You go in. A neat and tidy damsel with a pair of bare red arms, the fresh good looks of youth, and a white handkerchief pinned about her throat, lays down her knitting and goes to summon a father or mother, who appears and sells goods to you as you desire, be it a matter of two sous or of twenty thousand francs; the manner of the transaction varying as the humor of the vendor is surly, obliging or independent. You will see a dealer in barrel-staves sitting in his doorway, twirling his thumbs as he chats with a neighbor; judging from appearances, he might possess nothing in this world but the bottles on his few rickety shelves, and two or three bundles of laths; but his well-stocked timber yard on the quay supplies all the coopers in Anjou, he knows to a barrel-stave how many casks he can “turn out,” as he says, if the vines do well and the vintage is good; a few scorching days and his fortune is made, a rainy summer is a ruinous thing for him; in a single morning the price of puncheons will rise as high as eleven francs or drop to six.
Here, as in Touraine, the whole trade of the district depends upon an atmospherical depression. Landowners, vinegrowers, timber merchants, coopers, innkeepers, and lightermen, one and all are on the watch for a ray of sunlight. Not a man of them but goes to bed in fear and trembling lest he should hear in the morning that there has been a frost in the night. If it is not rain that they dread, it is wind or drought; they must have cloudy weather or heat, and the rainfall and the weather generally all arranged to suit their peculiar notions.
Between the clerk of the weather and the vine-growing interest there is a duel which never ceases. Faces visibly lengthen or shorten, grow bright or gloomy, with the ups and downs of the barometer. Sometimes you hear from one end to the other of the old High Street of Saumur the words, “This is golden weather!” or again, in language which likewise is no mere figure of speech, “It is raining gold louis!” and they all know the exact value of sun or rain at the right moment.
After twelve o’clock or so on a Saturday in the summer time, you will not do a pennyworth of business among the worthy townsmen of Saumur. Each has his little farm and his bit of vineyard, and goes to spend the “week end” in the country. As everybody knows this beforehand, just as everybody knows everybody else’s business, his goings and comings, his buyings and sellings, and profits to boot, the good folk are free to spend ten hours out of the twelve in making up pleasant little parties, in taking notes and making comments and keeping sharp lookout on their neighbors’ affairs. The mistress of a house cannot buy a partridge but the neighbors will inquire of her husband whether the bird was done to a turn; no damsel can put her head out of the window without being observed by every group of unoccupied observers.
Impenetrable, dark, and silent as the houses may seem, they contain no mysteries hidden from public scrutiny, and in the same way everyone knows what is passing in everyone else’s mind. To begin with, the good folk spend most of their lives out of doors, they sit on the steps of their houses, breakfast there and dine there, and adjust any little family differences in the doorway. Every passerby is scanned with the most minute and diligent attention; hence, any stranger who may happen to arrive in such a country town has, in a manner, to run the gauntlet, and is severely quizzed from every doorstep. By dint of perseverance in the methods thus indicated a quantity of droll stories may be collected; and, indeed, the people of Angers, who are of an ingenious turn, and quick at repartee, have been nicknamed “the tattlers” on these very grounds.
The largest houses of the old quarter in which the nobles once dwelt are all at the upper end of the street, and in one of these the events took place which are about to be narrated in the course of this story. As has been already said, it was a melancholy house, a venerable relic of a bygone age, built for the men and women of an older and simpler world, from which our modern France is further and further removed day by day. After you have followed for some distance the windings of the picturesque street, where memories of the past are called up by every detail at every turn, till at length you
