On the little Grande Place the crowd was packed densely. There the
several streams of humanity pouring into the town met and mingled; and
thence in a strong current flowed onward into the church. Coming from
the blackness without--for the tall houses surrounding the Grande Place
cut off the moonlight and made it a little pocket of darkness--it was
with a shock of splendour that we encountered the brightness within. All
the side-altars were blazing with candles; and as the service went on,
and the high-altar also flamed up, the whole building was filled with a
soft radiance--save that strange luminous shadows lingered in the lofty
vaulting of the nave.
After the high-altar, the most brilliant spot was the altar of Saint
Joseph, in the west transept; beside which was a magnificent creche--the
figures half life-size, beautifully modelled, and richly clothed. But
there was nothing whimsical about this creche: the group might have
been, and very possibly had been, composed after a well-painted
"Nativity" by some artist of the late Renaissance.
The mass was the customary office; but at the Offertory it was
interrupted by a ceremony that gave it suddenly an entirely Mediaeval
cast: of which I felt more fully the beauty, and the strangeness in our
time, because the Vidame sedulously had guarded against my having
knowledge of it in advance. This was nothing less than a living
rendering of the Adoration of the Shepherds: done with a simplicity to
make one fancy the figures in Ghirlandojo's picture were alive again and
stirred by the very spirit that animated them when they were set on
canvas four hundred years ago.
By some means only a little short of a miracle, a way was opened through
the dense crowd along the centre of the nave from the door to the altar,
and up this way with their offerings real shepherds came--the quaintest
procession that anywhere I have ever seen. In the lead were four
musicians--playing upon the _tambourin_, the _galoubet_, the very small
cymbals called _palets_, and the bagpipe-like _carlamuso_--and then, two
by two, came ten shepherds: wearing the long brown full cloaks,
weather-stained and patched and mended, which seem always to have come
down through many generations and which never by any chance are new;
carrying tucked beneath their arms their battered felt hats browned,
like their cloaks, by long warfare with sun and rain; holding in one
hand a lighted candle and in the other a staff. The two leaders
dispensing with staves and candles, bore garlanded baskets; one filled
with fruit--melons, pears, apples, and grapes--and in the other a pair
of doves: which with sharp quick motions turned their heads from side to
side as they gazed wonderingly on their strange surroundings with their
bright beautiful eyes.
Following came the main offering: a spotless lamb. Most originally, and
in a way poetically, was this offering made. Drawn by a mild-faced ewe,
whose fleece had been washed to a wonder of whiteness and who was decked
out with bright-coloured ribbons in a way to unhinge with vanity her
sheepish mind, was a little two-wheeled cart--all garlanded with laurel
and holly, and bedizened with knots of ribbon and pink paper roses and
glittering little objects such as are hung on Christmas-trees in other
lands. Lying in the cart placidly, not bound and not in the least
frightened, was the dazzlingly-white lamb, decked like the ewe with
knots of ribbon and wearing about its neck a red collar brilliant to
behold. Now and then the ewe would turn to look at it, and in response
to one of those wistful maternal glances the little creature stood up
shakily on its unduly long legs and gave an anxious baa! But when a
shepherd bent over and stroked it gently, it was reassured; lying down
contentedly again in its queer little car of triumph, and thereafter
through the ceremony remaining still. Behind the car came ten more
shepherds; and in their wake a long double line of country-folk, each
with a lighted candle in hand. There is difficulty, indeed, in keeping
that part of the demonstration within bounds, because it is esteemed an
honour and a privilege to walk in the procession of the offered lamb.
Slowly that strange company moved toward the altar, where the
ministering priest awaited its coming; and at the altar steps the
bearers of the fruit and the doves separated, so that the little cart
might come between them and their offering be made complete, while the
other shepherds formed a semi-circle in the rear. The music was stilled,
and the priest accepted and set upon the altar the baskets; and then
extended the paten that the shepherds, kneeling, might kiss it in token
of their offering of the lamb. This completed the ceremony. The
_tambourin_ and _galoubet_ and _palets_ and _carlamuso_ all together
struck up again; and the shepherds and the lamb's car passed down the
nave between the files of candle-bearers and so out through the door.
Within the past sixty years or so this naive ceremony has fallen more
and more into disuse. But it still occasionally is revived--as at
Barbentane in 1868, and Rognonas in 1894, and repeatedly within the past
decade in the sheep-raising parish of Maussane--by a cure who is at one
with his flock in a love for the customs of ancient times. Its origin
assuredly goes back far into antiquity; so very far, indeed, that the
airs played by the musicians in the procession seem by comparison quite
of our own time: yet tradition ascribes the composition of those airs to
the good King Rene, whose happy rule over Provence ended more than four
centuries ago.
Another custom of a somewhat similar character, observed formerly in
many of the Provencal churches, was the grouping before the altar at the
mass on Christmas Day of a young girl, a choir-boy, and a dove: in
allegorical representation of the Virgin Mary, the Angel Gabriel, and
the Holy Ghost. But the assembly of this quaint little company long
since ceased to be a part of the Christmas rite.