Les Misérables
popularity of Mademoiselle Mars among that little audience of stormy
children was seasoned with a touch of irony. The gamin called her
_Mademoiselle Muche_—“hide yourself.”
This being bawls and scoffs and ridicules and fights, has rags like a
baby and tatters like a philosopher, fishes in the sewer, hunts in the
cesspool, extracts mirth from foulness, whips up the squares with his
wit, grins and bites, whistles and sings, shouts, and shrieks, tempers
Alleluia with Matanturlurette, chants every rhythm from the De
Profundis to the Jack-pudding, finds without seeking, knows what he is
ignorant of, is a Spartan to the point of thieving, is mad to wisdom,
is lyrical to filth, would crouch down on Olympus, wallows in the
dunghill and emerges from it covered with stars. The gamin of Paris is
Rabelais in this youth.
He is not content with his trousers unless they have a watch-pocket.
He is not easily astonished, he is still less easily terrified, he
makes songs on superstitions, he takes the wind out of exaggerations,
he twits mysteries, he thrusts out his tongue at ghosts, he takes the
poetry out of stilted things, he introduces caricature into epic
extravaganzas. It is not that he is prosaic; far from that; but he
replaces the solemn vision by the farcical phantasmagoria. If Adamastor
were to appear to him, the street Arab would say: “Hi there! The
bugaboo!”
CHAPTER IV—HE MAY BE OF USE
Paris begins with the lounger and ends with the street Arab, two beings
of which no other city is capable; the passive acceptance, which
contents itself with gazing, and the inexhaustible initiative;
Prudhomme and Fouillou. Paris alone has this in its natural history.
The whole of the monarchy is contained in the lounger; the whole of
anarchy in the gamin.
This pale child of the Parisian faubourgs lives and develops, makes
connections, “grows supple” in suffering, in the presence of social
realities and of human things, a thoughtful witness. He thinks himself
heedless; and he is not. He looks and is on the verge of laughter; he
is on the verge of something else also. Whoever you may be, if your
name is Prejudice, Abuse, Ignorance, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism,
Injustice, Fanaticism, Tyranny, beware of the gaping gamin.
The little fellow will grow up.
Of what clay is he made? Of the first mud that comes to hand. A handful
of dirt, a breath, and behold Adam. It suffices for a God to pass by. A
God has always passed over the street Arab. Fortune labors at this tiny
being. By the word “fortune” we mean chance, to some extent. That pigmy
kneaded out of common earth, ignorant, unlettered, giddy, vulgar, low.
Will that become an Ionian or a Bœotian? Wait, _currit rota_, the
Spirit of Paris, that demon which creates the children of chance and
the men of destiny, reversing the process of the Latin potter, makes of
a jug an amphora.
CHAPTER V—HIS FRONTIERS
The gamin loves the city, he also loves solitude, since he has
something of the sage in him. _Urbis amator_, like Fuscus; _ruris
amator_, like Flaccus.
To roam thoughtfully about, that is to say, to lounge, is a fine
employment of time in the eyes of the philosopher; particularly in that
rather illegitimate species of campaign, which is tolerably ugly but
odd and composed of two natures, which surrounds certain great cities,
notably Paris. To study the suburbs is to study the amphibious animal.
End of the trees, beginning of the roofs; end of the grass, beginning
of the pavements; end of the furrows, beginning of the shops, end of
the wheel-ruts, beginning of the passions; end of the divine murmur,
beginning of the human uproar; hence an extraordinary interest.
Hence, in these not very attractive places, indelibly stamped by the
passing stroller with the epithet: _melancholy_, the apparently
objectless promenades of the dreamer.
He who writes these lines has long been a prowler about the barriers of
Paris, and it is for him a source of profound souvenirs. That
close-shaven turf, those pebbly paths, that chalk, those pools, those
harsh monotonies of waste and fallow lands, the plants of early
market-garden suddenly springing into sight in a bottom, that mixture
of the savage and the citizen, those vast desert nooks where the
garrison drums practise noisily, and produce a sort of lisping of
battle, those hermits by day and cut-throats by night, that clumsy mill
which turns in the wind, the hoisting-wheels of the quarries, the
tea-gardens at the corners of the cemeteries; the mysterious charm of
great, sombre walls squarely intersecting immense, vague stretches of
land inundated with sunshine and full of butterflies,—all this
attracted him.
There is hardly any one on earth who is not acquainted with those
singular spots, the Glacière, the Cunette, the hideous wall of Grenelle
all speckled with balls, Mont-Parnasse, the Fosse-aux-Loups, Aubiers on
the bank of the Marne, Mont-Souris, the Tombe-Issoire, the Pierre-Plate
de Châtillon, where there is an old, exhausted quarry which no longer
serves any purpose except to raise mushrooms, and which is closed, on a
level with the ground, by a trap-door of rotten planks. The campagna of
Rome is one idea, the banlieue of Paris is another; to behold nothing
but fields, houses, or trees in what a stretch of country offers us, is
to remain on the surface; all aspects of things are thoughts of God.
The spot where a plain effects its junction with a city is always
stamped with a certain piercing melancholy. Nature and humanity both
appeal to you at the same time there. Local originalities there make
their appearance.
Any one who, like ourselves, has wandered about in these solitudes
contiguous to our faubourgs, which may be designated as the limbos of
Paris, has seen here and there, in the most desert spot, at the most
unexpected moment, behind a meagre hedge, or in the corner of a
lugubrious wall, children grouped tumultuously, fetid, muddy, dusty,
ragged, dishevelled, playing hide-and-seek, and crowned with
corn-flowers. All of them are little ones who have made their escape
from poor families. The outer boulevard is their breathing space; the
suburbs belong to them. There they are eternally playing truant. There
they innocently sing their repertory of dirty songs. There they are, or
rather, there they exist, far from every eye, in the sweet light of May
or June, kneeling round a hole in the ground, snapping marbles with
their thumbs, quarrelling over half-farthings, irresponsible, volatile,
free and happy; and, no sooner do they catch sight of you than they
recollect that they have an industry, and that they must earn their
living, and they offer to sell you an old woollen stocking filled with
cockchafers, or a bunch of lilacs. These encounters with strange
children are one of the charming and at the same time poignant graces
of the environs of Paris.
Sometimes there are little girls among the throng of boys,—are they
their sisters?—who are almost young maidens, thin, feverish, with
sunburnt hands, covered with freckles, crowned with poppies and ears of
rye, gay, haggard, barefooted. They can be seen devouring cherries
among the wheat. In the evening they can be heard laughing. These
groups, warmly illuminated by the full glow of midday, or indistinctly
seen in the twilight, occupy the thoughtful man for a very long time,
and these visions mingle with his dreams.
Paris, centre, banlieue, circumference; this constitutes all the earth
to those children. They never venture beyond this. They can no more
escape from the Parisian atmosphere than fish can escape from the
water. For them, nothing exists two leagues beyond the barriers: Ivry,
Gentilly, Arcueil, Belleville, Aubervilliers, Ménilmontant,
Choisy-le-Roi, Billancourt, Meudon, Issy, Vanvre, Sèvres, Puteaux,
Neuilly, Gennevilliers, Colombes, Romainville, Chatou, Asnières,
Bougival, Nanterre, Enghien, Noisy-le-Sec, Nogent, Gournay, Drancy,
Gonesse; the universe ends there.
CHAPTER VI—A BIT OF HISTORY
At the epoch, nearly contemporary by the way, when the action of this
book takes place, there was not, as there is to-day, a policeman at the
corner of every street (a benefit which there is no time to discuss
here); stray children abounded in Paris. The statistics give an average
of two hundred and sixty homeless children picked up annually at that
period, by the police patrols, in unenclosed lands, in houses in
process of construction, and under the arches of the bridges. One of
these nests, which has become famous, produced “the swallows of the
bridge of Arcola.” This is, moreover, the most disastrous of social
symptoms. All crimes of the man begin in the vagabondage of the child.
Let us make an exception in favor of Paris, nevertheless. In a relative
measure, and in spite of the souvenir which we have just recalled, the
exception is just. While in any other great city the vagabond child is
a lost man, while nearly everywhere the child left to itself is, in
some sort, sacrificed and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in the
public vices which devour in him honesty and conscience, the street boy
of Paris, we insist on this point, however defaced and injured on the
surface, is almost intact on the interior. It is a magnificent thing to
put on record, and one which shines forth in the splendid probity of
our popular revolutions, that a certain incorruptibility results from
the idea which exists in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water
of the ocean. To breathe Paris preserves the soul.
What we have just said takes away nothing of the anguish of heart which
one experiences every time that one meets one of these children around
whom one fancies that he beholds floating the threads of a broken
family. In the civilization of the present day, incomplete as it still
is, it is not a very abnormal thing to behold these fractured families
pouring themselves out into the darkness, not knowing clearly what has
become of their children, and allowing their own entrails to fall on
the public highway. Hence these obscure destinies. This is called, for
this sad thing has given rise to an expression, “to be cast on the
pavements of Paris.”
Let it be said by the way, that this abandonment of children was not
discouraged by the ancient monarchy. A little of Egypt and Bohemia in
the lower regions suited the upper spheres, and compassed the aims of
the powerful. The hatred of instruction for the children of the people
was a dogma. What is the use of “half-lights”? Such was the
countersign. Now, the erring child is the corollary of the ignorant
child.
Besides this, the monarchy sometimes was in need of children, and in
that case it skimmed the streets.
Under Louis XIV., not to go any further back, the king rightly desired
to create a fleet. The idea was a good one. But let us consider the
means. There can be no fleet, if, beside the sailing ship, that
plaything of the winds, and for the purpose of towing it, in case of
necessity, there is not the vessel which goes where it pleases, either
by means of oars or of steam; the galleys were then to the marine what
steamers are to-day. Therefore, galleys were necessary; but the galley
is moved only by the galley-slave; hence, galley-slaves were required.
Colbert had the commissioners of provinces and the parliaments make as
many convicts as possible. The magistracy showed a great deal of
complaisance in the matter. A man kept his hat on in the presence of a
procession—it was a Huguenot attitude; he was sent to the galleys. A
child was encountered in the streets; provided that he was fifteen
years of age and did not know where he was to sleep, he was sent to the
galleys. Grand reign; grand century.
Under Louis XV. children disappeared in Paris; the police carried them