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Updated: June 11, 2025
"Well, we talked after this fashion we'd left the dining-room of the restaurant and had planted ourselves on a bench outside with Rangon between us when Rangon suddenly looked at his watch and said it was time he was off to see this agent of his.
There were no English ladies in Darbisson, he said.... We told him as nearly as we could just where the house was we weren't very precise, I'm afraid, for the village had been in darkness as we had come through it, and I had to admit that the cypress hedge I tried to describe where we'd met our friends was a good deal like other cypress hedges and, as I say, Rangon wasn't taking any.
I only began to see when Rangon, with more apologies, told us that we should have to go back to Darbisson for dinner.
Would we take a walk, he asked us, and meet him again there? he said.... But as his agent lived in the direction of his own home, we said we'd meet him at the house in an hour or so. Off he went, envying every Englishman who stepped, I don't doubt.... I told you how old how young we were.... Heigho!... "Well, off goes Rangon, and Carroll and I got up, stretched ourselves, and took a walk.
I myself was rather annoyed that he should think we were returning his hospitality by trying to get at him, and it wasn't very easy either to explain in my French and Carroll's Provençal that we were going to let the thing stand as it was and weren't going to call on our charming friends again.... The end of it was that Rangon just laughed and yawned....
"Well, we got to Darbisson. We'd run across some young chap or other Rangon his name was who was a vine-planter in those parts, and Rangon had asked us to spend a couple of days with him, with him and his mother, if we happened to be in the neighbourhood. So as we might as well happen to be there as anywhere else, we sent him a postcard and went. This would be in June or early in July.
"As you, no doubt, know, it's a restricted sort of life in some respects that a young vigneron lives in those parts, and it was as we reached the house that Rangon remembered something or he might have been trying to tell us as we came along for all I know, and not been able to get a word in edgeways for Carroll and his Provençal.
It appeared that when Madame Rangon went away for a few days she dispersed the whole of the female side of her establishment also, and she'd left her son with nobody to look after him except an old man we'd seen in the yard mending one of these double-cylindered sulphur-sprinklers they clap across the horse's back and drive between the rows of vines.... Rangon explained all this as we stood in the hall drinking an apéritif a hall crowded with oak furniture and photographs and a cradle-like bread-crib and doors opening to right and left to the other rooms of the ground floor.
"He spoke no English, Rangon didn't, though, of course, both French and Provençal; and as he drove us, there was Carroll, using him as a Franco-Provençal dictionary, peppering him with questions about the names of things in the patois I beg its pardon, the language though there's a good deal of my eye and Betty Martin about that, and I fancy this Félibrige business will be in a good many pieces when Frédéric Mistral is under that Court-of-Love pavilion arrangement he's had put up for himself in the graveyard at Maillanne.
And, after all, it was our place to return Rangon's hospitality in London if he ever came there, not, so to speak, on his own doorstep.... So presently I forgot all about Rangon, and I'm pretty sure that Carroll, who was talking to his companion of some Félibrige junketing or other and having the air of Gounod's Mireille hummed softly over to him, didn't waste a thought on him either.
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