eneath the promontory of Nicole. The
landscape is rich in colour. Great fields of tobacco alternate with
extensive orchards. It is a land to be seen in the season of blossoms.
The world-famed prunes of Bordeaux come mainly from about Agen, and the
pleasant little commune of Nicole probably draws a much larger tribute
to-day from London, in exchange for its precocious apricots, than it
ever paid to London when the Plantagenet eaglets were rending the eagle
of Winchester. The old traditions of Guienne seem to be much less vivid
than those of Normandy or Brittany. I have heard Bretons speak of the
Duchess Anne as the Scotch Jacobites still speak of the Stuarts. But
though Coeur de Lion is still a popular hero in the land of Bertrand
de Born, there is nothing there like the Provencal feeling in Provence.
At St. Remy, the beautiful birthplace of Nostradamus, a lively waiter in
the excellent hotel of the 'Cheval Blanc,' taking me for a Frenchman of
the north, contrived very skilfully to let me know that the Provencals
do not hold themselves responsible for the failure of Northern France to
repulse the Germans. 'If the Comte de Paris had not got the better long
ago of the Comte de Provence,' he informed me, 'France would have been
Provencal and not Provence French, and then things would have gone
differently altogether.' But all Languedoc is as proud of its language
as Wales. A youth who took me at Agen to see the shop and house of the
'barber-bard' was clearly of the opinion that the poetry of Lamartine
and Victor Hugo would have been as fine as the poetry of Jasmin had they
been so fortunate as to use his mother-tongue. 'The French language was
a kind of Gallic patois mixed with German, while the true langue d'Oc,
as I must know, was the language of the Romans.' This same philologist
took me also to the little valley of 'Verona,' where he showed me not
only a small vineyard, the property of Jasmin, but the house, the
fountain, and the huge stone chair of Scaliger, 'a great philosopher
descended from Julius Caesar.' Joseph Scaliger, I believe, was really
born in this house, which was given to his illustrious father by the
Bishop of Agen; and Joseph with his own eyes saw some three hundred
Huguenots burnt alive in Agen on the great Place du Gravier, where now
the annual fairs of Agen are held under the stately elms.

The lands of the Lot-et-Garonne are full of memories of the English
wars, of the Albigensian crusade, of the lon