Appetizers

OLD...

Didi is sick; he asks me to tell him stories "when I was little"... It's a time that seems to my children prodigiously distant, a little wonderful and quite ridiculous...

- So, Dad, when you broke your arm falling off a horse, were you transported by car?
- At that time, there were no cars.
- Did we call the doctor?
- At that time, there was no telephone.
- So, someone went on a bicycle to look for the doctor?
- In 1887, Didi, the bicycle was not even invented...

Between 1924 and 1887, there are only thirty-seven years; but there is much further than between 1887 and the century of Louis XIV.

I knew my grandmother's grandmother, who was born under the Directory. She was very old; she told me stories and when she was little,” and in the time she spoke of I didn’t feel out of place. Because nothing had changed, neither the setting, nor the accessories, nor the character of the characters.

The peaceful bourgeois contemporaries of President Grévy lived like the peaceful bourgeois of the First Empire (because nothing was more peaceful than a bourgeois, under Napoleon). They exchanged the same little ideas around the same wood fire; they exchanged the same visits by means of the same old carriage; the same old oil lamp burped when it was wound up and burned the rest of the time, and in the evening, before going to bed, the whole family...
I ask your pardon for mentioning this detail, which always provokes manifestations of excessive joy in Didi and which seems to me to be in incredible contradiction with the prudishness of the bourgeois of the time...

The amenities of English imports were then ignored in France, and, in terms of sewerage, no progress had been made since the Gauls...

Then, before going to bed, the candlesticks having been distributed, the whole family went to a fairly large room, which you will allow me to call the throne room. There were individual thrones for adults, and small thrones for children...

Everyone sat down solemnly, their candlestick in their hand, and went about their precautions for the night, with the same gravity that the family brought to evening prayer, also done jointly...

If you don't believe me, I appeal to all those who, before the Exhibition of 1889, lived in old houses in the provinces.

Before 1889, there was nothing at all: no automobiles, no electric lighting, no airplanes, no telephone, no wireless telegraphy, no cinema, no socialists, no germs, no central heating, no civilization...

It all happened in thirty years. And progress rushes towards us with ever accelerating speed, following the formula which governs the law of the fall of bodies.

When I make these confessions to Didi, I feel a little humiliated like an upstart emerging from a lower world into a perfected society. And I am especially offended by the air of pitying superiority that the young child of the century assumes. I feel the need for revenge.

When I was little, Didi, I sometimes had a cent coin in my pocket that was worth a hundred sous and with which I could really buy things. I didn't get in an automobile to dust the roads, but I rode on a donkey or a little horse which trotted along the little paths, and the little paths didn't go away between two rows of billboards. but between two flowering hedges...

When I was little, people ran slower, but sometimes arrived... They let themselves live and they didn't go out of their way to have fun (or to be bored under the pretext of having fun)...

When I was little people didn't have central heating and electric lights, but they sometimes ate oysters and truffles, and they often drank good wine...

Now you have to be very rich today to drink good wine, and oysters are as precious as pearls, and we talk about truffles as we used to talk about swallows' nests, as tomorrow we will talk about the priceless leek.

Didi, no doubt tired of my speeches, asked for the receivers of his TSF device... And he fell asleep lulled by the voice of a gentleman who was speaking on the Eiffel Tower, just as I used to fall asleep lulled by the tales of my nurse.

When I was little, dreams really were dreams.

I'm afraid that in Didi's dreams there are planes, engines and all the modern comforts, I'm afraid that in Didi's dreams there are only realities

G. de la Fouchardière