Yet had we come to the boat while still in the lowering mood begotten of our intemperate palterings with the dawn we must have yielded quickly to the infectious cheerfulness which obtained on board the _Gladiateur_. Even a Grey Penitent would have been moved, coming unawares into that gay company, to throw off his _cagoule_ and to dance a saraband. From end to end the big _Gladiateur_ was bright with bunting--flags set in clusters on the great paddle-boxes, on the bow, on the stern--and the company thronging on board was living up to the brightness of the sunshine and the flags. For they were going home, home to their dear South, those poet exiles: and their joy was so strong within them that it almost touched the edge of tears. I could understand their feeling because of a talk that I had had three days before, in Paris, with Baptiste Bonnet: up in his little apartment under the mansard, with an outlook over the flowers in the window-garden across roof-tops to Notre Dame. Bonnet could not come upon this expedition--and what love and longing there was in his voice while he talked to us about the radiant land which to him was forbidden but which we so soon were to see! To know that we were going, while he remained behind, made us feel like a brace of Jacobs; and when Madame Bonnet made delicious tea for us--"because the English like tea," as she explained with a clear kindliness that in no wise was lessened by her misty ethnology--we felt that so to prey upon their hospitality in the very moment that we were making off with their birthright was of the blackest of crimes. But because of what our dear Bonnet had said, and of the way in which he had said it, I understood the deep feeling that underlay the exuberant gayety of our boat-mates--and it seemed to me that there was a very tender note of pathos in their joy. They were of all sorts and conditions, our boat-mates: a few famous throughout the world, as the player Mounet-Sully, the painter Benjamin Constant, the prose poet Paul Arene; many famous throughout France; and even in the rank and file few who had not raised themselves above the multitude in one or another of the domains of art. And all of them were bound together in a democratic brotherhood, which yet--because the absolute essential to membership in it was genius--was an artistic aristocracy. With their spiritual honours had come to many of them honours temporal; indeed, so plentiful were the purple ribbons of the Palms and the red rosette of the Legion--with here and there even a Legion button--as to suggest that the entire company had been caught out without umbrellas while a brisk shower of decorations passed their way. A less general, and a far more picturesque, decoration was the enamelled cigale worn by the Cigaliers: at once the emblem of their Society, of the Felibrien movement, and of the glowing South where that gayest of insects is born and sings his life out in the summer days.