I rested awhile in a cafe, and chance led me to one that was kept by an
Englishman. He recognised my nationality, while I supposed him to be a
Frenchman, and he seemed as glad to see me as if I had been an old friend.
He told me that when he was a boy his father brought his family from
England to Les Eyzies, where he was employed at the iron works. (The
smelting furnace has been cold for many a year.) The man who spoke was
middle-aged, and although he expressed himself with difficulty in English,
and turned his phrases out of French moulds of thought, he had kept a
strong accent of the Midland counties. The tenacity with which an accent
adheres to the tongue, even when the language to which it belongs has
been half lost, is very remarkable. I remember meeting in my roamings an
Englishwoman who had married a French cobbler, and who had been buried
alive with him in the Haut-Quercy for forty years. She had learnt to speak
patois like a native, but it had become a sore trial to her to put her
thoughts into English words; nevertheless, when she did bring out those
words that had been so long put away in the mind's lumber-room, the accent
was as pure Cockney as if she had but lately drifted away from her own
Middlesex.
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