to their very earrings, and we pursued our
road without further interruption, quite satisfied with this specimen of
the loamy fatness of the soil. From the experience of this day, I
certainly should recommend no one to make the detour to Grignan in a
wheeled carriage of any sort. An active person might accomplish on foot,
before breakfast, the whole distance from Montelimart to Grignan, and
might reach St. Paul de Trois Chateaux, or perhaps La Palud, by night;
but even lady travellers would find less fatigue in hiring
saddle-horses and mules from Montelimart, than in being bumped at the
rate of two miles and a half per hour, over roads which frequently seem
a jumble of unhewn paving-stones. We afterwards understood that there
was a direct road from Grignan to Orange, which would have saved us some
distance, and could not have been worse than that which we travelled
this evening.

At La Palud we found the servants and voiture established in the second
inn, the name of which I forget. The accommodations, however, were
decent and comfortable, and the charges moderate: and, on the whole, the
appearance of this inn was nearly, or quite as good as that of the Hotel
d'Angouleme. The people of the latter house, to which the servants were
originally directed, concluding that they had positive orders to await
us there, persisted in demanding a price for every thing which more than
doubled any charge yet attempted; an instance of pertinacious rascality
which it is not amiss to mention, and which would have diverted us by
its very absurdity, had we not been too tired to find amusement in any
thing but supper and beds. In the course of this day and the next, we
heard, for the first time, the Provencal patois, which seems a bad
compound of French, Spanish, and Italian, with an original gibberish of
their own. As far, indeed, as a slight and partial observation enables
me to judge, I have been much struck by a similarity which the
inhabitants of the Mediterranean coast bear to each other in language
and character, a similarity so great, as to lead one to suppose them
descended from the same original stock. The same savage originality of
manner, (accompanied frequently by much good-humour and civility), the
same extravagance of gesture, which seems the overflow of bodily vigour
and animal spirits, the same red cap, and lastly, the same villainous
compound of languages, mixed up in discordant cadences and terminations,
appear to disting