My native village, Maillane, facing the Alpilles, holds the middle of the plain, a wide fertile plain, still called in Provençal, “Le Caieou,” no doubt in memory of the Consul Caius Marius. An old worthy of this district, “a famous wrestler known as the little Maillanais,” once assured me that in all his travels throughout the length and breadth of Languedoc and Provence never had he seen a plain so smooth as this one of ours. For if one ploughed a furrow straight as a die for forty miles from the Durance river down to the sea, the water would flow without hindrance owing to the steady gradient. And, in spite of our neighbours treating us as frog-eaters, we Maillanais always agree there is not a prettier country under the sun than ours. The old homestead where I was born, looking towards the hills and adjoining the Clos-Créma, was called “the Judge’s Farm.” We worked the land with four yoke of oxen, and kept a head-carter, several ploughmen, a shepherd, a dairy-woman whom we called “the Aunt,” besides hired men and women engaged by the month according to the work of the season, whether for the silk-worms, the hay, the weeding, the harvest and vintage, the season of sowing, or that of olive gathering. My parents were yeomen, and belonged to those families who live on their own land and work it from one generation to another. The yeomen of the country of Arles form a class apart, a sort of peasant aristocracy, which, like every other, has its pride of caste. For whilst the peasant of the village cultivates with spade and hoe his little plot of ground, the yeoman farmer, agriculturist on a large scale of the Camargue and the Crau, also puts his hand to the plough as he sings his morning song. If we Mistrals wish, like so many others, to boast of our descent, without presumption we may claim as ancestors the Mistrals of Dauphiny, who became by alliance Seigneurs of Montdragon and also of Romanin. The celebrated monument shown at Valence is the tomb of these Mistrals. And at Saint-Rémy, the home of my family and birthplace of my father, the Hôtel of the Mistrals of Romanin may still be seen, known by the name of the Palace of Queen Joan.