A Martigaux or a Marseillais would rather have the “mistral” than the damp humid winds from the east or northeast, which, curiously enough, brought fog with them on this abnormal occasion. The café gossips predicted that Marseilles, their beloved Marseilles with its Cannebière and its Prado, was degenerating into a fog-bound city like London, Paris, and Lyons. At Martigues the old sailors, those who had been toilers on the deep sea in their earlier years, told weird tales of the “pea-soup” fogs of London,--only they called them _purées_. One thing, however, all were certain. The “mistral” was sure to drive all this moisture-laden atmosphere away. In the words of the song they chanted, “_On n’sait quand y’r’viendra._” “_Va-t-il prendre enfin?_” “_Je ne sais pas_,” and so the fishermen of Martigues, and elsewhere on the Mediterranean coast, pulled their boats up on the shore and huddled around the café stoves and talked of the _mauvais temps_ which was always with them. What was the use of combating against the elements? The fish would not rise in what is thought elsewhere to be fishermen’s weather. They required the “mistral” and plenty of it. The Provence of the middle ages comprised a considerably more extensive territory than that which made one of the thirty-three general _gouvernements_ of the ancient régime. In fact it included all of the south-central portion of Languedoc, with the exception of the Comtat Venaissin (Avignon, Carpentras, etc.), and the Comté de Nice. In Roman times it became customary to refer to the region simply as “the province,” and so, in later times, it became known as “Provence,” though officially and politically the Narbonnaise, which extended from the Pyrenees to Lyons, somewhat hid its identity, the name Provence applying particularly to that region lying between the Rhône and the Alps. The Provence of to-day, and of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a wider region which includes the mouth of the Rhône, Marseilles, and the Riviera. It was that portion of France which first led the Roman legions northward, and, earlier even, gave a resting-place to the venturesome Greeks and Phoceans who, above all, sought to colonize wherever there was a possibility of building up great seaports. The chief Phocean colony was Marseilles, or Massilia, which was founded under the two successive immigrations of the years 600 and 542 B. C. In 1150, when the Carlovingian empire was dismembered, there was formed the Comté and Marquisat of Provence, with capitals at Avignon and Aix, the small remaining portion becoming known as the Comté d’Orange.