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:

Icicaille est la theatre Here is the theatre
Du petit dardant. 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 camouflet[42] 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 darkn