Paul Mariéton, Chancelier des Félibres.
APPENDIX
The following extract, translated from the biographical notice of Frédéric Mistral, written for “La Grande Encyclopédie” by Monsieur Paul Mariéton, for many years Chancelier des Félibres and a French poet and writer of note, takes up the history of Félibrige where the Memoirs leave off:
The unanimity of votes accorded to Mireille[20] by the members of the French Academy set the seal of sanction to the Provençal Renaissance, and reinforced Mistral himself with faith and resolution to carry out his mission. Up till that time he had said truly, as in the opening strophe of Mireille, that he “sang only for the shepherds and people of the soil!”—“What will they say at Arles?” was his one thought as he wrote Mireille. But before the completion of his epic his ambition for his native tongue had widened. The notes in the Appendix and the French translation published with the Provençal testify to this fact. Already he was beginning to realise the leading part he was about to play in the society founded at Font-Ségugne. The school of Roumanille, of which, in virtue of Mireille, Mistral was now chief, added to its members daily.
The rules of the language were now fixed, the language of the Félibres, and thanks to L’Armana (an annual publication initiated and edited by Roumanille) were little by little adopted by the people. This classic vulgate—with which Mistral, by pruning and enriching his native dialect, had, like another Dante, dowered his country—had become immortal, having given birth to a masterpiece. It now remained to give a national tendency to the movement. It was by raising the ambitions of a race, and annexing the sympathy of the “Félibres” among them, by showing them their ancestry from remotest times, and bringing to light their inalienable rights, that Mistral evolved out of a literary renaissance a great patriotic cause.
With his Ode aux Catalans (1859) and his Chant de la Coupe, Mistral sealed the alliance between the Provençals and the Catalans, their brethren both of race and tongue. This was ratified when in 1868 Mistral, together with Roumieux, Paul Meyer, and Bonaparte Wyse, met at the Barcelona fête in response to the call of the Catalonians.