Provençal

#On the Tongue Named at the Water

Provençal enters the Sacred Ledger by the back stair, as one word in a list. Its place is the testimony of the Red Slaughter of Lyon. There it stands third among the tongues that listeners on the Rhône said they heard rising from the river in –39 A.S., which the old calendar calls 1671. The list runs Latin, Burgundian French, Provençal, and one claim of Greek. The Bureau has never improved on that order, and I see no reason to start now.

Provençal is the speech of the lower river. The Rhône reaches its country after Avignon, where the water slows and the southern roads begin to bend toward Marseille. That is as much geography as I will sign. Where the tongue began, who first wrote it down and which villages keep which vowels are questions for grammarians, and grammarians are kept in a lower cellar. This tract has a narrower charge. It concerns one word, set down beside a sound whose words the surviving account does not give.

#On the Atrocity That Produced the Testimony

The facts come first, because the dead are owed them before they are owed any theory.

Lyonnais militias under municipal colours entered a friary on the Rhône's left bank after Compline. Forty-three friars were burned. Four lay brothers were shot separately. The municipal clerks of the day filed that as a separate matter, and I file it as the same crime with a second weapon. The ashes were carried down to the water and emptied into the current before dawn. The parent entry holds the full reconstruction, and I will not walk the reader through the refectory a second time. Once is instruction. Twice is appetite.

The killers were local men under civic warrant. No continental Republic yet existed to claim them. The Rationalists would later inherit their vocabulary and polish it into doctrine, and in seven more years the Year of Letters would show that a pen could do in forty cities what torches had done in one Lyon friary.

For three nights after the ashes went in, witnesses on both banks heard psalms from the water. The phrase "three nights" has hardened in the retelling until schoolboys picture the business as a purely nocturnal haunting. That is careless. The accounts tie the singing to the hours the friars had kept: Matins before dawn, Sext at the white height of midday and Compline when the lamps were shuttered. Anyone who calls it a night-sound has never opened a breviary. The river kept the Office, and the Office includes noon.

Rationalist pamphleteers called it superstition and echo. They did not say what was being echoed. That omission is the most honest sentence they ever printed.

The listeners agreed on the cadence and disagreed on the tongue. Latin was heard, and so were Burgundian French and Provençal. One listener claimed Greek, and the Bureau of Doctrine filed that claim under "pious overreach, musically admissible." That ruling belongs to the Greek alone. Provençal received no ruling, kind or otherwise. It received a place on the list, which is more than the four lay brothers received from the municipal clerks.

#On Cadence and Tongue

A trained ear knows a psalm by its shape before it catches a word. It hears the half-verse, the breath at the mediant and the falling close. A sacristan raised on the Office could name the hour from the cadence alone at fifty paces through fog. Telling the tongue apart is a different exercise, and the testimony is much less unanimous about it.

The Rationalist schoolmen had a tidy account of the disagreement. Each listener, they said, heard a liturgical rhythm and filled it with whatever language lived nearest his own teeth, so the bargeman heard his bargeman's speech and the sacristan heard his Latin. The theory is neat, cheap and pleased with itself, which is how I recognize Rationalist work in the dark. I do not adopt it. I do not refute it either, because refuting it would require knowing what the river did, and the Ledger does not know.

I can say exactly what the Provençal identification establishes. At least one witness on the Rhône in 1671 believed the river sang in Provençal, and the testimony thought that belief worth recording. That is the whole of it.

It does not establish that the river sang in Provençal. It does not establish that four tongues sounded together, that the dead were translated for each listener's ear, or that the languages took turns through the night like a rota of tired cantors. Some devout commentators have offered each of these, and each one invents more than the evidence gives.

The account before me preserves no Provençal verse, no rendering of one and no named witness who claimed the tongue as his own. I record that the page is missing. I do not claim the thing it would have recorded never existed. Those are different statements, and archivists who confuse them end up in Purity's waiting rooms.

#On the Later Custody of Words

In 1671 the Church had no Bureaus, no public seals and no Synod to speak of. Every office below is later, and every judgment it passes on the Lyon testimony is passed in hindsight. It still deserves a place here, because a psalm heard in a regional tongue on a public quay would today meet a whole apparatus before it finished its second verse.

The Bureau of Doctrine keeps the Index Claritatis. This is the approved vocabulary of Creation, a rolling compendium revised weekly, and a word left off it is heretical by omission. The Bureau of Purity enforces what Doctrine defines and keeps the Index Damnatus of forbidden names and words. Its White-Mantled Inquisitors walk the cities with pocket strips of the current Index, wax seals, censor knives and their chains of glass. They compare a suspect usage against the strip and the local errata. If it fails they seize the sheet, the book or the speaker, and they impose the correction. The Bureau of Orison and Song licenses hymnals and prosecutes unauthorized melody as heresy, whatever language the melody arrives in.

So a Provençal psalm would face three offices. Doctrine would ask whether its words appear on the Index. Purity would ask whether any of them appear on the wrong list. Orison and Song would ask who licensed the tune. Each office examines a word, a sheet or a melody one at a time.

I have found no ruling in these offices that takes up Provençal entire, either to forbid it or to bless it. I will not forge one to give this article a tidier ending. The Ledger has enough forgeries, and most of them are better than anything I could produce at short notice.

#On the Present Disposition

Lyon remembers under supervision. On the anniversary, a licensed procession carries bowls of clean ash from the upper city down to the river and comes back empty-handed. No one sings at the waterline without a permit from the Bureau of Festivals and a silence waiver from the Bureau of Bells. The requirement binds every throat on that quay, whatever tongue it learned in the cradle. It singles out Provençal no more than it singles out Latin.

The friars are dead. Their ashes went into the Rhône and do not come out on request. Afterward the river was heard to keep their hours, and someone listening on the bank heard those hours in Provençal. The Ledger holds that report, with the other three tongues beside it, and does not choose among them.