"The language is too gay, it has too much sing-song, it is too harmonious. It does not possess the rough gravity of the Spanish, and has too few of the i's and e's that soften the sonority of the Italian. I may venture to say it is too expressive, too full of onomatopœia. Imagine a language, in which to say, "He bursts out laughing," one must use the word s'escacalasso! There are too many on's and oun's and too much ts and dz in the pronunciation. So that the Provençal language, in spite of everything, keeps a certain patois vulgarity. It forces the poet, so to say, to perpetual song-making. It must be very difficult, in that language, to have an individual style, still more difficult to express abstract ideas. But it is a merry language."
The play has never yet been performed, and until a trial is made, one is inclined to think it would not be effective, except as a spectacle. It is curious that the Troubadours produced no dramatic literature whatever, and that the same lack is found in the modern revival.
Aubanel's Lou Pan dóu Pecat (The Bread of Sin), written in 1863, and performed in 1878 at Montpellier, seems to have been successful, and was played at Paris at the Théâtre Libre in 1888, in the verse-translation made by Paul Arène. Aubanel wrote two other plays, Lou Pastre, which is lost, and Lou Raubatòn, a work that must be considered unfinished. Two plays, therefore, constitute the entire dramatic production in the new language.