Les Misérables
Men were put there for stealing a hare from the king. In this
sepulchre-hell, what did they do? What man can do in a sepulchre, they
went through the agonies of death, and what can man do in hell, they
sang; for song lingers where there is no longer any hope. In the waters
of Malta, when a galley was approaching, the song could be heard before
the sound of the oars. Poor Survincent, the poacher, who had gone
through the prison-cellar of the Châtelet, said: “It was the rhymes
that kept me up.” Uselessness of poetry. What is the good of rhyme?
It is in this cellar that nearly all the slang songs had their birth.
It is from the dungeon of the Grand-Châtelet of Paris that comes the
melancholy refrain of the Montgomery galley: _“Timaloumisaine,
timaloumison.”_ The majority of these songs are melancholy; some are
gay; one is tender:—
Icicaille est la theatre
Du petit dardant.
Here is the theatre
Of the little archer (Cupid).
Do what you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic in the heart
of man, love.
In this world of dismal deeds, people keep their secrets. The secret is
the thing above all others. The secret, in the eyes of these wretches,
is unity which serves as a base of union. To betray a secret is to tear
from each member of this fierce community something of his own
personality. To inform against, in the energetic slang dialect, is
called: “to eat the bit.” As though the informer drew to himself a
little of the substance of all and nourished himself on a bit of each
one’s flesh.
What does it signify to receive a box on the ear? Commonplace metaphor
replies: “It is to see thirty-six candles.” Here slang intervenes and
takes it up: Candle, _camoufle_. Thereupon, the ordinary tongue gives
_camouflet_42 as the synonym for _soufflet_. Thus, by a sort of
infiltration from below upwards, with the aid of metaphor, that
incalculable, trajectory slang mounts from the cavern to the Academy;
and Poulailler saying: “I light my _camoufle_,” causes Voltaire to
write: “Langleviel La Beaumelle deserves a hundred _camouflets_.”
Researches in slang mean discoveries at every step. Study and
investigation of this strange idiom lead to the mysterious point of
intersection of regular society with society which is accursed.
The thief also has his food for cannon, stealable matter, you, I,
whoever passes by; _le pantre_. (_Pan_, everybody.)
Slang is language turned convict.
That the thinking principle of man be thrust down ever so low, that it
can be dragged and pinioned there by obscure tyrannies of fatality,
that it can be bound by no one knows what fetters in that abyss, is
sufficient to create consternation.
Oh, poor thought of miserable wretches!
Alas! will no one come to the succor of the human soul in that
darkness? Is it her destiny there to await forever the mind, the
liberator, the immense rider of Pegasi and hippogriffs, the combatant
of heroes of the dawn who shall descend from the azure between two
wings, the radiant knight of the future? Will she forever summon in
vain to her assistance the lance of light of the ideal? Is she
condemned to hear the fearful approach of Evil through the density of
the gulf, and to catch glimpses, nearer and nearer at hand, beneath the
hideous water of that dragon’s head, that maw streaked with foam, and
that writhing undulation of claws, swellings, and rings? Must it remain
there, without a gleam of light, without hope, given over to that
terrible approach, vaguely scented out by the monster, shuddering,
dishevelled, wringing its arms, forever chained to the rock of night, a
sombre Andromeda white and naked amid the shadows!
CHAPTER III—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 _pègre_ is always the poor _pègre_, 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.
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 _maluré_ 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