outroot it. The levelling edicts of the
first French Revolution were powerless against it. The Provencal, or
Langue d'Oc, if you will, the Gascon, the Auvergnat, are spoken to this
day in their respective provinces, universally spoken by the people, who
in many instances do not understand French at all. They must be preached
to in their own dialect. They have their songs, their theatre even.

Nor must this be understood as referring only to the lower strata
of society. The better classes, even, retain a fondness for their
mother-tongue which years of residence in Paris will not obliterate. In
their very French, they still retain the inflections, the tones of the
South,--a measured cadence in the phrase, which the Parisian uniformly
styles _gasconner_. They feel ill at ease in what they call the
cold-mannered speech of the _Franchiman_. In the words of one of their
poets, Mistral, who has proved that he was no less a master of the
academic forms and rules than of the riches and power of his own
Avignonais:--"Those who have not lived at the South, and especially
in the midst of our rural population, can have no idea of the
incompatibility, the insufficiency, the poverty of the language of the
North in regard to our manners, our needs, our organization. The French
language, transplanted to Provence, seems like the cast-off clothes of a
Parisian dandy adapted to the robust shoulders of a harvester bronzed by
the Southern sun."

The Provencal, in its two principal divisions, the Gascon and Langue
d'Oc, is the current idiom south of the Loire. The South-West Provinces
had, in the seventeenth century, no mean poet in Godelin; and in our
own day, Jasmin has found a host of followers. The inhabitants of the
South-East, however, the more immediate retainers of the language of
the Troubadours, save in a few drinking-songs and Christmas carols, had
forgotten the strains that once resounded beyond the limits of Provence
and had first awaked the poetic emulation of Spain and Italy. The
princess of song, stung by the envious spirit of persecution in the
Albigensian wars, had slept for centuries, and the thick hedge of
forgetfulness had grown rank about the language and its treasures. What
Raynouard, Diez, Mahn, Fauriel, and others have done to bring to light
again the unedited texts was little better than an autopsy. A living,
breathing poet was wanting to reanimate by his touch the poesy that had
slept so long. That poet was Roumani