Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 1).djvu/321

 

UCH of my readers as have made a pedestrian excursion to the south of France may perchance have noticed, midway between the town of Beaucaire and the village of Bellegarde, a small roadside inn, from the front of which hung, creaking and flapping in the wind, a sheet of tin covered with a caricature resemblance of the Pont du Gard. This little inn stood on the left-hand side of the grand route, turning its back on the Rhone. It also boasted of what in Languedoc is styled a garden, consisting of a small plot of ground, a full view of which might be obtained from a door immediately opposite the grand portal by which travelers were ushered in. In this garden the few dingy olives and stunted fig-trees spread their dusty foliage. Between them grew a scanty supply of garlic, tomatoes, and schalots; while, like a forgotten sentinel, a tall pine raised its melancholy head in one of the corners, while its head, spreading out like a fan, was burned by the scorching sun of thirty degrees.

Al these trees, great or small, were turned in the direction to which the Mistral blows, one of the three curses of Provence, the others being the Durance and the Parliament.

In the surrounding plain, which resembled a dusty lake, were scattered a few stalks of wheat, raised, no doubt, out of curiosity by the agriculturists, serving each one as a perch for a grasshopper, who follows, with his shrill, monotonous cry the travelers lost in the desert.

For nearly the last eight years the small auberge had been kept by a man and his wife, with two servants; one, answering to the name of Trinette, was the chambermaid, while the other, named Pecaud, was the stableman. This staff was quite large enough, for a canal recently made between Beauclaire and Aiguemortes superseded the heavy wagons by the towed barge, and the diligence by the packet-boat. And, as