“I hope you were a success?” said I.
He regarded me drolly.
“Yes—and no,” said he.
The meal over, we left the hotel.
“Now,” said he, “you would like to visit the towers on the ramparts. I would dearly love to accompany you, but I have business in the town. I will take you, however, to the gardien and put you in his charge.”
He raced me to the gate by which I had entered. The gardien des remparts issued from his lodge at Aristide Pujol’s summons and listened respectfully to his exhortation in Provençal. Then he went for his keys.
“I’ll not say good-bye,” Aristide Pujol declared, amiably. “I’ll get through my business long before you’ve done your sight-seeing, and you’ll find me waiting for you near the hotel. Au revoir, cher ami.”
He smiled, lifted his hat, waved his hand in a friendly way, and darted off across the square. The old gardien came out with the keys and took me off to the Tour de Constance, where Protestants were imprisoned pell-mell after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; thence to the Tour des Bourguignons, where I forget how many hundred Burgundians were massacred and pickled in salt; and, after these cheery exhibitions, invited me to walk round the ramparts and inspect the remaining eighteen towers of the enceinte. As the mistral, however, had sprung up and was shuddering across the high walls, I declined, and, having paid him his fee, descended to the comparative shelter of the earth.
There I found Aristide Pujol awaiting me at the corner of the narrow street in which the hotel was situated. He was wearing—like most of the young bloods of Provence in winter-time—a short, shaggy, yet natty goat-skin coat, ornamented with enormous bone buttons, and a little cane valise stood near by on the kerb of the square.
He was not alone. Walking arm in arm with him was a stout, elderly woman of swarthy complexion and forbidding aspect. She was attired in a peasant’s or small shopkeeper’s rusty Sunday black and an old-fashioned black bonnet prodigiously adorned with black plumes and black roses. Beneath this bonnet her hair was tightly drawn up from her forehead; heavy eyebrows overhung a pair of small, crafty eyes, and a tuft of hair grew on the corner of a prognathous jaw. She might have been about seven-and-forty.