was little else than one wrangling battle-field.  Neither the exterminating crusade against the Albigenses, after which the idiom of Provence was wellnigh stigmatized as heretical, nor the civil and religious wars of the seventeenth century, nor even the dragonnades of Louis XIV., have been able to 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 Roumanille.