The Virgins of Cannes (1)

This story was told to me in a café in Cannes, on a scorching day in July and over iced drinks, by a “distinguished Félibre”...

To meet the heroes, we must go back to the Saracens and to this moment in the civic life of Cannes when the Christian Spirit of the Lérins Islands dominated the coastline; Could we not also say that the civic life of coastal towns begins with the Lérins islands and their monastic empire?

On feast days, the Saracens had the habit of suddenly descending on Cannes and kidnapping the most beautiful young girls in the city (without sometimes disdaining the handsome young men).

In one of these raids which remained famous, sixty of the prettiest Cannes women were taken under the very noses of their compatriots and dragged aboard Saracen ships. Farewell, Cannes!

The local priest carefully noted the frightful adventure in the parish register, on the date of the following day. He was a very young priest and undoubtedly terribly moved. Perhaps the cries of these local beauties haunted him, perhaps these cries disturbed the peace of his heart day and night? At all hours he prayed for their souls, for these sixty virginal Cannes souls, and exhorted the faithful to imitate him.

For sixty years, the priest of Cannes prayed for these sixty virgins. His prayers must have traced a sort of Milky Way across the starry fields of the Heavens; God, for some inscrutable reason drawn from his infinite patience, did not impose silence on him. The prayers of this righteous man had to be answered. One beautiful spring day, a Saracen boat arrived, carrying sixty virgins on board. Rendering "! A sort of cargo of “remorse”. The people of Cannes were terrified.

The virgins were now eighty years old, and the people of Cannes had to defend their city against such a catastrophe. Running to arms, they forced the Saracens to keep their conquests. Farewell, Cannes! one more time.

The same priest, sixty years older, with the same care noted the fact in the parish register. His handwriting had barely changed.

I thanked my friend Félibre for this charming story; it made me understand better the pagan tradition of this country. With the mystical sentimentalism of the North (despite Strabo, the Greek geographer, who said that the Irish were keen to eat their grandfather), we Anglo-Saxons would have received the sixty old ladies in music, with a speech from Mayor. Local benevolent societies would have clothed and housed them, and for the rest of their lives they would have been carefully imprisoned in some dank and dreary asylum to dream of, or perhaps forget, the days of debauchery spent among the Saracens. .

ANDRE MAUROIS. (1) Excerpt from “Cannes and the Hills”, by Ms. Hansard.