True history being a mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything.
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.
One finds it difficult to recognize.
Is it really the French tongue, the great human tongue?
Behold it ready to step upon the stage and to retort upon crime, and prepared for all the employments of the repertory of evil.
It no longer walks, it hobbles; it limps on the crutch of the Court of Miracles, a crutch metamorphosable into a club; it is called vagrancy; every sort of spectre, its dressers, have painted its face, it crawls and rears, the double gait of the reptile.
Henceforth, it is apt at all roles, it is made suspicious by the counterfeiter, covered with verdigris by the forger, blacked by the soot of the incendiary; and the murderer applies its rouge.
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 distinguishes questions and replies.
One perceives, without understanding it, a hideous murmur, sounding almost like human accents, but more nearly resembling a howl than an articulate word. It is slang.