



[Illustration: Slang]






_Pigritia_ is a terrible word.

It engenders a whole world, _la pègre_, for which read _theft_, and a
hell, _la pègrenne_, for which read _hunger_.

Thus, idleness is the mother.

She has a son, theft, and a daughter, hunger.

Where are we at this moment? In the land of slang.

What is slang? It is at one and the same time, a nation and a dialect;
it is theft in its two kinds; people and language.

When, four and thirty years ago, the narrator of this grave and sombre
history introduced into a work written with the same aim as this39 a
thief who talked argot, there arose amazement and clamor.—“What! How!
Argot! Why, argot is horrible! It is the language of prisons, galleys,
convicts, of everything that is most abominable in society!” etc., etc.

We have never understood this sort of objections.

Since that time, two powerful romancers, one of whom is a profound
observer of the human heart, the other an intrepid friend of the
people, Balzac and Eugène Sue, having represented their ruffians as
talking their natural language, as the author of _The Last Day of a
Condemned Man_ did in 1828, the same objections have been raised.
People repeated: “What do authors mean by that revolting dialect? Slang
is odious! Slang makes one shudder!”


Who denies that? Of course it does.

When it is a question of probing a wound, a gulf, a society, since when
has it been considered wrong to go too far? to go to the bottom? We
have always thought that it was sometimes a courageous act, and, at
least, a simple and useful deed, worthy of the sympathetic attention
which duty accepted and fulfilled merits. Why should one not explore
everything, and study everything? Why should one halt on the way? The
halt is a matter depending on the sounding-line, and not on the
leadsman.

Certainly, too, it is neither an attractive nor an easy task to
undertake an investigation into the lowest depths of the social order,
where terra firma comes to an end and where mud begins, to rummage in
those vague, murky waves, to follow up, to seize and to fling, still
quivering, upon the pavement that abject dialect which is dripping with
filth when thus brought to the light, that pustulous vocabulary each
word of which seems an unclean ring from a monster of the mire and the
shadows. Nothing is more lugubrious than the contemplation thus in its
nudity, in the broad light of thought, of the horrible swarming of
slang. It seems, in fact, to be a sort of horrible beast made for the
night which has just been torn from its cesspool. One thinks one
beholds a frightful, living, and bristling thicket which quivers,
rustles, wavers, returns to shadow, threatens and glares. One word
resembles a claw, another an extinguished and bleeding eye, such and
such a phrase seems to move like the claw of a crab. All this is alive
with the hideous vitality of things which have been organized out of
disorganization.

Now, when has horror ever excluded study? Since when has malady
banished medicine? Can one imagine a naturalist refusing to study the
viper, the bat, the scorpion, the centipede, the tarantula, and one who
would cast them back into their darkness, saying: “Oh! how ugly that
is!” The thinker who should turn aside from slang would resemble a
surgeon who should avert his face from an ulcer or a wart. He would be
like a philologist refusing to examine a fact in language, a
philosopher hesitating to scrutinize a fact in humanity. For, it must
be stated to those who are ignorant of the case, that argot is both a
literary phenomenon and a social result. What is slang, properly
speaking? It is the language of wretchedness.

We may be stopped; the fact may be put to us in general terms, which is
one way of attenuating it; we may be told, that all trades,
professions, it may be added, all the accidents of the social hierarchy
and all forms of intelligence, have their own slang. The merchant who
says: “Montpellier not active, Marseilles fine quality,” the broker on
’change who says: “Assets at end of current month,” the gambler who
says: _“Tiers et tout, refait de pique,”_ the sheriff of the Norman
Isles who says: “The holder in fee reverting to his landed estate
cannot claim the fruits of that estate during the hereditary seizure of
the real estate by the mortgagor,” the playwright who says: “The piece
was hissed,” the comedian who says: “I’ve made a hit,” the philosopher
who says: “Phenomenal triplicity,” the huntsman who says: _“Voileci
allais, Voileci fuyant,”_ the phrenologist who says: “Amativeness,
combativeness, secretiveness,” the infantry soldier who says: “My
shooting-iron,” the cavalry-man who says: “My turkey-cock,” the
fencing-master who says: “Tierce, quarte, break,” the printer who says:
“My shooting-stick and galley,”—all, printer, fencing-master, cavalry
dragoon, infantry-man, phrenologist, huntsman, philosopher, comedian,
playwright, sheriff, gambler, stock-broker, and merchant, speak slang.
The painter who says: “My grinder,” the notary who says: “My
Skip-the-Gutter,” the hairdresser who says: “My mealyback,” the cobbler
who says: “My cub,” talks slang. Strictly speaking, if one absolutely
insists on the point, all the different fashions of saying the right
and the left, the sailor’s _port_ and _starboard_, the scene-shifter’s
_court-side_, and _garden-side_, the beadle’s _Gospel-side_ and
_Epistle-side_, are slang. There is the slang of the affected lady as
well as of the _précieuses_. The Hotel Rambouillet nearly adjoins the
Cour des Miracles. There is a slang of duchesses, witness this phrase
contained in a love-letter from a very great lady and a very pretty
woman of the Restoration: “You will find in this gossip a fultitude of
reasons why I should libertize.”40 Diplomatic ciphers are slang; the
pontifical chancellery by using 26 for Rome, _grkztntgzyal_ for
despatch, and _abfxustgrnogrkzu tu XI_. for the Duc de Modena, speaks
slang. The physicians of the Middle Ages who, for carrot, radish, and
turnip, said _Opoponach, perfroschinum, reptitalmus, dracatholicum,
angelorum, postmegorum_, talked slang. The sugar-manufacturer who says:
“Loaf, clarified, lumps, bastard, common, burnt,”—this honest
manufacturer talks slang. A certain school of criticism twenty years
ago, which used to say: “Half of the works of Shakespeare consists of
plays upon words and puns,”—talked slang. The poet, and the artist who,
with profound understanding, would designate M. de Montmorency as “a
bourgeois,” if he were not a judge of verses and statues, speak slang.
The classic Academician who calls flowers “Flora,” fruits, “Pomona,”
the sea, “Neptune,” love, “fires,” beauty, “charms,” a horse, “a
courser,” the white or tricolored cockade, “the rose of Bellona,” the
three-cornered hat, “Mars’ triangle,”—that classical Academician talks
slang. Algebra, medicine, botany, have each their slang. The tongue
which is employed on board ship, that wonderful language of the sea,
which is so complete and so picturesque, which was spoken by Jean Bart,
Duquesne, Suffren, and Duperré, which mingles with the whistling of the
rigging, the sound of the speaking-trumpets, the shock of the
boarding-irons, the roll of the sea, the wind, the gale, the cannon, is
wholly a heroic and dazzling slang, which is to the fierce slang of the
thieves what the lion is to the jackal.

No doubt. But say what we will, this manner of understanding the word
_slang_ is an extension which every one will not admit. For our part,
we reserve to the word its ancient and precise, circumscribed and
determined significance, and we restrict slang to slang. The veritable
slang and the slang that is pre-eminently slang, if the two words can
be coupled thus, the slang immemorial which was a kingdom, is nothing
else, we repeat, than the homely, uneasy, crafty, treacherous,
venomous, cruel, equivocal, vile, profound, fatal tongue of
wretchedness. There exists, at the extremity of all abasement and all
misfortunes, a last misery which revolts and makes up its mind to enter
into conflict with the whole mass of fortunate facts and reigning
rights; a fearful conflict, where, now cunning, now violent, unhealthy
and ferocious at one and the same time, it attacks the social order
with pin-pricks through vice, and with club-blows through crime. To
meet the needs of this conflict, wretchedness has invented a language
of combat, which is slang.

To keep afloat and to rescue from oblivion, to hold above the gulf,
were it but a fragment of some language which man has spoken and which
would, otherwise, be lost, that is to say, one of the elements, good or
bad, of which civilization is composed, or by which it is complicated,
to extend the records of social observation; is to serve civilization
itself. This service Plautus rendered, consciously or unconsciously, by
making two Carthaginian soldiers talk Phœnician; that service Molière
rendered, by making so many of his characters talk Levantine and all
sorts of dialects. Here objections spring up afresh. Phœnician, very
good! Levantine, quite right! Even dialect, let that pass! They are
tongues which have belonged to nations or provinces; but slang! What is
the use of preserving slang? What is the good of assisting slang “to
survive”?

To this we reply in one word, only. Assuredly, if the tongue which a
nation or a province has spoken is worthy of interest, the language
which has been spoken by a misery is still more worthy of attention and
study.

It is the language which has been spoken, in France, for example, for
more than four centuries, not only by a misery, but by every possible
human misery.

And then, we insist upon it, the study of social deformities and
infirmities, and the task of pointing them out with a view to remedy,
is not a business in which choice is permitted. The historian of
manners and ideas has no less austere a mission than the historian of
events. The latter has the surface of civilization, the conflicts of
crowns, the births of princes, the marriages of kings, battles,
assemblages, great public men, revolutions in the daylight, everything
on the exterior; the other historian has the interior, the depths, the
people who toil, suffer, wait, the oppressed woman, the agonizing
child, the secret war between man and man, obscure ferocities,
prejudices, plotted iniquities, the subterranean, the indistinct
tremors of multitudes, the die-of-hunger, the counter-blows of the law,
the secret evolution of souls, the go-bare-foot, the bare-armed, the
disinherited, the orphans, the unhappy, and the infamous, all the forms
which roam through the darkness. He must descend with his heart full of
charity, and severity at the same time, as a brother and as a judge, to
those impenetrable casemates where crawl, pell-mell, those who bleed
and those who deal the blow, those who weep and those who curse, those
who fast and those who devour, those who endure evil and those who
inflict it. Have these historians of hearts and souls duties at all
inferior to the historians of external facts? Does any one think that
Alighieri has any fewer things to say than Machiavelli? Is the under
side of civilization any less important than the upper side merely
because it is deeper and more sombre? Do we really know the mountain
well when we are not acquainted with the cavern?

Let us say, moreover, parenthetically, that from a few words of what
precedes a marked separation might be inferred between the two classes
of historians which does not exist in our mind. No one is a good
historian of the patent, visible, striking, and public life of peoples,
if he is not, at the same time, in a certain measure, the historian of
their deep and hidden life; and no one is a good historian of the
interior unless he understands how, at need, to be the historian of the
exterior also. The history of manners and ideas permeates the history
of events, and this is true reciprocally. They constitute two different
orders of facts which correspond to each other, which are always
interlaced, and which often bring forth results. All the lineaments
which providence traces on the surface of a nation have their
parallels, sombre but distinct, in their depths, and all convulsions of
the depths produce ebullitions on the surface. True history being a
mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything.

Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with a
double focus. Facts form one of these, and ideas the other.

Slang is nothing but a dressing-room where the tongue having some bad
action to perform, disguises itself. There it clothes itself in
word-masks, in metaphor-rags. In this guise it becomes horrible.

One finds it difficult to recognize. Is it really the French tongue,
the great human tongue? Behold it ready to step upon the stage and to
retort upon crime, and prepared for all the employments of the
repertory of evil. It no longer walks, it hobbles; it limps on the
crutch of the Court of Miracles, a crutch metamorphosable into a club;
it is called vagrancy; every sort of spectre, its dressers, have
painted its face, it crawls and rears, the double gait of the reptile.
Henceforth, it is apt at all rôles, it is made suspicious by the
counterfeiter, covered with verdigris by the forger, blacked by the
soot of the incendiary; and the murderer applies its rouge.

When one listens, by the side of honest men, at the portals of society,
one overhears the dialogues of those who are on the outside. One
distinguishes questions and replies. One perceives, without
understanding it, a hideous murmur, sounding almost like human accents,
but more nearly resembling a howl than an articulate word. It is slang.
The words are misshapen and stamped with an indescribable and fantastic
bestiality. One thinks one hears hydras talking.

It is unintelligible in the dark. It gnashes and whispers, completing
the gloom with mystery. It is black in misfortune, it is blacker still
in crime; these two blacknesses amalgamated, compose slang. Obscurity
in the atmosphere, obscurity in acts, obscurity in voices. Terrible,
toad-like tongue which goes and comes, leaps, crawls, slobbers, and
stirs about in monstrous wise in that immense gray fog composed of rain
and night, of hunger, of vice, of falsehood, of injustice, of nudity,
of suffocation, and of winter, the high noonday of the miserable.

Let us have compassion on the chastised. Alas! Who are we ourselves?
Who am I who now address you? Who are you who are listening to me? And
are you very sure that we have done nothing before we were born? The
earth is not devoid of resemblance to a jail. Who knows whether man is
not a recaptured offender against divine justice? Look closely at life.
It is so made, that everywhere we feel the sense of punishment.

Are you what is called a happy man? Well! you are sad every day. Each
day has its own great grief or its little care. Yesterday you were
trembling for a health that is dear to you, to-day you fear for your
own; to-morrow it will be anxiety about money, the day after to-morrow
the diatribe of a slanderer, the day after that, the misfortune of some
friend; then the prevailing weather, then something that has been
broken or lost, then a pleasure with which your conscience and your
vertebral column reproach you; again, the course of public affairs.
This without reckoning in the pains of the heart. And so it goes on.
One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day out of a
hundred which is wholly joyous and sunny. And you belong to that small
class who are happy! As for the rest of mankind, stagnating night rests
upon them.

Thoughtful minds make but little use of the phrase: the fortunate and
the unfortunate. In this world, evidently the vestibule of another,
there are no fortunate.

The real human division is this: the luminous and the shady. To
diminish the number of the shady, to augment the number of the
luminous,—that is the object. That is why we cry: Education! science!
To teach reading, means to light the fire; every syllable spelled out
sparkles.

However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy. People
suffer in the light; excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing.
To burn without ceasing to fly,—therein lies the marvel of genius.

When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still
suffer. The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those
in darkness.






Slang is the tongue of those who sit in darkness.

Thought is moved in its most sombre depths, social philosophy is bidden
to its most poignant meditations, in the presence of that enigmatic
dialect at once so blighted and rebellious. Therein lies chastisement
made visible. Every syllable has an air of being marked. The words of
the vulgar tongue appear therein wrinkled and shrivelled, as it were,
beneath the hot iron of the executioner. Some seem to be still smoking.
Such and such a phrase produces upon you the effect of the shoulder of
a thief branded with the fleur-de-lys, which has suddenly been laid
bare. Ideas almost refuse to be expressed in these substantives which
are fugitives from justice. Metaphor is sometimes so shameless, that
one feels that it has worn the iron neck-fetter.

Moreover, in spite of all this, and because of all this, this strange
dialect has by rights, its own compartment in that great impartial case
of pigeon-holes where there is room for the rusty farthing as well as
for the gold medal, and which is called literature. Slang, whether the
public admit the fact or not has its syntax and its poetry. It is a
language. Yes, by the deformity of certain terms, we recognize the fact
that it was chewed by Mandrin, and by the splendor of certain
metonymies, we feel that Villon spoke it.

That exquisite and celebrated verse—

Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?
But where are the snows of years gone by?


is a verse of slang. _Antan—ante annum_—is a word of Thunes slang,
which signified the past year, and by extension, _formerly_.
Thirty-five years ago, at the epoch of the departure of the great
chain-gang, there could be read in one of the cells at Bicêtre, this
maxim engraved with a nail on the wall by a king of Thunes condemned to
the galleys: _Les dabs d’antan trimaient siempre pour la pierre du
Coësre_. This means _Kings in days gone by always went and had
themselves anointed_. In the opinion of that king, anointment meant the
galleys.

The word _décarade_, which expresses the departure of heavy vehicles at
a gallop, is attributed to Villon, and it is worthy of him. This word,
which strikes fire with all four of its feet, sums up in a masterly
onomatopœia the whole of La Fontaine’s admirable verse:—

Six forts chevaux tiraient un coche.
Six stout horses drew a coach.


From a purely literary point of view, few studies would prove more
curious and fruitful than the study of slang. It is a whole language
within a language, a sort of sickly excrescence, an unhealthy graft
which has produced a vegetation, a parasite which has its roots in the
old Gallic trunk, and whose sinister foliage crawls all over one side
of the language. This is what may be called the first, the vulgar
aspect of slang. But, for those who study the tongue as it should be
studied, that is to say, as geologists study the earth, slang appears
like a veritable alluvial deposit. According as one digs a longer or
shorter distance into it, one finds in slang, below the old popular
French, Provençal, Spanish, Italian, Levantine, that language of the
Mediterranean ports, English and German, the Romance language in its
three varieties, French, Italian, and Romance Romance, Latin, and
finally Basque and Celtic. A profound and unique formation. A
subterranean edifice erected in common by all the miserable. Each
accursed race has deposited its layer, each suffering has dropped its
stone there, each heart has contributed its pebble. A throng of evil,
base, or irritated souls, who have traversed life and have vanished
into eternity, linger there almost entirely visible still beneath the
form of some monstrous word.

Do you want Spanish? The old Gothic slang abounded in it. Here is
_boffete_, a box on the ear, which is derived from _bofeton; vantane_,
window (later on _vanterne_), which comes from _vantana; gat_, cat,
which comes from _gato; acite_, oil, which comes from _aceyte_. Do you
want Italian? Here is _spade_, sword, which comes from _spada; carvel_,
boat, which comes from _caravella_. Do you want English? Here is
_bichot_, which comes from _bishop; raille_, spy, which comes from
_rascal, rascalion; pilche_, a case, which comes from _pilcher_, a
sheath. Do you want German? Here is the _caleur_, the waiter,
_kellner_; the _hers_, the master, _herzog_ (duke). Do you want Latin?
Here is _frangir_, to break, _frangere; affurer_, to steal, _fur;
cadene_, chain, _catena_. There is one word which crops up in every
language of the continent, with a sort of mysterious power and
authority. It is the word _magnus_; the Scotchman makes of it his
_mac_, which designates the chief of the clan; Mac-Farlane,
Mac-Callumore, the great Farlane, the great Callumore41; slang turns it
into _meck_ and later _le meg_, that is to say, God. Would you like
Basque? Here is _gahisto_, the devil, which comes from _gaïztoa_, evil;
_sorgabon_, good night, which comes from _gabon_, good evening. Do you
want Celtic? Here is _blavin_, a handkerchief, which comes from
_blavet_, gushing water; _ménesse_, a woman (in a bad sense), which
comes from _meinec_, full of stones; _barant_, brook, from _baranton_,
fountain; _goffeur_, locksmith, from _goff_, blacksmith; _guedouze_,
death, which comes from _guenn-du_, black-white. Finally, would you
like history? Slang calls crowns _les maltèses_, a souvenir of the coin
in circulation on the galleys of Malta.

In addition to the philological origins just indicated, slang possesses
other and still more natural roots, which spring, so to speak, from the
mind of man itself.

In the first place, the direct creation of words. Therein lies the
mystery of tongues. To paint with words, which contains figures one
knows not how or why, is the primitive foundation of all human
languages, what may be called their granite.

Slang abounds in words of this description, immediate words, words
created instantaneously no one knows either where or by whom, without
etymology, without analogies, without derivatives, solitary, barbarous,
sometimes hideous words, which at times possess a singular power of
expression and which live. The executioner, _le taule_; the forest, _le
sabri_; fear, flight, _taf_; the lackey, _le larbin_; the mineral, the
prefect, the minister, _pharos_; the devil, _le rabouin_. Nothing is
stranger than these words which both mask and reveal. Some, _le
rabouin_, for example, are at the same time grotesque and terrible, and
produce on you the effect of a cyclopean grimace.

In the second place, metaphor. The peculiarity of a language which is
desirous of saying all yet concealing all is that it is rich in
figures. Metaphor is an enigma, wherein the thief who is plotting a
stroke, the prisoner who is arranging an escape, take refuge. No idiom
is more metaphorical than slang: _dévisser le coco_ (to unscrew the
nut), to twist the neck; _tortiller_ (to wriggle), to eat; _être
gerbé_, to be tried; _a rat_, a bread thief; _il lansquine_, it rains,
a striking, ancient figure which partly bears its date about it, which
assimilates long oblique lines of rain, with the dense and slanting
pikes of the lancers, and which compresses into a single word the
popular expression: it rains halberds. Sometimes, in proportion as
slang progresses from the first epoch to the second, words pass from
the primitive and savage sense to the metaphorical sense. The devil
ceases to be _le rabouin_, and becomes _le boulanger_ (the baker), who
puts the bread into the oven. This is more witty, but less grand,
something like Racine after Corneille, like Euripides after Æschylus.
Certain slang phrases which participate in the two epochs and have at
once the barbaric character and the metaphorical character resemble
phantasmagories. _Les sorgueuers vont solliciter des gails à la
lune_—the prowlers are going to steal horses by night,—this passes
before the mind like a group of spectres. One knows not what one sees.

In the third place, the expedient. Slang lives on the language. It uses
it in accordance with its fancy, it dips into it hap-hazard, and it
often confines itself, when occasion arises, to alter it in a gross and
summary fashion. Occasionally, with the ordinary words thus deformed
and complicated with words of pure slang, picturesque phrases are
formed, in which there can be felt the mixture of the two preceding
elements, the direct creation and the metaphor: _le cab jaspine, je
marronne que la roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabri_, the dog is
barking, I suspect that the diligence for Paris is passing through the
woods. _Le dab est sinve, la dabuge est merloussière, la fée est
bative_, the bourgeois is stupid, the bourgeoise is cunning, the
daughter is pretty. Generally, to throw listeners off the track, slang
confines itself to adding to all the words of the language without
distinction, an ignoble tail, a termination in _aille_, in _orgue_, in
_iergue_, or in _uche_. Thus: _Vousiergue trouvaille bonorgue ce
gigotmuche?_ Do you think that leg of mutton good? A phrase addressed
by Cartouche to a turnkey in order to find out whether the sum offered
for his escape suited him.

The termination in _mar_ has been added recently.

Slang, being the dialect of corruption, quickly becomes corrupted
itself. Besides this, as it is always seeking concealment, as soon as
it feels that it is understood, it changes its form. Contrary to what
happens with every other vegetation, every ray of light which falls
upon it kills whatever it touches. Thus slang is in constant process of
decomposition and recomposition; an obscure and rapid work which never
pauses. It passes over more ground in ten years than a language in ten
centuries. Thus _le larton_ (bread) becomes _le lartif; le gail_
(horse) becomes _le gaye; la fertanche_ (straw) becomes _la fertille;
le momignard_ (brat), _le momacque; les fiques_ (duds), _frusques; la
chique_ (the church), _l’égrugeoir; le colabre_ (neck), _le colas_. The
devil is at first, _gahisto_, then _le rabouin_, then _the baker_; the
priest is a _ratichon_, then the boar (_le sanglier_); the dagger is
_le vingt-deux_ (twenty-two), then _le surin_, then _le lingre_; the
police are _railles_, then _roussins_, then _rousses_, then _marchands
de lacets_ (dealers in stay-laces), then _coquers_, then _cognes_; the
executioner is _le taule_, then _Charlot, l’atigeur_, then _le
becquillard_. In the seventeenth century, to fight was “to give each
other snuff”; in the nineteenth it is “to chew each other’s throats.”
There have been twenty different phrases between these two extremes.
Cartouche’s talk would have been Hebrew to Lacenaire. All the words of
this language are perpetually engaged in flight like the men who utter
them.

Still, from time to time, and in consequence of this very movement, the
ancient slang crops up again and becomes new once more. It has its
headquarters where it maintains its sway. The Temple preserved the
slang of the seventeenth century; Bicêtre, when it was a prison,
preserved the slang of Thunes. There one could hear the termination in
_anche_ of the old Thuneurs. _Boyanches-tu_ (bois-tu), do you drink?
But perpetual movement remains its law, nevertheless.

If the philosopher succeeds in fixing, for a moment, for purposes of
observation, this language which is incessantly evaporating, he falls
into doleful and useful meditation. No study is more efficacious and
more fecund in instruction. There is not a metaphor, not an analogy, in
slang, which does not contain a lesson. Among these men, to beat means
to feign; one beats a malady; ruse is their strength.

For them, the idea of the man is not separated from the idea of
darkness. The night is called _la sorgue_; man, _l’orgue_. Man is a
derivative of the night.

They have taken up the practice of considering society in the light of
an atmosphere which kills them, of a fatal force, and they speak of
their liberty as one would speak of his health. A man under arrest is a
_sick man_; one who is condemned is a _dead man_.

The most terrible thing for the prisoner within the four walls in which
he is buried, is a sort of glacial chastity, and he calls the dungeon
the _castus_. In that funereal place, life outside always presents
itself under its most smiling aspect. The prisoner has irons on his
feet; you think, perhaps, that his thought is that it is with the feet
that one walks? No; he is thinking that it is with the feet that one
dances; so, when he has succeeded in severing his fetters, his first
idea is that now he can dance, and he calls the saw the _bastringue_
(public-house ball).—A name is a centre; profound assimilation.—The
ruffian has two heads, one of which reasons out his actions and leads
him all his life long, and the other which he has upon his shoulders on
the day of his death; he calls the head which counsels him in crime _la
sorbonne_, and the head which expiates it _la tronche_.—When a man has
no longer anything but rags upon his body and vices in his heart, when
he has arrived at that double moral and material degradation which the
word blackguard characterizes in its two acceptations, he is ripe for
crime; he is like a well-whetted knife; he has two cutting edges, his
distress and his malice; so slang does not say a blackguard, it says
_un réguisé_.—What are the galleys? A brazier of damnation, a hell. The
convict calls himself a _fagot_.—And finally, what name do malefactors
give to their prison? The _college_. A whole penitentiary system can be
evolved from that word.

Does the reader wish to know where the majority of the songs of the
galleys, those refrains called in the special vocabulary _lirlonfa_,
have had their birth?

Let him listen to what follows:—

There existed at the Châtelet in Paris a large and long cellar. This
cellar was eight feet below the level of the Seine. It had neither
windows nor air-holes, its only aperture was the door; men could enter
there, air could not. This vault had for ceiling a vault of stone, and
for floor ten inches of mud. It was flagged; but the pavement had
rotted and cracked under the oozing of the water. Eight feet above the
floor, a long and massive beam traversed this subterranean excavation
from side to side; from this beam hung, at short distances apart,
chains three feet long, and at the end of these chains there were rings
for the neck. In this vault, men who had been condemned to the galleys
were incarcerated until the day of their departure for Toulon. They
were thrust under this beam, where each one found his fetters swinging
in the darkness and waiting for him.

The chains, those pendant arms, and the necklets, those open hands,
caught the unhappy wretches by the throat. They were rivetted and left
there. As the chain was too short, they could not lie down. They
remained motionless in that cavern, in that night, beneath that beam,
almost hanging, forced to unheard-of efforts to reach their bread, jug,
or their vault overhead, mud even to mid-leg, filth flowing to their
very calves, broken asunder with fatigue, with thighs and knees giving
way, clinging fast to the chain with their hands in order to obtain
some rest, unable to sleep except when standing erect, and awakened
every moment by the strangling of the collar; some woke no more. In
order to eat, they pushed the bread, which was flung to them in the
mud, along their leg with their heel until it reached their hand.

How long did they remain thus? One month, two months, six months
sometimes; one stayed a year. It was the antechamber of the galleys.
Men were put there for stealing a hare from the king. In this
sepulchre-hell, what did they do? What man can do in a sepulchre, they
went through the agonies of death, and what can man do in hell, they
sang; for song lingers where there is no longer any hope. In the waters
of Malta, when a galley was approaching, the song could be heard before
the sound of the oars. Poor Survincent, the poacher, who had gone
through the prison-cellar of the Châtelet, said: “It was the rhymes
that kept me up.” Uselessness of poetry. What is the good of rhyme?

It is in this cellar that nearly all the slang songs had their birth.
It is from the dungeon of the Grand-Châtelet of Paris that comes the
melancholy refrain of the Montgomery galley: _“Timaloumisaine,
timaloumison.”_ The majority of these songs are melancholy; some are
gay; one is tender:—

    Icicaille est la theatre
    Du petit dardant.

    Here is the theatre
    Of the little archer (Cupid).


Do what you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic in the heart
of man, love.

In this world of dismal deeds, people keep their secrets. The secret is
the thing above all others. The secret, in the eyes of these wretches,
is unity which serves as a base of union. To betray a secret is to tear
from each member of this fierce community something of his own
personality. To inform against, in the energetic slang dialect, is
called: “to eat the bit.” As though the informer drew to himself a
little of the substance of all and nourished himself on a bit of each
one’s flesh.

What does it signify to receive a box on the ear? Commonplace metaphor
replies: “It is to see thirty-six candles.” Here slang intervenes and
takes it up: Candle, _camoufle_. Thereupon, the ordinary tongue gives
_camouflet_42 as the synonym for _soufflet_. Thus, by a sort of
infiltration from below upwards, with the aid of metaphor, that
incalculable, trajectory slang mounts from the cavern to the Academy;
and Poulailler saying: “I light my _camoufle_,” causes Voltaire to
write: “Langleviel La Beaumelle deserves a hundred _camouflets_.”


Researches in slang mean discoveries at every step. Study and
investigation of this strange idiom lead to the mysterious point of
intersection of regular society with society which is accursed.

The thief also has his food for cannon, stealable matter, you, I,
whoever passes by; _le pantre_. (_Pan_, everybody.)

Slang is language turned convict.

That the thinking principle of man be thrust down ever so low, that it
can be dragged and pinioned there by obscure tyrannies of fatality,
that it can be bound by no one knows what fetters in that abyss, is
sufficient to create consternation.

Oh, poor thought of miserable wretches!

Alas! will no one come to the succor of the human soul in that
darkness? Is it her destiny there to await forever the mind, the
liberator, the immense rider of Pegasi and hippogriffs, the combatant
of heroes of the dawn who shall descend from the azure between two
wings, the radiant knight of the future? Will she forever summon in
vain to her assistance the lance of light of the ideal? Is she
condemned to hear the fearful approach of Evil through the density of
the gulf, and to catch glimpses, nearer and nearer at hand, beneath the
hideous water of that dragon’s head, that maw streaked with foam, and
that writhing undulation of claws, swellings, and rings? Must it remain
there, without a gleam of light, without hope, given over to that
terrible approach, vaguely scented out by the monster, shuddering,
dishevelled, wringing its arms, forever chained to the rock of night, a
sombre Andromeda white and naked amid the shadows!






As the reader perceives, slang in its entirety, slang of four hundred
years ago, like the slang of to-day, is permeated with that sombre,
symbolical spirit which gives to all words a mien which is now
mournful, now menacing. One feels in it the wild and ancient sadness of
those vagrants of the Court of Miracles who played at cards with packs
of their own, some of which have come down to us. The eight of clubs,
for instance, represented a huge tree bearing eight enormous trefoil
leaves, a sort of fantastic personification of the forest. At the foot
of this tree a fire was burning, over which three hares were roasting a
huntsman on a spit, and behind him, on another fire, hung a steaming
pot, whence emerged the head of a dog. Nothing can be more melancholy
than these reprisals in painting, by a pack of cards, in the presence
of stakes for the roasting of smugglers and of the cauldron for the
boiling of counterfeiters. The diverse forms assumed by thought in the
realm of slang, even song, even raillery, even menace, all partook of
this powerless and dejected character. All the songs, the melodies of
some of which have been collected, were humble and lamentable to the
point of evoking tears. The _pègre_ is always the poor _pègre_, and he
is always the hare in hiding, the fugitive mouse, the flying bird. He
hardly complains, he contents himself with sighing; one of his moans
has come down to us: “I do not understand how God, the father of men,
can torture his children and his grandchildren and hear them cry,
without himself suffering torture.”43 The wretch, whenever he has time
to think, makes himself small before the low, and frail in the presence
of society; he lies down flat on his face, he entreats, he appeals to
the side of compassion; we feel that he is conscious of his guilt.

Towards the middle of the last century a change took place, prison
songs and thieves’ ritournelles assumed, so to speak, an insolent and
jovial mien. The plaintive _maluré_ was replaced by the _larifla_. We
find in the eighteenth century, in nearly all the songs of the galleys
and prisons, a diabolical and enigmatical gayety. We hear this strident
and lilting refrain which we should say had been lighted up by a
phosphorescent gleam, and which seems to have been flung into the
forest by a will-o’-the-wisp playing the fife:—

Miralabi suslababo
Mirliton ribonribette
Surlababi mirlababo
Mirliton ribonribo.


This was sung in a cellar or in a nook of the forest while cutting a
man’s throat.

A serious symptom. In the eighteenth century, the ancient melancholy of
the dejected classes vanishes. They began to laugh. They rally the
_grand meg_ and the _grand dab_. Given Louis XV. they call the King of
France “le Marquis de Pantin.” And behold, they are almost gay. A sort
of gleam proceeds from these miserable wretches, as though their
consciences were not heavy within them any more. These lamentable
tribes of darkness have no longer merely the desperate audacity of
actions, they possess the heedless audacity of mind. A sign that they
are losing the sense of their criminality, and that they feel, even
among thinkers and dreamers, some indefinable support which the latter
themselves know not of. A sign that theft and pillage are beginning to
filter into doctrines and sophisms, in such a way as to lose somewhat
of their ugliness, while communicating much of it to sophisms and
doctrines. A sign, in short, of some outbreak which is prodigious and
near unless some diversion shall arise.

Let us pause a moment. Whom are we accusing here? Is it the eighteenth
century? Is it philosophy? Certainly not. The work of the eighteenth
century is healthy and good and wholesome. The encyclopedists, Diderot
at their head; the physiocrates, Turgot at their head; the
philosophers, Voltaire at their head; the Utopians, Rousseau at their
head,—these are four sacred legions. Humanity’s immense advance towards
the light is due to them. They are the four vanguards of the human
race, marching towards the four cardinal points of progress. Diderot
towards the beautiful, Turgot towards the useful, Voltaire towards the
true, Rousseau towards the just. But by the side of and above the
philosophers, there were the sophists, a venomous vegetation mingled
with a healthy growth, hemlock in the virgin forest. While the
executioner was burning the great books of the liberators of the
century on the grand staircase of the court-house, writers now
forgotten were publishing, with the King’s sanction, no one knows what
strangely disorganizing writings, which were eagerly read by the
unfortunate. Some of these publications, odd to say, which were
patronized by a prince, are to be found in the Secret Library. These
facts, significant but unknown, were imperceptible on the surface.
Sometimes, in the very obscurity of a fact lurks its danger. It is
obscure because it is underhand. Of all these writers, the one who
probably then excavated in the masses the most unhealthy gallery was
Restif de La Bretonne.

This work, peculiar to the whole of Europe, effected more ravages in
Germany than anywhere else. In Germany, during a given period, summed
up by Schiller in his famous drama _The Robbers_, theft and pillage
rose up in protest against property and labor, assimilated certain
specious and false elementary ideas, which, though just in appearance,
were absurd in reality, enveloped themselves in these ideas,
disappeared within them, after a fashion, assumed an abstract name,
passed into the state of theory, and in that shape circulated among the
laborious, suffering, and honest masses, unknown even to the imprudent
chemists who had prepared the mixture, unknown even to the masses who
accepted it. Whenever a fact of this sort presents itself, the case is
grave. Suffering engenders wrath; and while the prosperous classes
blind themselves or fall asleep, which is the same thing as shutting
one’s eyes, the hatred of the unfortunate classes lights its torch at
some aggrieved or ill-made spirit which dreams in a corner, and sets
itself to the scrutiny of society. The scrutiny of hatred is a terrible
thing.

Hence, if the ill-fortune of the times so wills it, those fearful
commotions which were formerly called _jacqueries_, beside which purely
political agitations are the merest child’s play, which are no longer
the conflict of the oppressed and the oppressor, but the revolt of
discomfort against comfort. Then everything crumbles.

Jacqueries are earthquakes of the people.

It is this peril, possibly imminent towards the close of the eighteenth
century, which the French Revolution, that immense act of probity, cut
short.

The French Revolution, which is nothing else than the idea armed with
the sword, rose erect, and, with the same abrupt movement, closed the
door of ill and opened the door of good.

It put a stop to torture, promulgated the truth, expelled miasma,
rendered the century healthy, crowned the populace.

It may be said of it that it created man a second time, by giving him a
second soul, the right.

The nineteenth century has inherited and profited by its work, and
to-day, the social catastrophe to which we lately alluded is simply
impossible. Blind is he who announces it! Foolish is he who fears it!
Revolution is the vaccine of Jacquerie.

Thanks to the Revolution, social conditions have changed. Feudal and
monarchical maladies no longer run in our blood. There is no more of
the Middle Ages in our constitution. We no longer live in the days when
terrible swarms within made irruptions, when one heard beneath his feet
the obscure course of a dull rumble, when indescribable elevations from
mole-like tunnels appeared on the surface of civilization, where the
soil cracked open, where the roofs of caverns yawned, and where one
suddenly beheld monstrous heads emerging from the earth.

The revolutionary sense is a moral sense. The sentiment of right, once
developed, develops the sentiment of duty. The law of all is liberty,
which ends where the liberty of others begins, according to
Robespierre’s admirable definition. Since ’89, the whole people has
been dilating into a sublime individual; there is not a poor man, who,
possessing his right, has not his ray of sun; the die-of-hunger feels
within him the honesty of France; the dignity of the citizen is an
internal armor; he who is free is scrupulous; he who votes reigns.
Hence incorruptibility; hence the miscarriage of unhealthy lusts; hence
eyes heroically lowered before temptations. The revolutionary
wholesomeness is such, that on a day of deliverance, a 14th of July, a
10th of August, there is no longer any populace. The first cry of the
enlightened and increasing throngs is: death to thieves! Progress is an
honest man; the ideal and the absolute do not filch
pocket-handkerchiefs. By whom were the wagons containing the wealth of
the Tuileries escorted in 1848? By the rag-pickers of the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine. Rags mounted guard over the treasure. Virtue rendered
these tatterdemalions resplendent. In those wagons in chests, hardly
closed, and some, even, half-open, amid a hundred dazzling caskets, was
that ancient crown of France, studded with diamonds, surmounted by the
carbuncle of royalty, by the Regent diamond, which was worth thirty
millions. Barefooted, they guarded that crown.

Hence, no more Jacquerie. I regret it for the sake of the skilful. The
old fear has produced its last effects in that quarter; and henceforth
it can no longer be employed in politics. The principal spring of the
red spectre is broken. Every one knows it now. The scare-crow scares no
longer. The birds take liberties with the mannikin, foul creatures
alight upon it, the bourgeois laugh at it.






This being the case, is all social danger dispelled? Certainly not.
There is no Jacquerie; society may rest assured on that point; blood
will no longer rush to its head. But let society take heed to the
manner in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer to be feared, but
phthisis is there. Social phthisis is called misery.

One can perish from being undermined as well as from being struck by
lightning.

Let us not weary of repeating, and sympathetic souls must not forget
that this is the first of fraternal obligations, and selfish hearts
must understand that the first of political necessities consists in
thinking first of all of the disinherited and sorrowing throngs, in
solacing, airing, enlightening, loving them, in enlarging their horizon
to a magnificent extent, in lavishing upon them education in every
form, in offering them the example of labor, never the example of
idleness, in diminishing the individual burden by enlarging the notion
of the universal aim, in setting a limit to poverty without setting a
limit to wealth, in creating vast fields of public and popular
activity, in having, like Briareus, a hundred hands to extend in all
directions to the oppressed and the feeble, in employing the collective
power for that grand duty of opening workshops for all arms, schools
for all aptitudes, and laboratories for all degrees of intelligence, in
augmenting salaries, diminishing trouble, balancing what should be and
what is, that is to say, in proportioning enjoyment to effort and a
glut to need; in a word, in evolving from the social apparatus more
light and more comfort for the benefit of those who suffer and those
who are ignorant.

And, let us say it, all this is but the beginning. The true question is
this: labor cannot be a law without being a right.

We will not insist upon this point; this is not the proper place for
that.

If nature calls itself Providence, society should call itself
foresight.

Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material
improvement. To know is a sacrament, to think is the prime necessity,
truth is nourishment as well as grain. A reason which fasts from
science and wisdom grows thin. Let us enter equal complaint against
stomachs and minds which do not eat. If there is anything more
heart-breaking than a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul
which is dying from hunger for the light.

The whole of progress tends in the direction of solution. Some day we
shall be amazed. As the human race mounts upward, the deep layers
emerge naturally from the zone of distress. The obliteration of misery
will be accomplished by a simple elevation of level.

We should do wrong were we to doubt this blessed consummation.

The past is very strong, it is true, at the present moment. It
censures. This rejuvenation of a corpse is surprising. Behold, it is
walking and advancing. It seems a victor; this dead body is a
conqueror. He arrives with his legions, superstitions, with his sword,
despotism, with his banner, ignorance; a while ago, he won ten battles.
He advances, he threatens, he laughs, he is at our doors. Let us not
despair, on our side. Let us sell the field on which Hannibal is
encamped.

What have we to fear, we who believe?

No such thing as a back-flow of ideas exists any more than there exists
a return of a river on its course.

But let those who do not desire a future reflect on this matter. When
they say “no” to progress, it is not the future but themselves that
they are condemning. They are giving themselves a sad malady; they are
inoculating themselves with the past. There is but one way of rejecting
To-morrow, and that is to die.

Now, no death, that of the body as late as possible, that of the soul
never,—this is what we desire.

Yes, the enigma will utter its word, the sphinx will speak, the problem
will be solved.

Yes, the people, sketched out by the eighteenth century, will be
finished by the nineteenth. He who doubts this is an idiot! The future
blossoming, the near blossoming forth of universal well-being, is a
divinely fatal phenomenon.

Immense combined propulsions direct human affairs and conduct them
within a given time to a logical state, that is to say, to a state of
equilibrium; that is to say, to equity. A force composed of earth and
heaven results from humanity and governs it; this force is a worker of
miracles; marvellous issues are no more difficult to it than
extraordinary vicissitudes. Aided by science, which comes from one man,
and by the event, which comes from another, it is not greatly alarmed
by these contradictions in the attitude of problems, which seem
impossibilities to the vulgar herd. It is no less skilful at causing a
solution to spring forth from the reconciliation of ideas, than a
lesson from the reconciliation of facts, and we may expect anything
from that mysterious power of progress, which brought the Orient and
the Occident face to face one fine day, in the depths of a sepulchre,
and made the imaums converse with Bonaparte in the interior of the
Great Pyramid.

In the meantime, let there be no halt, no hesitation, no pause in the
grandiose onward march of minds. Social philosophy consists essentially
in science and peace. Its object is, and its result must be, to
dissolve wrath by the study of antagonisms. It examines, it
scrutinizes, it analyzes; then it puts together once more, it proceeds
by means of reduction, discarding all hatred.

More than once, a society has been seen to give way before the wind
which is let loose upon mankind; history is full of the shipwrecks of
nations and empires; manners, customs, laws, religions,—and some fine
day that unknown force, the hurricane, passes by and bears them all
away. The civilizations of India, of Chaldea, of Persia, of Syria, of
Egypt, have disappeared one after the other. Why? We know not. What are
the causes of these disasters? We do not know. Could these societies
have been saved? Was it their fault? Did they persist in the fatal vice
which destroyed them? What is the amount of suicide in these terrible
deaths of a nation and a race? Questions to which there exists no
reply. Darkness enwraps condemned civilizations. They sprung a leak,
then they sank. We have nothing more to say; and it is with a sort of
terror that we look on, at the bottom of that sea which is called the
past, behind those colossal waves, at the shipwreck of those immense
vessels, Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, Rome, beneath the fearful
gusts which emerge from all the mouths of the shadows. But shadows are
there, and light is here. We are not acquainted with the maladies of
these ancient civilizations, we do not know the infirmities of our own.
Everywhere upon it we have the right of light, we contemplate its
beauties, we lay bare its defects. Where it is ill, we probe; and the
sickness once diagnosed, the study of the cause leads to the discovery
of the remedy. Our civilization, the work of twenty centuries, is its
law and its prodigy; it is worth the trouble of saving. It will be
saved. It is already much to have solaced it; its enlightenment is yet
another point. All the labors of modern social philosophies must
converge towards this point. The thinker of to-day has a great duty—to
auscultate civilization.

We repeat, that this auscultation brings encouragement; it is by this
persistence in encouragement that we wish to conclude these pages, an
austere interlude in a mournful drama. Beneath the social mortality, we
feel human imperishableness. The globe does not perish, because it has
these wounds, craters, eruptions, sulphur pits, here and there, nor
because of a volcano which ejects its pus. The maladies of the people
do not kill man.

And yet, any one who follows the course of social clinics shakes his
head at times. The strongest, the tenderest, the most logical have
their hours of weakness.

Will the future arrive? It seems as though we might almost put this
question, when we behold so much terrible darkness. Melancholy
face-to-face encounter of selfish and wretched. On the part of the
selfish, the prejudices, shadows of costly education, appetite
increasing through intoxication, a giddiness of prosperity which dulls,
a fear of suffering which, in some, goes as far as an aversion for the
suffering, an implacable satisfaction, the _I_ so swollen that it bars
the soul; on the side of the wretched covetousness, envy, hatred of
seeing others enjoy, the profound impulses of the human beast towards
assuaging its desires, hearts full of mist, sadness, need, fatality,
impure and simple ignorance.

Shall we continue to raise our eyes to heaven? is the luminous point
which we distinguish there one of those which vanish? The ideal is
frightful to behold, thus lost in the depths, small, isolated,
imperceptible, brilliant, but surrounded by those great, black menaces,
monstrously heaped around it; yet no more in danger than a star in the
maw of the clouds.




