The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

Emperor ordered everyone to leave the church and there alone with the Saint he confessed his sins—all of them save one, which he had not the courage to confess, though St. Gilles pressed him for twenty days to do so. St. Gilles, meantime, went on performing his miracles, but he forever prayed to God to make the Emperor confess his secret sin, and one day, when St. Gilles was saying Mass, an angel flew down on to the altar and left beside the holy wafer, a letter which God sent to his loyal servant, allowing him the power of remitting the Emperor’s secret sin.
    “Possessing as he did the special powers of performing miracles and remitting sins, the fame of St. Gilles grew apace and even after he died people from every country flocked to his tomb in the crypt of the Church, and as it is on the road of St. James the Jacobean pilgrims never failed to pray at his tomb, and those who were setting out for the long and perilous pilgrimage to the Holy Land also halted by his shrine and prayed.”
    The sacristan recited for me the story of St. Gilles as though it had been a cantefable. His speech always fascinated me, for it was such a complete contrast to the speech of Northern France. It was nearer to old Latin speech, for the Provençal and the Gascon alike have followed the Italians and Spaniards in keeping the resonant broad vowels that make the Southern tongues peculiarly adapted to song. And in the Middle Ages this tongue, the langue d’oc, covered a far greater range than today, for it was spoken as far north as Geneva on the East and Poitou on the West, and the first troubadour known to us was the Count of Poitiers who came from the central Loire.
    The sacristan was so convinced of the superiority of his Provençal civilization that I was put in mind of Andalusia, where even the poorest day-labourer in any pueblo feels the same superiority, which is really compassion for those who were not fortunate enough to be born on the banks of the Rhone and to speak the langue d’oc.
    After leaving St. Gilles, I continued plodding my way towards my next halting place, Montpellier. The landscape of Provence, once we leave the Camargue, is typically Mediterranean. Between the sea and the grey bleached mountains the land is cultivated with infinite toil and built up in terraces with vines and olives everywhere, and here and there occasional cypresses. In St. Gilles, the voluble sacristan had introduced me to a young seminarist, who was on his way to Montpellier, so we tramped along together. The seminarist, whom I nicknamed Canta l’Epistola, was a slender, ascetic youth, rapid and vivacious in manner and eager to air his knowledge of the history and poetry of his beloved Provence. As we walked he sang songs and rambled on in a fascinating chronique scandaleuse of the Provençal saints of St. Honorat and his sister, St. Margaret, in their ‘golden isles’ of Lérins, of the strawberries which St. Margaret cultivated in order to tempt her brother to visit her, for she was always in need of his holy counsel; of St. Mary Magdalen, who lived for thirty years in the forests of Sainte Baume, clothed only in her auburn hair, and whose bones have wandered further even than those of St. James of Compostella; of Saint Sara, the only saint accepted by les Bohémiens because she sanctifies their pilfering.
    The seminarist was a firm believer in the Greek heritage of Provence. “I am proud of being a Greek Massaliote,” he said. “Why, Greek was the tongue of our people until the sixth century, and even today the Sanjanens, the fishermen of the St. John’s quarter of Marseilles, employ many Greek words in their technical argot.”
    When we arrived at Montpellier, the seminarist brought me to a students’ hostel, where he sang and I fiddled for the company. But, already in Montpellier the atmosphere had become less Provençal, and more international. Nevertheless, it warmed my heart to hear Canta l’Epistola defend his Provençal Albigensians against the attacks of the young priests from northern France, who maintained the orthodox point of view, namely that the authority of the Church would have been doomed in southern France, had the Pope not taken strong action and proclaimed a crusade. The seminarist stoutly defended Raymond VI of Toulouse, saying that he had never been a heretic and had submitted to public penance imposed by the Church in St. Gilles, and his brother-in-law and ally in the war, Pedro II of Aragon, had been