It is the Homeric character of the life that has inspired the poet; he saw in it a grandeur that we have been taught to imagine belongs only to the times of the ancients; probably because those times have been shown to us through the eyes of genius. But the Provence of to-day has also its seer who reveals its qualities of grandeur: the poet of Maillane.
After our visit to Les Baux we lost no time in reading the translation of the cantos in Mireille telling of the descent into the Witch's Grotto. Vincent and Mireille are there introduced to the Thirteenth Cavern, where they find domesticated on the hearth seven black cats and two dragons quietly emitting jets of blue flame without the slightest signs of arrogance, but simply as part of the day's work. Tavèn makes a brew in her cauldron and heals the wound which Vincent's rival had inflicted. Then they return to their homes, solaced for the time. But tragedy awaits them. The father's opposition is brought to a head when Vincent formally proposes for Mireille, and her parents are so angry and so resolved to marry her to the wealthy cattle-owner of the Camargue, that one dark night she runs away from her home, directing her steps to the church of the Saintes Maries, to seek aid by her prayers. We find her in the last canto a desolate, fragile figure crossing the Crau. She arrives at last in the island of the Camargue, and reaches, dying, the white church where the three holy women float down through the roof in answer to her prayers.
"We are Baux' guardian saints," they cry, bidding her take comfort.
And they go on to tell her that she would not fear death if she knew how small her little world appears from their high dwellings: "how ripening hopes are washed away with tears," while hatred and cruelty breed sorrow where love should shed peace over all the world.
However, before they understood all these things, they had, like Mireille, to drain bitter cups to the dregs. They tell her of their hopeless wanderings; how they were delivered over to the mercy of the waves and landed in Provence where their task was to convert the people to Christianity; how St. Martha was impelled to go to Tarascon to lure the Tarasque from its wicked ways; and how she afterwards went to Avignon, "striking the rock with her virginal discourse," and willing the waves of faith to pour from it, whence long afterwards "Good Gregory drank, and Holy Clement filled his cup with life."
Just at the last, when Mireille is dying under the care of the Saints, her distracted father and Vincent, broken-hearted, arrive, but only just in time to see her pass peacefully away into the silence.
From the windows of our rooms one can see above the trees the fantastic summits of the Alpilles. They are clear against a "jewel-enamelled sky."
The roses are exhaling their fragrance in the dark garden just below; now and then the omnibus horses peacefully move in their stalls, perhaps going over again in their dreams the happy homeward journey after the last train.
It is not yet late, but St. Remy has gone to its rest; only the stars are awake and watching.
The sweet night air comes in quietly at the window which has been unbolted and thrown open—not without giant efforts, for French precautions against the dangerous element are thorough and hard to circumvent.