Frederic Mistral Part 13

To believe leads to victory. Doubt is the narcotic, and the poison in the barrel, and the euphorbia in the stream.

"E, quand lou pople a perdu fe, L'infer abrivo si boufet."

And when the people have lost faith, h.e.l.l sets its bellows blowing.

Then later we read: "What is this world? A wager between Christ and the Demon. Thousands of years ago he challenged G.o.d, and when the great game began, they played with great loose rocks from the hills, at quoits, and if any one is unwilling to believe this, let him go to Mount Leberon and see the stone thrown by Satan."

So we see that the theology was merely a means of leading up to a local legend.

The story is briefly as follows: Nerto, like all Mistral's heroines, is exceedingly young, thirteen years of age. Her father, the Baron Pons, had gambled away everything he owned in this world, when she was a very little child, and while walking along a lonely road one night he met the Devil, who took advantage of his despair to tempt him with the sight of heaps of money. The wretched father sold his daughter's soul to the Evil One. Now on his death-bed he tells his child the fearful tale; one means of salvation lies open for her--she must go to the Pope. Benedict XIII is besieged in the great palace at Avignon, but the Baron knows of a secret pa.s.sage from his castle leading under the river Durance to one of the towers of the papal residence. He bids Nerto go to seek deliverance from the bond, and to make known to the Pope the means of escape. Nerto reaches the palace at the moment when all is in great commotion, for the enemy have succeeded in setting it on fire. She is first seen by the Pope's nephew Don Rodrigue, an exceedingly wicked young man, a sort of brawling Don Juan, who seems to have been guilty of numerous a.s.sa.s.sinations. He immediately begins to talk love to the maiden, as the means of saving her from the Devil, "the path of love is full of flowers and leads to Paradise." But Nerto has been taught that the road to Heaven is full of stones and thorns, and her innocence saves her from the pa.s.sionate outburst of the licentious youth. And Nerto is taken to the Pope, whom she finds sadly enthroned in all his splendor, and brings him the news of a means of escape. The last Pope of Avignon bearing the sacred elements, _pourtant soun Dieu_, follows the maiden through the underground pa.s.sage, and escapes with all his followers. At Chateau-Renard he sets up his court with the King of Forcalquier, Naples, and Jerusalem and Donna Iolanthe his Queen. Nerto asks the Pope to save her soul, but he is powerless. Only a miracle can save a soul sold to Satan. She must enter a convent, and pray to the Saints continually. The Court is about to move to Arles, she shall enter the convent there. On the way, Don Rodrigue makes love to her a.s.siduously, but the young girl's heart seems untroubled.

At Arles we witness a great combat of animals, in which the lion of Arles, along with four bulls, is turned loose in the arena. The lion kills all but one of the bulls. The fourth beast, enraged, gores the lion. The royal brute rushes among the spectators and makes for the King's throne. Nerto and the Queen are crouching in terror before him, when Don Rodrigue slays the animal, saving Nerto's life. Nay, he saves more than her life, for had she died then she would have been a prey to the flames of h.e.l.l.

Nerto becomes a nun, but Don Rodrigue, with a band of ribald followers, succeeds in carrying her off with all the other nuns. They are all driven by the King's soldiers into the cemetery of the Aliscamps. Nerto wanders away during the battle and is lost among the tombs. At dawn the next day she strays far out to a forest, where she finds a hermit. The old man welcomes her, and believes he can save her soul. The Angel Gabriel visits him frequently, and he will speak to him. But the Angel disapproves, condemns the pride of the anchorite, and soars away to the stars without a word of hope or consolation, and so in great anxiety the pious man bids her go back to the convent, and prays Saint Gabriel, Saint Consortia, Saint Tullia, Saint Gent, Saint Verdeme, Saint Julien, Saint Trophime, Saint Formin, and Saint Stephen to accompany her.

Don Rodrigue is living in a palace built for him in one night by the Devil, wherein are seven halls, each devoted to one of the seven mortal sins. Hither Nerto wanders; here Rodrigue finds her, and begins his pa.s.sionate love-making afresh. But Nerto remains true to her vows, although the germ of love has been in her heart since the day Rodrigue saved her from the lion. On learning that she is in the Devil's castle, she is filled with terror, believing the fatal day has arrived. She confesses her love. The maiden cries: "Woe is me, Nerto loves you, but if h.e.l.l should swallow us up, would there be any love for the d.a.m.ned?

Rodrigue, no, there is none. If you would but break the tie that binds you, if, with one happy wing-stroke, you could soar up to the summits where lives last forever, where hearts vanish united in the bosom of G.o.d, I should be delivered, it seems to me, in the same upward impulse; for, in heaven or in the abyss, I am inseparable from you." Rodrigue replies sadly, that his past is too dreadful, that only the ocean could wipe it out. "Rodrigue, one burst of repentance is worth a long penance.

Courage, come, only one look toward Heaven!" The Devil appears. He swells with pride in this, his finest triumph; black souls he has in plenty, but since the beginning of his reign over the lower regions he has never captured an immaculate victim like this soul. Rodrigue inverts his sword, and at the sign of the cross, a terrific hurricane sweeps away the palace, Don Rodrigue, and the Devil, and nothing is left but a nun of stone who is still visible in the midst of a field on the site of the chateau. In an Epilogue we learn from the Archangel who visits the hermit that the knight and the maiden were both saved.

It is difficult to characterize the curious combination of levity and seriousness that runs through this tale. There is no illusion of reality anywhere; there is no agony of soul in Baron Pon's confession; Nerto's terror when she learns that she is the property of the Devil is far from impressive, because she says too much, with expressions that are too pretty, perhaps because the rippling octosyllabic verse, in Provencal at least, cannot be serious; it is hardly worth while to mention the objection that if the Devil can be worsted at any time merely by inverting a sword, especially when the sword is that of an a.s.sa.s.sin and a rake, whose repentance is scarcely touched upon and is by no means disinterested, it is clear that the Demon has wasted his time at a very foolish game; a religious mind might feel a deeper sort of reverence for the Archangels than is evinced here. Yet it cannot be said that the poem parodies things sacred and sublime, and it appears to be utterly without philosophical intention. Mistral really has to a surprising degree the navete of writers of former centuries, and as regards the tale itself and its general treatment it could almost have been written by a contemporary of the events it relates.

IV. LOU POUeMO DoU ROSE

The _Poem of the Rhone_, the third of the poems in twelve cantos that Mistral has written, appeared in 1897. It completes the symmetry of his life work; the former epics extolled the life of the fields, the mountains, and the sea, the last glorifies the beautiful river that brings life to his native soil. More than either of the other long poems, it is an act of affection for the past, for the Rhone of the poem is the Rhone of his early childhood, before the steam-packets churned its waters, or the railroads poured up their smoke along its banks.

Although the poet has interwoven in it a tale of merest fancy, it is essentially realistic, differing notably in this respect from Calendau.

This realism descends to the merest details, and the poetic quality of the work suffers considerably in many pa.s.sages. The poet does not shrink from minute enumeration of cargoes, or technical description of boats, or word-for-word reproduction of the idle talk of boatwomen, or the apparently inexhaustible profanity of the boatmen. The life on the river is vividly portrayed, and we put down the book with a sense of really having made the journey from Lyons to Beaucaire with the fleet of seven boats of Master Apian.

On opening the volume the reader is struck first of all with the novel versification. It is blank verse, the line being precisely that of Dante's _Divina Commedia_. Not only is there no rhyme, but a.s.sonance is very carefully avoided. The effect of this unbroken succession of feminine verses is slightly monotonous, though the poet shifts his pauses skilfully. The rhythm of the lines is marked, the effect upon the ear being quite like that of English iambic pentameters hypercatalectic.

The absence of rhyme is the more noteworthy in that rhyme offers little difficulty in Provencal. Doubtless the poet was pleased to show an additional claim to superiority for his speech over the French as a vehicle for poetic thought; for while on the one hand the rules of rhyme and hiatus give the poet writing in Provencal less trouble than when writing in French, on the other hand this poem proves that splendid blank verse may be written in the new language.

The plan of the poem is briefly as follows: it describes the departure of a fleet of boats from Lyons, accompanies them down the river to Beaucaire, describes the fair and the return up the river, the boats being hauled by eighty horses; narrates the collision with a steamboat coming down the stream, which drags the animals into the water, setting the boats adrift in the current, destroying them and their cargo, and typifying as it were the ruin of the old traffic on the Rhone. The river itself is described, its dangerous shoals, its beautiful banks, its towns and castles. We learn how the boats were manuvred; the life on board and the ideas of the men are set before us minutely. Legends and stories concerning the river and the places along the sh.o.r.es abound, of course; and into this general background is woven the tale of a Prince of Orange and a little maiden called the Anglore, two of the curiously half-real, half-unreal beings that Mistral seems to love to create. The Prince comes on board the fleet, intending to see Orange and Provence; some day he is to be King of Holland, but has already sickened of court ceremonies and intrigues.

"Uno foulie d'amour s'es mes en testo."

This dreamy, imaginative, blond Prince is in search of a Naade and the mysterious "swan-flower," wherein the fair nymph is hidden. This flower he wears as an emblem. When the boatmen see it, they recognize it as the _fleur de Rhone_ that the Anglore is so fond of culling. The men get Jean Roche, one of their number, to tell the Prince who this mysterious Anglore is, and we learn that she is a little, laughing maiden, who wanders barefoot on the sand, so charming that any of the sailors, were she to make a sign, would spring into the water to go and print a kiss upon her little foot. Not only is the Prince in search of a nymph and a flower, not only does he wish to behold Orange, he wishes also to learn the language in which the Countess of Die sang lays of love with Raimbaud of Orange. He is full of thoughts of the olden days, he feels regret for the lost conquests. "But why should he feel regret, if he may recover the sunny land of his forefathers by drinking it in with eager eyes! What need is there of gleaming swords to seize what the eye shows us?" He cares little for royalty.

"Strongholds crumble away, as may be seen on all these hills; everything falls to ruin and is renewed. But on thy summits, unchanging Nature, forever the thyme shall bloom, and the shepherds and shepherdesses frolic on the gra.s.s at the return of spring."

The Prince apostrophizes the "empire of the sun," bordering like a silver hem the dazzling Rhone, the "poetic empire of Provence, that with its name alone doth charm the world," and he calls to mind the empire of the Bosonides, the memory of which survives in the speech of the boatmen; they call the east sh.o.r.e "empire," the west sh.o.r.e "kingdom."

The journey is full of episodes. The owner of the fleet, Apian, is a sententious individual. He is devoted to his river life, full of religious fervor, continually crossing himself or praying to Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors. This faith, however, is not entire. If a man falls into the water, the fellows call to him, "Recommend thyself to Saint Nicholas, but swim for dear life." As the English expression has it, "Trust to G.o.d, but keep your powder dry."

Master Apian always says the Lord's Prayer aloud when he puts off from sh.o.r.e, and solemnly utters the words, "In the name of G.o.d and the Holy Virgin, to the Rhone!" His piety, however, does not prevent him from interrupting his prayer to swear at the men most vigorously. Says he, "Let whoever would learn to pray, follow the water," but his arguments and experiences rather teach the vanity of prayer. He is full of superst.i.tious tales. He has views of life.

"Life is a journey like that of the bark. It has its bad, its good days.

The wise man, when the waves smile, ought to know how to behave; in the breakers he must go slow. But man is born for toil, for navigation. He who rows gets his pay at the end of the month. He who is afraid of blistering his hands takes a dive into the abyss of poverty." He tells a story of Napoleon in flight down the Rhone, of the women who cried out at him, reviling him, bidding him give back their sons, shaking their fists and crying out, "Into the Rhone with him." Once when he was changing horses at an inn, a woman, bleeding a fowl at the door, exclaimed: "Ha, the cursed monster! If I had him here, I'd plant my knife into his throat like that!" The emperor, unknown to her, draws near. "What did he do to you?" said he. "I had two sons," replied the bereaved mother wrathfully, "two handsome boys, tall as towers. He killed them for me in his battles."--"Their names will not perish in the stars," said Napoleon sadly. "Why could I not fall like them? for they died for their country on the field of glory."--"But who are you?"--"I am the emperor."--"Ah!" The good woman fell upon her knees dismayed, kissed his hands, begged his forgiveness, and all in tears--Here the story is interrupted.

Wholly charming and altogether original is the tale of the little maiden whom the boatmen name L'Anglore, and whom Jean Roche loves. The men have named her so for fun. They knew her well, having seen her from earliest childhood, half naked, paddling in the water along the sh.o.r.e, sunning herself like the little lizard they call _anglore_. Now she had grown, and eked out a poor living by seeking for gold in the sands brought down by the Ardeche.

The little maid believed in the story of the Drac, a sort of merman, that lived in the Rhone, and had power to fascinate the women who ventured into the water. There was once a very widespread superst.i.tion concerning this Protean creature; and the women washing in the river often had a figure of the Drac, in the form of a lizard, carved upon the piece of wood with which they beat the linen, as a sort of talisman against his seduction. The mother of the Anglore had told her of his wiles; and one story impressed her above all--the story of the young woman who, fascinated by the Drac, lost her footing in the water and was carried whirling down into the depths. At the end of seven years she returned and told her tale. She had been seized by the Drac, and for seven years he kept her to nurse his little Drac.

The Anglore was never afraid while seeking the specks of gold in the sunlight. But at night it was different. A gem of poetry is the scene in the sixth canto, full of witchery and charm, wherein the imagination of the little maid, wandering out along the water in the mysterious moonlight, causes her to fancy she sees the Drac in the form of a fair youth smiling upon her, offering her a wild flower, uttering sweet, mysterious words of love that die away in the water. She often came again to meet him; and she noticed that if ever she crossed herself on entering the water, as she had always done when a little girl, the Drac would not appear. These three or four pages mark the genuine poet and the master of language. The mysterious night, oppressively warm, the moonlight shining on the little white figure, the deep silence, broken only by the faint murmur of the river and the distant singing of a nightingale, the gleam of the glowworms, compose a scene of fantastic beauty. The slightest sounds startle her, whether it be a fish leaping at the surface of the water to seize a fly, the gurgling of a little eddy, or the shrill cry of a bat. There is a certain voluptuous beauty in the very sound of the words that describe the little nymph, kissed by the moonbeams:--

"alusentido Per li rai de la luno que beisavon Soun fin coutet, sa jouino car ambrenco, Si bras poupin, sis esquino rabloto E si pousseto armouniouso e fermo Que s'amagavon coume dos tourtouro Dins l'esparpai de sa cabeladuro."

The last three lines fall like a caress upon the ear. Mistral often attains a perfect melody of words with the harmonious succession of varied vowel sounds and the well-marked cadence of his verse.

When Apian's fleet comes down the river and pa.s.ses the spot where the little maid seeks for gold, the men see her and invite her on board. She will go down to Beaucaire to sell her findings. Jean Roche offers himself in marriage, but she will have none of him; she loves the vision seen beneath the waves. When the Anglore spies the blond-haired Prince, she turns pale and nearly swoons. "'Tis he, 'tis he!" she cries, and she stands fascinated. William, charmed with the little maid, says to her, "I recognize thee, O Rhone flower, blooming on the water--flower of good omen that I saw in a dream." The little maid calls him Drac, identifies the flower in his hand, and lives on in this hallucination. The boatmen consider that she has lost her reason, and say she must have drunk of the fountain of Tourne. The little maid hears them, and bids them speak low, for their fate is written at the fountain of Tourne; and like a Sibyl, raising her bare arm, she describes the mysterious carvings on the rock, and the explanation given by a witch she knew. These carvings, according to Mistral's note, were dedicated to the G.o.d Mithra. The meaning given by the witch is that the day the Drac shall leave the river Rhone forever, that day the boatmen shall perish. The men do not laugh, for they have already heard of the great boats that can make their way against the current without horses. Apian breaks out into furious imprecations against the men who would ruin the thousands that depend for their living upon the river. One is struck by this introduction of a question of political economy into a poem.

During the journey to Avignon the Prince falls more and more in love with the little Anglore, whom no sort of evidence can shake out of her belief that the Prince is the Drac, for the Drac can a.s.sume any form at pleasure. Her delusion is so complete, so nave, that the prince, romantic by nature, is entirely under the spell.

There come on board three Venetian women, who possess the secret of a treasure, twelve golden statues of the Apostles buried at Avignon. The Prince leaves the boat to help them find the place, and the little maid suffers intensely the pangs of jealousy. But he comes back to her, and takes her all about the great fair at Beaucaire. That night, however, he wanders out alone, and while calling to mind the story of Auca.s.sin and Nicolette, he is sandbagged, but not killed. The Anglore believes he has left his human body on the ground so as to visit his caverns beneath the Rhone. William seems unhurt, and at the last dinner before they start to go up the river again, surrounded by the crew, he makes them a truly Felibrean speech:--

"Do you know, friends, to whom I feel like consecrating our last meal in Beaucaire? To the patriots of the Rhodanian sh.o.r.es, to the dauntless men who, in olden days, maintained themselves in the strong castle that stands before our eyes, to the dwellers along the riverbanks who defended so valiantly their customs, their free trade, and their great free Rhone. If the sons of those forefathers who fell bravely in the strife, to-day have forgotten their glory, well, so much the worse for the sons! But you, my mates, you who have preserved the call, Empire!

and who, like the brave men you are, will soon go and defend the Rhone in its very life, fighting your last battle with me, a stranger, but enraptured and intoxicated with the light of your Rhone, come, raise your gla.s.ses to the cause of the vanquished!"

The love scenes between the Prince and the Anglore continue during the journey up the river. Her devotion to him is complete; she knows not whither she goes, if to perish, then let it be with him. In a moment of enthusiasm William makes a pa.s.sionate declaration.

"Trust me, Anglore, since I have freely chosen thee, since thou hast brought me thy deep faith in the beautiful wonders of the fable, since thou art she who, without thought, yields to her love, as wax melts in the sun, since thou livest free of all our bonds and shams, since in thy blood, in thy pure bosom, lies the renewal of the old sap, I, on my faith as a Prince, I swear to thee that none but me, O my Rhone flower, shall have the happiness to pluck thee as a flower of love and as a wife!"

But this promise is never kept. One day the boats meet the steamer coming down the river. Apian, pale and silent, watches the magic bark whose wheels beat like great paws, and, raising great waves, come down steadily upon him.

The captain cries, "One side!" but, obstinate and angry, Apian tries to force the steamer to give way. The result is disastrous. The steamer catches in the towing cables and drags the horses into the water. The boats drift back and are hurled against a bridge. William and the Anglore are thrown into the river and are lost. All the others escape with their lives. Jean Roche is not sure but that he was the Drac after all, who, foreseeing the shipwreck, had thus followed the boats, to carry the Anglore at last down into the depths of the river. Maitre Apian accepts his ruin philosophically. Addressing his men, he says: "Ah, my seven boats! my splendid draught horses! All gone, all ruined!

It is the end of the business! Poor fellow-boatmen, you may well say, 'good-by to a pleasant life.' To-day the great Rhone has died, as far as we are concerned."

The idea of the poem is, then, to tell of the old life on the Rhone.

To-day the river flows almost as in the days when its sh.o.r.es were untrod by men. Rarely is any sort of boat seen upon its swift and dangerous current. Mistral portrays the life he knew, and he has done it with great power and vividness. The fanciful tale of the Prince and the Anglore, suggested by the beliefs and superst.i.tions of the humble folk, was introduced, doubtless, as a necessary love story. The little maid Anglore, half mad in her illusion, is none the less a very sympathetic creation, and surely quite original. This tale, however, running through the poem like a thread, is not the poem, nor does it fill proportionately a large place therein. The poem is, as its t.i.tle proclaims, the Poem of the Rhone, a poem of sincere regret for the good old days when the muscular sons of Condrieu ruled the stream, the days of jollity, of the curious boating tournaments of which one is described in _Calendau_, when the children used to watch the boats go by with a Condrillot at the helm, and the Rhone was swarming like a mighty beehive. The poet notes in sorrow that all is dead. The river flows on, broad and silent, and no vestige of all its past activity remains, but here and there a trace of the cables that used to rub along the stones.

As we said at the outset, what is most striking about this poem is its realism. The poet revels in enumerating the good things the men had to eat at the feast of Saint Nicholas; he describes with a wealth of vocabulary and a flood of technical terms quite bewildering every sort of boat, and all its parts with their uses; he reproduces the talk of the boatmen, leaving unvarnished their ignorance and superst.i.tion, their roughness and brutality; he describes their appearance, their long hair and large earrings; he explains the manner of guiding the boats down the swirling, treacherous waters, amid the dangers of shoals and hidden rocks; he describes all the cargoes, not finding it beneath the dignity of an epic poem to tell us of the kegs of foamy beer that is destined for the thirsty throats of the drinkers at Beaucaire; as the boats pa.s.s Condrieu, he reproduces the gossip of the boatmen's wives; he does not omit the explanations of Apian addressed to the Prince concerning fogs and currents; he is often humorous, telling us of the heavy merchants who promenade their paunches whereon the watch-charms rattle against their snug little money carried in a belt; he describes the pa.s.sengers, tells us their various trades and destinations, is even cynical; tells of the bourgeois, who, once away from their wives, grow suddenly lavish with their money, and like pigs let loose in the street, take up the whole roadway; he does not shrink from letting us know that the men chew a cud of tobacco while they talk; he mentions the price of goods; he puts into the mouth of Jean Roche's mother a great many practical and material considerations as to the matter of taking a wife, and a very wise and practical old lady she is; he treats as "joyeusetes" the conversation of the Venetian women who inform the Prince that in their city the n.o.blewoman, once married, may have quite a number of lovers without exciting any comment, the husband being rather relieved than otherwise; he allows his boatmen to swear and call one another vile names, and a howling, brawling lot they frequently become; and when at last we get to the fair at Beaucaire, there are pages of minute enumerations that can scarcely be called Homeric. In short, a very large part of the book is prose, animated, vigorous, often exaggerated, but prose. Like his other long poems it is singularly objective. Rarely does the author interrupt his narrative or description to give an opinion, to speak in his own name, or to a.n.a.lyze the situation he has created. Like the other poems, too, it is sprinkled with tales and legends of all sorts, some of them charming.

Superst.i.tions abound. Mistral shares the fondness of the Avignonnais for the number seven. Apian has seven boats, the Drac keeps his victim seven years, the woman of Condrieu has seven sons.

The poem offers the same beauties as the others, an astonishing power of description first of all. Mistral is always masterly, always poetic in depicting the landscape and the life that moves thereon, and especially in evoking the life of the past. He revives for us the princesses and queens, the knights and troubadours, and they move before us, a fascinating, glittering pageant. The perfume of flowers, the sunlight on the water, the great birds flying in the air, the silent drifting of the boats in the broad valley, the reflection of the tall poplars in the water, the old ruins that crown the hilltops--all these things are exquisitely woven into the verse, and more than a mere word-painting they create a mood in the reader in unison with the mood of the person of whom he is reading.

In touching truly deep and serious things Mistral is often superficial, and pa.s.ses them off with a commonplace. An instance in this poem is the episode of the convicts on their way to the galleys at Toulon. No terrible indignation, no heartfelt pity, is expressed. Apian silences one of his crew who attempts to mock at the unhappy wretches. "They are miserable enough without an insult! and do not seem to recognize them, for, branded on the shoulder, they seek the shade. Let this be an example to you all. They are going to eat beans at Toulon, poor fellows!

All sorts of men are there,--churchmen, rascals, n.o.bles, notaries, even some who are innocent!"

And the poet concludes, "Thus the world, thus the agitation, the stir of life, good, evil, pleasure, pain, pa.s.s along swiftly, confusedly, between day and night, on the river of time, rolling along and fleeing."

The enthusiasm of the poet leads him into exaggeration whenever he comes to a wonder of Provence. Things are relative in this world, and the same words carry different meanings. Avignon is scarcely a colossal pile of towers, and would not remind many of Venice, even at sunset, and we must make a discount when we hear that the boats are _engulfed_ in the _fierce_ (_sic_) arch of the _colossal_ bridge of stone that Benezet, the shepherd, erected seven hundred years ago. A moment later he refers daintily and accurately to the chapel of Saint Nicholas "riding on the bridge, slender and pretty." The epithets sound larger, too, in Provencal; the view of Avignon is "espetaclouso," the walls of the castle are "gigantesco."

Especially admirable in its sober, energetic expression is the account of the _Remonte_, in the eleventh canto, wherein we see the eighty horses, grouped in fours, tug slowly up the river.

"The long file on the rough-paved path, dragging the weighty train of boats, in spite of the impetuous waters, trudges steadily along. And beneath the lofty branches of the great white poplars, in the stillness of the Rhone valley, in the splendor of the rising sun, walking beside the straining horses that drive a mist from their nostrils, the first driver says the prayer."

With each succeeding poem the vocabulary of Mistral seems to grow, along with the boldness of expression. All his poems he has himself translated into French, and these translations are remarkable in more than one respect. That of the _Poem of the Rhone_ is especially full of rare French words, and it cannot be imputed to the leader of the Provencal poets that he is not past master of the French vocabulary. Often his French expression is as strange as the original. Not many French writers would express themselves as he does in the following:--

"Et il tressaille de jumeler le nonchaloir de sa jeunesse au renouveau de la belle ingenue."

In this translation, also, more than in the preceding, there is occasionally an affectation of archaism, which rather adds to than detracts from the poetic effect of his prose, and the number of lines in the prose translation that are really ten-syllable verses is quite remarkable. On one page (page 183 of the third edition, Lemerre) more than half the lines are verses.