If 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 dripping with blood, is as good as the cut-up horrors in the butcher’s shop. To emphasize its services to mankind, the Provençal idiom calls it gounflo-gus, the poor man’s bellows. [58] 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, you are welcome to my humble porringer. We shall be friends to the last. To-day it is not my intention to extol your deserts: I want to ask you a question, simply out of curiosity. What is your country of origin? Did you come from Central Asia, with the horse-bean and the pea? Did you belong to the collection of seeds which the first pioneers of husbandry handed to us from their garden patch? Were you known to antiquity? Here the insect, an impartial and well-informed witness, answers: ‘No, in our parts antiquity did not know the haricot. The precious legumen did not reach our country by the same road as the broad bean. It is a foreigner, introduced into the old continent at a later date.’ The insect’s statement merits serious examination, supported as it is by very plausible arguments. Here are the facts. Though I have followed agricultural matters closely for many years, I have never seen the haricots attacked by any ravager whatever of the insect series, nor in particular by the Bruchi, the licensed despoilers of leguminous seeds. I question my peasant neighbours on this point. They are men who keep a sharp look-out where their crops are concerned. To touch their property is a heinous crime, quickly discovered. Besides, there is the housewife, who would not fail to find the malefactor as she shells the haricots intended for the pot, conscientiously fingering them one by one before dropping them into a plate. Well, one and all reply to my question with a smile in which I read their disbelief in my knowledge of the smaller creatures: ‘Sir,’ they say, ‘learn that there are never any worms in the haricot. It is a blessed bean and respected by the Weevil. The pea, the broad bean, the lentil, the everlasting pea, the chick-pea, all have their vermin; this one, lou gounflo-gus, never. What should we poor people do if the Courcoussoun tried to rob us of it?’