The Market Before the Last of Everyone Disappears

August in France is mostly about what disappears.

The market gets smaller. Vendors go on vacation. Bars post closing dates. By mid-month, most of ordinary life has vanished and you adjust your speed to the place. You have to.

Bref

The little market near us is never that big, but it’s s usually crowded, with about 20 vendors bustling for a few hours every Saturday morning. July first quiets down & then August gets quieter still. I went this week partly for eggs, yogurt, fruit, the basics, but also just to see what’s there. This week there were peaches, bread, chickens, very small melons, a sold-out basket of quail eggs and the unmistakable feeling that everyone was doing their very last bits of work before they disappear.

& then there are pictures of fruit and chickens, in pieces.

The market in the little Loire town across the river is small, crowds easily as it crowds into a narrow one-way street leading to a wooden market building that serves as a parking lot the rest of the week.

The only bar nearby gets filled quickly and then out on the street any day that promises not to rain.

There are a lot of days without rain lately.

A few vendors sit along the street outside the covered hall, the rest fit loosely in rows, and you can walk the whole thing in a 5 minutes. You spend more of your time waiting in line, but even those move along quickly.

There are familiar faces now, a good rotation of vendors, and it’s small enough that the market doesn’t have to consume the whole morning.

But it was quiet in July and quieter still in August, until it all kind of stops in the middle of the month as more and more folks go on vacation. Then of course, it will boom to life come September, like every other thing in this country.

Le rentrée is real.

So is the intense quiet of August.

In August, it seems like 25% of the places are open and now I need to consider vacations and not just odd opening hours for the bakery that always seems closed whenever I go there.

People leave. Vendors make a point of telling you when (but not where) they’ll be on vacation. Bars & bistros post their closing dates. Shops put up signs explaining that they will return sometime toward the end of the month. With every week, another small piece of the normal machinery of the country gets switched off. This is August in France.

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Less on offer, for a few reasons

Despite my best intentions, I rarely arrive to this market with much of a list. Eggs are a constant - they’re fresh, local and remarkably cheap. For some reason, the farmers around here seem to have settled on 25 cents an egg but everybody seems to sell them - the chicken guys, obviously, but then the pork butchery and the cheese vendors all carry as well, which is a bit confusing.

The yogurt tastes better than most supermarket stuff and the containers can be reused, if we remember them. The fruit vendor seems to be a real admirer of the fruits themselves, but all of the offerings were a bit sparse.

A part of it is the really bad growing season this year, but a part of it is getting ready for the congés.

The poultry — and rabbit — vendor had a sign for quail eggs: 18 for €3, so I asked for them with very little idea what I would do with eighteen quail eggs. I usually just crack them over hot dishes, but I had started thinking about pickling them.

Désolé, chef.

The basket was empty. The Chicken Guy pointed across the market toward a woman rolling her cart near the Fish Guys.

“She bought all of them. €10. A great price,” he seemed to be admiring a bargain well made.

I had to agree. I still had no idea what she planned to do with that many quail eggs, or what exactly he wanted me to do with the information.

There was plenty of chicken, though, & rabbit, various cuts that remind you that animals have many more identifiable parts than supermarket packaging suggests.

I like the Chicken Guy’s whole team. I like that there is a Chicken Guy. After you have been going to the same little market long enough, people stop being anonymous vendors and become the Bread People, the Cheese People, the Chicken Guy, the Yogurt Couple, the Hipster Beer Guy, the Sad Wine Man, and so on.

You may not know their names, and you know almost nothing about their lives, but there is still a niceness and a familiarity of all of the hellos, the .

preserving the sparse harvest

This time of year, I am less interested in cheese than I am during the rest of the year. A little chèvre is fine, but when it is hot I kind of avoid cheese, especially the funkier types I’ll go for in a blink below 80°F. August is dense and pungent enough.

Right now the peaches and nectarines are beautiful, and in a few weeks I’ll buy several kilos of whatever is nearing the end of its season and turn some of it into jam

I did not grow up preserving much of anything, so every time I say something like “I’ll get a few kilos and jar them,” I am surprised by myself sometimes, but it’s easy. You do something once, then again because it worked, it becomes one of the things you do. The fruit appears, it gets very good, it gets cheap, you buy too much of it and then figure out what to do next. Jars.

[I like this simple recipe for peach preserves, even if the website is kind of a mess.]

The melons are another matter. French melons are often a bit dainty compared to some American fruit behemoths, but this season, they’re smaller still. It’s been an incredible drought and I am amazed that anything is growing. Not everythign is in greenhouses, either.

The ones this week were about 30% smaller than they have been in that same market with that same fruit guy. .

Bread, chickens and whatever happens at noon

I’m used to the bread selling out and by this time of the day, you start to explore your options, but they had everything today (except baguettes, of course)

It also means the usual crêpe vendor has been replaced by a bao seller, which I’d be happy to see more often, even if I like her crêpes. The man normally surrounded by piles of cooked sausages and smoked pork has been replaced by the Syrian falafel guy, a tremendous man working out of a cart clearly designed for someone smaller.

He looks a little like the guy from Despicable Me, hunched into the cart while his teenage daughter enthusiastically presses sandwiches beside him. He was beaming.

Then he pointed to a sign taped to the side of the cart:

EN CONGÉS DU 10 AU 24 AOÛT
DE RETOUR LE 25

Of course.

The thinner market

The most obvious sign of August is not really anything being sold. It is what starts disappearing. One of the produce sellers was already packing up while I was there, the shelves and crates mostly cleared away. Another vendor had a sign announcing annual vacation from August 10 through August 25. None of this is unusual, but when enough of those little notices start appearing at once, you can feel the month changing around you.

I had also planned to stop our local bistro afterward, but it was closed and the owner waved me in anyway. I can offer you 1 Guinness or a choice of non-alcoholic beers. On me, I am on vacation and the bash register isn’t even here.

I took the NA beer (Affligem, one of the best ones I’ve had here) and sat down as he and his wife rattled off their vacation plans and errands for the day. He cracked open the Guiness and he smoked cigarettes indoors and beamed a smile.

“I missed this,” by which I think he meant the smoking indoors and not me, but I wished him a good vacation because he’s off until September. Another place shuts for two weeks.

The August slowdown used to freak me out. Now I kind of love it.

Does this happen near you?

Someone ducked in quickly, gave him a thumbs up—I think about vacation, maybe about the cigarette.

Somebody else says they will see you at la rentrée. Running errands often means discovering that most of your regular spots are gone until the 27th.

When we first lived here, this kind of thing felt much stranger. There was always some question of whether a place was closed just today, closed for lunch, closed for Monday, closed for three weeks, or perhaps closed according to a schedule that everyone except us already understood.

August comes. Things slow down. People disappear. September brings them back.

Knowing the rhythm

That familiarity is probably what I notice most now. Not that I know everybody, because I do not, and not that I have become deeply involved in the local circulation of news, because I have limited appetite for that too. I like being able to speak to people, hear where they are going on vacation, ask when they will be back, say hello when we pass each other and then continue with the day. There is a version of local life that involves knowing who said what about whom and what happened three houses down, and I am perfectly happy to leave most of that to other people.

What I do like is knowing the rhythm. I know what the market looks like when it is busy and what it looks like when August starts taking pieces away. I know that if I want something from a particular vendor later this month, there is a decent chance they will be somewhere else. I know the bars will close, reopen, and resume as though nothing happened. I know September will suddenly feel busier, even though by most standards this place will still be extremely quiet.

It felt like a long time before I got used to the rhythms here. Even as NYC gets quieter in the summer, there’s still a lot going on. There is nothing like the French Quiet there, not that I know of.

The market gets smaller. The peaches get better. Somebody puts a sign in the window. The town gets even quieter than it already was, which seems impossible.

Then, in a few weeks, it all comes back.

Soundtrack

Françoise Hardy — “Voilà” (1967)

I was going to do Bridget Bardot, but I really haven’t been enjoying hearing her voice lately. But Françoise Hardy still impresses.