Excerpt from Les Miserables, Vol. 3 of 3 Pigritia is a terrible word, for it engenders a world, la pegre, for which read - robbery; and a Hades, la pefgrenne, 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 lan guage. 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* a robber Speaking slang, there was amazement and clamour. 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 abomin able in society, &c. &c. &c. We could never understand objections of this nature. Since that period two powerful ro mance-writers, of whom one was a profound observer of hu manity, the other an intrepid friend of the people, Balzac and Eugene Sue, having made bandits talk in their natural tongue, as the author of Le dernier J our d'un Condamne did in 1828, the same Objections were raised, and people repeated. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.