I told her that the flou was the cluster formed by the Urchin’s five white teeth and that the pécou was the antipodes of the mouth. She went away only half convinced. It may be that, at this moment, the seeds of the fruit, grains of sand rattling in the empty shell, are germinating in some old broken-mouthed pipkin.
Favier, therefore, knows many things; and he knows them more particularly through having eaten them. He knows the virtues of a Badger’s back, the toothsome qualities of the leg of a Fox; he is an expert as to the best part of that Eel of the bushes, the Snake; he has browned in oil the Eyed Lizard, the ill-famed [[328]]Rassade of the South; he has thought-out the recipe of a fry of Locusts. I am astounded at the impossible stews which he has concocted during his cosmopolitan career.
I am no less surprised at his penetrating eye and his memory for things. I have only to describe some plant, which to him is but a nameless weed, devoid of the least interest; and, if it grows in our woods, I feel pretty sure that he will bring it to me and tell me the spot where I can pick it for myself. The botany of the infinitesimal even does not foil his perspicacity. To complete my already-published work on the Sphæriaceæ of Vaucluse, I resume my patient herborizing with the lens during the bad weather, the insect’s slack time. When the frost hardens the ground, when the rains reduce it to slush, I take Favier away from his work in the garden to scour the woods with me; and there, in the tangle of some bramble-bush, we hunt together for those microscopic growths which speckle with black dots the tiny branches strewn all over the soil. He calls the largest species ‘gunpowder,’ an accurate expression which has already been used by the botanists to describe one of those Sphæriaceæ. He feels quite proud of his bunch of discoveries, which is richer than mine. When he lights upon a magnificent rosellinia, a mass of black pustules [[329]]wrapped in a purplish down, we smoke a pipe to celebrate the joyous occasion.
He excels, above all things, in ridding me of the troublesome folk whom I meet upon my rambles. The peasant is naturally curious, as fond of asking questions as a child; but his curiosity is flavoured with a spice of malice and in all his questions there is an undercurrent of chaff. What he fails to understand he turns into ridicule. And what can be more ludicrous than a gentleman looking through a glass at a Fly captured with a gauze net, or a bit of rotten wood picked up from the ground? Favier cuts short the bantering catechism with a word.
We were hunting along the ground, step by step, with bent backs, for some of the evidences of prehistoric times that abound on the south side of the mountain: serpentine-stone axes, black potsherds, flint arrow-heads and spear-heads, flakes, side-scrapers, cores.
‘What does your master do with those ‘payrards?’[2] asked a new arrival.
‘He makes them into putty for the glaziers,’ replied Favier, with an air of solemn assurance.
Another time, I had just gathered a handful of Rabbit-droppings in which the magnifying-glass had shown me a cryptogamous growth worthy of further inspection. Up comes an [[330]]inquisitive person who has seen me carefully packing the precious windfall in a paper bag. He suspects a money-making business, some crazy trade or other. Everything, to the countryman, is translatable into terms of francs and sous. In his eyes, I am making a steady income out of these Rabbit-droppings.
‘What does your master do with those pétourles?’[3] he asks Favier, in ingratiating tones.
‘He distils them to extract the essential oils,’ replies my man, with magnificent self-possession.