The word Felibre was furnished by Mistral, who had come upon it in an old hymn wherein occurs the expression that the Virgin met Jesus in the temple among “the seven Felibres of the law.”  The origin and etymology of this word have given rise to various explanations.  The Greek philabros, lover of the beautiful; philebraios, lover of Hebrew, hence, among the Jews, teacher; felibris, nursling, according to Ducange; the Irish filea, bard, and ber, chief, have been proposed.  Jeanroy (in Romania, XIII, p. 463) offers the etymology:  Spanish feligres, filii Ecclesiae, sons of the church, parishioners.  None of these is certain.

Seven poets were present at this first meeting, and as the day happened to be that of St. Estelle, the emblem of a seven-pointed star was adopted.  Very fond of the number seven are these Felibres; they tell you of the seven chief churches of Avignon, its seven gates, seven colleges, seven hospitals, seven popes who were there seventy years; the word Felibre has seven letters, so has Mistral’s name, and he spent seven years in writing each of his epics.

The task that lay before these poets was twofold:  they had not only to prune and purify their dialect and produce verses, they had also to find readers, to create a public, to begin a propaganda.  The first means adopted was the publication of the Armana prouvencau, already referred to.  In 1855, five hundred copies were issued, in 1894, twelve thousand.  For four years this magazine was destined for Provence alone; in 1860, after the appearance of Mireio, it was addressed to all the dwellers in southern France.  The great success of Mireio began a new period in the history of the Felibrige.  Mistral himself and the poets about him now took an entirely new view of their mission.  The uplifting of the people, the creation of a literature that should be admired abroad as well as at home, the complete expression of the life of Provence, in all its aspects, past and present, escape from the implacable centralization that tends to destroy all initiative and originality—­such were the higher aims toward which they now bent their efforts.  The attention of Paris was turned in their direction.  Jasmin had already shown the Parisians that real poetry of a high order could be written in a patois.  Lamartine and Villemain welcomed the new literature most cordially, and the latter declared that “France is rich enough to have two literatures.”

But the student of this history must not lose sight of the fact that the Provencal poets are not first of all litterateurs; they are not men devoting themselves to literature for a livelihood, or even primarily for fame.  They are patriots before they are poets.  The choice of subjects and the intense love of their native land that breathes through all their writings, are ample proof of this.  They meet to sing songs and to speak; it is always of Provence that they sing and speak.  Almost all of them are men who ply some trade, hardly one lives by his pen alone.  This fact gives a very special character to their whole production.  The Felibrean movement is more than an astonishing literary phenomenon.