The
old fashion and the new become mingled and confused, old white caps and
Parisian bonnets, old ceremonies and modern ways; the Norman peasant and
the English school-girl walk side by side in the crowd, whilst the
western door of the Church of St. Pierre, to which they are tending,
bears in flaming characters the name of a vendor of '_modes
parisiennes_' Men, women, and children, in gay and new attire, fill the
streets and quite outnumber those of the peasant class; the black coat
and hat predominate on fete days; a play-bill is thrust into our hands
announcing the performance of an opera in the evening, and we are
requested frequently to partake of coffee, syrop, and bonbons as we make
our way through the Rue St. Pierre and across the crowded square.
Stay here for a moment and witness a little episode--another accidental
collision between the old world and the new.
[Illustration]
An undergraduate, just arrived from England on the 'grand tour,' gets
into a wrangle with an old woman in the market-place; an old woman of
nearly eighty years, with a cap as old and ideas as primitive as her
dress, but with a sense of humour and natural combativeness that enables
her to hold her own in lively sallies and smart repartees against her
youthful antagonist.[18] It is a curious contrast, the wrinkled old
woman of Caen and the English lad--the one full of the realities and
cares of life; born in revolutionary days, and remembering in her
childhood Charlotte Corday going down this very street on her terrible
mission to Paris; her daughters married, her only son killed in war, her
life now (it never was much else) an uneventful round of market days,
eating and sleeping, knitting and prayers; the other--young, careless,
fresh to the world, his head stored with heathen mythology, the loves of
the Gods, and problems of Euclid--taking a light for his pipe from the
old woman, and airing his French in a discussion upon a variety of
topics, from the price of apples to the cost of a dispensation; the
conversation merging finally into a regular religious discussion, in
which the disputants were more abroad than ever,--a religion outwardly
represented, in the one case by so many chapels, in the other by so many
beads.
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