LIFE IN FRANCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 November 1938, Page 6

LIFE IN FRANCE

ATTRACTIONS OF NATIONAL MUSEUM. COSTUMES AND CUSTOMS DISPLAYED. A National Museum, showing the life of France, is nearing completion and will open in a few months. The contemplated museum will be a history of the people as well as a picture of the people of every part of France of today. It will show how France lives, with groups of figures illustrating the costumes and customs of the country. From room to room the visitor will be able to make a journey round France, passing from the fisherman’s hut to the farm of Brittany, with interiors showing the quaint bread racks above the table, the big chimney corner, the carved cradle; to the sunny south, with the sunburned maids of the Mediteranean se’aboard wearing their tambourine hats perched on the side of the head; to the Pyrenees, with white capped peaks against the blue sky seen through open doorways of peasants’ homes where the men seated round the table wear- red waistcoats and thick woollen stockings. While the museum will be extremely picturesque it will never fall to the level of a waxworks show. Every group will be accurate in every detail of costume and surroundings, and with that desire to make the museum really educative, which characterises all new museum organisation in France, beside each group will be found a notice summarising the chief characteristics and ■pointing out to the visitor what it is interesting that he should note. M. Georges Henri Riviere, the curator of this National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions, as it will be called, declared in an interview that the aim of the new museum was to present “a manorama of the people of France.” At the entrance to this museum there will be statues of St Eloi, patron saint of agriculturers, St Roch, patron saint of tillers of the soil, and St Grespin, patron saint of shoemakers and leather workers. Visitors on entering will find a vestibule which will be a sort of introduction to folklore and popular history from the earliest times, tracing the different phases of national evolution. Next will come the museum proper, With the grbups as indicated above. This will be followed by a section in which there be models of the dwellings of the different parts of France, from the Normandy farm, which its its back on the road and the passer-by and faces inwards where the owner can have under his eye all that is going on, to the Basque house with its irregular pointed roof, the house of the south, with walls recessed to seek shade from the sun, and the strange thatched cottages of the lonely Gardians of the Camargue, the cowboys of France, with the bent-back cross over the thatch. Next the visitor will see all the costumes of France, from the bright colours of Brittany, Alsace, and Savoy, to the more sober tones of Auvergne. Costumes from christening to confirmation, betrothal robes, bridal dress, and widows’ weeds? A “room of the calendar” will illustrate the festivities of the year, with costumes connected with Carnival. A final room will be devoted to temporary exhibitions arranged by each region of France in turn. A library attached to the museum is to contain thousands of photographs, documents and volumes dealing with every phase of the life of the people of France.