“Next week, Monseigneur,” the poet invariably replied. About once a month the great Duc de Morny made the same observation to the little Daudet, and every time the poet made the same answer. But the Duke himself was more likely to fall than Daudet’s mane. At that age the future chronicler of the prodigious adventures of Tartarin of Tarascon was a merry youth, who kept pace with the wind, impatient to know everything, an audacious Bohemian, frank and free with his tongue, throwing himself headlong in the swim of life with laughter and noise, always on the look-out for adventures. He had quicksilver in his veins. I remember one evening, when we were supping at the Chêne-Vert, a pleasant inn in the neighbourhood of Avignon, hearing music for a dance that was going on just below the terrace where we were dining. Daudet suddenly jumped down, a flying leap of some nine or ten feet, crashing through the branches of a vine trellis and landing in the midst of the dancers, who took him for a devil. Another time, from the height of the road which passes at the foot of the Pont du Gard, he threw himself, without knowing how to swim, into the River Gardon, to see, so he said, if the water was deep. Had not a fisherman caught hold of him with his boathook, my poor Alphonse would most certainly have drunk what we call “the soup of eleven o’clock!” Another time, on the bridge that leads from Avignon to the island of Barthelasse, he madly climbed on the narrow parapet, and racing along at the risk of tumbling over into the Rhône, he cried out, for the edification of some country people who heard him: “It is from here, by thunder! that we threw the corpse of Brune into the Rhône, yes, the Maréchal Brune! And may it serve as an example to those northerners and barbarians if ever they return to annoy us!” One day in September, at Maillane, I received a little note from friend Daudet, one of those notes minute as a parsley leaf, well known to all his friends, in which he said to me: “MY FRÉDÉRIC,--To-morrow, Wednesday, I leave Fontvieille to come and meet thee at Saint-Gabriel. Mathieu and Grivolas will join us by the road from Tarascon. The place of meeting is the ale-house, where we shall await thee about nine o’clock or half-past. And there, at Sarrasine’s, the lovely landlady of the place, having drunk a glass, we will set out on foot for Arles. Do not fail. “Thy RED HOOD.” On the day mentioned, between eight and nine o’clock, we all found ourselves at Saint-Gabriel, at the foot of the chapel which guards the mountain. At Sarrasine’s, we drank a cherry brandy, and then--forward on the white road. We inquired of a roadmender how far it was to Arles. “When you get to the tomb of Roland,” he answered, “you will still have two hours’ walk.” We inquired where was the tomb of Roland. “Down there where you see a group of cypresses on the banks of the Viqueirat.” “And this Roland, who was he?”