Dawn and dusk, births, sicknesses, deaths, interrupted works in the fields, wars, celebrations for the living and the dead, proud poverty, games and laughters, tough and simple life, pride of the pauper, of the destitute, of the day labourer.

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There was an out of fashion time where the universe was gathering at the focal point of an estaminet. A café overflowing with humanity where you would chat, and expose their four truths to the owner, to the priest and to the bourgeois. The peasant grew there, as knotted as a grapevine, to clean the crud off his burdensome life, with a comfited face and a merry heart, at last. You would badmouth about everything and nothing: about Marie and Lucien, about the teasing one, about the dead or alive one, or about this elder we called old man, about the old man we called what, again?

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Tipsy processions and dances, balls and open-air cafés, accordion waltzes, frills under skirts, lullabies blued with wounds, newlyweds before the birds, out-of-doors life and brutal death: cupbearer of the proletarian times, a thousand songs from a popular time.