Chapter 3

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The Catalans.
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.

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.