The strangeness of the place is increased by the circumstance that wandering gipsies, by a sort of traditional custom always select the vacant portions of it for their encampments.  Whenever any caravan arrives at Plassans it takes up its quarters on the Aire Saint-Mittre.  The place is consequently never empty.  There is always some strange band there, some troop of wild men and withered women, among whom groups of healthy-looking children roll about on the grass.  These people live in the open air, regardless of everybody, setting their pots boiling, eating nameless things, freely displaying their tattered garments, and sleeping, fighting, kissing, and reeking with mingled filth and misery.

The field, formerly so still and deserted, save for the buzzing of hornets around the rich blossoms in the heavy sunshine, has thus become a very rowdy spot, resounding with the noisy quarrels of the gipsies and the shrill cries of the urchins of the suburb.  In one corner there is a primitive saw-mill for cutting the timber, the noise from which serves as a dull, continuous bass accompaniment to the sharp voices.  The wood is placed on two high tressels, and a couple of sawyers, one of whom stands aloft on the timber itself, while the other underneath is half blinded by the falling sawdust, work a large saw to and fro for hours together, with rigid machine-like regularity, as if they were wire-pulled puppets.  The wood they saw is stacked, plank by plank, along the wall at the end, in carefully arranged piles six or eight feet high, which often remain there several seasons, and constitute one of the charms of the Aire Saint-Mittre.  Between these stacks are mysterious, retired little alleys leading to a broader path between the timber and the wall, a deserted strip of verdure whence only small patches of sky can be seen.  The vigorous vegetation and the quivering, deathlike stillness of the old cemetery still reign in this path.  In all the country round Plassans there is no spot more instinct with languor, solitude, and love.  It is a most delightful place for love-making.  When the cemetery was being cleared the bones must have been heaped up in this corner; for even to-day it frequently happens that one’s foot comes across some fragment of a skull lying concealed in the damp turf.

Nobody, however, now thinks of the bodies that once slept under that turf.  In the daytime only the children go behind the piles of wood when playing at hide and seek.  The green path remains virginal, unknown to others who see nought but the wood-yard crowded with timber and grey with dust.  In the morning and afternoon, when the sun is warm, the whole place swarms with life.  Above all the turmoil, above the ragamuffins playing among the timber, and the gipsies kindling fires under their cauldrons, the sharp silhouette of the sawyer mounted on his beam stands out against the sky, moving to and fro with the precision of clockwork, as if to regulate the busy activity that has sprung up in this spot once set apart for eternal slumber.  Only the old people who sit on the planks, basking in the setting sun, speak occasionally among themselves of the bones which they once saw carted through the streets of Plassans by the legendary tumbrel.