Or it is a winter scene that comes. The copper lamp, hanging from a beam, does its best, though not quite successfully, to play the part of the moon upon a harvest field. Catherine plies her distaff busily, making her bobbin hum; Toinette knits, steadily as a machine, a thick, woollen stocking; Jacquot mends, with osier rushes, a basket for next summer's vintage. Justin, sitting with his face to the back of his chair, is cutting, upon the blade of an iron shovel, bunches of maize, of which the grains go raining down and dancing up from the heaps in the vessel below. The old father, Claude, does just nothing at all. A long life of hard work has well earned him some idle hours; and he is content to sit and doze by the fireside; just throwing in a word now and again; when the right cord is struck, or something reminds him of a story of his early escapades, in the days when he was as Jacquot is—with a good hand for the plough, a good heart for the girls, and a good stomach for a bowl of la Pochouse.[196]
So, through the quiet round of French rustic life, the generations are born, are married, and pass again to the keeping of the earth that kept them.
The second of these episodes, marriage, in a family of any consequence, in the olden time, was a charmingly elaborate and picturesque function. Much of the poetry of it has now passed for ever; though, a few years back, a prominent citizen of the locality decided to revive all the ceremonies at his daughter's wedding, and did so with complete success.
I have not the space here to describe in detail, as I would—as M. Fertiault has done so effectively in "Une Noce d'Autrefois en Bourgogne,"—all that took place. But I cannot pass it by wholly in silence.
The wedding festivities extend over three days. The first day is full of processions, and fife and drum, and flying ribbons, and sweetmeats, and official journeys to summon from their abodes the Dames d'honneur, who attend upon the bride. Then comes the municipal ceremony at the mairie—the official marriage—and then the return to the Hôtel des Trois Maures, where the bride and bridegroom, who, all the time have been scattering sweetmeats right and left, receive, in their turn, an aspersion of grains of corn, which come showering down upon them from the upper windows. This is the ceremony of "Sowing the épousés"; the golden rain is a blessing upon the marriage, a poetical invocation of the good-will of Plenty's Goddess.
"Scarcity and want shall shun you Ceres' blessing now is on you."