Page:The Master of the House (Hall).djvu/9



the satisfaction of those readers who may wish for guidance as to the more generally accepted pronunciation of some of the names and sentences in the Provençal language that occur throughout this book, a brief pronouncing glossary is appended.

Some readers may even be sufficiently interested to care to know that the language in question is no humble dialect, but is the ancient Langue d'Oc of the troubadours, the language spoken in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries not only throughout France from Bordeaux to the Alps and from Auvergne to the Mediterranean, but also in England at the court of King Richard the Lion Heart, while tradition avers that Dante hesitated long between the beauties of Provençal and of Tuscan before deciding to express himself in the latter language.

Had he decided otherwise it is certain that the Provençal tongue would have been spared those centuries of eclipse during which, owing to its gradually enforced subjection, in all official concerns, to the French idiom, it found its only home in the hearts and on the lips of the peasants, from which neither time nor authority ever contrived to evict it. It was there that its long-despised beauties at length attracted the attention, in the middle of the nineteenth century, of Frédéric Mistral and the other patriot poets of the Félibrige, and thus to poet and peasant alike is due the fact that to-day the youth of Provence Rh