Translation:The Crime of the Fat Pig

No revolutionary would ever show a snitch the stuff I gave you, and no snitch ever pulled the dirty tricks on a revolutionary that you pulled on me.

From the day of my arrival in dark Roubaix, I went to your pretty house on Rue des Arts to beg you to forward a request to the prefect for a 24-hour stay permit in Lille. In the evening, I returned, and the prefect had refused; I was already flagged!

We talked, and I congratulated you in your home. Your belly swelled with contentment. I told you that the tree shaker, who worked behind your house, should have inspired in you ideas of peace and justice. Surely those words must have made you laugh. I explained that I had come to wage war on the rich, and that I was therefore obliged to attack you too; but that I would only wage a fair war against you. You (?), man, and you say you've seen it all. I told you that I was not entirely an ordinary agitator, that I only sought to give my life for the pure doctrine of anarchy, that Paris, Lille, Lyon, and fifty other cities were forbidden to me, that I had just been expelled from Belgium by Mouscron, that Roubaix being nearby, I had come there, and that; from my first steps through these prison-like streets, from my first conversations, I had been able to judge the extent to which the manufacturers are criminal and the yoke they place on the employees. I declared that (?) I would have turned your Roubaix upside down. But I added that I would only personally target you if you forced me to by committing some illegality, by having my posters torn down, for example. I told you that the law gave me the right to post everything, that you had no right to tear anything down, and I concluded by asking you to respect your own law, that law by which you live, man!

You snickered again, and we split; you, I didn't see you again privately until the day you threatened to have me offed.

My loyalty was wasted that day, Broyer. And it's a damn good time to say I threw pearls before swine.

You set your people on my trail, you sent your cops to pick a fight with me, you had me banned from the Bourse, you had my amplified file spread everywhere. You yourself, in a hundred places, liar, said that I had been convicted of rape, and you knew very well that it wasn't true!

You handed over my criminal record to the little nobody; you tried to slip a wallet into my pocket so you could accuse me of stealing it! You sent the infamous La Patrie journal to get good people who had given me credit to file a complaint for fraud; you ordered your thugs to create a pretext to shoot me. And don't say no, man!

You boasted about it to me yourself, in your office, when I threatened to sue you for illegally tearing down my posters. Didn't you say to me: "You'll see much worse. If you're at the head of the slightest gathering and..." You made the gesture of aiming a gun, Broyer!

Another time, in front of the town hall's general secretary, you said that there needed to be a good shooting. Besides, that's all you ever talk about. Twenty days ago, in the middle of the fire station courtyard, you said to your policemen, pointing out Émile Bourgeois, Baptiste Zaisne, and Félix Lanneau: "They needed a bullet in the gut!"

Hear your shame again, Broyer. It was you who forced Meurients to sign the lie that the Pharisee's newspaper had launched. That peddler had never believed things would go so far; he didn't want to (and I debated, who other than a policeman could have coldly contemplated such a crime!); but you, in your office, lectured him for an hour and a half to convince him. What did you promise him? What did you give him? What did you threaten him with?... Ah, my heart rises at the thought of you two criminals!

That's not all. You wrote to the court that all my mistresses were giving me money. Who? Me? A pimp? I'm so handsome!... Alas, I have known creatures who sold love, but they always charged me double, and they kicked me out by ten in the morning.

It's you again, always you, who sent the little nobody to invent that the woman shouting in the square was Madame Decourchelle. You had little idea what a good little woman she was, and that she would go to your Pharisee and overwhelm him with her contempt.

Cowardly man, you find a false witness, a man even, to accuse Decourchelle; you lock up the husband, then you want to dishonor the wife! With what filth must you pay for all of this?

Ah, you attack women! That's convenient; I know what you do to yours, I'll say it tomorrow. I'm on your trail, everyone calls you a big pile of shit, I want to pour poison into the shit that fills your belly. I will say everything, I will say what you are plotting with the Pharisee for the restoration of the scabby monarchy, and the sum you are being given. Yes, tomorrow, in the pamphlet The Two Accomplices, I will talk to you.