The Mott Family in France
by
[Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $2.00]
THIS is a gay, wise, and quiet story of an American family spending a year in France; or rather it is a series of stories and impressions of the French town and country, and most of all the French people as they appear to an American who knows them well enough to realize that no foreigner can fully understand them.
Mr. Mott, near the beginning of his stay, wanders at. night through the old town of Orne, homesick for his glamorous memories of earlier visits to France. He comes across two inscriptions, one to Marshal Foch, who had come to Orne in 1918, one to Jeanne d’Arc, who had come there in 1429. ‘So, thought Mr. Mott to himself: Foch was here on business yesterday, Joan the day before; maybe a month is n’t long enough for us to get used to living with the French — or for them to get used to us.’ And before he falls asleep he thinks: ‘They’ve been here so long — so long! Splendid people, how I do admire them! . . . But if only they were n’t so damn French.‘
The peculiar Frenchness of the French as it strikes Americans, to irritate, to charm, or sometimes simply to bewilder, gives point to each episode in the book. Mrs. Mott encounters it when in the innocence of her heart she imagines that stepping to the post office to mail a package to Switzerland will be a brief and simple errand; she goes out to wrestle with it in her cynical attempt to discover whether the life guard, at the little bathing resort, who ‘never, under any circumstances, entered the water,’ actually knows how to swim, and is forced to retreat, hopelessly worsted.
Though Mr. Mott feels that he understands and sympathizes with the French idea of thrift, he is still rather taken aback when an ancient Frenchman, whose family he helps to support by sending him a small quarterly check, not only reminds him when he once forgets to mail the cheek, but asks him for interest to make up for the three months’ delay. He is amused, if a little shocked, to discover the kind of souvenirs that his old friend, the stretcher-bearer, offers for sale on the streets of Paris; and is relieved when his friend, who deprecates his own stock in trade, shows him pictures, ‘which he kept in a different pocket,’ of his beaming and respectable family whom he supports in some comfort on the proceeds of his sidewalk peddling.
Mr. Mott knows too much to generalize about French architecture or French cooking. He dines at a Burgundy inn where ‘the substance of each dish tasted like itself, raised to a heavenly nth degree’; he is confronted, at a summer hotel, with ‘a little school of salt herring lying limp and dejected in a pool of oil’ and a potato salad that reminds his young daughter of ‘an old tired Irish stew.’
American impressions of the French are apt to be either sentimental or lugubriously whimsical. Their most obvious quality is the effort behind them. Mr. Moffat never raises his voice, makes no apparent effort, has no pretensions; and his book is really funny and really charming.
SAMUEL ROGERS