ard, Vincen's victory in the trial of strength,
the treachery of Ourrias, who sneaks back and strikes his enemy down
with the trident. "With a mighty groan the hapless boy rolls at full
length upon the grass, and the grass yields, bloody, and over his earthy
limbs the ants of the fields already make their way." The rapidity, the
compactness of the sentences, impressed Gaston Paris as very remarkable.
The assassin gallops away upon his mare, and seeks by night to cross the
Rhone. A singularly felicitous use of the supernatural is made here.
Ourrias is carried to the bottom of the river by the goblins and spirits
that come out and hover over it at night. There is a certain terror in
this termination, something that recalls parts of the Inferno. Ourrias's
superstitious fears are the effect of his guilty conscience. The souls
of the damned, their weird ceremonial, are but the outward rendering of
the inward terror he feels.

A less legitimate use of the supernatural is made in the succeeding
canto, called _La Masco_ (The Witch). In fact, the canto is really a
blemish in the beautiful poem. Vincen is found unconscious and carried
to the Mas des Micocoules, and various remedies tried. He comes to
himself, but the wound is deemed too serious to be healed by natural
means, and Mireio, at the suggestion of one of her maiden friends, takes
Vincen to the abode of the witch who lives in the Fairies' Hole under
the rocks of Les Baux. Besides the obvious objection that the magic
cure could not have been made, there is the physical impossibility of
Vincen's having walked, in his dying condition, through the labyrinth of
subterranean passages, amid the wild scenes of a sort of Walpurgis
night. The poet was doubtless led into this error by his desire to
preserve all the legends and superstitious lore of Provence. Possibly he
was led astray also by his desire to create an epic poem, in which a
visit to the lower regions is a necessity. The entire episode is
impossible and uninteresting, and is a blot in the beautiful idyll.
Later on, this desire to insert the supernatural leads the poet to
interrupt the action of his poem, while the three Maries relate to the
unconscious Mireio at great length the story of their coming from
Jerusalem to Provence. Interesting as folklore, or as an evidence of the
credulity of the Provencals, this narrative of the three Maries is out
of place in the poem. It does not help us out to suppose that Mireio
drea