Chương Chương 251 · IN WHICH LITTLE GAVROCHE EXTRACTS PROFIT FROM NAPOLEON THE

GREAT

Spring in Paris is often traversed by harsh and piercing breezes which

do not precisely chill but freeze one; these north winds which sadden

the most beautiful days produce exactly the effect of those puffs of

cold air which enter a warm room through the cracks of a badly fitting

door or window. It seems as though the gloomy door of winter had

remained ajar, and as though the wind were pouring through it. In the

spring of 1832, the epoch when the first great epidemic of this century

broke out in Europe, these north gales were more harsh and piercing

than ever. It was a door even more glacial than that of winter which

was ajar. It was the door of the sepulchre. In these winds one felt the

breath of the cholera.

From a meteorological point of view, these cold winds possessed this

peculiarity, that they did not preclude a strong electric tension.

Frequent storms, accompanied by thunder and lightning, burst forth at

this epoch.

One evening, when these gales were blowing rudely, to such a degree

that January seemed to have returned and that the bourgeois had resumed

their cloaks, Little Gavroche, who was always shivering gayly under his

rags, was standing as though in ecstasy before a wig-maker’s shop in

the vicinity of the Orme-Saint-Gervais. He was adorned with a woman’s

woollen shawl, picked up no one knows where, and which he had converted

into a neck comforter. Little Gavroche appeared to be engaged in intent

admiration of a wax bride, in a low-necked dress, and crowned with

orange-flowers, who was revolving in the window, and displaying her

smile to passers-by, between two argand lamps; but in reality, he was

taking an observation of the shop, in order to discover whether he

could not “prig” from the shop-front a cake of soap, which he would

then proceed to sell for a sou to a “hair-dresser” in the suburbs. He

had often managed to breakfast off of such a roll. He called his

species of work, for which he possessed special aptitude, “shaving

barbers.”

While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered

between his teeth: “Tuesday. It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday?

Perhaps it was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday.”

No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred.

Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last

occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now

Friday.

The barber in his shop, which was warmed by a good stove, was shaving a

customer and casting a glance from time to time at the enemy, that

freezing and impudent street urchin both of whose hands were in his

pockets, but whose mind was evidently unsheathed.

While Gavroche was scrutinizing the shop-window and the cakes of

windsor soap, two children of unequal stature, very neatly dressed, and

still smaller than himself, one apparently about seven years of age,

the other five, timidly turned the handle and entered the shop, with a

request for something or other, alms possibly, in a plaintive murmur

which resembled a groan rather than a prayer. They both spoke at once,

and their words were unintelligible because sobs broke the voice of the

younger, and the teeth of the elder were chattering with cold. The

barber wheeled round with a furious look, and without abandoning his

razor, thrust back the elder with his left hand and the younger with

his knee, and slammed his door, saying: “The idea of coming in and

freezing everybody for nothing!”

The two children resumed their march in tears. In the meantime, a cloud

had risen; it had begun to rain.

Little Gavroche ran after them and accosted them:—

“What’s the matter with you, brats?”

“We don’t know where we are to sleep,” replied the elder.

“Is that all?” said Gavroche. “A great matter, truly. The idea of

bawling about that. They must be greenies!”

And adopting, in addition to his superiority, which was rather

bantering, an accent of tender authority and gentle patronage:—

“Come along with me, young ’uns!”

“Yes, sir,” said the elder.

And the two children followed him as they would have followed an

archbishop. They had stopped crying.

Gavroche led them up the Rue Saint-Antoine in the direction of the

Bastille.

As Gavroche walked along, he cast an indignant backward glance at the

barber’s shop.

“That fellow has no heart, the whiting,”35 he muttered. “He’s an

Englishman.”

A woman who caught sight of these three marching in a file, with

Gavroche at their head, burst into noisy laughter. This laugh was

wanting in respect towards the group.

“Good day, Mamselle Omnibus,” said Gavroche to her.

An instant later, the wig-maker occurred to his mind once more, and he

added:—

“I am making a mistake in the beast; he’s not a whiting, he’s a

serpent. Barber, I’ll go and fetch a locksmith, and I’ll have a bell

hung to your tail.”

This wig-maker had rendered him aggressive. As he strode over a gutter,

he apostrophized a bearded portress who was worthy to meet Faust on the

Brocken, and who had a broom in her hand.

“Madam,” said he, “so you are going out with your horse?”

And thereupon, he spattered the polished boots of a pedestrian.

“You scamp!” shouted the furious pedestrian.

Gavroche elevated his nose above his shawl.

“Is Monsieur complaining?”

“Of you!” ejaculated the man.

“The office is closed,” said Gavroche, “I do not receive any more

complaints.”

In the meanwhile, as he went on up the street, he perceived a

beggar-girl, thirteen or fourteen years old, and clad in so short a

gown that her knees were visible, lying thoroughly chilled under a

porte-cochère. The little girl was getting to be too old for such a

thing. Growth does play these tricks. The petticoat becomes short at

the moment when nudity becomes indecent.

“Poor girl!” said Gavroche. “She hasn’t even trousers. Hold on, take

this.”

And unwinding all the comfortable woollen which he had around his neck,

he flung it on the thin and purple shoulders of the beggar-girl, where

the scarf became a shawl once more.

The child stared at him in astonishment, and received the shawl in

silence. When a certain stage of distress has been reached in his

misery, the poor man no longer groans over evil, no longer returns

thanks for good.

That done: “Brrr!” said Gavroche, who was shivering more than Saint

Martin, for the latter retained one-half of his cloak.

At this _brrr!_ the downpour of rain, redoubled in its spite, became

furious. The wicked skies punish good deeds.

“Ah, come now!” exclaimed Gavroche, “what’s the meaning of this? It’s

re-raining! Good Heavens, if it goes on like this, I shall stop my

subscription.”

And he set out on the march once more.

“It’s all right,” he resumed, casting a glance at the beggar-girl, as

she coiled up under the shawl, “she’s got a famous peel.”

And looking up at the clouds he exclaimed:—

“Caught!”

The two children followed close on his heels.

As they were passing one of these heavy grated lattices, which indicate

a baker’s shop, for bread is put behind bars like gold, Gavroche turned

round:—

“Ah, by the way, brats, have we dined?”

“Monsieur,” replied the elder, “we have had nothing to eat since this

morning.”

“So you have neither father nor mother?” resumed Gavroche majestically.

“Excuse us, sir, we have a papa and a mamma, but we don’t know where

they are.”

“Sometimes that’s better than knowing where they are,” said Gavroche,

who was a thinker.

“We have been wandering about these two hours,” continued the elder,

“we have hunted for things at the corners of the streets, but we have

found nothing.”

“I know,” ejaculated Gavroche, “it’s the dogs who eat everything.”

He went on, after a pause:—

“Ah! we have lost our authors. We don’t know what we have done with

them. This should not be, gamins. It’s stupid to let old people stray

off like that. Come now! we must have a snooze all the same.”

However, he asked them no questions. What was more simple than that

they should have no dwelling place!

The elder of the two children, who had almost entirely recovered the

prompt heedlessness of childhood, uttered this exclamation:—

“It’s queer, all the same. Mamma told us that she would take us to get

a blessed spray on Palm Sunday.”

“Bosh,” said Gavroche.

“Mamma,” resumed the elder, “is a lady who lives with Mamselle Miss.”

“Tanflûte!” retorted Gavroche.

Meanwhile he had halted, and for the last two minutes he had been

feeling and fumbling in all sorts of nooks which his rags contained.

At last he tossed his head with an air intended to be merely satisfied,

but which was triumphant, in reality.

“Let us be calm, young ’uns. Here’s supper for three.”

And from one of his pockets he drew forth a sou.

Without allowing the two urchins time for amazement, he pushed both of

them before him into the baker’s shop, and flung his sou on the

counter, crying:—

“Boy! five centimes’ worth of bread.”

The baker, who was the proprietor in person, took up a loaf and a

knife.

“In three pieces, my boy!” went on Gavroche.

And he added with dignity:—

“There are three of us.”

And seeing that the baker, after scrutinizing the three customers, had

taken down a black loaf, he thrust his finger far up his nose with an

inhalation as imperious as though he had had a pinch of the great

Frederick’s snuff on the tip of his thumb, and hurled this indignant

apostrophe full in the baker’s face:—

“Keksekça?”

Those of our readers who might be tempted to espy in this

interpellation of Gavroche’s to the baker a Russian or a Polish word,

or one of those savage cries which the Yoways and the Botocudos hurl at

each other from bank to bank of a river, athwart the solitudes, are

warned that it is a word which they [our readers] utter every day, and

which takes the place of the phrase: “Qu’est-ce que c’est que cela?”

The baker understood perfectly, and replied:—

“Well! It’s bread, and very good bread of the second quality.”

“You mean _larton brutal_ [black bread]!” retorted Gavroche, calmly and

coldly disdainful. “White bread, boy! white bread [_larton savonné_]!

I’m standing treat.”

The baker could not repress a smile, and as he cut the white bread he

surveyed them in a compassionate way which shocked Gavroche.

“Come, now, baker’s boy!” said he, “what are you taking our measure

like that for?”

All three of them placed end to end would have hardly made a measure.

When the bread was cut, the baker threw the sou into his drawer, and

Gavroche said to the two children:—

“Grub away.”

The little boys stared at him in surprise.

Gavroche began to laugh.

“Ah! hullo, that’s so! they don’t understand yet, they’re too small.”

And he repeated:—

“Eat away.”

At the same time, he held out a piece of bread to each of them.

And thinking that the elder, who seemed to him the more worthy of his

conversation, deserved some special encouragement and ought to be

relieved from all hesitation to satisfy his appetite, he added, as he

handed him the largest share:—

“Ram that into your muzzle.”

One piece was smaller than the others; he kept this for himself.

The poor children, including Gavroche, were famished. As they tore

their bread apart in big mouthfuls, they blocked up the shop of the

baker, who, now that they had paid their money, looked angrily at them.

“Let’s go into the street again,” said Gavroche.

They set off once more in the direction of the Bastille.

From time to time, as they passed the lighted shop-windows, the

smallest halted to look at the time on a leaden watch which was

suspended from his neck by a cord.

“Well, he is a very green ’un,” said Gavroche.

Then, becoming thoughtful, he muttered between his teeth:—

“All the same, if I had charge of the babes I’d lock ’em up better than

that.”

Just as they were finishing their morsel of bread, and had reached the

angle of that gloomy Rue des Ballets, at the other end of which the low

and threatening wicket of La Force was visible:—

“Hullo, is that you, Gavroche?” said some one.

“Hullo, is that you, Montparnasse?” said Gavroche.

A man had just accosted the street urchin, and the man was no other

than Montparnasse in disguise, with blue spectacles, but recognizable

to Gavroche.

“The bow-wows!” went on Gavroche, “you’ve got a hide the color of a

linseed plaster, and blue specs like a doctor. You’re putting on style,

‘pon my word!”

“Hush!” ejaculated Montparnasse, “not so loud.”

And he drew Gavroche hastily out of range of the lighted shops.

The two little ones followed mechanically, holding each other by the

hand.

When they were ensconced under the arch of a porte-cochère, sheltered

from the rain and from all eyes:—

“Do you know where I’m going?” demanded Montparnasse.

“To the Abbey of Ascend-with-Regret,”36 replied Gavroche.

“Joker!”

And Montparnasse went on:—

“I’m going to find Babet.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Gavroche, “so her name is Babet.”

Montparnasse lowered his voice:—

“Not she, he.”

“Ah! Babet.”

“Yes, Babet.”

“I thought he was buckled.”

“He has undone the buckle,” replied Montparnasse.

And he rapidly related to the gamin how, on the morning of that very

day, Babet, having been transferred to La Conciergerie, had made his

escape, by turning to the left instead of to the right in “the police

office.”

Gavroche expressed his admiration for this skill.

“What a dentist!” he cried.

Montparnasse added a few details as to Babet’s flight, and ended with:—

“Oh! That’s not all.”

Gavroche, as he listened, had seized a cane that Montparnasse held in

his hand, and mechanically pulled at the upper part, and the blade of a

dagger made its appearance.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, pushing the dagger back in haste, “you have brought

along your gendarme disguised as a bourgeois.”

Montparnasse winked.

“The deuce!” resumed Gavroche, “so you’re going to have a bout with the

bobbies?”

“You can’t tell,” replied Montparnasse with an indifferent air. “It’s

always a good thing to have a pin about one.”

Gavroche persisted:—

“What are you up to to-night?”

Again Montparnasse took a grave tone, and said, mouthing every

syllable: “Things.”

And abruptly changing the conversation:—

“By the way!”

“What?”

“Something happened t’other day. Fancy. I meet a bourgeois. He makes me

a present of a sermon and his purse. I put it in my pocket. A minute

later, I feel in my pocket. There’s nothing there.”

“Except the sermon,” said Gavroche.

“But you,” went on Montparnasse, “where are you bound for now?”

Gavroche pointed to his two protégés, and said:—

“I’m going to put these infants to bed.”

“Whereabouts is the bed?”

“At my house.”

“Where’s your house?”

“At my house.”

“So you have a lodging?”

“Yes, I have.”

“And where is your lodging?”

“In the elephant,” said Gavroche.

Montparnasse, though not naturally inclined to astonishment, could not

restrain an exclamation.

“In the elephant!”

“Well, yes, in the elephant!” retorted Gavroche. “Kekçaa?”

This is another word of the language which no one writes, and which

every one speaks.

Kekçaa signifies: _Qu’est que c’est que cela a? _ [What’s the matter

with that?]

The urchin’s profound remark recalled Montparnasse to calmness and good

sense. He appeared to return to better sentiments with regard to

Gavroche’s lodging.

“Of course,” said he, “yes, the elephant. Is it comfortable there?”

“Very,” said Gavroche. “It’s really bully there. There ain’t any

draughts, as there are under the bridges.”

“How do you get in?”

“Oh, I get in.”

“So there is a hole?” demanded Montparnasse.

“Parbleu! I should say so. But you mustn’t tell. It’s between the fore

legs. The bobbies haven’t seen it.”

“And you climb up? Yes, I understand.”

“A turn of the hand, cric, crac, and it’s all over, no one there.”

After a pause, Gavroche added:—

“I shall have a ladder for these children.”

Montparnasse burst out laughing:—

“Where the devil did you pick up those young ’uns?”

Gavroche replied with great simplicity:—

“They are some brats that a wig-maker made me a present of.”

Meanwhile, Montparnasse had fallen to thinking:—

“You recognized me very readily,” he muttered.

He took from his pocket two small objects which were nothing more than

two quills wrapped in cotton, and thrust one up each of his nostrils.

This gave him a different nose.

“That changes you,” remarked Gavroche, “you are less homely so, you

ought to keep them on all the time.”

Montparnasse was a handsome fellow, but Gavroche was a tease.

“Seriously,” demanded Montparnasse, “how do you like me so?”

The sound of his voice was different also. In a twinkling, Montparnasse

had become unrecognizable.

“Oh! Do play Porrichinelle for us!” exclaimed Gavroche.

The two children, who had not been listening up to this point, being

occupied themselves in thrusting their fingers up their noses, drew

near at this name, and stared at Montparnasse with dawning joy and

admiration.

Unfortunately, Montparnasse was troubled.

He laid his hand on Gavroche’s shoulder, and said to him, emphasizing

his words: “Listen to what I tell you, boy! if I were on the square

with my dog, my knife, and my wife, and if you were to squander ten

sous on me, I wouldn’t refuse to work, but this isn’t Shrove Tuesday.”

This odd phrase produced a singular effect on the gamin. He wheeled

round hastily, darted his little sparkling eyes about him with profound

attention, and perceived a police sergeant standing with his back to

them a few paces off. Gavroche allowed an: “Ah! good!” to escape him,

but immediately suppressed it, and shaking Montparnasse’s hand:—

“Well, good evening,” said he, “I’m going off to my elephant with my

brats. Supposing that you should need me some night, you can come and

hunt me up there. I lodge on the entresol. There is no porter. You will

inquire for Monsieur Gavroche.”

“Very good,” said Montparnasse.

And they parted, Montparnasse betaking himself in the direction of the

Grève, and Gavroche towards the Bastille. The little one of five,

dragged along by his brother who was dragged by Gavroche, turned his

head back several times to watch “Porrichinelle” as he went.

The ambiguous phrase by means of which Montparnasse had warned Gavroche

of the presence of the policeman, contained no other talisman than the

assonance _dig_ repeated five or six times in different forms. This

syllable, _dig_, uttered alone or artistically mingled with the words

of a phrase, means: “Take care, we can no longer talk freely.” There

was besides, in Montparnasse’s sentence, a literary beauty which was

lost upon Gavroche, that is _mon dogue, ma dague et ma digue_, a slang

expression of the Temple, which signifies my dog, my knife, and my

wife, greatly in vogue among clowns and the red-tails in the great

century when Molière wrote and Callot drew.

Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southwest corner of

the Place de la Bastille, near the basin of the canal, excavated in the

ancient ditch of the fortress-prison, a singular monument, which has

already been effaced from the memories of Parisians, and which deserved

to leave some trace, for it was the idea of a “member of the Institute,

the General-in-chief of the army of Egypt.”

We say monument, although it was only a rough model. But this model

itself, a marvellous sketch, the grandiose skeleton of an idea of

Napoleon’s, which successive gusts of wind have carried away and

thrown, on each occasion, still further from us, had become historical

and had acquired a certain definiteness which contrasted with its

provisional aspect. It was an elephant forty feet high, constructed of

timber and masonry, bearing on its back a tower which resembled a

house, formerly painted green by some dauber, and now painted black by

heaven, the wind, and time. In this deserted and unprotected corner of

the place, the broad brow of the colossus, his trunk, his tusks, his

tower, his enormous crupper, his four feet, like columns produced, at

night, under the starry heavens, a surprising and terrible form. It was

a sort of symbol of popular force. It was sombre, mysterious, and

immense. It was some mighty, visible phantom, one knew not what,

standing erect beside the invisible spectre of the Bastille.

Few strangers visited this edifice, no passer-by looked at it. It was

falling into ruins; every season the plaster which detached itself from

its sides formed hideous wounds upon it. “The ædiles,” as the

expression ran in elegant dialect, had forgotten it ever since 1814.

There it stood in its corner, melancholy, sick, crumbling, surrounded

by a rotten palisade, soiled continually by drunken coachmen; cracks

meandered athwart its belly, a lath projected from its tail, tall grass

flourished between its legs; and, as the level of the place had been

rising all around it for a space of thirty years, by that slow and

continuous movement which insensibly elevates the soil of large towns,

it stood in a hollow, and it looked as though the ground were giving

way beneath it. It was unclean, despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly

in the eyes of the bourgeois, melancholy in the eyes of the thinker.

There was something about it of the dirt which is on the point of being

swept out, and something of the majesty which is on the point of being

decapitated. As we have said, at night, its aspect changed. Night is

the real element of everything that is dark. As soon as twilight

descended, the old elephant became transfigured; he assumed a tranquil

and redoubtable appearance in the formidable serenity of the shadows.

Being of the past, he belonged to night; and obscurity was in keeping

with his grandeur.

This rough, squat, heavy, hard, austere, almost misshapen, but

assuredly majestic monument, stamped with a sort of magnificent and

savage gravity, has disappeared, and left to reign in peace, a sort of

gigantic stove, ornamented with its pipe, which has replaced the sombre

fortress with its nine towers, very much as the bourgeoisie replaces

the feudal classes. It is quite natural that a stove should be the

symbol of an epoch in which a pot contains power. This epoch will pass

away, people have already begun to understand that, if there can be

force in a boiler, there can be no force except in the brain; in other

words, that which leads and drags on the world, is not locomotives, but

ideas. Harness locomotives to ideas,—that is well done; but do not

mistake the horse for the rider.

At all events, to return to the Place de la Bastille, the architect of

this elephant succeeded in making a grand thing out of plaster; the

architect of the stove has succeeded in making a pretty thing out of

bronze.

This stove-pipe, which has been baptized by a sonorous name, and called

the column of July, this monument of a revolution that miscarried, was

still enveloped in 1832, in an immense shirt of woodwork, which we

regret, for our part, and by a vast plank enclosure, which completed

the task of isolating the elephant.

It was towards this corner of the place, dimly lighted by the

reflection of a distant street lamp, that the gamin guided his two

“brats.”

The reader must permit us to interrupt ourselves here and to remind him

that we are dealing with simple reality, and that twenty years ago, the

tribunals were called upon to judge, under the charge of vagabondage,

and mutilation of a public monument, a child who had been caught asleep

in this very elephant of the Bastille. This fact noted, we proceed.

On arriving in the vicinity of the colossus, Gavroche comprehended the

effect which the infinitely great might produce on the infinitely

small, and said:—

“Don’t be scared, infants.”

Then he entered through a gap in the fence into the elephant’s

enclosure and helped the young ones to clamber through the breach. The

two children, somewhat frightened, followed Gavroche without uttering a

word, and confided themselves to this little Providence in rags which

had given them bread and had promised them a shelter.

There, extended along the fence, lay a ladder which by day served the

laborers in the neighboring timber-yard. Gavroche raised it with

remarkable vigor, and placed it against one of the elephant’s forelegs.

Near the point where the ladder ended, a sort of black hole in the

belly of the colossus could be distinguished.

Gavroche pointed out the ladder and the hole to his guests, and said to

them:—

“Climb up and go in.”

The two little boys exchanged terrified glances.

“You’re afraid, brats!” exclaimed Gavroche.

And he added:—

“You shall see!”

He clasped the rough leg of the elephant, and in a twinkling, without

deigning to make use of the ladder, he had reached the aperture. He

entered it as an adder slips through a crevice, and disappeared within,

and an instant later, the two children saw his head, which looked pale,

appear vaguely, on the edge of the shadowy hole, like a wan and whitish

spectre.

“Well!” he exclaimed, “climb up, young ’uns! You’ll see how snug it is

here! Come up, you!” he said to the elder, “I’ll lend you a hand.”

The little fellows nudged each other, the gamin frightened and inspired

them with confidence at one and the same time, and then, it was raining

very hard. The elder one undertook the risk. The younger, on seeing his

brother climbing up, and himself left alone between the paws of this

huge beast, felt greatly inclined to cry, but he did not dare.

The elder lad climbed, with uncertain steps, up the rungs of the

ladder; Gavroche, in the meanwhile, encouraging him with exclamations

like a fencing-master to his pupils, or a muleteer to his mules.

“Don’t be afraid!—That’s it!—Come on!—Put your feet there!—Give us your

hand here!—Boldly!”

And when the child was within reach, he seized him suddenly and

vigorously by the arm, and pulled him towards him.

“Nabbed!” said he.

The brat had passed through the crack.

“Now,” said Gavroche, “wait for me. Be so good as to take a seat,

Monsieur.”

And making his way out of the hole as he had entered it, he slipped

down the elephant’s leg with the agility of a monkey, landed on his

feet in the grass, grasped the child of five round the body, and

planted him fairly in the middle of the ladder, then he began to climb

up behind him, shouting to the elder:—

“I’m going to boost him, do you tug.”

And in another instant, the small lad was pushed, dragged, pulled,

thrust, stuffed into the hole, before he had time to recover himself,

and Gavroche, entering behind him, and repulsing the ladder with a kick

which sent it flat on the grass, began to clap his hands and to cry:—

“Here we are! Long live General Lafayette!”

This explosion over, he added:—

“Now, young ’uns, you are in my house.”

Gavroche was at home, in fact.

Oh, unforeseen utility of the useless! Charity of great things!

Goodness of giants! This huge monument, which had embodied an idea of

the Emperor’s, had become the box of a street urchin. The brat had been

accepted and sheltered by the colossus. The bourgeois decked out in

their Sunday finery who passed the elephant of the Bastille, were fond

of saying as they scanned it disdainfully with their prominent eyes:

“What’s the good of that?” It served to save from the cold, the frost,

the hail, and rain, to shelter from the winds of winter, to preserve

from slumber in the mud which produces fever, and from slumber in the

snow which produces death, a little being who had no father, no mother,

no bread, no clothes, no refuge. It served to receive the innocent whom

society repulsed. It served to diminish public crime. It was a lair

open to one against whom all doors were shut. It seemed as though the

miserable old mastodon, invaded by vermin and oblivion, covered with

warts, with mould, and ulcers, tottering, worm-eaten, abandoned,

condemned, a sort of mendicant colossus, asking alms in vain with a

benevolent look in the midst of the crossroads, had taken pity on that

other mendicant, the poor pygmy, who roamed without shoes to his feet,

without a roof over his head, blowing on his fingers, clad in rags, fed

on rejected scraps. That was what the elephant of the Bastille was good

for. This idea of Napoleon, disdained by men, had been taken back by

God. That which had been merely illustrious, had become august. In

order to realize his thought, the Emperor should have had porphyry,

brass, iron, gold, marble; the old collection of planks, beams and

plaster sufficed for God. The Emperor had had the dream of a genius; in

that Titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, with trunk uplifted, bearing

its tower and scattering on all sides its merry and vivifying waters,

he wished to incarnate the people. God had done a grander thing with

it, he had lodged a child there.

The hole through which Gavroche had entered was a breach which was

hardly visible from the outside, being concealed, as we have stated,

beneath the elephant’s belly, and so narrow that it was only cats and

homeless children who could pass through it.

“Let’s begin,” said Gavroche, “by telling the porter that we are not at

home.”

And plunging into the darkness with the assurance of a person who is

well acquainted with his apartments, he took a plank and stopped up the

aperture.

Again Gavroche plunged into the obscurity. The children heard the

crackling of the match thrust into the phosphoric bottle. The chemical

match was not yet in existence; at that epoch the Fumade steel

represented progress.

A sudden light made them blink; Gavroche had just managed to ignite one

of those bits of cord dipped in resin which are called _cellar rats_.

The _cellar rat_, which emitted more smoke than light, rendered the

interior of the elephant confusedly visible.

Gavroche’s two guests glanced about them, and the sensation which they

experienced was something like that which one would feel if shut up in

the great tun of Heidelberg, or, better still, like what Jonah must

have felt in the biblical belly of the whale. An entire and gigantic

skeleton appeared enveloping them. Above, a long brown beam, whence

started at regular distances, massive, arching ribs, represented the

vertebral column with its sides, stalactites of plaster depended from

them like entrails, and vast spiders’ webs stretching from side to

side, formed dirty diaphragms. Here and there, in the corners, were

visible large blackish spots which had the appearance of being alive,

and which changed places rapidly with an abrupt and frightened

movement.

Fragments which had fallen from the elephant’s back into his belly had

filled up the cavity, so that it was possible to walk upon it as on a

floor.

The smaller child nestled up against his brother, and whispered to

him:—

“It’s black.”

This remark drew an exclamation from Gavroche. The petrified air of the

two brats rendered some shock necessary.

“What’s that you are gabbling about there?” he exclaimed. “Are you

scoffing at me? Are you turning up your noses? Do you want the

Tuileries? Are you brutes? Come, say! I warn you that I don’t belong to

the regiment of simpletons. Ah, come now, are you brats from the Pope’s

establishment?”

A little roughness is good in cases of fear. It is reassuring. The two

children drew close to Gavroche.

Gavroche, paternally touched by this confidence, passed from grave to

gentle, and addressing the smaller:—

“Stupid,” said he, accenting the insulting word, with a caressing

intonation, “it’s outside that it is black. Outside it’s raining, here

it does not rain; outside it’s cold, here there’s not an atom of wind;

outside there are heaps of people, here there’s no one; outside there

ain’t even the moon, here there’s my candle, confound it!”

The two children began to look upon the apartment with less terror; but

Gavroche allowed them no more time for contemplation.

“Quick,” said he.

And he pushed them towards what we are very glad to be able to call the

end of the room.

There stood his bed.

Gavroche’s bed was complete; that is to say, it had a mattress, a

blanket, and an alcove with curtains.

The mattress was a straw mat, the blanket a rather large strip of gray

woollen stuff, very warm and almost new. This is what the alcove

consisted of:—

Three rather long poles, thrust into and consolidated, with the rubbish

which formed the floor, that is to say, the belly of the elephant, two

in front and one behind, and united by a rope at their summits, so as

to form a pyramidal bundle. This cluster supported a trellis-work of

brass wire which was simply placed upon it, but artistically applied,

and held by fastenings of iron wire, so that it enveloped all three

holes. A row of very heavy stones kept this network down to the floor

so that nothing could pass under it. This grating was nothing else than

a piece of the brass screens with which aviaries are covered in

menageries. Gavroche’s bed stood as in a cage, behind this net. The

whole resembled an Esquimaux tent.

This trellis-work took the place of curtains.

Gavroche moved aside the stones which fastened the net down in front,

and the two folds of the net which lapped over each other fell apart.

“Down on all fours, brats!” said Gavroche.

He made his guests enter the cage with great precaution, then he

crawled in after them, pulled the stones together, and closed the

opening hermetically again.

All three had stretched out on the mat. Gavroche still had the _cellar

rat_ in his hand.

“Now,” said he, “go to sleep! I’m going to suppress the candelabra.”

“Monsieur,” the elder of the brothers asked Gavroche, pointing to the

netting, “what’s that for?”

“That,” answered Gavroche gravely, “is for the rats. Go to sleep!”

Nevertheless, he felt obliged to add a few words of instruction for the

benefit of these young creatures, and he continued:—

“It’s a thing from the Jardin des Plantes. It’s used for fierce

animals. There’s a whole shopful of them there. All you’ve got to do is

to climb over a wall, crawl through a window, and pass through a door.

You can get as much as you want.”

As he spoke, he wrapped the younger one up bodily in a fold of the

blanket, and the little one murmured:—

“Oh! how good that is! It’s warm!”

Gavroche cast a pleased eye on the blanket.

“That’s from the Jardin des Plantes, too,” said he. “I took that from

the monkeys.”

And, pointing out to the eldest the mat on which he was lying, a very

thick and admirably made mat, he added:—

“That belonged to the giraffe.”

After a pause he went on:—

“The beasts had all these things. I took them away from them. It didn’t

trouble them. I told them: ‘It’s for the elephant.’”

He paused, and then resumed:—

“You crawl over the walls and you don’t care a straw for the

government. So there now!”

The two children gazed with timid and stupefied respect on this

intrepid and ingenious being, a vagabond like themselves, isolated like

themselves, frail like themselves, who had something admirable and

all-powerful about him, who seemed supernatural to them, and whose

physiognomy was composed of all the grimaces of an old mountebank,

mingled with the most ingenuous and charming smiles.

“Monsieur,” ventured the elder timidly, “you are not afraid of the

police, then?”

Gavroche contented himself with replying:—

“Brat! Nobody says ‘police,’ they say ‘bobbies.’”

The smaller had his eyes wide open, but he said nothing. As he was on

the edge of the mat, the elder being in the middle, Gavroche tucked the

blanket round him as a mother might have done, and heightened the mat

under his head with old rags, in such a way as to form a pillow for the

child. Then he turned to the elder:—

“Hey! We’re jolly comfortable here, ain’t we?”

“Ah, yes!” replied the elder, gazing at Gavroche with the expression of

a saved angel.

The two poor little children who had been soaked through, began to grow

warm once more.

“Ah, by the way,” continued Gavroche, “what were you bawling about?”

And pointing out the little one to his brother:—

“A mite like that, I’ve nothing to say about, but the idea of a big

fellow like you crying! It’s idiotic; you looked like a calf.”

“Gracious,” replied the child, “we have no lodging.”

“Bother!” retorted Gavroche, “you don’t say ‘lodgings,’ you say

‘crib.’”

“And then, we were afraid of being alone like that at night.”

“You don’t say ‘night,’ you say ‘darkmans.’”

“Thank you, sir,” said the child.

“Listen,” went on Gavroche, “you must never bawl again over anything.

I’ll take care of you. You shall see what fun we’ll have. In summer,

we’ll go to the Glacière with Navet, one of my pals, we’ll bathe in the

Gare, we’ll run stark naked in front of the rafts on the bridge at

Austerlitz,—that makes the laundresses raging. They scream, they get

mad, and if you only knew how ridiculous they are! We’ll go and see the

man-skeleton. And then I’ll take you to the play. I’ll take you to see

Frédérick Lemaître. I have tickets, I know some of the actors, I even

played in a piece once. There were a lot of us fellers, and we ran

under a cloth, and that made the sea. I’ll get you an engagement at my

theatre. We’ll go to see the savages. They ain’t real, those savages

ain’t. They wear pink tights that go all in wrinkles, and you can see

where their elbows have been darned with white. Then, we’ll go to the

Opera. We’ll get in with the hired applauders. The Opera claque is well

managed. I wouldn’t associate with the claque on the boulevard. At the

Opera, just fancy! some of them pay twenty sous, but they’re ninnies.

They’re called dishclouts. And then we’ll go to see the guillotine

work. I’ll show you the executioner. He lives in the Rue des Marais.

Monsieur Sanson. He has a letter-box at his door. Ah! we’ll have famous

fun!”

At that moment a drop of wax fell on Gavroche’s finger, and recalled

him to the realities of life.

“The deuce!” said he, “there’s the wick giving out. Attention! I can’t

spend more than a sou a month on my lighting. When a body goes to bed,

he must sleep. We haven’t the time to read M. Paul de Kock’s romances.

And besides, the light might pass through the cracks of the

porte-cochère, and all the bobbies need to do is to see it.”

“And then,” remarked the elder timidly,—he alone dared talk to

Gavroche, and reply to him, “a spark might fall in the straw, and we

must look out and not burn the house down.”

“People don’t say ‘burn the house down,’” remarked Gavroche, “they say

‘blaze the crib.’”

The storm increased in violence, and the heavy downpour beat upon the

back of the colossus amid claps of thunder. “You’re taken in, rain!”

said Gavroche. “It amuses me to hear the decanter run down the legs of

the house. Winter is a stupid; it wastes its merchandise, it loses its

labor, it can’t wet us, and that makes it kick up a row, old

water-carrier that it is.”

This allusion to the thunder, all the consequences of which Gavroche,

in his character of a philosopher of the nineteenth century, accepted,

was followed by a broad flash of lightning, so dazzling that a hint of

it entered the belly of the elephant through the crack. Almost at the

same instant, the thunder rumbled with great fury. The two little

creatures uttered a shriek, and started up so eagerly that the network

came near being displaced, but Gavroche turned his bold face to them,

and took advantage of the clap of thunder to burst into a laugh.

“Calm down, children. Don’t topple over the edifice. That’s fine,

first-class thunder; all right. That’s no slouch of a streak of

lightning. Bravo for the good God! Deuce take it! It’s almost as good

as it is at the Ambigu.”

That said, he restored order in the netting, pushed the two children

gently down on the bed, pressed their knees, in order to stretch them

out at full length, and exclaimed:—

“Since the good God is lighting his candle, I can blow out mine. Now,

babes, now, my young humans, you must shut your peepers. It’s very bad

not to sleep. It’ll make you swallow the strainer, or, as they say, in

fashionable society, stink in the gullet. Wrap yourself up well in the

hide! I’m going to put out the light. Are you ready?”

“Yes,” murmured the elder, “I’m all right. I seem to have feathers

under my head.”

“People don’t say ‘head,’” cried Gavroche, “they say ‘nut’.”

The two children nestled close to each other, Gavroche finished

arranging them on the mat, drew the blanket up to their very ears, then

repeated, for the third time, his injunction in the hieratical tongue:—

“Shut your peepers!”

And he snuffed out his tiny light.

Hardly had the light been extinguished, when a peculiar trembling began

to affect the netting under which the three children lay.

It consisted of a multitude of dull scratches which produced a metallic

sound, as if claws and teeth were gnawing at the copper wire. This was

accompanied by all sorts of little piercing cries.

The little five-year-old boy, on hearing this hubbub overhead, and

chilled with terror, jogged his brother’s elbow; but the elder brother

had already shut his peepers, as Gavroche had ordered. Then the little

one, who could no longer control his terror, questioned Gavroche, but

in a very low tone, and with bated breath:—

“Sir?”

“Hey?” said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.

“What is that?”

“It’s the rats,” replied Gavroche.

And he laid his head down on the mat again.

The rats, in fact, who swarmed by thousands in the carcass of the

elephant, and who were the living black spots which we have already

mentioned, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle, so long as

it had been lighted; but as soon as the cavern, which was the same as

their city, had returned to darkness, scenting what the good

story-teller Perrault calls “fresh meat,” they had hurled themselves in

throngs on Gavroche’s tent, had climbed to the top of it, and had begun

to bite the meshes as though seeking to pierce this new-fangled trap.

Still the little one could not sleep.

“Sir?” he began again.

“Hey?” said Gavroche.

“What are rats?”

“They are mice.”

This explanation reassured the child a little. He had seen white mice

in the course of his life, and he was not afraid of them. Nevertheless,

he lifted up his voice once more.

“Sir?”

“Hey?” said Gavroche again.

“Why don’t you have a cat?”

“I did have one,” replied Gavroche, “I brought one here, but they ate

her.”

This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the little

fellow began to tremble again.

The dialogue between him and Gavroche began again for the fourth time:—

“Monsieur?”

“Hey?”

“Who was it that was eaten?”

“The cat.”

“And who ate the cat?”

“The rats.”

“The mice?”

“Yes, the rats.”

The child, in consternation, dismayed at the thought of mice which ate

cats, pursued:—

“Sir, would those mice eat us?”

“Wouldn’t they just!” ejaculated Gavroche.

The child’s terror had reached its climax. But Gavroche added:—

“Don’t be afraid. They can’t get in. And besides, I’m here! Here, catch

hold of my hand. Hold your tongue and shut your peepers!”

At the same time Gavroche grasped the little fellow’s hand across his

brother. The child pressed the hand close to him, and felt reassured.

Courage and strength have these mysterious ways of communicating

themselves. Silence reigned round them once more, the sound of their

voices had frightened off the rats; at the expiration of a few minutes,

they came raging back, but in vain, the three little fellows were fast

asleep and heard nothing more.

The hours of the night fled away. Darkness covered the vast Place de la

Bastille. A wintry gale, which mingled with the rain, blew in gusts,

the patrol searched all the doorways, alleys, enclosures, and obscure

nooks, and in their search for nocturnal vagabonds they passed in

silence before the elephant; the monster, erect, motionless, staring

open-eyed into the shadows, had the appearance of dreaming happily over

his good deed; and sheltered from heaven and from men the three poor

sleeping children.

In order to understand what is about to follow, the reader must

remember, that, at that epoch, the Bastille guard-house was situated at

the other end of the square, and that what took place in the vicinity

of the elephant could neither be seen nor heard by the sentinel.

Towards the end of that hour which immediately precedes the dawn, a man

turned from the Rue Saint-Antoine at a run, made the circuit of the

enclosure of the column of July, and glided between the palings until

he was underneath the belly of the elephant. If any light had

illuminated that man, it might have been divined from the thorough

manner in which he was soaked that he had passed the night in the rain.

Arrived beneath the elephant, he uttered a peculiar cry, which did not

belong to any human tongue, and which a paroquet alone could have

imitated. Twice he repeated this cry, of whose orthography the

following barely conveys an idea:—

“Kirikikiou!”

At the second cry, a clear, young, merry voice responded from the belly

of the elephant:—

“Yes!”

Almost immediately, the plank which closed the hole was drawn aside,

and gave passage to a child who descended the elephant’s leg, and fell

briskly near the man. It was Gavroche. The man was Montparnasse.

As for his cry of _Kirikikiou_,—that was, doubtless, what the child had

meant, when he said:—

“You will ask for Monsieur Gavroche.”

On hearing it, he had waked with a start, had crawled out of his

“alcove,” pushing apart the netting a little, and carefully drawing it

together again, then he had opened the trap, and descended.

The man and the child recognized each other silently amid the gloom:

Montparnasse confined himself to the remark:—

“We need you. Come, lend us a hand.”

The lad asked for no further enlightenment.

“I’m with you,” said he.

And both took their way towards the Rue Saint-Antoine, whence

Montparnasse had emerged, winding rapidly through the long file of

market-gardeners’ carts which descend towards the markets at that hour.

The market-gardeners, crouching, half-asleep, in their wagons, amid the

salads and vegetables, enveloped to their very eyes in their mufflers

on account of the beating rain, did not even glance at these strange

pedestrians.