"BLAGUEUR" AND "BLACKGUARD."
(Vol. vii., p. 77.)
I cannot concur in opinion with Sir Emerson Tennent, 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 Emerson 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 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.