Saint Martin in the Gaume: when a beet carries light through the village

It is half past six and it is already pitch black over the roads of the Hesse. Then, suddenly, orange points appear between the ochre-stone houses. They are the children, a knife in one pocket, a hollowed beet in the other, the candle trembling inside the vegetable's scooped-out belly. They walk in a file, their distorted shadows clinging to the walls. We are in the last days before November the eleventh, and the Gaume is replaying its Saint Martin's Day.

The hollowed beet, lamp of the farmhouse yards

Before plastic crept into the kitchen cupboards, the Saint Martin lantern was made from what the land gave: a heavy, earthy fodder beet, scooped out with a teaspoon. The soldier's face, you carved it through the flesh. A candle inside, a wire over the head, and the child walked behind the grown-ups with his living lamp, smelling of warm earth and beeswax.

This is not a grand piece of folklore staged for tourists. It is a yard gesture, a low-kitchen gesture, a boxwood-handled knife. People still do it in Florenville, in Virton, in the yards of Latour and Sommethonne — less for the procession than for the family ritual. The kid scoops out the beet, the mother lights the candle, the granddad mutters the legend for the thirtieth time.

The roasted goose and the knife that cut the cloak

The next day, the eleventh, it is the goose's turn. Not just any goose: the fattened one, fed on grain in the valley-bottom meadows, killed in early November and hung in the cold cellar to mature. You put it in the oven on the feast day, with its potatoes cooking in its own fat and its pan juices poured over the slices.

The Lorrain custom is old. It predates Christianity, the old ones say, or rather it covers it without erasing it. Before the Roman soldier Martin gave his cloak at the gates of Amiens, there was the feast near the solstice, the feast of the beast you kill before winter and eat together. The Gaume, Lorrain land at the tip of Wallonia, kept both layers stacked: the legend of the cloak and the grease of the roast.

Walking in the mud, carrying your own light

What survives, through the decades, is this walk in the November mud. The Gaume roads, climbing and stony, with their marl banks and bare walnut trees, do not lend themselves to cheerful strolling. You walk pressing the lamp against your belly, so the valley wind does not blow it out. The kids slip, the parents hold them by their hoods.

There is no grand parade, no staged spectacle. There are villages that step outside, a file that zigzags between the houses, a smell of wax and cooked beet, and then everyone goes home. Tomorrow, the goose will be carved up, and the granddad will say, knife in hand: « There — we cut the way the soldier did. » That is how the Gaume keeps telling its own story. Not in a museum. In a yard, at dusk, with a candle inside a root vegetable.