





Paris has a child, and the forest has a bird; the bird is called the
sparrow; the child is called the gamin.

Couple these two ideas which contain, the one all the furnace, the
other all the dawn; strike these two sparks together, Paris, childhood;
there leaps out from them a little being. _Homuncio_, Plautus would
say.

This little being is joyous. He has not food every day, and he goes to
the play every evening, if he sees good. He has no shirt on his body,
no shoes on his feet, no roof over his head; he is like the flies of
heaven, who have none of these things. He is from seven to thirteen
years of age, he lives in bands, roams the streets, lodges in the open
air, wears an old pair of trousers of his father’s, which descend below
his heels, an old hat of some other father, which descends below his
ears, a single suspender of yellow listing; he runs, lies in wait,
rummages about, wastes time, blackens pipes, swears like a convict,
haunts the wine-shop, knows thieves, calls gay women _thou_, talks
slang, sings obscene songs, and has no evil in his heart. This is
because he has in his heart a pearl, innocence; and pearls are not to
be dissolved in mud. So long as man is in his childhood, God wills that
he shall be innocent.

If one were to ask that enormous city: “What is this?” she would reply:
“It is my little one.”







The gamin—the street Arab—of Paris is the dwarf of the giant.

Let us not exaggerate, this cherub of the gutter sometimes has a shirt,
but, in that case, he owns but one; he sometimes has shoes, but then
they have no soles; he sometimes has a lodging, and he loves it, for he
finds his mother there; but he prefers the street, because there he
finds liberty. He has his own games, his own bits of mischief, whose
foundation consists of hatred for the bourgeois; his peculiar
metaphors: to be dead is _to eat dandelions by the root_; his own
occupations, calling hackney-coaches, letting down carriage-steps,
establishing means of transit between the two sides of a street in
heavy rains, which he calls _making the bridge of arts_, crying
discourses pronounced by the authorities in favor of the French people,
cleaning out the cracks in the pavement; he has his own coinage, which
is composed of all the little morsels of worked copper which are found
on the public streets. This curious money, which receives the name of
_loques_—rags—has an invariable and well-regulated currency in this
little Bohemia of children.

Lastly, he has his own fauna, which he observes attentively in the
corners; the lady-bird, the death’s-head plant-louse, the
daddy-long-legs, “the devil,” a black insect, which menaces by twisting
about its tail armed with two horns. He has his fabulous monster, which
has scales under its belly, but is not a lizard, which has pustules on
its back, but is not a toad, which inhabits the nooks of old lime-kilns
and wells that have run dry, which is black, hairy, sticky, which
crawls sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, which has no cry, but which
has a look, and is so terrible that no one has ever beheld it; he calls
this monster “the deaf thing.” The search for these “deaf things” among
the stones is a joy of formidable nature. Another pleasure consists in
suddenly prying up a paving-stone, and taking a look at the wood-lice.
Each region of Paris is celebrated for the interesting treasures which
are to be found there. There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the
Ursulines, there are millepeds in the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in
the ditches of the Champs-de-Mars.

As far as sayings are concerned, this child has as many of them as
Talleyrand. He is no less cynical, but he is more honest. He is endowed
with a certain indescribable, unexpected joviality; he upsets the
composure of the shopkeeper with his wild laughter. He ranges boldly
from high comedy to farce.

A funeral passes by. Among those who accompany the dead there is a
doctor. “Hey there!” shouts some street Arab, “how long has it been
customary for doctors to carry home their own work?”


Another is in a crowd. A grave man, adorned with spectacles and
trinkets, turns round indignantly: “You good-for-nothing, you have
seized my wife’s waist!”—“I, sir? Search me!”







In the evening, thanks to a few sous, which he always finds means to
procure, the _homuncio_ enters a theatre. On crossing that magic
threshold, he becomes transfigured; he was the street Arab, he becomes
the titi.18 Theatres are a sort of ship turned upside down with the
keel in the air. It is in that keel that the titi huddle together. The
titi is to the gamin what the moth is to the larva; the same being
endowed with wings and soaring. It suffices for him to be there, with
his radiance of happiness, with his power of enthusiasm and joy, with
his hand-clapping, which resembles a clapping of wings, to confer on
that narrow, dark, fetid, sordid, unhealthy, hideous, abominable keel,
the name of Paradise.

Bestow on an individual the useless and deprive him of the necessary,
and you have the gamin.

The gamin is not devoid of literary intuition. His tendency, and we say
it with the proper amount of regret, would not constitute classic
taste. He is not very academic by nature. Thus, to give an example, the
popularity of Mademoiselle Mars among that little audience of stormy
children was seasoned with a touch of irony. The gamin called her
_Mademoiselle Muche_—“hide yourself.”


This being bawls and scoffs and ridicules and fights, has rags like a
baby and tatters like a philosopher, fishes in the sewer, hunts in the
cesspool, extracts mirth from foulness, whips up the squares with his
wit, grins and bites, whistles and sings, shouts, and shrieks, tempers
Alleluia with Matanturlurette, chants every rhythm from the De
Profundis to the Jack-pudding, finds without seeking, knows what he is
ignorant of, is a Spartan to the point of thieving, is mad to wisdom,
is lyrical to filth, would crouch down on Olympus, wallows in the
dunghill and emerges from it covered with stars. The gamin of Paris is
Rabelais in this youth.

He is not content with his trousers unless they have a watch-pocket.

He is not easily astonished, he is still less easily terrified, he
makes songs on superstitions, he takes the wind out of exaggerations,
he twits mysteries, he thrusts out his tongue at ghosts, he takes the
poetry out of stilted things, he introduces caricature into epic
extravaganzas. It is not that he is prosaic; far from that; but he
replaces the solemn vision by the farcical phantasmagoria. If Adamastor
were to appear to him, the street Arab would say: “Hi there! The
bugaboo!”







Paris begins with the lounger and ends with the street Arab, two beings
of which no other city is capable; the passive acceptance, which
contents itself with gazing, and the inexhaustible initiative;
Prudhomme and Fouillou. Paris alone has this in its natural history.
The whole of the monarchy is contained in the lounger; the whole of
anarchy in the gamin.

This pale child of the Parisian faubourgs lives and develops, makes
connections, “grows supple” in suffering, in the presence of social
realities and of human things, a thoughtful witness. He thinks himself
heedless; and he is not. He looks and is on the verge of laughter; he
is on the verge of something else also. Whoever you may be, if your
name is Prejudice, Abuse, Ignorance, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism,
Injustice, Fanaticism, Tyranny, beware of the gaping gamin.

The little fellow will grow up.

Of what clay is he made? Of the first mud that comes to hand. A handful
of dirt, a breath, and behold Adam. It suffices for a God to pass by. A
God has always passed over the street Arab. Fortune labors at this tiny
being. By the word “fortune” we mean chance, to some extent. That pigmy
kneaded out of common earth, ignorant, unlettered, giddy, vulgar, low.
Will that become an Ionian or a Bœotian? Wait, _currit rota_, the
Spirit of Paris, that demon which creates the children of chance and
the men of destiny, reversing the process of the Latin potter, makes of
a jug an amphora.






The gamin loves the city, he also loves solitude, since he has
something of the sage in him. _Urbis amator_, like Fuscus; _ruris
amator_, like Flaccus.

To roam thoughtfully about, that is to say, to lounge, is a fine
employment of time in the eyes of the philosopher; particularly in that
rather illegitimate species of campaign, which is tolerably ugly but
odd and composed of two natures, which surrounds certain great cities,
notably Paris. To study the suburbs is to study the amphibious animal.
End of the trees, beginning of the roofs; end of the grass, beginning
of the pavements; end of the furrows, beginning of the shops, end of
the wheel-ruts, beginning of the passions; end of the divine murmur,
beginning of the human uproar; hence an extraordinary interest.

Hence, in these not very attractive places, indelibly stamped by the
passing stroller with the epithet: _melancholy_, the apparently
objectless promenades of the dreamer.

He who writes these lines has long been a prowler about the barriers of
Paris, and it is for him a source of profound souvenirs. That
close-shaven turf, those pebbly paths, that chalk, those pools, those
harsh monotonies of waste and fallow lands, the plants of early
market-garden suddenly springing into sight in a bottom, that mixture
of the savage and the citizen, those vast desert nooks where the
garrison drums practise noisily, and produce a sort of lisping of
battle, those hermits by day and cut-throats by night, that clumsy mill
which turns in the wind, the hoisting-wheels of the quarries, the
tea-gardens at the corners of the cemeteries; the mysterious charm of
great, sombre walls squarely intersecting immense, vague stretches of
land inundated with sunshine and full of butterflies,—all this
attracted him.

There is hardly any one on earth who is not acquainted with those
singular spots, the Glacière, the Cunette, the hideous wall of Grenelle
all speckled with balls, Mont-Parnasse, the Fosse-aux-Loups, Aubiers on
the bank of the Marne, Mont-Souris, the Tombe-Issoire, the Pierre-Plate
de Châtillon, where there is an old, exhausted quarry which no longer
serves any purpose except to raise mushrooms, and which is closed, on a
level with the ground, by a trap-door of rotten planks. The campagna of
Rome is one idea, the banlieue of Paris is another; to behold nothing
but fields, houses, or trees in what a stretch of country offers us, is
to remain on the surface; all aspects of things are thoughts of God.
The spot where a plain effects its junction with a city is always
stamped with a certain piercing melancholy. Nature and humanity both
appeal to you at the same time there. Local originalities there make
their appearance.

Any one who, like ourselves, has wandered about in these solitudes
contiguous to our faubourgs, which may be designated as the limbos of
Paris, has seen here and there, in the most desert spot, at the most
unexpected moment, behind a meagre hedge, or in the corner of a
lugubrious wall, children grouped tumultuously, fetid, muddy, dusty,
ragged, dishevelled, playing hide-and-seek, and crowned with
corn-flowers. All of them are little ones who have made their escape
from poor families. The outer boulevard is their breathing space; the
suburbs belong to them. There they are eternally playing truant. There
they innocently sing their repertory of dirty songs. There they are, or
rather, there they exist, far from every eye, in the sweet light of May
or June, kneeling round a hole in the ground, snapping marbles with
their thumbs, quarrelling over half-farthings, irresponsible, volatile,
free and happy; and, no sooner do they catch sight of you than they
recollect that they have an industry, and that they must earn their
living, and they offer to sell you an old woollen stocking filled with
cockchafers, or a bunch of lilacs. These encounters with strange
children are one of the charming and at the same time poignant graces
of the environs of Paris.

Sometimes there are little girls among the throng of boys,—are they
their sisters?—who are almost young maidens, thin, feverish, with
sunburnt hands, covered with freckles, crowned with poppies and ears of
rye, gay, haggard, barefooted. They can be seen devouring cherries
among the wheat. In the evening they can be heard laughing. These
groups, warmly illuminated by the full glow of midday, or indistinctly
seen in the twilight, occupy the thoughtful man for a very long time,
and these visions mingle with his dreams.

Paris, centre, banlieue, circumference; this constitutes all the earth
to those children. They never venture beyond this. They can no more
escape from the Parisian atmosphere than fish can escape from the
water. For them, nothing exists two leagues beyond the barriers: Ivry,
Gentilly, Arcueil, Belleville, Aubervilliers, Ménilmontant,
Choisy-le-Roi, Billancourt, Meudon, Issy, Vanvre, Sèvres, Puteaux,
Neuilly, Gennevilliers, Colombes, Romainville, Chatou, Asnières,
Bougival, Nanterre, Enghien, Noisy-le-Sec, Nogent, Gournay, Drancy,
Gonesse; the universe ends there.






At the epoch, nearly contemporary by the way, when the action of this
book takes place, there was not, as there is to-day, a policeman at the
corner of every street (a benefit which there is no time to discuss
here); stray children abounded in Paris. The statistics give an average
of two hundred and sixty homeless children picked up annually at that
period, by the police patrols, in unenclosed lands, in houses in
process of construction, and under the arches of the bridges. One of
these nests, which has become famous, produced “the swallows of the
bridge of Arcola.” This is, moreover, the most disastrous of social
symptoms. All crimes of the man begin in the vagabondage of the child.

Let us make an exception in favor of Paris, nevertheless. In a relative
measure, and in spite of the souvenir which we have just recalled, the
exception is just. While in any other great city the vagabond child is
a lost man, while nearly everywhere the child left to itself is, in
some sort, sacrificed and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in the
public vices which devour in him honesty and conscience, the street boy
of Paris, we insist on this point, however defaced and injured on the
surface, is almost intact on the interior. It is a magnificent thing to
put on record, and one which shines forth in the splendid probity of
our popular revolutions, that a certain incorruptibility results from
the idea which exists in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water
of the ocean. To breathe Paris preserves the soul.

What we have just said takes away nothing of the anguish of heart which
one experiences every time that one meets one of these children around
whom one fancies that he beholds floating the threads of a broken
family. In the civilization of the present day, incomplete as it still
is, it is not a very abnormal thing to behold these fractured families
pouring themselves out into the darkness, not knowing clearly what has
become of their children, and allowing their own entrails to fall on
the public highway. Hence these obscure destinies. This is called, for
this sad thing has given rise to an expression, “to be cast on the
pavements of Paris.”


Let it be said by the way, that this abandonment of children was not
discouraged by the ancient monarchy. A little of Egypt and Bohemia in
the lower regions suited the upper spheres, and compassed the aims of
the powerful. The hatred of instruction for the children of the people
was a dogma. What is the use of “half-lights”? Such was the
countersign. Now, the erring child is the corollary of the ignorant
child.

Besides this, the monarchy sometimes was in need of children, and in
that case it skimmed the streets.

Under Louis XIV., not to go any further back, the king rightly desired
to create a fleet. The idea was a good one. But let us consider the
means. There can be no fleet, if, beside the sailing ship, that
plaything of the winds, and for the purpose of towing it, in case of
necessity, there is not the vessel which goes where it pleases, either
by means of oars or of steam; the galleys were then to the marine what
steamers are to-day. Therefore, galleys were necessary; but the galley
is moved only by the galley-slave; hence, galley-slaves were required.
Colbert had the commissioners of provinces and the parliaments make as
many convicts as possible. The magistracy showed a great deal of
complaisance in the matter. A man kept his hat on in the presence of a
procession—it was a Huguenot attitude; he was sent to the galleys. A
child was encountered in the streets; provided that he was fifteen
years of age and did not know where he was to sleep, he was sent to the
galleys. Grand reign; grand century.

Under Louis XV. children disappeared in Paris; the police carried them
off, for what mysterious purpose no one knew. People whispered with
terror monstrous conjectures as to the king’s baths of purple. Barbier
speaks ingenuously of these things. It sometimes happened that the
exempts of the guard, when they ran short of children, took those who
had fathers. The fathers, in despair, attacked the exempts. In that
case, the parliament intervened and had some one hung. Who? The
exempts? No, the fathers.




INDIA


The body of street Arabs in Paris almost constitutes a caste. One might
almost say: Not every one who wishes to belong to it can do so.

This word _gamin_ was printed for the first time, and reached popular
speech through the literary tongue, in 1834. It is in a little work
entitled _Claude Gueux_ that this word made its appearance. The horror
was lively. The word passed into circulation.

The elements which constitute the consideration of the gamins for each
other are very various. We have known and associated with one who was
greatly respected and vastly admired because he had seen a man fall
from the top of the tower of Notre-Dame; another, because he had
succeeded in making his way into the rear courtyard where the statues
of the dome of the Invalides had been temporarily deposited, and had
“prigged” some lead from them; a third, because he had seen a diligence
tip over; still another, because he “knew” a soldier who came near
putting out the eye of a citizen.

This explains that famous exclamation of a Parisian gamin, a profound
epiphonema, which the vulgar herd laughs at without comprehending,—
_Dieu de Dieu! What ill-luck I do have! to think that I have never yet
seen anybody tumble from a fifth-story window! _ (_I have_ pronounced
_I’ave_ and _fifth_ pronounced _fift’_.)

Surely, this saying of a peasant is a fine one: “Father So-and-So, your
wife has died of her malady; why did you not send for the doctor?”
“What would you have, sir, we poor folks _die of ourselves_.” But if
the peasant’s whole passivity lies in this saying, the whole of the
free-thinking anarchy of the brat of the faubourgs is, assuredly,
contained in this other saying. A man condemned to death is listening
to his confessor in the tumbrel. The child of Paris exclaims: “He is
talking to his black cap! Oh, the sneak!”


A certain audacity on matters of religion sets off the gamin. To be
strong-minded is an important item.

To be present at executions constitutes a duty. He shows himself at the
guillotine, and he laughs. He calls it by all sorts of pet names: The
End of the Soup, The Growler, The Mother in the Blue (the sky), The
Last Mouthful, etc., etc. In order not to lose anything of the affair,
he scales the walls, he hoists himself to balconies, he ascends trees,
he suspends himself to gratings, he clings fast to chimneys. The gamin
is born a tiler as he is born a mariner. A roof inspires him with no
more fear than a mast. There is no festival which comes up to an
execution on the Place de Grève. Samson and the Abbé Montès are the
truly popular names. They hoot at the victim in order to encourage him.
They sometimes admire him. Lacenaire, when a gamin, on seeing the
hideous Dautin die bravely, uttered these words which contain a future:
“I was jealous of him.” In the brotherhood of gamins Voltaire is not
known, but Papavoine is. “Politicians” are confused with assassins in
the same legend. They have a tradition as to everybody’s last garment.
It is known that Tolleron had a fireman’s cap, Avril an otter cap,
Losvel a round hat, that old Delaporte was bald and bareheaded, that
Castaing was all ruddy and very handsome, that Bories had a romantic
small beard, that Jean Martin kept on his suspenders, that Lecouffé and
his mother quarrelled. “Don’t reproach each other for your basket,”
shouted a gamin to them. Another, in order to get a look at Debacker as
he passed, and being too small in the crowd, caught sight of the
lantern on the quay and climbed it. A gendarme stationed opposite
frowned. “Let me climb up, m’sieu le gendarme,” said the gamin. And, to
soften the heart of the authorities he added: “I will not fall.” “I
don’t care if you do,” retorted the gendarme.

In the brotherhood of gamins, a memorable accident counts for a great
deal. One reaches the height of consideration if one chances to cut
one’s self very deeply, “to the very bone.”


The fist is no mediocre element of respect. One of the things that the
gamin is fondest of saying is: “I am fine and strong, come now!” To be
left-handed renders you very enviable. A squint is highly esteemed.




LAST KING


In summer, he metamorphoses himself into a frog; and in the evening,
when night is falling, in front of the bridges of Austerlitz and Jena,
from the tops of coal wagons, and the washerwomen’s boats, he hurls
himself headlong into the Seine, and into all possible infractions of
the laws of modesty and of the police. Nevertheless the police keep an
eye on him, and the result is a highly dramatic situation which once
gave rise to a fraternal and memorable cry; that cry which was
celebrated about 1830, is a strategic warning from gamin to gamin; it
scans like a verse from Homer, with a notation as inexpressible as the
eleusiac chant of the Panathenæa, and in it one encounters again the
ancient Evohe. Here it is: “Ohé, Titi, ohééé! Here comes the bobby,
here comes the p’lice, pick up your duds and be off, through the sewer
with you!”


Sometimes this gnat—that is what he calls himself—knows how to read;
sometimes he knows how to write; he always knows how to daub. He does
not hesitate to acquire, by no one knows what mysterious mutual
instruction, all the talents which can be of use to the public; from
1815 to 1830, he imitated the cry of the turkey; from 1830 to 1848, he
scrawled pears on the walls. One summer evening, when Louis Philippe
was returning home on foot, he saw a little fellow, no higher than his
knee, perspiring and climbing up to draw a gigantic pear in charcoal on
one of the pillars of the gate of Neuilly; the King, with that
good-nature which came to him from Henry IV., helped the gamin,
finished the pear, and gave the child a louis, saying: “The pear is on
that also.”19 The gamin loves uproar. A certain state of violence
pleases him. He execrates “the curés.” One day, in the Rue de
l’Université, one of these scamps was putting his thumb to his nose at
the carriage gate of No. 69. “Why are you doing that at the gate?” a
passer-by asked. The boy replied: “There is a curé there.” It was
there, in fact, that the Papal Nuncio lived.

Nevertheless, whatever may be the Voltairianism of the small gamin, if
the occasion to become a chorister presents itself, it is quite
possible that he will accept, and in that case he serves the mass
civilly. There are two things to which he plays Tantalus, and which he
always desires without ever attaining them: to overthrow the
government, and to get his trousers sewed up again.

The gamin in his perfect state possesses all the policemen of Paris,
and can always put the name to the face of any one which he chances to
meet. He can tell them off on the tips of his fingers. He studies their
habits, and he has special notes on each one of them. He reads the
souls of the police like an open book. He will tell you fluently and
without flinching: “Such an one is a _traitor_; such another is very
_malicious_; such another is _great_; such another is _ridiculous_.”
(All these words: traitor, malicious, great, ridiculous, have a
particular meaning in his mouth.) That one imagines that he owns the
Pont-Neuf, and he prevents _people_ from walking on the cornice outside
the parapet; that other has a mania for pulling _person’s_ ears; etc.,
etc.






There was something of that boy in Poquelin, the son of the
fish-market; Beaumarchais had something of it. Gaminerie is a shade of
the Gallic spirit. Mingled with good sense, it sometimes adds force to
the latter, as alcohol does to wine. Sometimes it is a defect. Homer
repeats himself eternally, granted; one may say that Voltaire plays the
gamin. Camille Desmoulins was a native of the faubourgs. Championnet,
who treated miracles brutally, rose from the pavements of Paris; he
had, when a small lad, inundated the porticos of Saint-Jean de
Beauvais, and of Saint-Étienne du Mont; he had addressed the shrine of
Sainte-Geneviève familiarly to give orders to the phial of Saint
Januarius.

The gamin of Paris is respectful, ironical, and insolent. He has
villainous teeth, because he is badly fed and his stomach suffers, and
handsome eyes because he has wit. If Jehovah himself were present, he
would go hopping up the steps of paradise on one foot. He is strong on
boxing. All beliefs are possible to him. He plays in the gutter, and
straightens himself up with a revolt; his effrontery persists even in
the presence of grape-shot; he was a scapegrace, he is a hero; like the
little Theban, he shakes the skin from the lion; Barra the drummer-boy
was a gamin of Paris; he Shouts: “Forward!” as the horse of Scripture
says “Vah!” and in a moment he has passed from the small brat to the
giant.

This child of the puddle is also the child of the ideal. Measure that
spread of wings which reaches from Molière to Barra.

To sum up the whole, and in one word, the gamin is a being who amuses
himself, because he is unhappy.






To sum it all up once more, the Paris gamin of to-day, like the
_græculus_ of Rome in days gone by, is the infant populace with the
wrinkle of the old world on his brow.

The gamin is a grace to the nation, and at the same time a disease; a
disease which must be cured, how? By light.

Light renders healthy.

Light kindles.

All generous social irradiations spring from science, letters, arts,
education. Make men, make men. Give them light that they may warm you.
Sooner or later the splendid question of universal education will
present itself with the irresistible authority of the absolute truth;
and then, those who govern under the superintendence of the French idea
will have to make this choice; the children of France or the gamins of
Paris; flames in the light or will-o’-the-wisps in the gloom.

The gamin expresses Paris, and Paris expresses the world.

For Paris is a total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. The whole
of this prodigious city is a foreshortening of dead manners and living
manners. He who sees Paris thinks he sees the bottom of all history
with heaven and constellations in the intervals. Paris has a capital,
the Town-Hall, a Parthenon, Notre-Dame, a Mount Aventine, the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine, an Asinarium, the Sorbonne, a Pantheon, the Pantheon, a
Via Sacra, the Boulevard des Italiens, a temple of the winds, opinion;
and it replaces the Gemoniæ by ridicule. Its _majo_ is called “faraud,”
its Transteverin is the man of the faubourgs, its _hammal_ is the
market-porter, its lazzarone is the pègre, its cockney is the native of
Ghent. Everything that exists elsewhere exists at Paris. The fishwoman
of Dumarsais can retort on the herb-seller of Euripides, the discobols
Vejanus lives again in the Forioso, the tight-rope dancer.
Therapontigonus Miles could walk arm in arm with Vadeboncœur the
grenadier, Damasippus the second-hand dealer would be happy among
bric-à-brac merchants, Vincennes could grasp Socrates in its fist as
just as Agora could imprison Diderot, Grimod de la Reynière discovered
larded roast beef, as Curtillus invented roast hedgehog, we see the
trapeze which figures in Plautus reappear under the vault of the Arc of
l’Etoile, the sword-eater of Pœcilus encountered by Apuleius is a
sword-swallower on the Pont-Neuf, the nephew of Rameau and Curculio the
parasite make a pair, Ergasilus could get himself presented to
Cambacères by d’Aigrefeuille; the four dandies of Rome: Alcesimarchus,
Phœdromus, Diabolus, and Argyrippus, descend from Courtille in
Labatut’s posting-chaise; Aulus Gellius would halt no longer in front
of Congrio than would Charles Nodier in front of Punchinello; Marto is
not a tigress, but Pardalisca was not a dragon; Pantolabus the wag
jeers in the Café Anglais at Nomentanus the fast liver, Hermogenus is a
tenor in the Champs-Élysées, and round him, Thracius the beggar, clad
like Bobèche, takes up a collection; the bore who stops you by the
button of your coat in the Tuileries makes you repeat after a lapse of
two thousand years Thesprion’s apostrophe: _Quis properantem me
prehendit pallio? _ The wine on Surêne is a parody of the wine of Alba,
the red border of Desaugiers forms a balance to the great cutting of
Balatro, Père-Lachaise exhales beneath nocturnal rains the same gleams
as the Esquiliæ, and the grave of the poor bought for five years, is
certainly the equivalent of the slave’s hived coffin.

Seek something that Paris has not. The vat of Trophonius contains
nothing that is not in Mesmer’s tub; Ergaphilas lives again in
Cagliostro; the Brahmin Vâsaphantâ become incarnate in the Comte de
Saint-Germain; the cemetery of Saint-Médard works quite as good
miracles as the Mosque of Oumoumié at Damascus.

Paris has an Æsop-Mayeux, and a Canidia, Mademoiselle Lenormand. It is
terrified, like Delphos at the fulgurating realities of the vision; it
makes tables turn as Dodona did tripods. It places the grisette on the
throne, as Rome placed the courtesan there; and, taking it altogether,
if Louis XV. is worse than Claudian, Madame Dubarry is better than
Messalina. Paris combines in an unprecedented type, which has existed
and which we have elbowed, Grecian nudity, the Hebraic ulcer, and the
Gascon pun. It mingles Diogenes, Job, and Jack-pudding, dresses up a
spectre in old numbers of the _Constitutional_, and makes Chodruc
Duclos.

Although Plutarch says: _the tyrant never grows old_, Rome, under Sylla
as under Domitian, resigned itself and willingly put water in its wine.
The Tiber was a Lethe, if the rather doctrinary eulogium made of it by
Varus Vibiscus is to be credited: _Contra Gracchos Tiberim habemus,
Bibere Tiberim, id est seditionem oblivisci_. Paris drinks a million
litres of water a day, but that does not prevent it from occasionally
beating the general alarm and ringing the tocsin.

With that exception, Paris is amiable. It accepts everything royally;
it is not too particular about its Venus; its Callipyge is Hottentot;
provided that it is made to laugh, it condones; ugliness cheers it,
deformity provokes it to laughter, vice diverts it; be eccentric and
you may be an eccentric; even hypocrisy, that supreme cynicism, does
not disgust it; it is so literary that it does not hold its nose before
Basile, and is no more scandalized by the prayer of Tartuffe than
Horace was repelled by the “hiccup” of Priapus. No trait of the
universal face is lacking in the profile of Paris. The bal Mabile is
not the polymnia dance of the Janiculum, but the dealer in ladies’
wearing apparel there devours the lorette with her eyes, exactly as the
procuress Staphyla lay in wait for the virgin Planesium. The Barrière
du Combat is not the Coliseum, but people are as ferocious there as
though Cæsar were looking on. The Syrian hostess has more grace than
Mother Saguet, but, if Virgil haunted the Roman wine-shop, David
d’Angers, Balzac and Charlet have sat at the tables of Parisian
taverns. Paris reigns. Geniuses flash forth there, the red tails
prosper there. Adonaï passes on his chariot with its twelve wheels of
thunder and lightning; Silenus makes his entry there on his ass. For
Silenus read Ramponneau.

Paris is the synonym of Cosmos, Paris is Athens, Sybaris, Jerusalem,
Pantin. All civilizations are there in an abridged form, all barbarisms
also. Paris would greatly regret it if it had not a guillotine.

A little of the Place de Grève is a good thing. What would all that
eternal festival be without this seasoning? Our laws are wisely
provided, and thanks to them, this blade drips on this Shrove Tuesday.






There is no limit to Paris. No city has had that domination which
sometimes derides those whom it subjugates. To please you, O Athenians!
exclaimed Alexander. Paris makes more than the law, it makes the
fashion; Paris sets more than the fashion, it sets the routine. Paris
may be stupid, if it sees fit; it sometimes allows itself this luxury;
then the universe is stupid in company with it; then Paris awakes, rubs
its eyes, says: “How stupid I am!” and bursts out laughing in the face
of the human race. What a marvel is such a city! it is a strange thing
that this grandioseness and this burlesque should be amicable
neighbors, that all this majesty should not be thrown into disorder by
all this parody, and that the same mouth can to-day blow into the trump
of the Judgment Day, and to-morrow into the reed-flute! Paris has a
sovereign joviality. Its gayety is of the thunder and its farce holds a
sceptre.

Its tempest sometimes proceeds from a grimace. Its explosions, its
days, its masterpieces, its prodigies, its epics, go forth to the
bounds of the universe, and so also do its cock-and-bull stories. Its
laugh is the mouth of a volcano which spatters the whole earth. Its
jests are sparks. It imposes its caricatures as well as its ideal on
people; the highest monuments of human civilization accept its ironies
and lend their eternity to its mischievous pranks. It is superb; it has
a prodigious 14th of July, which delivers the globe; it forces all
nations to take the oath of tennis; its night of the 4th of August
dissolves in three hours a thousand years of feudalism; it makes of its
logic the muscle of unanimous will; it multiplies itself under all
sorts of forms of the sublime; it fills with its light Washington,
Kosciusko, Bolivar, Bozzaris, Riego, Bem, Manin, Lopez, John Brown,
Garibaldi; it is everywhere where the future is being lighted up, at
Boston in 1779, at the Isle de Léon in 1820, at Pesth in 1848, at
Palermo in 1860, it whispers the mighty countersign: Liberty, in the
ear of the American abolitionists grouped about the boat at Harper’s
Ferry, and in the ear of the patriots of Ancona assembled in the
shadow, to the Archi before the Gozzi inn on the seashore; it creates
Canaris; it creates Quiroga; it creates Pisacane; it irradiates the
great on earth; it was while proceeding whither its breath urge them,
that Byron perished at Missolonghi, and that Mazet died at Barcelona;
it is the tribune under the feet of Mirabeau, and a crater under the
feet of Robespierre; its books, its theatre, its art, its science, its
literature, its philosophy, are the manuals of the human race; it has
Pascal, Régnier, Corneille, Descartes, Jean-Jacques: Voltaire for all
moments, Molière for all centuries; it makes its language to be talked
by the universal mouth, and that language becomes the word; it
constructs in all minds the idea of progress, the liberating dogmas
which it forges are for the generations trusty friends, and it is with
the soul of its thinkers and its poets that all heroes of all nations
have been made since 1789; this does not prevent vagabondism, and that
enormous genius which is called Paris, while transfiguring the world by
its light, sketches in charcoal Bouginier’s nose on the wall of the
temple of Theseus and writes _Credeville the thief_ on the Pyramids.

Paris is always showing its teeth; when it is not scolding it is
laughing.

Such is Paris. The smoke of its roofs forms the ideas of the universe.
A heap of mud and stone, if you will, but, above all, a moral being. It
is more than great, it is immense. Why? Because it is daring.

To dare; that is the price of progress.

All sublime conquests are, more or less, the prizes of daring. In order
that the Revolution should take place, it does not suffice that
Montesquieu should foresee it, that Diderot should preach it, that
Beaumarchais should announce it, that Condorcet should calculate it,
that Arouet should prepare it, that Rousseau should premeditate it; it
is necessary that Danton should dare it.

The cry: _Audacity! _ is a _Fiat lux_. It is necessary, for the sake of
the forward march of the human race, that there should be proud lessons
of courage permanently on the heights. Daring deeds dazzle history and
are one of man’s great sources of light. The dawn dares when it rises.
To attempt, to brave, to persist, to persevere, to be faithful to one’s
self, to grasp fate bodily, to astound catastrophe by the small amount
of fear that it occasions us, now to affront unjust power, again to
insult drunken victory, to hold one’s position, to stand one’s ground;
that is the example which nations need, that is the light which
electrifies them. The same formidable lightning proceeds from the torch
of Prometheus to Cambronne’s short pipe.






As for the Parisian populace, even when a man grown, it is always the
street Arab; to paint the child is to paint the city; and it is for
that reason that we have studied this eagle in this arrant sparrow. It
is in the faubourgs, above all, we maintain, that the Parisian race
appears; there is the pure blood; there is the true physiognomy; there
this people toils and suffers, and suffering and toil are the two faces
of man. There exist there immense numbers of unknown beings, among whom
swarm types of the strangest, from the porter of la Râpée to the
knacker of Montfaucon. _Fex urbis_, exclaims Cicero; _mob_, adds Burke,
indignantly; rabble, multitude, populace. These are words and quickly
uttered. But so be it. What does it matter? What is it to me if they do
go barefoot! They do not know how to read; so much the worse. Would you
abandon them for that? Would you turn their distress into a
malediction? Cannot the light penetrate these masses? Let us return to
that cry: Light! and let us obstinately persist therein! Light! Light!
Who knows whether these opacities will not become transparent? Are not
revolutions transfigurations? Come, philosophers, teach, enlighten,
light up, think aloud, speak aloud, hasten joyously to the great sun,
fraternize with the public place, announce the good news, spend your
alphabets lavishly, proclaim rights, sing the Marseillaises, sow
enthusiasms, tear green boughs from the oaks. Make a whirlwind of the
idea. This crowd may be rendered sublime. Let us learn how to make use
of that vast conflagration of principles and virtues, which sparkles,
bursts forth and quivers at certain hours. These bare feet, these bare
arms, these rags, these ignorances, these abjectnesses, these
darknesses, may be employed in the conquest of the ideal. Gaze past the
people, and you will perceive truth. Let that vile sand which you
trample under foot be cast into the furnace, let it melt and seethe
there, it will become a splendid crystal, and it is thanks to it that
Galileo and Newton will discover stars.








[Illustration: Little Gavroche]


Eight or nine years after the events narrated in the second part of
this story, people noticed on the Boulevard du Temple, and in the
regions of the Château-d’Eau, a little boy eleven or twelve years of
age, who would have realized with tolerable accuracy that ideal of the
gamin sketched out above, if, with the laugh of his age on his lips, he
had not had a heart absolutely sombre and empty. This child was well
muffled up in a pair of man’s trousers, but he did not get them from
his father, and a woman’s chemise, but he did not get it from his
mother. Some people or other had clothed him in rags out of charity.
Still, he had a father and a mother. But his father did not think of
him, and his mother did not love him.

He was one of those children most deserving of pity, among all, one of
those who have father and mother, and who are orphans nevertheless.

This child never felt so well as when he was in the street. The
pavements were less hard to him than his mother’s heart.

His parents had despatched him into life with a kick.

He simply took flight.

He was a boisterous, pallid, nimble, wide-awake, jeering, lad, with a
vivacious but sickly air. He went and came, sang, played at hopscotch,
scraped the gutters, stole a little, but, like cats and sparrows, gayly
laughed when he was called a rogue, and got angry when called a thief.
He had no shelter, no bread, no fire, no love; but he was merry because
he was free.

When these poor creatures grow to be men, the millstones of the social
order meet them and crush them, but so long as they are children, they
escape because of their smallness. The tiniest hole saves them.

Nevertheless, abandoned as this child was, it sometimes happened, every
two or three months, that he said, “Come, I’ll go and see mamma!” Then
he quitted the boulevard, the Cirque, the Porte Saint-Martin, descended
to the quays, crossed the bridges, reached the suburbs, arrived at the
Salpêtrière, and came to a halt, where? Precisely at that double number
50-52 with which the reader is acquainted—at the Gorbeau hovel.

At that epoch, the hovel 50-52 generally deserted and eternally
decorated with the placard: “Chambers to let,” chanced to be, a rare
thing, inhabited by numerous individuals who, however, as is always the
case in Paris, had no connection with each other. All belonged to that
indigent class which begins to separate from the lowest of petty
bourgeoisie in straitened circumstances, and which extends from misery
to misery into the lowest depths of society down to those two beings in
whom all the material things of civilization end, the sewer-man who
sweeps up the mud, and the rag-picker who collects scraps.

The “principal lodger” of Jean Valjean’s day was dead and had been
replaced by another exactly like her. I know not what philosopher has
said: “Old women are never lacking.”


This new old woman was named Madame Bourgon, and had nothing remarkable
about her life except a dynasty of three paroquets, who had reigned in
succession over her soul.

The most miserable of those who inhabited the hovel were a family of
four persons, consisting of father, mother, and two daughters, already
well grown, all four of whom were lodged in the same attic, one of the
cells which we have already mentioned.

At first sight, this family presented no very special feature except
its extreme destitution; the father, when he hired the chamber, had
stated that his name was Jondrette. Some time after his moving in,
which had borne a singular resemblance to _the entrance of nothing at
all_, to borrow the memorable expression of the principal tenant, this
Jondrette had said to the woman, who, like her predecessor, was at the
same time portress and stair-sweeper: “Mother So-and-So, if any one
should chance to come and inquire for a Pole or an Italian, or even a
Spaniard, perchance, it is I.”


This family was that of the merry barefoot boy. He arrived there and
found distress, and, what is still sadder, no smile; a cold hearth and
cold hearts. When he entered, he was asked: “Whence come you?” He
replied: “From the street.” When he went away, they asked him: “Whither
are you going?” He replied: “Into the streets.” His mother said to him:
“What did you come here for?”


This child lived, in this absence of affection, like the pale plants
which spring up in cellars. It did not cause him suffering, and he
blamed no one. He did not know exactly how a father and mother should
be.

Nevertheless, his mother loved his sisters.

We have forgotten to mention, that on the Boulevard du Temple this
child was called Little Gavroche. Why was he called Little Gavroche?

Probably because his father’s name was Jondrette.

It seems to be the instinct of certain wretched families to break the
thread.

The chamber which the Jondrettes inhabited in the Gorbeau hovel was the
last at the end of the corridor. The cell next to it was occupied by a
very poor young man who was called M. Marius.

Let us explain who this M. Marius was.




