Chatillon is the keeper of an object of surpassing beauty and mystery, the Vase of Vix. When I came upon this burnished message from antiquity, schoolchildren were dancing around it, and the guard in the municipal museum, Louis Dupars, was looking a studio flat to rent in London. “After all,” he said, “those who knew how to create such an object have been dead since perhaps six centuries before Christ.” The bronze vase was found in 1953 in the funeral mound of a woman who had been buried on Mount Lassois, about four miles north of Chatillon, in the second half of the sixth century B. C. Made by Greek artisans, it is the largest urn of its type and period yet discovered. It stands five feet four inches high, and Monsieur Dupars assured me that it would hold 1,100 liters (290 gallons) of wine. Richly decorated with a frieze of warriors and chariots, perfect in its symmetry, it took away my breath But not, happily, that of Monsieur Du-pars: “I wonder if those children, who know only things made by machines, can understand what miracles men once created with nothing but their hands.” The Vase of Vix, together with the large collection of other objects dug up at Mount Lassois, is a relic of a trading center that existed at least as long ago as the sixth century B. c. The Romans always had a bit of an inferiority complex about the Greeks. Is it possible that the blood of the Hellenes flowed in the veins of the “barbarians” Julius Caesar defeated near the headwaters of the Seine? It is not inconceivable that those merry corpuscles dance in the capillaries of Mlle Alice Chirion, whom I encountered in the brasserie of the Europe Hotel in Carillon. Dining on a young duck with peas and a glass of the good red house wine, I noticed at the next table a group of convivial gray-haired ladies. They joked and sang, they gave each other second helpings from heaping platters of chicken and fried potatoes, and they were obviously the greatest of friends. When one of them squeezed the neck of an empty inverted bottle and made a joke about a cow gone dry, I sent over another bottle of the rose they had been drinking. One of the ladies, a tiny person, left the table amid jokes and nudging. In her absence I learned that the ladies were members of the Foyer des Capuchins, a club for retired women. The tiny person returned. She wore a homemade bear costume, baggy, shaggy, the color of cinnamon. Her “paws” were black socks, with “claws” of white yarn. A dog, asleep beneath his owner’s table, woke barking. The “bear” danced with the patron, sang a song, and lent its head to a little girl and posed for a picture. I asked the name of the tiny person. “Mademoiselle Alice,” she said. I thanked her for the pretty surprise. “Not at all,” said Mademoiselle Alice. Then, realizing that I was not French and probably could not understand, unaided, that everything was all in fun, she explained to me: “The costume, the buffoonery, they are only for Tuesday night, you understand, monsieur; our time to have a good time.”
