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Updated: May 20, 2025
The Piper of Hamelin, and the Tinker's Opinion of the Story. The Walloon Tinker of Spa. Argot. One summer day in London, in 1871, I was seated alone in an artist's studio. Suddenly I heard without, beneath the window, the murmur of two voices, and the sleepy, hissing, grating sound of a scissors-grinder's wheel. By me lay a few tools, one of which, a chisel, was broken.
He took a mischievous delight in drawing her out, especially on the æsthetic side, where she was wildest, and he revelled in her idiom, which reminded him of the dear argot of his beloved city, and which he declared was "the language of the future." Clive Reinhard, also, who came to dinner at the new house very soon, approved warmly of Ernestine.
Their witty argot, their easy morals, their rather loose adventures, their expedients, their brave and honorable toil, in a word, their greatness and their weakness, he understood it all marvellously well; and, like an ever-indulgent providence, he lent them his aid whenever they asked for it.
The mock-American fought like a devil unchained, cursing Duchemin fluently in the purest and foulest argot of Belleville which is not in the French vocabulary of the doughboy. The animals at the pole caught fire of this madness and ran away in good earnest, that wretched barouche rolled and pitched like a rudderless shell in a crazy sea, the two men floundered in its well like fish in a pail.
"From books." From books! That was always the idea. I answered as my readings of the champions of my side of the great controversy had taught me to answer: that a man can't handle glibly and easily and comfortably and successfully the argot of a trade at which he has not personally served.
Is this not absurd, when the same child can come home from school and talk glibly of a parallelepipedon, a rhombus, rhomboid, polyhedral angle, archipelago, law of primogeniture, the binomial theorem, and of a dicotyledon! He also learns French, German, Latin, Greek, and the argot of the public school! The theological leader of to-day cannot be a creed-monger: he must be a creed-maker.
They pass away the time in vehement gesticulation, and talking in a loud tone; so much of what they say is in argot, that the stranger will not find it easy to comprehend them. He would think they were talking crime or politics not a bit of it; their talk is altogether about their mistresses.
"She lets them take the centre of the stage, as they say in the profession," remarked one of the party, who prided herself upon being versed in the argot of the theatre. "But she plays with her back to the audience when she is speaking and acting, and everybody else on the stage is still but herself," petulantly insisted the Western Philistine, showing no signs of defeat.
The name "Claudine" startled her; and although she had had no comprehension of the argot of Happy Fear, the sense of a mysterious catastrophe oppressed her; she was sure that something horrible had happened. She went to the window; touched the shade, which disappeared upward immediately, and lifted the sash.
But when his captor dryly responded in an equally pure argot: "Thanks, old man, the same to youse," he resolved to take all the rest in silence.
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