A great danger puts no more strain upon the nerves of a man of good fibre than does a great joy; and it seemed to me that Esperit's absolute steadiness, under this sudden fire of happiness, showed him to be made of as fine and as manly stuff as went to the making of his kinsman who beat the _pas-de-charge_ up the slope at Arcolo at the head of the Fifty-first Demi-brigade. But nothing less than the turbulence of the whole battle of Arcolo--not to say of that whole triumphant campaign in Italy--will suffice for a comparison with the tumult that arose about our supper-table when the meaning of the Vidame's toast fairly was grasped by the company at large! I do not think that I could express in words--nor by any less elaborate method of illustration than a kinetoscope--the state of excitement into which a Provencal will fly over a matter of absolutely no importance at all; how he will burst forth into a very whirlwind of words and gestures about some trifle that an ordinary human being would dispose of without the quiver of an eye. And as our matter was one so truly moving that a very Dutchman through all his phlegm would have been stirred by it, such a tornado was set a-going as would have put a mere hurricane of the tropics to open shame! Naturally, the disturbance was central over Esperit and Magali and the Vidame. The latter--his kind old face shining like the sun of an Easter morning--gave back with a good will on Magali's cheeks her kisses of gratitude; and exchanged embraces and kisses with the elder women; and went through such an ordeal of violent hand-shaking that I trembled for the integrity of his arms. But as for the young people, whom everybody embraced over and over again with a terrible energy, that they came through it all with whole ribs is as near to being a miracle as anything that has happened in modern times! Gradually the storm subsided--though not without some fierce after-gusts--and at last worked itself off harmlessly in song: as we returned to the ritual of the evening and took to the singing of noels--the Christmas canticles which are sung between the ending of the Great Supper and the beginning of the midnight mass. XIV The Provencal noels--being some real, or some imagined, incident of the Nativity told in verse set to a gay or tender air--are the creche translated into song. The simplest of them are direct renderings of the Bible narrative. Our own Christmas hymn, "While shepherds watched their flocks by night," is precisely of this order; and, indeed, is of the very period when flourished the greatest of the Provencal noel writers: for the Poet Laureate Nahum Tate, whose laurel this hymn keeps green, was born in the year 1652 and had begun his mildly poetic career while Saboly still was alive.