The fields of wheat or oats, even in the summer season when they have such a lovely reddish tinge, so like the overheated earth, so like the turbid, gleaming waters of the Rhône, had no attraction for him. They gave him the impression of an obstacle that he must ride his horse around, and Renaud did not recognize the respectability of any obstacle--except the sea! He was more inclined to look favorably upon the vine, because it seemed to him that it was a glorious thing for his country to produce wine, just at the time when other districts in France had exhausted their producing power. And then, the Rhône, the _mistral_, horses, bulls, and wine, all seemed to him to go together, as things that told of holiday-making, of manly strength and courage and joy. They knew how to drink, never fear, did the men of Saint-Gilles and Arles and Avignon. Renaud had attended wedding-parties more than once on the island of Barthelasse in the middle of the Rhône, opposite Avignon, and there he had tasted a red wine whose color he could still see. It was an old Rhône wine, so they had told him, and he remembered that, being desirous to do honor to the wine as well as to the bride, and being a little exhilarated, he had solemnly thrown his cup into the Rhône after the last bumper. There are, at the bottom of the Rhône, many such cups, dead but not broken, from which joy was quaffed but yesterday. They go gently down, turning over and over, through the water to its sandy bed. There they sleep, covered with sand, and two or three thousand years hence--who knows?--the venerable scholars of that day will discover them, as they are discovering amphoræ of baked earth at Trinquetaille to-day, and now and then beside them a glass urn, wherein all the colors of the rainbow chase one another about as soon as its robe of dust is removed. Who can say that Renaud's brittle glass, from which he drank the best wine of his youth, will not remain for ages full of the sand and water of the Rhône, and that--in days to come--other youths will not find therein the same delight? For everything begins anew. Thus did the wanderer's thoughts wander from point to point, from vine to glass. Ah! that glass of his, thrown into the Rhône! His mind recurred once more to that memory of a debauch. It seemed to him now, that, by throwing it into the river on the wedding-day, he had foretold his own destiny, and that he, Livette's fiancé, would never be married! He would drink no more from the discarded glass. The first impulse of delight that came to him with the newness of the morning had already passed; his sadness had returned as the day lost the charm that attaches to a thing just beginning. Dreaming thus, Renaud rode across the marshes, Prince splashing through the water up to his thighs. Yes, my friends, he forgave the vine, did Renaud, for invading Camargue.