For the last ten years Numa, the great Numa, leader and Deputy representing all the professions, has been the prophet of Provence; for ten years the town of Aps has shown toward her illustrious son the tender care and effusiveness of a mother, one of those mothers of the South quick in her expressions, lively in her exclamations and gesticulatory caresses.
When he comes each summer during the vacation of the Chamber of Deputies, the ovation begins as soon as he appears at the station! There are the Orpheons swelling out their embroidered banners as they intone their heroic choral songs. The railway porters are in waiting, seated on the steps until the ancient family coach which always comes for the “leader” has made a few turns of its big wheels down the alley of big plane-trees on the Avenue Berchère; then they take the horses out and put themselves into the shafts and draw the great man with their own hands, amid the shouts of the populace and the waving of hats, as far as the Portal mansion, where he gets out. This enthusiasm has so completely passed into the stage of tradition in the rites of his arrival that the horses now stop of themselves, like a team in a post-chaise, at the exact corner where they are accustomed to be taken out by the porters; no amount of beating could induce them to go a step farther.
From the first day the whole city has changed its appearance. Here is no longer that melancholy palace of the prefect where long siestas are lulled by the strident note of the locusts in the parched trees on the Cours. Even in the hottest part of the day the esplanade is alive and the streets are filled with hurrying people arrayed in solemn black suits and hats of ceremony, all sharply defined in the brilliant sunlight, the shadows of their epileptic gestures cut in black against the white walls.
The carriages of the Bishop and the President shake the highroad; then delegations arrive from the aristocratic Faubourg where Roumestan is adored because of his royalist convictions; next deputations from the women warpers march in bands the width of the street, their heads held high under their Arlesian caps.
The inns overflow with the country people, farmers from the Camargue or the Crau, whose unhitched wagons crowd the small squares and streets as on a market day. In the evening the cafés crowded with people remain open well on into the night, and the windows of the club of the “Whites,” lighted up until an impossible hour, vibrate with the peals of a voice that belongs to the popular god.
Not a prophet in his own country? ’Twas only necessary to look at the Arena under the intense blue sky of that Sunday of July 1875, note the indifference of the crowd to the games going on in the circus below, and all the faces turned in the same direction, toward the municipal platform, where Roumestan was seated surrounded by braided coats and sunshades for festivals and gay dresses of many-colored silks. ’Twas only necessary to listen to the talk and cries of ecstasy and the simple words of admiration coming in loud voices from this good people of Aps, some expressed in Provençal and some in a barbarous kind of French well rubbed with garlic, but all uttered with an accent as implacable as is the sun down there, an accent which cuts out and gives its own to every syllable and will not so much as spare us the dot over an “i.”
“Diou! qu’es bèou! God! how beautiful he is!”
“He is a bit stouter than he was last year.”
“That makes him look all the more imposing.”
“Don’t push so! there is room for everybody!”