But without the music, and with only these crude translations in which is lost also the music of the words, I feel that I am giving very much less than the true effect of these Provençal Christmas songs. To be appreciated, to be understood, they must be heard as I heard them: sung by that Christmas company, with Magali's tenderly vibrant voice leading the chorus in which every one of those singing Provençaux joined. Even the old grandfather—still standing at the fire-place—marked the time of the music with the knife that he held in his hand; and his thin old voice piped in with the others, and had a gay or a tender ring in it with the changing melody, for all that it was so cracked and shrill.
I am persuaded, so thoroughly did they all enjoy their own carolling, that the singing of noëls would have gone on until broad daylight had it not been for the intervention of the midnight mass. But the mass of Christmas Eve—or, rather, of Christmas morning—is a matter not only of pleasure but of obligation. Even those upon whom churchly requirements at other times rest lightly rarely fail to attend it; and to the faithful it is the most touchingly beautiful—as Easter is the most joyous—church festival of the year.
By eleven o'clock, therefore, we were under way for our walk of a mile or so down the long slope of the hill side to the village: a little clump of houses threaded by narrow crooked streets and still in part surrounded by the crusty remnant of a battlemented wall—that had its uses in the days when robber barons took their airings and when pillaging Saracens came sailing up the slack-water lower reaches of the Rhône. Down the white road in the moonlight we went in a straggling company, while more and more loudly came to us through the crisp night air the sound of the Christmas bells.
Presently some one started a very sweet and plaintive noël: fairly heart-wringing in its tender beseeching and soft lament, yet with a consoling under-note to which it constantly returned. I think, but I am not sure, that it was Roumanille's noël telling of the widowed mother who carried the cradle of her own baby to the Virgin, that the Christ-Child might not lie on straw. One by one the other voices took up the strain, until in a full chorus the sorrowingly compassionate melody went thrilling through the moonlit silence of the night.
And so, singing, we walked by the white way onward; hearing as we neared the town the songs of other companies coming up, as ours was, from outlying farms. And when they and we had passed in through the gateways—where the townsfolk of old lashed out against their robber Infidel and robber Christian enemies—all the black little narrow streets were filled with an undertone of murmuring voices and an overtone of clear sweet song.
XVI
On the little Grande Place the crowd was packed densely. There the several streams of humanity pouring into the town met and mingled; and thence in a strong current flowed onward into the church. Coming from the blackness without—for the tall houses surrounding the Grande Place cut off the moonlight and made it a little pocket of darkness—it was with a shock of splendour that we encountered the brightness within. All the side-altars were blazing with candles; and as the service went on, and the high-altar also flamed up, the whole building was filled with a soft radiance—save that strange luminous shadows lingered in the lofty vaulting of the nave.
After the high-altar, the most brilliant spot was the altar of Saint Joseph, in the west transept; beside which was a magnificent crèche—the figures half life-size, beautifully modelled, and richly clothed. But there was nothing whimsical about this crèche: the group might have been, and very possibly had been, composed after a well-painted "Nativity" by some artist of the late Renaissance.
The mass was the customary office; but at the Offertory it was interrupted by a ceremony that gave it suddenly an entirely Mediæval cast: of which I felt more fully the beauty, and the strangeness in our time, because the Vidame sedulously had guarded against my having knowledge of it in advance. This was nothing less than a living rendering of the Adoration of the Shepherds: done with a simplicity to make one fancy the figures in Ghirlandojo's picture were alive again and stirred by the very spirit that animated them when they were set on canvas four hundred years ago.