Les Misérables
_boffete_, a box on the ear, which is derived from _bofeton; vantane_,
window (later on _vanterne_), which comes from _vantana; gat_, cat,
which comes from _gato; acite_, oil, which comes from _aceyte_. Do you
want Italian? Here is _spade_, sword, which comes from _spada; carvel_,
boat, which comes from _caravella_. Do you want English? Here is
_bichot_, which comes from _bishop; raille_, spy, which comes from
_rascal, rascalion; pilche_, a case, which comes from _pilcher_, a
sheath. Do you want German? Here is the _caleur_, the waiter,
_kellner_; the _hers_, the master, _herzog_ (duke). Do you want Latin?
Here is _frangir_, to break, _frangere; affurer_, to steal, _fur;
cadene_, chain, _catena_. There is one word which crops up in every
language of the continent, with a sort of mysterious power and
authority. It is the word _magnus_; the Scotchman makes of it his
_mac_, which designates the chief of the clan; Mac-Farlane,
Mac-Callumore, the great Farlane, the great Callumore41; slang turns it
into _meck_ and later _le meg_, that is to say, God. Would you like
Basque? Here is _gahisto_, the devil, which comes from _gaïztoa_, evil;
_sorgabon_, good night, which comes from _gabon_, good evening. Do you
want Celtic? Here is _blavin_, a handkerchief, which comes from
_blavet_, gushing water; _ménesse_, a woman (in a bad sense), which
comes from _meinec_, full of stones; _barant_, brook, from _baranton_,
fountain; _goffeur_, locksmith, from _goff_, blacksmith; _guedouze_,
death, which comes from _guenn-du_, black-white. Finally, would you
like history? Slang calls crowns _les maltèses_, a souvenir of the coin
in circulation on the galleys of Malta.
In addition to the philological origins just indicated, slang possesses
other and still more natural roots, which spring, so to speak, from the
mind of man itself.
In the first place, the direct creation of words. Therein lies the
mystery of tongues. To paint with words, which contains figures one
knows not how or why, is the primitive foundation of all human
languages, what may be called their granite.
Slang abounds in words of this description, immediate words, words
created instantaneously no one knows either where or by whom, without
etymology, without analogies, without derivatives, solitary, barbarous,
sometimes hideous words, which at times possess a singular power of
expression and which live. The executioner, _le taule_; the forest, _le
sabri_; fear, flight, _taf_; the lackey, _le larbin_; the mineral, the
prefect, the minister, _pharos_; the devil, _le rabouin_. Nothing is
stranger than these words which both mask and reveal. Some, _le
rabouin_, for example, are at the same time grotesque and terrible, and
produce on you the effect of a cyclopean grimace.
In the second place, metaphor. The peculiarity of a language which is
desirous of saying all yet concealing all is that it is rich in
figures. Metaphor is an enigma, wherein the thief who is plotting a
stroke, the prisoner who is arranging an escape, take refuge. No idiom
is more metaphorical than slang: _dévisser le coco_ (to unscrew the
nut), to twist the neck; _tortiller_ (to wriggle), to eat; _être
gerbé_, to be tried; _a rat_, a bread thief; _il lansquine_, it rains,
a striking, ancient figure which partly bears its date about it, which
assimilates long oblique lines of rain, with the dense and slanting
pikes of the lancers, and which compresses into a single word the
popular expression: it rains halberds. Sometimes, in proportion as
slang progresses from the first epoch to the second, words pass from
the primitive and savage sense to the metaphorical sense. The devil
ceases to be _le rabouin_, and becomes _le boulanger_ (the baker), who
puts the bread into the oven. This is more witty, but less grand,
something like Racine after Corneille, like Euripides after Æschylus.
Certain slang phrases which participate in the two epochs and have at
once the barbaric character and the metaphorical character resemble
phantasmagories. _Les sorgueuers vont solliciter des gails à la
lune_—the prowlers are going to steal horses by night,—this passes
before the mind like a group of spectres. One knows not what one sees.
In the third place, the expedient. Slang lives on the language. It uses
it in accordance with its fancy, it dips into it hap-hazard, and it
often confines itself, when occasion arises, to alter it in a gross and
summary fashion. Occasionally, with the ordinary words thus deformed
and complicated with words of pure slang, picturesque phrases are
formed, in which there can be felt the mixture of the two preceding
elements, the direct creation and the metaphor: _le cab jaspine, je
marronne que la roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabri_, the dog is
barking, I suspect that the diligence for Paris is passing through the
woods. _Le dab est sinve, la dabuge est merloussière, la fée est
bative_, the bourgeois is stupid, the bourgeoise is cunning, the
daughter is pretty. Generally, to throw listeners off the track, slang
confines itself to adding to all the words of the language without
distinction, an ignoble tail, a termination in _aille_, in _orgue_, in
_iergue_, or in _uche_. Thus: _Vousiergue trouvaille bonorgue ce
gigotmuche?_ Do you think that leg of mutton good? A phrase addressed
by Cartouche to a turnkey in order to find out whether the sum offered
for his escape suited him.
The termination in _mar_ has been added recently.
Slang, being the dialect of corruption, quickly becomes corrupted
itself. Besides this, as it is always seeking concealment, as soon as
it feels that it is understood, it changes its form. Contrary to what
happens with every other vegetation, every ray of light which falls
upon it kills whatever it touches. Thus slang is in constant process of
decomposition and recomposition; an obscure and rapid work which never
pauses. It passes over more ground in ten years than a language in ten
centuries. Thus _le larton_ (bread) becomes _le lartif; le gail_
(horse) becomes _le gaye; la fertanche_ (straw) becomes _la fertille;
le momignard_ (brat), _le momacque; les fiques_ (duds), _frusques; la
chique_ (the church), _l’égrugeoir; le colabre_ (neck), _le colas_. The
devil is at first, _gahisto_, then _le rabouin_, then _the baker_; the
priest is a _ratichon_, then the boar (_le sanglier_); the dagger is
_le vingt-deux_ (twenty-two), then _le surin_, then _le lingre_; the
police are _railles_, then _roussins_, then _rousses_, then _marchands
de lacets_ (dealers in stay-laces), then _coquers_, then _cognes_; the
executioner is _le taule_, then _Charlot, l’atigeur_, then _le
becquillard_. In the seventeenth century, to fight was “to give each
other snuff”; in the nineteenth it is “to chew each other’s throats.”
There have been twenty different phrases between these two extremes.
Cartouche’s talk would have been Hebrew to Lacenaire. All the words of
this language are perpetually engaged in flight like the men who utter
them.
Still, from time to time, and in consequence of this very movement, the
ancient slang crops up again and becomes new once more. It has its
headquarters where it maintains its sway. The Temple preserved the
slang of the seventeenth century; Bicêtre, when it was a prison,
preserved the slang of Thunes. There one could hear the termination in
_anche_ of the old Thuneurs. _Boyanches-tu_ (bois-tu), do you drink?
But perpetual movement remains its law, nevertheless.
If the philosopher succeeds in fixing, for a moment, for purposes of
observation, this language which is incessantly evaporating, he falls
into doleful and useful meditation. No study is more efficacious and
more fecund in instruction. There is not a metaphor, not an analogy, in
slang, which does not contain a lesson. Among these men, to beat means
to feign; one beats a malady; ruse is their strength.
For them, the idea of the man is not separated from the idea of
darkness. The night is called _la sorgue_; man, _l’orgue_. Man is a
derivative of the night.
They have taken up the practice of considering society in the light of
an atmosphere which kills them, of a fatal force, and they speak of
their liberty as one would speak of his health. A man under arrest is a
_sick man_; one who is condemned is a _dead man_.
The most terrible thing for the prisoner within the four walls in which
he is buried, is a sort of glacial chastity, and he calls the dungeon
the _castus_. In that funereal place, life outside always presents
itself under its most smiling aspect. The prisoner has irons on his
feet; you think, perhaps, that his thought is that it is with the feet
that one walks? No; he is thinking that it is with the feet that one
dances; so, when he has succeeded in severing his fetters, his first
idea is that now he can dance, and he calls the saw the _bastringue_
(public-house ball).—A name is a centre; profound assimilation.—The
ruffian has two heads, one of which reasons out his actions and leads
him all his life long, and the other which he has upon his shoulders on
the day of his death; he calls the head which counsels him in crime _la
sorbonne_, and the head which expiates it _la tronche_.—When a man has
no longer anything but rags upon his body and vices in his heart, when
he has arrived at that double moral and material degradation which the
word blackguard characterizes in its two acceptations, he is ripe for
crime; he is like a well-whetted knife; he has two cutting edges, his
distress and his malice; so slang does not say a blackguard, it says
_un réguisé_.—What are the galleys? A brazier of damnation, a hell. The
convict calls himself a _fagot_.—And finally, what name do malefactors
give to their prison? The _college_. A whole penitentiary system can be
evolved from that word.
Does the reader wish to know where the majority of the songs of the
galleys, those refrains called in the special vocabulary _lirlonfa_,
have had their birth?
Let him listen to what follows:—
There existed at the Châtelet in Paris a large and long cellar. This
cellar was eight feet below the level of the Seine. It had neither
windows nor air-holes, its only aperture was the door; men could enter
there, air could not. This vault had for ceiling a vault of stone, and
for floor ten inches of mud. It was flagged; but the pavement had
rotted and cracked under the oozing of the water. Eight feet above the
floor, a long and massive beam traversed this subterranean excavation
from side to side; from this beam hung, at short distances apart,
chains three feet long, and at the end of these chains there were rings
for the neck. In this vault, men who had been condemned to the galleys
were incarcerated until the day of their departure for Toulon. They
were thrust under this beam, where each one found his fetters swinging
in the darkness and waiting for him.
The chains, those pendant arms, and the necklets, those open hands,
caught the unhappy wretches by the throat. They were rivetted and left
there. As the chain was too short, they could not lie down. They
remained motionless in that cavern, in that night, beneath that beam,
almost hanging, forced to unheard-of efforts to reach their bread, jug,
or their vault overhead, mud even to mid-leg, filth flowing to their
very calves, broken asunder with fatigue, with thighs and knees giving
way, clinging fast to the chain with their hands in order to obtain
some rest, unable to sleep except when standing erect, and awakened
every moment by the strangling of the collar; some woke no more. In
order to eat, they pushed the bread, which was flung to them in the
mud, along their leg with their heel until it reached their hand.
How long did they remain thus? One month, two months, six months
sometimes; one stayed a year. It was the antechamber of the galleys.