But the task of wise men differs greatly from that of clever men, and the revolution of 1830 quickly stopped; for when a revolution has run ashore, the clever men plunder the wreck. Clever men in our century have decreed themselves the title of statesmen, so that the phrase has eventually become a bit of slang. For it must not be forgotten that where there is only cleverness, littleness necessarily exists, and to say "the clever" is much like saying the "mediocrities." In the same way the word "statesman" is often equivalent to saying "traitor." If we believe clever men, then revolutions like that of July are severed arteries, and a rapid ligature is required. Right, if too loudly proclaimed, begins to give way, and hence so soon as right is substantiated the State must be strengthened, and when liberty is injured attention must be turned to power. Here wise men, though they have not yet separated from clever men, begin to distrust them. Power, very good! But, in the first place, what is power; and secondly, whence does it come? The clever men do not appear to hear the muttered objection and continue their manœuvres. According to politicians who ingeniously place a mask of necessity upon profitable fiction, the first want of a people after a revolution, if that people form part of a monarchical continent, is to obtain a dynasty. In this way they say peace is secured after the revolution, that is to say, the necessary time for repairing the house and dressing the wounds. A dynasty hides the scaffolding and covers the hospital. Now, it is not always easy to obtain a dynasty, although the first man of genius or the first adventurer met with is sufficient to make a king. You have in the first case Bonaparte, and in the second Iturbide. But the first family come across is not sufficient to form a dynasty, for there is necessarily a certain amount of antiquity required as a race, and the wrinkle of centuries cannot be improvised.
If we place ourselves at the standpoint of statesmen, with all due reserves of course, what are the qualities of a king who issues from a revolution? He may be, and it is useful that he should be, revolutionary; that is to say, have played a personal part in the revolution, have become either compromised or renowned in it, and have wielded the axe or drawn the sword. What are the qualities of a dynasty? It must be national; that is to say, distantly revolutionary, not through acts done, but through ideas accepted. It must be composed of the past and be historical, and of the future and be sympathetic. All this explains why the first revolutions are satisfied with finding a man, Napoleon or Cromwell, while the second are determined on finding a family, like the House of Brunswick or the House of Orléans. Royal houses resemble those Indian fig-trees, each branch of which bends down, becomes rooted in the ground, and grows into a fig-tree. Each branch of the family may become a dynasty, on the sole condition that it bends down to the people. Such is the theory of clever men.
This, then, is the great art,—to give success the sound of a catastrophe, so that those who profit by it may also tremble at it; to season every step taken with fear; to increase the curve of the transition until progress is checked; to spoil this daybreak, denounce and retrench the roughness of enthusiasm; to cut angles and nails; to pad the triumph, muffle the right, roll the giant people in flannel, and put it to bed at full speed; to place this excess of health under medical treatment, and regard Hercules as a convalescent; to dilute the event in expediency, and offer to minds thirsting for the ideal this weak nectar; to take precautions against extreme success, and provide the revolution with a sunshade. 1830 practised this theory, which had already been applied to England by 1688. 1830 is a revolution arrested half-way, and a moiety of progress is almost right. Now, logic ignores this as absolutely as the sun ignores a rush-light. Who check revolutions half-way? The bourgeoisie. Why? Because the bourgeoisie represent satisfied self-interest. Yesterday appetite was felt, to-day fulness, and to-morrow satiety. The phenomenon of 1814, after Napoleon, was reproduced in 1830 after Charles X. Attempts have been made, though wrongly, to convert the bourgeoisie into a class, but they are merely the contented portion of the population. The bourgeois is a man who has at last time to sit down, and a chair is not a caste. But through a desire to sit down too soon, the progress of the human race may be arrested, and this has frequently been the fault of the bourgeoisie; and people are not a class because they commit a fault, and selfishness is not one of the divisions of the social order. However, as we must be just even towards selfishness, the condition for which that portion of the nation called the bourgeoisie yearned after the shock of 1830 was not inertness, which is complicated with indifference and sloth, and contains a little shame; nor was it sleep, which presupposes a momentary oblivion accessible to dreams, but it was a halt. This word contains a double, singular, and almost contradictory meaning, for it implies troops on the march, that is to say, movement, and a stop-page, that is to say, rest. A halt is the restoration of strength, it is repose armed and awake, it is the accomplished fact, posting its sentries and standing on guard. A halt presupposes a combat yesterday and a combat to-morrow,—it is the interlude between 1830 and 1848.
What we here call combat may also be called progress. Hence the bourgeoisie as well as the statesmen required a man who expressed the idea of a halt, an "although-because," a composite individuality signifying revolution and stability; in other words, strengthening the present by the evident compatibility of the past with the future. This man was found "ready-made," and his name was Louis Philippe d'Orléans. The 221 made Louis Philippe king, and Lafayette undertook the coronation. He named him "the best of Republics," and the Town Hall of Paris was substituted for the Cathedral of Rheims. This substitution of a half-throne for a complete throne was "the work of 1830." When the clever men had completed their task, the immense fault of their solution was apparent; all this had been done beyond the pale of absolute right, which shouted, "I protest!" and then, formidable thing, receded into the darkness.
Javert's triumph at the Maison Gorbeau had seemed complete, but was not so. In the first place, and that was his chief anxiety. Javert had not been able to make a prisoner of the prisoner; the assassinated man who escapes is more suspicious than the assassin, and it was probable that this personage, such a precious capture for the bandits, might be an equally good prize for the authorities. Next, Montparnasse slipped out of Javert's clutches, and he must wait for another opportunity to lay hands on that "cursed dandy." Montparnasse, in fact, having met Éponine on the boulevard, keeping watch, went off with her, preferring to play the Nemorino with the daughter rather than Schinderhannes with the father, and it was lucky for him that he did so, as he was now free. As for Éponine, Javert "nailed" her, but it was a poor consolation, and sent her to join Azelma at the Madelonnettes. Lastly, in the drive from No. 50-52 to La Force, one of the chief men arrested, Claquesous, had disappeared. No one knew how he did it, and the sergeants and agents did not at all understand it; he had turned into vapor, slipped through the handcuffs, and passed through a crack in the coach; but no one could say anything except that on reaching the prison there was no Claquesous. There was in this either enchantment or a police trick. Had Claquesous melted away in the darkness like a snow-flake in the water? Was there an unavowed connivance on the part of the agents? Did this man belong to the double enigma of disorder and order? Had this Sphynx its front paws in crimes, and its hind paws in the police? Javert did not accept these combinations, and struggled against such compromises; but his squad contained other inspectors besides himself, and though his subordinates, perhaps more thoroughly initiated in the secrets of the Préfecture, and Claquesous was such a villain that he might be a very excellent agent. To be on such intimate juggling relations with the night is excellent for plunder and admirable for the police, and there are double-edged rogues of the sort. However this might be, Claquesous was lost and could not be found, and Javert seemed more irritated than surprised. As for Marius, "that scrub of a lawyer who was probably frightened," and whose name he had forgotten, Javert did not trouble himself much about him, and besides, a lawyer can always be found. But, was he only a lawyer?
The examination began, and the magistrate thought it advisable not to put one of the members of the Patron Minette band in solitary confinement, as it was hoped he might chatter. This was Brujon, the hairy man of the Rue du Petit Banquier; he was turned into the Charlemagne Court, and the eyes of the spies were kept upon him. This name of Brujon is one of the recollections of La Force. In the hideous yard called the Bâtiment Neuf,—which the governor named the Court of St. Bernard, and the robbers christened the Lion's Den,—and on the wall covered with scars and leprosy, that rose on the left to the height of the roof, and close to a rusty old iron gate which led to the old chapel of the ducal house of La Force, converted into a sleeping-ward for prisoners, there might have been seen, twelve years ago, a species of Bastille, clumsily engraved with a nail in the stone, and beneath it this signature,—
BRUJON, 1811.
The Brujon of 1811 was the father of the Brujon of 1832. The latter, of whom we could only catch a glimpse in the Gorbeau trap, was a very crafty and artful young fellow, with a downcast and plaintive air. It was in consequence of this air that the magistrate turned him loose, believing him more useful in the Charlemagne yard than in a secret cell. Robbers do not interrupt their labors because they are in the hands of justice, and do not trouble themselves about such a trifle. Being in prison for one crime does not prevent another being commenced. There are artists who have a picture in the Exhibition, but for all that work at a new one in their studio. Brujon seemed stupefied by prison; he might be seen standing for hours in the yard near the canteen man's stall, contemplating like an idiot the mean tariff of prices of the canteen which began with "garlic, fifty-two centimes," and ended with "cigar, five centimes." Or else he passed his time in trembling, shaking his teeth, declaring he had the fever, and inquiring whether one of the twenty-six beds in the Infirmary were vacant.
All at once, toward the second half of February, 1832, it was discovered that Brujon, the sleepy-looking man, had had three messages delivered, not in his own name, but in those of his comrades, by the prison porters. These messages had cost him fifty sous altogether, an exorbitant sum, which attracted the sergeant's attention. After making inquiries and consulting the tariff of messages hung up in the prisoners' visiting room, this authority found out that the fifty sous were thus divided,—one message to the Panthéon, ten sous; one to Val de Grâce, fifteen sous; and one to the Barrière de Grenelle, twenty-five sous, the latter being the dearest in the whole list. Now at these very places resided these very dangerous prowlers at the barrière, Kruideniers alias Bizarro, Glorious an ex-convict, and Stop-the-coach, and the attention of the police was directed to these through this incident. It was assumed that these men belonged to Patron Minette, of which band two chiefs, Babet and Gueulemer, were locked up. It was supposed that Brujon's messages, which were not delivered at the houses, but to persons waiting in the street, contained information about some meditated crime. The three ruffians were arrested, and the police believed they had scented some machination of Brujon's.
A week after these measures had been taken, a night watchman who was inspecting the ground-floor sleeping ward of the Bâtiment Neuf, was just placing his chestnut in the box (this was the method employed to make sure that the watchmen did their duty properly; every hour a chestnut must be dropped into all the boxes nailed on the doors of the sleeping wards), when he saw through the peep-hole Brujon sitting up in bed and writing something. The watchman went in, Brujon was placed in solitary confinement for a month, but what he had written could not be found. Hence the police were just as wise as before. One thing is certain, that on the next day a "postilion" was thrown from Charlemagne into the Lion's Den over the five-storied building that separated the two yards. Prisoners give the name of "postilion" to a ball of artistically moulded bread, which is sent to "Ireland," that is to say, thrown from one yard into another. This ball falls into the yard, the man who picks it up opens it and finds in it a note addressed to some prisoner in the yard. If it be a prisoner who finds the note he delivers it to the right address; if it be a guard, or one of those secretly-bought prisoners, called "sheep" in prisons, and "foxes" at the galleys, the note is carried to the wicket and delivered to the police. This time the postilion reached its address, although the man for whom it was intended was at the time in a separate cell. This person was no other than Babet, one of the four heads of Patron Minette. It contained a rolled-up paper, on which only two lines were written.
"Babet, there's a job to be done in the Rue Plumet, a gate opening on the garden."
It was what Brujon had written during the night. In spite of male and female searchers, Babet contrived to send the note from La Force to the Salpêtrière to a "lady friend" of his locked up there. She in her turn handed the note to a girl she knew, of the name of Magnon, whom the police were actively seeking, but had not yet arrested. This Magnon, of whose name the reader has already caught a glimpse, was closely connected with the Thénardiers, as we shall show presently, and by going to see Éponine was able to serve as a bridge between the Salpêtrière and the Madelonnettes. At this very period Éponine and Azelma were discharged for want of evidence, and when Éponine went out, Magnon, who was watching for her at the gate of the Madelonnettes, handed her the note from Brujon to Babet, with instructions to look into the affair. Éponine went to the Rue Plumet, recognized the grating and the garden, observed the house, watched for some days, and then carried to Magnon a biscuit, which the latter sent to Babet's mistress at the Salpêtrière. A biscuit, in the dark language of prisons, means, "Nothing to be done."
In less than a week from this, Babet and Brujon happened to meet, as one was going before the magistrate, the other returning. "Well," Brujon asked, "the Rue P.?" "Biscuit," Babet answered. Thus the fœtus of crime engendered by Brujon at La Force became abortive; but this abortion had consequences, for all that, perfectly foreign to Brujon's plans, as will be seen. In fancying we are tying one thread we often tie another.
Properly speaking, however, Jean Valjean's house was at the Rue Plumet, and he had arranged his existence there in the following fashion: Cosette and the servant occupied the pavilion, she had the best bedroom, with the painted press, the boudoir with the gilt beading, the president's drawing-room with its hangings and vast easy chairs, and the garden. Jean Valjean placed in Cosette's room a bed with a canopy of old damask in three colors, and an old and handsome Persian carpet, purchased at Mother Gaucher's in the Rue Figuier St. Paul; while, to correct the sternness of these old splendors, he added all the light gay furniture of girls, an étagère, bookshelves with gilt books, a desk and blotting-case, a work-table inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a silver dressing-case, and toilet articles of Japanese porcelain. Long damask curtains of three colors, like those on the bed, festooned the first-floor windows, while on the ground-floor they were of tapestry. All through the winter Cosette's small house was warmed from top to bottom, while Jean Valjean himself lived in the sort of porter's lodge at the end of the back yard, which was furnished with a mattress and common bedstead, a deal table, two straw-bottomed chairs, an earthenware water-jug, a few books on a plank, and his dear valise in a corner, but he never had any fire. He dined with Cosette, and black bread was put on the table for him; and he had said to Toussaint, when she came, "This young lady is mistress of the house." "And you, sir?" Toussaint replied, quite stupefied. "Oh! I am much better than the master,—I am the father."
Cosette had been taught house-keeping in the convent, and checked the expenses, which were very small. Daily Jean Valjean took Cosette for a walk, leading to the most sequestered path of the Luxembourg, and every Sunday they attended Mass at the Church of St. Jacques du Haut-pas, because it was a long distance off. As it is a very poor district, he gave away a considerable amount of alms, and the wretched flocked around him in the church, which produced the letter from Thénardier, "To the Benevolent Gentleman of the Church of St. Jacques du Haut-pas." He was fond of taking Cosette to visit the indigent and the sick, but no stranger ever entered the house in the Rue Plumet. Toussaint bought the provision, and Jean Valjean himself fetched the water from a fountain close by, on the boulevard. The wood and wine were kept in a semi-subterranean building covered with rock-work, near the door in the Rue de Babylone, which had formerly served the president as a grotto, for in the age of Follies and Petites Maisons, love was not possible without a grotto. In the door opening on the Rue de Babylone there was a letter-box, but, as the inhabitants of the house in the Rue Plumet received no letters, this box, once on a time the go-between in amourettes, and the confidant of a love-sick lawyer, was now only of service to receive the tax-papers and the guard-notices. For M. Fauchelevent, annuitant, belonged to the National Guard, and had been unable to escape the close meshes of the census of 1831. The municipal inquiries made at that period extended even to the convent of the Little Picpus, whence Jean Valjean emerged venerable in the eyes of the mayoralty, and consequently worthy of mounting guard. Three or four times a year Jean Valjean donned his uniform and went on duty, and did so readily enough, for it was a disguise which enabled him to mix with everybody, while himself remaining solitary. Jean Valjean had attained his sixtieth year, or the age of legal exemption; but he did not look more than fifty; besides, he had no wish to escape his sergeant-major and cheat Count Lobau. He had no civil status, hid his name, his identity, his age, everything, and, as we just said, he was a willing National Guard,—all his ambition was to resemble the first-comer who pays taxes. The ideal of this man was internally an angel, externally a bourgeois.
Let us mention one fact, by the way. When Jean Valjean went out with Cosette he dressed himself in the way we have seen, and looked like a retired officer; but when he went out alone, and he did so usually at night, he was attired in a workman's jacket and trousers, and a cap whose peak was pulled deep over his eyes. Was this precaution or humility? Both at once. Cosette was accustomed to the enigmatical side of her destiny, and hardly noticed her father's singularities; as for Toussaint, she revered Jean Valjean, and considered everything he did right. One day her butcher, who got a glimpse of her master, said, "He's a queer looking stick," and she replied, "He's a—a—a—saint." All three never left the house except by the gate in the Rue de Babylone; and unless they were noticed through the garden gate it would be difficult to guess that they lived in the Rue Plumet. This gate was always locked, and Jean Valjean left the garden untended that it might not be noticed. In this, perhaps, he deceived himself.
One evening little Gavroche had eaten nothing; he remembered that he had not dined either on the previous day, and that was becoming ridiculous; so he formed the resolution to try and sup. He went prowling about at the deserted spots beyond the Salpêtrière, for there are good windfalls there; where there is nobody, something may be found. He thus reached a suburb which seemed to him to be the village of Austerlitz. In one of his previous strolls he had noticed there an old garden frequented by an old man and an old woman, and in this garden a passable apple-tree. By the side of this tree was a sort of badly closed fruit-loft, whence an apple might be obtained. An apple is a supper, an apple is life; and what ruined Adam might save Gavroche. The garden skirted a solitary unpaved lane, bordered by shrubs while waiting for houses, and a hedge separated it from the lane. Gavroche proceeded to the garden. He found the lane again, he recognized the apple-tree, and examined the hedge; a hedge is but a stride. Day was declining; there was not a cat in the lane, and the hour was good. Gavroche was preparing to clamber over the hedge, when he stopped short,—some people were talking in the garden. Gavroche looked through one of the interstices in the hedge. Two paces from him, at the foot of the hedge on the other side, at precisely the point where the hole he had intended to make would have opened, lay a stone which formed a species of bench; and on this bench the old man of the garden was seated with the old woman standing in front of him. The old woman was grumbling, and Gavroche, who was not troubled with too much discretion, listened.
"Monsieur Mabœuf!" the old woman said.
"Mabœuf!" Gavroche thought, "that's a rum name."
The old man thus addressed did not stir, and the old woman repeated,—
"Monsieur Mabœuf!"
The old man, without taking his eyes off the ground, decided to answer,—
"Well, Mother Plutarch!"
"Mother Plutarch!" Gavroche thought, "that's another rum name."
Mother Plutarch continued, and the old gentleman was compelled to submit to the conversation.
"The landlord is not satisfied."
"Why so?"
"There are three quarters owing."
"In three months more we shall owe four."
"He says that he will turn you out."
"I will go."
"The green-grocer wants to be paid, or she will supply no more fagots. How shall we warm ourselves this winter if we have no wood?"
"There is the sun."
"The butcher has stopped our credit, and will not supply any more meat."
"That is lucky, for I cannot digest meat; it is heavy."
"But what shall we have for dinner?"
"Bread."
"The baker insists on receiving something on account; no money, no bread, he says."
"Very good."
"What will you eat?"
"We have apples."
"But, really, sir, we cannot live in that way without money."
"I have none."
The old woman went away, and left the old gentleman alone. He began thinking, and Gavroche thought too; it was almost night. The first result of Gavroche's reflection was, that instead of climbing over the hedge, he lay down under it. The branches parted a little at the bottom. "Hilloh," said Gavroche to himself, "it's an alcove," and he crept into it. His back was almost against the octogenarian's bench, and he could hear him breathe. Then, in lieu of dining, Gavroche tried to sleep, but it was the sleep of a cat, with one eye open. While dozing, Gavroche watched. The whiteness of the twilight sky lit up the ground, and the lane formed a livid line between two rows of dark streets. All at once two figures appeared on this white stripe; one was in front and the other a little distance behind.
"Here are two coves," Gavroche growled.
The first figure seemed to be some old bowed citizen, more than simply attired, who walked slowly, owing to his age, and was strolling about in the starlight. The second was straight, firm, and slim. He regulated his steps by those of the man in front; but suppleness and agility could be detected in his voluntary slowness. This figure had something ferocious and alarming about it, and the appearance of what was called a dandy in those days; the hat was of a good shape, and the coat was black, well cut, probably of fine cloth, and tight at the waist. He held his head up with a sort of robust grace; and under the hat a glimpse could be caught of a pale youthful profile in the twilight. This profile had a rose in its mouth, and was familiar to Gavroche, for it was Montparnasse; as for the other, there was nothing to be said save that he was a respectable old man. Gavroche at once began observing, for it was evident that one of these men had projects upon the other. Gavroche was well situated to see the finale; and the alcove had opportunely become a hiding-place. Montparnasse, hunting at such an hour in such a spot,—that was menacing. Gavroche felt his gamin entrails moved with pity for the old gentleman. What should he do,—interfere? One weakness helping another! Montparnasse would have laughed at it; for Gavroche did not conceal from himself that the old man first, and then the boy, would be only two mouthfuls for this formidable bandit of eighteen. While Gavroche was deliberating, the attack—a sudden and hideous attack—took place; it was the attack of a tiger on an onager, of a spider on a fly. Montparnasse threw away the rose, leaped upon the old man, grappled him and clung to him; and Gavroche had difficulty in repressing a cry. A moment after, one of these men was beneath the other, crushed, gasping, and struggling with a knee of marble on his chest. But it was not exactly what Gavroche had anticipated; the man on the ground was Montparnasse, the one at the top the citizen. All this took place a few yards from Gavroche. The old man received the shock, and repaid it so terribly that in an instant the assailant and the assailed changed parts.
"That's a tough invalid," Gavroche thought. And he could not refrain from clapping his hands, but it was thrown away; it was not heard by the two combatants, who deafened one another, and mingled their breath in the struggle. At length there was a silence, and Montparnasse ceased writhing. Gavroche muttered this aside, "Is he dead?" The worthy man had not uttered a word or given a cry; he rose, and Gavroche heard him say to Montparnasse, "Get up."
Montparnasse did so, but the citizen still held him. Montparnasse had the humiliated and furious attitude of a wolf snapped at by a sheep. Gavroche looked and listened, making an effort to double his eyes with his ears; he was enormously amused. He was rewarded for his conscientious anxiety, for he was able to catch the following dialogue, which borrowed from the darkness a sort of tragic accent. The gentleman questioned, and Montparnasse answered,—
"What is your age?"
"Nineteen."
"You are strong and healthy, why do you not work?"
"It is a bore."
"What is your trade?"
"Idler."
"Speak seriously. Can anything be done for you? What do you wish to be?"
"A robber."
There was a silence, and the old gentleman seemed in profound thought; but he did not loose his hold of Montparnasse. Every now and then the young bandit, who was vigorous and active, gave starts like a wild beast caught in a snare; he shook himself, attempted a trip, wildly writhed his limbs, and tried to escape. The old gentleman did not appear to notice it, and held the ruffian's two arms in one hand with the sovereign indifference of absolute strength. The old man's reverie lasted some time; then, gazing fixedly at Montparnasse, he mildly raised his voice and addressed to him, in the darkness where they stood, a sort of solemn appeal, of which Gavroche did not lose a syllable.
"My boy, you are entering by sloth into the most laborious of existences. Ah! you declare yourself an idler, then prepare yourself for labor. Have you ever seen a formidable machine which is called a rolling-mill? You must be on your guard against it; for it is a crafty and ferocious thing, and if it catch you by the skirt of the coat it drags you under it entirely. Such a machine is indolence. Stop while there is yet time, and save yourself, otherwise it is all over with you, and ere long you will be among the cog-wheels. Once caught, hope for nothing more. You will be forced to fatigue yourself, idler; and no rest will be allowed you, for the iron hand of implacable toil has seized you. You refuse to earn your livelihood, have a calling, and accomplish a duty. It bores you to be like the rest; well, you will be different. Labor is the law, and whoever repulses it as a bore must have it as a punishment. You do not wish to be a laborer, and you will be a slave. Toil only lets you loose on one side to seize you again on the other; you do not wish to be its friend, and you will be its negro. Ah, you did not care for the honest fatigue of men, and you are about to know the sweat of the damned; while others sing you will groan. You will see other men working in the distance, and they will seem to you to be resting. The laborer, the reaper, the sailor, the blacksmith, will appear to you in the light like the blessed inmates of a paradise. What a radiance there is in the anvil! What joy it is to guide the plough, and tie up the sheaf! What a holiday to fly before the wind in a boat! But you, idler, will have to dig and drag, and roll and walk. Pull at your halter, for you are a beast of burden in the service of hell! So your desire is to do nothing? Well, you will not have a week, a day, an hour without feeling crushed. You will not be able to lift anything without agony, and every passing minute will make your muscles crack. What is a feather for others will be a rock for you, and the most simple things will become steep. Life will become a monster around you, and coming, going, breathing, will be so many terrible tasks for you. Your lungs will produce in you the effect of a hundred-pound weight; and going there sooner than here will be a problem to solve. Any man who wishes to go out, merely opens his door and finds himself in the street; but if you wish to go out you must pierce through your wall. What do honest men do to reach the street? They go downstairs; but you will tear up your sheets, make a cord of them fibre by fibre, then pass through your window and hang by this thread over an abyss. And it will take place at night, in the storm, the rain, or the hurricane; and if the cord be too short you will have but one way of descending, by falling—falling haphazard into the gulf, and from any height, and on what? On some unknown thing beneath. Or you will climb up a chimney at the risk of burning yourself; or crawl through a sewer at the risk of drowning. I will say nothing of the holes which must be masked; of the stones which you will have to remove and put back twenty times a day, or of the plaster you must hide under your mattress. A lock presents itself, and the citizen has in his pocket the key for it, made by the locksmith; but you, if you wish to go out, are condemned to make a terrible masterpiece. You will take a double sou and cut it asunder. With what tools? You will invent them; that is your business. Then you will hollow out the interior of the two parts, being careful not to injure the outside, and form a thread all round the edge, so that the two parts may fit closely like a box and its cover. When they are screwed together there will be nothing suspicious to the watchers,—for you will be watched. It will be a double sou, but for yourself a box. What will you place in this box? A small piece of steel, a watch-spring in which you have made teeth, and which will be a saw. With this saw, about the length of a pin, you will be obliged to cut through the bolt of the lock, the padlock of your chain, the bar at your window, and the fetter on your leg. This masterpiece done, this prodigy accomplished, all the miracles of art, skill, cleverness, and patience executed, what will be your reward if you are detected? A dungeon. Such is the future. What precipices are sloth and pleasure! To do nothing is a melancholy resolution, are you aware of that? To live in indolence on the social substance; to be useless, that is to say, injurious,—this leads straight to the bottom of misery. Woe to the man who wishes to be a parasite, for he will be vermin! Ah! it does not please you to work. Ah! you have only one thought, to drink well, eat well, and sleep well. You will drink water; you will eat black bread; you will sleep on a plank, with fetters riveted to your limbs, and feel their coldness at night in your flesh! You will break these fetters and fly; very good. You will drag yourself on your stomach into the shrubs and eat grass like the beasts of the field; and you will be re-captured, and then you will pass years in a dungeon, chained to the wall, groping in the dark for your water-jug, biting at frightful black bread which dogs would refuse, and eating beans which maggots have eaten before you. You will be a wood-louse in a cellar. Ah, ah! take pity on yourself, wretched boy, still so young, who were at your nurse's breast not twenty years ago, and have doubtless a mother still! I implore you to listen to me. You want fine black cloth, polished shoes, to scent your head with fragrant oil, to please bad women, and be a pretty fellow; you will have your hair close shaven, and wear a red jacket and wooden shoes. You want a ring on your finger; and will wear a collar on your neck, and if you look at a woman you will be beaten. And you will go in there at twenty and come out at fifty years of age. You will go in young, red-cheeked, healthy, with your sparkling eyes and all your white teeth, and your curly locks; and you will come out again broken, bent, wrinkled, toothless, horrible, and gray-headed! Ah, my poor boy, you are on the wrong road, and indolence is a bad adviser; for robbery is the hardest of labors. Take my advice, and do not undertake the laborious task of being an idler. To become a rogue is inconvenient, and it is not nearly so hard to be an honest man. Now go, and think over what I have said to you. By the bye, what did you want of me? My purse? Here it is."
And the old man, releasing Montparnasse, placed his purse in his hand, which Montparnasse weighed for a moment; after which, with the same mechanical precaution as if he had stolen it, Montparnasse let it glide gently into the back-pocket of his coat. All this said and done, the old gentleman turned his back and quietly resumed his walk.
"Old humbug!" Montparnasse muttered. Who was the old gentleman? The reader has doubtless guessed. Montparnasse, in his stupefaction, watched him till he disappeared in the gloom, and this contemplation was fatal for him. While the old gentleman retired, Gavroche advanced. He had assured himself by a glance that Father Mabœuf was still seated on his bench, and was probably asleep; then the gamin left the bushes, and began crawling in the shadow behind the motionless Montparnasse. He thus got up to the young bandit unnoticed, gently insinuated his hand into the back-pocket of the fine black cloth coat, seized the purse, withdrew his hand, and crawled back again into the shadow like a lizard. Montparnasse, who had no reason to be on his guard, and who was thinking for the first time in his life, perceived nothing; and Gavroche, when he had returned to the spot where Father Mabœuf was sitting, threw the purse over the hedge and ran off at full speed. The purse fell on Father Mabœuf's foot and awoke him. He stooped down and picked up the purse, which he opened without comprehending anything. It was a purse, with two compartments; in one was some change, in the other were six napoleons. M. Mabœuf, greatly startled, carried the thing to his housekeeper.
"It has fallen from heaven," said Mother Plutarch.
In the first fortnight of April Jean Valjean went on a journey; this, as we know, occurred from time to time at very lengthened intervals, and he remained away one or two days at the most. Where did he go? No one knew, not even Cosette; once only she had accompanied him in a hackney coach, upon the occasion of one of these absences, to the corner of a little lane which was called, "Impasse de la Planchette." He got out there, and the coach carried Cosette back to the Rue de Babylone. It was generally when money ran short in the house that Jean Valjean took these trips. Jean Valjean, then, was absent; and he had said, "I shall be back in three days." At night Cosette was alone in the drawing-room, and in order to while away the time, she opened her piano and began singing to her own accompaniment the song of Euryanthe, "Hunters wandering in the wood," which is probably the finest thing we possess in the shape of music. When she had finished she remained passive. Suddenly she fancied she heard some one walking in the garden. It could not be her father, for he was away; and it could not be Toussaint, as she was in bed, for it was ten o'clock at night. Cosette was near the drawing-room shutters, which were closed, and put her ear to them; and it seemed to her that it was the footfall of a man who was walking very gently. She hurried up to her room on the first floor, opened a Venetian frame in her shutter, and looked out into the garden. The moon was shining bright as day, and there was nobody in it. She opened her window; the garden was perfectly calm, and all that could be seen of the street was as deserted as usual.
Cosette thought that she was mistaken, and she had supposed that she heard the noise. It was an hallucination produced by Weber's gloomy and wonderful chorus, which opens before the mind bewildering depths; which trembles before the eye like a dizzy forest in which we hear the cracking of the dead branches under the restless feet of the hunters, of whom we catch a glimpse in the obscurity. She thought no more of it. Moreover, Cosette was not naturally very timid: she had in her veins some of the blood of the gypsy, and the adventurer who goes about barefooted. As we may remember, she was rather a lark than a dove, and she had a stern and brave temper.
The next evening, at nightfall, she was walking about the garden. In the midst of the confused thoughts which occupied her mind, she fancied she could distinguish now and then a noise like that of the previous night, as if some one were walking in the gloom under the trees not far from her; but she said to herself that nothing so resembles the sound of a footfall on grass as the grating of two branches together, and she took no heed of it,—besides, she saw nothing. She left the "thicket," and had a small grass-plat to cross ere she reached the house. The moon, which had just risen behind her, projected Cosette's shadow, as she left the clump of bushes, upon the grass in front of her, and she stopped in terror. By the side of her shadow the moon distinctly traced on the grass another singularly startling and terrible shadow,—a shadow with a hat on its head. It was like the shadow of a man standing at the edge of the clump a few paces behind Cosette. For a moment she was unable to speak or cry, or call out, or stir, or turn her head; but at last she collected all her courage and boldly turned round. There was nobody; she looked on the ground and the shadow had disappeared. She went back into the shrubs, bravely searched in every corner, went as far as the railings, and discovered nothing. She felt really chilled. Was it again an hallucination? What! two days in succession? One hallucination might pass, but two! The alarming point was, that the shadow was most certainly not a ghost, for ghosts never wear round hats.
The next day Jean Valjean returned, and Cosette told him what she fancied she had seen and heard. She expected to be reassured, and that her father would shrug his shoulders and say, "You are a little goose;" but Jean Valjean became anxious.
"Perhaps it is nothing," he said to her. He left her with some excuse, and went into the garden, where she saw him examine the railings with considerable attention. In the night she woke up. This time she was certain, and she distinctly heard some one walking just under her windows. She walked to her shutter and opened it. There was in the garden really a man holding a large stick in his hand. At the moment when she was going to cry out, the moon lit up the man's face,—it was her father. She went to bed again saying, "He seems really very anxious!" Jean Valjean passed that and the two following nights in the garden, and Cosette saw him through the hole in her shutter. On the third night the moon was beginning to rise later, and it might have been about one in the morning when she beard a hearty burst of laughter, and her father's voice calling her:—
"Cosette!"
She leaped out of bed, put on her dressing-gown, and opened her window; her father was standing on the grass-plat below.
"I have woke you up to reassure you," he said; "look at this,—here's your shadow in the round hat."
And he showed her on the grass a shadow which the moon designed, and which really looked rather like the spectre of a man wearing a round hat. It was an outline produced by a zinc chimney-pot with a cowl, which rose above an adjoining roof. Cosette also began laughing, all her mournful suppositions fell away, and the next morning at breakfast she jested at the ill-omened garden, haunted by the ghost of chimney-pots. Jean Valjean quite regained his ease; as for Cosette, she did not notice particularly whether the chimney-pot were really in the direction of the shadow which she had seen or fancied she saw, and whether the moon were in the same part of the heavens. She did not cross-question herself as to the singularity of a chimney-pot which is afraid of being caught in the act, and retires when its shadow is looked at; for the shadow did retire when Cosette turned round, and she fancied herself quite certain of that fact. Cosette became quite reassured, for the demonstration seemed to her perfect, and the thought left her brain that there could have been any one walking about the garden by night. A few days after, however, a fresh incident occurred.
Spring in Paris is very frequently traversed by sharp, violent breezes which, if they do not freeze, chill. These breezes, which sadden the brightest days, produce exactly the same effect as the blasts of cold wind which enter a warm room through the crevices of a badly closed door or window. It seems as if the gloomy gate of winter has been left ajar, and that the wind comes from there. In the spring of 1832, the period when the first great epidemic of this century broke out in Europe, these breezes were sharper and more cutting than ever, and some door even more icy than that of winter had been left ajar. It was the door of the sepulchre, and the breath of cholera could be felt in these breezes. From a meteorological point of view these cold winds had the peculiarity that they did not exclude a powerful electric tension. Frequent storms, accompanied by thunder and lightning, broke out at this period.
One evening, when these breezes were blowing sharply, so sharply that January seemed to have returned, and the citizens had put on their cloaks again, little Gavroche, still shivering gayly under his rags, was standing as if in ecstasy in front of a hair-dresser's shop in the vicinity of the Orme-Saint Gervais. He was adorned with a woman's woollen shawl, picked up no one knew where, of which he had made a muffler. Little Gavroche appeared to be lost in admiration of a waxen image of a bride, wearing a very low-necked dress, and a wreath of orange-flowers in her hair, which revolved between two lamps, and lavished its smiles on the passers-by; but in reality he was watching the shop to see whether he could not "prig" a cake of soap, which he would afterwards sell for a sou to a barber in the suburbs. He frequently breakfasted on one of these cakes, and he called this style of work, for which he had a talent, "shaving the barbers." While regarding the bride, and casting sheep's eyes on the cake of soap, he growled between his teeth: "Tuesday: this is not Tuesday. Is it Tuesday? Perhaps it is Tuesday; yes, it is Tuesday." What this soliloquy referred to was never known; but if it was to the last time he had dined, it was three days ago, for the present day was a Friday. The barber, in his shop warmed with a good stove, was shaving a customer and taking every now and then a side-glance at this enemy,—this shivering and impudent gamin who had his two hands in his pockets, but his mind evidently elsewhere.
While Gavroche was examining the bride, the window, and the Windsor soap, two boys of unequal height, very decently dressed, and younger than himself, one apparently seven, the other five years of age, timidly turned the handle and entered the shop, asking for something, charity possibly, in a plaintive murmur which was more like a sob than a prayer. They both spoke together, and their words were unintelligible, because sobs choked the voice of the younger boy, and cold made the teeth of the elder rattle. The barber turned with a furious face, and without laying down his razor drove the older boy into the street with his left hand, and the little one with his knee, and closed the door again, saying,—
"To come and chill people for nothing!"
The two lads set out again, crying. A cloud had come up in the mean while, and it began raining, little Gavroche ran up to them, and accosted them thus,—
"What's the matter with you, brats?"
"We don't know where to sleep," the elder replied.
"Is that all?" said Gavroche; "that's a great thing. Is that anything to cry about, simpletons?" And assuming an accent of tender affection and gentle protection, which was visible through his somewhat pompous superiority, he said,—
"Come with me, kids."
"Yes, sir," said the elder boy.
And the two children followed him as they would have done an archbishop, and left off crying. Gavroche led them along the Rue St. Antoine, in the direction of the Bastille, and while going off took an indignant and retrospective glance at the barber's shop.
"That whiting has no heart," he growled; "he's an Englishman."
A girl, seeing the three walking in file, Gavroche at the head, burst into a loud laugh. This laugh was disrespectful to the party.
"Good day, Mamselle Omnibus," Gavroche said to her.
A moment after the hair-dresser returning to his mind, he added,—
"I made a mistake about the brute; he is not a whiting, but a snake. Barber, I'll go and fetch a locksmith, and order him to put a bell on your tail."
This barber had made him aggressive; as he stepped across a gutter, he addressed a bearded portress, worthy to meet Faust on the Brocken, and who was holding her broom in her hand,—
"Madame," he said to her, "I see that you go out with your horse."
And after this he plashed the varnished boots of a passer-by.
"Scoundrel!" the gentleman said furiously. Gavroche raised his nose out of the shawl.
"Have you a complaint to make, sir?"
"Yes, of you," said the gentleman.
"The office is closed," Gavroche remarked. "I don't receive any more complaints to-day."
As he went along the street he noticed a girl of thirteen or fourteen, shivering in a gateway, in such short petticoats that she showed her knees. But the little girl was beginning to get too tall a girl for that. Growth plays you such tricks, and the petticoat begins to become short when nudity grows indecent.
"Poor girl," said Gavroche, "she hasn't even a pair of breeches. Here, collar this."
And taking off all the good wool which he had round his neck he threw it over the thin violet shoulders of the beggar-girl, when the muffler became once again a shawl. The little girl looked at him with an astonished air, and received the shawl in silence. At a certain stage of distress a poor man in his stupor no longer groans at evil, and gives no thanks for kindness. This done,—
"B-r-r!" said Gavroche, colder than Saint Martin, who, at any rate, retained one half his cloak. On hearing this "Brr," the shower, redoubling its passion, poured down; those wicked skies punish good actions.
"Hilloh!" Gavroche shouted, "what's the meaning of this? It is raining again. Bon Dieu! if this goes on, I shall withdraw my subscription."
And he set out again.
"No matter," he said as he took a glance at the beggar-girl crouching under her shawl, "she's got a first-rate skin."
And, looking at the clouds, he cried,—"Sold you are!"
The two children limped after him, and as they passed one of those thick close gratings which indicate a baker's, for bread, like gold, is placed behind a grating, Gavroche turned round.
"By the bye, brats, have you dined?"
"We have had nothing to eat, sir, since early this morning," the elder answered.
"Then you haven't either father or mother?" Gavroche continued magisterially.
"I beg your pardon, sir; we have a pa and a ma, but we don't know where they are."
"Sometimes that is better than knowing," said Gavroche, who was a philosopher in his small way.
"We have been walking about for two hours," the lad continued, "and looked for things at the corners of the streets, but found nothing."
"I know," said Gavroche; "the dogs eat everything."
He resumed after a pause,—
"And so we have lost our authors. We don't know what we have done with them. That isn't right, gamins. It is foolish to mislay grown-up people. Well, one must swig, for all that."
He did not ask them any more questions, for what could be more simple than to have no domicile? The elder of the boys, who had almost entirely recovered the happy carelessness of childhood, made this remark: "It is funny all the same. Mamma said she would take us to look for blessed box, on Palm Sunday. Mamma is a lady who lives with Mamselle Miss."
"Tanflute!" added Gavroche.
He stopped, and for some minutes searched all sorts of corners which he had in his rags: at length he raised his head with an air which only wished to represent satisfaction, but which was in reality triumphant,—
"Calm yourselves, kids; here is supper for three."
And he drew a sou from one of his pockets; without giving the lads time to feel amazed, he pushed them both before him into the baker's shop, and laid his sou on the counter, exclaiming,—
"Garçon, five centimes' worth of bread."
The baker, who was the master in person, took up a loaf and a knife.
"In three pieces, garçon," remarked Gavroche, and he added with dignity,—
"We are three."
And seeing that the baker, after examining the three suppers, had taken a loaf of black bread, he thrust his finger into his nose, with as imperious a sniff as if he had the great Frederick's pinch of snuff on his thumb, and cast in the baker's face this indignant remark,—
"Keksekça?"
Those of our readers who might be tempted to see in this remark of Gavroche's to the baker a Russian or Polish word, or one of the savage cries which the Ioways or the Botocudos hurl at each other across the deserted streams, are warned that this is a word which they (our readers) employ daily, and which signifies, qu'est ce que c'est que cela? The baker perfectly comprehended, and replied,—
"Why, it is bread, very good seconds bread."
"You mean black bread," Gavroche remarked, with a calm and cold disdain. "White bread, my lad; I stand treat."
The baker could not refrain from smiling, and while cutting some white bread gazed at them in a compassionate way which offended Gavroche.
"Well, baker's man," he said, "what is there about us that you measure us in that way?"
When the bread was cut, the baker put the sou in the till, and Gavroche said to the two boys,—
"Grub away."
The boys looked at him in surprise, and Gavroche burst into a laugh.
"Oh, yes, that's true, they don't understand yet, they are so little."
And he continued, "Eat."
At the same time he gave each of them a lump of bread. Thinking that the elder, who appeared to him more worthy of his conversation, merited some special encouragement, and ought to have any hesitation about satisfying his hunger removed, he added, as he gave him the larger lump,—
"Shove that into your gun."
There was one piece smaller than the two others, and he took that for himself. The poor boys, Gavroche included, were starving; while tearing the bread with their teeth, they blocked up the baker's shop, who, now that he was paid, looked at them angrily.
"Let us return to the street," said Gavroche.
They started again in the direction of the Bastille; and from time to time as they passed lighted shops, the younger boy stopped to see what o'clock it was by a leaden watch hung round his neck by a string.
"Well, he is a great fool," said Gavroche.
Then he thoughtfully growled between his teeth, "No matter, if I had kids of my own I would take more care of them than that."
As they were finishing their bread, they reached the corner of that gloomy Rue de Ballet at the end of which the low and hostile wicket of La Force is visible.
"Hilloh, is that you, Gavroche?" some one said.
"Hilloh, is that you, Montparnasse?" said Gavroche.
It was a man who accosted Gavroche, no other than Montparnasse disguised with blue spectacles, but Gavroche was able to recognize him.
"My eye!" Gavroche went on, "you have a skin of the color of a linseed poultice and blue spectacles like a doctor. That's your style, on the word of an old man!"
"Silence," said Montparnasse, "not so loud;" and he quickly dragged Gavroche out of the light of the shops. The two little boys followed mechanically, holding each other by the hand. When they were under the black arch of a gateway, protected from eyes and rain, Montparnasse remarked,
"Do you know where I am going?"
"To the abbey of Go-up-with-regret" (the scaffold), said Gavroche.
"Joker!"
And Montparnasse added,—
"I am going to meet Babet."
"Ah!" said Gavroche, "her name is Babet, is it?"
Montparnasse lowered his voice,—
"It is not a she, but a he."
"I thought he was buckled up."
"He has unfastened the buckle," Montparnasse replied.
And he hurriedly told the boy that on that very morning Babet, while being removed to the Conciergerie, escaped by turning to the left instead of the right in the "police-office passage."
Gavroche admired his skill.
"What a dentist!" said he.
Montparnasse added a few details about Babet's escape, and ended with, "Oh, that is not all."
Gavroche, while talking, had seized a cane which Montparnasse held in his hand; he mechanically pulled at the upper part, and a dagger blade became visible.
"Ah!" he said as he quickly thrust it back, "you have brought your gendarme with you disguised as a civilian."
Montparnasse winked.
"The deuce!" Gavroche continued, "are you going to have a turn-up with the slops?"
"There's no knowing," Montparnasse answered carelessly; "it's always as well to have a pin about you."
Gavroche pressed him.
"What are you going to do to-night?"
Montparnasse again became serious, and said, mincing his words,—
"Some things."
And he suddenly changed the conversation.
"By the bye—"
"What?"
"Something that happened the other day. Just fancy. I meet a bourgeois, and he makes me a present of a sermon, and a purse. I put it in my pocket, a moment later I feel for it, and there was nothing there."
"Only the sermon," said Gavroche.
"But where are you going now?" Montparnasse continued.
Gavroche pointed to his two protégés, and said,—
"I am going to put these two children to bed."
"Where?"
"At my house."
"Have you a lodging?"
"Yes."
"Where?"
"Inside the elephant," said Gavroche.
Montparnasse, though naturally not easy to astonish, could not refrain from the exclamation,—
"Inside the elephant?"
"Well, yes, kekçaa?"
This is another word belonging to the language which nobody reads and everybody speaks; kekçaa signifies, qu'est-ce-que cela a? The gamin's profound remark brought Montparnasse back to calmness and good sense: he seemed to entertain a better opinion of Gavroche's lodgings.
"Ah, yes," he said, "the 'elephant.' Are you comfortable there?"
"Very," Gavroche replied. "Most comfortable. There are no draughts as there are under the bridges."
"How do you get in? Is there a hole?"
"Of course there is, but you have no need to mention it; it's between the front legs, and the police-spies don't know it."
"And you climb in? yes, I understand."
"A turn of the hand, cric crac, it's done; and there's no one to be seen."
After a pause Gavroche added,—
"I shall have a ladder for these young ones."
Montparnasse burst into a laugh.
"Where the devil did you pick up those kids?"
"A barber made me a present of them."
In the mean while Montparnasse had become pensive.
"You recognized me very easily," he said.
He took from his pocket two small objects, which were quills wrapped in cotton, and thrust one into each nostril; they made him quite a different nose.
"That changes you," said Gavroche; "you are not so ugly now, and you ought to keep them in for good."
Montparnasse was a handsome fellow, but Gavroche was fond of a joke.
"Without any humbug," Montparnasse asked; "what do you think of me now?"
It was also a different sound of voice; in a second Montparnasse had become unrecognizable.
"Oh! play Porrichinelle for us!" Gavroche exclaimed.
The two lads, who had heard nothing up to this moment, engaged as they were themselves in thrusting their fingers up their noses, drew nearer on hearing this name, and gazed at Montparnasse with a beginning of joy and admiration. Unhappily Montparnasse was in no humor for jesting; he laid his hand on Gavroche's shoulder, and said, with a stress on each word,—
"Listen to what I tell you, boy; if I were on the spot, with my dog, my knife, and my wife, and you were to offer me ten double sous I would not refuse to work, but we are not at Mardi Gras."[1]
This strange sentence produced a singular effect on the gamin; he turned around sharply, looked with his little bright eyes all around, and noticed a few yards off a policeman with his back turned to them. Gavroche let an "all-right" slip from him, which he at once repressed, and shook Montparnasse's hand.
"Well, good-night," he said; "I am off to my elephant with my brats. Should you happen to want me any night you'll find me there. I lodge in the entresol, and there's no porter; ask for Monsieur Gavroche."
"All right," said Montparnasse.
And they parted, Montparnasse going toward the Grève, and Gavroche toward the Bastille. The youngest boy, dragged on by his brother, whom Gavroche dragged along in his turn, looked round several times to watch "Porrichinelle" go away.
The enigmatical sentence by which Montparnasse informed Gavroche of the presence of the policeman contained no other talisman but the sound dig repeated five or six times under various forms. This syllable, not pronounced separately, but artistically mingled with the words of a sentence, means, "Take care, we cannot speak freely." There was also in Montparnasse's remark a literary beauty which escaped Gavroche's notice, that is, mon dogue, ma dague, et ma digue,—a phrase of the Temple slang greatly in use among the merry-andrews and queues rouges of the great age in which Molière wrote and Callot designed.
Twenty years back there might have been seen in the southeastern corner of the square of the Bastille near the canal dock, dug in the old moat of the citadel-prison, a quaint monument, which has already been effaced from the memory of Parisians, and which should have left some trace, as it was an idea of the "Member of the Institute, Commander-in-Chief of the army of Egypt." We say monument, though it was only a plaster cast; but this cast itself, a prodigious sketch, the grand corpse of a Napoleonic idea which two or three successive puffs of wind carried away each time farther from us, had become historic, and assumed something definitive, which formed a contrast with its temporary appearance. It was an elephant, forty feet high, constructed of carpentry and masonry, bearing on its back a castle which resembled a house, once painted green by some plasterer, and now painted black by the heavens, the rain, and time. In this deserted and uncovered corner of the square the wide forehead of the colossus, its trunk, its tusks, its castle, its enormous back, and its four feet like columns, produced at night upon the starlit sky a surprising and terrible outline. No one knew what it meant, and it seemed a sort of symbol of the popular strength. It was gloomy, enigmatical, and immense; it looked like a powerful phantom visible and erect by the side of the invisible spectre of the Bastille. Few strangers visited this edifice, and no passer-by looked at it. It was falling in ruins, and each season plaster becoming detached from its flanks, made horrible wounds upon it. The "Édiles," as they were called in the fashionable slang, had forgotten it since 1814. It stood there in its corner, gloomy, sickly, crumbling away, surrounded by rotting palings, which were sullied every moment by drunken drivers. There were yawning cracks in its stomach, a lath issued from its tail, and tall grass grew between its legs; and as the level of the square had risen during the last thirty years through that slow and continuous movement which insensibly elevates the soil of great cities, it was in a hollow, and it seemed as if the earth were giving way beneath it. It was unclean, despised, repulsive, and superb; ugly in the eyes of cits, but melancholy in the eyes of the thinker. It had something about it of the ordure which is swept away, and something of the majesty which is decapitated.
As we said, at night its appearance changed; for night is the real medium of everything which is shadow. So soon as twilight set in the old elephant was transfigured; and it assumed a placid and redoubtable appearance in the formidable serenity of the darkness. As it belonged to the past it belonged to night, and this obscurity suited its grandeur. This monument, rude, broad, heavy, rough, austere, and almost shapeless, but most assuredly majestic, and imprinted with a species of magnificent and savage gravity, has disappeared to allow the sort of gigantic stove adorned with its pipe to reign in peace, which was substituted for the frowning fortalice with its nine towers much in the same way as the bourgeoisie are substituted for feudalism. It is very simple that a stove should be the symbol of an epoch in which a copper contains the power. This period will pass away; it is already passing away. People are beginning to understand that if there may be strength in a boiler there can only be power in a brain; in other words, that what leads and carries away the world is not locomotives, but ideas. Attach locomotives to ideas, and then it is all right; but do not take the horse for the rider.
However this may be, to return to the Bastille square, the architect of the elephant managed to produce something grand with plaster, while the architect of the stove-pipe has succeeded in making something little out of bronze. This stove-pipe, which was christened a sonorous name and called the Column of July, this spoiled monument of an abortive revolution, was still wrapped up, in 1832, in an immense sheet of carpentry-work,—which we regret for our part,—and a vast enclosure of planks, which completed the isolation of the elephant. It was to this corner of this square, which was scarce lighted by the reflection of a distant oil-lamp, that the gamin led the two urchins.
(Allow us to interrupt our narrative here, and remind our readers that we are recording the simple truth; and that twenty years ago a boy, who was caught sleeping in the inside of the elephant of the Bastille, was brought before the police on the charge of vagabondage and breaking a public monument.)
On coming near the colossus, Gavroche understood the effect which the infinitely great may produce on the infinitely little, and said,—
"Don't be frightened, brats."
Then he went through a hole in the palings into the ground round the elephant, and helped the children to pass through the breach. The lads, a little frightened, followed Gavroche without a word, and confided in this little Providence in rags who had given them bread and promised them a bed. A ladder, employed by workmen at the column by day, was lying along the palings; Gavroche raised it with singular vigor, and placed it against one of the elephant's fore legs. At the point where the ladder ended, a sort of black hole could be distinguished in the belly of the colossus. Gavroche pointed out the ladder and the hole to his guests, and said, "Go up, and go in." The two little boys looked at each other in terror.
"You are frightened, kids!" Gavroche exclaimed, and added, "you shall see."
He clung round the elephant's wrinkled foot, and in a twinkling, without deigning to employ the ladder, he reached the hole. He went in like a lizard gliding into a crevice, and a moment after the boys saw his head vaguely appear, like a white livid form, on the edge of the hole, which was full of darkness.
"Well," he cried, "come up, my blessed babes. You will see how snug it is. Come up, you," he said to the elder. "I will hold your hand."
The little boys nudged each other, for the gamin at once frightened and reassured them; and then it was raining very hard. The elder boy ventured, and the younger, on seeing his brother ascending and himself left alone between the feet of this great beast, felt greatly inclined to cry, but did not dare. The elder climbed up the rungs of the ladder in a very tottering way, and as he did so Gavroche encouraged him by exclamations of a fencing-master to his pupils, or of a muleteer to his mules.
"Don't be frightened! That is it—keep on moving; set your foot there; now, your hand here—bravo!"
And when he was within reach he quickly and powerfully seized him by the arm, and drew him to him.
"Swallowed!" he said.
The boy had passed through the crevice.
"Now," said Gavroche, "wait for me. Pray sit down, sir."
And leaving the hole in the same way as he had entered it, he slid down the elephant's leg with the agility of a monkey, fell on his feet in the grass, seized the youngest boy round the waist and planted him on the middle of the ladder; then he began ascending behind him, shouting to the elder boy,—
"I'll push him and you'll pull him."
In a second the little fellow was pushed up, dragged, pulled, and drawn through the hole before he knew where he was; and Gavroche, entering after him, kicked away the ladder, which fell in the grass, and clapped his hands as he shouted, "There we are! Long live General Lafayette!" This explosion over, he added, "Brats, you are in my house."
Gavroche was, in fact, at home. Oh, unexpected utility of the useless! Oh, charity of great things! Oh, goodness of the giants! This huge monument, which had contained a thought of the Emperor, had become the lodging of a gamin. The brat had been accepted and sheltered by the colossus. The cits in their Sunday clothes who passed by the elephant of the Bastille were prone to say, as they measured it with a contemptuous look from the eyes flush with their head, Of what service is that? It served to save from cold, from frost, from damp and rain; to protect from the winter wind; to preserve from sleeping in the mud, which entails fever, and from sleeping in the snow, which causes death, a little fatherless and motherless boy without bread, clothes, or shelter. It served to shelter the innocent boy whom society repulsed. It served to diminish the public wrong. It was a lair opened to him against whom all doors were closed. It seemed as if the old wretched mastodon, attacked by vermin and oblivion, covered with warts, mould, and ulcers, tottering, crumbling, abandoned, and condemned,—a species of colossal mendicant asking in vain the alms of a benevolent glance in the midst of the highway,—had taken pity on this other beggar, the poor pygmy who walked about without shoes on his feet, without a ceiling over his head, blowing his fingers, dressed in rags, and supporting life on what was thrown away. This is of what use the elephant of the Bastille was; and this idea of Napoleon, disdained by men, had been taken up again by God. What had only been illustrious had become august. The Emperor would have needed, in order to realize what he meditated, porphyry, bronze, iron, gold, and marble; but for God the old collection of planks, beams, and plaster was sufficient. The Emperor had had a dream of genius. In this Titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, raising its trunk, and spouting all around glad and living waters, he wished to incarnate the people; and God had made a greater thing of it, for He lodged a child in it.
The hole by which Gavroche entered was a breach scarce visible from the outside, as it was concealed, as we said, under the elephant's belly, and so narrow that only cats and boys could pass through it.
"Let us begin," said Gavroche, "by telling the porter that we are not at home."
And plunging into the darkness with certainty like a man who knows every corner of the room, he took a plank and stopped up the hole. Gavroche plunged again into the darkness; the children heard the fizzing of a match dipped into the bottle of phosphorus,—for lucifer matches did not yet exist, and the Fumade fire-producer represented progress at that day. A sudden light made them wink. Gavroche had lit one of those bits of string dipped in pitch which are called "cellar rats;" and this thing, which smoked more than it illumined, rendered the inside of the elephant indistinctly visible. Gavroche's two guests looked around them, and had much such a feeling as any one would have if shut up in the Heidelberg tun, or, better still, what Jonas must have experienced in the biblical belly of the whale. An entire gigantic skeleton was visible to them and enveloped them; above their heads a long brown beam, from which sprang at regular distances massive cross-bars, represented the spine with the ribs; stalactites of plaster hung down like viscera, and vast spider webs formed from one side to the other dusty diaphragms. Here and there in corners could be seen large black spots which seemed alive, and changed places rapidly with a quick and startled movement. The pieces which had fallen from the elephant's back on its belly had filled up the concavity, so that it was possible to walk on it as on a flooring. The youngest lad nudged his brother and said,—
"It is black."
This remark made Gavroche cry out, for the petrified air of the two lads rendered a check necessary.
"What's that you give me?" he shouted; "do you gab? You have dislikes, eh! I suppose you want the Tuileries? Are you brutes? Tell me, but I warn you that I do not belong to the regiment of spoonies. Well, to hear you talk one would think that your father was a prince of the blood."
A little roughness is good in terror, for it reassures; the two children drew nearer to Gavroche, who, affected paternally by this confidence, passed from sternness to gentleness, and addressing the younger lad,—
"Blockhead," he said, toning down the insult with a caressing inflection of the voice, "it is outside that it's black. Outside it rains, and here it does not rain; outside it is cold, and here there is not a breath of wind; outside there is a heap of people, and here there's nobody; outside there's not even the moon, and here there's a candle, the deuce take it all!"
The two lads began looking round the apartment with less terror, but Gavroche did not allow them any leisure for contemplation.
"Quick," he said.
And he thrust them toward what we are very happy to call the end of the room, where his bed was. Gavroche's bed was perfect, that is to say, there was a mattress, a coverlet, and an alcove with curtains. The mattress was a straw mat, and the coverlet was a rather wide wrapper of coarse gray wool, very warm, and nearly new. This is what the alcove was,—three long props were driven securely into the plaster soil, that is to say, the elephant's belly, two in front and one behind, and were fastened by a cord at the top, so as to form a hollow pyramid. These props supported a grating of brass wire, simply laid upon them, but artistically fastened with iron wire, so that it entirely surrounded the three poles. A row of large stones fastened the lattice-work down to the ground, so that nothing could pass; and this lattice was merely a piece of the brass-work put up in aviaries in menageries. Gavroche's bed was under the wire-work as in a cage, and the whole resembled an Esquimaux's tent. Gavroche moved a few of the stones that held down the lattice-work in front, and shouted to the lads,—
"Now then, on all fours."
He made his guests enter the cage cautiously, then went in after them, brought the stones together again, and hermetically closed the opening. They lay down all three on the mat, and though they were all so short, not one of them could stand upright in the alcove. Gavroche still held the "cellar rat" in his hand.
"Now," he said, "to roost; I am going to suppress the chandelier."
"What is that, sir?" the elder of the lads asked Gavroche, pointing to the brass grating.
"That," said Gavroche, gravely, "is on account of the rats. Go to roost!"
Still he thought himself obliged to add a few words of instruction for these young creatures, and continued,—
"It comes from the Jardin des Plantes, and is employed to guard ferocious animals. There is a whole store-house full; you have only to climb over a wall, crawl through a window, and pass under a door, and you can have as much as you like."
While speaking he wrapped up the little boy in the blanket, who murmured,—
"Oh, that is nice, it's so warm!"
Gavroche took a glance of satisfaction at the coverlet.
"That also comes from the Jardin des Plantes," he said, "I took it from the monkeys."
And pointing out to the elder one the straw mat on which he was lying, which was very thick and admirably made, he added,—
"That belonged to the giraffe."
After a pause he continued,—
"The beasts had all those things, and I took them from them; they were not at all angry, for I told them that I wanted them for the elephant."
There was another interval of silence, after which he continued, "You climb over walls and snap your fingers at the Government."
The two lads gazed with a timid and stupefied respect at this intrepid and inventive being, a vagabond like them, isolated like them, weak like them, who had something admirable and omnipotent about him, who appeared to them supernatural, and whose face was composed of all the grimaces of an old mountebank, mingled with the simplest and most charming smile.
"Then, sir," the elder lad said timidly, "you are not afraid of the policemen?"
Gavroche limited himself to answering,—
"Brat! we don't say 'policemen,' we say 'slops.'"
The younger had his eyes wide open, but said nothing; as he was at the edge of the mat, the elder being in the centre, Gavroche tucked in the coverlet around him as a mother would have done, and raised the mat under his head with old rags, so as to make him a pillow. Then he turned to the elder boy,—
"Well! it is jolly here, eh?"
"Oh, yes!" the lad answered, as he looked at Gavroche with the expression of a saved angel.
The two poor little fellows, who were wet through, began to grow warm again.
"By the bye," Gavroche went on, "why were you blubbering?"
And pointing to the younger boy he said to his brother,—
"A baby like that, I don't say no; but for a tall chap like you to cry is idiotic, you look like a calf."
"Well, sir," the lad said, "we hadn't any lodging to go to."
"Brat," Gavroche remarked, "we don't say 'lodging,' but 'crib.'"
"And then we felt afraid of being all alone like that in the night."
"We don't say 'night,' but 'sorgue.'"
"Thank you, sir," said the boy.
"Listen to me," Gavroche went on. "You must never blubber for anything. I'll take care of you, and you'll see what fun we shall have. In summer we'll go to the Glacière with Navet, a pal of mine; we'll bathe in the dock, and run about naked on the timber floats in front of the bridge of Austerlitz, for that makes the washerwomen rage. They yell, they kick, and, Lord! if you only knew how ridiculous they are! We'll go and see the skeleton man; he's alive at the Champs Élysées, and the cove is as thin as blazes. And then I will take you to the play, and let you see Frederick Lemaître; I get tickets, for I know some actors, and even performed myself once in a piece. We were a lot of boys who ran about under a canvas, and that made the sea. I will get you an engagement at my theatre. We will go and see the savages, but they ain't real savages, they wear pink fleshing which forms creases, and you can see repairs made at their elbows with white thread. After that we will go to the Opera, and enter with the claquers. The claque at the Opera is very well selected, though I wouldn't care to be seen with the claque on the boulevard. At the Opera, just fancy, they're people who pay their twenty sous, but they are asses, and we call them dish-clouts. And then we will go and see a man guillotined, and I'll point out the executioner to you, Monsieur Sanson; he lives in the Rue de Marais, and he's got a letter-box at his door. Ah! we shall amuse ourselves famously."
At this moment a drop of pitch fell on Gavroche's hand, and recalled him to the realities of life.
"The devil," he said, "the match is wearing out. Pay attention! I can't afford more than a sou a month for lighting, and when people go to bed they are expected to sleep. We haven't the time to read M. Paul de Kock's romances. Besides, the light might pass through the crevices of the gate, and the slops might see it."
"And then," timidly observed the elder lad, who alone dared to speak to Gavroche and answer him, "a spark might fall on the straw, and we must be careful not to set the house on fire."
"You mustn't say 'set the house on fire,'" Gavroche remarked, "but 'blaze the crib.'"
The storm grew more furious, and through the thunder-peals the rain could be heard pattering on the back of the colossus.
"The rain's sold!" said Gavroche. "I like to hear the contents of the water-bottle running down the legs of the house. Winter's an ass; it loses its time, it loses its trouble; it can't drown us, and so that is the reason why the old water-carrier is so growling with us."
This allusion to the thunder, whose consequences Gavroche, in his quality as a nineteenth-century philosopher, accepted, was followed by a lengthened flash, so dazzling that a portion of it passed through the hole in the elephant's belly. Almost at the same moment the thunder roared, and very furiously. The two little boys uttered a cry, and rose so quickly that the brass grating was almost thrown down; but Gavroche turned toward them his bold face, and profited by the thunder-clap to burst into a laugh.
"Be calm, children, and do not upset the edifice. That's fine thunder of the right sort, and it isn't like that humbugging lightning. It's almost as fine as at the 'Ambigu.'"
This said, he restored order in the grating, softly pushed the two lads on to the bed, pressed their knees to make them lie full length, and cried,—
"Since le Bon Dieu is lighting his candle, I can put out mine. Children, my young humans, we must sleep, for it's very bad not to sleep. It makes you stink in the throat, as people say in fashionable society. Wrap yourselves well up in the blanket, for I am going to put the light out; are you all right?"
"Yes," said the elder boy, "I'm all right, and feel as if I had a feather pillow under my head."
"You mustn't say 'head,'" Gavroche cried, "but 'nut.'"
The two lads crept close together; Gavroche made them all right on the mat, and pulled the blanket up to their ears; then he repeated for the third time in the hieratic language, "Roost."
And he blew out the rope's end. The light was scarce extinguished ere a singular trembling began to shake the trellis-work under which the three children were lying. It was a multitude of dull rubbings which produced a metallic sound, as if claws and teeth were assailing the copper wire, and this was accompanied by all sorts of little shrill cries. The little boy of five years of age, hearing this noise above his head, and chilled with terror, nudged his elder brother, but he was "roosting" already, as Gavroche had ordered him; then the little one, unable to hold out any longer for fright, dared to address Gavroche, but in a very low voice and holding his breath.
"Sir?"
"Hilloh!" said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.
"What is that?"
"It's the rats," Gavroche answered.
And he laid his head again on the mat. The rats, which were really by thousands in the elephant's carcass, and were the live black spots to which we have alluded, had been held in check by the flame of the link so long as it was alight; but as soon as this cavern, which was, so to speak, their city, had been restored to night, sniffing what that famous story-teller, Perrault, calls "fresh meat," they rushed in bands to Gavroche's tent, climbed to the top, and were biting the meshes, as if trying to enter this novel sort of trap. In the mean while the little one did not sleep.
"Sir?" he began again.
"Well?" Gavroche asked.
"What are rats?"
"They're mice."
This explanation slightly reassured the child, for he had seen white mice in his life, and had not been afraid of them; still, he raised his voice again.
"Sir?"
"Well?" Gavroche repeated.
"Why don't you keep a cat?"
"I had one," Gavroche answered; "I brought it here, but they ate it for me."
This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the child began trembling once more; the dialogue between him and Gavroche was resumed for the fourth time.
"Sir?"
"Well?"
"What was eaten?"
"The cat."
"What ate the cat?"
"The rats."
"The mice?"
"Yes, the rats."
The child, terrified by these mice which ate the cats, continued,—
"Would those mice eat us?"
"Oh, Lord, yes!" Gavroche said.
The child's terror was at its height, but Gavroche added,—
"Don't be frightened, they cant get in. And then, I am here. Stay; take my hand, hold your tongue, and sleep."
Gavroche at the same time took the boy's hand across his brother, and the child pressed the hand against his body and felt reassured; for courage and strength have mysterious communications. Silence had set in again around them, the sound of voices had startled and driven away the rats; and when they returned a few minutes later and furiously attacked, the three boys, plunged in sleep, heard nothing more. The night hours passed away; darkness covered the immense Bastille Square. A winter wind, which was mingled with the rain, blew in gusts. The patrols examined doors, enclosures, and dark corners, and, while searching for nocturnal vagabonds, passed silently before the elephant; the monster, erect and motionless, with its eyes open in the darkness, seemed to be dreaming, as if satisfied at its good deed, and sheltered from the sky and rain the three poor sleeping children. In order to understand what is going to follow, it must be remembered that at this period the main-guard of the Bastille was situated at the other end of the square, and that what took place near the elephant could neither be prevented nor heard by the sentry. Toward the end of the hour which immediately precedes daybreak, a man came running out of the Rue St. Antoine, crossed the square, went round the great enclosure of the Column of July, and slipped through the palings under the elephant's belly. If any light had fallen on this man, it might have been guessed from his thoroughly drenched state that he had passed the night in the rain. On getting under the elephant he uttered a peculiar cry, which belongs to no human language, and which a parrot alone could reproduce. He repeated twice this cry, of which the following orthography scarce supplies any idea, "Kirikikiou!" At the second cry a clear, gay, and young voice answered from the elephant's belly, "Yes!" Almost immediately the plank that closed the whole was removed, and left a passage for a lad, who slid down the elephant's leg and fell at the man's feet. It was Gavroche, and the man was Montparnasse. As for the cry of "Kirikikiou," it was doubtless what the lad meant to say by, "You will ask for Monsieur Gavroche." On hearing it, he jumped up with a start, crept out of his alcove by moving the grating a little, and then carefully closing it again, after which he opened the trap and went down. The man and the child silently recognized each other in the night, and Montparnasse confined himself to saying,—
"We want you, come and give us a lift."
The gamin asked for no other explanation.
"Here I am," he said.
And the pair proceeded toward the Rue St. Antoine, whence Montparnasse had come, winding rapidly through the long file of market-carts which were coming into town at the time. The gardeners, lying on their wagons among their salads and vegetables, half asleep, and rolled up to the eyes in their great-coats, owing to the beating rain, did not even look at these strange passers-by.
[1] Écoute ce que je te dis, garçon, si j'étais sur la place, avec mon dogue, ma dague, et ma digue, et si vous me prodiguiez dix gros sous, je ne refuserais pas d'y goupiner, mais nous ne sommes pas le Mardi Gras.
Slang is the language of the dark. Thought is affected in its gloomiest depths, and social philosophy is harassed in its most poignant undulations, in the presence of this enigmatical dialect, which is at once branded and in a state of revolt. There is in this a visible chastisement, and each syllable looks as if it were marked. The words of the common language appear in it, as if branded and hardened by the hangman's red-hot irons, and some of them seem to be still smoking; some phrases produce in you the effect of a robber's fleur-de-lysed shoulder suddenly exposed, and ideas almost refuse to let themselves be represented by these convict substantives. The metaphors are at times so daring that you feel that they have worn fetters. Still, in spite of all this, and in consequence of all this, this strange patois has by right its compartment in that great impartial museum, in which there is room for the oxydized sou as well as the gold medal, and which is called toleration. Slang, whether people allow it or no, has its syntax and poetry. It is a language. If, by the deforming of certain vocables, we perceive that it has been chewed by Mandrin, we feel from certain metonyms that Villon spoke it. That line so exquisite and so celebrated,—
"Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?
(But where are the snows of yester-year?)"
is a line of slang. Antan, ante annum, is a slang word of Thunes, which signified the past year, and, by extension, formerly. Five-and-thirty years ago, on the departure of the great chain-gang, in 1827, there might be read in one of the dungeons of Bicêtre this maxim, engraved with a nail upon the wall by a king of Thunes condemned to the galleys, "Les dabs d'antan trimaient siempre pour la pierre du Coësre," which means, "The kings of former days used always to go to be consecrated." In the thought of that king, the consecration was the galleys. The word décarade, which expresses the departure of a heavy coach at a gallop, is attributed to Villon, and is worthy of him. This word, which strikes fire, contains in a masterly onomatopœia the whole of Lafontaine's admirable line,—
"Six forts chevaux tiraient un coche."
From a purely literary point of view, few studies would be more curious or fertile than that of slang. It is an entire language within a language, a sort of sickly grafting which has produced a vegetation, a parasite which has its roots in the old Gaulish trunk, and whose sinister foliage crawls up the whole of one side of the language. This is what might be called the first or common notion of slang, but to those who study the language as it should be studied, that is to say, as geologists study the earth, slang appears like a real alluvium. According as we dig more or less deeply, we find in slang, beneath the old popular French, Provençal, Spanish, Italian, Levantine, that language of the Mediterranean ports, English, and German, Romanic,—in its three varieties of French, Italian, and Roman,—Latin, and finally, Basque and Celtic. It is a deep and strange formation, a subterranean edifice built up in common by all scoundrels. Each accursed race has deposited its stratum, each suffering has let its stone fall, each heart has given its pebble. A multitude of wicked, low, or irritated souls who passed through life, and have faded away in eternity, are found there almost entire, and to some extent still visible, in the shape of a monstrous word.
Do you want Spanish? The old Gothic slang swarms with it. Thus we have boffette, a box on the ears, which comes from bofeton; vantane, a window (afterwards vanterne), from vantana; gat, a cat, from gato; acite, oil, from aceyte. Do you want Italian? We have spade, a sword, which comes from spada, and carvel, a boat, which comes from caravella. From the English we have bichot, the bishop; raille, a spy, from rascal, rascalion, roguish; and pilche, a case, from pitcher, a scabbard. Of German origin are caleur, the waiter, from kellner; hers, the master, from herzog, or duke. In Latin we find frangir, to break, from frangere; affurer, to steal, from fur; and cadène, a chain, from catena. There is one word which is found in all continental language with a sort of mysterious power and authority, and that is the word magnus: Scotland makes mac of it, which designates the chief of the clan, Mac Farlane, Mac Callumore, the great Farlane, the great Callumore; slang reduces it to meck, afterwards meg, that is to say, the Deity. Do you wish for Basque? Here is gahisto, the devil, which is derived from gaiztoa, bad, and sorgabon, good-night, which comes from gabon, good-evening. In Celtic we find blavin, a handkerchief, derived from blavet, running water; ménesse, a woman (in a bad sense), from meinec, full of stones; barant, a stream, from baranton, a fountain; goffeur, a locksmith, from goff, a blacksmith; and guédouze, death, which comes from guenn-du, white and black. Lastly, do you wish for history? Slang calls crowns "the Maltese," in memory of the coin which was current aboard the Maltese galleys.
In addition to the philological origins which we have indicated, slang has other and more natural roots, which issue, so to speak, directly from the human mind. In the first place, there is the direct creation of words, for it is the mystery of language to paint with words which have, we know not how or why, faces. This is the primitive foundation of every human language, or what might be called the granite. Slang swarms with words of this nature, immediate words created all of one piece; it is impossible to say when, or by whom, without etymologies, analogies, or derivatives,—solitary, barbarous, and at times hideous words, which have a singular power of expression, and are alive. The executioner, le taule (the anvil's face); the forest, le sabri (cudgels); fear or flight, taf; the footman, le larbin; the general, prefect, or minister, pharos (head man); and the devil, le rabouin (the one with the tail). Nothing can be stranger than these words, which form transparent masks; some of them, le rabouin, for instance, are at the same time grotesque and terrible, and produce the effect of a Cyclopean grimace. In the second place, there is metaphor, and it is the peculiarity of a language which wishes to say everything and conceal everything, to abound in figures. Metaphor is an enigma in which the robber who is scheming a plot, or the prisoner arranging an escape, takes the refuge. No idiom is more metaphorical than slang; dévisser (to unscrew) le coco (the cocoa-nut), to twist the neck; tortiller (to wind up), to eat; être gerbé (sheaved), to be tried; un rat, a stealer of bread; il lansquine, it rains,—an old striking figure, which bears to some extent its date with it, assimilates the long oblique lines of rain to the serried sloping pikes of the lansquenets, and contains in one word the popular adage, "It is raining halberts." At times, in proportion as slang passes from the first to the second stage, words pass from the savage and primitive state to the metaphorical sense. The devil ceases to be le rabouin, and becomes "the baker," or he who puts in the oven. This is wittier but not so grand; something like Racine after Corneille, or Euripides after Æschylus. Some slang phrases which belong to both periods, and have at once a barbarous and a metaphorical character, resemble phantasmagorias: Les sorgueurs vont sollicer des gails à la lune (the prowlers are going to steal horses at night). This passes before the mind like a group of spectres, and we know not what we see. Thirdly, there is expediency: slang lives upon the language, uses it as it pleases, and when the necessity arises limits itself to denaturalizing it summarily and coarsely. At times, with the ordinary words thus deformed and complicated with pure slang, picturesque sentences are composed, in which the admission of the two previous elements, direct creation and metaphor, is visible,—le cab jaspine, je marronne que la roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabri, (the dog barks, I suspect that the Paris diligence is passing through the wood); le dab est sinve, la dabuge est merloussière, la fée est bative, (the master is stupid, the mistress is cunning, and the daughter pretty). Most frequently, in order to throw out listeners, slang confines itself to adding indistinctly to all the words of the language, a species of ignoble tail, a termination in aille, orgue, iergue, or uche. Thus: Vouziergue trouvaille bonorgue ce gigotmuche? (Do you find that leg of mutton good?) This was a remark made by Cartouche to a jailer, in order to learn whether the sum offered him for an escape suited him. The termination in mar has been very recently added.
Slang, being the idiom of corruption, is itself quickly corrupted. Moreover, as it always tries to hide itself so soon as it feels that it is understood, it transforms itself. Exactly opposed to all other vegetables, every sunbeam kills what it falls on in it. Hence slang is being constantly decomposed and re-composed; and this is an obscure and rapid labor which never ceases, and it makes more way in ten years than language does in ten centuries. Thus larton (head) becomes lartif; gail (horse) gaye; fertanche (straw) fertille; momignard (the child) momacque; fiques (clothes) frusques; chique (the church) l'égrugeoir; and colabre (the neck) colas. The devil is first gahisto, then le rabouin, and next "the baker;" a priest is the ratichon, and then the sanglier; a dagger is the vingt-deux, next the surin, and lastly the lingre; the police are railles, then roussins, then marchands de lacet (handcuff dealers), then coqueurs, and lastly cognes; the executioner is the taule, then Charlot, then the atigeur, and then the becquillard. In the seventeenth century to fight was to "take snuff;" in the nineteenth it is "to break the jaw;" but twenty different names have passed away between these two extremes, and Cartouche would speak Hebrew to Lacenaire. All the words of this language are perpetually in flight, like the men who employ them. Still, from time to time, and owing to this very movement, the old slang reappears and becomes new again. It has its headquarters where it holds its ground. The Temple preserved the slang of the seventeenth century, and Bicêtre, when it was a prison, that of Thunes. There the termination in anche of the old Thuners could be heard: Boyanches-tu? (do you drink?); il croyanche (he believes). But perpetual motion does not the less remain the law. If the philosopher succeeds in momentarily fixing, for the purpose of observation, this language, which is necessarily evaporating, he falls into sorrowful and useful meditations, and no study is more efficacious, or more fertile and instructive. There is not a metaphor or an etymology of slang which does not contain a lesson.
Among these men "fighting" means "pretending:" they "fight" a disease, for cunning is their strength. With them the idea of man is not separated from the idea of a shadow. Night is called la sorgue and man l'orgue: man is a derivative of night. They have formed the habit of regarding society as an atmosphere which kills them, as a fatal force, and they speak of their liberty as one speaks of his health. A man arrested is a "patient;" a man sentenced is a "corpse." The most terrible thing for the prisoner within the four stone walls which form his sepulchre is a sort of freezing chastity, and hence he always calls the dungeon the castus. In this funereal place external life will appear under its most smiling aspect. The prisoner has irons on his feet, and you may perhaps fancy that he thinks how people walk with their feet; no, he thinks that they dance with them, hence, if he succeed in cutting through his fetters, his first idea is that he can now dance, and he calls the saw a bastringue. A name is a centre, a profound assimilation. The bandit has two heads,—the one which revolves his deeds and guides him through life, the other which he has on his shoulders on the day of his death; he calls the head which counsels him in crime, the sorbonne, and the one that expiates it the tronche. When a man has nothing but rags on his body and vices in his heart, when he has reached that double moral and material degradation which the word gueux characterizes in its two significations, he is ripe for crime; he is like a well-sharpened blade; he has two edges, his distress and his villany, and hence slang does not call him a gueux but a réguisé. What is the bagne? A furnace of damnation, a hell, and the convict calls himself a "fagot." Lastly, what name do malefactors give to the prison? The "college." A whole penitentiary system might issue from this word.
Would you like to know whence came most of the galley songs,—those choruses called in the special vocabularies the lirlonfa? Listen to this:
There was at the Châtelet of Paris a large long cellar, which was eight feet below the level of the Seine. It had neither windows nor gratings, and the sole opening was the door; men could enter it, but air not. This cellar had for ceiling a stone arch, and for floor ten inches of mud; it had been paved, but, owing to the leakage of the water, the paving had rotted and fallen to pieces. Eight feet above the ground, a long massive joist ran from one end to the other of this vault; from this joist hung at regular distances chains, three feet long, and at the end of these chains were collars. In this cellar men condemned to the galleys were kept until the day of their departure for Toulon; they were thrust under this beam, where each had his fetters oscillating in the darkness and waiting for him. The chains, like pendant arms, and the collars, like open hands, seized these wretches by the neck; they were riveted and left there. As the chain was too short, they could not lie down; they remained motionless in this cellar, in this night, under this beam, almost hung, forced to make extraordinary efforts to reach their loaf or water-jug, with the vault above their heads and mud up to their knees, drawn and quartered by fatigue, giving way at the hips and knees, hanging on by their hands to the chain to rest themselves, only able to sleep standing, and awakened every moment by the choking of the collar—some did not awake. To eat they were compelled to draw up their bread, which was thrown into the mud, with the heel all along the thigh to their hand. How long did they remain in this state? One month, two months, sometimes six months; one man remained a year. It was the antechamber of the galleys, and men were put in it for stealing a hare from the king. In this hellish sepulchre what did they? They died by inches, as people can do in a sepulchre, and sang, which they can do in a hell; for when there is no longer hope, song remains,—in the Maltese waters, when a galley was approaching, the singing was heard before the sound of the oars. The poor poacher Survincent, who passed through the cellar-prison of the Châtelet, said, "Rhymes sustained me." Poetry is useless; what is the good of rhymes? In this cellar nearly all the slang songs were born, and it is from the dungeon of the Great Châtelet of Paris that comes the melancholy chorus of Montgomery's galley: Timaloumisaine, timoulamison. Most of the songs are sad, some are gay, and one is tender:—
"Icicaille est le théâtre
Du petit dardant."[1]
Do you what you will, you cannot destroy that eternal relic of man's heart, love.
In this world of dark deeds secrets are kept; for secrets are a thing belonging to all, and with these wretches secrecy is the unity which serves as the basis of union. To break secrecy is to tear from each member of this ferocious community something of himself. To denounce is called in the energetic language of slang "to eat the piece," as if the denouncer took a little of the substance of each, and supported himself on a piece of the flesh of each. What is receiving a buffet? The conventional metaphor answers, "It is seeing six-and-thirty candles." Here slang interferes and reads camoufle for candle; life in its ordinary language takes camouflet as a synonym for a box on the ears. Hence, by a sort of penetration from bottom to top, and by the aid of metaphor, that incalculable trajectory, slang ascends from the cellar to the academy, and Poulailler saying, "I light my camoufle" makes Voltaire write, "Langleviel la Beaumelle deserves a hundred camouflets." Searching in slang is a discovery at every step, and the study and investigation of this strange idiom lead to the point of intersection of regular with accursed society. The robber has also his food for powder, or stealable matter in you, in me, in the first passer-by, the pantre (pan, everybody). Slang is the word converted into a convict. It produces a consternation to reflect that the thinking principle of man can be hurled down so deep that it can be dragged there and bound by the obscure tyranny of fatality, and be fastened to some unknown rivets on this precipice. Alas! will no one come to the help of the human soul in this darkness? Is it its destiny ever to await the mind, the liberator, the immense tamer of Pegasuses and hippogriffs, the dawn-colored combatant, who descends from the azure sky between two wings, the radiant knight of the future? Will it ever call in vain to its help the lance of the light of idealism? Is it condemned always to look down into the gulf of evil and see closer and closer to it beneath the hideous water the demoniac head, this slavering mouth, and this serpentine undulation of claws, swellings, and rings? Must it remain there without a gleam of hope, left to the horror of this formidable and vaguely smelt approach of the monster, shuddering, with dishevelled hair, wringing its arms, forever chained to the rock of night, a sombre Andromeda white and naked in the darkness?
Cosette and Marius lived vaguely in the intoxication of their madness, and they did not notice the cholera which was decimating Paris in that very month. They had made as many confessions to each other as they could; but they had not extended very far beyond their names. Marius had told Cosette that he was an orphan, Pontmercy by name, a lawyer by profession, and gaining a livelihood by writing things for publishers; his father was a colonel, a hero, and he, Marius, had quarrelled with his grandfather, who was very rich. He also incidentally remarked that he was a baron; but this did not produce much effect on Cosette. Marius a baron? She did not understand it, and did not know what the word meant, and Marius was Marius to her. For her part, she confided to him that she had been educated at the convent of the Little Picpus; that her mother was dead, like his; that her father's name was Fauchelevent, that he was very good and gave a great deal to the poor, but was himself poor, and deprived himself of everything, while depriving her of nothing. Strange to say, in the species of symphony which Marius had lived in since he found Cosette again, the past, even the most recent, had become so confused and distant to him that what Cosette told him completely satisfied him. He did not even dream of talking to her about the nocturnal adventure in the garret, the Thénardiers, the burning, the strange attitude and singular flight of her father. Marius momentarily forgot all this; he did not know at night what he had done in the morning, where he had breakfasted, or who had spoken to him; he had a song in his ears which rendered him deaf to every other thought, and he only existed during the hours when he saw Cosette. As he was in heaven at that time, it was perfectly simple that he should forget the earth. Both of them bore languidly the undefinable weight of immaterial joys; that is the way in which those somnambulists called lovers live.
Alas! who is there that has not experienced these things? Why does an hour arrive when we emerge from this azure, and why does life go on afterwards?
Love almost takes the place of thought. Love is, indeed, an ardent forgetfulness. It is absurd to ask passion for logic; for there is no more an absolute logical concatenation in the human heart than there is a perfect geometric figure in the celestial mechanism. For Cosette and Marius nothing more existed than Marius and Cosette; the whole universe around them had fallen into a gulf, and they lived in a golden moment, with nothing before them, nothing behind them. Marius scarce remembered that Cosette had a father. It was blotted from his brain by his bedazzlement. Of what did these lovers talk? As we have seen, of flowers, swallows, the setting sun, the rising moon, and all the important things. They had told themselves everything except everything; for the everything of lovers is nothing. Of what use would it be to talk of her father, the realities, that den, those bandits, that adventure? And was it quite certain that the nightmare had existed? They were two, they adored each other, and there was only that, there was nothing else. It is probable that this unconsciousness of death behind us is inherent to the arrival in Paradise. Have we seen demons? Are there any? Have we trembled? Have we suffered? We no longer know, and there is a roseate cloud over it all.
Hence these two beings lived in this way, very high up, and with all the unverisimilitude which there is in nature; neither at the nadir nor at the zenith, but between man and the seraphs, above the mud and below the ether, in the clouds. They were not so much flesh and bone, as soul and ecstasy from head to foot, already too sublimated to walk on earth, and still too loaded with humanity to disappear in ether, and held in suspense like atoms which are waiting to be precipitated; apparently beyond the pale of destiny, and ignorant of that rut, yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow; amazed, transported, and floating at moments with a lightness sufficient for a flight in the infinitude, and almost ready for the eternal departure. They slept awake in this sweet lulling; oh, splendid lethargy of the real over-powered by the ideal! At times Cosette was so beautiful that Marius closed his eyes before her. They best way of gazing at the soul is with closed eyes. Marius and Cosette did not ask themselves to what this would lead them, and looked at each other as if they had already arrived. It is a strange claim on the part of men to wish that love should lead them somewhere.
Marius had left M. Gillenormand's house in a wretched state; he had gone in with very small hopes, and came out with an immense despair. However,—those who have watched the beginnings of the human heart will comprehend it,—the lancer, the officer, the fop, cousin Théodule, had left no shadow on his mind, not the slightest. The dramatic poet might apparently hope for some complications to be produced by this revelation, so coarsely made to the grandson by the grandfather; but what the drama would gain by it truth would lose. Marius was at that age when a man believes nothing that is wrong; later comes the age when he believes everything. Suspicions are only wrinkles, and early youth has none; what o'erthrows Othello glides over Candide. Suspect Cosette? Marius could have committed a multitude of crimes more easily. He began walking about the streets, the resource of those who suffer, and he thought of nothing which he might have remembered. At two in the morning he went to Courfeyrac's lodging and threw himself on his mattress full dressed; it was bright sunshine when he fell asleep, with that frightful oppressive sleep which allows ideas to come and go in the brain. When he awoke he saw Courfeyrac, Enjolras, Feuilly, and Combeferre, all ready to go out, and extremely busy. Courfeyrac said to him,—
"Are you coming to General Lamarque's funeral?"
It seemed to him as if Courfeyrac were talking Chinese. He went out shortly after them, and put in his pockets the pistols which Javert had intrusted to him at the affair of February 3, and which still remained in his possession. They were still loaded, and it would be difficult to say what obscure notion he had in his brain when he took them up. The whole day he wandered about, without knowing where; it rained at times, but he did not perceive it; he bought for his dinner a halfpenny roll, put it in his pocket, and forgot it. It appears that he took a bath in the Seine without being conscious of it, for there are moments when a man has a furnace under his skull, and Marius had reached one of those moments. He hoped for nothing, feared nothing now, and had taken this step since the previous day. He awaited the evening with a feverish impatience, for he had but one clear idea left, that at nine o'clock he should see Cosette. This last happiness was now his sole future; after that came the shadow. At times, while walking along the most deserted boulevards, he imagined that he could hear strange noises in Paris; then he thrust his head out of his reverie, and said,—"Can they be fighting?" At nightfall, at nine o'clock precisely, he was at the Rue Plumet, as he had promised Cosette. He had not seen her for eight-and-forty hours; he was about to see her again. Every other thought was effaced, and he only felt an extraordinary and profound joy. Those minutes in which men live ages have this sovereign and admirable thing about them, that at the moment when they pass they entirely occupy the heart.
Marius removed the railing and rushed into the garden. Cosette was not at the place where she usually waited for him, and he crossed the garden and went to the niche near the terrace. "She is waiting for me there," he said; but Cosette was not there. He raised his eyes and saw that the shutters of the house were closed; he walked round the garden, and the garden was deserted. Then he returned to the garden, and, mad with love, terrified, exasperated with grief and anxiety, he rapped at the shutters, like a master who returns home at a late hour. He rapped, he rapped again, at the risk of seeing the window open and the fathers frowning face appear and ask him,—"What do you want?" This was nothing to what he caught a glimpse of. When he had rapped, he raised his voice, and called Cosette. "Cosette!" he cried: "Cosette!" he repeated imperiously. There was no answer. It was all over; there was no one in the garden, no one in the house. Marius fixed his desperate eyes on this mournful house, which was as black, as silent, and more empty, than a tomb. He gazed at the stone bench on which he had spent so many adorable hours by Cosette's side; then he sat down on the garden steps, with his heart full of gentleness and resolution; he blessed his love in his heart, and said to himself that since Cosette was gone all left him was to die. All at once he heard a voice which seemed to come from the street, crying through the trees,—
"Monsieur Marius!"
He drew himself up.
"Hilloh!" he said.
"Monsieur Marius, are you there?"
"Yes."
"Monsieur Marius," the voice resumed, "your friends are waiting for you at the barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie."
This voice was not entirely strange to him, and resembled Éponine's rough, hoarse accents. Marius ran to the railings, pulled aside the shifting bar, passed his head through, and saw some one, who seemed to be a young man, running away in the gloaming.
There is riot, and there is insurrection; they are two passions, one of which is just, the other unjust. In democratic States, the only ones based on justice, it sometimes happens that the fraction usurps power; in that case the whole people rises, and the necessary demand for its rights may go so far as taking up arms. In all the questions which result from collective sovereignty, the war of all against the fraction is insurrection, and the attack of the fraction on the masses is a riot; according as the Tuileries contain the king or the convention, they are justly or unjustly attacked. The same guns pointed at the mob are in the wrong on August 14, and in the right on the 14th Vendémiaire. Their appearance is alike, but the base is different; the Swiss defend what is false, and Bonaparte what is true. What universal suffrage has done in its liberty and its sovereignty cannot be undone by the street. It is the same in matters of pure civilization, and the instinct of the masses, clear-sighted yesterday, may be perturbed to-morrow. The same fury is legitimate against Terray and absurd against Turgot. Smashing engines, pillaging store-houses, tearing up rails, the demolition of docks, the wrong ways of multitudes, the denial of popular justice to progress, Ramus assassinated by the scholars, and Rousseau expelled from Switzerland by stones,—all this is riot Israel rising against Moses, Athens against Phocion, Rome against Scipio, are riots, while Paris attacking the Bastille is insurrection. The soldiers opposing Alexander, the sailors mutinying against Christopher Columbus, are the same revolt,—an impious revolt; why? Because Alexander does for Asia with the sword what Columbus does for America with the compass; Alexander, like Columbus, finds a world. These gifts of a world to civilization are such increments of light, that any resistance in such a case is culpable. At times the people breaks its fidelity to itself, and the mob behaves treacherously to the people. Can anything, for instance, be stranger than the long and sanguinary protest of the false salt-makers, a legitimate chronic revolt which at the decisive moment, on the day of salvation, and in the hour of the popular victory, espouses the throne, turns into chouannerie, and from an insurrection against the government becomes a riot for it? These are gloomy masterpieces of ignorance. The false salt-maker escapes from the royal gallows, and with the noose still round his neck mounts the white cockade. "Death to the salt taxes" brings into the world, "Long live the king." The killers of St. Bartholomew, the murderers of September, the massacrers of Avignon, the assassins of Coligny, of Madame de Lamballe, the assassins of Brune, the Miquelets, the Verdets, and the Cadenettes, the Companions of Jehu, and the Chevaliers du Brassard,—all this is riot. The Vendée is a grand Catholic riot The sound of right in motion can be recognized, and it does not always come from the trembling of the overthrown masses; there are mad furies and cracked bells, and all the tocsins do not give the sound of bronze. The commotion of passions and ignorances differs from the shock of progress. Rise, if you like, but only to grow, and show me in what direction you are going, for insurrection is only possible with a forward movement. Any other uprising is bad, every violent step backwards is riot, and recoiling is an assault upon the human race. Insurrection is the outburst of the fury of truth; the paving-stones which insurrection tears up emit the spark of right, and they only leave to riot their mud. Danton rising against Louis XVI. is insurrection; Hébert against Danton is riot.
Hence it comes that if insurrection in given cases may be, as Lafayette said, the most holy of duties, riot may be the most fatal of attacks. There is also some difference in the intensity of caloric; insurrection is often a volcano, a riot often a straw fire. Revolt, as we have said, is sometimes found in the power. Polignac is a rioter, and Camille Desmoulins is a government. At times insurrection is a resurrection. The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an absolutely modern fact, and all history anterior to that fact being for four thousand years filled with violated right and the suffering of the peoples, each epoch of history brings with it the protest which is possible to it. Under the Cæsars there was no insurrection, but there was Juvenal. The facit indignatio takes the place of the Gracchi. Under the Cæsars there is the Exile of Syene, and there is also the man of the "Annals." We will not refer to the immense Exile of Patmos, who also crushes the real world with a protest in the name of the ideal world, converts a vision into an enormous satire, and casts on Rome-Nineveh, Rome-Babylon, and Rome-Sodom the flashing reflection of the Apocalypse. John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal. We cannot understand him, for he is a Jew, and writes in Hebrew; but the man who writes the "Annals" is a Latin, or, to speak more correctly, a Roman. As the Neros reign in the black manner, they must be painted in the same. Work produced by the graver alone would be pale, and so a concentrated biting prose must be poured into the lines. Despots are of some service to thinkers, for chained language is terrible language, and the writer doubles and triples his style when silence is imposed by a master on the people. There issues from this silence a certain mysterious fulness which filters and fixes itself in bronze in the thought. Compression in history produces conciseness in the historian, and the granitic solidity of certain celebrated prose is nothing but a pressure put on by the tyrant. Tyranny forces the writer into contraction of the diameter, which is increase of strength. The Ciceronian period, scarce sufficient for Verres, would be blunted upon a Caligula. Though there is less breadth in the sentence, there is more intensity in the blow, and Tacitus thinks with a drawn-back arm. The honesty of a great heart condensed in justice and truth is annihilating.
We must observe, by the way, that Tacitus is not historically superimposed on Cæsar, and the Tiberii are reserved for him. Cæsar and Tacitus are two successive phenomena, whose meeting seems to be mysteriously prevented by Him who regulates the entrances and exits on the stage of centuries. Cæsar is great, Tacitus is great, and God spares these two grandeurs by not bringing them into collision. The judge, in striking Cæsar, might strike too hard and be unjust, and God does not wish that. The great wars of Africa and Spain, the Cilician pirates destroyed, civilization introduced into Gaul, Britain, and Germany,—all this glory covers the Rubicon. There is in this a species of delicacy on the part of divine justice, hesitating to let loose on the illustrious usurper the formidable historian, saving Cæsar from the sentence of a Tacitus, and granting extenuating circumstances to genius. Assuredly despotism remains despotism, even under the despot of genius. There is corruption under illustrious tyrants, but the moral plague is more hideous still under infamous tyrants. In such reigns nothing veils the shame; and the producers of examples, Tacitus like Juvenal, buffet more usefully in the presence of this human race this ignominy, which has no reply to make. Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sylla; under Claudius and Domitian there is a deformity of baseness corresponding with the ugliness of the tyrant. The foulness of the slaves is the direct product of the despots; a miasma is extracted from these crouching consciences in which the master is reflected; the public power is unclean, heads are small, consciences flat, and souls vermin; this is the case under Caracalla, Commodus, and Heliogabalus, while from the Roman senate under Cæsar there only issues the smell of dung peculiar to eagles' nests. Hence the apparently tardy arrival of Juvenal and Tacitus, for the demonstrator steps in at the hour for the experiment to be performed.
But Juvenal or Tacitus, like Isaiah in biblical times and Dante in the Middle Ages, is the man; riot, and insurrection are the multitude, which is sometimes wrong, sometimes right. In the most general cases riot issues from a material fact, but insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Riot is Masaniello; insurrection is Spartacus. Insurrection is related to the mind, riot to the stomach; Gaster is irritated, but Gaster is certainly not always in the wrong. In questions of famine, riot, the Buzançais one, for instance, has a true, pathetic, and just starting point, and yet it remains a riot. Why? Because, though right in the abstract, it is wrong in form. Ferocious though legitimate, violent though strong, it has marched haphazard, crushing things in its passage like a blind elephant; it has left behind it the corpses of old men, women, and children, and has shed, without knowing why, the blood of the unoffending and the innocent. Feeding the people is a good end, but massacre is a bad means.
All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even August 10 and July 14, set out with the same trouble, and before right is disengaged there are tumult and foam. At the outset an insurrection is a riot, in the same way as the river is a torrent, and generally pours itself into that ocean, Revolution. Sometimes, however, insurrection, which has come from those lofty mountains which command the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, and right, and is composed of the purest snow of the ideal, after a long fall from rock to rock, after reflecting the sky in its transparency, and being swollen by a hundred confluents in its majestic course, suddenly loses itself in some bourgeois bog, as the Rhine does in the marshes. All this belongs to the past, and the future will be different; for universal suffrage has this admirable thing about it, that it dissolves riot in its origin, and, by giving insurrection a vote, deprives it of the weapon. The disappearance of war, street wars as well as frontier wars,—such is the inevitable progress. Whatever To-day may be, peace is To-morrow. However, the bourgeois, properly so called, makes but a slight distinction between insurrection and riot. To him everything is sedition, pure and simple rebellion, the revolt of the dog against the master, an attempt to bite, which must be punished with the chain and the kennel, a barking, until the day when the dog's head, suddenly enlarged, stands out vaguely in the shadow with a lion's face. Then the bourgeois shouts, "Long live the people!"
This explanation given, how does the movement of 1832 stand to history? Is it a riot or an insurrection? It is an insurrection. It may happen that in the course of our narrative of a formidable event we may use the word "riot," but only to qualify surface facts, and while still maintaining the distinction between the form riot and the basis insurrection. The movement of 1832 had in its rapid explosion and mournful extinction so much grandeur that even those who only see a riot in it speak of it respectfully. To them it is like a remnant of 1830; for, as they say, excited imaginations cannot be calmed in a day, and a revolution does not stop short with a precipice, but has necessarily a few undulations before it returns to a state of peace, like a mountain in redescending to the plain. There are no Alps without Jura, nor Pyrenees without Asturia. This pathetic crisis of contemporary history, which the memory of the Parisians calls the "time of the riots," is assuredly a characteristic hour among the stormy hours of this age. One last word before we return to our story.
The facts which we are going to record belong to that dramatic and living reality which the historian sometimes neglects through want of time and space, but they contain—we insist upon it—life, heart-beats, and human thrills. Small details, as we think we have said, are, so to speak, the foliage of great events, and are lost in the distance of history. The period called the riots abounds in details of this nature, and the judicial inquiries, through other than historic reasons, have not revealed everything, or perhaps studied it. We are, therefore, going to bring into light among the peculiarities known and published, things which are not known and facts over which the forgetfulness of some and the death of others have passed. Most of the actors in these gigantic scenes have disappeared. On the next day they held their tongues, but we may say that we saw what we are about to narrate. We will change a few names, for history recounts and does not denounce, but we will depict true things. The nature of our book will only allow us to display one side and one episode, assuredly the least known, of the days of June 5 and 6, 1832; but we will do so in such a way that the reader will be enabled to catch a glimpse of the real face of this frightful public adventure behind the dark veil which we are about to lift.
Holding a pistol without a cock in the streets is such a public function, that Gavroche felt his humor increase at every step. He cried between the scraps of the Marseillaise which he sang,—
"All goes well. I suffer considerably in my left paw. I have broken my rheumatism, but I am happy, citizens. The bourgeois have only to hold firm, and I am going to sing them some subversive couplets. What are the police? Dogs. Holy Moses! we must not lack respect for the dogs. Besides, I should be quite willing to have one[1] for my pistol. I have just come from the boulevard, my friends, where it's getting warm, and the soup is simmering; it is time to skim the pot. Forward, my men, and let an impure blood inundate the furrows! I give my days for my country. I shall not see my concubine again; it's all over. Well, no matter! Long live joy! Let us fight, crebleu! I have had enough of despotism!"
At this moment the horse of a lancer in the National Guard, who was passing, fell. Gavroche laid his pistol on the pavement, helped the man up, and then helped to raise the horse, after which he picked up his pistol and went his way again. In the Rue de Thorigny all was peace and silence; and this apathy, peculiar to the Marais, contrasted with the vast surrounding turmoil. Four gossips were conversing on the step of a door; Scotland has trios of witches, but Paris has quartettes of gossips, and the "Thou shalt be king" would be as lugubriously cast at Bonaparte at the Baudoyer crossway, as to Macbeth on the Highland heath,—it would be much the same croak. The gossips in the Rue Thorigny only troubled themselves about their own affairs; they were three portresses, and a rag-picker with her dorser and her hook. They seemed to be standing all four at the four corners of old age, which are decay, decrepitude, ruin, and sorrow. The rag-picker was humble, for in this open-air world the rag-picker bows, and the portress protects. The things thrown into the street are fat and lean, according to the fancy of the person who makes the pile, and there may be kindness in the broom. This rag-picker was grateful, and she smiled,—what a smile!—at the three portresses. They were making remarks like the following,—
"So your cat is as ill-tempered as ever?"
"Well, good gracious! you know that cats are naturally the enemy of dogs. It's the dogs that complain."
"And people too."
"And yet cats' fleas do not run after people."
"Dogs are really dangerous. I remember one year when there were so many dogs that they were obliged to put it in the papers. It was at that time when there were large sheep at the Tuileries to drag the little carriage of the King of Rome. Do you remember the King of Rome?"
"I preferred the Duc de Bordeaux."
"Well, I know Louis XVII., and I prefer him."
"How dear meat is, Mame Patagon!"
"Oh, dont talk about it! Butcher's meat is a horror,—a horrible horror. It is only possible to buy bones now."
Here the rag-picker interposed,—
"Ladies, trade does not go on well at all, and the rubbish is abominable. People do not throw away anything now, but eat it all."
"There are poorer folk than you, Vargoulême."
"Ah, that's true," the rag-picker replied deferentially, "for I have a profession."
There was a pause, and the rag-picker, yielding to that need of display which is at the bottom of the human heart, added,—
"When I go home in the morning I empty out my basket and sort the articles; that makes piles in my room. I put the rags in a box, the cabbage-stalks in a tub, the pieces of linen in my cupboard, the woollen rags in my chest of drawers, old papers on the corner of the window, things good to eat in my porringer, pieces of glass in the fire-place, old shoes behind the door, and bones under my bed."
Gavroche had stopped, and was listening.
"Aged dames," he said, "what right have you to talk politics?"
A broadside, composed of a quadruple yell, assailed him.
"There's another of the villains."
"What's that he has in his hand,—a pistol?"
"Just think, that rogue of a boy!"
"They are never quiet unless when they are overthrowing the authorities."
Gavroche disdainfully limited his reprisals to lifting the tip of his nose with his thumb, and opening his hand to the full extent. The rag-picker exclaimed,—
"The barefooted scamp!"
The one who answered to the name of Mame Patagon struck her hands together with scandal.
"There are going to be misfortunes, that's sure. The young fellow with the beard round the corner, I used to see him pass every morning with a girl in a pink bonnet on his arm; but this morning I saw him pass, and he was giving his arm to a gun. Mame Bacheux says there was a revolution last week at, at, at, at,—where do the calves come from?—at Pontoise. And then, just look at this atrocious young villain's pistol. It seems that the Célestins are full of cannon. What would you have the Government do with these vagabonds who can only invent ways to upset the world, after we were beginning to get over all the misfortunes which fell—good gracious!—on that poor Queen whom I saw pass in a cart! And all this will raise the price of snuff. It is infamous, and I will certainly go and see you guillotined, malefactor."
"You snuffle, my aged friend," said Gavroche; "blow your promontory."
And he passed on. When he was in the Rue Pavée his thoughts reverted to the rag-picker, and he had this soliloquy,—
"You are wrong to insult the revolutionists, Mother Cornerpost. This pistol is on your behalf, and it is for you to have in your baskets more things good to eat."
All at once he heard a noise behind; it was the portress Patagon, who had followed him, and now shook her fist at him, crying,—
"You are nothing but a bastard."
"At that I scoff with all my heart," said Gavroche.
A little later he passed the Hôtel Lamoignon, where he burst into this appeal,—
"Go on to the battle."
And he was attacked by a fit of melancholy; he regarded his pistol reproachfully, and said to it,—
"I am going off, but you will not go off."
One dog may distract another;[2] a very thin whelp passed, and Gavroche felt pity for it.
"My poor little creature," he said to it, "you must have swallowed a barrel, as you show all the hoops."
Then he proceeded toward the Orme St. Gervais.
[1] The hammer of a pistol is called a dog in France.
[2] Another allusion to the hammer (chien) of the pistol.
Laigle of Meaux, as we know, liked better to live with Joly than any one else, and he had a lodging much as the bird has a branch. The two friends lived together, ate together, slept together, and had everything in common, even a little Musichetta. They were what they call bini in the house of the Assistant Brothers. On the morning of June 5 they went to breakfast at Corinth. Joly had a cold in his head, and Laigles coat was threadbare, while Joly was well dressed. It was about nine in the morning when they pushed open the door of Corinth, and went up to the first-floor room, where they were received by Matelote and Gibelotte.
"Oysters, cheese, and ham," said Laigle.
They sat down at a table; the room was empty; there was no one in it but themselves. Gibelotte, recognizing Joly and Laigle, placed a bottle of wine on the table, and they attacked the first dozen of oysters. A head appeared in the hatchway and a voice said,—
"As I was passing I smelt a delicious perfume of Brie cheese, so I stepped in."
It was Grantaire; he took a stool and sat down at the table. Gibelotte, on seeing Grantaire, placed two bottles of wine on the table, which made three.
"Are you going to drink these two bottles?" Laigle asked Grantaire, who replied,—
"All men are ingenious, but you alone are ingenuous. Two bottles never yet astonished a man."
The others began with eating, but Grantaire began with drinking; a pint was soon swallowed.
"Why, you must have a hole in your stomach," said Laigle.
"Well, you have one in your elbow," Grantaire retorted, and after emptying his glass, he added,—
"Oh yes, Laigle of the funeral orations, your coat is old."
"I should hope so," Laigle replied, "for my coat and I live comfortably together. It has assumed all my wrinkles, does not hurt me anywhere, has moulded itself on my deformities, and is complacent to all my movements, and I only feel its presence because it keeps me warm. Old coats and old friends are the same thing."
"Grantaire," Joly asked, "have you come from the boulevard?"
"No."
"Laigle and I have just seen the head of the procession pass. It is a marvellous sight."
"How quiet this street is!" Laigle exclaimed. "Who could suspect that Paris is turned topsy-turvy? How easy it is to see that formerly there were monasteries all round here! Du Breuil and Sauval give a list of them, and so does the Abbé Lebeuf. There was all around where we are now sitting a busy swarm of monks, shod and barefooted, tonsured and bearded, gray, black, white, Franciscans, Minims, Capuchins, Carmelites, little Augustines, great Augustines, old Augustines—"
"Don't talk about monks," Grantaire interrupted, "for it makes me want to scratch myself." Then he exclaimed,—
"Bouh! I have just swallowed a bad oyster, and that has brought back my hypochondria. Oysters are spoiled, servant-girls are ugly, and I hate the human race. I passed just now before the great public library in the Rue Richelieu, and that pile of oyster-shells, which is called a library, disgusts me with thinking. What paper! What ink! What pot-hooks and hangers! All that has been written! What ass was that said man was a featherless biped? And then, too, I met a pretty girl I know, lovely as spring, and worthy to be called Floréal, who was ravished, transported, happy in Paradise, the wretch, because yesterday a hideous banker spotted with small-pox deigned to throw his handkerchief to her! Alas! woman looks out for a keeper quite as much as a lover; cats catch mice as well as birds. This girl not two months ago was living respectably in a garret, and fitted little copper circles into the eyelet-holes of stays,—what do you call it? She sewed, she had a flockbed, she lived by the side of a pot of flowers, and was happy. Now she is a bankeress, and the transformation took place last night. I met the victim this morning perfectly happy, and the hideous thing was that the wretched creature was quite as pretty this morning as she was yesterday, and there was no sign of the financier on her face. Roses have this more or less than women, that the traces which the caterpillars leave on them are visible. Ah! there is no morality left in the world, and I call as witnesses the myrtle, symbol of love, the laurel, symbol of war, the olive, that absurd symbol of peace, the apple-tree, which nearly choked Adam with its pips, and the fig-tree, the grandfather of petticoats. As for justice, do you know what justice is? The Gauls covet Clusium, Rome protects Clusium and asks what wrong Clusium has done them. Brennus answers, 'The wrong which Alba did to you, the wrong that Fidène did to you, the wrong that the Equi, Volscians, and Sabines did to you. They were your neighbors, and the Clusians are ours. We understand neighborhood in the same way as you do. You stole Alba, and we take Clusium.' Rome says, 'You shall not take Clusium,' and Brennus took Rome, and then cried 'Væ victis!' That is what justice is! Oh, what beasts of prey there are in the world! What eagles, what eagles! the thought makes my flesh creep."
He held out his glass to Joly, who filled it, then drank, and continued almost without having been interrupted by the glass of wine, which no one noticed, not even himself:—
"Brennus who takes Rome is an eagle; the banker who takes the grisette is an eagle; and there is no more shame in one than the other. So let us believe nothing; there is only one reality, drinking. Of whatever opinion you may be, whether you back the lean cock, like the canton of Uri, or the fat cock, like the canton of Glaris, it is of no consequence; drink. You talk to me about the boulevard, the procession, etc.; what, are we going to have another revolution? This poverty of resources astonishes me on the part of le bon Dieu; and He must at every moment set to work greasing the groove of events. Things stick and won't move,—look sharp then with a revolution; le bon Dieu has always got his hands black with that filthy cart-wheel grease. In his place I should act more simply, I should not wind up my machinery at every moment, but lead the human race evenly; I should knit facts mesh by mesh without breaking the thread; I should have no temporary substitutes, and no extraordinary repertory. What you fellows call progress has two motive-powers, men and events, but it is a sad thing that something exceptional is required every now and then. For events as for men the ordinary stock company is not sufficient; among men there must be geniuses, and among events revolutions. Great accidents are the law, and the order of things cannot do without them; and, judging from the apparition of comets, we might be tempted to believe that Heaven itself feels a want of leading actors. At the moment when it is least expected, God bills the wall of the firmament with a meteor, and some strange star follows, underlined by an enormous tail; and that causes the death of Cæsar. Brutus gives him a dagger-thrust, and God deals him a blow with a comet. Crac! here is an aurora borealis, here is a revolution, here is a great man: '93 in big letters, napoleon in a line by itself, and the comet of 1811 at the head of the bill. Ah! what a fine blue poster, spangled all over with unexpected flashes! Boum! boum! an extraordinary sight. Raise your eyes, idlers. Everything is in disorder, the star as well as the drama. Oh Lord! It is too much and not enough; and these resources, drawn from exceptional circumstances, seem magnificence and are only poverty. My friends, Providence has fallen into the stage of expedients. What does a revolution prove? That God is running short: He produces a coup d'état, because there is a solution of continuity between the present and the future, and He is unable to join the ends. In fact, this confirms me in my conjectures as to the state of Jehovah's fortune; and on seeing so much discomfort above and below, so much paltriness and pinching and saving and distress both in heaven and on earth, from the bird which has not a seed of grain, to myself who have not one hundred thousand francs a year,—on seeing human destiny which is very much worn, and even royal destiny which is threadbare, as witness the Prince de Condé hanged,—on seeing winter, which is only a rent in the zenith through which the wind blows,—on seeing so many rags, even in the bran-new morning purple on the tops of the hills,—on seeing drops of dew, those false pearls, and hoar-frost, that paste jewelry,—on seeing humanity unripped and events patched, and so many spots on the sun, so many holes in the moon, and so much wretchedness everywhere,—I suspect that God is not rich. There is an appearance, it is true, but I see the pressure, and He gives a revolution just as a merchant whose cash-box is empty gives a ball. We must not judge the gods by appearances, and under the gilding of heaven I catch a glimpse of a poor universe. There is a bankruptcy in creation, and that is why I am dissatisfied. Just see, this is June 5, and it is almost night; I have been waiting since morning for day to come, and it has not come, and I will wager that it does not come at all. It is the irregularity of a badly-paid clerk. Yes, everything is badly arranged, nothing fits into anything, this old world is thrown out of gear, and I place myself in the ranks of the opposition. Everything goes crooked, and the universe is close-fisted; it is like the children,—those who ask get nothing, and those who don't ask get something. And then, again, it afflicts me to look at that bald-headed Laigle of Meaux, and I am humiliated by the thought that I am of the same age as that knee. However, I criticise but do not insult; the universe is what it is, and I speak without any evil meaning, and solely to do my duty by my conscience. Ah! by all the saints of Olympus, and by all the gods of Paradise, I was not made to be a Parisian, that is to say, to be constantly thrown like a shuttle-cock between two battledores, from a group of idlers to a group of noisy fellows. No! I was meant to be a Turk, looking all day at Egyptian damsels performing those exquisite dances, wanton like the dreams of a chaste man, or a Beauceron peasant, or a Venetian gentleman surrounded by fair ladies, or a little German prince, supplying one half a soldier to the Germanic Confederation, and employing his leisure hours in drying his stockings on his hedge, that is to say, his frontier! Such were the destinies for which I was born. Yes, I said Turk, and I will not recall it. I do not understand why the Turks are usually looked upon askance, for Mahom has some good points. Let us respect the inventor of harems of houris, and Paradises of Odalisques, and we ought not to insult Mahometism, the only religion adorned with a hen-coop! After this, I insist on drinking, for the earth is a great piece of stupidity. And it appears that all those asses are going to fight, to break each other's heads and massacre one another in the heart of summer, in the month of June, when they might go off with a creature on their arm to inhale in the fields the perfume of that immense cup of tea of cut hay. Really, too many follies are committed. An old broken lantern, which I saw just now at a bric-à-brac dealer's, suggests a reflection to me, 'it is high time to enlighten the human race.' Yes, I am sad again, and it has come from swallowing an oyster and a revolution the wrong way. I am growing lugubrious again. Oh, frightful old world! On your surface people strive, are destitute, prostitute themselves, kill themselves, and grow accustomed to it!"
And after this burst of eloquence Grantaire had a burst of coughing, which was well deserved.
"Talking of a revolution," said Joly, "it seebs that Barius is certaidly in love."
"Do you know with whom?" Laigle asked.
"Do."
"No?"
"Do, I tell you."
"The loves of Marius!" Grantaire exclaimed, "I can see them from here. Marius is a fog and will have found a vapor. Marius is of the poetic race. Who says poet says madman. Tymbræus Apollo. Marius and his Marie, or his Maria, or his Mariette, or his Marion, must be a funny brace of lovers. I can fancy what it is: ecstasies in which kissing is forgotten. Chaste on earth but connected in the infinitude. They are souls that have feelings, and they sleep together in the stars."
Grantaire was attacking his second bottle, and perhaps his second harangue, when a new head emerged from the staircase hatchway. It was a boy under ten years of age, ragged, very short and yellow, with a bull-dog face, a quick eye, and an enormous head of hair; he was dripping with wet, but seemed happy. The lad choosing without hesitating among the three, though he knew none of them, addressed Laigle of Meaux.
"Are you Monsieur Bossuet?" he asked.
"I am called so," Laigle replied; "what do you want?"
"A big blonde on the boulevard said to me, 'Do you know Mother Hucheloup's?' I said,' Yes, Rue Chanvrerie, the widow of the old buffer,' He says to me, 'Go there; you will find Monsieur Bossuet there, and say to him from me, A—B—C.' I suppose it's a trick played you, eh? He gave me ten sous."
"Joly, lend me ten sous," said Laigle; and turning to Grantaire, "Grantaire, lend me ten sous."
This made twenty sous, which Laigle gave the lad. "Thank you, sir," he said.
"What is your name?" Laigle asked.
"Navet, Gavroche's friend."
"Stay with us," Laigle said.
"Breakfast with us," Grantaire added.
The lad replied, "I can't, for I belong to the procession, and have to cry, 'Down with Polignac!'"
And, drawing his foot slowly after him, which is the most respectful of bows possible, he went away. When he was gone, Grantaire remarked,—
"That is the pure gamin, and there are many varieties in the gamin genus. The notary-gamin is called 'skip-the-gutter;' the cook-gamin is called 'scullion;' the baker-gamin is called 'paper-cap;' the footman-gamin is called 'tiger;' the sailor-gamin is called 'cabin-boy;' the soldier-gamin is called 'drummer-boy;' the painter-gamin is called 'dauber;' the tradesman-gamin is called 'errand-boy;' the courtier-gamin is called 'favorite;' the royal-gamin is called 'dauphin;' and the divine-gamin is called 'Bambino.'"
In the mean while Laigle meditated, and said in a low voice,—
"A—B—C, that is to say, funeral of General Lamarque."
"The tall, fair man," Grantaire observed, "is Enjolras, who has sent to warn you."
"Shall we go?" asked Bossuet.
"It's raiding," said Joly; "I have sworn to go through fire but dot through water, and I do dot wish to bake by cold worse."
"I shall stay here," Grantaire remarked; "I prefer a breakfast to a hearse."
"Conclusion, we remain," Laigle continued; "in that case let us drink. Besides, we may miss the funeral without missing the row."
"Ah, the row!" cried Joly, "I'b id that."
Laigle rubbed his hands.
"So the revolution of 1830 is going to begin over again. Indeed, it disturbs people by brushing against them."
"I do not care a rap for your revolution," Grantaire remarked, "and I do not execrate the present Government, for it is the crown tempered by the cotton nightcap, a sceptre terminating in an umbrella. In such weather as this Louis Philippe might use his royalty for two objects,—stretch out the sceptre-end against the people, and open the umbrella-end against the sky."
The room was dark, and heavy clouds completely veiled the daylight. There was no one in the wine-shop or in the streets, for everybody had gone "to see the events."
"Is it midday or midnight?" Bossuet asked; "I can see nothing; bring a candle, Gibelotte."
Grantaire was drinking sorrowfully.
"Enjolras disdains me," he muttered. "Enjolras said to himself, 'Joly is ill and Grantaire is drunk,' and so he sent Navet to Bossuet. And yet, if he had fetched me, I would have followed him. All the worse for Enjolras! I will not go to his funeral."
This resolution formed, Bousset, Grantaire, and Joly did not stir from the wine-shop, and at about 2 P.M. the table at which they sat was covered with empty bottles. Two candles burned on it, one in a perfectly green copper candlestick, the other in the neck of a cracked water-bottle. Grantaire had led Joly and Bossuet to wine, and Bossuet and Joly had brought Grantaire back to joy. As for Grantaire, he gave up wine at midday, as a poor inspirer of illusions. Wine is not particularly valued by serious sots, for in ebriety there is black magic and white magic, and wine is only the white magic. Grantaire was an adventurous drinker of dreams. The blackness of a formidable intoxication yawning before him, far from arresting, attracted him, and he had given up bottles and taken to the dram-glass, which is an abyss. Not having at hand either opium or hashish, and wishing to fill his brain with darkness, he turned to that frightful mixture of brandy, stout, and absinthe, which produces such terrible lethargies. Of these three vapors, beer, brandy, and absinthe, the lead of the soul is made: they are three darknesses in which the celestial butterfly is drowned; and there are formed in a membraneous smoke, vaguely condensed into a bat's wing, three dumb furies, Nightmare, Night, and Death, which hover over the sleeping Psyche. Grantaire had not yet reached that phase; far from it: he was prodigiously gay, and Bossuet and Joly kept even with him. Grantaire added to the eccentric accentuation of words and ideas the vagary of gestures; he laid his left hand on his knee with a dignified air, and with his neckcloth unloosed, straddling his stool, and with his full glass in his right hand, he threw these solemn words at the stout servant-girl Matelote:—
"Open the gates of the Palace! Let every man belong to the Académie Française, and have the right of embracing Madame Hucheloup! Let us drink."
And turning to the landlady, he added,—
"Antique female, consecrated by custom, approach, that I may contemplate thee."
And Joly exclaimed,—
"Batelote and Gibelotte, don't give Grantaire adybore drink. He is spending a frightful sum, and odly since this borning has devoured in shabeful prodigality two francs, dwenty-five centibes."
And Grantaire went on,—
"Who has unhooked the stars without my leave, in order to place them on the table in lieu of candles?"
Bossuet, who was very drunk, had retained his calmness, and was sitting on the sill of the open window, letting the rain drench his back, while he gazed at his two friends. All at once he heard behind him a tumult, hurried footsteps, and shouts of "To arms!" He turned, and noticed in the Rue St. Denis, at the end of the Rue Chanvrerie, Enjolras passing, carbine in hand, Gavroche with his pistol, Feuilly with his sabre, Courfeyrac with his sword, Jean Prouvaire with his musquetoon, Combeferre with his gun, Bahorel with his, and the whole armed and stormy band that followed them. The Rue de la Chanvrerie was not a pistol-shot in length, so Bossuet improvised a speaking-trumpet with his two hands round his mouth, and shouted,—
"Courfeyrac! Courfeyrac! hilloh!"
Courfeyrac heard the summons, perceived Bossuet, and walked a few steps down the Rue de la Chanvrerie, exclaiming, "What do you want?" which was crossed by a "Where are you going?"
"To make a barricade," Courfeyrac answered.
"Well, why not make it here? the spot is good."
"That is true, Eagle," Courfeyrac remarked.
And at a sign from Courfeyrac the mob rushed into the Rue de la Chanvrerie.
Any being hovering over Paris at this moment, with the wings of a bat or an owl, would have had a gloomy spectacle under his eyes. The entire old district of the markets, which is like a city within a city, which is traversed by the Rues St. Denis and St. Martin, and by a thousand lanes which the insurgents had converted into their redoubt and arsenal, would have appeared like an enormous black hole dug in the centre of Paris. Here the eye settled on an abyss, and, owing to the broken lamps and the closed shutters, all brilliancy, life, noise, and movement had ceased in it. The invisible police of the revolt were watching everywhere and maintaining order, that is to say, night. To hide the small number in a vast obscurity, and to multiply each combatant by the possibilities which this obscurity contains, this is the necessary tactics of insurrection, and at nightfall every window in which a candle gleamed received a bullet; the light was extinguished, and sometimes the occupant killed. Hence, nothing stirred; there was nought but terror, mourning, and stupor in the houses, and in the streets a sort of sacred horror. Not even the long rows of windows and floors, the network of chimneys and roofs, and the vague reflections which glisten on the muddy and damp pavement, could be perceived. The eye which had looked down from above on this mass of shadow might perhaps have noticed here and there indistinct gleams, which made the broken and strange lines, and the profile of singular buildings, stand out, something like flashes flitting through ruins; at such spots were the barricades. The rest was a lake of darkness and mystery, oppressive and funereal, above which motionless and mournful outlines rose,—the Tower of St. Jacques, St. Merry church, and two or three other of those grand edifices of which man makes giants and night phantoms. All around this deserted and alarming labyrinth, in those districts where the circulation of Paris was not stopped, and where a few lamps glistened, the aerial observer would have distinguished the metallic scintillation of bayonets, the dull rolling of artillery, and the buzz of silent battalions which was augmented every moment; it was a formidable belt, slowly contracting and closing in on the revolt.
The invested district was now but a species of monstrous cavern; everything seemed there asleep or motionless, and, as we have seen, each of the streets by which it could be approached only offered darkness. It was a stern darkness, full of snares, full of unknown and formidable collisions, into which it was terrifying to penetrate and horrible to remain, where those who entered shuddered before those who awaited them, and those who awaited shuddered before those who were about to come. Invisible combatants were intrenched at the corner of every street, like sepulchral traps hidden in the thickness of the night. It was all over; no other light could be hoped for there henceforth save the flash of musketry, no other meeting than the sudden and rapid apparition of death. Where, how, when, they did not know, but it was certain and inevitable: there, in the spot marked out for the contest, the Government and the insurrection, the National Guards and the popular society, the bourgeoisie and the rioters, were about to grope their way toward one another. There was the same necessity for both sides, and the only issue henceforth possible was to be killed or conquer. It was such an extreme situation, such a powerful obscurity, that the most timid felt resolute and the most daring terrified. On both sides, however, there was equal fury, obstinacy, and determination; on one side advancing was death, and no one dreamed of recoiling; on the other, remaining was death, and no one thought of flying. It was necessary that all should be over by the morrow, that the victory should be with one side or the other, and the insurrection either become a revolution or a riot. The Government understood this as well as the partisans, and the smallest tradesman felt it. Hence came an agonizing thought with the impenetrable gloom of this district, where all was about to be decided; hence came a redoubled anxiety around this silence, whence a catastrophe was going to issue. Only one sound could be heard,—a sound as heart-rending as a death-rattle and as menacing as a male-diction, the tocsin of St. Merry. Nothing could be so chilling as the clamor of this distracted and despairing bell as it lamented in the darkness.
As often happens, nature seemed to have come to an understanding with what men were going to do, and nothing deranged the mournful harmonies of the whole scene. The stars had disappeared, and heavy clouds filled the entire horizon with their melancholy masses. There was a black sky over these dead streets, as if an intense pall were cast over the immense tomb. While a thoroughly political battle was preparing on the same site which had already witnessed so many revolutionary events,—while the youth, the secret associations, and the schools in the name of principles, and the middle classes in the name of interests, were coming together to try a final fall,—while everybody was hurrying up and appealing to the last and decisive hour of the crisis, in the distance and beyond that fatal district, at the lowest depths of the unfathomable cavities of that old wretched Paris which is disappearing under the splendor of happy and opulent Paris, the gloomy voice of the people could be heard hoarsely growling. It is a startling and sacred voice, composed of the yell of the brute and the word of God, which terrifies the weak and warns the wise, and which at once comes from below like the voice of the lion, and from above like the voice of thunder.
Since the arrival at Corinth and the barricade had been begun no one paid any further attention to Father Mabœuf. M. Mabœuf, however, had not quitted the insurgents: he had gone into the ground-floor room of the wine-shop and seated himself behind the bar, where he was, so to speak, annihilated in himself. He seemed no longer to see or think. Courfeyrac and others had twice or thrice accosted him, warning him of the peril and begging him to withdraw, but he had not appeared to hear them. When no one was speaking to him his lips moved as if he were answering some one, and so soon as people addressed him his lips left off moving, and his eyes no longer seemed alive. A few hours before the barricade was attacked he had assumed a posture which he had not quitted since, with his two hands on his knees, and his head bent forward, as if he were looking into a precipice. Nothing could have drawn him out of this attitude, and it did not appear as if his mind were in the barricade. When every one else went to his post the only persons left in the room were Javert tied to the post, an insurgent with drawn sabre watching over Javert, and Mabœuf. At the moment of the attack, at the detonation, the physical shock affected and as it were awoke him; he suddenly rose, crossed the room, and at the moment when Enjolras repeated his appeal, "Does no one offer?" the old man was seen on the threshold of the wine-shop. His presence produced a species of commotion in the groups, and the cry was raised,—
"It is the voter, the conventionalist, the representative of the people!"
He probably did not hear it: he walked straight up to Enjolras, the insurgents making way for him with a religious fear, tore the flag from Enjolras, who recoiled with petrifaction, and then, no one daring to arrest or help him, this old man of eighty, with shaking head but firm step, slowly began ascending the staircase of paving-stones formed inside the barricade. This was so gloomy and so grand that all around him cried, "Off with your hats!" With each step he ascended the scene became more frightful; his white hair, his decrepit face, his high, bald, and wrinkled forehead, his hollow eyes, his amazed and open mouth, and his old arm raising the red banner, stood out from the darkness and were magnified in the sanguinary, brightness of the torch, and the spectators fancied they saw the spectre of '93 issuing from the ground, holding the flag of terror in its hand. When he was on the last step, when this trembling and terrible phantom, standing on the pile of ruins, in the presence of twelve hundred invisible gun-barrels, stood facing death, and as if stronger than it, the whole barricade assumed a supernatural and colossal aspect in the darkness. There was one of those silences which occur only at the sight of prodigies, and in the midst of this silence the old man brandished the red flag and cried,—
"Long live the revolution! Long live the republic! Fraternity, equality, and death!"
A low and quick talking, like the murmur of a hurried priest galloping through a mass, was heard; it was probably the police commissary making the legal summons at the other end of the street; then the same loud voice which had shouted "Who goes there?" cried,—
"Withdraw!"
M. Mabœuf, livid, haggard, with his eyeballs illumined by the mournful flames of mania, raised the flag about his head and repeated,—
"Long live the republic!"
"Fire!" the voice commanded.
A second discharge, resembling a round of grape-shot, burst against the barricade; the old man sank on his knees, then rose again, let the flag slip from his hand, and fell back on the pavement like a log, with his arms stretched out like a cross. Streams of blood flowed under him, and his old, pale, melancholy face seemed to be gazing at heaven. One of those emotions stronger than man, which makes him forget self-defence, seized on the insurgents, and they approached the corpse with respectful horror.
"What men these regicides are!" said Enjolras.
Courfeyrac whispered in Enjolras's ear,—
"This is only between ourselves, as I do not wish to diminish the enthusiasm; but this man was anything rather than a regicide. I knew him, and his name was Mabœuf. I do not know what was the matter with him to-day, but he was a brave idiot. Look at his head."
"The head of an idiot and the heart of Brutus!" Enjolras replied; then he raised his voice:—
"Citizens! such is the example which the old give to the young. We hesitated and he came; we recoiled and he advanced. This is what those who tremble with old age teach those who tremble with fear! This aged man is august before his country; he has had a long life and a magnificent death! Now let us place his corpse under cover; let each of us defend this dead old man as he would defend his living father; and let his presence in the midst of us render the barricade impregnable!"
A murmur of gloomy and energetic adhesion followed these words. Enjolras bent down, raised the old man's head and sternly kissed him on the forehead; then, stretching out his arms and handling the dead man with tender caution, as if afraid of hurting him, he took off his coat, pointed to the blood-stained holes, and said,—
"This is now our flag!"
How long did he remain there? What was the ebb and flow of this tragical meditation? Did he draw himself up? Did he remain bowed down? Had he been bent till he was broken? Could he recover himself and stand again upon something solid in his conscience? Probably he could not have said himself. The street was deserted, and a few anxious citizens who hurriedly returned home scarce noticed him, for each for himself is the ride in times of peril. The lamplighter came as usual to light the lamp which was exactly opposite the door of No. 7, and went away. Jean Valjean would not have appeared to be a living man to any one who might have examined him in this gloom, and he sat on his bench motionless, like a statue of ice. His despair had got beyond congelation. The tocsin and vague stormy rumors could be heard, and in the midst of all these convulsions of the bell blended with the riot, the clock of St. Paul struck the eleventh hour, solemnly and without hurrying; for the tocsin is man, the hour is God. The passing of the hour produced no effect on Jean Valjean, and he did not stir. Almost immediately after, however, a sudden detonation broke out in the direction of the markets, followed by a second even more violent; it was probably that attack on the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie which we have just seen repulsed by Marius. At this double discharge, whose fury seemed increased by the stupor of the night, Jean Valjean started; he turned in the direction whence the sound came, but then fell back on his bench, crossed his arms, and his head slowly bent down again on his chest. He resumed his dark dialogue with himself.
All at once he raised his eyes, for there was some one in the street; he heard footsteps close to him, and by the light of the lamp he perceived a livid, young, and radiant face, in the direction of the street which runs past the Archives. It was Gavroche, who had just arrived from the Rue de la Chanvrerie; Gavroche was looking up in the air, and appeared to be seeking. He saw Jean Valjean distinctly, but paid no attention to him. Gavroche, after looking up in the air, looked down on the ground; he stood on tiptoe, and felt the doors and ground-floor windows; they were all shut, bolted, and barred. After examining the fronts of several houses barricaded in this way, the gamin shrugged his shoulders, and then resumed his self-colloquy with himself, thus, "By Jove!" Then he looked up in the air again. Jean Valjean, who a moment previously in his present state of mind would neither have spoken to nor answered any one, felt an irresistible impulse to address this lad.
"My little boy," he said, "what is the matter with you?"
"Why, I'm hungry," Gavroche answered bluntly. And he added, "Little yourself!"
Jean Valjean felt in his pocket and pulled out a five-franc piece. But Gavroche, who was a species of wagtail, and rapidly passed from one gesture to another, had just picked up a stone. He had noticed the lamp.
"Hilloh!" he said, "you have still got lights here. You are not acting rightly, my friends; that is disorderly conduct. Break it for me."
And he threw the stone at the lamp, whose glass fell with such a noise that the citizens concealed behind their curtains in the opposite house cried, "There is '93!" The lamp oscillated violently and went out; the street suddenly became dark.
"That's it, old street," said Gavroche, "put on your nightcap." Then, turning to Jean Valjean, he said,—
"What do you call that gigantic monument which you have there at the end of the street? It's the Archives, isn't it? Let's pull down some of those great brutes of columns and make a tidy barricade."
Jean Valjean walked up to Gavroche.
"Poor creature!" he said in a low voice, and as if speaking to himself, "he is hungry."
And he placed the five-franc piece in his hand. Gavroche raised his nose, amazed at the size of this double sou; he looked at it in the darkness, and the whiteness of the double sou dazzled him. He was acquainted with five-franc pieces by hearsay, and their reputation was agreeable to him; he was delighted to see one so closely, and said, "Let us contemplate the tiger." He looked at it for some moments in ecstasy; then, turning to Jean Valjean, he held out the coin to him, and said majestically,—
"Citizen, I prefer breaking the lamps. Take back your ferocious animal, for I am not to be corrupted. It has five claws, but can't scratch me."
"Have you a mother?" Jean Valjean asked.
Gavroche replied,—
"Perhaps more than you."
"Well," Jean Valjean continued, "keep that money for your mother."
Gavroche was affected. Moreover, he had noticed that the man who was addressing him had no hat on, and this inspired him with confidence.
"Really, then," he said, "it is not to prevent me breaking the lamps?"
"Break as many as you like."
"You are a worthy man," said Gavroche.
And he put the five-franc piece in one of his pockets. Then, with increasing confidence, he added;—
"Do you belong to this street?"
"Yes; why?"
"Can you point me out No. 7?"
"What do you want at No. 7?"
Here the lad stopped, for he feared lest he had said too much. He energetically plunged his nails into his hair, and confined himself to answering,—
"Ah, there it is."
An idea flashed across Jean Valjean's mind, for agony has lucidities of that nature. He said to the boy,—
"Have you brought me the letter which I am expecting?"
"You," said Gavroche, "you ain't a woman."
"The letter is for Mademoiselle Cosette, is it not?"
"Cosette?" Gavroche grumbled; "yes, I think it is that absurd name."
"Well," Jean Valjean continued, "you have to deliver the letter to me; so give it here."
"In that case, you must be aware that I am sent from the barricade?"
"Of course," said Jean Valjean.
Gavroche thrust his hand into another of his pockets, and produced a square folded letter; then he gave the military salute.
"Respect for the despatch," he said; "it comes from the Provisional Government."
"Give it to me," said Jean Valjean.
Gavroche held the paper above his head.
"You must not imagine that it is a love-letter, though it is for a woman; it is for the people; we are fighting, and we respect the sex; we are not like people in the world of fashion, where there are lions that send poulets to camels."
"Give it to me."
"After all," Gavroche continued, "you look like an honest man."
"Make haste."
"Here it is."
And he handed the paper to Jean Valjean.
"And make haste, Monsieur Chose, since Mamselle Chosette is waiting."
Gavroche felt pleased at having made this pun. Jean Valjean added,—
"Must the answer be taken to St. Merry?"
"You would make in that way," Gavroche exclaimed, "one of those pastries vulgarly called brioches [blunders]. That letter comes from the barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and I am going back to it. Good-night, citizen."
This said, Gavroche went away, or, to speak more correctly, resumed his birdlike flight to the spot whence he had escaped. He plunged again into the darkness, as if there were a hole there, with the rigid rapidity of a projectile: the lane of l'Homme Armé became once again silent and solitary. In a twinkling, this strange lad, who had shadows and dreams within him, buried himself in the gloom of these rows of black houses, and was lost in it like smoke in darkness, and it might have been fancied that he was dispersed, had vanished, had not, a few minutes after his disappearance, a noisy breakage of glass, and the splendid echo of a lamp falling on the pavement, suddenly reawakened the indignant citizens. It was Gavroche passing along the Rue de Chaume.