Beautiful soup : why does "string" not give me the string?

[Gabriel Rossetti]

Hello everyone,

I am using beautiful soup 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