I was up early next morning and walked out of the town by a roundabout way, which gave me a sight of its quaint arcaded streets, King René's castle, which would have been worth a visit if I had had time for it, and the suspension bridge across the river to Beaucaire. I passed along a plane-shaded boulevard on the outskirts of the town, always on the lookout for Tartarin's villa, which I think I saw, though there were no signs of the india-rubber tree in its elegant little garden.
I was on a literary pilgrimage. You remember Daudet's story "L'Elixir du Révérend Père Gaucher"—how the monastery of the White Canons had fallen upon such evil times that even the belfry was as silent as a deserted dovecot, and the monks, for lack of money, were obliged to sound to matins with rattles of almond-wood; how the humble cowherd restored them to affluence by the cordial cunningly distilled from Provençal herbs, of which he had learnt the secret from the naughty old woman who had brought him up; and the dreadful things that followed when the wonderful elixir proved too seductive for his soul's health. Now this monastery was St. Michel de Frigolet, up in the hills a mile or two off the road from Tarascon to Avignon, and there is a good deal more attached to it than Daudet's story.
To begin with, Mistral went to school there, and I will make use of another chapter of his Memoirs to describe its situation and tell its story.
It was nearly eighty years ago that he was taken there from Maillane in the farm cart, together with a small folding bed, a deal box to hold his papers and a bristly pigskin trunk containing his books and belongings.
"At the Revolution, the lands of Saint-Michel had been sold piece by piece for paper money, and the despoiled abbey, deserted and solitary, remained up there, bereft in the wilds, open to the four winds and the wild animals. Sometimes smugglers would use it to make their powder in. When it rained the shepherds would shelter their sheep in the church. The gamblers of the neighbourhood would hide there in winter at midnight to avoid the police, and there by the pale light of a few candles, as the gold followed the movement of the cards, the vaulted roof echoed with oaths and blasphemies instead of psalms. Then when their game was finished these rakes ate and drank and revelled and rioted until dawn.
"About 1832 some mendicant friars established themselves there. They had put a bell in the old Roman belfry, and rang it on Sundays. But they rang in vain; nobody came up the hill to their offices, for they had no faith in them. The Duchess de Berry about this time had come to Provence to raise the Carlists against Louis Philippe, and I remember it being whispered that these runaway friars were nothing but Spanish bandits under their black robes plotting some dubious intrigue.
"Following these friars a worthy native of Cavaillon, M. Donnat, came and started a boarding-school for boys at the Convent of Saint-Michel, which he had bought on credit.
"He was an old bachelor, yellow and swarthy in complexion, with lank hair, flat nose, large mouth with prominent teeth, in a long black frock-coat and tanned shoes. Very devout, and as poor as a church mouse, he had made shift to start his school and to find pupils without a penny to bless himself with.
"For instance, he would go to Graveson, or Tarascon, or Barbentane or Saint-Pierre to a farmer who had boys.
"'I have come to tell you,' he would say, 'that I have opened a school at Saint-Michel de Frigolet. You have thus at your very door an excellent institution to which you can send your sons and have them prepared for their examinations.'