CHAPTER XIII 
THE HARICOT-WEEVIL 
]F there is a Heaven-sent vegetable on 
earth, it is the haricot bean. It has every 
good quality in its favour: it is soft to the 
tooth, of an agreeable flavour, plentiful, 
cheap and very nutritious. It is a vegetable 
flesh which, without being repulsive or drip- 
ping with blood, is as good as the cut-up 
horrors in the butcher’s shop. To em- 
phasize its services to mankind, the Pro- 
vencal idiom calls it gounflo-gus, the poor 
man’s bellows.? 
Blessed bean, consoler of the poor, yes, 
you easily fill out the labourer, the honest and 
capable worker who has drawn the wrong 
number in life’s mad lottery; kindly bean, 
with three drops of oil and a dash of vinegar, 
you were the favourite dish of my boyhood; 
and even now, in the evening of my days, 
10Qr, if the reader prefers, the Swell-belly. Gus, in 
the Provencal dialect, means both “guts” and “bigger.” 
—Translator’s Note. 
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