Wicklow.
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"BLAGUEUR" AND "BLACKGUARD."
(Vol. vii., p. 77.)
I cannot concur in opinion with SIR EMERSON TENNANT, who thinks he has a
right to identify the sense of our low word _blagueur_ with that of your
lower one, _blackguard_. I allow that there some slight similitude of
pronunciation between the words, but I contend that their sense is
perfectly distinct, or, rather, wholly different; as distant, in fact,
as is the date of their naturalisation in our respective idioms. Your
_blackguard_ had already won a "local habitation and a name" under the
reigns of Pope and his immediate predecessor Dryden. Of all living
unrespectable characters our own _blagueur_ is the youngest, the most
innocent, and the shyest. He is entirely of modern growth. He has but
lately emerged from the soldier's barracks, the suttler's shop, and the
mess-room. As a prolific tale-teller he amused the leisure hours of
superannuated sergeants and half-pay subalterns. Ten or twelve years ago
he had not yet made his appearance in plain clothes; he is now creeping
and winding his way with slow and sure steps from his old haunts into
some first-rate coffee-houses and shabby-genteel drawing-rooms, which
Carlyle calls _sham gentility_. He bears on his very brow the newest
_flunky-stamp_. The poor young fellow, after all, is no villain; he has
no kind of connexion with the horrid rascal SIR EMERSOM TENNENT alludes
to--with the _blackguard_. That he is a boaster, a talker, an idiot, a
nincompoop; that he scatters "words, words, words," as Polonius did of
old; that he is bombastic, wordy, prosy, nonsensical, and a fool, no one
will deny. But he is no rogue, though he utters rogueries and
drolleries. No one is justified in slandering him.
The _blackguard_ is a dirty fellow in every sense of the word--a
_gredin_ (a cur), the true translation, by-the-bye, of the word
_blackguard_. Voltaire, who dealt largely in Billingsgate, was very fond
of the word _gredin_:
"Je semble à trois gredins, dans leur petit cerveau,
Que pour être imprimés et reliés en veau," &c.
The word _blagueur_ implies nothing so contemptuous or offensive as the
word _blackguard_ does. The emptiness of the person to whom it applies
is very harmless. Its etymon _blague_ (bladder, _tobacco-bag_), the
pouch, which smoking voluptuaries use to deposit their tobacco, is
perfectly symbolic of the inane, bombastic, windy, and long-winded
speeches and sayings of the _blagueur_. Every French commercial
traveller, buss-tooter, and Parisian jarvy is one. When he deports
himself with modesty, and shows a gentlemanly tact in his peculiar
avocation, we call him a _craqueur_ (a cracker). "Ancient Pistol" was
the king of _blagueurs_; Falstaff, of _craqueurs_. I like our _Baron de
Crac_, a native of the land of white-liars and honey-tongued gentlemen
(Gascony). The genus _craqueur_ is common here: as it shoots out into a
thousand branches, shades, varieties, and modifications, judicial,
political, poetical, and so on, it would be {415} quite out of my
province to pursue farther the description of _blagueur_-land or
_blarney_-land.
P.S.--Excuse my French-English.
PHILARÈTE CHASLES, Mazarinæus.
Paris, Palais de l'Institut.
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