Numa Roumestan

TO THE ARENA!

That Sunday--it was a scorching hot Sunday in July at the time of the yearly competitions for the department--there was a great open-air festival held in the ancient amphitheatre of Aps in Provence. All the town was there--the weavers from the New Road, the aristocrats of the Calade quarter, and some people even came all the way from Beaucaire.

“Fifty thousand persons at the lowest estimate,” said the Forum in its account the next day; but then we must allow for Provençal puffing.

The truth was that an enormous crowd was crushed together upon the sun-baked stone benches of the old amphitheatre, just as in the palmy days of the Antonines, and it was evident that the meet of the Society of Agriculture was far from being the main attraction to this overflow of the folk. Something more than the Landes horse-races was needed, or the prize-fights for men and “half men,” the athletic games of “strangle the cat” and “jump the swineskin,” or the contests for fifers and tabor-players, as old a story to the townspeople as the ancient red stones of the Arena; something more was needed to keep this multitude standing for two hours under that blinding, murderous sun, upon those burning flags, breathing in an atmosphere of flame and dust flavored with gunpowder, risking blindness, sunstroke, fevers and all the other dangers and tortures attendant on what is called down there in Provence an open-air festival.

The grand attraction of the annual competitions was Numa Roumestan.

Ah, well; the proverb “No man is a prophet” etc. is certainly true when applied to painters and poets, whose fellow-countrymen in fact are always the last to acknowledge their claims to superiority for whatever is ideal and lacking in tangible results; but it does not apply to statesmen, to political or industrial celebrities, those mighty advertised fames whose currency consists of favors and influence, fames that reflect their glory on city and townsmen in the form of benefits of every sort and kind.

For the last ten years Numa, the great Numa, leader and Deputy representing all the professions, has been the prophet of Provence; for ten years the town of Aps has shown toward her illustrious son the tender care and effusiveness of a mother, one of those mothers of the South quick in her expressions, lively in her exclamations and gesticulatory caresses.

When he comes each summer during the vacation of the Chamber of Deputies, the ovation begins as soon as he appears at the station! There are the Orpheons swelling out their embroidered banners as they intone their heroic choral songs. The railway porters are in waiting, seated on the steps until the ancient family coach which always comes for the “leader” has made a few turns of its big wheels down the alley of big plane-trees on the Avenue Berchère; then they take the horses out and put themselves into the shafts and draw the great man with their own hands, amid the shouts of the populace and the waving of hats, as far as the Portal mansion, where he gets out. This enthusiasm has so completely passed into the stage of tradition in the rites of his arrival that the horses now stop of themselves, like a team in a post-chaise, at the exact corner where they are accustomed to be taken out by the porters; no amount of beating could induce them to go a step farther.

From the first day the whole city has changed its appearance. Here is no longer that melancholy palace of the prefect where long siestas are lulled by the strident note of the locusts in the parched trees on the Cours. Even in the hottest part of the day the esplanade is alive and the streets are filled with hurrying people arrayed in solemn black suits and hats of ceremony, all sharply defined in the brilliant sunlight, the shadows of their epileptic gestures cut in black against the white walls.

The carriages of the Bishop and the President shake the highroad; then delegations arrive from the aristocratic Faubourg where Roumestan is adored because of his royalist convictions; next deputations from the women warpers march in bands the width of the street, their heads held high under their Arlesian caps.

The inns overflow with the country people, farmers from the Camargue or the Crau, whose unhitched wagons crowd the small squares and streets as on a market day. In the evening the cafés crowded with people remain open well on into the night, and the windows of the club of the “Whites,” lighted up until an impossible hour, vibrate with the peals of a voice that belongs to the popular god.

Not a prophet in his own country? ’Twas only necessary to look at the Arena under the intense blue sky of that Sunday of July 1875, note the indifference of the crowd to the games going on in the circus below, and all the faces turned in the same direction, toward the municipal platform, where Roumestan was seated surrounded by braided coats and sunshades for festivals and gay dresses of many-colored silks. ’Twas only necessary to listen to the talk and cries of ecstasy and the simple words of admiration coming in loud voices from this good people of Aps, some expressed in Provençal and some in a barbarous kind of French well rubbed with garlic, but all uttered with an accent as implacable as is the sun down there, an accent which cuts out and gives its own to every syllable and will not so much as spare us the dot over an “i.”

“_Diou! qu’es bèou!_ God! how beautiful he is!”

“He is a bit stouter than he was last year.”

“That makes him look all the more imposing.”

“Don’t push so! there is room for everybody!”

“Look at him, my son; there’s our Numa. When you are grown up you can say that you have seen him, _qué!_”

“His Bourbon nose is all there! and not one of his teeth missing!”

“Not a single gray hair, either!”

“_Té_, I should say not! he is not so very old yet. He was born in ’32--the year that Louis Philippe pulled down the mission crosses, _pecaïré!_”

“That scoundrel of a Philippe!”

“They scarcely show, those forty-three years of his.”

“Sure enough, they certainly don’t.... Té! here, great star--”

And with a bold gesture a big girl with burning eyes throws a kiss toward him from afar that resounds through the air like the cry of a bird.

“Take care, Zette--suppose his wife should see you.”

“The one in blue, is that his wife?”

No, the lady in blue was his sister-in-law, Mlle. Hortense, a pretty girl just out of the convent, but one, they say, who already straddled a horse just as well as a dragoon. Mme. Roumestan was more dignified, more thoroughbred in appearance, but she looked much haughtier. These Parisian ladies think so much of themselves! And so, with the picturesque impudence of their half-Latin language, the women, standing and shading their eyes with their hands, proceeded in loud voices deliberately to pick the two Parisians to pieces--their simple little travelling hats, their close-fitting dresses worn without jewelry, which were so great a contrast to the local toilettes, in which gold chains and red and green skirts puffed out by enormous bustles prevailed.

The men talked of the services rendered by Numa to the good cause, of his letter to the Emperor, and his speeches for the White Flag. Oh, if we had only a dozen men in the Chamber like him, Henry V would have been on his throne long ago!

Intoxicated by this circumambient enthusiasm and wrought up by these remarks, Numa could not remain quiet in one spot. He threw himself back in his great arm-chair, his eyes shut, his expression ecstatic, and swayed himself restlessly back and forth; then, rising, he strode up and down the platform and leaned over toward the arena to breathe in as it were all the light and cries, and then returned to his seat. Jovial and unceremonious, his necktie loose, he knelt on his chair, his back and his boot-soles turned to the crowd, and conversed with his Paris ladies seated above and behind him, trying to inoculate them with his own joy and satisfaction.

Mme. Roumestan was bored--that was evident from the expression of abstracted indifference on her face, which though beautiful in lines seemed cold and a little haughty when not enlivened by the light of two gray eyes, two eyes like pearls, true Parisian eyes, and by the dazzling effect of the smile on her slightly open mouth.

All this southern gayety, made up of turbulence and familiarity, and this wordy race all on the outside and the surface, whose nature was so much the opposite of her own, which was serious and self-contained, grated on her perhaps unconsciously, because she saw in them multiplied and vulgarized the same type as that of the man at whose side she had lived ten years, whom she had learned to know to her cost. The glaring hot blue sky, so excessively brilliant and vibrating with heat, was also not to her liking. How could these people breathe? Where did they find breath enough to shout so? She took it into her head to speak her thought aloud, how delightful a nice gray misty sky of Paris would be, and how a fresh spring shower would cool the pavements and make them glisten!

“Oh, Rosalie, how can you talk so!”

Her husband and sister were quite indignant, especially her sister, a tall young girl in the full bloom of youth and health, who, the better to see everything, was making herself as tall as possible. It was her first visit to Provence, and yet one might have thought that these shouts and gestures beneath the burning Italian sky had stirred within her some secret fibre, some dormant instinct, her southern origin, in fact, which was revealed in the heavy eyebrows meeting over her houri-like eyes, and her pale complexion, on which the fierce summer sun left not one red mark.

“Do, please, Rosalie!” pleaded Roumestan, who was determined to persuade his wife. “Get up and look at that. Did Paris ever show you anything like that?”

In the vast theatre widening into an ellipse that made a great jag in the blue sky, thousands of faces were packed together on the many rows of benches rising in terraces; bright eyes made luminous points, while bright colored and picturesque costumes spangled the whole mass with butterfly tints. Thence, as from a huge caldron, rose a chorus of joyous shouts, the ringing of voices and the blare of trumpets volatilized, as it were, by the intense light of the sun. Hardly audible on the lower stories, where dust, sand and human breath formed a floating cloud, this din grew louder as it rose and became more distinct and unveiled itself in the purer air. Above all rang out the cry of the milk-roll venders, who bore from tier to tier their baskets draped with white linen: “_Li pan ou la, li pan ou la!_” (Here’s your milk bread, here’s your milk bread!) The sellers of drinking-water, cleverly balancing their green glazed pitchers, made one thirsty just to hear them cry: “_L’aigo es fresco! Quau voù beùre?_” (The water’s fresh! Who will drink?)

Up on the highest brim of the amphitheatre, high up, groups of children playing and running noisily added a crown of sharp calls to the mass of noise below, much like a flock of martins soaring high above the other birds.