ns out to be! One day, at
Sainte-Baume, he came across two gangs of men intent on violently
settling their hash on the grave of Master Jacques, a Provencal who did
the carpentry in the Temple of Solomon, if you please. Calendal threw
himself into the heart of the murderous mayhem, and calmed the men and
talked them down....

These were superhuman efforts!... High up in the rocks of Lure, there
was an inaccessible cedar forest, where even lumberjacks wouldn't go.
Calendal, though, does go up there, all alone, and sets up camp for
thirty days. The sound of his axe burying its head into tree trunks is
heard the whole time. The forest screams its protest, but, one by one,
the giant old trees fall and roll into the abyss, until, by the time
Calendal comes down, there isn't a single cedar left on the mountain....

At last, in reward for so many exploits, the anchovy fisherman won the
love of Esterelle and was made Consul of Cassis by its inhabitants.
That's it then, the story of Calendal.... But why all this fuss about
Calendal? The star of the poem is Provence itself--the Provence of the
sea; the Provence of the mountains--with its history, its ways, its
legends, its scenery, indeed a whole people, free and true to
themselves, who have found their poetic voice, before they die....
Nowadays, follow the roads, the railways, the telegraph poles, hunt
down the language in the schools! Provence will live for ever in
_Mireille_ and _Calendal_.

* * * * *

--That's enough poetry! said Mistral closing his notebook. To the fair!

We went out; the whole village was in the streets, as a great gust of
wind cleared the sky, which radiantly lit up the red roofs, still wet
with rain. We arrived in time to see the procession on its way back. It
took a whole hour to go past. There was an endless line of hooded,
white, blue, and grey penitents, sisterhoods of young, veiled girls;
and gold flowered, pink banners, great faded, wooden saints carried
shoulder high by four men. There was pottery saints coloured like idols
with big bouquets in their hands, copes, monstrances, green velvet
canopies, crucifixes framed in white silk; and everything waving in the
wind, in the candle light and the sunlight, amongst the Psalms, the
litanies, with the bells ringing a full peal.

Once the procession was over and the saints put back into their
chapels, we went to see the bulls and then went on the open air games.
There were men w