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Burley looked up into the sky; the negroes raised their sweating, dark faces in pleased astonishment; Stick and Kid Glenn lifted puzzled visages to the zenith. The fat brigadier smiled and waved his cigarette: "Il est midi, messieurs. That is the carillon of Sainte Lesse." The angelic melody died away. Then, high in the old bell-tower, a great resonant bell struck twelve times.
Such a place is Castres, prosperous, industrial, historically dramatic, but actually commonplace. Old houses, picturesque and mouldy, with irregular, overhanging eaves, lean along the banks of the little river as they are wont to line the banks of every old stream of the Midi, and they are nearly all the remains of Castres' Mediævalism.
It was only now and then, from the summit of some slope, that she saw the far-away mountains, the Pic du Midi, the Pic de Viscos, those masses which rose up, bright or gloomy, according to the weather, and which stretched away to other peaks, lightly and faintly coloured, vaguely and confusedly outlined, like apparitions seen in dreams.
Tartarin is a hunter of lions and charmer of women, a true "produit du midi," as Daudet says, a character of the most extravagant, genial comedy. He is a minimised Don Quixote, with much less dignity but with equal good faith; and the story of his exploits is a little masterpiece of the free fantastic.
And this brigandage was rampant everywhere. There was so little safety in the Midi from Marseilles to Toulon and Toulouse that one could not travel without an escort. In the Var, the Bouches-du-Rhône, Vaucluse, from Digne and Draguignan, to Avignon and Aix, one had to pay ransom.
The Canal du Midi flows through the town, and, spanned at this point by a small suspension-bridge, presented a certain sketchability. On the farther side were the vendors and chafferers old women under awnings and big umbrellas, rickety tables piled high with fruit, white caps and brown faces, blouses, sabots, donkeys.
Philippe wore a green silk shade with a wire edge over his eyes; his head, which was nearly bald, the tints of his skin, and his sunken face too plainly revealed that he was just leaving the terrible Hopital du Midi.
It was late in the afternoon when, on arrival at our destination, we took rooms at the Hôtel du Midi on the opposite side of the Tarn to the prosperous pleasant little French town, once a headquarter of the Inquisition, and even now containing in its Museum the executioner's axe and many instruments of torture.
We are sorry, but we'll forget it as soon as the women and children are buried. We are sorry, but it is not important. Things are a bit livened up here. Day before yesterday a regiment of dragoons arrived. They are billeted for three months. They are men from the midi, and, alas! none too popular at this moment. Still, they have been well received, and their presence does liven up the place.
It was an afternoon late in March when she was struggling along the Boulevard du Midi, in the teeth of a warm west wind. On her left children played in the sands or threw sticks or bruised flowers into the huge breakers to see them rolled shoreward. On her right the palms in the villa gardens bowed their heads eastward, while the mimosas tossed their yellow branches wildly.
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