The Galley-Slaves’ Lament
EDIT: I realized that I mistranslated et point d’cravatte - I’ll update that now.
So I went down a rabbit hole the other day, and I found the lyrics (in French) for a song that was sung by the galley slaves of France (early/mid 1800s). I found two versions - one had verses 1, 2, 3, and 5 (I think) and the other had verses 1, 2, 4, and 5. I combined it all together and ran it through Google Translate. Thought I’d share the results.
The chain:
it's hail,
but it's equal.
It does no harm.
Our clothes are scarlet.
We wear instead of hats
caps and stock point. (orignally caps and no tie before I realized my mistake) *
It made a brush for the frills**. (see notes - special translation)
(my alternative: Our bristles are lace // It makes brushes our neckpiece)
We would be wrong to complain.
We are spoiled children
and it's fear of losing us
that we are held in chains.
When the time comes to stuff your stomach,
forward the beans!
It's not good, but it gets in -
everything like the best stew.
Our curse would have been worse
if, like pretty cadets,
we were made shorter
at the Abbey of Mount Regret.
La Chaîne
ç'est la grêle
mais c'est égal
c'a ne fait pas d'mal
nos habit sont écarlate
nous portons au lieu d'chapeaux
des bonnets et point d'cravatte
C'a fait brosse pour les jabots.
nous aurions tort de nous plaindre
nous sommes des enfans gâtés
et c'est crainte de nous perdre
que l'on nous tient enchaînés
quand vient l'heur' de s'bourrer l'ventre
en avant les haricots!
Ca n'est pas bon, mais ça entre
Tout comm' le meilleur fricot.
Notr' guignon eût été pire
si, comme de jolis cadets
on nous eût fait raccourcire
a l'abbaye d'Monte-à-regret
I find it interesting that they chose hail - as in the ice that falls from the sky - for the first stanza. A thing that comes down and beats upon you, I suppose.
“The chain” refers to the line of prisoners who were bound together by a physical chain.
Okay, so grêle has turned out to be a bit more difficult than I thought it would be. The first guess was “hail,” supported by a quick google search and a quick plug into a translator. Then I started looking at alternate meanings and saw that it has some interesting etymology. Honestly? I’ll make a separate textpost about grêle because it’s kinda cool.
Some other notes about grêle - it can mean “pockmarked,” “slender/spindly/delicate,” “high-pitched and without resonance” (like a thin voice), “hail,” or “something that falls like hail” (ex. a hail of bullets, a volley). Hail, however, is the most common modern meaning of the word. (grêlon, for example, is the direct and only translation of “hailstone.”)
c'a ne fait pas d'mal literally means “it does not do badness” or “it did not do of bad,” but the meaning is a bit more complex. From what I can tell, an approximate translation would be somewhere between “it cannot be harmful,” “it doesn’t do any harm,” and “it couldn’t hurt.” The original translation result from Google was “it didn’t hurt,” which I feel implies a physical pain in this context.
It seems to be more of a saying - something like “Ça ne fait pas de mal d'essayer” means “it doesn’t hurt to try.”
* et point d’cravatte was mistranslated at first. Google provided two possible translations - “and no tie” and “and tie point.” Since searching “tie point” got me nothing but pictures of ties, I just threw my hands up, said “French is weird,” and moved on. A more accurate translation is now reflected above: “and stock point.” A stock point is a small piece of metal that was used to hold a cravat or a stock in place during the day. (A stock, in this context, is basically a detachable, upturned shirt collar.) Analogous is a tie pin or a hatpin.
Here, I believe that it references the iron collar that the convicts wore - specifically the iron pin/s that held the two halves of the collar together.
** Jabot is a word in both French and English. In French, it can mean either the crop of a bird (as in the digestive pouch in the esophagus) or the shared meaning, which is a type of neckwear. The neckwear (a piece of ruffled lace or cloth) became popular in the 1650s and lasted well into the Victorian era for both men and women. By the Edwardian era, however, jabots were smaller and primarily worn by women.
For the alternative line, I switched some stuff around (ex. cravate vs jabot) to get a better feel for the meaning. What I believe it’s saying here is a joke by the bagnards that their coarse and lopsided facial hair acted like a fine man’s lace.
Guignon has no good direct translation, but it roughly means “persistent bad luck.” I chose to replace it with “curse” for a meaning that carries a similar connotation. “Misfortune” could also work.
Similarly, fricot has a couple meanings. Directly, it means “roughly cooked food.” It is synonymous with rata, which is “coarse stew served to soldiers” and/or “bad food poorly prepared.” Another synonym is frichiti, which is a cooked mean of generally poor quality.
The root/infinitive of raccourcire is raccourcir, which means “to shorten.” This specifically seems to mean to make an item shorter - the examples given for the translation are “this skirt has shortened in the wash” and “shorten a dress.” When I was first figuring this translation out, I thought it meant to shorten one’s lifespan; I realized the joke once I dug a little deeper.
“Monte-à-regret“ means “mountain of regret,” and the phrase as a whole (l'abbaye d'Monte-à-regret) is a term for the guillotine.
I also added some punctuation to the translation - the original is left as-is. This includes c vs ç - everything is left as it was written.
Er, actually, it seems I missed a couple letters. I went ahead and fixed that
