FRANCE:They came in trickles, streams and finally a flood from all across the Midi-Pyrenees region, and its capital, Toulouse, (a city roughly the size of Dublin) to Ségolène Royal's final rally, with Spanish prime minister José Luis Zapatero as her guest speaker.
Numbers were impossible, almost irrelevant. I counted 120 coaches, 6,000 supporters from the region, with at least twice as many from the city itself. There were close to 20,000.
The very programming of the rally said it all. The exhibition centre had been booked months before. Lionel Jospin had been pencilled in as the guest speaker - a classic rally where the past hands over to the present.
Zapatero transformed it into a blaze of something new, a radiant future for 21st-century European socialism. Dressed casually in an open-neck shirt, he delivered a powerful endorsement.
Speaking in Spanish, with the French text scrolling across the screens, this was no diplomatic address, no routine offering of fraternal greetings. Instead, the Spanish prime minister enthusiastically identified Royal as an architect of radical change, telling her and a near-delirious crowd "Ségolène is the future".
If the young face of today's dynamic Spain was decidedly turned to that future, roots were far from forgotten.
Zapatero acknowledged the debt Spanish democrats owe Toulouse, where thousands of refugees from the defeated republic found refuge in 1938. Their descendants, scattered throughout the hall, loved it.
By the time Royal arrived on the podium, the crowd was roaring "Ségolène présidente" with all its heart, despite the by- now stultifying heat - a wave of enthusiasm on an ocean of perspiration.
She is no natural orator. More at home with smaller audiences, she can seem stiff behind a lectern. Whether it was the Castilian charm, the energy of the audience, or just a growing sure-footedness, she delivered a powerful performance.
There was the pledge of a modern, federal, France, a less pompous state with greater citizen power, homosexual marriage and a crackdown on domestic violence, all drawing inspiration from the Spanish model.
She offered a dynamic France, liberating the energy of its people to sweep away state obstacles to growth and progress. Watching her in action, I was reminded of last November's comments from veteran Daily Telegraph correspondent David Rennie ". . . as a professional politician, and I have watched a lot of them in my time, she is the real deal, a class act."
A class act she certainly was.
It had been a good day for the Socialist candidate, with opinion polls beginning to hint at a victory trend, endorsements from Le Monde and the weekly Nouvel Observateur, crowned with Zapatero's enthusiasm and the presence of François Mitterrand's widow, Danielle.
The crowd knew that Nicolas Sarkozy was doing something similar in Marseilles, while 200km to the west, François Bayrou had assembled 6,000 miracle-seeking supporters not far from Lourdes.
Yet as the supporters dispersed into the balmy Garonne night, hope easing their aching muscles and dry throats, they could - just - begin to believe that Ségolène and José Luis might turn the defiant "No Pasarán" of the Spanish Civil War International Brigades into a positive "Pasarán" - they will make it!
Tony Kinsella is an Irish author and commentator who spends much of his time in southwest France.