BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE



CHAPTER I

SOME EXPLANATIONS WITH REGARD TO THE ORIGIN OF GAVROCHE'S POETRY.
THE INFLUENCE OF AN ACADEMICIAN ON THIS POETRY


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

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

"Mother What's-your-name, I'm going to borrow your machine."

And off he ran with the pistol.

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

La nuit on ne voit rien,
Le jour on voit tres bien,
D'un ecrit apocrypha
Le bourgeois s'ebouriffe,
Pratiquez la vertu,
Tutu, chapeau pointu![44]


[44] At night one sees nothing, by day one sees very well;
the bourgeois gets flurried over an apocryphal scrawl,
practice virtue, tutu, pointed hat!


It was little Gavroche on his way to the wars.

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

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

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

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

It is hard to miss the last cake.

Nevertheless, Gavroche pursued his way.

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

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

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