Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (95 page)

Nobody ever discovered to what this monologue related.

If, perchance, this soliloquy referred to the last time he had dined it was three days before, for it was then Friday.

The barber in his shop, warmed by a good stove, was shaving a customer and casting from time to time a look towards this enemy, this frozen and brazen
gamin,
who had both hands in his pockets, but his wits evidently out of their sheath.

While Gavroche was examining the bride, the windows, and the Wind sor soap, two children of unequal height, rather neatly dressed, and still smaller than he, one appearing to be seven years old, the other five, timidly turned the knob of the door and entered the shop, asking for something, charity, perhaps, in a plaintive manner which rather resembled a groan than a prayer. They both spoke at once and their words were unintelligible because sobs choked the voice of the younger, and the cold made the elder’s teeth chatter. The barber turned with a furious face, and without leaving his razor, crowding back the elder with his left hand and the little one with his knee, pushed them into the street and shut the door saying:

“Coming and freezing people for nothing!”

The two children went on, crying. Meanwhile a cloud had come up; it began to rain.

Little Gavroche ran after them and accosted them:

“What is the matter with you, little brats?”

“We don’t know where to sleep,” answered the elder.

“Is that all?” said Gavroche. “That is nothing. Does anybody cry for that? You aren’t lost puppies.”

And assuming, through his slightly bantering superiority, a tone of softened authority and gentle protection:

“Momacques,
come with me.”

“Yes, monsieur,” said the elder.

And the two children followed him as they would have followed an archbishop. They had stopped crying.

Gavroche led them up the Rue Saint Antoine in the direction of the Bastille.

Gavroche, as he travelled on, cast an indignant and retrospective glance at the barber’s shop.

“He has no heart, that
merlan,”
he muttered. “He is an
Angliche.”
^ej

A girl, seeing them all three marching in a row, Gavroche at the head, broke into a loud laugh. This laugh was lacking in respect for the group.

“Good day, Mamselle Onmibus,”
^ek
said Gavroche to her.

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

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

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

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

This done:

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

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

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

And he started walking again.

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

And, looking at the cloud, he cried:

“Gotcha!”

The two children limped along behind him.

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

“Ah, ha,
mômes,
have we dined?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

He resumed, after a moment’s silence:

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

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

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

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

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

And he took a sou from one of his pockets.

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

“Boy! five centimes’ worth of bread.”

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

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

“There are three of us.”

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

“Whossachuav?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The little boys looked at him confounded.

Gavroche began to laugh:

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

And he added:

“Eat.”

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

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

“Stick that in your gun.”

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

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

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

They went on in the direction of the Bastille.

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

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

Then he thoughtfully muttered between his teeth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Brats! don’t be frightened.”

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

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

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

“Mount and enter.”

The two little fellows looked at each other in terror.

“You are afraid,
mômes!”
exclaimed Gavroche.

And he added:

“You shall see.”

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

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

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

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

“Don’t be afraid!”

“That’s it!”

“Come on!”

“Put your foot there!”

“Your hand here!”

“Be brave!”

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

“Gulped!” said he.

The
môme
had passed through the crevice.

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

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

“I will push him; you pull him.”

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

“Here we are! Hurrah for General Lafayette!”

This explosion over, he added:

“Brats, you are in my house.”