There is a flower market on the Place Royal, and you will see the Spanish women there, with their foulards and trinkets, to catch a few sous from the rustics.
We cannot confine our interest to the market-folk, however, for everybody is more or less picturesque in this strange land, and we are never tired of saying, “See here,” and “See there.” Sometimes it is a gray-haired spinner with her ancient distaff that attracts our notice, as she sits in a sunny door-way or totters along the sidewalk; and then there are the antics of these foreign children! Béarnais boys are as fond of standing on their heads as their American brethren are, but their large and heavy sabots are a great in convenience.
Just look at those wooden shoes ranged along the sidewalk over there, while the owners thereof are flourishing their emancipated heels in fine style.
These are some of the sights of a market-day at Pau; but how can you ever get a notion of the sounds? For when we add to the market-day hubbub the various every-day street cries that mingle with it we have a strange orchestra.
“As fond of standing on their heads as their American brethren.”
There are the charcoal men, who begin on a high key and drop with an almost impossible interval to a prolonged, nasal, twanging note; the old clo’ men, whose patois for rags sounds so exactly like my companion’s name that she is sure they are after the dresses she is economically wearing out at Pau; the chimney-sweeps; the jonchée women, who sell cream cheese, rolled in what looks like onion-tops; the roasted chestnut women, whose shrill “Tookow!” (patois for “Tout chaud”) suggests piping-hot chestnuts in bursting shells; and the crockery and earthen men, who push their wares before them in long shallow box-carts, and give, in a sustained recitative, the whole catalogue of delf and pottery.
In the afternoon when the noise and stir are subsiding, we hear a few notes, often repeated, from what I should like to call a shepherd’s pipe; only the instrument in question is not in the least like one, but resembles more one of those little musical toys with a row of holes cut along one side, upon which our children at home are so fond of performing. However, our shepherd contrives to produce a pastoral effect with his simple strain, and we favor the illusion of the pipe by only listening to him, while we look at his pretty goats with long, silky black hair. He leads them through the town twice a day, and at the sound of his call those who wish goat’s milk send out their glasses and get it warm from a goat milked at the door. As his last faint notes die out in the distance the rosy light fades from the peaks of the Pyrenees; the sun has set, and market-day is over.