The Christmas Kalends of Provence / And Some Other Provençal Festivals

by Thomas A. Janvier

By long experience, gained on many such occasions, the Vidame knew that the culminating point of the supper would be reached when the family drummer swam the river and headed the French charge at Arcolo. Therefore had he reserved until a later period, when the excitement incident to the revival of that honourable bit of family history should have subsided, a joy-giving bomb-shell of his own that he had all ready to explode. An American or an Englishman never could have fired it without something in the way of speech-making; but the Vidame was of a shy temper, and speech-making was not in his line. When the chatter caused by Magali's costuming had lulled a little, and there came a momentary pause in the talk, he merely reached diagonally across the table and touched glasses with Esperit and said simply: "To your good health, Monsieur the Superintendent of the Lower Farm!"

It was done so quietly that for some seconds no one realized that the Vidame's toast brought happiness to all the household, and to two of its members a life-long joy. Esperit, even, had his glass almost to his lips before he understood to what he was drinking; and then his understanding came through the finer nature of Magali—who gave a quick deep sob as she buried her face in the buxom Nanoun's bosom and encircled that astonished young person's neck with her arms. Esperit went pale at that; but the hand did not tremble in which he held his still-raised glass, nor did his voice quaver as he said with a deep earnestness: "To the good health of Monsieur le Vidame, with the thanks of two very happy hearts!"—and so drained his wine.

A great danger puts no more strain upon the nerves of a man of good fibre than does a great joy; and it seemed to me that Esperit's absolute steadiness, under this sudden fire of happiness, showed him to be made of as fine and as manly stuff as went to the making of his kinsman who beat the pas-de-charge up the slope at Arcolo at the head of the Fifty-first Demi-brigade.

But nothing less than the turbulence of the whole battle of Arcolo—not to say of that whole triumphant campaign in Italy—will suffice for a comparison with the tumult that arose about our supper-table when the meaning of the Vidame's toast fairly was grasped by the company at large! I do not think that I could express in words—nor by any less elaborate method of illustration than a kinetoscope—the state of excitement into which a Provençal will fly over a matter of absolutely no importance at all; how he will burst forth into a very whirlwind of words and gestures about some trifle that an ordinary human being would dispose of without the quiver of an eye. And as our matter was one so truly moving that a very Dutchman through all his phlegm would have been stirred by it, such a tornado was set a-going as would have put a mere hurricane of the tropics to open shame!

Naturally, the disturbance was central over Esperit and Magali and the Vidame. The latter—his kind old face shining like the sun of an Easter morning—gave back with a good will on Magali's cheeks her kisses of gratitude; and exchanged embraces and kisses with the elder women; and went through such an ordeal of violent hand-shaking that I trembled for the integrity of his arms. But as for the young people, whom everybody embraced over and over again with a terrible energy, that they came through it all with whole ribs is as near to being a miracle as anything that has happened in modern times!

Gradually the storm subsided—though not without some fierce after-gusts—and at last worked itself off harmlessly in song: as we returned to the ritual of the evening and took to the singing of noëls—the Christmas canticles which are sung between the ending of the Great Supper and the beginning of the midnight mass.

XIV

The Provençal noëls—being some real, or some imagined, incident of the Nativity told in verse set to a gay or tender air—are the crèche translated into song. The simplest of them are direct renderings of the Bible narrative. Our own Christmas hymn, "While shepherds watched their flocks by night," is precisely of this order; and, indeed, is of the very period when flourished the greatest of the Provençal noël writers: for the Poet Laureate Nahum Tate, whose laurel this hymn keeps green, was born in the year 1652 and had begun his mildly poetic career while Saboly still was alive.

But most of the noëls—nouvè, they are called in Provençal—are purely imaginative: quaintly innocent stories created by the poets, or taken from those apocryphal scriptures in which the simple-minded faithful of Patristic times built up a warmly coloured legend of the Virgin's life and of the birth and childhood of her Son. Sometimes, even, the writers stray away entirely from a religious base and produce mere roistering catches or topical songs. Such are those Marseille noëls which are nothing more than Pantagruelian lists of succulent dishes proper to Christmas time—frankly ending, in one case, with the materialistic query: "What do I care for the future, now that my belly is well lined?" It was against such "bacchanals of noël" that the worthy Father Cotton preached in Marseille in the year 1602: but the flesh and the devil always have had things pretty much their own way in that gay city, and he preached in vain. And at Aix-en-Provence the most popular noël of all that were sung in the cathedral was a satirical review of the events of the year: that as time went on grew to be more and more of a scandal, until at last the Bishop had to put a stop to it in the year 1653.