In so remote a place as Nyons, over four hundred miles from the capital, the glamour of Paris exercised a magical attraction.  The few inhabitants of Nyons who had ever visited Paris, or even merely passed through it, were never quite as other people, some little remnant of an aureole encircled them.  The dowdy little wife of M. Pelissier, who had first seen the light in some grubby suburb of Paris, either Levallois-Perret or Clichy, held an immense position in Nyons on the strength of being “une vraie Parisienne,” and most questions of taste were referred to her.  M. Sisteron, the collector of taxes, himself a native of Nyons, had twenty years before gone to Paris on business, and spent four days there.  There were the darkest rumours current in Nyons, to the effect that M. Sisteron had spent these four days in a whirl of the most frantic and abandoned dissipation.  It was popularly supposed that these four days in Paris, twenty years ago, had so completely unsettled M. Sisteron that life in Nyons had lost all zest for him.  He was perpetually hungering for the delirious joys of the metropolis; even the collection of taxes no longer afforded him the faintest gratification.  Every inhabitant of Nyons was secretly proud of being able to claim so dare-devil a roysterer as a fellow-townsman.  The memory of those rumored four hectic days in Paris clung round him like a halo; it became almost a pleasure to pay taxes to so celebrated a character.  M. Sisteron was short, paunchy, bald, and bearded.  He was a model husband and a pattern as a father.  I am persuaded that he had spent those four days in Paris in the most blameless and innocuous fashion, living in the cheapest hotel he could find, and, after the manner of the people of Nyons, never spending one unnecessary franc.  Still, the legend of his lurid four days, and of the amount of champagne he had consumed during them, persisted.  In moments of expansion, his intimate friends would dig him in the ribs, remembering those four feverish days, with a facetious, “Ah! vieux polisson de Sisteron, va!  Nous autres, nous n’avons pas fait des farces a Paris dans notre jeunesse!” to M. Sisteron’s unbounded delight.  It was in the genuine spirit of Tartarin de Tarascon, with all the mutual make-believe on both sides.  His wife, Mme. Sisteron, was fond of assuring her friends that she owed her excellent health to the fact that she invariably took a bath twice a year, whether she required it or not.

The other members of the cercle were also mostly short, tubby, black-bearded, and olive-complexioned.  When not engaged in playing “manille” for infinitesimal points, they would all shout and gesticulate violently, as only Southern Frenchmen can, relapsing as the discussion grew more heated into their native Provencal, for though Nyons is geographically in Dauphine, climatically and racially it is in Provence.  In Southern France the “Langue d’Oil,” the literary language of Paris and Northern France,