The name given to the head while still on the shoulders—­la Sorbonne—­shows the antiquity of this dialect which is mentioned by very early romance-writers, as Cervantes, the Italian story-tellers, and Aretino.  In all ages the moll, the prostitute, the heroine of so many old-world romances, has been the protectress, companion, and comfort of the sharper, the thief, the pickpocket, the area-sneak, and the burglar.

Prostitution and robbery are the male and female forms of protest made by the natural state against the social state.  Even philosophers, the innovators of to-day, the humanitarians with the communists and Fourierists in their train, come at last, without knowing it, to the same conclusion—­prostitution and theft.  The thief does not argue out questions of property, of inheritance, and social responsibility, in sophistical books; he absolutely ignores them.  To him theft is appropriating his own.  He does not discuss marriage; he does not complain of it; he does not insist, in printed Utopian dreams, on the mutual consent and bond of souls which can never become general; he pairs with a vehemence of which the bonds are constantly riveted by the hammer of necessity.  Modern innovators write unctuous theories, long drawn, and nebulous or philanthropical romances; but the thief acts.  He is as clear as a fact, as logical as a blow; and then his style!

Another thing worth noting:  the world of prostitutes, thieves, and murders of the galleys and the prisons forms a population of about sixty to eighty thousand souls, men and women.  Such a world is not to be disdained in a picture of modern manners and a literary reproduction of the social body.  The law, the gendarmerie, and the police constitute a body almost equal in number; is not that strange?  This antagonism of persons perpetually seeking and avoiding each other, and fighting a vast and highly dramatic duel, are what are sketched in this Study.  It has been the same thing with thieving and public harlotry as with the stage, the police, the priesthood, and the gendarmerie.  In these six walks of life the individual contracts an indelible character.  He can no longer be himself.  The stigmata of ordination are as immutable as those of the soldier are.  And it is the same in other callings which are strongly in opposition, strong contrasts with civilization.  These violent, eccentric, singular signs —­sui generis—­are what make the harlot, the robber, the murderer, the ticket-of-leave man, so easily recognizable by their foes, the spy and the police, to whom they are as game to the sportsman:  they have a gait, a manner, a complexion, a look, a color, a smell—­in short, infallible marks about them.  Hence the highly-developed art of disguise which the heroes of the hulks acquire.

One word yet as to the constitution of this world apart, which the abolition of branding, the mitigation of penalties, and the silly leniency of furies are making a threatening evil.  In about twenty years Paris will be beleaguered by an army of forty thousand reprieved criminals; the department of the Seine and its fifteen hundred thousand inhabitants being the only place in France where these poor wretches can be hidden.  To them Paris is what the virgin forest is to beasts of prey.