WHAT IS the turmoil in a city compared with that of the human heart? Man the individual is a deeper being than man in the mass. Jean Valjean, at that moment, was in a state of appalling shock, with all his worst terrors realized. Like Paris itself he was trembling on the verge of a revolution that was both formidable and deep-seated. A few hours had sufficed to bring it about. His destiny and his conscience were both suddenly plunged in shadow. It might be said of him, as of Paris, that within him two principles were at war. The angel of light was about to grapple with the angel of darkness on the bridge over the abyss. Which would overthrow the other? Which would gain the day?
On the evening of that 5 June, Valjean, with Cosette and Toussaint, had removed to the Rue de l’Homme-Armé, and it was here that the unforeseen awaited him.
Cosette had not left the Rue Plumet without protest. For the first time in their life together her wishes and those of Jean Valjean had shown themselves to be separate matters which, if not wholly opposed, were at least contradictory. Objections on the one side had been met by inflexibility on the other. The abrupt warning to Valjean to change his abode, flung at him by a stranger, had so alarmed him as to make him overbearing. He had thought that his secret was discovered and that the police were after him. Cosette had been forced to give way.
They had arrived in tight-lipped silence at the Rue de l’Homme-Armé, each concerned with a personal problem, Valjean so perturbed that he did not perceive Cosette’s distress, and Cosette so unhappy that she failed to discern his state of alarm.
Valjean had brought Toussaint with them, a thing he had never done on their previous removals. He foresaw that he might never go back to the Rue Plumet, and he could neither leave Toussaint behind not tell her his secret. In any event, he could trust her to be faithful. The start of betrayal, as between servant and master, is curiosity. But Toussaint, as though she had been born to be Val – jean’s servant, was quite incurious. She said in her stumbling peasant dialect, ‘It’s all one to me. I do my work, and the rest is no affair of mine.’
In their departure from the Rue Plumet, so hasty as to be almost flight, Jean Valjean had taken nothing with him except the cherished box of child’s clothing which Cosette had nicknamed his ‘inseparable’. A pile of luggage would have necessitated the services of a carrier, and a carrier is a witness. A fiacre had been summoned to the door in the Rue de Babylone, and they had driven off. It was only with difficulty that Toussaint had obtained permission to make up a few packages of clothes and toilet articles. Cosette had taken nothing but her letter-case and blotter. Valjean, as a further precaution, had arranged for them to leave at nightfall, which had allowed her time to write her letter to Marius. It was dark when they reached the Rue de l’Homme-Armé.
They went to bed in silence. The apartment in the Rue de l’Homme-Armé was on the second floor overlooking the courtyard at the back of the house, and consisted of two bedrooms, a living-room with a kitchen adjoining, and an attic room furnished with a truckle-bed, which fell to Toussaint. The living-room was also the entrance-lobby and it separated the two bedrooms. The apartment was equipped with all the necessary domestic paraphernalia.
Panic, such is human nature, may the down as irrationally as it arises. Scarcely had they reached their new dwelling than Valjean’s alarm subsided until finally it had vanished altogether. There are places of which the calm communicates itself almost mechanically to the human spirit. The Rue de l’Homme-Armé is a small, unimportant street inhabited by peaceful citizens, so narrow that it is barred to vehicles at either end, silent amid the tumult of Paris, dark even in broad daylight, seemingly incapable of any emotion between its two rows of tall, century-old houses which keep them-selves to themselves like the ancients they are. It is a street of placid forgetfulness, and Jean Valjean, breathing its odour of tranquillity, was caught by the contagion. How could anyone find him here?
His first act was to put the ‘inseparable’ beside his bed. He slept well. The night brings counsel, and, one may add, it soothes. He was almost light-hearted when he got up next morning. He found the living-room delightful, hideous though it was with its old round dining-table, the low sideboard with a mirror hanging on the wall above it, a worm-eaten armchair, and a few other chairs loaded with Toussaint’s packages. A tear in one of these showed that it contained Valjean’s National Guard uniform.
As for Cosette, she had asked Toussaint to bring her a cup of soup in her bedroom and she did not appear until the evening. At about five o’clock Toussaint, who had been busy all day putting things to rights, set a dish of cold chicken on the table and Cosette deigned to attend the meal, out of deference to her father.
This done, and saying that she had a headache, Cosette bade her father good night and went back to her bedroom. Valjean, having eaten a wing of chicken with a good appetite, sat with his elbows on the table, basking in his present security. He had been vaguely aware, while he was eating, of Toussaint’s stammer as she tried to tell him the news – ‘Monsieur, there’s something happening. There’s fighting in the town.’ Absorbed in his own thoughts, he had paid no attention to this. In fact, he had not really listened. He got up presently and began to walk up and down the room, from the door to the window and back, feeling more and more at ease.
And with his growing serenity the thought of Cosette, his constant preoccupation, returned to him. Not that he was troubled by her headache, which he regarded as nothing but a trifling crise de nerfs, a girlish sulk that would wear off in a day or two; but he was thinking of her future, and, as always, with affectionate concern. After all, there seemed to be no reason why their happy life should not continue. There are times when all things look impossible, and times when all things look easy. For Valjean this was one of the latter occasions. As a rule they follow bad times as day follows night, by that law of succession and contrast which is at the heart of Nature, and which superficial minds call antithesis. In the placid street where he had taken refuge, Valjean shrugged off all the anxieties which for some time had been troubling him. From the very fact of having seen so many dark clouds, he now had glimpses of a clearer sky. To have left the Rue Plumet without difficulty or any untoward incident was in itself a gain.
It might well be prudent to leave France, if only for a few months and go to London. Well then, that was what they would do. What did it matter where they were provided they were together? Cosette was his only country, all that he needed for his happiness. The thought that perhaps he might not be all that Cosette needed for happiness, which at one time had caused him sleepless nights, did not now enter his mind. He was rid of all past troubles, in a state of brimming optimism. Cosette, being near him, seemed part of him – an optical illusion which everyone has experienced. He mentally planned their journey to England, endowing it with every imaginable comfort, and, in his day-dream, saw his happiness reborn no matter where they were.
But as he paced slowly up and down the room something suddenly caught his eye. He came face to face with the mirror hanging at an inclined angle over the sideboard, and, reflected in it, he read the following lines:
My dearest,
Alas, father insists that we must leave here at once. We go tonight to No. 7, Rue de l’Homme-Armé, and in a week we shall be in England.
Cosette 4th June.
Jean Valjean stood aghast.
Cosette when they arrived had put her blotting-book on the dresser, and in her distress had forgotten to remove it, leaving it open at the page on which she had blotted her letter to Marius, and the mirror, reflecting the reversed handwriting, had made it clearly legible. It was simple and it was devastating.
Valjean moved closer to the mirror. He re-read the lines without believing in their existence. They were like something seen in a lightning-flash, a hallucination. The thing was impossible; it could not be true.
Slowly his wits returned to him. He examined the blotter with a renewed sense of reality, studying the blotted lines which, in their reversed state, were a meaningless scrawl. He thought, ‘But there’s no sense in this, it’s not handwriting,’ and drew a deep breath of irrational relief. Which of us has not known these aberrations in moments of intense shock? The spirit does not give way to despair until it has exhausted every possibility of self-deception.
He stood staring stupidly at the blotter in his hand, almost ready to laugh at the hallucination which had so nearly deceived him. But then he looked again in the mirror and saw the words reflected in remorseless clarity. This was no illusion. The reflection of a fact is in itself a fact. This was Cosette’s handwriting. He saw it all.
He trembled and, putting down the blotter, sank into the armchair by the sideboard, to sit there with his head lolling, his eyes dulled in utter dismay. He said to himself that there was no escape, the light of his world had gone out, since Cosette had written this to someone other than himself. But then he heard his own spirit, become again terrible, roar sullenly in the darkness. Try to rob a lion of its cub!
What is strange and sad is that at that time Marius had not received the letter. Fate had treacherously delivered it into Valjean’s hands before Marius had seen it.
Until that moment no trial had been too much for Jean Valjean. He had endured hideous ordeals; no extremity of ill-fortune had been spared him; every utmost hardship, every vindictiveness and all the spite of which society was capable had been visited upon him. He had stood his ground unflinching, accepting, when he had to, the bitterest blows. He had sacrificed the inviolability he had gained as a man restored to life, surrendered his freedom, risked his neck, lost everything and suffered everything, and had remained tolerant and stoical to the point that at moments he seemed to have achieved the self-abnegation of a martyr. His conscience, fortified by so many battles with a malignant fate, had seemed unassailable. But anyone able to see into his heart would have been forced to admit that now he weakened.
Of all the torments he had suffered in his long trial by adversity, this was the worst. Never had the rack and thumbscrew been more shrewdly applied. He felt the stirring of forgotten sensibilities, the quiver of deep-buried nerves. Alas, the supreme ordeal – indeed, the one true ordeal – is the loss of the beloved.
It is true that the poor, ageing man loved Cosette only as a father; but, as we have already said, the emptiness of his life had caused this paternal love to embrace all others. He loved Cosette as his daughter, his mother, his sister; and since he had had neither mistress nor wife, since human nature is a creditor who accepts no compromise, that kind of love, too, was mingled with the others, confused and unrealized, pure with the purity of blindness, innocent, unconscious and sublime, less an emotion than an instinct, and less an instinct than a bond, impalpable, indefinable, but real. The true essence of love was threaded through his immense tenderness for Cosette like the seam of gold hidden unsullied beneath the mountainside.
We must recall the relationship between them that we have already described. No marriage between them was possible, not even a marriage of souls, and yet their destinies were assuredly joined. Except Cosette – that is to say, except a child – Jean Valjean had known nothing of the things that men love. No succession of loves and passions had coloured his life with those changing shades of green, fresh green followed by dark green, which we see in trees that have lived through a winter and men who have lived for more than fifty years. In short, as we have more than once emphasized, that inner fusion, that whole of which the sum was a lofty virtue, had resulted in making Jean Valjean a father to Cosette. A strange father compounded of the parent, son, brother and husband who all existed within him; a father in whom there was even something of the mother; a father who loved and worshipped Cosette, for whom she was light and dwelling-place, family, country, paradise.
So that now, when he realized that this was positively ended, that she was escaping from him, slipping through his fingers like water, like a mist; when he was confronted by the crushing evidence that another possessed her heart and was the end and purpose of her life, and that he was no more than the father, someone who no longer existed; when he could no longer doubt this, but was forced to say, ‘She is going to leave me’, the intensity of his pain was past enduring. To have done so much for it to end like this; to be no one, of no account! He was shaken throughout his being by a tempest of revolt, and he felt to the very roots of his hair an overweening rebirth of egotism – self bellowed from the depths of his emptiness.
There is such a thing as spiritual collapse. The thrust of a desperate certainty into a man cannot occur without the disruption of certain profound elements which are sometimes the man himself. Anguish, when it has reached this stage, becomes a panic-flight of all the powers of conscience. There are mortal crises from which few of us emerge in our right mind, with our sense of duty still intact. When the limit of suffering is overpassed the most impregnable virtue is plunged in disarray. Jean Valjean picked up the blotter again, and again convinced himself. As though turned to stone, he stood with eyes intent on those irrefutable lines, and such a darkness filled his mind as to make it seem that all his soul had crumbled.
He studied the revelation, and the exaggerations which his own imagination supplied, with an appearance of calm that in itself was frightening, for it is a dreadful thing when the calm of a man becomes the coldness of a statue. He measured this change effected by a remorseless destiny of which he had been quite unaware, recalling his fears of the summer, so lightly dismissed. It was the same precipice, it had not changed; but now he was not standing at the edge, he was at the bottom. And, which was of all things most bitter and outrageous, he had fallen without knowing. The light of his life had vanished while he thought that the sun still shone.
His instinct spared him nothing. He recalled incidents, dates, certain flushes and pallors on Cosette’s cheek, and he thought, ‘That was he!’ The lucid percipience of despair is like an arrow that never fails to find its target. His thoughts flew instantly to Marius. He did not know the name, but he promptly placed the man. He clearly saw, in the implacable revival of memory, the youthful stranger in the Luxembourg, the contemptible chaser of girls, the love-lorn idler, the fool, the cheat – for it is treachery to make eyes at a girl with a loving parent at her side.
Having decided in his mind that this young man was at the bottom of it all, Jean Valjean, the man who had redeemed himself, who had mastered his soul and with such painful effort resolved all life, hardship and suffering in love, turned his inward vision upon himself: and a ghost rose before his eyes – hatred.
Great suffering brings great weakness; it undermines the will to live. In youth it is perilous, but later it may be disastrous. For if despair is terrible when the blood is hot, the hair dark, the head still held high like the flame of a torch; when the thread of destiny has still to be unreeled and the heart may still beat faster with a worthy love; when there are still women and laughter and the whole wide world; when the force of life is undiminished – if despair even then is terrible, what must it be in age, when the years rush past with a growing pallor and through the dusk we begin to see the stars of eternity?
While he sat brooding Toussaint entered the room. Valjean turned to her and asked:
‘Where is it happening? Do you know?’
She stared at him in bewilderment.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Didn’t you say there was fighting going on somewhere?’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Toussaint. ‘It’s near Saint-Merry.’
There are actions which arise, without our knowing it, from the depths of our thought. No doubt it was owing to an impulse of this kind, of which he was scarcely conscious, that a few minutes later Valjean was out in the street. He was seated, bareheaded, on the kerbstone outside the house. He seemed to be listening.
Darkness had fallen.
How long did he stay there? What was the ebb and flow of his tragic meditation? Did he seek to recover himself? Was he so bowed down as to be broken, or could he still stand upright, finding within himself something still solid on which to set his feet? Probably he himself did not know.
The street was empty. The occasional apprehensive inhabitant, hurriedly returning home, scarcely noticed him. In times of peril it is every man for himself. The lamplighter, on his accustomed round, lit the lamp, which was just opposite the door of No. 7, and went his way. To anyone pausing to examine him in the half-light, Jean Valjean would not have seemed a living man. Seated on the kerbstone outside his door he was like a figure carved in ice. There is a frozen aspect of despair. Vague sounds of distant tumult, tocsins and fanfares, were to be heard, and mingled with these the clock of the Église de Saint-Paul, gravely and without haste striking the hour of eleven: for the tocsin is man, but the hour is God. The passing of time made no impression on Valjean; he did not move. But at about that time a sudden burst of firing sounded from the direction of the market, followed by a second, even more violent. Probably this was the attack on the Rue de Chanvrerie barricade which, as we know, Marius repulsed. The two volleys, their savagery seeming heightened by the outraged stillness of the night, caused Valjean to get to his feet and stand facing the direction from which the din had come: but then he sat down again, and, crossing his arms, let his chin sink slowly on to his chest while he resumed his inward debate.
The sound of footsteps caused him to raise his head. By the light of the street-lamp he saw a youthful figure approaching, pale-faced but glowing with life. Gavroche had arrived in the Ruedel’Homme-Armé.
He was gazing at the housefronts, apparently in search of a number. Although he could see Valjean he paid no attention to him. He stared up and then down, and, rising on tip-toe, rapped on doors and ground-floor windows. All were locked and barred. After trying five or six houses in vain he shrugged his shoulders and commented on the situation as follows:
‘Well, blow me!’
Jean Valjean, who in his present state of mind would not have addressed or answered any other person, was irresistibly moved to question this lively small boy.
‘Well, youngster, what are you up to?’
‘What I’m after is that I’m hungry,’ said Gavroche crisply; and he added, ‘Youngster yourself.’
Valjean felt in his pocket and produced a five-franc piece. But Gavroche, skipping from one subject to another like the sparrow he was, had become aware of the street-lamp. He picked up a stone.
‘You’ve still got lights burning in these parts,’ he said. ‘That’s not right, mate. No discipline. I’ll have to smash it.’
He flung the stone, and the lamp-glass fell with a clatter which caused the occupants of the near-by houses, huddled behind their curtains, to exclaim, ‘It’s ’93 all over again!’
‘There you are, you old street,’ said Gavroche. ‘Now you’ve got your nightcap on.’ He turned to Valjean. ‘What’s that monstrous great building at the end of the street? The Archives, isn’t it? You ought to pull down some of those pillars and make them into a barricade.’
Jean Valjean went towards him.
‘Poor little chap,’ he muttered. ‘He’s half-starved.’ And he pressed the five-franc piece into his hand.
Startled by the size of the offering, Gavroche stared at the coin, charmed by its whiteness as it glimmered faintly in his hand. He had heard of five-franc pieces, he knew them by reputation, and he was delighted to see one at close quarters. Something worth looking at, he thought, and did so for some moments with pleasure. But then he held out the coin to Valjean, saying in a lordly fashion:
‘Thank you, guv’nor, but I’d sooner smash street-lamps. Take back your bribe. It doesn’t work with me.’
‘Have you a mother?’ Valjean asked.
‘More than you have perhaps.’
‘Then keep it and give it to her.’
Gavroche was melted by this. Besides, the man was hatless, and this predisposed him in his favour.
‘You mean I can have it?’ he said. ‘It’s not just to stop me smashing lamps?’
‘Smash as many as you like.’
‘You’re all right,’ said Gavroche. He put the coin in one of his pockets, and with a growing assurance, asked: ‘Do you live in this street?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Would you mind telling me which is Number Seven?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
Gavroche was brought up short, feeling that he had already said too much. He ran a hand through his hair and said cryptically:
‘Because.’
A thought occurred to Jean Valjean. Acute distress has these moments of lucidity. He asked:
‘Have you brought me the letter I’ve been waiting for?’
‘You?’ said Gavroche. ‘But you’re not a woman.’
‘A letter addressed to Mademoiselle Cosette.’
‘Cosette,’ muttered Gavroche. ‘I think that’s a rummy name.’
‘Well then, I’m to give it to her. May I have it?’
‘I take it you know that I’ve come from the barricades.’
‘Of course…’ said Valjean.
Gavroche fished in another pocket and got out the folded sheet of paper. He then gave a military salute.
‘Confidential dispatch,’ he said, ‘from the Provisional Government.’
‘Let me have it,’ said Valjean.
Gavroche held the missive above his head.
‘Don’t go getting the idea that this is just a billet doux. It’s addressed to a woman, but it’s for the people. Our lot, we may be rebels, but we respect the weaker sex. We aren’t like the fine world where it’s all wolves chasing after geese.’
‘Give it to me.’
‘I’m bound to say,’ said Gavroche, ‘you look to me like a decent cove.’
‘Quickly, please.’
‘Well, here you are.’ Gavroche handed over the letter. ‘And hurry it up, Monsieur Chose. You mustn’t keep Mamselle Chosette waiting.’ He was pleased with this happy play on words.
‘One thing,’ said Jean Valjean. ‘Should I take the reply to Saint-Merry?’
‘If you did you’d be making what’s called a floater,’ said Gavroche. ‘That letter comes from the barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, to which I am now returning. Good night, citizen.’
Whereupon Gavroche departed – or, better, returned like a homing pigeon to its nest. He sped away into the night with the swift certainty of a bullet, and the narrow Rue de l’Homme-Armé was again plunged in empty silence. In the twinkling of an eye the strange little boy, that creature of darkness and fantasy, had disappeared into the gloom amid the tall rows of houses, vanishing like a puff of smoke; and one might have thought that he had vanished for ever if, a minute after his departure, the indignant dwellers in the Rue du Chaume had not been startled by the crash of another street-lamp.
Jean Valjean went back into the house with Marius’s letter. As grateful for the darkness as an owl clutching its prey, he groped his way upstairs, gently opened his door and closed it behind him, and stood listening until he was assured that Cosette and Toussaint were asleep. Then, so greatly was his hand shaking, he made several vain attempts before extracting a spark from the Fumade tinder-box. His every action was like that of a thief in the night. Finally, with his candle lighted, he sat down at the table and unfolded the letter.
We cannot be said to read when in a state of violent emotion. Rather, we twist the paper in our hands, mutilating it as though it were an enemy, scoring it with the finger-nails of our anger or delight. Our eyes skip the beginning, hurrying on to the end. With a feverish acuteness we grasp the general sense, seize upon the main point and ignore the rest. In the letter written by Marius, Jean Valjean was conscious only of the following: ‘I shall die… When you read this my soul will be very near…’
The effect of these words was to kindle in him a horrid exaltation, so that for a moment he was as it were dumbfounded by the sudden change of feeling in himself. He stared in a kind of drunken bemusement at the letter. There, beneath his eyes, was a marvel – the death of the hated person.
His triumph cried out hideously within him. So it was done with! His problem was solved, more rapidly than he had dared to hope. The individual who threatened his happiness was to vanish from the scene; and of his own free will. Without any action on the part of Jean Valjean, through no fault of his, this ‘other man’ was about to die, perhaps was already dead. Valjean’s fevered mind made calculations. No, he was not yet dead. The letter was evidently intended to be read by Cosette tomorrow morning. Nothing had happened after those two bursts of musket fire between eleven and midnight. The real attack on the barricade would not begin until daylight. But it made no difference. Having joined in the battle the ‘other man’ was doomed to die, swept away in the stream of events… Valjean felt that he was saved. Once again he would have Cosette to himself, without any rival, and their life together would continue as before. He had only to keep this letter in his pocket. Cosette would never know what had happened to that other man. ‘I have only to let things take their course. There is no escape for the youth. If he is not yet dead he will certainly die. What happiness!’
But having assured himself of this, Valjean’s gloom returned; and presently he went downstairs and roused the porter.
About an hour later he left the house again, clad in the full uniform of the National Guard and fully armed. The porter had had no difficulty in finding in the neighbourhood the means to complete his equipment. With a loaded musket and a pouch filled with cartridges he set off for Les Halles.
Gavroche, meanwhile, had been having an adventure. Having conscientiously shattered the street-lamp in the Rue du Chaume, he had passed on into the Rue des Vieilles-Haudriettes where, finding nothing worthy of his attention, he had seen fit to unburden himself of a lusty repertoire of song. The sleeping or terrified houses had been favoured with subversive ditties of which the following is a sample:
The birds sit brooding in the trees
Where distantly the river swirls
Their chirping lingers on the breeze-
But where are all the golden girls?Pierrot, my friend, you’re on your knees,
While through your head fair fortune whirls,
And prayer perhaps may bring you ease –
But where are all the golden girls?Toiling and buzzing like the bees
You dream of houses decked with pearls,
But I love Agnes and Louise –
And where are all the golden girls?…
And so on… While he walked Gavroche was acting his song, for the weight of the refrain is in the gesture that accompanies it. His face, with its endless variety of expressions, writhed in a series of grimaces more fantastic and extraordinary than those of a torn cloth flying in the wind. Unhappily, since he was alone and in darkness, no one saw or could have seen him: and this wealth was scattered in vain.
But suddenly he stopped short – ‘Away with sentiment,’ he said.
His cat’s eyes had discerned in the recess of a doorway what is known to painters as an ensemble – a composition, that is to say, of man and object. The object was a handcart, the man was an Auvergnat, a peasant from the Auvergne, lying asleep in it. The handles of the cart were resting on the pavement and the man’s head was resting against the tail-board, so that he lay sloping downwards with his feet touching the ground. Gavroche, rich in worldly experience, at once knew what he had to deal with – a street carrier who had drunk rather too much and was now sleeping it off.
‘So here’s the use of a summer night,’ reflected Gavroche. ‘The Auvergnat is asleep in his cart. We requisition the cart for the service of the Republic and leave the Auvergnat to the Monarchy.’ For it had instantly occurred to him that the cart would come in very handy on the barricade.
The man was snoring. Gavroche gently pulled the cart one way and the man the other by his feet, so that in a very short time the Auvergnat, undisturbed, was lying on the pavement. The cart was now free.
Gavroche, being always prepared for emergencies, was as always well equipped. He got out of his pocket a scrap of paper and a stub of red pencil pinched from a carpenter’s shop, and wrote as follows:
French Republic
Received – one handcart.
(signed) GAVROCHE
He then put the receipt in the pocket of the snoring Auvergnat’s waistcoat, grasped the handcart by the handles, and set off for the market at a run, pushing it with a glorious clatter in front of him.
This was dangerous, for there was a military post in the Imprimerie Royale, the royal printing-works. Gavroche did not think of this. The post was occupied by a section of the Garde Nationale from outside Paris. For some time there had been a certain restiveness in the section and heads had been raised from camp beds. The smashing of two street-lamps, followed by a song delivered at full lung-power, all this was rather surprising in unadventurous streets which were accustomed to put out their candles and go to bed at nightfall. For the past hour the urchin Gavroche had been setting up a stir in that peaceful neighbourhood that was like the buzzing of a fly in a bottle. The out-of-town sergeant was listening. But he was also waiting, being a prudent man.
The clatter of the handcart over the cobbles robbed him of all further excuse for delay, and he decided to go out and reconnoitre. ‘– there must be a whole gang of them,’ he reflected. ‘Gently does it.’ Who could doubt that the Hydra of Anarchy had raised its head and was rampaging through the quarter? He ventured cautiously out of the post.
And Gavroche, pushing the handcart into the Rue des Vieilles-Haudriettes, found himself suddenly confronted by a uniform, a plumed helmet, and a musket. For the second time he was brought up short.
‘So here we are,’ he said. ‘Authority in person. Good day to you.’ Gavroche was never long put out of countenance.
‘Where are you going, rascal?’ barked the sergeant.
‘Citizen,’ said Gavroche, ‘I haven’t called you a bourgeois. Why should you insult me?’
‘Where are you going, clown?’
‘Monsieur,’ said Gavroche, ‘yesterday you were perhaps a man of wit, but today your wits have failed you.’
‘I’m asking where you’re going.’
‘How politely you talk!’ You know, you don’t look your age. You should sell your hair at a hundred francs apiece. That would net you five hundred francs.
‘Where are you going? Where are you off to? What are you doing, you young scoundrel?’
‘That’s a very ugly word. Before you have another drink you should wash your mouth out.’
The sergeant levelled his musket.
‘Will you or will you not tell me where you’re going?’
‘My lord General,’ said Gavroche, ‘I’m on my way to fetch the doctor for my wife, who’s in labour.’
‘To arms!’ shouted the sergeant.
It is the hall-mark of great men that they can turn weaknesses into triumph. Gavroche summed up the situation at a glance. The handcart had got him into trouble and the handcart must get him out of it. As the sergeant bore down upon him, the cart, driven forward like a battering ram, took him in the stomach and he fell backwards into the gutter while his musket was discharged into the air. The sound of his shot brought his men rushing out of the post, and that first shot was followed by a ragged burst of firing, after which they reloaded and began again. This blind-man’s-buff engagement lasted a quarter of an hour. The casualties were a number of window-panes.
Meanwhile, Gavroche, who had taken to his heels, pulled up half-a-dozen streets away and sat down on a kerbstone to get his breath. He raised his left hand to the level of his nose and jerked it forward three times, at the same time clapping the back of his head with his right hand – the sovereign gesture with which the Paris street-urchin sums up all French irony, and which is evidently efficacious, since it has endured for half a century.
But his triumph was damped by a sobering thought.
‘It’s all very fine,’ he reflected. ‘I’m laughing fit to split and having a high old time, but now I’m on the wrong road and I’ve got a long way to go. It won’t do for me to get back too late.’
Running on he resumed his song, and the following stanza echoed through the sombre streets:
We drain the wine-cup to the lees,
And cheer the flag when it unfurls;
And life and death are as you please-
But where are all the golden girls?
The armed sortie from the post was not without a sequel. The handcart was captured and its drunken owner taken prisoner. The one was impounded and the other half-heartedly tried by court martial as an accomplice of the rebels. Thus did authority display its zeal in the protection of society.
Gavroche’s adventure, now a part of the folk-lore of the Temple quarter, is among the most terrifying memories of aged citizens of the Marais, its title being’ Night attack on the post at the Imprimerie Royale’.