“‘Veneris nec præmia noris.’
“Who has not been wounded by Venus?”
M. Alphonse, who understood French better than Latin, winked with a knowing look, and glanced at me as if to ask:
“And you, Monsieur le Parisien, do you understand?”
The supper came to an end. I had eaten nothing for the last hour. I was tired and I could not succeed in dissembling the frequent yawns which escaped me. Madame de Peyrehorade was the first to notice my plight and observed that it was time to go to bed. Thereupon began a new series of apologies for the wretched accommodations I was to have. I should not be as comfortable as I was in Paris. One is so badly off in the provinces! I must be indulgent for the Roussillonnais. In vain did I protest that after a journey in the mountains a sheaf of straw would be a luxurious bed for me—she continued to beg me to excuse unfortunate country folk if they did not treat me as well as they would have liked to do. I went upstairs at last to the room allotted to me, escorted by M. de Peyrehorade. The staircase, the upper stairs of which were of wood, ended in the centre of a corridor upon which several rooms opened.
“At the right,” said my host, “is the apartment which I intend to give to Madame Alphonse that is to be. Your room is at the end of the opposite corridor. You know,” he added, with an expression meant to be sly, “you know we must put a newly married couple all by themselves. You are at one end of the house and they at the other.”
We entered a handsomely furnished room, in which the first object that caught my eye was a bed seven feet long, six feet wide, and so high that one had to use a stool to climb to the top. My host, having pointed out the location of the bell, having assured himself that the sugarbowl was full, and that the bottles of cologne had been duly placed on the dressing-table, and having asked me several times if I had everything that I wanted, wished me a good-night and left me alone.
The windows were closed. Before undressing I opened one of them to breathe the fresh night air, always delicious after a long supper. In front of me was Canigou, beautiful to look at always, but that evening, it seemed to me the most beautiful mountain in the world, lighted as it was by a brilliant moon. I stood for some minutes gazing at its wonderful silhouette, and was on the point of closing my window when, as I lowered my eyes, I saw the statue on a pedestal some forty yards from the house. It was placed at the corner of a quickset hedge which separated a small garden from a large square of perfectly smooth turf, which, as I learned later, was the tennis-court of the town. This tract, which belonged to M. de Peyrehorade, had been ceded by him to the commune, at his son’s urgent solicitation.
I was so far from the statue that I could not distinguish its attitude and could only guess at its height, which seemed to be about six feet. At that moment two young scamps from the town walked across the tennis-court, quite near the hedge, whistling the pretty Roussillon air, Montagnes Régalades. They stopped to look at the statue, and one of them apostrophised it in a loud voice. He spoke Catalan; but I had been long enough in Roussillon to understand pretty nearly what he said.
“So there you are, hussy! (The Catalan term was much more forcible.) So there you are!” he said. “So it was you who broke Jean Coll’s leg! If you belonged to me, I’d break your neck!”