To our friends predicting the worst from the provocations of a Princip on steroids (the Likud Party and its allies; the followers of Stepan Bandera; Kim Jong-un; …), it is good to remember that all is rarely ever lost. Certain forms, practices, habits, and styles do persist. For example, nearly a century ago, when France went from being ‘a Republic that was still curiously light-hearted, even in its amiable cynicism and humorous, but shameless self-examination’, to ‘a Republic that was becoming somber, divisive and increasingly frightened’, there was this:
… the Bon Marché was not just a shop, but a way of life, designed to meet – and indeed to provoke – every middle-class need and craving, to equip its customers with every visible status symbol – new ones were being discovered all the time – and to enable the Hulots of prewar days to walk out in self-confidence, even with a jaunty air and the light flicker of a bamboo cane (purchasable in the umbrella department, from the umbrella salesmen who, in the Livre d’Or photographs, gaze out at us with most distinguished hauteur, above their high collars), aware that they were properly clothed and fully equipped, and that, if dressed up for le cyclisme, one did not tuck the bottoms of one’s trousers into one’s socks.
How much less ill at ease would poor Hoopdriver have been had he had access to a suburban Bon Marché! It was the apparently immobile, changeless, frozen world of the French primer, of a type which was still in use in English schools in the 1920s, as though the Great War had never been: the band – the garde républicaine, is always playing in the bandstand, the little boy in sailor suit is always sailing his boat in the grand bassin, the little girl is always pursuing a butterfly with her butterfly net, a tiny boy is always rolling his hoop, elegant ladies are always sitting, in decent bathing costumes, under brightly coloured parasols, languid ladies are always reclining in hammocks, reading edifying literature (chez Mame), family groups are always having tea on the open balcony, the formal fountains are always playing, little girls in straw hats are always batting their cerf-volants across a net, artistic women in loosely fitted print gowns are always sitting at their easels, painting, girls and boys, well wrapped up in coats with fur collars, are always engaged in snowball fights, Nanny is always pushing baby in an elaborate pram with a white canopy, young men in white trousers and blazers and boaters with bright ribbons are always lounging, dangling their tennis rackets, the game is always about to begin, the bonne (Alsatian or Breton) is always laying the table for a grand dinner, the napkins laid out with their fantails in the air, the elderly, white-haired, deferential gardener is always watering the flowers, gentlemen in white gloves are always dropping their visiting cards in silver trays, the family home is always faux-Henri III with crenellations, as in Larousse, under ‘Maison’. For, in Larousse, too, everything is eternally mobile, solid, well-made, long-lasting.
Everyone knows what to do, to remove gloves before shaking hands, how to kiss a lady’s hand, slightly bent over it, when to advance a chair, when to sit down, how to retain the crease in tight trousers in the act of sitting down, how to light a cigar, when to open a door, how to blow one’s nose, when to raise one’s hat, and to whom. If in doubt, go to the Bon Marché, the academy of bon ton.
— Richard Cobb