A Book of the Riviera Author:Sabine Baring-Gould Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II LE GAI SABER The formation of the Proveral tongue—Vernacular ballads and songs : brought into church—Recitative and formal music—Rhythmic music ... more »of the people: traces of it in ancient times : S. Ambrose writes hymns to it—People sing folk-songs in church—Hymns composed to folk-airs—The language made literary by the Troubadours—-Position of women—The ideal love—Ideal love and marriage could not co-exist— William de Balaun—Geofrey Rudel—Poem of Pierre de Barjac— Boccaccio scouts the Chivalric and Troubadour ideals. WHAT the language of the Ligurians was we do not know. Among them came the Phoenicians, then the Greeks, next the Romans. The Roman soldiery and slaves and commercials did not talk the stilted Latin of Cicero, but a simple vernacular. Next came the Visigoths and the Saracens. What a jumble of peoples and tongues! And out of these tongues fused together the Langue d'oc was evolved. It is remarkable how readily some subjugated peoples acquire the language of their conquerors. The Gauls came to speak Latin. The Welsh—the bulk of the population was not British at all; dark-haired and dark- eyed, they were conquered by the Cymri and adopted their tongue. So in Provence, although there is a strong strain of Ligurian blood, the Ligurian tongue is gone SONGS IN CHURCH 25 past recall. The prevailing language is Romance ; that is to say, the vernacular Latin. Verna means a slave; it was the gabble of the lower classes, mainly a bastard Latin, but holding in suspense drift words from Greek and Gaulish and Saracen. In substance it was the vulgar talk of the Latins. Of this we have curious evidence in 813. In his old age Charlemagne concerned himself much with Church matters, and he convoked five Councils in five quarters of his empire to regulate Church ma...« less