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Keeper of the Keys: A Profile of Frederic Mistral
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23521 |
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BOOK WORLD
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12 / 2003 |
2,755 Words |
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Timothy Rake
Timothy Rake is a freelance writer and educator living in
Eugene, Oregon. Sebastien Rake is an architecture student at
the University of Oregon and was an award-winning photographer
as a young teen. |
He who keeps his native tongue, keeps the keys that deliver him from bondage.
--Frédéric Mistral
On the Place des Carmes in Avignon, France, enormous plane trees sway in the breeze, casting shadows from another century on the cloistered walls of what was once the boarding school of Frédéric Mistral. Here, in the cobbledstone square, the ghostly presence of Provence's poet laureate permeates the senses and settles underfoot. In fact, you can barely take a step in this celebrated city, as Mistral himself asserted, "without treading on some memory." And of all the memories sealed behind the walls of the Collge Royal of Mistral's youth, none is more seminal than an event that took place here in 1845, which propelled the writer toward the Nobel Prize in literature.
A country boy from the neighboring village of Maillane, Mistral was barely fifteen years old when he was caught by the school's proctor, Joseph Roumanille, scribbling during evening prayers. Imagine the devout Roumanille sneaking up behind the startled youngster, seizing the scrap of paper, and uttering to Mistral, "My dear boy, one does not doodle during vespers." And imagine equally Roumanille's astonishment to find the "evidence" was not at all the mischievous doodling of a daydreaming teenager. The pious Mistral had been translating the sacred psalms into verse in his native Provenau.
"So, young Mistral," Monsieur Roumanille remarked later that evening while walking around the ramparts of Avignon with his precocious charge, "you entertain yourself in that fashion by writing Provenal
... (1950 of 17244 Characters)
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