Sans-Souci, Penniless, Clean-for-Nothing and Starving
Once upon a time there were four rascals with predestined names. They were called Sans-Souci, Sans-le-Sou, Propre-à-Rien and Dying of Starvation.
They lived as they pleased, sleeping most of the time and waking up only to beg for the little they needed to survive. Eating little, not washing, they were not pretty to look at and inspired no confidence in anyone who had the misfortune to come across them.
However, one day, when a storm of incredible violence broke out, a poor lost stranger asked them for asylum while waiting for the sky to pour out its overflow of anger. Good buggers all the same, they let him enter their miserable hut. At the end of the deluge, the stranger left them, not without promising to send each of them a box which they should take great care of and in which they would find something to plant.
When the boxes arrived, they obeyed and planted what they found there: vines and fig trees, kernels of almonds and hazelnuts. The land was uncultivated, but the trees grew there, and the four bad subjects even learned to dry the fruit.
These, later, entered into the composition of their winter dessert, which they sold successfully.
Sans-Souci, Sans-le-Sou, Propre-à-Rien and Die-of-Hungry earned more and more money and worked more and more, but so as not to forget who they were and always remember the time. past, they had decided to call their product: "The Four Beggars".
Even today, you can still taste this dessert made up of four kinds of dried fruit: figs, hazelnuts, raisins and almonds.
It is also said, and it may be true, that this name relates to the four mendicant orders: raisins for the Dominicans, dried figs for the Franciscans, hazelnuts for the Augustinians and almonds for the Carmelites.
