the elders to
smoke and drink and gossip at the little tables beneath the verandah,
the younger folk to dance on the uneven gravel. Young as I was, I felt
grateful that no physical exercise was required of me for some hours to
come. Even Narcisse and the cat (which followed him) waddled heavily to
the verandah where we were to play.

The signal to start was soon given. Paragot tucked his violin under his
chin, tuned up, waved one, two, three with his bow; Blanquette struck a
cord on her zither and the dance began. At first all was desperately
correct. The men in their ill-fitting broadcloth and white ties and
enormous wedding favours, the women in their tight and decent finery,
gyrated with solemn circumspection. But by degrees the music and the
good Savoy wines and the abominable cognac flushed faces and set heads
a-swimming. The sweltering heat caused a gradual discarding of garments.
Arms took a closer grip of waists. Loud laughter and free jests replaced
formal conversation; steps were performed of Southern fantasy; the dust
rose in clouds; throats were choked though countenances streamed; the
consumption of wine was Rabelaisian. And all through the orgy Paragot
fiddled with strenuous light-heartedness, and Blanquette thrummed her
zither with the awful earnestness of a woman on whose efforts ten francs
and perhaps half a goose depended. But it was Paragot who made the
people dance. To me, sitting in red shirt and pomaded hair at his feet,
it seemed as if he were a magician. He threw his bow across the strings
and compelled them to do his bidding. He was the great, the omnipotent
personage of the feast. I sunned myself in his glory.

Indeed, he had the incommunicable gift of setting his soul a-dancing as
he played, of putting the devil into the feet of those who danced. The
wedding party were enraptured. If he had consumed all the bumpers he was
offered, he would have been as drunk as a fiddler at an Irish wake.
During a much needed interval in the dancing he advanced to the edge of
the verandah and as a solo played Stephen Heller's "Tarantella," which
crowned his triumph. With his unkempt beard and swarthy face and
ridiculous pearl-buttoned velveteens, there was an air of rakish
picturesqueness about Paragot, and he retained, what indeed he never
quite lost, a certain aristocracy of demeanour. Wild cries of "_Bis!_"
saluted him when he stopped. Men clapped each other on the shoulder
uttering clumsy oaths, women sm