Le roman de la rose

searches, chapter 44. "A similar fault," he says, "do we find in the ancient manuscripts of our Romance of the Rose, in each of which the French language is such as it was when they were copied, except for the rhyme of the Verses, to which they could give no new order. Indeed, you will find there I know not what of the 'chirping' original: "ramage," a term for the song of birds, here used to mean the peculiar sound of dialects. of those who were the Scribes; I mean of their Picard, Norman, and Champenois Dialects of Northern and Eastern France., which are things to which the Reader must pay heed before interposing his judgment."

Moreover, it can be said that independently of all these alterations, one would find in most Provinces the explanation for several ancient terms that are no longer in use, each part of the Kingdom having preserved those it held most dear.

But these changes only became sensible Meaning noticeable or perceptible. at the beginning of the 15th century. Our Language having then taken on more perfection and politeness than it had previously, one easily perceived the difference between a work made at the end of the 13th century and the same work written at the beginning of the 15th. And it was around that time that the first cor-

corrections of the Romance of the Rose were made, either by removing terms that were beginning to no longer be of fine usage, or by reforming the orthography spelling which still held something of the Germanic language, to adopt that which we have today, which has maintained itself with enough uniformity for 300 years. The entire 15th century brought few changes to our Language, so the Romance suffered no sensible alteration during that time. But the renewal of Letters The Renaissance, and more than all that, the Ladies who began to take precedence at Court under Louis XII and Francis I, produced a marvelous change in our Language. The turn and arrangement of phrases were adapted to the delicacy of their ears; everything that carried any sort of roughness was once again exiled; new words and new, softer, more gracious ways of speaking were sought to substitute for those that were being set aside.

It was around this time that the first Editions of the Romance of the Rose appeared, and printing occasioned the