Armand’s First Letter. Amelia’s First Letter.

15 February 1021, L’École du Sorciers

My dearest cousin Armand,

Your little cousin Jane has become much more interesting of late! During her first eight weeks of life she was so little concerned with the world around her—saving always my motherly presence—that Maximilian had taken to referring to her as “our little plum pudding”. It was, I fear, “a phrase of the most apt,” as Dr. Laguerre noted last week; for she has spent most of her short life swaddled in cloth, quite warm, and at intervals both damp and aromatic.

In the weeks since I last wrote, however, she has begun to notice things, and to look around as best she can; and to smile and to hold on to her father’s proffered finger.

I can almost see you nodding, and, I hope, smiling, as you say to yourself, “Ah, yes, she is just like all the others at this stage.” (I shall not ask whether you are referring to infants like Jane or new mothers like me.)

I have been continuing to struggle with Old Provençese, and with Florissant’s Annals of the Salians, though not entirely at the same time. Having seen how hard I was working at it—having seen how hard I was trying to work at it—Dr L’Auberge has taken pity on me.

“For you are not unintelligent, so I do see, but you are stupid with fatigue,” he said in response to my halting attempts. “The babies, they represent more work than I had known. Rest now; I shall return.”

I gladly laid down the tome, right in the middle of the account of the coronation of Hlodowig as king of the Salians, following his father Hildiric. Hlodowig will go on to unite the Salians with the other tribes in the vicinity, thus becoming the first king of the Marovingens and the founder of what will be known in later years as the kingdom of Provençe. It is said that the most ancient laws of the Provençese go back to his day.

I know none of this from Florissant, mind you, for I have found the Old Provençese text to be nearly impenetrable. The grammar and the meanings of the words have shifted greatly since Florissant’s day, as has the pronunciation; though I am assured that the spelling of words has changed relatively little. I suppose this explains why written Provençese looks so odd to the Cumbrian ear, with so many silent letters. Dr. L’Auberge has solemnly assured me that while modern Provençese has sixteen distinct vowels, Old Provençese has thirty-three!

But the stability of Provençese spelling has been of less aid to me than you might think. In Florissant’s day Old Provençese was not a single language but rather a collection of related regional dialects, each of which had its own characteristic words and each of which was written according to its sound, thereby producing a a veritable wealth of riches for Dr. L’Auberge, and an unnecessary trial for me.

When Dr. L’Auberge returned to L’École on the following day, he came bearing a different edition of the Annals, with, bless the man, both the Old Provençese and a modern translation on facing pages. “I prefer to throw my pupils into deep water and let them learn to swim,” he said. “If they can. And if they cannot, best they learn that, vite, vite! But Florissant is widely studied, even by those who will never learn the old tongue, and I think you will not take any harm if you have both to look at.”

And so I have been reading about Hlodowig and his legal code and his heirs, looking from the new tongue to the old; and if it is not an entertaining pastime—for the Annals are simply a list of events, year by year, with here and there a spot of narrative—I have already made a discovery.

The passage describing the institution of Hlodowig’s legal code says he wished for the Salians to have laws “as the Ancients did”—so it is rendered in modern Provençese—but it is clear even to my ignorant eyes that the word rendered as “Ancients” is, in Old Provençese, something more like “les Ituriens”. It seems that this word, which once connoted a specific people, soon switched its meaning to simply “the people of antiquity,” and was in turn replaced in the common speech by “les Anciens.”

Thus we see how little the Iturians matter to the scholars of Provençe! I would have thought that a scholarly text such as this would hew more closely to the source terminology; but now I understand why Dr. L’Auberge insists that his students learn the old tongue. More, I am much reassured in my new course of study: perhaps more treasure awaits!

Your matronly yet hard-working cousin,

Amelia

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