Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (early readers .txt) 📖

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Author: Victor Hugo
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people made haste to bolt their doors. They said: “How will all this end?” From moment to moment, in proportion as the darkness descended, Paris seemed to take on a more mournful hue from the formidable flaming of the revolt.

BOOK ELEVENTH.—THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE

CHAPTER I—SOME EXPLANATIONS WITH REGARD TO THE ORIGIN OF GAVROCHE’S POETRY. THE INFLUENCE OF AN ACADEMICIAN ON THIS POETRY

At the instant when the insurrection, arising from the shock of the populace and the military in front of the Arsenal, started a movement in advance and towards the rear in the multitude which was following the hearse and which, through the whole length of the boulevards, weighed, so to speak, on the head of the procession, there arose a frightful ebb. The rout was shaken, their ranks were broken, all ran, fled, made their escape, some with shouts of attack, others with the pallor of flight. The great river which covered the boulevards divided in a twinkling, overflowed to right and left, and spread in torrents over two hundred streets at once with the roar of a sewer that has broken loose.

At that moment, a ragged child who was coming down through the Rue Ménilmontant, holding in his hand a branch of blossoming laburnum which he had just plucked on the heights of Belleville, caught sight of an old holster-pistol in the show-window of a bric-à-brac merchant’s shop.

“Mother What’s-your-name, I’m going to borrow your machine.”

And off he ran with the pistol.

Two minutes later, a flood of frightened bourgeois who were fleeing through the Rue Amelot and the Rue Basse, encountered the lad brandishing his pistol and singing:—

La nuit on ne voit rien,
Le jour on voit très bien,
D’un écrit apocryphe
Le bourgeois s‘ébouriffe,
Pratiquez la vertu,
Tutu, chapeau pointu!44

It was little Gavroche on his way to the wars.

On the boulevard he noticed that the pistol had no trigger.

Who was the author of that couplet which served to punctuate his march, and of all the other songs which he was fond of singing on occasion? We know not. Who does know? Himself, perhaps. However, Gavroche was well up in all the popular tunes in circulation, and he mingled with them his own chirpings. An observing urchin and a rogue, he made a potpourri of the voices of nature and the voices of Paris. He combined the repertory of the birds with the repertory of the workshops. He was acquainted with thieves, a tribe contiguous to his own. He had, it appears, been for three months apprenticed to a printer. He had one day executed a commission for M. Baour-Lormian, one of the Forty. Gavroche was a gamin of letters.

Moreover, Gavroche had no suspicion of the fact that when he had offered the hospitality of his elephant to two brats on that villainously rainy night, it was to his own brothers that he had played the part of Providence. His brothers in the evening, his father in the morning; that is what his night had been like. On quitting the Rue des Ballets at daybreak, he had returned in haste to the elephant, had artistically extracted from it the two brats, had shared with them some sort of breakfast which he had invented, and had then gone away, confiding them to that good mother, the street, who had brought him up, almost entirely. On leaving them, he had appointed to meet them at the same spot in the evening, and had left them this discourse by way of a farewell: “I break a cane, otherwise expressed, I cut my stick, or, as they say at the court, I file off. If you don’t find papa and mamma, young ‘uns, come back here this evening. I’ll scramble you up some supper, and I’ll give you a shakedown.” The two children, picked up by some policeman and placed in the refuge, or stolen by some mountebank, or having simply strayed off in that immense Chinese puzzle of a Paris, did not return. The lowest depths of the actual social world are full of these lost traces. Gavroche did not see them again. Ten or twelve weeks had elapsed since that night. More than once he had scratched the back of his head and said: “Where the devil are my two children?”

In the meantime, he had arrived, pistol in hand, in the Rue du Pont-aux-Choux. He noticed that there was but one shop open in that street, and, a matter worthy of reflection, that was a pastry-cook’s shop. This presented a providential occasion to eat another apple-turnover before entering the unknown. Gavroche halted, fumbled in his fob, turned his pocket inside out, found nothing, not even a sou, and began to shout: “Help!”

It is hard to miss the last cake.

Nevertheless, Gavroche pursued his way.

Two minutes later he was in the Rue Saint-Louis. While traversing the Rue du Parc-Royal, he felt called upon to make good the loss of the apple-turnover which had been impossible, and he indulged himself in the immense delight of tearing down the theatre posters in broad daylight.

A little further on, on catching sight of a group of comfortable-looking persons, who seemed to be landed proprietors, he shrugged his shoulders and spit out at random before him this mouthful of philosophical bile as they passed:

“How fat those moneyed men are! They’re drunk! They just wallow in good dinners. Ask ‘em what they do with their money. They don’t know. They eat it, that’s what they do! As much as their bellies will hold.”

CHAPTER II—GAVROCHE ON THE MARCH

The brandishing of a triggerless pistol, grasped in one’s hand in the open street, is so much of a public function that Gavroche felt his fervor increasing with every moment. Amid the scraps of the Marseillaise which he was singing, he shouted:—

“All goes well. I suffer a great deal in my left paw, I’m all broken up with rheumatism, but I’m satisfied, citizens. All that the bourgeois have to do is to bear themselves well, I’ll sneeze them out subversive couplets. What are the police spies? Dogs. And I’d just like to have one of them at the end of my pistol. I’m just from the boulevard, my friends. It’s getting hot there, it’s getting into a little boil, it’s simmering. It’s time to skim the pot. Forward march, men! Let an impure blood inundate the furrows! I give my days to my country, I shall never see my concubine more, Nini, finished, yes, Nini? But never mind! Long live joy! Let’s fight, crebleu! I’ve had enough of despotism.”

At that moment, the horse of a lancer of the National Guard having fallen, Gavroche laid his pistol on the pavement, and picked up the man, then he assisted in raising the horse. After which he picked up his pistol and resumed his way. In the Rue de Thorigny, all was peace and silence. This apathy, peculiar to the Marais, presented a contrast with the vast surrounding uproar. Four gossips were chatting in a doorway.

Scotland has trios of witches, Paris has quartettes of old gossiping hags; and the “Thou shalt be King” could be quite as mournfully hurled at Bonaparte in the Carrefour Baudoyer as at Macbeth on the heath of Armuyr. The croak would be almost identical.

The gossips of the Rue de Thorigny busied themselves only with their own concerns. Three of them were portresses, and the fourth was a rag-picker with her basket on her back.

All four of them seemed to be standing at the four corners of old age, which are decrepitude, decay, ruin, and sadness.

The rag-picker was humble. In this open-air society, it is the rag-picker who salutes and the portress who patronizes. This is caused by the corner for refuse, which is fat or lean, according to the will of the portresses, and after the fancy of the one who makes the heap. There may be kindness in the broom.

This rag-picker was a grateful creature, and she smiled, with what a smile! on the three portresses. Things of this nature were said:—

“Ah, by the way, is your cat still cross?”

“Good gracious, cats are naturally the enemies of dogs, you know. It’s the dogs who complain.”

“And people also.”

“But the fleas from a cat don’t go after people.”

“That’s not the trouble, dogs are dangerous. I remember one year when there were so many dogs that it was necessary to put it in the newspapers. That was at the time when there were at the Tuileries great sheep that drew the little carriage of the King of Rome. Do you remember the King of Rome?”

“I liked the Duc de Bordeau better.”

“I knew Louis XVIII. I prefer Louis XVIII.”

“Meat is awfully dear, isn’t it, Mother Patagon?”

“Ah! don’t mention it, the butcher’s shop is a horror. A horrible horror—one can’t afford anything but the poor cuts nowadays.”

Here the rag-picker interposed:—

“Ladies, business is dull. The refuse heaps are miserable. No one throws anything away any more. They eat everything.”

“There are poorer people than you, la Vargoulême.”

“Ah, that’s true,” replied the rag-picker, with deference, “I have a profession.”

A pause succeeded, and the rag-picker, yielding to that necessity for boasting which lies at the bottom of man, added:—

“In the morning, on my return home, I pick over my basket, I sort my things. This makes heaps in my room. I put the rags in a basket, the cores and stalks in a bucket, the linen in my cupboard, the woollen stuff in my commode, the old papers in the corner of the window, the things that are good to eat in my bowl, the bits of glass in my fireplace, the old shoes behind my door, and the bones under my bed.”

Gavroche had stopped behind her and was listening.

“Old ladies,” said he, “what do you mean by talking politics?”

He was assailed by a broadside, composed of a quadruple howl.

“Here’s another rascal.”

“What’s that he’s got in his paddle? A pistol?”

“Well, I’d like to know what sort of a beggar’s brat this is?”

“That sort of animal is never easy unless he’s overturning the authorities.”

Gavroche disdainfully contented himself, by way of reprisal, with elevating the tip of his nose with his thumb and opening his hand wide.

The rag-picker cried:—

“You malicious, bare-pawed little wretch!”

The one who answered to the name of Patagon clapped her hands together in horror.

“There’s going to be evil doings, that’s certain. The errand-boy next door has a little pointed beard, I have seen him pass every day with a young person in a pink bonnet on his arm; to-day I saw him pass, and he had a gun on his arm. Mame Bacheux says, that last week there was a revolution at—at—at—where’s the calf!—at Pontoise. And then, there you see him, that horrid scamp, with his pistol! It seems that the Célestins are full of pistols. What do you suppose the Government can do with good-for-nothings who don’t know how to do anything but contrive ways of upsetting the world, when we had just begun to get a little quiet after all the misfortunes that have happened, good Lord! to that poor queen whom I saw pass in the tumbril! And all this is going to make tobacco dearer. It’s infamous! And I shall certainly go to see him beheaded on the guillotine, the wretch!”

“You’ve got the sniffles, old lady,” said Gavroche. “Blow your promontory.”

And he passed on. When he was in the Rue Pavée, the rag-picker occurred to his mind, and he indulged in this soliloquy:—

“You’re in the wrong to insult the revolutionists, Mother Dust-Heap-Corner. This pistol is in your interests. It’s so that you may have more good things to eat in your basket.”

All at once, he heard a shout behind him; it was the portress Patagon who had followed him, and who was shaking her fist at him in the distance and crying:—

“You’re nothing but a bastard.”

“Oh! Come now,” said Gavroche, “I don’t care a brass farthing for that!”

Shortly afterwards, he