But in spite of their eager natural love for all good things eatable,
the Provencaux also are poets; and, along with the cooking, another
matter was in train that was wholly of a poetic cast. This was the
making of the creche: a representation with odd little figures and
accessories of the personages and scene of the Nativity--the whole at
once so naive and so tender as to be possible only among a people
blessed with rare sweetness and rare simplicity of soul.
The making of the creche is especially the children's part of the
festival--though the elders always take a most lively interest in
it--and a couple of days before Christmas, as we were returning from one
of our walks, we fell in with all the farm children coming homeward from
the mountains laden with creche-making material: mosses, lichens,
laurel, and holly; this last of smaller growth than our holly, but
bearing fine red berries, which in Provencal are called _li poumeto de
Sant-Jan_--"the little apples of Saint John."
Our expedition had been one of the many that the Vidame took me upon in
order that he might expound his geographical reasons for believing in
his beloved Roman Camp; and this diversion enabled me to escape from
Marius--I fear with a somewhat unseemly precipitation--by pressing him
for information in regard to the matter which the children had in hand.
As to openly checking the Vidame, when once he fairly is astride of his
hobby, the case is hopeless. To cast a doubt upon even the least of his
declarations touching the doings of the Roman General is the signal for
a blaze of arguments down all his battle front; and I really do not like
even to speculate upon what might happen were I to meet one of his major
propositions with a flat denial! But an attack in flank, I find--the
sudden posing of a question upon some minor antiquarian theme--usually
can be counted upon, as in this instance, to draw him outside the Roman
lines. Yet that he left them with a pained reluctance was so evident
that I could not but feel some twinges of remorse--until my interest in
what he told me made me forget my heartlessness in shunting to a side
track the subject on which he so loves to talk.
In a way, the creche takes in Provence the place of the Christmas-tree,
of which Northern institution nothing is known here; but it is closer to
the heart of Christmas than the tree, being touched with a little of the
tender beauty of the event which it represents in so quaint a guise. Its
invention is ascribed to Saint Francis of Assisi. The chronicle of his
Order tells that this seraphic man, having first obtained the permission
of the Holy See, represented the principal scenes of the Nativity in a
stable; and that in the stable so transformed he celebrated mass and
preached to the people. All this is wholly in keeping with the character
of Saint Francis; and, certainly, the creche had its origin in Italy in
his period, and in the same conditions which formed his graciously
fanciful soul. Its introduction into Provence is said to have been in
the time of John XXII.--the second of the Avignon Popes, who came to
the Pontificate in the year 1316--and by the Fathers of the Oratory of
Marseille: from which centre it rapidly spread abroad through the land
until it became a necessary feature of the Christmas festival both in
churches and in homes.
Obviously, the creche is an offshoot from the miracle plays and
mysteries which had their beginning a full two centuries earlier. These
also survive vigorously in Provence in the "Pastouralo": an acted
representation of the Nativity that is given each year during the
Christmas season by amateurs or professionals in every city and town,
and in almost every village. Indeed, the Pastouralo is so large a
subject, and so curious and so interesting, that I venture here only to
allude to it. Nor has it, properly--although so intensely a part of the
Provencal Christmas--a place in this paper, which especially deals with
the Christmas of the home.
In the farm-houses, and in the dwellings of the middle-class, the creche
is placed always in the living-room, and so becomes an intimate part of
the family life. On a table set in a corner is represented a rocky
hill-side--dusted with flour to represent snow--rising in terraces
tufted with moss and grass and little trees and broken by foot-paths and
a winding road. This structure is very like a Provencal hill-side, but
it is supposed to represent the rocky region around Bethlehem. At its
base, on the left, embowered in laurel or in holly, is a wooden or
pasteboard representation of the inn; and beside the inn is the stable:
an open shed in which are grouped little figures representing the
several personages of the Nativity. In the centre is the Christ-Child,
either in a cradle or lying on a truss of straw; seated beside him is
the Virgin; Saint Joseph stands near, holding in his hand the mystic
lily; with their heads bent down over the Child are the ox and the
ass--for those good animals helped with their breath through that cold
night to keep him warm. In the foreground are the two _ravi_--a man and
a woman in awed ecstasy, with upraised arms--and the adoring shepherds.
To these are added on Epiphany the figures of the Magi--the Kings, as
they are called always in French and in Provencal--with their train of
attendants, and the camels on which they have brought their gifts.
Angels (pendent from the farm-house ceiling) float in the air above the
stable. Higher is the Star, from which a ray (a golden thread) descends
to the Christ-Child's hand. Over all, in a glory of clouds, hangs the
figure of Jehovah attended by a white dove.
These are the essentials of the creche; and in the beginning, no doubt,
these made the whole of it. But for nearly six centuries the delicate
imagination of the Provencal poets and the cruder, but still poetic,
fancy of the Provencal people have been enlarging upon the simple
original: with the result that twoscore or more figures often are found
in the creche of to-day.
Either drawing from the quaintly beautiful mediaeval legends of the birth
and childhood of Jesus, or directly from their own quaintly simple
souls, the poets from early times have been making Christmas
songs--noels, or nouve as they are called in Provencal--in which new
subordinate characters have been created in a spirit of frank realism,
and these have materialized in new figures surrounding the creche. At
the same time the fancy of the people, working with a still more naive
directness along the lines of associated ideas, has been making the most
curiously incongruous and anachronistic additions to the group.
To the first order belong such creations as the blind man, led by a
child, coming to be healed of his blindness by the Infant's touch; or
that of the young mother hurrying to offer her breast to the new-born
(in accordance with the beautiful custom still in force in Provence)
that its own mother may rest a little before she begins to suckle it; or
that of the other mother bringing the cradle of which her own baby has
been dispossessed, because of her compassion for the poor woman at the
inn whose child is lying on a truss of straw.
But the popular additions, begotten of association of ideas, are far
more numerous and also are far more curious. The hill-top, close under
the floating figure of Jehovah, has been crowned with a
wind-mill--because wind-mills abounded anciently on the hill-tops of
Provence. To the mill, naturally, has been added a miller--who is riding
down the road on an ass, with a sack of flour across his saddle-bow
that he is carrying as a gift to the Holy Family. The adoring shepherds
have been given flocks of sheep, and on the hill-side more shepherds and
more sheep have been put for company. The sheep, in association with the
ox and the ass, have brought in their train a whole troop of domestic
animals--including geese and turkeys and chickens and a cock on the roof
of the stable; and in the train of the camels has come the extraordinary
addition of lions, bears, leopards, elephants, ostriches, and even
crocodiles! The Provencaux being from of old mighty hunters (the
tradition has found its classic embodiment in Tartarin), and hill-sides
being appropriate to hunting, a figure of a fowler with a gun at his
shoulder has been introduced; and as it is well, even in the case of a
Provencal sportsman, to point a gun at a definite object, the fowler
usually is so placed as to aim at the cock on the stable roof. He is a
modern, yet not very recent addition, the fowler, as is shown by the
fact that he carries a flint-lock fowling-piece. Drumming and fifing
being absolute essentials to every sort of Provencal festivity, a
conspicuous figure always is found playing on a _tambourin_ and
_galoubet_. Itinerant knife-grinders are an old institution here, and in
some obscure way--possibly because of their thievish propensities--are
associated intimately with the devil; and so there is either a
knife-grinder simple, or a devil with a knife-grinder's wheel. Of old it
was the custom for the women to carry distaffs and to spin out thread as
they went to and from the fields or along the roads (just as the women
nowadays knit as they walk), and therefore a spinning-woman always is of
the company. Because child-stealing was not uncommon here formerly, and
because gypsies still are plentiful, there are three gypsies lurking
about the inn all ready to steal the Christ-Child away. As the
inn-keeper naturally would come out to investigate the cause of the
commotion in his stable-yard, he is found, with the others, lantern in
hand. And, finally, there is a group of women bearing as gifts to the
Christ-Child the essentials of the Christmas feast: codfish, chickens,
carde, ropes of garlic, eggs, and the great Christmas cakes, _poumpo_
and _fougasso_.
Many other figures may be, and often are, added to the group--of which
one of the most delightful is the Turk who makes a solacing present of
his pipe to Saint Joseph; but all of these which I have named have come
to be now quite as necessary to a properly made creche as are the few
which are taken direct from the Bible narrative: and the congregation
surely is one of the quaintest that ever poetry and simplicity together
devised!
In Provencal the diminutive of saint is _santoun_; and it is as santouns
that all the personages of the creche--including the whole of the purely
human and animal contingent, and even the knife-grinding devil--are
known. They are of various sizes--the largest, used in churches, being
from two to three feet high--and in quality of all degrees: ranging
downward from real magnificence (such as may be seen in the
seventeenth-century Neapolitan creche in Room V. of the Musee de Cluny)
to the rough little clay figures two or three inches high in common
household use throughout Provence. These last, sold by thousands at
Christmas time, are as crude as they well can be: pressed in rude
moulds, dried (not baked), and painted with glaring colours, with a
little gilding added in the case of Jehovah and the angels and the
Kings.
For two centuries or more the making of clay santouns has been a notable
industry in Marseille. It is largely a hereditary trade carried on by
certain families inhabiting that ancient part of the city, the Quarter
of Saint-Jean, which lies to the south of the Vieux Port. The figures
sell for the merest trifle, the cheapest for one or two sous, yet the
Santoun Fair--held annually in December in booths set up in the
Cour-du-Chapitre and in the Allee-des-Capucins--is of a real commercial
importance; and is also--what with the oddly whimsical nature of its
merchandise, and the vast enjoyment of the children under parental or
grand-parental convoy who are its patrons--the very gayest sight in that
city of which gayety is the dominant characteristic the whole year
round.