While we are talking about these ancient customs, let us spare a word or two for the tongue which was heard through so many of them—the patois. The Burgundian patois, to use Sainte-Beuve's picturesque expression—"a eu des malheurs"; it has never become a living language as the Breton and the Provençal have, and is therefore doomed, I suppose, to early destruction; as its older devotees die off, and the young peasant, versed in the language of towns, learns to despise his father's tongue.
M. Perrault-Dabot, in his excellent little work on the subject,[197] tells us that, as might have been expected, all the many races that have inhabited or influenced Burgundy—the Eduens, the Romans, the Flemish—have left their traces upon its local tongue. Its chief defect, he adds, is that, like the country itself, half plain half mountain, it lacks unity. Placed between the two great centres of the Langue d'Oil and Langue d'Oc, it has naturally drawn from both. In accent, its chief characteristics are vivacity, expression, and charm; it comes between the northern lisp and the resonant redundance of the southern tongue, and is spoken in a sing-song manner not easily rendered typographically. It has many peculiar words, phrases, and idioms, but does not appear to have taken definite form until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it was spoken in all the provinces of eastern and central France, and also in the Canton of Geneva (Switzerland), which once formed part of the ancient kingdom of Burgundy.
To the practised ear, a Burgundian reveals his origin at once, by the way he pronounces his a's. A becomes â (ah) in all words such as cave, table, Jacques, terminated by a dumb syllable, and the O is shortened in all words ending in ot or op, such as gigot or sirop.
The Burgundian offers no exception to the general rule that the words peculiar to a dialect are often very beautiful. Provence gives us "voun, voun" for the hum of the bees, Normandy gives us "boisettes" for the dead sticks that the peasants gather for faggots; while from Burgundy we get "faublette" for a little tale. For "beggar," instead of a brutal word like "mendiant," they say "cherchou de pain." There is purity in their dialect, as in their customs.
While writing these pages upon the old creeds and customs of rustic Burgundy, I have felt strongly, as a foreigner, my inefficiency for such a task, and have wished that I could hand over my pen to the Burgundian poet, my friend, M. François Fertiault, by whose kind permission I am able to make use of so much material that is his, and to whom any merit there may be in this chapter is wholly due. Had his still firm and active, though aged hand, taken up my task, my readers would well have been able to say, as the peasants of Burgundy, with one voice, have said of his work: "Yé ben vrâ qu' tout c'qui s'passe cheu nous."
Footnotes:
[191] "L'Histoire d'un Chant Populaire." F. Fertiault.