It's an idyllic life that the Gitano and the Romany-Chiel leads, or at least the poet would have us think so.
"Upon the road to Romany It's stay, friend, stay! There's lots o' love and lots o' time To linger on the way; Poppies for the twilight, Roses for the noon, It's happy goes as lucky goes To Romany in June."
But as the Frenchman puts it, "look to the other side of the coin."
Brigandage is the original profession of the gypsy, though to-day the only stealing which they do is done stealthily, and not in the plain hold-up fashion. They profess a profound regard for the Catholic religion, but they practise other rites in secret, and form what one versed in French Catholicism would call a "_culte particulière_." It is known that they baptize their newly-born children _as often as possible_--of course each time in a different place--in order that they may solicit alms in each case. Down-right begging is forbidden in France, but for such a purpose the law is lenient.
They are gross feeders, the Gitanos, and a fowl "a little high" has no terrors for them; they have even been known to eat sea-gulls, which no white man has ever had the temerity to taste. It has been said that they will eat cats and dogs and even rats, but this is doubtless another version of the Chinese fable. At any rate a mere heating of their viands in a saucepan--not by any stretch of the imagination can it be called cooking--is enough for them, and what their dishes lack in cooking is made up by liberal additions of salt, pepper, _piment_ (which is tobacco or something like it), and saffron.
As to type, the French Gitanos are of that olive-brown complexion, with the glossy black hair, usually associated with the stage gypsy, rather small in stature, but well set up, strong and robust, fine eyes and features and, with respect to the young women and girls (who marry young), often of an astonishing beauty. In the course of a very few years the beauty of the women pales considerably, owing, no doubt, to their hard life, but among the men their fine physique and lively emotional features endure until well past the half-century.
The gypsies are supposedly a joyful, amiable race; sometimes they are and sometimes they are not; but looking at them all round it is not difficult to apply the verses of Béranger, beginning: