The white owl hooted. Fear seized us, and huddling together we turned homewards, munching the cakes and figs we had brought for the kings.
Our mothers greeted us with, “Well, did you see them?”
Sadly we answered, “Only afar—they passed behind the mountain.”
“But which road did you take?”
“The road to Arles.”
“Oh, poor lambs—but the kings never come by that road. They come from the East—you should have taken the Roman road. Ah dear, what a pity, you should have seen them enter Maillane. It was a beautiful sight, with their tambours and trumpets, the pages and the camels—it was a show! Now they are gone to the church to offer their adoration. After supper you shall go and see them!”
We supped with speed, I at my grandmother’s, and then we ran to the church. It was crowded, and, as we entered, the voices of all the people, accompanied by the organ, burst forth into the superbly majestic Christmas hymn:
This morn I met the train
Of the three great kings from the East;
This morn I met the train
Of the kings on the wide high road.
We children, fascinated, threaded our way between the women, till we reached the Chapel of the Nativity. There, suspended above the altar, was the beautiful star, and bowing the knee in adoration before the Holy Child we beheld at last the three kings. Gaspard, with his crimson mantle, offering a casket of gold; Melchior, arrayed in yellow, bearing in his hands a gift of incense; and Balthazar, with his cloak of blue, presenting a vase of the sadly prophetic myrrh. How we admired the finely dressed pages who upheld the kings’ flowing mantles, and the great humped camels whose heads rose high above the sacred ass and ox; also the Holy Virgin and Saint Joseph, besides all the wonderful background, a little mountain in painted paper with shepherds and shepherdesses bringing hearth-cakes, baskets of eggs, swaddling clothes, the miller with a sack of corn, the old woman spinning, the knife-grinder at his wheel, the astonished innkeeper at his window, in short, all the traditional crowd who figure in the Nativity, and, above and beyond all, the Moorish king.
Many a time since those early days it has chanced that I have found myself upon the road to Arles at this same Epiphany season about dusk. Still the robin and the wren haunt the long hawthorn hedge. Still some poor old beggar may be seen searching for snails in the ditch, and still the hoot of the owl breaks the stillness of the winter evening. But in the rays of the setting sun I see no more the glory and crowns of the old kings.