tripe, the slice of garlic sausage, the tiny cut of beef for the
_ragout_, cannot be heavy items. Everything eatable is utilised, and
many weird edibles are sold; for the French can contrive tasty dishes
out of what in Britain would be thrown aside as offal.

On three mornings a week--Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday--the presence of
the open-air market rouses Versailles from her dormouse-like slumber and
galvanises her into a state of activity that lasts for several hours.
Long before dawn, the roads leading townwards are busy with all manner
of vehicles, from the great waggon drawn by four white horses driven
tandem, and laden with a moving stack of hay, to the ramshackle
donkey-cart conveying half a score of cabbages, a heap of dandelions
grubbed from the meadows, and the owner.

[Illustration: Marketing]

By daybreak the market square under the leafless trees presents a lively
scene. There are stalls sacred to poultry, to butter, eggs, and cheese;
but the vegetable kingdom predominates. Flanked by bulwarks of greens
and bundles of leeks of incredible whiteness and thickness of stem, sit
the saleswomen, their heads swathed in gay cotton kerchiefs, and the
ground before them temptingly spread with little heaps of corn salad, of
chicory, and of yellow endive placed in adorable contrast to the scarlet
carrots, blood-red beetroot, pinky-fawn onions, and glorious orange-hued
pumpkins; while ready to hand are measures of white or mottled haricot
beans, of miniature Brussels sprouts, and of pink or yellow potatoes, an
esculent that in France occupies a very unimportant place compared with
that it holds amongst the lower classes in Britain.

[Illustration: Private Boxes]