Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/123

Rh enough money to take me back to Navarre, to my poor old mother, who has no support in the world but me, besides her little barratcea with twenty cider-apple trees in it. Ah! if I were only back in my own country, looking up at the white mountains! I have been insulted here, because I don't belong to this land of rogues and sellers of rotten oranges; and those hussies are all banded together against me, because I told them that not all their Seville jacques, and all their knives, would frighten an honest lad from our country, with his blue cap and his maquila! Good comrade, won't you do anything to help your own countrywoman?' "She was lying then, sir, as she has always lied. I don't know that that girl ever spoke a word of truth in her life, but when she did speak, I believed her—I couldn't help myself. She mangled her Basque words, and I believed she came from Navarre. But her eyes and her mouth and her skin were enough to prove she was a gipsy. I was mad, I paid no more attention to anything, I thought to myself that if the Spaniards had dared to speak evil of my country, I would have slashed their faces just as she had slashed her comrade's. In short, I was like a drunken man, I was beginning to