strong within them that it almost touched the edge
of tears. I could understand their feeling because of a talk that I had
had three days before, in Paris, with Baptiste Bonnet: up in his little
apartment under the mansard, with an outlook over the flowers in the
window-garden across roof-tops to Notre Dame. Bonnet could not come upon
this expedition--and what love and longing there was in his voice while
he talked to us about the radiant land which to him was forbidden but
which we so soon were to see! To know that we were going, while he
remained behind, made us feel like a brace of Jacobs; and when Madame
Bonnet made delicious tea for us--"because the English like tea," as she
explained with a clear kindliness that in no wise was lessened by her
misty ethnology--we felt that so to prey upon their hospitality in the
very moment that we were making off with their birthright was of the
blackest of crimes. But because of what our dear Bonnet had said, and of
the way in which he had said it, I understood the deep feeling that
underlay the exuberant gayety of our boat-mates--and it seemed to me
that there was a very tender note of pathos in their joy.

They were of all sorts and conditions, our boat-mates: a few famous
throughout the world, as the player Mounet-Sully, the painter Benjamin
Constant, the prose poet Paul Arene; many famous throughout France; and
even in the rank and file few who had not raised themselves above the
multitude in one or another of the domains of art. And all of them were
bound together in a democratic brotherhood, which yet--because the
absolute essential to membership in it was genius--was an artistic
aristocracy. With their spiritual honours had come to many of them
honours temporal; indeed, so plentiful were the purple ribbons of the
Palms and the red rosette of the Legion--with here and there even a
Legion button--as to suggest that the entire company had been caught out
without umbrellas while a brisk shower of decorations passed their way.
A less general, and a far more picturesque, decoration was the enamelled
cigale worn by the Cigaliers: at once the emblem of their Society, of
the Felibrien movement, and of the glowing South where that gayest of
insects is born and sings his life out in the summer days.

Most of the poets came to the boat breakfastless, and their first move
on board was toward the little cabin on deck wherein coffee was served.
The headwaiter at the improvised breakfas