large chariots, pink and gold as at Tunis.  Mme. Jansoulet had tended them almost as holy relics, and they had come out of their coverings, with their panels, their hangings and their gold fringes, as shining and new as the day they were made.  Here again Cardailhac’s ingenuity had been freely exercised.  He had thought horses looked too heavy for those unreal fragilities, so he had harnessed instead eight mules, with white reins, decorated with bows and pompons and bells, and caparisoned from head to foot in that marvellous Esparto work—­an art Provence has borrowed from the Moors and perfected.  How could the Bey not be pleased!

The Nabob, Monpavon, the prefect, and one of the generals got into the first coach; the others filled the succeeding carriages.  The priests and the mayors, swelling with importance, rushed to the head of the choral societies of their villages which were to go in front, and all moved off along the road to Giffas.

The weather was magnificent, but hot and heavy, three months in advance of the season, as often happens in this impetuous country, where everything is in a hurry and comes too soon.  Although there was not a cloud to be seen, the stillness of the atmosphere—­the wind had fallen suddenly like a loose sail—­dazzling and heated white, a silent solemnity hanging over all, foretold a storm brewing in some corner of the horizon.  The immense torpor of things gradually influenced the living beings.  One heard too distinctly the tinkling mule-bells, the heavy steps in the dust of the band of singers whom Cardailhac was placing at regular distances in the seething human hedge which bordered the road and was lost in the distance; a sudden call, children’s voices, and the cry of the water-seller, that necessary accompaniment of all open-air festivals in the Midi.

“Open your window, general, it is stifling,” said Monpavon, crimson, fearing for his paint, and the lowered windows exposed to the populace these high functionaries mopping their august faces, strained, agonized, by the same expression of waiting—­waiting for the Bey, for the storm, waiting for something, in short.

Still another trimphal arch.  It was at Giffas, its long, stony street strewn with green palms, and its sordid houses gay with flowers and bright hangings.  The station was outside the village, white and square, stuck like a thimble on the roadside—­true type of a little country station, lost in the midst of vineyards, never having any one in it except perhaps sometimes an old woman and her parcels waiting in a corner, come three hours before the time.