These tiresome, empty tirades had at least the spice of being uttered in the strangest and most amusing kind of language, in which an old-school stilted French, the French of books of rhetoric, was mixed with the oddest provincialisms. Aunt Portal detested the Provençal tongue, that dialect so admirable in color and sonorousness, which only the peasants and people talk, which contains an echo of Latin vibrating across the deep blue sea. She belonged to the burgher class of Provence who translate pécaïré by péchère (sinner) and fancy they talk correctly.
When her coachman Ménicle (Dominick) in his frank way said to her in Provençal:
“Voù baia de civado au chivaou” (I am going to give the horses oats)—she would assume an austere air and say:
“I do not understand you—speak French, my good fellow!”
Then Ménicle, like a docile schoolboy, would say:
“Je vais bayer dé civade au chivau.”
“That is right, now I understand you!”—and he would go away thinking that he had been speaking the language. It is a fact that most of the people in the South below Valence only know this hybrid kind of French.
But besides all this Aunt Portal played upon her words by no means according to her fancy but in accordance with the rules of some local grammar. Thus she said déligence for diligence, achéter for acheter, anédote for anecdote, régitre for régistre. She called a pillow-slip (taie d’oreiller) a coussinière, an umbrella was an ombrette, the foot-warmer which she used at all seasons of the year was a banquette. She did not cry, she “fell to tears;” and though very “overweighted” she never took more than “half hour” for her round of the city. All this twaddle was larded with those little words and expressions without precise meaning which Provençals scatter through their speech, those verbal snips which they stuff between sentences to lessen their stress or increase their strength, or keep up the multifold character of the accent, such as
“Aie, ouie, avai, açavai, au moins, pas moins, différemment, allons!”
This contempt of Mme. Portal for the language of her province extended to its usages and its traditions and even to its costume. Just as she did not permit her coachman to lapse into Provençal, in the same way she never would have allowed a servant to enter her house wearing the head-dress and neck-kerchief of Arles.