"Well, we got to Darbisson. We'd run across some young chap or
other--Rangon his name was--who was a vine-planter in those parts, and
Rangon had asked us to spend a couple of days with him, with him and his
mother, if we happened to be in the neighbourhood. So as we might as
well happen to be there as anywhere else, we sent him a postcard and
went. This would be in June or early in July. All day we walked across
a plain of vines, past hurdles of wattled _cannes_ and great wind-screens
of velvety cypresses, sixty feet high, all white with dust on the north
side of 'em, for the mistral was having its three-days' revel, and it
whistled and roared through the _cannes_ till scores of yards of 'em
at a time were bowed nearly to the earth. A roaring day it was, I
remember.... But the wind fell a little late in the afternoon, and we
were poring over what it had left of our Ordnance Survey--like fools,
we'd got the unmounted paper maps instead of the linen ones--when Rangon
himself found us, coming out to meet us in a very badly turned-out trap.
He drove us back himself, through Darbisson, to the house, a mile and a
half beyond it, where he lived with his mother.
"He spoke no English, Rangon didn't, though, of course, both French and
Provençal; and as he drove us, there was Carroll, using him as a
Franco-Provençal dictionary, peppering him with questions about the names
of things in the patois--I beg its pardon, the language--though there's
a good deal of my eye and Betty Martin about that, and I fancy this
Félibrige business will be in a good many pieces when Frédéric Mistral
is under that Court-of-Love pavilion arrangement he's had put up for
himself in the graveyard at Maillanne. If the language has got to go,
well, it's got to go, I suppose; and while I personally don't want to
give it a kick, I rather sympathise with the Government. Those jaunts of
a Sunday out to Les Baux, for instance, with paper lanterns and Bengal
fire and a fellow spouting _O blanche Venus d'Arles_--they're well
enough, and compare favourably with our Bank Holidays and Sunday League
picnics, but ... but that's nothing to do with my tale after all.... So
he drove on, and by the time we got to Rangon's house Carroll had learned
the greater part of _Magali_....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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