V
Sometimes we hire a carriage and drive far and wide, with half a dozen huge flagoons under the driver’s seat, in search of fountain-water for my husband to analyze. Last year, on one of these expeditions, he left me in the phaeton while he, with his great glass bottles, went down a hill to the springs of Badalhac. It was Sunday. The peasants of that cheerful mountain-eyrie were standing about, picturesque enough in their white shirts, with short black boleros or sleeved waistcoats, and large sombreros. (In autumn they add a voluminous mantle to this outfit.) One of them came up to the carriage, and, after a few words to the coachman, began to address me in patois. I caught the words “Proubenço, Piémont.” “He says,” explained the coachman, “that if you cannot speak our patois, he can understand you almost as well in the dialect of Provence or Piémont.” Never have I felt so ignorant! Here were three modern languages, in none of which was I able to say good morning to a friendly fellow-traveller.
The Félibres came in time to give a new lease of life to the fast-decaying patois of Auvergne. Under their auspices there is published at Aurillac a local paper, Lo Cobreto (The Bagpipes); for the bagpipes, as befits a Celtic country, is our national instrument, and we dance a stately sort of reel, more like a minuet, la bourrée. Lo Cobreto, of course, is written in patois, not by peasants, but, as in Provence, by middle-class men of letters who have made the dialect their hobby. If Mistral next summer should visit Aurillac as he proposes, they would give him a great banquet, as they did some years ago for Felix Gras; and the peasants and small shopkeepers would turn out to stare at and do homage to the Laureate of Languedoc. Our cousin Vermenouze would recite him an ode in patois, for Vermenouze is the local genius and copiscol, or chief of the school of Auvergne. Fancy Don Quixote turned poet and sportsman, pious and chivalrous as ever, with a cross stuck in his cravat, a blessed medal at his watch-chain, a gun in his hand, a fishing-rod under his arm, and a volume of Mistral or Virgil in his pocket. As like as not he has also a pipe in his mouth; and on his feet, perhaps, a pair of sabots.
“Jéu pouorte pas toutchiour, quond tourne de lo casso,
Lèbre, perdigal ou becasso,
Mès, se trobe plus res, pes puets ou pes trobèrs
Li culisse ou min fouorço bèrs,
O plenoi mos e per doutchino,
Deis bèrs de brousso que sentou lo soubotchino”
(“I do not always bring home, when I return from shooting, a hare, a partridge, or a snipe. But if I find nothing else on the peaks and on the fells, at least I gather plenty of verses, by handfuls and by dozens; verses, made of heather, verses with a wilding scent”)—no description could be better than the poet’s own. Such is the copiscol; an old bachelor, devoted to family, kinsmen, country; no poet has sung less of love or more sincerely of home and Nature. The moors round St. Paul-des-Landes, where the wild duck and snipe troop by in March, where the partridge rustles in autumn, and the startled hare bounds from the tussocked grass; the buron on the mountain, the life of the farm in the village, the great distant Puys on the horizon; such are the subjects of his muse. Last year, I grieved that such a poet should write for men who seldom read. But my little Auvergnate housemaid tells me that his poems are recited in the market-place at Aurillac on holiday afternoons. What poet could wish for more?
Our patois has a Spanish or a Gascon sound, rough but sonorous, pleasant to the ear, with numerous o’s and rolling ou’s and aü’s. You pronounce the v almost like b (Bit for Vic, bedel for veau). A changes to o, as in Contau, Cantal; Morgorido, Marguerite. O changes to ou—Obeiroun, Aveyron; Louzéro, Lozère. French au, pronounced as ô, changes to au, pronounced as â-oo (Nautres, nous-aûtres; Contau, Cantal; Naut-Miétchour, Haut-midi), except when it changes to ou, pronounced oo, as in Ourlhat, Aurillac; Oubergno, Auvergne. Like all the idioms of France, the patois of our Highlands is a corruption of the Low Latin, or rustic Lingua Romana, spoken generally in Gaul at the time of the barbarian invasion and for some centuries after. Most of the frequent words of every day are still very close to their Romance origin: Copt, caput, head; aigo, aqua, water; fau, fagus, beech; compono, campana, church-bell; semen, semen, seed; lün, lumen, lamp; camps, campus, a field overgrown with heather, or a moor; baco, vacca, cow; bedel, vitellus, calf; òussell, ucellus, bird; fromentau, fromentalia, corn-land; gal, gallus, cock; nèu, neve, snow; sor, soror, a sister; fenno, femina, woman; hibernar, hibernare, and estivar, æstivare, spend the winter or pass the summer. Other later words and expressions are a vulgar corruption of the French: tchiobal, cheval; bilatchi, village; biatchi, voyage; Toutchion (All Saints), Toussaint. At once antique and popular, the speech of our mountains is doubtless destined to disappear, but not without a struggle, and not, if our Félibres can help it, without having made its mark in literature.
“Nautres que son lou Naut-Mietjiour,
Contau, Obeiroun, o Louzèro,
Porlons tobe lo lengo fiéro
De los onticos Cours d’Omour.”
“We others, of the High-South: Cantal, Aveyron, Lozère, we also speak the proud language of the antique Courts of Love,” says Vermenouze, mindful that his dialect is a branch of that vast and ancient Langue d’Oc which includes the Provençal and the Catalan, so recently honoured and preserved by a Mistral and a Verdaguer.