I. ORIGIN
PIGRITIA is a terrible word.
It engenders a world, la pegre, read robbery, and a hell, la pegrenne,
read hunger.
So idleness is a mother.
She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger.
Where are we now? In argot.
What is argot? It is at the same time the nation and the idiom, it is robbery under its two as-
pects; people and language.
When thirty-four years ago the narrator of this grave and gloomy story introduced into a work
written with the same aim as the present a robber talking argot, there was amazement and
clamour. "What! how! argot! But argot is hideous! why, it is the language of convicts, of the
galleys, of the prisons, of all that is most abominable in society!" etc., etc., etc.
We have never comprehended this sort of objection.
Since then two powerful. romancers, one of whom is a profound observer of the human heart, the
other an intrepid friend of the People, Balzac and Eugene Sue, having made
bandits talk in
their natural tongue as the author of Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamne had done in 1828, the same
outcry was made. It was repeated: "What do these writers mean by this revolting patois? Argot
is horrid! argot makes us shudder!"
Who denies it? Undoubtedly.
Where the purpose is to probe a wound, an abyss, or a society, since when
has it been a crime to
descend too far, to go to the botton? We had always thought that it was
sometimes an act of
courage and at the very least a simple and useful act, worthy of the sympathetic attention which
is merited by a ditty accomplished and a cepted. Not explore the whole, not study the whole,
stop by the way, why? To stop is the part of the lead and not of the leadsman.
Certainly, to go into the lowest depths of the social order, where the
earth ends and the mire
begins, to search in those thick waters to pursue, to seize and to throw
out still throbbing u-
pon the pavement this abject idiom which streams with filth as it is thus
drawn to the light,
this pustulous vocabulary in which each word seems a huge ring from some monster of the slime
and the darkness, is neither an attractive task nor an easy task. Nothing is more mournful
than to contemplate thus bare, by the light of thought, the fearful crawl of argot. It seems
indeed as if it were a species of horrible beast made for the night, which
has just been drag-
ged from its cesspool. We seem to see a frightful living and bristling bush which trembles,
moves, quivers, demands its darkness again, menaces. and stares. This word resembles a fang,
that a quenched and bleeding eye; this phrase seems to move like the claw of a crab. All this
is alive with the hideous vitality of things which are organised in disorganisation.
Now, since when has horror excluded study? Since when has the sickness driven away the physi-
cian? Imagine a naturalist who should refuse to study the viper, the bat, the scorpion, the
scolopendra, the tarantula, and who should cast them back into their darkness,
saying: Oh!
how ugly they are! The thinker who should turn away from argot would be
like a surgeon who
should turn away from an ulcer or a wart. He would be a philologist hesitating
to examine a
fact of language, a philosopher hesitating to scrutinise a fact of humanity.
For, it must in-
deed be said to those who know it not, argot is both a literary phenomenon and a social result.
What is argot; properly speaking? Argot is the language of misery.
Here we may be stopped; facts may be generalised. which is sometimes a method of extenuating
them; it may be said that all trades, all professions, one might almost add all the accidents
of the social hierarchy and all the forms of the intellect, have their argot. The merchant who
says: merchantable London stout, fine quality Marseillles, the stockbroker who says: seller sixty,
dividend off, the gambler who says: I'll see you ten better, will you fight the tiger? the hui-
ssier of the Norman Isles who says: the enfeoffor restricted to his lands cannot claim the
fruits of these grounds during the heritable seisen of the renouncer's fixtures, the philosoph-
er who says: phenomenal triplicity, the whale hunter who says: there she blows, there she
breaches, the phrenologist who says: amativeness, combativeness, secretiveness, the fencing
master who says: tierce, guarte, retreat, the compositor who says: a piece of pie, all, composi-
tor, fencing-master, phrenologist, whale-hunter, philosopher, huissier, gambler, stockbroker,
merchant, speak argot. The cobbler who says: my kid, the shopkeeper who says: my counter-
jumper, the barber who says: my clerk, the printer who says: my devil, speak argot. In strictness,
and if we will be absolute, all the various methods of saying right and
left, the sailor's larboard
and starboard, the machinist's court side and garden side, the beadle's Epistle side and Gospel
side, are argot. There is an argot of the affected as there was the argot of
the Preciuses.
The Hotel de Rambouill bordered to some extent upon the Cour des Miracles.
There is an argot
of duchesses, witness this phrase written in a love-letter by a very great lady and a very
pretty woman of the Restoration: "You will find in these postings a multitude of reasons why
I should litertise."Diplomatic ciphers are argot; the Pontifical Chancellory,
in saying 26
for Rome, grkantryal for packet, and able:argent,. grkeu In xi for Duke of Modena, speaks ar-
got. The physicians of the Middle Ages who, to say carrot, radish, and turnip,
said: opoponach,
perfroschinunt, reptitalmus, dracatholieum angelorm postmegortnn, spoke argot. The
sugar manufacturer who says: "Rectified, loaf, clarified, crushed, lump, molasses, mixed com-
mon, burned, caked," this honest manufacturer talks argot. A certain critical school of twenty
years ago which said: "The half of Shakespeare is plays upon words and puns"--spoke argot.
The poet and the artist who, with deep significance, will descnbe M. de Montmorency as "bour-
geois, if he is not familiar with poetry and statues, speak argot. The classic Academician who
calls flowers Flora, fruits Pomona, the sea Neptune, love the fires, beauty the attractions,
a horse a courser, the white or the tricoloured cockade the rose of Bellona, the three-corn-
ered hat the triangle of Mars, the classic-Academician speaks argot. Algebra, medicine, botany,
have their argot. The language which is employed afloat, that wonderful language of the sea,
so coffiplete and so picturesque, which was spoken by Jean Bart, Duquesne, Suffren, and Duperre,
which mingles with the whistling of the rigging, with the sound of the speaking trumpet, with
the clash of the boarding-axe, with the rolling, with the wind, with the squall, with the can-
non, is all heroic and splendid argot which is to the savage argot of crime what the lion is
to the jackal.
Undoubtedly. But, whatever can be said about it, this method of understanding the word argot
is an extension, which even people in general will not admit. As for us, we continue to this
word its old acceptation, precise, circumscribed, and definite and we limit argot to argot.
The real argot, the argot par excellence, if the words can he joined, the immemorial argot
which was a realm, is nothing more nor less, we repeat, than the ugly,
restless, sly, treach-
erous, venomous, cruel, crooked, vile, deep, deadly language of misery.
There is, at the ex-
tremity of all debasements and all misfortunes, a last wretchedness which revolts and deter-
mines to enter into a struggle against the whole mass of fortunate things and reigning rights;
a hideous struggle in which, sometimes by fraud, sometimes by force, at the same time sickly
and fierce, it attacks social order with pin-thrusts through vice and with club strokes through
crime. For the necessities of this struggle, misery has invented a language of battle which
is argot.
To buoy up and to sustain above oblivion, above the abyss, were it only a fragment of any
language whatever which man his spoken and which would otherwise be lost, that is to say one
of the elements, good or evil, of which civilisation is composed or with which it is compli-
cated, is to extend the data of social observation; it is to serve civilisation itself. This
service, Plautus rendered, intentionally or unintentionally, by making two Carthaginian sol-
diers speak Phccnician; this service Moliere rendered, by making so many of his personages
speak Levantine and all manner of patois. Here objections are revived; the Pheenician, per-
fectly right! the Levantine, well and good I even patois, so be it! these are languages which
have belonged to nations or provinces; but argot? what is the use of preserving argot? what
is the use of "buoying up" argot?
To this we shall answer but a word. Certainly, if the language which a nation or a province
has spoken is worthy of interest, there is something still more worthy of attention and study
in the language which a misery has spoken.
It is the language which has been spoken in France, for example, for more than four centuries,
not merely by a particular form of misery, but by misery, every possible human misery.
And then, we insist, the study of social deformities and infirmi-ties and their indication in
order to cure them, is not a work in which choice is permissible. The historian of morals and
ideas has a mission no less austere than that of the historian of events. The latter has the
surface of civilisation, the struggles of the crowns, the births of princes,
the marriages of
kings, the battles, the assemblies, the grand public men, the revolutions
in the sunlight, all
the exterior; the other historian has the interior, the foundation, the
people who work, who
suffer, and who wait, overburdened woman. agonising childhood. the dumb wars of man with man,
the obscure ferocities, the prejudices, the established iniquities, the
subterranean reactions
of the law, the secret evolutions of souls, the vague shudderings of the multitudes, the star-
ving, the barefooted, the bare-armed, the disinherited, the orphans. the unfortunate and the
infamous, all the goblins that wander in darkness. He must descend with
a heart at the same
time full of charity and of severity, as a brother and as a judge, to those impenetrable case-
mates where crawl in confusion those who bleed and those who strike, those who weep and those
who curse, those who fast and those who devour, those who suffer wrong, and those who commit
it. Have these historians of hearts and souls lesser duties than the historians
of exterior
facts? Do you think that Dante has fewer things to say than Machiavelli? Is the
under-world
of civilisation, because it is deeper and more gloomy, less important than the upper? Do we
really know the mountain when we do not know the cavern?
We must say, however, by the way, from some words of what precedes, a decided
separation
between the two classes of historians might be inferred, which does not exist in our mind.
No man is a good historian of the open, visible, signal, and public life
of nations, if he is
not, at the same time, to a certain extent, the historian of their deeper and hidden life;
and no man is a good historian of the interior if he know not to be, whenever there is neat,
the history of the exterior. The history of morals and ideas interpenetrate the history of
events, and vice versa. They are two orders of 'different facts which answer to each other,
which are always linked with and of ten produce each other. All the lineaments which Provi-
dence traces upon the surface of a nation have their dark but distinct
parallels, in the
bottom, and all the convulsions of the bottom produce upheavals at the
surface. True history
dealing with all, the true historian deals with all.
Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with two foci.
Facts are one,
ideas are she other.
Argot is nothing more nor less than a wardrobe in which language, having some bad
deed to do,
disguises itself. It puts on word-masks and metaphoric rags.
In which way it becomes horrible.
We can hardly recognise it. Is it really the French tongue, the great human
tongue? There it
is ready to enter upon the scene and give the cue to crime, and fitted
for all the employments
of the repertory, of evil. It walks no more, it hobbles; It limps upon
the crutch of the Cour
des Miracles, a crutch which can be metammorphosed into a club; it gives itself the name of
vagrancy; all the spectres, its dressing-maids, have begrimed it; it drags itself along and
rears its head, the two characeteristics of the reptile. It is apt for all parts henceforth,
made squint-eyed by the forger, verdigrised by the poisoner, charcoaled by the incendiary's
soot; and the murderer puts on his red.
When we listen, on the side of honest people, at the door of society, we overhear the dia-
logue of those who are without. We dim distinguish questions and answers. We perceive, without
understanding, a hideous murmur, sounding almost like human tones, but nearer a howling than
speech. This is argot. The words are uncouth, and marked by an indescribably fantastic
beastliness. We think we hear hydras talking.
It is the unintelligible in the dark. It gnashes and it whispers, completing
twilight by en-
igma. It grows black in misfortune, it grows blacker still in crime these
two bladmesses amal-
gamated make Argot. Darkness in the atmosphere, darkness in the deeds, darkness in the voices.
Appalling toad brorage, which comes and goes, hops, crawls, drivels, and moves monstrously in
that boundless grey mist made up of rain, night, hunger, vice, lying, injustice, nakedness,
asphyxia, and winter, the broad noonday of the miserable.
Let us have compassion on the chastened. Who, alas! are we ourselves? who am I who speak to
you? who are you who listen to me? whence do we come? and is it quite certain
that we did no-
thing before we were born? The earth is not without resemblance to a jail? Who knows that man
is not a prisoner of Divine Justice.
Look closely into life. It is so constituted that we feel punishment everywhere.
Are you what is called a fortunate man? Well, you are sad every day. Each day has its great
grief or its little care. Yesterday you were troubling for the health of one who is dear to
you, to-day you fear for your own; tomorrow it will he an anxiety about
money, the next day
the slanders of a calumniator, the day after the misfortune of a friend; then the weather,
then something broken or lost, then a pleasure for which you are reproached
by your conscience
or your vertebral column reproaches you; another time, the course of public affairs. Without
counting heart troubles. And so on. One cloud is dissipated, another gathers. Hardly one day
in a hundred of unbroken joy and of unbroken sunshine. And you are of that small number who
are fortunate! As to other men, stagnant night is upon them.
Reflecting minds make little use of this expression: the happy and the unhappy. In this world,
the vestibule of another evidently, there is none happy.
The true division of humanity is this: the luminous and the dark.
To diminish the number of the dark, to increase the number of the luminous, behold the aim.
This is why we cry: education, knowledge! to learn to read is to kindle a fire; every syllable
spelled sparkles.
But he who says light does not necessarily say joy. There is suf-fering in the light; in ex-
cess it burns. Flame is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, this is the miracle of
genius.
When you know and when you love you shall suffer still. The day dawns in tears. The luminous
weep, were it only over the dark.
II. ROOTS
Argot is the language of the dark.
Thought is aroused in its gloomiest depths, social philosophy is excited to its most poignant
meditations. before this enigmatic dialect which is at once withered and rebellious. Here is
chastisement visible. Each syllable has a branded look. The words of the
common language here
appear as if wrinkled and shrivelled under the red-hot iron of the executioner.
Some seem
still smoking. A phrase affects you like the branded shoulder of a robber suddenly laid bare.
Ideas almost refuse to be expressed by these substantives condemned of justice. Its metaphor
is sometimes so shameless that we feel it has worn the iron collar.
Still, in spite of all that and because of all that, this strange dialect
has of right its
compartment in that great impartial collection in which there is place for the rusty farthing
as well as for the gold medal, and which is called literature. Argot, whether we consent In
it or not, has its syntax and its poesy. It is a language. If, by the deformity of certain
terms, we recognise that it was mumbled by Tlandrin, by the splendour of certain metonomies,
we feel that it was spoken by Villon.
This verse so exquisite and so famous:
Mais ou sont les neiges d'anton?
is a verse of argot. Antan--ante annum--is a word of the argot of Thanes which signifies the
past Tear, and by extension formerly. There might still he read thirty-five years ago, at the
time of the departure of the great chain in 1827, in one of the dungeons of Bicetre, this maxim
engraved on the wall with a nail by a king of Thunes condemned to the galleys: Lea dabs d'anton:
siemprpre pour la Pierre du Client. Which means: the kings of old time
always went to be con-
secrated. In the mind of that king, consecration was the galleys.
The word decorade, which expresses the departure of a hazy waggon at a gallop, is attributed
to Villon, and it is worthy of him. This word, which strikes Are with four feet, resumes in a
masterly onomatomma the whole of La Fontaine's admirable verse:
Six forts elsevaux lirnient nn cache
In a purely literary point of view, few studies would be more curious and more prolific than
that of argot. It is a complete language within a language, a sort of diseased excrescence,
a
sickly graft which has produced a vegetation, a parasite which has its roots m the old Gallic
trunk, the sinister foliage of which creeps over an entire side of the
language. This is what
may be called the primary aspect, the general aspect of argot. But to those
who study lan-
guage as it should he studied, that is to say as geologists study the earth, argot appears,
as it were, a true alluvium. According as we dig more or less deep, we find in argot, beneath
the old popular French, Provencal, Spanish, Italian, Levantine, this language of the Mediter-
ranean pons, English and German, Romance in its three varieties. French Romance, Italian Ro-
mance, Romance Romance, Latin, and finally Basque and Celtic. A deep and grotesque formation.
A subterranean edifice built in common' by all the miserable. Each accursed race has deposited
its stratum, each suffering has dropped its stone, each heart has given its pebble. A multitude
of evil, low, or embittered souls, who have passed through life and vanished in eternity, are
preserved here almost entire and in some sort still visible under the form of a monstrous word.
Will you have Spanish the old Gothic argot swarms with it. Here is boffette, blow, which comes
from bofeton; vantane, window (afterwards vanlcrnc), which comes from vantana; gat, cat, which
comes from gato; acite, oil, which comes from aceyte. Will you have Italian? Here is spade, sword,
which comes from spade; carve!, boat, which comes from caranclia. Will you have English? Here
is bichol, bishop; raffle, spy, which comes from rascal, rascal-lieu; plicht, box, which comes
from pitcher. Will you have German? Here is talent, waiter, Miner; hers, master, herzog (duke).
Will you have Latin? Here is frangir, to break, frangerc; off urn-, to rob, fur; cadent, chain,
eaten; there is a word which appears in all the languages of the continent with a sort of mys-
terious power and authority, the word magma; the Scotchman makes of it his mac, which desig-
nates the chief of the clan, Mae Farlant, Mae Callummore, the great Paden; the great Callummore;
argot makes of it the meek, and afterwards, the meg, that is to say God. Will you have Basque?
Here is gahisio, the devil, which comes from gdizioa, evil; sargabous a good night, which con-
ies from pa-Pon, good evening. Will you lave Celtic? Here is Navin, handkerchief, which comes
from Naves, gushing water; inenesse, woman (in a bad sense), which comes from ,ucincc, full of
stones; Lamm, brook, from haranton, fountain; goffrur, locksmith, from god, blacksmith; pram:
death, which comes from gurus-du, white-black. Finally, will you have history? argot calls
crowns malleses, a reminiscence of thecoins which circulated on the galleys of Malta.
Besides the philological origins which we have just pointed out, argot has other still more
natural roots, which spring, so to speak, from the mind of man itself.
First, the direct creation of words. In this is the mystery of languages. To paint by words
which have forms, we know not how nor why. This is the primitive foundation of all human lan-
guage--what might be called the granite. .Argot swarms with words of this kind, root-words,
made out of whole cloth, we know not where nor by whom, without etymology, without analogy,
without derivation, solitary barbarous, sometimes hideous words, which have a singular power
of expression, and which are all alive. The executioner, the taule; the forest, the sabri; fear,
flight, taf; the lackey, the larbin; the general, the prefet, the minister, pharos; the devil, the
rabouin:. There is nothing stranger than these words, which mask and yet reveal.
Some of
them, the rabouin for example, are at the same time grotesque and terrible, and produce
the effect of a cyclopian grimace.
Secondly, metaphor. It is the peculiarity of a language, the object of which is to tell ever-
ything and conceal everything, to abound in figures. Metaphor is an enigma which offers itself
as a refuge to the robber who plots a blow, to the prisoner who plans an escape. No idiom is
more metaphorical than argot, to unscrew tlw coco, to wring the neck; to wind up,2 to eat;
to be sheaved, to be judged; a rat: a bread thief; il lansquine, it rains, an old and striking
figure, which in some sort carries its date with it. which assimilates the long slanting
lines of the rain with the thick and driving pikes of the lansquenets, and which includes in
a single word the popular metonomy, it rains pitchforks. Sometimes, in proportion as argot
passe. from the first period to the second, words pass from the Savage and primitive slate
to the metaphorical sense. The devil ceases to be the rabonin and becomes the baker, he who
puts into the oven. This is more witty, but not so grand; something like Racine after Cor-
neille, like Euripedes after Aeschylus. Certain phrases of argot which
partake of both per-
iods, and have at the same time the barbaric and the metaphorical character, resemble phan-
tasmagorias, Les sorgucurs vont Miker des gaits a to lune (the prowlers are going to steal
some horses by night). This passes before the mind like a group of spectres. We know not what
we see.
Thirdly, expedient. Argot lives upon the language. It uses it at its caprice, it takes from
it by chance, and contents itself often, when the necessity arises, with summarily and gross-
ly distorting it. Sometimes with common words thus deformed, and mystified with words of
pure
argot, it forms picturesque expressions in which we feel the mixture of
the two preceding el-
ements, direct creation and metephor: Le cab jaspine, je marronne que la roulotte de Pan-
tine trime dans la sabri, the dog barks, I suspect that the Paris diligence is passing in the
woods. Le dab est sinve, la dabouge est merlouis siere, la fee at bative, the bourgeois is stu-
pid, the bourgeoise is cunning, the daughter is pretty. Most commonly, in order to mislead
listeners, argot contents itself with adding promiscuously to all the words of the language
a sort of ignoble tail, a termination in aille, in orgue, in iergue, or in uche. Thus: Vouzierque
trouvaille bonorgue ce gigotmuche. Do you like this leg of mutton? A phrase addressed by
Cartouche to a turnkey, to know whether the amount offered for an escape
satisfied him. The
termination in mar is of modern date.
Argot, being the idiom of corruption, is easily corrupted. More-over, as it always seeks
disguise so soon as it perceives it is understood, it transforms itself. Unlike all other
vegetation, every ray of light upon it kills what it touches. Thus argot goes on decomposed
and recomposed incessantly; an obscure and rapid process which never ceases. It changes
more in ten years than the language in ten centuries. Thus the larton becomes the lartif; the
gail becomes the gaye; the fertauche; the fertille; the momignard, the momaque; the fiques,
the frusques; the chique, the egrugeoir; the colabre, the colas. The devil is first gahisto,
then the Monist, then the baker; the priest is the raarhon, then the haw; the dagger k the
twenty-two, then the sorin, then the lingre; police officers are rallies, then roussins,
then rousse:, then lacing merchants, then canon-curs, them coves; the executioner is the
Tank, then Chariot, then the atigenr, then the basprifard. In the seventeenth century. to
fight was to take some tobacco; in the nineteenth it is to chew the jaws. Twenty different
expressions have passed between these two ex-tremes. Cartouche would speak Hebrew to Isce-
naire. All the words of this Language are perpetually in flight like the men who use them.
From time to time, however, and because of this very change, the ancient argot reappears
and again becomes new. It has its centres in which it is continuous. The temple preserves
the argot of the seventeenth century; Bialtre, when it was a prison, preserved the argot
of Thames. There was heard the termination in anchr of the old Thuners. Boyanars in? °
(do you drink?) it eroyanche° (he believes). But perpetual movement, nevertheless, is
the law.
If the philosopher succeeds in fixing for a moment for the ob-server this language, which
is incessantly evaporating, he falls into painful yet useful meditations. No study is more
efficacious and more prolific m instruction. Not a metaphor, not an etymology of argot
which does not contain its lesson. Among these men, to ocar means to feign; they ban a
sickness; craft is their strength.
To them the idea of man is inseparable from the idea of shade. The night is called sorgur;
man, orgue. Man is a derivative of night.
They have acquired the habit of considering society as an atmosphere which kills them, as
a fatal force, and they speak of their liberty as one would of his health. A man arrested
is sick; a man condemned is dead.
What is most terrible to the prisoner in the four stone. walls which enshroud
him is a sort
of icy chastity; he calls the dungeon the callus. In this funereal place, life without is
always under its most cheerful aspect. The prisoner has irons on his feet; you might sup-
pose that he would be thinking that people walk with their feet? no, he is thinking that
people dance with their feet; so, let him succeed in sawing through his irons, his first
idea is that now he can dance, and he calls the saw a fandango. A name is a centre; a deep
assimilation. The bandit has two heads, one which regulates his actions and controls him
during his whole life, another which he has on his shoulders on the day of his death; he
calls the head which counsels him to crime the sorbonne, and the bead which expiates it
the trona& When a man has nothing but rags on his body and vices in his heart, when
he has
reached that double degradation, material as well as moral, which characterises, in its
two accepta-tions, the word beggarly, he is at an edge for crime; he is like a well-whetted
knife; he has two edges, his distress and his wickedness; so argot does not say "a vaga-
bond it says a reguise. What are the galleys? a brazier of damnation, a Hell. The convict
calls himself a fagot. Finally, what name do the malefactors give to the prison? the col-
lege. A whole penitentiary system might spring from this word.
Would you know where most of the songs of the galleys have originated, those refrains call-
ed in special phrase the hrlonfal Listen to this.
There was at the Chfitclet de Paris a broad long cellar. This cellar was eight feet deep be-
low the level of the Seine. It had neither windows nor ventilators, the only opening was the
door; men could enter, but not air. The cellar had for a ceiling a stone arch, and for a
floor, ten inches of mud, It had been paved with tiles, but, under the oozing of the waters,
the pavement had rotted and broken up Eight feet above the floor, a long massive beam cross-
ed this vault from side to side; from this beam there hung, at intervals, chains three feet
in length, and at the end of these chains there were iron collars. Alen condemned to the
galleys were put into this cellar until the day of their departure for Toulon. They were
pushed under this timber, where each had his iron swinging in the darkness, waiting for him.
The chains, those pendent arms, and the collars, those open hands, seized these wretches by
the neck. They were riveted, and down. They remained motionless in this cave, in this blac-
kness, , not mulct they were left there. The chain being too short, they this timber, al-
most hung, forced to monstrous exertions to reach their bread or their pitcher, the arch
above their heads, the mud up to their knees, their ordure running down their legs, coll-
apsing with fatigue, their hips and knees giving way, hanging by their hands to the chain
to rest themselves, unable to sleep except standing. and zawakened every moment by the
strangling of the collar: some did not awake. hi order to cat, they had to draw their bread,
which was thrown into the mire, up the leg with the heel, within reach of the hand. How
long did they continue thus? A month, two months, six months sometimes; one remained a
year. It was the antechamber of the galleys. Men were put there for stealing a have from
the king. In this hell-sepulchre what did they do? What can be done in a sepulchre, they
agonised, and what can be done in a hell, they King. For where there is no more hope, song
remains. In the waters of Malta, when a galley was approaching, they heard the song before
they heard the oars. The poor poacher, Survinccnt, who bad passed through the cellar-prison
of the afitelet said: if taus the rhymes which sustained ore. Uselessness
of poetry. Of
what use is rhyme? In this cellar almost all the argot songs took birth. It is from the
dungeon of the Grand °intim de Paris that the melancholy galley refrain of Montgomery
comes: Thualoundsaine, Ihnoulamaison.Most of these songs are dreary; some are cheerful;
one is tender:
Icicaille est le theatre
Du petit dardant!
The endeavour is vain, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.
In this world of dark deeds secrecy is preserved. Secresy is the interest of all. Secresy
to these wretches is the unity which serves as a basis of union. To violate secresy is to
tear from each member of this savage community something of himself. To inform against, in
the energetic language of argot, is caned: Manger It suareeou? As if the informer seized a
bit of the substance of all, and fed upon a morsel of the flesh of each.
What is to receive a blow? The hackneyed metaphor responds: Ceti' voir trade-six ehand-
elles.3 Here argot intervenes and says: chandelle, cam*. Upon this, the common language
gives as a synonym for blow, camonflet. Thus, by a sort of upward penetration, through the
aid of a metaphor, that incalculable trajectory, argot rises from the cavern to the Academy:
and Pmdailler saying: "I light my camoulle," makes Voltaire write: "Langleviel La Beaumelle
deserves a hundred canunilletsr
A search into argot is a discovery at every step. Study and research into this strange idiom
lead to the mysterious point of intersection between popular society and
outcast society.
The robber also has his food for powder, his matter for plunder, you, me, the world in gen-
eral; the pantre. (Pan, everybody.) Argot is speech become a convict.
That the thinking principle of man can be trampled down so low, that it can be bound and
dragged there by the obscure tyrannies of fatality, that it can be tied with unknown fast-
enings in that gulf, this is appalling.
Oh, pitiful thought of the miserable!
Alas! will none come to the help of the human soul in this gloom? Is it
its destiny for ever
to await the mind, the liberator, the huge rider of Pegasus and the hippogriffs, the aurora-
hued combatant who descends from the skies with wings, the radiant Knight of the future?
Shall it always call to its aid the gleaming lance of the ideal in vain?
is it condemned
to hear the Evil coming terribly through the depths of the abyss, and to see nearer and
nearer at hand, under the hideous water, that dragon-head, those jaws reeking
with foam,
That serpentine waving of claws, distensions, and rings? Must it remain there, with no
ray, no hope, abandoned to that horrible approach, vaguely scented by the
monster, shud-
dering, dishevelled, wringing its hands, forever chained to the rock of night, hopeless
Andromeda, white and naked in the darkness?
III. ARGOT WHICH WEEPS AND ARGOT WHICH LAUGHS
As we see, all argot, the argot of four hundred years ago as well as the argot
of the pre-
sent, is pervaded with that sombre spirit of symbolism which gives to its every word,
sometimes an appearance of grief, sometimes an air of menace. We feel in it the old, sav-
age gloom of those vagabonds of the Cour des Miracles who played cards with packs peculiar
to themselves, some of which have ken preserved. The eight of clubs, for instance, rep-
resented a large tree bearing eight enormous clover leafs, a sort of fantastic
personifi-
cation of the forest. At the foot of this tree a fire was seen at which three hares were
roasting a hunter on a spit, and in the background, over another fire,
was a smoking pot
from which the head of a dog projected. Nothing can be more mournful than these pictured
reprisals, upon a pack of cards, in the days of the stake for roasting
contrabandists,
and the cauldron for boiling counterfeiters. The various forms which thought assumed in
the realm of argot, even song, even raillery, even menace, all had this impotent and ex-
hausted character. All the songs, some melodies of which have been preserved,
were humble
and lamentable unto weeping.. The pegre calls itself the poor