NAPOULE, it is true, is only a very little place on the bay of Cannes;
yet it is pretty well known through all Provence. It lies in the shade
of lofty evergreen palms, and darker orange trees; but that alone would
not make it renowned. Still they say that there are grown the most
luscious grapes, the sweetest roses, and the handsomest girls. I don’t
know but it is so; in the mean time I believe it most readily. Pity that
Napoule is so small, and can not produce more luscious grapes, fragrant
roses, and handsome maidens; especially, as we might then have some of
them transplanted to our own country.
As, ever since the foundation of Napoule, all the Napoulese women have
been beauties, so the little Marietta was a wonder of wonders, as the
chronicles of the place declare. She was called the _little_ Marietta; yet
she was not smaller than a girl of seventeen or thereabout ought to be,
seeing that her forehead just reached up to the lips of a grown man.
The chronicles aforesaid had very good ground for speaking of Marietta.
I, had I stood in the shoes of the chronicler, would have done the
same. For Marietta, who until lately had lived with her mother Manon
at Avignon, when she came back to her birthplace, quite upset the whole
village. Verily, not the houses, but the people and their heads; and not
the heads of all the people, but of those particularly whose heads and
hearts are always in danger when in the neighborhood of two bright eyes.
I know very well that such a position is no joke.
Mother Manon would have done much better if she had remained at Avignon.
But she had been left a small inheritance, by which she received at
Napoule an estate consisting of some vine-hills, and a house that lay in
the shadow of a rock, between certain olive trees and African acacias.
This is a kind of thing which no unprovided widow ever rejects; and,
accordingly, in her own estimation, she was as rich and happy as though
she were the Countess of Provence or something like it.
So much the worse was it for the good people of Napoule. They never
suspected their misfortune, not having read in Homer how a single pretty
woman had filled all Greece and Lesser Asia with discord and war.