au trepas
Nous laisses pas!"

Lord, we are thy prodigal sons; but we are thy Christians of old:

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