That morning, the village people wondered who could be howling like that, down there by Estève's farm.
It was the mother in the courtyard by the stone table which was covered with dew and with blood. She was wailing over her son's lifeless body, limp, in her arms.
THE POPE'S MULE
When Provencal people talked about an aggressive man with a grudge, they used to say, "Beware of that man!… he is like the Pope's mule, who saved up her kick for seven years."
I have long been trying to find out where the saying came from, and what this papal mule and the seven year kick was all about. Nobody, not even Francet Mamaï, my fife player, who knows the Provencal legends like the back of his hand, has been able to tell me. Francet, like me, thinks that it is from an old tale from Avignon, but he has not heard of it elsewhere.
—You'll find it in the Cicada's open library, the old piper told me with a snigger.
It seemed a good idea to me, and, the Cicada's library being right outside my door, I decided to shut myself in for a week.
It's a marvellous library, well stocked, and open twenty four hours a day to poets and it is served by those little cymbal-clashing librarians who make music for you all the time. I stayed in there for several delightful days, and after a week's searching—lying on my back—I came up with just what I was looking for: my own version of the mule with the famous seven year grudge. The story is charming and simple, and I will tell it to you as I read it yesterday from a manuscript, which had the lovely smell of dried lavender, and long strands of maiden hair fern for bookmarks.
* * * * *
If you hadn't seen Avignon in papal times, you'd seen nothing. For gaiety, life, vitality, and a succession of feasts, no town was its peer. From morning till night there were processions, pilgrimages, flower strewn streets, high-hung tapestries, cardinals' arriving on the Rhone, buntings, galleries with flags flying, papal soldiers chanting Latin in the squares, and brothers' rattling their collecting boxes. There were such noises coming from the tallest to the smallest dwelling, which crowded and buzzed all around the grand Papal Palace, like bees round a hive. There was the click-click of the lace-makers' machines, the to and fro of the shuttles weaving gold thread for the chasubles, the little hammer taps of the cruet engravers, the twanging harmonic scales of the string instrument makers, the sing-songs of the weavers, and above all that, the peal of the bells, and the ever-throbbing tambourines, down by the bridge. You see, here in Provence, when people are happy, they must dance and dance. And then; they must dance again. When the town streets proved too narrow for the farandole, the fifers and tambourine players were placed in the cooling breeze of the Rhone, Sur le pont d'Avignon, where, round the clock, l'on y dansait, l'on y dansait. Oh, such happy times; such a happy town. The halberds which have never killed anyone, the state prisons used only to cool the wine. Never any famine. Never any war…. That's how the Comtat Popes governed their people, and that's why their people missed them so much….