Christopher Morley

“ By now, of course, settled householders in a Norman village, Titania and I know the essentials of rustic technic. We know how to bicycle into a strange hamlet, pick out the most promising café, and take our lunch sitting at a bare table in the kitchen, looking into the mouth of an enormous fireplace where a kettle of sausages is simmering over a charcoal fire; where the bare table is spread with knives and a huge haunch of bread, and you get your share of the great platter of vegetables that goes round to the teamsters and others who are on the adjoining bench. ”

“ At the apéritif-concerts, where you sit with your Raphael-citron or your café-cognac watching the dancing, you enjoy the cheerful French habit of taking the whole family along for an afternoon sip—grandmother, babies, and the dog. It would be nice to believe that the young men are all poets, for those broad-brimmed black hats and something odd about the shape of their trousers certainly suggest it. ”

“ And now, as I look back at my memories of Cherbourg, it is evening, that soft gradual dusk; and though it may be drizzling a bit you stroll along the docks. Across the bridge, now out of use while the lock gates are open, the special train for Paris, crammed with the Berengaria's passengers, is just pulling out. Waiting for the bridge to reopen is a whole cross-section of the French provinces: the tiny trolley car with two girls as conductor and driver; the workman with his string-bag carrying home two bottles of wine; the market-cart with the dog underneath doing his best to help pull ”

“ Life is reduced almost to its animal rudiments; the ruddy old women jogging back from Cherbourg market in their high-wheeled carts have an almost speechless tranquillity, lulled into a warm doze of the wits by the lyric humming of thin little telephonc wires in the breeze. ”

“ You can't see your surroundings, and the next day you wake into a new world. From my bedroom window eight hours later I looked out upon the sunny courtyard of the hotel and an ancient in a blue apron cutting grass with a scythe.
The Casino—where we stayed two weeks—is perhaps a little symbol of the whole matter. There is one wing of the establishment which is the hotel proper, devoted mostly to the one-night ravishment of Americans. But then you pass through a little door into the casino itself, and are in France. A terrace with blue tables fronts the harbor and the pebble beach ”

“ One uses one's own tongue so glibly, the words arriving in the mouth almost unconsciously, that it is an enormous advantage to study seriously, at a mature age, the actual hooks and couplings by which a foreign speech is put together—how, to pursue my railway metaphor, these little baggage trucks of nouns and adjectives are made into trains, conjunctioned to the engine of a verb, and puffed off to carry their cargo to some destination. ”

“ Amply provided with nouns of all sorts, my methods of putting them together in trains of speech are as primitive as the French way of shunting freight cars with an elderly horse. It was on the sidings of Cherbourg that I invented my trick to avoid the embarrassment of genders—always use all nouns in the plural and without qualifying adjectives. Do not say, for instance, I love this old church, for then you've got to know whether "church" is male or female. Say rather One loves churches. ”

“ This lends a plain and even a quite lofty flavor to one's style, full of an eighteenth-century tincture, a Ben Franklin aphoristic and moralizing touch that must be soothing to the French ear. And indeed one is perpetually charmed by the infinite courtesy with which they hear us mangle their pronunciations. ”

“ It is these creatures who account for that deeply submerged glitter in the manager's eye, and make travel so much more expensive for the rest of us. At any rate, Cherbourg is not such a bad place to study one's fellow citizens, for you see them at a moment of crisis when they are very keenly conscious of their nationality. With an almost defiant air they insist on talking English to the employees as though to prove and ram home the fact that there really is such a language.
AMERICANS FLIT THROUGH CHERBOURG WITHOUT HALTING
I shall never forget the thrill and charm of that late arrival. ”

“ The dusty byways are patterned with the nailprints of their frugally bossed footgear; on the very soil one reads the mark of their pious and necessary thrift. Larks, little mounting flutters of song, keep earnestly pushing up the sky for fear it will tumble. ”

“ If it's one of those bright mornings of early June, as blue as an alcohol flame, the railway men who are off duty will be down on the shingle, paddling. Frenchmen always seem to be able to take a few hours off during the day to go wading. Very likely they are picking up kindling; for when the urchin and I wanted a billet of wood to make a toy boat, we scoured the beach and environs for many furlongs without finding a single scrap. ”

“ In fact, said the editor, perhaps it was exactly the fact that our Cherbourg workmen hadn't overhauled the hèlices that caused one of them to falter under the excessive strain of the hitherto-unheard-of celerity at which the vast vessel was marching after the invigorating repairs made to the machine by our expert mechanicians. Local pride, happily, is the same ah the world round.
Titania would never quite agree with me as to the fun of patrolling the railway sidings, reading the étiquettes on the freight cars. But that is how I learn my French, such as it is. ”

“ Across the bridge you find the taxicabs drawn up, a compact little squadron, and among them, if you are fortunate, perhaps you'll find Lucien Le Cornu, kindest of guides to the enchanting old towns near Cherbourg. His only sorrow in life is that a hundred and fifty Americans have gone touring in his car and taken photos of him, but have never sent him a print. This has now been rectified. If you don't find Le Cornu at his station at the bridge-end, the thing to do is to go to the Café Continental near by where they'll give him a "coup de téléphone." M. Le Cornu was a godsend to us ”

“ The French take their movies very tranquilly and, odd as it may seem, on a warm clear summer evening they prefer sitting outdoors and watching the sunset, fishing along the docks, or sipping the Raphaël-citron that is the favorite bourgeois apértif. ”

“ Cherbourg has resigned itself to this state of affairs: so much so that if you tell them you intend to stay there awhile they'll hardly believe you, and unless you watch your baggage piece by piece they shove it on the Paris train anyhow. (Crede experto.) Those Americans who are still in the hotel when you enter the dining room are perhaps making themselves obnoxious to the head waiter because there aren't any hot-breads. As I was sitting happily with my café complet I could hear one elderly gentleman crying bitterly, "Hot rolls, hot rolls. ”

“ I suppose they make in a year about what a New York hat-checker pockets on a Saturday night;—but I don't know that they're less happy. One consoling feature of human life is that wherever you go you find the people quite innocently certain that to be where they are and to do what they are doing is the normal and sensible thing. ”

“ It makes one wamble a bit to think of the million villages of Europe, all those frugal people going about their hard and harmless concerns, cutting their hay and arranging their local fêtes with the children riding on a petit manége (or merry-go-round) turned by hand, and meanwhile the pride and stupidity and harassment of politicians can slide the whole thing toward fiendish catastrophe. ”

“ Surely the great clerics need not be alarmed at the government's withdrawing its embassy from the Vatican: the church's share in French life is not pillared upon embassies. And if they all wear black when they approach the church, what race has more reason to? ”

“ By the village churches are the washing pools, always with a cross or sacred effigy to bless the wholesome work; the women kneel to paddle the linen just as they would kneel to pray, and hardly know one from the other ”

“ White, and change some money. If you happen to be interested in books and plays, Mr. White is just the man to gossip with, for he used to be chauffeur to Mrs. Deland and also to Winthrop Ames. Mr. Ames used to have him read play MSS. now and then, and I was tempted to get his opinion on a script of my own that was in my trunk; but he was giving me nineteen and a half francs to the dollar, and I didn't want to do anything to lower the rate. Or perhaps Titania lures you into the Grands Magasins L. Ratti (Mr. Ratti is the Wanamaker of Cherbourg) to buy a waist for the urchin. ”

“ Vin d'Anjou, for instance, which costs two francs twenty-five per bottle in the town, though it rises to five or seven at the hotel. (At hotels where they cater to Americans it is hard to get them to serve you vin ordinaire. The little man with the green apron comes for your order, and unless you are very stiff with him he'll send you something with a label on it.) ”

“ I didn't begin to get the hang of the subjunctive until I found it on the label of my matchbox. "Ne jetez jamais vos allumettes avant qu'elles soient entièrement éteintes." And sometimes the bills-of-lading pasted on the sides of freight cars will tell you more truth about what's going on than the daily paper. While some of the journals were expressing alarm that the first thing M. Herriot and his "bolshevik" government would do would be to evacuate the Ruhr, I found freight cars loaded with gun carriages marked for l'Armée sur Rhin. ”

“ At the issue of this little manifestation, La Musique put itself on the road, followed by about 120 persons, whose number continued to augment all the length of the traject, attaining approximately 450 near Querqueville, and that in spite of the storm, menacing more and more. ”