One may rise early, and enjoy the coolness of the morning: true; but for this end it is necessary to go to bed early, and be deprived of the coolness of the evening. I knew, however, one man who had the good-sense and resolution to dispose of his day during summer in the following manner: he went to bed at midnight, rose at four in the morning, took his exercise, transacted his affairs, eat his déjeuné à la fourchette, as may be supposed, with a good appetite, and went to bed again at mid-day: at four p. m. he rose again, made his toilette, eat his dinner, and went into society, till the end of the second of the two days which he thus contrived to form out of twenty-four hours. I have been told that such is the practice of the English in the East Indies. The plague of bugs may be avoided by care and cleanliness: the defence against gnats is a gause net surrounding the bed; but wo be to those who find one or more gnats enclosed within the net itself, as happens not unfrequently from the carelessness of the femme de chambre: the hum of the insect, and the dread of his attack, deprive you of sleep: there is no remedy but to wait till he settles upon the face; and then, while he is busy with his first bite, with an expectant and prepared hand to crush him. Flies are also very troublesome in these envied regions of the south; but flies are not like those Cassiuses, the gnats;--"they sleep o'nights." The _bise_ or north wind, coming from the frozen Alps, following the course of the Rhone, and spreading wide to right and left, is very delightful and refreshing during the summer at Avignon: but, in the winter, it penetrates even to the marrow of the bones, and sometimes, for several days together, blows with such violence, that people are afraid to walk the streets, lest they should be knocked on the head by falling tiles or chimneys. This _bise_ is supposed to render the climate healthy: the Avignonais have a proverb:--"Avenio ventosa; si ventosa, fastidiosa; si non ventosa, venenosa." How far it is "venenosa," I have but too much reason to know. The Rhone is sometimes frozen over at Avignon: I have seen people walk across it on the ice. The cold during part of the winter is sometimes greater than that of Paris; and I have seen the cold of the _hyver moyen_[53] of Paris marked, on a French thermometer, as two degrees of Reaumur lower, that is stronger, than the cold of the _hyver moyen_ of London. All the world knows that in summer it is much hotter at Paris than at London: the vine bears witness to it; but both heat and cold are tempered to England by passing over the sea.