Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (62 page)

His whole heart melted in gratitude, and he loved more and more.
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Several years passed thus. Cosette was growing.

PARIS has a child and the forest has a bird; the bird is called the sparrow; the child is called the
gamin.
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Couple these two ideas, the one containing all the heat of the furnace, the other all the light of the dawn; strike together these two sparks, Paris and infancy; and there leaps forth from them a little creature. Homuncio, Plautus would say.
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This little creature is full of joy. He has not food to eat every day, yet he goes to the show every evening, if he sees fit. He has no shirt to his back, no shoes to his feet, no roof over his head; he is like the flies in the air who have none of all these things. He is from seven to thirteen years of age, lives in troops, ranges the streets, sleeps in the open air, wears an old pair of his father’s trousers down about his heels, an old hat of some other father, which covers his ears, and a single suspender of coarse yellow cloth, runs about, is always on the watch and on the search, kills time, breaks in pipes, swears like an imp, hangs about the wine-shop, knows thieves and robbers, is hand in glove with the street-girls, rattles off slang, sings smutty songs, and, withal, has nothing bad in his heart. This is because he has a pearl in his soul, innocence; and pearls do not dissolve in mire. So long as man is a child, God wills that he be innocent.

If one could ask of this vast city: what is that creature? She would answer: “it is my little one.”

THE gamin of Paris is the dwarf of the giantess.

We will not exaggerate. This cherub of the gutter sometimes has a shirt, but then he has only one; sometimes he has shoes, but then they have no soles; sometimes he has a shelter, and he loves it, for there he finds his mother; but he prefers the street for there he finds his liberty. He has games of his own, roguish tricks of his own, of which a hearty hatred of the bourgeois is the basis; he has his own metaphors; to be dead he calls eating dandelions by the root; he has his own occupations, such as running for hacks, letting down carriage-steps, sweeping the rain away from the cross-walks in rainy weather, creating dryer walkways which he charges pedestrians to cross—he calls them “Ponts des Arrhes,”
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shouting out the speeches often made by the authorities on behalf of the French people, and digging out the grout between the flagstones; he has his own kind of money, consisting of all the little bits of wrought copper that can be found on the public thoroughfares. This curious currency, which takes the name of scraps, has an unvarying and well-regulated circulation throughout this little gipsy-land of children.

He has a fauna of his own, which he studies carefully in the corners; the ladybug, the death’s head grub, the reaper, and the “devil,” a black insect that threatens you by twisting about its tail which is armed with two horns. He has his fabulous monster which has scales on its belly, and yet is not a lizard, has warts on its back, and yet is not a toad, which lives in the crevices of old lime-kilns and dry-cisterns, a black, velvety, slimy, crawling creature, sometimes swift and sometimes slow of motion, emitting no cry, but which stares at you, and is so terrible that nobody has ever seen it; this monster he calls the “deaf thing.” Hunting for deaf things among the stones is a pleasure which is thrillingly dangerous. Another enjoyment is to raise a slab of the sidewalk suddenly and see the wood-lice. Every region of Paris is famous for the discoveries which can be made in it. There are earwigs in the wood-yards of the Ursulines, there are wood-lice at the Pantheon, and tadpoles in the ditches of the Champ-de-Mars.

In repartee, this youngster is as gifted as Talleyrand. He is equally cynical, but he is more sincere. He is gifted with an odd kind of unpremeditated jollity; he stuns the shopkeeper with his wild laughter. His gamut slides merrily from high comedy to farce.

A funeral is passing. There is a doctor in the procession. “Hullo!” shouts a gamin, “how long is it since the doctors began to take home their work?”

Another happens to be in a crowd. A grave-looking man, who wears spectacles and trinkets, turns upon him indignantly: “You scamp, you’ve been seizing my wife’s waist!”

“I, sir! search me!”

IN THE EVENING, by means of a few pennies which he always manages to scrape together, the
homuncio
goes to some theatre. By the act of passing that magic threshold, he becomes transfigured; he was a
gamin,
he becomes a
titi.
Theatres are a sort of vessel turned upside down with the hold at the top; in this hold the
titi
gather in crowds.
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The
titi
is to the
gamin
what the butterfly is to the grub; the same creature on wings and sailing through the air. It is enough for him to be there with his radiance of delight, his fulness of enthusiasm and joy and his clapping of hands like the clapping of wings, to make that hold, close, dark, foetid, filthy, unwholesome, hideous, and detestable as it is, to be called the “Paradise.”
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Give to a being the useless, and deprive him of the needful, and you have the
gamin.

The gamin is not without a certain inclination towards literature. His tendency, however—we say it with the befitting quantum of regret—would not be considered as towards the classic. He is, in his nature, but slightly academic. For instance, the popularity of Mademoiselle Mars among this little public of children was spiced with a touch of irony. The
gamin
called her Mademoiselle
Muche.
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This being jeers, wrangles, sneers, jangles, has frippery like a baby and rags like a philosopher, fishes in the gutter, hunts in the sewer, extracts gaiety from filth, lashes the street corners with his wit, sneers and bites, hisses and sings, applauds and hoots, tempers Hallelujah with tralalas, chants all sorts of rhythms from De Profundis to the Shit-in-the-bed, finds without searching, knows what he does not know, is Spartan even to roguery, is witless even to wisdom, is lyric even to impurity, would squat upon Olympus, wallows in the dung-heap and comes out of it covered with stars. The gamin of Paris is Rabelais as a child.

He is never satisfied with his trousers unless they have a watch-fob.

He is seldom astonished, is frightened still less frequently, turns superstitions into doggerel verses and sings them, deflates exaggerations, makes light of mysteries, sticks out his tongue at ghosts, lowers everything that is on stilts, and introduces caricature into all epic pomposities. This is not because he is prosaic, far from it; but he substitutes the phantasmagoria of fun for solemn dreams. Were the giant Adamaster to appear to him, he would shout out: “Hallo, there, old Bug-a-boo!”
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PARIS BEGINS with the curious onlooker and ends with the
gamin,
two beings of which no other city is capable; passive acceptance satisfied with merely looking on, and exhaustless enterprise; Prudhomme and Fouillou. Paris alone comprises this in its natural history. All monarchy is comprised in the onlooker; all anarchy in the
gamin.

This pale child of the Paris suburbs lives, develops, and gets into and out of “scrapes,” amid suffering, a thoughtful witness of our social realities.

ABOUT eight or nine years after the events narrated in the second part of this story, there was seen, on the Boulevard du Temple, and in the neighbourhood of the Château d‘Eau, a little boy of eleven or twelve years of age, who would have realised with considerable accuracy the ideal of the gamin previously sketched, if, with the laughter of his youth upon his lips, his heart had not been absolutely dark and empty. This child was well muffled up in a man’s pair of trousers, but he had not got them from his father, and in a woman’s chemise, which was not an inheritance from his mother. Strangers had clothed him in these rags out of charity. Still, he had a father and a mother. But his father never thought of him, and his mother did not love him. He was one of those children so deserving of pity from all, who have fathers and mothers, and yet are orphans.

This little boy never felt so happy as when in the street. The pavement was not so hard to him as the heart of his mother.

His parents had thrown him out into life with a kick.

He had quite ingenuously spread his wings, and taken flight.

He was a boisterous, pallid, nimble, wide-awake, roguish urchin, with an air at once vivacious and sickly. He went, came, sang, played pitch and toss, scraped the gutters, stole a little, but he did it gaily like the cats and the sparrows, laughed when people called him an errand-boy, and got angry when they called him a juvenile delinquent. He had no shelter, no food, no fire, no love, but he was light-hearted because he was free.

When these poor creatures are men, the millstone of our social system almost always comes in contact with them, and grinds them, but while they are children they escape because they are little. The smallest hole saves them.

However, deserted as this lad was, it happened sometimes, every two or three months, that he would say to himself: “Come, I’ll go and see my mother!”Then he would leave the Boulevard, the Cirque, the Porte Saint Martin, go down along the quays, cross the bridges, reach the suburbs, walk as far as the Salpêtrière, and arrive—where? Precisely at that double number, 50-52, which is known to the reader, the Gorbeau building.

At the period referred to, the tenement No. 50-52, usually empty, and permanently decorated with the placard “Rooms to let,” was, for a wonder, tenanted by several persons who, in all other respects as is always the case at Paris, had no relation to or connection with each other. They all belonged to that indigent class which begins with the petit bourgeois in straitened circumstances, and descends, from grade to grade of wretchedness, through the lower strata of society, until it reaches those two beings in whom all the material things of civilisation terminate, the scavenger and the ragpicker.

The “landlady” of the time of Jean Valjean was dead, and had been replaced by another exactly like her. I do not remember what philosopher it was who said: “There is never any lack of old women.”

The new old woman was called Madame Burgon, and her life had been remarkable for nothing except a dynasty of three paroquets, which had in succession ruled over her affections.

Among those who lived in the building, the wretchedest of all were a family of four persons, father, mother, and two daughters nearly grown, all four lodging in the same garret room, one of those cells of which we have already spoken.

This family at first sight presented nothing very peculiar but its extreme destitution; the father, in renting the room, had given his name as Jondrette. Some time after his moving in, which had singularly resembled, to borrow the memorable expression of the landlady, the entrance of nothing at all, this Jondrette said to the old woman, who, like her predecessor, was, at the same time, portress and swept the stairs: “Mother So-and-So, if anybody should come and ask for a Pole or an Italian or, perhaps, a Spaniard, that is for me.”

Now, this family was the family of our sprightly little bare-footed urchin. When he came there, he found distress and, what is sadder still, no smile; a cold hearthstone and cold hearts. When he came in, they would ask: “Where have you come from?” He would answer: “From the street.” When he was going away they would ask him: “Where are you going to?” He would answer: “Into the street.” His mother would say to him: “What have you come here for?”

The child lived, in this absence of affection, like those pale plants that spring up in cellars. He felt no suffering from this mode of existence, and bore no ill-will to anybody. He did not know how a father and mother ought to be.

But yet his mother loved his sisters.

We had forgotten to say that on the Boulevard du Temple this boy went by the name of little Gavroche. Why was his name Gavroche? Probably because his father’s name was Jondrette.

To break all links seems to be the instinct of some wretched families.

The room occupied by the Jondrettes in the Gorbeau tenement was the last at the end of the hall. The adjoining cell was tenanted by a very poor young man who was called Monsieur Marius.

Let us see who and what Monsieur Marius was.

 

 

 

 

WHOEVER, at that time, had passed through the little town of Vernon, and walked over that beautiful monumental bridge which will be very soon replaced, let us hope, by some horrid wire bridge, would have noticed, as his glance fell from the top of the parapet, a man of about fifty, with a leather cap on his head, dressed in trousers and waistcoat of coarse grey cloth, to which something yellow was stitched which had been a red ribbon, shod in wooden shoes, browned by the sun, his face almost black and his hair almost white, a large scar upon his forehead extending down his cheek, bent, bowed down, older than his years, walking nearly every day with a spade and a pruning knife in his hand, in one of those walled compartments, in the vicinity of the bridge, which, like a chain of terraces border the left bank of the Seine,—charming inclosures full of flowers of which one would say, if they were much larger, they are gardens, and if they were a little smaller, they are bouquets. All these inclosures are bounded by the river on one side and by a house on the other. The man in the waistcoat and wooden shoes of whom we have just spoken lived, about the year 1817, in the smallest of these inclosures and the humblest of these houses. He lived there solitary and alone, in silence and in poverty, with a woman who was neither young nor old, neither beautiful nor ugly, neither peasant nor bourgeois, who waited upon him. The square of earth which he called his garden was celebrated in the town for the beauty of the flowers which he cultivated in it. Flowers were his occupation.