easons
pass away, and, as they roll on, their echoes sound in our ears; but the
loved tongue shall not and must not die. The mother-tongue recalls our
own dear mother, sisters, friends, and crowds of bygone associations,
which press into our minds while sitting by the evening fire. This
tongue is the language of our toils and labours; she comes to us at our
birth, she lingers at our tomb.

"No, no--I cannot desert my mother-tongue!" said Jasmin. "It preserves
the folk-lore of the district; it is the language of the poor, of the
labourer, the shepherd, the farmer and grape-gatherers, of boys and
girls, of brides and bridegrooms. The people," he said to M. Dumon,
"love to hear my songs in their native dialect. You have enough poetry
in classical French; leave me to please my compatriots in the dialect
which they love. I cannot give up this harmonious language, our second
mother, even though it has been condemned for three hundred years. Why!
she still lives, her voice still sounds; like her, the seasons pass, the
bells ring out their peals, and though a hundred thousand years may roll
away, they will still be sounding and ringing!"

Jasmin has been compared to Dante. But there is this immense difference
between them. Dante was virtually the creator of the Italian language,
which was in its infancy when he wrote his 'Divine Comedy' some six
hundred years ago, while Jasmin was merely reviving a gradually-expiring
dialect. Drouilhet de Sigalas has said that Dante lived at the sunrise
of his language, while Jasmin lived at its sunset. Indeed, Gascon was
not a written language, and Jasmin had to collect his lexicon, grammar,
and speech mostly from the peasants who lived in the neighbourhood of
Agen. Dante virtually created the Italian language, while Jasmin merely
resuscitated for a time the Gascon dialect.

Jasmin was not deterred by the expostulations of Dumon, but again wrote
his new epic of Franconnette in Gascon. It took him a long time to
clothe his poetical thoughts in words. Nearly five years had elapsed
since he recited The Blind Girl of Castel-Cuille to the citizens of
Bordeaux; since then he had written a few poetical themes, but he was
mainly thinking and dreaming, and at times writing down his new epic
Franconnette. It was completed in 1840, when he dedicated the poem to
the city of Toulouse.

The story embodied in the poem was founded on an ancient tradition. The
time at which it occurred was towards the end