ek.

To tell how Aristide drummed and cymballed the progress of Les
Huguenots, Carmen, La Juive, La Fille de Madame Angot and L'Arlesienne
through France would mean the rewriting of a "Capitaine Fracasse." To
hear the creature talk about it makes my mouth as a brick kiln and my
flesh as that of a goose. He was the Adonis, the Apollo, the Don Juan,
the Irresistible of the Tournee. Fled truculent bass and haughty tenor
before him; from diva to moustachioed contralto in the chorus, all the
ladies breathlessly watched for the fall of his handkerchief; he was
recognized, in fact, as a devil of a fellow. But in spite of these
triumphs, the manipulation of the drum, kettle-drum, triangle, cymbals,
castagnettes and tambourine, which at first had given him intense and
childish delight, at last became invested with a mechanical monotony
that almost drove him mad. All day long the thought of the ill-lit
corner, on the extreme right of the orchestra, garnished with the
accursed instruments of noise to which duty would compel him at eight
o'clock in the evening hung over him like a hideous doom. Sweet singers
of the female sex were powerless to console. He passed them by, and
haughty tenor and swaggering basso again took heart of grace.

"_Mais, mon Dieu, c'est le metier!_" expostulated Roulard.

"_Sale metier!_" cried Aristide, who was as much fitted for the
merciless routine of a theatre orchestra as a quagga for the shafts of
an omnibus. "A beast of a trade! One is no longer a man. One is just an
automatic system of fog-signals!"

In this depraved state of mind he arrived at Perpignan, where that
befell him which I am about to relate.

Now, Perpignan is the last town of France on the Gulf of Lions, a few
miles from the Spanish border. From it you can see the great white
monster of Le Canigou, the pride of the Eastern Pyrenees, far, far away,
blocking up the valley of the Tet, which flows sluggishly past the
little town. The Quai Sadi-Carnot (is there a provincial town in France
which has not a _something_ Sadi-Carnot in it?) is on the left bank
of the Tet; at one end is the modern Place Arago, at the other Le
Castillet, a round, castellated red-brick fortress with curiously long
and deep machicolations of the 14th century with some modern additions
of Louis XI, who also built the adjoining Porte Notre Dame which gives
access to the city. Between the Castillet and the Place Arago, the Quai
Sadi-Carnot is the site of the Prefe