After the fair commences, many articles are on sale daily; but others are exhibited only for a short time. Thus, following the custom at Troyes, for the first day or two cloths are displayed in special variety; after that leather goods and furs; then various bulk commodities, such as salt, medicinal drugs, herbs, raw wool, flax, etc.; next comes the excitement of a horse and cattle market, when Conon will be induced to buy for his oldest son a palfrey and for his farms a blooded bull;[119] and after that various general articles will hold the right of way.
THE SALE OF PELTRIES (BOURGES)
The Pontdebois masters are required to close their shops and do all their business at the fair grounds in order that there may be no unjust competition with the visiting traders. Indeed, all business outside the fair grounds is strictly forbidden in order to prevent fraudulent transactions which the bishop's officers cannot suppress. Thus, besides the costly imported wares, you can get anything you ordinarily want from the curriers, shoemakers, coppersmiths, hardware, linen, and garment venders, and the dealers in fish, grain, and even bread.
All this means a chaffering, chattering, and ofttimes a quarreling, which makes one ask, "Have the days of the Tower of Babel returned?" The sergeants are always flying about on foot or horseback among the winding avenues of tents and booths, and frequently drag off some vagabond for the pillory. They even seize a cut-purse red-handed and soon give the idlers the brutal pleasure of watching a hanging. There are a couple of tents where notaries are ready with wax and parchments to draw up and seal contracts and bargains. Flemish merchants are negotiating with their Bordeaux compeers to send the latter next year a consignment of solid linseys; while a Mayence wine dealer is trying to prove to a seigneur how much his cellars would be improved by a few tuns of Rheingold, shipped in to mellow after the next vintage.
Professional Entertainers at Fairs
Along with all this honest traffic proceed the amusements worthy and unworthy. There are several exhibitors of trick dogs and performing bears. In a cage there is a creature called a "lion," though it is certainly a sick, spiritless, and mangy one; there are also male and female rope dancers and acrobats, professional story tellers, professors of white magic, and, of course, jongleurs of varying quality sawing their viols, or reciting romances and merry fabliaux—clever tales, though often indescribably coarse. There are, in addition (let the sinful truth be told) perfect swarms of brazen women of an evil kind; and there is enough heady wine being consumed to fill a brook into the Claire. The sergeants continually have to separate drunkards who get to fighting, and to roll their "full brothers"—more completely overcome—into safe places where they can sleep off their liquor unkicked by horses and uncrushed by constantly passing carts.
This bustle continues two weeks. By that time everybody who has come primarily to buy has spent all his money. If he has come to sell, presumably he is satisfied. The drunkards are at last sad and sober. "Hare! Hare!" cry the sergeants on the evening of the last day. The fair is over. The next morning the foreign merchants pack their wares, strike their tents, and wander off to another market fifty miles distant, while the Pontdebois traders and industrialists resume their normal activity. They have stocked up with necessary raw materials for the year, they have absorbed many new ideas as to how they can make better wares or trade to more advantage; yet probably most of them are grumbling against "those Germans and Flemings and Jews whom the bishop turns loose on us. Blessed saints! how much money they have taken out of the neighborhood!" But the bishop, when his provost reports the tax receipts, is extraordinarily well satisfied.