Let thy justice chastise us, but give us not over unto death!

Then the poet prays in the name of all the brave men who gave up their lives in battle, in the name of all the mothers who will never again see their sons, in the name of the poor, the strong, the dead, in the name of all the defeats and tears and sorrow, the slaughter and the fires, the affronts endured, that God disarm his justice, and he concludes:—­

    “Segnour, voulen deveni d’ome;
          En liberta
          Pos nous bouta! 
    Sian Gau-Rouman e gentilome,
          E marchan dre
          Dins noste endre.

    “Segnour, dou mau sian pas Pencauso. 
          Mando eicabas
          Un rai de pas! 
    Segnour, ajudo nosto Causo,
          E revieuren
          E t’amaren.”

     Lord, we desire to become men; thou canst set us free!

     We are Gallo-Romans and of noble race, and we walk upright in our
     land.

     Lord, we are not the cause of the evil.  Send down upon us a ray of
     peace!  Lord, aid our Cause, and we shall live again and love thee.

The poem called The Stone of Sisyphus completes sufficiently the evidence necessary to exculpate Mistral of the charge of antipatriotism and makes clear his thought.  Provence was once a nation, she consented years ago to lose her identity in the union with France.  Now it is proposed to heap up all the old traditions, the Gai Savoir, the glory of the Troubadours, the old language, the old customs, and burn them on a pyre.  Well, France is a great people and Vive la nation.  But some would go further, some would suppress the nation:  “Down with the frontiers, national glories are an abomination!  Wipe out the past, man is God! Vive l’humanite!” Our patrimony we repudiate.  What are Joan of Arc, Saint Louis, and Turenne?  All that is old rubbish.

Then the people cry with Victor Hugo, “Emperaire, siegues maudi, maudi, maudi! nous as vendu” and hurl down the Vendome column, burn Paris, slaughter the priests, and then, worn out, commence again, like Sisyphus, to push the rock of progress.

So much for the conservatism of Mistral.

We shall conclude this story of the shorter poems with some that are not polemical or essentially Provencal; three or four are especially noteworthy. The Drummer of Arcole, Lou Prego-Dieu, Rescontre (Meeting), might properly find a place in any anthology of general poetry, and an ode on the death of Lamartine is sincere and beautiful.  Such poems must be read in the original.

The first one, The Drummer of Arcole, is the story of a drummer boy who saved the day at Arcole by beating the charge; but after the wars are over, he is forgotten, and remains a drummer as before, becomes old and regrets his life given up to the service of his country.  But one day, passing along the streets of Paris, he chances to look up at the Pantheon, and there in the huge pediment he reads the words, “Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante.”