Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 1).djvu/43

 

BOUT a hundred paces from the spot where the two friends were, with their looks fixed on the distance, and their ears attentive, whilst they imbibed the sparkling wine of La Malgue, behind a bare wall, torn and worn by sun and storm, was the small village of the Catalans.

One day a mysterious colony quitted Spain and settled on the tongue of land on which it is to this day. It arrived from no one knew where, and spoke an unknown tongue. One of its chiefs, who understood Provencal, begged the commune of Marseilles to give them this bare and barren promontory, on which, like the sailors of the ancient times, they had run their boats ashore. The request was granted; and three months afterward, around the twelve or fifteen small vessels which had brought these gypsies of the sea, a small village sprang up.

This village, constructed in a singular and picturesque manner, half Moorish, half Spanish, is the one we behold at the present day inhabited by the descendants of those men who speak the language of their fathers. For three or four centuries they remained faithful to this small promontory on which they had settled like a flight of sea-birds, without mixing with the Marseillaise population, intermarrying and preserving their original customs and the costume of their mother-country, as they have preserved its language.

Our readers will follow us along the only street of this little village, and enter with us into one of the houses, on the outside of which the sun had stamped that beautiful dead-leaf color peculiar to the buildings of the country, and within, a coat of limewash, of that white tint which forms the only ornament of Spanish posadas. A young and beautiful girl, with hair as black as jet, her eyes as velvety as the gazelle's, was leaning with her back against a partition, rubbing in her slender fingers,