Pigritia is a terrible word. It engenders a whole world, la pegre, for which read theft, and a hell, la pegrenne, for which read hunger. Thus, idleness is the mother. She has a son, theft, and a daughter, hunger. Where are we at this moment? In the land of slang. What is slang? It is at one and the same time a nation and a dialect; it is theft in its two kinds, people and language. When, four and thirty years ago, the narrator introduced into a work a thief who talked argot, there arose amazement and clamor. Argot is horrible. It is the language of prisons, galleys, convicts. Since that time Balzac and Eugene Sue have represented their ruffians as talking their natural language, and the same objections have been raised. Slang is odious. Slang makes one shudder. Who denies that? Of course it does. When it is a question of probing a wound, a gulf, a society, since when has it been considered wrong to go too far, to go to the bottom? Why should one halt on the way? The halt is a matter depending on the sounding-line, and not on the leadsman. It is neither attractive nor easy to rummage in those vague, murky waves and to fling, still quivering, upon the pavement that abject dialect which is dripping with filth. Nothing is more lugubrious than the contemplation of the horrible swarming of slang. It seems a horrible beast made for the night which has just been torn from its cesspool. One word resembles a claw, another an extinguished and bleeding eye. Now, when has horror ever excluded study? The thinker who should turn aside from slang would resemble a surgeon who should avert his face from an ulcer. For argot is both a literary phenomenon and a social result. What is slang, properly speaking? It is the language of wretchedness.
We may be told that all trades have their own slang: the merchant, the broker, the gambler, the soldier, the printer, the duchess, even the Academician who calls the sea Neptune. Algebra, medicine, botany have each their slang. The tongue of the sea is a heroic slang, which is to the fierce slang of the thieves what the lion is to the jackal. No doubt. But this manner of understanding the word is an extension. We restrict slang to slang. The veritable slang is nothing else than the homely, uneasy, crafty, treacherous, venomous, cruel, equivocal, vile, profound, fatal tongue of wretchedness. There exists, at the extremity of all abasement, a last misery which revolts and makes up its mind to enter into conflict with the whole mass of fortunate facts. To meet the needs of this conflict, wretchedness has invented a language of combat, which is slang. To keep afloat, were it but a fragment of some language which man has spoken, is to serve civilization itself. If the tongue which a nation has spoken is worthy of interest, the language which has been spoken by a misery is still more worthy of attention. The historian of manners has no less austere a mission than the historian of events. The latter has the surface, the conflicts of crowns, revolutions in the daylight. The other has the interior, the people who toil, suffer, wait, the agonizing child, the go-bare-foot. He must descend with his heart full of charity, and severity at the same time, as a brother and as a judge. Do we really know the mountain well when we are not acquainted with the cavern?
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. It no longer walks, it hobbles; it limps on the crutch of the Court of Miracles, a crutch metamorphosable into a club. 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 thinks one hears hydras talking. It is unintelligible in the dark. It is black in misfortune, it is blacker still in crime; these two blacknesses amalgamated compose slang. Let us have compassion on the chastised. The earth is not devoid of resemblance to a jail. Who knows whether man is not a recaptured offender against divine justice? Are you what is called a happy man? Well, you are sad every day. 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 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. 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.
