The Bravade
By W. HILTON-YOUNG
g4 HAT are you celebrating? " we asked the girl at the inn.
" We are celebrating the arrival of the Saint in his boat."
" And when was that? " - " That was in the year 68."
" Then how do the muskets come in? " we said, having reached the point we were aiming at. " Why," she said, " it must have happened with muskets." In A.D. 68, sure enough, the Roman knight Torpes, the hagio:. graphers say, was beheaded at Nero's order for refusing to renounce Christianity. Some of the present inhabitants of the little Provençal port of Saint Tropez say he was beheaded for refusing to embrace Christianity ; others say he was an admiral. In any case, he is honoured with a delightful celebration. After his execution, his headless body was put in a boat with a cock and a dog and set adrift at Pisa. Nineteen days later he arrived, miraculously unputrefied, at Heraclea, where the people identified him and a few centuries later called their town after him. In the fourteenth century the Barbary pirates became too much for them, and for two hundred years the town was aban- doned. It was colonised again in 1470 by some Genoese, and by the seventeenth century its people were established as specialists in repelling at the point of pike and pistol the attacks of Spaniards, Turks and pirates. They owed their new-found valour on the one hand to their firearms and on the other, clearly, to the Saint.
So once every year they take his effigy out of the church and shoot at it all round the town. It is a large, colourful effigy, cut off at the waist, but complete with head, and lives under a pompous baldaquin ; it has a little moustache, and looks like Charles II in a good temper. First in the procession come all the other saints in the church, each followed by the class of the community for which he is responsible: the fishermen's wives after Saint Elmo, and so on. Next comes the model of the boat, containing body, cock and dog, and carried by' Boy Scouts ; next four or five very small boys dressed like cardinals, squabbling ; next two drum-and-pipe bands ; -then the Corps de Bravade itself, consisting of most of the men of the town, dressed some as Napoleonic sailors with long thin muskets and some as Napoleonic soldiers with short flared muskets called tromblons.
From four in the afternoon until one the next morning the Saint is carried from place to place round the little town, set down, and shot not perhaps so much at as in honour of. The naval element of the Corps de Bravade is comparatively harmless. Though they are more numerous and younger than the military, their narrow muskets, fired in the air, make a tolerable, swishing sort of explosion and pretty stabbing flashes. The military element, on the other hand, the solid elders of the people, fire their heavy musketoons on the ground at the feet of the Saint. The noise is frightful in the old narrow streets, assailing the guts as much as the ears ; the flash and heat are alarming, and the pall of smoke takes ten minutes to lift and reveal Charles H still smiling. There are many blind, men in Saint Tropez.
For nine hours it goes on. Salvoes are fired about every three minutes at a secret sign from the standard-bearer. The Navy sends a destroyer, which ties up by the houses and contributes a few shots from a three-inch gun. This destroyer seduces the devotion of the bravadeurs for a few minutes : they shoot at its stern while the captain and officers stand at the salute on the quarterdeck. The priests, wearing vestments and dark glasses,take it in turn to stand behind the Saint,but for all the rest the perform- ance is continuous. Sometimes the priest, who has been standing with palms together before his chest, comes forward, takes a tromblon from a bravadeur, and discharges his private bolt of veneration at where the feet of the Saint would be. Sometimes a widow from the crowd steps out, timorously finds the trigger, shuts her eyes, and does the same. Later in the evening the bravadeurs, two by two, take a few minutes off and come into a café with their pieces, black and reeking with gunpowder, and shouting in their deafness. The civilians shrink back over their drinks, partly in apprehension and partly in the self-effacement due to heroism. But the military element, being older and more responsible, shoot only at the Saint, with a brief diversion for the destroyer. Not so the naval element. When the musketry had blackened and shaken four of five little squares each very like the last, they made a longish expedition over the rocks by the sea to the house of a benefactor who had recently given the municipality a lot of dustbins. Him, too, they shoot in honour of.
By midnight the tour of the town is complete, and the Bravade returns for an hour's explosion in front of the little town hall. This last stance is lit not only by the flashes of gunpowder but by pink and green magnesium flares, the cloudy white smoke of which joins the acrid black of the muskets in caked noses and lungs. The standard, symbol of the lay State's contribution, is handed ceremoniously back to the Mayor, and the Saint returns to the church. Here, in very dim candle-light, the women of the town and the visitors have been waiting since midnight. The fusillades blast nearer and nearer through the narrow deep streets, and the congregation turns its back on the high altar and looks at the shut west door. Its opening is like the end of Don Giovanni. The large interior of the church is suddenly lit by the infernal glow of magnesium flares in the porch, and the two drum-and-pipe bands come banging and tootling up each side aisle. Each pair of bravadeurs, arriving at the porch, discharges its last appalling shots into the church, and all round votive offerings tinkle under their glass. Through the smoke and uproar comes at last the Statue, borne shoulder-high. Is his smile really the same as at the beginning? Surely it is broader, more satisfied ; surely those stylised ears under the beehive hat of sainthood have been pleased by the din ; surely the conventionally noble nostrils have sniffed with approval the lethal incense the Roman knight never knew. So he, blackened like us and happy like us, slides back for a year on to his pedestal, and we go home to bed pursued by the last bangs of a thrifty people using up its gunpowder.
Nine solid hours of, noise ; but what is more, to make quite sure that all went well, the thing had already been done for nine solid hours the day before.
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