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Updated: June 8, 2025
The distaff and spindle which are to be seen on Egyptian monuments are still employed by thousands of French, peasant-women, but the wheel invented in the sixteenth century is rarely used now, unless it be by Martha in the opera. The next morning I made friends with the pedlar, who was about to start upon my road, and who offered to give me a lift in his trap as far as La Roche Canillac.
Upon a closer approach they turn out to be not so very far removed from this conception; they are a company of poor Ayash peasant-women, each carrying a bundle of camel-thorn shrubs several times larger than herself, which they have been scouring the neighboring hills all morning to obtain for fuel.
Here also the peasant-women sometimes bring immense pots of Peruvian aloes for sale, whose snowy blossoms are scented like those of the magnolia, and rise in gigantic pyramids of magnificent cup-shaped flowers. They are plants to salute respectfully as you pass by them, such is their size and dignity.
Boabdil, exceeding his promises, immediately set free twenty captive priests, one hundred and thirty Castilian and Aragonian cavaliers, and a number of peasant-women.
Hungarian singers and Tyrolese singers and Swiss peasant-women, who were to chant the /Ranz des Vaches/, and milk cows or make syllabubs, were engaged. The great marquee was decorated as a Gothic banquet-hall; the breakfast itself was to consist of "all the delicacies of the season."
She liked feasting the peasant-women, too, on holidays; they would dance, and she would tap with her heels and throw herself into attitudes. Alexey Sergeitch was well aware that his wife was a fool; but almost from the first year of his marriage he had schooled himself to keep up the fiction that she was very witty and fond of saying cutting things.
Very bright, good-looking, amiable and intelligent she was, but sadly neglectful of her personal appearance, with locks unkempt and dress slatternly a strange contrast to the neat, clean, tidy peasant-women we had seen elsewhere on our journey. The farmhouse, turned into a hostelry, only required a little outlay and cosmopolitan experience to be transformed into quite a captivating health resort.
They are filled with men disguised as peasant-women, and vice versa; but, whether justly or unjustly, they are supposed to be chartered for the show by the Government, and attract small comment or notice. Amongst the foot-crowd, with the exception of a stray foreigner, there is not a well- dressed person to be seen. The fun is of the most dismal character.
I have spoken much of the men of France, but the women have also earned our respect those splendid peasant-women who even in times of peace worked and now carry a double burden on their shoulders; the middle-class women, endeavouring to keep together the little business built up by the man with years of toil, stinting themselves to save five francs to send a parcel to the man at the front that he may not suspect that there is not still every comfort in the little homestead; the noble women of France, who in past years could not be seen before noon, since my lady was at her toilette, but who can be seen now, their hands scratched and bleeding, kneeling on the floors of the hospitals scrubbing, proud and happy to take their part in national service.
Those months are the months of harvest, when the peasant-women are forced by necessity to leave their newborn infants to be nursed by children four or five years old, or by old women whose hands can no longer grasp the reaping-hook.
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