[Illustration:
_Copyright, 1898, by Little Brown & C^o._ _Goupil & C^o. Paris_
]
[Illustration: “‘_Qué, Valmajour! suppose you play something for the
pleasure of the pretty lady._’”
Drawn by ADRIEN MOREAU. Photogravured by GOUPIL & CO.
NUMA ROUMESTAN. _Frontispiece._
]
NUMA
ROUMESTAN
BY
ALPHONSE DAUDET
TRANSLATED BY
CHARLES DE KAY
[Illustration]
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
_Copyright, 1899, 1900_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved._
University Press:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
NUMA ROUMESTAN.
CHAPTER I.
TO THE ARENA!
That Sunday--it was a scorching hot Sunday in July at the time of the
yearly competitions for the department--there was a great open-air
festival held in the ancient amphitheatre of Aps in Provence. All the
town was there--the weavers from the New Road, the aristocrats of the
Calade quarter, and some people even came all the way from Beaucaire.
“Fifty thousand persons at the lowest estimate,” said the _Forum_ in
its account the next day; but then we must allow for Provençal puffing.
The truth was that an enormous crowd was crushed together upon the
sun-baked stone benches of the old amphitheatre, just as in the palmy
days of the Antonines, and it was evident that the meet of the Society
of Agriculture was far from being the main attraction to this overflow
of the folk. Something more than the Landes horse-races was needed,
or the prize-fights for men and “half men,” the athletic games of
“strangle the cat” and “jump the swineskin,” or the contests for
fifers and tabor-players, as old a story to the townspeople as the
ancient red stones of the Arena; something more was needed to keep this
multitude standing for two hours under that blinding, murderous sun,
upon those burning flags, breathing in an atmosphere of flame and dust
flavored with gunpowder, risking blindness, sunstroke, fevers and all
the other dangers and tortures attendant on what is called down there
in Provence an open-air festival.
The grand attraction of the annual competitions was Numa Roumestan.
Ah, well; the proverb “No man is a prophet” etc. is certainly true when
applied to painters and poets, whose fellow-countrymen in fact are
always the last to acknowledge their claims to superiority for whatever
is ideal and lacking in tangible results; but it does not apply to
statesmen, to political or industrial celebrities, those mighty
advertised fames whose currency consists of favors and influence, fames
that reflect their glory on city and townsmen in the form of benefits
of every sort and kind.
For the last ten years Numa, the great Numa, leader and Deputy
representing all the professions, has been the prophet of Provence;
for ten years the town of Aps has shown toward her illustrious son
the tender care and effusiveness of a mother, one of those mothers of
the South quick in her expressions, lively in her exclamations and
gesticulatory caresses.
When he comes each summer during the vacation of the Chamber of
Deputies, the ovation begins as soon as he appears at the station!
There are the Orpheons swelling out their embroidered banners as they
intone their heroic choral songs. The railway porters are in waiting,
seated on the steps until the ancient family coach which always comes
for the “leader” has made a few turns of its big wheels down the alley
of big plane-trees on the Avenue Berchère; then they take the horses
out and put themselves into the shafts and draw the great man with
their own hands, amid the shouts of the populace and the waving of
hats, as far as the Portal mansion, where he gets out. This enthusiasm
has so completely passed into the stage of tradition in the rites of
his arrival that the horses now stop of themselves, like a team in a
post-chaise, at the exact corner where they are accustomed to be taken
out by the porters; no amount of beating could induce them to go a step
farther.
From the first day the whole city has changed its appearance. Here is
no longer that melancholy palace of the prefect where long siestas are
lulled by the strident note of the locusts in the parched trees on
the Cours. Even in the hottest part of the day the esplanade is alive
and the streets are filled with hurrying people arrayed in solemn
black suits and hats of ceremony, all sharply defined in the brilliant
sunlight, the shadows of their epileptic gestures cut in black against
the white walls.
The carriages of the Bishop and the President shake the highroad; then
delegations arrive from the aristocratic Faubourg where Roumestan is
adored because of his royalist convictions; next deputations from the
women warpers march in bands the width of the street, their heads held
high under their Arlesian caps.
The inns overflow with the country people, farmers from the Camargue or
the Crau, whose unhitched wagons crowd the small squares and streets
as on a market day. In the evening the cafés crowded with people
remain open well on into the night, and the windows of the club of the
“Whites,” lighted up until an impossible hour, vibrate with the peals
of a voice that belongs to the popular god.
Not a prophet in his own country? ’Twas only necessary to look at the
Arena under the intense blue sky of that Sunday of July 1875, note the
indifference of the crowd to the games going on in the circus below,
and all the faces turned in the same direction, toward the municipal
platform, where Roumestan was seated surrounded by braided coats and
sunshades for festivals and gay dresses of many-colored silks. ’Twas
only necessary to listen to the talk and cries of ecstasy and the
simple words of admiration coming in loud voices from this good people
of Aps, some expressed in Provençal and some in a barbarous kind of
French well rubbed with garlic, but all uttered with an accent as
implacable as is the sun down there, an accent which cuts out and gives
its own to every syllable and will not so much as spare us the dot over
an “i.”
“_Diou! qu’es bèou!_ God! how beautiful he is!”
“He is a bit stouter than he was last year.”
“That makes him look all the more imposing.”
“Don’t push so! there is room for everybody!”
“Look at him, my son; there’s our Numa. When you are grown up you can
say that you have seen him, _qué!_”
“His Bourbon nose is all there! and not one of his teeth missing!”
“Not a single gray hair, either!”
“_Té_, I should say not! he is not so very old yet. He was born in
’32--the year that Louis Philippe pulled down the mission crosses,
_pecaïré!_”
“That scoundrel of a Philippe!”
“They scarcely show, those forty-three years of his.”
“Sure enough, they certainly don’t.... _Té!_ here, great star--”
And with a bold gesture a big girl with burning eyes throws a kiss
toward him from afar that resounds through the air like the cry of a
bird.
“Take care, Zette--suppose his wife should see you.”
“The one in blue, is that his wife?”
No, the lady in blue was his sister-in-law, Mlle. Hortense, a pretty
girl just out of the convent, but one, they say, who already straddled
a horse just as well as a dragoon. Mme. Roumestan was more dignified,
more thoroughbred in appearance, but she looked much haughtier.
These Parisian ladies think so much of themselves! And so, with the
picturesque impudence of their half-Latin language, the women,
standing and shading their eyes with their hands, proceeded in loud
voices deliberately to pick the two Parisians to pieces--their simple
little travelling hats, their close-fitting dresses worn without
jewelry, which were so great a contrast to the local toilettes, in
which gold chains and red and green skirts puffed out by enormous
bustles prevailed.
The men talked of the services rendered by Numa to the good cause, of
his letter to the Emperor, and his speeches for the White Flag. Oh, if
we had only a dozen men in the Chamber like him, Henry V would have
been on his throne long ago!
Intoxicated by this circumambient enthusiasm and wrought up by these
remarks, Numa could not remain quiet in one spot. He threw himself back
in his great arm-chair, his eyes shut, his expression ecstatic, and
swayed himself restlessly back and forth; then, rising, he strode up
and down the platform and leaned over toward the arena to breathe in as
it were all the light and cries, and then returned to his seat. Jovial
and unceremonious, his necktie loose, he knelt on his chair, his back
and his boot-soles turned to the crowd, and conversed with his Paris
ladies seated above and behind him, trying to inoculate them with his
own joy and satisfaction.
Mme. Roumestan was bored--that was evident from the expression of
abstracted indifference on her face, which though beautiful in lines
seemed cold and a little haughty when not enlivened by the light of
two gray eyes, two eyes like pearls, true Parisian eyes, and by the
dazzling effect of the smile on her slightly open mouth.
All this southern gayety, made up of turbulence and familiarity, and
this wordy race all on the outside and the surface, whose nature was
so much the opposite of her own, which was serious and self-contained,
grated on her perhaps unconsciously, because she saw in them multiplied
and vulgarized the same type as that of the man at whose side she had
lived ten years, whom she had learned to know to her cost. The glaring
hot blue sky, so excessively brilliant and vibrating with heat, was
also not to her liking. How could these people breathe? Where did they
find breath enough to shout so? She took it into her head to speak her
thought aloud, how delightful a nice gray misty sky of Paris would be,
and how a fresh spring shower would cool the pavements and make them
glisten!
“Oh, Rosalie, how can you talk so!”
Her husband and sister were quite indignant, especially her sister, a
tall young girl in the full bloom of youth and health, who, the better
to see everything, was making herself as tall as possible. It was her
first visit to Provence, and yet one might have thought that these
shouts and gestures beneath the burning Italian sky had stirred within
her some secret fibre, some dormant instinct, her southern origin,
in fact, which was revealed in the heavy eyebrows meeting over her
houri-like eyes, and her pale complexion, on which the fierce summer
sun left not one red mark.
“Do, please, Rosalie!” pleaded Roumestan, who was determined to
persuade his wife. “Get up and look at that. Did Paris ever show you
anything like that?”
In the vast theatre widening into an ellipse that made a great jag
in the blue sky, thousands of faces were packed together on the many
rows of benches rising in terraces; bright eyes made luminous points,
while bright colored and picturesque costumes spangled the whole mass
with butterfly tints. Thence, as from a huge caldron, rose a chorus
of joyous shouts, the ringing of voices and the blare of trumpets
volatilized, as it were, by the intense light of the sun. Hardly
audible on the lower stories, where dust, sand and human breath formed
a floating cloud, this din grew louder as it rose and became more
distinct and unveiled itself in the purer air. Above all rang out the
cry of the milk-roll venders, who bore from tier to tier their baskets
draped with white linen: “_Li pan ou la, li pan ou la!_” (Here’s your
milk bread, here’s your milk bread!) The sellers of drinking-water,
cleverly balancing their green glazed pitchers, made one thirsty just
to hear them cry: “_L’aigo es fresco! Quau voù beùre?_” (The water’s
fresh! Who will drink?)
Up on the highest brim of the amphitheatre, high up, groups of children
playing and running noisily added a crown of sharp calls to the mass of
noise below, much like a flock of martins soaring high above the other
birds.
And over all of it, how wonderful was the play of light and shadow, as
with the advance of day the sun turned slowly in the hollow of the vast
amphitheatre as it might on the disk of a sundial, driving the crowd
along, and grouping it in the zone of shade, leaving empty those parts
of the vast structure exposed to a terrible heat--broad stretches of
red flags fringed with dry grass where successive conflagrations have
left their mark in black.
At times a stone would detach itself in the topmost tier of the ancient
monument, and, rolling down from story to story, cause cries of terror
and much crowding among the people below, as if the whole edifice were
about to crumble; then on the tiers there was a movement like the
assault of a raging sea on the dunes, for with this exuberant race the
effect of a thing never has any relation to its cause, enlarged as it
is by dreams and perceptions that lack all sense of proportion.
Thus peopled and thus animated once more, the ancient ruin seemed to
live again, and no longer retain its appearance of a showplace for
tourists. Looking thereon, it gave one the sensation of a poem by
Pindar recited by a modern Greek, which means a dead language come
to life again, having lost its cold scholarly look. The clear sky,
the sun like silver turned to vapor, these Latin intonations still
preserved in the Provençal idiom, and here and there, particularly in
the cheap seats, the poses of the people in the opening of a vaulted
passage--motionless attitudes made antique and almost sculptural by the
vibration of the air, local types, profiles standing out like those on
ancient coins, with the short aquiline nose, broad shaven cheeks and
upturned chin that Numa showed; all this filled out the idea of a Roman
festival--even to the lowing of the cows from the Landes which echoed
through the vaults below--those vaults whence in olden days lions and
elephants were wont to issue to the combat. Thus, when the great black
hole of the _podium_, closed by a grating, stood open to the arena all
empty and yellow with sand, one almost expected to see wild beasts
spring out instead of the peaceful bucolic procession of men and of the
animals that had received prizes in the competitions.
At the moment it was the turn of the mules led along in harness,
sumptuously arrayed in rich Provençal trappings, carrying proudly their
slender little heads adorned with silver bells, rosettes, ribbons
and feathers, not in the least alarmed at the fierce cracking of
whips clear and sharply cut, swung serpent-like or in volleys by the
muleteers, each one standing up full length upon his beast. In the
crowd each village recognized its champions and named each one aloud:
“There’s Cavaillon! There’s Maussane!”
The long, richly-colored file rolled its slow length around the arena
to the sound of musical bells and jingling, glittering harness, and
stopped before the municipal platform and saluted Numa with a serenade
of whip-crackings and bells; then passed along on its circular course
under the leadership of a fine-looking horseman in white tights and
high top-boots, one of the gentlemen of the local club who had planned
the function and quite unconsciously had struck a false note in its
harmony, mixing provincialism with Provençal things and thus giving to
this curious local festival a vague flavor of a procession of riders
at Franconi’s circus. However, apart from a few country people, no
one paid much attention to him. No one had eyes for anything but the
grand stand, crowded just then with persons who wished to shake hands
with Numa--friends, clients, old college chums, who were proud of
their relations with the great man and wished all the world to see
them conversing with him and proposed to show themselves there on the
benches, well in sight.
Flood of visitors succeeded flood without a break. There were old
men and young men, country gentlemen dressed all in gray from their
gaiters to their little hats, managers of shops in their best clothes
creased from much lying away in presses, _ménagers_ or farmers from
the district of Aps in their round jackets, a pilot from Port St.
Louis twirling his big prisoner’s cap in his hands--all bearing their
“South” stamped upon their faces, whether covered to the eyes with
those purple-black beards which the Oriental pallor of their complexion
accentuates, or closely shaven after the ancient French fashion,
short-necked ruddy people sweating like terra cotta water coolers;
all of them with flaming black eyes sticking well out from the face,
gesticulating in a familiar way and calling each other “thee” and
“thou”!
And how Roumestan did receive them, without distinction of birth or
class or fortune, all with the same unquenchable effusiveness! It was:
“_Té_, Monsieur d’Espalion! and how are you, Marquis?” “_Hé bé!_ old
Cabantous, how goes the piloting?” “Delighted to see you, President
Bédarride!”
Then came shaking of hands, embraces, solid taps on the shoulder that
give double value to words spoken, which are always too cold for the
intense feeling of the Provençal. To be sure, the conversations were
of short duration. Their “leader” gave but a divided attention, and as
he chatted he waved how-d’ye-do with his hand to the new-comers. But
nobody resented this unceremonious way of dismissing people with a few
kind words: “Yes, yes, I won’t forget--send in your claim--I will take
it with me.”
There were promises of government tobacco shops and collectors’
offices; what they did not ask for he seemed to divine; he encouraged
timid ambitions and provoked them with kindly words:
“What, no medal yet, my old Cabantous, after you have saved twenty
lives? Send me your papers. They adore me at the Navy Department. We
must repair this injustice.”
His voice rang out warm and metallic, stamping and separating each
word. One would have said that each one was a gold piece rolling out
fresh from the mint. And every one went away delighted with this
shining coin, leaving the platform with the beaming look of the pupil
who has been awarded a prize. The most wonderful thing about this
devil of a man was his prodigious suppleness in assuming the air and
manner of the person to whom he was speaking, and perfectly naturally,
too, apparently in the most unconscious way in the world.
With President Bédarride he was unctuous, smooth in gestures, his mouth
fixed affectedly and his arm stretched forth in a magisterial fashion
as if he were tossing aside his lawyer’s toga before the judge’s seat.
When talking to Colonel Rochemaure he assumed a soldierly bearing, his
hat slapped on one side; while with Cabantous he thrust his hands into
his pockets, bowed his legs and rolled his shoulders as he walked, just
like an old sea-dog. From time to time, between two embraces as it
were, he turned to his Parisian guests, beaming and wiping his steaming
brow.
“But, my dear Numa!” cried Hortense in a low voice with her pretty
laugh, “where will you find all these tobacco shops you have been
promising them?”
Roumestan bent his large head with its crop of close curling hair
slightly thinned at the top and whispered: “They are promised, little
sister, not given.”
And, fancying a reproach in his wife’s silence, he added:
“Do not forget that we are in Provence, where we understand each
other’s language. All these good fellows understand what a promise is
worth. They don’t expect to get the shops any more positively than
I count on giving them. But they chatter about them--which amuses
them--and their imaginations are at work: why deprive them of that
pleasure? Besides, you must know that among us Southerners words have
only a relative meaning. It is merely putting things in their proper
focus.” The phrase seemed to please him, for he repeated several times
the final words, “in their proper focus--in their proper focus--”
“I like these people,” said Hortense, who really seemed to be amusing
herself immensely; but Rosalie was not to be convinced. “Still, words
do signify something,” she murmured very seriously, as if communing
with her own soul.
“My dear, it is a simple question of latitude.” Roumestan accompanied
his paradox with a jerk of the shoulder peculiar to him, like that of
a peddler putting up his pack. The great orator of the aristocracy
retained several personal tricks of this kind, of which he had never
been able to break himself--tricks that might have caused him in
another political party to seem a representative of the common folk;
but it was a proof of power and of singular originality in those
aristocratic heights where he sat enthroned between the Prince of
Anhalt and the Duc de la Rochetaillade. The Faubourg St. Germain went
wild over this shoulder-jerk coming from the broad stalwart back that
carried the hopes of the French monarchy.
If Mme. Roumestan had ever shared the illusions of the Faubourg she
did so no longer, judging from her look of disenchantment and the
little smile with which she listened to her husband’s words, a smile
paler with melancholy than with disdain. But he left them suddenly,
attracted by the sound of some peculiar music that came to them from
the arena below. The crowd in great excitement was on its feet shouting
“Valmajour! Valmajour!”
Having taken the musicians’ prize the day before, the famous Valmajour,
the greatest taborist of Provence, had come to honor Numa with his
finest airs. In truth he was a handsome youth, this same Valmajour, as
he stood in the centre of the arena, his coat of yellow wool hanging
from one shoulder and a scarlet belt standing out against the white
linen of his shirt. Suspended from his left arm he carried his long
light tabor by a strap and with his left hand held a small fife to
his lips, while with his right hand and his right leg held forward he
played on his tabor with a brave and gallant air. The fife, though but
small, filled the whole place like a chorus of locusts; appropriate
music in this limpid crystalline atmosphere in which all sounds
vibrate, while the deep notes of the tabor supported this peculiar
singing and its many variations.
The sound of the wild, sharp music brought back his childhood to
Numa more vividly than anything else that he had seen that day; he
saw himself a little Provence boy running about to country fairs,
dancing under the leafy shadow of the plane-trees, on village squares,
in the white dust of the highroads, or over the lavender flowers of
sun-parched hillsides. A delicious emotion passed through his eyes,
for, notwithstanding his forty years and the parching effects of
political life, he still retained a good portion of imagination, thanks
to the kindliness of nature, a surface-sensibility that is so deceptive
to those who do not know the true bottom of a man’s character.
And besides, Valmajour was not an everyday taborist, one of those
common minstrels who pick up music-hall catches and odds and ends of
music at country fairs, degrading their instrument by trying to cater
to modern taste. Son and grandson of taborists, he played only the
songs of his native land, songs crooned during night watches over
cradles by grandmothers; and these he did know; he never wearied of
them. After playing some of Saboly’s rhythmical Christmas carols
arranged as minuets and quadrilles, he started the “March of the
Kings,” to the tune of which, during the grand epoch, Turenne conquered
and burned the Palatinate. Along the benches where but a moment before
one heard the humming of popular airs like the swarming of bees, the
delighted crowd began keeping time with their arms and heads, following
the splendid rhythm which surged along through the grand silences of
the theatre like mistral, that mighty wind; silences only broken by
the mad twittering of swallows that flew about hither and thither in
the bluish green vault above, disquieted, and as it were crazy, as
if trying to discover what unseen bird it was that gave forth these
wonderfully high and sharp notes.
When Valmajour had finished, wild shouts of applause burst forth.
Hats and handkerchiefs flew into the air. Numa called the musician up
to the platform, and throwing his arms around his neck exclaimed: “You
have made me weep, my boy.” And he showed his big golden-brown eyes all
swimming in tears.
Very proud to find himself in such exalted company, among embroidered
coats and the mother-of-pearl handles of official swords, the musician
accepted these praises and embraces without any great embarrassment.
He was a good-looking fellow with a well shaped head, broad forehead,
beard and moustache of lustrous black against a swarthy skin, one of
those proud peasants from the valley of the Rhône who have none of the
artful humility of the peasants of central France.
Hortense had noticed at once how delicately formed were his hands under
their covering of sunburn. She examined the tabor with its ivory-tipped
drum-stick and was astonished at the lightness of the old instrument,
which had been in his family for two hundred years, and whose case
curiously carved in walnut wood, decked with light carvings, polished,
thin and sonorous, seemed to have grown pliable under the patina time
had lent it. They admired above all the little old fife, that simple
rustic flute with three stops only, such as the ancient taborists used,
to which Valmajour had returned out of respect for tradition and the
management of which he had conquered after infinite pains and patience.
Nothing more touching than to hear the little tale of his struggles and
victory in an odd sort of French.
“It come to me in the night,” he said, “as I listened me to the
nightingawles. Thought I in meself--look there, Valmajour, there’s a
little birrd o’ God whose throat alone is equal to all the trills. Now,
what he can do with one stop, can’t you accomplish with the three holes
in your little flute?”
He talked quietly, with a perfectly confident tone of voice, without a
suspicion of being ridiculous. No one indeed would have dared to smile
in the face of Numa’s enthusiasm, for he was throwing up his arms and
stamping so that he almost went through the platform. “How handsome he
is! What an artist!” And after him the Mayor and President Bédarride
and the General and M. Roumavage, the big brewer from Beaucaire,
vice-consul of Peru, tightly buttoned into a carnival costume all over
silver, echoed the sentiments of the leader, repeating in convinced
tones: “What a great artist!”
Hortense agreed with them, and in her usual impulsive manner expressed
her sentiments: “Oh, yes, a great artist indeed” while Mme. Roumestan
murmured “You will turn his head, poor fellow.”
But there seemed to be no fear of this for Valmajour, to judge by his
tranquil air; he was not even in the least excited on hearing Numa
suddenly exclaim:
“Come to Paris, my boy, your fortune is assured!”
“Oh, my sister never would let me go,” he explained with a quiet smile.
His mother was dead and he lived with his father and sister on a farm
that bore the family name some three leagues distant from Aps on the
Cordova mountain. Numa swore he would go to see him before he returned
to Paris; he would talk to his relations--he was sure to make it a go.
“And I will help you, Numa,” said a girlish voice behind him.
Valmajour bowed without speaking, turned on his heel and walked down
the broad carpet of the platform, his tabor under his arm, his head
held high and in his gait that light, swaying motion of the hips
common to the Provençal, a lover of dancing and rhythm. Down below his
comrades were waiting for him and shook him by the hand.
Suddenly a cry arose, “The farandole, the farandole,” a shout without
end doubled by the echoes of the stone passages and corridors from
which the shadows and freshness seemed to come which were now invading
the arena and ever diminishing the zone of sunlight. In a moment the
arena was crowded, crammed to suffocation with merry dancers, a regular
village crowd of girls in white neckscarfs and bright dresses, velvet
ribbons nodding on lace caps, and of men in braided blouses and colored
waistcoats.
At the signal from the tabor that mob fell into line and filed off in
bands, holding each other’s hands, their legs all eager for the steps.
A prolonged trill from the fife made the whole circus undulate, and
led by a man from Barbantane, a district famous for its dancers, the
farandole slowly began its march, unwinding its rings, executing its
figures almost on one spot, filling with its confused noise of rustling
garments and heavy breathing the huge vaulted passage of the outlet in
which, bit by bit, it was swallowed up.
Valmajour followed them with even steps, solemnly, managing his long
tabor with his knee, while he played louder and louder upon the fife,
as the closely packed crowd in the arena, already plunged in the bluish
gray of the twilight, unwound itself like a bobbin filled with silk and
gold thread.
“Look up there!” said Roumestan all of a sudden.
It was the head of the line of dancers pouring in through the arches
of the second tier, while the musician and the last line of dancers
were still stepping about in the arena. As it proceeded the farandole
took up in its folds everybody whom the rhythm forced to join in the
dance. What Provençal could have resisted the magic flute of Valmajour?
Upborne and shot forward by the rebounding undernote of the tabor, his
music seemed to be playing on every tier at the same time, passing the
gratings and the open donjons, overtopping the cries of the crowd.
So the farandole climbed higher and higher, and reached at last the
uppermost tier, where the sun was yet glowing with a tawny light.
The outlines of the long procession of dancers, bounding in their
solemn dance, etched themselves against the high panelled bays of the
upper tier in the hot vibration of that July afternoon, like a row of
fine silhouettes or a series of bas-reliefs in antique stone on the
sculptured pediment of some ruined temple.
Down below on the deserted platform--for people were beginning to leave
and the lower tiers were empty--Numa said to his wife as he wrapped a
lace shawl about her to protect her from the evening chill:
“Now, really, is it not beautiful?”
“Very beautiful,” answered the Parisian, moved this time to the depths
of her artistic nature.
And the great man of Aps seemed prouder of this simple word of
approbation than of all the noisy homage with which he had been
surfeited for the last two hours.