BeautifulSoup : why does "string" not give me the string?

[Gabriel Rossetti]

Hello everyone,

I am using BeautifulSoup to parse some HTML and I came across something
strange.
Here is an illustration:

>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(u'<div class="text">hello ça boume<br /></div')
>>> soup
<div class="text">hello ça boume<br /></div>
>>> soup.find("div", "text")
<div class="text">hello ça boume<br /></div>
>>> soup.find("div", "text").string
>>> soup.find("div", "text").next
u'hello \xe7a boume'

why does soup.find("div", "text").string not give me the string? Is it
because there is a <br/>? Is there a way to have it ignore the <br/>
tag? Am I doing something wrong?

Thank you,
Gabriel

PS
Sorry if this appears twice on the list, but I sent it 4 hours ago and 
it never showed up so I resent it.