“I have read _Mirèio_. Nothing until now has appeared of such national, vital, inimitable growth of the South. There is a virtue in the sun of Provence. I have received such a thrust both in the spirit and the heart that I was impelled to write a discourse on the poem. Tell this to Monsieur Mistral. Since the Homerics of Archipel, no such spring of primitive poetry has gushed forth. I cried, even as you did, ‘It is Homer!’” Adolphe Dumas wrote me: _March, 1859._ “Another joyful letter for you, my dear friend. I went, last evening, to Lamartine. On seeing me enter, he received me with exclamations of enthusiasm, using much the same expressions as I did in my letter to the _Gazette de France_. He has read and understood, he says, your poem from one end to the other. He read it and re-read it three times; he cannot leave it, and reads nothing else. His niece, that beautiful person whom you saw, added that she has been unable to steal it from him for one instant to read it herself, and he is going to devote an entire lecture to you and _Mirèio_. He asked me for biographical notes on you and on Maillane. I sent them to him this morning. You were the subject of general conversation all the evening, and your poem was rehearsed by Lamartine and by me from the first word to the last. If this lecture speaks thus of you, your fame is assured throughout the world. He says you are ‘A Greek of the Cyclades.’ He has written of you to Reboul, ‘He is a Homer.’ He charges me to write you _all that I will_, and he added I cannot say too much, he is so entirely delighted. So be very happy, you and your dear mother, of whom I retain a charming remembrance.” I wish to record here a very singular fact of maternal intuition. I had given to my mother a copy of _Mirèio_, but without having spoken to her of Lamartine’s opinion, of which I was still ignorant. At the end of the day, when I thought she had made acquaintance with the work, I asked her what she thought of it, and she answered me, deeply moved: “A very strange thing happened to me when I opened thy book: a flash of light, like a star, dazzled me suddenly, and I was obliged to delay the reading until later!” One may believe it or no, but I have always thought that this vision of my beloved and sainted mother was a very real sign of the influence of Sainte-Estelle, otherwise of the star that had presided at the foundation of Félibrige.