Mirèio
by Frédéric Mistral
Summary
Mirèio follows Mireille, the daughter of a prosperous farming family in Provence, and Vincent, a poor basket weaver who has nothing to offer her family but his devotion, and Mistral spends the poem's early songs establishing just how impossible their match looks to everyone around them. When Mireille's parents flatly refuse to let her marry so far beneath her, she does not accept the decision quietly. She sets out alone across the Camargue, the flat, sun scorched marshland of the Rhone delta, walking toward the shrine of the Saintes Maries de la Mer to pray that her love will somehow be allowed to stand. She makes the crossing bareheaded under the summer sun, and sunstroke overtakes her; she reaches the shrine only to die there among her grieving family, who find her too late to save her. Mistral softens the ending only with faith: the walk meant to win her family's blessing becomes the thing that kills her, but the three Marys appear to the dying girl, tell her their own story and show her a glimpse of paradise, so she dies serene while everyone around her grieves.
Mistral wrote the entire twelve part epic in Provençal, the regional language of southern France, at a moment when French literary culture treated it as a peasant dialect unworthy of serious poetry, and he built into it the sweep and formal ambition of classical epic, full choruses of natural description, extended comparisons and invocations, applied to ordinary rural people rather than to gods or kings. It suits a reader willing to move at the pace of a long poem rather than a novel, one who wants landscape treated as a genuine character in its own right; the Camargue's heat and light are drawn here as fully as either of the two lovers.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy awarded Frédéric Mistral a share of the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature, recognizing, in the Academy's own words, the fresh originality and true inspiration of his poetic production. He shared the prize that year with the Spanish dramatist José Echegaray, only the first of four times the literature prize has ever been split between two winners.
That second, unshared half of Mistral's reputation rests on an equally large project: he spent years compiling Lou Tresor dóu Felibrige, a comprehensive Provençal dictionary published between 1878 and 1886, and he put his share of the Nobel money into the Museon Arlaten, the museum of Provençal folk life he had founded in Arles in 1896 and which still stands today. Mirèio itself was translated into roughly fifteen European languages within decades of its 1859 publication, and it remains the work most credited with proving that Provençal could carry a major literary ambition rather than only supply regional color.