Chapter 71Marseilles — Les Baux — Arles — MistralMARSEILLE — LES BEAUX — ARLES — MISTRAL
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
My journeys I must for the most part win for myself by economy. At Marseilles, though, the martyrdom only began, in waiting for Mabronk in vain. He could not get a passport. At last, one morning, he stood before me. In a white silk shirt richly embroidered with blue silk, a crimson turban, with a white burnous and yellow kid gloves. He was radiant. But now the martyrdom went on. Day after day passed in fruitless exertions, from bureau to bureau. So by way of a rest I made an excursion to Arles and to the wild Provençal castle of Les Baux, the scene of Mistral's poem “Miraglio.” I stayed a night up there beside the “Hostelrie de la reina Jeana.” Everything breathed the eleventh century. I revelled! Mistral, the great poet of Provence, had just died and was to be buried the next day at Arles1. Up there I also saw the ancient stone pavilion in the court of love, on whose original form Mistral had settled his own grave monument in advance. A “mistral,” the storm of Provence, got up and swept across the country so that it flung everything, myself nearly included, to the ground. I could hardly walk back from the castle to the railway. At Arles, to the tolling of his passing bells, I looked with deep emotion at Mistral's creation, the wonderful Musée provencale. To every single piece, out of thousands, the poet has added a verse written in his own hand.
The “toison d'or”2 I saw there too, the “golden mane,” of which the innkeeper had told me early that morning, that he and Mistral and a curé of Les Baux had found it, so he said, in a coffin of the princes' vault upon a female skeleton of which all the rest had crumbled to dust, and of which nobody knows whether she was a princess or a mistress, for the coffin was nameless. This “toison d'or” had a place of honour on a dais under glass, and a shattering poem added to it — la toison d'or!
At last I left Marseilles, for I could wait no longer. Mabronk stayed behind.
After I had kept him in board there for three weeks, he too finally left without a passport, and stood one morning before my Tempio in the same picturesque get-up. And the Mabronk affair began!
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑had just died and was to be buried the next day at Arles — Frédéric Mistral died at Maillane on 25 March 1914 and was buried there on the 27th, not at Arles. So this is 26 March 1914 — and it is the only exact date the whole African journey gives up. Everything else in these ten chapters has been dated by inference: a December, a Christmas, two railway openings, a canvas dated 1914 on an easel. This is a death in the newspapers. She is at Les Baux on the night of 26 March 1914 with the poet lying dead a few miles off, walks down in the wind next morning, and hears the passing bells in Arles while the funeral is going on at Maillane — which is where she has the burial wrong, and it is the sort of thing a traveller gets wrong from an innkeeper's account. The date also strains her own chronology: she has just described three months in Algiers and its excursions, which cannot be fitted between the five weeks at Biskra ending in late January and a night at Les Baux in March. The three months are loose; the 26th of March is not. (Frédéric Mistral)
- ↑The “toison d'or” — A head of golden hair, said to have been found in a nameless coffin at Les Baux and kept under glass at Arles. Not traced in this project. The story reaches her at second hand, from the innkeeper at Les Baux over breakfast, and she marks it as his: the German turns to reported speech at gefunden hätten and stays there. What he tells her is that he, Mistral and the curé of Les Baux opened a coffin in the princes' vault and found a woman's hair intact on a skeleton that had otherwise gone to dust, with nothing to say who she was. Searches here have not found the object in the Museon Arlaten's published collections or the story in the literature on Les Baux, which settles nothing either way — it is a small relic in a large museum, and the search has not been taken to the museum's own inventory. What is certain is that she saw something on a dais under glass with a poem beside it, and that the poem was the point: la toison d'or, the golden fleece, is the last thing she writes about Europe before the war. (The Museon Arlaten)