All at once, out of the dampness comes a new odor, something of the earth, but not of the deep earth. It is as if the plowshare had just turned over a bit of sun-warmed humus, and as your eyes become accustomed to the darkness you see that this vault, so much like a stage setting of Gordon Craig’s, has small apertures in its sides where beds of mushrooms are pushing their way out of the ground. It is in places like this that the supply for Paris is grown.
Turning to the left, you will find a continuous passage, and if you have the courage to traverse its three miles of length you will come out to the light at the site of another red-roofed village—this one called Montessan—and strange to relate, there again is the Seine, which has coiled itself around like a snake and met you at the other side. Across the river at this point is a large and formidable building which seems by its modernity to deny the facts of all you have seen, for this is the Pavilion Henri Quatre, and Paris is but twenty miles away.
My hotel at Carrière St.-Denis was above a shop where pig meat in different forms was sold. M. Perdrielle, charcutier, was a genial host, and his wife’s cooking did ample justice to his artistry as a butcher. We often went out there for a few days, and once I spent a month with these people who lived the life of the France of a hundred years ago. I was always called “M. Edouard le Dessineur,” which is not French, but peasant argot, and they did not see anything at all generous in including cigarettes, billiards, and drinks in the two hundred and fifty francs a month they charged for board.
Berthe, the daughter of the household, was married while I was in Carrière St.-Denis, and I had the extreme pleasure of assisting at a true rural marriage. Her husband-to-be was a wine merchant and, wishing to do him great honor, she begged me to wear my evening clothes. A merchant de vin is on about the same social level with that of the owner of a corner saloon in America; but I was perfectly willing to show off for Berthe’s sake.
The banquet began in the evening and was enlivened by many old customs. At a certain time a small boy came in with a giggle and ran away with the bride’s garter, which was twenty yards long, and was immediately pulled this way and that by all the men, who fought for the pieces. One ceremony, which must have been a survival of the Rabelaisian period, was carried out by the bridesmaids, who came in singing an old French song (one of those delightful things whose meaning could be taken either of two ways) and holding aloft a pot de chambre filled with dragees, or sugar almonds, which they distributed to the company. The procession of young men followed with a pair of candy horns for the groom.
At the end of many toasts they all were sufficiently tipsy to begin their long pilgrimage, for it is the custom for the bridal pair to spend the first week of their married life visiting all their friends, taking all the bridesmaids and groomsmen with them. At each home they eat and drink, and on the seventh day an exhausted pair of lovers return home, dirty and forlorn, with their clothes—and their nerves—in tatters.
Every change of season has its corresponding duties to nature, and each one is made the occasion of a festival by the simple folk in all lands. Let the foreigner who wanders into peasant France in the autumn beware of letting himself loose among the grape gatherers. The “vendange,” as it is called, is the ceremony of picking these little fruits out of which the native wine is made, and it is during this season that the peasants let themselves go, like children. They dance and they sing and they play practical jokes, the most common being to catch the unwary bystander and rub him with the juice of the tenturier, the Spanish grape. There are a certain number of these in every vineyard. They are called the “dyer” grape, and are used to give color to the petit vin, and assuredly give a lasting color to the poor victim. After the harvest they all come home in a tumbrel, the noise and laughter in no way indicating the former gruesome use for that vehicle.
When you have managed to tear yourself away from this interesting and strange suburb of Paris, and crossed the Seine, should you look back upon the scene of your former pleasures, you will see nothing of the villages with the red-tiled roofs, nothing of the cabbages and beets, indeed, nothing to indicate any human habitation. As far as you know, there is only a solid cliff of Caen stone—the same of which the Louvre is built—pale cream in tone and gray when the air touches it. I once dug my finger-nail into a soft piece of the rock and found it was made of an infinite number of seashells, a veritable paste of dead animals.
II. Barbizon
On the fringe of the woods of the forest of Fontainebleau is Barbizon. We used to go out here whenever we could, where, at the Hotel Siron there were always dozens of artists gathered together, hoping to pick up one of Millet’s paper collars.