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and becomes le boulanger (the baker), who puts the bread
into the oven. This is more witty, but less grand, something
like Racine after Corneille, like Euripides after AEschylus.
Certain slang phrases which participate in the two epochs
and have at once the barbaric character and the metaphori-
cal character resemble phantasmagories. Les sorgueuers
vont solliciter des gails a la lune—the prowlers are going to
steal horses by night,— this passes before the mind like a
group of spectres. One knows not what one sees.
In the third place, the expedient. Slang lives on the lan-
guage. It uses it in accordance with its fancy, it dips into it
hap-hazard, and it often confines itself, when occasion aris-
es, to alter it in a gross and summary fashion. Occasionally,
with the ordinary words thus deformed and complicated
with words of pure slang, picturesque phrases are formed,
in which there can be felt the mixture of the two preceding
elements, the direct creation and the metaphor: le cab jas-
pine, je marronne que la roulotte de Pantin trime dans le
sabri, the dog is barking, I suspect that the diligence for Par-
is is passing through the woods. Le dab est sinve, la dabuge
est merloussiere, la fee est bative, the bourgeois is stupid,
the bourgeoise is cunning, the daughter is pretty. Generally,
to throw listeners off the track, slang confines itself to add-
ing to all the words of the language without distinction, an
ignoble tail, a termination in aille, in orgue, in iergue, or in
uche. Thus: Vousiergue trouvaille bonorgue ce gigotmuche?
Do you think that leg of mutton good? A phrase addressed
by Cartouche to a turnkey in order to find out whether the
sum offered for his escape suited him.