THE PARISIAN GAMIN.
Paris has one institution possessed by no other city in the world--the
genuine street Arab. London has, heaven knows, enough homeless waifs,
born the Lord only knows where, and brought up the Lord only knows how;
but the London article is no more like the Parisian than chalk is like
cheese. The New York street boy comes nearer it--New York is more like
Paris than any other city--but even the New York Arab is not to be
compared with the Parisian. He stands alone, a miracle of impudence,
good nature, self-possession and resource.
Where he was born he never knows and never cares. He don't carry his
pedigree in his pocket, not simply because he has no pocket, but because
he don't care a straw about it. It doesn't concern him. He would not
give a sou to be the son of the late Emperor. Birth and blood concern
him very little. What his mind is running on, chiefly, is where and how
to get a crust of black bread, a draught of very cheap wine, and a dry,
warm place to sleep.
His mother was, and is, a seamstress, or a house servant, or woman of
all work, or a shop girl. His father--well, it is doubtful if the mother
could give any very definite information on that subject. She may have
been a true daughter of Paris, or she may have come from the delicious
valleys of Normandy or Brittany, or the mountains of Switzerland, with
her heavy shoes, her quaint bodice, and her long, braided hair hanging
down her shapely back. She got work, she wrought in a clothing
warehouse, or she went behind a counter; then came the balls in the
Latin quarter (it is a part of the nature of the girls of this country
to love lights and glitter and dancing, and the like); then appeared
the student with his half-polished brigandage, and then began the life
of a grisette. They lived together till the student was called home, and
he went back to his native country to marry and settle down into
respectable citizenship, forgetting entirely the poor little girl he
left behind, and the wee baby she had borne him.
[Illustration: THE MOTHER OF THE GAMIN--AS SHE WAS.]
But whoever his father might have been he never saw him that he
remembers, and he has a very indistinct idea of what a father is.
The uncertainty of fatherhood in Paris is illustrated by the grisette
who was walking with her little boy. A funeral procession was passing:--
"Who is it that is dead?" asked the boy of his mother.
"I do not know, but take off your hat, my child. It may be your father!"
It was not unlikely. I don't think this ever happened, however, for in
France, every one removes his hat while a funeral passes. They are
polite to the dead as to the living. Besides this, the boy had no hat to
remove.
[Sidenote: THE MOTHER OF THE GAMIN.]
He knows his mother, however, very well; he remembers a pale, worn
woman, who always gave him the largest half of the scant bread, and
assuaged her hunger by seeing him eat, and who managed somehow to keep
the rags that hung about him clean, and had hidden somewhere, a neat and
tidy suit of clothes which were worn only on fête days, and when they
went to church. No matter about the father, since every boy knows who
his mother is, and he knows likewise that whatever may happen to her, he
is sure of all she can possibly do for him, even to the last, the
supreme sacrifice.
They lived together in a garret, somewhere, or a cellar. With these
people it is always one extreme or another,--they never have the middle
of anything.
[Illustration: THE MOTHER OF THE GAMIN IN THE SERE AND YELLOW LEAF.]
Somehow she managed to make the little den they existed in rather
pleasant, and he had a tolerably happy life. Only the mother was
compelled to leave him very much alone, for there was the black bread to
earn, and no matter how miserable their apartment, there was something
to pay for rent. He was left, always, with a score of others just like
him, with an old woman who had once gone through the same experience,
and who, unable now to do other work, earned her few sous a day caring
for children that were short a father, and whose mothers were
skirmishing on the outside borders of existence for enough to keep body
and soul together. This was all very well till the little legs were
strong enough to walk, and the old woman could no longer control him.
Armed with the
[Illustration: THE AGED PICKER-UP OF CIGAR STUMPS.]
[Sidenote: THE GAMIN AND HIS MOTHER.]
preternatural sharpness that always accompanies poverty, he took to the
streets, and, in the old times when begging was permitted, he was a
beggar. Now he is anything. He scorns regular work, he is a hawk, who
picks up his living here, there and everywhere. He may be on the
boulevards, and a handkerchief may be dropped; the apple-women, sharp as
they are, find in him a most competent brigand. There are cigar-stumps
to be picked up, and they are worth something an ounce to be worked
over into smoking tobacco. Everywhere in the great city there are
unconsidered trifles, but an unconsidered trifle is everything to a boy
who has no use for clothing, and to whom a crust of bread is enough for
a day.
Finally, at the mature age of eight, or thereabouts, he leaves his
mother; or, rather, some night he does not come home. He has found a dry
place under an arch to sleep, or a hole in the docks, and he has
associated with him other boys of the same breed; now he is an
independent citizen.
His mother knows the way of the world, and she goes right on, sure that
her child is living, and, in his way, well.
He occasionally goes to see her, till she moves some time suddenly, and
is lost to him in the great desert.
He probably never sees her again. If she gets on well and keeps her
health she dies finally in a hospital--if not, a plunge in the Seine
ends her struggles with a very hard world. Not infrequently his last
look at her is taken in the Morgue.
While he is a boy he leads a very independent and happy life. He toils
not, neither does he spin; he does not dine at the Maison Doree; nor
does he drink champagne or burgundy. He drinks wine when he can get it,
and water from the public fountain when he cannot. He eats black bread
when he has a sou to buy it with; lacking the sou, there are always
opportunities to steal an apple, and failing in that, there are apple
cores to be picked up on the streets.
As for clothing, very little does him; very little, but where he obtains
that little, I have never been able to ascertain. He gets it, though,
somehow, each article in the suit coming from a different source, and
all just strong enough to hold together. A picturesque vagabond it makes
of him.
His conversation is something wonderful. There isn't a slang phrase in
French that he has not, and as the mothers are of all nations, he has
made piratical excursions into other languages, and has the worst of
them all. He can swear very well in English, not the unctuous, brutal
oaths of the American or Englishman, for even a Parisian gamin has
taste, but English oaths lose none of their strength in him. He
ornaments them, but not to the degree of weakening.
No Frenchman would ever think of chaffing a gamin twice, for he knows by
bitter experience that the gamin always gets the best of it, and the
first and last time he tried it he retired with everybody laughing but
himself and the boy. He did not laugh, because the boy had routed him,
horse, foot and dragoon--the boy did not, because to have laughed would
have been undignified, and lessened the effect of his wordy victory. He
professed to sympathize with his victim, which was adding insult to
injury.
In this matter of talk the very cabmen are afraid of him, and the
policemen dread him. It is his delight to catch a policeman or a soldier
in a position where he cannot move, and to cover him with not exactly
abuse, but what the English call chaff. He makes the poor fellow
ridiculous; he sets a crowd laughing at him, and does it in perfect
safety, too, for the official cannot leave his post to capture and
punish him, and if he could it would do no good. The urchin is as
slippery as an eel, and as fleet as an antelope. He can slip through the
crowd and be a safe distance long before the encumbered man has made up
his mind to go for him.
These boys make up no small portion of every mob that has devastated
Paris for centuries, and popular risings are altogether too common for
comfort in that excitable city. In all the revolutions these little
fellows have handled muskets and pikes, and made much of them. The gamin
was foremost in the mob that leveled the Bastille to the ground, and
when that monument of irresponsible tyranny was in ruins the dead bodies
of hundreds of them were found underneath them, and the living bodies of
hundreds of others waved their crownless hats over the smoking debris.
There never has been a barricade erected that had not gamins behind it,
boys of fourteen, fighting as coolly and steadily as grizzled veterans
of sixty.
[Sidenote: AN INTERVIEW WITH A GAMIN.]
They knew not what they were fighting for, nor cared. They only felt it
was the people against the recognized authorities, and that was enough.
The Parisian gamin hates the authorities, for his chief idea is that the
name means a prison, police, and everything else that a brigand in a
small way don't like. He loves commotion, for commotion signifies
excitement, and excitement is as necessary to him as bread itself. He
will stand behind a barricade and load and fire as long as the oldest
man, and, firing with a musket, he is as good as a giant.
There are theaters which he patronizes regularly, for next to a
revolution he loves the theater. Where he procures the money for
admission, small as it is, heaven only knows; but he gets it somehow,
for he is there nearly every night. If he cannot get in at the
beginning, he hangs about the entrances, waiting for some good-natured
man, who does not care to see the performance out, to give him his
check, or he wheedles a good natured doorman into letting him pass. And
once in, there is no adult in the audience who is so critical an
auditor. He knows all about the drama, all about the music, and all
about everything connected with it. He applauds at the right place, and
if there be the slightest fault of omission or commission in the
representation, his hiss is the first and the most distinct and deadly.
The Parisian actor dreads the gamin almost as much as he does the
newspaper critics. They have made and unmade many an aspirant for public
favor.
I gave a sou to one for the privilege of a minute's conversation. (I had
a friend to translate--a street boy would not understand my French.)
"Where were you born?"
There was a comprehensive wave of the hand which took in all Paris. He
might have been born all over the vast city.
"How do you live?"
There was an expressive shrug of the shoulders that meant anything you
chose.
"What are you intending to do when you are older?"
Another expressive shrug, as if to say "Who knows?" (These French boys
can talk more with their arms and shoulders than other people can with
their tongues.)
But when he saw the sou in hand he had expression enough all over him
for a dozen boys. He took it with the invariable "Merci, Monsieur," and
darting away, in a minute re-appeared with a loaf of black bread, and
was as willing to be communicative as you desired.
All that could be gathered from him was that his mother was a
washerwoman, his father the Lord only knew, and he had been living on
the streets as long as he could remember anything. That was all. That
was his beginning--his end was in the hands of fate; possibly one thing,
and possibly another, but, one thing or another, he had bread enough to
last him twenty-four hours, and he was more happy than many a man in a
palace.
[Illustration: A TALK WITH A GAMIN.]
They are ubiquitous, and all alike. Their being all alike is what makes
them ubiquitous. You see him on the boulevards--you dive down from those
dizzy heights of splendor, from the broad glare of that magnificence, to
the poverty-made twilight of the Latin quarter, or the Cimmerian gloom
of the Faubourg St. Antoine, and you see him.
Just the same. He wears the same reminiscence of a hat, the same
remnants of trowsers, the same shirt with holes torn in it in the same
places, the flag of distress floats from the same quarter, if, indeed,
the shirt is long enough to boast a lower end, and the bare feet in the
summer, and the dilapidated shoes in the winter, are the same. It is not
the same boy, but it is the boy cast in the same mold, and with all the
others, subject to the same conditions, and consequently exactly like as
peas.
Nature makes men in molds. Noblemen's sons have something in their
make-up besides their clothes, and so have the children of poverty. A
pallet in a garret, or, more usually, the bare floor; a crust, or the
core of an apple at rare and uncertain intervals, are as certain to
produce one typical face and a typical body as luxurious beds and rich
food do another.
[Sidenote: WHAT BECOMES OF THE GAMIN.]
The Parisian gamins are alike wherever you see them, for they all come
from one stock, and are all brought up in one way. So nearly are they
alike that the old saying might well be reversed. Instead of its being
"It's a wise child that knows its own father," it should read "It's a
wise mother that knows her own child." With these waifs, a child's
knowing, or even guessing, at its own father, would be an idea utterly
chimerical.
Yet they are good-natured, and even kind to each other. There are girl
vagabonds and girl waifs as well as boy waifs. The boys are wonderfully
good to the little homeless girls who are too Arab-like to go to the
retreats provided for them by the Government. If the boy has a warm
place under a bridge or over a lime kiln, he gives it up to the
wandering female rat, with as much chivalry as any grand Seigneur could
display, and he shares with her the result of his predatory excursions,
even going a trifle more hungry himself that she may not entirely
starve. They are always hungry--it is only a question of how hungry they
may be.
What becomes of them? I don't know. Sometimes they get into other ways
and grow into respectable citizens. Occasionally one of them is
sufficiently tamed to learn a trade, if some citizen picks him up and
cares for him, and now and then a street boy or girl drifts, by
accident, into a profession and becomes eminent. The great French
actress, Rachel, was a street girl, whose only fortune was her guitar,
and whose living was made by singing in front of cafés. By hook or crook
she got upon the stage, and once there her genius made her way for her.
The Frenchman cares nothing for birth or position in the matter of
genius. He wants good singing and good acting, and he cares not whether
the singer or actor comes from the gutter or the palace. If from the
gutter, the genius which delights him removes the slime, and he does it
even greater honor than as though it had been pushed by more favorable
circumstances.
Rachel not only made a world-wide fame, but she raised her family, all
of whom were as poor and low down as herself, to the very heights of
French grandeur. One of the Felix girls--that is their name--is now the
wealthy and prosperous manufacturer of a face powder, which is the
delight of the upper classes. With the shrewdness of the Israelite, she
did not go into groceries or such trifles. She knew the French people
too well. She invented a face powder and hair restorative, and waxed
rich. She will marry her daughters to noblemen, and possibly Kings may
spring from a line that once was delighted with a sou thrown into the
gutter for them to scramble for.
One of the great chocolate manufacturers, whose name is known wherever
there is civilization, who counts his residences by the dozen, and his
wealth by millions, was a gamin till he was eighteen.
Some of them, like Rachel, from their intense love of the drama, get to
be actors, when they are old enough. Some of them become rag-pickers, or
work into other employments of a semi-vagabondizing nature; some of them
become thieves, and take in all the range of crime from picking a pocket
to committing murder, and numbers of them go into the army and navy.
But these instances are comparatively rare. The gamin grows, as a rule,
into a vagabond, the vagabond into a criminal, and the criminal either
ends at the guillotine or in the prison hospital. A lucky chance may
graft something better on them, or a revolution may afford them
opportunities for distinction in a military way, but those so promoted
are exceptions. The rule is quite the other way.
In New York these human rats sell newspapers, clean boots, and do things
of that nature, nominally. The genuine Parisian gamin might do this, for
there are papers cried and sold on the street, though the most of this
trade is transacted in picturesque little buildings called "Kiosques."
But he will have none of it. Should he labor or do anything approaching
labor, he would lose caste with his fellows, and become to them a social
pariah.
One important specimen of the kind, nine years old, and weighing,
perhaps, fifty pounds, saw a former member of the fraternity, who had
seceded, passing with packages to deliver, neatly dressed, and with a
general air of being well cared for, and comfortably fed and housed.
[Sidenote: THE SECEDING GAMIN.]
The ragamuffin looked upon him with an expression of contempt never
equalled off the stage, and he called the attention of a score of his
ragged comrades to the seceder:--
"Look at him! just look at him! He has got to be a baker's boy! Poor
devil! Poor devil! He has clothes, he has a cap on his head, and shoes
on his feet. He sits at a table with the maid, and eats three times a
day, and has a bed to sleep in! He will never more be one of us! He is
ruined! Poor devil! Why can't everybody have spirit? Bah! A bed to sleep
in, and regular meals!"
And the mob of ragamuffins jeered and hooted at him as he passed, and
the boy himself looked as though he had been a traitor to his class, and
as if he had half a mind to confiscate the bread he was carrying and
return to his former fellows.
The young bundle of rags felt all that he said. To him this desertion
from a life of vagabondage was a betrayal, as it were, and he felt,
actually, a supreme pity for the gamin who could be anything else for so
small a consideration as a comfortable life. To him the liberty of the
streets was better than any house that required regularity. He would not
have dined at the Grand Hotel if it required his coming at regular
hours.
And after venting his opinion he went out in search of something to eat,
and if he found that something he was happy--if not it was a shrug of
the shoulders, and to sleep an hour or two sooner. They have a trick of
making a dinner upon an hour or two of sleep, and an enjoyable breakfast
by not waking up till dinner time. It is an economical way of living,
but not conducive to increase of flesh. How long they can stand it has
never been determined, for, not regarding the interests of science, they
always manage to find a crust, or a bone, or something, just as the
experiment is getting to be interesting. None of them have ever been
willing to die in the interest of science. They are largely devoted to
themselves.
The gamin of Paris is deserving of more credit than the gamin of New
York, for he has nothing especially cheerful before him. When he ceases
to be a vagabond boy he becomes a vagabond man, except in the rare cases
I have mentioned, and ends his career, as vagabond men do, the world
over.
In New York the ending is quite different--indeed the vagabond boy has
better opportunities than the good boy. For in New York he loafs about
gin mills, and he has the advantages of free lunches, an institution
unknown in Paris, and the good old ladies get up excursions for him, and
give him sandwiches and ice cream, in the hopes of reaching his better
nature through the medium of his stomach, they firmly believing there is
a better nature, and as it has never been seen it must be in the
stomach. In time he grows up and gets as far along as to have that
blessed boon of the ballot, and becomes useful to the politicians, who
transfer him from the front of the bar to the back of it, and he has a
gin mill of his own, and controls votes, and "hez inflooence in my
warrud."
When his "inflooence" is sufficient, he boldly demands office for
himself and becomes a School Commissioner, or an Alderman, and finally
goes to the Legislature and waxes enormously rich, and his wife--for
this sort of a fellow marries when he gets off the streets and has a gin
mill of his own--wears diamonds and has a carriage.
It was Teddy McShane, and Mickey O'Finnegan, two of this class, who got
into the Board of Aldermen of New York. Alderman McShane had heard of
gondolas and wanted a few in the little lakes in the park, for, of
course, had his motion prevailed he would have got his commission from
the builder thereof. And so he spoke:--
"Misther Prisidint--We cannot be too liberal in ornamintin' our parruks.
A parruk is for the paple, and they should be ornamintid. To this ind, I
move ye sorr, that twinty gondolas be purchast for the lakes in Cintril
Parruk to-wanst."
Alderman McFinnegan, who saw a job in this, decided to oppose it till
McShane should come to him and propose a divide. And so he said:--
"Misther Prisidint--No man in New Yorrick will go furdther in
ornamintin' the city than mesilf; but the paple's money musht not be
squandered. Why buy twinty gondolas, to-wanst? Why not buy two--a male
and a faymale, and breed thim ourselves?"
[Sidenote: A CONTENTED BEING.]
The Parisian gamin can do nothing of this kind--indeed, it is impossible
in Paris, and he would not want to do it if it were possible. He does
not care for money; he does not long for houses and lands or a fixed
habitation. If he had the best house in Paris, with silken beds and all
that sort of thing, the second night he would steal away and sleep
comfortably under an arch, or in one of his accustomed places. He is
very like one of the chiefs of the Onondaga Indians, who was persuaded
to build him a house in the civilized fashion. He slept in it one night
and the next morning broke every pane of glass out of the windows. That
night he slumbered with the rain and sleet pouring in upon him, and was
happy. That was something like.
The Parisian gamin, grown to be a man, could not sit still long enough
to make an efficient Alderman, and he would not give a turn of his hand
for all the money that could be made out of the position. He can be
happy with rags and a crust, and what is money to such a being? He
understands better than any philosopher, that riches consist in not how
much you have, as how little you can get on with. If rags and apple
cores suffice, why more?
And so he doesn't go about speculating in stocks, and getting "politikle
inflooence," as his counterpart in New York does, but he is content with
what he finds himself. No one ever heard of a Parisian grown-up gamin
attempting to control railroads, or build steamships, or anything of the
sort. He dies as he lived, and is always happy. Possibly he is the wise
man. Who shall say?
But he is a part and parcel of French civilization--a natural outgrowth
of French habits and customs. Without the gamin, Paris would not be
Paris. Bad as he may be, he is always like Artemus Ward's kangaroo, "an
amoosin' little cuss," a perpetual mystery, an everlasting study, and
something that no other city in the world possesses. He can live on less
and get more happiness out of it than any other human being on earth;
but he could not exist out of Paris. He had rather be in prison in Paris
than to have a palace anywhere else. He belongs to that atmosphere, to
those surroundings, and can exist nowhere else in the world. He is a
savage in the midst of the highest civilization, a drone in a hive of
industry, and hungry in the midst of plenty. He is everything that he
should not be. Nevertheless, I rather like him, to say the least. He is
picturesque.