Use of Auxiliary Verbs in Romance Languages. 41 



ive pronoun to its verb so completely as to prevent it from 

 being any longer the direct object of the verb ? I do not 

 think so. The reflexive pronoun will remain in the accusa- 

 tive case and be the direct object of the verb. The words du 

 danger merely explain why the subject is under the control 

 of fear, and could be replaced by en face du danger or a cause 

 du danger. 



This way of looking at the logical construction of words 

 seems to me the natural one. Mr. Gessner is too obscure 

 when he pretends that in expressions like the above the re- 

 flexive pronoun is in the accusative case and yet not the 

 object of the verb, and that this accusative adds to the reflex- 

 ive idea an interior intenseness, and has a tendency to de- 

 prive the verbal notion of all exterior activity, reducing it to 

 an especially interior expression. 



M. Littre, I think, was on the way towards a more plausible 

 explanation of the difficulty, when he said in his Histoire de 

 la langue francaise, II, 317, '^ Se erant convers, of the Frag- 

 ment de Valenciennes, presupposes the low Latin se erant 

 conversiy The explanation he gives of the connection be- 

 tween convertor passive and convertor reflexive is good, but he 

 fails to see that the pronouns me, te, se, etc., had been added 

 in the low Latin to the perfect of convertor through an ana- 

 lytic tendency, and in analogy with convertor reduced to me 

 converto in Romance, and he concludes in saying that se is 

 not an accusative case, but that it represents all the cases 

 with the exception of the nominative, being " a regime inde- 

 terniine sans cas determine'"; and that as such " Se a pu se 

 joindre a des verbes neutres, tcls que s' en aller, s' enfuir, se 

 taire, s' eerier!' 



M. Chabanneau, in his Histoire de la conjugaison francaise, 

 considers the auxiliaries as mere inflectional endings of the 

 verbs in their compound tenses. Whether that inflectional 

 ending be the auxiliary etre or avoir, it does not change the 

 nature of the relation of the verb to its object. So M. 

 Chabanneau recognizes in the reflexive pronoun not only an 

 accusative case, but also a direct object of the verb ; for he 



71 



