number of enthusiastic friends sang songs and made
merry. They had none of the solemnity of a conclave, or the dignity of
literary assemblies. There was no formal organization. Those writers who
were zealously interested in the rehabilitation of the Provencal speech
and connected themselves with Mistral and his friends were the
Felibres. Not until 1876 was there a Felibrige with a formal
constitution and an elaborate organization.

The word _Felibre_ was furnished by Mistral, who had come upon it in an
old hymn wherein occurs the expression that the Virgin met Jesus in the
temple among "the seven Felibres of the law." The origin and etymology
of this word have given rise to various explanations. The Greek
_philabros_, lover of the beautiful; _philebraios_, lover of Hebrew,
hence, among the Jews, teacher; _felibris_, nursling, according to
Ducange; the Irish _filea_, bard, and _ber_, chief, have been proposed.
Jeanroy (in _Romania_, XIII, p. 463) offers the etymology: Spanish
_feligres, filii Ecclesiae_, sons of the church, parishioners. None of
these is certain.

Seven poets were present at this first meeting, and as the day happened
to be that of St. Estelle, the emblem of a seven-pointed star was
adopted. Very fond of the number seven are these Felibres; they tell you
of the seven chief churches of Avignon, its seven gates, seven colleges,
seven hospitals, seven popes who were there seventy years; the word
_Felibre_ has seven letters, so has Mistral's name, and he spent seven
years in writing each of his epics.

The task that lay before these poets was twofold: they had not only to
prune and purify their dialect and produce verses, they had also to find
readers, to create a public, to begin a propaganda. The first means
adopted was the publication of the _Armana prouvencau_, already referred
to. In 1855, five hundred copies were issued, in 1894, twelve thousand.
For four years this magazine was destined for Provence alone; in 1860,
after the appearance of _Mireio_, it was addressed to all the dwellers
in southern France. The great success of _Mireio_ began a new period in
the history of the Felibrige. Mistral himself and the poets about him
now took an entirely new view of their mission. The uplifting of the
people, the creation of a literature that should be admired abroad as
well as at home, the complete expression of the life of Provence, in all
its aspects, past and present, escape from the implacable centraliza