e, transports one back
five hundred years to the age of chivalry.

"How I should have loved to be a troubadour, or a _trouvere_, Frank;
that was my true _metier_, to travel from castle to castle singing love
songs and telling romantic stories to while away the tedium of the lives
of the great. Fancy the reception they would have given me for bringing
a new joy into their castled isolation, new ideas, new passions--a
breath of gossip and scandal from the outside world to relieve the
intolerable boredom of the middle ages. I should have been kept at the
Court of Aix: I think they would have bound me with flower-chains, and
my fame would have spread all through the sunny vineyards and grey
olive-clad hills of Provence."

When we got into the train again he began:

"We stop next at Marseilles, don't we, Frank? A great historic town for
nearly three thousand years. One really feels a barbarian in comparison,
and yet all I know of Marseilles is that it is famous for
_bouillabaisse_. Suppose we stop and get some?"

"_Bouillabaisse_," I replied, "is not peculiar to Marseilles or the _Rue
Cannebiere_. You can get it all along this coast. There is only one
thing necessary to it and that is _rascasse_, a fish caught only among
the rocks: you will get excellent _bouillabaisse_ at lunch where we are
going."

"Where are we going? You have not told me yet."

"It is for you to decide," I answered. "If you want perfect quiet there
are two places in the Esterel mountains, Agay and La Napoule. Agay is in
the middle of the Esterel. You would be absolutely alone there except
for the visit of an occasional French painter. La Napoule is eight or
ten miles from Cannes, so that you are within reach of a town and its
amusements. There is still another place I had thought of, quieter than
either, in the mountains behind Nice."

"Nice sounds wonderful, Frank, but I should meet too many English people
there who would know me, and they are horribly rude. I think we will
choose La Napoule."

About ten o'clock we got out at La Napoule and installed ourselves in
the little hotel, taking up three of the best rooms on the second or top
floor, much to the delight of the landlord. At twelve we had breakfast
under a big umbrella in the open air, looking over the sea. I had put
the landlord on his mettle, and he gave us a fry of little red mullet,
which made us understand how tasteless whitebait are: then a plain
beefsteak _aux pommes_, a morsel of