At this time a famous case was proceeding in the Criminal Court, that of the dreadful murder committed on the persons of Monsieur and Madame Crottat, the notary’s father and mother, retired farmers who, as this horrible business showed, kept eight hundred thousand francs in gold in their house.
One of the men concerned in this double murder was the notorious Dannepont, known as la Pouraille, a released convict, who for five years had eluded the most active search on the part of the police, under the protection of seven or eight different names.
This villain’s disguises were so perfect, that he had served two years of imprisonment under the name of Delsouq, who was one of his own disciples, and a famous thief, though he never, in any of his achievements, went beyond the jurisdiction of the lower Courts.
La Pouraille had committed no less than three murders since his dismissal from the hulks.
The certainty that he would be executed, not less than the large fortune he was supposed to have, made this man an object of terror and admiration to his fellow-prisoners; for not a farthing of the stolen money had ever been recovered.
Even after the events of July 1830, some persons may remember the terror caused in Paris by this daring crime, worthy to compare in importance with the robbery of medals from the Public Library; for the unhappy tendency of our age is to make a murder the more interesting in proportion to the greater sum of money secured by it.
La Pouraille, a small, lean, dry man, with a face like a ferret, forty-five years old, and one of the celebrities of the prisons he had successively lived in since the age of nineteen, knew Jacques Collin well, how and why will be seen.
Two other convicts, brought with la Pouraille from La Force within these twenty-four hours, had at once acknowledged and made the whole prison-yard acknowledge the supremacy of this past-master sealed to the scaffold.
One of these convicts, a ticket-of-leave man, named Selerier, alias l’Avuergnat, Pere Ralleau, and le Rouleur, who in the sphere known to the hulks as the swell-mob was called Fil-de-Soie (or silken thread)— a nickname he owed to the skill with which he slipped through the various perils of the business — was an old ally of Jacques Collin’s.
Trompe-la-Mort so keenly suspected Fil-de-Soie of playing a double part, of being at once in the secrets of the swell-mob and a spy laid by the police, that he had supposed him to be the prime mover of his arrest in the Maison Vauquer in 1819 (Le Pere Goriot). Selerier, whom we must call Fil-de-Soie, as we shall also call Dannepont la Pouraille, already guilty of evading surveillance, was concerned in certain well-known robberies without bloodshed, which would certainly take him back to the hulks for at least twenty years.
The other convict, named Riganson, and his kept woman, known as la Biffe, were a most formidable couple, members of the swell-mob.
Riganson, on very distant terms with the police from his earliest years, was nicknamed le Biffon.
Biffon was the male of la Biffe — for nothing is sacred to the swell-mob.
These fiends respect nothing, neither the law nor religions, not even natural history, whose solemn nomenclature, it is seen, is parodied by them.
Here a digression is necessary; for Jacques Collin’s appearance in the prison-yard in the midst of his foes, as had been so cleverly contrived by Bibi–Lupin and the examining judge, and the strange scenes to ensue, would be incomprehensible and impossible without some explanation as to the world of thieves and of the hulks, its laws, its manners, and above all, its language, its hideous figures of speech being indispensable in this portion of my tale.
So, first of all, a few words must be said as to the vocabulary of sharpers, pickpockets, thieves, and murderers, known as Argot, or thieves’ cant, which has of late been introduced into literature with so much success that more than one word of that strange lingo is familiar on the rosy lips of ladies, has been heard in gilded boudoirs, and become the delight of princes, who have often proclaimed themselves “done brown” (floue)!
And it must be owned, to the surprise no doubt of many persons, that no language is more vigorous or more vivid than that of this underground world which, from the beginnings of countries with capitals, has dwelt in cellars and slums, in the third limbo of society everywhere (le troisieme dessous, as the expressive and vivid slang of the theatres has it).
For is not the world a stage?
Le troisieme dessous is the lowest cellar under the stage at the Opera where the machinery is kept and men stay who work it, whence the footlights are raised, the ghosts, the blue-devils shot up from hell, and so forth.
Every word of this language is a bold metaphor, ingenious or horrible.
A man’s breeches are his kicks or trucks (montante, a word that need not be explained).
In this language you do not sleep, you snooze, or doze (pioncer — and note how vigorously expressive the word is of the sleep of the hunted, weary, distrustful animal called a thief, which as soon as it is in safety drops — rolls — into the gulf of deep slumber so necessary under the mighty wings of suspicion always hovering over it; a fearful sleep, like that of a wild beast that can sleep, nay, and snore, and yet its ears are alert with caution).
In this idiom everything is savage.
The syllables which begin or end the words are harsh and curiously startling.
A woman is a trip or a moll (une largue).
And it is poetical too: straw is la plume de Beauce, a farmyard feather bed.
The word midnight is paraphrased by twelve leads striking — it makes one shiver!
Rincer une cambriole is to “screw the shop,” to rifle a room.
What a feeble expression is to go to bed in comparison with “to doss” (piausser, make a new skin).
What picturesque imagery!
Work your dominoes (jouer des dominos) is to eat; how can men eat with the police at their heels?
And this language is always growing; it keeps pace with civilization, and is enriched with some new expression by every fresh invention.
The potato, discovered and introduced by Louis XVI. and Parmentier, was at once dubbed in French slang as the pig’s orange (Orange a Cochons)[the Irish have called them bog oranges].
Banknotes are invented; the “mob” at once call them Flimsies (fafiots garotes, from “Garot,” the name of the cashier whose signature they bear).
Flimsy! (fafiot.) Cannot you hear the rustle of the thin paper?
The thousand franc-note is male flimsy (in French), the five hundred franc-note is the female; and convicts will, you may be sure, find some whimsical name for the hundred and two hundred franc-notes.
In 1790 Guillotin invented, with humane intent, the expeditious machine which solved all the difficulties involved in the problem of capital punishment.
Convicts and prisoners from the hulks forthwith investigated this contrivance, standing as it did on the monarchical borderland of the old system and the frontier of modern legislation; they instantly gave it the name of l’Abbaye de Monte-a-Regret.
They looked at the angle formed by the steel blade, and described its action as repeating (faucher); and when it is remembered that the hulks are called the meadow (le pre), philologists must admire the inventiveness of these horrible vocables, as Charles Nodier would have said.
The high antiquity of this kind of slang is also noteworthy.
A tenth of the words are of old Romanesque origin, another tenth are the old Gaulish French of Rabelais.
Effondrer, to thrash a man, to give him what for; otolondrer, to annoy or to “spur” him; cambrioler, doing anything in a room; aubert, money; Gironde, a beauty (the name of a river of Languedoc); fouillousse, a pocket — a “cly”— are all French of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The word affe, meaning life, is of the highest antiquity.
From affe anything that disturbs life is called affres (a rowing or scolding), hence affreux, anything that troubles life.
About a hundred words are derived from the language of Panurge, a name symbolizing the people, for it is derived from two Greek words signifying All-working.
Science is changing the face of the world by constructing railroads. In Argot the train is le roulant Vif, the Rattler.
The name given to the head while still on the shoulders — la Sorbonne — shows the antiquity of this dialect which is mentioned by very early romance-writers, as Cervantes, the Italian story-tellers, and Aretino.
In all ages the moll, the prostitute, the heroine of so many old-world romances, has been the protectress, companion, and comfort of the sharper, the thief, the pickpocket, the area-sneak, and the burglar.
Prostitution and robbery are the male and female forms of protest made by the natural state against the social state.
Even philosophers, the innovators of to-day, the humanitarians with the communists and Fourierists in their train, come at last, without knowing it, to the same conclusion — prostitution and theft.