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"No, no I cannot desert my mother-tongue!" said Jasmin. "It preserves the folk-lore of the district; it is the language of the poor, of the labourer, the shepherd, the farmer and grape-gatherers, of boys and girls, of brides and bridegrooms. The people," he said to M. Dumon, "love to hear my songs in their native dialect.
Indeed, Gascon was not a written language, and Jasmin had to collect his lexicon, grammar, and speech mostly from the peasants who lived in the neighbourhood of Agen. Dante virtually created the Italian language, while Jasmin merely resuscitated for a time the Gascon dialect. Jasmin was not deterred by the expostulations of Dumon, but again wrote his new epic of Franconnette in Gascon.
Dumon had published his protest on the 28th of August, 1837, and a few days later, on the 2nd of September, Jasmin replied in the following poem: "There's not a deeper grief to man Than when his mother, faint with years, Decrepit, old, and weak and wan, Beyond the leech's art appears;
In 1843 the Duchess of Orleans had a golden medal struck in his honour; and M. Dumon, when presenting it to Jasmin, announced that the Minister of Instruction had inscribed his name amongst the men of letters whose works the Government was desirous of encouraging; and that consequently a pension had been awarded to him of 1,000 francs per annum.
Like most of his previous poems, Jasmin wrote Franconnette in the Gascon dialect. Some of his intimate friends continued to expostulate with him for using this almost dead and virtually illiterate patois. Why not write in classical French? M. Dumon, his colleague at the Academy of Agen, again urged him to employ the national language, which all intelligent readers could understand.
"Under the reign of our Henry IV.," said M. Dumon, "the Langue d'Oil became, with modifications, the language of the French, while the Langue d'Oc remained merely a patois. Do not therefore sing in the dialect of the past, but in the language of the present, like Beranger, Lamartine, and Victor Hugo. "What," asked M. Dumon, "will be the fate of your original poetry?
Jasmin was cut to the quick by this severe letter of his friend, and he lost not a moment in publishing a defence of the language condemned to death by his opponent. He even displayed the force and harmony of the language which had been denounced by M. Dumon as a patois.
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