during the breakfast, don their costumes, and return, escorted by the
musicians, dogs, children, and pistol-shots. They represent a couple of
beggars, husband and wife, covered with the vilest rags. The husband is
the dirtier of the two: it is vice that has degraded him; the woman is
unhappy simply and debased by her husband's evil ways.

They are called the _gardener_ and the _gardener's wife_, and claim to
be fitted to watch and cultivate the sacred cabbage. But the husband is
known by several appellations, all of which have a meaning. He is
called, indifferently, the _pailloux_,[7] because he wears a wig made of
straw or hemp, and, to hide his nakedness, which is ill protected by his
rags, he surrounds his legs and a part of his body with straw. He also
provides himself with a huge belly or a hump by stuffing straw or hay
under his blouse. The _peilloux_ because he is covered with _peille_
(rags). And, lastly, the _païen_ (heathen), which is the most
significant of all, because he is supposed, by his cynicism and his
debauched life, to represent in himself the antipodes of all the
Christian virtues.

He arrives with his face daubed with grease and wine lees, sometimes
swallowed up in a grotesque mask. A wretched, cracked earthen cup, or an
old wooden shoe, hanging by a string to his belt, he uses to ask alms in
the shape of wine. No one refuses him, and he pretends to drink, then
pours the wine on the ground by way of libation. At every step, he falls
and rolls in the mud; he pretends to be most disgustingly drunk. His
poor wife runs after him, picks him up, calls for help, tears out the
hempen hair that protrudes in stringy locks from beneath her soiled cap,
weeps over her husband's degradation, and reproaches him pathetically.

"You wretch!" she says, "see what your bad conduct has reduced us to!