Gleaning --or Stealing?

Thursday, August 20, 2015

     Many people know Millet's painting The Gleaners, but few people actually know what gleaning is.

     In Millet's painting, peasants are bent over a field, picking up from the ground grains that have fallen after the harvest.  At first glance, if you don't know, you might think that the three women with scarves around their heads are finishing up some last detail of the harvest.  Not so.

     The women are glaneuses, the French word for female gleaners.  A gleaner is a person who picks up whatever is left lying on the ground after a crop is harvested.  At the time of Millet's painting, a gleaner would have been a very, very poor person without land of his own on which to grow crops.  Under French law anyone is allowed to enter agricultural land privately owned to take whatever part of the crop has fallen to the ground and left behind at the harvest.  The law applies both to agricultural products and to the products of farm-raised shellfish, like oysters and shrimp.

     Agnes Varda made a wonderful film, The Gleaners and I, about modern gleaners: dumpster divers, and just people who know a good thing when they see it.  She makes reference to Millet's painting while drawing the analogy to poverty in France.

     My friend Chantal is a gleaner --or perhaps a thief-- of fruit.  She spies orchards that are untended, then takes their fruit off the trees when it is ripe.   She reasons that if she does not take it, it will fall to the ground and rot, even if the fruit does properly belong to the owner of the orchard.  The trees she takes fruit from are always on the side of the road, and she takes the fruit only for her personal use and that of neighbors to whom she gives a portion.

     Early on in the summer she took cherries.  Last night Beau and I joined her and her bear of a dog, Baboon, on a quest for figs.  She gave me a small bag of figs and I scrupled not: they were delicious.

     Today, Chantal told me that she had seen a group of almond trees, the fruit read to drop, near the marble quarry.  Originally she thought she we might drive there, but decided she needed the exercise, so we walked, just as the sun was beginning to set.  She carried a walking stick, which she put to good use in knocking the almonds off the branches by striking the fruit-laden branches hard with the walking stick.  As she is not very tall, I lent my longer arms to the effort, becoming an accessory, perhaps.  I would not venture deeper into the almond grove out of fear of deer ticks, so waited for Chantal to complete her gleaning --or stealing-- by waiting by a large block of marble lying by the opposite side of the road.  Spread out against the sky was the panorama of the Minervois and, in the distance, the Pyrenees,

     When Chantal had filled her bag, we walked down the hill back to Caunes.  On our right as we walked, a man had parked a car near a small area belonging to the marble quarry.  He was bringing a block of marble small enough for him to carry in his arms but large enough to make something rather large with, to his car.

      He, perhaps, was gleaning, too.