king of all this region, not to say the god; and the plain-
est peasant may offer him a greeting and a jest in the
patois made classical by his poems and his Trésor. ²

But St. Remy is the real idyl. Once a country-seat of
the counts of Provence, and frequented by many a baron
and troubadour, ³ it is now a town of gardens--flower gar-
dens--worthy to be cared for by Roumanille, the father of
the Félibrige. Streams of sparkling water glide through
borders of bloom; hedges of flowering hawthorn bind
rather than divide the fields; century-old plane trees,
gnarled and hollow, look benignly down upon the ver-
dure like age upon childhood; over walls and hedges,
up and down the avenues of plane trees, filling the "Green
City" as the dream-like haze fills the valleys of Sardinia,
come the perfumes of the flowers, that symphony of odors
which Baudelaire dreamed of, while above us crouches the
guardian lion of Arles--Mt. Gaussier--"cousin to the
lion of St. Mark," his nostrils of rock opening wide to
inhale the incense of the valley.

Pressing on toward Les Baux we have a foretaste of the
summer sun. From heavens of azure to an earth of green,
a vast illumination blazes through the firmament. The
heavens quiver with excess of light, and the earth seems
mantled with a veil of gauzy flame. The radiance dazzles,
burns, excites. It buries us in the waves of a torrid sea,
not to drown but to inundate us with life. We feel within
us the Provençal expansiveness. Something of the spirit
of Tartarin mounts to the brain. We long to be gay,
to jest, to laugh. We talk, and grow intoxicated with
talking--"on se grise en parlant." And why not? Is
it not a fête of the sun, "Lord Sun," "Saint Sun," "the
great sun of Provence," to whom Mistral intoned a
hymn? Apollo, god of the sun, was the god of poets;
and it was not by chance that the muse of modern
poetry sang first in the sunny Midi.

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