PARIS HAD her especial child and the woods have their especial bird. The bird is the sparrow, and the child is the street-urchin.
Paris and childhood, the heat of the furnace and the light of the dawn. Strike the two together and the spark you will draw from them is a small live person – homuncio, as Plautus would say.
A small, happy person. He does not eat every day but he goes to the play every evening if he chooses. He has no shirt to his back, no shoes on his feet, no roof over his head; like the flies, he does without these things. He is aged between seven and thirteen, lives in a gang, haunts the streets, sleeps in the open, wears a pair of his father’s old trousers which come down to his heels, an old hat belonging to some other father which comes down below his ears, a single brace with a yellow border. He bustles about, keeps his eyes open, rummages everywhere, squanders time, hangs round the cafés, knows thieves and is familiar with trollops, talks argot, sings obscene ditties and has no evil in him. In his heart there is a pearl of innocence, and pearls do not dissolve in mud. While man is still a child God keeps him innocent.
If you ask the great city, ‘Who is this person?,’ she will answer, ‘He’s my child.’
The Paris urchin is the dwarf born of a giantess.
Let us not exaggerate. This gutter-innocent may sometimes have a shirt, but if so only one; he may have boots, but they lack soles. He may have a dwelling, which he loves because there his mother awaits him; but he prefers the streets, because there he finds freedom. He has his own games and his own enmities, with hatred of the bourgeois at the bottom of them. He has his own metaphors: to die is ‘to eat dandelion root’. He has his employments; he fetches cabs and lets down their steps, sweeps muddy crossings in the rain (making a pont des arts, as he terms it), repeats the latest official pronouncement for the benefit of the general public, cleans out the weeds that grow between paving-stones. He has his own money consisting of any scrap of worked metal picked up in public places. This strange currency, known to him as loques, is strictly valued and controlled in his child’s bohemia.
He has his own fauna which he minutely scrutinizes in dark corners, all manner of insects, ‘death’s-head bugs’, ‘scavengers’, and ‘devils’ – the last a species of black beetle with a menacing two-pronged tail. He has his fabulous monster, with a scaly stomach and horned back but neither a lizard nor a toad, a loathsome black and slimy creature inhabiting old chalk-pits and quarries which moves on its belly, sometimes slowly and sometimes fast, which utters no sound but is always on the watch, and is so terrible that no one has ever set eyes on it. He calls this ‘le sourd’, which may be interpreted as ‘the soundless’. To search for sourds among the stones is a daring enterprise. Another amusement is to lift up a paving-stone and study the wood-lice. Every part of Paris is known to him for the interesting things that may be found there. There are earwigs in the timber-yards near the Ursulines, centipedes in the Pantheon, tadpoles in the ditches of the Champ de Mars.
When it comes to repartee the urchin is as gifted as Talleyrand, no less cynical but more honest. He has a talent for unpredictable mirth. He startles shopkeepers with sudden laughter, a ribaldry ranging from high comedy to farce.
A funeral passes, with a doctor among the mourners. ‘Hey!’ yells the urchin. ‘When did the doctors start delivering their own work?’ A grave-faced citizen among the onlookers, adorned with spectacles and a fob, swings round in a fury.
‘Rascal, you pinched my wife!’
‘What me, Monsieur? Search me!’
Of an evening, by virtue of the pennies he always manages to pick up, homuncio goes to the theatre, and in crossing the threshold he is transformed. The urchin becomes a god. A theatre is like a ship capsized with its hold uppermost; and this hold, the gallery, is the place of the gods. The god is to the urchin what the butterfly is to the grub, the same being borne on air. He has only to be there, radiating happiness with all his aptitude for enthusiasm and delight, the clapping of his hands like the beating of wings, for that congested ship’s hold, squalid, foetid, hideous, and unhealthy, to become a Paradise.
Give a youngster what is superfluous, deprive him of what is needful, and you have an urchin.
The urchin does not lack literary instinct, but – it may be admitted with appropriate regrets – he has little classical bent. His nature is not that of an academic. To give an example, his admiration for that esteemed actress, Mademoiselle Mars, was tinged with irony. He called her Mademoiselle Huche, or, as it might be, Mademoiselle All Right.
He squeals, leers, reviles and quarrels, wears child’s clothing under the tattered gown of a philosopher, fishes in the gutters, hunts in the sewers, haunts the street corners with his ribaldry, his laughter and his malice, whistles, sings, applauds, derides, finds without seeking, knows what he does not know, is at once a Spartan and a pickpocket, mad to the point of wisdom, lyrical to the point of lewdness, squatting on Olympus, wallowing in the mire and emerging decked with stars.
The Paris urchin is Rabelais in miniature. Little amazes him and still less impresses him. He scorns superstition, deflates exaggeration, laughs at mystery, sticks out his tongue at ghosts, brings pretension down to earth, caricatures the over-blown epic. Not because he is lacking in poetry, far from it; but for the solemn vision he substitutes his own irreverent fancy. Confronted by the giant Adamastor he would say, ‘Blimey, a circus clown!’
Paris begins with its strollers and ends with its street-urchins, two species produced by no other town. Passive acceptance content merely to look on, and inexhaustible enterprise; Respectability and Riot. In no other town are these so much a part of the natural scene. All monarchy is in the stroller, all anarchy in the urchin.
This pale-faced child of the Paris back streets lives and grows, gets all tied up and then finds his feet, in hardship, in the presence of social and human realities of which he is the perceptive witness. He thinks himself heedless but is not. He watches prepared to laugh, but prepared also for other things. You who are Prejudice, Abuse, Ignominy, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice, Fanaticism, beware of the wide-eyed urchin. He will grow up.
He is born of the rankest clay, but a handful of mud and a breath created Adam. It sufficed for a god to pass. A god has always passed by the urchin, Destiny is at work upon him, and the word, gamin, as we use it, contains the element of Chance. This pigmy shaped of common earth, ignorant, unlettered, uncouth, vulgar, mob-made, what will he grow into, an Ionian or a Boeotian? We must await the turning of the wheel, the spirit of Paris, the demon which creates both children of hazard and Men of Destiny, refining the potter’s work, making an amphora out of a common jug.
The urchin loves the town but he also loves solitude, having in him something of the sage – urbis amator, like Fuscus, and ruris amator, like Flaccus.
To wander in contemplation, that is to say, to loiter, is for a philosopher an excellent way of passing the time, and particularly in that bastard countryside, ugly as a rule but fascinating for its twofold nature, which surrounds many large cities, and notably Paris. To observe those outskirts is to observe an amphibious world, trees giving way to rooftops, grass to pavements, furrowed fields to streets of shops, rutted lanes to human passions, murmurous nature to the clamour of mankind; and this is of extraordinary interest. Hence the fascination, for those of a thoughtful mind, of a stroll through unattractive regions to which only one adjective, sad, can be applied.
The writer of these lines was for many years an explorer of the outskirts of Paris, the gateways to the city, and they have left him with many memories. Patches of worn grass, stony paths, chalk and clay and rubble; the harsh monotony of fallow and untilled land; the early crops of market-gardeners seen suddenly in a sheltered place; the mingling of wilderness and order; the rough clearings where the drummers of the garrison parade, setting up a stuttering imitation of battle; places that are solitudes by day and the haunts of footpads, death-traps by night; the ramshackle windmill of which the sails still turn; the apparatus of a stone-quarry; the drinking-booth by the cemetery; the mysterious charm of high, shady walls cutting squarely into great stretches of wasteland bathed in sunshine and alive with butterflies – all these things attracted him.
Very few people know those singular places – la Glacière, la Canette, the hideous Grenelle wall pock-marked with cannon-fire, Mont-Parnasse, la Fosse-aux-Loups, les Aubiers on the bank of the Marne, Montsouris, la Tombe-Issoire, and the Pierre-Plate de Châtillon where there is a worked-out quarry now only used for growing mushrooms, with a trap-door of rotting planks leading into it. The countryside of Rome is one idea and the surroundings of Paris are another; to see no more than the prospect of fields, houses, and trees is to be confined to the surface, for all aspects of things are thoughts of God. The place where country merges into town is always impregnated with an underlying melancholy, nature and humankind join voices and local characteristics appear.
Anyone who has wandered as we have done in those solitudes on the outskirts of our suburbs, which may be termed the limbo of Paris, will have encountered here and there, in the most deserted spots and at the most unexpected moments, tumultuous groups of pale-faced, ragged, unwashed children, intent upon their own pursuits, amid the wild flowers in the shadow of a neglected hedge or a mouldering wall. They are the runaway children of the very poor, the outer boulevards their dwelling-place and this limbo their private domain. They are perpetual truants, artlessly singing their repertoire of scabrous songs, living their true life here, far from any supervision, in the gentle light of May or June; clustered in a circle round a hole in the ground into which they flip marbles with their thumb, quarrelling over farthings, rowdy, carefree, neglected, and happy. But at the sight of you they remember that they have business to transact and a living to earn; they offer to sell you an old woollen stocking filled with beetles, or a bunch of lilac. These little bands of children are among the charms, at once delightful and heart-breaking, of the outskirts of Paris.
And sometimes amid the cluster of boys there will be girls as well – their sisters, perhaps? – some of them quite big girls, lean and sunburnt, freckle-faced, wearing headgear of grasses or poppies, gay, wild-looking and barefoot. One sees them eating cherries in the long grass, and in the evening one hears their laughter. These groups, seen bathed in the warm sun of midday, or half-seen in the dark, linger in the thoughts and memories of the wanderer.
Paris is the centre, its environs the circumference, of the whole world for these children. They never venture beyond, being no more able to leave the atmosphere of Paris than a fish is able to leave the water. For them nothing exists two leagues beyond the city gates. Ivry, Gentilly, Arcueil, Belleville, Aubervilliers, Menilmontant, Choisy-le-Roi, Billancourt, Meudon, Issy, Vanvres, Sèvres, Puteaux, Neuilly, Gennevilliers, Colombes, Romainville, Chatou, Asnières, Bougival, Nanterre, Enghien, Noisy-le-Sec, Nogent, Gournay, Drancy, Gonesse – these are the bounds of the Universe.
At the period of this tale, which after all is not very remote, there was not to be found, as there is today, a sergent de ville at the corner of every street (a benefaction we have no time to discuss.) Vagabond children were numerous in Paris. The statistics show that on an average 260 homeless children were rounded up every year in un-enclosed areas, on building sites and under the arches of the bridges. One of these rookeries, which is still famous, produced the ‘swallows of the Pont d’Arcole’. This, it may be remarked, is the most disastrous of all social ills. All adult crime has its source in the vagabondage of the young.
Nevertheless we may except Paris, and in some degree, despite what we have said, the exception is justified. Whereas in every other great city the forgotten child becomes the deboshed man, and whereas nearly everywhere the child left to his own devices becomes rootless and immersed in open vice which destroys in him all conscience and sense of probity, the Paris urchin, we insist, however footloose and disreputable he may appear on the surface, remains in himself almost unspoiled. It is a magnificent phenomenon, splendidly manifest in the honesty of our popular revolutions, a kind of incorruptibility born of the instinct that resides in the air of Paris like salt in the waters of the ocean. To breathe Paris is to preserve one’s soul.
But to say this is in no way to lessen the pang that assails us whenever we set eyes on one of those children who seem to trail behind them the shreds of a broken family. It is nothing very uncommon in our present state of civilization, incomplete as it still is, for disrupted households to disperse in darkness, no longer knowing what has become of the children, and leaving them on the public highways. Hence those obscure destinies. It is called, for the sad event has acquired a phrase of its own, ‘being thrown on the Paris streets’.
Be it said in passing that abandoning children was not discouraged under the old monarchy. A touch of Egypt and Bohemia among the lower orders suited the book of those in high places. Hatred of popular education had become a dogma. What purpose was served by ‘semi-literacy’? Such was the principle. But the vagabond child is the corollary of the unlettered child.
Moreover the monarchy sometimes needed children and scoured the streets for them. Louis XIV, to go back no further, had to build a fleet. It was a necessary measure, but consider what it entailed. No fleet of sailing vessels, dependent on the wind, could exist without attendant vessels propelled by other means to tow them to their moorings and link them with the shore. Oared galleys were to the fleet of those days what steam-tugs are to the fleet of today. But the galleys needed crews, that is to say, convicts, galley-slaves. Colbert, through the provincial governors and parliaments, created as many convicts as possible, and the magistrates gave him every assistance. The man who failed to raise his hat at the passing of a procession was judged to be a Huguenot and sent to the galleys. Any child found loitering in the streets, provided he was over the age of fifteen and homeless, went to the galleys. A great reign; a great century.
Under Louis XV children disappeared in Paris, kidnapped by the police for reasons that remain a mystery. Hideous tales were whispered of the King’s ‘purple baths’. Barbier refers naïvely to these matters. It happened sometimes that the press-gangs, or exempt-gangs, took children possessing parents, for want of others. The parents invoked the law, Parliament intervened – and who was hanged? Not the press-gangs but the parents.
The street-urchins of Paris, the gaminerie, are almost a caste of which it may be said, ‘not everyone can join’. The word itself, gamin, was printed for the first time in 1834, in a small work entitled Claude Gueux, thus passing from popular slang into the literary language. Its use occasioned some scandal, but it came to be accepted.
The attributes entitling a gamin to the esteem of his fellows are very varied. We know of one who was greatly honoured and admired because he had seen a man fall from the top of one of the towers of Notre Dame; another hero succeeded in getting into the back-yard where the statues intended for the dome of the Invalides were temporarily housed and had ‘swiped’ a bit of lead; a third had seen a coach overturn, and a fourth ‘knew’ a soldier who had nearly knocked out a citizen’s eye. The first of these instances accounts for a characteristic flight of urchin-rhetoric: ‘Coo, aren’t I unlucky – never even seen anyone fall off a fifth floor!’
There is an old country jest that is not without eloquence. ‘Père So-and-so, your wife has died of her illness. Why did you not send for the doctor?’ … ‘What would you, Monsieur? The poor have to attend to their own dying.’ But if this retort embodies all the sardonic acceptance of the peasantry, the free-thinking anarchy of the Paris urchin is certainly contained in the following. A condemned man on his way to the scaffold was listening in the tumbril to his confessor. An urchin yelled: ‘He’s talking to a sky-pilot, the dirty funk!’
A degree of audacity in religious matters improves the urchin’s standing. To be strong-minded is important. To attend executions becomes a duty. You look at the guillotine and laugh. You give it all sorts of nicknames – ‘The last course’, ‘the last mouthful’, ‘the grunter’, ‘old Mother Nowhere’, and so on. To be sure of missing nothing you climb walls or trees, or on to balconies or roofs. The urchin is a born steeplejack, no more afraid of chimney-tops than a sailor is of a mast. No fair-ground equals La Grève, the place of execution, and Sanson, the executioner, and the Abbé Montès are the true celebrities. You hoot the victim to encourage him, and sometimes you admire him. The youthful Lacenaire* uttered the following prophetic words after watching the atrocious Dautun die bravely: ‘I was jealous of him.’ All the guillotine’s victims are well-remembered, their memory handed down, their bearing, even to the clothes they wore.
A noteworthy accident is highly esteemed among the Paris urchins. Nothing inspires more respect than to have been severely injured, ‘cut to the bone’. Nor is the clenched fist a trivial matter. ‘Me, I’m tough,’ is the commonest of boasts … To be left-handed is to be envied, and a squint is a prized attribute.
In summer he turns into a frog. As darkness falls in the evening he plunges head first into the Seine off the coal-barges and washerwomen’s boats by the Austerlitz and Jean bridges, shamelessly infringing the laws of decency and police regulations. But the police watch out for him, and this gives rise to a highly dramatic situation which on one occasion produced a memorable street-cry. The cry, which is one of warning from gamin to gamin, became celebrated round about 1830; it can be scanned like an Homeric couplet, its notation an echo of the antique Evohe, ‘Ohé, Titi, ohéee! y a de la grippe, y a de la cogne, prends tes zardes et va-t’en, passe par l’égout!’†
Sometimes this gadfly (he uses the word of himself) knows how to read; sometimes he can write, and he can always draw. By some mysterious process of mutual instruction he contrives to acquire all the talents most serviceable in public life: between 1815 and 1830 he imitated the cry of a turkey, and from 1830 to 1845 he drew a pear (the King’s nickname) on the walls. One summer evening Louis-Philippe, returning home on foot, saw an undersized urchin straining on tip-toe to draw an enormous pear on one of the pillars of the Neuilly gateway. With the amiability which he inherited from Henri IV, the King helped him to finish it and then gave him a coin, a louis d’or. ‘There’s a pear on that too,’ he said.
The gamin loves disorder, any kind of violent uproar. He abominates the priesthood. On one occasion an urchin was seen cocking a snook at the doorway of No. 69, Rue de l’Université. When asked why he did it he replied, ‘A curé lives there.’ The house is in fact the residence of the papal nuncio. But however Voltairian his attitude to religion, if he has the chance of becoming a choir-boy the gamin is quite likely to take it, in which case he decorously performs his duties. He has two consuming ambitions, never achieved: to overthrow the government and to get his trousers mended.
The gamin at his best knows every policeman in Paris and can name them all. He lists them on his fingers, studies their habits and files them away in his memory. He knows all about them. He will say unhesitatingly: ‘So-and-so’s a cheat … So-and-so’s a dirty swine … So-and-so’s great … So-and-so’s ridiculous …’ All the words have a special meaning for him. ‘Old So-and-so thinks he owns the Pont-Neuf, he tries to stop people walking on the parapet. So-and-so likes pushing people around …’ And so on.
There was something of the Paris gamin in Poquelin the clown who was born in les Halles, and something of him in Beaumarchais. Gaminerie is a manifestation of the Gallic spirit, good sense to which a certain pungency is sometimes added, like the alcohol in wine. And this may be carried to excess. If Homer nodded, Voltaire may be said to have played the urchin.
The gamin is respectful, sardonic, and insolent. He has bad teeth because he is underfed, and fine eyes because he has sharp wits. If Jehovah beckoned he would go scampering up the steps of Paradise. He fights with both hands and feet. He may grow in any direction. He plays in the gutter and rises above it in revolt, his audacity unchecked by musket-fire. The guttersnipe turns hero. Like the Theban boy he twists the lion’s tail. He cries ‘Aha!’ among the trumpets like the war-horse in the book of Job. In an instant the urchin may be transformed into a giant.
In a word, he amuses himself because he is unhappy.
To sum up, the gamin, the urchin of present-day Paris, is like the graeculus, the ‘little Greek’, under Rome – a child population bearing on its brow the wrinkles of an ancient world. He is at once a national emblem and a disease. A disease that must be cured. How? By light. Light that makes whole. Light that enlightens.
All fruitful social impulses spring from knowledge, letters, the arts, and teaching. We must make whole men, whole men, by bringing light to them that they may bring us warmth. Sooner or later the splendid challenge of universal education will confront us with the authority of absolute truth; and those who govern under the scrutiny of the French Idea will then have to make this choice: Are we to have children of France or street-urchins of Paris, flames burning in the light of day or will-o’-the-wisps in shadow?
The gamin stands for Paris, and Paris stands for the world.
Paris is a sum total, the ceiling of the human race. The prodigious city is an epitome of dead and living manners and customs. To observe Paris is to review the whole course of history, filling the gaps with sky and stars. Paris has her Capitol, the Hôtel de Ville; her Parthenon, Notre-Dame; her Aventine Mount, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; her Asinarium, the Sorbonne; her Pantheon which bears the same name; her Via Sacra, the Boulevard des Italiens; and her Tower of Babel, which is Public Opinion, drowning the voice of rhetoric in ridicule. Everything that is to be found elsewhere is to be found in Paris; she has her bumpkin, whom she calls le Faraud; her transteverino, whom she calls le faubourien; her native bearers, whom she calls market porters; her lazzarone whom she calls le pègre; and her own brand of cockney whom she calls le gandin. Her fishwife could hold her own with Euripides’ herb-woman; the discobolus Vejanus lives again in Forioso the tightrope-walker; Therapontigonus Miles would go arm-in-arm with the grenadier Vadeboncoeur; Damasippus the second-hand dealer would loiter happily in the antique-shops; Vincennes would lay hands on Socrates, as some prison in Athens would have grabbed Diderot …
And so on. What is there that Paris does not possess? She has her prophets and her king-makers, her quacks, conjurers, and magicians. Rome put a courtesan on the throne and Paris put a grisette: but, when all is said, if Louis XV was not the equal of Claudius, Madame Du Barry was better than Messalina. Although Plutarch said that tyrants do not live to grow old, Rome under Sulla, as under Domitian, meekly bowed her head and watered her wine, and the waters of the Tiber, if we are to believe Varus Vibiscus, were like the waters of Lethe, they caused men to forget sedition. But Paris drinks a million litres of water a day and still sounds the tocsin when the need arises.
And with it all she is indulgent, royally accepting all things, easygoing in the realm of Venus, with callipygian leanings; ready to forgive where she is made to laugh, amused by ugliness, entertained by deformity, diverted by vice. Be comical and you will be accepted as a clown. Even hypocrisy, the supreme cynicism, does not revolt her; she is no more outraged by the posturing of Tartuffe than was Horace by the belching of Priapus. There is no aspect of the universal countenance that is not present in the face of Paris. The Bal Mabille may not be the polyhymnian dance on the Janiculum, but the shop-girl studies the actress in her finery as avidly as the procuress Staphyla studied the virgin Planesium. The Syrian hostess may have been more elegant than Mère Saguet in her Montparnasse restaurant, but you may find David d’Angers, Balzac, and Charlet seated together at a table in a Paris tavern. Paris reigns supreme and genius flowers within her. Adonais drives past with his twelve-wheel chariot of thunder and lightning; and Silenus rides in on his mule.
Paris is the world in miniature – Athens, Rome, Sybaris, Jerusalem, Pantin – all the civilizations, and all the barbarisms as well. She would be grieved if she had no guillotine.
A little of the Place de Grève is a good thing. What would the endless festivity amount to without that seasoning? Our laws have wisely provided it, and thanks to them the blade drips over the carnival.
To Paris there are no bounds. No other city has held this dominance which sometimes derides what it subjugates. ‘I seek but to please you, oh Athenians!’ cried Alexander. Paris does more than make the law, she makes the fashion; and, more than the fashion, she makes the event. She can be foolish when the mood takes her, as it sometimes does. Then the world is foolish with her; and presently Paris opens her eyes and says, ‘How silly I am!’ and laughs in the face of humankind. The marvel of such a town! How wonderful that so much majesty is not troubled by its own parody, that the lips which today sound the summons to judgement will tomorrow play a tune on a Jew’s harp! Paris has a sovereign joviality. Her gaiety strikes like the lightning and her frolic brandishes a sceptre. Her hurricanes spring sometimes out of a grimace. Her explosions, her crises, her masterpieces, her prodigies, her epics reach to the ends of the earth, and so do her ribaldries. Her laughter is a volcanic outburst that bespatters the globe; her derision sears like flame. She thrusts her caricatures upon the nation as well as her ideals; the loftiest monuments of human civilization bow to her ironies and commemorate her gibes for all eternity. She is superb. She frees the world with her prodigious 14th July, and with her night of 4th August dissolves a thousand years of feudalism in three hours; she makes her logic the strong arm of the universal will; she reshapes herself in every form of the sublime and with her radiance lights the spirit of Washington, Kosciusko and Bolivar, of John Brown and Garibaldi. She is everywhere where the future dawns, in Boston in 1779, in Pesth in 1848, in Palermo in 1861, whispering the watchword, ‘Liberty’, in the ears of the American abolitionists at Harper’s Ferry, and of the patriots of Ancona gathered in the shadows at the water’s edge. It was her wind that bore Byron to his death at Missolonghi. She was the platform under the feet of Mirabeau, the crater under the feet of Robespierre. Her books, her theatre, her art, her science, her philosophy, these are the manuals of the human race – Pascal, Régnier, Corneille, Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire, Molière for every century. She has made of her language the universal speech, and this speech has become the Word: it instils in every mind the idea of progress, and the liberating dogmas it has forged are the sword at the bedside of future generations; all heroes of the people in all countries since 1789 have been made of the spirit of her thinkers and poets. But none of this prevents her from playing the urchin. The huge genius that is Paris, while transforming the world with the light she sheds, can still charcoal the nose of Bouginier on the wall of the Temple of Theseus and write Crédeville voleur on the Pyramids.
Paris always shows her teeth, laughing when she does not scold.
Such is Paris. The smoke from her chimney-tops is the thinking of the world. A cluster of mud and stone if you like, but above all things a moral entity. She is more than great, she is immense. Why? Because she dares.
Daring is the price of progress. All splendid conquests are the prize of boldness, more or less. For the Revolution to happen it was not enough that Montesquieu predicted it, that Diderot preached it, that Beaumarchais announced it, that Condorcet planned it, that Arouet paved the way for it, that Rousseau dreamed of it – it needed Danton to dare it.
The cry, ‘Boldness!’, is a Fiat Lux. If mankind is to advance there must be installed permanently at the head of its columns proud instances of courage. Acts of daring light the pages of history and the soul of man. The sunrise is an act of daring. To venture, to defy, to persevere, to be true to one’s self, to grapple with destiny, to dismay calamity by not being afraid of it, to challenge now unrighteous powers and now victory run wild, to stand fast and hold firm – these are the examples that the peoples need, the spark that electrifies them. The same formidable lightnings issue from the torch of Prometheus and the raucous bellow of Cambronne.
As for the people of Paris, the man fully grown is still the urchin. To paint the child is to paint the town, which is why we have depicted this eagle in the guise of a sparrow.
It is above all in the back streets, let us be clear about this, that the real Parisian race is to be found, the pure stock, the true face; in the places where men work and suffer, for work and suffering are the two faces of man. There, in that ant-heap of the humble and unknown, the strangest types exist, from the stevedore of La Rapée to the horse-butcher of Montfaucon. Fex Urbis, ‘the lees of the city’, Cicero called them, and ‘mob’ was the word. Burke used mob, masses, crowd, public … the words are easily said. But what does that matter? What does it matter if they go barefoot, or if they cannot read? Will you abandon them on that account, and make of their distress a curse? Cannot light penetrate to the masses? Light! Let us repeat it again and again – Light and more Light … And then, who knows, opacity may be found to be transparent. Are not revolutions transformations? Let the philosophers continue to teach and enlighten, to think high and speak loud, turn gladly towards the sunrise, mingle in the market-place, proclaim the good news, dispense the alphabet, assert men’s rights, sing the Marseillaise, foster enthusiasm, pluck the green shoots from the oaks. Turn the idea into a whirlwind. The crowd can be made sublime. We must learn to make use of that great furnace of principles and virtues which sparks and crackles and at moments bursts into flame. Those bare feet and arms, the rags, the ignorance, the abjection, the dark places, all may be enlisted in the service of the ideal. Peer through the heart of the people and you will discover the truth. The common sand that you tread underfoot, let it be cast into the furnace to boil and melt and it will become a crystal as splendid as that through which Galileo and Newton discovered the stars.
Some eight or nine years after the events related in the second part of this tale there was to be seen on the Boulevard du Temple and in the streets around the Château-d’Eau a boy aged eleven or twelve who would have been an admirable embodiment of the gamin we have depicted except for the fact that, while the laughter of his years was on his lips, there was only darkness and emptiness in his heart. This youngster went round in a pair of man’s trousers that did not come from his father, and a woman’s blouse that did not come from his mother, castaway garments bestowed on him out of charity by comparative strangers. He had a father and mother nonetheless; but his father never gave him a thought and his mother disliked him. He was one of those children who are most to be pitied, those who possess parents but are still orphans. He was never happier than when he was in the streets, their very flagstones seeming to him less hard than his mother’s heart.
He was a rowdy little boy, pale-faced, agile, alert and rascally, with a lively, sickly air. He darted here and there, sang, played pitch-and-toss, scratched in the gutters, stole now and then, but needlessly, like a cat or sparrow, laughed when he was called an urchin but was indignant when he was called a scamp. He had neither hearth nor home, nor any regular source of food; yet he was happy because he was free. By the time the poor have grown to man’s estate they have nearly always been caught in the wheels of the social order and become shaped to its requirements; but while they are children their smallness saves them, they can escape through the smallest crevice.
Nevertheless, neglected though he was, it happened occasionally, two or three times a month, that the boy said to himself, ‘I’ll go and see Mamma.’ So then he left the boulevards, the Cirque and the Porte Saint-Martin, headed for the river-embankment, crossed over and, passing through the working-class streets in the direction of the Salpêtrière, arrived eventually – where? At no other place than the house numbered 50-52 which is already known to the reader, the Gorbeau tenement.
At this particular time it happened that No. 50–52, which generally stood empty and eternally bore the notice ‘Rooms to Let’, was occupied by a number of people who, as is the common case in Paris, had no connection between them and no knowledge of one another. They all belonged to that indigent class which ranges from the lowest stratum of impoverished respectability down through every stage of pauperdom to that of the two beings who represent the nethermost rung of the social ladder, the crossing-sweeper and the chiffonier, the scavenger.
The ‘chief tenant’ had died since the days of Jean Valjean, and had been replaced by another exactly like her. As some philosopher has remarked, there is never any shortage of old women. The replacement was a Madame Bourgon and there was nothing remarkable about her life except the dynasty of three parrots who in succession had ruled over her heart.
The most squalid of all the present occupants of the tenement was a family of four, father and mother and two daughters, quite big girls, living together in the same garret, one of the cell-like rooms we have already described.
At first glance there was nothing remarkable about this family except its state of extreme destitution; the father, when he took the room, had given his name as Jondrette. But a short time after they had moved in – which, in the words of the chief tenant, ‘was like the moving in of nothing at all’ – he had said to the lady in question, who like her predecessor acted as door-keeper and swept the stairs, that if anyone should call asking for a Pole, an Italian, or possibly a Spaniard, he was the person they would be looking for.
This was the family of our lively barefoot urchin. He went there to be greeted by poverty and wretchedness, and, which was worse, never a smile, by hearts as chilly as the room itself. When he entered they asked where he had come from and he answered, ‘off the streets’; when he left they asked where he was going and his answer was, ‘back ot the streets’. His mother asked, ‘Why did you come here?’
The boy had grown up in this absence of affection like the pallid weeds that grow in cellars. His situation caused him no particular distress and he blamed no one. The fact is that he had no idea how parents ought to behave.
But the mother loved his sisters.
We have omitted to mention that on the Boulevard du Temple the boy was known as Gavroche. Why Gavroche? Perhaps for the same reason that had caused his father to adopt the name of Jondrette. To tear up the roots seems to be instinctive with some families of the very poor.
The Jondrettes’ garret in the Gorbeau tenement was at the far end of the corridor. The cell next to theirs was occupied by a penniless young man called Monsieur Marius.
It is with this Monsieur Marius that we are now concerned.