Rosa joined in, and leaning over her neighbour’s legs, she kissed the three animals on the head, and immediately all the girls wanted to kiss them in turn, and the gentleman took them on to his knees, made them jump up and down and pinched them. The two peasants, who were even in greater consternation than their poultry, rolled their eyes as if they were possessed, without venturing to move, and their old wrinkled faces had not a smile nor a movement.
Then the gentleman, who was a commercial traveller, offered the ladies braces by way of a joke, and taking up one of his packages, he opened it. It was a trick, for the parcel contained garters. There were blue silk, pink silk, red silk, violet silk, mauve silk garters, and the buckles were made of two gilt metal Cupids, embracing each other. The girls uttered exclamations of delight and looked at them with that gravity which is natural to a woman when she is hankering after a bargain. They consulted one another by their looks or in a whisper, and replied in the same manner, and Madame was longingly handling a pair of orange garters that were broader and more imposing looking than the rest; really fit for the mistress of such an establishment.
The gentleman waited, for a bright idea had struck him.
“Come, my dears,” he said, “you must try them on.”
There was a storm of exclamations, and they squeezed their petticoats between their legs, as if they thought he was going to ravish them, but he quietly waited his time, and said: “Well, if you will not, I shall pack them up again.”
And he added cunningly: “I offer any pair they like, to those who will try them on.”
But they would not, and sat up very straight, and looked dignified.
But the two Pumps looked so distressed that he renewed the offer to them, and Flora Balançoire especially visibly hesitated. He pressed her: “Come, my dear, a little courage! Just look at that lilac pair; it will suit your dress admirably …”
That decided her, and pulling up her dress she showed a thick leg fit for a milkmaid, in a badly-fitting, coarse stocking. The commercial traveller stooped down and fastened the garter below the knee first of all and then above it; and he tickled the girl gently, which made her scream and jump. When he had done, he gave her the lilac pair, and asked: “Who next?”
“I! I!” they all shouted at once, and he began on Rosa la Rosse, who uncovered a shapeless, round thing without any ankle, a regular “sausage of a leg,” as Raphaële used to say.
The commercial traveller complimented Fernande, and grew quite enthusiastic over her powerful columns.
The thin tibias of the handsome Jewess met with less success, and Louise Cocote, by way of a joke, put her petticoats over his head, so that Madame was obliged to interfere to check such unseemly behaviour.
Lastly, Madame herself put out her leg, a handsome, Norman leg, muscular and plump, and in his surprise and pleasure, the commercial traveller gallantly took off his hat to salute that master calf, like a true French cavalier.
The two peasants, who were speechless from surprise, looked aside, out of the corners of their eyes, and they looked so exactly like fowls that the man with the light whiskers, when he sat up, said “cock-a-doodle-do!” under their very noses, and that gave rise to another storm of amusement.
The old people got out at Motteville, with their basket, their ducks, and their umbrella, and they heard the woman say to her husband, as they went away:
“They are bad women, who are off to that cursed place Paris.”
The funny commercial traveller himself got out at Rouen, after behaving so coarsely, that Madame was obliged sharply to put him into his right place, and she added, as a moral: “This will teach us not to talk to the first-comer.”
At Oissel they changed trains, and at a little station farther on, Monsieur Joseph Rivet was waiting for them with a large cart and a number of chairs in it, which was drawn by a white horse.
The carpenter politely kissed all the ladies, and then helped them into his conveyance.
Three of them sat on three chairs at the back, Raphaële, Madame and her brother on the three chairs in front, and Rosa, who had no seat, settled herself as comfortably as she could on tall Fernande’s knees, and then they set off.
But the horse’s jerky trot shook the cart so terribly that the chairs began to dance, throwing the travellers into the air, to the right and to the left, as if they had been dancing puppets, which made them make frightened grimaces, and scream with fear. But this was suddenly cut short by another jolt of the cart.
They clung on to the sides of the vehicle, their bonnets fell on to their backs, their noses on their shoulders, and the white horse went on stretching out his head, and holding out his tail quite straight, a little, hairless rat’s tail, with which he whisked his buttocks from time to time.
Joseph Rivet, with one leg on the shafts and the other bent under him, held out the reins with his elbows very high, and he kept uttering a kind of chuckling sound, which made the horse prick up its ears and go faster.
The green country extended on either side of the road, and here and there the colza in flower presented a waving expanse of yellow, from which there arose a strong, wholesome, sweet and penetrating smell, which the wind carried to some distance. Cornflowers showed their little blue heads among the tall rye, and the women wanted to pick them, but Monsieur
