She was telling us of her nephew in Tunis—“_Un pays où on ne voit que des sauvages_”—and of the sweetheart he had left behind at Barbentane; repeating by heart, one after another, his queer, bald, little letters—how he had been kicked by his horse (he was a _spahi_; “_zouave à cheval_” she called it), and had been sick ten days in the hospital; and how, without telling anyone, she had scraped together a hundred sous to send out to him. Somehow, irresistibly, while she chattered, I seemed to see that soldier nephew of hers—broad and straight and bronzed, his fez stuck jauntily on the back of his head, noisily _noçant avec des camarades_ with those hundred sous, which old Tante Latou had sent out to him. By-and-bye, she related her journey to Valence, in the time when she had worked as a cherry-packer for Madame Charbonnier in the Rue Joseph-Vernet, insisting with comical, energetic wrinklings of her forehead on her contempt for the _jargon de l’Ardèche_.... She had been to Marseilles, too, last year—that was a great journey—eighteen of them had gone from Villeneuve, “_femmes et filles et trois garçons, dans un train ‘ambulant’—quatre francs et douze sous, aller et retour .... Marseilles, vous savez_,” Jeanne-Marie Latou reiterated, “_c’est quelque chose ... c’est quelque chose ... c’est quelque chose ... enfin, c’est la plus jolie ville que j’ai trouvée_.” Afterwards, starting to recall bygone times, she described the breaking up of the _Chartreuse_ in _quatre-vingt douze_, and the selling of the whole building by auction in the little _place_, there, below us (not for money—no one in the _pays_ had any money in those days—but for _assignats_), and, Jeanne-Marie Latou explained, “_Ceux qui avaient peur n’en prenaient pas, et ceux qui n’avaient pas peur en prenaient_.” And her father, who had been a stone-worker, over there at Les Angles, had bid _douze cents francs d’assignats_ for the house where the _supérieure_ had lived—_douze cents francs d’assignats_ which no one had ever asked him to pay. There Jeanne-Marie Latou had always lived—seventy-seven years, it was now, as near as she could remember—she, and her husband who had been dead these twenty-three years. She could remember the time when the frescoes on the cloister walls were bright and beautiful, and no grass grew between the flags. Yes, she had seen all the other houses pass from family to family; there were six of them now who had the right to use the old church as a barn, “_ma foi, elle est bien grande, l’église_,” Jeanne-Marie Latou concluded, smiling knowingly at us, “_Mais, quand même, ils se chicanent toujours._”... And with that, she rose slowly and bid us good-bye, and wished us good health, toddling grotesquely away down the steps.