Here is the letter which Aubanel wrote to me in 1866, when he also made the pilgrimage.
“My dear Friend,—With Grivolas I have just returned from a pilgrimage to Saint-Gent. It is a wonderful, sublime, and poetical experience, and that nocturnal journey bearing the image of the saint has left on my soul a unique impression. The mayor lent us a carriage, and we followed with the pilgrims through fields and woods by the light of the moon, to the song of nightingales, from eight o’clock in the evening till past midnight. It was so impressive and mysterious—strange and beautiful—that one felt the tears start. Four youths lightly clothed in nankin, running like hares, flying like birds, set out with the sacred burden, preceded by a man on horseback, galloping and signalling their approach with pistol-shots. The people of the farms hurried out to see the saint pass, men, women, children and old people, stopped the carriers, kissing the statue, praying, weeping, gesticulating. Then off went the bearers again more swiftly than ever, while the women cried after them:
“‘Happy journey, boys.’
“And the men added:
“‘May the good saint uphold you.’
“And so they run till they pant for breath. Oh! that journey through the night, and that little troop going forth into the darkness under the protection of God and Saint-Gent, into the desert, no one knew whither. I assure you there was in all this a profound note of poetry that made an indelible impression on my mind.”
The second pilgrimage of Saint-Gent takes place in September, and it was to that we went. Now as Saint-Gent had only been canonised by the voice of the people, the priests take very little notice of him, and the townsfolk still less. It is the people of the soil who recognise the right of the good saint to be canonised, he who was simply one of themselves, spoke and worked even as they, and who, with but moderate delays, sends them the rain they pray for, and cures their fevers. His cult is so fervent that, in the narrow gorge dedicated to the legend of his memory, sometimes as many as 20,000 pilgrims are assembled.
Tradition records that Saint-Gent slept on a bed of stone with his head down and his feet up; so all the pilgrims, in a spirit of devotion not unmixed with gaiety, go and lie like fallen trees in the bed of Saint-Gent, which is a hollow formed in the sloping rock; the women also place themselves there, carefully holding each other’s skirts in a decorous position.
We, too, lay in the stone bed like the others, and I went with my mother to see the “Spring of the Wolf,” and the “Spring of the Cow.” Then on to the Chapel of Saint-Gent, surrounded by a group of old walnut-trees, and containing his tomb. And lastly, we visited the “terrible rock,” as the old canticle calls it, from whence flows the miraculous fount which cures fever.
Full of wonder at all these tales, these beliefs and visions, my soul intoxicated by the scent of the plants and the sight of this place, still hallowed by the impress of the saint’s feet, with the beautiful faith of my twelve years I drank freely of the spring, and—people may think what they please—from that moment I had no more fever. Therefore do not be astonished that the daughter of the Félibre, the poor Mireille, when lost in the Crau and dying of thirst, calls on the good Saint-Gent to come to her rescue. (Mireille, Song viii.)