04.22.07
Posted in Books & Paper, Paris Life at 9:03 pm by rachel
In school we learned many French songs and rhymes, which don’t have English equivalents. The following one I learned from an elderly man from Louisiana (he sang it as a child):
Il pleut, il mouille. C’est la fête à la grenouille.
Il’s raining, it’s getting wet. It’s the frog’s fête.
Because I have a love for old books and can’t bear to see a book thrown away, I recently saved three children’s books from the dumpster: Three French versions of those Little Golden Books so many of us grew up with. I never learned anything about a French “Little Miss Muffett” or “Humpty Dumpty” or “This Little Piggie…” and I don’t know if this is because I just didn’t spend my first years in France, or if it’s because they are English nursery rhymes that were translated just for this particular printing.
In any case, they are darling and I am in love with the vintage drawings and find the French version of “Ring Around the Rosie” (”…the roses are in bloom…”) is much more cheerful than “ashes, ashes, we all fall down!”
Here are some of the pages I’ve scanned (click them to enlarge). I hope you enjoy them as much as I have!
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03.09.07
Posted in Academic, Books & Paper, Paris Life at 3:14 pm by rachel
Look what I found! I picked up this 1902 almanac at an antique book fair this week. It is packed with the lovliest images of most everything a respected housewife would need to know in 1902: maps (both terrestrial and celestial), wheat varieties, bicycles, pipes, fashion, statues from Antiquity, furniture, jewelry, European rulers, theater seating charts… This reference for daily life is a window to another era, showing the past under a new light. I particularly love the kind of sources that unveil customs and habits – sources that simply answer the question, ‘what did regular people do back then?’
The section on health and remedies is particularly revealing. Sadly, we have not made any progress in curing the migraine headache (the recommended treatment is the same today: caffeine and staying far away from light). Nevertheless, modern medecine has proven that, contrary to the 1902 belief, smoking cigarettes (!) probably isn’t the best remedy for a cough or the flu.
The hair styles look complicated to do up every single day, but there was an easy solution to this time-consuming practice: in 1902, it was recommended that women wash their hair once a month (once a week for men). Women would probably leave their hairdo in.
The large calendar section was perhaps the most important for the reader’s role in the family: it was the wife’s job to keep track of the household budget, so each day she wrote down expenses and earnings. At the beginning of each month are ideas for family meals, which was a serious financial responsability. The yearly proportion of earnings that went to food in 1902 is significantly larger than it is today. Food was by far the biggest expenditure: 4 1/2 months of salary per year were spent on it, compared to 2 months of salary for rent, and just 10 days of salary spent on taxes. Other expenditures:
1 1/2 months for “la bonne” (the servant)
1 month for up-keep
1 month for savings
1 month for children’s education
15 days spent on heat
5 days devoted to “les plaisirs” (pleasures)
While I am focusing on the Fin-de-Siècle and Belle Epoque for my dissertation, I have worked extensively on the interwar period as well, which is characterized by a great concern with dropping birthrates. So much has been written about pronatalism in the 1920s and 1930s, I was somewhat suprised to note the same concern in the 1902 almanac (by the way, France pushed a pronatalist policy into the 1980s). I have included this page below, entitled “La Frace sans enfants.” Note the proverb at the bottom: “Household without children, vine without branch.” With all the homemaker had to keep up with in daily life, between theater visits, social calls, sewing, horse and dog shows, agricultural salons, and letter-writing (there is a whole section on that, including handwriting analysis), it is no wonder she couldn’t find time to produce a soccer team of children.
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