les pigeons,
No sait ben d’où qu’i viennent.
No n’sait point où qu’i vont.
N’y a cô qu’sé à ses noces.—Il n’est rien de tel que soi-même pour veiller à ses intérêts.
L’ergent ça s’compte deux fé.—L’argent se compte deux fois.
Veux-tu être hureu un jour? Saoule té!
Veux-tu être hureu trois jours? Marie té!
Veux-tu être hureu huit jours? Tue tan cochan!
Veux-tu être hureu toute ta vie? Fais té curé!
With the English tourist, at least, the Norman patois will not cause dissension, if indeed he notices it at all—or knows what it’s all about, if he does notice it.
Every intelligent person, of course, is fond of speculating as to the etymology of foreign words and phrases; and in France he will find many expressions which will make him think he knows nothing at all of the language, provided he has learned it out of school-books.
Many a university prize-winner has before now found himself stranded and hungry at a railway buffet because he could not make the waiter understand that he wanted his tea served with milk and his cut of roast beef underdone.
French colloquialism and idiom are the stumbling-blocks of the foreigner in France, even if he is college bred. The French are not so prolific in proverbs as the Spanish, and the slang of the boulevards is not the speech of the provincial Frenchman. There are in the French language quaint and pat sayings, however, which now and then crop up all over France, and as an unexpected reply to some simple and grammatically well-formed inquiry are most disconcerting to the foreigner.
A Frenchman will make you an off-hand reply to some observation by stating “C’est vieux comme le Pont Neuf,” meaning “it’s as old as the hills,” and “bon chat, bon rat,” when he means “tit for tat,” or “sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”
If you have had a struggle with your automobile tire, or have just escaped from slipping off the gangplank leading from a boat to the shore, you might well say in English, “That was warm work.” The Frenchman’s comment is not far different; he says, “L’affaire a été chaude.” “Business is business” is much the same in French, “Les affaires sont les affaires,” and “trade is bad” becomes “Les affaires ne marchent pas.” “He is a dead man,” in French, becomes, “Son affaire (or son compte) est fait.” The Frenchman, when he pawns his watch, does not “put it up” with his uncle, but tells you, “J’ai porté ma montre chez ma tante.” “Every day is not Sunday” in its French equivalent reads, “Ce n’est pas tous les jours fête.”
“He hasn’t an idea in his head” becomes “Il a jeté tout son feu,” and, paradoxically, when one gets a receipt from his landlord that individual writes, “pour acquit.”
A fortune, in a small way, awaits the person who will evolve some simple method of teaching English-speaking people how to know a French idiom when they meet with it. Truly, idiomatic French is a veritable pitfall of phrase.
PART II
CHAPTER I.
THE PROVINCE AND ITS PEOPLE
GAUL in the time of Cæsar included Normandy in its general scheme, as is shown by the ancient names—that of the Lexovii, at Lisieux; the Bajocasses, at Bayeux; the Unelli of the Cotentin; the Ambivariti, at Avranches; the Veliscasses of Vexin and Rotomagus (Rouen), and the Caletes of the Pays de Caux.
It was many centuries before all these peoples were welded together under one stable government, the Franks only predominating toward the end of the fifth century, after they had vanquished the Romans at Soissons, in Belgica, in 486.
Normandy formed one of the four ancient provinces of transalpine Gaul known to their founder, Augustus, as Lyonnaise. Since it bordered upon the Manche, or what is otherwise known as the English Channel, the “ancient land of Lyonnese” is known to geologists as forming a fragment of what was one day the mainland of Europe.
In our later day the only attempt at the preservation of this ancient name was in the distribution of the ecclesiastical provinces of France previous to the Revolution, when the archbishop who had his throne at Rouen exercised his rights through all the northern province of the Lyonnaise of Augustus.
Later ancient Gaul became again divided, so far as the present limits of France are concerned, into four great divisions, of which Neustria, a vast triangle between the mouth of the Escaut, the source of the Seine, and Bretagne, which included the whole of Normandy, was one of the most important.
The Neustri Kingdom (ne-ost-reich, the kingdom which is not of the east) was further distinguished from the Ostrasien by manners and customs which were climatically influenced to differ from those of the ost reich, which were manifestly Germanic.
In 1789 the Assembly reconstructed the map of France—the great rhomboid of France, as the French school geographies put it—into eighty-three departments, when Normandy was dismembered to form the Departments of Calvados, Orne, Manche, Eure, and the Lower Seine.
| DÉPARTEMENTS. | PRÉFECTURES. | SOUS-PRÉFECTURES. |
| Lower Seine. | Rouen. | Havre, Yvetot, Dieppe, Neufchâtel. |
| Eure. | Evreux. | Bernay, Pt. Audemer, Louviers, Les Andelys. |
| Manche. | St. Lô. | Cherbourg, Valognes, Coutances, Avranches, Mortain. |
| Orne. | Alençon. | Domfront, Argentan, Mortagne. |
| Calvados. | Caen. | Vire, Bayeux, Falaise, Pont l’Évêque, Lisieux. |
Normandy, as a powerful independent state in the middle ages, was greatly helped by its natural advantages.
Its great spread of territory, along the Channel coast between the Bresle and the Couesnon, for a matter of six hundred kilometres, has its shore lined with numerous creeks and valleys and marked by jutting fangs of rock, with here and there a sand-spread shore lying beneath a chalky cliff.
Upper Normandy was the name given to
