Here is finally the whole truth about the peach-moon, squat and slightly arched silhouette.
Much has been said about moon fishing. And even at the French Academy, in front of an audience of old men in green coats. I get the truth from my great-great-grandpapet. It had been told to him one summer evening, when he was cooling off under the messorgues tree. The “messorgues”, with us, are not lies. But embellished truths, a little transformed. Because not all truths are good to say.
The common people simply called him “the old man”
This famous sunfish, no one knew where it came from. Peremptory, Arthur, the cafetier of Champ-de-Mars, insisted that it was a mutinous sailor whose criminal acts caused the shipwreck of a tub in the bay of Aigues-Mortes. Other equally romantic versions – such as that of Ursule, the grocer on rue Bouquerie – attested to a wealthy landowner crippled with gambling debts and wanted for family abandonment.
In the absence of the slightest proof of civil status, unable to give a nickname to this stocky and slightly arched figure, to this hermetic face half eaten by a snow beard, the common people called him quite simply “the old man”. He lived in a wooden hut, covered with a sagne roof, very far away, where the Gold Pond merges with infinity and came back two or three times a week accompanied by a small donkey as gray. than him. The animal was carrying baskets loaded to the brim of the tides.
The old man was setting up under the arcades of the fish market a pile of carp as long as they were wide, mullets with muzzles as thick as the bottoms of champagne bottles, eels as thick as the arms of fairground hoops. No one could say what particular tremor of the wind, what particular sign of the wind, warned the housewives of its coming. In the absence of a label, it was enough to point the index finger at the desired fish and look at the old man deep in his eyes.
The strange salesman, lowering his gaze, then assessed his merchandise and then muttered an amount confirmed by a few raised fingers. After the settlement nodded, he buried coins or bills in a handkerchief tied at the four corners. His fishing sold, the old man wandered around town to do some shopping – a demijohn for wine, sometimes coffee or olive oil – then returned to the marshes, the donkey on his heels.
with each silver drop, a wriggling fish
This routine lasted until December 24 of I do not know what year. When this rascal from Pistole, no doubt wishing to appropriate for himself without a purse, untie a pair of eels for the bouillabaisse on New Year’s Eve, followed the old man to find out where the miraculous peaches were. With Sioux tricks he therefore followed the man and his donkey through quagmires, organs and slabs of mud.
The early winter night almost drowned the swamp when the strange procession reached its destination. When a last ray of sunlight set the surroundings of the old man’s hut on fire, Pistole, the crude but observant man, became perplexed. And was surprised that a small mesh net, that no long pole, that no boat used for millennia by the fishermen of the pond is nearby. What process allowed the old man so many miraculous catches?
After midnight mass, the faithful were leaving the church when Pistole returned to town. Going from group to group, he made incoherent remarks. According to him, when the moon reflected in the water, very close to the hut, the old man took a wicker basket, tied it to a rope and pretended to fish. He never ascended the star, of course, nor a single star, but every drop falling on the bank turned into a wriggling fish.
When the old man returned to his hut, the trickster seized a pair of eels but his theft melted in his hand. Annoyed, he fled with the basket. Since then Pistole no longer has his own head. In the evening, he posts at the edge of the canal and tries desperately to ascend the moon with his utensil. We never saw the old man again at the fish market. But we suspect him of having cast a spell on our city. Pistole was no longer the only one to haunt the banks of the canal with his basket. And all his fellow citizens became pescalunes.
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