THE STUDY OF FRENCH IN FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES. $6l 



ducted the teaching of French literature with incomparable supe- 

 riority at the Sorl.onne, hut who represented it on its classical and 

 literary side only. The romantic movement in the second quarter 

 of the nineteenth century, with its tinsel paraphernalia, its fan- 

 tastic vagaries about mediaeval chivalry and pageantry, its love 

 of antitheses, its admiration for ancient ruins, abbeys, and feudal 

 castles, its attempts at resuscitating old forgotten lore, proved 

 greatly instrumental in making the attention of the literary world 

 revert to the old French epics — the chansons de geste — the 

 romances of bygone ages and to the poetry of the trouveres. But 

 romanticism was far too effervescent and too hot of its nature 

 to be capable of brooking the discipline of the patient and labo- 

 rious methodical study that was practically the only means of 

 procuring access to these venerable literary treasures. When 

 .August Immanuel Bekker (1785-1871) had unearthed the Pro- 

 vencal version of the Fierabras, and had followed up his edition 

 of this work — published in 1829 — by divers fragments of the 

 other old French poems, his publications proved quite a revela- 

 tion to the majority of their readers. And when Paulin Paris — ■ 

 the father of the illustrious Gaston Paris — a good while before 

 the ( rovernment created, on his special behalf, the chair of 

 French Mediaeval Literature (1853), was obliged, by the post he 

 was then holding at the " Bibliotheque Nationale," to daily peruse 

 a number of old manuscripts, he was delighted to find himself in 

 permanent contact with those venerable chansons de geste and 

 their monotonously mellow assonances, with those admirable 

 romances of King Arthur and the Round Table, the existence of 

 which was in those days hardly as much as conjectured. The 

 amiable scholar, anxious to make congenial minds share his 

 enthusiasm, hastened to lay those treasures before an astonished 

 and enraptured public. It seemed, indeed, as if another Columbus 

 had discovered another New World. The literature of Old- 

 French was now definitely drawn into light. However, the philo- 

 logy of the Romance tongues, which alone was capable of imprint- 

 ing the truly scientific stamp on the study of these old documents, 

 was as yet unborn. The honour of having been the harbinger of 

 its advent is due to a poet of Southern France : Francois Ray- 

 nouard. The imperishable glory of having brought it into the 

 world, been its first sponsor, and fostered its babyhood, belongs 

 to a German professor, Friedrich Diez. 



In 1816 Raynouard published the first volume of his " Choir 

 des poeses originates des Troubadours;' and in 1838, two years 

 after his demise, the first of the six volumes of his " Lexique " 

 was published. He was the first to formulate the rule for the 

 declensions in the langue d'oc and the langue d'oil, that most 

 interesting relic of ancient Latin declensions. However, he made 

 himself at the same time responsible for the mistake of attributing 

 to the Provencal tongue — his mother tongue — the prerogative of 

 primogeniture over all the other neo-latin languages, a priority 

 which factu it had by no means. Moreover, he proclaimed it the 

 only genuine Romance tongue extant, sole daughter of the 



