"How far is it to the Pont du Gard?" I asked, with the swiftness of inspiration.
Tartarin's face brightened.
"Est-ce que Madame désire d'y aller?"
"Certainement."
Tartarin rubbed his hands. We could start after the déjeuner and be back at the Hôtel de la Couronne in the late afternoon. It was about eighteen kilometres; a fine long job for Tartarin, who usually had to take his chance with the many other drivers for quite a short round of the town. The Pont du Gard being more usually visited from Nimes, the expedition was a windfall for our friend.
So we set off. The carriage would not open, and as the day was warm with the sun in spite of a cold wind, it was annoying to be shut into a stuffy little box which hid from view half the long stretches of country, and allowed one no time to dwell upon the features of the farms and villages, for one could look neither back nor forward. But there were, as a matter of fact, but few villages, only farms. Mas is the Provençal for a farm, as any reader of Mistral will soon learn, for the poet is never tired of dwelling on the simple and, it would seem, exceptionally happy life that is passed in these homesteads; the owner a sort of benevolent patriarch directing the labours of sowing, sheep-shearing, the vintage, the olive gathering, the treading of the corn, and the harvest. It is Mistral's own father whom he describes so often with so much affection and reverence:—
THE PONT DU GARD.
By E. M. Synge.
"When the old man came to die he said, 'Frederi que tems fai?' ('Frederick, what kind of weather is it?') I replied, 'Plou, moun paire.' 'Ah! ben, se plou fai ben tems per li semenco,' and rendered up his soul to God.[16] You won't wonder," added the poet, at my writing in Mireille this verse—