y, his long arms and his pointed head, surrounded
by a flame of red hair on the top of the crown.

He was a clown, a peasant clown by nature, born to play tricks, to act
parts, simple parts, as he was a peasant's son and was himself a peasant,
who could scarcely read. Yes! God had certainly created him to amuse
others, the poor country devils who have neither theaters nor fetes, and
he amused them conscientiously. In the cafe people treated him to drink
in order to keep him there, and he drank intrepidly, laughing and joking,
hoaxing everybody without vexing anyone, while the people were laughing
heartily around him.

He was so droll that the very girls could not resist him, ugly as he was,
because he made them laugh so. He would drag them about joking all the
while, and he tickled and squeezed them, saying such funny things that
they held their sides while they pushed him away.

Towards the end of June he engaged himself for the harvest to farmer Le
Harivan, near Rouville. For three whole weeks he amused the harvesters,
male and female, by his jokes, both by day and night. During the day,
when he was in the fields, he wore an old straw hat which hid his red
shock head, and one saw him gathering up the yellow grain and tying it
into bundles with his long, thin arms; and then suddenly stopping to make
a funny movement which made the laborers, who always kept their eyes on
him, laugh all over the field. At night he crept, like some crawling
animal, in among the straw in the barn where the women slept, causing
screams and exciting a disturbance. They drove him off with their wooden
clogs, and he escaped on all fours, like a fantastic monkey, amidst
volleys of laughter from the whole place.

On the last day, as the wagon full of reapers, decked with ribbons and
playing bag-pipes, shouting and singing with pleasure and drink, went
along the white, high road, slowly drawn by six dapple-gray horses,
driven by a lad in a blouse, with a rosette in his cap, Pavilly, in the
midst of the sprawling women, danced like a drunken satyr, and kept the
little dirty-faced boys and astonished peasants, standing staring at him
open-mouthed on the way to the farm.

Suddenly, as they got to the gate of Le Harivan's farm yard, he gave a
leap as he was lifting up his arms, but unfortunately, as he came down,
he knocked against the side of the long wagon, fell over it onto the
wheel, and rebounded into the road. His companions jumped out, but