42 J- A, Fontaine, 



says, " Dans je me suis frappe, par exemple, me est le com< 

 plement de suis frappe, comme il le serait de ai frappe dans 

 la phrase supposee plus .correcte je m'ai frappe." We agree 

 thoroughly with M. Chabanneau, and indeed a rigorous pars- 

 ing of the sentence cannot be made to yield to the reflexive 

 pronoun i}ie or se any other office (compare the "direct 

 object " of the Latin deponent verb). It seems to me that 

 M. Chabanneau is very near solving the question when he 

 says (p. 5 of the work quoted above) : "A I'epoque du haut 

 moyen age tons les verbes deponents (du latin) suivaient 

 dans la langue parlee la conjugaison active, du moins quant 

 a leurs temps simples, car leurs temps composes etaient trop 

 d'accord avec les tendances des langues nouvelles qui se for- 

 maient pour ne pas etre maintenus, et nous les retrouvons 

 parfaitement conserves dans la conjugaison de nos verbes 

 reflechis et d'un grand nombre de nos verbes intransitifs." 



Although I prefer the theory of M. Chabanneau to that of 

 Mr. Gessner, as being more complete and giving a safer clue 

 to the question, I by no means intend to depreciate that of 

 Mr. Gessner. The poetical meaning, the emphatic expres- 

 siveness added to the verb by the use of the reflexive pronoun 

 se cannot be doubted, and this is felt by every one who is well 

 acquainted with the French language ; for it is very easy to 

 notice that between two expressions, the one active and the 

 other reflexive, the French generally chooses the latter, be- 

 cause there is in it something agreeing better with the genius 

 of the language. But all this is far from explaining to us 

 the difficulty presented by the reflexive verb system of the 

 Romance languages, especially v/hen we take into account 

 the different tendency of some of these languages to use the 

 auxiliary esse rather than the auxiliary habej-e, and that with 

 either one of these auxiliaries they could convey their reflex- 

 ive meaning, sometimes making use of the poetical reflexive 

 pronoun and sometimes leaving it out, without causing the 

 verb to undergo any change in its meaning, probably also 

 without its losing any of its poetical coloring. This is espe- 

 cially striking in the first centuries of the development of the 



72 



