The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (9.1896)

68 On the Art of Yvette Guilbert

wished to rehabilitate a failing credit by the performance of
miracles. Members of the fraternity would simulate diseases for
years, until they were well known as lepers, paralytics, or epi-
leptics, and when a religious procession passed in the street they
would, by previous arrangement with the clergy, stagger up to
the shrine, and rise healed, to the delight of the populace.

The argot of Bruant is not, of course, the pure argot of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. On the dissolution of the
Guild of Beggars in 1656, the argot of the streets began to make
its way into the older language, and the confusion was still further
increased by the publication of songs and novels in which a mixed
argot was freely introduced, so that the purity of the original
language of the Gueux is gone. But the seeds of the old tongue
are still to be found in many of the French songs of to-day, and it
is to this we must look for an explanation of the hideous character
of many of the songs which Yvette Guilbert sings. We must
remember that she is singing a language, the traditions of which
are associated with the criminal classes, a language of vice and
blood, poor in relation to the number of objects denoted, but
rising in vocabulary when we want words to express drunkenness,
assault, profligacy. In a small dictionary of French argot we
find in the introduction the following table of words :

To denote “Eating” 10 words.

„ “ Drinking ” 20 „

„ “ Drunkenness ” 40 „

„ “Money” 60 „

„ “ Prostitute ” 80 „

And the only word which is used to mean an honest man is
the contemptuous simple, while the horror of the language is here
and there redeemed by such touches of fancy as fee to mean a
young girl.

Enough