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To set it forth necessitates a digression which seems to have nothing to do with the subject in hand and is nevertheless connected with it in the closest fashion. Without certain preliminaries, the remainder would be unintelligible. So now for the preliminaries. I was in those days busy with the poison of the Languedocian scorpion and its action upon insects.
The numerous changes, political and religious, of the Mediævalism of Languedoc, had such considerable and diverse influence on the architecture of the province that it is not possible, as in Provence, to trace an uninterrupted evolution of one style. The Languedocian is generally a later builder than the Provençal; he is bolder.
They were flying, they were escaping, they were brutally gay. One laughed, another sang; the laugh was dry but free, the song was low but careless. The Languedocian cried, "Caoucagno!" "Cocagne" expresses the highest pitch of satisfaction in Narbonne.
The Languedocian Sphex, sprawling flat upon the vine leaves, grows dizzy with the heat and frisks for very pleasure; "with its feet it taps rapidly on its resting-place, and thus produces a drumming like that of a shower of rain falling thickly on the leaves."
Now may some Languedocian Wordsworth turn the sonnet into patois: "Mountains and vales and floods, heard YE that whistle?" At a place called La Bastide I was directed to leave the river, and follow a road that mounted on the left among the hills of Vivarais, the modern Ardèche; for I was now come within a little way of my strange destination, the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Snows.
Here Adolphe or any other man in Adolphe's place resembles a certain Languedocian peasant who suffered agonies from an agacin, or, in French, corn, but the term in Lanquedoc is so much prettier, don't you think so? This peasant drove his foot at each step two inches into the sharpest stones along the roadside, saying to the agacin, "Devil take you! Make me suffer again, will you?"
There are yet alive very old mariners who remember hearing it. It forewarned, but rather too late. The orders of the skipper were obeyed. The Languedocian made a third sailor. All bore a hand.
The gros sou, the penny-piece, if you please, stimulates their zeal; but with misadventurous results! What I need to-day is Crickets. The band sallies forth and returns with not a single Cricket, but numbers of Ephippigers, for which I asked the day before yesterday and which I no longer need, my Languedocian Sphex being dead. General surprise at this sudden change of market.
It is not that I have not still some remnants of gayety; but what would seem such in anybody else is melancholy for a Languedocian. Burn my letter, and never doubt my attachment." "I shall always say, Happy he who is free from the proud yoke to which I am bound. When shall I see my château of Candiac, my plantations, my chestnut grove, my oil-mill, my mulberry-trees? O bon Dieu!
She handed the pen to the Irish woman, who, not knowing how to write, made a cross. The doctor, by the side of this cross, wrote, BARBARA FERMOY, of Tyrrif Island, in the Hebrides. Then he handed the pen to the chief of the band. The chief signed, GAIZDORRA: Captal. The Genoese signed himself under the chief's name. The Languedocian signed, JACQUES QUARTOURZE: alias, the Narbonnais.
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