And so the revel went on.  As the glasses were refilled the noise grew louder and the smoke denser.  I soon had enough of it, and taking a candle I climbed to my bedroom, leaving the controleur in his corner.  Before going to bed I did a little sewing, having borrowed a threaded needle from the landlady with this object in view.  The wayfarer should be ready to help himself as far as he can, and although sewing is not, perhaps, the most manly of accomplishments, no tourist should be incapable of sewing on a button or closing up a rent that makes the village children laugh.

My walk across the causse separating two rivers had tired me, but I might as well have remained downstairs for all the sleep that I enticed.  As the hours wore on the uproar, instead of subsiding, became more terrific.  These Southerners have voices of such rock-splitting power that, when twenty or thirty of them, inspired by Bacchus, or excited by discussion, shout together, one asks if it would be possible for devils on the rampage to raise a more hideous tumult.  The house trembled as from a succession of thunderclaps.  Midnight struck, and the uproar was unabated.  At one it had entered upon the quarrelsome phase, and at two there was a fight.  Chairs or tables were overthrown, there was a smashing of glass, a rapid scuffling of feet, and the screaming and howling as of a menagerie on fire.  Above the fiendish din rang out the shrill voice of the hostess, who was evidently trying to separate the combatants, and who seemed to be successful, for the hurricane suddenly lulled.

This hostess was a woman of words, but the landlady of an inn near Rodez, which I entered one summer evening, showed herself under similar circumstances to be a woman of action.  Two young men who were sitting at a table, after a very brief difference of opinion, stared fixedly and fiercely into each other’s face, and then sprang at one another like a couple of tom-cats.  Presently the stronger took the other up in his arms, carried him out through the door, and, having pitched him considerately upon the manure-heap in the yard, returned to his place with the expression of the victorious cat.  But he reckoned without his hostess.  She was not tall, but her cubic capacity took up more place in the world than that of two or three ordinary mortals.  With her great bare arms folded across her ample person she waddled towards the triumphant young man, and there was a look in her eye that made him wriggle uneasily upon his chair.  I think he was tempted to run away, but shame nailed him to his seat.  As soon as the pair were at close quarters, one of the folded bolster-like arms made a sudden movement, and the back of the strong rough hand, hardened by forty years or more of toil, covered for an instant the youth’s nose and mouth.  That single movement of a female arm, the muscular development of which a pugilist might have envied, shed more blood than all the clawing, tugging, and butting of the male combatants had caused to flow.  ‘That is to teach you,’ said the strong woman, ’not to fight in my house again!’