FRENCH PROSODY WITH SPECIMENS OF FRENCH VERSE PRESENT DAY BY LOUIS M. BRANDIN Licencié ès Lettres, Ph.D. Fielden Professor of French, and Professor of Romance Philology AND W. G. HARTOG B.A.(Lond.) Lecturer in French at University College, London LONDON BLACKIE & SON, LIMITED, 50 OLD BAILEY PREFACE This book is mainly intended for advanced students of French already possessing some knowledge of French literature, and more especially of French poetry. But it is addressed also to the larger public of those who take an interest in reading the French poets. It is not, therefore, intended to be a textbook and that alone. It aims at being a sort of guide pointing out to the passer-by that which might possibly escape his notice. Its object is to train the reader's ear and to quicken his powers of observation. All those questions that we regard as essential to the understanding of the technique of French verse have been discussed in this book. We have said nothing of the theory of the rôle of the accent (tonic or other), which seems to us at present obscure, and only to be elucidated by the methods of experimental phonetics. The question of the origin of French verse, again, is too little advanced for treatment in this book. We have departed somewhat from the usual practice in restricting within narrow limits the chapter dealing with the number of syllables formed by groups of vowels. On the other hand, we have devoted a whole chapter to the subject of Alliteration, which has been left untouched in previous V |