Chapter 26

CHAPTER 26
The Pont du Gard Inn.

Such of my readers as have made a pedestrian excursion to
the south of France may perchance have noticed, about midway
between the town of Beaucaire and the village of Bellegarde,
-- a little nearer to the former than to the latter, -- a
small roadside inn, from the front of which hung, creaking
and flapping in the wind, a sheet of tin covered with a
grotesque representation of the Pont du Gard. This modern
place of entertainment stood on the left-hand side of the
post road, and backed upon the Rhone. It also boasted of
what in Languedoc is styled a garden, consisting of a small
plot of ground, on the side opposite to the main entrance
reserved for the reception of guests. A few dingy olives and
stunted fig-trees struggled hard for existence, but their
withered dusty foliage abundantly proved how unequal was the
conflict. Between these sickly shrubs grew a scanty supply
of garlic, tomatoes, and eschalots; while, lone and
solitary, like a forgotten sentinel, a tall pine raised its
melancholy head in one of the corners of this unattractive
spot, and displayed its flexible stem and fan-shaped summit
dried and cracked by the fierce heat of the sub-tropical
sun.

In the surrounding plain, which more resembled a dusty lake
than solid ground, were scattered a few miserable stalks of
wheat, the effect, no doubt, of a curious desire on the part
of the agriculturists of the country to see whether such a
thing as the raising of grain in those parched regions was
practicable. Each stalk served as a perch for a grasshopper,
which regaled the passers by through this Egyptian scene
with its strident, monotonous note.

For about seven or eight years the little tavern had been
kept by a man and his wife, with two servants, -- a
chambermaid named Trinette, and a hostler called Pecaud.
This small staff was quite equal to all the requirements,
for a canal between Beaucaire and Aiguemortes had
revolutionized transportation by substituting boats for the
cart and the stagecoach. And, as though to add to the daily
misery which this prosperous canal inflicted on the
unfortunate inn-keeper, whose utter ruin it was fast
accomplishing, it was situated between the Rhone from which
it had its source and the post-road it had depleted, not a
hundred steps from the inn, of which we have given a brief
but faithful description.

The inn-keeper himself was a man of from forty to fifty-five
years of age, tall, strong, and bony, a perfect specimen of
the natives of those southern latitudes; he had dark,
sparkling, and deep-set eyes, hooked nose, and teeth white
as those of a carnivorous animal; his hair, like his beard,
which he wore under his