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Flow
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Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart: Chamber Music for Strings, 1787–1791,
Danuta Mirka
Songs in Motion: Rhythm and Meter in the German Lied, Yonatan Malin
Audacious Euphony: Chromaticism and the Triad’s Second Nature, Richard Cohn
Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era, Roger Mathew Grant
1
iv
1
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the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
vi T Contents
Example 1.16. Krizz Kaliko featuring Tech N9ne, “Strange,” mm. 9–14,
re-quantized to unified C32 metric space (i.e., without
swing). 26
Example 1.17. Krizz Kaliko featuring Tech N9ne, “Strange,” mm. 9–14,
with larger circles representing accented syllables. 27
Example 1.18. Krizz Kaliko featuring Tech N9ne, “Strange,” mm. 9–14,
schematic outline of inter-accent intervals (IAIs). 27
Example 1.19. The derivation of flow from primary and derived
constituents. 29
Example 2.1. Six lists of “the best emcees” used in the construction of
the corpus. 38
Example 2.2. Histogram of chronological and geographical distribution
of the corpus sample (n = 225) and subsample (n = 75). 40
Example 2.3. Lil’ Wayne, “Weezy Baby” (2005, 0:37–0:44), with repre-
sentation of syllable duration (below). 42
Example 2.4. Lil’ Wayne, “Weezy Baby,” beginning, wave form (top)
with four levels of annotations, marking (1) the onsets of
vowels, (2) the onsets of syllables implied by my quantiza-
tion, (3) the onsets of C16 positions implied by the boom-
bap, and (4) the onsets of the boom-bap (i.e., bass drum
and snare). 43
Example 2.5. Bubba Sparxxx, “Deliverance” (2003, 1:05–1:15). 44
Example 2.6. The Roots featuring Erykah Badu, “You Got Me” (1999,
0:29–0:39), emceed by Black Thought. 45
Example 3.1a. Jean Grae, “My Crew” (2003, 0:45–0:50). 48
Example 3.1b. Logic, “Under Pressure” (2014, 0:36–0:43). 48
Example 3.2. Transcriptions of m. 10 of Eminem’s second verse on Jay-
Z’s “Renegade”: (a) studio version at left (2001, 1:32–1:36)
and (b) live performance at right (2010, 1:43–1:47), in
conventional Western music notation. Notated pitches in-
dicate the closest equal-tempered pitch to the highest fre-
quency within a syllable. In syllables without note heads,
the accompanying parts obscure the pitch of the voice. 49
Example 3.3a. Distribution of event durations less than four beats in
Beethoven, Opus 18, no. 1 (n = 4,467). 50
Example 3.3b. Distribution of event durations less than four beats in the
genre-wide corpus (n = 13,973). 50
Example 3.4. The phonological hierarchy of the spoken sentence “The
music theory course was entertaining,” as spoken by the
author. Boldface indicates a primary accent beginning at
Level 3 (feet). Italics indicates a secondary accent begin-
ning at Level 4 (words). 52
Example 3.5. Distribution of primary accents, secondary accents, non-
accents, and monosyllabic words among the four metric
positions of the beat in the rap corpus. Syllables not on
List of Examples T ix
x T List of Examples
Example 7.8. The Roots, “How I Got Over” (2010, first verse, 1:09–
1:43): (a) groove segmentation of the flow; (b) instru-
mental streams, from top to bottom: organ, congas, drum
set; (c) new guitar heard in mm. 9–13; (d) more active
organ part, heard in mm. 15–16. 170
Example 7.9a. The Roots, “False Media” (2006, 0:39–1:23), flow tran-
scription of mm. 1–8, plus brass. Hairpins (<) show brass
crescendos, ◦ indicates brass attacks.
Example 7.9b. The Roots, “False Media” (2006, 0:39–1:23), flow
transcription of mm. 9–16, plus brass. ◦ indicates brass
attacks.
Example 7.10. The Roots, “Bread and Butter” (2006, second verse, 2:03–
3:07): (a) groove segmentation of the verse; (b) flow tran-
scription, mm. 1–8; (c) instrumental streams. From top
to bottom, first guitar part (heard throughout), second
guitar part (heard in intro at 0:22 and 0:31), bass of intro
and hook, bass of verses, and drums throughout. 174
Example 7.11. The Roots, “Long Time” (2006, 2:40–3:00): (a) flow tran-
scription with percussion. □ = bass drum; × = snare
drum; ◦ = tom; • = crash symbol. (b) Instrumental
streams (minus percussion) in “Long Time,” third verse.
Upper line transcribes guitar in mm. 5–15 and strings in
mm. 12–16. Lower line transcribes synth throughout and
bass in mm. 5–16. 176
Example 7.12. Tempo in seven live performances of The Roots, “You Got
Me.” Numbers refer to “Index” column of Table 7.1. 179
Example 7.13. The Roots, “You Got Me,” first verse, mm. 13–15: (a)
studio version (1999a, 81 bpm) and (b) live version on
VH1’s Soul Stage (2008, 85 bpm). 179
Example 7.14. Percentage of accents on 1mod2 positions vs. tempo in
seven performances of “You Got Me,” verse 1. 180
Example 7.15. The Roots, “You Got Me,” first verse, mm. 4–5: (a) studio
version featuring Erykah Badu (1999, 81 bpm); (b) VH1’s
Soul Stage featuring Kirk Douglas (2008, 85 bpm);
(c) AMEX Unstaged featuring John Legend and Estelle
(2010, 83 bpm); (d) Brooklyn Bowl featuring Soul Rebels
(2015, 88 bpm).
Example 7.16. The Roots, “You Got Me,” first verse, mm. 11–12: (a)
studio version featuring Erykah Badu (1999, 81 bpm): (b)
VH1’s Soul Stage featuring Kirk Douglas (2008, 85 bpm);
(c) AMEX Unstaged featuring John Legend and Estelle
(2010, 83 bpm); (d) Brooklyn Bowl featuring Soul Rebels
(2015, 88 bpm).
Example 8.1. Talib Kweli, “Get By” (2002, 0:10–1:06), lyrics of first
verse, segmented into two-measure groups. 184
List of Examples T xv
Without the work of countless artists, producers, and instrumentalists in hip hop’s
first forty years, there would be nothing to write about in this book. Their work
appeared prior to and enables my own.
I have been fortunate to be able to address rap music in the college classroom,
and I am grateful for the discussions I have had with students at Shenandoah
University and the University of Denver. Whatever I know about rap music post-
2005 is thanks to them, and their recommendations and enthusiasm keep me en-
gaged in teaching.
My colleagues Keith Salley, Kristin Taavola, Laurie McManus, and Jack
Sheinbaum provided much needed guidance at various stages of this work. Kyle
Adams showed me that music analysis of hip hop was viable and generously read
early versions of the book proposal. Chris Brody told me to let the scope of the
idea shape the scope of the work, which was the permission I needed to write a
book in the first place. Christopher William White wrote a very helpful signed
review of that proposal. I am also grateful for two anonymous reviews written for
Oxford University Press. The team at OUP, including Suzanne Ryan, Steven Rings,
Dorian Mueller, Andrew Maillet, Jamie Kim, Patti Brecht, and Emma Clements
has been unfailingly helpful and responsive throughout this process.
The ideas in Chapter 8 were presented at the 2016 meeting of the Society for
Music Theory’s Popular Music Interest Group, the 2017 meeting of the Rocky
Mountain Society for Music Theory, and the 2017 annual meeting of the Society
for Music Theory. At all these events, I received invaluable feedback and am espe-
cially grateful to Noriko Manabe, Jim Bungert, Robin Attas, and John Mattesich
for their input on that work. Nathaniel Condit-Schultz reviewed a related article
of mine in Empirical Musicology Review and provided commentary that I have
incorporated here. I have also had the privilege of presenting this work outside
of my “home discipline” of music theory, especially at the 2015 annual meeting of
the United States Chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular
Music and at the 2016 Dagstuhl Seminar on Computational Music Structure
Analysis. Participants at both these events provided generous and understanding
perspectives of non-specialists in music theory.
Though I’ve not met most of them, many authors, journalists, and podcasters
have been indispensable in my education in rap music and hip-hop studies, espe-
cially H. Samy Alim, Adam Bradley, Jon Caramanica, Jeff Chang, Martin Connor,
Zach Diaz, Michael Eric Dyson, Paul Edwards, Kyra Gaunt, Steven Gilbers, Mickey
xxii
xxii T Acknowledgments
Hess, Byron Hurt, Cheryl Keyes, Bakari Kitwana, KRS-One, Serge Lacasse, Felicia
Miyakawa, Chris Molanphy, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Halifu Osumare, Imani
Perry, James Braxton Peterson, Tricia Rose, Kelefa Sanneh, stic.man, and Justin
Williams.
Since 2017, I have spent time at Youth On Record, a Denver-based non-
profit that provides music education and access to recording studios to young
Coloradans. I am grateful for the many discussions I’ve had on making hip-hop
music with Brent Adams, Devin Urioste (Mace), and Jesus Rodriguez, an extraor-
dinary multitasker. I am in awe of what the young artists do there.
Lastly, my son Nadav’s birth was a wonderful reason to set this work aside for
a time, and my son Zev’s birth was a wonderful and motivating reason to finish it.
My wife Taliah Weber made possible them, this book, and everything else good
in my world.
I N T R O D U C T IO N
This book addresses the rhythm of the rapping voice, a phenomenon widely
termed “flow” by emcees and fans alike. As such, it extends and converses with
work by Adam Krims (2000); Felicia Miyakawa (2005); Serge Lacasse (2006);
Noriko Manabe (2006); Kyle Adams (2008, 2009, 2015a, 2015b); Martin Connor
(2011–2017); myself (Ohriner 2013, 2016); Paul Edwards (2015); Oliver Kautny
(2015); and Nathaniel Condit-Schultz (2016). Flow presents challenges to un-
derstanding rhythm not encountered anywhere else. On the one hand, flow is
rhythmic in the same way other music is rhythmic, including other music on a
rap track. But on the other hand, rapping differs from singing: the rhythm of flow
is related to the rhythm of speech. Listeners engage perceptual systems related to
both these rhythmic systems in understanding and interpreting the rhythm of the
rapping voice. While flow exists in a rhythmic space between music and speech,
existing theories of rhythm in these two domains, as well as the domain of lyric
poetry, are framed quite differently, addressing different features and making dif-
ferent assumptions. Key rhythmic concepts such as meter, periodicity, patterning,
and accent are treated independently in scholarship of music-and speech-rhythm,
and an analysis of flow must reconcile these theories. While examining flow
through these different lenses enhances our understanding of what emcees do,
the particularities of flow-as-rhythm also offer the promise of refining our un-
derstanding of rhythm more generally in popular music, speech, and the singing
voice. Moving that understanding forward is a primary aim of this book.
A second aim of this book is to bring the full force of the tools of computational
music analysis (CMA) to bear on questions of flow. CMA begins by representing
a large collection of music—rap flows, in this case—in a digital format called a
corpus. As I practice it, CMA then seeks to ground the assertions of humanistic
analysis and close reading in formal characterizations of the data. I view this sort
of analysis as an extension of Leonard B. Meyer’s distinction between style anal-
ysis and critical analysis (1973, p. 6). The former seeks to identify the “rules of the
game” operating in a style; the latter seeks to explain the individual choices of an
artist by identifying the range of possibilities available to her and speculating on
the reasoning that led her to one possibility over the others. The corpus approach
formally identifies this field of possibilities and can characterize the exception-
ality of artists’ choices given the tendencies of the style. Not only does the compu-
tational approach greatly expand the range of music that characterizes the style,
but it avoids a host of implicit biases and praxes in human analysis by forcing the
Mitchell Ohriner, Flow. Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190670412.001.0001
xxiv
xxiv T Introduction
undertaken and how the features are represented. Of particular importance is the
concept of “accent” in rap music and how it is patterned in and between verses. (I
use “accent” as a synonym for prominence or emphasis, not regional differences
in speech.) Chapter 3 details my conception of accent and how I automatically
annotate it in verses, drawing from independent and somewhat contradictory
theories of accent found in scholarship on the rhythm of speech and the rhythm
of music. The latter part of the chapter addresses my model of rhyme in similar
terms. Chapter 4 defines what I consider the most essential feature of flow: what
I term vocal groove, reiterated patterns of durations between accents. To direct
this concept of vocal groove at analyses of verses and tracks, I introduce a model
of “groovy listening” that segments a verse into a succession of grooves heard by
listeners with varying tolerance for inexactitude in patterning.
The second part of the book consists of three case studies that, drawing on
the model of Part I, address pressing questions in the theories of rhythm, meter,
and interaction through the work of three artists. Specifically, I explore how vocal
grooves relate to narratives in the lyrics of Eminem, how the rhythm of Black
Thought of the group The Roots interacts with the other instrumental streams
he flows over, and how the rhythm of speech and the rhythm of music are recon-
ciled (or not reconciled) in performances by Talib Kweli. Throughout, I argue that
the methods most appropriate to the analysis of these artists offer new avenues of
understanding to artists in related genres, or perhaps anyone who flows or sings
against a steady beat.
As may already be clear, the choice to use a computational approach means that for
some readers this work will be stridently formalist and culturally detached. These
critiques of music theory have been made for some time, though the stakes may be
higher for music-theoretical work on hip hop. In discussing the recent flourishing
of hip-hop scholarship, the self-described “journalist, activist, and political ana-
lyst” Bakari Kitwana (2017) aligns hip-hop scholarship with political advocacy:
Hip-hop studies should build on this tradition of Black Studies, which was rooted
in [making] a commitment, in the study, to advance the lifestyle of the people that
created the music and the culture. So returning back to those black and brown
communities, how can the study uplift the lifestyles of those people? That has to be
central in any study of hip hop, rather than simply folks writing dissertations and
advancing their own personal careers.2
2. This quote can be heard seven minutes into the broadcast. “Hip- hop” and “hip hop” are
both standard in the literature. I use the hyphen only with the adjectival form, for example, “hip-hop
scholarship.”
xxvi
xxvi T Introduction
I have been trained in music theory and music analysis, disciplines that remain
largely focused on repertoires whose composers are no longer living, and thus
the perspective that analysis might improve the lifestyles of artists was not one
I encountered in my training. Still, in my experience, engaging with unfamiliar
musical repertoires or unfamiliar scholarly techniques serves as training for en-
gaging with other people across lines of difference. But that is certainly not what
Kitwana is calling for, and this book will disappoint those who view scholarship
as a means of advancing broad policy goals. Ultimately, and regardless of my sup-
port for many of those goals, this is not an ambition I share. Instead, I seek to
answer what I believe are important questions about important music, even if
those questions are not encountered in everyday political or cultural discourse. In
my understanding of academic freedom, a scholar’s right to pursue social justice
through scholarship must be defended and strengthened, as must my own right
not to.
As this book is not focused on advocacy, neither is it focused primarily on the
relationship between African American culture and rap music. To be sure, the
voices of the “Hip-Hop Nation” permeate the book, from interviews with artists,
to fan comments on YouTube videos, to the work of hip-hop journalists. But this
book differs from scholarship that is focused mainly on the relation of rap music
to earlier black cultural forms, or the ways rap music operates in the wider culture
as a means of resistance. Previous authors have related rap music to expressive
forms such as the dozens (Wald 2012), the spoken word recitations of The Last
Poets (Kopano 2002), the games played by black girls such as double-dutch (Gaunt
2006), and the singing of West African griots (Keyes 2002).3 Other authors have
stressed how urban geography (Krims 2007) and social policies targeting or ex-
cluding specific communities gave rise to hip hop (Rose 1994). Like Krims (2003,
p. 3), I acknowledge that these matters of cultural meaning and history are crucial
in understanding rap music’s expressive power. I am grateful for the many titles
I have read addressing these topics, and I have incorporated them into this work
where relevant. But I also concur with Krims that “the vast majority of rap and
hip-hop scholarship . . . takes the music seriously but gives little, if any, attention
to its musical organization.” While studies of rap music presented at and in music-
theory conferences and journal articles have burgeoned in the last decade, Krims’s
statement remains true of hip-hop scholarship more broadly. In this regard, I echo
Joseph Schloss’s objectives, if not his methods:
It does no disservice to previous work to say that it has tended to focus on certain
areas (such as the influence of the cultural logic of late capitalism on urban iden-
tities, the representation of race in popular culture, etc.) to the exclusion of others
(such as the specific aesthetic goals that artists have articulated). Nor is it a criti-
cism to say that this is largely a result of its methodologies, which have, for the most
part, been drawn from literary analysis. We must simply note that there are blank
3. Sajnani (2013) offers important context on the similarities and dissimilarities between the
hip-hop emcee and the griot.
Introduction T xxvii
spaces and then set about to filling them in. Ethnography, I believe, is a good place
to start. (2004, p. 2)
xxviii T Introduction
Rose goes on to argue that rap music’s complexity was denied “by a mainstream
cultural adherence to the traditional paradigms of western classical music as the
highest legitimate standard for musical creation” (p. 65). As someone trained in
the analysis of that music, and as someone who spends a significant portion of his
working life teaching students the tools and methods necessary to analyze that
music, it is essential to consider how these “traditional paradigms” inform my
analyses of rap music. For starters, I do not consider them “the highest legitimate
standard for musical creation.” Music communities determine aesthetic values
by making music together. In most cases, the tools of classical music analysis are
unhelpful in understanding popular music generally and rap music specifically.
A great many of those tools are concerned with harmony and voice leading, the
ways independent musical lines relate to each other. Rap’s aesthetic ideal of “hard-
ness” and preference for harmonic dissonance diminishes the usefulness of these
tools. But what of the more abstract values of classical music?
The analysis of Western classical music is an analysis of texts, namely, musical
scores. These scores fix the details of a musical work into a single version that
can be analyzed. I, like many others, treat rap music, especially verses, as a fixed
text represented by a commercial recording. Others construe rap as an oral or
post-literary form for which textual analysis is inappropriate. It is true that some
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Les tramways, copiés sur les Américains, sont aussi de
fabrication allemande, et le parcours se paye par kilomètre à raison
de deux sous.
Quand le moment fut venu de prendre congé et de faire nos
adieux métalliques, nous eûmes quelque inquiétude.
— « Mira ! l’ama. Combien devons-nous ? Et ne salez pas trop la
note.
— Trois pesetas et demie chacun, dit-elle.
— Trois francs cinquante pour la chambre, c’est un peu cher.
Enfin, on ne vient pas tous les jours à Malaga, et l’on n’a pas
toujours d’aussi jolie chambrière. Et pour les repas ? »
Elle nous regarda toute surprise.
« Mais, s’exclama-t-elle, c’est trois francs cinquante pour le
tout. »
XXXIX
A TRAVERS L’ANDALOUSIE
« Quel plaisir peut avoir une excursion où l’on est toujours sûr
d’arriver, de trouver des chevaux prêts, un lit moelleux, un excellent
souper et toutes les aisances dont on peut jouir chez soi ? Ce qui
constitue le plaisir, c’est l’obstacle, la fatigue, le péril. »
C’est l’opinion de Gautier et je la partage. Il n’avait pourtant
traversé l’Espagne qu’en mule ou en diligence, mais la diligence
d’alors offrait de ces imprévus que ne donnent plus, à part
l’écrabouillement, les parcours en chemins de fer.
Enfin, dans l’horizon empourpré, nous distinguons une grande
tour rousse carrée, surmontée d’une lanterne à jour. C’est la Giralda.
Nous voici bientôt à Séville.
XL
SÉVILLE
Il ne faut pas quitter Séville sans rendre visite aux cigareras dont
les doigts effilés et agiles fournissent de puros et de papelitos tous
les fumeurs espagnols. Ne fumant pas, je laisse à de meilleurs juges
le soin de discuter le mérite des cigares sévillans pour ne m’occuper
que de celui des cigarières.
Elles sont plusieurs milliers — la surveillante qui nous ciceronait
donna le chiffre un peu exagéré, je crois, de sept mille deux cents —
entassées, c’est le mot juste, dans une succession de longues
galeries communiquant les unes aux autres par des rangées
d’arcades.
Matrones, jeunes femmes, fillettes, tout pêle-mêle dans une
promiscuité qui doit être fort dangereuse pour la tendre innocence.
Mais d’innocentes, je ne pense pas qu’il s’en trouve beaucoup.
Le comité des rosières trouverait difficilement le placement de ses
couronnes, et l’angélique Société pour la propagation de la pureté,
de Londres, y perdrait ses sermons et ses tracts. Il n’est pas besoin,
d’ailleurs, pour rouler des cigares, d’un certificat de vertu.
Aussi, beaucoup et de très jeunes, mariées sans doute en
expectative, se trouvaient dans cet état pénible à l’œil, que par
galanterie pour les dames nous appelons intéressant. Un plus grand
nombre allaitaient ou berçaient un poupon, tandis qu’un autre
marmot se traînait autour de leurs jupes. L’administration, humaine
et sage, tolère que ces jeunes mères gardent près d’elles l’enfant
qu’elles nourrissent. Payées à la tâche, elles peuvent travailler à leur
fantaisie sans léser en rien les intérêts de la fabrique. Je n’en ai vu
aucune fumer, mais j’en ai vu beaucoup dormir sans que les
surveillantes songeassent à troubler leur méridienne.
Malgré cette agglomération de femmes, de nourrices, de
marmaille, de filles aux dessous négligés, l’odeur est supportable,
car celle du tabac domine et couvre toutes les émanations
suspectes.
Pas de bruit. Interpellations et conversations à haute voix
défendues ; mais un petit bavardage, continu, incessant, emplit les
salles comme un bourdonnement d’abeilles.
Il faisait très chaud et presque toutes s’étaient mises à l’aise,
fichus rejetés, corsages ouverts. Quelques-unes même,
débarrassées de jupes trop lourdes, ne gardaient que
l’indispensable. Aussi, dès notre entrée dans chaque galerie,
jouissions-nous de la vue d’une collection des plus variées en
couleur et en forme de gorges andalouses, du blanc laiteux au rouge
brique, de la grenade au potiron.
Spectacle agréable et inattendu, mais de courte durée, car au fur
et à mesure que notre présence était signalée tout rentrait dans le
corsage ou disparaissait sous un châle hâtivement saisi, avec
accompagnement de petites mines effarouchées fort plaisantes à
voir, mais seulement pour la forme, comme nous dit un torero avec
qui nous avions fait connaissance et qui nous accompagnait, et
parce qu’il fallait, devant les contremaîtresses, garder les
convenances.
Ces cigareras, dont la plupart sont fort jolies, font les délices de
la garnison. C’est un sérail toujours ouvert aux heureux soldats
casernés à Séville, très prisés, comme le sont partout les soldats,
des filles du peuple.
Mais aux toreros la fleur de la corbeille ! Nous le vîmes bien à
l’engouement qu’excitait notre ami. Tous les cœurs pour lui, tous les
regards, tous les sourires. Son nom courait de bouche en bouche :
« Manuel Erreria ! Le matador ! Manuel Erreria ! »
Nous en étions jaloux. Lui, souriant, jouissait modestement de
son triomphe, sans morgue comme sans griserie, en homme habitué
aux ovations des cœurs. D’ailleurs, il avait son enamorada qu’il
énamourait lui-même et cela lui suffisait. Heureux garçon ! Il était
encore à l’âge où l’on croit à la constance !
Mais il ne faudrait pas se faire illusion et s’imaginer qu’en la ville
natale de don Juan on peut impunément suivre les traces du cynique
scélérat. S’il est facile de jeter son mouchoir dans ce harem agité, de
ramasser une Elvire dans le tas des jeunes amoureuses, il serait
dangereux, le choix fait, de donner une rivale à l’odalisque. Les
petites cigarières de Séville prennent l’amour au grand sérieux et ne
badinent pas avec lui. Gare à la vengeance ! Si elles ne vitriolent pas
le traître, comme quelques-unes de nos gourgandines, elles lui font
deux bonnes entailles sur la face pour en dégoûter les autres ; deux
entailles en croix à l’aide d’un navaja bien aiguisé, l’une au nom du
Christ et la plus profonde en celui de la Vierge Marie.
Le bourreau des cœurs ainsi stigmatisé ne peut plus que
difficilement continuer la série de ses conquêtes ; du moins s’il le
tente, ses victimes sont averties. Elles savent du premier coup d’œil
qu’elles ont affaire à un lâcheur.
Ces demoiselles, on le voit, ne sont pas toujours commodes. Il y
a deux ou trois ans, elles s’insurgèrent, je ne sais à quel propos, se
saisirent d’un surveillant détesté qui leur faisait la morale, lui mirent
culotte bas et le fessèrent de la belle façon. De mémoire de jésuite
on n’avait vu cinglade pareille. Les vieilles maîtresses d’école
d’Albion, expertes et cuirassées en la matière, en eussent elles-
mêmes frémi. Plus de cinquante enragées s’acharnèrent sur ce
malheureux derrière, que l’on dut arracher tout sanglant des mains
des ménades. Il fallut la troupe et deux jours de siège pour venir à
bout des petites furies.
La sainte Vierge est la patronne de cette armée de jupes, où
cependant, passé douze ans, il n’est plus guère de virginités. Dans
chaque salle et au milieu des vastes corridors de la manufacture,
elle est placée en belle niche, entourée de fleurs pieusement
renouvelées chaque jour.
Outre une lampe perpétuelle, les petites cigarières lui brûlent des
cierges et lui adressent d’étranges prières. Celles pourvues d’un
amant la supplient de le rendre éternellement fidèle, les novices de
leur en procurer un aimable et bien amoureux ; je ne parle pas des
plus ferventes qui ne cessent de répéter :
O Marie, conçue sans péché, fais-moi pécher sans concevoir.