Les Misérables, page 264
CHAPTER III--SLANG WHICH WEEPS AND SLANG WHICH LAUGHS
As the reader perceives, slang in its entirety, slang of four hundredyears 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 thosevagrants of the Court of Miracles who played at cards with packs oftheir own, some of which have come down to us. The eight of clubs, forinstance, represented a huge tree bearing eight enormous trefoil leaves,a sort of fantastic personification of the forest. At the foot of thistree a fire was burning, over which three hares were roasting a huntsmanon a spit, and behind him, on another fire, hung a steaming pot, whenceemerged the head of a dog. Nothing can be more melancholy than thesereprisals in painting, by a pack of cards, in the presence of stakesfor the roasting of smugglers and of the cauldron for the boiling ofcounterfeiters. The diverse forms assumed by thought in the realmof slang, even song, even raillery, even menace, all partook of thispowerless and dejected character. All the songs, the melodies of someof which have been collected, were humble and lamentable to the point ofevoking tears. The _pègre_ is always the poor _pègre_, and he is alwaysthe hare in hiding, the fugitive mouse, the flying bird. He hardlycomplains, he contents himself with sighing; one of his moans has comedown to us: "I do not understand how God, the father of men, can torturehis children and his grandchildren and hear them cry, without himselfsuffering torture."43 The wretch, whenever he has time to think, makeshimself 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 ofcompassion; we feel that he is conscious of his guilt.
Towards the middle of the last century a change took place, prison songsand thieves' ritournelles assumed, so to speak, an insolent and jovialmien. The plaintive _maluré_ was replaced by the _larifla_. We findin the eighteenth century, in nearly all the songs of the galleys andprisons, a diabolical and enigmatical gayety. We hear this stridentand lilting refrain which we should say had been lighted up by aphosphorescent gleam, and which seems to have been flung into the forestby 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 aman's throat.
A serious symptom. In the eighteenth century, the ancient melancholyof the dejected classes vanishes. They began to laugh. They rally the_grand meg_ and the _grand dab_. Given Louis XV. they call the King ofFrance "le Marquis de Pantin." And behold, they are almost gay. Asort of gleam proceeds from these miserable wretches, as though theirconsciences were not heavy within them any more. These lamentable tribesof darkness have no longer merely the desperate audacity of actions,they possess the heedless audacity of mind. A sign that they are losingthe sense of their criminality, and that they feel, even among thinkersand dreamers, some indefinable support which the latter themselvesknow not of. A sign that theft and pillage are beginning to filterinto doctrines and sophisms, in such a way as to lose somewhat of theirugliness, while communicating much of it to sophisms and doctrines. Asign, in short, of some outbreak which is prodigious and near unlesssome diversion shall arise.
Let us pause a moment. Whom are we accusing here? Is it the eighteenthcentury? Is it philosophy? Certainly not. The work of the eighteenthcentury is healthy and good and wholesome. The encyclopedists, Diderotat their head; the physiocrates, Turgot at their head; the philosophers,Voltaire at their head; the Utopians, Rousseau at their head,--these arefour sacred legions. Humanity's immense advance towards the light is dueto them. They are the four vanguards of the human race, marching towardsthe four cardinal points of progress. Diderot towards the beautiful,Turgot towards the useful, Voltaire towards the true, Rousseau towardsthe just. But by the side of and above the philosophers, there were thesophists, a venomous vegetation mingled with a healthy growth, hemlockin the virgin forest. While the executioner was burning the greatbooks of the liberators of the century on the grand staircase of thecourt-house, writers now forgotten were publishing, with the King'ssanction, no one knows what strangely disorganizing writings, which wereeagerly read by the unfortunate. Some of these publications, odd tosay, which were patronized by a prince, are to be found in the SecretLibrary. These facts, significant but unknown, were imperceptible on thesurface. Sometimes, in the very obscurity of a fact lurks its danger.It is obscure because it is underhand. Of all these writers, the onewho probably then excavated in the masses the most unhealthy gallery wasRestif de La Bretonne.
This work, peculiar to the whole of Europe, effected more ravages inGermany than anywhere else. In Germany, during a given period, summed upby Schiller in his famous drama _The Robbers_, theft and pillage rose upin protest against property and labor, assimilated certain specious andfalse elementary ideas, which, though just in appearance, were absurd inreality, enveloped themselves in these ideas, disappeared within them,after a fashion, assumed an abstract name, passed into the state oftheory, and in that shape circulated among the laborious, suffering, andhonest masses, unknown even to the imprudent chemists who had preparedthe mixture, unknown even to the masses who accepted it. Whenever a factof this sort presents itself, the case is grave. Suffering engenderswrath; and while the prosperous classes blind themselves or fall asleep,which is the same thing as shutting one's eyes, the hatred of theunfortunate classes lights its torch at some aggrieved or ill-madespirit which dreams in a corner, and sets itself to the scrutiny ofsociety. The scrutiny of hatred is a terrible thing.
Hence, if the ill-fortune of the times so wills it, those fearfulcommotions which were formerly called _jacqueries_, beside which purelypolitical agitations are the merest child's play, which are no longerthe conflict of the oppressed and the oppressor, but the revolt ofdiscomfort against comfort. Then everything crumbles.
Jacqueries are earthquakes of the people.
It is this peril, possibly imminent towards the close of the eighteenthcentury, which the French Revolution, that immense act of probity, cutshort.
The French Revolution, which is nothing else than the idea armed withthe sword, rose erect, and, with the same abrupt movement, closed thedoor 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 asecond soul, the right.
The nineteenth century has inherited and profited by its work, andto-day, the social catastrophe to which we lately alluded is simplyimpossible. 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 andmonarchical maladies no longer run in our blood. There is no more ofthe Middle Ages in our constitution. We no longer live in the days whenterrible swarms within made irruptions, when one heard beneath his feetthe obscure course of a dull rumble, when indescribable elevations frommole-like tunnels appeared on the surface of civilization, where thesoil cracked open, where the roofs of caverns yawned, and where onesuddenly beheld monstrous heads emerging from the earth.
The revolutionary sense is a moral sense. The sentiment of right, oncedeveloped, develops the sentiment of duty. The law of all isliberty, which ends where the liberty of others begins, according toRobespierre's admirable definition. Since '89, the whole people hasbeen 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 feelswithin him the honesty of France; the dignity of the citizen is aninternal armor; he who is free is scrupulous; he who votes reigns. Henceincorruptibility; hence the miscarriage of unhealthy lusts; hence eyesheroically lowered before temptations. The revolutionary wholesomenessis 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 andincreasing throngs is: death to thieves! Progress is an honest man; theideal and the absolute do not filch pocket-handkerchiefs. By whom werethe wagons containing the wealth of the Tuileries escorted in 1848? Bythe rag-pickers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Rags mounted guard overthe treasure. Virtue rendered these tatterdemalions resplendent. Inthose wagons in chests, hardly closed, and some, even, half-open, amid ahundred dazzling caskets, was that ancient crown of France, studded withdiamonds, 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. Theold fear has produced its last effects in that quarter; and henceforthit can no longer be employed in politics. The principal spring of thered spectre is broken. Every one knows it now. The scare-crow scaresno longer. The birds take liberties with the mannikin, foul creaturesalight upon it, the bourgeois laugh at it.
