And Ramoun welcomes Veran, and hopes that Mireio will wed him, and calls his daughter, who gently refuses.  The third suitor, Ourrias, has no better fortune.  The account of this man’s giant strength, the narrative of his exploits in subduing the wild bulls, are quite Homeric.  The story is told of the scar he bears, how one of the fiercest bulls that he had branded carried him along, threw him ahead on the ground, and then hurled him high into the air.  The strong, fierce man presents his suit, describing the life the women lead in the Camargue; but before he has her love, “his trident will bear flowers, the hills will melt away like wax, and the journey to Les Baux will be by sea.”  This canto and the next, recounting the fierce combat between Ourrias and Vincen, are really splendid narrative poetry.  The style is marvellously compressed, and the story thrilling.  The sullen anger of Ourrias, his insult that does not spare Mireio, the indignation of Vincen, that fires him with unwonted strength, the battle of the two men out alone in the fields near the mighty Pont du Gard, Vincen’s victory in the trial of strength, the treachery of Ourrias, who sneaks back and strikes his enemy down with the trident.  “With a mighty groan the hapless boy rolls at full length upon the grass, and the grass yields, bloody, and over his earthy limbs the ants of the fields already make their way.”  The rapidity, the compactness of the sentences, impressed Gaston Paris as very remarkable.  The assassin gallops away upon his mare, and seeks by night to cross the Rhone.  A singularly felicitous use of the supernatural is made here.  Ourrias is carried to the bottom of the river by the goblins and spirits that come out and hover over it at night.  There is a certain terror in this termination, something that recalls parts of the Inferno.  Ourrias’s superstitious fears are the effect of his guilty conscience.  The souls of the damned, their weird ceremonial, are but the outward rendering of the inward terror he feels.

A less legitimate use of the supernatural is made in the succeeding canto, called La Masco (The Witch).  In fact, the canto is really a blemish in the beautiful poem.  Vincen is found unconscious and carried to the Mas des Micocoules, and various remedies tried.  He comes to himself, but the wound is deemed too serious to be healed by natural means, and Mireio, at the suggestion of one of her maiden friends, takes Vincen to the abode of the witch who lives in the Fairies’ Hole under the rocks of Les Baux.  Besides the obvious objection that the magic cure could not have been made, there is the physical impossibility of Vincen’s having walked, in his dying condition, through the labyrinth of subterranean passages, amid the wild scenes of a sort of Walpurgis night.  The poet was doubtless led into this error by his desire to preserve all the legends and superstitious lore of Provence.  Possibly he was led astray also by his desire to create