We were at the entrance gate, and the round of the fortress was finished. We bade goodbye to the woman, who pocketed her "tip" and hastened back with her attendant sprite to the little grey, half-ruined house where she passes her grey, unimaginable life!
"La cigalo di piboulo, La bouscarlo do bouissoun, Lou grihet di farigoulo Tout canto sa cansoun."
The tree locust in the poplar, the thrush in the wayside bush, The grasshopper in the wild thyme, each sings its own song.
At the _table d'hôte_ of our hotel, a little group of travellers was clustered at the far end of the long, old-fashioned room--silent, French though they were. My neighbour was a pale, faintly-outlined young man, with short, colourless hair. Curious that so artistic a nation should crop its hair so very close, I idly mused. That pallor? Presumably the lack of outdoor exercise, not to enter upon dark possibilities of absinthe and other Parisian roads to ruin.
At about the stage of the _entrée_ the subject of these conjectures, bracing himself to the task, turned and said--
"Est ce que vous êtes depuis longtemps à Avignon, madame?" (Accent a little provincial, I thought, perhaps Provençal, which was interesting!)
"Non, monsieur, je ne suis ici que depuis hier," I responded, not only in my best French, but with as much sociability as I could throw into the somewhat arid reply, for I desired to prolong a conversation that might throw light upon the fascinating country.
"Ah!" said the close-cropped one, with a gesture that I thought Gallic, "je suis un peu--de--dis--disappointed, as we say in English," he suddenly broke up, with an exasperated abandonment of the foreign lingo. The man was an Englishman, for all he was worth! Barbara laughed aloud, getting wind of the situation. So much for the distinctions of national types. My neighbour had made precisely the same mistake on his side that I had made on mine.
With Avignon he was indeed "a little disappointed." He thought the Palace bare and ugly, and the town dirty and unattractive. The view from the Rocher du Dom? Yes, that was rather fine. Give the devil his due, he evidently felt. What was the height of Mont Ventoux? I longed to rush wildly into figures, but principle restrained me. Did I mean to go to Chateauneuf? Our friend had been there. Tumble-down old place. One could see it from the Rocher du Dom across the river. They made rather good wine there.