"Segnour, dóu mau sian pas Pencauso.
Mando eiçabas
Un rai de pas!
Segnour, ajudo nosto Causo,
E reviéuren
E t'amaren."
Lord, we desire to become men; thou canst set us free!
We are Gallo-Romans and of noble race, and we walk upright in our land.
Lord, we are not the cause of the evil. Send down upon us a ray of peace! Lord, aid our Cause, and we shall live again and love thee.
The poem called The Stone of Sisyphus completes sufficiently the evidence necessary to exculpate Mistral of the charge of antipatriotism and makes clear his thought. Provence was once a nation, she consented years ago to lose her identity in the union with France. Now it is proposed to heap up all the old traditions, the Gai Savoir, the glory of the Troubadours, the old language, the old customs, and burn them on a pyre. Well, France is a great people and Vive la nation. But some would go further, some would suppress the nation: "Down with the frontiers, national glories are an abomination! Wipe out the past, man is God! Vive l'humanité!" Our patrimony we repudiate. What are Joan of Arc, Saint Louis, and Turenne? All that is old rubbish.
Then the people cry with Victor Hugo, "Emperaire, siegues maudi, maudi, maudi! nous as vendu" and hurl down the Vendôme column, burn Paris, slaughter the priests, and then, worn out, commence again, like Sisyphus, to push the rock of progress.
So much for the conservatism of Mistral.
We shall conclude this story of the shorter poems with some that are not polemical or essentially Provençal; three or four are especially noteworthy. The Drummer of Arcole, Lou Prègo-Diéu, Rescontre (Meeting), might properly find a place in any anthology of general poetry, and an ode on the death of Lamartine is sincere and beautiful. Such poems must be read in the original.
The first one, The Drummer of Arcole, is the story of a drummer boy who saved the day at Arcole by beating the charge; but after the wars are over, he is forgotten, and remains a drummer as before, becomes old and regrets his life given up to the service of his country. But one day, passing along the streets of Paris, he chances to look up at the Pantheon, and there in the huge pediment he reads the words, "Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante."