the french ledger book

This  weekend at a fair I bought two ledger books.  Nothing valuable, but the sort of encounter that sends a little frisson up my back.

I picked up the first book, with an unpromising dusty black cover, not really expecting to find anything interesting on its pages.  Inside I found a most beautifully written ledger of accounts, dated from 1858  to  1893.  No doubt, kept by a business man, keeping track of his expenses and investments.  The contents are too vague to be really informative, but the careful handwriting and neat notes are charming and unique.

The lady selling her pile of bric-a-brac saw me smiling at the pages and sidled up to me with a much much smaller book in her hand.  "You might like to look at this one too", she almost whispered to me.

The little notebook had a handwritten label on the front: "Recettes et Dépenses",  (income and expenses).

I opened it to find  a notebook, a financial record for the year 1912, whose sparse pages spoke to me of a simple life with few and inexpensive needs.

I thanked the lady enthusiastically, and she told me the book had been her great uncle's.  He apparently bought bicarb of soda, shaving cream, stamps and other small necessities.

"Why are you selling this?" I asked;  "But why would you want to buy it?", she replied.  !!

 I opened a page of the tiny ledger, where the owner had listed a hotel bill at 44 francs, and  a list of othr travelling expenses*,    then pulled from my pocket a receipt from a trip to the supermarket this week.  Dozens of items required for one week of family life.  

We both smiled as we looked at the two short  pages that covered her uncle's expenses for the whole of the month of May ......  "Don't you think life was simpler then?!"

*[this is in old francs, so today 44 francs would be worth 67 centimes of a euro or 0.86 US$]