and sombre, timid or savage; not answering when any one speaks to them.  I don’t even know what to call them.  The name that I have been told has escaped me but I could get some one to tell me again.  Naturally the country people hate them and that they have no religion; if that is so they ought to be superior to us.  I ventured all alone among them.  “Good day, sirs.”  Response, a slight bend of the head.  I looked at their encampment, no one moved.  It seemed as if they did not see me.  I asked them if my curiosity annoyed them.  A shrug of the shoulders as if to say, “What do we care?” I spoke to a young man who was mending the meshes in a net very cleverly; I showed him a piece of five francs in gold.  He looked the other way.  I showed him one in silver.  He deigned to look at it.  “Do you want it?” He bent his head on his work.  I put it near him, he did not move.  I went away, he followed me with his eyes.  When he thought that I could not see him any longer, he took the piece and went to talk with a group.  I don’t know what happened.  I fancy that they put it in the common exchequer.  I began botanizing at some distance within sight to see if they would come to ask me something or to thank me.  No one moved.  I returned as if by chance towards them; the same silence, the same indifference.  An hour later, was at the top of the cliff, and I asked the coast-guard who those people were who spoke neither French, nor Italian, nor patois.  He told me their name, which I have not remembered.

He thought that they were Moors, left on the coast since the time of the great invasions from Provence, and perhaps he is not mistaken.  He told me that he had seen me among them from his watch tower, and that I was wrong, for they were a people capable of anything; but when I asked him what harm they did he confessed to me that they had done none.  They lived by their fishing and above all on the things cast up by the sea which they knew how to gather up before the most alert.  They were an object of perfect scorn.  Why?  Always the same story.  He who does not do as all the world does can only do evil.

If you go into the country, you might perhaps meet them at the end of the Brusq.  But they are birds of passage, and there are years when they do not appear at all.  I have not even seen the Paris Guide.  They owe me a copy, however; for I gave something to it without receiving payment.  It is because of that no doubt that they have forgotten me.

To conclude, I shall be in Paris from the 20th of June to the 5th of July.  Send me a word always to 97 rue des Feuillantines.  I shall stay perhaps longer, but I don’t know.  I embrace you tenderly, my splendid old fellow.  Walk a little, I beg of you.  I don’t fear anything for the novel; but I fear for the nervous system taking too much the place of the muscular system.  I am very well, except for thunder bolts, when I fall on my bed for forty-eight hours and don’t want any one to speak to me.  But it is rare and if I do not relent so that they can nurse me, I get up perfectly cured.