Numa Roumestan

by Alphonse Daudet

The truth was that while strolling about Paris the old man had discovered in the St. Denis quarter a big shop of food-stuffs, where he had entered, lured by the sign and by the temptations of the exotic shop-front, which was full of colored fruits and of silver and painted papers; it made a brilliant bit of color in the foggy, populous street. This shop, where he had ended by becoming a crony and friend of the family, was well known to Southerners quartered in Paris and had for its sign:

Aux Produits du Midi.

“At the products of the South”—never was a sign more truthful. Everything in that shop was the product of the South, from the shopkeepers, M. and Mme. Mèfre, who were two products of the Fat South, having the prominent nose of Roumestan, the flaring eyes, the accent, the phrases and demonstrative welcome of Provence, down to their shop-boys, who were familiar and called people by their first names and did not hesitate in their guttural voices to call out to the desk: “I say, Mèfre, where did youse put the sausages?”—yes, down to the little Mèfre children, whining and dirty, who passed their lives amid a constant menace of being disembowelled or scalped or made into soup, but who nevertheless kept right on sticking their little dirty fingers into all the open barrels; nay, even to the buyers, gesticulating and gossiping by the hour together in order at last to buy a barquette (boat shaped cake) for two cents, or taking their seats on chairs in a circle in order to discuss the merits of garlic sausage or of pepper sausage. Here one might listen to the “none the less, at least, come now, other ways”—the whole vocabulary, in fact, belonging to Aunt Portal, exchanged in the most noisy voices, whilst the “dear brother” in a dyed-over black coat, a friend of the family, haggled over some salt fish, and the flies, the vast horde of flies, drawn hither by all the sugar of these fruits and the candies and the almost Oriental pastries, buzzed and boomed right in the middle of the winter, kept alive by that steady heat. And when some busy Parisian grew impatient at the attendants all down at heel and the sublime indifference these shop people showed, continuing their gossip from one counter to the other whilst weighing and doing up things all wrong, it was a sight to see how that Parisian was put in his place by some remark uttered in the strongest country accent:

“Té! vé! if you are in a hurry the door is always open, you know, and the tram-cars are passing in front of the shop.”

Father Valmajour was received with open arms by this gang of compatriots. M. and Mme. Mèfre remembered that they had seen him in the old time at the Fair of Beaucaire in a competition of tabor-players.

Between old people from the South that Fair at Beaucaire, now no more and existing merely as a name, has remained like a Masonic bond of brotherhood. In our Southern provinces it was the fairy-tale for the whole year, the one distraction for all those narrow lives; people got ready for it a long time in advance, and for a long time after they talked about it. It formed a reward which could be promised to wife and children, and if it was not possible to take them along, one might bring them a bit of Spanish lace or a toy, which took little place in one’s bag. The Beaucaire Fair, moreover, under pretext of business, meant a whole month or a fortnight at least of the free, exuberant and unexpected life of a camp of gypsies. One got a bed here or there from the citizens or in the shops or on top of desks, or else in the open street under the canvas hood of wagons or even below the warm light of the July stars.

O, for the business without the boredom of the shop, matters treated while one dines, or at the door in shirt sleeves, or at the booths ranged along the Pré, on the banks of the Rhône! The river itself was nothing but a moving fair-ground, supporting its boats of all shapes, its lahuts, lute shaped boats with lateen sails which came from Arles, Marseilles, Barcelona, the Balearic Islands, filled with wines, anchovies, oranges and cork, decorated with banners and standards and streamers which sounded in the fresh wind and reflected their colors in the swiftly flowing water. And what a clamor there was in that variegated crowd of Spaniards, Sardinians, Greeks in long tunics and embroidered slippers, Armenians with their furred hats and Turks with their befrogged jackets, their fans and wide trousers of gray linen! All these were jammed together in the open-air restaurants, the booths for children’s toys and canes and umbrellas, for jewelry and Oriental pastils and caps. And then to think of what was called the “fine Sunday,” that is to say, the first Sunday after the opening of the fair—the orgies on the quays and the boats and in the famous restaurants, such as La Vignasse or the Grand Jardin or the Café Thibaut! Those who have once seen that fair have always felt a home-sickness for it to the end of their days.

One felt free and easy at the shop of the Mèfre couple, somewhat as at the Beaucaire Fair. And as a matter of fact, in its picturesque disorder the shop did resemble an improvised grand fair for the sale of foreign and southern products. Here all full and bending were sacks of meal in a golden powder, dried peas as big and hard as buck-shot and big chestnuts all wrinkled and dusty looking, like little faces of old female charcoal-burners; there stood jars of black and green olives preserved in the Picholini manner, tin cans of red oil with the taste of fruit, barrels of preserves from Apt made of melon rinds, of figs, of quinces and of apricots—all the remains of fruit from a fair dropped into molasses. Up there on the shelves among the salted goods and preserves, in a thousand bottles and a thousand tin boxes, were the special relishes belonging to each city—the shells and little ships of Nîmes, the nougat of Montélimar, the ducklings and biscuits of Aix—all in gilded envelopes ticketed and signed.

Then there were the early vegetables, an outpouring of Southern gardens without shadows, in which the fruits hanging in slender green foliage have a factitious look of jewels—firm looking jujubes with a fine sheen of newly lacquered walnut side by side with pale azeroles, figs of every sort, sweet lemons, green or scarlet peppers, great big swelling melons, enormous onions with flowerlike hearts, muscat grapes with long berries so transparent that the flesh of them trembles like wine in a flask, rows of bananas striped black and yellow, regular landslides of oranges and pomegranates with their red gold tones, like little bombs made of red copper with their fuses issuing from a small crenelated crown. And finally, everywhere, on the walls and ceilings, on both sides of the door, in the tangle of burnt palms, chaplets of leeks and onions and dried carobs, packages of sausages, bunches of corn on the cob, there was a constant stream of warm hues, there was the entire summer, there was the Southern sunshine fastened up in boxes, sacks and jars radiating color out to the very sidewalk through the muddiness of the windows.

Old Valmajour would enter this shop with his nostrils dilated, quivering and most excited. This man, who refused the slightest work in the presence of his children and would wipe his brow for hours over a single button that he had to sew on his waistcoat, boasting of having accomplished a labor like one of “Caesar’s,” in this shop was always ready to lend a helping hand, throw off his coat to nail up or open cases, picking up here and there an olive or a bit of berlingot candy and lightening the labor with his monkey tricks and stories. On one day in the week, indeed, the day of the arrival of codfish à la brandade, he stayed very late at the store in order to aid them in sending out the orders.