However that may be, the triumphal procession arrives at the bride’s house and marches into her garden.  There they select the finest cabbage, which is not quickly done, for the ancients hold a council and discuss the matter at interminable length, each pleading for the cabbage which seems to him the best adapted for the occasion.  The question is put to a vote, and when the choice is made, the gardener fastens his rope around the stalk and goes as far away as the size of the garden permits.  The gardener’s wife looks out to see that the sacred vegetable is not injured in its fall.  The Jesters of the wedding-party, the hemp-beater, the grave-digger, the carpenter, or the cobbler,—­in a word, all those who do not work on the land, and who, as they pass their lives in other people’s houses, are reputed to have and do really have more wit and a readier tongue than the simple agricultural laborers,—­take their places around the cabbage.  One digs a trench with the spade, so deep that you would say he was preparing to dig up an oak-tree.  Another puts on his nose a drogue, made of wood or pasteboard, in imitation of a pair of spectacles:  he performs the duties of engineer, comes forward, walks away, prepares a plan, overlooks the workmen, draws lines, plays the pedant, cries out that they are spoiling the whole thing, orders the work to be abandoned and resumed according to his fancy, and makes the performance as long and as absurd as he can.  Is this an addition to the former programme of the ceremony, in mockery of theorists in general, for whom the ordinary peasant has the most sovereign contempt, or in detestation of land-surveyors, who control the register of lands and assess the taxes, or of the employees of the Department of Roads and Bridges, who convert common lands into highways and cause the suppression of time-worn abuses dear to the peasant heart?  Certain it is that this character in the comedy is called the geometrician, and that he does his utmost to make himself unbearable to those who handle the pick and shovel.

At last, after quarter of an hour of mummery and remonstrances, so that the roots of the cabbage may not be cut and it can be transplanted without injury, while spadefuls of earth are thrown into the faces of the bystanders,—­woe to him who does not step aside quickly enough; though he were a bishop or a prince, he must receive the baptism of earth,—­the paien pulls the rope, the paienne holds her apron, and the cabbage falls majestically amid the cheers of the spectators.  Then the basket is brought, and the pagan couple proceed to plant the cabbage therein with all imaginable care and precautions.  They pack it in fresh soil, they prop it up with sticks and strings as city florists do their superb potted camellias; they plant red apples stuck on twigs, branches of thyme, sage, and laurel all about it; they deck the whole with ribbons and streamers; they place the trophy on the hand-barrow with the paten, who is expected to maintain its equilibrium and keep it from accident, and at last they leave the garden in good order to the music of a march.