Introduction to volume I of The French Country Housewife, my translation of the 1859 edition of Maison rustique des dames, by Cora Millet-Robinet

25 Nov

It should be noted at the outset that this first volume of my translation is available in printed form from the publisher, Prospect Books. The second volume is available only on this website, in downloadable PDFs.

*Cora Millet-Robinet, a portrait painted by her brother-in-la, Hippolyte Bruyères*

The expectation of coming across a farmhouse in France or, even more, in Britain, where the decoration, furnishings and household equipment date from no later than the 1920s or ’30s has, perhaps reached vanishing point. Were you fortunate enough to light upon an example, this book would be a fine vade mecum to its intricacies. If, however, such a place now burns bright only in your memories of childhood, then it will serve to explain much that was then a mystery. Its author first wrote, in fact, in 1845, and this version of her book dates from 1859, but there are many points of contact with the ways of our grandparents, although they may have lived a half-century later. My aim with this translation was both to make the book better known and to salute Cora Millet-Robinet, its author, a remarkable woman deserving of our admiration. It also lays bare aspects of that much-loved style of cookery, cuisine bourgeoise, with recipes that are at once simple and fully explained.

What follows is a long introduction. Too long, perhaps, for the reader eager to sample the delights of the book itself, but necessary to place it in some context and to give details of a life hitherto obscure. It may be ignored at the start and act as a reservoir of information once curiosity is piqued by the memorable pages of Mme Millet-Robinet’s own composition.

THE TRANSLATION AND THE TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is a translation of the first volume of Maison rustique des dames (‘The lady’s country house’, although I have given a more authentically English-sounding title for the purposes of sale today), a manual of domestic economy, cookery, household medicine, gardening and the distaff side of farming written by Cora Élisabeth Millet-Robinet (1798–1890) and first published in Paris in 1845 (although bibliographers point out its actual date was 1844, despite the evidence of the title page). It was perhaps the most widely read of all such guides in France, going through twenty-one editions until 1944. The issue in question here is the fourth, appearing in 1859.

Although we can trace the outlines of Madame Millet-Robinet’s career from official records, her books and her journalism, few letters and no diaries or memoirs of her own have so far come to light, nor does she figure in the reminiscences or the manuscript archives yet discovered of her contemporaries. Any portrait, therefore, lacks a degree of nuance or a strong sense of personality, although she is free enough with her opinions in her published works to allow us to catch some impression of what she must have been like in life. What’s more, for an author who was so greatly esteemed in her day, there has been surprisingly little attention paid her by the modern French academic community or indeed by historians of food and domestic management. So the reader who comes across her for the first time will be at a loss to place her achievements in some sort of context. This introduction is couched with this in mind, for Mme Millet-Robinet was a formidable woman and her books of lasting significance.

The Maison rustique des dames was an extensive guide to the practical aspects of life a young wife might encounter when first moving to the country. Some advice is offered for almost everything, be it childcare, education, reading-matter, musical taste, entertaining, hiring and keeping staff, cookery, interior design, architecture, heating, lighting or cleaning – and that’s before we’ve stepped outside the house to discuss the garden, the poultry-run or the farm. Elizabeth David remarked that ‘judging from the manner of its arrangement and content, [it] may well have had some influence on our own Mrs. Beeton,’ but there were many differences between the two writers. Although both women were mindful of the need to instruct their readers on ways to better themselves, Mrs Beeton addressed a largely urban audience while Millet-Robinet speaks only to country-dwellers – the fact that these may well have been city-bred neophytes to the world of ditch and hedgerow merely added spice to her counsels. Another way they differed was in their approach to crafting a book. Mrs Beeton gathered her recipes from hither and yon, many via the pages of her husband’s Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. These she then fleshed out with sound advice and information, much of it encyclopaedic and culled from a variety of sources. Cora Millet-Robinet’s work feels much more grounded in personal experience. She certainly did draw on other people and other authors, but an arid repertoire of facts is not her style. Her book is a manifesto of right-living, proved by example. Another important distinction between her book and Mrs Beeton’s is that while the English author died shortly after her first appearance in print, Mme Millet-Robinet lived on for almost half a century. Over more than a dozen editions, she was able to make changes and improvements, as well as comment on technical developments in household equipment which she had put to the test herself.

Maison rustique des dames was first published in 1845 by the Librairie agricole de la Maison Rustique, 26 rue Jacob, Paris. All subsequent editions were issued by the same house. The Librairie was founded in 1834, in the first instance to produce an agricultural encyclopaedia under the general title of Maison rustique du XIXe siècle. It then developed an extensive catalogue relating to agriculture, gardening, viticulture and domestic matters. Maison rustique des dames went through at least twenty-one editions (it gets a little hazy after the First World War). Mme Millet-Robinet had to wait ten years before the second edition was issued in 1855 but thereafter a new version appeared every four years or thereabouts until 1914, the date of the eighteenth edition. The core of the book remained stable, but elements did change: the menus that appeared in 1859 were a new feature; suggestions for a model library were soon suppressed; changes in laundry equipment provoked variation in advice from one edition to the next; but the repertoire of recipes, for example, was surprisingly constant. After the First World War, the book was remodelled, but by no means shortened, by Madame L. Babet-Charton, a director of the École Normale Supérieure of agriculture and domestic science at Grignon (the oldest agricultural college in France), and later the founding director of the first agricultural college for girls at Coetlogen in Brittany. Mme Babet-Charton wrote the deathless handbook Blanchissage, repassage (Laundry, ironing) in 1909. Her daughter Henriette also wrote on domestic topics: a good book on French cheese, one about preparing skins and furs, and one on charcuterie. This revised version of Maison rustique was last issued (according to the catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale) in 1944, although it probably first saw the light of day in about 1920–25. There have been no subsequent editions, but the culinary sections were offered up as Les Recettes de cuisine de ma grand-mère d’après Madame Millet-Robinet, published by J.M. Williamson at Nantes in 1995. It was based on the same fourth edition that is translated here.

There was one translation made of this book, into Spanish in 1932 (using the Babet-Charton revision). Entitled El ama de casa en el campo: Consejero de la mujer en la granja it was published in Barcelona and appeared as a single volume of 917 pages.

Despite the most recent version made up entirely of recipes, Maison rustique was far more than a cookery book and to better understand its place in the literature of domestic economy in the first half of the nineteenth century we might look at several tendencies that seem to come together in its creation. The first thing to remark is that Cora Millet-Robinet was part of a movement – it seems like that at least – of women writers tackling for the first time this broad topic of household management, from the point of view of living in the country, furnishing a house, cooking good meals and preserving a range of foodstuffs. A second strand is how her work reflected the general enthusiasm in the country for agricultural improvement and for the better acceptance of farming and food production as worthy of social status and respect. This was as true of Mme Millet-Robinet’s own life as it was of the content of her books, as well as those of her fellow-writers. Contingent on this was the eloquent case she and others made for improving the education of young women so as to fit them for more useful roles in agriculture and around the house and kitchen. A final element in the success, indeed the existence, of the Maison rustique was the arrival of a handful of publishing houses on the Paris scene devoted to technical education and instruction. All these possible influences on Mme Millet-Robinet’s work depended of course on the radical transformation of French society in the years after the Revolution: on the emergence of a dominant middle class, a certain emancipation of women, the greater part played by the press and publishers, the improvement of agricultural practice, the growth of industry and technological change.

It may be wondered at this point why Cora Millet-Robinet felt moved to write this book. Some lines towards an answer are sketched out in the ensuing pages but a premature conclusion might be attempted. Mme Millet Robinet did not start writing books until she was in her fortieth year, as the 1830s drew to a close. The early years after her marriage in 1823 saw her move from Paris to a country estate, give birth to and raise a handful of children and set about learning the business of farming. Her husband, an old soldier, was new to this activity too, and felt his work was a mission: to improve of his land, and act as a model for others to emulate. Added to plain farming, the couple took on the specific venture of sericulture and production of silk thread, again, as a model for the locality, not merely an income. In the 1830s, they were joined in the business by Cora’s scientist-brother Stéphane Robinet and made a formidable team that wrote up their activities, submitted them for prizes and medals and all in all acted as a lighthouse of agricultural reform and rural renewal. Note Cora’s own comments in the opening pages of the Maison rustique: ‘To all these satisfactions, there’s the success of the farm to which we devote our time; the improvements we describe then see imitated in the district, spreading affluence…. Finally, is it not true to say that the repute that our efforts may bestow on a farm, which then may become a model for the whole district, brings with it that sense of reward that accompanies any useful undertaking brought to a happy conclusion?’ Cora was very much involved in all aspects of the work, particularly as her husband was often away performing official military duties. He retired in about 1840 and was thus able to undertake all the supervision himself. Perhaps it was at this juncture that Cora decided her most productive role would be that of writer: pouring all her experience (of both motherhood and running house and farm) into instructions for the next generation.

THE TRANSLATION AND THE TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

French women came later than their equivalents in England or Germany to writing on cookery or household management. In France, most cookery books had been written by men for male cooks, with a few exceptions (often quite early ones concerning sugar and sweetmeats) addressing women directly. The most celebrated of these exceptions was the founding text La Cuisinière bourgeoise (The bourgois woman-cook) by Menon, a man of course, first published in 1746. Another exception, from not many years later, was Louis Rose’s La Bonne Fermière, ou Élémens économiques, utiles aux jeunes personnes destinées à cet état (The good farmer’s wife, or aspects of household management useful to young people intended for this role) – a study of household management with comments on food and feeding but few recipes – published at Lille in 1765. The steady output in Georgian England of works such as Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1747), Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) or Martha Bradley’s The British Housewife (1756) was never matched by the French. In general, the French audience for cookery books consisted of male cooks in noble or gentry households, not the middle-class town-dwellers of England. Nor was domestic economy as important a topic in ancien régime France as it was in Britain. It took the Revolution to make a difference.

The first French cookery book written by a woman and addressing female readers was La Cuisinière républicaine (The republican woman-cook) of 1795, by Mme Mérigot: her chosen topic was cooking the potato. Thereafter, women did begin to take up the pen, an early example being Louise Beate Augustine Utrecht-Friedel, whose first book was about sweet things, but who then wrote Le Petit Cuisinier habile (The small book for the skilful man-cook) in 1814, changing its name to La Petite Cuisinière habile (The small book for the skilful woman-cook) in 1822 and for subsequent editions (it found its way to America, as their first ‘French’ cookbook). More relevant to Mme Millet-Robinet’s approach, however, are the books written by Marie Armande Jeanne Gacon-Dufour, dame d’Humières (1753–1835), whose early forays into print antedate the Revolution but whose first manuals of household management, Recueil pratique d'économie rurale et domestique (Useful compendium of rural and domestic economy) and Manuel de la ménagère à la ville et à la campagne, et de la femme de basse-cour (Town and country housewife and poultrywoman’s manual) were published in 1804 and 1805. Subsequently, she composed Manuel du pâtissier et de la pâtissière, à l'usage de la ville et de la campagne (Man- and woman-pastrycook’s manual, for use in town and country), 1825, and Manuel des habitants de la campagne et de la bonne fermière (Manual for countrydwellers and the good woman-farmer), 1826, as well as a score of novels and historical works and more practical books on agriculture, animal husbandry, perfumery and soap-making. The American scholar Valérie Lastinger makes an eloquent case for her scientific achievements in her essay, ‘The Laboratory, the Boudoir and the Kitchen’. Mme Gacon-Dufour was a product of the Enlightenment, rationalist, republican, embracing the improving aims of the Physiocrats, strongly feminist (e.g. in her Dangers d'un mariage forcé [Risks of forced marriage], 1801) and an advocate of better female education (e.g. in De la Nécessité de l'instruction pour les femmes [On the need to educate women], 1805). Her works on domestic economy have a bias towards farming matters, but included much on the preservation of foods and the exploitation of the holding to make readers more self-sufficient. She was, for example, in favour of bee-keeping as a useful income for the housewife and inventive in her food substitutions to cope with deficiencies in supply of foreign imports during the Napoleonic wars: ways to make apples taste like pineapples, using chillies instead of pepper and the dried petals of pinks (Dianthus caryophyllus) instead of cloves (after all, the English called them clove gilliflowers). She justifies her down-to-earth style and simple vocabulary in terms very reminiscent of Hannah Glasse, in England half a century earlier, who had said, ‘I have not wrote in the high, polite stile … for my Intention is to instruct the lower sort’. All these broader intentions, first seen in Mme Gacon-Dufour, of instruction, improvement, female betterment, autarchy, and good agricultural and domestic practice are taken up again by Millet-Robinet. And similarly, although the older writer sometimes includes townspeople in her titles and her comments, the general drift of much of her work is to glorify country ways over those of the enervated city. Her somewhat combative feminism did not endear her to the male critical establishment, one of whom memorably commented, ‘I would rather her ratafias than her books.’

Mme Gacon-Dufour has a place in the career of Cora Millet-Robinet thanks to a striking coincidence. In 1820, the botanist, physician and explorer Armand Havet (1795–1820) published the impressive Dictionnaire des ménages: ou, Recueil de recettes et d'instructions pour l'économie domestique (Household dictionary: or, compilation of recipes and instructions in domestic economy). Then, unfortunately, he died while on an expedition to Madagascar. A second edition was issued in 1822 but for the third of 1826 the publisher recruited Mme Gacon-Dufour to correct and improve those articles relating to domestic economy and Cora’s older brother (and future business partner) Stéphane Robinet, then just qualified as a pharmacist, to look after the scientific matter. You might see there the outline of an apostolic succession of lady writers on household management.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a handful of female authors explored similar fields. Perhaps the highest in social status, though a liberal at heart, was Madame de Genlis (1746–1830), a positive blue-stocking, the governess of the future king Louis-Philippe, who published a Manuel de la jeune femme: Guide Complet de la maîtresse de maison (The young lady’s manual: a complete guide for the mistress of the house) in 1829. Its instructions were sketchy at best and its recipes a ladylike collection of sweet things and still-room items. Élisabeth-Félicie Bayle-Mouillard (1796–1865), under the name Élisabeth Celnart, was responsible for a dozen more useful manuals published by Roret on subjects as diverse as pork butchery, animal husbandry, good manners, household management and perfumery. She was sometimes accused of plagiarism, particularly of the work of Gacon-Dufour, but her books were widely read from their first appearance in the mid-1820s. She was a native of Moulins, in the Bourbonnais, and was allowed a good education by her schoolmaster father before marrying an Auvergnat lawyer. The publisher Roret later issued Celnart together with Gacon-Dufour and a third writer, Mme Pariset in a single volume. Mme Pariset first wrote Manuel de la maîtresse de maison, ou Lettres sur l’économie domestique (Manual for the mistress of the house, or letters on domestic economy) for the publisher Audot in 1821, its last issue by Roret being in 1852. She spoke to the urban bourgeoisie and hardly ruffled the hierarchies of gender. Nor did she write much about cookery (suggesting that hiring a good woman cook was the mistress’s first priority), concentrating on management of the house, keeping servants in check and, prescriptively, interior decoration. When most of these women wrote on food, their emphasis was on conservation and preserves and their repertoire was never very systematic, more a miscellany. Millet-Robinet may have drawn on them for inspiration and sometimes attitude, but was somewhat ahead of them in culinary efficiency and range.

Allusion to the Bourbonnais must bring to mind George Sand, her château of Nohant and her novels of country life. On the level of the day-to-day – the scale of their country houses, for example, and their undoubted feminism – there are many parallels that could be drawn with the career of Cora Millet-Robinet, even though Sand was emphatically of higher social status, somewhat more bohemian in conduct and touched only on the practical via her works of fiction. Another writer from that region, however, might be proposed as a better reflection in every sense. Aglaé Adanson (1775–1852) was the daughter of the famous botanist, Michel Adanson, described by some as a ‘precursor of evolutionism’. Convent educated, twice married and twice divorced, Aglaé fled the salons of Paris at the turn of the century for her mother’s lover’s property in Villeneuve-sur-Allier just north of Moulins. Here she reclaimed the estate, fashioned a garden and park, and planted a remarkable collection of trees in an arboretum that survives to the present day (still in the hands of her descendants). She condensed her knowledge into two volumes of excellence called La Maison de campagne, ouvrage qui peut aussi, en ce qui concerne l’économie domestique, être utile aux personnes qui habitent la ville (The country house, a work which can also be useful, insofar as it concerns domestic economy, to those who live in town). First published by Audot in 1822, it went through six editions to 1852. The first third of the first volume is a survey of planning, furnishing and management of a small country house (but never a château), the arrangement of the poultry yard and ancillary buildings and ways to handle staff; then there is a short but comprehensive set of recipes; finally an alphabetical miscellany of factual articles on everything from cement to medications. The second volume is a manual of gardening, again suitable for the modest country property, not rolling acres. The leitmotif of the book is a wholehearted embrace of country life, the celebration of a decision to quit the city for the sake of personal renewal and rebirth. There is little here about families and offspring: it reads almost as a late-twentieth-century declaration of womanly independence. Mme Adanson (she retook her maiden name in 1808) cites with approval the works of Mesdames Pariset and Gacon-Dufour. Although she was a prize-winner at the Société centrale d’Agriculture de Paris (as was Mme Millet-Robinet), there is no hint in Cora’s writings of their having ever met or corresponded. But Aglaé’s evangelical approach to country living, her insistence on writing for people of modest means, and her emphasis on practical not theoretical experience would have met Cora’s entire approval.

Although all the works alluded to had some culinary content, they were not principally cookery books. But just as advice on household management had flourished, so too had sensible kitchen manuals addressing a readership not so very distant from that of Gacon-Dufour, Pariset or Adanson. The latter was clear that there were two sorts of cookery books. ‘I do not pretend,’ she wrote in her Maison de campagne (1822), ‘to rival Le Cuisinier, once impérial, but actually royal, of M. Viart. On the contrary, I would make a most definite distinction between his work and mine: he has worked for very rich people, and I write for modest country-dwellers.’ Just such a distinction is also drawn by Cora Millet-Robinet, referring to the same book, written by one A. Viard or Viart, first published in 1806 and reaching its thirty-second edition by 1875. (Thanks to the vagaries of French politics, its simple title went through several changes to reflect the national constitution: impérial, royal, national, impérial again, before finally settling with national on the fall of Louis-Napoleon. It had also nearly doubled in length.) If Viard was for the rich, Carême’s L'Art de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle (The art of French cookery in the nineteenth century), 1835–47, was for the richer, as were later books by the chefs Jules Gouffé (Le Livre de cuisine [Cookery book], 1867) and Urbain Dubois (La Cuisine classique [Classic cookery], 1856) – although the latter did write a Nouvelle Cuisine bourgeoise pour la ville et pour la campagne (New bourgeois cookery for the town and the country) in 1878. Another important general work for either the (male) cooking professional or the moneyed classes was Antoine Beauvilliers’s L'Art du cuisinier (The man-cook’s art), 1814, though criticised as a blatant imitation of Viard. These books may occasionally be mentioned by our domestic economists, but only to be dismissed as not for the likes of their readers. Nor, indeed, was the burgeoning literature of gastronomy – exemplified by Grimod de la Reynière and Brillat-Savarin – anything to do with them. It gets never a mention.

More relevant were books of recipes for the bourgeoisie that began to come off the press with the new century. Not only were they for the middle classes, but they were also for women. Pride of place must be accorded to La Cuisinière de la Campagne et de la Ville (The woman-cook in the country and the town) first issued anonymously in 1818, but later over the initials or the name of Louis-Eustache Audot (1783–1870), an important Paris bookseller and publisher. This achieved its hundredth edition in 1928, completely revised by Henriette Babet-Charton, whose mother had reworked the Maison rustique des dames. In a note about the origin of the book which he appended to later editions, Audot claimed to be an amateur cook who had perfected his own skills while living in the country (guided, he admitted, by Menon’s Cuisinière bourgeoise). He certainly borrowed recipes from Menon and, later, a fair few from Aglaé Adanson, whom he had himself published. He kept his methods simple, decoration low-key, ingredients affordable and eschewed, while respecting, the ambitions of Viard and Carême. His book was the foundation of French modern cuisine bourgeoise. It was translated into many European languages. Audot was not without his imitators and competitors. He complained his success engendered a host of masquerades and re-titlings, that cuisiniers, hitherto impérials, had suddenly become campagnards. Among his bona fide competitors was a book published by Roret over the name of P. Cardelli, Manuel du cuisinier et de la cuisinière à l’usage de la ville et de la campagne (The man-cook’s and woman-cook’s manual for use in town and country) which went through a score of editions from 1822. Cardelli was in fact M.H. Duval, former secretary to the Marquis de Las Cases, who had accompanied Napoleon to St Helena. His book was distinguished by a note after each recipe indicating its digestibility: veal cutlets braised with truffles were reckoned heating or liable to cause constipation, pig’s kidneys were thought a ‘bad food’ (mauvais aliment) and salmis of woodcock, good.

As more and more cookery books were addressed directly to the female cook and the mistress of the house, rather than to the steward of the household or the gourmandizing master as had been the pre-revolutionary case, so the authors of these books assumed a feminine guise. Often enough, they were in point of fact male: thus the Cordon Bleu, par mademoiselle Marguerite (The professional woman-cook, by Miss Marguerite), 1827, was written by Horace Raisson, who used the pseudonym A.B. de Périgord for other gastronomic titles. A scholar of oriental languages, one J.-J. Mayeux, wrote first Le Petit Cuisinier français (The small book of French cookery – though literally, one might suggest, ‘The small French man-cook’) in 1823, turning it into the Manuel Complet de la cuisinière bourgeoise (A complete manual for the bourgeois woman-cook) by ‘Mlle Catherine’ in 1839. It was reissued constantly throughout the century. These demoiselles were but the first in a line that stretched to ‘Tante Marie’, the supposed author of La Véritable Cuisine de famille (Real family cooking) published by Taride in 1925 and still going strong (‘Uncle Paul’ wrote Taride’s guide to home medicine, while ‘Uncle Peter’ dispensed knowledge of fishing). Today, the gold-standard of cuisine bourgeoise is often deemed Le Livre de cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange, indeed a woman and the maiden name of Marie Ébrard (adopted for fear that her son would be teased at school), first published in 1927. While it is sometimes difficult to trace borrowings from one book to another, at least if the borrower was linguistically adept, it is plain that this group of books, over more than a century, was working with an identical repertoire. Sequences of recipes in Cora Millet-Robinet can be matched to similar runs in Audot and others. Often the methods and the detail of Cora’s instructions indicate individual preference or direct experience, but the palette was not hers, even if the picture was.

There is a revealing paragraph in the collection of recipes from Mmes Pariset, Gacon-Dufour, and Celnart published by Roret. ‘The cook as well as the mistress should know most ordinary dishes off by heart; but it is good, not to say essential, to have cookery books to show you a wider variety of things, especially for days when you have guests. There are many such books: I know them all and can guide the mistress towards the best choice. La Cuisinière bourgeoise is too old-fashioned; Le Cuisinier royal, Le Cuisinier impérial, Le Cuisinier des Cuisiniers, the Art du Cuisinier, Le Manuel des Amphytrions, are only suitable for restaurateurs or chefs to millionaires. Le Cuisinier économe, even if it barely deserves its title, is more useful; but the best, in my view, is the Manuel du Cuisinier et de la Cuisinière, by Cardelli (part of Roret’s encyclopedia).’ It’s little wonder that she should recommend a Roret publication, but the other titles are instructive. The first is Menon; then comes Viard’s work (in two versions); then there is reference to another long-lived occupant of chefs’ shelves, Le Cuisinier des Cuisiniers, which first appeared anonymously in 1825 and then (throughout the century) over the name of Jourdan Lecointe, who claimed to be a physician and whose first book was issued in 1790; the Art du Cuisinier and Le Manuel des Amphytrions are by Beauvilliers and Grimod de la Reynière respectively; and Le Cuisinier économe was by ‘the late’ Archambault, a former restaurateur, and first appeared in 1821.

The very existence of these practical manuals depended on the immense expansion of the printed word, whether in books, magazines, journals or newspapers. Its most eloquent witness is perhaps Gustave Flaubert’s final, unfinished, novel Bouvard et Pécuchet which appeared in 1881 but described France in the 1840s. The protagonists are two Parisian bachelors earning a humdrum living as copy-clerks, thanks to good handwriting if but little education. A fortunate legacy spurs them to leave the city for the country, buying a small farm in Normandy. Here, straightaway, we meet the idea (though reality was somewhat different) of the rural idyll, so strenuously promoted by Millet-Robinet and her predecessors. Once installed in their ramshackle property, our two heroes set about improvement, both to it and to their own fund of knowledge. Step by step, their failing in one branch of expertise leads them to investigate another to explain their lack of success in the first – thus the explosion of their alcohol still demands that they should study chemistry. From small, practical beginnings, their intellectual quest leads them ineluctably towards the great imponderables. Flaubert perhaps intended his narrative a satire on man’s fatuities and baseless presumptions (an incomplete conclusion to the novel contained a ‘Dictionary of Received Ideas’), but we may take it as a portrait of a society in which all knowledge was accessible: you only had to buy a book, and Bouvard and Pécuchet accumulated thousands of them. On their first night, ‘they took out from their library the four volumes of the Maison rustique, sent for Gasparin’s course, and took out a subscription to an agricultural journal.’ The volumes referred to here are the first issue of the Maison rustique du XIXe siècle, an encyclopaedia of agriculture issued by Millet-Robinet’s own publisher (a fifth, on horticulture, was to follow); ‘Gasparin’s course,’ from the same publisher, was a six-volume instructional manual published from 1843 by a former minister of the interior and, briefly, of agriculture; and of agricultural journals for our student-farmers, there was legion to choose from as each provincial agricultural society had its own publication and the same house that supplied them the Maison rustique and Gasparin could also provide the Journal d’Agriculture pratique. Millet-Robinet’s own Maison rustique, for women, was written with the Bouvards and Pécuchets in mind: women need no longer depend on word-of-mouth instruction that probably enshrined the ignorance and prejudice of older generations. They could drink from a pure source, unbiased, experienced, and freighted with every modern invention.

Three Parisian publishing houses were especially relevant to Mme Millet-Robinet’s work. First in point of time was Audot, run by Louis-Eustache Audot of La Cuisinière de la Campagne. His business was set up in his own name in 1809, having wisely married the boss’s daughter. Audot himself was interested in horticulture, as well as cooking, and had early identified women as a target market. His Encyclopédie des dames from 1821 gathered a miscellany of improving titles, from histories of dance and music, to Aglaé Adanson’s domestic economy and his own plain cookery. Other titles covered pâtisserie and other culinary specialities, as well as home crafts and hobbies (‘recreational chemistry’), agriculture and estate management (how to kill moles, for instance), and several trade manuals.

The firm of Roret was founded in 1822 by Nicolas-Edme Roret (1797–1860), himself related to earlier publishers who had specialized in works of natural history (Buffon) and had issued versions of La Nouvelle Maison rustique (The new book of the country house) written by Louis Liger in 1702. Roret’s great achievement was the Encyclopédie Roret, a series of 300 technical descriptive manuals produced over the century on every possible industrial or artisanal process: from bread ovens to drinking fountains. The Manuels Roret encompassed cookery (Cardelli, above) and household economy (Mme Celnart, for instance, composed a dozen texts on animal husbandry, artificial flowers, raising children, perfumery, cosmetics, sewing and manners). Their portraits of artisanal skills were, as pointed out by the scholar Anne-Françoise Garçon, useful raw material for realist novelists such as Émile Zola.

The third company we should notice was Cora Millet-Robinet’s own Librairie agricole de la Maison Rustique. This functioned as an independent publisher from 1834 until the end of the century when it was transferred to Flammarion, now part of Éditions Gallimard. It continued as a bookshop, at the same address, until 2012. The impetus for the Librairie came from a group of farm and garden improvers anxious to translate best English practice, exemplified by the works of John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843) particularly his Encyclopaedia of Agriculture of 1825 and Encyclopaedia of Gardening of 1823, for the benefit of French reformers. Their most important production was the Maison rustique du XIXe siècle in five volumes from 1834 to 1843. The publishing professional responsible in the first instance was Rosalie Huzard (1767–1849) who had established her own firm in 1798 specializing in veterinary and agricultural books. It was she who published Cora Millet-Robinet’s first book on the nursing of infants in 1841. Another link that Cora had with the enterprise was the person of Alexandre Bixio (1808–1865), one of the founders and later chief editor. Of Italian origin, this politician and reforming agronomist served briefly as minister of agriculture at the fall of the July Monarchy in 1848 but saw his career cut short by the Third Empire. He was a founder of the Journal d’Agriculture pratique, de jardinage et d’économie domestique (Journal of practical agriculture, gardening and domestic economy) in 1837 and one of his colleagues in this venture was Cora’s brother Stéphane Robinet. Some of the Librairie’s titles were product of a partnership with the ministry of agriculture under the rubric Bibliothèque du cultivateur (Farmer’s library). Mme Millet-Robinet contributed books to this series. The direction of the Librairie was taken over by M. Dusacq in the 1850s and then by Léon-Joseph-Elisée Bourguignon through to the last years of the century. Bourguignon was the subject of many of Cora’s complaints late in her life as she battled to see new versions of her work come back into print.

THE TRANSLATION AND THE TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We have already made many references to the state of agriculture in France at this time and how efforts were under way to improve it. They were not without precedent. L’Agriculture et maison rustique (Agriculture and the country house) by Charles Estienne and Jean Liébault of 1564, the Théâtre d’agriculture of 1600 by Olivier de Serres, and the Nouvelle maison rustique of 1700 by Louis Liger, which was reworked by Jean-François Bastien in 1798, contribute to an impressive roll-call of encyclopaedic and practical literature from earlier decades. The repeated use of the title Maison rustique by these first theorists goes some way towards explaining why those of the nineteenth century recycled it in their own work, to reinforce a sense of continuity as well as commitment to reform. Add to these the achievements of the encyclopaedists and physiocratic political economists of the eighteenth century and it would be unfair to dismiss all French agriculture as primitive. But primitive it often was, and unproductive. It seemed not to measure up to the progress being made in northern Europe, in Germany, the Low Countries, and Great Britain, hence the labour of translation and interpretation by agronomists such as Mathieu de Dombasle and the Comte de Gasparin whose course of agriculture was devoured by Bouvard and Pécuchet.

Many factors contributed to perceived inefficiencies of French agriculture: the size of the country, the lack of transport infrastructure, the various forms of holdings and the multiplicity of small or peasant farms. Some regions were impressive, especially if they had large urban markets easily accessible, others backward. This was a great educational challenge, as well as economic. Cora Millet-Robinet, her husband and brother were all in the thick of it, and the Maison rustique des dames was intended as a mighty blow for enlightenment, specifically in the agricultural sphere, even if much of its advice concerned the household alone.

An article in the Revue des deux mondes in 1846 is a good account of the movement for agricultural reform in the first half of the century. Its few paragraphs describe accurately the world in which the Millets and Robinets were working, as each of them – Cora, her husband François and her brother Stéphane – was an eager correspondent and contributor to the periodical literature that underpinned the movement, and were proud winners of the various prizes and trophies distributed. It runs thus: ‘In the middle of the eighteenth century, France did not yet possess a single agricultural society, and the first was only founded in 1751. … The French Revolution changed everything. On the one hand, it brought, so to speak, land into the public domain; and on the other, the revolutionary wars and those of the Empire, in spreading our armies across Europe, brought the agricultural practices of various countries to the notice of those of our soldiers who were versed in these matters, and the lessons learned and imparted by these men of action underpinned many aspects of our future prosperity. Under the restored monarchy, the efforts of M. Mathieu de Dombasle and the creation of the model farm at Roville in 1823 quickened progress, and one could say that we owe the new directions taken by agriculture to M. de Dombasle. Since 1830, much activity is plain to see. Forty years ago, there were about fifteen agricultural societies or associations; now they number eight-hundred and twenty-five, if you include local agricultural shows. Membership totals one-hundred thousand. … Many provincial scientific, literary and cultural academies have their agricultural sections; some societies are specifically agricultural and publish their own bulletins or journals. … The agricultural shows, which date from no earlier than 1835, are above all practical … it is remarkable that in less than twelve years these institutions have spread throughout France.’

CORA MILLET-ROBINET

Cora Élisabeth Robinet was born in Paris at the end of 1798, the year of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign and the Battle of the Nile. Her parents were Joachim Étienne Robinet (1768–1858) and Agathe Eulalie Laure, née Millet (1775–1810). Her father was variously described in the official record as a merchant’s agent, a négociant or merchant in his own right, and as an agent de change or stockbroker (but this last was struck through on his death certificate). He was born in Mâcon on the Rhône, where his father was clerk to the civil tribunal. His inclusion in a government list of people who had suffered losses or been forced to flee from the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, on the island of Hispaniola, after the rebellion led by Toussaint Louverture which culminated in independence in 1804, links his early career to that island and doubtless explains his marriage to Laure Millet in 1795.

She came from a family of sailors and merchants in Nantes, at the mouth of the Loire. Her own father had started out as a privateer but had given up the sea upon marriage and settled in Saint-Domingue. Laure was born on the island but probably moved to Nantes with her own mother when she came back from the colony in the 1780s. (Although of no relevance here, some of her mother’s letters to her sister back home in Nantes have been printed by Guy Debien, see the bibliography below.) Laure’s father was a plantation manager and a coffee plantation owner on his own account in Saint-Domingue but did not survive the conflicts and political manoeuvrings that followed the French Revolution, dying in 1792. In France, the Millets were a large clan in southern Brittany. Whether Laure was a close relative of those Millets who in 1810 were the first recorded producers of tinned sardines in the town of Port-Louis, along the coast from Nantes, is not known. Cora’s enthusiasm for canned preserves would make it a fitting connection.

Until at least 1810, the Robinet parents were noted as living in the rue des Petits-Augustins (now the rue Bonaparte) in Paris, which ran from the left bank of the Seine up to the rue Jacob. After that, they seem to have moved to the faubourg Saint-Honoré, most often placed at 19 rue Duphot, running from the rue Saint-Honoré to the place de la Madeleine.

Cora had three siblings: her elder brother Stéphane (1796–1869); an elder sister Laure who was born in 1797 but died at the age of twelve in 1809; and a younger sister Marie (1804–1882).

Beyond the dry twigs of bureaucratic record-keeping, we know little of Cora’s upbringing. But one document has survived from these years, as if a searing comet traversing an inscrutable sky. It is in a small folder with letters of the 1870s and ’80s from Cora and her sister Marie to their great-nephew’s wife Isaure Schéfer, née Bachellery, and is a letter from Cora’s mother to ‘maman’ – although undated, it must have been written before 1810 (when Cora would have been twelve). The identity of maman is not easy to establish: Laure’s own mother had died in 1786; it is possibly an unidentified step-mother. The drift of the letter reflects the eternal tensions of family life. Maman has evidently found fault with almost everyone: but particularly with Cora. Laure pleads that she does not take her behaviour amiss, that she really is a loveable girl. Maman obviously treated Stéphane little better (but, the implication seems to be, he has now left home for school and Cora bears the brunt of her resentment). She would appear to be more lenient towards Marie (who, of course, was four years younger). Nor were the parents immune from maman’s whiplash tongue, but she assures her they have only her best interests at heart. Her husband may have his moods, which she should forgive, but he has business worries.

Three dates in Cora’s early years are evidently significant. In 1809 her older sister died; in 1810 her mother died; and in 1823 she was married. Her husband was her mother’s brother, her uncle in other words, François Millet (1777–1860), twenty-one years her senior, a divorcé with two male children, a serving officer in the military administration, with a country property in Poitou. This fact is so arresting that we naturally seek an explanation. All one might observe is that the Millets and the Robinets were a close family. After the death of her mother, Cora would have been the oldest female in the family and as she grew up, presumably took on more household responsibilities. At some stage, they moved from rue des Petits-Augustins to the rue Duphot. This was also the address (no. 19) given as the residence of her uncle François Millet in 1821, two years before his marriage to Cora. One might posit, therefore, a grouping of two older males, one widowed, the other divorced; two sons of the divorced François Millet; and two daughters of the widowed Joachim Robinet (their brother Stéphane having left home). As events turned out, the youngest sister Marie ended up looking after their father. At a later date, he moved to the village of Quinçay in Poitou to be close to her, dying there in 1858. Perhaps Cora ‘looked after’ her uncle. The dispensations that would have been required for this marriage, both from church and state, have not yet been discovered. (Avunculate marriage is illegal in Great Britain but permissible in France with presidential – or at this stage royal – dispensation.) To continue this theme of family cohesion, when François and Cora moved to Poitou soon after their marriage, they were to be joined by Cora’s brother Stéphane, after being widowed in 1832, and his three children. Cora, François and Stéphane were business partners for the next decade at least. Meanwhile, Cora’s younger sister Marie married the painter Hippolyte Bruyères in 1834 and moved to a small country house in Quinçay not more than 30 kilometres distant from Cora, where she was joined by her father.

Cora and François Millet had five children. The first died shortly after birth, and there were three other sons and a daughter, each born a couple of years apart after 1825. Not one outlived their mother. The second son died aged ten; the third son died while at agricultural college, aged twenty; their daughter died at thirty-three, but had married and given birth to three daughters of her own; and their eldest son, a bachelor, died at the age of forty-five in 1871. Cora found this difficult to bear. In a letter to her great-niece Isaure written some time in the early 1880s, she scrawled across the top of the sheet: ‘Je suis bien malheureuse – je suis seule!’ (I am really unhappy – I am alone!).

FRANÇOIS MILLET

As François was her mother’s brother, Cora’s maternal grandparents were his parents too, and we have already noticed that they hailed from Nantes in Brittany and had been plantation managers and owners in the Caribbean. Both François and his sister were born at Jérémie on the westernmost promontary of Saint-Domingue (the birthplace of Alexandre Dumas’ father, the first black general in the French army). As François was orphaned by the age of fifteen, his grandfather Pierre Millet took on the role of guardian. Pierre was a man of some heft in Breton affairs: merchant, shipowner, plantation owner on Saint-Domingue, consul and alderman of the town of Nantes, sometime representative of Nantais mercantile interests at the conseil du roi at Versailles and fermier général, tax farmer, of the customs and excise for Brittany.

François first enters the official record with his marriage at the age of nineteen to Bonne Angélique Giroud in 1796. She too was the offspring of a mercantile family in Nantes. On his wedding-day, François was living on the island of Belle-Isle in Quiberon Bay off the coast of Vannes. The young couple had two sons. Although no documentation has yet been discovered, the marriage did not prosper. A genealogical note survives among the papers of Cora’s great-niece Isaure Schéfer that states it ended in divorce. François seems to have cared for his children himself and they remained in contact with their step-mother Cora (who was no more than two years older than them) until the end of their lives.

As he came to maturity at a time of almost constant warfare, it is hardly surprising that François opted for a military career. However, rather than a front-line role, he was employed in the commissariat. He served in Spain during the Peninsular War as adjutant to the Commissaires des guerres, the department charged with every aspect of support, payment and supply of the army – an office filled by Stendhal when serving in Germany in 1806–08. Millet’s Spanish campaign was crowned by appointment as governor of the Catalan city of Gerona in 1814, although his tenure was brief, the French being ousted from the province in the spring of that year. His commander-in-chief, and Governor General of the province in 1810–11, was Marshal Étienne MacDonald, Duke of Taranto, although ill-health soon forced him to give up these posts (his next field of battle being Russia). Catalonia must have been the occasion of the two men meeting and some years afterwards the association was resumed. After the Marshal had safely navigated the regime-change that occurred with the Bourbon restoration and was appointed a major-general of the royal bodyguard, he continued to serve the Bourbons until the July Revolution of 1830. François Millet, meanwhile, remained in military administration, the Commissaires des guerres being reconstituted by Louis XVIII as the Intendance militaire. During the 1820s he may have served in Saverne in Alsace and in Limoges, but more importantly he was secretary to Marshal MacDonald in his capacity as Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honour and from 1823, chef de bureau of the Legion (François was himself an officer of the Legion). The connection with MacDonald has some bearing on the Maison rustique because one of its very few recipes having reference to an identifiable person is one for Marshal MacDonald’s coffee creams in the chapter on home-made sweets. In the 1830s, François served as sous-intendant militaire de première classe (in military rank, equivalent to lieutenant-colonel, hitherto he had been an adjoint or adjutant) first at Châtellerault, then at Poitiers. After that, he devoted himself to his farming activities. Sous-intendants were on post in their localities to look after all aspects of military administration: payment, billetting, uniforms, camps, saddlery, subsistence, transport.

The article in the Revue des deux mondes regarding agricultural improvement that was quoted earlier remarked that ‘the revolutionary wars and those of the Empire, in spreading our armies across Europe, brought the agricultural practices of various countries to the notice of those of our soldiers who were versed in these matters, and the lessons learned and imparted by these men of action underpinned many aspects of our future prosperity.’ François Millet was a case in point. His brother-in-law recalled that when he returned from the war in 1814, his curiosity turned to agriculture and he took every opportunity to improve his knowledge. The works of Mathieu de Dombasle became his favourite reading and although he never received direct instruction from the master, he entered into correspondence with him and was the first to introduce the reforms promoted at Dombasle’s model farm and school at Roville into Poitou. Later on, he sent both his sons to the agricultural school of Grand-Jouan, north of Nantes, which emulated Roville and was founded by Dombasle’s disciple Jules Rieffel (for whom Cora wrote almost her first essay in print).

This new enthusiasm needed an outlet and five years after war’s end, François bought the small property (100 hectares) of la Cataudière in the commune of Availles-en-Châtellerault. This was to be his and Cora’s home until the end of the 1840s.

CHÂTEAU DE LA CATAUDIÈRE

La Cataudière is a charming gentilhommière rather than a mansion of the nobility. Externally, it is much the same today as it was in the nineteenth century, although the offices and appurtenances have changed somewhat since a plan of the curtilage was drawn for the cadastral survey of 1810. The core of the building dates from 1663, and the handsome chapel at one end of the range marks it as some degree more elaborate a property than those described by Mme Millet-Robinet in her chapters on the ideal farmhouse. The estate lies at the wooded edge of the commune, in the village of Prinçay, which was absorbed by Availles in 1818. A Gallo-Roman tomb was discovered in fields north of the château by François Millet in 1841, doubtless an unintended consequence of agricultural improvement. The area is now designated an official archaeological zone by the commune.

Availles and Prinçay boast other estates, both older and more distinguished than la Cataudière. The earliest, dating from the twelfth century, is la Tour d’Oyré, founded by Raoul le Faye, younger son of Viscount Aimery of Châtellerault, uncle of Eleanor of Aquitaine and seneschal of Aquitaine. Owners of the château in the later nineteenth century included the dramatist Ludovic Halévy (father of the historian Élie Halévy) and the composer Charles Gounod. The property now known as the Pigeonnier du Perron was inherited by the philosopher René Descartes, who liked to style himself Sieur du Perron. His father was from Châtellerault. Le Perron was no more than a farmhouse, a métairie, held on a basis of crop-sharing. Meanwhile, in the same hamlet of Prinçay as la Cataudière, the central range of Château de la Doubtière was built in the eighteenth century by Joseph François Dupleix, the French Governor-General of India who was worsted by Clive in the Carnatic Wars. La Doubtière is close to deep quarries that were once used to grow mushrooms and are home to several species of bats, not least the greater horseshoe.

The subsequent history of la Cataudière has left it in fine condition but with signs of previous occupants altered or suppressed. It was not helped in this regard by being a private secondary school for the latter part of the twentieth century and then being occupied by a new-age community originating in Belgium. It is now back in private, family hands.

The first child born to Cora and François, who survived but a few brief days, was born in Paris; all her four others saw the first light of day at la Cataudière. Meanwhile, François was occupied in Paris at the chancery of the Legion of Honour and it was only with his appointment as sous-intendant militaire at Châtellerault in 1830 that he was able to devote all his energies to agricultural improvement in Poitou. His brother-in-law catalogued some of his activities: sowing grassland leys; cultivating root crops (he was a pioneer of Jerusalem artichokes for example); introduction of improved breeds of livestock and better housing for them; changing over to four-field rotations rather than the traditional system of leaving land to lie fallow; using modern ploughs, as had been developed by Matheiu de Dombasle, and harrows with iron tines; employing stone rollers and rolling ploughland; deep ploughing; and using scythes rather than sickles for harvesting. All these, he commented, transformed what up to that date had been standard practice in the region. His work did not go unnoticed: prizes and awards were accorded him by the Société centrale d’agriculture de Paris as well as the societies of Tours, Poitiers and Châtellerault. That farming was relatively backward in Poitou is confirmed by an tract written by one Alix Sauzeau, ‘farmer at Granzay’ (a village near Niort, south-west of Poitiers) in 1844 called Agriculture de partie du Poitou (Agriculture of part of Poitou), in which he celebrates recent progress but draws attention to much conservatism and bad practice. Cora Millet-Robinet herself tells a story of her close encounter with ignorance when exploring a district with a view to buying a new estate in the late 1840s. They visited a domaine owned by a peasant couple that were not so plumb stupid as their neighbours but who had none the less let the house collapse around them and apparently encouraged nothing but weeds of the worst sort in the orchard, garden and home fields. When taxed with this neglect, the farmer replied that his wife preferred the weeds to cultivated leys and that the ivy choking the fruit trees was grand fodder for the cattle in winter.

While applauding François Millet’s initiatives, Cora Millet-Robinet interests us the more. She was ever insistent of the significant role that a woman must play in a farming household. It was not the same as in town, she once wrote, where the wife had no practical function in household matters (neither earning money nor undertaking the day-to-day labour). In the country, ‘if the man is the great wheel which drives the mill, then the woman is the millstone and nothing will be achieved without her action.’ How true this was at la Cataudière. Her husband was often absent on official duties and it fell to her to implement his proposals on the ground. This close involvement in running the enterprise was, she admitted, the impetus and the necessary understanding she needed to be able to write. Without it, she would have known nothing: ‘This is how I learnt to be a farmer and acquire the agricultural expertise which allowed me to publish my Maison rustique des dames. That work is the fruit of my experience, not just something learned from books.’

OF SILK AND SILKWORMS

Although the intention at la Cataudière was one of broad agricultural improvement, a specific aspect came to occupy centre-stage, silk. Silk had been produced in France since the fifteenth century when Louis XI had invited weavers from Italy and Greece to set up in Tours. White mulberries were needed to feed the silkworms (they eat little else) so the early history of silk in France is the establishment of the mulberry, by such people as François Traucat, Olivier de Serres, and Louis XIV’s minister Colbert. The centre of gravity of the nascent industry drifted southwards from the Touraine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not least because those climes were extremely well suited to the mulberry. Numbers of trees increased greatly, for example in the Cévennes, after the great frost of 1709 which wiped out whole tracts of chestnuts. The mulberry was called ‘the golden tree’ (l’arbre d’or) thanks to its utility as a marginal cash crop for peasants and small farmers. The silk industry was set back by the departure of Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 (to the benefit of Spitalfields) but began to grow again, especially with improved machinery, during the next century. At first, home production of silk was unable to keep up with the expansion of weaving, but output of silk cocoons rose dramatically in the first half of the nineteenth century, from about 4–5,000 tons in 1804 to over 25,000 tons in 1853. To this expanding industry, the Millets wished to contribute. Their achievements would have been less, however, had it not been for the encouragement and co-operation of Cora’s brother Stéphane.

STÉPHANE ROBINET

Stéphane (1796–1869) was the eldest child of Joachim and Laure Robinet. He had a long and successful career as a chemist, pharmacist and freelance expert in the production of silk. He was also an accomplished amateur sculptor, exhibiting at the Paris Salons of 1834 and 1835, and making the bust of Cora illustrated here. Even though we know nothing of Cora’s intellectual formation as a young girl, if her brother’s is anything to go by, she did not lack for the right company or cast of mind. His parents sent him in 1807 to Worms in Germany for his schooling. Displaying an aptitude for science, his family’s acquaintance with the widow of the celebrated chemist Antoine-François de Fourcroy (d. 1809) gained him admittance in 1812 to the laboratory of Fourcroy’s associate Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin (1763–1829), sometime president of the Pharmaceutical Society of Paris and professor of chemistry at the Collège de France. It is worth noting that Cora makes one of her few personal interventions à propos Fourcroy in chapter IX of Maison rustique. She describes a fireplace designed by him and remarks, ‘I have seen it in action in the home of the sainted chemist’s widow and in those of her friends.’

In 1816, Stéphane decided that he should pursue a more commercial line of work and transferred from Vauquelin’s laboratory in the Jardin des Plantes (the Paris botanic garden) to the celebrated pharmacy kept by the widow of Bertrand Pelletier in the rue Jacob. Six years of study enabled him to qualify in 1822, in which year he married, set up shop on his own account, and was received as a full member into the Société de pharmacie – he was to become its president in 1832 and 1862. The next few years saw a stream of publications, for instance on the chemical analysis of plants. He was secretary of the Société de chimie médicale in 1824 and elected member of the Académie royale de médécine (section de pharmacie) in 1825 – he was to be vice-president in 1860 and president in 1861. In 1825, with Vauquelin and others, he founded the Journal de chimie médicale (Journal of medical chemistry), which he then edited for ten years. He was also a good friend of the group of agricultural theorists and educators behind the Maison rustique du XIXe siècle and joined them in the production of the Journal d’Agriculture pratique. He was appointed to the Legion of Honour in 1831 – and, while on a quasi-military theme, he was also battalion commander in the 10th legion of the National Guard in Paris from 1830 to 1848.

His steady progress through life came to an abrupt halt with the death of his wife, Jenny Richard, in 1832, leaving him bereft with three children under seven. He sought a radical change of direction, gave up his dispensary and eventually joined his sister in Poitou in 1836 or 1837. He also turned his focus towards a single object: the improvement of the silk industry in France. His success was such as to earn the honorific title of ‘professor’ for his free public lectures in Paris and Poitiers on silk production from 1838 to 1843, although he held no official post. For the next ten years he was a partner in the enterprise at la Cataudière and a driving force in its involvement in silk and silkworms. When the Millets moved from la Cataudière to their new property near Loches after 1847, Stéphane Robinet resumed his engagement with the wider world of science. At the end of his life, his most important contribution was as member of a commission overseeing the construction of an aqueduct bringing water from the River Dhuis in the Aisne to a thirsty Paris 131 kilometres to the west. He died leaving unfinished his hydrographic dictionary for the whole of France.

STÉPHANE ROBINET

This small family group, therefore, set about demonstrating to all Poitou the virtues of silk production. The first thing to do was to plant mulberry trees. In 1834, more than 20,000 were set in 2 hectares of ground at la Cataudière (to obtain 46 kilograms of cocoons, silkworms might consume 1,000 kilograms of white mulberry leaves). Then there needed to be the buildings in which to raise the silkworms: they did not hang off twigs in the open air, but were carefully housed and fed harvested leaves – although, in fact, Cora did attempt one cycle in the open air in 1838. A magnanery (the building for keeping and breeding silkworms, from the French magnanerie which derives in turn from the Occitan for silkworm, magnan) was built in Poitiers as a model establishment for the department of the Vienne in 1836 and a second one was developed at la Cataudière which came to be Cora’s specific responsibility. At the same time, Stéphane began producing a host of publications and inventions concerning the inner workings of the magnanery, spinning thread and processing the silkworms’ food. All his inventions were placed in the public domain for the benefit of all, he took out no patents. Their work involved improvements and experiments with the process of bringing silkworms to maturity, as well as breeding new varieties such as the one name after its creator, Cora. It encompassed not only the worms and their cocoons, but the production of the thread itself. Many were the prizes accorded the partnership by agricultural societies in Paris and the provinces; perhaps most impressive were the bronze and silver medals at the Industrial Exhibitions of 1839 and 1844 respectively, as well as a gold medal from the Société royale et centrale d’agriculture.

There were many reasons why they might have thought silk worth all this time and trouble. It was a growing market, a useful source of cash for the agricultural sector. It was also a very technical process, which repaid study and improvement. The risks of disease and losses were manifold, usually stemming from bad practice. While the Millets may have seen silk as an income stream, their role was educational: the Poitiers magnanery was a ‘model’ installation for the department as a whole.

To Cora Millet-Robinet, silkworms offered her readers another source of independent income or route to self-sufficiency. Keeping bees was another solution. Earlier writers, for instance Mme Gacon-Dufour, were very keen on bees and honey. But in fact Cora had no chapters devoted to bees or silkworms in her earlier editions, only with the tenth issue of 1877 do they get a mention. There, she speaks fondly of her involvement in silk production and urges her readers to take it up, to provide an income from the fruits of their labour in which they can take a justifiable pride. She had already made this claim to the Société agricole of Poitiers in 1838 when she wrote that small family magnaneries were particularly suited to female direction (exploiting the maternal instinct) and that the income deriving from them was of especial value to the womenfolk.

The Millets established a third magnanery at Loches, a town in the Indre et Loire department to the north-east of Châtellerault, in 1847. This was clearly in response to their planned sale of la Cataudière for it was but a few miles distant from their new property, the Domaine de Pont in the commune of Genillé close to the small town of Montrésor. The next year, Stéphane took himself off on a winter’s sojourn in Egypt, having given the last of his public lectures on sericulture. This appears to be the moment when he returned to wider scientific studies. In 1853, the departmental magnanery at Poitiers closed its doors. This was at a critical juncture in French silk production. Over-exuberance in the market had given rise to a series of crippling diseases. Some of these stemmed from bad management either in the magnaneries themselves or in the quality of feed provided. Eventually, the government called in Louis Pasteur to advise on the matter, but not before production was reduced to a fraction of its peak. Whether problems such as these had anything to do with the Millets’ removal from la Cataudière is not known.

*Domaine or Château de Pont, Genillé, the new building erected by the Millets at the end of the 1840s and the beginning of the 1850s*

DOMAINE DE PONT

The Domaine de Pont is now sometimes called the Château de Pont. Today, the estate is largely devoted to the vine. When the Millets bought the property in 1847, if Cora’s account is to be believed, much was in ruins, although dating back to the sixteenth century. They wrapped a new house around what remained of the original structure. They do not appear to have put la Cataudière on the market until the end of 1849, when it was advertised as having a net income of 5,600 francs, two farmyards, a handsome family dwelling, beautiful views, hunting and fishing, vineyards and excellent soils. Their address by the time of this advertisement was Château de Pont, so the building work must have been rapidly undertaken.

We are fortunate to have a series of articles that Cora wrote in 1871 for Le Magasin pittoresque, an illustrated miscellany that had great sale from its foundation (in emulation of the English Penny Magazine) in 1833. Her object was to explain to an imaginary correspondent how best she should arrange matters when effecting a move from the city to the country. Happily for us, she offered sketch plans of possible residences. Two are for substantial farmhouses such as she describes in the opening chapters of the Maison rustique; then there are plans for something altogether more substantial which, she confesses, is the house she had built for herself: in other words, the Château de Pont at Genillé. The present house conforms to her drawings. This was no mean undertaking, especially as her husband François was by this time over 70 years-old, however their eldest son Étienne had been recruited to help run the estate – in 1852 he won a second prize from the departmental agricultural society for best-managed enterprise. The parish history of Genillé by Christophe Meunier makes clear that the Millets were still closely involved in silk production, even if M. Meunier does ignore the fact that so glorious an ornament of French practical literature once lived in his native village. There was, of course, the magnanery they had established at Loches, and then there was the record of the principal landowner in the commune: an improving landlord, once a medical man, Jacques-Philippe Dubreuil-Charmontel. François Millet made an extensive report to the Société royale et centrale d’agriculture in 1848 on the doctor’s efforts to bring his holding up to modern standards , noting among other things the planting of 12,000 white mulberry trees to supply leaves to the producers of Loches.

François Millet died in 1860. Cora had two children still living, but her son Étienne who had been helping on the estate, had by this time moved to the Landes in Gascony – this may be why Cora was able to write a short contribution to the Petite bibliothèque économique et rurale in 1869 on foie gras in the Landes. Her daughter Lucie had married a lawyer and had a house in Poitiers. It is not known where Cora settled immediately after her loss. She may have lived with one of her relations, but her name does not appear on the census lists for any of the likely candidates. We do not find her in the official record again until the census of 1876, when she was identified as the owner of a small farm, la Bernonnière (now Berlonnière), in the village of Saint-Benoît, just south of Poitiers. Before the Revolution, the village had the name of Saint-Benoît-de-Quinçay and was home to an ancient abbey. La Bernonnière was once part of the abbey’s estate. After the Revolution, the abbey dissolved, the parishioners renamed the village Quinçay-les-Plaisirs before it reverted to Saint-Benoît tout court. Cora remained here until her death in 1890.

It is from these years that a few letters from Cora have survived. They show her feeling slightly isolated from the world, a situation not helped by a progressive loss of sight, so that her letters, for example, had to be written by an amanuensis after 1880, though she could still pen the odd scrawled phrase or scribble her signature. But she was still active. In the autumn of 1881 she’s packing chestnuts off to her great-niece, bottling tomatoes and harvesting cauliflowers. All through these years she is supervising revisions to the Maison rustique (largely the work of, or organized by, her great-niece and nephew) and chivvying her publisher for a new version of her Conseils aux jeunes femmes sur leur condition et leurs devoirs de mère. Nor does she let up on arranging a new contract with the Librairie agricole to ensure that matters are in order at the end of her life. But she does feel isolated; her house, she complains, is not as comfortable as her sister Marie’s, nor the company as stimulating.

That sister lived in the village of Quinçay (another Quinçay) about 15 kilometres away. Her house, the Château Gaillard, had been the property of her second husband, Hippolyte Bruyères, who had died in 1855. Her two children had predeceased their father. Bruyères was a painter. His portrait of Cora survives, and prints of his paintings (largely historical and genre) can still be purchased. He wrote and illustrated a treatise on phrenology, La Phrénologie: Le Geste et la physionomie mis en scène ([Phrenology: gesture and physionomy displayed], Aubert, 1847). His qualification was that he was the stepson of Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1766–1832), the founder, with Franz Joseph Gall, of the science of phrenology (and the coiner of the word itself).

As Cora’s life drew to a close, she was accorded her greatest honour by the French state, being made a chevalier de l’ordre du Mérite agricole in December 1884. The Order had been created by the French minister of agriculture twelve months before and Cora was one of the first two women chevaliers, cited for her agricultural activities and her writings. The other was Marie-Anne Thomas from the village of Penhars in Finistère, whose contribution to farming matters has not so far been identified.

After her death in December 1890, her publisher Louis Bourguignon wrote a heartfelt tribute for the pages of the Journal d’Agriculture pratique. Self-interest might have some bearing on his views, but his words reflect the esteem France had for her: ‘We had the honour of knowing this worthy woman for the last twenty years, and the memory of her remarkable qualities will live long with us. She worked up until the last day, alert to any developments, always seeking some improvement to incorporate in each new edition of her masterpiece, the Maison rustique des dames, which has been and remains the best of guides for the housewife. You needed to witness just how passionate she was about any new invention that might have bearing on domestic economy, whenever she thought them practical and useful, but also how careful she was to evaluate them before recommending them.

‘No one understood better, nor explained better than Mme Millet-Robinet, the significant part of women in modern society.… What particularly distinguishes [her] books is that from the first line to the last, the author has a single thought and a single end in sight: instructing women in the duties that flow from their roles as mother and mistress of the house.’

Cora was buried next to other members of her family, all in identical tombs, in the cemetery at Quinçay.

CORA MILLET-ROBINET: A BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cora Millet-Robinet wrote extensively, both books and contributions to agricultural journals, with a certain amount of freelance journalism elsewhere. Many of her more substantial pieces for journals found their way into print for separate sale. Almost without exception, her books appeared under the imprint of the Librairie agricole de la Maison rustique or its affiliates.

Her first essays into print were not until she had reached her fortieth birthday, when she joined with her husband and brother in accounts of their efforts to raise silkworms in Poitiers and at la Cataudière in 1838–41, delivered in the first instance to various agricultural journals. Had she had her own way, her first appearance would have been entirely on her own account. In 1839, she ‘threw a few words on paper,’ as she put it, on the subject of education to better fit girls for a life agricultural. She felt strongly, and the matter is constantly returned to in her Maison rustique, that they were taught mere fripperies and extravagances and thus had no desire at all to marry farmers. As a result, she concluded, all the young farmers were unhappy with their lot and deprived of fitting helpmeets. Far better that girls should be taught the realities, and joys, of country life, of raising healthy and right-thinking children, of looking after animals. She showed her essay to her brother and he tried to get it published in several agricultural journals. To no avail until 1846 when the great improver Jules Rieffel, one of Mathieu de Dombasle’s principal disciples, printed it in his Agriculture de l'Ouest de la France. Her educational syllabus, it has to be said, read very like a table of contents for her first two published books.

Cora’s proper debut was her Conseils aux jeunes femmes sur leur condition et leurs devoirs de mère, pendant l'allaitement (Advice to young women on their maternal condition and duties when breast-feeding) of 1841. This is an attractive book, drawing closely on her own experience as a nursing mother, which guides the novice through infancy (taking in teething and walking) but no further. She was not the only one to urge mothers to nurse their offspring: Rousseau had made a good start and several of her female domestic-economy predecessors had advocated breast-feeding. But among the middle classes, the wet-nurse was still in demand, even if the usual thing was to have her at home under your own supervision, rather than merely sending the infant off to who knows what squalid circumstance. Emmanuelle Romanet points out that at the end of the century, in France, 2.8 per cent of all births in Lille were suckled by wet-nurses, 9.6 per cent in Bordeaux, 29.3 per cent in Paris and 47.9 per cent in Lyon.

A variant title was given to the same book (Conseils aux jeunes femmes sur l’éducation de la première enfance [Advice to young women on bringing up a newborn child]) in 1855, but reverted to the original for a second edition in 1862. It does not seem to have been reissued. However, the Librairie agricole recognized its value and wished to produce a thorough revision some time in the 1870s. Judging from Cora’s letters to her great-niece, some of this work was done by herself, but Louis Bourguignon wanted a medical contribution to make it both more extensive and more reliable. He asked Émile Allix to undertake the work. Allix was Victor Hugo’s doctor during his exile in Jersey. He had already written a book on the physiology of infants and was medical inspector of child protection and nurseries in Paris. (His brother Jules was an eccentric of the first rank. Imprisoned for his republican sympathies by Napoleon III, he was not only somewhat mad but an advocate of the ‘snail telegraph’ whereby snails could transmit messages anywhere in the world thanks to their ‘sympathetic communication’.) Allix took a very long time to finish his contribution, much to Cora’s frustration. The reissue, under the new title of Le Livre des jeunes mères, la nourrice et le nourrisson (The book for young mothers, breastfeeding and the baby at the breast), appeared in 1884 and went through twelve editions until 1922, the last being revised yet again by Mme Le Bihan Rolland. This book had an unexpected transatlantic ripple. Cora Millet Holden was an artist born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1895. Her mother, a doctor, was born Cora Millet Babb. Her grandmother was also a doctor and a feminist. It must have been in homage to an admirable French feminist that these women took her name.

Cora signed her first book ‘Cora Millet, née Robinet’, as she did too the first edition of her Maison rustique in 1845. Subsequent issues, and all her other books, were signed ‘Mme Millet-Robinet’ or ‘Mme Cora Millet-Robinet’. In the census return for 1856, she is listed as Cora Robinet, ‘auteur’, as well as wife to François. As the success of Maison rustique became more assured as the years passed, so she too became more confident of her status. In venting her spleen at Louis Bourguignon’s delays at issuing a new version of her Conseils in 1881, she protested that his behaviour was unpardonable given he was dealing with the author of Maison rustique that had earned him so much money over the decades.

After Conseils…, Cora’s next book was indeed the Maison rustique in 1844/5. The series of editions over more than seventy years has already been sketched in. It was in every sense her magnum opus. Much her subsequent output depended on it for content and approach.

A book that appeared in the early 1850s was Le jardinier des fenêtres, des appartements et des petits jardins (Gardening for window-boxes, apartments and small gardens). This is listed in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale, but undated. A third edition was listed by the Librairie agricole in 1853 and the title crops up again as an Italian translation in about 1870 from a Milanese publisher. By the end of the 1850s, the Librairie agricole published something with the same title, but over the name of Jules Rémy, with a fourth edition coming out in 1861. (Window boxes were quite a popular subject in nineteenth-century France. Other books on the topic are recorded by P. Boitard [Audot, 1823] and Maurice Cristal [Garnier, 1865].)

Definitely from Cora’s pen is the Manuel de l'éleveur des oiseaux de basse-cour et du lapin domestique (Poultry- and domestic rabbit-keeper’s manual) which was first printed after 1850 with a second edition dated 1853 as part of the Librairie agricole’s co-operative venture with the ministry of agriculture in their series Bibliothèque du cultivateur. The book went through several editions and impressions with a major revision by René Girardeau just before the First World War, which then went through another four editions until 1944. By this time the poultry and rabbits had been joined by pigeons in the title. Understandably, there was much from the Maison rustique in the text, but extra material was incorporated – for example, details of slaughter, and some new species of poultry. The book was translated into Danish under the title Fjerkræets Opdrætning in 1865; there was a further version in 1881.

Another recycling of her Maison rustique was also part of the Bibliothèque du cultivateur. This was Économie domestique (Domestic economy), first appearing in 1853 and going through at least four editions until 1872. The book was essentially the first half of the first volume of the Maison rustique, the text hardly changed. This was translated into Italian in 1891 in Turin.

In the same collection, Cora wrote an excellent guide to conserving fruit (including many fruit-based products such as drinks and ices), Conservation des fruits (Preserving fruits). This came out in a single edition in 1854. The core of the work might well have been the Maison rustique, but it was not a slavish copy.

At the end of the 1850s, Mme Millet-Robinet wrote two books for the Poitiers publisher G. Hilleret. Both depended again on the Maison rustique, but allowed her space to expand her original or to vary its approach. The first was a manual for servants, Le Bon domestique, instructions pratiques sur la manière de bien servir, à l'usage des maîtres et des domestiques (The good servant, useful instructions on good service, for the use of masters and servants). Her second title was La Routine vaincue par le progrès, histoire agricole et morale (Routine overcome by progress, an agricultural moral tale), 1860, described as a practical guide for the farmer and the farmer’s wife, and an annex to the Maison rustique des dames.

Cora’s final book was published in 1868, thereafter it was either journalism or reissues. This was Maison rustique des enfants (The children’s country house), in quarto, not the usual compact duodecimo. Print, margins and production were generous and its didactic purpose sums up her larger intentions: to bring the joys of country life to all. She wrote it for her grandchildren.

Cora proudly wore her membership of various agricultural societies like medals on her chest, crowned by the foreign decoration from the royal academy in Turin. Women were rarely admitted as full members, permitted only to be correspondents, and she doubtless recalled the difficulties she met trying to place her first contribution on women’s education, when she had to rely on the intercession of her brother. Her name crops up frequently in their various bulletins and proceedings, often to do with her work with silkworms, but she wrote most often for the Journal d’Agriculture pratique with which Stéphane Robinet was closely associated (and which, of course, came from the same publisher as her own books). We have referred earlier to some pieces she had in Le Magasin pittoresque in the years 1870–1872. The editorial footnote to her first appearance is some measure of the world’s respect: ‘The author of the much-esteemed book La Maison rustique des dames, which most of our readers will certainly know. We are happy to announce that Mme Cora Millet is willing to share in our work: we hold her co-operation in the highest regard.’ At about the same time, she was contributing articles to the Québecois weekly paper, the Gazette des campagnes, on the role of women in agriculture. This was a hot topic among the Canadian farming community and a study by Martine Tremblay makes clear the weight accorded her opinions.

CORA MILLET-ROBINET: A BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cora’s appointment as a chevalier of the order of Mérite agricole was sign enough of her standing in the world at large, or at least in the world of France. But other indications abound. In the 1960s and ’70s a remarkable investigation was undertaken of the Burgundian village of Minot by a small group of ethnographers, the most famous of whom was the incomparable Yvonne Verdier. One of her colleagues, Françoise Zonabend, wrote about how gardening was always thought women’s work and how the grandmothers would teach their children’s offspring all they knew of the art. ‘Rural ladies at the beginning of the century,’ she commented, ‘derived all their knowledge from the same bible, La maison rustique des dames by Madame Millet-Robinet.’ Another modern testimony to its ubiquity is an attractive essay on how changes in French domestic economy can be traced through the various editions of the Maison rustique. The author was Georges-Henri Bousquet and while noting that the book was meant for farming families, he observed that plenty of townsfolk relied on it too. ‘My grandmother Bousquet,’ he recalled, ‘who settled in the Batignolles district of Paris after her marriage in 1868, possessed it, although she certainly had nothing to do with the rural economy.’ He goes on to aver that all ‘the generation of a certain age … remember the book perfectly.’ This earlier universal acquaintance is not matched by that of their descendants. It is not easy today to find a Frenchman who knows the name Millet-Robinet at all, be they farmer, gardener, cook, boulevardier or scholar.

Some ten years before Madame Bousquet’s marriage, Cora had been awarded a first-class medal for her writings at the Paris Universal Exhbition of 1855. Just a year before those nuptials, the fledgling mathematician Henri Poincaré gave his doting mother a copy of the Maison rustique, which must have been about the time that Colette’s mother Sidonie was relying on Cora’s instructions for the house, kitchen and garden at every turn. Colette herself came to value the Maison rustique: ‘Mme Millet-Robinet and her sweet science of housewifery, of grafting, of cooking and of keeping animals is always to hand.’ Her English biographer, Margaret Crosland, described Colette’s enthusiastic gardening and over-enthusiastic dressmaking at her summer house near Saint-Malo, both activities guided – more or less successfully – by Millet-Robinet: ‘Colette prided herself on her practical touch, but no amount of reading how to do it books can teach some things. Her domestic bible was La Maison Rustique des Dames, by Madame Millet-Robinet, a delightful old book describing the perfect housewife.’ Today, the restoration of Colette’s birthplace in Burgundy goes on apace, with Millet-Robinet the constant resource for reconstructing the garden.

Mme Cora is less well remembered for her cookery than for her precepts of family life and household management. Competition at the kitchen hearth was perhaps more intense, other authorities took precedence. None the less, Georges Vicaire, in his Bibliographie gastronomique of 1890 was minded to comment, ‘This work has become an absolute classic and is a complete small encyclopedia of great utility to many housewives. The culinary part is very important and takes up, without any other matter, a good half of the first volume.’ Praise indeed.

Cora was not without her English admirers. One was a painter, Philip Gilbert Hamerton, married to a Frenchwoman and occupying a small farm in Scotland in the 1860s. His book, A Painter’s Camp in the Highlands and Thoughts about Art (1862) opened with a discussion of whether painters should write about art themselves or leave it to more intelligent outside critics. He mused on whether tradesmen ever had the mental equipment to write about their lives: ‘Illiterate farmers not only will not, but really cannot explain their most habitual occupations…. The author of a popular little book, “Our Farm of Four Acres”, found that it was useless to consult farmers’ wives on the important subject of butter-making…. But when intelligent ladies take to farming, as Madame Millet-Robinet has done, it is astonishing how many things they find means to explain, and how lucidly they explain them.’ He was lucky, his wife was a friend of Alexandre Bixio, one of the founders of the Maison rustique du XIXe siècle, and he had sent them a copy of Cora’s book to help these unlikely farmers on their smallholding. Hamerton’s wife wrote her own memoirs, including an account of their farming in the north and their proposed migration to southern France to set up closer to her father. ‘I had diligently applied myself to our small farm and garden, with the help of a most valuable and simple guide, “La Maison Rustique des Dames,” by Madame Millet-Robinet, … and I had often thought that if my efforts were not always thwarted by the inclemency of the weather, I might count upon a fair return.’ She had to persuade her father, a gasworks manager, that country life would be possible, explaining that ‘there were now many gentlemen-farmers who did not neglect either their work on the land or their own culture – M. and Madame Millet-Robinet might be cited as examples.’ Just as Cora intended, her life and work showed that people could flee the town for a rural idyll – so long as they were properly equipped with instruction.

Another warm testimonial comes from Mrs C.W. Earle, a gardening writer who put together some pleasing essays in Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden (1897). ‘The real fault,’ she remarked, ‘of all the houses I go into to-day, my own included, though less so than some, is that they are far too full. Things are sure to accumulate. Avoid rubbish, frills and valances, draperies and bows, and all the terrible devices of the modern upholsterer. … I have a French domestic book which I think fascinating and instructive, just because it is French, and much less showy and more primitive than English books of the same kind. It is in two volumes, is called ‘Maison Rustique des Dames’ and is by Madame Millet Robinet. It has had an immense sale in France, and all the little details of household life seem more dignified and less tiresome when read in excellent French.’

Apart from these enthusiastic endorsements, I have not identified any obvious connection between the growing number of English cookery books that purported to describe French cookery for people of modest income and the specific content of the Maison rustique. Menon’s Cuisinière bourgeoise was translated as early as 1793 (as The French Family Cook). Audot was Englished in 1846 (as French Domestic Cookery Combining Elegance with Economy). A very similarly titled work, French Domestic Cookery Combining Economy with Elegance, ‘by an English physician many years resident in France’, which came out in 1825 does not seem to depend on Audot at all. Anne Cobbett, William’s daughter, wrote an excellent handbook, The English Housekeeper: or, Manual of Domestic Management in 1835 which includes more general advice on the household than most, including an eloquent descant on female education that Cora would have wholly endorsed. She even included advice on the garden and admits she was inspired by La Maison de campagne by Aglaé Adanson, a book she once thought of translating but reckoned it too French for her fellow-Britons. A book that is imbued with everything French is Cookery for English Households, ‘by a French Lady’ (Macmillan, 1864). The only comment she makes about French cookery books is that most of what Alexis Soyer suggests is too elaborate for the likes of her readers. Her recipes have points of similarity with those of Mme Millet-Robinet both in method, ingredients and that they both espouse simplicity before show. They are also quite close in their choice of repertoire.

MAISON RUSTIQUE DES DAMES

While most attention has so far been paid to the circumstances surrounding the composition of the Maison rustique, some few remarks regarding its contents may be apposite, while not wishing to compromise any reader’s approach to the text itself.

For whom was Mme Millet-Robinet writing, and why did she think it necessary to write? In her opening comments, she does not mince her words, agriculture was in crisis: ‘A seventh of France is uncultivated, and a significant proportion of the land in hand is so badly worked that yields are low and quality poor.’ With her book, she aimed to equip a new generation of female readers with sufficient agricultural knowledge and enthusiasm to make them want to join with a freshly educated male workforce (which had been fleeing the land in unprecedented numbers) and render French farming worthwhile once more. ‘I will speak of what experience has taught me; it will be a first stone laid in the great edifice of agricultural education for women.’

She did not merely wish to purvey information, however, but rather to impart a love of a whole situation, a location, a status: ‘[I will] try hard to portray both the charm and powerful appeal that I have found in my new way of life. I will tell of my activities, my pleasures, the duties I have mapped out for myself.’ Even at their most mundane, the two volumes of the Maison rustique exude affection for the country and, by implication, for the act of leaving the town for pastures new. Rarely are towns mentioned save with disdain (unless the reader has to obtain some useful supply); never are the charms of urban society preferred over country pursuits: ‘The pleasures of the summer months are so varied: walks, meals taken under spreading boughs in a beauty spot, rides out in a carriage, on a horse, even on a donkey; fishing, shooting: all these diversions, so costly to townspeople, can be had for next to nothing if you live in the country. Village fiestas, where you go to dance, rackety country weddings, celebrated in the midst of plenty, are sweet delights to be savoured with friends and relations. If these affairs have none of the show of those in town, nor do they have their stiffness and ceremony.’

While there can be no doubt as to the gender of her audience, its affluence and social standing may be slightly less certain. Millet-Robinet’s instructions are all-embracing, descending to such relative simplicities as how best to express oneself in the metric system. She had no illusions about the pretensions of many of her readers: ‘I am going to give a few details about service at table which both masters and servants may find profitable. If these details seem overly fussy, or even superfluous, to those women who have always lived in good society and know them already, they will be, I think, of great utility to women who have come out of boarding school to get married or who, never having been in the world, know nothing of how guests are received.’ She knew that many would know nothing of what she wrote, that their education was almost nil, their experience less than that. This may explain why she was so prescriptive, and certainly often literal-minded in her expressions: they knew nothing at all, a tabula rasa.

Did Cora Millet-Robinet patronize her readers? On the one hand her background was both urban and intelligent, and on the other she lived in houses (see above) that were generally a cut above those of her audience. In that series of articles she wrote for Le Magasin pittoresque she included plans of two ideal farmhouses. They accord closely with the descriptions in the Maison rustique (although she eschewed giving plans in the book, advising readers to apply to an architect). While not nearly so grand as her own places, neither are they farmworkers’ cottages. She presumes her readers to be proprietors, or at least substantial tenants, with dining arrangements that do not include the outside labour force – none of those hierarchical tables with farmer at the head, shepherd to one side and herdsman to the other. She expects her audience to go on country walks, to take carriage drives, to have guests for dinner and winter evening parties. Equally, she expects them to be able and willing to cook, to sew, to cast up accounts, and to go into the fields, discuss farming policy with the husband and supervise the labour when he has to be absent. The world she imagines is quite a modern one: servants are certainly essential, but the mistress is no mere ornament: ‘A mistress of the house has many obligations. The order and perfection she brings to their accomplishment contributes much to the prosperity of the family. She should understand the importance of her role and be resolute in pursuing it; she will find true joy in its performance, stemming from a conviction of her usefulness. She will never be bored, for that stems from idleness or from the futility of our actions; and, once she has banished boredom, content is there to take its place. The slightest act can provoke or renew a sense of enjoyment and, once achieved, life passes so much more rapidly, with that delight that is the true companion of truth and utility.

‘A young girl you wish to educate so as to equip her to run a farming household must neglect nothing which might improve her mind and allow her to acquire the attributes of society. These attributes will be just as valuable to her in the country as in the town and, as they are more rarely encountered there, they will be the more remarked; careful study will give her more confidence and allow her to converse with her husband on all those topics that only menfolk are interested in; because, if she wishes to please her husband, who is often her only companion, she must endeavour to think as he does. As she should try to make their spare time together a delight, she can quite reasonably give up learning many of the finer and insignificant details of needlework – and be less preoccupied with her personal appearance – so she may pursue those studies her position requires.’ This is a portrait of a woman as a productive economic unit, quite different from the drones of the urban bourgeoisie, and not one who depends on sexual allure as a source of profit: ‘Any woman who decides to live in the country, and who takes her duties seriously, must never hesitate to put her hand to the wheel.’

Despite the relative size of the houses she occupied, Cora Millet-Robinet’s own establishment appears quite modest, perhaps implying that she lived up to her own ideals of self-reliance. The census return for la Cataudière in 1836 lists only four servants: one bachelor of 30, a married couple of 39 and 33 respectively, with three small children and their grandmother, a 68 year-old widow. Twenty years later, the household at the Château de Pont was not much larger: three single men in their twenties, a female cook, one other female servant and a boy of thirteen. In her old age at la Bernonnière, her servants numbered an old couple and a very young girl.

If she wrote at a critical moment for agriculture, when every sinew of progressives was strained to promote better management and practice, she also stood at a significant juncture in the life domestic. The historian Suzanne Tardieu, in her pioneering analysis of the furnishings and equipment of houses in the Mâconnais ‘préindustriel’, demonstrates how material culture broadened and deepened in the years around 1850. Industrial production provoked a great accumulation of objects, from tableware to bedding, ornaments to lighting, floor-coverings to window-hangings. One reason that nineteenth-century interiors were so cluttered is that shopping was so easy, and so cheap. Mme Millet-Robinet set out to describe and assess these new opportunities to consume, to place them in the context of the well-run household, to suggest how best they might be used. We have already seen that she developed her content from one edition to the next to take novelties into account. Thus, a small example, in 1845 she does not mention matches; in 1859 she urges caution in the use and storage of the new strikable phosphorous matches; in 1893 she points out that these dangers can be avoided by the use of safety matches; and in 1920 she does not mention matches at all.

In her advice, Mme Millet-Robinet leans vertiginously towards the practical. Not for her random ornament, of dress or of furnishings. Durability, with grace, was her watchword. Mud and dirt were ever-present foes. Realism also informs her approach to man and God. There is almost no mention of the divine in her text, nor of political matters. And man, as opposed to woman, is accorded his customary place at the top of the hierarchy, but it is one which admits the possibility of partnership, not mere command. Her women have an executive role that extends beyond the kitchen and nursery, but they also have their own resorts: ‘A lady’s bedroom should be a refuge from disturbance, a place of rest and recuperation respected even by the family; in keeping with this, the furniture ought to be of useful simplicity, cleanliness its only ornament. It should include a bed, a mirrored wardrobe or a chest of drawers, a secrétaire or small desk, a wooden chest, a comfortable armchair, some more chairs, a stool and a carpet.’

Cora’s approach to human relationships other than man and wife is refreshing: her treatment of children is firm but looks forward to independence; her dealings with servants seem exemplary – an element of paternalism such as you might expect, but also a degree of respect for their privacy and identity. She was in favour of allowing some economic participation on the part of servants, for example bonuses or profit-sharing for producing livestock or commodities; she encourages social activities outside the house; she does not insist on burdensome arrangements such as the servants paying for breakages and so forth. The treatment of servants, here as in England, was always a bone of contention, but the depths to which some families might sink, as portrayed in memoirs such as Jean et Yvonne domestiques en 1900 (Jean and Yvonne servants in 1900), are not glimpsed in the pages of the Maison rustique.

Of a piece with Millet-Robinet’s vision of the role of the mistress in her own household, she expects her to know how to cook, even if not called upon to do so with too great a frequency. The mistress, after all, is already sewing for the family, teaching the children, doing the accounts, supervising the basse-cour, dispensing medicine and charity and a host of other things. Her remarks at the beginning of her Kitchen Manual are to the point: ‘It is absolutely essential that the mistress of the house knows how to cook. A thousand entirely predictable circumstances may make it necessary for even a rich woman to have to cook at some stage, especially in the country where no opportunity exists, as it does in town, of obtaining supplies from a restaurateur. Even if she does have somewhere to go for help, is it not a great blessing for the mistress who is not wealthy to be able to stand in for her cook at a moment’s notice? She will thereby study economy, and avoid imposing on her family a strange and sometimes unwholesome diet; for restaurateurs of the second rank abuse their spices and seasonings to mask the poor quality of the raw materials they employ. And finally, is it not necessary to be able to give helpful advice to an ignorant cook? One can only demand what one knows how to do. The mistress will have only herself to blame for poor food being served if she knows no more than her cook. What can she answer this poor girl when she says, “Madame, I am doing my best; I don’t know how to do otherwise?” Furthermore, a whole host of little expedients may exist in a household that, when properly handled, will result in excellent foodstuffs at very little cost. It is rare that a cook knows how to take advantage of these, and even rarer that thoughts of economy will occur to her spontaneously.’

Anyone reading the Kitchen Manual will be struck by its relative conservatism, especially in equipment, and the simplicity of its recipes. We have mentioned earlier that Millet-Robinet and her fellow-recipe-writers for the bourgeoisie had the more modest segment of that social class in mind. Rich urbanites could consult their Viards or, later, their Dubois, but Millet-Robinet does not even – at least to some extent – come up to Audot’s standards. The number of stages to a recipe, the added aromatics, are more at the level of La Petite Cuisinière habile than Audot or his ilk. That’s not to say that in the lavish deployment of certain ingredients, truffles for instance, Cora has not a more relaxed approach to good value than does the modern cook – but inflation has a way with such things. Conservative too is her relative lack of detail as to quantities (these are particularly nebulous in baking), were we to compare her recipes to her English contemporary Eliza Acton. But the recipes may still, with a little effort, be followed by a modern cook.

On the point of conservatism, Millet-Robinet mentions new developments in kitchen equipment such as the cast-iron range, the Harel stove or the economic stove (fourneau économique), but in large part she seems to suggest her recipes be cooked on an open hearth or on the old-fashioned brick- or stone-built charcoal stoves that were current in the eighteenth century. Another feature that may be unfamiliar to the modern reader is Cora’s frequent injunction to give a dish top and bottom heat. This may be a tart which is placed on the open hearth beneath a four de campagne or Dutch oven, or it is a braise of meat, for example a breast and shoulder of veal, which is cooked in a pan with top and bottom heat. In this case, the pan has a lid with a raised edge to it (or, more exactly in some examples, a depressed centre) so that embers can be piled on its surface. The modern solution is to place the pan in an oven.

Where Mme Millet-Robinet is nicely up-to-date in her thinking is her advice on family meals. These by no means fit the protein-rich, unbalanced stereotype we hold dear for nineteenth-century dining. Her thoughts about feeding children are also sensible, though we might go easy in introducing them to wine, and her closing remarks on her intended audience in this short extract cannot be repeated too often: ‘As a general rule, I do advise a household to adopt the practice of serving two dishes at dinner, or three at the most; one of meat, the other of vegetables, to which can sometimes be joined something from the dairy or a sweet dish. This economical and simple manner of feeding offers more than one advantage: in the first place I think it conducive to good health, of which there is no better protector than moderation – too much variety in food over-excites the stomach; and then it is rare that one does not serve too much food and I am convinced that the slight fatigue provoked each day by so doing is the source of many ailments which are otherwise ascribed to quite different causes; and finally, it spares the servants much time and effort.

‘Luncheon can be made from the remains of dinner, if there is insufficient left over to provide another dinner. You can add something to that if necessary. I even advise you to accustom the children to a simple lunch, composed of a soup of some sort, usually milk-based, and a nice dish of vegetables or eggs. I am of the opinion that once wine is part of the diet, it is enough to eat meat once a day, although there are many who do not share my views. Very tasty food does not encourage child development or make them vigorous, that will come from simple, healthy food, combined with lots of exercise. As a final point, I would suggest it is good for the children to get used to being less well provided for than their parents, so long as you do it without fuss or severity.

‘My advice might be criticized by those people who are used to the ways of opulent households, where the mistress has no care about such details, entrusted to able servants and performed with much greater ceremony; but, as I have written already, I do not address these people: they have no need for my humble knowledge; I write for good and simple housewives; I wish to be useful to them, and I hope they welcome my counsels.’

While Cora Millet-Robinet seems to have stayed resolutely in Poitou during her working life, her book was intended to be used more widely. She is frank enough about local practices, or differences to the rest of France, but she does not make a point of offering regional dishes in her recipe collection, nor of ignoring other people’s habits – for example she cites Flemish and Belgian ways of cooking a number of times. Nor does she personalise her information by name-dropping, anecdote or other means. She refers once to her place of residence (then, in 1859, Genillé in the canton of Montrésor), and she has one recipe linked to a specific individual (Marshal MacDonald, see above). There are a very few Poitevin things, the most obvious being the ‘Jaw breaker’ or casse-museau cake or biscuit.

THE TRANSLATION AND THE TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Cora Millet-Robinet was careful in her choice of words and clear in her expression of them. She would have made a fine parliamentary draftsman for her clarity and economy. She has a tendency to repeat words for good measure, to ensure she is not misunderstood at any point. Generally, her vocabulary is either accurate or, in the case of adjectives, limited. I have not taken too many liberties, nor attempted to introduce colour or variety where she has eschewed them. Any footnotes in the text which follows are written by the translator.

Millet-Robinet today is most often discussed with reference to her views on child-rearing, the treatment of servants and her dispensing of home-medicines. A measured assessment of her whole output has not yet been undertaken. The single individual deserving most credit for maintaining and increasing Cora’s modern reputation is Mme Gloria Godard, a resident also of Availles-en-Châtellerault. Her blogs (most especially http://coramilletrobinet.blogspot.co.uk) and her genealogical work on Cora’s family (http://gw.geneanet.org/coramillet?lang=en&p=cora%20elisabeth&n=robinet&oc=0) have been the twin rocks on which this introduction is constructed. Mme Godard has been generous with her information and assistance. I am also grateful for M. Stéphane Robinet for permission to reproduce the portrait of his ancestor. I am grateful to Françoise Bérard, Librarian, and her colleagues at the Institut de France, as well as to the unnamed staff at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and their matchless digital programme Gallica (http://gallica.bnf.fr). Philip and Mary Hyman have been, as ever, ready with their co-operation and willingness to share their infinite knowledge of French culinary literature and food history. Barbara Santich and Caroline Davidson have been generous as audience and commentators, while my wife Sally has put up with a lot. Catheryn Kilgarriff has been kind enough to publish this; I hope it repays her complaisance.

Bibliography

(Unless otherwise stated, the French books were published in Paris and the English in London.)

Adanson, Aglaé, La Maison de campagne (Audot, 1822).

Audot, Louis-Eustache, La Cuisinière de la Campagne et de la Ville (1st ed., Audot, 1818; 15th ed., Audot, 1834; translated as French Domestic Cookery … in Twelve Hundred Receipts published by David Bogue, London, and Harper Bros., New York, 1846).

Baroli, Marc, La Vie quotidienne en Berry au temps de George Sand (Hachette, 1982).

Béguin, Maurice, La Cuisine en Poitou (Librairie Saint-Denis, Niort, [1932]).

Brioist, Pascal and Fichou, Jean-Christophe, ‘La sardine à l’huile ou le premier aliment industriel’, Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest, vol. 119–4 (2012), pp. 69–80.

Bousquet, Georges-Henri, ‘Quelques remarques sur l’évolution de l’économie domestique en France depuis Louis-Philippe’, Revue d'histoire économique et sociale, Vol. 45, No. 4 (1967), pp. 509–538.

Cardelli, P., pseud. of M.H. Duval, Manuel du cuisinier et de la cuisinière à l’usage de la ville et de la campagne (Roret, 1822).

Celnart, Mme [Élisabeth Félicie Bayle Mouillard], Nouveau Manuel complet d’économie domestique (3rd ed., Roret, 1837).

Chauvaud, Frédéric, ed., La Société agricole de la Vienne au XIXe et XXe siècles: Guide de recherche (Geste éditions, La Crèche, 2001).

Chabot, Paul, Jean et Yvonne domestiques en 1900 (Tema-éditions, 1977).

David, Elizabeth, French Provincial Cooking (Michael Joseph, 1960).

––––, South Wind Through the Kitchen (Michael Joseph, 1997).

Debien, G., ‘Une Nantaise à Saint-Domingue (1782–1786) [Jeanne Eulalie Lebourg, the wife of Jacques Patrice Millet],’ Revue du Bas-Poitou et des Provinces de l’Ouest, no. 6, 1972, pp. 413–436.

Demonet, Michel, Tableau de’Agriculture Française au milieu du 19e siècle. L’enquête de 1852 (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1990).

Flaubert, Gustave, Bouvard et Pécuchet (first published in 1881; English translation by A.J. Krailsheimer, Penguin Books, 1976).

Gacon-Dufour, Marie Armande Jeanne, Manuel de la ménagère à la ville et à la campagne, et de la femme de basse-cour (Buisson, 1805).

––––, Manuel du pâtissier et de la pâtissière, à l'usage de la ville et de la campagne (Roret, 1825).

––––, Manuel des habitants de la campagne et de la bonne fermière (Roret, 1826).

Garçon, Anne-Françoise, ‘Innover dans le texte. L'Encyclopédie Roret et la vulgarisation des techniques, 1830–1880’, Colloque Les Archives de l'Invention, May 2003, Paris.

Guérin, André, La Vie quotidienne en Normandie au temps de Madame Bovary (Hachette, 1975).

Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité Du Crest, Comtesse de [Mme de Genlis], Manuel de la jeune femme: Guide Complet de la maîtresse de maison (Bouchet, 1829).

Guiral, Pierre, and Thuillier, Guy, La Vie quotidienne des domestiques en France au XIXe siècle (Hachette, 1978).

Heywood, Colin, The Development of the French Economy, 1750–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1995),

Lastinger, Valérie, ‘The Laboratory, the Boudoir and the Kitchen’, in Ann Kathleen Doig, Felicia B. Sturzer, eds., Women, Gender and Disease in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).

Lehmann, Gilly, The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Prospect Books, Blackawton, 2003).

Madame Mérigot, La Cuisinière républicaine (Mérigot jeune, 1794–1795).

Menon, La Cuisinière bourgeoise (Pierre Guillyn, 1746; modern facsimile, edited by Alice Peeters, Temps Actuels, 1981).

Meunier, Christophe, Genillé…au fil des temps (Éditions Hugues de Chivré, Chemillé-sur-Indrois, 2006).

Pariset, Mme, Nouveau Manuel complet de la maîtresse de maison…suivi par une appendice par Mesdames Gacon-Dufour, Celnart, &c (Roret, 1852 ed.; Pariset first published by Audot, 1821).

Perrot, Marguerite, Le Mode de vie des familles bourgeoises, 1873–1953 (Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1982 ed.).

Price, Roger, An Economic History of Modern France, 1730–1914 (Macmillan, 1981).

Robinet, Stéphane, Obituary notice of François Millet, Journal d’Agriculture pratique, 1860, vol. II, July–December.

Romanet, Emmanuelle, ‘La mise en nourrice, une pratique répandue en France au XIXe siècle’, Transtext(e)s Transcultures, 8, 2013.

Rose, Louis, La Bonne Fermière, ou élémens économiques, utiles aux jeunes personnes destinées à cet état (J.-B. Henry, Lille, 1765).

Simon-Hiernard, D., ‘Les tombes sous tuiles du Bas-Empire de la Cataudière (Availles-en-Châtellerault, Vienne)’, in Boissavit-Camus, B., Rérolle, M., Romains et Barbares entre Loire et Gironde – IVe–Xe siècles, Catalogue de l'exposition de Poitiers, 6 oct. 1989–28 févr. 1990, Poitiers, 1989.

Tardieu, Suzanne, La Vie domestique dans le Mâconnais rural préindustriel (Université de Paris, Travaux et mémoires de l’Institut d’Ethnologie, LXIX, Musée de l’Homme, 1964).

Tremblay, Martine, La Représentation de l’idéal féminin en milieu rural Québecois au XIXe siècle (MA thesis, Université de Québec, 1987).

Utrecht-Friedel, Louise Beate Augustine, Le Petit Cuisinier habile (the author, 1814).

––––, La Petite Cuisinière habile (Friedel et Gasc, 1822).

Viard, A., Le Cuisinier Royale (11th ed., Barba, 1822).

Vicaire, Georges, Bibliographie gastronomique (Rouquette et fils, 1890).

Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham, ‘The Endangered Cuisinière Bourgeoise’, in Harlan Walker ed., Disappearing Foods: Studies in Foods and Dishes at Risk. Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1994 (Prospect Books, 1995), pp. 221–226.

Zeldin, Theodore, France, 1848–1945 (Oxford University Press, 1973–1977).

Zonabend, Françoise, trans. Anthony Forster, The enduring memory. Time and history in a french village (Manchester University Press, 1979).

Tom Jaine

Introduction to volume I of The French Country Housewife, my translation of the 1859 edition of Maison rustique des dames, by Cora Millet-Robinet

The Travellers’ Food Club, 1938