In spite of these physical differences in their country, the men of the three regions have a distinctive character of their own. The north Frenchman will tell you that they are noisy and boastful, fond of jewellery and all sorts of display, better suited to politics than to soldiering. And yet both Joffre and Foch are from the Pyrenees. Certainly the Southern Frenchman’s skin is darker and his speech is not quite the same as that of the Northerner; it is nearer to the old Latin speech in that Gascon and Provençal alike have followed the Italians and Spaniards in keeping the grand broad vowels that make the southern tongues peculiarly adapted to song. In the early Middle Ages this tongue of theirs, the langue d’oc, was spoken as far north as Geneva on the east and Poitou on the west (the first troubadour that we know was Count of Poitiers, not far from the central Loire), but the royal province afterwards called Languedoc was much smaller, and included, roughly, only the land already marked off as the theatre of the Albigensian war. Civilization was very old there. Before the beginnings of recorded history, when Rome was an obscure village, the shores of the Mediterranean were already covered with highly organized little city states, building solidly in stone, possessing law, plastic art, and intense local patriotism. The Gallic coast of the Mediterranean became one of the earliest Roman provinces. It had already been so for more than half a century when Cæsar, burdened with his debts but full of ambition, began those northward marches that were to make civilization not so much a Mediterranean as a European thing. The schoolboy remembers how throughout the Commentaries there is continually talk of calling drafts for the cavalry from “Tolosa et Narbone.” This country came to be called “The Province,” _par excellence_; the name survives in the modern word “Provence.” Incidentally it is interesting to note that “Provincia” was not confined to the Mediterranean lands. Scarcely had the Romans occupied these than they went forward, over the gap of Carcassonne, the saddle between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees, where the railway and the canal go to-day. They took the upper Garonne country, then as now centreing about Toulouse as its chief town, and connected it for administration with the Mediterranean coastal plain from the Rhône to the Pyrenees. This arrangement, after enduring for five hundred years under the Romans, reappears in the Dark Ages under the Counts of Toulouse, and, first under them and later under the Kings of France, lasts for eight hundred years more. It is astonishing to see how closely the Roman administrative division called “Narbonensis Prima” of B.C. 100 corresponds with the province of Languedoc of the French monarchy of A.D. 1790.