And—if one comes to that—on what ground have they been divorced?
The feast of Flora was celebrated in Provence till the sixteenth century, when it was suppressed; the "mimes" and actors of antiquity were familiar figures of the Middle Ages; among them a class of women jongleurs who went about from city to city; and the wild feast of the Lupercal is said to have had its mediæval representative in this essentially pagan land.
This was the epoch when Latin had about ceased to be a living tongue, and from its corpse, so to speak, had arisen a multitude of dialects all over the Roman world, among them the Romance or Provençal, the Langue d'Oc, in which poems and legends were now written. Authors at this time were nearly always monks, but they treated their subjects with much freedom, as, for instance, in the Vision of St. Paul,[12] who descends to the Infernal Regions to visit the "cantons of hell" and to see the luckless sinners in their misery, each tormented appropriately according to the nature of their transgression. The poem was evidently a crude forerunner of the Divine Comedy.
From this popular literature the troubadour poetry of the next centuries sprang, without, however, extinguishing its predecessors, which continued to exist side by side with the new forms of art.
That character makes destiny is very clearly evidenced in Provençal history. This rich, eventful, romantic story is just what a people renowned for bonté d'esprit, grace, good looks, poetry, eloquence, sentiment, passion, must inevitably weave for themselves in the course of ages. From the time when paleolithic man was making rude stone implements and living in caves or holes in the earth, this country has been busily forming and developing the human body and soul, perhaps in a more clear and visible sequence of progress that can easily be traced elsewhere.
The variety and persistence of ancient legends and customs serves to indicate the road of evolution from stage to stage with picturesque vividness. The prehistoric is not far off in this land, where Time loses its illusory quality and seems to assume the character that all philosophers attribute to it when they speak of the Eternal Now.
The mountains contiguous to the mountains of the Moors, the beautiful Esterelles, so familiar to visitors on the Riviera, have a legend of a fairy Estelle, or Esterella, who used to be worshipped there and to receive sacrifices. The woodcutters dread the apparition. Her smile is of such unearthly beauty that any man who sees her is so fascinated that he is for ever drawn by a resistless longing to find her again, and some "have spent years leaping from crag to crag, while others have wandered away to lead the life of a hermit in forest shades." Is this a myth typifying the search after the Ideal and the Beautiful?
The Incourdoules have their Golden Goat which haunts the most inaccessible fastnesses, living in a cavern full of precious stones and treasure.[13]
One day a mysterious man appeared and began to build a cabanoun, or hut, in a lonely spot. He wore a sheepskin, red turban, and blue sash; and when a woodcutter spoke to him he laughed mockingly and cried:—
"Taragnigna, Taragnigna!