From Time To Time A Market Is Held, And The Town Has A Season Of
Revival; Cattle And Pigs Are Stabled In The Streets; And
Pickpockets Have Been Known To Come All The Way From Lyons For The
Occasion.
Every Sunday the country folk throng in with daylight to
buy apples, to attend mass, and to visit one of the wine-shops, of
which there are no fewer than fifty in this little town.
Sunday
wear for the men is a green tailcoat of some coarse sort of
drugget, and usually a complete suit to match. I have never set
eyes on such degrading raiment. Here it clings, there bulges; and
the human body, with its agreeable and lively lines, is turned into
a mockery and laughing-stock. Another piece of Sunday business
with the peasants is to take their ailments to the chemist for
advice. It is as much a matter for Sunday as church-going. I have
seen a woman who had been unable to speak since the Monday before,
wheezing, catching her breath, endlessly and painfully coughing;
and yet she had waited upwards of a hundred hours before coming to
seek help, and had the week been twice as long, she would have
waited still. There was a canonical day for consultation; such was
the ancestral habit, to which a respectable lady must study to
conform.
Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, but they rival each other in
polite concessions rather than in speed. Each will wait an hour or
two hours cheerfully while an old lady does her marketing or a
gentleman finishes the papers in a cafe.
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