Early in May of this year, the band of gipsies had brought with them to the saints a young woman whom they called their “Queen.”
This “Queen,” pending the arrival of the approaching fête-day, passed part of her time seated on the wooden bench under the canopy of thorn-broom erected by the customs’ officers between two tamarisks, on the sand-dune just in front of the village; and there she sat and gazed at the sea.
Her name was Zinzara.
Her thick, black, wavy hair was twisted carelessly into a mass on top of her head. Two locks came forward to her temples, which were sunken and filled with shadows. Her piercing black eyes gleamed from beneath her thick arching eyebrows. A copper circlet with sequins hanging from it was placed upon her forehead, slightly at one side, after the manner of a crown.
The glaringly bright materials in which she enveloped her figure revealed the outline of her powerful chest, and her hips that swayed at every step she took. And the fragment that formed her skirt fell in graceful folds, beneath which her naked foot peeped out, glistening with sand.
Evening surprised her upon her bench beneath the broom, looking out upon the sea. The sun tinged the waves and the sand with golden yellow, then with red. The night wind made the reeds and rushes quiver. Slowly the gipsy drew a bright-colored handkerchief from her girdle and arranged it on her head. She put it over her face to tie the ends together behind the mass of hair, then raised it and threw it over her head, so that it fell upon her back. Thus arranged as a head-dress, it framed the face in stiff, broad folds, falling on both sides,—and the Egyptian, her hands spread out upon her knees, her eyes fixed on the horizon, resembled some figure of Isis, while about her a flock of red flamingoes or a solitary ibis, in hieroglyphic cries, told the sands of Camargue and the rushes of the Rhône tales of the sands of Libya and the lotus-trees of the Nile.
III
THE DROVERS
Jacques Renaud, Livette’s lover, was employed as drover of bulls and horses in this strange Camargue country, on the estate of the Château d’Avignon.