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He is not only a poet of Provence. He is Provence incarnate, and, apart from the noble quality of his work, his position as the foremost representative of his compatriots is romantically unique. No other country today, pointing to its greatest man, would point out a poet; whereas Mistral, were he not as unspoiled as he is laurelled, might, with literal truth, say: "Provence c'est moi!"
A large lamp was burning brightly there. The floor was of mere flag-stones but the few rugs scattered about though extremely worn were very costly. Somebody must have been attending it lately, for the fire roared and the warmth of the place was very grateful after the bone-searching cold blasts of mistral outside.
Add to this, that Provence is proverbially the land of dust, and, what is worse, the land of the mistral a wind from the north-west, which carries stones, men, and carriages before it. 'For several days in spring the climate may no doubt be delicious, although, however, always too warm about mid-day, when suddenly the mistral, of evil celebrity, begins to blow.
They needed a name to call themselves by. They had all met together to talk things over in the old castle of Font-Ségugne, or, as Mistral more picturesquely puts it: "It was written in heaven that one blossoming Sunday, the twenty-first of May, 1854, in the full springtide of life and of the year, seven poets should come to meet together in the castle of Font-Ségugne."
All day we walked across a plain of vines, past hurdles of wattled cannes and great wind-screens of velvety cypresses, sixty feet high, all white with dust on the north side of 'em, for the mistral was having its three-days' revel, and it whistled and roared through the cannes till scores of yards of 'em at a time were bowed nearly to the earth.
Nothing could be more beautiful than the wording of the exquisite thoughts, yet I wished we could have seen those thoughts embodied in Provençal, the language practically created by Mistral, as Italian was by Dante and Petrarch, or German by Goethe.
I had proceeded several miles without encountering any body at that still hour of the night, occasionally alarmed at the barking of some snarling cur, as I passed through the small villages in my route, when, worn out with fatigue and cold, I sat down under a hedge to screen myself from the cold "mistral" which blew.
Had not "Faust," which it often recalls, preceded it, its fate might have been different. Still, it contains many strong passages and much beautiful writing. "Mireille," a pastoral opera in three acts, words by M. Carré, the subject taken from "Mireio," a Provençal poem by Mistral, was first produced at the Théâtre Lyrique, Paris, March 19, 1864, with the following cast: MIREILLE Mme.
All the time a frightful riot, the rumbling of carts, the "Haul all, haul away!" of the shipmen, oaths, songs, steamboat whistles, the bugles and drums in Forts Saint Jean and Saint Nicolas, the bells of the Major, the Accoules, and Saint Victor; with the mistral atop of all, catching up the noises and clamour, and rolling them up together with a furious shaking, till confounded with its own voice, which intoned a mad, wild, heroic melody like a grand charging tune one that filled hearers with a longing to be off, and the farther the better a craving for wings.
The press, however, had its little fling at the new-comer. "The Mistral it appears," said one pitiful punster, "has been incarnated in a poem. We shall soon see whether it is anything else but wind." Such has been the invariable welcome of great men in a small world.
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