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."
BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE
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 Vargouleme."
"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 Celestins 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 Pavee, 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 passed the Hotel Lamoignon.
There he uttered this appeal:--
"Forward march to the battle!"
And he was seized with a fit of melancholy.
He gazed at his pistol with an air of reproach which seemed an attempt to appease it:--
"I'm going off," said he, "but you won't go off!"
One dog may distract the attention from another dog.[45] A very gaunt poodle came along at the moment.
Gavroche felt compassion for him.
[45] Chien, dog, trigger.
"My poor doggy," said he, "you must have gone and swallowed a cask, for all the hoops are visible."
Then he directed his course towards l'Orme-Saint-Gervais.
BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE
CHAPTER III
JUST INDIGNATION OF A HAIR-DRESSER
The worthy hair-dresser who had chased from his shop the two little fellows to whom Gavroche had opened the paternal interior of the elephant was at that moment in his shop engaged in shaving an old soldier of the legion who had served under the Empire. They were talking.
The hair-dresser had, naturally, spoken to the veteran of the riot, then of General Lamarque, and from Lamarque they had passed to the Emperor.
Thence sprang up a conversation between barber and soldier which Prudhomme, had he been present, would have enriched with arabesques, and which he would have entitled: "Dialogue between the razor and the sword."
"How did the Emperor ride, sir?" said the barber.
"Badly.
He did not know how to fall--so he never fell."
"Did he have fine horses?
He must have had fine horses!"
"On the day when he gave me my cross, I noticed his beast. It was a racing mare, perfectly white.
Her ears were very wide apart, her saddle deep, a fine head marked with a black star, a very long neck, strongly articulated knees, prominent ribs, oblique shoulders and a powerful crupper.
A little more than fifteen hands in height."
"A pretty horse," remarked the hair-dresser.
"It was His Majesty's beast."
The hair-dresser felt, that after this observation, a short silence would be fitting, so he conformed himself to it, and then went on:--
"The Emperor was never wounded but once, was he, sir?"
The old soldier replied with the calm and sovereign tone of a man who had been there:--
"In the heel.
At Ratisbon.
I never saw him so well dressed as on that day.
He was as neat as a new sou."
"And you, Mr. Veteran, you must have been often wounded?"
"I?" said the soldier, "ah! not to amount to anything.
At Marengo, I received two sabre-blows on the back of my neck, a bullet in the right arm at Austerlitz, another in the left hip at Jena. At Friedland, a thrust from a bayonet, there,--at the Moskowa seven or eight lance-thrusts, no matter where, at Lutzen a splinter of a shell crushed one of my fingers.
Ah! and then at Waterloo, a ball from a biscaien in the thigh, that's all."
"How fine that is!" exclaimed the hair-dresser, in Pindaric accents, "to die on the field of battle!
On my word of honor, rather than die in bed, of an illness, slowly, a bit by bit each day, with drugs, cataplasms, syringes, medicines, I should prefer to receive a cannon-ball in my belly!"
"You're not over fastidious," said the soldier.
He had hardly spoken when a fearful crash shook the shop. The show-window had suddenly been fractured.
The wig-maker turned pale.
"Ah, good God!" he exclaimed, "it's one of them!"
"What?"
"A cannon-ball."
"Here it is," said the soldier.
And he picked up something that was rolling about the floor. It was a pebble.
The hair-dresser ran to the broken window and beheld Gavroche fleeing at the full speed, towards the Marche Saint-Jean. As he passed the hair-dresser's shop Gavroche, who had the two brats still in his mind, had not been able to resist the impulse to say good day to him, and had flung a stone through his panes.
"You see!" shrieked the hair-dresser, who from white had turned blue, "that fellow returns and does mischief for the pure pleasure of it. What has any one done to that gamin?"
BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE
CHAPTER IV
In the meantime, in the Marche Saint-Jean, where the post had already been disarmed, Gavroche had just "effected a junction" with a band led by Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Feuilly. They were armed after a fashion.
Bahorel and Jean Prouvaire had found them and swelled the group.
Enjolras had a double-barrelled hunting-gun, Combeferre the gun of a National Guard bearing the number of his legion, and in his belt, two pistols which his unbuttoned coat allowed to be seen, Jean Prouvaire an old cavalry musket, Bahorel a rifle; Courfeyrac was brandishing an unsheathed sword-cane. Feuilly, with a naked sword in his hand, marched at their head shouting: "Long live Poland!"
