第 一百四十九 章 · SOME OF HIS PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS

The gamin—the street Arab—of Paris is the dwarf of the giant.

Let us not exaggerate, this cherub of the gutter sometimes has a shirt,

but, in that case, he owns but one; he sometimes has shoes, but then

they have no soles; he sometimes has a lodging, and he loves it, for he

finds his mother there; but he prefers the street, because there he

finds liberty. He has his own games, his own bits of mischief, whose

foundation consists of hatred for the bourgeois; his peculiar

metaphors: to be dead is _to eat dandelions by the root_; his own

occupations, calling hackney-coaches, letting down carriage-steps,

establishing means of transit between the two sides of a street in

heavy rains, which he calls _making the bridge of arts_, crying

discourses pronounced by the authorities in favor of the French people,

cleaning out the cracks in the pavement; he has his own coinage, which

is composed of all the little morsels of worked copper which are found

on the public streets. This curious money, which receives the name of

_loques_—rags—has an invariable and well-regulated currency in this

little Bohemia of children.

Lastly, he has his own fauna, which he observes attentively in the

corners; the lady-bird, the death’s-head plant-louse, the

daddy-long-legs, “the devil,” a black insect, which menaces by twisting

about its tail armed with two horns. He has his fabulous monster, which

has scales under its belly, but is not a lizard, which has pustules on

its back, but is not a toad, which inhabits the nooks of old lime-kilns

and wells that have run dry, which is black, hairy, sticky, which

crawls sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, which has no cry, but which

has a look, and is so terrible that no one has ever beheld it; he calls

this monster “the deaf thing.” The search for these “deaf things” among

the stones is a joy of formidable nature. Another pleasure consists in

suddenly prying up a paving-stone, and taking a look at the wood-lice.

Each region of Paris is celebrated for the interesting treasures which

are to be found there. There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the

Ursulines, there are millepeds in the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in

the ditches of the Champs-de-Mars.

As far as sayings are concerned, this child has as many of them as

Talleyrand. He is no less cynical, but he is more honest. He is endowed

with a certain indescribable, unexpected joviality; he upsets the

composure of the shopkeeper with his wild laughter. He ranges boldly

from high comedy to farce.

A funeral passes by. Among those who accompany the dead there is a

doctor. “Hey there!” shouts some street Arab, “how long has it been

customary for doctors to carry home their own work?”

Another is in a crowd. A grave man, adorned with spectacles and

trinkets, turns round indignantly: “You good-for-nothing, you have

seized my wife’s waist!”—“I, sir? Search me!”