galuché.*
The very facts that such a mnemonic rhyme should be necessary and that Vidocq, who was then a member of the police, could record it, marks the decline of thieves’ argot as a language or code, peculiar to the profession.
The fact is that the argot had obeyed the natural tendency all codes have, that of spreading to cover more and more of the possible exigencies of conversation, and in this process it had become so complicated and difficult as to fall of its own weight. The men for whom it was produced simply could not or would not spend the time and effort necessary to learn it. The early nineteenth century was also the period when police science enjoyed its great and rapid development, with most detective forces coming into being. It was instantly evident to such officers as M. Henry in France and Sir Richard Mayne in England that a man who could hang about criminals’ haunts as one of themselves could learn their argot, and through it learn anything else he wished to know about their operations. Smart detectives therefore made a business of learning argot, and the moment this happened it began to decline.
VII
A criminals’ code of sorts, common to the whole underworld, still exists, but it has become largely a matter of inflection and innuendo, with the inclusion of a few special identifying terms. The professional thief in E. H. Sutherland’s Professional Thief tells the following story:
“The language of the underworld is both an evidence of the isolation of the underworld and also a means of identification. A professional thief can tell in two minutes’ conversation with a stranger whether he is acquainted with the criminal underworld and in two minutes more what particular rackets he knows intimately. If a thief were in the can and another person were brought in, the first might ask, ‘Where were you nailed?’ The second might say, ‘In the shed.’ It is possible that an amateur might know that ‘nailed’ meant arrested but no amateur would use the word ‘shed’ for railroad station.
“I was eating supper in a cafeteria with an occasional thief who was a student in law school. Two coppers were sitting at another table near by. The occasional thief had selected our table and had not recognized them as coppers. They were not in uniform. My friend said loud enough so the coppers could hear, ‘Did you hear what Jerry Myers got?’ I knew alright Jerry got four years, but I was not going to let the coppers know we were talking about anyone who had received a bit, and I had to hush the youngster up. I could not say ‘Nix!’ as a thief might have said if the coppers had not been able to hear, for this in itself would have informed the coppers that we were worth watching. So I said, ‘I understand the doctor said he got tonsillitis.’ A professional thief would have sensed danger at once and would have carried on along that line, but my friend started in again, ‘No, I mean—’ but I kicked him under the table and butted in again with some more about tonsillitis. The police were watching us carefully and I could not office my partner by moving my eyes toward them. I had to get up and go to the counter for something more to eat. When I returned I picked up his book on Conveyances and looked at it and then asked, ‘Have you seen the new book on abnormal psychology by Dr. Oglesby?’ The policemen immediately got up and reached for their hats. I nudged my partner to look at them as they got up and you could see that each had a revolver in a holster. My partner now understood why I had interrupted him and he asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell me they were here?’ I had told him a half-dozen times in language any professional thief would have understood.”
VIII
It is impossible to say when and in what manner thieves’ slang got itself into a gold-laced coat and began to present diplomatic credentials. We sight only a few details through the fogs, just enough to be fairly sure that while ciphers were developing in Italy the diplomatic jargon-codes were coming into being at the opposite end of Europe. Margaret, the queen who united Scandinavia for a brief period under one head, writes to her ministers in language none but they and she can understand; almost two hundred years later Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador to Ivan the Terrible sends home a dispatch couched in strange terms.
There is also the record of a complete jargon-code from 1622, just before Cardinal Richelieu came into power in France. Louis XIII’s ambassador to Rome takes with him a code-book written on two large sheets of paper. The Pope is to be referred to as “the rose,” and Rome is “the garden”; Cardinal de Savoye is “the laurel,” Cardinal Aldobrandini “the jasmine,” Germany “the stable,” Spain “the manger.”
The use of such a code was apparently the product of dissatisfaction with the ciphers that had just preceded it as the common vehicle of diplomatic use, and it was left to the ambassador’s ingenuity to combine these various botanical references into sentences that would slip through the mind of an interceptor without making an impression. The Louis XIII code, however, suffers to an exaggerated degree from the common defect of all codes—that of limiting the writer’s power of expression. It is difficult to conceive, for instance, by what verbal trickery such a statement as “the jasmine is now acting in the interest of the manger” could be so altered that it would not appear to have a secret meaning; and once the fact of such a code’s existence was discovered, its secret was as good as gone. The context of even a single message would be enough to give the whole thing away.
Yet the basic idea was too good to be abandoned without thorough trial—a code that would convey secret information right under the nose of an interceptor by means of a perfectly harmless text. All through the eighteenth century the jargon-code is tried again and again, by governments and private individuals and at times it becomes a perfect mania. Frederick the Great invited Voltaire to leave France and come to his court in such an allegorical code, and after he got there sent him the famous “code invitation” which is still a puzzle for schoolboy students of French:
To which the reply was:
Ja*
Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Scotch Jacobites sent one another information in an allegorical code, and when the latter toasted the King at dinner they passed their wineglasses over the water carafe to signify “The King over the water.” The great Duke of Marlborough and his hatchet-faced wife used such a code.
About the middle of the century the French state papers furnish another example of such a code in diplomatic use, an ambassador to Russia taking with him a small code dictionary much more elaborate than the one of a hundred years before. In it individuals are referred to under the names of furs; nations, intrigues and movements of armies are described in terms of the trade. The code lists the English ambassador as “fox,” the Austrian as “wolf,” and refers to English troops as “moleskins.”
The system was possible because the French ambassador carried a perfectly genuine fur merchant in his suite. When he wished to send a secret dispatch, he would first write an ordinary dispatch in ordinary language, deliberately getting as much wrong as possible, and send it through the regular channels, being quite sure it would be intercepted and read. Meanwhile the fur-merchant secretary would send to another fur merchant in Paris something like the following:
“Wolf is all the fashion at St. Petersburg now. I hear that Herr Emmerich of Berlin has sent through an order for thirty thousand moleskins, although his financial condition is not good and one wonders where he will find the money to pay for them.”
The Paris fur merchant would take this innocent commercial message around to the French chancellery, where it would be interpreted to mean that Russia and Austria were drawing toward an alliance, and that there was a rumor the King
