day on which contracts between masters and servants come to an end.
These transmutations of servants every year serve as pretext for a festival, which Blandine remembers with a sort of voluptuous, soothing melancholy. At Smaragdis, the odour of the elders and syringas was sufficient to call up again before her the circumstances and the actors in these rustic festivities.
A warm sun excites the sweet fragrance of the hedges and thickets. The quail, squatting amid the corn, whines a love-call. No one is any longer working in the freshly-laboured plains. In their haste to go holiday-making, men have thrown down here and there scythe and pruning-bill, hoe and harrow. If the fields are deserted, all along the neighbouring roads on the contrary, there is a long procession of kitchen-gardeners' carts, overhung with white canvas, not laden, as on Fridays, with vegetables and milk, but newly painted, tapestried with flowers, the arches entwined with ribbons, and driven at a good speed by drivers decked out in their Sunday clothes, astonished at their own fine get-up, and in the interior of which are jostled together a crowd of rustic
