"Soft speech Provençal under the olives! Like a queen’s raiment from days long perish’d, Breathing aromas of old unremember’d Perfumes and shining in dust-cover’d places With sudden hints of forgotten splendour— So on the lips of the peasant his language, His only now, the tongue of the peasant."

"In fair Provence, the land of lute and rose..."

"He play’d an ancient ditty, long since mute, In Provence call’d, ‘La belle dame sans mercy’."

"Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!"

"Ab l'alen tir vas me l'aire Qu'ieu sen venir de Proensa; Tot quant es de lai m'agensa, Si que, quan n'aug ben retraire, Ieu m'o escout en rizen E'n deman per un mot cen, Tan m'es bel quan n'aug ben dire."

"Plus me plaît le séjour qu'ont bâti mes aïeux, Que des palais Romains le front audacieux, Plus que le marbre dur me plaît l'ardoise fine:Plus mon Loir gaulois, que le Tibre latin, Plus mon petit Liré, que le mont Palatin, Et plus que l'air marin la doulceur angevine."

"By heaven, these scroyles of Angiers flout you, kings, And stand securely on their battlements, As in a theatre, whence they gape and point At your industrious scenes and acts of death."

"France’s Interior Minister told his country’s legislature that some 42,000 people – about one in five possible voters in New Caledonia – are denied the right to vote under the 1998 Noumea Accord between France and the independence movement that froze the electoral roll."

"Starting from little Lower Savoy, the small nation of warlike mountaineers of the entire province concentrated themselves into a state and then descended into the Italian plain and, by conquest and policy, annexed Piedmont, Monferrato, Nice, the Lomellina, Sardinia and Genoa, one after the other. The dynasty settled in Turin and became Italian, but Savoy remained the cradle of the state, and today the cross of Savoy is the coat of arms of North Italy from Nice to Rimini and from Sondrio to Siena. ...Savoy, separated from Piedmont by the main chain of the Alps, supplies almost all its needs from the north, from Geneva and in part from Lyons, just as on the other hand the canton of Ticino, which lies south of the Alpine passes, draws on Genoa and Venice. If this circumstance is a motive for separation from Piedmont, it is not one for annexation to France, for the commercial metropolis of Savoy is Geneva; that was taken care of, apart from the geographical situation, by the wisdom of the French tariff laws and the chicanery of the French customs."