“the ‘topicality’ of the eighteenth century, as we see it, is made up of words (often punishable) spoken by people of no, or little, importance in the heated environment of the public sphere – or the public square. Novelists, of course, delight in the liveliness of such words and the buried dramas and tiny renunciations which they help to reveal; novelists, of course, aspire to communicate that ‘living substance’ through an art of dialogue which will in no way falsify it. Theirs is a noble task; we shall leave them to it. Historians, meanwhile, have to cleave words so as to extract their meaning; their desire is above all to give a name to the thing of no importance, the ordinary everyday word which falls apart as soon as spoken, but pushes in between two morsels of time which were formerly indivisible. It is the space thus created which is ‘topical’. It is those words which we are trying to speak. ‘He claimed that he was pursued by the vulgar words (sordida verba) and that he had to speak them…’”
-- Arlette Farge,
Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth Century France (1994) p. ix
