The Ducros lived at Nyons in the south of France.  Nyons lay twenty-five miles east of the main line from Paris to Marseilles, and could only be reached by diligence.  I think that I can safely say that no foreigner (with the exception of the Ducros’ pupils) had ever set foot in Nyons, for the place was quite unknown, and there was nothing to draw strangers there.  It was an extraordinarily attractive spot, lying in a little circular cup of a valley of the Dauphine Alps, through which a brawling river had bored its way.  Nyons was celebrated for its wine, its olive oil, its silk, and its truffles, all of them superlatively good.  The ancient little walled town, basking in this sun-trap of a valley, stood out ochre-coloured against the silver-grey background of olive trees, whilst the jagged profiles of the encircling hills were always mistily blue, with that intense blue of which the Provence hills seem alone to have the secret.  So few English people knew anything about the conditions of life in a little out-of-the-way French provincial town, where no foreigners have ever set foot, that it may be worth while saying something about them.  In the first place, it must have been deadly dull for the inhabitants, for nothing whatever happened there.  Even the familiar “tea and tennis,” the stereotyped mild dissipation of little English towns, was quite unknown.  There was no entertaining of any sort, beyond the formal visits the ladies were perpetually paying each other.  The Ducros alone, occasionally, asking their legal friends to dinner, invitations accepted with the utmost enthusiasm, for the culinary genius who presided over the Ducros’ kitchen (M.  Dueros’ own sister) deservedly enjoyed an enormous local reputation.

Most people must be familiar with Alphonse Daudet’s immortal work, Tartarin de Tarascon, in which the typical “Meridional” of Southern France is portrayed with such unerring exactitude that Daudet himself, after writing the book, was never able to set foot in Tarascon again.

We had a cercle in Nyons, in the Place Napoleon (re-christened Place de la Republique after September 4, 1870), housed in three rather stately, sparsely furnished, eighteenth-century rooms.  Here, with the exception of Tartarin himself, the counterparts of all Daudet’s characters were to be found.  “Le Capitaine Bravida” was represented by Colonel Olivier, a fiercely moustached and imperialled Crimean veteran, who perpetually breathed fire and swords on any potential enemy of France.  “Costecalde” found his prototype in M. Sichap, who, although he had in all probability never fired off a gun in his life, could never see a tame pigeon, or even a sparrow flying over him, without instantly putting his walking-stick to his shoulder and loudly ejaculating, “Pan, pan,” which was intended to counterfeit the firing of both barrels of a gun.  I once asked M. Sichap why so excellent a shot as he (with a walking-stick) invariably missed his bird with his first barrel, and only brought him down with his second.  This was quite a new light to M. Sichap, who had hithered considered the double “Pan, pan,” an indispensable adjunct to the pantomime of firing a gun; much as my young brother and I had once imagined “Ug, ug,” an obligatory commencement to any remark made by a Red Indian “brave.”