Laudator Temporis Acti

Stella Bowen (1893-1947), Drawn from Life (1941; rpt. London: Virago, 1984), pp. 95-96:

To my mind the best market on the whole coast is one which I came to know later at Toulon, in the Cours Lafayette. The booths come curving out of a shady street into a sunny boulevard which shows the waters of the harbour at one end and high mountains at the other. Immense symmetrical plane trees slant slightly forwards down each side of the old street, their trunks bisected by the tilted white canvas canopies of the stalls. Here, if you can make yourself heard above the clamour, you may buy garments or bandanna handkerchiefs or china, as well as all the fruits of the earth and sea. What flowers! What oranges, lemons, and tangerines! And what vegetables! Fennel, and pimentos, and courgettes and herbs and salade de mache and aubergines. And in the fish market, sea-urchins and octopus and langoustines and mussels, as well as all the serious fishes, and everything you could want for a bouillabaisse, even to the rascasse. A shop nearby sells nothing but olive oils, which you will taste from a row of taps, on a piece of bread, whilst next door is a noble selection of sausages and cheeses and a choice of olives. Daily life has richness and savour here, where a passionate interest attaches to the buying of even the humblest portion of food. Lucky housewives, turning their leisurely steps into the crowded, sunny hubbub to choose, weigh, compare and haggle over the piled merchandise surrounding them; little do they know that in other countries their sisters are huddled into mackintoshes and scuttling from the grocer to the butcher, who will serve them dourly with a fixed portion at a fixed price — a transaction calling for no skill and little judgment?