t himself
suffering torture."[43] The wretch, whenever he has time to think, makes
himself small before the low, and frail in the presence of society;
he lies down flat on his face, he entreats, he appeals to the side of
compassion; we feel that he is conscious of his guilt.

Towards the middle of the last century a change took place, prison songs
and thieves' ritournelles assumed, so to speak, an insolent and jovial
mien. The plaintive malure was replaced by the larifla. We find in the
eighteenth century, in nearly all the songs of the galleys and prisons,
a diabolical and enigmatical gayety. We hear this strident and lilting
refrain which we should say had been lighted up by a phosphorescent
gleam, and which seems to have been flung into the forest by a
will-o'-the-wisp playing the fife:--

Miralabi suslababo
Mirliton ribonribette
Surlababi mirlababo
Mirliton ribonribo.

This was sung in a cellar or in a nook of the forest while cutting a
man's throat.

A serious symptom. In the eighteenth century, the ancient melancholy of
the dejected classes vanishes. They began to laugh. They rally the grand
meg and the grand dab. Given Louis XV. they call the King of France "le
Marquis de Pantin." And behold, they are almost gay. A sort of gleam
proceeds from these miserable wretches, as though their consciences were
not heavy within them any more. These lamentable tribes of darkness have
no longer merely the desperate audacity of actions, they possess the
heedless audacity of mind. A sign that they are losing the sense of
their criminality, and that they feel, even among thinkers and dreamers,
some indefinable support which the latter themselves know not of. A
sign that theft and pillage are beginning to filter into doctrines and
sophisms, in such a way as to lose somewhat of their ugliness, while
communicating much of it to sophisms and doctrines. A sign, in short, of
some outbreak which is prodigious and near unless some diversion shall
arise.

Let us pause a moment. Whom are we accusing here? Is it the eighteenth
century? Is it philosophy? Certainly not. The work of the eighteenth
century is healthy and good and wholesome. The encyclopedists, Diderot
at their head; the physiocrates, Turgot at their head; the philosophers,
Voltaire at their head; the Utopians, Rousseau at their head,--these are
four sacred legions. Humanity's immense advan