SAUSAGE PAGEANT.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 92, 25 May 1914, Page 5

SAUSAGE PAGEANT.

THE HAM FAIR IN PARIS. It has come and gone, this wonderful Ham Fair of Paris. Nothing remains of it now except the faint odour of garlic that still floats persistently along the wide Boulevard of Richard Lenoir, and the memories of all the enchanting dialects of France lingering with me like the echoes of a dream (wrote Alphonse Courlander in the "Express"). Unless you have seen the Ham Fair, you can have no conception of its peculiar happiness. I have seen the marketplaces of our own West Country filled with sturdy farmers selling cheeses, and old Somersetshire women trading in chickens and eggs, but they are not happy about it. They do not make merry and sing the virtues of their wares. . . . And at night the beer houses turn these country fairs into an orgy:

Now, the Ham Fair of Paris is something that you can only see once a year. It spreads over two miles, from the tall monument in the Place de la Bastille down the broad Boulevard Richard Lenoir until it reaches the wide Place de la Republique, and you may walk the pleasantest two miles in Paris during the days of the fair. It is the feast of the Ham; the pageant oi the Sausage—a gargantuan open-air display of smoked and potted delicacies that the great Appenrodt himself would delight in.

COSMOPOLITAN. Yet it is not ail hams and sausages; it is Farringdon Street, with its book' stalls and old iron, the Caledonian Market, with its fabrics and old bits of furniture and rusty things that the undaunted connoisseur rubs and polishes and finds are old brass and bronze and Sheffield plate. It is Fair, and Yeovil market-place, and Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday, all thrust together into a stew-pot of bargaining, and set down in the heart of Paris on a day in spring. Here, at the beginning, by the Place de la Bastille, the drums beat as only a showman can beat them, and powerful ladies in black silk tights throw somersaults and perform prodigious feats with all the ancient artistry of the street acrobat—powerful ladies, whose weight has not been reduced even by these active exercises. Here is a solemn Algerian in Eastern robes, looking towards the East with confiding eyes, and telling the fortunes of all who pay. Music, and jugglers, and cheap-jacks; tin medallions of the Virgin, and studs and pencil-cases and tape measures, all to be had for a sou; a confusion of trumpery, glittering bargains made, I should hazard, in Germany, though in Paris we pretend not to know.it. And now the scent of garlic greets you—that smell that brings with it visions of lemon and olive groves, and poplar trees lining the roads of white villages. Inseparable smell of the Latin lands, detestable anywhere except in its homes, where it is part of the charm of the very atmosphere.

FRENCHMEN FROM EVERYWHERE We are in the France that lies beyond Paris; peasants from Alsace-Lor-raine, who can never be German, and men and women from Yalais; sturdy Bretons, and Auvergnats; peasants frojn the lowlands of Normandy and the mountains and valleys of the Savoy, all standing before their bootlis r that are festooned with the particular sausage or piled with the special produce for which each district is famed.'"

Black sausages from -Alsatian Saverne (isn't that prettier than Sabern?), little pots of minced meat from Tours, ' 1 andouillettes" of pork, sausages of horse and ass flesh, smoked beef, smoked goose, and hams, hams, hams, from all the far corners of France.

"Goutez Goutez!" they cry, offering tempting slices of sausage on the tip of their knives. "Aha! they are tasting it," they sing, "isn't it* wonderful?" I remember a wizened old peasant shaving bits of sausage, handing them left &nd sight, and singing all the time in a mournful cadence, "On la goutera,"' which is more musical than "Everybody's tasting it." How these pink-cheeked, buxom peasant girls brought the wind and freshness of the country towns into Paris! Some of them wore their headdresses; the big black bows of satin above the fair hair of the Alsatians bore a little tri-colour cockade, just to show that they were home again in France. BUMMAGING. Presently, a new note comes into the crowd,, and a new cry is heard: we are at the end of the Ham section, and are now entering the old iron and miscellaneous market. "Fouillez . . . Fouillez . . they cry. "Come and rummage, come aud rummage. . . And what is there more enticing than to rummage', through red fabrics, brocades, and silks, and wonderful embroideries that once graced a Chinaman in Peking, and now, in all their peacock glories of blue and bronze-green, are spread on the Paris pavement?

There is no difference, really, between any of the old iron markets of the world. Something universal seems to standardise them. Since the first Phoenicians offered their bargains, the same spirit broods over the stalls or mats spread with rubbish in which one may be lucky, enough to find a pearl. The Iron Fair is not so exclusivelv French as the Ham Fair. Thus, old bead bags are anything from £2 to £4 here, as they are everywhere in the old shops; old oak and' bronze has its international value among collectors; old prints also, and the only thing in which the dealers can be caught napping is Sheffield plate. Thus, if you are lucky, you may pick up fine candlesticks and cake baskets for a few francs. There was a shabby, secondhand mechanical doll that beat a drum and clashed cymbals when the woman of the stall wound it up. "Quite cheap," she said to another woman who was hesitating over its purchase. "One franc only!" In the shadows of the stall a little girl sat on a high stool probably the daughter of the owner of the mechanical doll. Her eyes were wistful. . . . The woman bought the mechanical doll, and as she paid over her franc I saw tears come into the eyes of the little girl. ... I wish that doll had not been sold.