Chapter 3. The Catalans (1) Capítulo 3. Los catalanes Los catalanes (1)

Beyond a bare, weather-worn wall, about a hundred paces from the spot where the two friends sat looking and listening as they drank their wine, was the village of the Catalans. Au-delà d'un mur nu et usé par les intempéries, à une centaine de pas de l'endroit où les deux amis étaient assis à regarder et à écouter en buvant leur vin, se trouvait le village des Catalans. Long ago this mysterious colony quitted Spain, and settled on the tongue of land on which it is to this day. Whence it came no one knew, and it spoke an unknown tongue. One of its chiefs, who understood Provencal, begged the commune of Marseilles to give them this bare and barren promontory, where, like the sailors of old, they had run their boats ashore. Un de ses chefs, qui comprenait le provençal, pria la commune de Marseille de leur donner ce promontoire dénudé et stérile, où, comme les marins d'autrefois, ils avaient débarqué leurs bateaux. The request was granted; and three months afterwards, around the twelve or fifteen small vessels which had brought these gypsies of the sea, a small village sprang up. La demande a été acceptée; et trois mois après, autour des douze ou quinze petits vaisseaux qui avaient amené ces bohémiens de la mer, un petit village surgit. This village, constructed in a singular and picturesque manner, half Moorish, half Spanish, still remains, and is inhabited by descendants of the first comers, who speak the language of their fathers. For three or four centuries they have remained upon this small promontory, on which they had settled like a flight of seabirds, without mixing with the Marseillaise population, intermarrying, and preserving their original customs and the costume of their mother-country as they have preserved its language.

Our readers will follow us along the only street of this little village, and enter with us one of the houses, which is sunburned to the beautiful dead-leaf color peculiar to the buildings of the country, and within coated with whitewash, like a Spanish posada. Nos lecteurs nous suivront le long de la seule rue de ce petit village, et entreront avec nous dans une des maisons, qui est brûlée par le soleil à la belle couleur de feuille morte propre aux bâtiments du pays, et à l'intérieur enduite de chaux, comme un espagnol posada. A young and beautiful girl, with hair as black as jet, her eyes as velvety as the gazelle's, was leaning with her back against the wainscot, rubbing in her slender delicately moulded fingers a bunch of heath blossoms, the flowers of which she was picking off and strewing on the floor; her arms, bare to the elbow, brown, and modelled after those of the Arlesian Venus, moved with a kind of restless impatience, and she tapped the earth with her arched and supple foot, so as to display the pure and full shape of her well-turned leg, in its red cotton, gray and blue clocked, stocking. Une jeune et belle fille, aux cheveux noirs comme du jais, aux yeux aussi veloutés que ceux de la gazelle, était adossée au lambris, frottant dans ses doigts fins et délicatement modelés un bouquet de bruyères dont elle cueillait les fleurs. éteint et éparpillé sur le sol; ses bras nus jusqu'au coude, bruns et modelés sur ceux de la Vénus arlésienne, se mouvaient avec une sorte d'impatience agitée, et elle tapait la terre de son pied cambré et souple, de manière à montrer la forme pure et pleine de son jambe bien tournée, dans son coton rouge, gris et bleu cadencé, bas. At three paces from her, seated in a chair which he balanced on two legs, leaning his elbow on an old worm-eaten table, was a tall young man of twenty, or two-and-twenty, who was looking at her with an air in which vexation and uneasiness were mingled. A trois pas d'elle, assis sur une chaise qu'il tenait en équilibre sur deux pieds, accoudé à une vieille table vermoulue, était un grand jeune homme de vingt ans, ou vingt-deux ans, qui la regardait avec un un air où se mêlaient le dépit et l'inquiétude. He questioned her with his eyes, but the firm and steady gaze of the young girl controlled his look. Il l'interrogea du regard, mais le regard ferme et régulier de la jeune fille contrôla son regard.

"You see, Mercedes," said the young man, "here is Easter come round again; tell me, is this the moment for a wedding?" — Tu vois, Mercedes, dit le jeune homme, voilà encore Pâques ; dis-moi, est-ce le moment d'un mariage ? "I have answered you a hundred times, Fernand, and really you must be very stupid to ask me again." "Well, repeat it,--repeat it, I beg of you, that I may at last believe it! Tell me for the hundredth time that you refuse my love, which had your mother's sanction. Dis-moi pour la centième fois que tu refuses mon amour, qui avait la sanction de ta mère. Make me understand once for all that you are trifling with my happiness, that my life or death are nothing to you. Ah, to have dreamed for ten years of being your husband, Mercedes, and to lose that hope, which was the only stay of my existence!" "At least it was not I who ever encouraged you in that hope, Fernand," replied Mercedes; "you cannot reproach me with the slightest coquetry. I have always said to you, 'I love you as a brother; but do not ask from me more than sisterly affection, for my heart is another's.' Is not this true, Fernand?" "Yes, that is very true, Mercedes," replied the young man, "Yes, you have been cruelly frank with me; but do you forget that it is among the Catalans a sacred law to intermarry?"