I have mentioned the mistral. I had heard a great deal previously about this wind, and while at Beziers, had the pleasure of making its personal acquaintance. This mistral is the plague and the curse of the Mediterranean provinces of France. The ancient historians mention it as sweeping gravel and stones up into the air. St. Paul talks of the south wind, which blew softly until there arose against it a fierce wind, called Euroclydon--certainly the mistral. Madame de Sevigne paints it as "_le tourbillon, l'ouregan, tous les diables dechainés qui veulent bien emporter votre chateau_;" and my amazement is, that the hurricane does not sometimes carry bodily off, if not a chateau, at least the ricketty villages of the peasants. I had but a taste of this wild, gusty, and most abominably drying and cutting wind; for the gale which blew for a couple of days over Beziers formed, I was told, only a very modified version of the true mistral; but it was quite enough to give a notion of the wind in the full height of its evil powers. The whole country was literally one moving cloud of dust. The roads, so to speak, smoked. From an eminence, you could trace their line for miles by the columns of white powdered earth driven into the air. As for the paths you actually traversed, the ground-down gravel was blown from the ruts, leaving the way scarred, as it were, with ridgy seams, and often worn down to the level of the subsidiary stratum of rock. The streaky, russet-brown of the fields was speedily converted into one uniform grey. Never had I seen anything more intensely or dismally parched up. As for any tree or vegetable but vines and olives--whose very sustenance and support is dust and gravel, thriving under the liability to such visitations--the thing was impossible. Nor was the dust by any means the only evil. The wind seemed poisonous; it made the eyes--mine, at all events--smart and water; cracked the lips, as a sudden alternation from heat to cold will do; caused a little accidentally inflicted scratch to ache and shoot; and finally, dried, hardened, and roughened the skin, until one felt in an absolute fever. The cold in the shade, let it be noted, was intense--a pinching, nipping cold, in noways frosty or kindly; while in sheltered corners the heat was as unpleasant, the blaze of an unclouded sun darting right down upon the parched and gleaming earth. All this, however, I was told, formed but a modified attack of mistral. The true wind mingles with the flying dust a greyish or yellowish haze, through which the sun shines hot, yet cheerless. I had, however, a specimen of the wind, which quite satisfied me, and which certainly enables me to affirm, that the coldest, harshest, and most rheumatic easterly gale which ever whistled the fogs from Essex marshes over the dripping and shivering streets of London, is a genial, balmy, and ambrosial zephyr, compared with the mistral of the ridiculously bepuffed climate of the South of France.