Among these men "fighting" means "pretending:" they "fight" a disease, for cunning is their strength. With them the idea of man is not separated from the idea of a shadow. Night is called _la sorgue_ and man _l'orgue_: man is a derivative of night. They have formed the habit of regarding society as an atmosphere which kills them, as a fatal force, and they speak of their liberty as one speaks of his health. A man arrested is a "patient;" a man sentenced is a "corpse." The most terrible thing for the prisoner within the four stone walls which form his sepulchre is a sort of freezing chastity, and hence he always calls the dungeon the _castus_. In this funereal place external life will appear under its most smiling aspect. The prisoner has irons on his feet, and you may perhaps fancy that he thinks how people walk with their feet; no, he thinks that they dance with them, hence, if he succeed in cutting through his fetters, his first idea is that he can now dance, and he calls the saw a _bastringue_. A name is a _centre_, a profound assimilation. The bandit has two heads,--the one which revolves his deeds and guides him through life, the other which he has on his shoulders on the day of his death; he calls the head which counsels him in crime, the _sorbonne_, and the one that expiates it the _tronche_. When a man has nothing but rags on his body and vices in his heart, when he has reached that double moral and material degradation which the word _gueux_ characterizes in its two significations, he is ripe for crime; he is like a well-sharpened blade; he has two edges, his distress and his villany, and hence slang does not call him a _gueux_ but a _réguisé_. What is the bagne? A furnace of damnation, a hell, and the convict calls himself a "fagot." Lastly, what name do malefactors give to the prison? The "college." A whole penitentiary system might issue from this word. Would you like to know whence came most of the galley songs,--those choruses called in the special vocabularies the _lirlonfa_? Listen to this: