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?
It will live, no doubt, like the dialect in which it is written; but is this, the Gascon patois, likely to live?
Will it be spoken by our posterity as long as it has been spoken by our ancestors?
I hope not; at least I wish it may be less spoken.

Yet I love its artless and picturesque expressions, its lively recollections of customs and manners which have long ceased to exist, like those old ruins which still embellish our landscape.

But the tendency which is gradually effacing the vestiges of our old language and customs is but the tendency of civilisation itself.
"When Rome fell under the blows of the barbarians, she was entirely conquered; her laws were subjected at the same time as her armies.