of the in 1693, the monks of the abbey were unable to locate the manuscript. It remained lost throughout the 18th century, until the entire contents of the abbey library were confiscated and transferred to Valenciennes in 1792, by order of the revolutionary government. In September 1837, Hoffmann von Fallersleben visited the library of Valenciennes with the intention of unearthing the lost text of the . According to his account, it only took him one afternoon to find the manuscript and to realize that it contained another important text, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia. Text The Eulalia text is a sequence or "prose" consisting of 14 assonant couplets, each written on one line and separated by a punctus, followed by a final unpaired coda verse. The Sequence follows no strict meter. Most of the couplets consist of two ten-syllable verses, although some have 11, 12, or 13 syllables. Both the vernacular Sequence and the Latin poem that precedes it show similarities with the hymn to Eulalia in the , by the 4th-century Christian poet Prudentius. A transcription of the original text is provided below (with abbreviations expanded and some word boundaries inserted), along with a reconstructed phonetic transcription and an English translation. Analysis Dialect The language of the Sequence presents characteristics of Walloon, Champenois, and Picard. At the time, these three Oïl varieties shared a common , or written literary koiné. The evidence points to a geographic origin for the text in modern-day Wallonia or an adjacent region of north-east France. Some northern/northeastern dialectal features of the texts are: the stressed form of the feminine singular dative pronoun (line 13) the 1st person plural imperative ending in (line 26) the unpalatalized initial in the forms and (< Latin ), contrasting with in Francien dialect to the south (mod. Fr. ) vocalization of before in (line 4, < ) lowering of pre-tonic to in (line 6, < *) and (line 8, < ). In contrast, the epenthetic indicated by the forms (lines 3, 4, < ), (line 21, < ) and (line 16, < ) is more characteristic of central French dialects. The pronoun that appears in line 19 (instead of the expected feminine form ) has been variously explained as a dialectal feature, a pejorative neuter ("they threw it into the fire"), or simply a scribal error. Line 15 Line 15 of the Sequence is "one of the most vexed