A FRENCH MARKET.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5014, 19 April 1877, Page 3

A FRENCH MARKET.

Our modern method of housekeeping has done away with the picturesque circumstaces of the market in England, and the tradespeople who call for orders make bargaining at the stalls, and choosing for oneself from among the various vendors, as unnecessary an employment for the ordinary housekeeper as private brewing or the distilling of “strong waters.” But in Erance things are different, and the market still holds its place in a country where the butcher’s boy and the baker’s cart are unknown at two miles distance from a town. It is still the custom for ladies to market for themselves here, and even where the mistress is too fine to disturb herself so early, the maid takes her place, and “catches” the sons which the vendors lose and her mistress does not gain. If not so many nor so striking as the famous humors of Bartholomew Fair, the humors of a French market are yet not wholly valueless ; and if a cosmopolitan seaside place in Normandy has fewer points of local color than might be found . iu a quaint old Breton villiage say, or even in Normandy itself out of the beaten track of English, Parisians, and Americans, still there are certain specialities which repay us for a hot, dusty walk under a burning sun and down a road where the twisted trees fling all their shadows the wrong way. The first thing that strikes us is the extraordiuay colors of the umbrellas. We in sober England are generally content with dark brown and sombre purples, with inoffensive greens, or at the best a modest fawn for the dog days ; but here iu Trouville we set out an array that makes the market look at a distance like a bed of gigantic mushrooms, where every color is to be found in its order. Huge cotton tonts arc they, where burning red and jaunty apple green, brightyellow, sky blue, brilliantpurple, dazzling white, are all in juxtaposition; with here and there toylike carriage parasols elaborately trimmed with lace and lined with silk to give the right dash of fashion to the scene, And next to the colors of the umbrellas we notice the infinite ugliness of the women. For the most part old, and with their heads bound up in kerchiefs or encasedin our men’s old-fashioned double-tassclled nightcaps, these French market women of Trouville have lost every charm and almost every trait of womanhood. Their scanty gray hair creeps down in rough elf locks from under their disfiguring headgear; their polls are bare, and their necks, wrinkled by age and tanned deep brown by the sun, look more like leather than human flesh ; their ears are dragged down by the weight of their enormous hoop earrings ; and their hideous obesity is not improved by the short full petticoat and slovenly-looking casaque which is the general costume among them. To be sure, here and there we come to a handsome face and noble presence—to one of those peasant queens who, had fortune planted her in a high place, would have led the world ; but these are rare exceptions ; and for the most part the old women at the stalls might each one of them play Hecate or a Macbeth witch without paint or make-up. Fortunately, they are not all old and hard ; for what can equal die hardness of an elder Frenchwomen of any degree, accustomed to fight her own way in the world, and look on life as a flaying room where, if you would save your own skin, you must strip off that of others ?—and every now and then we are refreshed by the sight of a bri.sk and natty little native fermUre in her pretty frilled cap, or by that of a dark-eyed, dark-browned, melancholy, and intense-looking stranger. Evidently from the far-off sunny south, she sits by her stolid Norman husband with an expressive look of isolation and strangeness, and as evidently she despises this cold and colorless Normandy—much as the Norman would despise that cold and foggy and yet more colorless England lying across the Channel, could he be transported there on some raw, chill January day. But if the market women are generally old and unpersonable, with only a few among them pleasant, many of the purchasers are good to look at, all of them are essentially unlike what we see in England. Here wo have the Heat, smart bonne, with her becoming cap and trim waist, bargaining for butter and eggs with • matchless volubility and unquenchable audacity; there one more languid, who affects a certain young-ladyism by being only “in her hair”—for the/m?»c de chambrc claims for herself exemption from the cap which here, as with us, is the “ flag” whereat the excitable vanities of womanhood revolt—gives what she is asked without an attempt at beating down. The day is hot, she was up late last night, it is her mistress’ money, not hers, and indolence prompts to generosity as she shrugs her shoulders and says, when remonstrated with. Dame, ilfaut que chacun vive / There a widow, with her black veil over her white cap to mark her state, walks with a stately step and a disapproving glance past two young girls in flashy bonnets and vulgarly fine costumes, who ought to have been iu whiteoaps and ungainly casaques. The gaily dressed children of the fashionable visitors trot, with their sand baskets in their hands, at the heels of their nurses glad of an opportunity for a little flirting in their vooatiou ; a French mother and daughter in capuchons go from stall to stall bargaining with true French hardness, offering ten sons when asked twelve, and spending half-an-hour on the reduction ; French gentlemen, whose wives and bonnes alike are at home, do the week's marketing with exemplary docility, but mostly buy at the stalls of the best looking sellers ; beggars with naked feet walk in and about, whining out their pretended sorrows, or offering trays full of rubbish under guise of honest dealing ; here is M. le Cure buying the carrots for his pot-aafeu like any old wife; here a douce aud quiet-looking piou-piou has his long loaf under his arm and a bunch of onions in his hand ; while the inevitable gendarme stands apart and watchful, with folded arms and restless eyes, like the • incarnation of social order and military domination. But it does the heart good to see one of them, perhaps off duty, carry in his hand a bunch of leeks and a cabbage like any other Christian body.— Queen.