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SOME OF HIS PRIVATE MARKS

THE gamin of Paris is the dwarf of the giantess.

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

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

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

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

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

“I, sir! search me!”