He certainly looked very droll, did Daddy Pavilly,
with his great, spider legs and his little body, his
long arms and his pointed head, surrounded by a flame
of red hair on the top of the crown.
He was a clown, a peasant clown by nature, born to
play tricks, to act parts, simple parts, as he was
a peasant’s son and was himself a peasant, who
could scarcely read. Yes! God had certainly
created him to amuse others, the poor country devils
who have neither theaters nor fetes, and he amused
them conscientiously. In the cafe people treated
him to drink in order to keep him there, and he drank
intrepidly, laughing and joking, hoaxing everybody
without vexing anyone, while the people were laughing
heartily around him.
He was so droll that the very girls could not resist
him, ugly as he was, because he made them laugh so.
He would drag them about joking all the while, and
he tickled and squeezed them, saying such funny things
that they held their sides while they pushed him away.
Towards the end of June he engaged himself for the
harvest to farmer Le Harivan, near Rouville.
For three whole weeks he amused the harvesters, male
and female, by his jokes, both by day and night.
During the day, when he was in the fields, he wore
an old straw hat which hid his red shock head, and
one saw him gathering up the yellow grain and tying
it into bundles with his long, thin arms; and then
suddenly stopping to make a funny movement which made
the laborers, who always kept their eyes on him, laugh
all over the field. At night he crept, like some
crawling animal, in among the straw in the barn where
the women slept, causing screams and exciting a disturbance.
They drove him off with their wooden clogs, and he
escaped on all fours, like a fantastic monkey, amidst
volleys of laughter from the whole place.
On the last day, as the wagon full of reapers, decked
with ribbons and playing bag-pipes, shouting and singing
with pleasure and drink, went along the white, high
road, slowly drawn by six dapple-gray horses, driven
by a lad in a blouse, with a rosette in his cap, Pavilly,
in the midst of the sprawling women, danced like a
drunken satyr, and kept the little dirty-faced boys
and astonished peasants, standing staring at him open-mouthed
on the way to the farm.
Suddenly, as they got to the gate of Le Harivan’s
farm yard, he gave a leap as he was lifting up his
arms, but unfortunately, as he came down, he knocked
against the side of the long wagon, fell over it onto
the wheel, and rebounded into the road. His companions
jumped out, but he did not move; one eye was closed,
while the other was open, and he was pale with fear,
while his long limbs were stretched out in the dust,
and when they touched his right leg he began to scream,
and when they tried to make him stand up, he immediately
fell down.
