SLANG
I. ORIGINS
Pigritia is a terrible word. It brings a whole world to life; la pègre, the criminal underworld, for which read theft, and la pégrenne, hell, for which read hunger.
And so idleness is a mother. She has a son, theft, and a daughter, hunger. Where are we right now? In the world of slang.
What is slang? It is both nation and idiom at the same time; it is theft in its two different species, people and language.
When, thirty-four years ago, the narrator of this grave and somber tale introduced a slang-speaking thief in the middle of a written work with the same aim as this one, there was amazement and uproar. “What! The very idea! Slang! But slang is ghastly! Why, it’s the language of convicts, of galleys, of jails, of all that is most abominable in society!” and so on and so forth.
We have never understood this kind of objection.
Since then, two powerful novelists, one of whom is a profound observer of the human heart, the other a fearless friend of the people, Balzac and Eugène Sue, having got crooks to talk in their native language just as the author of Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné had done in 1828, the same complaints were made. They kept repeating: “What are these writers trying to do to us with this revolting patois? Slang is vile! Slang makes you shudder!”
Who denies it? Of course it’s all true.
When it comes to probing a wound, or sounding an abyss, or a society, since when has it been a crime to go too far, to descend to the very depths? We have always thought that this was sometimes an act of courage, and at the very least a simple and useful activity, worthy of the sympathetic attention that duty accepted and performed deserves. Not to explore everything, not to study everything, to stop en route, what for? Stopping is up to the probe and not the prober.
Certainly, to go poking about among the dregs of the social order, where the ground ends and the muck begins, to ferret around in these muddy waters, to pursue, seize, and dash on the pavement, still throbbing, this abject idiom streaming filth thus exposed to the light of day, this pustulous vocabulary each word of which seems like an obscene ring of some monster of the slimy deep, is not an attractive task nor an easy one. Nothing is more disheartening than contemplating the awful teeming of slang, thus laid bare, by the light of the mind. It does indeed feel like a sort of horrible animal of the night that has just been dragged out of its cesspool. You think you see some hideous bush, alive and thorny, rustling, stirring, whipping around, trying to crawl back into the shadows, menacing and watching. This word here is like a claw, this other one is like a dead eye, bleeding; this phrase seems to pinch like a crab’s pincers. And all of it is alive with the awful vitality of things that have organized themselves in the midst of disorganization.
Now, since when has horror ruled out study? Since when has disease chased the doctor away? Just imagine a naturalist who refused to study the viper, the bat, the scorpion, the scolopendrid centipede, the tarantula, who chucked them back into their gloom with this: “Yeek! That’s so ugly!” The thinker who turned his back on slang would be like a surgeon who turned his back on an ulcer or a wart. He would be like a philologist hesitating to examine a linguistic act, a philosopher hestitating to scrutinize an act of humanity. For, those who don’t know it must be told, slang is both a literary phenomenon and a product of society all in one. What is slang, strictly speaking? Slang is the language of destitution.
Here, you might stop us; you might generalize the facts, which is sometimes a way of attenuating them; you might remind us that all trades, all professions, one might almost add all accidents in the social hierarchy and all forms of intelligence, have their slang. The shopkeeper who says: Montpellier available, Marseilles good quality; the stockbroker who says: carryover rate, premium, end current account; the gambler who says: a run of three sees you out, spades it is; the bailiff of the Norman isles who says: the enfeoffor who closes on his property cannot claim the fruits of this property during the seizure of the immovable property of the defaulting tenant; the vaudevillian who says: they baited the bear (for they booed the play); the actor who says: I was a flop; the philosopher who says: phenomenal triplicity; the whale hunter who says: there she blows, there she breaches; the phrenologist who says: amativeness, combativeness, secretiveness; the foot soldier who says: my clarinette (for his musket); the horseman who says: my Indian chicken (for his horse); the fencing master who says: tierce, quarte, break; the printer who says: let’s use boldface—all of them, printer, fencing master, horseman, foot soldier, phrenologist, whale hunter, philosopher, actor, vaudeville writer, bailiff, gambler, stockbroker, shopkeeper, all of them are talking slang. The painter who says: my dauber (for one of his art students); the notary who says: my puddle jumper (for his office boy); the wigmaker who says: my gofer (for his assistant); the cobbler who says: my tinker (for his journeyman), are talking slang. At a pinch and if you really want to push it, all the various ways of saying left and right are slang, from the sailor’s portside and starboard to the stagehand’s court side (stage left) and garden side (stage right) and the beadle’s Epistle side (of the altar) and Gospel side. There is the slang of stuck-up little mesdames just as there once was the slang of the Précieuses. If you like, you could say the Hôtel de Rambouillet meets the Cour des Miracles. Duchesses have their slang, too, as is attested by this sentence that occurs in a love letter written by a very great lady, and a very pretty one, of the Restoration: “You will find in such palaver a spate of reasons why I should want to fly the coop” (for: You will find in that gossip many reasons why I wish to free myself). Diplomatic ciphers are slang; the pontifical chancellery, in saying 26 for Rome, grkztntgzyal for dispatch and abfxustgrnogrkzutu XI for duke of Modena, talks slang. The doctors of the Middle Ages who, to say carrot, radish, and turnip, said: opoponach, perfroschinum, reptitalmus, dracatholicum angelorum, post-megorem, were talking slang. The sugar manufacturer who says: low-grade beet, cone, refined, crushed, lumps, molasses, coarse, unrefined, overrefined, loaf, this respectable manufacturer is talking slang. A certain school of criticism of twenty years ago used to say, “Half of Shakespeare is wordplay and puns”—and was thereby talking slang. The poet and the artist who, with profound significance, would label Monsieur de Montmorency a bourgeois for not being au fait with verse and statues, are talking slang. The classics academician who calls flowers Flora, fruit Pomona, the sea Neptune, love a flame, beauty charms, a horse a steed, the white or tricolor cockade the rose of Bellona, the tricorn hat the triangle of Mars—that classics academician is talking slang. Algebra, medicine, and botany all have their slang. The language employed on board ship, that admirable language of the sea, so perfect and so picturesque, spoken by Jean Bart, Duquesne, Suffren, and Duperré, and that blends with the whistling of the rigging, the noise of the bullhorns, the clang of the scuttling axes, with the rolling, with the wind, with the squalling, with the cannon, is one great heroic dazzling form of slang that is to the fierce unflinching slang of the underworld what the lion is to the jackal.
Granted. But, whatever you may say, this way of understanding the word slang is an extrapolation and one that not everybody would even accept. As for us, we hold to the old precise meaning of the word, which is circumscribed and specific, and we limit slang to slang. True slang, slang par excellence, if those two words can be coupled together, that immemorial slang that was once a whole realm to itself, is nothing else, we repeat, than the ugly, fretful, underhand, treacherous, venomous, cruel, sleazy, vile, profound, fatal language of misery. There is, at the extreme of all debasements and all personal disasters, one last form of misery that rebels and decides to do battle with the whole raft of happy facts and reigning rights; an appalling battle where, now cunning, now violent, at once morbid and wild, it attacks the social order through the pinpricks of vice and through the club blows of crime. For the requirements of this battle, misery has invented a language of combat and that language is slang.
To keep afloat and hold above oblivion, above the abyss, if only a fragment of whatever language man has spoken and which would otherwise be lost, that is to say one of the elements, good or bad, which civilization consists of and which makes it complex, is to extend the scope of social observation, it is to serve civilization itself. This service Plautus performed, whether he wanted to or not, by making two Carthaginian soldiers speak Phoenician; this service Molière performed by making so many of his characters speak Levantine9 and all sorts of dialects. Here objections pick up again: Phoenician, marvelous! Levantine, well and good! Even dialect, all right! Those are languages that have belonged to nations or to provinces; but slang? What’s the good of preserving slang? What’s the good of “keeping afloat” slang?
To that we will answer in a word. Certainly, if the language spoken by a nation or a province is worthy of interest, there is something still more worthy of attention and study and that is the language spoken by any form of misery.
That is the language spoken in France, for example, for more than four centuries now, not only by a form of misery, but by misery itself, all the possible human misery in the world.
And then, we insist, studying social deformities and infirmities and identifying them in order to cure them is not a job where choice is allowed. The historian of customs and ideas has no less austere a mission than the historian of events. The latter has the surface of civilization, the struggles for crowns, the births of princes, the marriages of kings, the battles, the assemblies, the great public men, the revolutions in broad daylight, all the externals; the other historian has the internals, the background, the common people who work, suffer, and wait, the downtrodden woman, the child in its death throes, the muted one-on-one wars, obscure ferocities, the prejudices, the accepted iniquities, the hidden repercussions of the law, the secret revolutions of souls, the indistinct quiverings of the multitudes, those dying of hunger, the barefoot, the bare-armed, the disinherited, the orphans, the wretched, and the vile, all the spineless worms that wander about in the dark. He has to descend, his heart full of charity and severity at the same time, like a brother and like a judge, right down to those impenetrable blockhouses where those who are bleeding and those who strike, those who are crying and those who curse, those who go without food and those who devour, those who endure wrong and those who do it, crawl and slither willy-nilly. Are the duties of these historians of hearts and souls lesser than those of the historians of external events? Do you think Dante has less to say than Machiavelli? Is the bottom of civilization, being deeper and darker, any less important than the top? Can you really know the mountain well if you don’t know anything about the cave?
We must say, however, in passing that from some of the above you might infer that there is a clear-cut division between the two classes of historian that does not, to our mind, exist. Nobody can be a good historian of the patent, visible, dazzling, and public life of peoples if he is not at the same time, to a certain extent, a historian of their deep and hidden life; and nobody can be a good historian of the inner life if he can’t manage to be, whenever necessary, a historian of the outer life. The history of customs and ideas bleeds into the history of events, and the other way round. They are two different orders of fact that match each other, that always follow on from one another and often generate each other. All the lines that Providence draws on a nation’s surface have their somber but distinct parallels down below, and all the convulsions down below produce upheavals on the surface. True history involving everything, the true historian gets involved with everything.
Man is not a circle with a single center; he is an ellipse with two focal points. Deeds are one, ideas the other.
Slang is nothing more nor less than a changing room where language, having some dirty deed to do, disguises itself. It puts on word-masks and rag-metaphors.
In the process it turns ugly.
You can hardly recognize it. Is this really the French language, the great language of humanity? There it is ready to take to the stage and give crime its cues, apt to play every role in the repertoire of evildoing. It no longer walks, it hobbles; it limps on the crutch of the Cour des Miracles, a crutch that can metamorphose into a club; it goes by the name of vagrancy; all the specters, its dressers, have tarted it up with makeup; it drags itself along and rears its ugly head, twin attributes of the reptile. It is now primed for any role, made seedy by the forger, tarnished by the poisoner, blackened with soot by the arsonist; and the murderer applies its rouge.
When you listen, from the side of honest folk, at the gate of society, you catch the dialogue of those who are outside. You make out questions and answers. You pick up, without understanding it, a hideous murmur that sounds almost like the human voice but is closer to some kind of howling than to speech. This is slang. The words are deformed, stamped with some indescribable and fantastical bestiality. You think you are hearing hydras talking.
This is the unintelligible in the dark. It screeches and it whispers, rounding off the dying light with an enigma. It is dark in misfortune, it is darker still in crime; these two darknesses together compose slang. Obscurity in the atmosphere, obscurity in deeds, obscurity in voices. Abominable toad language that comes and goes, hops, crawls, dribbles, and wriggles monstrously in that endless gray mist made of rain, night, hunger, vice, lies, injustice, nakedness, suffocation, and winter, high noon for the outcast.
Let’s have compassion for those so chastised. Alas! Who are we ourselves? Who am I, I who am talking to you? Who are you, you who are listening to me? Where have we come from? And can we be sure we didn’t do anything before we were born? The earth is not unlike a jail. Who knows if man is not an ex-convict of divine justice?
Look closely at life. It is so made that you can sense punishment everywhere.
Are you what is known as a lucky man? Well, you are sad every day. Every day has its great chagrin or its small worry. Yesterday you were trembling for the health of someone dear to you; today you fear for your own; tomorrow it will be anxiety over money, the day after tomorrow the vicious attack of some slanderer, the day after that, the misfortune of a friend; then the weather, then something broken or lost, then some pleasure that both your conscience and your spinal column hold against you; another time, the course of public affairs. Without counting all the heartaches. And on it goes. One cloud disperses, another forms. Scarcely one day in a hundred of unbounded joy and unbounded sunshine. And you are among the happy few! As for other men, stagnant night is upon them.
Thoughtful people rarely use the terms, the happy and the unhappy. In this world, antechamber of another, evidently, there are no happy people.
The true division of humanity is this: those filled with light and those filled with darkness.
To reduce the number of those filled with darkness, to increase the number of those filled with light, that is the goal. That is why we cry: education! knowledge! science! To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable spelled out sparkles.
But when we say light we do not necessarily say joy. We suffer in the light; too much of it burns. Flames are inimical to wings. To burn without ceasing to fly, that is the miracle of genius.
When you learn finally to know and when you learn finally to love, you will suffer still. The day begins in tears. Those filled with light weep, if only over those filled with darkness.
II. ROOTS
Slang is the language of those filled with darkness.
Thought is moved in its gloomiest depths, social philosophy is spurred on to its most poignant meditations, in the presence of this enigmatic dialect at once blighted and defiant. It is here that chastisement is visible. Every syllable in it seems to be marked. The words of the vernacular appear in it as though wrinkled and withered under the red-hot brand of the executioner. Some of them seem still to be smoking. A particular phrase hits you like the suddenly bared shoulder of a thief tattooed with fleurs-de-lis. Ideas almost refuse to allow themselves to be expressed by these ex-convict nouns. Its metaphors are sometimes so shameless you can feel they have been in shackles.
Yet, in spite of all that and because of all that, this strange patois is entitled to its pigeonhole in that great impartial filing cabinet, where there is room for the oxidized farthing as well as the gold medal, and which we call literature. Slang, whether we like it or not, has its syntax and its poetry. It is a language. If, by the deformity of certain terms, we recognize that it has been chewed up by the outlaw Mandrin, by the splendor of certain metonyms we can feel it has been spoken by Villon.
This line, so exquisite and so celebrated:
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?
But where are the snows of yore?
is a line of slang. Antan—ante annum—is a word from the argot of Thunes that meant the past year and by extension the past. At the time of the departure of the great chain gang of 1827, thirty-five years ago, you could still read in one of the dungeons of Bicêtre this maxim dug into the wall with a nail by a king of Thunes sentenced to the galleys: “Les dabs d’antan trimaient siempre pour la pierre du Coësre”—The old men of yore always slaved away for the stone of the Grand Coësre. Which means: In the past the kings always went off to be crowned. In the mind of that particular king, the crown was jail.
The word décarrade, which expresses the departure at a gallop of a heavy carriage, is attributed to Villon and is worthy of him. This word, which blazes along on all four feet, sums up in masterly onomatopoeia the whole of La Fontaine’s wonderful line:
Six forts chevaux tiraient un coche.
Six strong horses pulled a coach.
From a purely literary point of view, few studies could be more fascinating and more fruitful than the study of slang. It is a whole language within a language, a sort of sickly excrescence, an unwholesome graft that has produced a vegetation of its own, a parasite with roots in the old Gallic trunk and whose sinister foliage creeps over the whole of one side of the language. This is what we might call the primary aspect, the vulgar side of slang. But, for those who study language as it should be studied, meaning, the way geologists study the earth, slang appears as a veritable alluvium. If you dig far enough, below popular old French, you find in slang Provençal, Spanish, Italian, Levantine, that language of the Mediterranean ports, English and German, the three Romance languages—French, Italian, and Norman—Latin, and, finally, Basque and Celtic. A deep-rooted and bizarre formation. A subterranean edifice built together by all the miserable outcasts. Every accursed race has laid down its deposit, every torment has dropped its stone, every heart has given its pebble. A host of souls, evil, vile, or bitter, who have passed through life and vanished into eternity are there, almost intact and in a way still visible in the form of a monstrous word.
Would you like some Spanish? The old gothic slang is crawling with it. There is boffette, bellows, which comes from bofeton; vantane, window (later vanterne), which comes from ventana; gat, cat, which comes from gato; acite, oil, which comes from aceite. Would you like some Italian? There is spade, sword, which comes from spada; carvel, boat, which comes from caravella. Would you like some English? There is bichot, bishop; raille, spy, which comes from rascal, rascalion, rapscallion, rogue; pilche, case, which comes from pilcher, sheath. Would you like some German? There is caleur, waiter, Kellner; hers, master, Herzog (duke). Would you like some Latin? There is frangir, to break, frangere; affurer, to rob, fur; cadène, chain, catena. There is a word that crops up in every language on the Continent with a sort of power and mysterious authority and that is the word magnus; Scotland turns it into mac, which designates the chief of the clan. MacFarlane, Mac-Callummore, the great Farlane, the great Callummore. (It should be noted, though, that mac means son in Celtic.) Slang turns mac into meck and later, meg, meaning God. Would you like some Basque? There is gahisto, devil, which comes from gaïztoa, bad; sorgabon, good night, which comes from gabon, good evening. Would you like some Celtic? There is blavin, handkerchief, which comes from blavet, gushing water; ménesse, woman (in a bad sense), which comes from meinec, full of stones; barant, stream, from baranton, fountain; goffeur, locksmith, from goff, blacksmith; guédouze, death, which comes from guenn-du, white-black. Would you like some history, finally? Slang calls the coins known as écus les maltaises, or Malteses, in a nod to the coinage that was current on the galleys of Malta.
Apart from the philological origins we just mentioned, slang has other even more natural roots that spring, so to speak, from the very mind of man:
First, the direct creation of words. This is where the mystery of languages lies. To paint with words that have, we know not how or why, images. This is the primitive foundation of every human language, what we might call the bedrock. Slang is riddled with words of this kind, words that are immediate, out-and-out inventions from we know not where nor by whom, without etymologies, without analogies, without derivations, solitary words, barbarous, sometimes hideous, that have a rare expressive power, that are alive. Executioner, le taule; forest, le sabri; fear, flight, taf; lackey, le larbin; general, prefect, minister, pharos; the devil, le rabouin. Nothing could be stranger than these words that both conceal and reveal. Some of them, le rabouin, for instance, are at once grotesque and terrible, and conjure up a colossal grimace.
Second, metaphor. The thing about a language that wants to say everything and to hide everything is that it abounds in images. Metaphor is a riddle in which the thief planning a job, the prisoner plotting a breakout, take refuge. No idiom could be more metaphoric than slang. Dévisser le coco, to unscrew the coconut—wring someone’s neck; tortiller, to wolf down—to eat; être gerbé, to cop it—to be sentenced; un rat, a rat—a bread thief; il lansquine, to pelt down daggers—to rain, a striking age-old image that, in a way, bears its own date with it, assimilating the long slanting lines of rain with the thick angled pikes of the lansquenets, and capturing in a single word the popular metonymy: it’s raining pitchforks. Sometimes, as slang passes from the first phase to the second, words pass from their wild and primitive state to the state of metaphor. The devil ceases to be le rabouin and becomes le boulanger, the baker, he who puts into the oven. This is wittier, but less grand; something like Racine after Corneille, like Euripides after Aeschylus. Certain slang phrases that belong to both generations and are both barbaric and metaphoric at once resemble phantasmagoria. Les sorgueurs vont sollicer des gails à la lune, the night owls are going to snitch nags by the moon—the rustlers are going to steal horses when night comes. This rolls past the mind’s eye like a bevy of ghosts. It is hard to tell what we see.
Third, expediency. Slang lives off the language. It does whatever it likes with it, dips into it at random and is often content, when the need arises, to summarily and grossly distort it. Now and then, with common words thus deformed and jumbled up with words of pure slang, colorful expressions are created in which you can feel the melding of the two preceding elements, direct invention and metaphor: Le cab jaspine, je marronne que la roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabri, the mutt’s yapping, I have a hunch the Pantin buggy’s slogging through the scrub—the dog is barking, I suspect the Paris diligence is passing through the woods. Le dab est sinve, la dabuge est merloussière, la fée est bative, the old man’s thick, the old lady’s slippery, the sprite’s easy on the eye—the bourgeois gentleman is stupid, his lady wife is cunning, the daughter is pretty. Most often, to throw unwelcome listeners off track, slang is content to stick a sort of ignoble tail on all the words of the language, indiscriminately, such as an ending in -aille, -orgue, -iergue, or -uche. Accordingly: Vousiergue trouvaille bonorgue ce gigotmuche? Do you find this leg of lamb good? A question put by Cartouche to a prison gatekeeper in order to ascertain whether the sum offered for an escape was acceptable to him. The -mar ending is a fairly recent addition.
Being the idiom of corruption, slang is corrupted fast. On top of this, as it always seeks to conceal itself, as soon as it feels understood it transforms itself. In contrast to all other vegetation, every ray of light that falls on it kills what it touches. And so slang goes on decomposing and recomposing itself endlessly; a murky and swift labor that never stops. It covers more ground in ten years than the official language does in ten centuries. And so le larton, bread, becomes le lartif; le gail, nag, becomes le gaye; la fertanche, straw, la fertille; le momignard, brat, le momacque; les figues, clothes, les frusques; la chique, church, l’égrugeoir; le colabre, neck, le colas. The devil is first gahisto, then le rabouin, then le boulanger; the priest is le ratichon, little teeth-gnasher, then le sanglier, wild boar; a dagger is le vingt-deux, twenty-two (meaning watch out!), then le surin, knife, then le lingre, gold ingot; the police are railles, the crew, then roussins, partners in crime, then rousses, the fuzz, then marchands de lacets, lace merchants, then coqueurs, squealers, then cognes, coppers; the executioner is le taule, the slammer man, then Charlot, then l’atigeur, a man who goes too far, then le becquillard, the man with the crutches. In the seventeenth century, se battre, to have a fight, was se donner du tabac, to give each other tobacco—a hammering; in the nineteenth century, it has become se chiquer la gueule, to chew each other’s mug. Twenty different versions have come and gone between these two extremes. Cartouche could be talking Hebrew to Lacenaire. All the words in this language are perpetually on the run like the people who utter them.
Yet, from time to time, and because of this very movement, the old slang reappears and becomes new again. It has its main centers where it holds steady. The Temple preserved the slang from the seventeenth century; Bicêtre, when it was still a prison, preserved the slang of Thunes. You could hear there the -anche ending of old Thuners. Boyanches-tu (bois-tu), are you drinking? Il croy-anche (il croit), he believes. But perpetual movement still remains the rule.
If the philosopher manages to set aside a moment to observe this language that is endlessly evaporating, he lapses into painful yet useful meditation. No study is more effective and more fruitful in instruction. There is not one metaphor, not one etymological derivation of slang that does not contain a lesson. Among these men, battre, to beat but also to whip up, means feindre, to feign; you whip up an illness; ruse is their strong point.
To them the idea of man is inseparable from the idea of the dark. Night is called la sorgue; man, l’orgue. Man is a derivation of night.
These people have acquired the habit of regarding society as an atmosphere that kills them, like a deadly force, and they talk about their liberty as you would talk about your health. A man arrested is malade, sick, a man condemned is mort, dead.
The most terrible thing for the prisoner within the four stone walls that entomb him is a sort of icy chastity; he calls the dungeon, le castus, the castrator. In that funereal place, life outside always appears in its most deliriously happy aspect. The prisoner has iron shackles on his feet; perhaps you assume he dreams about how you walk with your feet? No, he dreams about how you dance with your feet; and so, if he somehow manages to saw through his irons, his first thought is that now he can dance and so he calls the saw a bastringue, a sleazy dance hall. A name is a centre, center—which is a profound association for you. A bandit has two heads, one reasons out his actions and guides him all his life, the other is what sits on his shoulders the day he dies, when it is on the block; he calls the head that counsels crime la sorbonne, and the head that expiates it la tronche, noggin. When a man has nothing left but the rags on his back and the vices in his heart, when he has reached that twin degradation, material and moral, that characterizes the two accepted meanings of the word gueux, beggar, he is ripe for crime; he is like a well-sharpened knife; he has a double edge, his distress and his malice; and so slang does not say “a beggar”; it says a réguisé, which sounds like a pun on aiguisé, sharpened. What is jail? An inferno of damnation, a hell. And so the convict is a fagot, a bit of firewood. Lastly, what name do felons give prison? Le collège, college. A whole penitentiary system could spring from that word.
The thief, too, has his cannon fodder, robbable material—you, me, whoever happens to be passing by, le pantre, sucker, the ordinary everyman. (Pan, everybody.)
Would you like to know where most prison songs come from, those refrains known in the specialized vocabulary as les lirlonfa? Then listen to this:
There used to be a great long cellar at Châtelet in Paris.
This cellar was eight feet below the level of the Seine. It had neither windows nor ventilators, the only opening was the door; people could go in, but not air. This cellar had a stone vault for a ceiling and ten feet of mud for a floor. It had been paved with flagstones, but under the oozing waters the flagstones had rotted and cracked. Eight feet above the floor, a massive beam went from one end of this underground passage to the other; from this beam, at regular intervals, hung chains three feet long, and on the end of these chains were collar shackles. Men condemned to the galleys were put in this cellar until the day of their departure for Toulon. They were shoved under this beam where each one of them had his iron brace swinging in the darkness, waiting for him. The chains, those hanging arms, and the collar shackles, those open hands, grabbed these poor bastards by the neck. They were riveted in and they were left there. The chain was too short, they could not lie down. They remained immobile in this cellar, in that pitch blackness, under that beam, very nearly hung by the neck, forced to make unbelievable efforts to reach the bread or the pitcher, the vault on top of their heads, mud up to their knees, their excrement running down their legs, shattered by exhaustion, sagging at the hips and the knees, hanging on to the chain by their hands for a rest, unable to sleep except standing, and woken up at every instant by the stranglehold of the iron collar; some did not wake up. To eat, they dragged their bread, which was thrown in the mud at their feet, up their shinbone with their heel until they could reach it with their hand. How long were they left like this? A month, two months, six months sometimes; one stayed a year. It was the antechamber to the galleys. You were put there for stealing a hare from the king. In this hell-like tomb, what did they do? What can be done in a tomb, they died, and what can be done in a hell, they sang. For when you have no more hope, you still have song. In the waters off Malta, whenever a galley was approaching, you could hear the singing before you heard the oars. The poor poacher Survincent, who had been through the cellar prison of Châtelet, used to say: “It was the rhymes that kept me going.” Useless poetry. What good is rhyme? It is in this cellar that nearly all the slang songs were born. It is from this dungeon of the Grand-Châtelet of Paris that the melancholy refrain of the galleys of Montgomery comes: “Timaloumisaine, timoulamison.” Most of these songs are mournful, a few of them are gay; one of them is tender:
Icicaille est le théâtre
Du petit dardant.
Thisaway’s the theater
Of Cupid, the little pricker
Try as you might, you will never annihilate that eternal remnant of the heart of man, love.
In this world of dark deeds, you keep your secrets to yourself. A secret is something anyone can have. A secret, for these poor bastards, is the unity that serves as a basis for union. To violate a secret is to tear something of himself from each member of this savage community. To inform on someone, in the vibrant language of slang, is known as manger le morceau, to eat the morsel, the pound of flesh. As though the informer pulled off a bit of the substance of all and fed himself with a morsel, a pound, of the flesh of each.
What is it to get a slap in the face? The ordinary everyday metaphor answers: voir trente-six chandelles, to see thirty-six candles—to see stars. Here slang intervenes and sums up: Chandelle, camoufle. In so doing, this idiomatic language makes camouflet, candlestick, a synonym for soufflet, a slap in the face. And so, through a sort of trickling upward from the bottom to the top, with the help of metaphor, that incalculable pathway, slang climbs from the cavern to the academy; and when Poulailler says, “J’allume ma camoufle,” I light my candle, he makes Voltaire write, “Langleviel La Beaumelle6 mérite cent camouflets,” Langleviel La Beaumelle deserves a hundred slaps in the face.
Any dig into slang means discovery every step of the way. Studying and deepening our understanding of this strange idiom leads us to the mysterious point of intersection between regular society and the society of the damned.
Slang is the word made convict.
That the thinking principle of man can be trampled so low underfoot, that it can be dragged down to the pits and choked there by the obscure tyrannies of fate, that it can be tethered there we know not how at that brink of disaster—this is appalling.
O poor thinking of the down-and-out!
Alas! Will no one come to the rescue of the human soul in this shadowland? Is its destiny to wait forever there for the mind, the liberator, the towering rider of the pegasuses and the hippogriffs, the fighter the color of dawn who descends from out of the blue between two wings, the radiant knight in shining armor of the future? Will it always call out in vain for the lance of light of the ideal to rescue it? Is it condemned to the horror of hearing Evil approaching through the denseness of the abyss and of glimpsing, closer and closer to it, beneath the hideous water, that draconian head, that great maw chomping on foam, that serpentine undulation of claws, swellings, and rings? Must it stay there, without a glimmer of light, without a glimmer of hope, delivered up to that awful approach, dimly sniffed out by the monster, shaking, frantic, wringing its hands, forever chained to the rock of night, somber Andromeda, white and naked in the darkness!