the _gardener's wife_, and claim to
be fitted to watch and cultivate the sacred cabbage. But the husband is
known by several appellations, all of which have a meaning. He is
called, indifferently, the _pailloux_,[7] because he wears a wig made of
straw or hemp, and, to hide his nakedness, which is ill protected by his
rags, he surrounds his legs and a part of his body with straw. He also
provides himself with a huge belly or a hump by stuffing straw or hay
under his blouse. The _peilloux_ because he is covered with _peille_
(rags). And, lastly, the _paien_ (heathen), which is the most
significant of all, because he is supposed, by his cynicism and his
debauched life, to represent in himself the antipodes of all the
Christian virtues.

He arrives with his face daubed with grease and wine lees, sometimes
swallowed up in a grotesque mask. A wretched, cracked earthen cup, or an
old wooden shoe, hanging by a string to his belt, he uses to ask alms in
the shape of wine. No one refuses him, and he pretends to drink, then
pours the wine on the ground by way of libation. At every step, he falls
and rolls in the mud; he pretends to be most disgustingly drunk. His
poor wife runs after him, picks him up, calls for help, tears out the
hempen hair that protrudes in stringy locks from beneath her soiled cap,
weeps over her husband's degradation, and reproaches him pathetically.

"You wretch!" she says, "see what your bad conduct has reduced us to!
It's no use for me to spin, to work for you, to mend your clothes! you
never stop tearing and soiling them. You have run through my little
property, our six children are in the gutter, we live in a stable with
the beasts; here we are reduced to asking alms, and you're so ugly, so
revolting, so despised, that soon they will toss bread to us as they do
to the dogs. Alas! my poor _mondes_ [people], take pity on us! take pity
on me! I don't deserve my fate, and no woman ever had a filthier, more
detestable husband. Help me to pick him up, or else the wagons will
crush him like an old broken bottle, and I shall be a widow, which would
kill me with grief, although everybody says it would be great good
fortune for me."

Such is the role of the gardener's wife and her constant lamentation
throughout the play. For it is a genuine, spontaneous, improvised
comedy, played in the open air, on the highways, among the fields,
seasoned by all the incidents that happen to occur; and in it everybody
takes