Ovid tells us, in a delightful passage, of the manner in which Philemon and Baucis welcomed the gods unawares as guests in their humble cottage. On the three-legged table steadied by means of a potsherd, they served cabbage-soup, rancid bacon, eggs turned for a moment over the hot cinders, cornelian cherries preserved in brine, honey and fruits. One dish is lacking amid this rustic magnificence, an essential dish which no Baucis of our country-side would ever forget. The bacon-soup would have been followed, inevitably, by a plateful of haricots. Why does Ovid, the poet so rich in details, fail to speak of the bean which would have looked so well on the bill of fare? The reply is the same: he cannot have known of it.
In vain do I go over the little that my reading has taught me of rustic food in ancient times: I have no recollection of the haricot. The stew-pots of the vine-dresser and the harvester tell me of the lupin, the broad bean, the pea, and the lentil; but they never mention the bean of beans.
The haricot has a reputation of another kind, a reputation more flatulent than flattering. You eat it and then, as the saying goes, the sooner you are off the better. It therefore lends itself [[219]]to the coarse jests loved by the rabble, especially when these are put into words by the shameless genius of an Aristophanes or a Plautus. What stage effects could have been produced by the merest allusion to the noisy bean, raising guffaws of laughter from the mariners of Athens or the street-porters of Rome! Did the two comic poets, in the unfettered gaiety of a language less reserved than ours, ever refer to the virtues of the haricot? Not once. They are quite silent on the subject of the sonorous bean.
The word haricot itself sets us thinking. It is an outlandish term, related to none of our expressions. Its turn of language, which is alien to our combinations of sounds, suggests to the mind some West-Indian jargon, as do caoutchouc and cocoa. Does the word, as a matter of fact, come from the American Redskins? Did we receive, together with the bean, the name by which it is called in its native country? Perhaps so; but how are we to know? Haricot, fantastic haricot, you set us a curious linguistic problem.
The Frenchman calls it also faséole, flageolet. The Provençal dubs it faïoù and favioù; the Catalan fayol; the Spaniard faseolo; the Portuguese feyâo; the Italian faguilo. Here I am on familiar ground: the languages of the Latin family have kept, with the inevitable terminal modifications, the ancient word faseolus.
Now, if I consult my dictionary, I find: faselus, [[220]]phaselus, faseolus, phaseolus, haricot. Learned vocabulary, permit me to tell you that your translation is wrong: phaselus or phaseolus cannot mean haricot. And the incontestable proof is in the Georgics[3] where Virgil tells us the season at which to sow the faseolus. He says:
Si vero viciamque seres vilemque phaselum.…
Haud obscura cadens mittet tibi signa Bootes;
Incipe et ad medias sementem extende pruinas.[4]
Nothing is clearer than the teaching of the poet, who was wonderfully well-informed on agricultural matters: we must begin to sow the phaselus when the constellation Bootes disappears at sunset, that is to say, at the end of October, and continue doing so until the middle of the winter.