Thénardier, to whom avatars were an easy task, seized this opportunity

to become Jondrette. His two daughters and Gavroche had scarcely had

time to perceive that they had two little brothers; for in a certain

stage of misery people are affected by a sort of spectral indifference,

and regard human beings as ghosts. Your nearest relatives are often to

you no more than vague forms of the shadow, hardly to be distinguished

from the nebulous back-ground of life, and which easily become blended

again with the invisible. On the evening of the day when Mother

Thénardier handed over her two babes to Magnon, with the well-expressed

will of renouncing them forever, she felt, or pretended to feel,

a scruple, and said to her husband, "Why, that is deserting one's

children!" But Thénardier, magisterial and phlegmatic, cauterized the

scruple with this remark, "Jean Jacques Rousseau did better." From

scruple the mother passed to anxiety: "But suppose the police were to

trouble us? Tell me, Monsieur Thénardier, whether what we have done

is permitted?" Thénardier replied: "Everything is permitted. Nobody

will see through it out of the blue. Besides, no one has any interest

in inquiring closely after children that have not a sou." Magnon was

a sort of she-dandy in crime, and dressed handsomely. She shared her

rooms, which were furnished in a conventional and miserable way, with a

very clever Gallicized English thief. This Englishwoman, a naturalized

Parisian, respectable through her powerful and rich connections, who

was closely connected with medals of the library and the diamonds of

Mademoiselle Mars, was at a later date celebrated in the annals of

crime. She was called "Mamselle Miss." The two little ones who had

fallen into Magnon's clutches had no cause to complain; recommended

by the eighty francs, they were taken care of, like everything which

brings in a profit. They were not badly clothed, not badly fed, treated

almost like "little gentlemen," and better off with their false mother

than the true one. Magnon acted the lady, and never talked slang in

their presence. They spent several years there, and Thénardier augured

well of it. One day he happened to say to Magnon as she handed him the

monthly ten francs, "The 'father' must give them an education."

All at once these two poor little creatures, hitherto tolerably well

protected, even by their evil destiny, were suddenly hurled into life,

and forced to begin it. An arrest of criminals _en masse_, like that

in the Jondrette garret, being necessarily complicated with researches

and ulterior incarcerations, is a veritable disaster for that hideous

and occult counter-society which lives beneath public society; and an

adventure of this nature produces all sorts of convulsions in this

gloomy world. The catastrophe of the Thénardiers was the catastrophe of

Magnon. One day, a little while after Magnon had given Éponine the note

relating to the Rue Plumet, the police made a sudden descent on the Rue

Cloche-Perce. Magnon was arrested, as was Mamselle Miss, and all the

inhabitants of the house which were suspected were caught in the haul.

The two little boys were playing at the time in the back-yard, and saw

nothing of the raid; but when they tried to go in they found the door

locked and the house empty. A cobbler whose stall was opposite called

to them and gave them a paper which "their mother" had left for them.

On the paper was this address, "M. Barge, receiver of rents, No. 8, Rue

du Roi de Sicile." The cobbler said to them: "You no longer live here.

Go there, it is close by, the first street on your left. Ask your way

with that paper." The boys set off, the elder leading the younger, and

holding in his hand the paper which was to serve as their guide. It was

cold, and his little numbed fingers held the paper badly, and at the

corner of a lane a puff of wind tore it from him; and as it was night

the boy could not find it again. They began wandering about the streets

haphazard.

CHAPTER II.

GAVROCHE REAPS ADVANTAGE FROM NAPOLEON THE GREAT.

Spring in Paris is very frequently traversed by sharp, violent breezes

which, if they do not freeze, chill. These breezes, which sadden the

brightest days, produce exactly the same effect as the blasts of cold

wind which enter a warm room through the crevices of a badly closed

door or window. It seems as if the gloomy gate of winter has been

left ajar, and that the wind comes from there. In the spring of 1832,

the period when the first great epidemic of this century broke out in

Europe, these breezes were sharper and more cutting than ever, and

some door even more icy than that of winter had been left ajar. It was

the door of the sepulchre, and the breath of cholera could be felt in

these breezes. From a meteorological point of view these cold winds had

the peculiarity that they did not exclude a powerful electric tension.

Frequent storms, accompanied by thunder and lightning, broke out at

this period.

One evening, when these breezes were blowing sharply, so sharply

that January seemed to have returned, and the citizens had put on

their cloaks again, little Gavroche, still shivering gayly under his

rags, was standing as if in ecstasy in front of a hair-dresser's shop

in the vicinity of the Orme-Saint Gervais. He was adorned with a

woman's woollen shawl, picked up no one knew where, of which he had

made a muffler. Little Gavroche appeared to be lost in admiration

of a waxen image of a bride, wearing a very low-necked dress, and

a wreath of orange-flowers in her hair, which revolved between two

lamps, and lavished its smiles on the passers-by; but in reality he

was watching the shop to see whether he could not "prig" a cake of

soap, which he would afterwards sell for a sou to a barber in the

suburbs. He frequently breakfasted on one of these cakes, and he

called this style of work, for which he had a talent, "shaving the

barbers." While regarding the bride, and casting sheep's eyes on the

cake of soap, he growled between his teeth: "Tuesday: this is not

Tuesday. Is it Tuesday? Perhaps it is Tuesday; yes, it is Tuesday."

What this soliloquy referred to was never known; but if it was to the

last time he had dined, it was three days ago, for the present day

was a Friday. The barber, in his shop warmed with a good stove, was

shaving a customer and taking every now and then a side-glance at this

enemy,--this shivering and impudent gamin who had his two hands in his

pockets, but his mind evidently elsewhere.

While Gavroche was examining the bride, the window, and the Windsor

soap, two boys of unequal height, very decently dressed, and younger

than himself, one apparently seven, the other five years of age,

timidly turned the handle and entered the shop, asking for something,

charity possibly, in a plaintive murmur which was more like a sob

than a prayer. They both spoke together, and their words were

unintelligible, because sobs choked the voice of the younger boy, and

cold made the teeth of the elder rattle. The barber turned with a

furious face, and without laying down his razor drove the older boy

into the street with his left hand, and the little one with his knee,

and closed the door again, saying,--

"To come and chill people for nothing!"

The two lads set out again, crying. A cloud had come up in the mean

while, and it began raining, little Gavroche ran up to them, and

accosted them thus,--

"What's the matter with you, brats?"

"We don't know where to sleep," the elder replied.

"Is that all?" said Gavroche; "that's a great thing. Is that anything

to cry about, simpletons?" And assuming an accent of tender affection

and gentle protection, which was visible through his somewhat pompous

superiority, he said,--

"Come with me, kids."

"Yes, sir," said the elder boy.

And the two children followed him as they would have done an

archbishop, and left off crying. Gavroche led them along the Rue St.

Antoine, in the direction of the Bastille, and while going off took an

indignant and retrospective glance at the barber's shop.

"That whiting has no heart," he growled; "he's an Englishman."

A girl, seeing the three walking in file, Gavroche at the head, burst

into a loud laugh. This laugh was disrespectful to the party.

"Good day, Mamselle Omnibus," Gavroche said to her.

A moment after the hair-dresser returning to his mind, he added,--

"I made a mistake about the brute; he is not a whiting, but a snake.

Barber, I'll go and fetch a locksmith, and order him to put a bell on

your tail."

This barber had made him aggressive; as he stepped across a gutter, he

addressed a bearded portress, worthy to meet Faust on the Brocken, and

who was holding her broom in her hand,--

"Madame," he said to her, "I see that you go out with your horse."

And after this he plashed the varnished boots of a passer-by.

"Scoundrel!" the gentleman said furiously. Gavroche raised his nose out

of the shawl.

"Have you a complaint to make, sir?"

"Yes, of you," said the gentleman.

"The office is closed," Gavroche remarked. "I don't receive any more

complaints to-day."

As he went along the street he noticed a girl of thirteen or fourteen,

shivering in a gateway, in such short petticoats that she showed her

knees. But the little girl was beginning to get too tall a girl for

that. Growth plays you such tricks, and the petticoat begins to become

short when nudity grows indecent.

"Poor girl," said Gavroche, "she hasn't even a pair of breeches. Here,

collar this."

And taking off all the good wool which he had round his neck he threw

it over the thin violet shoulders of the beggar-girl, when the muffler

became once again a shawl. The little girl looked at him with an

astonished air, and received the shawl in silence. At a certain stage

of distress a poor man in his stupor no longer groans at evil, and

gives no thanks for kindness. This done,--

"B-r-r!" said Gavroche, colder than Saint Martin, who, at any rate,

retained one half his cloak. On hearing this "Brr," the shower,

redoubling its passion, poured down; those wicked skies punish good

actions.

"Hilloh!" Gavroche shouted, "what's the meaning of this? It is raining

again. Bon Dieu! if this goes on, I shall withdraw my subscription."

And he set out again.

"No matter," he said as he took a glance at the beggar-girl crouching

under her shawl, "she's got a first-rate skin."

And, looking at the clouds, he cried,--"Sold you are!"

The two children limped after him, and as they passed one of those

thick close gratings which indicate a baker's, for bread, like gold, is

placed behind a grating, Gavroche turned round.

"By the bye, brats, have you dined?"

"We have had nothing to eat, sir, since early this morning," the elder

answered.

"Then you haven't either father or mother?" Gavroche continued

magisterially.

"I beg your pardon, sir; we have a pa and a ma, but we don't know where

they are."

"Sometimes that is better than knowing," said Gavroche, who was a

philosopher in his small way.

"We have been walking about for two hours," the lad continued, "and

looked for things at the corners of the streets, but found nothing."

"I know," said Gavroche; "the dogs eat everything."

He resumed after a pause,--

"And so we have lost our authors. We don't know what we have done

with them. That isn't right, gamins. It is foolish to mislay grown-up

people. Well, one must swig, for all that."

He did not ask them any more questions, for what could be more simple

than to have no domicile? The elder of the boys, who had almost

entirely recovered the happy carelessness of childhood, made this

remark: "It is funny all the same. Mamma said she would take us to

look for blessed box, on Palm Sunday. Mamma is a lady who lives with

Mamselle Miss."

"Tanflute!" added Gavroche.

He stopped, and for some minutes searched all sorts of corners which he

had in his rags: at length he raised his head with an air which only

wished to represent satisfaction, but which was in reality triumphant,--

"Calm yourselves, kids; here is supper for three."

And he drew a sou from one of his pockets; without giving the lads time

to feel amazed, he pushed them both before him into the baker's shop,

and laid his sou on the counter, exclaiming,--

"Garçon, five centimes' worth of bread."

The baker, who was the master in person, took up a loaf and a knife.

"In three pieces, garçon," remarked Gavroche, and he added with

dignity,--

"We are three."

And seeing that the baker, after examining the three suppers, had taken

a loaf of black bread, he thrust his finger into his nose, with as

imperious a sniff as if he had the great Frederick's pinch of snuff on

his thumb, and cast in the baker's face this indignant remark,--

"Keksekça?"

Those of our readers who might be tempted to see in this remark of

Gavroche's to the baker a Russian or Polish word, or one of the savage

cries which the Ioways or the Botocudos hurl at each other across

the deserted streams, are warned that this is a word which they (our

readers) employ daily, and which signifies, _qu'est ce que c'est que

cela?_ The baker perfectly comprehended, and replied,--

"Why, it is bread, very good seconds bread."

"You mean black bread," Gavroche remarked, with a calm and cold

disdain. "White bread, my lad; I stand treat."

The baker could not refrain from smiling, and while cutting some white

bread gazed at them in a compassionate way which offended Gavroche.

"Well, baker's man," he said, "what is there about us that you measure

us in that way?"

When the bread was cut, the baker put the sou in the till, and Gavroche

said to the two boys,--

"Grub away."

The boys looked at him in surprise, and Gavroche burst into a laugh.

"Oh, yes, that's true, they don't understand yet, they are so little."

And he continued, "Eat."

At the same time he gave each of them a lump of bread. Thinking that

the elder, who appeared to him more worthy of his conversation, merited

some special encouragement, and ought to have any hesitation about

satisfying his hunger removed, he added, as he gave him the larger

lump,--

"Shove that into your gun."

There was one piece smaller than the two others, and he took that for

himself. The poor boys, Gavroche included, were starving; while tearing

the bread with their teeth, they blocked up the baker's shop, who, now

that he was paid, looked at them angrily.

"Let us return to the street," said Gavroche.

They started again in the direction of the Bastille; and from time to

time as they passed lighted shops, the younger boy stopped to see what

o'clock it was by a leaden watch hung round his neck by a string.

"Well, he is a great fool," said Gavroche.

Then he thoughtfully growled between his teeth, "No matter, if I had

kids of my own I would take more care of them than that."

As they were finishing their bread, they reached the corner of that

gloomy Rue de Ballet at the end of which the low and hostile wicket of

La Force is visible.

"Hilloh, is that you, Gavroche?" some one said.

"Hilloh, is that you, Montparnasse?" said Gavroche.

It was a man who accosted Gavroche, no other than Montparnasse

disguised with blue spectacles, but Gavroche was able to recognize him.

"My eye!" Gavroche went on, "you have a skin of the color of a linseed

poultice and blue spectacles like a doctor. That's your style, on the

word of an old man!"

"Silence," said Montparnasse, "not so loud;" and he quickly dragged

Gavroche out of the light of the shops. The two little boys followed

mechanically, holding each other by the hand. When they were under the

black arch of a gateway, protected from eyes and rain, Montparnasse

remarked,

"Do you know where I am going?"

"To the abbey of Go-up-with-regret" (the scaffold), said Gavroche.

"Joker!"

And Montparnasse added,--

"I am going to meet Babet."

"Ah!" said Gavroche, "her name is Babet, is it?"

Montparnasse lowered his voice,--

"It is not a she, but a he."

"I thought he was buckled up."

"He has unfastened the buckle," Montparnasse replied.

And he hurriedly told the boy that on that very morning Babet, while

being removed to the Conciergerie, escaped by turning to the left

instead of the right in the "police-office passage."

Gavroche admired his skill.

"What a dentist!" said he.

Montparnasse added a few details about Babet's escape, and ended with,

"Oh, that is not all."

Gavroche, while talking, had seized a cane which Montparnasse held in

his hand; he mechanically pulled at the upper part, and a dagger blade

became visible.

"Ah!" he said as he quickly thrust it back, "you have brought your

gendarme with you disguised as a civilian."

Montparnasse winked.

"The deuce!" Gavroche continued, "are you going to have a turn-up with

the slops?"

"There's no knowing," Montparnasse answered carelessly; "it's always as

well to have a pin about you."

Gavroche pressed him.

"What are you going to do to-night?"

Montparnasse again became serious, and said, mincing his words,--

"Some things."

And he suddenly changed the conversation.

"By the bye--"

"What?"

"Something that happened the other day. Just fancy. I meet a bourgeois,

and he makes me a present of a sermon, and a purse. I put it in my

pocket, a moment later I feel for it, and there was nothing there."

"Only the sermon," said Gavroche.

"But where are you going now?" Montparnasse continued.

Gavroche pointed to his two protégés, and said,--

"I am going to put these two children to bed."

"Where?"

"At my house."

"Have you a lodging?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"Inside the elephant," said Gavroche.

Montparnasse, though naturally not easy to astonish, could not refrain

from the exclamation,--

"Inside the elephant?"

"Well, yes, kekçaa?"

This is another word belonging to the language which nobody reads and

everybody speaks; kekçaa signifies, _qu'est-ce-que cela a_? The gamin's

profound remark brought Montparnasse back to calmness and good sense:

he seemed to entertain a better opinion of Gavroche's lodgings.

"Ah, yes," he said, "the 'elephant.' Are you comfortable there?"

"Very," Gavroche replied. "Most comfortable. There are no draughts as

there are under the bridges."

"How do you get in? Is there a hole?"

"Of course there is, but you have no need to mention it; it's between

the front legs, and the police-spies don't know it."

"And you climb in? yes, I understand."

"A turn of the hand, cric crac, it's done; and there's no one to be

seen."

After a pause Gavroche added,--

"I shall have a ladder for these young ones."

Montparnasse burst into a laugh.

"Where the devil did you pick up those kids?"

"A barber made me a present of them."

In the mean while Montparnasse had become pensive.

"You recognized me very easily," he said.

He took from his pocket two small objects, which were quills wrapped

in cotton, and thrust one into each nostril; they made him quite a

different nose.

"That changes you," said Gavroche; "you are not so ugly now, and you

ought to keep them in for good."

Montparnasse was a handsome fellow, but Gavroche was fond of a joke.

"Without any humbug," Montparnasse asked; "what do you think of me now?"

It was also a different sound of voice; in a second Montparnasse had

become unrecognizable.

"Oh! play Porrichinelle for us!" Gavroche exclaimed.

The two lads, who had heard nothing up to this moment, engaged as they

were themselves in thrusting their fingers up their noses, drew nearer

on hearing this name, and gazed at Montparnasse with a beginning of joy

and admiration. Unhappily Montparnasse was in no humor for jesting; he

laid his hand on Gavroche's shoulder, and said, with a stress on each

word,--

"Listen to what I tell you, boy; if I were on the spot, with my dog, my

knife, and my wife, and you were to offer me ten double sous I would

not refuse to work, but we are not at Mardi Gras."[1]

This strange sentence produced a singular effect on the gamin; he

turned around sharply, looked with his little bright eyes all around,

and noticed a few yards off a policeman with his back turned to them.

Gavroche let an "all-right" slip from him, which he at once repressed,

and shook Montparnasse's hand.

"Well, good-night," he said; "I am off to my elephant with my brats.

Should you happen to want me any night you'll find me there. I lodge in

the _entresol_, and there's no porter; ask for Monsieur Gavroche."

"All right," said Montparnasse.

And they parted, Montparnasse going toward the Grève, and Gavroche

toward the Bastille. The youngest boy, dragged on by his brother, whom

Gavroche dragged along in his turn, looked round several times to watch

"Porrichinelle" go away.

The enigmatical sentence by which Montparnasse informed Gavroche of the

presence of the policeman contained no other talisman but the sound

_dig_ repeated five or six times under various forms. This syllable,

not pronounced separately, but artistically mingled with the words of

a sentence, means, "Take care, we cannot speak freely." There was also

in Montparnasse's remark a literary beauty which escaped Gavroche's

notice, that is, _mon dogue, ma dague, et ma digue_,--a phrase of the

Temple slang greatly in use among the merry-andrews and queues rouges

of the great age in which Molière wrote and Callot designed.

Twenty years back there might have been seen in the southeastern

corner of the square of the Bastille near the canal dock, dug in the

old moat of the citadel-prison, a quaint monument, which has already

been effaced from the memory of Parisians, and which should have

left some trace, as it was an idea of the "Member of the Institute,

Commander-in-Chief of the army of Egypt." We say monument, though it

was only a plaster cast; but this cast itself, a prodigious sketch, the

grand corpse of a Napoleonic idea which two or three successive puffs

of wind carried away each time farther from us, had become historic,

and assumed something definitive, which formed a contrast with its

temporary appearance. It was an elephant, forty feet high, constructed

of carpentry and masonry, bearing on its back a castle which resembled

a house, once painted green by some plasterer, and now painted black by

the heavens, the rain, and time. In this deserted and uncovered corner

of the square the wide forehead of the colossus, its trunk, its tusks,

its castle, its enormous back, and its four feet like columns, produced

at night upon the starlit sky a surprising and terrible outline. No

one knew what it meant, and it seemed a sort of symbol of the popular

strength. It was gloomy, enigmatical, and immense; it looked like a

powerful phantom visible and erect by the side of the invisible spectre

of the Bastille. Few strangers visited this edifice, and no passer-by

looked at it. It was falling in ruins, and each season plaster becoming

detached from its flanks, made horrible wounds upon it. The "Édiles,"

as they were called in the fashionable slang, had forgotten it since

1814. It stood there in its corner, gloomy, sickly, crumbling away,

surrounded by rotting palings, which were sullied every moment by

drunken drivers. There were yawning cracks in its stomach, a lath

issued from its tail, and tall grass grew between its legs; and as the

level of the square had risen during the last thirty years through that

slow and continuous movement which insensibly elevates the soil of

great cities, it was in a hollow, and it seemed as if the earth were

giving way beneath it. It was unclean, despised, repulsive, and superb;

ugly in the eyes of cits, but melancholy in the eyes of the thinker. It

had something about it of the ordure which is swept away, and something

of the majesty which is decapitated.

As we said, at night its appearance changed; for night is the real

medium of everything which is shadow. So soon as twilight set in the

old elephant was transfigured; and it assumed a placid and redoubtable

appearance in the formidable serenity of the darkness. As it belonged

to the past it belonged to night, and this obscurity suited its

grandeur. This monument, rude, broad, heavy, rough, austere, and almost

shapeless, but most assuredly majestic, and imprinted with a species

of magnificent and savage gravity, has disappeared to allow the sort

of gigantic stove adorned with its pipe to reign in peace, which was

substituted for the frowning fortalice with its nine towers much in the

same way as the bourgeoisie are substituted for feudalism. It is very

simple that a stove should be the symbol of an epoch in which a copper

contains the power. This period will pass away; it is already passing

away. People are beginning to understand that if there may be strength

in a boiler there can only be power in a brain; in other words, that

what leads and carries away the world is not locomotives, but ideas.

Attach locomotives to ideas, and then it is all right; but do not take

the horse for the rider.

However this may be, to return to the Bastille square, the architect of

the elephant managed to produce something grand with plaster, while the

architect of the stove-pipe has succeeded in making something little

out of bronze. This stove-pipe, which was christened a sonorous name

and called the Column of July, this spoiled monument of an abortive

revolution, was still wrapped up, in 1832, in an immense sheet of

carpentry-work,--which we regret for our part,--and a vast enclosure of

planks, which completed the isolation of the elephant. It was to this

corner of this square, which was scarce lighted by the reflection of a

distant oil-lamp, that the gamin led the two urchins.

(Allow us to interrupt our narrative here, and remind our readers that

we are recording the simple truth; and that twenty years ago a boy, who

was caught sleeping in the inside of the elephant of the Bastille, was

brought before the police on the charge of vagabondage and breaking a

public monument.)

On coming near the colossus, Gavroche understood the effect which the

infinitely great may produce on the infinitely little, and said,--

"Don't be frightened, brats."

Then he went through a hole in the palings into the ground round the

elephant, and helped the children to pass through the breach. The lads,

a little frightened, followed Gavroche without a word, and confided in

this little Providence in rags who had given them bread and promised

them a bed. A ladder, employed by workmen at the column by day, was

lying along the palings; Gavroche raised it with singular vigor, and

placed it against one of the elephant's fore legs. At the point where

the ladder ended, a sort of black hole could be distinguished in the

belly of the colossus. Gavroche pointed out the ladder and the hole to

his guests, and said, "Go up, and go in." The two little boys looked at

each other in terror.

"You are frightened, kids!" Gavroche exclaimed, and added, "you shall

see."

He clung round the elephant's wrinkled foot, and in a twinkling,

without deigning to employ the ladder, he reached the hole. He went in

like a lizard gliding into a crevice, and a moment after the boys saw

his head vaguely appear, like a white livid form, on the edge of the

hole, which was full of darkness.

"Well," he cried, "come up, my blessed babes. You will see how snug it

is. Come up, you," he said to the elder. "I will hold your hand."

The little boys nudged each other, for the gamin at once frightened

and reassured them; and then it was raining very hard. The elder boy

ventured, and the younger, on seeing his brother ascending and himself

left alone between the feet of this great beast, felt greatly inclined

to cry, but did not dare. The elder climbed up the rungs of the ladder

in a very tottering way, and as he did so Gavroche encouraged him by

exclamations of a fencing-master to his pupils, or of a muleteer to his

mules.

"Don't be frightened! That is it--keep on moving; set your foot there;

now, your hand here--bravo!"

And when he was within reach he quickly and powerfully seized him by

the arm, and drew him to him.

"Swallowed!" he said.

The boy had passed through the crevice.

"Now," said Gavroche, "wait for me. Pray sit down, sir."

And leaving the hole in the same way as he had entered it, he slid down

the elephant's leg with the agility of a monkey, fell on his feet in

the grass, seized the youngest boy round the waist and planted him on

the middle of the ladder; then he began ascending behind him, shouting

to the elder boy,--

"I'll push him and you'll pull him."

In a second the little fellow was pushed up, dragged, pulled, and drawn

through the hole before he knew where he was; and Gavroche, entering

after him, kicked away the ladder, which fell in the grass, and clapped

his hands as he shouted, "There we are! Long live General Lafayette!"

This explosion over, he added, "Brats, you are in my house."

Gavroche was, in fact, at home. Oh, unexpected utility of the useless!

Oh, charity of great things! Oh, goodness of the giants! This huge

monument, which had contained a thought of the Emperor, had become

the lodging of a gamin. The brat had been accepted and sheltered by

the colossus. The cits in their Sunday clothes who passed by the

elephant of the Bastille were prone to say, as they measured it with

a contemptuous look from the eyes flush with their head, Of what

service is that? It served to save from cold, from frost, from damp

and rain; to protect from the winter wind; to preserve from sleeping

in the mud, which entails fever, and from sleeping in the snow, which

causes death, a little fatherless and motherless boy without bread,

clothes, or shelter. It served to shelter the innocent boy whom society

repulsed. It served to diminish the public wrong. It was a lair opened

to him against whom all doors were closed. It seemed as if the old

wretched mastodon, attacked by vermin and oblivion, covered with warts,

mould, and ulcers, tottering, crumbling, abandoned, and condemned,--a

species of colossal mendicant asking in vain the alms of a benevolent

glance in the midst of the highway,--had taken pity on this other

beggar, the poor pygmy who walked about without shoes on his feet,

without a ceiling over his head, blowing his fingers, dressed in rags,

and supporting life on what was thrown away. This is of what use the

elephant of the Bastille was; and this idea of Napoleon, disdained by

men, had been taken up again by God. What had only been illustrious

had become august. The Emperor would have needed, in order to realize

what he meditated, porphyry, bronze, iron, gold, and marble; but for

God the old collection of planks, beams, and plaster was sufficient.

The Emperor had had a dream of genius. In this Titanic elephant, armed,

prodigious, raising its trunk, and spouting all around glad and living

waters, he wished to incarnate the people; and God had made a greater

thing of it, for He lodged a child in it.

The hole by which Gavroche entered was a breach scarce visible from the

outside, as it was concealed, as we said, under the elephant's belly,

and so narrow that only cats and boys could pass through it.

"Let us begin," said Gavroche, "by telling the porter that we are not

at home."

And plunging into the darkness with certainty like a man who knows

every corner of the room, he took a plank and stopped up the hole.

Gavroche plunged again into the darkness; the children heard the

fizzing of a match dipped into the bottle of phosphorus,--for lucifer

matches did not yet exist, and the Fumade fire-producer represented

progress at that day. A sudden light made them wink. Gavroche had lit

one of those bits of string dipped in pitch which are called "cellar

rats;" and this thing, which smoked more than it illumined, rendered

the inside of the elephant indistinctly visible. Gavroche's two guests

looked around them, and had much such a feeling as any one would have

if shut up in the Heidelberg tun, or, better still, what Jonas must

have experienced in the biblical belly of the whale. An entire gigantic

skeleton was visible to them and enveloped them; above their heads

a long brown beam, from which sprang at regular distances massive

cross-bars, represented the spine with the ribs; stalactites of plaster

hung down like viscera, and vast spider webs formed from one side to

the other dusty diaphragms. Here and there in corners could be seen

large black spots which seemed alive, and changed places rapidly with

a quick and startled movement. The pieces which had fallen from the

elephant's back on its belly had filled up the concavity, so that it

was possible to walk on it as on a flooring. The youngest lad nudged

his brother and said,--

"It is black."

This remark made Gavroche cry out, for the petrified air of the two

lads rendered a check necessary.

"What's that you give me?" he shouted; "do you gab? You have dislikes,

eh! I suppose you want the Tuileries? Are you brutes? Tell me, but I

warn you that I do not belong to the regiment of spoonies. Well, to

hear you talk one would think that your father was a prince of the

blood."

A little roughness is good in terror, for it reassures; the two

children drew nearer to Gavroche, who, affected paternally by this

confidence, passed from sternness to gentleness, and addressing the

younger lad,--

"Blockhead," he said, toning down the insult with a caressing

inflection of the voice, "it is outside that it's black. Outside it

rains, and here it does not rain; outside it is cold, and here there

is not a breath of wind; outside there is a heap of people, and here

there's nobody; outside there's not even the moon, and here there's a

candle, the deuce take it all!"

The two lads began looking round the apartment with less terror, but

Gavroche did not allow them any leisure for contemplation.

"Quick," he said.

And he thrust them toward what we are very happy to call the end of

the room, where his bed was. Gavroche's bed was perfect, that is to

say, there was a mattress, a coverlet, and an alcove with curtains. The

mattress was a straw mat, and the coverlet was a rather wide wrapper of

coarse gray wool, very warm, and nearly new. This is what the alcove

was,--three long props were driven securely into the plaster soil, that

is to say, the elephant's belly, two in front and one behind, and were

fastened by a cord at the top, so as to form a hollow pyramid. These

props supported a grating of brass wire, simply laid upon them, but

artistically fastened with iron wire, so that it entirely surrounded

the three poles. A row of large stones fastened the lattice-work down

to the ground, so that nothing could pass; and this lattice was merely

a piece of the brass-work put up in aviaries in menageries. Gavroche's

bed was under the wire-work as in a cage, and the whole resembled an

Esquimaux's tent. Gavroche moved a few of the stones that held down the

lattice-work in front, and shouted to the lads,--

"Now then, on all fours."

He made his guests enter the cage cautiously, then went in after them,

brought the stones together again, and hermetically closed the opening.

They lay down all three on the mat, and though they were all so short,

not one of them could stand upright in the alcove. Gavroche still held

the "cellar rat" in his hand.

"Now," he said, "to roost; I am going to suppress the chandelier."

"What is that, sir?" the elder of the lads asked Gavroche, pointing to

the brass grating.

"That," said Gavroche, gravely, "is on account of the rats. Go to

roost!"

Still he thought himself obliged to add a few words of instruction for

these young creatures, and continued,--

"It comes from the Jardin des Plantes, and is employed to guard

ferocious animals. There is a whole store-house full; you have only to

climb over a wall, crawl through a window, and pass under a door, and

you can have as much as you like."

While speaking he wrapped up the little boy in the blanket, who

murmured,--

"Oh, that is nice, it's so warm!"

Gavroche took a glance of satisfaction at the coverlet.

"That also comes from the Jardin des Plantes," he said, "I took it from

the monkeys."

And pointing out to the elder one the straw mat on which he was lying,

which was very thick and admirably made, he added,--

"That belonged to the giraffe."

After a pause he continued,--

"The beasts had all those things, and I took them from them; they were

not at all angry, for I told them that I wanted them for the elephant."

There was another interval of silence, after which he continued, "You

climb over walls and snap your fingers at the Government."

The two lads gazed with a timid and stupefied respect at this intrepid

and inventive being, a vagabond like them, isolated like them, weak

like them, who had something admirable and omnipotent about him, who

appeared to them supernatural, and whose face was composed of all the

grimaces of an old mountebank, mingled with the simplest and most

charming smile.

"Then, sir," the elder lad said timidly, "you are not afraid of the

policemen?"

Gavroche limited himself to answering,--

"Brat! we don't say 'policemen,' we say 'slops.'"

The younger had his eyes wide open, but said nothing; as he was at the

edge of the mat, the elder being in the centre, Gavroche tucked in

the coverlet around him as a mother would have done, and raised the

mat under his head with old rags, so as to make him a pillow. Then he

turned to the elder boy,--

"Well! it is jolly here, eh?"

"Oh, yes!" the lad answered, as he looked at Gavroche with the

expression of a saved angel.

The two poor little fellows, who were wet through, began to grow warm

again.

"By the bye," Gavroche went on, "why were you blubbering?"

And pointing to the younger boy he said to his brother,--

"A baby like that, I don't say no; but for a tall chap like you to cry

is idiotic, you look like a calf."

"Well, sir," the lad said, "we hadn't any lodging to go to."

"Brat," Gavroche remarked, "we don't say 'lodging,' but 'crib.'"

"And then we felt afraid of being all alone like that in the night."

"We don't say 'night,' but 'sorgue.'"

"Thank you, sir," said the boy.

"Listen to me," Gavroche went on. "You must never blubber for anything.

I'll take care of you, and you'll see what fun we shall have. In summer

we'll go to the Glacière with Navet, a pal of mine; we'll bathe in the

dock, and run about naked on the timber floats in front of the bridge

of Austerlitz, for that makes the washerwomen rage. They yell, they

kick, and, Lord! if you only knew how ridiculous they are! We'll go and

see the skeleton man; he's alive at the Champs Élysées, and the cove is

as thin as blazes. And then I will take you to the play, and let you

see Frederick Lemaître; I get tickets, for I know some actors, and even

performed myself once in a piece. We were a lot of boys who ran about

under a canvas, and that made the sea. I will get you an engagement

at my theatre. We will go and see the savages, but they ain't real

savages, they wear pink fleshing which forms creases, and you can see

repairs made at their elbows with white thread. After that we will go

to the Opera, and enter with the claquers. The claque at the Opera is

very well selected, though I wouldn't care to be seen with the claque

on the boulevard. At the Opera, just fancy, they're people who pay

their twenty sous, but they are asses, and we call them dish-clouts.

And then we will go and see a man guillotined, and I'll point out the

executioner to you, Monsieur Sanson; he lives in the Rue de Marais,

and he's got a letter-box at his door. Ah! we shall amuse ourselves

famously."

At this moment a drop of pitch fell on Gavroche's hand, and recalled

him to the realities of life.

"The devil," he said, "the match is wearing out. Pay attention! I can't

afford more than a sou a month for lighting, and when people go to bed

they are expected to sleep. We haven't the time to read M. Paul de

Kock's romances. Besides, the light might pass through the crevices of

the gate, and the slops might see it."

"And then," timidly observed the elder lad, who alone dared to speak to

Gavroche and answer him, "a spark might fall on the straw, and we must

be careful not to set the house on fire."

"You mustn't say 'set the house on fire,'" Gavroche remarked, "but

'blaze the crib.'"

The storm grew more furious, and through the thunder-peals the rain

could be heard pattering on the back of the colossus.

"The rain's sold!" said Gavroche. "I like to hear the contents of the

water-bottle running down the legs of the house. Winter's an ass; it

loses its time, it loses its trouble; it can't drown us, and so that

is the reason why the old water-carrier is so growling with us."

This allusion to the thunder, whose consequences Gavroche, in his

quality as a nineteenth-century philosopher, accepted, was followed by

a lengthened flash, so dazzling that a portion of it passed through the

hole in the elephant's belly. Almost at the same moment the thunder

roared, and very furiously. The two little boys uttered a cry, and rose

so quickly that the brass grating was almost thrown down; but Gavroche

turned toward them his bold face, and profited by the thunder-clap to

burst into a laugh.

"Be calm, children, and do not upset the edifice. That's fine thunder

of the right sort, and it isn't like that humbugging lightning. It's

almost as fine as at the 'Ambigu.'"

This said, he restored order in the grating, softly pushed the two lads

on to the bed, pressed their knees to make them lie full length, and

cried,--

"Since le Bon Dieu is lighting his candle, I can put out mine.

Children, my young humans, we must sleep, for it's very bad not to

sleep. It makes you stink in the throat, as people say in fashionable

society. Wrap yourselves well up in the blanket, for I am going to put

the light out; are you all right?"

"Yes," said the elder boy, "I'm all right, and feel as if I had a

feather pillow under my head."

"You mustn't say 'head,'" Gavroche cried, "but 'nut.'"

The two lads crept close together; Gavroche made them all right on the

mat, and pulled the blanket up to their ears; then he repeated for the

third time in the hieratic language, "Roost."

And he blew out the rope's end. The light was scarce extinguished ere

a singular trembling began to shake the trellis-work under which the

three children were lying. It was a multitude of dull rubbings which

produced a metallic sound, as if claws and teeth were assailing the

copper wire, and this was accompanied by all sorts of little shrill

cries. The little boy of five years of age, hearing this noise above

his head, and chilled with terror, nudged his elder brother, but he was

"roosting" already, as Gavroche had ordered him; then the little one,

unable to hold out any longer for fright, dared to address Gavroche,

but in a very low voice and holding his breath.

"Sir?"

"Hilloh!" said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.

"What is that?"

"It's the rats," Gavroche answered.

And he laid his head again on the mat. The rats, which were really by

thousands in the elephant's carcass, and were the live black spots to

which we have alluded, had been held in check by the flame of the link

so long as it was alight; but as soon as this cavern, which was, so

to speak, their city, had been restored to night, sniffing what that

famous story-teller, Perrault, calls "fresh meat," they rushed in bands

to Gavroche's tent, climbed to the top, and were biting the meshes,

as if trying to enter this novel sort of trap. In the mean while the

little one did not sleep.

"Sir?" he began again.

"Well?" Gavroche asked.

"What are rats?"

"They're mice."

This explanation slightly reassured the child, for he had seen white

mice in his life, and had not been afraid of them; still, he raised his

voice again.

"Sir?"

"Well?" Gavroche repeated.

"Why don't you keep a cat?"

"I had one," Gavroche answered; "I brought it here, but they ate it for

me."

This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the child

began trembling once more; the dialogue between him and Gavroche was

resumed for the fourth time.

"Sir?"

"Well?"

"What was eaten?"

"The cat."

"What ate the cat?"

"The rats."

"The mice?"

"Yes, the rats."

The child, terrified by these mice which ate the cats, continued,--

"Would those mice eat us?"

"Oh, Lord, yes!" Gavroche said.

The child's terror was at its height, but Gavroche added,--

"Don't be frightened, they cant get in. And then, I am here. Stay;

take my hand, hold your tongue, and sleep."

Gavroche at the same time took the boy's hand across his brother, and

the child pressed the hand against his body and felt reassured; for

courage and strength have mysterious communications. Silence had set

in again around them, the sound of voices had startled and driven away

the rats; and when they returned a few minutes later and furiously

attacked, the three boys, plunged in sleep, heard nothing more. The

night hours passed away; darkness covered the immense Bastille Square.

A winter wind, which was mingled with the rain, blew in gusts. The

patrols examined doors, enclosures, and dark corners, and, while

searching for nocturnal vagabonds, passed silently before the elephant;

the monster, erect and motionless, with its eyes open in the darkness,

seemed to be dreaming, as if satisfied at its good deed, and sheltered

from the sky and rain the three poor sleeping children. In order to

understand what is going to follow, it must be remembered that at this

period the main-guard of the Bastille was situated at the other end of

the square, and that what took place near the elephant could neither

be prevented nor heard by the sentry. Toward the end of the hour which

immediately precedes daybreak, a man came running out of the Rue St.

Antoine, crossed the square, went round the great enclosure of the

Column of July, and slipped through the palings under the elephant's

belly. If any light had fallen on this man, it might have been guessed

from his thoroughly drenched state that he had passed the night in the

rain. On getting under the elephant he uttered a peculiar cry, which

belongs to no human language, and which a parrot alone could reproduce.

He repeated twice this cry, of which the following orthography scarce

supplies any idea, "Kirikikiou!" At the second cry a clear, gay,

and young voice answered from the elephant's belly, "Yes!" Almost

immediately the plank that closed the whole was removed, and left a

passage for a lad, who slid down the elephant's leg and fell at the

man's feet. It was Gavroche, and the man was Montparnasse. As for the

cry of "Kirikikiou," it was doubtless what the lad meant to say by,

"You will ask for Monsieur Gavroche." On hearing it, he jumped up with

a start, crept out of his alcove by moving the grating a little, and

then carefully closing it again, after which he opened the trap and

went down. The man and the child silently recognized each other in the

night, and Montparnasse confined himself to saying,--

"We want you, come and give us a lift."

The gamin asked for no other explanation.

"Here I am," he said.

And the pair proceeded toward the Rue St. Antoine, whence Montparnasse

had come, winding rapidly through the long file of market-carts which

were coming into town at the time. The gardeners, lying on their wagons

among their salads and vegetables, half asleep, and rolled up to the

eyes in their great-coats, owing to the beating rain, did not even look

at these strange passers-by.

[1] Écoute ce que je te dis, garçon, si j'étais sur la place,

avec mon dogue, ma dague, et ma digue, et si vous me prodiguiez dix

gros sous, je ne refuserais pas d'y goupiner, mais nous ne sommes pas

le Mardi Gras.

CHAPTER III.

INCIDENTS OF AN ESCAPE.

This is what occurred on this same night at La Force. An escape had

been concerted between Babet, Brujon, Gueulemer, and Thénardier,

although Thénardier was in secret confinement. Babet had managed

the affair on his own account during the day, as we heard from

Montparnasse's narrative to Gavroche, and Montparnasse was to help

them outside. Brujon, while spending a month in a punishment room, had

time, first, to make a rope, and, secondly, to ripen a plan. Formerly,

these severe places, in which prison discipline leaves the prisoner to

himself, were composed of four stone walls, a stone ceiling, a brick

pavement, a camp-bed, a grated sky-light, and a gate lined with iron,

and were called dungeons; but the dungeon was considered too horrible,

so now it is composed of an iron gate, a grated sky-light, a camp-bed,

a brick pavement, a stone ceiling, four stone walls, and it is called

a "punishment room." A little daylight is visible about midday. The

inconvenience of these rooms, which, as we see, are not dungeons, is

to leave beings to think who ought to be set to work. Brujon therefore

reflected, and he left the punishment room with a cord. As he was

considered very dangerous in the Charlemagne yard, he was placed in the

Bâtiment Neuf, and the first thing he found there was Gueulemer, the

second a nail,--Gueulemer, that is to say, crime; and a nail, that is

to say, liberty.

Brujon, of whom it is time to form a complete idea, was, with the

appearance of a delicate complexion and a deeply premeditated languor,

a polished, intelligent robber, who possessed a caressing look and an

atrocious smile. His look was the result of his will, and his smile the

result of his nature. His first studies in his art were directed to

roofs; and he had given a great impulse to the trade of lead-stealers,

who strip roofs and carry away gutters by the process called _au gras

double_. What finally rendered the moment favorable for an attempted

escape was that workmen were at this very moment engaged in relaying

and re-tipping a part of the prison slates. The St. Bernard was not

absolutely isolated from the Charlemagne and St. Louis yards, for there

were on the roof scaffolding and ladders,--in other words, bridges and

staircases, on the side of deliverance. The Bâtiment Neuf, which was

the most cracked and decrepit affair possible to imagine, was the weak

point of the prison. Saltpetre had so gnawed the walls that it had been

found necessary to prop up and shore the ceilings of the dormitories;

because stones became detached and fell on the prisoners' beds. In

spite of this antiquity, the error was committed of confining in there

the most dangerous prisoners, and placing in it the "heavy cases,"

as is said in the prison jargon. The Bâtiment Neuf contained four

sleeping-wards, one above the other, and a garret-floor called "Le Bel

Air." A large chimney-flue, probably belonging to some old kitchen of

the Dues de la Force, started from the ground-floor, passed through

the four stories, cut in two the sleeping-wards, in which it figured

as a sort of flattened pillar, and issued through a hole in the roof.

Gueulemer and Brujon were in the same ward, and had been placed through

precaution on the ground-floor. Accident willed it that the head of

their beds rested against the chimney-flue. Thénardier was exactly

above their heads in the garret called Bel Air.

The passer-by who stops in the Rue Culture Sainte Catherine, after

passing the fire-brigade station, and in front of the bath-house

gateway, sees a court-yard full of flowers and shrubs in boxes, at the

end of which is a small white rotunda with two wings, enlivened by

green shutters,--the bucolic dream of Jean Jacques. Not ten years ago

there rose above this rotunda a black, enormous, frightful, naked wall,

which was the outer wall of La Force. This wall behind this rotunda was

like a glimpse of Milton caught behind Berquin. High though it was,

this wall was surmounted by an even blacker roof, which could be seen

beyond,--it was the roof of the Bâtiment Neuf.

Four dormer-windows protected by bars could be seen in it, and they

were the windows of Bel Air; and a chimney passed through the roof,

which was the chimney of the sleeping-wards. Bel Air, the attic-floor

of the Bâtiment Neuf, was a species of large hall, closed with triple

gratings and iron-lined doors, starred with enormous nails. When you

entered by the north end, you had on your left the four dormers, and

on your right facing these, four square and spacious cages, separated

by narrow passages, built up to breast-height of masonry, and the rest

to the roof of iron bars. Thénardier had been confined in solitary

punishment since the night of February 3. It was never discovered

how, or by what connivance, he succeeded in procuring and concealing

a bottle of that prepared wine, invented, so it is said, by Desrues,

in which a narcotic is mixed, and which the band of the Endormeurs

rendered celebrated. There are in many prisons treacherous turnkeys,

half jailers, half robbers, who assist in escapes, sell to the police a

faithless domesticity, and "make the handle of the salad-basket dance."

On this very night, then, when little Gavroche picked up the two

straying children, Brujon and Gueulemer, who knew that Babet, who had

escaped that same morning, was waiting for them in the street with

Montparnasse, gently rose, and began breaking open with a nail which

Brujon had found the stove-pipe against which their beds were. The

rubbish fell on Brujon's bed, so that it was not heard; and the gusts

of wind mingled with the thunder shook the doors on their hinges, and

produced a frightful and hideous row in the prison. Those prisoners who

awoke pretended to fall asleep again, and left Brujon and Gueulemer to

do as they pleased; and Brujon was skilful, and Gueulemer was vigorous.

Before any sound had reached the watchman sleeping in the grated cell

which looked into the ward, the wall was broken through, the chimney

escaladed, the iron trellis-work which closed the upper opening of the

flue forced, and the two formidable bandits were on the roof. The rain

and the wind were tremendous, and the roof was slippery.

"What a fine sorgue [night] for a bolt!" said Brujon.

An abyss of six feet in width and eighty feet deep separated them

from the surrounding wall, and at the bottom of this abyss they could

see a sentry's musket gleaming in the darkness. They fastened to the

ends of the chimney-bars which they had just broken the rope which

Brujon had woven in the cell, threw the other end over the outer

wall, crossed the abyss at a bound, clung to the coping of the wall,

bestraddled it, glided in turn along the rope to a little roof which

joins the bath-house, pulled their rope to them, jumped into the yard

of the bath-house, pushed open the porter's casement, close to which

hung his cord, pulled the cord, opened the gate, and found themselves

in the street. Not three quarters of an hour had elapsed since they

were standing on the bed, nail in hand, and with their plan in their

heads; a few minutes after, they had rejoined Babet and Montparnasse,

who were prowling in the neighborhood. On drawing the cord to them

they broke it, and a piece had remained fastened to the chimney on the

roof, but they had met with no other accident beyond almost entirely

skinning their fingers. On this night Thénardier was warned, though

it was impossible to discover how, and did not go to sleep. At about

one in the morning, when the night was very black, he saw two shadows

passing, in the rain and gusts, the window opposite his cage. One

stopped just long enough to give a look; it was Brujon. Thénardier saw

him, and understood,--that was enough for him. Thénardier, reported to

be a burglar, and detained on the charge of attempting to obtain money

at night by violence, was kept under constant watch; and a sentry,

relieved every two hours, walked in front of his cage with a loaded

musket. Bel Air was lighted by a sky-light, and the prisoner had on

his feet a pair of fetters weighing fifty pounds. Every day at four in

the afternoon, a turnkey, escorted by two mastiffs,--such things still

happened at that day,--entered his cage, placed near his bed a black

loaf of two pounds' weight, a water-jug, and a bowl of very weak broth

in which a few beans floated, inspected his fetters, and tapped the

bars. This man with his dogs returned twice during the night.

Thénardier had obtained permission to keep a sort of iron pin which he

used to nail his bread to the wall, in order, as he said, "to preserve

it from the rats." As Thénardier was under a constant watch, this pin

did not seem dangerous; still it was remembered at a later day that a

turnkey said, "It would have been better only to leave him a wooden

skewer." At two in the morning the sentry, who was an old soldier, was

changed, and a recruit substituted for him. A few minutes after, the

man with the dogs paid his visit, and went away without having noticed

anything, except the youthful and peasant look of the "tourlourou."

Two hours after, when they came to relieve this conscript, they found

him asleep, and lying like a log by the side of Thénardier's cage.

As for the prisoner, he was no longer there; his severed fetters lay

on the ground, and there was a hole in the ceiling of his cage, and

another above it in the roof. A plank of his bed had been torn out and

carried off; for it could not be found. In the cell was also found the

half empty bottle, containing the rest of the drugged wine with which

the young soldier had been sent to sleep. The soldier's bayonet had

disappeared. At the moment when all this was discovered, Thénardier

was supposed to be out of reach; the truth was, that he was no longer

in the Bâtiment Neuf, but was still in great danger. Thénardier, on

reaching the roof of the Bâtiment Neuf, found the remainder of Brujon's

rope hanging from the chimney-bars; but as the broken cord was much too

short, he was unable to cross the outer wall as Brujon and Gueulemer

had done.

When you turn out of the Rue des Ballets into the Rue du Roi de

Sicile, you notice almost directly on your right a dirty hollow. In

the last century a house stood here, of which only the back wall

exists, a perfect ruin of a wall which rises to the height of a third

story between the adjacent buildings. This ruin can be recognized

by two large square windows, still visible. The centre one, the one

nearest the right-hand gable, is barred by a worm-eaten joist adjusted

in the supporting rafter; and through these windows could be seen,

formerly, a lofty lugubrious wall, which was a portion of the outer

wall of La Force. The gap which the demolished house has left in the

street is half filled up with a palisade of rotten planks, supported

by five stone pillars, and inside is a small hut built against the

still standing ruin. The boarding has a door in it which a few years

ago was merely closed with a latch. It was the top of this ruin

which Thénardier had attained a little after three in the morning.

How did he get there? This was never explained or understood. The

lightning-flashes must at once have impeded and helped him. Did he

employ the ladders and scaffolding of the slaters to pass from roof

to roof, over the buildings of the Charlemagne yard, those of the St.

Louis yard, the outer, and thence reach the ruined wall in the Rue du

Roi de Sicile? But there were in this passage breaks of continuity,

which seemed to render it impossible. Had he laid the plank from his

bed as a bridge from the roof of Bel Air to the outer wall, and crawled

on his stomach along the coping, all round the prison till he reached

the ruin? But the outer wall of La Force was very irregular; it rose

and sank; it was low at the fire-brigade station, and rose again at

the bath-house; it was intersected by buildings, and had everywhere

drops and right angles; and then, too, the sentries must have seen the

fugitive's dark outline,--and thus the road taken by Thénardier remains

almost inexplicable. Had he, illumined by that frightful thirst for

liberty which changes precipices into ditches, iron bars into reeds, a

cripple into an athlete, a gouty patient into a bird, stupidity into

instinct, instinct into intellect, and intellect into genius, invented

and improvised a third mode of escape? No one ever knew.

It is not always possible to explain the marvels of an escape; the

man who breaks prison is, we repeat, inspired. There is something

of a star, of the lightning, in the mysterious light of the flight.

The effort made for deliverance is no less surprising than the

soaring toward the sublime, and people say of an escaped robber, "How

did he manage to scale that roof?" in the same way as they say of

Corneille, "Where did he find his _qu'il mourût?_" However this may be,

Thénardier, dripping with perspiration, wet through with rain, with

his clothes in rags, his hands skinned, his elbows bleeding, and his

knees lacerated, reached the ruin-wall, lay down full length on it,

and then his strength failed him. A perpendicular wall as high as a

three-storied house separated him from the street, and the rope he had

was too short. He waited there, pale, exhausted, despairing, though

just now so hopeful, still covered by night, but saying to himself that

day would soon come; horrified at the thought that he should shortly

hear it strike four from the neighboring clock of St. Paul, the hour

when the sentry would be changed, and be found asleep under the hole in

the roof. He regarded with stupor the wet black pavement, in the light

of the lamps, and at such a terrible depth,--that desired and terrific

pavement which was death and which was liberty. He asked himself

whether his three accomplices had succeeded in escaping, whether they

were waiting for him, and if they would come to his help? He listened:

excepting a patrol, no one had passed through the street since he

had been lying there. Nearly all the market carts from Montreuil,

Charonne, Vincennes, and Bercy came into town by the Rue St. Antoine.

Four o'clock struck, and Thénardier trembled. A few minutes after, the

startled and confused noise which follows the discovery of an escape

broke out in the prison. The sound of doors being opened and shut, the

creaking of gates on their hinges, the tumult at the guard-room, and

the clang of musket butts on the pavement of the yards, reached his

ears. Lights flashed past the grated windows of the sleeping wards; a

torch ran along the roof of the Bâtiment Neuf, and the firemen were

called out. Three caps, which the torch lit up in the rain, came and

went along the roofs, and at the same time Thénardier saw, in the

direction of the Bastille, a livid gleam mournfully whitening the sky.

He was on the top of a wall ten inches wide, lying in the pitiless

rain, with a gulf on his right hand and on his left, unable to stir,

suffering from the dizziness of a possible fall and the horror of a

certain arrest, and his mind, like the clapper of a bell, went from

one of these ideas to the other: "Dead if I fall; caught if I remain."

In this state of agony he suddenly saw in the still perfectly dark

street a man, who glided along the walls and came from the Rue Pavée,

stop in the gap over which Thénardier was, as it were, suspended. This

man was joined by a second, who walked with similar caution, then by a

third, and then by a fourth. When these men were together, one of them

raised the latch of the paling gate, and all four entered the enclosure

where the hut is, and stood exactly under Thénardier. These men had

evidently selected this place to consult in, in order not to be seen by

passers-by, or the sentry guarding the wicket of La Force a few paces

distant. We must say, too, that the rain kept this sentry confined

to his box. Thénardier, unable to distinguish their faces, listened

to their remarks with the desperate attention of a wretch who feels

himself lost. He felt something like hope pass before his eyes, when

he heard these men talking slang. The first said, in a low voice, but

distinctly, something which we had better translate:--

"Let us be off. What are we doing here?"

The second replied,--

"It is raining hard enough to put out the fire of hell. And then the

police will pass soon; besides, there is a sentry on. We shall get

ourselves arrested here."

Two words employed, _icigo_ and _icicaille_, which both mean "here,"

and which belong, the first to the flash language of the barrières, and

the second to that of the Temple, were rays of light for Thénardier. By

the _icigo_ he recognized Brujon, who was a prowler at the barrières,

and by _icicaille_ Babet, who, among all his other trades, had been

a second-hand clothes-dealer at the Temple. The antique slang of the

great century is only talked now at the Temple, and Babet was the only

man who spoke it in its purity. Had it not been for the _icicaille_,

Thénardier could not have recognized him, for he had completely altered

his voice. In the mean while the third man had interfered.

"There is nothing to hurry us, so let us wait a little. What is there

to tell us that he does not want us?"

Through this, which was only French, Thénardier recognized

Montparnasse, whose pride it was to understand all the slang dialects

and not speak one of them. As for the fourth man, he held his

tongue, but his wide shoulders denounced him, and Thénardier did not

hesitate,--it was Gueulemer. Brujon replied almost impetuously, but

still in a low voice:--

"What is that you are saying? The innkeeper has not been able to bolt.

He doesn't understand the dodge. A man must be a clever hand to tear

up his shirt and cut his sheets in slips to make a rope; to make holes

in doors; manufacture false papers; make false keys; file his fetters

through; hang his rope out of the window; hide and disguise himself.

The old man cannot have done this, for he does not know how to work."

Babet added, still in the correct classic slang which Poiailler and

Cartouche spoke, and which is to the new, bold, and colored slang

which Brujon employed what the language of Racine is to that of André

Chénier,--

"Your friend the innkeeper must have been taken in the attempt. One

ought to be wide awake. He is a flat. He must have been bamboozled by

a detective, perhaps even by a prison spy, who played the simpleton.

Listen, Montparnasse; do you hear those shouts in the prison? You saw

all those candles; he is caught again, and will get off with twenty

years. I am not frightened. I am no coward, as is well known; but the

only thing to be done now is to bolt, or we shall be trapped. Do not

feel offended; but come with us, and let us drink a bottle of old wine

together."

"Friends must not be left in a difficulty," Montparnasse growled.

"I tell you he is caught again," Brujon resumed, "and at this moment

the landlord is not worth a farthing. We can do nothing for him, so let

us be off. I feel at every moment as if a policeman were holding me in

his hand."

Montparnasse resisted but feebly; the truth is, that these four men,

with the fidelity which bandits have of never deserting each other, had

prowled the whole night around La Force, in spite of the peril they

incurred, in the hope of seeing Thénardier appear on the top of some

wall. But the night, which became really too favorable, for the rain

rendered all the streets deserted, the cold which attacked them, their

dripping clothes, their worn-out shoes, the alarming noises which had

broken out in the prison, the hours which had elapsed, the patrols they

had met, the hope which departed, and the fear that returned,--all

this urged them to retreat. Montparnasse himself, who was perhaps

Thénardier's son-in-law in a certain sense, yielded, and in a moment

they would be gone. Thénardier gasped on his wall as the shipwrecked

crew of the "Méduse" did on their raft, when they watched the ship

which they had sighted fade away on the horizon. He did not dare call

to them, for a cry overheard might ruin everything; but he had an idea,

a last idea, an inspiration,--he took from his pocket the end of

Brujon's rope which he had detached from the chimney of the Bâtiment

Neuf, and threw it at their feet.

"A cord!" said Babet

"My cord!" said Brujon.

"The landlord is there," said Montparnasse. They raised their eyes and

Thénardier thrust out his head a little.

"Quiet," said Montparnasse. "Have you the other end of the rope,

Brujon?"

"Yes."

"Fasten the two ends together. We will throw the rope to him; he will

attach it to the wall, and it will be long enough for him to come down."

Thénardier ventured to raise his voice,--

"I am wet through."

"We'll warm you."

"I cannot stir."

"You will slip down, and we will catch you."

"My hands are swollen."

"Only just fasten the rope to the wall."

"I can't."

"One of us must go up," said Montparnasse.

"Three stories!" Brujon ejaculated.

An old plaster conduit pipe, which had served for a stove formerly, lit

in the hut, ran along the wall almost to the spot where Thénardier was

lying. This pipe, which at that day was full of cracks and holes, has

since fallen down, but its traces may be seen. It was very narrow.

"It would be possible to mount by that," said Montparnasse.

"By that pipe?" Babet exclaimed. "A man? Oh no, a boy is required."

"Yes, a boy," Brujon said in affirmative.

"Where can we find one?" Gueulemer said.

"Wait a minute," Montparnasse said; "I have it."

He gently opened the door of the paling, assured himself that there

was no passer-by in the street, went out, shut the gate cautiously

after him, and ran off in the direction of the Bastille. Seven or

eight minutes elapsed, eight thousand centuries for Thénardier; Babet,

Brujon, and Gueulemer did not open their lips; the door opened again,

and Montparnasse came in, panting and leading Gavroche. The rain

continued to make the street completely deserted. Little Gavroche

stepped into the enclosure and looked calmly at the faces of the

bandits. The rain was dripping from his hair, and Gueulemer said to

him,--

"Brat, are you a man?"

Gavroche shrugged his shoulders, and replied,--

"A child like me is a man, and men like you are children."

"What a well-hung tongue the brat has!" Babet exclaimed.

"The boy of Paris is not made of wet paste," Brujon added.

"What do you want of me?" said Gavroche.

Montparnasse answered,--

"Climb up that pipe."

"With this rope," Babet remarked.

"And fasten it," Brujon continued.

"At the top of the wall," Babet added.

"To the cross-bar of the window," Brujon said, finally.

"What next?" asked Gavroche.

"Here it is," said Gueulemer.

The gamin examined the rope, the chimney, the wall, and the window,

and gave that indescribable and disdainful smack if the lips which

signifies, "What is it?"

"There is a man up there whom you will save," Montparnasse continued.

"Are you willing?" Brujon asked.

"Ass!" the lad replied, as if the question seemed to him extraordinary,

and took off his shoes.

Gueulemer seized Gavroche by one arm, placed him on the roof of the

pent-houses, where mouldering planks bent under the boy's weight, and

handed him the rope which Brujon had joined again during the absence

of Montparnasse. The gamin turned to the chimney, which it was an easy

task to enter by a large crevice close to the roof. At the moment

when he was going to ascend, Thénardier, who saw safety and life

approaching, leaned over the edge of the wall. The first gleam of day

whitened his dark forehead, his livid cheek-bones, his sharp savage

nose, and his bristling gray beard, and Gavroche recognized him.

"Hilloh!" he said, "it's my father. Well, that won't stop me."

And taking the rope between his teeth, he resolutely commenced his

ascent. He reached the top of the wall, straddled across it like a

horse, and securely fastened the rope to the topmost cross-bar of the

window. A moment after, Thénardier was in the street. So soon as he

touched the pavement, so soon as he felt himself out of danger, he was

no longer wearied, chilled, or trembling. The terrible things he had

passed through were dissipated like smoke, and all his strange and

ferocious intellect was re-aroused, and found itself erect and free,

ready to march onward. The first remark this man made was,--

"Well, whom are we going to eat?"

It is unnecessary to explain the meaning of this frightfully

transparent sentence, which signifies at once killing, assassinating,

and robbing. The real meaning of "to eat" is "to devour".

"We must get into hiding," said Brujon. "We will understand each other

in three words, and then seperate at once. There was an affair that

seemed good in the Rue Plumet,--a deserted street; an isolated house;

old rust-eaten railings looking on a garden, and lone women."

"Well, why not try it?" Thénardier asked.

"Your daughter Éponine went to look at the thing," Babet answered.

"And has told Magnon it is 'a biscuit,'" Brujon added; "there's nothing

to be done here."

"The girl's no fool," said Thénardier; "still we must see."

"Yes, yes," Brujon remarked; "we must see."

Not one of the men seemed to notice Gavroche, who, during this

colloquy, was sitting on one of the posts. He waited some minutes,

perhaps in the hope that his father would turn to him, and then put on

his shoes again, saying,--

"Is it all over? You men don't want me any more, I suppose, as I've got

you out of the scrape? I'm off, for I must go and wake my cubs."

And he went off. The five men left the enclosure in turn. When Gavroche

had disappeared round the corner of the Rue des Ballets, Babet took

Thénardier on one side.

"Do you notice that kid?" he asked him.

"What kid?"

"The one who climbed up the wall and handed you the rope."

"Not particularly."

"Well, I don't know; but I fancy it's your son."

"Bah!" said Thénardier; "do you think so?"

BOOK VII.

SLANG.

CHAPTER I.

THE ORIGIN OF SLANG.

"Pigritia" is a terrible word. It engenders a world, _la pègre_, for

which read, _robbery_; and a Hades, _la pégrenne_, for which read,

_hunger_. Hence indolence is a mother, and has a son, robbery, and

a daughter, hunger. Where are we at this moment? In slang. What is

slang? It is at once the nation and the idiom; it is robbery in its

two species, people and language. Four-and-thirty years ago, when

the narrator of this grave and sombre history introduced into the

middle of a work written with the same object as this one[1] a robber

speaking slang, there was amazement and clamor. "Why! what! slang! why,

it is frightful; it is the language of the chain-gang, of hulks and

prisons, of everything that is the most abominable in society," etc.

We could never understand objections of this nature. Since that period

two powerful romance-writers, of whom one was a profound observer of

humanity, the other an intrepid friend of the people,--Balzac and

Eugène Sue,--having made bandits talk in their natural tongue, as

the author of "Le dernier Jour dun Condamné" did in 1828, the same

objections were raised, and people repeated: "What do writers want with

this repulsive patois? Slang is odious, and produces a shudder." Who

denies it? Of course it does. When the object is to probe a wound, a

gulf, or a society, when did it become a fault to drive the probe too

deep? We have always thought that it was sometimes an act of courage

and at the very least a simple and useful action, worthy of the

sympathetic attention which a duty accepted and carried out deserves.

Why should we not explore and study everything, and why stop on the

way? Stopping is the function of the probe, and not of the prober.

Certainly it is neither an attractive nor an easy task to seek in the

lowest depths of social order, where the earth leaves off and mud

begins, to grope in these vague densities, to pursue, seize, and throw

quivering on the pavement that abject idiom which drips with filth when

thus brought to light, that pustulous vocabulary of which each word

seems an unclean ring of a monster of the mud and darkness. Nothing is

more mournful than thus to contemplate, by the light of thought, the

frightful vermin swarm of slang in its nudity. It seems, in fact, as if

you have just drawn from its sewer a sort of horrible beast made for

the night, and you fancy you see a frightful, living, and bristling

polype, which shivers, moves, is agitated, demands the shadow again,

menaces, and looks. One word resembles a claw, another a lustreless

and bleeding eye, and some phrases seem to snap like the pincers of

a crab. All this lives with the hideous vitality of things which are

organized in disorganization. Now, let us ask, when did horror begin to

exclude study; or the malady drive away the physician? Can we imagine

a naturalist who would refuse to examine a viper, a bat, a scorpion, a

scolopendra, or a tarantula, and throw them into the darkness, saying,

"Fie, how ugly they are!" The thinker who turned away from slang would

resemble a surgeon who turned away from an ulcer or a wart. He would be

a philologist hesitating to examine a fact of language, a philosopher

hesitating to scrutinize a fact of humanity. For we must tell all those

ignorant of the fact, that slang is at once a literary phenomenon and a

social result. What is slang, properly so called? It is the language of

misery.

Here we may, perhaps, be stopped; the fact may be generalized, which

is sometimes a way of alternating it; it may be observed that every

trade, every profession, we might also say all the accidents of the

social hierarchy, and all the forms of intelligence, have their slang.

The merchant who says "Montpellier in demand, Marseille fine quality;"

the broker who says, "amount brought forward, premium at end of month;"

the gambler who says, "pique, répique, and capot;" the bailiff of the

Norman Isles who says, "the holder in fee cannot make any claim on the

products of the land during the hereditary seizure of the property of

the re-lessor;" the playwright who says, "the piece was goosed;" the

actor who says, "I made a hit;" the philosopher who says, "phenomenal

triplicity;" the sportsman who says, "a covey of partridges, a leash

of woodcocks;" the phrenologist who says, "amativeness, combativeness,

secretiveness;" the infantry soldier who says, "my clarionette;" the

dragoon who says, "my turkey-cock;" the fencing-master who says,

"tierce, carte, disengage;" the printer who says, "hold a chapel;"

all--printer, fencing-master, dragoon, infantry man, phrenologist,

sportsman, philosopher, actor, playwright, gambler, stock-broker, and

merchant--talk slang. The painter who says, "my grinder;" the attorney

who says, "my gutter-skipper;" the barber who says, "my clerk;" and

the cobbler who says, "my scrub,"--all talk slang. Rigorously taken,

all the different ways of saying right and left, the sailors larboard

and starboard, the scene-shifter's off-side and prompt-side, and the

vergers Epistle-side and Gospel-side, are slang. There is the slang of

affected girls as there was the slang of the précieuses, and the Hôtel

de Rambouillet bordered to some slight extent the Cour des Miracles.

There is the slang of duchesses, as is proved by this sentence,

written in a note by a very great lady and very pretty woman of the

Restoration: "Vous trouverez dans ces potains-là une foultitude de

raisons pour que je me libertise."[2] Diplomatic ciphers are slang,

and the Pontifical Chancery, writing 26 for "Rome," _grkztntgzyal_

for "Envoy," and _abfxustgrnogrkzu tu_ XI. for "the Duke of Modena,"

talk slang. The mediæval physicians who, in order to refer to carrots,

radishes, and turnips, said, _opoponach, perfroschinum, reptitalinus,

dracatholicum, angelorum_, and _postmegorum_, talk slang. The

sugar-refiner who says, "clarified syrup, molasses, bastard, common,

burned, loaf-sugar,"--this honest manufacturer talks slang. A certain

school of critics, who twenty years ago said, "one half of Shakespeare

is puns and playing on words," spoke slang. The poet and artist who

with profound feeling would call M. de Montmorency a bourgeois, if

he were not a connoisseur in verses and statues, talk slang. The

classic academician who calls flowers Flora, the fruits Pomona, the

sea Neptune, love the flames, beauty charms, a horse a charger, the

white or tricolor cockade the rose of Bellona, the three-cornered hat

the triangle of Mars,--that classic academician talks slang. Algebra,

medicine, and botany have their slang. The language employed on

shipboard--that admirable sea-language so complete and picturesque,

which Jean Bart, Duquesne, Suffren, and Duperré spoke, which is mingled

with the straining of the rigging, the sound of the speaking-trumpets,

the clang of boarding-axe, the rolling, the wind, the gusts, and the

cannon--is an heroic and brilliant slang, which is to the ferocious

slang of robbers what the lion is to the jackal.

All this is perfectly true, but whatever people may say, this mode

of comprehending the word "slang" is an extension which everybody

will not be prepared to admit. For our part, we perceive the precise

circumscribed and settled acceptation of the word, and restrict slang

to slang. The true slang, the slang _par excellence_, if the two

words can be coupled, the immemorial slang which was a kingdom, is

nothing else, we repeat, than the ugly, anxious, cunning, treacherous,

venomous, cruel, blear-eyed, vile, profound, and fatal language of

misery. There is at the extremity of all abasements and all misfortunes

a last misery, which revolts and resolves to contend with the ensemble

of fortunate facts and reigning rights,--a frightful struggle, in

which, at one moment crafty, at another violent, at once unhealthy and

ferocious, it attacks the social order with pinpricks by vice, and with

heavy blows by crime. For the necessities of this struggle, misery has

invented a fighting language, which is called slang. To hold up on the

surface and keep from forgetfulness, from the gulf, only a fragment

of any language which man has spoken, and which would be lost,--that

is to say, one of the elements, good or bad, of which civilization is

composed and complicated,--is to extend the data of social observation

and serve civilization itself. Plautus rendered this service, whether

voluntarily or involuntarily, by making two Carthaginian soldiers

speak Phœnician; Molière rendered it also by making so many of his

characters talk Levantine and all sorts of patois. Here objections

crop out afresh: Phœnician, excellent; Levantine, very good; and

even patois may be allowed, for they are languages which have belonged

to nations or provinces--but slang? Of what service is it to preserve

slang and help it to float on the surface?

To this we will only make one remark. Assuredly, if the language which

a nation or a province has spoken is worthy of interest, there is

a thing still more worthy of attention and study, and that is the

language which a wretchedness has spoken. It is the language which has

been spoken in France, for instance, for more than four centuries,

not only by a wretchedness, but by every wretchedness, by every human

wretchedness possible. And then, we insist upon the fact, to study

social deformities and infirmities, and point them out for cure, is

not a task in which choice is permissible. The historian of morals

and ideas has a mission no less austere than the historian of events.

The latter has the surface of civilization, the struggles of crowned

heads, the births of princes, the marriages of kings, assemblies, great

public men and revolutions,--all the external part; the other historian

has the interior,--the basis, the people that labors, suffers, and

waits, the crushed woman, the child dying in agony, the dull warfare

of man with man, obscene ferocities, prejudices, allowed iniquities,

the subterranean counter-strokes of the law, the secret revolutions

of minds, the indistinct shivering of multitudes, those who die of

hunger, the barefooted, the bare-armed, the disinherited, the orphans,

the unhappy, the infamous, and all the ghosts that wander about in

obscurity. He must go down with his heart full of charity and severity,

at once as a brother and as a judge, into the impenetrable dungeons

in which crawl pell-mell those who bleed and those who wound, those

who weep and those who cure, those who fast and those who devour,

those that endure evil, and those who commit it. Are the duties of the

historians of hearts and souls inferior to those of the historians of

external facts? Can we believe that Alighieri has less to say than

Machiavelli? Is the lower part of civilization, because it is deeper

and more gloomy, less important than the upper? Do we know the mountain

thoroughly if we do not know the caverns?

We will notice, by the way, that from our previous remarks a marked

separation, which does not exist in our mind, might be inferred between

the two classes of historians. No one is a good historian of the

patent, visible, glistening, and public life of a people, unless he is

at the same time to a certain extent the historian of their profound

and hidden life; and no one is a good historian of the interior unless

he can be, whenever it is required, historian of the exterior. The

history of morals and ideas penetrates the history of events, and _vice

versâ_; they are two orders of different facts which answer to each

other, are always linked together, and often engender one another.

All the lineaments which Providence traces on the surface of a nation

have their gloomy, but distinct, parallels at the base, and all the

convulsions of the interior produce up-heavings on the surface. As

true history is a medley of everything, the real historian attends to

everything. Man is not a circle with only one centre; he is an ellipse

with two foci, facts being the one, and ideas the other. Slang is

nothing but a vestibule in which language, having some wicked action

to commit, disguises itself. It puts on these masks of words and rags

of metaphors. In this way it becomes horrible, and can scarce be

recognized. Is it really the French language, the great human tongue?

It is ready to go on the stage and take up the cue of crime, and

suited for all the parts in the repertory of evil. It no longer walks,

but shambles; it limps upon the crutch of the Cour des Miracles, which

may be metamorphosed into a club. All the spectres, its dressers, have

daubed its face, and it crawls along and stands erect with the double

movement of the reptile. It is henceforth ready for any part, for it

has been made to squint by the forger, has been verdigrised by the

poisoner, blackened by the soot of the incendiary, and the murderer has

given it his red.

When you listen at the door of society, on the side of honest men,

you catch the dialogue of those outside. You distinguish questions

and answers, and notice, without comprehending it, a hideous murmur

sounding almost like the human accent, but nearer to a yell than to

speech. It is slang; the words are deformed, wild, imprinted with

a species of fantastic bestiality. You fancy that you hear hydras

conversing. It is unintelligibility in darkness; it gnashes its teeth

and talks in whispers, supplementing the gloom by enigmas. There is

darkness in misfortune, and greater darkness still in crime, and these

two darknesses amalgamated compose slang. There is obscurity in the

atmosphere, obscurity in the deeds, obscurity in the voices. It is

a horrifying, frog-like language, which goes, comes, hops, crawls,

slavers, and moves monstrously in that common gray mist composed of

crime, night, hunger, vice, falsehood, injustice, nudity, asphyxia, and

winter, which is the high noon of the wretched.

Let us take compassion on the chastised, for, alas! what are we

ourselves? Who am I, who am speaking to you? Who are you, who are

listening to me? Whence do we come? And is it quite sure that we did

nothing before we were born? The earth is not without a resemblance

to a prison, and who knows whether man is not the ticket-of-leave of

Divine justice? If we look at life closely we find it so made that

there is punishment everywhere to be seen. Are you what is called a

happy man? Well, you are sad every day, and each of them has its great

grief or small anxiety. Yesterday, you trembled for a health which

is dear to you, to-day you are frightened about your own, to-morrow

it will be a monetary anxiety, and the day after the diatribe of a

calumniator, and the day after that again the misfortune of some

friend; then the weather, then something broken or lost, or a pleasure

for which your conscience and your backbone reproach you; or, another

time, the progress of public affairs, and we do not take into account

heart-pangs. And so it goes on; one cloud is dissipated, another forms,

and there is hardly one day in one hundred of real joy and bright

sunshine. And you are one of that small number who are happy; as for

other men, the stagnation of night is around them. Reflecting minds

rarely use the expressions "the happy" and the "unhappy," for in this

world, which is evidently the vestibule of another, there are no happy

beings. The true human division is into the luminous and the dark. To

diminish the number of the dark, and augment that of the luminous,

is the object; and that is why we cry, "Instruction and learning!"

Learning to read is lighting the fire, and every syllable spelled is

a spark. When we say light, however, we do not necessarily mean light;

for men suffer in light, and excess of light burns. Flame is the enemy

of the wings, and to burn without ceasing to fly is the prodigy of

genius. When you know and when you love, you will still suffer, for the

day is born in tears, and the luminous weep, be it only for the sake of

those in darkness.

[1] Le dernier Jour d'un Condamné.

[2] "You will find in that tittle-tattle a multitude of reasons why I

should take my liberty."

CHAPTER II.

ROOTS.

Slang is the language of the dark. Thought is affected in its gloomiest

depths, and social philosophy is harassed in its most poignant

undulations, in the presence of this enigmatical dialect, which is

at once branded and in a state of revolt. There is in this a visible

chastisement, and each syllable looks as if it were marked. The words

of the common language appear in it, as if branded and hardened by the

hangman's red-hot irons, and some of them seem to be still smoking;

some phrases produce in you the effect of a robber's fleur-de-lysed

shoulder suddenly exposed, and ideas almost refuse to let themselves

be represented by these convict substantives. The metaphors are at

times so daring that you feel that they have worn fetters. Still, in

spite of all this, and in consequence of all this, this strange patois

has by right its compartment in that great impartial museum, in which

there is room for the oxydized sou as well as the gold medal, and which

is called toleration. Slang, whether people allow it or no, has its

syntax and poetry. It is a language. If, by the deforming of certain

vocables, we perceive that it has been chewed by Mandrin, we feel from

certain metonyms that Villon spoke it. That line so exquisite and so

celebrated,--

"Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?

(But where are the snows of yester-year?)"

is a line of slang. Antan, _ante annum_, is a slang word of Thunes,

which signified the past year, and, by extension, formerly.

Five-and-thirty years ago, on the departure of the great chain-gang,

in 1827, there might be read in one of the dungeons of Bicêtre this

maxim, engraved with a nail upon the wall by a king of Thunes condemned

to the galleys, "Les dabs d'antan trimaient siempre pour la pierre du

Coësre," which means, "The kings of former days used always to go to

be consecrated." In the thought of that king, the consecration was the

galleys. The word _décarade_, which expresses the departure of a heavy

coach at a gallop, is attributed to Villon, and is worthy of him. This

word, which strikes fire, contains in a masterly onomatopœia the

whole of Lafontaine's admirable line,--

"Six forts chevaux tiraient un coche."

From a purely literary point of view, few studies would be more curious

or fertile than that of slang. It is an entire language within a

language, a sort of sickly grafting which has produced a vegetation,

a parasite which has its roots in the old Gaulish trunk, and whose

sinister foliage crawls up the whole of one side of the language. This

is what might be called the first or common notion of slang, but to

those who study the language as it should be studied, that is to say,

as geologists study the earth, slang appears like a real alluvium.

According as we dig more or less deeply, we find in slang, beneath

the old popular French, Provençal, Spanish, Italian, Levantine, that

language of the Mediterranean ports, English, and German, Romanic,--in

its three varieties of French, Italian, and Roman,--Latin, and finally,

Basque and Celtic. It is a deep and strange formation, a subterranean

edifice built up in common by all scoundrels. Each accursed race has

deposited its stratum, each suffering has let its stone fall, each

heart has given its pebble. A multitude of wicked, low, or irritated

souls who passed through life, and have faded away in eternity, are

found there almost entire, and to some extent still visible, in the

shape of a monstrous word.

Do you want Spanish? The old Gothic slang swarms with it. Thus we have

_boffette_, a box on the ears, which comes from _bofeton; vantane_, a

window (afterwards vanterne), from _vantana; gat_, a cat, from _gato;

acite_, oil, from _aceyte_. Do you want Italian? We have _spade_, a

sword, which comes from _spada_, and _carvel_, a boat, which comes from

_caravella._ From the English we have _bichot_, the _bishop; raille_,

a spy, from _rascal, rascalion_, roguish; and _pilche_, a case, from

_pitcher_, a scabbard. Of German origin are _caleur_, the waiter, from

_kellner; hers_, the master, from _herzog_, or duke. In Latin we find

_frangir_, to break, from _frangere; affurer_, to steal, from _fur_;

and _cadène_, a chain, from _catena_. There is one word which is

found in all continental language with a sort of mysterious power and

authority, and that is the word _magnus_: Scotland makes _mac_ of it,

which designates the chief of the clan, Mac Farlane, Mac Callumore,

the great Farlane, the great Callumore; slang reduces it to _meck_,

afterwards _meg_, that is to say, the Deity. Do you wish for Basque?

Here is _gahisto_, the devil, which is derived from _gaiztoa_, bad,

and _sorgabon_, good-night, which comes from _gabon_, good-evening. In

Celtic we find _blavin_, a handkerchief, derived from _blavet_, running

water; _ménesse_, a woman (in a bad sense), from _meinec_, full of

stones; _barant_, a stream, from _baranton_, a fountain; _goffeur_,

a locksmith, from _goff_, a blacksmith; and _guédouze_, death, which

comes from _guenn-du_, white and black. Lastly, do you wish for

history? Slang calls crowns "the Maltese," in memory of the coin which

was current aboard the Maltese galleys.

In addition to the philological origins which we have indicated, slang

has other and more natural roots, which issue, so to speak, directly

from the human mind. In the first place, there is the direct creation

of words, for it is the mystery of language to paint with words which

have, we know not how or why, faces. This is the primitive foundation

of every human language, or what might be called the granite. Slang

swarms with words of this nature, immediate words created all of one

piece; it is impossible to say when, or by whom, without etymologies,

analogies, or derivatives,--solitary, barbarous, and at times hideous

words, which have a singular power of expression, and are alive. The

executioner, _le taule_ (the anvil's face); the forest, _le sabri_

(cudgels); fear or flight, _taf_; the footman, _le larbin_; the

general, prefect, or minister, _pharos_ (head man); and the devil, _le

rabouin_ (the one with the tail). Nothing can be stranger than these

words, which form transparent masks; some of them, _le rabouin,_ for

instance, are at the same time grotesque and terrible, and produce

the effect of a Cyclopean grimace. In the second place, there is

metaphor, and it is the peculiarity of a language which wishes to say

everything and conceal everything, to abound in figures. Metaphor is

an enigma in which the robber who is scheming a plot, or the prisoner

arranging an escape, takes the refuge. No idiom is more metaphorical

than slang; _dévisser_ (to unscrew) _le coco_ (the cocoa-nut), to twist

the neck; _tortiller_ (to wind up), to eat; _être gerbé_ (sheaved), to

be tried; _un rat_, a stealer of bread; _il lansquine_, it rains,--an

old striking figure, which bears to some extent its date with it,

assimilates the long oblique lines of rain to the serried sloping pikes

of the lansquenets, and contains in one word the popular adage, "It is

raining halberts." At times, in proportion as slang passes from the

first to the second stage, words pass from the savage and primitive

state to the metaphorical sense. The devil ceases to be _le rabouin,_

and becomes "the baker," or he who puts in the oven. This is wittier

but not so grand; something like Racine after Corneille, or Euripides

after Æschylus. Some slang phrases which belong to both periods,

and have at once a barbarous and a metaphorical character, resemble

phantasmagorias: _Les sorgueurs vont sollicer des gails à la lune_ (the

prowlers are going to steal horses at night). This passes before the

mind like a group of spectres, and we know not what we see. Thirdly,

there is expediency: slang lives upon the language, uses it as it

pleases, and when the necessity arises limits itself to denaturalizing

it summarily and coarsely. At times, with the ordinary words thus

deformed and complicated with pure slang, picturesque sentences are

composed, in which the admission of the two previous elements, direct

creation and metaphor, is visible,--_le cab jaspine, je marronne que

la roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabri_, (the dog barks, I suspect

that the Paris diligence is passing through the wood); _le dab est

sinve, la dabuge est merloussière, la fée est bative,_ (the master

is stupid, the mistress is cunning, and the daughter pretty). Most

frequently, in order to throw out listeners, slang confines itself to

adding indistinctly to all the words of the language, a species of

ignoble tail, a termination in _aille, orgue, iergue,_ or _uche_. Thus:

_Vouziergue trouvaille bonorgue ce gigotmuche?_ (Do you find that leg

of mutton good?) This was a remark made by Cartouche to a jailer, in

order to learn whether the sum offered him for an escape suited him.

The termination in _mar_ has been very recently added.

Slang, being the idiom of corruption, is itself quickly corrupted.

Moreover, as it always tries to hide itself so soon as it feels that

it is understood, it transforms itself. Exactly opposed to all other

vegetables, every sunbeam kills what it falls on in it. Hence slang is

being constantly decomposed and re-composed; and this is an obscure and

rapid labor which never ceases, and it makes more way in ten years

than language does in ten centuries. Thus _larton_ (head) becomes

_lartif; gail_ (horse) _gaye; fertanche_ (straw) _fertille; momignard_

(the child) _momacque; fiques_ (clothes) _frusques; chique_ (the

church) _l'égrugeoir_; and _colabre_ (the neck) _colas_. The devil is

first _gahisto_, then _le rabouin_, and next "the baker;" a priest is

the _ratichon_, and then the _sanglier_; a dagger is the _vingt-deux_,

next the _surin_, and lastly the _lingre_; the police are _railles_,

then _roussins_, then _marchands de lacet_ (handcuff dealers), then

_coqueurs,_ and lastly _cognes_; the executioner is the _taule_, then

_Charlot_, then the _atigeur_, and then the _becquillard._ In the

seventeenth century to fight was to "take snuff;" in the nineteenth

it is "to break the jaw;" but twenty different names have passed

away between these two extremes, and Cartouche would speak Hebrew to

Lacenaire. All the words of this language are perpetually in flight,

like the men who employ them. Still, from time to time, and owing to

this very movement, the old slang reappears and becomes new again. It

has its headquarters where it holds its ground. The Temple preserved

the slang of the seventeenth century, and Bicêtre, when it was a

prison, that of Thunes. There the termination in _anche_ of the old

Thuners could be heard: _Boyanches-tu?_ (do you drink?); _il croyanche_

(he believes). But perpetual motion does not the less remain the law.

If the philosopher succeeds in momentarily fixing, for the purpose

of observation, this language, which is necessarily evaporating, he

falls into sorrowful and useful meditations, and no study is more

efficacious, or more fertile and instructive. There is not a metaphor

or an etymology of slang which does not contain a lesson.

Among these men "fighting" means "pretending:" they "fight" a disease,

for cunning is their strength. With them the idea of man is not

separated from the idea of a shadow. Night is called _la sorgue_ and

man _l'orgue_: man is a derivative of night. They have formed the habit

of regarding society as an atmosphere which kills them, as a fatal

force, and they speak of their liberty as one speaks of his health. A

man arrested is a "patient;" a man sentenced is a "corpse." The most

terrible thing for the prisoner within the four stone walls which form

his sepulchre is a sort of freezing chastity, and hence he always

calls the dungeon the _castus_. In this funereal place external life

will appear under its most smiling aspect. The prisoner has irons on

his feet, and you may perhaps fancy that he thinks how people walk

with their feet; no, he thinks that they dance with them, hence, if he

succeed in cutting through his fetters, his first idea is that he can

now dance, and he calls the saw a _bastringue_. A name is a _centre_,

a profound assimilation. The bandit has two heads,--the one which

revolves his deeds and guides him through life, the other which he

has on his shoulders on the day of his death; he calls the head which

counsels him in crime, the _sorbonne_, and the one that expiates it the

_tronche_. When a man has nothing but rags on his body and vices in his

heart, when he has reached that double moral and material degradation

which the word _gueux_ characterizes in its two significations, he is

ripe for crime; he is like a well-sharpened blade; he has two edges,

his distress and his villany, and hence slang does not call him a

_gueux_ but a _réguisé_. What is the bagne? A furnace of damnation, a

hell, and the convict calls himself a "fagot." Lastly, what name do

malefactors give to the prison? The "college." A whole penitentiary

system might issue from this word.

Would you like to know whence came most of the galley songs,--those

choruses called in the special vocabularies the _lirlonfa_? Listen to

this:

There was at the Châtelet of Paris a large long cellar, which was eight

feet below the level of the Seine. It had neither windows nor gratings,

and the sole opening was the door; men could enter it, but air not.

This cellar had for ceiling a stone arch, and for floor ten inches of

mud; it had been paved, but, owing to the leakage of the water, the

paving had rotted and fallen to pieces. Eight feet above the ground, a

long massive joist ran from one end to the other of this vault; from

this joist hung at regular distances chains, three feet long, and at

the end of these chains were collars. In this cellar men condemned to

the galleys were kept until the day of their departure for Toulon; they

were thrust under this beam, where each had his fetters oscillating

in the darkness and waiting for him. The chains, like pendant arms,

and the collars, like open hands, seized these wretches by the neck;

they were riveted and left there. As the chain was too short, they

could not lie down; they remained motionless in this cellar, in this

night, under this beam, almost hung, forced to make extraordinary

efforts to reach their loaf or water-jug, with the vault above their

heads and mud up to their knees, drawn and quartered by fatigue, giving

way at the hips and knees, hanging on by their hands to the chain

to rest themselves, only able to sleep standing, and awakened every

moment by the choking of the collar--some did not awake. To eat they

were compelled to draw up their bread, which was thrown into the mud,

with the heel all along the thigh to their hand. How long did they

remain in this state? One month, two months, sometimes six months;

one man remained a year. It was the antechamber of the galleys, and

men were put in it for stealing a hare from the king. In this hellish

sepulchre what did they? They died by inches, as people can do in a

sepulchre, and sang, which they can do in a hell; for when there is

no longer hope, song remains,--in the Maltese waters, when a galley

was approaching, the singing was heard before the sound of the oars.

The poor poacher Survincent, who passed through the cellar-prison of

the Châtelet, said, "Rhymes sustained me." Poetry is useless; what is

the good of rhymes? In this cellar nearly all the slang songs were

born, and it is from the dungeon of the Great Châtelet of Paris that

comes the melancholy chorus of Montgomery's galley: _Timaloumisaine,

timoulamison_. Most of the songs are sad, some are gay, and one is

tender:--

"Icicaille est le théâtre

Du petit dardant."[1]

Do you what you will, you cannot destroy that eternal relic of man's

heart, love.

In this world of dark deeds secrets are kept; for secrets are a thing

belonging to all, and with these wretches secrecy is the unity which

serves as the basis of union. To break secrecy is to tear from each

member of this ferocious community something of himself. To denounce

is called in the energetic language of slang "to eat the piece," as if

the denouncer took a little of the substance of each, and supported

himself on a piece of the flesh of each. What is receiving a buffet?

The conventional metaphor answers, "It is seeing six-and-thirty

candles." Here slang interferes and reads _camoufle_ for candle; life

in its ordinary language takes _camouflet_ as a synonym for a box on

the ears. Hence, by a sort of penetration from bottom to top, and

by the aid of metaphor, that incalculable trajectory, slang ascends

from the cellar to the academy, and Poulailler saying, "I light my

_camoufle_" makes Voltaire write, "Langleviel la Beaumelle deserves

a hundred _camouflets._" Searching in slang is a discovery at every

step, and the study and investigation of this strange idiom lead to the

point of intersection of regular with accursed society. The robber has

also his food for powder, or stealable matter in you, in me, in the

first passer-by, the _pantre_ (_pan_, everybody). Slang is the word

converted into a convict. It produces a consternation to reflect that

the thinking principle of man can be hurled down so deep that it can

be dragged there and bound by the obscure tyranny of fatality, and be

fastened to some unknown rivets on this precipice. Alas! will no one

come to the help of the human soul in this darkness? Is it its destiny

ever to await the mind, the liberator, the immense tamer of Pegasuses

and hippogriffs, the dawn-colored combatant, who descends from the

azure sky between two wings, the radiant knight of the future? Will it

ever call in vain to its help the lance of the light of idealism? Is

it condemned always to look down into the gulf of evil and see closer

and closer to it beneath the hideous water the demoniac head, this

slavering mouth, and this serpentine undulation of claws, swellings,

and rings? Must it remain there without a gleam of hope, left to the

horror of this formidable and vaguely smelt approach of the monster,

shuddering, with dishevelled hair, wringing its arms, forever chained

to the rock of night, a sombre Andromeda white and naked in the

darkness?

CHAPTER III.

SLANG THAT CRIES AND SLANG THAT LAUGHS.

As we see, the whole of slang, the slang of four hundred years ago, as

well as that of the present day, is penetrated by that gloomy symbolic

spirit which gives to every word at one moment a suffering accent,

at another a menacing air. We see in it the old ferocious sorrow of

those mumpers of the Cour des Miracles, who played at cards with packs

of their own, some of which have been preserved for us. The eight of

clubs, for instance, represented a tall man bearing eight enormous

clover leaves, a sort of fantastic personification of the forest. At

the foot of this tree could be seen a lighted fire, at which three

hares were roasting a game-keeper on a spit, and behind, over another

fire, a steaming caldron from which a dog's head emerged. Nothing can

be more lugubrious than these reprisals in painting upon a pack of

cards, in the face of the pyres for smugglers, and the caldron for

coiners. The various forms which thought assumed in the kingdom of

slang, singing, jests, and menaces, all had this impotent and crushed

character. All the songs of which a few melodies have come down to us

were humble and lamentable enough to draw tears. The _pègre_ (thief)

calls himself the poor _pègre_; for he is always the hare that hides

itself, the mouse that escapes, or the bird that flies away. He hardly

protests, but restricts himself to sighing, and one of his groans

has reached us: _Je n'entrave que le dail comment meck, le daron des

orgues, peut atiger ses mômes et ses momignards, et les locher criblant

sans être agité lui même_. (I do not understand how God, the Father of

men, can torture His children and His grandchildren, and hear them cry,

without being tortured Himself.) The wretch, whenever he has time to

think, makes himself little before the law and paltry before society;

he lies down on his stomach, supplicates, and implores pity, and we can

see that he knows himself to be in the wrong.

Toward the middle of the last century a change took place; the person,

songs, and choruses of the robbers assumed, so to speak, an insolent

and jovial gesture. The _larifla_ was substituted for the plaintive

_maluré_, and we find in nearly all the songs of the galleys, the

hulks, and the chain-gangs, a diabolical and enigmatical gayety. We

hear in them that shrill and leaping chorus which seems illumined

by a phosphorescent gleam, and appears cast into the forest by a

will-o'-the-wisp playing the fife:--

"Mirlababi surlababo

Mirliton ribonribette

Surlababi mirlababo

Mirliton ribonribo."

They sang this while cutting a man's throat in a cellar or a thicket.

It is a serious symptom that in the eighteen century the old

melancholy of three desponding classes is dissipated, and they begin

to laugh; they mock the great "meg" and the great "dab" (governor),

and Louis XV. being given they call the King of France the Marquis

de Pantin. The wretches are nearly gay, and a sort of dancing light

issues from them, as if their conscience no longer weighed them down.

These lamentable tribes of darkness no longer possess the despairing

audacity of deeds, but the careless audacity of the mind; this is a

sign that they are losing the feeling of their criminality, and finding

some support, of which they are themselves ignorant, among the thinkers

and dreamers. It is a sign that robbery and plunder are beginning to

be filtered even into doctrines and sophisms, so as to lose a little

of their ugliness, and give a good deal of it to the sophisms and the

doctrine. Lastly, it is a sign of a prodigious and speedy eruption,

unless some diversion arise. Let us halt here for a moment. Whom do we

accuse? Is it the eighteenth century? Is it all philosophy? Certainly

not. The work of the eighteenth century is healthy and good; and

the Encyclopædists with Diderot at their head, the physicists under

Turgot, the philosophers led by Voltaire, and the Utopists commanded

by Rousseau, are four sacred legions. The immense advance of humanity

toward the light is due to them, and they are the four advance

guards of the human races, going toward the four cardinal points of

progress,--Diderot toward the beautiful, Turgot toward the useful,

Voltaire toward truth, and Rousseau toward justice. But by the side of

and below the philosophers were the sophists,--a venomous vegetation

mingled with a healthy growth, a hemlock in the virgin forest. While

the hangman was burning on the grand staircase of the Palace of

Justice the grand liberating books of the age, writers now forgotten

were publishing, with the royal privilege, strangely disorganizing

books, which were eagerly read by the scoundrels. Some of these

publications, patronized, strange to say, by a prince, will be found

in the "Bibliothèque secrète." These facts, profound but unknown, were

unnoticed on the surface; but at times the very obscurity of a fact

constitutes its danger, and it is obscure because it is subterranean.

Of all the writers, the one who perhaps dug the most unhealthy gallery

at that day in the masses was Restif de la Bretonne.

This work, peculiar to all Europe, produced greater ravages in Germany

than anywhere else. In Germany, during a certain period, which was

summed up by Schiller in his famous drama of The Robbers, robbery and

plunder were raised into a protest against property and labor. They

appropriated certain elementary ideas, specious and false, apparently

just, and in reality absurd, wrapped themselves up in these ideas,

and to some extent disappeared in them, assumed an abstract name, and

passed into a theoretical state, and in this way circulated among the

laborious, suffering, and honest masses, without even the cognizance

of the imprudent chemists who prepared the mixture, and the masses

that accepted it. Whenever a fact of this nature is produced it is

serious. Suffering engenders passion; and while the prosperous

blind themselves, or go to deep, the hatred of the unfortunate

classes kindles its torch at some sullen or ill-constituted mind

which is dreaming in a corner, and sets to work examining society.

The examination of hatred is a terrible thing. Hence come, if the

misfortune of the age desires it, those frightful commotions, formerly

called Jacqueries, by the side of which purely political commotions are

child's-play, and which are no longer the struggle of the oppressed

with the oppressor, but the revolt of want against comfort. Everything

is overthrown at such a time. Jacqueries are the earthquakes of nations.

The French Revolution, that immense act of probity, cut short this

peril, which was perhaps imminent in Europe toward the close of the

eighteenth century. The French Revolution, which was nothing but

the ideal armed with a sword, rose, and by the same sudden movement

closed the door of evil and opened the door of good. It disengaged the

question, promulgated the truth, expelled the miasma, ventilated the

age, and crowned the people. We may say that it created man a second

time by giving him a second soul,--justice. The nineteenth century

inherits and profits by its work, and at the present day the social

catastrophe which we just now indicated is simply impossible. Blind is

he who denounces it, a fool who fears it, for the Revolution is the

vaccine of Jacquerie. Thanks to the Revolution, the social conditions

are altered, and the feudal and monarchical diseases are no longer in

our blood. There is no middle age left in our constitution, and we

are no longer at the time when formidable internal commotions broke

out; when the obscure course of a dull sound could be heard beneath

the feet; when the earth thrown out from the mole-holes appeared on

the surface of civilization; when the soil cracked; when the roof of

caverns opened, and monstrous heads suddenly emerged from the ground.

The revolutionary sense is a moral sense, and the feeling of right

being developed, develops the feeling of duty. The law of all is

liberty, which ends where the liberty of another begins, according to

Robespierre's admirable definition. Since 1789 the whole people has

been dilated in the sublimated individual. There is no poor man who,

having his right, has not his radius; the man, dying of hunger, feels

within himself the honesty of France. The dignity of the citizen is

an internal armor; the man who is free is scrupulous, and the voter

reigns. Hence comes incorruptibility; hence comes the abortiveness

of unhealthy covetousness, and hence eyes heroically lowered before

temptation. The revolutionary healthiness is so great, that on a day of

deliverance, a 14th of July, or a 10th of August, there is no populace,

and the first cry of the enlightened and progressing crowds is, "Death

to the robbers!" Progress is an honest man, and the ideal and the

absolute do not steal pocket-handkerchiefs. By whom were the carriages

containing the wealth of the Tuileries escorted in 1848? By the

rag-pickers of the Faubourg St. Antoine. The rag mounted guard over the

treasure. Virtue rendered these ragged creatures resplendent. In these

carts, in barely closed chests,--some, indeed, still opened,--there

was, amid a hundred dazzling cases, that old crown of France, all made

of diamonds, surmounted by the royal carbuncle and the Regent diamonds,

worth thirty millions of francs; barefooted they guarded this crown.

Hence Jacquerie is no longer possible, and I feel sorry for the clever

men; it is an old fear which has made its last effort, and could no

longer be employed in politics. The great spring of the red spectre is

now broken. Everybody understands this now. The scarecrow no longer

horrifies. The birds treat the manikin familiarly, and deposit their

guano upon it, and the bourgeois laugh at it.

[1] The archer Cupid.

CHAPTER IV.

TWO DUTIES: TO WATCH AND TO HOPE.