Les Mystères de Paris (Intégrale, Volumes 1 à 10) (French Edition)

Indeed, it was knowledge that only through a process of initiation could those of the upper classes successfully acquire it. Mop said again, taking pity on this ignorance of slang or the crude language of the land … he is drunk like a Kentuckian]. Again, it is the character from an under-privileged social class who exercises a more powerful role linguistically. Mop and Doggy have complete reign over the information at hand, and Effie must acknowledge the limitations of her own social class.

These limitations speak to a reversal of the typical relationship between those of the dominant classes and those of the dominated ones in which those from the dominant classes have more cultural power due to their educational and economic status. But within the context of a society constructed by the dominated classes, the cultural symbols of their upper-class counterparts loses value and are replaced with different symbols that are not easily accessible to the dominant class.

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It seems that there is a constant tension between dominant and dominated in both social contexts, i. When Frank takes Mr. Precise slumming, Precise asks his guide if there is any potential danger:. However, Buntline is not without his exceptions. When Big Lize attempts to explain to her cousin Angelina what a panel house is, Angelina needs the flash terms defined for her.

One refers to criminal action while the other refers to a physical place where criminals are found.

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The association is clear: For him, behavior and language are not necessarily class-bounded. You speak the lingo like one of us. In this way, Sue creates such a contrast that the reader becomes aware of the topsy-turvy indexical orders at play and can therefore properly establish which indexical orders should go with which characters based on their class background.

These writers continuously play with the indexical orders that relate class-to-language-to-morality in a way that disrupts the social expectations of the reader.

Les Mystères de Paris (10 volumes)

Additionally, there exists a similar connection between the setting and the kind of language that the characters use. Apart from taking place in cities, the haunts in which characters use flash and slang are mostly in bars, brothels, poorhouses and soup houses, and the streets. These associations function to contextualize the language in the same way that class would, through the reinforced demarcation of certain physical spaces in relation to speech practices. And these barbarians are all around us. If we had not felt that the story you are about to read needed so urgently to be heard, we would have regretted placing it in such shocking surroundings.

Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London , Seth Koven studies the popularization of slumming by the upper classes in late-nineteenth-century London: Edward Tannenbaum also comments on this collective bourgeois interest in a lifestyle that was completely foreign to them, but that remained within their geographical grasp nonetheless: The use of slang exoticizes the urban dwellings of the poor and criminal classes by creating linguistic and symbolic barriers between the barbaric and the bourgeois. The physical and linguistic terrain function as one entity since the speakers cannot be separated, physically or metaphysically, from the locations they frequent.

The fact that the argot found aurally in the tavern is now found scripturally on the building itself means that this language physically makes up part of the location, and not just in the abstract. The indexical relationship between language and location is not only literal but binding as well; the destruction of the building means the destruction of the language, physically and metaphorically. The crude and barbaric way-of-life of hardened criminals is not far off from that of our pre-historic human ancestors with their rudimentary cave drawings and caveman speech. The resemblance between the criminal and the caveman, although historically removed from one another, functions in two ways.

Second, it socially distances the bourgeois reader from evildoers rendering the reader more akin to an anthropologist who observes from a removed social position. From this objective standpoint, the upper classes are not only seen as biologically superior but are seemingly distanced from an imminent social threat. The crude drawings on the walls of the tavern reveal a kind of biological and linguistic primitivity with regards to both the language and the speakers, in addition to placing the reader in a position of objectivity. Like the zoologists who can study their animal subjects behind the safety of fortified glass, the bourgeois public can study their criminal subjects behind the safety of a serial novel.

Jean Cocteau's Mystery of Jean the Birdcatcher. The manuscript.

Due to his mastery of argot and infiltration of criminal life, the aristocratic protagonist Rodolphe stands as the existential shape shifter par excellence. The house acts as the headquarters of the va-et-vient of characters of various social milieus; as Knight points out: At the same time the house is a means for Sue to explore the considerable variations of life and attitudes in the lower-income levels We also hope to have inspired disgust, aversion, horror, and a healthy fear of all that is absolutely impure and criminal.

For the upper-class characters, do-gooding is a form of diversion. After asking la Louve if she is happy, la Goualeuse paints a vivid picture of a life previously unimagined by her friend p. Nature permits the momentary escape from a reality littered with injustice, poverty, and moral anarchy. After Rodolphe describes for her what her life at the farm in Bouqueval would look like, she becomes captivated by her fantasy to such an extent that she enters an a-temporal space: Like the physical space itself, the imagined space of the fantasy cannot last and is always interrupted by either the physical or imagined present.

In any case, whether urban or rural, Sue uses language to infuse space with certain moral indexes, i. Like the Lapin-Blanc, the building itself is slang personified: He goes on to claim that:. The advantage is that the reader encounters no real physical danger moral, perhaps , but can still participate in a kind of literary slumming. The conversation between Charley and Big Lize on the streets of New York in the beginning of Part I is indecipherable to the uninitiated reader:. She then criticizes Charley for not being there to steal from them, a remark that prompts Charley to ask if anybody was there to assist her.

By placing the glossary in a separate section of the text, the reader becomes more aware of their dependence on such tools in order to comprehend what the characters are saying; in order for reading to occur, the reader must engage in the necessary work or else the text is meaningless. African Americans and European immigrants became synonymous with transgressive actions and behaviors.

The indexical relationship between speech practices and bodily movement implies additional relationships of class, ethnicity, and race that are not mentioned explicitly, but that are already present in the upper-class imaginary to such an extent that it goes without saying for lexicographers like Desrat. These bodies are indeed chaotic, as revealed through their subversive dance and speech, and if uncontained, they could potentially violate prohibited physical boundaries in addition to the moral and social ones they have already crossed.

However, by limiting the immoral behaviors of African-American and European characters to places such as brothels, dive bars, and prisons, Buntline reassures that reader that, even if immoral activities occur, spatial lines will not be crossed. For example, when Frank takes Mr. Precise to The Tombs, a New York prison,its location is characterized by the music and dance in the surrounding buildings: In his initial impression of the bar, Precise immediately notices the music.

When Sam, the doorman, demands a shilling from Frank in order to enter, Frank responds using a slang expression: This first interaction with the doorman prompts Precise to examine the language. The narrative conflates music, slang, dancing, and other immoral pursuits to such an extent that they all index the same demographic i. The appearance of Juba dancers in Parts I and II definitively adds race to the list of details indexing immorality.

The author is careful to frame such transgressions in places that possess as much immoral repute. In any case, for Buntline, Lermina, and Sue, language infuses space with certain moral indexes while the location indexes the language used there and vice versa. This indexical exchange further reflects the moral integrity of the speakers, with the author serving as the interface between reader and reality since access to slum-life is theoretically forbidden to the intended readership.

The appearance of slang in nineteenth-century American and French literature was both a bottom-up and a top-down process. By virtue of their presence in literature these words and expressions, while undergoing the harsh condemnation of the writers that placed them in their works, were undermining the standards set in place by regulatory institutions especially in France as well as by codification tools like dictionaries.

However, I have deliberately shied away from this avenue of inquiry, because it would be impossible to authenticate the claims and representations these authors make. Thus, it is best to disregard an interest in dis proving the authenticity of the source, and instead to focus on how Sue, Buntline, and Lermina in addition to their many contemporaries used argot and slang in their respective works to represent the criminal and working classes by rendering their way of speaking indexical of that milieu through the textual encounter between the oral and the written.

The blurring of these modalities onto the page, in addition to reinforced images of the slang speaker as incarnating certain characteristics, which their language indexed to a nineteenth-century public.

Sue, Buntline, and Lermina use non-referential indexes to their advantage and do not hesitate to reinforce associations between slang, social status, morality, gender, place, ethnicity, race, and sexuality. In addition to generating social meaning, these constant associations function comprehensively to render both standard and non-standard forms of language bounded by a specific social context. At the same time, these associations legitimize the non-standard language, albeit slowly, not only through its presence in fictional works, but also through the inclusion of slang glossaries, in-text footnotes, parentheses and italics, etc.

The bourgeois fascination with and repulsion of the representation of the lower classes in literature speaks for itself through the market success of the urban mystery genre, demarcating a shift in collective literary preferences overall. While it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to see an aesthetic pull in the urban mysteries, I believe there is a beauty, not in the stylistics, but I dare say in the content.

This duality highlights a sort of Hugolian and Baudelairean aesthetic of the urban in which the sublime, in the form of self-identification within an overarching Story of Modernity, is drawn precisely from the grotesque. Ironically, each city mystery attempted to render the unreadable readable, a feat that could never be wholly achieved but one that both author and public continued to pursue throughout the nineteenth century. The new trinity of Writer-Audience-City continuously informed the other and, through literature, molded the definitions of emerging social phenomenon and types, sometimes to such an extent that they needed language infused with a historically and socially bounded context.

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Shweder et James W. Stigler, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, , p. Ithaca, Cornell UP, Le Boute-Charge, physiologie du quartier esquisses militaires. Roublard et Compagnie - Les Tripoteurs du socialisme. Le Royaume de minuit. Le mari et amant.

Le Clos de Vaugirard. Le Royaume de Minuit Le Roi de minuit. Le Chevalier de la Barre. Le Journal du Peuple. Marie-Rose, la Mignon du Nord grand roman dramatique. Marie-Rose, la Mignon du Nord. La Cour des Miracles. Le Pont des soupirs. Les Amants de Venise. Les Pardaillan Les Pardaillan.

Les Pardaillan - Volume 1, Le chevalier de Pardaillan pp. La Fausta Les Pardaillan. Les Pardaillan - Volume 3, La Fausta pp. Le Rival du Roi.

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Roman en 2 parties: Le Capitaine Buridan [feuilletons ]. La Reine sanglante, Marguerite de Bourgogne. Les Amours de Marguerite de Bourgogne. La Cour des miracles. Mabel, la femme en noir. Pardaillan et Fausta Les Pardaillan. Les Amours du Chico. Le Fils de Pardaillan.