Cette.  There are in this town about ten thousand inhabitants.  Its principal commerce is wine; it furnishes great quantities of grape-pumice for making verdigrise.  They have a very growing commerce; but it is kept under by the privileges of Marseilles.

May 13. Agde.  On the right of the Etang de Thau are plains of some width, then hills, in olives, vines, mulberry, corn, and pasture.  On the left a narrow sand-bar, separating the Etang from the sea, along which it is proposed to make a road from Cette to Agde.  In this case, the post would lead from Montpelier by Cette and Agde to Beziers, being leveller, and an hour or an hour and a half nearer.  Agde contains six or eight thousand inhabitants.

May 14. Beziers.  Rich plains in corn, saintfoin, and pasture; hills at a little distance to the right in olives; the soil both of hill and plain is red going from Agde to Beziers.  But at Beziers the country becomes hilly, and is in olives, corn, saintfoin, pasture, some vines, and mulberries.

May 15. Beziers.  Argilies.  Le Saumal.  From Argilies to Saumal are considerable plantations of vines.  Those on the red hills, to the right, are said to produce good wine.  No wood, no enclosures.  There are sheep and good cattle.  The Pyrenees are covered with snow.  I am told they are so in certain parts all the year.  The canal of Languedoc, along which I now travel, is six toises wide at bottom, and ten toises at the surface of the water, which is one toise deep.  The barks which navigate it are seventy and eighty feet long, and seventeen or eighteen feet wide.  They are drawn by one horse, and worked by two hands, one of which is generally a woman.  The locks are mostly kept by women, but the necessary operations are much too laborious for them.  The encroachments by the men, on the offices proper for the women, is a great derangement in the order of things.  Men are shoemakers, tailors, upholsterers, staymakers, mantua-makers, cooks, housekeepers, house-cleaners, bed-makers, they coiffe the ladies, and bring them to bed:  the women, therefore, to live, are obliged to undertake the offices which they abandon.  They become porters, carters, reapers, sailors, lock-keepers, smiters on the anvil, cultivators of the earth, &c.  Can we wonder, if such of them as have a little beauty, prefer easier courses to get their livelihood, as long as that beauty lasts?  Ladies who employ men in the offices which should be reserved for their sex, are they not bawds in effect?  For every man whom they thus emply, some girl, whose place he has thus taken, is driven to whoredom.  The passage of the eight locks at Beziers, that is, from the opening of the first to the last gate took one hour and thirty-three minutes.  The bark in which I go is about thirty-five feet long, drawn by one horse, and goes from two to three geographical miles an hour.  The canal yields abundance of carp and eel.  I see also small fish, resembling our perch and chub.  Some plants of white clover, and some of yellow, on the banks of the canal near Capestan; santolina also, and a great deal of yellow iris.  Met a raft of about three hundred and fifty beams, forty feet long, and twelve or thirteen inches in diameter, formed into fourteen rafts, tacked together.  The extensive and numerous fields of saintfoin, in general bloom, are beautiful.