All the devils are let loose on earth on All Souls Eve—that is a fact known to everybody here in Provence. But whether it was one of those loosed devils, or the devil that had grown big in my own inside, that made me do what I did I do not know. What I do know, certainly, is that about dusk on All Saints Day the thought of how I could force things to be as I wanted them to be came into my heart.  
My thought was not a new thought, exactly. It was only that I would do what we had planned to do to make my mother give in to us: get Magali into my boat and carry her off with me for a day or two to Les Saintes. But it came to me with the new meaning that in that way I could make Magali give in to me too. When we came back she would be ready enough to marry me, and my mother would be for hurrying our marrying along. It all was as plain and as sure as anything could be. And, as I have[153] said, nobody would think the worse of Magali afterward; because that way of cutting through such difficulties is a common way with us in Provence.
 
And All Souls Eve was the time of all times for doing it. The whole town is in commotion then. In the churches, when the Vespers of All Saints are finished, the Vespers of the Dead are said. Then, just after sunset, the streets are crowded with our people hurrying to the graveyard with their lanterns for the graves. Nothing is thought about but the death-fires. From all the church towers—in Jonquières, in the Isle, in Ferrières—comes the sad dull tolling of bells. After that, for an hour or more, the town is almost deserted. Only the very old, and the very young, and the sick with their watchers, and the bell-ringers in the towers, are left there. Everybody else is in the graveyard, high up on the hill-side: first busied in setting the lights and in weeping over dead loved ones; and then, when the duty to the dead ones is done with, in walking about through the graveyard to see the show. In Provence we take a great interest in every sort of show.
 
Magali and I had no death-fires to kindle, for in the graveyard were no dead of ours. Our peo[154]ple were of Les Saintes Maries, and there their graves were—and my father, who was drowned at his fishing, had no grave at all. But we went always to the graveyard on All Souls Eve, and most times together, that we might see the show with the others and enjoy the bustle of the crowd. And so there was nothing out of the common when I asked her to come with me; and off we started together—leaving my old mother weeping at home for my dead father, who could have no death-fire lit for him because his bones were lying lost to us far away in the depths of the sea.
 
Our house was in the eastern quarter of the town, in Jonquières. To reach the graveyard we had to cross the Isle, and go through Ferrières, and then up the hill-side beyond. But I did not mean that we should do that; and when we had crossed the Canal du Roi I said to Magali that we would turn, before we went onward, and walk down past the Fish-market to the end of the Isle—that from there we might see the lights glowing in the dusk on the slope rising above us black against the western sky. We had done that before—it is a pretty sight to see all those far-off glittering points of light above, and then to see their glittering reflections[155] near by in the water below—and she willingly came with me.
 
But I had more in view. Down at the end of the Isle, along with the other boats moored at the wharf there to be near the Fish-market, my boat was lying; and when we were come close to her I said suddenly, as though the thought had entered my head that minute, that we would go aboard of her and run out a little way—and so see the death-fires more clearly because they would be less hidden by the shoulder of the hill. I did not have to speak twice. Magali w............