AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
FOR the satisfaction of those readers who may wish
for guidance as to the more generally accepted pro-
nunciation of some of the names and sentences in the
Provencal 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
Provensal and of Tuscan before deciding to express
himself in the latter language.
Had he decided otherwise it is certain that the
Provencal tongue would have been spared those
centuries of eclipse during which, owing to its gradu-
ally 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 Frederic Mistral and the other patriot
poets of the Jelibrige, and thus to poet and peasant
alike is due the fact that to-day the youth of Provence
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