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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 pegre is always the poor pegre, 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.
[43] Je n'entrave que le dail comment meck, le daron des
orgues, peut atiger ses momes et ses momignards et les locher
criblant sans etre agite lui-meme.
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 malure 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.
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