boats drift back and are hurled against a bridge. William and the
Anglore are thrown into the river and are lost. All the others escape
with their lives. Jean Roche is not sure but that he was the Drac after
all, who, foreseeing the shipwreck, had thus followed the boats, to
carry the Anglore at last down into the depths of the river. Maître
Apian accepts his ruin philosophically. Addressing his men, he says:
"Ah, my seven boats! my splendid draught horses! All gone, all ruined!
It is the end of the business! Poor fellow-boatmen, you may well say,
'good-by to a pleasant life.' To-day the great Rhone has died, as far as
we are concerned."

The idea of the poem is, then, to tell of the old life on the Rhone.
To-day the river flows almost as in the days when its shores were untrod
by men. Rarely is any sort of boat seen upon its swift and dangerous
current. Mistral portrays the life he knew, and he has done it with
great power and vividness. The fanciful tale of the Prince and the
Anglore, suggested by the beliefs and superstitions of the humble folk,
was introduced, doubtless, as a necessary love story. The little maid
Anglore, half mad in her illusion, is none the less a very sympathetic
creation, and surely quite original. This tale, however, running through
the poem like a thread, is not the poem, nor does it fill
proportionately a large place therein. The poem is, as its title
proclaims, the Poem of the Rhone, a poem of sincere regret for the good
old days when the muscular sons of Condrieu ruled the stream, the days
of jollity, of the curious boating tournaments of which one is described
in _Calendau_, when the children used to watch the boats go by with a
Condrillot at the helm, and the Rhone was swarming like a mighty
beehive. The poet notes in sorrow that all is dead. The river flows on,
broad and silent, and no vestige of all its past activity remains, but
here and there a trace of the cables that used to rub along the stones.