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Delightful as was the winter climate of Nyons, that sun-scorched little cup amongst the hills became a place of positive torment as the summer advanced. The heat was absolutely unendurable. Has Nature given this singular insect the power of dispensing with sleep? What possible object can it hope to attain by keeping up this incessant din?
Every inhabitant of Nyons was secretly proud of being able to claim so dare-devil a roysterer as a fellow-townsman. The memory of those rumored four hectic days in Paris clung round him like a halo; it became almost a pleasure to pay taxes to so celebrated a character. M. Sisteron was short, paunchy, bald, and bearded. He was a model husband and a pattern as a father.
She had never left Nyons, and, from her experience of a long string of English pupils, was convinced that all Englishmen were savages. They inhabited an island enveloped in dense fog from year's end to year's end. They had never seen the sun, and habitually lived on half-raw "rosbif."
In so remote a place as Nyons, over four hundred miles from the capital, the glamour of Paris exercised a magical attraction. The few inhabitants of Nyons who had ever visited Paris, or even merely passed through it, were never quite as other people, some little remnant of an aureole encircled them.
Then you are in the "Midi," and any black-bearded, olive-complexioned, stumpy little men in the carriage will give a sigh of relief, for now, at last, the sun will begin to shine. Nyons had been for two hundred years a Huguenot stronghold, so for a French town an unusual proportion of its inhabitants were Protestants, and there was, oddly enough, a colony of French Wesleyans there.
After the Revolution, the term was only applied to Supreme Courts, without administrative powers. M. Ducros was Assistant Judge of the Nyons Tribunal, and the Ducros were rather fond of insisting that they belonged to the old noblesse de robe.
Are they, like some young men we know, always yearning to turn night into day? All these are, and will remain, unsolved problems? As I found the summer heat of Nyons unbearable, I went back to England for a holiday, and, on the morning of my departure, climbed some olive trees and captured fourteen live cicadas, whom I imprisoned in a perforated cardboard box, and took back to London with me.
I can see Nyons, with its encircling fringe of blue hills, just as vividly, perhaps, with my inner eyes as I could if it lay actually before me, and now I can still people it with the noisy, gesticulating inhabitants whom I knew and liked so much. I may add that in Southern French style Nyons is pronounced "Nyonsse," just as Carpentras is termed "Carpentrasse."
Never have I shared a couch with so many uninvited guests, and never have I been so ruthlessly devoured as in that Russian Monastery. With June at Nyons, silkworm time arrived. Three old women, celebrated for their skill in rearing silkworms, came down from the mountains, and the magnanerie, as lofts devoted to silkworm culture are called, was filled with huge trays fashioned with reeds.
With the exception of one friendly visit to the Ducros, I have never seen pleasant Nyons again. Of late years I have often meditated a pilgrimage to that sunny little cup in the Dauphine hills, but have hesitated owing to one of the sad penalties advancing years bring with them; every single one of my friends, man or woman, must have passed away long since.
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