All at once a servant came to announce that a Spaniard, a harpist called Herrera, asked permission to play some of the music of his country before Monsieur de Lamartine.
“Let him come in,” said the poet.
When the harpist had played his tunes, Lamartine, in a whisper to his niece, Madame de Cessia, asked if there was any money in the drawers of his bureau.
“There are still two louis,” she replied.
“Give them to Herrera,” said the kind-hearted Lamartine.
I returned to Provence to get my poem printed, and so soon as it issued from the printing office of Seguin at Avignon, I directed the first proof to Lamartine, who wrote to Reboul[17] the following letter:
“I have read Mirèio. Nothing until now has appeared of such national, vital, inimitable growth of the South. There is a virtue in the sun of Provence. I have received such a thrust both in the spirit and the heart that I was impelled to write a discourse on the poem. Tell this to Monsieur Mistral. Since the Homerics of Archipel, no such spring of primitive poetry has gushed forth. I cried, even as you did, ‘It is Homer!’”
Adolphe Dumas wrote me:
March, 1859.
“Another joyful letter for you, my dear friend. I went, last evening, to Lamartine. On seeing me enter, he received me with exclamations of enthusiasm, using much the same expressions as I did in my letter to the Gazette de France. He has read and understood, he says, your poem from one end to the other. He read it and re-read it three times; he cannot leave it, and reads nothing else. His niece, that beautiful person whom you saw, added that she has been unable to steal it from him for one instant to read it herself, and he is going to devote an entire lecture to you and Mirèio. He asked me for biographical notes on you and on Maillane. I sent them to him this morning. You were the subject of general conversation all the evening, and your poem was rehearsed by Lamartine and by me from the first word to the last. If this lecture speaks thus of you, your fame is assured throughout the world. He says you are ‘A Greek of the Cyclades.’ He has written of you to Reboul, ‘He is a Homer.’ He charges me to write you all that I will, and he added I cannot say too much, he is so entirely delighted. So be very happy, you and your dear mother, of whom I retain a charming remembrance.”