Through Roumanille he came to know Aubanel, Croustillat, and others.  They met at Avignon, full of youthful enthusiasm, and during this period Mistral, encouraged by his friends, worked upon his greatest poem, Mireio.  In 1854, on the 21st of May, the Felibrige was founded by the seven poets,—­Joseph Roumanille, Paul Giera, Theodore Aubanel, Eugene Garcin, Anselme Mathieu, Frederic Mistral, Alphonse Tavan.  In 1868, Garcin published a violent attack upon the Felibres, accusing them, in the strongest language, of seeking to bring about a political separation of southern France from the rest of the country.  This apostasy was a cause of great grief to the others, and Garcin’s name was stricken from the official list of the founders of the Felibrige, and replaced by that of Jean Brunet.  Mistral, in the sixth canto of Mireio, addresses in eloquent verse his comrades in the Provencal Pleiade, and there we still find the name of Garcin.

      Tu’ nfin, de quau un vent de flamo
      Ventoulo, emporto e fouito l’amo
    Garcin, o fieu ardent dou manescau d’Alen!

     (And finally, thou whose soul is stirred and swept and whipped by a
     wind of flame, Garcin, ardent son of the smith of Alleins.)

This attack upon the Felibrige was the first of the kind ever made.  Many years later, Garcin became reconciled to his former friends and in 1897 he was vice-president of the Felibrige de Paris.

The number seven and the task undertaken by these poets and literary reformers remind us instantly of the Pleiade, whose work in the sixteenth century in attempting to perfect the French language was of a very similar character.  It is certain, however, that the seven poets who inaugurated their work at the Chateau of Font-Segugne, had no thought of imitating the Pleiade either in the choice of the number seven or in the reformation they were about to undertake.

They began their propaganda by founding an annual publication called the Armana Prouvencau, which has appeared regularly since 1855, and many of their writings were first printed in this official magazine.  Of the seven, Aubanel alone besides Mistral has attained celebrity as a poet, and these two with Roumanille have been usually associated in the minds of all who have followed the movement with interest as its three leaders.

Mistral completed Mireio in 1859.  The poem was presented by Adolphe Dumas and Jean Reboul to Lamartine, who devoted to it one of the “Entretiens” of his Cours familier de litterature.  This article of Lamartine, and his personal efforts on behalf of Mistral, contributed greatly to the success of the poem.  Lamartine wrote among other things:  “A great epic poet is born!  A true Homeric poet in our own time; a poet, born like the men of Deucalion, from a stone on the Crau, a primitive poet in our decadent age; a Greek poet at Avignon; a poet who has created a language out of a dialect, as Petrarch created Italian; one who, out of a vulgar patois, has made a language full of imagery and harmony delighting the imagination and the ear....  We might say that, during the night, an island of the Archipelago, a floating Delos, has parted from its group of Greek or Ionian islands and come silently to join the mainland of sweet-scented Provence, bringing along one of the divine singers of the family of the Melesigenes.”