Renaud, who was galloping along with his spear resting in his stirrup, his head leaning heavily on the arm that held it and his eyes closed, under the influence of the rocking motion of the horse, suddenly reopened them, and looked about with the joyous glance of a king.
He paused a moment to gaze at a huge plough drawn by several horses, which was transforming a wretched stony field into cleared land ready for the vine.
The phylloxera, which has done so much harm in rich and healthy districts, affords Camargue a new opportunity to fight the fever and to gain ground on the swamp. The sand is, in fact, very favorable to the vine and very unfavorable to the parasitic insect, and this watery country will gradually become, please God, a genuine land of the vine!
Renaud watched the ploughman with a feeling of delight at the thought of his native country being enriched by honest toil; and with a confused feeling of regret, too, for he preferred that the moor should remain uncultivated and wild and free. The idea of a flat plain, tilled from end to end, where no room was left for the straying feet of horses as God made them—that idea saddened him.
He would always say to himself as he rode through more civilized regions: “Now there, you know, a man can neither live nor die.”
The fields of wheat or oats, even in the summer season when they have such a lovely reddish tinge, so like the overheated earth, so like the turbid, gleaming waters of the Rhône, had no attraction for him. They gave him the impression of an obstacle that he must ride his horse around, and Renaud did not recognize the respectability of any obstacle—except the sea!
He was more inclined to look favorably upon the vine, because it seemed to him that it was a glorious thing for his country to produce wine, just at the time when other districts in France had exhausted their producing power. And then, the Rhône, the mistral, horses, bulls, and wine, all seemed to him to go together, as things that told of holiday-making, of manly strength and courage and joy. They knew how to drink, never fear, did the men of Saint-Gilles and Arles and Avignon. Renaud had attended wedding-parties more than once on the island of Barthelasse in the middle of the Rhône, opposite Avignon, and there he had tasted a red wine whose color he could still see. It was an old Rhône wine, so they had told him, and he remembered that, being desirous to do honor to the wine as well as to the bride, and being a little exhilarated, he had solemnly thrown his cup into the Rhône after the last bumper. There are, at the bottom of the Rhône, many such cups, dead but not broken, from which joy was quaffed but yesterday. They go gently down, turning over and over, through the water to its sandy bed. There they sleep, covered with sand, and two or three thousand years hence—who knows?—the venerable scholars of that day will discover them, as they are discovering amphoræ of baked earth at Trinquetaille to-day, and now and then beside them a glass urn, wherein all the colors of the rainbow chase one another about as soon as its robe of dust is removed.
Who can say that Renaud’s brittle glass, from which he drank the best wine of his youth, will not remain for ages full of the sand and water of the Rhône, and that—in days to come—other youths will not find therein the same delight? For everything begins anew.
Thus did the wanderer’s thoughts wander from point to point, from vine to glass. Ah! that glass of his, thrown into the Rhône! His mind recurred once more to that memory of a debauch. It seemed to him now, that, by throwing it into the river on the wedding-day, he had foretold his own destiny, and that he, Livette’s fiancé, would never be married! He would drink no more from the discarded glass.
The first impulse of delight that came to him with the newness of the morning had already passed; his sadness had returned as the day lost the charm that attaches to a thing just beginning.