Chapter XI

The creche, around which the children were gathered in a swarm, was built up in one corner; and our coming was the signal for the first of the ceremonies, the lighting of the creche candles, to begin. In this all the children had a part--making rather a scramble of it, for there was rivalry as to which of them should light the most--and in a moment a constellation of little flames covered the Bethlehem hill-side and brought into bright prominence the Holy Family and its strange attendant host of quite impossible people and beasts and birds.

The laying of the yule-log followed; a ceremony so grave that it has all the dignity of, and really is, a religious rite. The buzz of talk died away into silence as Elizo's father, the oldest man, took by the hand and led out into the court-yard where the log was lying his great-grandson, the little Tounin, the youngest child: it being the rule that the nominal bearers of the _cacho-fio_ to the hearth shall be the oldest and the youngest of the family--the one personifying the year that is dying, the other the year new-born. Sometimes, and this is the prettiest rendering of the custom, the two are an old, old man and a baby carried in its mother's arms--while between them the real bearers of the burden walk.

In our case the log actually was carried by Marius and Esperit; but the tottering old man clasped its forward end with his thin feeble hands, and its hinder end was clasped by the plump feeble hands of the tottering child. Thus, the four together, they brought it in through the doorway and carried it thrice around the room, circling the supper-table and the lighted candles; and then, reverently, it was laid before the fire-place--that still sometimes is called in Provencal the _lar_.

There was a pause, while the old man filled out a cup of _vin cue_; and a solemn hush fell upon the company, and all heads were bowed, as he poured three libations upon the log, saying with the last: "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost!"--and then cried with all the vigor that he could infuse into his thin and quavering old voice:

Cacho-fio,
Bouto-fio!
Alegre! Alegre!
Dieu nous alegre!
Calendo ven! Tout ben ven!
Dieu nous fague la graci de veire l'an que ven,
E se noun sian pas mai, que noun fuguen pas mens!

Yule-log,
Catch fire!
Joy! Joy!
God gives us joy!
Christmas comes! All good comes!
May God give us grace to see the coming year,
And if we are not more, may we not be less!

As he ended his invocation he crossed himself, as did all the rest; and a great glad shout was raised of "Alegre! Alegre!" as Marius and Esperit--first casting some fagots of vine-branches on the bed of glowing coals--placed the yule-log upon the fire. Instantly the vines blazed up, flooding the room with brightness; and as the yule-log glowed and reddened everybody cried

Cacho-fio,
Bouto-fio!
Alegre! Alegre!

again and again--as though the whole of them together of a sudden had gone merry-mad!

In the midst of this triumphant rejoicing the bowl from which the libation had been poured was filled afresh with _vin cue_ and was passed from hand to hand and lip to lip--beginning with the little Tounin, and so upward in order of seniority until it came last of all to the old man--and from it each drank to the new fire of the new year.

Anciently, this ceremony of the yule-log lighting was universal in Provence, and it is almost universal still; sometimes with a less elaborate ritual than I have described, but yet substantially the same: always with the libation, always with an invocation, always with the rejoicing toast to the new fire. But in modern times--within the last century or so--another custom in part has supplanted it in Marseille and Aix and in some few other towns. This is the lighting of candles at midnight in front of the creche; a ceremony, it will be observed, in which new fire still bears the most important part.

One of my Aix friends, the poet Joachim Gasquet, has described to me the Christmas Eve customs which were observed in his own home: the Gasquet bakery, in the Rue de la Cepede, that has been handed down from father to son through so many hundreds of years that even its owners cannot tell certainly whether it was in the fourteenth or the fifteenth century that their family legend of good baking had its rise. As Monsieur Auguste, the _contre-maitre_ of the bakery, opened the great stone door of the oven that I might peer into its hot depths, an historical cross-reference came into my mind that made me realize its high antiquity. Allowing for difference of longitude, the _contre-maitre_ who was Monsieur Auguste's remote predecessor was lifting the morning's baking out of that oven at the very moment when Columbus saw through the darkness westward the lights of a new world!

In the Gasquet family it was the custom to eat the Great Supper in the oven room: because that was the heart, the sanctuary, of the house; the place consecrated by the toil which gave the family its livelihood. On the supper-table there was always a wax figure of the Infant Christ, and this was carried just before midnight to the living-room, off from the shop, in one corner of which the creche was set up. It was the little Joachim whose right it was, because he was the youngest, the purest, to carry the figure. A formal procession was made. He walked at its head, a little chap with long curling golden hair, between his two grandfathers; the rest followed in the order of their age and rank: his two grandmothers, his father and mother, Monsieur Auguste (a dashing blade of a young baker then) with the maid-servant, and the apprentices last of all. A single candle was carried by one of his grandfathers into the dark room--the illumination of which, that night, could come only from the new fire kindled before the creche. Precisely at midnight--at the moment when all the clocks of Aix striking together let loose the Christmas chimes--the child laid the holy figure in the manger, and then the candles instantly were set ablaze.

Sometimes there would be a thrilling pause of half a minute or more while they waited for the bells: the child, with the image in his hands, standing before the creche in the little circle of light; the others grouped behind him, and for the most part lost in dark shadow cast by the single candle held low down; those nearest to the creche holding matches ready to strike so that all the candles might be lighted at once when the moment came. And then all the bells together would send their voices out over the city heavenward; and his mother would say softly, "Now, my little son!"; and the room would flash into brightness suddenly--as though a glory radiated from the Christ-Child lying there in the manger between the ox and the ass.

Every evening throughout the Christmas season the candles were relighted before this Christmas shrine, and there the members of the family said in common their evening prayer; and when the time came for taking down the creche those parts of it which were not preserved for the ensuing year--the refuse scraps of wood and pasteboard and moss and laurel--were burned (this is the orthodox general custom) with something of the flavour of a rite; not cast into the household fire nor the bakery oven, but saved from falling into base places by being consumed in a pure fire of its own.