Catholic and Provençal, Our faith shall know no fear. With ardour let us cheer, Catholic and Provençal. This was alternated with invectives, jokes, and hootings addressed to the officers, as the latter marched past with fierce aspect. Excepting only the genuine indignation aroused by the injustice of these proceedings in every heart, it would be hard to find a more burlesque siege than this of Frigolet, which furnished the subject of Sinnibaldi Doria’s “Siege of Caderousse,” and also a heroic poem by the Abbé Faire, neither of them half as comic as the original. Alphonse Daudet, who had already written of the convent of the White Brothers in his story “The Elixir of Brother Gaucher,” also gave us, in his last romance on Tarascon, the hero Tartarin valiantly joining the besieged in the Convent of Saint-Michel. CHAPTER VI AT MONSIEUR MILLET’S SCHOOL After that experience, my parents had to find me another school, not too distant from Maillane, nor of too exalted a condition, for we country people were not proud. So they placed me at a school in Avignon, with Monsieur Millet, who lived in the Rue Pétramale. This time, it was Uncle Bénoni who acted as charioteer. Although Maillane is not more than about six miles from Avignon, at a time when no railways existed, and the roads were broken with heavy waggon wheels, and one had to cross the large bed of the Durance by ferry, the journey to Avignon was a matter of some importance. Three of my aunts, with my mother, Uncle Bénoni, and myself, all scrambled into the cart, in which was placed a straw mattress, and thus, a goodly caravan load, we started at sunrise. I said advisedly “three of my aunts.” Few people, I am sure, can boast of as many aunts as I had. There were a round dozen. First and foremost came the Great-aunt Mistrale, then Aunt Jeanneton, Aunt Madelon, Aunt Véronique, Aunt Poulinette, Aunt Bourdette, Aunt Françoise, Aunt Marie, Aunt Rion, Aunt Thérèse, Aunt Mélanie and Aunt Lisa. All of them, to-day, are dead and buried, but I love to say over the names of those good women, who, like beneficent fairies, each with her own special attraction, circled round the cradle of my childhood. Add to my aunts the same number of uncles, and then the cousins, their numerous progeny, and you can form some idea of my relations. Uncle Bénoni was my mother’s brother and the youngest of the family--dark, thin, loosely made, with a turned-up nose and eyes black as jet. By trade he was a land-surveyor, but he had the reputation of an idler, and was even proud of it. He had a passion for three things, however--dancing, music and jesting.