Emile RIPERT tells in the introduction to his “Provençal Renaissance” the goal he pursues through this book: click here: The text will be read

“No doubt I could have spared myself an easier task by leaving in the shade, as we have done too often until now, the beginnings of this literature in need of organization, to greet easy verses the great Mistralian masterpieces, but even if I would have followed Mistral, on the paths where glory has led him to see himself standing, immortal, in a place of Arles, even if I would have unrolled the During his admirable career until the serene death which marked for him the hour of a last apotheosis, I would have had less joy than to see patiently and slowly emerging from the veils which enveloped him the blossoming Provençal soul in Mirèio. The efforts of this soul which awakens after centuries of slumber to find itself, to realize its beauty, its value, its rights, that is the whole dramatic subject of this book.

Ah! whatever the result of this momentum, whether this awakened soul must relapse into definitive lethargy or whether it must create new masterpieces, that is not the question here; the effort she made in the 19th century is beautiful enough to hold, for a long time, on its own, our moved gazes. This book, born under the inspiration of the great Master Mistral … I hoped someday to bring it myself to Maillane … Alas! At the very moment when I was finishing the drafting, death had laid the great poet in the tomb which he had had erected at the foot of those beautiful bluish hills, the sight of which he said had “reassured his verses and rested his soul. “.