The end came at last in a characteristic manner. We had, as I have said, a negro as cook, and one fine day this individual, without warning, packed his box and disappeared. This was the signal for a general disbanding. No cook meant no broth for us, and the professors one by one left us in the lurch. Monsieur Donnat was, as usual, absent. His mother, poor old soul, tried her hand for a day or two at boiling potatoes, but one morning the old father Donnat told us sadly: “My children, there are no more potatoes to boil—you had better all go home!”
And at once, like a flock of kids let loose from the fold, we ran off to gather tufts of thyme from the hills to carry away as a remembrance of this beautiful and beloved country—for Frigolet signifies in the Provençal tongue a place where thyme abounds.
Then, shouldering our little bundles, by twos and threes we scattered over the valleys and hills, some up, some down, but none of us without many a backward look and sigh of regret at departing.
Poor Monsieur Donnat! After all his efforts in every direction to make his school a success, he ended his days, alas! in the almshouse.
But before taking leave of St. Michel de Frigolet, I must add one word as to what became of the old monastery. After being abandoned for twelve years it was bought by a White Monk, Father Edmond. In 1854 he restored it under the Law of Saint-Norbert, the Order of Prémontré, which had ceased to exist in France. Thanks to the activity, the preaching and collecting of this zealous missioner, the little monastery fast grew into importance. Numerous buildings, crowned with embattled walls, were added; a new church, magnificently ornamented, raised its three naves, surmounted by a couple of big clock-towers. A hundred monks or lay brothers peopled the cells, and every Sunday all the neighbourhood mounted the hillside to witness the pomp of the High Mass. In 1880 the Abbot of the White Brothers had become so popular that upon the Republic ordering the closing of the convents, over a thousand peasants came up from the plain and shut themselves in the monastery to protest in person against the radical decree. And it was then that we saw a whole army in marching order—cavalry, infantry, generals and captains, with baggage waggons and all the apparatus of war—camping around the monastery of St. Michel de Frigolet, seriously going through this comic-opera siege, which four or five policemen, had they chosen, could easily have brought to a termination.
Every morning during this siege, which lasted a week, the country people, taking their provisions, posted themselves on the hills and spurs of the mountains which dominated the monastery, and watched from afar the progress of events. The prettiest sight I well remember was the girls from Barbentane, Boulbon, Saint-Rémy, and Maillane, encouraging the besieged with enthusiastic singing and waving of kerchiefs:
Catholic and Provençal,
Our faith shall know no fear.
With ardour let us cheer,
Catholic and Provençal.
This was alternated with invectives, jokes, and hootings addressed to the officers, as the latter marched past with fierce aspect. Excepting only the genuine indignation aroused by the injustice of these proceedings in every heart, it would be hard to find a more burlesque siege than this of Frigolet, which furnished the subject of Sinnibaldi Doria’s “Siege of Caderousse,” and also a heroic poem by the Abbé Faire, neither of them half as comic as the original. Alphonse Daudet, who had already written of the convent of the White Brothers in his story “The Elixir of Brother Gaucher,” also gave us, in his last romance on Tarascon, the hero Tartarin valiantly joining the besieged in the Convent of Saint-Michel.
CHAPTER VI
AT MONSIEUR MILLET’S SCHOOL
After that experience, my parents had to find me another school, not too distant from Maillane, nor of too exalted a condition, for we country people were not proud. So they placed me at a school in Avignon, with Monsieur Millet, who lived in the Rue Pétramale.