vered with grease. M. Louis had prudently
withdrawn. The glasses were filled before they were emptied; a
chambermaid dipped a handkerchief in hers, which was full of water, and
bathed her forehead with it because her head was going round, she said.
It was time that it should end; in fact, an electric bell, ringing
loudly in the hall, warned us that the footman on duty at the theatre
had called the coachmen. Thereupon Monpavon proposed a toast to the
master of the house, thanking him for his little party. M. Noel
announced that he would repeat it at Saint-Romans, during the
festivities in honor of the bey, to which most of those present would
probably be invited. And I was about to rise in my turn, being
sufficiently familiar with banquets to know that on such occasions the
oldest of the party is expected to propose a toast to the ladies, when
the door was suddenly thrown open and a tall footman, all muddy,
breathless and perspiring, with a dripping umbrella in his hand, roared
at us, with no respect for the guests:

"Come, get out of here, you pack of cads; what are you doing here?
Don't I tell you it's done!"

XI.

THE FETES IN HONOR OF THE BEY.

In the regions of the South, of the civilization of long ago, the
historic chateaux still standing are very few. At rare intervals some
old abbey rears its tottering and dismantled facade on a hillside,
pierced with holes which once were windows, which see naught now but
the sky,--monuments of dust, baked by the sun, dating from the days of
the Crusades or of Courts of Love, without a trace of man among their
stones, where even the ivy has ceased to climb, and the acanthus, but
where the dried lavender and the _ferigoule_ perfume the air. Amid
all these ruins the chateau de Saint-Romans stands forth a glorious
exception. If you have travelled in the South you have seen it, and you
shall see it again in a moment. It is between Valence and Montelimart,
in a neighborhood where the railroad runs straight along the Rhone, at
the base of the hills of Beaume, Rancoule and Mercurol, the whole
glowing vintage of the Hermitage, spread out over five leagues of vines
growing in close, straight lines in the vineyards, which seem to the
eye like fields of fleece, and extend to the very brink of the river,
as green and full of islands at that spot as the Rhine near Bale, but
with such a flood of sunshine as the Rhine never had. Saint-Romans is
opposite, on the other bank; and, n