Les Misérables
To keep afloat and to rescue from oblivion, to hold above the gulf,
were it but a fragment of some language which man has spoken and which
would, otherwise, be lost, that is to say, one of the elements, good or
bad, of which civilization is composed, or by which it is complicated,
to extend the records of social observation; is to serve civilization
itself. This service Plautus rendered, consciously or unconsciously, by
making two Carthaginian soldiers talk Phœnician; that service Molière
rendered, by making so many of his characters talk Levantine and all
sorts of dialects. Here objections spring up afresh. Phœnician, very
good! Levantine, quite right! Even dialect, let that pass! They are
tongues which have belonged to nations or provinces; but slang! What is
the use of preserving slang? What is the good of assisting slang “to
survive”?
To this we reply in one word, only. Assuredly, if the tongue which a
nation or a province has spoken is worthy of interest, the language
which has been spoken by a misery is still more worthy of attention and
study.
It is the language which has been spoken, in France, for example, for
more than four centuries, not only by a misery, but by every possible
human misery.
And then, we insist upon it, the study of social deformities and
infirmities, and the task of pointing them out with a view to remedy,
is not a business in which choice is permitted. The historian of
manners and ideas has no less austere a mission than the historian of
events. The latter has the surface of civilization, the conflicts of
crowns, the births of princes, the marriages of kings, battles,
assemblages, great public men, revolutions in the daylight, everything
on the exterior; the other historian has the interior, the depths, the
people who toil, suffer, wait, the oppressed woman, the agonizing
child, the secret war between man and man, obscure ferocities,
prejudices, plotted iniquities, the subterranean, the indistinct
tremors of multitudes, the die-of-hunger, the counter-blows of the law,
the secret evolution of souls, the go-bare-foot, the bare-armed, the
disinherited, the orphans, the unhappy, and the infamous, all the forms
which roam through the darkness. He must descend with his heart full of
charity, and severity at the same time, as a brother and as a judge, to
those impenetrable casemates where crawl, pell-mell, those who bleed
and those who deal the blow, those who weep and those who curse, those
who fast and those who devour, those who endure evil and those who
inflict it. Have these historians of hearts and souls duties at all
inferior to the historians of external facts? Does any one think that
Alighieri has any fewer things to say than Machiavelli? Is the under
side of civilization any less important than the upper side merely
because it is deeper and more sombre? Do we really know the mountain
well when we are not acquainted with the cavern?
Let us say, moreover, parenthetically, that from a few words of what
precedes a marked separation might be inferred between the two classes
of historians which does not exist in our mind. No one is a good
historian of the patent, visible, striking, and public life of peoples,
if he is not, at the same time, in a certain measure, the historian of
their deep and hidden life; and no one is a good historian of the
interior unless he understands how, at need, to be the historian of the
exterior also. The history of manners and ideas permeates the history
of events, and this is true reciprocally. They constitute two different
orders of facts which correspond to each other, which are always
interlaced, and which often bring forth results. All the lineaments
which providence traces on the surface of a nation have their
parallels, sombre but distinct, in their depths, and all convulsions of
the depths produce ebullitions on the surface. True history being a
mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything.
Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with a
double focus. Facts form one of these, and ideas the other.
Slang is nothing but a dressing-room where the tongue having some bad
action to perform, disguises itself. There it clothes itself in
word-masks, in metaphor-rags. In this guise it becomes horrible.
One finds it difficult to recognize. Is it really the French tongue,
the great human tongue? Behold it ready to step upon the stage and to
retort upon crime, and prepared for all the employments of the
repertory of evil. It no longer walks, it hobbles; it limps on the
crutch of the Court of Miracles, a crutch metamorphosable into a club;
it is called vagrancy; every sort of spectre, its dressers, have
painted its face, it crawls and rears, the double gait of the reptile.
Henceforth, it is apt at all rôles, it is made suspicious by the
counterfeiter, covered with verdigris by the forger, blacked by the
soot of the incendiary; and the murderer applies its rouge.
When one listens, by the side of honest men, at the portals of society,
one overhears the dialogues of those who are on the outside. One
distinguishes questions and replies. One perceives, without
understanding it, a hideous murmur, sounding almost like human accents,
but more nearly resembling a howl than an articulate word. It is slang.
The words are misshapen and stamped with an indescribable and fantastic
bestiality. One thinks one hears hydras talking.
It is unintelligible in the dark. It gnashes and whispers, completing
the gloom with mystery. It is black in misfortune, it is blacker still
in crime; these two blacknesses amalgamated, compose slang. Obscurity
in the atmosphere, obscurity in acts, obscurity in voices. Terrible,
toad-like tongue which goes and comes, leaps, crawls, slobbers, and
stirs about in monstrous wise in that immense gray fog composed of rain
and night, of hunger, of vice, of falsehood, of injustice, of nudity,
of suffocation, and of winter, the high noonday of the miserable.
Let us have compassion on the chastised. Alas! Who are we ourselves?
Who am I who now address you? Who are you who are listening to me? And
are you very sure that we have done nothing before we were born? The
earth is not devoid of resemblance to a jail. Who knows whether man is
not a recaptured offender against divine justice? Look closely at life.
It is so made, that everywhere we feel the sense of punishment.
Are you what is called a happy man? Well! you are sad every day. Each
day has its own great grief or its little care. Yesterday you were
trembling for a health that is dear to you, to-day you fear for your
own; to-morrow it will be anxiety about money, the day after to-morrow
the diatribe of a slanderer, the day after that, the misfortune of some
friend; then the prevailing weather, then something that has been
broken or lost, then a pleasure with which your conscience and your
vertebral column reproach you; again, the course of public affairs.
This without reckoning in the pains of the heart. And so it goes on.
One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day out of a
hundred which is wholly joyous and sunny. And you belong to that small
class who are happy! As for the rest of mankind, stagnating night rests
upon them.
Thoughtful minds make but little use of the phrase: the fortunate and
the unfortunate. In this world, evidently the vestibule of another,
there are no fortunate.
The real human division is this: the luminous and the shady. To
diminish the number of the shady, to augment the number of the
luminous,—that is the object. That is why we cry: Education! science!
To teach reading, means to light the fire; every syllable spelled out
sparkles.
However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy. People
suffer in the light; excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing.
To burn without ceasing to fly,—therein lies the marvel of genius.
When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still
suffer. The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those
in darkness.
CHAPTER II—ROOTS
Slang is the tongue of those who sit in darkness.
Thought is moved in its most sombre depths, social philosophy is bidden
to its most poignant meditations, in the presence of that enigmatic
dialect at once so blighted and rebellious. Therein lies chastisement
made visible. Every syllable has an air of being marked. The words of
the vulgar tongue appear therein wrinkled and shrivelled, as it were,
beneath the hot iron of the executioner. Some seem to be still smoking.
Such and such a phrase produces upon you the effect of the shoulder of
a thief branded with the fleur-de-lys, which has suddenly been laid
bare. Ideas almost refuse to be expressed in these substantives which
are fugitives from justice. Metaphor is sometimes so shameless, that
one feels that it has worn the iron neck-fetter.
Moreover, in spite of all this, and because of all this, this strange
dialect has by rights, its own compartment in that great impartial case
of pigeon-holes where there is room for the rusty farthing as well as
for the gold medal, and which is called literature. Slang, whether the
public admit the fact or not has its syntax and its poetry. It is a
language. Yes, by the deformity of certain terms, we recognize the fact
that it was chewed by Mandrin, and by the splendor of certain
metonymies, we feel that Villon spoke it.
That exquisite and celebrated verse—
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?
But where are the snows of years gone by?
is a verse of slang. _Antan—ante annum_—is a word of Thunes slang,
which signified the past year, and by extension, _formerly_.
Thirty-five years ago, at the epoch of the departure of the great
chain-gang, there could be read in one of the cells at Bicêtre, this
maxim engraved with a nail on the wall by a king of Thunes condemned to
the galleys: _Les dabs d’antan trimaient siempre pour la pierre du
Coësre_. This means _Kings in days gone by always went and had
themselves anointed_. In the opinion of that king, anointment meant the
galleys.
The word _décarade_, which expresses the departure of heavy vehicles at
a gallop, is attributed to Villon, and it is worthy of him. This word,
which strikes fire with all four of its feet, sums up in a masterly
onomatopœia the whole of La Fontaine’s admirable verse:—
Six forts chevaux tiraient un coche.
Six stout horses drew a coach.
From a purely literary point of view, few studies would prove more
curious and fruitful than the study of slang. It is a whole language
within a language, a sort of sickly excrescence, an unhealthy graft
which has produced a vegetation, a parasite which has its roots in the
old Gallic trunk, and whose sinister foliage crawls all over one side
of the language. This is what may be called the first, the vulgar
aspect of slang. But, for those who study the tongue as it should be
studied, that is to say, as geologists study the earth, slang appears
like a veritable alluvial deposit. According as one digs a longer or
shorter distance into it, one finds in slang, below the old popular
French, Provençal, Spanish, Italian, Levantine, that language of the
Mediterranean ports, English and German, the Romance language in its
three varieties, French, Italian, and Romance Romance, Latin, and
finally Basque and Celtic. A profound and unique formation. A
subterranean edifice erected in common by all the miserable. Each
accursed race has deposited its layer, each suffering has dropped its
stone there, each heart has contributed its pebble. A throng of evil,
base, or irritated souls, who have traversed life and have vanished
into eternity, linger there almost entirely visible still beneath the
form of some monstrous word.
Do you want Spanish? The old Gothic slang abounded in it. Here is