the influence of this Bluebeard chamber began asserting itself, and it
was all I could do to refrain from singing (of course very
sympathetically) the lines from Offenbach's _Barbe-Bleue_ beginning:

"Ma premiere femme est morte
Que le diable l'emporte!"

but on second thoughts I refrained.

M. Bayol's garden reminded me of that of the immortal Tartarin of
Tarascon, for the only green things in it grew in pots, and nothing
was over four inches high. The rest of the garden consisted of bare,
sun-baked tracts of clay, intersected by gravel walks. I felt certain
that amongst these seedlings there must have been a two-inch high
specimen of the Baobab "l'arbre geant," the pride of Tartarin's heart,
the tree which, as he explained, might under favourable conditions
grow 200 feet high. After all, Marseilles and Tarascon are not far
apart, and their inhabitants are very similar in temperament.

I was pleased to see a fine statue of Dupleix at Pondicherry, for he
was a man to whom scant justice has been done by his compatriots. Few
people seem to realise how very nearly Dupleix succeeded in his design
of building up a great French empire in India. He arrived in India in
1715, at the age of eighteen, and amassed a large fortune in
legitimate trade; he became Administrator of Chandernagore, in Bengal,
in 1730, and displayed such remarkable ability in this post that in
1741 he was appointed Governor-General of the French Indies. In 1742
war broke out between France and Britain, and at the outset the French
arms were triumphant. Madras surrendered in 1746 to a powerful French
fleet under La Bourdonnais, the Governor of the Island of Reunion, and