Read "The Death-Fires of Les Martigues" by Thomas A. Janvier online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
"God keep you from the she-wolf, and from your heart's deep desire!"
That is one of our old sayings here in Provence. I used to laugh at it when I was young. I do not laugh at it now. When those words come into my heart, and they come often, I go by the rough hard way that leads upward to Notre Dame de la Garde until I come to the Crime Cross -- it is a wearying toil for me to get up that steep hill-side, I am so stiff and old now -- and there I cast fresh stones upon the heap at the foot of the cross. Each stone cast there, you know, is a prayer for forgiveness for some hidden crime: not a light fault, but a crime. The stones must be little stones, yet the heap is very wide and high -- though every winter, when the great mistrals are blowing across the Etang de Berre, the little stones are whirled away down the hill-side. I do not know how this custom began, nor when; but it is a very old custom with us here in Les Martigues.