Page 1652 - les-miserables

trepid friend of the people, Balzac and Eugene Sue, having
represented their ruffians as talking their natural language,
as the author of The Last Day of a Condemned Man did in
1828, the same objections have been raised. People repeat-
ed: ‘What do authors mean by that revolting dialect? 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 soci-
ety, since when has it been considered wrong to go too far?
to go to the bottom? We have always thought that it was
sometimes a courageous act, and, at least, a simple and use-
ful deed, worthy of the sympathetic attention which duty
accepted and fulfilled merits. Why should one not explore
everything, and study everything? Why should one halt on
the way? The halt is a matter depending on the sounding-
line, and not on the leadsman.
Certainly, too, it is neither an attractive nor an easy task
to undertake an investigation into the lowest depths of the
social order, where terra firma comes to an end and where
mud begins, to rummage in those vague, murky waves, to
follow up, to seize and to fling, still quivering, upon the
pavement that abject dialect which is dripping with filth
when thus brought to the light, that pustulous vocabulary
each word of which seems an unclean ring from a monster
of the mire and the shadows. Nothing is more lugubrious
than the contemplation thus in its nudity, in the broad light
of thought, of the horrible swarming of slang. It seems, in
fact, to be a sort of horrible beast made for the night which
has just been torn from its cesspool. One thinks one beholds

1652 Les Miserables