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_ 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. _
Read next: VOLUME IV: BOOK SEVENTH - SLANG: CHAPTER IV. The Two Duties: To Watch and to Hope
Read previous: VOLUME IV: BOOK SEVENTH - SLANG: CHAPTER II. Roots
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