But the material element of the Great Supper is its least part. What
entitles it to the augmenting adjective is its soul: that subtle essence
of peace and amity for which the word Christmas is a synonym in all
Christian lands. It is the rule of these family gatherings at Christmas
time in Provence that all heartburnings and rancours, which may have
sprung up during the year, then shall be cut down; and even if sometimes
they quickly grow again, as no doubt they do now and then, it makes for
happiness that they shall be thus banished from the peace-feast of the
year.
Janetoun and one of her sisters-in-law were the only members of our
party who had a hatchet to bury; and the burial was over so
quickly--being but an extra hug and an explosion of kisses--that I
should have known nothing about it but for the over-long tongue of Mise
Fougueiroun: who, in a kindly way, is as thorough-going a gossip as ever
lived. Of all things in the world to quarrel about, this quarrel had
grown out of a spirited difference of opinion as to how the heel of a
knitted stocking should be turned! But the matter had come to be quite
of a seriousness, and all the family breathed freer when those
resounding peace-kisses were given and received. Actually, as I happened
to learn later, the reconciliation was pushed to such an extreme that
each of them incontinently adopted the other's knitting creed--with the
curious result that they now are in a fair way to have a fresh quarrel
for next Christmas out of the same matter on inverted lines! It was
before the lighting of the yule-log that the feud of the stocking heels
thus happily (even though only temporarily) was pacified, and the family
festival was cloudless from first to last.
When the serious part of the supper had been disposed of and the mere
palate-tickling period of the dessert had come, I was much interested in
observing that the talk--mainly carried on by the elders--was turned
with an obviously deliberate purpose upon family history; and especially
upon the doings of those who in the past had brought honour upon the
family name. And I was still more interested when, later, the Vidame
informed me that it is the Provencal custom at the Christmas festival
for the old thus to instruct the young and so to keep family tradition
alive. No doubt there is in this a dim survival of ancestor-worship; but
I should be glad to see so excellent a relic of paganism preserved in
the Christmas ritual of my own land.
The chief ancestral glory of the family of the Mazet is its close
blood-relationship with the gallant Andre Etienne: that drummer of the
Fifty-first Demi-brigade of the Army of Italy who is commemorated on the
frieze of the Pantheon, and who is known and honoured as the "Tambour
d'Arcole" all over France. It was delightful to listen to old Jan's
telling of the brave story: how this Andre, their own kinsman, swam the
stream under the enemy's fire at Arcolo with his drum on his back and
then drummed his fellow-soldiers on to victory; how the First Consul
awarded him the drum-sticks of honour, and later--when the Legion of
Honour was founded--gave him the cross; how they carved him in stone,
drumming the charge, up there on the front of the Pantheon in Paris
itself; how Mistral, the great poet of Provence, had made a poem about
him that had been printed in a book; and how, crowning glory, they had
set up his marble statue in Cadenet--the little town, not far from
Avignon, where he was born!
Old Jan was not content with merely telling this story--like a true
Provencal he acted it: swinging a supposititious drum upon his back,
jumping into an imaginary river and swimming it with his head in the
air, swinging his drum back into place again, and then--_Zou!_--starting
off at the head of the Fifty-first Demi-brigade with such a rousing play
of drum-sticks that I protest we fairly heard the rattle of them, along
with the spatter of Italian musketry in the face of which Andre Etienne
beat that gallant _pas-de-charge_!
It set me all a-thrilling; and still more did it thrill those other
listeners who were of the Arcolo hero's very blood and bone. They
clapped their hands and they shouted. They laughed with delight. And the
fighting spirit of Gaul was so stirred within them that at a word--the
relations between France and Italy being a little strained just then--I
verily believe they would have been for marching in a body across the
south-eastern frontier!
Elizo's old father was rather out of the running in this matter. It was
not by any relative of his that the drum-sticks of honour had been won;
and his thoughts, after wandering a little, evidently settled down upon
the strictly personal fact that his thin old legs were cold. Rising
slowly from the table, he carried his plate to the fire-place; and when
he had arranged some live coals in one of the baskets of the waist-high
andirons he rested the plate above them on the iron rim: and so stood
there, eating contentedly, while the warmth from the glowing yule-log
entered gratefully into his lean old body and stirred to a brisker
pulsing the blood in his meagre veins. But his interest in what was
going forward revived again--his legs being, also, by that time well
warmed--when his own praises were sounded by his daughter: in the story
of how he stopped the runaway horse on the very brink of the precipice
at Les Baux; and how his wife all the while sat calmly beside him in the
cart, cool and silent, and showing no sign of fear.
When Elizo had finished this story she whispered a word to Magali and
Nanoun that sent them laughing out of the room; and presently Magali
came back again arrayed in the identical dress which had been worn by
the heroine of the adventure--who had perked and plumed herself not a
little while her daughter told about it--when the runaway horse so
nearly had galloped her off the Baux rock into Eternity. It was the
Provencal costume--with full sleeves and flaring cap--of sixty years
back; but a little gayer than the strict Arles dress of that period,
because her mother was not of Arles but of Beaucaire. It was not so
graceful, especially in the head-dress, as the costume of the present
day; nor nearly so becoming--as Magali showed by looking a dozen years
older after putting it on. But Magali, even with a dozen years added,
could not but be charming; and I think that the little old bowed
grandmother--who still was a bit of a coquette at eighty--would have
been better pleased had she been spared this encounter with what must
have seemed to her very like a meeting with her own young ghost, raised
suddenly from the depths of the distant past.
[Illustration: MAGALI]
By long experience, gained on many such occasions, the Vidame knew that
the culminating point of the supper would be reached when the family
drummer swam the river and headed the French charge at Arcolo.
Therefore had he reserved until a later period, when the excitement
incident to the revival of that honourable bit of family history should
have subsided, a joy-giving bomb-shell of his own that he had all ready
to explode. An American or an Englishman never could have fired it
without something in the way of speech-making; but the Vidame was of a
shy temper, and speech-making was not in his line. When the chatter
caused by Magali's costuming had lulled a little, and there came a
momentary pause in the talk, he merely reached diagonally across the
table and touched glasses with Esperit and said simply: "To your good
health, Monsieur the Superintendent of the Lower Farm!"
It was done so quietly that for some seconds no one realized that the
Vidame's toast brought happiness to all the household, and to two of its
members a life-long joy. Esperit, even, had his glass almost to his lips
before he understood to what he was drinking; and then his understanding
came through the finer nature of Magali--who gave a quick deep sob as
she buried her face in the buxom Nanoun's bosom and encircled that
astonished young person's neck with her arms. Esperit went pale at
that; but the hand did not tremble in which he held his still-raised
glass, nor did his voice quaver as he said with a deep earnestness: "To
the good health of Monsieur le Vidame, with the thanks of two very happy
hearts!"--and so drained his wine.
A great danger puts no more strain upon the nerves of a man of good
fibre than does a great joy; and it seemed to me that Esperit's absolute
steadiness, under this sudden fire of happiness, showed him to be made
of as fine and as manly stuff as went to the making of his kinsman who
beat the _pas-de-charge_ up the slope at Arcolo at the head of the
Fifty-first Demi-brigade.
But nothing less than the turbulence of the whole battle of Arcolo--not
to say of that whole triumphant campaign in Italy--will suffice for a
comparison with the tumult that arose about our supper-table when the
meaning of the Vidame's toast fairly was grasped by the company at
large! I do not think that I could express in words--nor by any less
elaborate method of illustration than a kinetoscope--the state of
excitement into which a Provencal will fly over a matter of absolutely
no importance at all; how he will burst forth into a very whirlwind of
words and gestures about some trifle that an ordinary human being would
dispose of without the quiver of an eye. And as our matter was one so
truly moving that a very Dutchman through all his phlegm would have been
stirred by it, such a tornado was set a-going as would have put a mere
hurricane of the tropics to open shame!
Naturally, the disturbance was central over Esperit and Magali and the
Vidame. The latter--his kind old face shining like the sun of an Easter
morning--gave back with a good will on Magali's cheeks her kisses of
gratitude; and exchanged embraces and kisses with the elder women; and
went through such an ordeal of violent hand-shaking that I trembled for
the integrity of his arms. But as for the young people, whom everybody
embraced over and over again with a terrible energy, that they came
through it all with whole ribs is as near to being a miracle as anything
that has happened in modern times!
Gradually the storm subsided--though not without some fierce
after-gusts--and at last worked itself off harmlessly in song: as we
returned to the ritual of the evening and took to the singing of
noels--the Christmas canticles which are sung between the ending of the
Great Supper and the beginning of the midnight mass.