“What are you saying, you foolish woman? Two fête-days a year! Mother of God! That would mean death to pilgrimages. To keep the custom going, everything must be just as it is and nothing change at all. Our men know that well enough. Remember the visit the Archbishop of Aix and those great ladies paid us twenty years ago.”
And once more the story was told of the visit of the Archbishop of Aix to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer twenty or thirty years before.
On a certain 24th of May the archbishop arrived at Saintes-Maries with several elderly ladies of the nobility of Aix. But it so happened that that 24th of May was the evening of the 25th! Anybody may be mistaken!—So that, instead of being lowered at four o’clock, the reliquaries were raised again on that day, and when monseigneur entered the church with his fair companions, it was good-by, saints! They had already been hoisted up at the end of their ropes to the lofty chapel, amid the singing of canticles.
“Oh! well!” said the archbishop to the curé, “they must come down again for us.”
The curé was about to obey, but a rumor of what was going on had already spread through the village!—Ah! bless my soul, what a commotion!
“What!” said the old villagers. “They would lower the reliquaries on some other day than the 24th, would they? Why, if it is such a simple thing and can be done so often, why do you make the poor devils from every corner of Provence and all the rest of the world come hurrying to us on a special day? No, no, it would be the ruin of the country, that is certain!”
To make a long story short, the people of Saintes-Maries took their guns, and under arms, in the church itself, compelled the prince of the Church to respect the sovereign will of the people of the town.
And they did very well, for rarity is the quality by virtue of which miracles retain their value.
One of the women having told this anecdote, which was perfectly well known to them all, they began, as soon as she had finished, to make up for their long silence by loud talk, vying with one another in their approval of the villagers’ revolt against the bishops, who would have abused the good-will of the two Maries.
“We are very lucky, all the same,” said one of the old women, “to have a good well with good stone walls instead of the brackish spring the saints had to get their drinking-water from. I can remember the time when we got our water from the pousaraque (artificial pond), as the people on our farms do to-day. The Rhône water that was brought into them through the canals was always so thick and muddy you could cut it with a knife!”