A wonderful week followed. From the start we could not resist her charm, though to be on such terms with one's servant as to know that she has charm, is no doubt the worst possible kind of bad form. Even William Penn, the fastidious, was her slave at first sight,--and it would have been rank ingratitude if he had not been, for, from the ordinary London tabby average people saw in him, he was at once transformed into the most superb, the most magnificent of cats! And we were all superb, we were all magnificent, down to the snuffy, tattered old Irish charwoman who came to make us untidy three times a week, and whom we had not the heart to turn out, because we knew that if we did, there could be no one else foolish enough to take her in again.
And Louise, though her southern imagination did such great things for us, had not overrated herself. She might be always laughing at everything, as they always do laugh "down there,"--at the English she couldn't understand, at _Mizé Boum_, the nearest she came to the charwoman's name, at the fog she must have hated, at the dirt left for her to clean. But she worked harder than any servant I have ever had, and to better purpose. She adored the cleanliness and the order, it seemed, and was appalled at the dirt and slovenliness of the English, as every Frenchwoman is when she comes to the land that has not ceased to brag of its cleanliness since its own astonished discovery of the morning tub. Before Louise, the London blacks disappeared as if by magic. Our wardrobes were overhauled and set to rights. The linen was mended and put in place. And she could cook! Such _risotto_!--she had been in Italy--Such _macaroni_! Such _bouillabaisse_! Throughout that wonderful week, our chambers smelt as strong of _ail_ as a Provençal kitchen.
In the face of all this, I do not see how I brought myself to find any fault. To do myself justice, I never did when it was a question of the usual domestic conventions. Louise was better than all the conventions--all the prim English maids in prim white caps--in the world. Just to hear her talk, just to have her call that disreputable old _Mizé Boum ma belle_, just to have her announce as _La Dame de la bouillabaisse_ a friend of ours who had been to Provence and had come to feast on her masterpiece and praised her for it,--just each and every one of her charming southern ways made up for the worst domestic crime she could have committed, I admit to a spasm of dismay when, for the first meal she served, she appeared in her petticoat, a dish-cloth for apron, and her sleeves rolled up above her elbows. But I forgot it with her delightful laugh at herself when I explained that, absurdly it might be, we preferred a skirt, an apron, and sleeves fastened at the wrists. It seemed she adored the economy too, and she had wished to protect her dress and even her apron.
