CHAPTER III.
SLANG THAT CRIES AND SLANG THAT LAUGHS.
As we see, the whole of slang, the slang of four hundred years ago, aswell as that of the present day, is penetrated by that gloomy symbolicspirit which gives to every word at one moment a suffering accent,at another a menacing air. We see in it the old ferocious sorrow ofthose mumpers of the Cour des Miracles, who played at cards with packsof their own, some of which have been preserved for us. The eight ofclubs, for instance, represented a tall man bearing eight enormousclover leaves, a sort of fantastic personification of the forest. Atthe foot of this tree could be seen a lighted fire, at which threehares were roasting a game-keeper on a spit, and behind, over anotherfire, a steaming caldron from which a dog's head emerged. Nothing canbe more lugubrious than these reprisals in painting upon a pack ofcards, in the face of the pyres for smugglers, and the caldron forcoiners. The various forms which thought assumed in the kingdom ofslang, singing, jests, and menaces, all had this impotent and crushedcharacter. All the songs of which a few melodies have come down to uswere humble and lamentable enough to draw tears. The _pègre_ (thief)calls himself the poor _pègre_; for he is always the hare that hidesitself, the mouse that escapes, or the bird that flies away. He hardlyprotests, but restricts himself to sighing, and one of his groanshas reached us: _Je n'entrave que le dail comment meck, le daron desorgues, peut atiger ses mômes et ses momignards, et les locher criblantsans être agité lui même_. (I do not understand how God, the Father ofmen, can torture His children and His grandchildren, and hear them cry,without being tortured Himself.) The wretch, whenever he has time tothink, makes himself little before the law and paltry before society;he lies down on his stomach, supplicates, and implores pity, and we cansee that he knows himself to be in the wrong.
Toward the middle of the last century a change took place; the person,songs, and choruses of the robbers assumed, so to speak, an insolentand jovial gesture. The _larifla_ was substituted for the plaintive_maluré_, and we find in nearly all the songs of the galleys, thehulks, and the chain-gangs, a diabolical and enigmatical gayety. Wehear in them that shrill and leaping chorus which seems illuminedby a phosphorescent gleam, and appears cast into the forest by awill-o'-the-wisp playing the fife:--
"Mirlababi surlababo Mirliton ribonribette Surlababi mirlababo Mirliton ribonribo."
They sang this while cutting a man's throat in a cellar or a thicket.It is a serious symptom that in the eighteen century the oldmelancholy of three desponding classes is dissipated, and they beginto laugh; they mock the great "meg" and the great "dab" (governor),and Louis XV. being given they call the King of France the Marquisde Pantin. The wretches are nearly gay, and a sort of dancing lightissues from them, as if their conscience no longer weighed them down.These lamentable tribes of darkness no longer possess the despairingaudacity of deeds, but the careless audacity of the mind; this is asign that they are losing the feeling of their criminality, and findingsome support, of which they are themselves ignorant, among the thinkersand dreamers. It is a sign that robbery and plunder are beginning tobe filtered even into doctrines and sophisms, so as to lose a littleof their ugliness, and give a good deal of it to the sophisms and thedoctrine. Lastly, it is a sign of a prodigious and speedy eruption,unless some diversion arise. Let us halt here for a moment. Whom do weaccuse? Is it the eighteenth century? Is it all philosophy? Certainlynot. The work of the eighteenth century is healthy and good; andthe Encyclopædists with Diderot at their head, the physicists underTurgot, the philosophers led by Voltaire, and the Utopists commandedby Rousseau, are four sacred legions. The immense advance of humanitytoward the light is due to them, and they are the four advanceguards of the human races, going toward the four cardinal points ofprogress,--Diderot toward the beautiful, Turgot toward the useful,Voltaire toward truth, and Rousseau toward justice. But by the side ofand below the philosophers were the sophists,--a venomous vegetationmingled with a healthy growth, a hemlock in the virgin forest. Whilethe hangman was burning on the grand staircase of the Palace ofJustice the grand liberating books of the age, writers now forgottenwere publishing, with the royal privilege, strangely disorganizingbooks, which were eagerly read by the scoundrels. Some of thesepublications, patronized, strange to say, by a prince, will be foundin the "Bibliothèque secrète." These facts, profound but unknown, wereunnoticed on the surface; but at times the very obscurity of a factconstitutes its danger, and it is obscure because it is subterranean.Of all the writers, the one who perhaps dug the most unhealthy galleryat that day in the masses was Restif de la Bretonne.
This work, peculiar to all Europe, produced greater ravages in Germanythan anywhere else. In Germany, during a certain period, which wassummed up by Schiller in his famous drama of The Robbers, robbery andplunder were raised into a protest against property and labor. Theyappropriated certain elementary ideas, specious and false, apparentlyjust, and in reality absurd, wrapped themselves up in these ideas,and to some extent disappeared in them, assumed an abstract name, andpassed into a theoretical state, and in this way circulated among thelaborious, suffering, and honest masses, without even the cognizanceof the imprudent chemists who prepared the mixture, and the massesthat accepted it. Whenever a fact of this nature is produced it isserious. Suffering engenders passion; and while the prosperousblind themselves, or go to deep, the hatred of the unfortunateclasses kindles its torch at some sullen or ill-constituted mindwhich is dreaming in a corner, and sets to work examining society.The examination of hatred is a terrible thing. Hence come, if themisfortune of the age desires it, those frightful commotions, formerlycalled Jacqueries, by the side of which purely political commotions arechild's-play, and which are no longer the struggle of the oppressedwith the oppressor, but the revolt of want against comfort. Everythingis overthrown at such a time. Jacqueries are the earthquakes of nations.
The French Revolution, that immense act of probity, cut short thisperil, which was perhaps imminent in Europe toward the close of theeighteenth century. The French Revolution, which was nothing butthe ideal armed with a sword, rose, and by the same sudden movementclosed the door of evil and opened the door of good. It disengaged thequestion, promulgated the truth, expelled the miasma, ventilated theage, and crowned the people. We may say that it created man a secondtime by giving him a second soul,--justice. The nineteenth centuryinherits and profits by its work, and at the present day the socialcatastrophe which we just now indicated is simply impossible. Blind ishe who denounces it, a fool who fears it, for the Revolution is thevaccine of Jacquerie. Thanks to the Revolution, the social conditionsare altered, and the feudal and monarchical diseases are no longer inour blood. There is no middle age left in our constitution, and weare no longer at the time when formidable internal commotions brokeout; when the obscure course of a dull sound could be heard beneaththe feet; when the earth thrown out from the mole-holes appeared onthe surface of civilization; when the soil cracked; when the roof ofcaverns opened, and monstrous heads suddenly emerged from the ground.The revolutionary sense is a moral sense, and the feeling of rightbeing developed, develops the feeling of duty. The law of all isliberty, which ends where the liberty of another begins, according toRobespierre's admirable definition. Since 1789 the whole people hasbeen dilated in the sublimated individual. There is no poor man who,having his right, has not his radius; the man, dying of hunger, feelswithin himself the honesty of France. The dignity of the citizen isan internal armor; the man who is free is scrupulous, and the voterreigns. Hence comes incorruptibility; hence comes the abortivenessof unhealthy covetousness, and hence eyes heroically lowered beforetemptation. The revolutionary healthiness is so great, that on a day ofdeliverance, a 14th of July, or a 10th of August, there is no populace,and the first cry of the enlightened and progressing crowds is, "Deathto the robbers!" Progress is an honest man, and the ideal and theabsolute do not steal pocket-handkerchiefs. By whom were the carriagescontaining the wealth of the Tuileries escorted in 1848? By therag-pickers of the Faubourg St. Antoi
ne. The rag mounted guard over thetreasure. Virtue rendered these ragged creatures resplendent. In thesecarts, in barely closed chests,--some, indeed, still opened,--therewas, amid a hundred dazzling cases, that old crown of France, all madeof diamonds, surmounted by the royal carbuncle and the Regent diamonds,worth thirty millions of francs; barefooted they guarded this crown.Hence Jacquerie is no longer possible, and I feel sorry for the clevermen; it is an old fear which has made its last effort, and could nolonger be employed in politics. The great spring of the red spectre isnow broken. Everybody understands this now. The scarecrow no longerhorrifies. The birds treat the manikin familiarly, and deposit theirguano upon it, and the bourgeois laugh at it.
[1] The archer Cupid.