Argot

“ En argot de lupanar, on appelle “veilleurs de morts” les jeunes vauriens qui emploient leur soirée à mettre sens dessus dessous les maisons de tolérance. Ils sont la terreur des maquerelles, et les pertes qu’ils leur font subir sont les revers de la médaille du proxénétisme.—Léo Taxil. ”

“ It seems to be resorted to in order to make up for the shortcomings of a well-balanced and polished tongue, which will not lend itself to exaggeration and violence of utterance. Journalists, artists, politicians, men of fashion, soldiers, even women talk argot, sometimes unawares, and these as well as the lower classes are depicted in the Naturalistic novel. ”

“ Balzac thus expresses his admiration for argot: “People will perhaps be astonished if we venture to assert that no tongue is more energetic, more picturesque than the tongue of that subterranean world which since the birth of capitals grovels in cellars, in sinks of vice, in the lowest stage floors of societies. For is not the world a theatre? ”

“ Could this be the missing hat? It seemed incredible. Argot would never dare display so openly such a proof of his guilt! But if he were demented (which I firmly believed him to be) would not this flaunting of his crime be one of the things one might expect of an insane man? I had been so startled that it was some minutes before I dared raise my eyes, fearing that their expression would betray me. I have absolutely no idea what he was talking about during that time, but the next sentence I caught was: “She vill, she vill come, but you jus’ say, nonsense, zat is nossing, and zen she go.” ”

“ Les hommes qui se livrent au genre d’escroquerie dit chantage et qui dans leur argot, prétendent s’occuper de politique ... spéculent sur les habitudes vicieuses de certains individus, pour les attirer, par l’appât de leurs passions secrètes, dans des pièges où ils rançonnent sans peine leur honteuse faiblesse.—Tardieu, Etude Médico-légale sur les attentats aux mœurs. ”

“ Machabée, m. (popular) , gay girls’ bully, or “ponce”; see Poisson; Jew, “mouchey, Ikey, or sheney;” body of a drowned person.
Je ne vois d’autre origine à cette expression que la lecture du chap. xii. du deuxième livre des Machabées, qui a encore lieu aux messes des morts; ou plutôt c’est de là que sera venue la danse macabre, dont l’argot a conservé le souvenir.—Michel. ”

“ Then came the Kingdom of Argot; that is to say, all the thieves of France, arranged according to the order of their dignity; the minor people walking first. Thus defiled by fours, with the divers insignia of their grades, in that strange faculty, most of them lame, some cripples, others one-armed, shop clerks, pilgrims, hubins, bootblacks, thimble-riggers, street arabs, beggars, the blear-eyed beggars, thieves, the weakly, vagabonds, merchants, sham soldiers, goldsmiths, passed masters of pickpockets, isolated thieves. ”

“ Drilles ou narquois sont des soldats qui truchent la flamme sous le bras, et battent en ruine les entiffes et tous les creux des vergnes ... ils ont fait banqueroute au grand coëre et ne veulent pas être ses sujets ni le reconnaître.—Le Jargon de l’Argot.
Parler —— formerly had the signification of to talk the jargon of vagabonds.
Nase, m. (popular) , nose.
Naser quelqu’un (popular) , is equivalent to “avoir quelqu’un dans le nez,” to have a strong dislike for one, to abominate one. ”

“ An allusion to the bending posture of a man who is troubled with the ailment.
Chenâtre, adj. (thieves’) , good, excellent, “nobby.”
Ils ont de quoi faire un chenâtre banquet avec des rouillardes pleines de pivois et du plus chenâtre qu’on puisse trouver.—Le Jargon de l’Argot.
Chêne, m. (thieves’) , man, or “cove;” —— affranchi, thief, or “flash cove.” For synonyms see Grinche. Faire suer un ——, to kill a man, “to give a cove his gruel.” ”

“ Knowing this, and seeing how much escargots were used in the Middle Ages, not only as a delicacy by the monks and nobles, but also in medicine with herbs, presumably amongst the poor, it is curious now, the horror that exists at the thought of eating either snails or frogs. At first, when I gave some dinners to the very needy, they would hardly dare come for them, and declared that they were sure that in Auguste’s ragouts there would be found some lurking, somewhere. ”

“ This girl is not a human being, but a flying ogre. Of flying ogres there are thousands of varieties, who bring ruin to people everywhere. I have already slain a countless number of them, and have pretty well done away with them. But this one is the worst of all. Last night the Lord of the Heavens gave me a triple command, and that is the reason I have hurried down from the skies. There are eight thousand of us under way in all directions to catch this monster. If you do not tell the truth, monk, then you are sinning against heaven itself! ”

“ For, as sure as a gun, they will give up the ghost,
If the maggot cries click when it scratches the post.
But a kettle of scalding hot water injected
Infallibly cures the timber affected:
The omen is broken, the danger is over;
The maggot will die, and the sick will recover. ”

“ Then the ogre resumed his own ugly shape, and laughed at puss's fear. "It was very surprising," said the cat; "you are of such a grand size that I do not wonder you could become a lion—but could you change yourself into some very small animal?" "You shall see," said the stupid vain ogre, and he turned into a mouse. Directly puss saw him in that shape, he darted at him and eat him up. The ogre quite deserved it, for he had eaten many men himself. ”

“ The guides again said, ‘These offenders when on earth used their tongues skilfully to tell lies and to separate friend from friend, and so they are punished.’
“The next hell had inscribed on it, ‘Deceivers.’ I saw in it many scores of people. There were ogres that cut the flesh from their bodies, and fed it to starving demons. These ate and ate, and the flesh was cut and cut till only the bones remained. When the winds of hell blew, flesh returned to them; then metal snakes and copper dogs crowded in to bite them and suck their blood. Their screams of pain made the earth to tremble. ”

“ That is enough for the maggot's first establishment. These causes of failure are avoided with a layer of sand about an inch thick. Then the Bluebottle, the Flesh-fly, and other Flies whose grubs batten on dead bodies are kept at a proper distance.
In the hope of awakening us to a proper sense of our insignificance, pulpit orators sometimes make an unfair use of the grave and its worms. Let us put no faith in their doleful rhetoric. The chemistry of man's final dissolution is eloquent enough of our emptiness: there is no need to add imaginary horrors. ”

“ And on the occasion of a calamity, while the women are giving themselves up to lamentation, you will see one man writhing on the ground like a boa constrictor or a crocodile, another howling and leaping like a panther, a third baying like a jackal, roaring like a lion, or grunting like a hippopotamus, all of them imitating the characters of the various animals to perfection.398 Clearly these people imagine that the soul or vital essence of the animal is manifested in the maggots bred in its decaying carcase ”

“ The maiden spied on him without his knowing it, and saw that from a youth he turned himself into an ogre, with hair as red as madder and a face as black as coal. His eyeballs bulged out of their sockets, and his mouth looked like a dish full of blood. Crooked white fangs thrust themselves from his lips, and two wings grew from his shoulders. Spreading them, he flew down to earth and at once turned into a man again. ”

“ Every one knows the first, the big, dark-blue Fly who, after effecting her designs in the ill-watched meat-safe, settles on our window-panes and keeps up a solemn buzzing, anxious to be off in the sun and ripen a fresh emission of germs. How does she lay her eggs, the origin of the loathsome maggot that battens poisonously on our provisions whether of game or butcher's meat? ”

“ Those terrible Muses, geology, astronomy, and particularly biology, have reduced man to a humility which, if in some degree salutary, becomes in its excess highly dangerous. Why should one maggot in this great cheese of the world take itself more seriously than others? ”

“ But the ogre, who was more greedy of flesh than the squirrel is of nuts, the bear of honey, the cat of fish, the sheep of salt, or the ass of bran, said to his wife, "Let the poor creature come in, for if she sleeps in the fields, who knows but she may be eaten up by some wolf." ”

“ It 's lucky for you that you are old and tough! I am expecting three ogre friends of mine to pay me a visit in the next few days, and here is a tasty dish which will just come in nicely for them!'
One after another he dragged the children out from under the bed.
The poor things threw themselves on their knees, imploring mercy; but they had to deal with the most cruel of all ogres. Far from pitying them, he was already devouring
'He could smell fresh flesh'
them with his eyes, and repeating to his wife that when cooked with a good sauce they would make most dainty morsels. ”

“ Wondering a little at what might be going to happen to him, the youth did as the ogre bade him, and when they reached the shore of the lake, the ogre turned and said to him:
‘Step into the water and shut your eyes! You will find yourself sinking slowly to the bottom; but take courage, all will go well. ”

“ How often have we lain in the dim light at night and seen the lid lift just a peep for ogre eyes to peer out, and, when the terror was growing beyond endurance, close down, only to lift once and again, until from sheer weariness and exhaustion we fell into a troubled sleep and dreamed of the hideous monster which inhabited the unused garret! ”

“ Now that I have finished with maggots and shed
their dust with some misgiving,
I am glad for the words not said,
for being spared the hungers other men have bred,
in my old age needing
but a tranquil bed. ”

“ Ogres, too—of whom you read in fairy tales—I am afraid that there were such people once, even here in Europe; strong and terrible savages, who ate human beings. Of course, the legends and tales about them became ridiculous and exaggerated as they passed from mouth to mouth over the Christmas fire, in the days when no one could read or write. ”

“ A child might have guessed that men who were lurking at such an hour in the thickets that overhung the ford of the Arguenon could be after no good; and in truth they did well to hide themselves, for it would have been hard to find, even in an age so fruitful in ruffians of high and low degree, a more villainous-looking rabble of cut-throats. ”

“ As the great grey-bearded ogre stood beside his open door;
But an echo seemed to answer from a land beyond the sky—
Won’t you walk into my parlour? said the spider to the fly!
Then we looked a little closer at the ogre as he stood
With his great red eyeballs glowing like two torches in a wood,{109}
And his mighty speckled belly and his dreadful clutching claws,
And his nose—a horny parrot’s beak, his whiskers and his jaws;
Yet he seemed so sympathetic, and we saw two tears descend,
As he murmured, “I’m so ugly, but I’ve lost my dearest friend! ”

“ Whilst pointing the finger of scorn at the magic lamp, the ogre's hen, or the seven-league boots, she plays the fool and pays the fiddler in actual life merely because under it all there lurks a passion for the marvellous, founded on chance. ”

“ Yes! in the prehistoric, in Ogga, the gaunt horror of the desire to kill had arisen. The pallid beast of hatred, ridden by the clutching hags of envy and jealousy and spite and terror, ran before Ogga in his path. He—Ogga—stared wildly at the image of a man, stifled and gasping, held at the throat by Ogga’s hand—his own—until the eyes started from their sockets, turning their lifeless whitenesses downward and upward in the wanton agony of death. ”

“ Beggars and vagabonds, the dregs of negro humanity, sit about under the gaunt, yellow cocoanut palms; old leper women stretching out hands covered with white ulcers for alms; old moribund skeletons, their legs swollen with elephantiasis, with big fat flies and maggots feeding on the open sores. ”

“ Nor was it long before the last of them had fled from the kitchen to the sculleries.
But thither also they were followed, and there again they were hunted about. They were bespattered with the dirt of their own neglect; they were soused in the stinking water that had boiled greens; they were smeared with rancid dripping; their faces were rubbed in maggots: I dare not tell all that was done to them. At last they got the door into a back yard open, and rushed out. Then first they knew that the wind was howling and the rain falling in sheets. But there was no rest for them even there. ”

“ So ruthless is fact in its war with poetic vapourings that even the glories of the shepherd’s summer do not remain. Instead of the shepherd piping and watching the sheep with lambs by their sides streaming over green swelling hills, in the English mountain-land it is the season of the detested maggot. ”

“ The ogre, upon seeing her diabolic plans frustrated, threw herself in the tank, and the frogs and snakes there ate her in a moment. Such is the fate of bad people that enjoy making good people suffer! ”

“ Ogre, could you turn yourself into a small animal as well? That must be a great deal harder. Could you turn yourself into a mouse?”
Yes, the ogre could do that, too, and at once he turned himself into a mouse, and ran, scampering gayly about the room. But he did not scamper long. “Ps-s-s-t!” with a bound Puss caught him and swallowed him down in a moment before [365] he could even squeak, and that was the end of the ogre.
Meanwhile the King and the Princess and Jack were rolling along together in the fine coach and talking pleasantly together. ”