Respecting the Dracs, Gervase farther adds:
"There is also on the banks of the Rhone, under a guardhouse, at the North-gate of the city of Arles, a great pool of the river.... In these deep places, they say that the Dracs are often seen of bright nights, in the shape of men. A few years ago there was, for three successive days, openly heard the following words in the place outside the gate of the city, which I have mentioned, while the figure as it were of a man ran along the bank: 'The hour is passed, and the man does not come.' On the third day, about the ninth hour, while that figure of a man raised his voice higher than usual, a young man ran simply to the bank, plunged in, and was swallowed up; and the voice was heard no more."
The word Drac is apparently derived from Draco; but we are inclined to see its origin in the Northern Duerg. We must recollect that the Visigoths long occupied Provence and Languedoc. It is, we apprehend, still in use. Fa le Drac, in Provençal, signifies Faire le diable.[531] Goudelin, a Provençal poet of the seventeenth century, begins his Castel en l'Ayre with these lines:
Belomen qu' yeu faré le Drac
Se jamay trobi dins un sac
Cinc ô siés milante pistolos
Espessos como de redolos.
The following curious narrative also occurs in Gervase's work, and might seem to belong to Provence:—
"Seamen tell that one time as a ship was sailing in the Mediterranean sea, which sea we call ours, she was surrounded by an immense number of porpoises (delphinos), and that when an active young man, one of the crew, had wounded one of them with a weapon, and all the rest of them had rapidly sought the bottom, a sudden and awful tempest enveloped the ship. While the sailors were in doubt of their lives, lo! one in the form of a knight came borne on a steed on the sea, and demanded that, for the salvation of all the rest, the person who had wounded the porpoise should be delivered up to him. The sailors were in an agony between their own danger and their aversion to expose their comrade to death, which seemed to them to be most cruel, and they thought it infamous to consult their own safety at the expense of the life of another. At last the man himself, deeming it better that all should be saved at the cost of one, as they were guiltless, than that such a number of people should run the risk of destruction on account of his folly, and lest by defending him they should become guilty, devoted himself to the death he merited, and voluntarily mounted the horse behind the rider, who went over the firm water, taking his road along it as if it had been the solid land. In a short time he reached a distant region, where he found lying in a magnificent bed the knight whom he had wounded the day before as a porpoise. He was directed by his guide to pull out the weapon which was sticking in the wound, and when he had done so, the guilty right hand gave aid to the wound. This being done, the sailor was speedily brought back to the ship, and restored to his companions. Hence it is, that from that time forth sailors have ceased to hunt the porpoises."[532]
Gervase also describes the Kobold, or House-spirit, the Esprit Follet, or Goblin of the North of France.
"There are," says he, "other demons, commonly called Follets, who inhabit the houses of simple country people, and can be kept away neither by water nor exorcisms; and as they are not seen, they pelt people as they are going in at the door with stones, sticks, and domestic utensils. Their words are heard like those of men, but their form does not appear. I remember to have met several wonderful stories of them in the Vita Abbreviata, et Miraculis beatissimi Antonii."[533]