him with questions about the names
of things in the patois--I beg its pardon, the language--though there's
a good deal of my eye and Betty Martin about that, and I fancy this
Felibrige business will be in a good many pieces when Frederic Mistral
is under that Court-of-Love pavilion arrangement he's had put up for
himself in the graveyard at Maillanne. If the language has got to go,
well, it's got to go, I suppose; and while I personally don't want to
give it a kick, I rather sympathise with the Government. Those jaunts of
a Sunday out to Les Baux, for instance, with paper lanterns and Bengal
fire and a fellow spouting _O blanche Venus d'Arles_--they're well
enough, and compare favourably with our Bank Holidays and Sunday League
picnics, but ... but that's nothing to do with my tale after all.... So
he drove on, and by the time we got to Rangon's house Carroll had learned
the greater part of _Magali_....

"As you, no doubt, know, it's a restricted sort of life in some respects
that a young _vigneron_ lives in those parts, and it was as we reached
the house that Rangon remembered something--or he might have been trying
to tell us as we came along for all I know, and not been able to get a
word in edgeways for Carroll and his Provencal. It seemed that his mother
was away from home for some days--apologies of the most profound, of
course; our host was the soul of courtesy, though he did try to get at
us a bit later.... We expressed our polite regrets, naturally; but I
didn't quite see at first what difference it made. I only began to see
when Rangon, with more apologies, told us that we should have to go back
to Darbisson for dinner. It appeared that when Madame Rangon went away
for a few days she dispersed the whole of the female side of her
establishment also, and she'd left her son with nobody to look after
him except an old man we'd seen in the yard mending one of these
double-cylindered sulphur-sprinklers they clap across the horse's back
and drive between the rows of vines.... Rangon explained all this as we
stood in the hall drinking an _aperitif_--a hall crowded with oak
furniture and photographs and a cradle-like bread-crib and doors opening
to right and left to the other rooms of the ground floor. He had also, it
seemed, to ask us to be so infinitely obliging as to excuse him for one
hour after dinner--our postcard had come unexpectedly, he said, and
already he had made an appointment with his agent about the _ven