"Pigritia" is a terrible word. It engenders a world, _la pègre_, for which read, _robbery_; and a Hades, _la pégrenne_, for which read, _hunger_. Hence indolence is a mother, and has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger. Where are we at this moment? In slang. What is slang? It is at once the nation and the idiom; it is robbery in its two species, people and language. Four-and-thirty years ago, when the narrator of this grave and sombre history introduced into the middle of a work written with the same object as this one[1] a robber speaking slang, there was amazement and clamor. "Why! what! slang! why, it is frightful; it is the language of the chain-gang, of hulks and prisons, of everything that is the most abominable in society," etc. We could never understand objections of this nature. Since that period two powerful romance-writers, of whom one was a profound observer of humanity, the other an intrepid friend of the people,--Balzac and Eugène Sue,--having made bandits talk in their natural tongue, as the author of "Le dernier Jour dun Condamné" did in 1828, the same objections were raised, and people repeated: "What do writers want with this repulsive patois? Slang is odious, and produces a shudder." Who denies it? Of course it does. When the object is to probe a wound, a gulf, or a society, when did it become a fault to drive the probe too deep? We have always thought that it was sometimes an act of courage and at the very least a simple and useful action, worthy of the sympathetic attention which a duty accepted and carried out deserves. Why should we not explore and study everything, and why stop on the way? Stopping is the function of the probe, and not of the prober.