morning, excited the more by the long wait and the storm, shouted with
all the force of their voices and the strength of their lungs, mingling
with the song of Provence the cry of "Hurrah for the Bey!" till it
seemed a perpetual chorus. Most of them had no idea what a Bey was,
did not even think about it. They accentuated the appellation in an
extraordinary manner as though it had three b's and ten y's. But it made
no difference, they excited themselves with the cry, holding up their
hands, waving their hats, becoming agitated as a result of their own
activity. Women wept and rubbed their eyes. Suddenly, from the top of an
elm, the shrill voice of a child made itself heard: "Mamma, mamma--I see
him!" He saw him! They all saw him, for that matter! Now even, they will
all swear to you they saw him!

Confronted by such a delirium, in the impossibility of imposing silence
and calm on such a crowd, there was only one thing for the people in the
carriages to do: to leave them alone, pull up the windows and dash along
at full speed. It would at least shorten a bitter martyrdom. But this
was even worse. Seeing the procession hurrying, all the road began to
gallop with it. To the dull booming of their tambourines the dancers
from Barbantane, hand in hand, sprang--a living garland--round the
carriage doors. The choral societies, breathless with singing as they
ran, but singing all the same, dragged on their standard-bearers, the
banners now hanging over their shoulders; and the good, fat priests, red
and panting, shoving their vast overworked bellies before them, still
found strength to shout into the very ear of the mules, in an unctuous,
effusive voice, "Long live our noble Bey!" The rain on all this, the
rain falling in buckets, discolouring the pink coaches, precipitating
the disorder, giving the appearance of a rout to this triumphal return,
but a comic rout, mingled with songs and laughs, mad embraces, and
infernal oaths. It was something like the return of a religious
procession flying before a storm, cassocks turned up, surplices over
heads, and the Blessed Sacrament put back in all haste, under a porch.

The dull roll of the wheels over the wooden bridge told the poor Nabob,
motionless and silent in a corner of his carriage, that they were almost
there. "At last!" he said, looking through the clouded windows at the
foaming waters of the Rhone, whose tempestuous rush seemed calm after
what he had just suffered. But at the