THE FOREIGN GOVERNESS.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1807, 21 July 1913, Page 2

THE FOREIGN GOVERNESS.

M. Marcel Prevost has made an attack upon the unfortunato foreign governess who has to earn her living by teaching her own language to the children ot\ French people, writes the Paris correspondent of "Tho Queen." Tho attack is not kind, but worse than that, it is unjust. Ho says that most of the English women wlio come over to Franco to teach are obliged to leave their country and home cither because they are no good or are unhappy. Many of the girls and' women who come here—from England, at any rate—come simply becauso they have to work, and they look upon a little foreign experience and a second language as beneficial. It may bo that they are not at all gracious or particularly beautiful specimens of their race, but most of them are brave women, making the best of a very difficult situation. M. Prevost considers that they have a bad influence over the children under their care, but ho would be nearer the truti if he said that they had no influence at all, or, if any, more likely for good, as the average English woman is a truthful, straight-dealing person, with a few national prejudices which do no harm to anyone but herself. She sometimes has a very unhappy life with Her spoilt young charges, and nearly always she is dull, for it is a well-known fact that very few French people take any interest at all in their foreign governesses beyond seeing that they give to the last ounce the pound of flesli that is duo to their employers. She has few comforts, few-plea-sures, and, worst of all, she has an indefinite position, which it would take the clevorost of diplomatists to fill well. She is not a servant, she is still less one of the family, but she must so manage as to bo friendly with all. Of course, there are cases where "the foreign governess is treated beautifully. I know (says the writer) of several such cases myself. But the average middle-class Frenchwoman treats her foreign governess with absolutely no consideration at all, and any girl or woman who contemplates entering a French family must be prepared to be well fed, moderately paid, but moro or less of a pariah on account of her position and her nationality, be the latter what it may.