“You wretch!” she says, “see what your bad conduct has reduced us to!  It’s no use for me to spin, to work for you, to mend your clothes! you never stop tearing and soiling them.  You have run through my little property, our six children are in the gutter, we live in a stable with the beasts; here we are reduced to asking alms, and you’re so ugly, so revolting, so despised, that soon they will toss bread to us as they do to the dogs.  Alas! my poor mondes [people], take pity on us! take pity on me!  I don’t deserve my fate, and no woman ever had a filthier, more detestable husband.  Help me to pick him up, or else the wagons will crush him like an old broken bottle, and I shall be a widow, which would kill me with grief, although everybody says it would be great good fortune for me.”

Such is the role of the gardener’s wife and her constant lamentation throughout the play.  For it is a genuine, spontaneous, improvised comedy, played in the open air, on the highways, among the fields, seasoned by all the incidents that happen to occur; and in it everybody takes a part, wedding-guests and outsiders, occupants of the houses and passers-by, for three or four hours in the day, as we shall see.  The theme is always the same, but it is treated in an infinite variety of ways, and therein we see the instinct of mimicry, the abundance of grotesque ideas, the fluency, the quickness at repartee, and even the natural eloquence of our peasants.

The part of the gardener’s wife is ordinarily entrusted to a slender, beardless man with a fresh complexion, who is able to give great verisimilitude to the character he assumes and to represent burlesque despair so naturally that the spectators may be amused and saddened at the same time as by the genuine article.  Such thin, beardless men are not rare in our country districts, and, strangely enough, they are sometimes the most remarkable for muscular strength.

After the wife’s wretched plight is made evident, the younger wedding-guests urge her to leave her sot of a husband and divert herself with them.  They offer her their arms and lead her away.  Gradually she yields, becomes animated, and runs about, now with one, now with another, behaving in a scandalous way:  a new moral lesson—­the husband’s misconduct incites and causes misconduct on the part of his wife.

The paien thereupon awakes from his drunken stupor; he looks about for his companion, provides himself with a rope and a stick, and runs after her.  They lead him a long chase, they hide from him, they pass the woman from one to another, they try to keep her amused, and to deceive her jealous mate.  His friends try hard to intoxicate him.  At last, he overtakes his faithless spouse and attempts to beat her.  The most realistic, shrewdest touch in this parody of the miseries of conjugal life, is that the jealous husband never attacks those who take his wife away from him.  He is very polite and prudent with them, he does not choose to vent his wrath on any one but the guilty wife, because she is supposed to be unable to resist him.