The popular ballads of some of the southern nations give us the legend of the Magdalen without mixture.
French. A, Poésies populaires de la France, I (not paged), from Sermoyer, Ain, thirty lines, made stanzas by repetition. Mary goes from door to door seeking Jesus. He asks what she wants: she answers, To be shriven. Her sins have been such, she says, that the earth ought not to bear her up, the trees that see her can but tremble. For penance she is to stay seven years in the woods of Baume, eat the roots of the trees, drink the dew, and sleep under a juniper. Jesus comes to inquire about her when this space has expired. She says she is well, but her hands, once white as flower-de-luce, are now black as leather. For this Jesus requires her to stay seven years longer, and then, being thoroughly cured of her old vanities, she is told,
'Marie Magdeleine, allez au paradis;
La porte en est ouverte depuis hier à midi.'
B is nearly the same legend in Provençal: Damase Arbaud, I, 64. The penance is seven years in a cave, at the end of which Jesus passes, and asks Mary what she has had to eat and drink. "Wild roots, and not always them; muddy water, and not always that." The conclusion is peculiar. Mary expresses a wish to wash her hands. Jesus pricks the rock, and water gushes out. She bewails the lost beauty of her hands, and is remanded to the cavern for another seven years. Upon her exclaiming at the hardship, Jesus tells her that Martha shall come to console her, the wood-dove fetch her food, the birds drink. But Mary is not reconciled:
'Lord God, my good father,
Make me not go back again!
With the tears from my eyes
I will wash my hands clean.
'With the tears from my eyes
I will wash your feet,
And then I will dry them
With the hair of my head.'
C, Poésies populaires de la Gascogne, Bladé, 1881, p. 339; 'La pauvre Madeleine,' seventeen stanzas of four short lines, resembles B till the close. When Jesus comes back after the second penance, and Mary says, as she had before, that she has lived like the beasts, only she has lacked water, Jesus again causes water to spring from the rock. But Mary says, I want no water. I should have to go back to the cave for another seven years. She is conducted straightway to paradise.
D, Bladé, as before, p. 183, 'Marie-Madeleine,' six stanzas of five short lines. Mary is sent to the mountains for seven years' penance; at the end of that time washes her hands in a brook, and is guilty of admiring them; is sent back to the mountains for seven years, and is then taken to heaven.
A Catalan ballad combines the legend of the Magdalen's penance with that of her conversion: Milá, Observaciones, p. 128, No 27, 'Santa Magdalena,' and Briz y Saltó, Cansons de la Terra, II, 99. Martha, returning from church, asks Magdalen, who is combing her hair with a gold comb, if she has been at mass. Magdalen says no, nor had she thought of going. Martha advises her to go, for she certainly will fall in love with the preacher, a young man; pity that he ever was a friar. Magdalen attires herself with the utmost splendor, and, to hear the sermon better, takes a place immediately under the pulpit. The first word of the sermon touched her; at the middle she fainted. She stripped off all her ornaments, and laid them at the preacher's feet. At the door of the church she inquired of a penitent where Jesus was to be found. She sought him out at the house of Simon, washed his feet with her tears, and wiped them with her hair, picked up from the floor the bones which he had thrown away. Jesus at last noticed her, and asked what she wished. She wished to confess. He imposed the penance of seven years on a mountain, "eating herbs and fennels, eating bitter herbs." Magdalen turned homewards after the seven years, and found on the way a spring, where she washed her hands, with a sigh over their disfigurement. She heard a voice that said, Magdalen, thou hast sinned. She asked for new penance, and was sent back to the mountain for seven years more. At the end of this second term she died, and was borne to the skies with every honor from the Virgin, saints, and angels.