“Cousin, good-day.”
And there he was. His hand shaken and his stick deposited, unobtrusively he took up his accustomed seat in his corner, and, while eating a good slice of bread and butter and cheese, he would give us the news.
Cousin Tourette being, like most dreamers, a bit of an idler, had all his life dreamt of a remunerative post where there would be very little work.
“I should like,” he told us, “the situation of reckoner of cod-fish. At Marseilles, for instance, in one of those big shops where they unload, a man can, while seated, earn, so I am told, by counting the fish in dozens, his twelve hundred francs a year!”
Poor old Major! He died, like many another, without having realised his cod-fish dream.
I can never forget either, among those who helped me to make the poetry of Mireille, the woodcutter Siboul, a fine fellow from Montfrin, in a suit of velvet, who came every year towards the end of the autumn with his great billhook to trim our undergrowth of willow. While he worked away busily, what shrewd observations he would make to me about the Rhône, its currents, eddies, lagoons and bays, the soil and the islands! Also about the animals that frequented the dikes, the otters that lodged in the hollow trees, the beavers who work as deftly as woodcutters, the birds who suspend their nests from the white poplars, besides endless stories of the osier-cutters and basket-makers of Vallabrèque and that district.
My chief instructor, however, in the botany of Provence was our neighbour Xavier, a peasant herbalist, who told me the Provençal names and virtues of all the simples and herbs of Saint-Jean and of Saint-Roch. And thus I collected such a good store of botanical knowledge that, without wishing to speak slightingly of the learned professors of our schools, either high or low, I believe those gentlemen would have found it difficult to pass the examination I could, for instance, on the subject of thistles.
Suddenly, like a bomb, during this quiet, growing time of my Mireille, burst the news of the Revolution of December 2, 1851.
I had never been one of those fanatics to whom the Republic meant religion, country, justice—everything; and the Jacobites, by their intolerance, their mania for levelling, their hardness, brutality and materialism, had disgusted and wounded me more than once, and now the action of the Government in uprooting the very law to which they had sworn fidelity, filled me with indignation, and dissipated once and for all any illusions about those future federations which I had once hoped would be the outcome of a Republic of France.
Some of my colleagues from the Law School placed themselves at the head of the insurgent bands who were raised in Le Var in the name of the Constitution; but the greater number, in Provence as elsewhere, some disgusted by the turbulence of the opposing party, others dazzled by the brilliance of the first Empire, applauded the change of Government. Who could have foretold that the new Empire would tumble to pieces as it did, in a terrible war and national wreck?