Page:Mistral - Mirèio. A Provençal poem.djvu/16

x a work at once beautiful and unique, and which created a marvellous excitement in the orderly circles of literary France. Critics of the sensational and conjectural order shouted in ecstasy that this was "primeval poesy," a "draught from the fountain-head," and, with the true French instinct for dramatic effect, proclaimed the author to be an unlettered peasant, a daily farm-laborer. In truth M. Mistral was a youth of fortune, the son of what we should call a "gentleman farmer" of Maiano, or Maillane, and had received a liberal education at the college of Montpellier, after graduating from the tuition of Roumanille.

"Mirèio" first appeared at Paris in September, 1859, having beside the Provençal a parallel French version of the author's own, or rather a prose translation divided into verses to correspond with the stanzas of the original. This translation is absolutely literal, following the very order of the Provençal words, even when least consonant with French usage; and strange French it is, as French, to one who knows only the acknowledged models,—artless, abrupt, homely, not to say sauvage, but always poetical and always fascinating. Indeed the critic quoted above does not hesitate to affirm his belief that M. Mistral wrote from the first with an eye to his Parisian audience, and even