King of Camargue Part 19

Monsieur le cure would prove, with doc.u.ments to sustain him, that Mary Magdalen was not in the boat. She came to Provence by some other means, no one can say by what miracle.

With the exception of the two Maries and Sara, all the pa.s.sengers upon the miraculous craft dispersed in different directions, preaching and making converts.

The holy women did not leave Camargue, the island in the Rhone, divided at that time into a great number of small islands by the ponds--a veritable archipelago, called _Sticados_ and inhabited by heathens. In those days, all these small islands, formed by the swamps, were covered with forests and filled with wild beasts. And this delta of the Rhone was infested with crocodiles.

Now, a long, long time after the death of the holy women, a hunter, followed by his dogs, was pa.s.sing over the spot where they lay buried in unknown graves; he fell in with a hermit there, beside a spring.

"My lord," said the hermit, "I had a revelation in a dream last night.

In the sand beside this spring repose the bodies of three sainted women!"

The hunter was a Comte de Provence. His palace was at Arles, and the cure had every reason to believe that he was Guillaume I., son of Boson I., famous for his liberality to the church.

It was in 981. This Guillaume had overcome the Saracens, and Conrad I., King of Bourgogne, his suzerain, loved and respected him.

The prince, having listened to the hermit's tale, rode away musing deeply; not long after, he returned and caused a church in the form of a citadel to be built at that point of the coast, in the very centre of a s.p.a.cious enclosure surrounded by moats.

Then he made known throughout Provence that special privileges would be accorded to all those who should build houses between the church and the moat.

Thus was founded the Villa-de-la-Mar--which is in fact a town (_ville_), although it is too often spoken of as a village, under its other name of Saintes-Maries.

The Comtes de Provence have always granted special privileges to the town.

Under Queen Jeanne, a guard was stationed all the time at the top of the church-tower to watch the s.h.i.+ps and make signals. Sentinels were obliged to call to one another and answer every hour during the night.

The people of Saintes-Maries were also exempted by the queen from payment of tolls and the tax upon salt.

Monsieur le cure explains all these things in his book, which is very interesting. He also describes therein, "as in duty bound," the discovery of the sacred bones. In 1448, King Rene, being then at Aix, his capital, heard a preacher declare that Saintes Marie-Jacobe and Salome were certainly buried beneath the church of Villa-de-la-Mar.

Rene at once consulted his confessor, Pere Adhemar, and sent a messenger to the Pope, asking that he be authorized to make search underground in the church. The authorization was given in the month of June in the same year. The Archbishop of Aix, Robert Damiani, presided at the search.

They found the spring; near the spring was an earthen altar; at the foot of the altar a marble tablet with this inscription, upon which the good cure descants at great length:

D. M.

IOV. M. L. CORN. BALBUS P. ANATILIORUM AD RHODANI OSTIA SACR. ARAM V. S. L. M.

Lastly, they found the bones of the saints, perfectly recognizable, and, in addition, a head sealed up in a leaden box, which, according to the cure, was the head of Saint James the Less, brought from Jerusalem by Marie-Jacobe, his mother.

The bones, having been devoutly taken from their resting-place, were with great ceremony bestowed in shrines of cypress wood. The king was present with his court. The papal legate was also there, and an archbishop, ten or twelve bishops, a great number of ecclesiastical dignitaries, professors, and learned doctors. The chancellor of the University of Avignon, too, and--so the reports of the proceedings set forth--three prothonotaries of the Holy See and three notaries public.

And so nothing is more firmly established than the authenticity of the relics of the saints.

But various apocryphal legends had appeared to throw doubt upon the truth, and Monsieur le cure was at work upon the following pa.s.sage while Livette, with increasing uneasiness, was awaiting him in the parlor.

"Among the popular fallacies," wrote the cure, "which destroy pure tradition, we must stigmatize as one of the most deplorable, I may say one of the most pernicious, that one which insists that among the pa.s.sengers of the miraculous craft was a third Saint Marie, surnamed the Egyptian. It is downright heresy! How could it have taken root, and how far does it extend?"

Monsieur le cure proposed to retouch that last phrase forthwith, and for a very good reason.

"Without doubt," he continued, "the Egyptians, or Bohemians, or gipsies, by manifesting, from remote times, particular veneration for Saint Sara, who was, according to their ideas, an Egyptian and the wife of Pontius Pilate, have contributed to the formation of an absurd legend, but this one has its source, or its root, in something different; there is an episode of a boat in the life of the Egyptian, which a.s.sists the error by causing confusion."

Monsieur le cure proposed to return to that paragraph also.

"Born in the outskirts of Alexandria, Marie the Egyptian left her family to lead the life of shame she had chosen, in the great city.

Coming to a river, she desired to cross it in a boat, and having not the wherewithal for her pa.s.sage, she paid the boatman in an impure manner.

"Later, she undertook a journey to Jerusalem with a great number of pilgrims, and on that occasion again she paid the expenses of her journey in diabolical fas.h.i.+on, especially if we remember that those whom she enticed into evil ways were devout pilgrims! And so, when she presented herself at the door of the temple, an invisible and invincible force held her back. She could not gain admission there."

Monsieur le cure was better satisfied with that, and took a pinch of snuff.

"She thereupon withdrew to the desert, where she lived forty-seven years. Her image appeared one day to the monk Sosimus at Jerusalem.

She appeared before him naked and begged him to come and confess her.

He obeyed, and went into the desert. He found her, naked, indeed, but very old. And Sosimus was convinced of her saintliness because she had the power of walking on the water. He listened to her confession. She died in the odor of sanct.i.ty, as decrepit and horrible to look upon as she had been fair and pleasant to the sight. A lion dug a grave for her with his claws in the sand of the desert.

"The Egyptian's long penance had redeemed her life, therefore, and under Louis IX. the Parisians dedicated a church to her, which bore the name of Sainte-Marie-l'egyptienne,--corrupted at a later period to _La Gypecienne_ and then to _La Jussienne_. This church was on Rue Montmartre, at the corner of Rue de la Jussienne.

"The church contained a stained window representing the saint and the boatman, with this inscription: _How the saint offered her body to the boatman to pay her pa.s.sage._[5]

"We must not, then, in any case, confound Saint Sara, a contemporary of the Christ, with Marie the Egyptian, who lived in the fifth century,--a fact that cuts short all controversy.

"It is very fortunate," continued Monsieur le cure, well pleased with his somewhat tardy conclusion, "that such a sinner was not among those on board the boat of our Maries-de-la-Mer, for in that boat, as we have said above, there were several of the Christ's disciples.

_Spiritus quidem promptus est; caro autem infirma._"[6]

Monsieur le cure took snuff, he removed and replaced his spectacles.

Monsieur le cure forgot himself. He went over all the early pages of his treatise, he struck out and interlined; he struggled with rebellious words. From time to time, he adjusted his spectacles more firmly, and opened and consulted an ancient book of great size. He was very busy, very deeply absorbed in his favorite employment. He forgot that somebody was waiting for him, and poor Livette, all alone in the parlor, with the dead birds and the sh.e.l.ls, was sadly disturbed in mind. The melancholy that possessed her was not dissipated--far from it!--by the place in which she found herself.

All the dead birds, most of which she recognized as birds of pa.s.sage, reminded her of the weariness of winter, the season when the wave-washed island is immersed in fog.

There were screech-owls, the pale-yellow owls that live in church-steeples and at night drink the oil in the church-lamps; vultures that come down from the Alps and Pyrenees in times of excessive cold; the ash-colored vulture that lives at Sainte-Baume.

There are little tomt.i.ts, called _serruriers_ (locksmiths), which are found only on the banks of the Rhone, and _pendulines_, so called because they hang their nests like little pendulums from the flexible branches swaying to and fro above the water; and _stocking-makers_, whose nests resemble the tissue of a knitted stocking; and the _alcyon_, that is to say, the _bleuret_ or kingfisher; and the _siren_, of the brilliant diversified plumage, called also _honey-eater_, which flies north in the month of May, and spends its winters by preference in Camargue. There was a stork, that probably considered Camargue, between the dikes of the Rhone, a little like Holland. There, too, was the heron with its frill of delicate feathers, falling like a long fringe over its throat. Livette knew it only by the name of _galejon_, bestowed upon it in that neighborhood because the herons' favorite place of a.s.semblage was the pond of Galejon. There was one that bore on its pedestal the date: 1807, and the words: _Purchased at Arles market_; it was of a bluish slate color, and had on its head three slender black feathers, a foot in length. Then there were flamingoes galore, for they sometimes build their nests by myriads in the marshes of Crau, sitting astride their nests which are as tall as their legs. And the divers! and grebes! and penguins, which are seldom seen! And the rascally pelican, called by the people thereabouts _grand gousier_!

Livette fancied that she could hear in the distance the mournful, heart-rending cry of the birds of pa.s.sage, rising above the roar of the wind and the sound of the river shedding its tears into the ocean; dominating the mysterious sounds that fill the darkness. How many times had she heard the cries of cranes and petrels and Egyptian curlews over the Chateau d'Avignon in the season when the nights are long, when the sight of the fire rejoices the heart like a living thing full of promise, when the blackness of death envelops the world.

The birds remind her also of the Christmas evenings, the evenings when the logs blazing in the huge fire-place and the many lamps seem to say: "Courage! the night will pa.s.s." And it is then that the wheat shows its green stalk, saying likewise: "Yes, courage! bad weather, like all other, comes to an end at last."

Livette mused thus, and mechanically raised her eyes to the ceiling, from which the crocodile was hanging.[7]

Livette did not say to herself that there was, somewhere on the other side of the great sea, in the same Egypt to which Saint Joseph and the Virgin Mary fled to protect the Child Jesus from the persecution of King Herod, a great river, the mighty brother of the Rhone, and that in the hottest hours of the day, on the islands in the Nile, the crocodiles crawl in great numbers out upon the overheated sands to expose their backs to the rays of a sun as hot as any oven.

She did not say to herself that Saint Sara, the swarthy patron saint of the gipsies, is called by them the Egyptian, and that they water their gaunt horses in the Nile as well as in the Rhone. She could not say to herself--because she knew it not--that the Egyptians inherit from the Hindoos a debased sort of magic, and that it was the same sort, even more debased without doubt, that gave Zinzara her power.

Nor did Livette know that Zinzara carried in one of the boxes in her ambulatory house--between a crocodile from the Nile and a sacred ibis, both found in an Egyptian crypt--the mummy of a young girl, six thousand years old, whose face, from which the bandages had been taken, wore a mask of gold. She could conceive no connection between the ibis of the Nile and yonder creature of the same name killed within the year on the sh.o.r.e of the Vaccares, but she underwent the influence of all these mysterious connecting currents to which s.p.a.ce and time are naught.

The lifeless creatures, scattered all about her, lived again by virtue of the power of retaining their form forever. And fear seized upon her, for suddenly the mad idea, at once vague and precise, entered her mind of a resemblance between the profile of the great reptile hanging from the ceiling and the lower part of the gipsy queen's face.

Livette thought that she must be ill, and rose to go, determined to wait no longer, but as she put out her hand to the door she uttered a cry. A centipede was crawling along the key, as lively as you please.

She recoiled, and saw upon the white wall, at about the level of her head, a _tarente_, that seemed to be watching her with its pale-gray eyes. The _tarente_ is inoffensive, but Livette knew nothing of that.

It is the Mauritanian _gecko_, which abounds in Provence, a reptile repugnant to the sight, with gray protuberances on the head and back like those upon cantaloupe melons. And then the little fellow, the tiny creature, resembles the crocodile!--Surely, Livette has the fever.

"What's the matter, my child?"

Monsieur le cure has entered the room. He has a kindly air that comforts the poor child at once.