The laurel is well fixed, the drums cease. From every window of the house, besieged by the gamins, pours down a shower of sugar plums. The timid ones get what they can, the greedy fight and struggle. After the mass it is still worse; there is many a sore head for souvenir. Fameux! Fameux les enfants! But the thing has been mightily well done. * * * * * [Illustration: ·CHATEAU DE MOUX·] While we are talking about these ancient customs, let us spare a word or two for the tongue which was heard through so many of them--the patois. The Burgundian patois, to use Sainte-Beuve's picturesque expression--"a eu des malheurs"; it has never become a living language as the Breton and the Provençal have, and is therefore doomed, I suppose, to early destruction; as its older devotees die off, and the young peasant, versed in the language of towns, learns to despise his father's tongue. M. Perrault-Dabot, in his excellent little work on the subject,[197] tells us that, as might have been expected, all the many races that have inhabited or influenced Burgundy--the Eduens, the Romans, the Flemish--have left their traces upon its local tongue. Its chief defect, he adds, is that, like the country itself, half plain half mountain, it lacks unity. Placed between the two great centres of the Langue d'Oil and Langue d'Oc, it has naturally drawn from both. In accent, its chief characteristics are vivacity, expression, and charm; it comes between the northern lisp and the resonant redundance of the southern tongue, and is spoken in a sing-song manner not easily rendered typographically. It has many peculiar words, phrases, and idioms, but does not appear to have taken definite form until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it was spoken in all the provinces of eastern and central France, and also in the Canton of Geneva (Switzerland), which once formed part of the ancient kingdom of Burgundy. To the practised ear, a Burgundian reveals his origin at once, by the way he pronounces his _a's_. A becomes â (ah) in all words such as _cave_, _table_, _Jacques_, terminated by a dumb syllable, and the O is shortened in all words ending in _ot_ or _op_, such as _gigot_ or _sirop_. The Burgundian offers no exception to the general rule that the words peculiar to a dialect are often very beautiful. Provence gives us "voun, voun" for the hum of the bees, Normandy gives us "boisettes" for the dead sticks that the peasants gather for faggots; while from Burgundy we get "faublette" for a little tale. For "beggar," instead of a brutal word like "mendiant," they say "cherchou de pain." There is purity in their dialect, as in their customs.