I returned through Languedoc and Gascony. At Nîmes, the Arena[494] and the Maison Carrée[495] had not yet been extricated: in the present year, 1838, I have seen them exhumed. I have also looked up Jean Reboul[496]. I had my doubts concerning those workmen poets, who are generally neither poets nor workmen: I owe M. Reboul a reparation. I found him in his bakery; I spoke to him without knowing whom I was addressing, failing to distinguish him from his fellow-worshippers of Ceres. He took my name and said he would go and see if the person for whom I was asking was there. He returned soon after and introduced himself: he took me into his shop; we wended our way through a labyrinth of flour-sacks, and clambered up a sort of ladder into a little closet resembling the upper room of a wind-mill. There we sat down and talked. I was as happy as in my garret in London, and happier than in my ministerial armchair in Paris. M. Reboul drew a manuscript from a chest of drawers, and read me some powerful verses from a poem which he is writing on the _Dernier Jour._ I congratulated him on his religion and his talent[497]. I had to take leave of my host, not without wishing him the gardens of Horace. I would have better loved to see him dream beside the Cascade at Tivoli than gather the wheat crushed by the wheel above that cascade. It is true that Sophocles was perhaps a blacksmith in Athens, and that Plautus, in Rome, was a harbinger of Reboul at Nîmes[498]. Between Nîmes and Montpellier, I passed, on my left, Aigues-Mortes, which I have visited in 1838. This town is still quite intact, with its towers and its surrounding rampart; it resembles a large ship stranded on the sands where St. Louis, time and the sea have left it. The Saint-king gave "usages" and statutes to the town of Aigues-Mortes: "He wills that the prison be such that it serve not for the extermination of the person, but for its safe-keeping; that no information be granted for mere injurious words; that adultery itself be not enquired into, except in certain cases; and that he who violates a maid, _volente vel nolente_, shall not lose his life, nor any of his members, _sed alio modo puniatur._" At Montpellier I again saw the sea, to which I would gladly have written in the words of the Most Christian King to the Swiss Confederation: "My trusty ally and well-beloved friend." Scaliger[499] would have liked to make Montpellier "the nest of his old age." It received its name from two virgin saints, _Mons puellarum_: hence the beauty of its women. Montpellier[500], falling before the Cardinal de Richelieu, witnessed the death of the aristocratic constitution of France.