[wood] footnotes to CANADIAN FOLKSONGS lOl 



A sharper flavour is to be found in 



Quand le mari s'en vint du bois,'"'' 

 and 



Mon mari est ben malade ; ^'"' 



but the quintessence of gauloiserie is in Malbroucke}^ Malbroucke 

 himself, like his predecessor the Duc de Guise, is burnt in effi^y with all 

 the mock-heroics possible. The "beau page" tells "Madame" how the great 

 man was followed to his grave by '• quatre-z-officiers " : 



L'un portait sa cuirasse, 

 L'autre son bouclier, 

 L'un portait son grand sabre, 

 L'autre ne portait rien ; 



and French illustrators have not left us in any doubt as to how the chief 

 mourners carried their burdens — "'^ but Malbroucke is not to be appre- 

 ciated in extracts. 



To be gay and Gallic and to sing Malbroucke with gusto ought 

 to be enough to pi'ove Canadians true heirs of the singers of the "gay 

 refrain," who, in their turn, are heirs of the Gallic legionaries that, in the 

 time of Julius Csesar, are said to have borne the lark upon their helmets 

 as the distinctive emblem of their race.^"' But there is a reverse to all 

 this. The Gallic funeral ceremonies of Malbroucke seem very like a 

 modern variant of the mediïeval Dance of Death. Both old and new 

 owe their popularity to the same cause ; and he who runs may read the 

 moral of both ; which is, that the great King Death will mete out equal 

 justice to all alike, to high and low, to rich and poor, to victor and to 

 vanquished. What a satisfaction to be able to rejoice in the foreknow- 

 ledge of this common doom ! Professor Pellegrini tells us "" that this 

 guiding inscription appears upon the wall on the road to the cemetery of 

 Galliate : " Via al vero comunismo." And Malbroucke, for all it does 

 it with a smiling face, points out the self-same way ; so, perhaps, gau- 

 loiserie may be somewhat grimmer than it seems, and its refrains not, 

 after all, so very gay. 



VII. 

 Lullabies. 



Having briefly noted the general characteristics of the songs as found 

 in our texts, let us now turn to a few particular classes of them. To 

 begin at the beginning, the lullabies must be considered first ; then the 

 nursery rhymes of childhood, followed by the love-songs of youth : and 

 lastly, we must by no means forget to notice the most typically Canadian 

 class of all — the songs of the voyageurs. 



The Lullaby has all the form and rhythm of a natural simplicity, its 

 • burden is made soothing with onomatopoeic and reduplicated words, and 



