Round farmstead and garden, along her banks, and far away on the great spaces of this wonderful country, long, tall rows of cypresses keep guard over house and home; for only these steadfast trees of Wisdom and of Sorrow can stand against the fury of the mistral. For unnumbered ages, long, long before all human history or tradition, he has lorded it over the country, descending after the fashion of the ancient Ligurian inhabitants from the hill-tops, for raid and ravage in the valleys.
Many have been his victims from first to last; among them the daughter to whom Madame de Sévigné addresses her famous letters. She suffers from his onslaught upon her Provençal château of Grignan, which was nearly destroyed by the monster; unless, indeed, the lady is romancing a little to keep her lively mother amused and quiet; for Madame de Sévigné writes: "Vous dépeignez cette horreur comme Virgile!"
A householder seriously damaged in his property would be most unlikely to describe the disaster thus classically. Perhaps a chimney or two blown off and a roof carried away may have stimulated Madame de Grignan's fancy. There were always those letters to be written and a certain dearth of subjects for a lady besieged by the mistral in a Provençal château. What Madame de Grignan must have said one gathers from the mother's reply—
"Voila le vent, le tourbillon, l'ouragon, les diables déchainés, qui veulent emporter votre château.... Ah ma fille, quelle ébranlement universel!"
The mother recommends taking refuge in Avignon; a curious place to flee to from such a foe! But in those days there was no swift flight possible, and a removal from the howling country to the whistling town was all that could be achieved even by the wealthy. One wonders how the removal of a household was effected when there were no railways and probably few roads—and a mistral at full tilt across the plains!
Poets of all ages have sung of the feats of the amazing wind, and there are descriptions of its furious descent upon the Crau, where in default of anything better to wreak its anger upon, it sends the stones hurling across the plain. Nothing can stand against it. Mistral says that in tempest "il souffle toujours. Les arbres ... se courbent, se secouent à arracher leurs troncs."
The ancients assigned a place to the great wind among their deities, and the Emperor Augustus erected a temple in its honour. It is curious how this pagan feeling of personality in the wind survives to this day.
Its famous namesake, the Provençal poet, whose home is at Maillane, on the great plain among the guardian cypresses, expresses the sentiment in a hundred forms, and he adduces a still more striking instance in the account he once gave of his father—a fine specimen of the Provençal farmer or yeoman—who had a positive adoration for "le bon vent."
"Le jour ou l'on vannait le blé, souvent il n'y avait pas un souffle d'air pour emporter la poussière blonde, alors, mon père avait recours a une sorte d'invocation au mistral.
"Souffle mon mignon, disait il, et il priait et implorait.