you would like to visit the towers on the ramparts. I
would dearly love to accompany you, but I have business in the town. I
will take you, however, to the _gardien_ and put you in his charge."

He raced me to the gate by which I had entered. The _gardien des
remparts_ issued from his lodge at Aristide Pujol's summons and listened
respectfully to his exhortation in Provencal. Then he went for his keys.

"I'll not say good-bye," Aristide Pujol declared, amiably. "I'll get
through my business long before you've done your sight-seeing, and
you'll find me waiting for you near the hotel. _Au revoir, cher ami._"

He smiled, lifted his hat, waved his hand in a friendly way, and darted
off across the square. The old _gardien_ came out with the keys and took
me off to the Tour de Constance, where Protestants were imprisoned
pell-mell after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; thence to the
Tour des Bourguignons, where I forget how many hundred Burgundians were
massacred and pickled in salt; and, after these cheery exhibitions,
invited me to walk round the ramparts and inspect the remaining eighteen
towers of the enceinte. As the mistral, however, had sprung up and was
shuddering across the high walls, I declined, and, having paid him his
fee, descended to the comparative shelter of the earth.

There I found Aristide Pujol awaiting me at the corner of the narrow
street in which the hotel was situated. He was wearing--like most of
the young bloods of Provence in winter-time--a short, shaggy, yet natty
goat-skin coat, ornamented with enormous bone buttons, and a little cane
valise stood near by on the kerb of the square.

He was not alone. Walking arm in arm with him was a stout, elderly woman
of swarthy complexion and forbidding aspect. She was attired in a
peasant's or small shopkeeper's rusty Sunday black and an old-fashioned
black bonnet prodigiously adorned with black plumes and black roses.
Beneath this bonnet her hair was tightly drawn up from her forehead;
heavy eyebrows overhung a pair of small, crafty eyes, and a tuft of hair
grew on the corner of a prognathous jaw. She might have been about
seven-and-forty.

Aristide Pujol, unlinking himself from this unattractive female,
advanced and saluted me with considerable deference.

"Monseigneur----" said he.

As I am neither a duke nor an archbishop, but a humble member of the
lower automobiling classes, the high-flown title startled me.

"Monseigneur, will you permi