weakened vocabulary that no longer necessarily implied the images or the
ideas that they bore a century earlier? Let us turn once more to Furetiere:
Sabbat "is said by extension of a great noise, of shouting such as one imagines
is made at the Sabbath. There are the cats, beginning their sabbat in the
gutters." Hence the word had come some distance from its first referent,
passing, as the linguists say, from denotation to simple connotation. Contat
attests to this himself when he calls the cook who mistreats the apprentices
and journeymen diable incarne' habille' en femme ("the Devil incarnate dressed
as a woman"). Must we necessarily conclude that when he speaks of her in
these terms he really thinks the cook a sorceress as the seventeenth century
understood the term? Similarly, the allusion to a spell cast, of which the
parish priest is aware, does not seem sufficient evidence on which to decide
that the cat-hunt was ordered by the master as a substitute for an exorcism,
nor that the mistress is accused of being herself a witch. Words are just as
mobile as symbols and are charged with meaning to unequal degrees. It is
not at all certain that the use of terms taken from the vocabulary of sorcery
set off the same associations among Parisian printers as a hundred years
earlier in peasant culture.
Is the massacre a charivari? Darnton thinks it is, on the basis of allusions
to relations between the master printer's wife and the young abbe who tutors
their two sons. The master is thus cuckolded, "so the revelry of the workers
took the form of a charivari" (p. 97). But is this a legitimate term for a
"festivity" in which none of the elements that characterize the charivari are
present? To return to Furetiere: "Charivari: Confused noise that the common
people make with pans, basins, and pots to show offense to someone. One
makes charivaris in derision of people of highly unequal age who marry."
The massacre of the rue Saint-Severin hardly corresponds to this definition,
either in its forms (there is no parade and none of the noisemaking common
to charivaris) or in its supposed motivation, since adultery did not usually
give rise to charivaris, which mocked either remarrying widows or henpecked
husbands. The allusion to the mistress's infidelity when she deceives her
husband with the young abbe probably has another function in the text. When
we couple it with another intrigue between Marion, the printer's daughter,
and an abbe attached to Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois, it adds a joking, entertaining
touch of anticlerical satire to the narration.
To finish the series, can the parodic trial of the cats that crowns the massacre
be fully likened to carnival festivities? The Mardi Gras execution included
one essential element missing here: the fire in which the effigy of carnival is
burned. On the rue Saint-Severin there is no pyre and no glowing coals, but
only hanging cats which is a far cry from both the carnival ritual and the
typical festive use of the cat, in which (e.g., in Saint John's Eve festivities)
it is thrown into the fire. The mock trial, as Darnton indicates, echoes a
cultural form common among typographic workers and practiced, for example,
at the Feast of Saint Martin. There is therefore no reason whatsoever to see
in it a strictly carnival rite. The massacre, as Contat describes it, is thus not
easy to place among folklorists' classical categories, and it is perhaps wiser