for everybody and the sweet wine flowed in rivers. Then
there were crackers, and fireworks, and coloured lanterns all over the
nettle trees. Long live St. Eli! They all danced the farandole until
they dropped. Cadet scorched his new smock.... Even Jan looked content,
and actually asked his mother for a dance. She cried with joy.

At midnight they all went to bed; everybody was tired out. But Jan
himself didn't sleep. Cadet said later that he had been sobbing the
whole night. Oh, I tell you, he was well smitten that one....

* * * * *

The next morning the mother heard someone running across her sons'
bedroom. She felt a sort of presentiment:

--Jan, is that you?

Jan didn't reply, he was already on the stairs.

His mother got up at once:

--Jan, where are you going?

He went up into the loft, she followed him:

--In heavens name, son!

He shut and bolted the door:

--Jan, Jan, answer me. What are you doing?

Her old trembling hands felt for the latch.... A window opened; there
was the sound of a body hitting the courtyard slabs. Then ... an awful
silence.

The poor lad had told himself: "I love her too much.... I want to end
it all...." Oh, what pitiful things we are! It's all too much; even
scorn can't kill love....

That morning, the village people wondered who could be howling like
that, down there by Esteve's farm.

It was the mother in the courtyard by the stone table which was covered
with dew and with blood. She was wailing over her son's lifeless body,
limp, in her arms.

THE POPE'S MULE

When Provencal people talked about an aggressive man with a grudge,
they used to say, "Beware of that man!... he is like the Pope's mule,
who saved up her kick for seven years."

I have long been trying to find out where the saying came from, and
what this papal mule and the seven year kick was all about. Nobody, not
even Francet Mamai, my fife player, who knows the Provencal legends
like the back of his hand, has been able to tell me. Francet, like me,
thinks that it is from an old tale from Avignon, but he has not heard
of it elsewhere.

--You'll find it in the Cicada's open library, the old piper told me
with a snigger.

It seemed a good idea to me, and, the Cicada's library being right
outside my door, I decided to shut myself in for a week.

It's a marvellous library, well stocked, and open twenty four hours a
day to poets and it is served by those little cymbal-cl