on all the objects of beauty to be seen—not that I deemed it strange that people should be so well behaved, but I could not help contrasting them with even small gatherings in England and America. Perhaps some one will say that they are so surrounded by gendarmes that they have to behave! Then let me reply, that we never saw...

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