Grace always is said before the Great Supper—a simple formula ending with the prayer of the yule-log that if another year there are no more, there may be no less. It is the custom that this blessing shall be asked by the youngest child of the family who can speak the words: a pretty usage which sometimes makes the blessing go very queerly indeed. Our little Tounin came to the front again in this matter, exhibiting an air of grave responsibility which showed that he had been well drilled; and it was with quite a saintly look on his little face that he folded his hands together and said very earnestly: "God bless all that we are going to eat, and if we are no less next year may we be no more!" At which everybody looked at Janetoun and laughed.
In our seating a due order of precedence was observed. Old Jan, the head of the family, presided, with the Vidame and myself on his right and with Elizo's father and mother on his left; and thence the company went downward by age and station to the foot of the table, where were grouped the servants from the Château and the workmen on the farm. But no other distinction was made. All were served alike and all drank together as equals when the toasts were called. The servers were Elizo and Janetoun, with Nanoun and Magali for assistants; and those four, although they took their places at the table when each course had been brought on, had rather a Passover time of it: for they ate as it were with their loins girded and with full or empty dishes imminent to their hands.
The stout Nanoun—whose robust body thrills easily to superstitious fears—was still farther handicapped in her own eating by her zealous effort so to stuff the family cat as to give that animal no excuse for uttering evil-portending miaus. For it is well known that should the family cat fall to miauing on Christmas Eve, and especially while the supper is in progress, very dreadful things surely will happen to the family during the ensuing year. Fortunately Nanoun's preventive measures averted this calamity; yet were they like to have overshot their mark. Only the cat's natural abstemiousness saved her that night from dying of a surfeit—and in agony surely provocative of the very cries which Nanoun sought to restrain!
As I have said, the Great Supper must be "lean," and is restricted to certain dishes which in no wise can be changed; but a rich leanness is possible in a country where olive-oil takes the place of animal fat in cooking, and where the accumulated skill of ages presides over the kitchen fire. The principal dish is the raïto—a ragout made of delicately fried fish served in a sauce flavoured with wine and capers—whereof the tradition goes back a round twenty-five hundred years: to the time when the Phokæan housewives brought with them to Massalia (the Marseille of to-day) the happy mystery of its making from their Grecian homes. But this excellent dish was not lost to Greece because it was gained to Gaul: bearing the same name and made in the same fashion it is eaten by the Greeks of the present day. It usually is made of dried codfish in Provence, where the cod is held in high esteem; but is most delicately toothsome when made of eels.
The second course of the Great Supper also is fish, which may be of any sort and served in any way—in our case it was a perch-like variety of dainty pan-fish, fresh from the Rhône. A third course of fish sometimes is served, but the third course usually is snails cooked in a rich brown sauce strongly flavoured with garlic. The Provençal snails, which feed in a gourmet fashion upon vine-leaves, are peculiarly delicious—and there was a murmur of delight from our company as the four women brought to the table four big dishes full of them; and for a while there was only the sound of eager munching, mixed with the clatter on china of the empty shells. To extract them, we had the strong thorns, three or four inches long, of the wild acacia; and on these the little brown morsels were carried to the avid mouths and eaten with a bit of bread sopped in the sauce—and then the shell was subjected to a vigorous sucking, that not a drop of the sauce lingering within it should be lost.
To the snails succeeded another dish essentially Provençal, carde. The carde is a giant thistle that grows to a height of five or six feet, and is so luxuriantly magnificent both in leaf and in flower that it deserves a place among ornamental plants. The edible portion is the stem—blanched like celery, which it much resembles, by being earthed-up—cooked with a white sauce flavoured with garlic. The garlic, however, is a mistake, since it overpowers the delicate taste of the carde—but garlic is the overlord of all things eatable in Provence. I was glad when we passed on to the celery, with which the first section of the supper came to an end.
The second section was such an explosion of sweets as might fly into space should a comet collide with a confectioner's shop—nougat, fougasso, a great poumpo, compotes, candied-fruits, and a whole nightmare herd of rich cakes on which persons not blessed with the most powerful organs of digestion surely would go galloping to the country of dreadful dreams. This was prodigality; but even the bare requirements of the case were lavish, the traditional law of the Great Supper ordaining that not fewer than seven different sweets shall be served. Misè Fougueiroun, however, was not the person to stand upon the parsimonious letter of any eating law. Here had been her opportunity, and she had run amuck through all the range of sugary things!
Of the dessert of nuts and fruit the notable features were grapes and winter-melons. Possibly because they are an obscure survival of some Bacchic custom connected with the celebration of the winter solstice, the grapes are considered a very necessary part of the Great Supper; but as Provençal grapes are of a soft substance and soon wither, though a world of care is taken to preserve a few bunches until Christmas, this part of the feast usually is a ceremony rather than a satisfaction.
But our melons were a pure vegetable delight. These winter-melons are a species of cantaloupe, but of a firmer texture than the summer fruit, sowed late in the season and laid away a little green on beds of straw in cool and dark and well-aired rooms. Thus cared for, they will keep until the end of January; but they are preserved especially for Christmas, and few survive beyond that day. They are of American origin: as I discovered quite by chance while reading a collection of delightful letters, but lately published, written near three hundred years ago by Dr. Antoine Novel; that Provençal naturalist, whom Buffon quotes under the wrongly Latinized name of Natalis, sometime physician to the Duke of Medina-Sidonia in Spain. He was a rolling stone of a naturalist, the excellent Novel; but his gatherings were many, and most of them were for the benefit of his beloved Provence. It was from "Sainct Luquar," under date of March 24, 1625, that he wrote to his friend Peiresc in Aix: "I send you by the Patron Armand a little box in which are two specimens of ore ... and ten sorts of seeds of the most exquisite fruits and flowers of the Indies; and to fill the chinks I have put in the seeds of winter-melons." And in a letter of June 12th, following, he wrote: "I hope that you have received my letter sent by the Patron Armand of Martigues, who sailed in Holy Week for that town, by whom I sent you some seeds of exquisite fruits and flowers of the Indies, together with two specimens of ore, the one from Potosí and the other from Terra-Firma, and also a box of seven winter-melons of that country." And so the winter-melons came into Provence from somewhere on the Spanish Main. I could wish that my gentleman had been a bit more definite in his geography. As he leaves the matter, his melons may have come from anywhere between the Orinoco and Florida; and down in that region somewhere, no doubt, they still are to be found.
With the serious part of the supper we drank the ordinary small wine diluted with water; but with the dessert was paraded a gallant company of dusty bottles containing ancient vintages which through many ripening years had been growing richer by feeding upon their own excellence in the wine-room of the Mazet or the cellar of the Château. All were wines of the country, it being a point of honour in Provençal households of all degrees that only from Provençal vineyards—or from the near-by vineyards of Languedoc—shall come the Christmas wines. Therefore we drank rich and strong Tavel, and delicate Ledenon, and heavy Frontignan—the cloyingly-sweet Mouscat de Maroussa—and home-made champagne (the clairette, with a superabundance of pop and fizz but undeniably cider-like), and at last, for a climax, old Châteauneuf-du-Pape: the dean of the Provençal vinous faculty, rich, smooth, delicate, with a slightly aromatic after-taste that the dallying bees bring to the vine-blossoms from the blossoms of the wild-thyme. Anciently it filled the cups over which chirped the sprightly Popes of Avignon; and in later times, only forty years back, it was the drink of the young Félibrien poets—Mistral, Roumanille, Aubanel, Mathieu and the rest—while they tuned and set a-going their lyres. But it is passing into a tradition now. The old vines, the primitive stock, were slain by the phylloxera, and the new vines planted to replace them do not produce a wine like that over which Popes and poets once were gay. Only in rich old cellars, such as that of Vièlmur, may still be found a bin or two of dust-grey Papal veterans: survivors of the brave army that has gurgled its life out in a happy past!