“It was September, and it was Provence,” are the opening words of Daudet’s “Port Tarascon.” What more significant words could be uttered to awaken the memories of that fair land in the minds of any who had previously threaded its highways and byways? From the days of Petrarch writers of many schools have sung its praises, and the literature of the subject is vast and varied, from that of the old geographers to the last lays of Mistral, the present deity of Provençal letters. [Illustration: “_It was September, and it was Provence_”] The Loire divides France on a line running from the southeast to the middle of the west coast, parting the territory into two great divisions, which in the middle ages had a separate form of legislation, of speech, and of literature. The language south of the Loire was known as the _langue d’oc_ (an expression which gave its name to a province), so called from the fact, say some etymologists and philologists, that the expression of affirmation in the romance language of the south was “_oc_” or “_hoc_.” Dialects were common enough throughout this region, as elsewhere in France; but there was a certain grammatical resemblance between them all which distinguished them from the speech of the Bretons and Normans in the north. This southern language was principally distinguished from northern French by the existence of many Latin roots, which in the north had been eliminated. Foreign influences, curiously enough, had not crept in in the south, and, like the Spanish and the Italian speech, that of Languedoc (and Provence) was of a dulcet mildness which in its survival to-day, in the chief Provençal districts, is to be remarked by all. Northward of the Loire the _langue d’œil_ was spoken, and this language in its ultimate survival, with the interpolation of much that was Germanic, came to be the French that is known to-day. The Provençal tongue, even the more or less corrupt patois of to-day which Mistral and the other Félibres are trying to purify, is not so bad after all, nor so bizarre as one might think. It does not resemble French much more than it does Italian, but it is astonishingly reminiscent of many tongues, as the following quatrain familiar to us all will show: “Trento jour en Setèmbre, Abrieu Jun, e Nouvèmbre, De vint-e-une n’i’a qu’un Lis autre n’an trento un.” An Esperantist should find this easy. The literary world in general has always been interested in the Félibres of the land of “_la verte olive, la mure vermeille, la grappe de vie, croissant ensemble sous un ciel d’azur_,” and they recognize the “_littérature provençale_” as something far more worthy of being kept alive than that of the Emerald Isle, which is mostly a fad of a few pedants so dead to all progress that they even live their lives in the past.