a part, wedding-guests and outsiders, occupants of the houses and
passers-by, for three or four hours in the day, as we shall see. The
theme is always the same, but it is treated in an infinite variety of
ways, and therein we see the instinct of mimicry, the abundance of
grotesque ideas, the fluency, the quickness at repartee, and even the
natural eloquence of our peasants.

The part of the gardener's wife is ordinarily entrusted to a slender,
beardless man with a fresh complexion, who is able to give great
verisimilitude to the character he assumes and to represent burlesque
despair so naturally that the spectators may be amused and saddened at
the same time as by the genuine article. Such thin, beardless men are
not rare in our country districts, and, strangely enough, they are
sometimes the most remarkable for muscular strength.

After the wife's wretched plight is made evident, the younger
wedding-guests urge her to leave her sot of a husband and divert herself
with them. They offer her their arms and lead her away. Gradually she
yields, becomes animated, and runs about, now with one, now with
another, behaving in a scandalous way: a new moral lesson--the husband's
misconduct incites and causes misconduct on the part of his wife.

The _paien_ thereupon awakes from his drunken stupor; he looks about for
his companion, provides himself with a rope and a stick, and runs after
her. They lead him a long chase, they hide from him, they pass the woman
from one to another, they try to keep her amused, and to deceive her
jealous mate. His _friends_ try hard to intoxicate him. At last, he
overtakes his faithless spouse and attempts to beat her. The most
realistic, shrewdest touch in this parody of the miseries of conjugal
life, is that the jealous husband never attacks those who take his wife
away from him. He is very polite and prudent with them, he does not
choose to vent his wrath on any one but the guilty wife, because she is
supposed to be unable to resist him.

But just as he raises his stick and prepares his rope to bind the
culprit, all the men in the wedding-party interpose and throw themselves
between the two. _Don't strike her! never strike your wife_! is the
formula that is repeated to satiety in these scenes. They disarm the
husband, they force him to pardon his wife and embrace her, and soon he
pretends to love her more dearly than ever. He walks about arm-in-arm
with her, singing and dancing, until a fresh a