But just as he raises his stick and prepares his rope to bind the culprit, all the men in the wedding-party interpose and throw themselves between the two. Don’t strike her! never strike your wife! is the formula that is repeated to satiety in these scenes.  They disarm the husband, they force him to pardon his wife and embrace her, and soon he pretends to love her more dearly than ever.  He walks about arm-in-arm with her, singing and dancing, until a fresh attack of intoxication sends him headlong to the ground once more:  and with that his wife’s lamentations recommence, her discouragement, her pretended misconduct, the husband’s jealousy, the intervention of the bystanders, and the reconciliation.  There is in all this an ingenuous, even commonplace, lesson, which savors strongly of its origin in the Middle Ages, but which always makes an impression, if not upon the bride and groom,—­who are too much in love and too sensible to-day to need it,—­at all events, upon the children and young girls and boys.  The paien so terrifies and disgusts the girls, by running after them and pretending to want to kiss them, that they fly from him with an emotion in which there is nothing artificial.  His besmeared face and his great stick—­perfectly harmless, by the way—­makes the youngsters shriek with fear.  It is the comedy of manners in its most elementary but most impressive state.

When this farce is well under way, they prepare to go in search of the cabbage.  They bring a hand-barrow, on which the paien is placed, armed with a spade, a rope, and a great basket.  Four strong men carry him on their shoulders.  His wife follows him on foot, the ancients come in a group behind, with grave and pensive mien; then the wedding-party falls in two by two, keeping time to the music.  The pistol-shots begin again, the dogs howl louder than ever at sight of the unclean paien, thus borne in triumph.  The children salute him derisively with wooden clogs tied at the ends of strings.

But why this ovation to such a revolting personage?  They are marching to the conquest of the sacred cabbage, the emblem of matrimonial fecundity, and this besotted drunkard is the only man who can put his hand upon the symbolical plant.  Therein, doubtless, is a mystery anterior to Christianity, a mystery that reminds one of the festival of the Saturnalia or some ancient Bacchanalian revel.  Perhaps this paien, who is at the same time the gardener par excellence, is nothing less than Priapus in person, the god of gardens and debauchery,—­a divinity probably chaste and serious in his origin, however, like the mystery of reproduction, but insensibly degraded by licentiousness of manners and disordered ideas.