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 Chatelet 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.
Men were put there for stealing a hare from the king.
In this sepulchre-hell, what did they do?
What man can do in a sepulchre, they went through the agonies of death, and what can man do in hell, they sang; for song lingers where there is no longer any hope.
In the waters of Malta, when a galley was approaching, the song could be heard before the sound of the oars.
Poor Survincent, the poacher, who had gone through the prison-cellar of the Chatelet, said: “It was the rhymes that kept me up.”
Uselessness of poetry.
What is the good of rhyme?
It is in this cellar that nearly all the slang songs had their birth.
It is from the dungeon of the Grand-Chatelet of Paris that comes the melancholy refrain of the Montgomery galley: “Timaloumisaine, timaloumison.”
The majority of these songs are melancholy; some are gay; one is tender:—
Here is the theatre
Of the little archer (Cupid).
Do what you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic in the heart of man, love.
In this world of dismal deeds, people keep their secrets.
The secret is the thing above all others.
The secret, in the eyes of these wretches, is unity which serves as a base of union.
To betray a secret is to tear from each member of this fierce community something of his own personality.
To inform against, in the energetic slang dialect, is called: “to eat the bit.”
As though the informer drew to himself a little of the substance of all and nourished himself on a bit of each one’s flesh.
What does it signify to receive a box on the ear?
Commonplace metaphor replies: “It is to see thirty-six candles.”
Here slang intervenes and takes it up: Candle, camoufle.
Thereupon, the ordinary tongue gives camouflet42 as the synonym for soufflet.
Thus, by a sort of infiltration from below upwards, with the aid of metaphor, that incalculable, trajectory slang mounts from the cavern to the Academy; and Poulailler saying: “I light my camoufle,” causes Voltaire to write: “Langleviel La Beaumelle deserves a hundred camouflets.”
Researches in slang mean discoveries at every step.
Study and investigation of this strange idiom lead to the mysterious point of intersection of regular society with society which is accursed. The thief also has his food for cannon, stealable matter, you, I, whoever passes by; le pantre. (Pan, everybody.)
Slang is language turned convict.
That the thinking principle of man be thrust down ever so low, that it can be dragged and pinioned there by obscure tyrannies of fatality, that it can be bound by no one knows what fetters in that abyss, is sufficient to create consternation.
Oh, poor thought of miserable wretches!
Alas! will no one come to the succor of the human soul in that darkness?
Is it her destiny there to await forever the mind, the liberator, the immense rider of Pegasi and hippogriffs, the combatant of heroes of the dawn who shall descend from the azure between two wings, the radiant knight of the future?