e all French of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The word affe, meaning life, is of
the highest antiquity. From affe anything that disturbs life is called
affres (a rowing or scolding), hence affreux, anything that troubles
life.

About a hundred words are derived from the language of Panurge, a
name symbolizing the people, for it is derived from two Greek words
signifying All-working.

Science is changing the face of the world by constructing railroads. In
Argot the train is le roulant Vif, the Rattler.

The name given to the head while still on the shoulders--la
Sorbonne--shows the antiquity of this dialect which is mentioned by
very early romance-writers, as Cervantes, the Italian story-tellers, and
Aretino. In all ages the moll, the prostitute, the heroine of so many
old-world romances, has been the protectress, companion, and comfort of
the sharper, the thief, the pickpocket, the area-sneak, and the burglar.

Prostitution and robbery are the male and female forms of protest made
by the natural state against the social state. Even philosophers,
the innovators of to-day, the humanitarians with the communists and
Fourierists in their train, come at last, without knowing it, to the
same conclusion--prostitution and theft. The thief does not argue out
questions of property, of inheritance, and social responsibility,
in sophistical books; he absolutely ignores them. To him theft is
appropriating his own. He does not discuss marriage; he does not
complain of it; he does not insist, in printed Utopian dreams, on the
mutual consent and bond of souls which can never become general; he
pairs with a vehemence of which the bonds are constantly riveted by the
hammer of necessity. Modern innovators write unctuous theories, long
drawn, and nebulous or philanthropical romances; but the thief acts. He
is as clear as a fact, as logical as a blow; and then his style!

Another thing worth noting: the world of prostitutes, thieves, and
murders of the galleys and the prisons forms a population of about
sixty to eighty thousand souls, men and women. Such a world is not to be
disdained in a picture of modern manners and a literary reproduction of
the social body. The law, the gendarmerie, and the police constitute
a body almost equal in number; is not that strange? This antagonism of
persons perpetually seeking and avoiding each other, and fighting a vast
and highly dramatic duel, are what are sketched in this Study. It has
be