Tale of a Starry Night, by Alphonse Daudet

Alphonse Daudet · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 5 pages

Five pages carrying Daudet's short story Les Étoiles: Récit d'un Berger Provençal, first published in Le Bien Public in April 1873, in the English translation from The World of Romance: A Treasury of Tales, Legends, and Traditions (Cassell, 1892). The Provençal star names are identified in footnotes.

The narrator is a shepherd of twenty on the Luberon who passes whole weeks without seeing anyone but his dog and his flock, and who lives for the fortnightly arrival of provisions and the news that comes with them — particularly news of his employer's daughter Stéphanette, the prettiest girl for ten leagues round, about whom he is careful not to seem too interested. One Sunday the provisions are late, and when they arrive it is Stéphanette herself who brings them; a swollen river prevents her returning, and she must spend the night on the mountain. What follows is the whole substance of the story: the shepherd, to settle her, begins naming the stars and telling the folk-tales attached to them — the road of St James, the Chariot of Souls, John of Milan and the Three Kings racing along the sky, the walking-stick hurled in a fury by the one who overslept, and the Shepherd's Star, lovely Maguelonne, who runs after Pierre of Provence and is his bride every seven years. She asks, with perfect seriousness, whether there really are marriages among the stars. While he is trying to explain, her head drops asleep against his shoulder, and she stays so until the stars pale with the climbing day. The closing sentence is what the story exists for: the shepherd, a little troubled but kept holy by a clear night which has never given him other than beautiful thoughts, watches the stars continue their silent march like an obedient army, and fancies that one of them, the most delicate and lustrous, had missed her way and come to lean upon his shoulder and sleep.

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