§ 5. Still more recently, Dr. Max Kaluza has pointed out that there is another distinct break in the poem near l. 1700. The style of translation, not to speak of its accuracy, is much better in the first 1700 lines than in the subsequent portions. We may notice, in particular, that the French word _boutons_ is translated by _knoppes_ in ll. 1675, 1683, 1685, 1691, 1702, whilst, in l. 1721 and subsequent passages, the same word is merely Englished by _botoun_ or _botouns_. A closer study of the passage extending from l. 1702 to l. 1721 shews that there is a very marked break at the end of l. 1705. Here the French text has (ed. Méon, l. 1676):--
'L'odor de lui entor s'espent; La soatime qui en ist Toute la place replenist.'
'The swote smelle sprong so wyde That it dide al the place aboute'--
'Whan I had smelled the savour swote, No wille hadde I fro thens yit go'; &c.
It will be observed that the sentence in the two former lines is incomplete; _dide_ is a mere auxiliary verb, and the real verb of the sentence is lost; whilst the two latter lines lead off with a new sentence altogether. It is still more interesting to observe that, at this very point, we come upon a false rime. The word _aboute_ was then pronounced (abuu·t[*e]), where (uu) denotes the sound of _ou_ in _soup_, and ([*e]) denotes an obscure vowel, like the _a_ in _China_. But the vowel _o_ in _swote_ was then pronounced like the German _o_ in G. _so_ (nearly E. _o_ in _so_), so that it was quite unlike the M.E. _ou_; and the rime is no better than if we were to rime the mod. E. _boot_ with the mod. E. _goat_. It is clear that there has been a _join_ here, and a rather clumsy one. The supply of 'copy' of the first translation ran short, perhaps because the rest of it had been torn away and lost, and the missing matter was supplied from some other source. We thus obtain, as the result to be tested, the following arrangement:--
Fragment A.--Lines 1-1705. French text, 1-1678.
Fragment B.--Lines 1706-5810. French text, 1679-5169.
Fragment C.--Lines 5811-7698. French text, 10716-12564.
It should be noted, further, that l. 7698 by no means reaches to the _end_. It merely corresponds to l. 12564 of the French text, leaving 9510 lines untouched towards the end, besides the gap of 5547 lines between Fragments B and C. In fact, the three fragments, conjointly, only represent 7018 lines of the original, leaving 15056 lines (more than double that number) wholly untranslated.