San Luis has all the outward semblance of a French village. Even the church looked French, and was light and airy, in striking contrast to the sombre church interiors of Majorca. The streets of the village were broad, and the roads leading to it were planted on either side with trees.
The whole atmosphere was so reminiscent of Northern France that it was no surprise on entering the general shop to be greeted in French by the young man in charge. He, as he confessed, had secretly been studying the language for some months, and he was evidently spoiling to try his new acquirement upon foreigners of any nationality. The French, which he spoke very fairly, but which speedily lapsed into Spanish, naturally recalled our first impression of the place, and we remarked upon it.
A bright small boy, who with his father was in the shop, explained matters. San Luis was a French village, he said. It was named after the French king and had been built during the French occupation of the island. The site had been laid out and the church designed by French architects.
For the moment we had forgotten that the French flag had flown over Minorca, but the boy's words brought back something we had read of the fête Madame de Pompadour gave at the Hermitage of Compiègne, where the Court happened to be when the news arrived of the taking of Port Mahón. A royal fête, when fountains flowed wine, and ribbons and sword-knots à la Mahón were distributed to the guests.
While buying sweets in the shop, we noticed a glass jar of the black sticks of Spanish liquorice beloved of our childhood. And on a shelf was a row of genuine English cottage-loaves.
The wind had obligingly blown us on our feet out the three miles to San Luis, but we wisely drove back. Sitting snugly inside the closed carriage, watching the storm-harried crops and shrubs bend before the wind, while the sun beat warmly upon us, we agreed that, if one could only travel about in a glass-sided box during gales, life in Minorca would be fine. We fully realized the necessity for the houses being built of slabs of stone nearly twice as thick as those used in the sister island.
In Minorca, somehow, we did not feel quite so much aliens as we did at first in Majorca. The greatest prosperity the island had known had been under British government, and the native mind seemed to cherish a kindly feeling towards our nation. It was curious that while in Palma we were always supposed to be French, in Mahón we were at once recognized as English.
A few English words have been absorbed into the Minorcan language, as people seemed proud to tell us. But the only examples we gathered were "stop," "please," and "nuncle."
In the harbour, over the door of a small tavern that bore no other sign, we saw suspended a bit of a shrub. Remembering the white wand at the door of the change-house in the clachan of Aberfoyle, we wondered if that symbol also had drifted across the seas.
It was with something of the sensation of marooned sailors that on Friday night we fell asleep, to awake to changed conditions. The sun shone from a clear blue sky. The sting had disappeared from the wind, and the air was comparatively mild and calm.