Frédéric Mistral. Charles Alfred Downer

as the emblem of his office a seven-pointed golden star, the other Majoraux, a golden grasshopper.

      The other Félibres are unlimited in number. Any seven Félibres dwelling in the same place may ask the Maintenance to form them into a school. The schools administer their own affairs.

      Every seven years the Floral Games are held, at which prizes are distributed; every year, on the feast of St. Estelle, a general meeting of the Félibrige takes place. Each Maintenance must meet once a year.

      At the Floral Games he who is crowned poet-laureate chooses the Queen, and she crowns him with a wreath of olive leaves.

      To-day there are three Maintenances within the limits of French soil, Provence, Languedoc, Aquitaine.

      Among other facts that should doubtless be reported here is, the list of Capouliés. They have been Mistral (1876–1888), Roumanille (1888–1891), and Félix Gras; the Queens have been Madame Mistral, Mlle. Thérèse Roumanille, Mlle. Marie Girard, and the Comtesse Marie-Thérèse de Chevigné, who is descended upon her mother's side from Laura de Sade, generally believed to be Petrarch's Laura.

      Since the organization went into effect the Félibrige has expanded in many ways, its influence has continually grown, new questions have arisen. Among these last have been burning questions of religion and politics, for although discussions of them are banished from Felibrean meetings, opinions of the most various kind exist among the Félibres, have found expression, and have well-nigh resulted in difficulties. Until 1876 these questions slept. Mistral is a Catholic, but has managed to hold more or less aloof from political matters. Aubanel was a zealous Catholic, and had the title by inheritance of Printer to his Holiness. Roumanille was a Catholic, and an ardent Royalist. When the Félibrige came to extend its limits over into Languedoc, the poet Auguste Fourès and his fellows proclaimed a different doctrine, and called up memories of the past with a different view. They affirmed their adherence to the Renaissance méridionale, and claimed equal rights for the Languedocian dialect. They asserted, however, that the true tradition was republican, and protested vigorously against the clerical and monarchical parties, which, in their opinion, had always been for Languedoc a cause of disaster, servitude, and misery. The memory of the terrible crusade in the thirteenth century inspired fiery poems among them. Hatred of Simon de Montfort and of the invaders who followed him, free-thought, and federalism found vigorous expression in all their productions. In Provence, too, there have been opinions differing widely from those of the original founders, and the third Capoulié, Félix Gras, was a Protestant. Of him M. Jourdanne writes:—

      "Finally, in 1891, after the death of Roumanille, the highest office in the Félibrige was taken by a man who could rally about him the two elements that we have seen manifested, sufficiently Republican to satisfy the most ardent in the extreme Left, sufficiently steady not to alarm the Royalists, a great enough poet to deserve without any dispute the first place in an assembly of poets."

      He, like Mistral, wrote epics in twelve cantos. His first work, Li Carbounié, has on its title-page three remarkable lines:—