Le bonnet triomphal des femmes de Caux. An

allusion to the caps of the peasant women, which vary in form for the different districts.

19. ia province celtique. The Celts of Brittany are not of the original Gallic stock; they were driven over the channel from England at the time of the Germanic invasions.

6. — 18. Quand les hommes du Nord couraient impunément nos côtes. The Northmen (chiefly from Norway and Denmark) came to France in the ninth century, invading the coasts and the land along the rivers. They forced Charles the Simple to abandon Normandy to their leader, Rollo, in 911.

26. c'est un Nantais. The French general Pierre Cambronne; he was in command of Napoleon's picked body of troops, known as the Old Guard, and is said to have made the famous reply given in the text when called upon to surrender at Waterloo (1770-1842).

7. — 13. cet esprit d'opposition. Of the five men cited in illustration of this statement, the first three were representatives of the philosophical movement, that is they were anti-christian and against tradition; the last two stood (after the Revolution had been effected) for a reaction in favor of Christianity. Lamennais, however, broke away from orthodox Catholicism.

21. Saint-Malo et Nantes, la ville des corsaires et celle des négriers. The privateersmen of Saint-Malo preyed on English commerce from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries; Nantes was a center for the slave-trade from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. This business was illegal after 1808, but even as late as the American civil war numerous slaves were brought to America in boats from Nantes (see Mérimée's Tamango for a vivid description of this business).

8. — 2. Quand ils ont eu récemment l'espoir de courir sus aux vaisseaux hollandais. The Belgians seceded from Holland in 1830; the following year the French sent an army into Belgium to force the Dutch to recognize the new state.

12. — 26. chouans. Two explanations are offered for the origin of this word, one that it may be due to the name of Jean Chouan, a leader of these royalist insurgents; the other that it may come from the word chouan ('screech-owl'), because of the nocturnal habits or cries of these birds.

13. — 3. la folle d'Hamlet. Ophelia. She is the heroine of the play and is loved by Hamlet; because of his cruelty, her mind is unbalanced and she is accidentally drowned while gathering flowers on a river bank. After losing her mind she adorns herself fantastically with straw and flowers.

25. la primatie de Tours. This city owed its importance as a theological center especially to Saint Martin, its bishop and founder of the noted abbey (fourth century), to Gregory of Tours (celebrated theologian and historian of the sixth century), and to Alcuin's famous school in the abbey of Saint Martin (under Charlemagne).

14. — 27. parlement. The French parliament was the chief body for the dispensation of justice. At the time of the Revolution thirteen cities had parliaments (that of Nancy was recent and lasted only a short time); of these the most important was that established at Paris by Saint Louis. In the absence of constitutional guarantees the parliaments often furnished the chief opposition to royal despotism, but were also often guilty of an abuse of power, as was the case in the Calas affair (see this selection). They were abolished in the Revolution, because they were opposed to the new ideas and because it was deemed best not to allow judicial bodies to concern themselves with legislation, as had been the case at times with the old parliaments.

16. — 19. La noire ville. An adjective of color usually follows its substantive; however, when the adjective is merely an ornamental epithet, or when it forms an essential part of the substantive, it precedes.

19. — 20. troubadours. During the Middle Ages the troubadours were the poets of southern France who went through the country from castle to castle singing their songs, usually on love, in the southern dialects; the trouvères were the northern poets who wrote in the northern dialects (the two words come from trovatorem and trovator, the accusative and nominative cases of the Latin trovator). In regard to the dialects of France, the following summary may be found useful:

The dialects of France fall into two great classes: the Langue d'oïl in the north, and the Langue d'oc in the south (oil is the old northern form for oui, oc the southern form). The difference really dates from Roman colonization, which occurred on the Mediterranean some seventy-five years before Caesar conquered „^orthern Gaul (59-51 b.c.). Provençal is, from the literary standpoint, the principal dialect of the southern group; during the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries (prior to the Albigensian crusade), it was, at least in lyric poetry, the most important literary language of France. Because of political and literary superiority, the language of Paris, or of the Ile-de-France, gradually became the literary language of northern France and finally supplanted that of the south. The dialects, however, still live on, and Provençal has recently been somewhat revived by the efforts of Mistral and other poets. Many authorities regard the characteristics of the territory embraced by the modern departments of Loire, Rhône, Isère, Ain, Savoie, the old province of Franche-Comté and a part of Switzerland, as sufficient to form a third group of dialects known as Franco- Provençal. The dividing line between the Langue d'oïl and the Langue d'oc passes approximately from the mouth of the Gironde to the Alps by way of Limoges, Clermont-Ferrand and Grenoble.

20. — I. C'est de sa cathédrale que brilla. Besides this miracle should be mentioned the other celebrated legend of the hind indicating the ford to Clovis as he was trying to

cross the river Vienne on his way to the battle with the Visigoths in 507 (both legends relate to the same march against the Visigoths).

19. l'école de Chartres. Chartres was a center of scholasticism in the twelfth century.

29. Guillaume de Toulouse, et Gérard de Roussillon. The first of these is the hero of that division of the Old French national epics known as the southern cycle; he is also called Guillaume Fièrebrace, Guillaume au Court Nez, and Guillaume d'Orange. This epic Guillaume became identified with Guillaume de Toulouse, an historical character who became count of Toulouse in 790; he engaged in a number of bloody battles with the Saracens and died in 812. The poems of this entire cycle deal with the exploits of seven or eight generations of this family. Gérard de Roussillon (the historical Gérard lived in Burgundy) belonged to what is known as the feudal cycle of the Old French epics, that is, to the cycle dealing with the deeds of the nobles who struggled against the king; in the case of this hero the contest was with Charles the Bald.

21. — 15. la belle Rosemonde. An illustration of Michelet's tendency to accept dramatic legends without scientific criticism. It is by no means proved that Rosemonde was murdered in this manner.

22. — 22. cage de fer. Confinement in these iron cages was a favorite method of punishment with Louis XI; in fact the idea appealed to him so strongly that he proceeded to confine Cardinal de La Balue, their inventor, in one at the castle of Loches. There is a vivid description of these cages in Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris.

25. les deux fameux sièges. Coligny and Condé made La Rochelle the Hugennot headquarters in 1568. In 1572- 1573 the town successfully withstood a siege of more than six months. In 1627-1628 Richelieu succeeded in investing the town and captured it after a siege of thirteen months; this marks the overthrow of the political power of the Huguenots.

24. — 13. Les noms des Ségur, des Sainte- Aulaire, etc. Note that a proper name remains in the singular even though the article is plural; however, the name of a royal family takes the plural sign, les Bourbons, etc.; also certain Latin words, les Horaces, etc.; and such cases as les Corneilles sont rares, that is, 'poets like Corneille are rare,' fai vu deux Raphaels au musée, 'I saw two Raphaels in the museum.'

26. — 13. Pascal. Pascal coming in the seventeenth century believed in Christianity. He tried to show that the Christian religion has as many evidences of certainty as those worldly things that are considered indubitable. Therefore, although he realized that there were apparent grounds for doubt, he strongly leaned toward Christianity, thus differing from Montaigne, the great skeptic of the sixteenth century, and from Voltaire, the great philosopher of the eighteenth century.

27. — 26. la cave aux morts. According to Michelet, bodies could be preserved in this cave five hundred years.