"Mistral" combines the mysterious death of a young village man on the eve of his wedding, with a priest's illicit passion for his beautiful female ward, the dead man's fiancée, and hence recalls not only the romantic suspicion and intrigue of "Jealousy" and "The Cobbler,"… but also the portrait of a libidinous, tormented priest, originally intended as part of the series of short stories and prose sketches Faulkner published in the Times-Picayune between February and September 1925.
As he subsequently did with several other tales (e.g., "Red Leaves," "Dry September," and "That Evening Sun"), Faulkner chose a title indicative of the story's correlation of theme and environmental conditions. The mistral, or tramontane—a dry, cold northerly wind that blows in squalls throughout the area of the northern Mediterranean—is an apt symbol for the extremity of the story's action. The maddening, harassing mistral, which penetrates the walls of the presbytery, parallels and even aggravates the private agony and eventual derangement—itself the product of imposed isolation—that causes the priest to become involved in underhanded and finally violent activities. As Faulkner puts it in "Mistral," "Maybe in any natural exaggerated situation—wind, rain, drouth—man is always alone." (pp. 413-14)
