.⁠—When a man has no longer anything but rags upon his body and vices in his heart, when he has arrived at that double moral and material degradation which the word blackguard characterizes 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 réguisé .⁠—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 vocabulary lirlonfa , have had their birth?

Let him listen to what follows:⁠—