Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (96 page)

Gavroche was in fact at home.

O unexpected utility of the useless! charity of great things! goodness of giants! This monstrous monument which had contained a thought of the emperor, had become the box of a
gamin.
The
môme
had been accepted and sheltered by the colossus. The bourgeois in their Sunday clothes, who passed by the elephant of the Bastille, frequently said, eyeing it scornfully with their goggle eyes: “What’s the use of that?” The use of it was to save from the cold, the frost, the hail, the rain, to protect from the wintry wind, to preserve from sleeping in the mud, which breeds fever, and from sleeping in the snow, which breeds death, a little being with no father or mother, with no bread, no clothing, no asylum. The use of it was to receive the innocent whom society repulsed. The use of it was to diminish the public crime. It was a den open for him to whom all doors were closed. It seemed as if the miserable old mastodon, invaded by vermin and oblivion, covered with warts, mould, and ulcers, tottering, worm-eaten, abandoned, condemned, a sort of colossal beggar asking in vain the alms of a benevolent look in the middle of the Square, had taken pity itself on this other beggar, the poor pigmy who went with no shoes to his feet, no roof over his head, blowing his fingers, clothed in rags, fed upon what is thrown away. This was the use of the elephant of the Bastille. This idea of Napoleon, disdained by men, had been taken up by God. That which had been illustrious only, had become august. The emperor must have had, to realise what he meditated, porphyry, brass, iron, gold, marble; for God the old assemblage of boards, joists, and plaster was enough. The emperor had had a dream of genius; in this titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, brandishing his trunk, bearing his tower, and making the joyous and vivifying waters gush out on all sides about him, he desired to incarnate the people. God had done a grander thing with it, he lodged a child.

The hole by which Gavroche had entered was a break hardly visible from the outside, concealed as it was, and as we have said under the belly of the elephant, and so narrow that hardly anything but cats and
mômes
could have passed through.

“Let us begin,” said Gavroche, “by telling the porter that we are not in.”

And plunging into the darkness with certainty, like one who is familiar with his room, he took a board and stopped the hole.

Gavroche plunged again into the darkness. The children heard the sputtering of the taper plunged into the phosphoric bottle. The chemical taper was not yet in existence; the Fumade tinder-box represented progress at that period.

A sudden light made them wink; Gavroche had just lighted one of those bits of string soaked in resin which are called cellar-rats. The cellar-rats, which made more smoke than flame, rendered the inside of the elephant dimly visible.

Gavroche’s two guests looked about them, and felt something like what one would feel who should be shut up in the great tun of Heidelberg, or better still, what Jonah must have felt in the Biblical belly of the whale. An entire gigantic skeleton appeared to them, and enveloped them. Above, a long dusky beam, from which projected at regular distances massive encircling timbers, represented the vertebral column with its ribs, stalactites of plaster hung down like the viscera, and from one side to the other huge spider-webs made dusty diaphragms. Here and there in the corners great blackish spots were seen, which had the appearance of being alive, and which changed their places rapidly with a wild and startled motion.

The debris fallen from the elephant’s back upon his belly had filled up the concavity, so that they could walk upon it as upon a floor.

The smaller one hugged close to his brother and said in a low tone:

“It’s dark.”

This word made Gavroche cry out. The petrified air of the two
mômes
rendered a shock necessary.

“What’s your point?” he exclaimed. “Are we kidding around? Are we being fussy? Must you have the Tuileries? would you be fools? Say, I warn you that I do not belong to the regiment of ninnies. Are you the brats of the pope’s headwaiter?”

A little roughness is good for a person who’s afraid. It is reassuring. The two children came close to Gavroche.

Gavroche, paternally softened by this confidence, passed “from the grave to the gentle,” and addressing himself to the smaller:

“Goosy,” said he to him, accenting the insult with a caressing tone, “it is outside that it is dark. Outside it rains, here it doesn’t rain; outside it is cold, here there isn’t a speck of wind; outside there are heaps of folks, here there isn’t anybody; outside there isn’t even a moon, here there is my candle, by jinks!”

The two children began to regard the apartment with less fear; but Gavroche did not allow them much longer leisure for contemplation.

“Quick,” said he.

And he pushed them towards what we are very happy to be able to call the bottom of the chamber.

His bed was there.

Gavroche’s bed was complete. That is to say, there was a mattress, a covering, and an alcove with curtains.

The mattress was a straw mat, the covering a large blanket of coarse grey wool, very warm and almost new. The alcove was like this:

Three rather long laths, sunk and firmly settled into the rubbish of the floor, that is to say of the belly of the elephant, two in front and one behind, and tied together by a string at the top, so as to form a pyramidal frame. This frame supported a fine trellis of brass wire which was simply hung over it, but artistically applied and kept in place by fastenings of iron wire, in such a way that it entirely enveloped the three laths. A row of large stones fixed upon the ground all about this trellis so as to let nothing pass. This trellis was nothing more nor less than a fragment of those copper nettings which are used to cover the bird-houses in menageries. Gavroche’s bed under this netting was as if in a cage. Altogether it was like an Esquimaux tent.

It was this netting which took the place of curtains.

Gavroche removed the stones a little which kept down the netting in front, and the two folds of the trellis which lay one over the other opened.

“
Mômes,
on your hands and knees!” said Gavroche.

He made his guests enter into the cage carefully, then he went in after them, creeping, pulled back the stones, and hermetically closed the opening.

They were all three stretched upon the straw.

Small as they were, none of them could have stood up in the alcove. Gavroche still held the cellar-rat in his hand.

“Now,” said he,
“pioncez!
[sleep] I am going to suppress the candelabra.”

“Monsieur,” inquired the elder of the two brothers, of Gavroche, pointing to the netting, “what is that?”

“That,” said Gavroche, “is for the rats,
pioncez!”

The two children looked with a timid and stupefied respect upon this intrepid and inventive being, a vagabond like them, isolated like them, wretched like them, who was something wonderful and all-powerful, who seemed to them supernatural, and whose countenance was made up of all the grimaces of an old mountebank mingled with the most natural and most pleasant smile.

“Monsieur,” said the elder timidly, “you are not afraid then of the sergents de ville?”

Gavroche merely answered:

“Môme!
we don’t say sergents de ville, we say
cognes.”

The smaller boy had his eyes open, but he said nothing. As he was on the edge of the mat, the elder being in the middle, Gavroche tucked the blanket under him as a mother would have done, and raised the mat under his head with some old rags in such a way as to make a pillow for the
môme.
Then he turned towards the elder:

“Eh! we are pretty well off here!”

“Oh, yes,” answered the elder, looking at Gavroche with the expression of a rescued angel.

The two poor little soaked children were beginning to get warm.

“Ah, now,” continued Gavroche, “what in the world were you crying for?”

And pointing out the little one to his brother:

“A youngster like that, I don’t say, but a big boy like you to cry is silly; it makes you look like a calf.”

“Well,” said the child, “we had no room, no place to go.”

“Brat!” replied Gavroche, “we don’t say a room, we say a
piolle.”

“And then we were afraid to be all alone like that in the night.”

“We don’t say night, we say sorgue.”

“Thank you, monsieur,” said the child.

“Listen to me,” continued Gavroche, “you must never whine any more for anything. I will take care of you. You will see what fun we have. In summer we will go to the Glacière with Navet, a comrade of mine, we will go in swimming in the Basin, we will run on the track before the Bridge of Austerlitz all naked, that makes the washerwomen mad. They scream, they scold, if you only knew how funny they are! We will go to see the skeleton man. He is alive. At the Champs-Elysées. That parishioner is as thin as anything. And then I will take you to the theatre. I will take you to see Frederic Lemaitre.
^ep
I have tickets, I know the actors, I even acted once in a play. We were
mômes
so high, we ran about under a cloth, that made the sea. I will have you hired at my theatre. We will go and see the savages. They’re not real, those savages. They have red tights which wrinkle, and you can see their elbows darned with white thread. After that we will go to the Opera. We will go in with the claqueurs. The claque at the Opera is very select. I wouldn’t go with the claque on the boulevards. At the Opera, just think, there are some who pay twenty sous, but they are fools. They call them dishrags. And then we will go to see the guillotining. I will show you the executioner. He lives in the Rue des Marias. Monsieur Sanson. There is a letter-box on his door. Oh! we have famous fun!”

At this moment, a drop of wax fell upon Gavroche’s finger, and recalled him to the realities of life.

“The deuce!” said he, “there’s the match used up. Attention! I can’t spend more than a sou a month for my lighting. When we go to bed, we must go to sleep. We haven’t time to read the romances of Monsieur Paul de Kock. Besides the light might show through the cracks of the porte-cochère, and the cognes couldn’t help seeing.”

“And then,” timidly observed the elder who alone dared to talk with Gavroche and reply to him, “a spark might fall into the straw, we must take care not to burn the house up.”

“We don’t say burn the house,” said Gavroche, “we say
riffauder
the
bocard.”

The storm redoubled. They heard, in the intervals of the thunder, the tempest beating against the back of the colossus.

“Pour away, old rain!” said Gavroche. “It does amuse me to hear the decanter emptying along the house’s legs. Winter is a fool; he throws away his goods, he loses his trouble, he can’t wet us, and it makes him grumble, the old water-carrier!”

This allusion to thunder, all the consequences of which Gavroche accepted as a philosopher of the nineteenth century, was followed by a very vivid flash, so blinding that something of it entered by the crevice into the belly of the elephant. Almost at the same instant the thunder burst forth very furiously. The two little boys uttered a cry, and rose so quickly that the trellis was almost thrown out of place; but Gavroche turned his bold face towards them, and took advantage of the clap of thunder to burst into a laugh.

“Be calm, children. Don’t upset the edifice. That was fine thunder; give us some more. That wasn’t any fool of a flash. Bravo God! by jinks! that is most as good as it is at the theatre.”

This said, he restored order in the trellis, gently pushed the two children to the head of the bed, pressed their knees to stretch them out at full length, and exclaimed:

“As God is lighting his candle, I can blow out mine. Children, we must sleep, my young humans. It is very bad not to sleep. It would make you
schlinguer
in your strainer, or, as the big bugs say, stink in your jaws. Wind yourselves up well in the peel! I’m going to extinguish. Are you all right?”

“Yes,” murmured the elder, “I am right. I feel as if I had feathers under my head.”

“We don’t say head,” cried Gavroche, “we say
tronche.”

The two children hugged close to each other. Gavroche finished arranging them upon the mat, and pulled the blanket up to their ears, then repeated for the third time the injunction in hieratic language:

And he blew out the taper.

Hardly was the light extinguished when a singular tremor began to agitate the trellis under which the three children were lying. It was a multitude of dull rubbings, which gave a metallic sound, as if claws and teeth were grinding the copper wire. This was accompanied by all sorts of little sharp cries.

The little boy of five, hearing this tumult over his head, and shivering with fear, pushed the elder brother with his elbow, but the elder brother had already
“pioncé,
according to Gavroche’s order. Then the little boy, no longer capable of fearing him, ventured to accost Gavroche, but very low, and holding his breath:

“Monsieur?”

“Hey?” said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.

“What is that?”

“It is the rats,” answered Gavroche.

And he laid his head again upon the mat.

The rats, in fact, which swarmed by thousands in the carcass of the elephant, and which were those living black spots of which we have spoken, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle so long as it burned, but as soon as this cavern, which was, as it were, their city, had been restored to night, smelling there what the good storyteller Perrault calls “some fresh meat,” they had rushed in en masse upon Gavroche’s tent, climbed to the top, and were biting its meshes as if they were seeking to get through this new-fashioned mosquito bar.