same name, but the name of the
honey-tongued "Master." Our innkeeper--O the delightful innkeepers of
France!--on our consulting him as to our project of a walking trip
through the Midi--as Frenchmen usually speak of Provence--said, for his
first aid to the traveller: "Then, of course, you will see our great
poet, Mistral." And he promptly produced a copy of _Mireio_, which he
begged me to use till I had bought a copy for myself.

"Ah! Mistral," he cried, with Gallic enthusiasm, using the words I have
borrowed from his lips, "Mistral is the King of Provence!"

Marseilles had not always been so enthusiastic over Mistral and his
fellows. And Mistral, in his memoirs, gives an amusing account of a
philological battle fought over the letter "s" in a room behind one of
the Marseilles bookshops between "the amateurs of trivialities, the
rhymers of the white beard, the jealous, the grumblers," and the young
innovators of the "felibrige."

But that was over fifty years ago, and the battle of those young
enthusiasts has long since been won. What that battle was and what an
extraordinary victory came of it must needs be told for the significance
of Mistral in Provence to be properly understood.

The story is one of the most romantic in the history of literature.
Briefly, it is this:

The Provencal language, the "langue d'oc," was, of course, once the
courtly and lettered language of Europe, the language of the great
troubadours, and through them the vehicle of the culture and refinement
of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From it may be said to have
sprung the beginnings of Italian literature.

But, owing to various historical vicissitudes, the language of Northern
France, the "langue d'oil," gradually took its place, and when Mistral
was born, in 1830, Provencal had long been regarded as little more than
a _patois_.

Now it was the young Mistral's dream, as a school-boy in the old convent
school of Saint Michael de Frigolet, at Avignon, to restore his native
tongue to its former high estate, to make it once more a literary
language, and it chanced that one of his masters, Joseph Roumanille, was
secretly cherishing the same dream.

The master, looking over his pupil's shoulder one day, found that,
instead of working at his prescribed task, he was busily engaged in
translating the Penitential Psalms into Provencal. Instead of punishing
him, the master gratefully hailed a kindred spirit, and presently
confided Prove