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Show FRENCH HOMES - True, typical French homes are delightful ones. Where else is anything like them to be found? How admirably they realize the ideal of what family life may be in all its tender, eager, loving, sunny attributes! If French homes are not perfect, they approach, at all events, much nearer to perfection than any other homes do, precisely for the reason that they contain the largest proportion of the component parts that produce happiness in its active living forms. The universal French birthright is amusement. It is not a process, it is a state; it is not an acting operation, it is an instinctive sentiment; it is not the result of any cause whatever, it is a true example of spontaneous generation. The French need amusement, so they have it; it springs up everywhere around them; everything is a possible occasion for it; its sources abide in the nature of the race, its elements are in the people themselves; it is an internal capacity, not an external creation, and in that capacity lies the main explanation of the general brightness of their homes; it is that which enables the women to provide the abundant decoration of gayety that ornaments the life of France; it aids to throw over the land a delightful aspect of social oneness. The common necessity and the common capacity of amusement, and the universal disposition to extract amusement from the simplest and the most easily utilizable causes, create a bond which holds the entire race together. |