live
in the open air, regardless of everybody, setting their pots boiling,
eating nameless things, freely displaying their tattered garments, and
sleeping, fighting, kissing, and reeking with mingled filth and misery.

The field, formerly so still and deserted, save for the buzzing of
hornets around the rich blossoms in the heavy sunshine, has thus become
a very rowdy spot, resounding with the noisy quarrels of the gipsies and
the shrill cries of the urchins of the suburb. In one corner there is a
primitive saw-mill for cutting the timber, the noise from which serves
as a dull, continuous bass accompaniment to the sharp voices. The wood
is placed on two high tressels, and a couple of sawyers, one of whom
stands aloft on the timber itself, while the other underneath is half
blinded by the falling sawdust, work a large saw to and fro for
hours together, with rigid machine-like regularity, as if they were
wire-pulled puppets. The wood they saw is stacked, plank by plank, along
the wall at the end, in carefully arranged piles six or eight feet high,
which often remain there several seasons, and constitute one of the
charms of the Aire Saint-Mittre. Between these stacks are mysterious,
retired little alleys leading to a broader path between the timber and
the wall, a deserted strip of verdure whence only small patches of
sky can be seen. The vigorous vegetation and the quivering, deathlike
stillness of the old cemetery still reign in this path. In all the
country round Plassans there is no spot more instinct with languor,
solitude, and love. It is a most delightful place for love-making. When
the cemetery was being cleared the bones must have been heaped up in
this corner; for even to-day it frequently happens that one's foot comes
across some fragment of a skull lying concealed in the damp turf.

Nobody, however, now thinks of the bodies that once slept under that
turf. In the daytime only the children go behind the piles of wood when
playing at hide and seek. The green path remains virginal, unknown to
others who see nought but the wood-yard crowded with timber and grey
with dust. In the morning and afternoon, when the sun is warm, the whole
place swarms with life. Above all the turmoil, above the ragamuffins
playing among the timber, and the gipsies kindling fires under their
cauldrons, the sharp silhouette of the sawyer mounted on his beam stands
out against the sky, moving to and fro with the precision of clockwork,
a