Page 1651 - les-miserables

CHAPTER I

ORIGIN

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 lan-
guage.
When, four and thirty years ago, the narrator of this
grave and sombre history introduced into a work written
with the same aim as this[39] a thief who talked argot, there
arose amazement and clamor.—‘What! How! Argot! Why,
argot is horrible! It is the language of prisons, galleys, con-
victs, of everything that is most abominable in society!’ etc.,
etc.
[39] The Last Day of a Condemned Man.
We have never understood this sort of objections.
Since that time, two powerful romancers, one of whom
is a profound observer of the human heart, the other an in-

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