Limoges is also a city of butchers, and their annual festival, La Frairie des Petits Ventres, or The Brotherhood of Small Bellies, is a celebration of what Christine Travers delicately terms "products that we could never find in supermarkets."

The festival was created with the idea of building interest in the meat products consumed by peasants in much older days. One local favorite is the Amourettes — literally, "the fling" — a dish of sheep testicles cooked in garlic, parsley and port.

Mrs. Travers had just finished a blood sausage sandwich and a piece of chestnut pie, and after washing it down with some cider, confided a closely held secret: it is the sheep testicles that draw her most of all.

"It melts in your mouth, and tastes like lamb sweetbread," she said, as she made her way though a crowd of ecstatic seekers after delicacies prepared from tripe, lamb testicles, and the organs of lamb, veal and pigs.

The one-day festival starts in the morning with an open-air market, and closes in the evening with a religious procession. It is the excellence of the tripe that attracts hundreds of food lovers to the narrow Rue de la Boucherie, or butcher's street, a picturesque medieval lane lined with half-timbered houses.

Lured by the powerful smell of grilled pig, visitors strolled along the butchers' stalls in search of "grillons," grilled pig fat, or an "andouillette" sandwich made of a cooked sausage with veal or pork intestines and onions.

In the street, butchers fried the offerings in deep, heavy pans, often under the visitors' expectant gaze; many, like François Brun, proudly showed off their original tripe-based creations. Mr. Brun's "nez d'amour," or "nose of love," is an elaborate assemblage of boned and cooked pig snout stuffed with pig tongue and vegetables.

"There aren't any kebabs here!" said Michel Toulet, the director of Renaissance du Vieux Limoges, the group that organizes the event. "Here, we have cider, we have beer from the Limousin region. It's only local products, and we care about it."

Liliane Guédon, 69, a retired teacher and adventurous food lover, comes here every year to buy girot, a sausage of dried lamb's blood sold only for the occasion.

"It's very special," she said. "Some say it's tasteless, but I find it very fine."

The Frairie des Petits Ventres was created in 1973 by Renaissance du Vieux Limoges, an association of preservationists and butchers who came together successfully to fight plans to demolish the old city center.

The butchers showed their commitment, they said, by putting up stalls outside their shops to sell cooked innards and local specialties. The Frairie des Petits Ventres quickly became a local institution.

Even shop owners along Rue de la Boucherie, including a notions store, a beauty salon and an antiques store, turned themselves into butcher shops for the day, swapping their balls of knitting wool, day creams and old books for blood sausages, veal heads and pigs' feet.

"Our neighborhood is unique," said Geneviève Mausset-Cibot, the senior butcher from an ancient butchers' family. "So we had to revive the old trade and show another way to sell our products."

Butchers have a long and important history here, often overshadowing the local nobility in power and prestige. They established a powerful medieval guild, and legend has it that they grew so wealthy that they lent money to the kings. When King Henry IV visited Limoges in the 17th century, he was greeted by a delegation of butchers, as was President François Mitterrand in 1982.

Guilds were outlawed in 1789, but in 1887 they formed the Brotherhood of Saint-Aurélien, named after the butchers' patron saint, which was nearly as exclusive. Until the 1960s, the brotherhood granted memberships only to Roman Catholic male butchers, their sons or sons-in-law.

"The butchers were tied to each other by marriage," said Jean Parot, a member of one of the city's oldest families of butchers. They have three bonds, he said: family, profession and religion. "They married each other, they were all butchers and they were all Catholics."

The butchers also entered the city's public institutions, and some of them still have their coats of arms engraved on the front of the butcher's chapel, known formally as Notre Dame des Petits Ventres.

The tiny 15th-century church, nicknamed the butchers' chapel, shelters a curious stone sculpture, depicting the Virgin Mary giving the baby Jesus what is said to be a kidney. It is known as La Vierge au Rognon, the virgin of the kidney.

Monique Boulestin, a local Socialist Party legislator, said that the fair, both religious and pagan, was unusual in France. "It is a curious celebration based on devotion to the saints, in a land that is profoundly secular," she said.

Still, the sheep testicles, the membranes of veal intestine and the pig's cheek terrines (deep fried or grilled) do not appeal to everyone.

"The tripe and the andouillette aren't really my thing," said Alexia Collombat, 19, a local business student. "But it's only once a year, and lets us discover our local food traditions."

But the Frairie des Petits Ventres is also aimed at bringing butchers and tripe-sellers back into fashion, at a time when industrialization of meat products, modern consumption habits and past occurrences of mad cow disease have deprived them of regular customers.

"We work on a magnificent product," said Jean-Pierre Ribière, the last tripe maker of Limoges and one of the last in France, speaking in this case of the heart. "But for the man in the street, it's only an organ meat."