His schooling began at the age of nine, but the boy played truant so frequently that he was sent to boarding-school in Avignon.  Here he had a sad time of it, and seems especially to have felt the difference of language.  Teachers and pupils alike made fun of his patois, for which he had a strong attachment, because of the charm of the songs his mother sung to him.  Later he studied well, however, and became filled with a love of Virgil and Homer.  In them he found pictures of life that recalled vividly the labors, the ways, and the ideas of the Maillanais.  At this time, too, he attempted a translation, in Provencal, of the first eclogue of Virgil, and confided his efforts to a school-mate, Anselme Mathieu, who became his life-long friend and one of the most active among the Felibres.

It was at this school, in 1845, that he formed his friendship with Roumanille, who had come there as a teacher.  It is not too much to say that the revival of the Provencal language grew out of this meeting.  Roumanille had already written his poems, Li Margarideto (The Daisies).  “Scarcely had he shown me,” says Mistral, “in their spring-time freshness, these lovely field-flowers, when a thrill ran through my being and I exclaimed, ’This is the dawn my soul awaited to awaken to the light!’” Mistral had read some Provencal, but at that time the dialect was employed merely in derision; the writers used the speech itself as the chief comic element in their productions.  The poems of Jasmin were as yet unknown to him.  Roumanille was the first in the Rhone country to sing the poetry of the heart.  Master and pupil became firm friends and worked together for years to raise the home-speech to the dignity of a literary language.

At seventeen Mistral returned home, and began a poem in four cantos, that he has never published; though portions of it are among the poems of Lis Isclo d’Or and in the notes of Mireio.  This poem is called Li Meissoun (Harvest).  His family, seeing his intellectual superiority, sent him to Aix to study law.  Here he again met Mathieu, and they made up for the aridity of the Civil Code by devoting themselves to poetry in Provencal.

In 1851 the young man returned to the mas, a licencie en droit, and his father said to him:  “Now, my dear son, I have done my duty; you know more than ever I learned.  Choose your career; I leave you free.”  And the poet tells us he threw his lawyer’s gown to the winds and gave himself up to the contemplation of what he so loved,—­the splendor of his native Provence.