“What for?”
“Oh! for that nonsense they do every year.”
“What nonsense?”
“I have to go there as a judge to hear all the rubbish and gossip you can imagine for forty-eight hours.”
“What about?”
“A most stupid thing, as I will tell you. It is not to adjudge a house, or a field, or an inheritance, but a rose!”
“How? A rose? You are to give a rose?”
“Eh! Mon Dieu! Yes, it is I who have to decide this important affair. It is an old custom established there in barbarous times. It is astonishing that, in a century so enlightened as ours, they should not have done away with a folly that gives me a journey of ten or twelve leagues every summer, through abominable cross-lanes, for I have to make two journeys for that absurdity.”
“A rose does not seem to me particularly barbarous. But who do you give it to?”
“To the peasant girl declared to be the most virtuous and obedient to her parents.”