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Updated: June 2, 2025
Of his beautiful life-work, Roumanille has written: "As organist of the church of St. Pierre, Saboly soon won a great and beautiful renown as a musician; but his fame and his glory have come to him because of the blessed thought that he had of composing his marvellous noëls.
Esperit and Magali sang this responsively; Magali taking Saint Joseph's part in which, in all the noëls, is a strain of feminine sweetness and gentleness. Then Marius and Esperit, in the same fashion, sang the famous "C'est le bon lever": a dialogue between an Angel and a Shepherd, in which the Angel as becomes so exalted a personage speaks French, while the Shepherd speaks Provençal.
And at Aix-en-Provence the most popular noël of all that were sung in the cathedral was a satirical review of the events of the year: that as time went on grew to be more and more of a scandal, until at last the Bishop had to put a stop to it in the year 1653. The Provençaux have been writing noëls for more than four hundred years.
Of all the modern noëls it has come closest to and has taken the strongest hold upon the popular heart: this pathetic story of the child "blind from her birth" who pleads with her mother that she also may go with the rest to Bethlehem, urging that though she cannot see "the lovely golden face" she still may touch the Christ-Child's hand.
Either drawing from the quaintly beautiful mediæval legends of the birth and childhood of Jesus, or directly from their own quaintly simple souls, the poets from early times have been making Christmas songs noëls, or nouvé as they are called in Provençal in which new subordinate characters have been created in a spirit of frank realism, and these have materialized in new figures surrounding the crèche.
The Provençal noëls being some real, or some imagined, incident of the Nativity told in verse set to a gay or tender air are the crèche translated into song. The simplest of them are direct renderings of the Bible narrative.
There are many of these noëls in dialogue; and most of them are touched with this same quality of easy familiarity with sacred subjects, and abound in turns of broad humour which render them not a little startling from our nicer point of view.
But most of the noëls nouvè, they are called in Provençal are purely imaginative: quaintly innocent stories created by the poets, or taken from those apocryphal scriptures in which the simple-minded faithful of Patristic times built up a warmly coloured legend of the Virgin's life and of the birth and childhood of her Son.
And all Avignon presently would be singing them, and soon the chorus would swell throughout the Comtat and Provence. The inimitable Troubadour of Bethlehem died just as he had tied together the eighth of his little sheaves.... His noëls have been reprinted many times; and, thanks be to God, they will be printed again and again forever!"
It is one of the series in his history of the Nativity and is the most popular of all his noëls: a dialogue between Saint Joseph and the Bethlehem inn-keeper, that opens with a sweet and plaintive long-drawn note of supplication as Saint Joseph timorously calls: "O-o-oh, there, the house! Master! Mistress! Varlet! Maid! Is no one there?"
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