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

Meanwhile, continuing up the street, he saw, quite frozen under a porte-cochère, a beggar girl of thirteen or fourteen, whose clothes were so short that her knees could be seen. The little girl was beginning to be too big a girl for that. Growth plays you such tricks. The skirt becomes short at the moment that nudity becomes indecent.

“Poor girl!” said Gavroche. “She hasn’t even any underwear. But here, take this.”

And, taking off all that good woollen scarf which he had about his neck, he threw it upon the bony and purple shoulders of the beggar girl, where the muffler became a shawl again.

The little girl looked at him with an astonished appearance, and received the shawl in silence. At a certain depth of distress, the poor, in their stupor, groan no longer over evil, and are no longer thankful for good.

This done:

“Brrr!” said Gavroche, shivering worse than St. Martin, who, at least, kept half his cloak.^el

At this brrr! the storm, redoubling its fury, became violent. These malignant skies punish good actions.

“Ah,” exclaimed Gavroche, “what does this mean? It’s raining again! Good God, if this continues, I withdraw my subscription.”

And he started walking again.

“It’s all the same,” added he, casting a glance at the beggar girl who was cuddling herself under the shawl, “there is somebody who has some great duds.”

And, looking at the cloud, he cried:

“Gotcha!”

The two children limped along behind him.

As they were passing by one of those thick grated lattices which indicate a baker’s shop, for bread like gold is kept behind iron gratings, Gavroche turned:

“Ah, ha, mômes, have we dined?”

“Monsieur,” answered the elder, “we have not eaten since early this morning.”

“You are then without father or mother?” resumed Gavroche, majestically.

“Excuse us, monsieur, we have a papa and mamma, but we don’t know where they are.”

“Sometimes that’s better than knowing,” said Gavroche, who was a thinker.

“It is two hours now,” continued the elder, “that we have been walking; we have been looking for things in every corner, but we can find nothing.”

“I know,” said Gavroche. “The dogs eat up everything.”

He resumed, after a moment’s silence:

“Ah! we have lost our authors. We don’t know now what we have done with them. That won’t do, gamins. It is stupid to get lost like that for people of any age. Ah, yes, we must licher for all that.”^em

Still he asked them no questions. To be without a home, what could be more natural?

Meanwhile he had stopped, and for a few minutes he had been groping and fumbling in all sorts of recesses which he had in his rags.

Finally he raised his head with an air which was only intended for one of satisfaction, but which was in reality triumphant.

“Let us compose ourselves, momignards. Here is enough for supper for three.”

And he took a sou from one of his pockets.

Without giving the two little boys time for amazement, he pushed them both before him into the baker’s shop, and laid his sou on the counter, crying:

“Boy! five centimes’ worth of bread.”

The man, who was the master baker himself, took a loaf and a knife.

“In three pieces, boy!” resumed Gavroche, and he added with dignity:

“There are three of us.”

And seeing that the baker, after having examined the three costumes, had taken a black loaf, he thrust his finger deep into his nose with a respiration as imperious as if he had had the great Frederick’s pinch of snuff at the end of his thumb, and threw full in the baker’s face this indignant apostrophe:

“Whossachuav?”

Those of our readers who may be tempted to see in this summons of Gavroche to the baker a Russian or Polish word, or one of those savage cries which the Iowas and the Botocudos hurl at each other from one bank of a stream to the other in their solitudes, are informed that it is a phrase which they use every day (they, our readers), and which takes the place of this phrase: what is that you have? The baker understood perfectly well, and answered:

“Why! it is bread, very good bread of the second quality.”

“You mean larton brutal, ”^en replied Gavroche, with a calm cold disdain. “White bread, boy! larton savonné! I am treating.”

The baker could not help smiling, and while he was cutting the white bread, he looked at them in a compassionate manner which offended Gavroche.

“Come, paper cap!” said he, “what are you fathoming us like that for?”

All three placed end to end would hardly have made a fathom.

When the bread was cut, the baker put the sou in his drawer, and Gavroche said to the two children:

“Morfilez.”

The little boys looked at him confounded.

Gavroche began to laugh:

“Ah! stop, that is true, they don’t know yet, they are so small.”

And he added:

“Eat.”

At the same time he handed each of them a piece of bread.

And, thinking that the elder, who appeared to him more worthy of his conversation, deserved some special encouragement and ought to be relieved of all hesitation in regard to satisfying his appetite, he added, giving him the largest piece:

“Stick that in your gun.”

There was one piece smaller than the other two; he took it for himself.

The poor children were starving, Gavroche included. While they were wolfing down the bread, they encumbered the shop of the baker who, now that he had received his pay, was regarding them ill-humouredly.

“Let’s go back into the street,” said Gavroche.^eo

They went on in the direction of the Bastille.

From time to time when they were passing before a lighted shop, the smaller one stopped to look at the time by a lead watch suspended from his neck by a string.

“Here is decidedly a real ninny,” said Gavroche.

Then he thoughtfully muttered between his teeth:

“It’s all the same, if I had any mômes, I would hug them tighter than this.”

Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southeast corner of the Place de la Bastille, near the canal basin dug in the ancient ditch of the prison citadel, a grotesque monument which has now faded away from the memory of Parisians, and which is worthy to leave some trace, for it was an idea of the “member of the Institute, General-in-Chief of the Army of Egypt.”

We say monument, although it was only a rough model. But this rough model itself, a huge plan, a vast carcass of an idea of Napoleon which two or three successive gusts of wind had carried away and thrown each time further from us, had become historical, and had acquired a definiteness which contrasted with its provisional aspect. It was an elephant, forty feet high, constructed of framework and masonry, bearing on its back its tower, which resembled a house, formerly painted green by some house-painter, now painted black by the sun, the rain, and the weather. In that open and deserted corner of the square, the broad front of the colossus, his trunk, his tusks, his size, his enormous rump, his four feet like columns, produced at night, under the starry sky, a startling and terrible outline. One knew not what it meant. It was a sort of symbol of the force of the people. It was gloomy, enigmatic, and immense. It was a mysterious and mighty phantom, visibly standing by the side of the invisible spectre of the Bastille.

It was towards this corner of the square, dimly lighted by the reflection of a distant lamp, that the gamin directed the two “mômes.”

We must be permitted to stop here long enough to declare that we are within the simple reality, and that twenty years ago the police tribunals would have had to condemn upon a complaint for vagrancy and breach of a public monument, a child who should have been caught sleeping in the interior even of the elephant of the Bastille. This fact stated, we continue.

As they came near the colossus, Gavroche comprehended the effect which the infinitely great may produce upon the infinitely small, and said:

“Brats! don’t be frightened.”

Then he entered through a gap in the fence into the inclosure of the elephant, and helped the mômes to crawl through the breach. The two children, a little frightened, followed Gavroche without saying a word, and trusted themselves to that little Providence in rags who had given them bread and promised them a lodging.

Lying by the side of the fence was a ladder, which, by day, was used by the working-men of the neighbouring wood-yard. Gavroche lifted it with singular vigour, and set it up against one of the elephant’s forelegs. About the point where the ladder ended, a sort of black hole could be distinguished in the belly of the colossus.

Gavroche showed the ladder and the hole to his guests, and said to them:

“Mount and enter.”

The two little fellows looked at each other in terror.

“You are afraid, mômes!” exclaimed Gavroche.

And he added:

“You shall see.”

He clasped the elephant’s wrinkled foot, and in a twinkling, without deigning to make use of the ladder, he reached the crevice. He entered it as an adder glides into a hole, and disappeared, and a moment afterwards the two children saw his pallid face dimly appearing like a faded and wan form, at the edge of the hole full of darkness.

“Well,” cried he, “why don’t you come up, momignards? you’ll see how nice it is! Come up,” said he, to the elder, “I will give you a hand.”

The little ones urged each other forward. The gamin made them afraid and reassured them at the same time, and then it was raining very hard. The elder ventured. The younger, seeing his brother go up, and himself left all alone between the paws of this huge beast, had a great desire to cry, but he did not dare.

The elder clambered up the rounds of the ladder. He tottered badly. Gavroche, while he was on his way, encouraged him with the exclamations of a fencing master to his scholars, or of a muleteer to his mules:

“Don’t be afraid!”

“That’s it!”

“Come on!”

“Put your foot there!”

“Your hand here!”

“Be brave!”

And when he came within his reach he caught him quickly and vigorously by the arm and drew him up.

“Gulped!” said he.

The môme had passed through the crevice.

“Now,” said Gavroche, “wait for me. Monsieur, have the kindness to sit down.”

And, going out by the crevice as he had entered, he let himself glide with the agility of a monkey along the elephant’s leg, he dropped upon his feet in the grass, caught the little five-year-old by the waist and set him half way up the ladder, then he began to mount up behind him, crying to the elder:

“I will push him; you pull him.”

In an instant the little fellow was lifted, pushed, dragged, pulled, stuffed, crammed into the hole without having had time to know what was going on. And Gavroche, entering after him, pushing back the ladder with a kick so that it fell upon the grass, began to clap his hands, and cried:

“Here we are! Hurrah for General Lafayette!”

This explosion over, he added:

“Brats, you are in my house.”

Gavroche was in fact at home.

O unexpected utility of the useless! charity of great things! goodness of giants! This monstrous monument which had contained a thought of the emperor, had become the box of a gamin. The môme had been accepted and sheltered by the colossus. The bourgeois in their Sunday clothes, who passed by the elephant of the Bastille, frequently said, eyeing it scornfully with their goggle eyes: “What’s the use of that?” The use of it was to save from the cold, the frost, the hail, the rain, to protect from the wintry wind, to preserve from sleeping in the mud, which breeds fever, and from sleeping in the snow, which breeds death, a little being with no father or mother, with no bread, no clothing, no asylum. The use of it was to receive the innocent whom society repulsed. The use of it was to diminish the public crime. It was a den open for him to whom all doors were closed. It seemed as if the miserable old mastodon, invaded by vermin and oblivion, covered with warts, mould, and ulcers, tottering, worm-eaten, abandoned, condemned, a sort of colossal beggar asking in vain the alms of a benevolent look in the middle of the Square, had taken pity itself on this other beggar, the poor pigmy who went with no shoes to his feet, no roof over his head, blowing his fingers, clothed in rags, fed upon what is thrown away. This was the use of the elephant of the Bastille. This idea of Napoleon, disdained by men, had been taken up by God. That which had been illustrious only, had become august. The emperor must have had, to realise what he meditated, porphyry, brass, iron, gold, marble; for God the old assemblage of boards, joists, and plaster was enough. The emperor had had a dream of genius; in this titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, brandishing his trunk, bearing his tower, and making the joyous and vivifying waters gush out on all sides about him, he desired to incarnate the people. God had done a grander thing with it, he lodged a child.

The hole by which Gavroche had entered was a break hardly visible from the outside, concealed as it was, and as we have said under the belly of the elephant, and so narrow that hardly anything but cats and mômes could have passed through.

“Let us begin,” said Gavroche, “by telling the porter that we are not in.”

And plunging into the darkness with certainty, like one who is familiar with his room, he took a board and stopped the hole.

Gavroche plunged again into the darkness. The children heard the sputtering of the taper plunged into the phosphoric bottle. The chemical taper was not yet in existence; the Fumade tinder-box represented progress at that period.

A sudden light made them wink; Gavroche had just lighted one of those bits of string soaked in resin which are called cellar-rats. The cellar-rats, which made more smoke than flame, rendered the inside of the elephant dimly visible.

Gavroche’s two guests looked about them, and felt something like what one would feel who should be shut up in the great tun of Heidelberg, or better still, what Jonah must have felt in the Biblical belly of the whale. An entire gigantic skeleton appeared to them, and enveloped them. Above, a long dusky beam, from which projected at regular distances massive encircling timbers, represented the vertebral column with its ribs, stalactites of plaster hung down like the viscera, and from one side to the other huge spider-webs made dusty diaphragms. Here and there in the corners great blackish spots were seen, which had the appearance of being alive, and which changed their places rapidly with a wild and startled motion.

The debris fallen from the elephant’s back upon his belly had filled up the concavity, so that they could walk upon it as upon a floor.

The smaller one hugged close to his brother and said in a low tone:

“It’s dark.”

This word made Gavroche cry out. The petrified air of the two mômes rendered a shock necessary.

“What’s your point?” he exclaimed. “Are we kidding around? Are we being fussy? Must you have the Tuileries? would you be fools? Say, I warn you that I do not belong to the regiment of ninnies. Are you the brats of the pope’s headwaiter?”

A little roughness is good for a person who’s afraid. It is reassuring. The two children came close to Gavroche.

Gavroche, paternally softened by this confidence, passed “from the grave to the gentle,” and addressing himself to the smaller:

“Goosy,” said he to him, accenting the insult with a caressing tone, “it is outside that it is dark. Outside it rains, here it doesn’t rain; outside it is cold, here there isn’t a speck of wind; outside there are heaps of folks, here there isn’t anybody; outside there isn’t even a moon, here there is my candle, by jinks!”

The two children began to regard the apartment with less fear; but Gavroche did not allow them much longer leisure for contemplation.

“Quick,” said he.

And he pushed them towards what we are very happy to be able to call the bottom of the chamber.

His bed was there.

Gavroche’s bed was complete. That is to say, there was a mattress, a covering, and an alcove with curtains.

The mattress was a straw mat, the covering a large blanket of coarse grey wool, very warm and almost new. The alcove was like this:

Three rather long laths, sunk and firmly settled into the rubbish of the floor, that is to say of the belly of the elephant, two in front and one behind, and tied together by a string at the top, so as to form a pyramidal frame. This frame supported a fine trellis of brass wire which was simply hung over it, but artistically applied and kept in place by fastenings of iron wire, in such a way that it entirely enveloped the three laths. A row of large stones fixed upon the ground all about this trellis so as to let nothing pass. This trellis was nothing more nor less than a fragment of those copper nettings which are used to cover the bird-houses in menageries. Gavroche’s bed under this netting was as if in a cage. Altogether it was like an Esquimaux tent.

It was this netting which took the place of curtains.

Gavroche removed the stones a little which kept down the netting in front, and the two folds of the trellis which lay one over the other opened.

“Mômes, on your hands and knees!” said Gavroche.

He made his guests enter into the cage carefully, then he went in after them, creeping, pulled back the stones, and hermetically closed the opening.

They were all three stretched upon the straw.

Small as they were, none of them could have stood up in the alcove. Gavroche still held the cellar-rat in his hand.

“Now,” said he, “pioncez! [sleep] I am going to suppress the candelabra.”

“Monsieur,” inquired the elder of the two brothers, of Gavroche, pointing to the netting, “what is that?”

“That,” said Gavroche, “is for the rats, pioncez!”

The two children looked with a timid and stupefied respect upon this intrepid and inventive being, a vagabond like them, isolated like them, wretched like them, who was something wonderful and all-powerful, who seemed to them supernatural, and whose countenance was made up of all the grimaces of an old mountebank mingled with the most natural and most pleasant smile.

“Monsieur,” said the elder timidly, “you are not afraid then of the sergents de ville?”

Gavroche merely answered:

“Môme! we don’t say sergents de ville, we say cognes.”

The smaller boy had his eyes open, but he said nothing. As he was on the edge of the mat, the elder being in the middle, Gavroche tucked the blanket under him as a mother would have done, and raised the mat under his head with some old rags in such a way as to make a pillow for the môme. Then he turned towards the elder:

“Eh! we are pretty well off here!”

“Oh, yes,” answered the elder, looking at Gavroche with the expression of a rescued angel.

The two poor little soaked children were beginning to get warm.

“Ah, now,” continued Gavroche, “what in the world were you crying for?”

And pointing out the little one to his brother:

“A youngster like that, I don’t say, but a big boy like you to cry is silly; it makes you look like a calf.”

“Well,” said the child, “we had no room, no place to go.”

“Brat!” replied Gavroche, “we don’t say a room, we say a piolle.”

“And then we were afraid to be all alone like that in the night.”

“We don’t say night, we say sorgue.”

“Thank you, monsieur,” said the child.

“Listen to me,” continued Gavroche, “you must never whine any more for anything. I will take care of you. You will see what fun we have. In summer we will go to the Glacière with Navet, a comrade of mine, we will go in swimming in the Basin, we will run on the track before the Bridge of Austerlitz all naked, that makes the washerwomen mad. They scream, they scold, if you only knew how funny they are! We will go to see the skeleton man. He is alive. At the Champs-Elysées. That parishioner is as thin as anything. And then I will take you to the theatre. I will take you to see Frederic Lemaitre.^ep I have tickets, I know the actors, I even acted once in a play. We were mômes so high, we ran about under a cloth, that made the sea. I will have you hired at my theatre. We will go and see the savages. They’re not real, those savages. They have red tights which wrinkle, and you can see their elbows darned with white thread. After that we will go to the Opera. We will go in with the claqueurs. The claque at the Opera is very select. I wouldn’t go with the claque on the boulevards. At the Opera, just think, there are some who pay twenty sous, but they are fools. They call them dishrags. And then we will go to see the guillotining. I will show you the executioner. He lives in the Rue des Marias. Monsieur Sanson. There is a letter-box on his door. Oh! we have famous fun!”

At this moment, a drop of wax fell upon Gavroche’s finger, and recalled him to the realities of life.

“The deuce!” said he, “there’s the match used up. Attention! I can’t spend more than a sou a month for my lighting. When we go to bed, we must go to sleep. We haven’t time to read the romances of Monsieur Paul de Kock. Besides the light might show through the cracks of the porte-cochère, and the cognes couldn’t help seeing.”

“And then,” timidly observed the elder who alone dared to talk with Gavroche and reply to him, “a spark might fall into the straw, we must take care not to burn the house up.”

“We don’t say burn the house,” said Gavroche, “we say riffauder the bocard.”

The storm redoubled. They heard, in the intervals of the thunder, the tempest beating against the back of the colossus.

“Pour away, old rain!” said Gavroche. “It does amuse me to hear the decanter emptying along the house’s legs. Winter is a fool; he throws away his goods, he loses his trouble, he can’t wet us, and it makes him grumble, the old water-carrier!”

This allusion to thunder, all the consequences of which Gavroche accepted as a philosopher of the nineteenth century, was followed by a very vivid flash, so blinding that something of it entered by the crevice into the belly of the elephant. Almost at the same instant the thunder burst forth very furiously. The two little boys uttered a cry, and rose so quickly that the trellis was almost thrown out of place; but Gavroche turned his bold face towards them, and took advantage of the clap of thunder to burst into a laugh.

“Be calm, children. Don’t upset the edifice. That was fine thunder; give us some more. That wasn’t any fool of a flash. Bravo God! by jinks! that is most as good as it is at the theatre.”

This said, he restored order in the trellis, gently pushed the two children to the head of the bed, pressed their knees to stretch them out at full length, and exclaimed:

“As God is lighting his candle, I can blow out mine. Children, we must sleep, my young humans. It is very bad not to sleep. It would make you schlinguer in your strainer, or, as the big bugs say, stink in your jaws. Wind yourselves up well in the peel! I’m going to extinguish. Are you all right?”

“Yes,” murmured the elder, “I am right. I feel as if I had feathers under my head.”

“We don’t say head,” cried Gavroche, “we say tronche.”

The two children hugged close to each other. Gavroche finished arranging them upon the mat, and pulled the blanket up to their ears, then repeated for the third time the injunction in hieratic language:

“Pioncez!”

And he blew out the taper.

Hardly was the light extinguished when a singular tremor began to agitate the trellis under which the three children were lying. It was a multitude of dull rubbings, which gave a metallic sound, as if claws and teeth were grinding the copper wire. This was accompanied by all sorts of little sharp cries.

The little boy of five, hearing this tumult over his head, and shivering with fear, pushed the elder brother with his elbow, but the elder brother had already “pioncé, according to Gavroche’s order. Then the little boy, no longer capable of fearing him, ventured to accost Gavroche, but very low, and holding his breath:

“Monsieur?”

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

“What is that?”

“It is the rats,” answered Gavroche.

And he laid his head again upon the mat.

The rats, in fact, which swarmed by thousands in the carcass of the elephant, and which were those living black spots of which we have spoken, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle so long as it burned, but as soon as this cavern, which was, as it were, their city, had been restored to night, smelling there what the good storyteller Perrault calls “some fresh meat,” they had rushed in en masse upon Gavroche’s tent, climbed to the top, and were biting its meshes as if they were seeking to get through this new-fashioned mosquito bar.

Still the little boy did not go to sleep.

“Monsieur!” he said again.

“Hey?” said Gavroche.

“What are the rats?”

“They are mice.”

This explanation reassured the child a little. He had seen some white mice in the course of his life, and he was not afraid of them. However, he raised his voice again:

“Monsieur?”

“Hey?” replied Gavroche.

“Why don’t you have a cat?”

“I had one,” answered Gavroche, “I brought one here, but they ate her on me.”

This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the little fellow again began to tremble. The dialogue between him and Gavroche was resumed for the fourth time.

“Monsieur!”

“Hey?”

“Who was it that was eaten up?”

“The cat.”

“Who was it that ate the cat?”

“The rats.”

“The mice?”

“Yes, the rats.”

The child, dismayed by these mice who ate cats, continued:

“Monsieur, would those mice eat us?”

“Damn right!” said Gavroche.

The child’s terror was complete. But Gavroche added:

“Don’t be afraid! they can’t get in. And when I am here. Here, take hold of my hand. Be still and pioncez!”

Gavroche at the same time took the little fellow’s hand across his brother. The child clasped his hand against his body, and felt safe. Courage and strength have such mysterious communications. It was once more silent about them, the sound of voices had startled and driven away the rats; in a few minutes they might have returned and done their worst in vain, the three mômes, plunged in slumber, heard nothing more.

The hours of the night passed away. Darkness covered the immense Place de la Bastille; a wintry wind, which mingled with the rain, blew in gusts, the patrolmen ransacked the doors, alleys, yards and dark corners, and, looking for nocturnal vagabonds, passed silently by the elephant; the monster, standing, motionless, with open eyes in the darkness, appeared to be in reverie and well satisfied with his good deeds, and he sheltered from the heavens and from men the three poor sleeping children.

To understand what follows, we must remember that at that period the guard-house of the Bastille was situated at the other extremity of the Square, and that what occurred near the elephant could neither be seen nor heard by the sentinel.

Towards the end of the hour which immediately precedes daybreak, a man turned out of the Rue Saint Antoine, running, crossed the Square, turned the great inclosure of the Column of July, and glided between the palisades under the belly of the elephant. Had any light whatever shone upon this man, from his thoroughly wet clothing, one would have guessed that he had passed the night in the rain. When under the elephant he raised a grotesque call, which belongs to no human language and which a parrot alone could reproduce. He twice repeated this call, of which the following orthography gives but a very imperfect idea:

“Kirikikiou!”

At the second call, a clear, cheerful young voice answered from the belly of the elephant:

“Yes!”

Almost immediately the board which closed the hole moved away, and gave passage to a child, who descended along the elephant’s leg and dropped lightly near the man. It was Gavroche. The man was Montparnasse.

As to this call, kirikikiou, it was undoubtedly what the child meant by, You will ask for Monsieur Gavroche.

On hearing it he had waked with a spring, crawled out of his “alcove,” separating the netting a little, which he afterwards carefully closed again, then he had opened the trap and descended.

The man and the child recognised each other silently in the dark; Montparnasse merely said:

“We need you. Come and give us a lift.”

The gamin did not ask any other explanation.

“I’m on hand,” said he.

And they both took the direction of the Rue Saint Antoine, whence Montparnasse came, winding their way rapidly through the long file of market waggons which go down at that hour towards the market.

The market gardeners, crouching among the salads and vegetables, half asleep, buried up to the eyes in the trunks of their waggons on account of the driving rain, did not even notice these strange passengers.