“Well, I hope, Rosalie, that you are not going to vagabondize with these feather-heads!”
“No, no, aunt, I will stay with you” answered Rosalie, amused at the character of elderly relative that her unvarying amiability and resignation had created for her in that house.
At the right moment the carriage came promptly to the door, but they sent it on ahead, telling Ménicle to wait for them at the amphitheatre square, and Roumestan set out on foot with his little sister on his arm, full of curiosity and pride at seeing Aps in his company, to visit the house in which he was born and to retrace with him the streets through which he had so often walked when a child.
It was the hour of the midday rest. The whole town slept, silent and deserted, rocked by the south wind blowing in great fanlike gusts, cooling and freshening the fierce Provençal summer heat, but making walking difficult, especially along the Corso, which offered no resistance to it, where it roared round the little city with the bellowings of a loosened bull. Hortense, with her head down, her hands tightly clasped about her brother’s arm, out of breath and bewildered, enjoyed the sensation of being raised and borne along by the gusts which were like resistless waves, noisy and complaining, white with foamlike dust. Sometimes they had to stop and cling to the ropes stretched along the ramparts for use on windy days. Owing to the whirlwinds in which bits of bark and plane-tree seeds spun round, and owing to its solitude the Corso had an air of distress in its wide desolation, still soiled as it was with the remains of the recent market, strewn with melon-rinds, straw litters, empty casks, as if the mistral alone had charge of the street cleaning.
Roumestan was anxious to reach the carriage as soon as possible, but Hortense enjoyed this battle with the hurricane and insisted on walking farther, panting and overborne by the gust that curled her blue veil three times around her hat and molded her short walking skirt against her figure as she walked. She was saying:
“It is queer how different people are! Rosalie, now, hates the wind. She says it blows away all her ideas, keeps her from thinking. Now me the wind excites, intoxicates!”
“So it does me!” said Numa, clinging on to his hat, his eyes full of water, and then suddenly, as they turned a corner:
“Ah, here is my street—I was born here.”
The wind was going down, at least they felt it less; it was blowing farther away with a sound as of billows breaking on a beach, as one hears them from the quiet inner bay. The street was a largish one, paved with pointed stones, without sidewalks, and the house an insignificant little gray structure standing between an Ursuline convent shaded with big plane-trees and a fine old seignorial mansion on which was carved a coat of arms and the inscription “Hôtel de Rochemaure.” Opposite stood a very old and characterless building with broken columns, defaced statues and grave-stones with Roman inscriptions carved on them; it had the word “Academy” in faded gilt letters over a green door.
In that little gray house the great orator first saw the light on the 15th of July, 1832; it was easy to draw more than one parallel between his narrow, classical talent and his education as a Catholic and a Legitimist, and that little house of needy citizens with a convent on one side and a seignorial residence on the other, and a provincial academy in front of it.