بخش 3 کتاب 7

BOOK SEVEN

PATRON-MINETTE

MINES AND MINERS

EVERY HUMAN SOCIETY has what is known in the theatre as “the third substage,” the lowest level below stage. The social soil is everywhere mined, for better or for worse. This honeycomb of underground tunnels is layered. There are the upper mines and the lower mines. There is a top and a bottom in this dark basement that sometimes caves in under civilization and which we in our careless indifference stomp around on and trample underfoot. The Encyclopaedia, in the last century, was virtually an open-cut mine. The darkness, that murky incubator of primitive Christianity, was just waiting for the chance to set off an explosion under the Caesars and flood the human race with light. For in the thickest darkness there is latent light. Volcanoes are full of darkness capable of bursting into flame. All lava begins in blackness. The catacombs, where the first mass was said, were not only the caves of Rome, they were the underground of the world.

Underneath the social structure, that marvel saddled with a ramshackle slum, all kinds of shafts have been bored. There is the religious mine, the philosophical mine, the political mine, the economic mine, the revolutionary mine. One person digs with an idea, another digs with numbers, yet another digs with rage. There is calling and answering from one catacomb to the next. Utopias make their way underground in tunnels that branch out in every direction. They sometimes run into each other there and fraternize. Jean-Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends him his lantern.1 Sometimes they do battle. Calvin grabs Socin by the hair.2 But nothing stops or interrupts the straining of all these energies toward their goal, and this vast simultaneous activity comes and goes, goes up and down and up again in the darkness, slowly transforming what lies above from below and the outside from the inside, in an immense teeming infestation. Society barely suspects this burrowing and undermining that changes its very guts, leaving its surface untouched. So many subterranean levels, so many different works, so many diverse yields. What comes out of all this deep delving? The future.

The deeper down you go, the more mysterious the workers become. Down to a level that social philosophy is still able to recognize, the work is good; beyond this level, it is dubious and mixed; deeper still, it becomes appalling. At a certain depth, the excavation work becomes impenetrable to the spirit of civilization, the limit at which mankind can breathe is exceeded; it is here that monsters may crop up.

The ladder going down is strange; and each of its rungs corresponds to a level where philosophy can get a foothold and where you meet one of the workers, sometimes divine, sometimes deformed. Below John Huss is Luther; below Luther is Descartes; below Descartes is Voltaire; below Voltaire is Condorcet; below Condorcet is Robespierre; below Robespierre is Marat; below Marat is Babeuf.3 And on it goes. Lower still, murkily, at the line that divides the indistinct from the invisible, you catch sight of other sombre men who perhaps do not yet exist. Those of yesterday are ghosts; those of tomorrow are spectral larvae. The mind’s eye dimly makes them out. The embryonic labour of the future is one of the visions of the philosopher.

A limbo world in foetal state, something never before seen!

Saint-Simon, Owen, and Fourier4 are there, too, in side saps.

Of course, although unbeknownst to them an invisible divine chain connects all these pioneers of the underground, who almost always believe themselves to be alone but are not, their work is extremely varied and the light of some contrasts with the blazing of others. Some are heavenly, others tragic. Yet, whatever the contrast, all these workers, from the uppermost to the most nocturnal, from the wisest to the most unhinged, have one thing in common and it is this: disinterestedness. Marat, like Jesus, forgets about himself. They put themselves completely to one side, leave themselves out, do not think about themselves. They see something other than themselves. They have a look in their eyes and this look is trained on the absolute. The very uppermost among them has the whole sky in his eyes; the lowest, no matter how enigmatic he may be, still has the pale glow of infinity in his sights. So no matter what he does, venerate whoever bears the sign of starry eyes.

Dead eyes—that is the opposite sign.

Evil starts with dead eyes. Faced with someone whose eyes see nothing, think carefully and be afraid. The social order has its starless miners.

There is a point where digging any deeper means being entombed and where the light is completely extinguished.

Below all these mines that we have described, below all these galleries, below all this vast network of the underground veins of progress and utopia, far deeper in the earth, deeper than Marat, deeper than Babeuf, deeper, far deeper, way beyond any connection to the upper levels, there is the final sap. A dreadful place. This is what we have called the third substage—the dregs, rock bottom. It is the pit of darkness. It is the repository of the blind. Inferi.5 This is the way to the bottomless abyss.

THE DREGS

HERE, DISINTERESTEDNESS VANISHES. The fiend dimly takes shape; it is every man for himself. The eyeless self howls, hunts, gropes and gnaws. Society’s cannibals, the Ugolinos,1 are found in this abyss.

The savage figures that prowl around this pit, half beast, half phantom, do not bother themselves with universal progress; they have never heard of the idea or the word, all they care about is individual satisfaction. They are barely conscious, and inside them there is a sort of terrifying blankness. They have two mothers, both stepmothers: ignorance and misery. They have one guide only, want; and only one craving, for all forms of gratification. They are brutally voracious, that is, ferocious, not in the manner of the tyrant, but in the manner of the tiger. These ghouls start out as larvae in dire poverty and then move on to crime—a fatal line of descent, a dizzying begetting, the logic of the dark. What grovels in this third social substage is no longer the stifled demand for the absolute; it is the protest of matter. Man turns into dragon there. Going hungry or thirsty is the point of departure, turning into Satan is the point of arrival. From this underground repository, Lacenaire2 emerges.

A moment ago, in Book Four, we saw one of the chambers of the upper mine, of the great sap of politics, revolution, and philosophy. There, as we said, all is noble, pure, dignified, honest. Of course, you can make mistakes there, and do make mistakes; but error is venerable there, for it involves so much heroism. The whole of the work done there has a name: Progress.

The time has come to take a peek at depths below this, hideous depths.

Underneath society there is, and we must insist, until the day ignorance is dispelled, there always will be, the great cavern of evil.

This repository is below all the rest and is the enemy of all the rest. It is hate without exception. This cavernous hold knows no philosophers; its daggers have never whittled quills. Its blackness bears no relation to the sublime sable blackness of the writing case. Never have the fingers of night that clench beneath that suffocating ceiling leafed through a book or unfolded a newspaper. Babeuf is an exploiter for Cartouche;3 Marat is an aristocrat for Schinderhannes.4 The aim of this dark hold is to bring everything crashing down.

Everything. Including the upper galleries, which it loathes. In its hideous pullulation, it not only undermines the current social order, it undermines philosophy, it undermines science, it undermines law, it undermines human thought, it undermines civilization, it undermines revolution, it undermines progress. It is called quite simply theft, prostitution, murder, and assassination. It is darkness and it desires chaos. Its vaulted roof is made of ignorance.

All the others, those above, have but one goal and that is to do away with it. It is to this end that philosophy and progress tend, through all their organs at once, through the improvement of the real as well as contemplation of the absolute. Destroy the dark hold, Ignorance, and you destroy the mole, Crime.

To sum up in a few words part of what we have just said: The sole social peril is Darkness.

Humanity is identity. All men are made of the same clay. No difference, here below at least, in predestination. The same darkness before, the same flesh during, the same ashes after. But when ignorance is mixed with human dough, it blackens it. This incurable blackness takes over man’s insides and there turns into Evil.

BABET, GUEULEMER, CLAQUESOUS, AND MONTPARNASSE

A QUARTET OF crooks, Claquesous, Gueulemer, Babet, and Montparnasse, ruled the dregs of Paris from 1830 to 1835.

Gueulemer was a lowlife Hercules. His hideout was the Arche-Marion sewer. He was six feet tall, had pectorals of marble, biceps of bronze, cavernous lungs, the torso of a colossus, and the skull of a bird. You would think you were looking at the Farnese Hercules1 decked out in drill trousers and a velveteen jacket. Built along such sculptural lines, Gueulemer could have broken monsters; he had found it easier to become one. With a low forehead, broad temples, a mass of crow’s-feet though not yet forty years old, wiry short hair, bushy cheeks, the beard of a wild boar—you can see the man from here. His muscles cried out for work, his stupidity wouldn’t hear of it. He was a huge lazy force. He was a killer out of nonchalance. He was thought to be a Creole.2 He had probably had a bit of a brush with Maréchal Brune3 at one time, having done a stint as a porter in Avignon in 1815. After that lesson, he moved up in the world and graduated as a crook.

Babet’s diaphanousness was in stark contrast to Gueulemer’s meatiness. Babet was skinny and smart. He was transparent, yet impenetrable. You could see daylight through his bones, but nothing in his eyes. He claimed to be a chemist. He had been a buffoon at Bobèche’s and a clown at Bobino’s.4 He had played vaudeville at Saint-Mihiel. He was a man full of hot air, a good talker who put his smiles in italics and his gestures in inverted commas. His business was selling plaster busts and portraits of “the head of state” out on the street. On top of this, he pulled teeth. He had shown freaks at fairs and owned a booth with a trumpet and this advertisement: “Babet, dental artist, member of the academies, conducts physical experiments on metals and metalloids, extracts teeth, tackles stumps abandoned by his colleagues. Price: one tooth, one franc fifty centimes; two teeth, two francs; three teeth, two francs fifty centimes. Take advantage of this opportunity.” (That “Take advantage of this opportunity” meant: Get as many pulled out as possible.) He had been married and he had had children. He did not know what had become of his wife or his children. He had lost them the way you lose your hankie. A noteworthy exception in the obscure world he lived in, Babet read the newspapers. Once, in the days when he had his family travelling with him in his booth-on-wheels, he had read in the Messager that a woman had given birth to a child with the muzzle of a calf who was likely to survive, and he had cried: “That’s worth a fortune! Why can’t my wife have the wit to give me a child like that!” Since then he had left everything to “tackle” Paris. His words.

What was Claquesous? He was night. He would wait till the sky had painted itself black before showing himself, crawling out from some hole after dark and crawling back into it again before daybreak. Where was this hole? Nobody knew. When it was pitch black, he would speak, though only to his accomplices and only with his back turned. Was his name really Claquesous? No. He would say: “My name is Not-at-all.” If a candle appeared, he slapped on a mask. He was a ventriloquist. Babet would say: “Claquesous is a night bird with two calls.” Claquesous was blurry, restless, terrible. You couldn’t be sure he had a name, Claquesous being only a nickname meaning blow-your-dough; you couldn’t be sure he had a voice, his stomach having more to say than his mouth; you couldn’t be sure he had a face, nobody having seen anything but his mask. He would vanish like an apparition and then reappear as though popping up out of the ground.

A lugubrious creature, that was Montparnasse. Montparnasse was a mere boy, less than twenty years old, with a pretty face, lips like cherries, lustrous black hair, the brightness of spring in his eyes; he had all the vices and aspired to all the crimes. Digesting what was bad gave him a craving for what was worse. He was the street kid turned lout and the lout turned killer. He was cute, effeminate, graceful, wiry, lethargic, cruel. He wore his hat turned up on the left to make room for a tuft of hair in the vogue of 1829. He lived off armed robbery. His redingote was of the best cut, but worn. Montparnasse was a fashion plate who had fallen on hard times, living in misery and committing murder and mayhem. The cause of all of this adolescent’s assaults was the desire to look slick and expensive. The first hussy who had said to him, “You’re easy on the eye,” had flung the stain of darkness into his heart and turned this Abel into a Cain.5 Finding himself pretty, he had wanted to be elegant, and, well, the first form elegance takes is idleness; and the idleness of a pauper means crime. Few prowlers were as feared as Montparnasse. At eighteen, he already had several corpses to his name. More than one passerby, with their arms outstretched and their face in a pool of blood, lay dead in the shadow of this miserable wretch. With his crimped and pomaded hair, his pinched waist, his womanly hips, and the bust of a Prussian officer, surrounded by the murmur of admiration of the girls on the boulevard, his tie suavely knotted, a club in his pocket and a flower in his buttonhole; such was this fop of the house of death.

COMPOSITION OF THE TROUPE

TOGETHER THESE FOUR crooks formed a single entity, a sort of Proteus,1 snaking through and around the police and strenuously avoiding the indiscreet gaze of the great Vidocq2 by taking on, like the ancient Greek sea god, “various guises, tree, flame, fountain,” lending each other their names and tricks, disappearing into their own shadows, each one a secret bolt-hole and refuge for the others, throwing off their personalities as you take off a false nose at a masked ball, sometimes simplifying themselves to the point of being just one person, sometimes multiplying themselves to the point where Coco-Lacour3 himself took them for a crowd.

These four men were not four men; they were a sort of single four-headed mystery thief working Paris in a big way; they were a single monstrous polyp of evil living in the crypt of society.

Thanks to their offshoots and to the underlying network of their contacts, Babet, Gueulemer, Claquesous, and Montparnasse ran the general ambush business of the entire département of the Seine.4 They performed the coups d’état of the underworld on unsuspecting passersby. Men with ideas in this line, men of nocturnal imagination, came to them to get the job done. People came to these four rogues with the outline and they took care of the stage management. They worked up the script. They were always able to provide the right number and type of personnel for any crime that needed a hand and was sufficiently lucrative. If a crime was shorthanded, they subcontracted accomplices. They had a troupe of shady extras at their disposal for any secret underworld drama.

They usually gathered together at nightfall, which is when they woke up, in the wasteland next to La Salpêtrière. This was where they conferred. That way they had twelve hours of darkness ahead of them and they worked out how to put them to use.

Patron-Minette was the name in circulation in the underground for this four-man society. In the old popular whimsical parlance disappearing a little more each day, Patron-Minette refers to early morning, just as entre chien et loup—between dog and wolf—refers to early evening. The name Patron-Minette probably derived from the time their work usually finished, dawn being the moment phantoms fade and the crooks break up. It is the name these four men were known by. When the chief justice of the circuit court visited Lacenaire in jail, he questioned him over a felony that Lacenaire denied committing. “Who did it, then?” the judge demanded. Lacenaire gave this reply, puzzling to the magistrate but clear as day to the police: “Could be Patron-Minette.” Sometimes you can tell what a play is like from the list of the characters; similarly, you can more or less appreciate a gang by the list of gangsters. There follows, for these particular names linger on in special memoirs, a list of the names the principal affiliates of Patron-Minette answered to: Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille,

or Hotwhack, Springlike, Golightly.

Brujon. (There was a whole dynasty of Brujons; we can’t promise

not to say more about this later.)

Boulatruelle, the road-mender we have already met.

Laveuve, or the Widow.

Finistère.

Homère Hugu, a black man.

Mardisoir, or Tuesday night.

Dépêche, or Dispatch.

Fauntleroy, alias Bouquetière, or the Flowergirl, that is, prostitute.

Glorieux, or Glorious, a freed convict.

Barrecarrosse, or Coachrod, alias Monsieur Dupont.

Lesplanade-du-Sud, or South-Esplanade.

Poussagrive, or Pushathrush.

Carmagnolet.

Kruideniers, alias Bizarro.

Mangedentelle, or Eatlace.

Les-pieds-en-l’air, or Feet-in-the-air.

Demi-liard, alias Deux-milliards, or Half-a-liard; Two Billion.

Etc., etc.

We pass over the rest, and not the worst. These names have faces. They express not only beings, but species. Each one of these names corresponds to a variety of those deformed toadstools that grow underneath civilization.

These beings were by no means happy showing their faces, though; they were not among those you see getting about the streets. During the day, tuckered out by the turbulent nights they put in, they went off to sleep, sometimes in plaster kilns, sometimes in the abandoned quarries of Montmartre or Mont-rouge, at times even in the sewers. They went to ground.

What’s become of these men? They still exist. They have always existed. Horace talks about them: Ambubaïarum collegia, pharmacopolae, mendici, mimde;5 and, for as long as society is what it is, they will be what they are. Under the dark roof of their holds, they are forever reborn out of the slime society oozes. Like ghosts, they return, always the same; only, they no longer bear the same names and no longer get about in the same skins.

The individuals may be eradicated, but the tribe lives on.

They always have the same skills. From the truant to the prowler, the race maintains its purity. They can divine purses in pockets, they can smell watches in fobs. Gold and silver have a distinct smell for them. There are guileless bourgeois who look as though they were just born to be robbed. These men patiently follow such bourgeois. When a foreigner or a provincial goes by, they quiver like spiders.

Men like that, when you run into them or merely catch a glimpse of them on a deserted boulevard around midnight, are terrifying. They don’t look like men at all but like shapes made of living mist; you’d say they were one with the darkness, that they can’t be distinguished from it, that they have no soul other than the gloom, and that it is only momentarily, just to live a monstrous life for a few minutes, that they break away from the night.

What is required to dissolve these ghouls? Light. Floods of light. No bat can brave the dawn. Light up the dregs of society.