PROVENCE 



6368 



PROVERB 



Provence. Province, one of 

 those into which France was 

 divided before the Revolution. It 

 was a province of the Roman Em- 

 pire, before the opening of the 

 Christian era, and lay between the 

 Rhone, the Alps, and the Mediter- 

 ranean. Its capital was at first A i \ . 

 and then Aries, with Marseilles as 

 another important city. Its boun- 

 daries were continually changing 

 and its close association with 

 Burgundy has led to much con- 

 fusion between the two. After the 

 fall of the Roman Empire, the S. 

 part of Provence was seized by the 

 Visigoths, and in the 6th century 

 the whole of it appears to have 

 come under the rule of the Franks. 

 History after Charlemagne 



It was transferred, either in whole 

 or in part, from one king to another 

 during the century which followed 

 the death of Charlemagne, but 

 before 900 it had been again 

 united and formed into a kingdom 

 for a certain Boso, brother-in-law 

 of Charles the Bald. This was 

 called the kingdom of Provence, or 

 Burgundy, but it must not be con- 

 fused with the other kingdom of 

 Burgundy, away to the N. It had 

 but a brief existence, and Provence 

 was next included in the more N. 

 Burgundy, which, in 1032, passed 

 by bequest to the German king, 

 Conrad II. 



Before this time, as all over the 

 Carolingian Empire, a number of 

 counts had arisen in the district, 

 one of whom soon made himself 

 paramount. He was called the 

 count, duke, or marquess of Aries, 

 or sometimes of Provence. Early 

 in the 12th century the heiress of 

 this family, the real although not 

 the nominal sovereign of Provence, 

 married the count of Barcelona, 

 to whose heir, Alphonso, king of 

 Aragon, it passed about 60 years 

 later. He and his son ruled it for 

 some years, and then it went, again 

 by marriage, to Charles of Anjou, 

 king of Naples, who had trouble 

 with the Proven9al towns, then 

 becoming rich and turbulent. 



During the next two centuries, 

 i.e. the period between 1250 and 

 1470, the country of Provence was 

 disturbed and impoverished by 

 warfare between its Angevin rulers 

 and their many foes. In 1482 the 

 last count bequeathed Provence 

 to Louis XI of France, whose suc- 

 cessor Charles VIII made good his 

 authority therein against other 

 claimants. Provence, whose over- 

 lord had been the German king, 

 thus passed definitely to France. 

 It retained certain special privi- 

 leges, including an assembly of 

 estates which endured until the 

 17th century, and it was never quite 

 merged in the rest of France as 



were other provinces. Provence 

 now constitutes the departments of 

 Bouchea du Rh6ne, Var, Vaucluse, 

 and Basses- Alpes. It is noted for 

 its valuable Roman remains. 



LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. 

 Provenfal proper was originally 

 the most important dialect of the 

 broader Romance language known 

 as the langue rf'oc, which in the 

 12-1 4th centuries was the spoken 

 tongue of S. France, Italy, and 

 Spain. A highly developed literary 

 language by the 12th century, its 

 hold was weakened by the political 

 developments of France and Prov- 

 ence and by contact with the langue 

 d'o'il, and by the mid- 14th century 

 it was little more than a patois. 

 Derived directly from Latin, Pro- 

 ven9al bears a close general resem- 

 blance to the French language, 

 but has important phonetic differ- 

 ences. With many local variations 

 and French modifications, the 

 dialect survives in S. France. 



Proven9al literature was rich 

 both in quantity and in variety of 

 form. The chivalrov- romances of 

 Provence, such as Flor et Blanche- 

 flor or Gerard de Roussillon, were 

 overshadowed by those of the 

 north, but in the lyric poetry of 

 the troubadours it was unrivalled 

 in its time. Among the principal 

 forms were the canzones and albas, 

 love songs, the sirventes, satiric 

 songs, the plants, plaints, prezies, 

 war songs, tensons, dialogues, and 

 pastorelas, shepherd songs. Prose 

 works are few and of minor 

 interest. The development of this 

 great literature reached its climax 

 during the 12th century and ended 

 practically with the 13th. 



The 19th Century Revival 



A notable revival, however, in 

 Proven9al literature took place in 

 the 19th century. Chiefly under 

 the impulse of Joseph Roumanille 

 and F. Mistral, the Felibrige 

 was founded in 1854, rrith the 

 object of preserving the vitality 

 and purity of the language. Among 

 other notable posts associated 

 with the revival have been Jacques 

 Jasmin, Theodore Aubanel, Jean 

 Brunet, Paul Giera, Xavier de 

 Ricard, Felix Gras, and Pierre 

 Devoluy. The annual publication 

 Armana Prouven9au, founded in 

 1854, reflects the main current of 

 the movement and has reached a 

 wide circulation in the Midi, and 

 several Proven9al periodicals ap- 

 pear in the principal towns. See 

 France; Troubadour; consult also 

 Histoire de Provence, 4 vols., A. 

 Fabre, 1833 ; Old Provence, T. A. 

 Cook, 1905; Provence and Lan- 

 guedoc, C. Headlam, 1912. 



Proverb (Lat. pro ; verbum, 

 word). Short familiar sentence, an 

 obvious truth or moral lesson. De- 



scribed as the collective wisdom of 

 mankind, or, by Cervantes, as 

 " short sentences drawn from long 

 experience," they are the most in- 

 timate folk-lore, for they embody, 

 in simplest, pithiest terms, the 

 homely knowledge of the common 

 people, their everyday philosophy 

 learned from experience of the ways 

 of men and women and universal 

 nature. Any clever man may make 

 an aphorism, but no aphorism be- 

 comes a proverb, hi the accepted 

 sense of the word, until it has been 

 tried by time, and obtained cur- 

 rency by general consent. 



It is impossible to name tne au- 

 thor of any proverb. Some obscure 

 sage must first have formulated 

 each one of them in words, but they 

 seem rather to have emanated from 

 the common consciousness and 

 crystallised into phrases, much as 

 seeds scattered by the wind put 

 forth branch and leaf and open into 

 flower before any man is aware of 

 them. Certainly, the majority of 

 proverbs were familiar in the 

 mouths of the multitude long be- 

 fore they were written down. Many 

 have found niches in the ancient 

 literatures of Greece and Rome, of 

 China, India, and Arabia. Each 

 country, often each part of each 

 country, has its own characteristic 

 sayings, Spain, perhaps owing to 

 Moorish influence, being very rich 

 in them, but human nature and ex- 

 perience being essentially at one 

 the world over, there is a marked 

 affinity between them. 



Frequently the same proverb, 

 with colloquial variations, belongs 

 to so many nations that none 

 would venture to say in which 

 country it was originally born, or 

 whether it was spontaneously gen- 

 erated in all. " There's many a slip 

 'twixt the cup and the lip " is 

 an old English proverb ; but the 

 French have one as old : " The 

 soup is often lost between the hand 

 and the mouth " ; and in the 2nd 

 century A.D. Gellius quoted " Many 

 things happen betwixt the cup and 

 the lip " as a Greek proverb match- 

 ing a world-old Latin one. " It is 

 too late to shut the door when the 

 horse is stolen " has equivalents in 

 France, Holland, Denmark, Italy, 

 India, and Japan. Sterne is 

 credited with " God tempers the 

 wind to the shorn lamb," but a cen- 

 tury earlier George Herbert in- 

 cluded in his Jacula Prudentium 

 " To a close-shorn sheep God gives 

 wind to measure," and his was a 

 collection of such wise saws, Eng- 

 lish and foreign, as were already 

 popular. 



Before Herbert, John Heywood, 

 in 1546, compiled a book of Eng- 

 lish proverbs, and Ray followed his 

 example in 1670. In 1855 a Hand- 



