Les Misérables
linseed plaster, and blue specs like a doctor. You’re putting on style,
‘pon my word!”
“Hush!” ejaculated Montparnasse, “not so loud.”
And he drew Gavroche hastily out of range of the lighted shops.
The two little ones followed mechanically, holding each other by the
hand.
When they were ensconced under the arch of a porte-cochère, sheltered
from the rain and from all eyes:—
“Do you know where I’m going?” demanded Montparnasse.
“To the Abbey of Ascend-with-Regret,”36 replied Gavroche.
“Joker!”
And Montparnasse went on:—
“I’m going to find Babet.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Gavroche, “so her name is Babet.”
Montparnasse lowered his voice:—
“Not she, he.”
“Ah! Babet.”
“Yes, Babet.”
“I thought he was buckled.”
“He has undone the buckle,” replied Montparnasse.
And he rapidly related to the gamin how, on the morning of that very
day, Babet, having been transferred to La Conciergerie, had made his
escape, by turning to the left instead of to the right in “the police
office.”
Gavroche expressed his admiration for this skill.
“What a dentist!” he cried.
Montparnasse added a few details as to Babet’s flight, and ended with:—
“Oh! That’s not all.”
Gavroche, as he listened, had seized a cane that Montparnasse held in
his hand, and mechanically pulled at the upper part, and the blade of a
dagger made its appearance.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, pushing the dagger back in haste, “you have brought
along your gendarme disguised as a bourgeois.”
Montparnasse winked.
“The deuce!” resumed Gavroche, “so you’re going to have a bout with the
bobbies?”
“You can’t tell,” replied Montparnasse with an indifferent air. “It’s
always a good thing to have a pin about one.”
Gavroche persisted:—
“What are you up to to-night?”
Again Montparnasse took a grave tone, and said, mouthing every
syllable: “Things.”
And abruptly changing the conversation:—
“By the way!”
“What?”
“Something happened t’other day. Fancy. I meet a bourgeois. He makes me
a present of a sermon and his purse. I put it in my pocket. A minute
later, I feel in my pocket. There’s nothing there.”
“Except the sermon,” said Gavroche.
“But you,” went on Montparnasse, “where are you bound for now?”
Gavroche pointed to his two protégés, and said:—
“I’m going to put these infants to bed.”
“Whereabouts is the bed?”
“At my house.”
“Where’s your house?”
“At my house.”
“So you have a lodging?”
“Yes, I have.”
“And where is your lodging?”
“In the elephant,” said Gavroche.
Montparnasse, though not naturally inclined to astonishment, could not
restrain an exclamation.
“In the elephant!”
“Well, yes, in the elephant!” retorted Gavroche. “Kekçaa?”
This is another word of the language which no one writes, and which
every one speaks.
Kekçaa signifies: _Qu’est que c’est que cela a? _ [What’s the matter
with that?]
The urchin’s profound remark recalled Montparnasse to calmness and good
sense. He appeared to return to better sentiments with regard to
Gavroche’s lodging.
“Of course,” said he, “yes, the elephant. Is it comfortable there?”
“Very,” said Gavroche. “It’s really bully there. There ain’t any
draughts, as there are under the bridges.”
“How do you get in?”
“Oh, I get in.”
“So there is a hole?” demanded Montparnasse.
“Parbleu! I should say so. But you mustn’t tell. It’s between the fore
legs. The bobbies haven’t seen it.”
“And you climb up? Yes, I understand.”
“A turn of the hand, cric, crac, and it’s all over, no one there.”
After a pause, Gavroche added:—
“I shall have a ladder for these children.”
Montparnasse burst out laughing:—
“Where the devil did you pick up those young ’uns?”
Gavroche replied with great simplicity:—
“They are some brats that a wig-maker made me a present of.”
Meanwhile, Montparnasse had fallen to thinking:—
“You recognized me very readily,” he muttered.
He took from his pocket two small objects which were nothing more than
two quills wrapped in cotton, and thrust one up each of his nostrils.
This gave him a different nose.
“That changes you,” remarked Gavroche, “you are less homely so, you
ought to keep them on all the time.”
Montparnasse was a handsome fellow, but Gavroche was a tease.
“Seriously,” demanded Montparnasse, “how do you like me so?”
The sound of his voice was different also. In a twinkling, Montparnasse
had become unrecognizable.
“Oh! Do play Porrichinelle for us!” exclaimed Gavroche.
The two children, who had not been listening up to this point, being
occupied themselves in thrusting their fingers up their noses, drew
near at this name, and stared at Montparnasse with dawning joy and
admiration.
Unfortunately, Montparnasse was troubled.
He laid his hand on Gavroche’s shoulder, and said to him, emphasizing
his words: “Listen to what I tell you, boy! if I were on the square
with my dog, my knife, and my wife, and if you were to squander ten
sous on me, I wouldn’t refuse to work, but this isn’t Shrove Tuesday.”
This odd phrase produced a singular effect on the gamin. He wheeled
round hastily, darted his little sparkling eyes about him with profound
attention, and perceived a police sergeant standing with his back to
them a few paces off. Gavroche allowed an: “Ah! good!” to escape him,
but immediately suppressed it, and shaking Montparnasse’s hand:—
“Well, good evening,” said he, “I’m going off to my elephant with my
brats. Supposing that you should need me some night, you can come and
hunt me up there. I lodge on the entresol. There is no porter. You will
inquire for Monsieur Gavroche.”
“Very good,” said Montparnasse.
And they parted, Montparnasse betaking himself in the direction of the
Grève, and Gavroche towards the Bastille. The little one of five,
dragged along by his brother who was dragged by Gavroche, turned his
head back several times to watch “Porrichinelle” as he went.
The ambiguous phrase by means of which Montparnasse had warned Gavroche
of the presence of the policeman, contained no other talisman than the
assonance _dig_ repeated five or six times in different forms. This
syllable, _dig_, uttered alone or artistically mingled with the words
of a phrase, means: “Take care, we can no longer talk freely.” There
was besides, in Montparnasse’s sentence, a literary beauty which was
lost upon Gavroche, that is _mon dogue, ma dague et ma digue_, a slang
expression of the Temple, which signifies my dog, my knife, and my
wife, greatly in vogue among clowns and the red-tails in the great
century when Molière wrote and Callot drew.
Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southwest corner of
the Place de la Bastille, near the basin of the canal, excavated in the
ancient ditch of the fortress-prison, a singular monument, which has
already been effaced from the memories of Parisians, and which deserved
to leave some trace, for it was the idea of a “member of the Institute,
the General-in-chief of the army of Egypt.”
We say monument, although it was only a rough model. But this model
itself, a marvellous sketch, the grandiose skeleton of an idea of
Napoleon’s, which successive gusts of wind have carried away and
thrown, on each occasion, still further from us, had become historical
and had acquired a certain definiteness which contrasted with its
provisional aspect. It was an elephant forty feet high, constructed of
timber and masonry, bearing on its back a tower which resembled a
house, formerly painted green by some dauber, and now painted black by
heaven, the wind, and time. In this deserted and unprotected corner of
the place, the broad brow of the colossus, his trunk, his tusks, his
tower, his enormous crupper, his four feet, like columns produced, at
night, under the starry heavens, a surprising and terrible form. It was
a sort of symbol of popular force. It was sombre, mysterious, and
immense. It was some mighty, visible phantom, one knew not what,
standing erect beside the invisible spectre of the Bastille.
Few strangers visited this edifice, no passer-by looked at it. It was
falling into ruins; every season the plaster which detached itself from
its sides formed hideous wounds upon it. “The ædiles,” as the
expression ran in elegant dialect, had forgotten it ever since 1814.
There it stood in its corner, melancholy, sick, crumbling, surrounded
by a rotten palisade, soiled continually by drunken coachmen; cracks
meandered athwart its belly, a lath projected from its tail, tall grass
flourished between its legs; and, as the level of the place had been
rising all around it for a space of thirty years, by that slow and
continuous movement which insensibly elevates the soil of large towns,
it stood in a hollow, and it looked as though the ground were giving
way beneath it. It was unclean, despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly
in the eyes of the bourgeois, melancholy in the eyes of the thinker.
There was something about it of the dirt which is on the point of being
swept out, and something of the majesty which is on the point of being
decapitated. As we have said, at night, its aspect changed. Night is
the real element of everything that is dark. As soon as twilight
descended, the old elephant became transfigured; he assumed a tranquil
and redoubtable appearance in the formidable serenity of the shadows.
Being of the past, he belonged to night; and obscurity was in keeping
with his grandeur.
This rough, squat, heavy, hard, austere, almost misshapen, but
assuredly majestic monument, stamped with a sort of magnificent and
savage gravity, has disappeared, and left to reign in peace, a sort of
gigantic stove, ornamented with its pipe, which has replaced the sombre
fortress with its nine towers, very much as the bourgeoisie replaces
the feudal classes. It is quite natural that a stove should be the
symbol of an epoch in which a pot contains power. This epoch will pass
away, people have already begun to understand that, if there can be
force in a boiler, there can be no force except in the brain; in other
words, that which leads and drags on the world, is not locomotives, but
ideas. Harness locomotives to ideas,—that is well done; but do not
mistake the horse for the rider.
At all events, to return to the Place de la Bastille, the architect of
this elephant succeeded in making a grand thing out of plaster; the
architect of the stove has succeeded in making a pretty thing out of
bronze.
This stove-pipe, which has been baptized by a sonorous name, and called
the column of July, this monument of a revolution that miscarried, was
still enveloped in 1832, in an immense shirt of woodwork, which we
regret, for our part, and by a vast plank enclosure, which completed
the task of isolating the elephant.
It was towards this corner of the place, dimly lighted by the
reflection of a distant street lamp, that the gamin guided his two
“brats.”
The reader must permit us to interrupt ourselves here and to remind him
that we are dealing with simple reality, and that twenty years ago, the
tribunals were called upon to judge, under the charge of vagabondage,
and mutilation of a public monument, a child who had been caught asleep
in this very elephant of the Bastille. This fact noted, we proceed.
On arriving in the vicinity of the colossus, Gavroche comprehended the
effect which the infinitely great might produce on the infinitely
small, and said:—
“Don’t be scared, infants.”
Then he entered through a gap in the fence into the elephant’s
enclosure and helped the young ones to clamber through the breach. The
two children, somewhat frightened, followed Gavroche without uttering a
word, and confided themselves to this little Providence in rags which