nfoundedly joyful about it?

The mistral blew bitterly. I snuggled beneath the rug and hunched up my
shoulders so as to get my ears protected by my coat-collar. Aristide,
sufficiently protected by his goat's hide, talked like a shepherd on a
May morning. Why he took for granted my interest in his unromantic, not
to say sordid, courtship I knew not; but he gave me the whole history of
it from its modest beginnings to its now penultimate stage. From what I
could make out--for the mistral whirled many of his words away over
unheeding Provence--he had entered the Cafe de l'Univers one evening, a
human derelict battered by buffeting waves of Fortune, and, finding a
seat immediately beneath Mme. Gougasse's _comptoir_, had straightway
poured his grievances into a feminine ear and, figuratively speaking,
rested his weary heart upon a feminine bosom. And his buffetings and
grievances and wearinesses? Whence came they? I asked the question
point-blank.

[Illustration: HAD STRAIGHTWAY POURED HIS GRIEVANCES INTO A
FEMININE EAR]

"Ah, my dear friend," he answered, kissing his gloved finger-tips, "she
was adorable!"

"Who?" I asked, taken aback. "Mme. Gougasse?"

"_Mon Dieu_, no!" he replied. "Not Mme. Gougasse. Amelie is solid, she
is virtuous, she is jealous, she is capacious; but I should not call her
adorable. No; the adorable one was twenty--delicious and English; a
peach-blossom, a zephyr, a summer night's dream, and the most provoking
little witch you ever saw in your life. Her father and herself and six
of her compatriots were touring through France. They had circular
tickets. So had I. In fact, I was a miniature Thomas Cook and Son to the
party. I provided them with the discomforts of travel and supplied
erroneous information. _Que voulez-vous?_ If people ask you for the
history of a pair of Louis XV. corsets, in a museum glass case, it's
much better to stimulate their imagination by saying that they were worn
by Joan of Arc at the Battle of Agincourt than to dull their minds by
your ignorance. _Eh bien_, we go through the chateaux of the Loire,
through Poitiers and Angouleme, and we come to Carcassonne. You know
Carcassonne? The great grim _cite_, with its battlements and bastions
and barbicans and fifty towers on the hill looking over the rubbishy
modern town? We were there. The rest of the party were buying picture
postcards of the _gardien_ at the foot of the Tour de l'Inquisition. The
man who inve