So one fine day I found myself alone at Tarascon. It is supposed to be necessary to have some idea of what one is going to do with oneself in a place before electing to go there, but this I believe to be a superstition. It is only necessary to present oneself and destiny will do the rest.
Yet I had seen everything of note in Tarascon, and Tartarin was evidently concerned about me, for even he could suggest nothing further. We were discussing possibilities in a desultory manner when one of his professional brothers passed at a rattling pace with a fare evidently just returned from doing Tarascon in the twenty minutes--"sans Beaucaire."
The inmate of the fly was pale and lank, with colourless hair. I gave a start--my critical Englishman of the Pont du Gard! The hat went off, and I caught, as the carriage rolled by, the simple words, "Wretched hole; not a decent----" but the movement of the fly bereft me of the end of the sentence.
"How far is it to the Pont du Gard?" I asked, with the swiftness of inspiration.
Tartarin rubbed his hands. We could start after the _déjeuner_ and be back at the Hôtel de la Couronne in the late afternoon. It was about eighteen kilometres; a fine long job for Tartarin, who usually had to take his chance with the many other drivers for quite a short round of the town. The Pont du Gard being more usually visited from Nimes, the expedition was a windfall for our friend.
So we set off. The carriage would not open, and as the day was warm with the sun in spite of a cold wind, it was annoying to be shut into a stuffy little box which hid from view half the long stretches of country, and allowed one no time to dwell upon the features of the farms and villages, for one could look neither back nor forward. But there were, as a matter of fact, but few villages, only farms. _Mas_ is the Provençal for a farm, as any reader of Mistral will soon learn, for the poet is never tired of dwelling on the simple and, it would seem, exceptionally happy life that is passed in these homesteads; the owner a sort of benevolent patriarch directing the labours of sowing, sheep-shearing, the vintage, the olive gathering, the treading of the corn, and the harvest. It is Mistral's own father whom he describes so often with so much affection and reverence:--