Page 1670 - les-miserables

tringue (public-house ball).—A name is a centre; profound
assimilation.—The ruffian has two heads, one of which rea-
sons 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 sor-
bonne, and the head which expiates it la tronche.—When a
man has no longer anything but rags upon his body and vic-
es in his heart, when he has arrived at that double moral and
material degradation which the word blackguard charac-
terizes 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 reguise.—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 vo-
cabulary lirlonfa, have had their birth?
Let him listen to what follows:—
There existed at the Chatelet in Paris a large and long cel-
lar. 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 un-
der 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

1670 Les Miserables