Slang is the tongue of those who sit in darkness. Thought is moved in its most sombre depths in the presence of that enigmatic dialect at once so blighted and rebellious. Therein lies chastisement made visible. Every syllable has an air of being marked. The words of the vulgar tongue appear wrinkled and shrivelled, as it were, beneath the hot iron of the executioner. Ideas almost refuse to be expressed in these substantives which are fugitives from justice. Moreover, and because of all this, this strange dialect has by rights its own compartment in that great impartial case of pigeon-holes which is called literature. Slang, whether the public admit the fact or not, has its syntax and its poetry. It is a language. By the deformity of certain terms we recognize that it was chewed by Mandrin, and by the splendor of certain metonymies we feel that Villon spoke it. That exquisite verse, But where are the snows of years gone by, is a verse of slang. Antan is a word of Thunes slang which signified the past year, and by extension, formerly. From a purely literary point of view, few studies would prove more curious. Slang is a whole language within a language, a parasite which has its roots in the old Gallic trunk. But for those who study the tongue as geologists study the earth, slang appears like a veritable alluvial deposit. Each accursed race has deposited its layer, each suffering has dropped its stone there, each heart has contributed its pebble.
Slang possesses still more natural roots, which spring from the mind of man itself. In the first place, the direct creation of words: immediate words, created instantaneously no one knows where or by whom, solitary, barbarous, sometimes hideous, which at times possess a singular power of expression. The executioner, the forest, fear, the devil. Nothing is stranger than these words which both mask and reveal. 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. Sometimes words pass from the savage sense to the metaphorical sense. The devil ceases to be one name and becomes the baker who puts the bread into the oven. In the third place, the expedient. Slang lives on the language. It dips into it at hap-hazard, and often confines itself to adding to all the words an ignoble tail. Slang, being the dialect of corruption, quickly becomes corrupted itself. As it is always seeking concealment, as soon as it feels that it is understood, it changes its form. Every ray of light which falls upon it kills whatever it touches. It passes over more ground in ten years than a language in ten centuries. All the words of this language are perpetually engaged in flight like the men who utter them. Still, from time to time, the ancient slang crops up again. The Temple preserved the slang of the seventeenth century; Bicetre, when it was a prison, preserved the slang of Thunes. If the philosopher succeeds in fixing, for a moment, this language which is incessantly evaporating, he falls into doleful and useful meditation. There is not a metaphor, not an analogy, in slang, which does not contain a lesson. Among these men, to beat means to feign. The night is called one word; man, another. Man is a derivative of the night. A man under arrest is a sick man; one who is condemned is a dead man. The ruffian has two heads: the one which counsels him in crime, and the one which expiates it. 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 have had their birth? There existed at the Chatelet in Paris a large and long cellar, eight feet below the level of the Seine, with neither windows nor air-holes. Its only aperture was the door; men could enter there, air could not. For floor, ten inches of mud. Eight feet above, a long beam; from this beam hung chains, and at the end of these chains there were rings for the neck. Men condemned to the galleys were incarcerated there until the day of their departure for Toulon. The chain was too short; they could not lie down. They remained motionless in that cavern, almost hanging, mud even to mid-leg, 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? They went through the agonies of death, and they sang; for song lingers where there is no longer any hope. Poor Survincent, the poacher, said: It was the rhymes that kept me up. It is in this cellar that nearly all the slang songs had their birth. Some are gay; one is tender. 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. To inform against, in the energetic slang dialect, is called to eat the bit. Study of this strange idiom leads to the mysterious point of intersection of regular society with society which is accursed. Slang is language turned convict. Oh, poor thought of miserable wretches. Will no one come to the succor of the human soul in that darkness? Must it remain there, without a gleam of light, forever chained to the rock of night, a sombre Andromeda white and naked amid the shadows?
