"_Ma foi!_" replied the clerical dignitary; "they were bad times for France in general; but they were rare times for the few who lived upon it. There were Frenchmen, at any rate, then, who understood wine; at least, they drunk enough of it to understand the science, from the alpha to the omega." We parted, after a proper degree of hand-shaking; and a quarter of an hour afterwards I was rattling along the Montpellier and Cette railway, with a ticket for Lunel in my pocket. CHAPTER XIII. MORE ABOUT THE OLIVE-TREE--THE GATHERING OF THE OLIVES--LUNEL--A NIGHT WITH A SCORE OF MOSQUITOES--AIGUES-MORTES--THE DEAD LANDSCAPE--THE MARSH FEVER--A STRANGE CICERONE--THE LAST CRUSADING KING--THE SALTED BURGUNDIANS--THE POISONED CAMISARDS--THE MEDITERRANEAN. Passing, for the present, Montpellier, where people with consumptions used to be sent to swallow dust, as likely to be soothing to the lungs, and to breathe the balmy zephyrs of the whispering mistral, I made straight for Lunel, in order to get from thence to one of the strangest old towns in France--Aigues-Mortes. All around us, as we hurried on, were vines and olives--a true land of wine and oil. The olive-tree did not improve on acquaintance--it got uglier and uglier--more formal, and more cast-iron looking, the more you saw of it. And then it was invariably planted in rows, at regular intervals, so as to give the notion of a prim old garden--never of a wood. Like all fruit-trees in France, the olive is most carefully trimmed, and clipped, and tortured, and twisted into the most approved or fashionable shape. The man who can make his _oliviers_ look most like umbrellas is the great cultivator; and the services of the peasants who have got a reputation for olive dressing are better paid than those of any agricultural labourers in France. They are eternally snipping and slashing, and turning and twisting the tree, until the unfortunate specimens have had any small degree of natural ease and harmony which they possessed assiduously wrenched out of them. And yet there are people in the South of France who are enthusiastic on the hidden beauty of the olive. There are technical terms for all the particular spreads and contortions given to the branches; and the olive amateur will hold forth to you by the hour upon the subtle charms of each. A gentleman from beyond Marseilles has dilated with rapture to me on his delight, after a residence in Normandy, in returning again to the hot South, and revisiting the dear olives, so prim, and orderly, and symmetrical--not like the huge, straggling, sprawling oaks and elms of the North, growing up in utter defiance of all rule and system.