“We sing but for you, shepherds and people of the farms.”
I had no definite plan in commencing Mireille, except the broad lines of a love-story between two beautiful children of Provence, both with the temperament of their country though of different ranks in life, and to let the ball roll in the unpremeditated way that happens in real life, apparently at the pleasure of the winds.
Mireille, the happy name which breathes its own poetry, was destined to be that of my heroine, for I had heard it in our home from my cradle, though nowhere else.
When old Nanon, my maternal grandmother, wished to compliment one of her daughters she would say:
“That is Mireille, the beautiful Mireille of my heart!”
And my mother in fun would say sometimes of a young girl:
“There, do you see her? That is the Mireille of my heart.”
But when I questioned concerning Mireille, no one could tell me anything; hers was a lost history of which nothing remained but the name of the heroine, and a gleam of beauty lost in a mist of love. It was enough, however, to bring good fortune to a poem, which perhaps—who can tell?—was the reconstruction of a true romance, revealed through the intuition granted to the poet.
The Judge’s Farm was at this time the best of all soils for the growth of idyllic poetry. Was not this epic of Provence, with its background of blue and its frame of the Alpilles, living and singing around me? Did I not see Mireille passing, not only in my dreams of a young man, but also in actual person? Now in the sweet village maidens who came to gather mulberry leaves for the silk-worms, now in the charming white-coifed haymakers, gleaners and reapers who came and went through the corn, the hay, the olives and the vines.
And the actors of my drama, my labourers, harvesters, cowherds and shepherds, did they not gladden my eyes from early morn till eve? Could one possibly find a grander prototype for my Master Ramon than the patriarch François Mistral, he whom all the world, even my mother, called “The Master”? My dear father! Sometimes, when the work was pressing and help was needed, either for the hay or to draw water from the well, he would call out, “Where is Frédéric?” Perhaps at that moment I had crept away under a sheltering willow in pursuit of some flying rhyme, and my poor mother would answer: