In summer the “mistral,” when it blows, makes the coast towns and cities of the mouth of the Rhône, and even farther to the east and west, cool and delightful even in the hottest summer months, and it always has a great purifying and healthful influence.
Ordinarily the “mistral” is faithful to tradition, but for long months in the winter of 1905-06 it only appeared at Marseilles, and then only to disappear again immediately. The Provençal used to pray to be preserved from Æolus, son of Jupiter, but this particular season the god had forsaken all Provence. From the 31st of August to the 4th of September it blew with all its wonted vigour, with a violence which lifted roof-tiles and blew all before it, but until the first of the following March it made only fitful attempts, many of which expired before they were born.
There were occasions when it rose from its torpor and ruffled the waves of the blue Mediterranean into the white horses of the poets, but it immediately retired as if shorn of its former strength.
“C’est humiliant,” said the observer at the meteorological bureau at Marseilles, as he shut up shop and went out for his apéritif.
All Provence was marvelling at the strange anomaly, and really seemed to regret the absence of the “mistral,” though they always cursed it loudly when it was present—all but the fisherfolk of the Étang de Berre and the old men who sheltered themselves on the sunny side of a wall and made the best use possible of the “cheminée du Roi René,” as the old pipe-smokers call the glorious sun of the south, which never seems so bright and never gives out so much warmth as when the “mistral” blows its hardest.
A Martigaux or a Marseillais would rather have the “mistral” than the damp humid winds from the east or northeast, which, curiously enough, brought fog with them on this abnormal occasion. The café gossips predicted that Marseilles, their beloved Marseilles with its Cannebière and its Prado, was degenerating into a fog-bound city like London, Paris, and Lyons. At Martigues the old sailors, those who had been toilers on the deep sea in their earlier years, told weird tales of the “pea-soup” fogs of London,—only they called them purées.
One thing, however, all were certain. The “mistral” was sure to drive all this moisture-laden atmosphere away. In the words of the song they chanted, “On n’sait quand y’r’viendra.” “Va-t-il prendre enfin?” “Je ne sais pas,” and so the fishermen of Martigues, and elsewhere on the Mediterranean coast, pulled their boats up on the shore and huddled around the café stoves and talked of the mauvais temps which was always with them. What was the use of combating against the elements? The fish would not rise in what is thought elsewhere to be fishermen’s weather. They required the “mistral” and plenty of it.
The Provence of the middle ages comprised a considerably more extensive territory than that which made one of the thirty-three general gouvernements of the ancient régime. In fact it included all of the south-central portion of Languedoc, with the exception of the Comtat Venaissin (Avignon, Carpentras, etc.), and the Comté de Nice.
In Roman times it became customary to refer to the region simply as “the province,” and so, in later times, it became known as “Provence,” though officially and politically the Narbonnaise, which extended from the Pyrenees to Lyons, somewhat hid its identity, the name Provence applying particularly to that region lying between the Rhône and the Alps.
The Provence of to-day, and of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a wider region which includes the mouth of the Rhône, Marseilles, and the Riviera. It was that portion of France which first led the Roman legions northward, and, earlier even, gave a resting-place to the venturesome Greeks and Phoceans who, above all, sought to colonize wherever there was a possibility of building up great seaports. The chief Phocean colony was Marseilles, or Massilia, which was founded under the two successive immigrations of the years 600 and 542 B. C.