ore, 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"--ar