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He prowled in the library, and found interest in the mustiest facts relating to that place, learning with aesthetic pleasure that the number of its population was fifty thousand, that the mean temperature of its atmosphere was 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and that the peculiarities of a mistral were far from agreeable. He waited overlong for her reply; but it ultimately came.
He has learned the language, and reads it: in particular Roumanille, whose easy, familiar style pleases him better than the grandiloquence of Mistral, although he delights also in Calendal, whose lyrical powers fill him with enthusiasm. >From this ancient tongue, which was early as familiar to him as the French, he borrowed certain mannerisms, certain tricks of style, certain neologisms, and also, to some extent, his simplicity of manner and the cadence of his prose.
It is entered through an oval antechamber which resembles the hilt of the sword; and which most likely was the original prehistoric dwelling. But the largest of the islands was Montmajeur, that now rises abruptly from the plain, crowned with ruins. I walked to it in driving rain and mistral.
Denise would not sit, but stood shaking and swaying like a reed in a mistral. And yet each in her way was as brave a woman as could be found even in their own country. Mademoiselle Brun leant forward, and held her head between her two hands, while she stared at the ground between her feet. At last speech caine to her, but not her natural voice.
The swarthy man answered to the name of Ballantrae; he of the dreamy eyes was sometimes called Balmile, and sometimes my Lord, or my Lord Gladsmuir; but when the title was given him, he seemed to put it by as if in jesting, not without bitterness. The mistral blew in the city.
At a few miles' distance, in another village, that other great peasant, Mistral, the singer of Provence, the poet of love and joy, the minstrel of rustic labour and antique faiths, was pursuing, amid the homage of his apotheosis, the incredible cycle of his splendid existence.
Everybody, high and low, was anxious to have the last fling. Companies of masks with linked arms and whooping like red Indians swept the streets in crazy rushes while gusts of cold mistral swayed the gas lights as far as the eye could reach. There was a touch of bedlam in all this.
There, under the ancient Gothic vault, among the pupils of the primary Normal College, an eager crowd of listeners pressed to hear him; and among the most assiduous was Roumanille, the friend of Mistral, he who so exquisitely wove into his harmonies "the laughter of young maidens and the flowers of springtime."
The boatmen then recovered a little from their terror and resumed some sort of control of their boat; but the Mistral continued, and the two coaches offering a resistance to the wind made any manoeuvre almost impossible.
In the square before our hotel a simple crowd round the statue of Mistral chattered or listened to a girl singing excruciating songs; a crowd as old-looking as in Italy or Spain, aged as things only are in the South. We walked up to the Arena. Quite a recent development in the life of Arles, they say, that marvellous Roman building, here cut down, there built up, by Saracen hands.
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