"The Fête De Gayant" by Agnes Repplier is a travel essay that blends personal observation with historical inquiry, centering on the author's unexpected encounter with a centuries-old festival in the French town of Douai. Repplier opens with a broad reflection on provincial France's seemingly endless appetite for celebration, noting that its towns are perpetually engaged in religious or patriotic festivity. She describes attending a procession in Auray on the Fête du Sacré Cœur, where the entire community participated without division or dissent, contrasting this unity favorably with the fractured public life she associates with America. She then recounts her arrival in Amiens during a fair, where the normally contemplative town was thrown into disorder and the landlady of her hotel mourned the disruption to her well-run establishment. Seeking peace, Repplier and her companions travel on to Douai, expecting to find a quiet provincial backwater. Instead, they arrive to find the town in a state of uproar. The source of the commotion soon reveals itself: the Fête de Gayant is underway. Into the crowded square marches the Sire de Gayant, a giant effigy some thirty feet tall, clad in steel armor and carrying a massive mace, followed by his equally imposing wife in brocaded finery, their son in velvet cape, and an elder daughter of self-conscious bearing. The procession's most beloved figure, however, is the youngest, Mademoiselle Thérèse, known as la petite Binbin, a sprightly effigy barely eight feet tall, carrying a paper windmill and pausing to receive kisses from the small children held up to embrace her. The sight is irresistible, and Repplier abandons all thought of moving on to Lille. She then turns to the origins of the festival, which dates to 1479 and the successful defense of Douai against Louis XI. The popular tradition holds that a knight of extraordinary size fought on behalf of the city, and his memory has been honored ever since. The Church, however, claims the figure represents St. Maurand, the patron saint of Douai, and supports this identification with a legend in which the saint appears at midnight to a sleeping monk, compelling him to ring the bells of St. Amé and thereby warn the city of a planned surprise attack by Admiral Coligny in 1556. A more skeptical school of historians attributes the entire pageant to Spanish cultural influence under Charles V, who added popular entertainments to the existing civic celebrations. Repplier surveys these competing claims with amusement and scholarly interest without decisively resolving them. The financial and administrative history of the festival is traced through archival records from Douai. These documents reveal the costs of carrying the figures through the streets, the elaborate expense of outfitting Madame Gayant when she was introduced in 1665, and the periodic disapproval of the Church, which twice banned the procession as having grown too secular. Yet the town's attachment to its giant always prevailed, and the Sire de Gayant was restored each time to his place of honor. The essay broadens into a lively account of the festival's four days of diversions: archery contests, decorated boats on the river Scarpe, a balloon ascent, carrier pigeons released in the public square, a cycling carousel, and daily concerts in the Jardin des Plantes. Repplier observes the crowds with affectionate precision, noting the frugality of the provincial French in their pleasures, their small glasses of wine or cider, their contentment with what may be enjoyed at no cost, and their particular enthusiasm when the Chant de Gayant closes each concert. The essay ends with an extended reflection prompted by the sight of young provincial women sitting quietly with their families at these concerts. Repplier meditates on the severe restrictions governing their lives: no solitary walks, no novels, no plays, no unaccompanied movement even to church, and unrelenting supervision. Yet she finds them neither foolish nor dull. In their restrained alertness and instinctive elegance she reads the signs of a deeper intelligence cultivated under constraint. She compares French women favorably to their German, English, and American counterparts, arguing that French women have little need to demand privileges because their command of tact, good taste, and practical administration already gives them considerable authority in domestic and commercial life. The essay closes on this gently ironic note, with Repplier observing that these composed young women of Douai are unlikely ever to need to remind themselves that it was their own town that thought to give the solitary Gayant a wife.
By Agnes Repplier · First published 1889 · Genre: Essay, Cultural Criticism, Travel Writing