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The Slandered and Despised Young Girl

Like many others of us in the world, there was a mother and her daughter. They were very poor, and the daughter said that she wished to go out to service, in order to do something for her mother. The mother will not listen to it; what would become of her without her daughter? She prefers to be poor with her to being rich alone. The young girl stays at home. She used to go out as needlewoman; but suddenly her mother falls ill, and quickly she dies.

This poor young girl had the deepest sorrow, and she continued to go out to work as before. One day, while she was at work in a house, some acquaintance came and said to them—

“What! you have this young girl here to work! She is a bad girl; she is not at all what she ought to be. You should not take her.”

In the evening they give her her day’s wages, and say that they do not want her any more. She goes to another house, and there the same thing happens. Some people come and say in the same way—

“You have that young girl to work! She will come to a bad end, that girl will. She is even a thief; do not have her again.”

In the evening they give her her day’s wages, and say to her that they do not want her any more. No one asked her to work any more, and she remained at home. By charity and pity, some neighbours, without any necessity, let her come to work for them, because they were pained to see her distress. But there, too, someone comes and says,

“I am astonished to see that young girl here. She is a worthless girl. How is it that you have her here?”

They answer, “Moved by charity, just to help her.”

“Do not have her any more; she is a thief, and as bad as can be.”

After having given her her day’s wages, they send her off, and say that they do not want her any more.¹⁷⁶

This poor young girl was in the greatest distress; if she wished to eat, she must beg. She set to work begging then, and everyone disliked her so much that, when they saw her, they used to spit at her.

There came home from one of his voyages a ship’s captain, and, while he was amusing himself with his friends, this young girl asks for charity. His friends tell him that she was a bad girl, and they spit at her, and he does like the rest. Our captain goes off for another voyage; but he was overtaken by a terrible tempest. The storm was so violent, and the rain came down as if it would never leave off; it made them all tremble. In the midst of his prayers the captain made a vow that, if he escaped, he would marry the worst and most despised girl that he could find. Immediately the weather became fine. He makes a very successful voyage, and one which brought him plenty of money; but, when he reached land, he forgot his vow, and began to amuse himself as much as possible.

This same young girl asks charity, and, after his friends have told him that she was a bad girl, they spat at her, and he did so too.

Again he goes to sea, and he is overtaken by a storm, much worse than the former one. The wind was most violent, and the lightning terrible; they saw nothing but that. All trembled, and were praying. The captain again makes a vow of marrying, if he should get safe home, with the most abandoned and the poorest girl he can find, and he regrets that he has not kept his vow. He said to himself,

“If I had kept it, perhaps I should not have had such weather as this; but nothing now shall make me forget my promise.”

Immediately the weather becomes fine; he has immense good fortune, and gains as much money as he wishes.

When he comes home, he sees this young girl again. His friends spit at her, but he says to them,

“I will not spit at her—I wish to marry her.”

His friends burst out into roars of laughter, “Ha! ha! ha!” The sailor goes home to his mother, and tells her that he is going to be married. His mother answers him,

“If you make a good and rich marriage, very well.”

The son said to her, “She is not at all rich. She is that girl there.”

The mother was not pleased. “Leave that bad girl alone.”

He said, “It is all the same to me; I will marry none but her.”

He asks his friends where she lives. They point to an old house. The captain goes there in the evening and knocks at the door. The girl says, “Who is there?”

The man says, “Open the door for me. It is I.”

The young girl says, “I will not open the door—I am in bed.”

“Never mind, open it.”

“No! I will not do it.”

“I am going to break in the door.”

“Do what you will, but I will not open it.”

He breaks open the door, as he said, and goes in. He sees this young girl on a little straw, covered only by her dress. The man wants to go near her. The girl says:

“You may kill me if you like, but you shall not come near me.”

They were like that a long time. The man says to her:

“Give me your promise of marriage, then?”

The young girl says, “What do you mean? I so poor and you so rich—how can we marry?”

The man says that they will do so. The young girl will not believe him, and the gentleman says to her:

“If you will give me your promise I will go away at once.” And the young girl says “Yes,” in order to make him go away. Then he goes away.

The next day he goes to a priest and tells him what has taken place, and gives him forty thousand francs, and tells him to build a fine house with it, and to furnish it, and if anything more is wanting he will pay it at his next voyage. The young girl, too, goes to the priest, for before this she had been helped and comforted by him. The priest tells her how the captain had given him forty thousand francs for her to build a fine house with, and for her to make use of for all she wanted. The priest said that he would undertake building the house, and she said that she would see to all that was wanting for herself.

The captain goes off, and has as successful a voyage as could be made—he had nothing but fair weather. He brought back plenty of money, and they were married soon after his arrival. His mother and his brothers and sister were at the wedding. After some time the captain wished to go and make another voyage. He left his fine house to take his wife to his mother’s house, and he said to her:

“My wife will be better with you than all alone. You will have her always dressed as becomes her position, and keep a good table for her, and take good care of her.”

The husband went to sea. He often wrote to his wife; but what do the captain’s mother and her daughter do after he is gone? They take away from this lady all her pretty dresses, and make her put on old ones, and wooden shoes too with straw inside, and send her off to keep the geese with a bit of bread, telling her that she must bring home a load of small wood (to light the fire with), and that she must keep spinning while she is watching the geese. This poor young girl says nothing. She goes off with her flock of geese. When night comes she returns with four skeins of thread spun and a load of small wood. Every day she does the same. They do not even tell her that her husband has written to her.

The captain has a fine voyage. He had some fears about his mother and his sister, and he thought to himself that it would be best to come home secretly, in silence, and see how they were treating his wife. He comes then as a foreigner, in the dress of a captain. He says that he comes from a distance, and that he wishes to pass a week in their house. The mother and the daughter receive him very well. They tell him to choose his own room, and he chooses his own wedding-chamber. At nightfall the geese come home, cackling, cackling, and with them the young girl. This gentleman tells them that it is his habit to have some young girl with him when he travels like that, and asks them if they can get him one. They tell him “Yes,” that there would be none more glad than this young girl, and that they will give her to him. They go and tell it to the goose girl.

She says that certainly she will not go. They say to her that he has chests full of gold, and that they would willingly go, but that he has chosen her; and they push her by force into the room. The gentleman orders an excellent supper, and says that he has the habit of supping well. The goose girl stands sadly before the table. She would not eat anything; the gentleman presses her, and she kept saying that she was not hungry—that she had eaten as much as she usually did. He asks her:

“Where have you eaten? and what have you eaten?”

“A piece of bread that I took with me in the morning.”

He tells her again to eat these good things. She says that she does not want anything, and that the greatest pleasure he can give her is to let her go off to her geese. The gentleman says to her:

“You do not know then why you have come here? You are to sleep with me.”

The young girl says: “You shall cut me in pieces on the spot before I will go to your bed. I have a husband, and I wish to be faithful to him.”

And she tells, on his asking her, how that she was very poor, and no one loved her, and how a rich gentleman had wished to marry her—how very good he had been to her even after the marriage, and how when he went on a voyage he had left her at his mother’s house, thinking that she would be best there, and that since he was gone she had had no news of her husband. The gentleman said to her:

“Would you recognise your husband?” She says, “Yes.”

“Has he any marks?”

The young girl says, “Yes; he has a mole between his two breasts with three hairs on it.”

The gentleman opens his shirt and shows her his birthmark.

This young girl was seized with such joy that she fainted away, and fell down on the floor. As this gentleman knew the ways of the room he burst open the closet, and took a bottle of liqueur to bring his wife round again, and at last she came to herself, and passes a sweet night with her husband.

The next morning the geese come, cackle, cackle, before the door, and the mistress of the house and her daughter come to the gentleman’s door, calling out, if they have not stopped there long enough, that it is time to set off, and that it is a shame to be in bed at that hour. The gentleman gets up and says to his mother:

“What, mother, was this the way that you ought to have treated my dearly-loved wife?”

And he was in such a rage that, if his wife had not begged him to forgive her, he would even have beaten her; but his wife prevented him. He sent his mother and his sister out of the house, and he and his wife lived for many years happy and pleased with each other; and as they lived well they died well too.

The Sister of Laurentine.

This may be Toutou, but in the Basque country it is sometimes difficult to get hold of a person’s surname. “Who is Laurentine?” you ask. “She is Toutou’s sister,” is the reply. “But who is Toutou?” “She is Laurentine’s sister.” If you want to get anything more out you have to cross-examine for half-an-hour. Some of our tales are not signed; we believe these are to be divided between Catherine Elizondo and Laurentine Kopena. Fresh names we think we always put down, but these brought so many tales that we sometimes omitted it with them, and in the rearrangement for printing we have lost our clue.

We have some thirteen other tales of all kinds, besides variations, which we have not given. They are mostly short, and not very different in character from those given above, except in being more stupid in two or three cases; and a few of them are to be found in M. Cerquand’s collection.

An Essay on the Basque Language,

By M. Julien Vinson.

The Basque Language is one which is particularly attractive to specialists. Its place in the general series of idioms has at last been well defined—it is an agglutinative and incorporating language, with some tendency to polysynthetism. It consequently finds a place in the second great morphological linguistic group, between the Finnic and the North American family of languages. I shall now attempt a very short sketch of its general features; but I must ask permission, first, briefly to state some of the most essential principles of the science of language.

It is acknowledged that the science of language—that is to say, the science of the characteristic phenomenon of the human species, is a purely natural science. It has nothing in common with philology, which is mainly a historical study. Whether it be called linguistique, glottology, phonology, or even, by a too common abuse, comparative philology, the science of language follows the same method as the other natural sciences, and advances by observation and experience. The direct subject-matter of this science is those vocal organisms which express, by sensible sounds, thought and its divers modes of existence. These organisms are the spontaneous and unconscious product of organs which, as natural phenomena, fall under the general law of perpetual variation, acted on by their surroundings, climate, &c.; but as incapable of being modified by the external or internal exercise of human volition as any other of the organized beings which surround us.

But as the object of language is to express thought in all its niceties, both the fact that gives rise to it, and the modifications of it caused by time and space, so it is seen that different idioms have adopted different methods of expressing, in the best and readiest manner, the idea, the conception or intuition, with its variable forms, in order to translate with precision its signification, and its relations. From this point of view language has been divided into three great groups: the first, that of isolating languages, wherein the monosyllabic roots all retain their meaning, and wherein the relations are only expressed conventionally, i.e., were not originally expressed at all; the second, that of agglutinative languages, in which the relations are expressed by roots once significative, but now reduced to a secondary and subordinate office; lastly, the third, that of inflectional languages, in which the change of relations is expressed by a modification in the root itself, and even in the radical vowel. It is clear that the idioms of the second group were once isolating, and that inflectional idioms have passed through both the former states. We conclude from this that language is essentially progressive and variable in the sense of a constant improvement in the expression of relations. And yet, in the study of existing languages we find, on the contrary, that they are often in this respect inferior to their ancestors.

This contradiction, however, is only an apparent one. Thus, as Schleicher has demonstrated, languages are born, grow up, become stationary, decline and die; in a word, live after the same fashion as do organized beings. There are in every language two principal periods—that of formal development, during which the idiom passes from the first (monosyllabic) stage to the second (agglutinative) by reducing certain roots to a secondary and dependent office, then from the second to the third (inflectional) by a new effort to express simultaneously signification and relation; and that of formal decay, during which the original meaning of the relative affixes is more and more forgotten, they get worn out, change by degrees, and often end by perishing altogether. Formal decay begins when a language becomes historical, and it often gives rise to remarkable cases of regressive metamorphosis. One remark which we must make on this subject is that the known agglutinative languages have not spontaneously arrived at historical life—that is to say, have not commenced their decay, except under the influence of a foreign idiom either isolating or inflectional. Nevertheless, during their decay, languages can adopt fresh forms, but these are merely composed of words already in use; man in the historical period has no longer bare roots at his service.¹⁷⁷

These linguistic elements are, moreover, subject to the terrible law of the struggle for existence, and of vital competition. Many of them have perished and have left no trace; others are preserved to us merely in some scanty records. The Basque, pressed hard by Latin and its derived languages, has lost ground, especially in Spain. Beyond its actual limits, there are in Navarre many villages, the names of which are Basque, but in which Spanish only is spoken; and all along the frontiers of the actual region of the Basque in the Spanish provinces this idiom is spoken only by a minority of the inhabitants. It is, moreover, undergoing modification everywhere; the children often replace the old expressive native terms by a vocabulary drawn from the Romance tongues. In those places which are most in contact with strangers, and in which the movement of modern life is most keenly felt—at St. Sebastian and at St. Jean de Luz, for instance—the language has become exceedingly debased and incorrect. Everything presages the speedy extinction of the Escuara or Euscara, which is the name given to the Basque by those who speak it. The word, apparently, means merely “manner of speaking.” All people have, in a greater or less degree, the pretension which caused the Greeks to treat all foreigners as barbarians—that is, as not properly-speaking men.

Prince L. L. Bonaparte reckons the actual number of the Basques, not including emigrants established in Mexico, at Monte Video, and at Buenos Ayres, at 800,000, of whom 660,000 are in Spain, and 140,000 in France.

The phonetic laws of the Escuara are simple; the sounds most frequently employed are the sibilants, nasals, and hard gutturals; the soft consonants are often suppressed between two vowels. The mixed sounds, between palatals and gutturals, characteristic of the second large group of languages, are also frequently met with. One of the predominant features is the complete absence of reduplication of consonants, the aversion to groups of consonants, and the care taken to complete the sound of final mute consonants by an epenthetic vowel. It is probable that originally the words were composed of a series of syllables formed regularly of a single consonant and a vowel. We must mention, besides, the double form of the nominatives, one of which is used only as the subject of an active verb; the other serves equally for the subject of the intransitive, and the object of the active verb. This is absolutely the same distinction remarked by M. Fried. Müller in the Australian languages between the subjective and the predicative nominative.

Formal derivation is accomplished by means of suffixing the elements of relations; pronominal signs are nevertheless not only suffixed, but also prefixed to verbs. Except in this respect, nouns and verbs are not treated in two distinct manners; they are both equally susceptible of receiving suffixes which mark the relations of time and space, and many of which have preserved in their integrity both their proper signification and their primitive sonorous form. The article is the remote demonstrative pronoun. The pronouns “we” and “ye” are not the plurals of “I” and “thou,” but have the appearance of special individualities. There are no possessive derivative terms; “my house,” for example, is expressed by “the house of me,” and has no analogy with “I eat,” or any other verbal expression. There are no genders, although some suffixes are specially replaced by others in the names of animate beings; and in the verb there are special forms to indicate if a man or woman is being spoken to. There is no dual. The sign of the plural is interposed between the article and the suffixes. In the singular alone can there be an indefinite or indeterminate declension without the article.

The conjugation is exceedingly complicated. The Basque verb includes in a single verbal expression the relations of space; of one person to another—(1) subjective (the idea of neutrality, of action limited to its author), (2) objective (the idea of action on a direct object), and (3) attributive (the idea of an action done to bear on an object viewed indirectly, the idea of indirect action); the relations of time; the relations of state, corresponding to as many distinct moods; the variations of action, expressed by different voices; the distinctions of subject or object, marked by numerous personal forms; the conditions of time and state which are expressed by conjunctions in modern languages—to each of these relations is appropriated an affix, often considerably abbreviated and condensed, but almost always recognisable.

The primitive Basque verb—that is to say, in its full development—did not differ from that of other languages of the globe. It comprised only two moods, the indicative, and the conjunctive, which was derived from the indicative by a suffix; and three tenses, the present, the imperfect, and a kind of aorist indicating eventual possibility. There was only one secondary voice, the causative, formed by a special affix. To these forms it joined the signs of the direct and indirect object, which is the essential characteristic of incorporating idioms.

During its historic life, during its period of formal decay, the verb has experienced in Basque modifications which are not found to a similar extent elsewhere. The primitive conjugation, or, so to say, the simple and direct one of verbal nouns, has little by little fallen into disuse, and has been replaced by a singular combination of verbal nouns, of adjectives, and of some auxiliary verbs. Thus it is that the Escuara, in all its dialects, has developed eleven moods and ninety-one tenses (each of which has three persons in each number), variable according to the sex or rank of the person addressed; it receives besides a certain number of terminations, which perform the office of our conjunctions. Moreover, from the totality of these auxiliaries two parallel series have been formed, which, joined alternatively to nouns of action, produce the active and middle voices, or rather the transitive and intransitive. The auxiliaries of the periphrastic conjugation are almost the only verbs that have been preserved belonging to the simple primitive system.

With regard to syntax, the Basque resembles all agglutinative languages. The sentence is always simple. The phrases are generally short; relative pronouns are unknown. The complexity of the verb, which unites many ideas in a single word, contributes to this simplicity of the sentence, in which the subject and the attribute, with their respective complements, tend to form but one expression. This object is attained by the invariability of the adjectives, and especially by composition.

The adjective is placed after the noun it qualifies, whilst the genitive, on the contrary, precedes the governing noun.

Composition is of such common use in Basque, that it has caused several juxta-posed words to be contracted and reduced, so as to be partially confounded one with the other. This phenomenon is familiar to languages of the New World; it is this which properly constitutes polysynthetism, and which we must carefully distinguish from incorporation. This last word should be reserved to designate more particularly the phenomena of objective or attributive conjugation common to idioms of the second form.

The Basque vocabulary appears to be very poor. Although it is still imperfectly known (for the old books, and the names of places, as well as certain little studied dialectic variations, must have retained some words generally forgotten), we are yet able to assert that pure Basque terms do not express abstract ideas. Except in words borrowed from the Gascon, French, Spanish, and Latin, we find no trace of any advanced civilization, and we can discover but very few expressions which imply collectivity or generalization—e.g., there is no word which has the wide signification of our word “tree,” of our “animal.” “God” is simply, by anthropomorphism, “the Master on High.” One and the same word translates our ideas of “will, desire, fancy, thought.” Borrowed words are more numerous, from the fact that the influence of Aryan dialects has been felt through many ages; it is probably owing to their contact with the Indo-European races that the Basques, or those who used to speak the Basque, have any historical existence.

Thus, in order to study this singular idiom, it is necessary to understand thoroughly the history of the intervention of Latin in the Pyrenean region. No assistance is to be obtained from written documents, for there is not (and there cannot have been) any primitive Basque literature. The oldest book was published in 1545.¹⁷⁸ The second is the Protestant version of the New Testament, printed at La Rochelle by order of Jeanne d’Albret, in 1571.¹⁷⁹

Another difficulty arises from the extreme variability of the language. There are, perhaps, not two villages where it is spoken absolutely in the same manner. This is natural enough among an unlettered people, and one which can only rise to the level of the surrounding civilization by forgetting its ancient language. These different varieties are easily grouped into secondary dialects. Prince L. L. Bonaparte recognises twenty-five of them, but they are reduced without difficulty to eight great dialects. A closer inspection further reduces these eight divisions to three; that is to say, the differences between the eight principal dialects are unequal, and admit of partial resemblances.

The eight dialects are: (1) The Labourdine, (2) The Souletine, (3) The Eastern Lower-Navarrese, (4) The Western Lower-Navarrese, (5) The Northern Upper-Navarrese, (6) The Southern Upper-Navarrese, (7) The Guipuzcoan, (8) The Biscayan. The Souletine and the two Lower-Navarrese dialects form the first group, which may be called the Oriental division. The Biscayan alone forms the Western, and the four others form the Central group. These names are taken from territorial divisions. La Soule was formerly a province feudatory to Navarre, and now embraces, within the French department of the Basses-Pyrénées, the cantons of Mauléon and Tardets, as well as some parishes of the canton of St. Palais, in the arrondissement of Mauléon. The Labourd, a viscounty, vassal of the Duchy of Aquitaine, corresponded to the cantons of Bayonne (excepting the city itself and three other parishes), of St. Jean de Luz, of Ustaritz, of Espelette, and part of Hasparren, in the arrondissement of Bayonne. The remaining part of the two French arrondissements which we have just named composes Lower Navarre, which is again subdivided into the districts of Cize, Mixe, Arberoue, Ostabaret, and the valleys of Osses and Baigorry. This was originally the sixth merindad of Navarre, a kingdom which extended into Spain as far as the Ebro, from Garde and Cortés on the one side to Vera and Viana on the other. Basque is still spoken along the French frontier and in several valleys forming the upper part of the territory. Guipuzcoa contains the cantons (partidos) of St. Sebastian, Tolosa, Azpeitia, and Vergara. Biscay comprises all the territory between Ondarroa and the river of Sommorostro, between La Carranza and the Peña de Gorbea.

The dialects do not correspond exactly to the territorial subdivisions whose names they bear. Thus the Western Lower-Navarrese is spoken in a part of the ancient Labourd; the Biscayan in Guipuzcoa. Lastly, on the Spanish maps, there is another Basque province, Alava; but Basque is scarcely spoken there, excepting in a narrow strip along the northern frontier. The dialect of these Alavese districts is included in the Biscayan. To resume, the Biscayan dialect is now spoken in Alava, Biscay, and the western third part of Guipuzcoa, in Vergara, and in Las Salinas; the Guipuzcoan in almost all the rest of Guipuzcoa; the Northern Upper-Navarrese in some villages of Guipuzcoa on the French frontier, in Fontarabie, Irun, and in the northern part of Navarre; the Southern Upper-Navarrese in the rest of Basque Navarre; the Labourdine in the south-western part of the arrondissement of Bayonne; the Western Lower-Navarrese in the north-eastern part of the same arrondissement; the Souletine is spoken in the two cantons of Mauléon and Tardets, and at Esquiule in the arrondissement of Oloron; the Eastern Lower-Navarrese extends into the arrondissement of Bayonne as far as St. Pierre d’Irube, by Meharrin, Ayherre, Briscous, Urcuit.

Of these arrondissements, of these provinces, none is entirely Basque in a linguistic point of view, except Guipuzcoa. Navarre is only half so, Alava only a tenth part. A little less than a fourth part has to be subtracted from Biscay, and certain Gascon villages from the arrondissements of Mauléon and Bayonne in France. Neither Bayonne, nor Pampeluna, nor Bilbao are Basque.¹⁸⁰ And, moreover, skirting the districts where the Basque is the native idiom of the majority of the inhabitants, on many points there is an intermediate zone in which Basque is known only by a minority of the population; nevertheless, this zone must be included in the geographical area of the idiom, since the persons who speak Basque in it know it as their native language, and have never learnt it. This zone is most extensive in Navarre, but exists also in Alava and in Biscay. In France there is no analogous mixed zone; and, as M. P. Broca remarks (“Sur l’Origine et la Repartition de la Langue Basque,” Paris, 1875, p. 39), “the demarcation is brusque, and may be indicated by a single line.” The Basques, moreover, in this respect, present some curious points for study. “In the valley of Roncal the men speak Spanish together; with the women they speak Basque, as do the women to each other. A similar state of things is to be observed at Ochagavia in Salazar. But this custom is not observed in the Roncalese villages of Uztarroz and Isaba, where the men among themselves speak indifferently Basque or Spanish.” (Prince L. L. Bonaparte, “Etudes sur les Dialects d’Aezcoa,” &c., p. 3).

The preceding description justifies the opinion advanced at the beginning of this notice. The Basque is an agglutinative idiom, and must be placed, in a morphological point of view, between the Finnic family, which is simply incorporating, and the North American incorporating and polysynthetic families. But we must not conclude thence that the Escuara is a near relation either of the Finnic or of the Magyar, of the Algonquin or of the Irokese. The relationship of two or more languages cannot, in fact, be concluded merely from a resemblance of their external physiognomy. To prove a community of origin, it is indispensable that (if compared at the same stage of development) their principal grammatical elements should not only be analogous in their functions, but should also have a certain phonetic resemblance, in order to render the hypothesis of their original identity admissible. It is better to abstain from asserting that such languages are derived from the same source, if the significant roots—which, after all, constitute the proper basis, the true originality of a language—should be found to be totally different. At present, no language has been discovered which presents any root-likeness to the Basque, analogous to that which exists between the Sanscrit, Greek, and Gothic, or between Arabic and Hebrew.