第 二百五十五 章 · SLANG WHICH WEEPS AND SLANG WHICH LAUGHS

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.