Listen, Hunk, I know the greatest joke on the French people,—they don’t eat blackberries; they think they are poison. They eat every dam thing you can imagine and many dam things you can’t imagine, frogs, mussels, periwinkles, snails, every kind of grass that grows, etc. but they are convinced that blackberries are poison, and they never touch them. The blackberries, however, having not yet been informed that they are considered poisonous and undesirable, still grow in great plenty about these parts, the roads are lined with them, and there are great thickets of them on the bluffs over the sea, just getting ripe now. And since nearly all the English and Americans have gone back to town in the last few days, as far as I can see all the blackberries in northern France are living and having their being and ripening in the sun for my personal delectation. Isn’t that amusing?
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (in a letter to her sister Norma)
