In my last post, I put up a bunch of pictures of the village where I now live, Cournonterral. Who caught the image of the two dummies on the side of the building? 🙂 Did anyone wonder who they are?

What you are looking at are in fact signs of a festival of medieval or pagan origins that still takes place every year here in this village on the Wednesday before the Lenten season. These figures are called “pepettes” and are a representation of the two major players in this festival. (The signs are in Occitan which is the regional dialect here in the  Languedoc. (Langue (language) d’Oc, see?)

My understanding is that “Taisa-te” (in French, “tais-toi”) basically means “Shut up”; “Lenga de Pelha” (langue de peille) means “tongue/language of rags”(which is an expression that kind of translates as “gossip” or “bad mouthing”.

It’s a VERY local variation on Carnival, and…