There is nothing which corresponds to this ancient inn sign to be seen to-day, but any one of a dozen humble houses by the side of the canal which runs from Beaucaire to Aigues Mortes might have been the inn in question, kept by the unworthy Caderousse, with whom Dantes, disguised as the abbé, had the long parley which ultimately resulted in his getting on the track of his former defamers. Dumas’s further descriptions were astonishingly good, as witness the following: “The place boasted of what, in these parts, was called a garden, scorched beneath the ardent sun of this latitude, with its soil giving nourishment to a few stunted olive and dingy fig trees, around which grew a scanty supply of tomatoes, garlic, and eschalots, with a sort of a lone sentinel in the shape of a scrubby pine.” If this were all that there was of Provence, the picture might be thought an unlovely one, but there is a good deal more, though often enough one does see--just as Dumas pictured it--this sort of habitation, all but scorched to death by the dazzling southern sun. At the time of which Dumas wrote, the canal between Beaucaire and Aigues Mortes had just been opened and the traffic which once went on by road between this vast trading-place (for the annual fair of Beaucaire, like that of Guibray in Normandy, and to some extent like that of Nijni Novgorod, was one of the most considerable of its kind in the known world) and the cities and towns of the southwest came to be conducted by barge and boat, and so Caderousse’s inn had languished from a sheer lack of patronage. Dumas does not forget his tribute to the women of the Pays d’Arles, either; and here again he had a wonderfully facile pen. Of Caderousse and his wife he says: “Like other dwellers of the southland, Caderousse was a man of sober habits and moderate desires, but fond of external show and display and vain to a degree. During the days of his prosperity, not a fête or a ceremonial took place but that he and his wife were participants. On these occasions he dressed himself in the picturesque costume worn at such times by the dwellers in the south of France, bearing an equal resemblance to the style worn by Catalans and Andalusians. “His wife displayed the charming fashion prevalent among the women of Arles, a mode of attire borrowed equally from Greece and Arabia, with a glorious combination of chains, necklaces, and scarves.” The women of the Pays d’Arles have the reputation of being the most beautiful of all the many types of beautiful women in France, and they are faithful, always, to what is known as the costume of the _pays_, which, it must be understood, is something more than the _coiffe_ which usually marks the distinctive dress of a _petit pays_.