Les Misérables
“Ah, yes!” replied the elder, gazing at Gavroche with the expression of
a saved angel.
The two poor little children who had been soaked through, began to grow
warm once more.
“Ah, by the way,” continued Gavroche, “what were you bawling about?”
And pointing out the little one to his brother:—
“A mite like that, I’ve nothing to say about, but the idea of a big
fellow like you crying! It’s idiotic; you looked like a calf.”
“Gracious,” replied the child, “we have no lodging.”
“Bother!” retorted Gavroche, “you don’t say ‘lodgings,’ you say
‘crib.’”
“And then, we were afraid of being alone like that at night.”
“You don’t say ‘night,’ you say ‘darkmans.’”
“Thank you, sir,” said the child.
“Listen,” went on Gavroche, “you must never bawl again over anything.
I’ll take care of you. You shall see what fun we’ll have. In summer,
we’ll go to the Glacière with Navet, one of my pals, we’ll bathe in the
Gare, we’ll run stark naked in front of the rafts on the bridge at
Austerlitz,—that makes the laundresses raging. They scream, they get
mad, and if you only knew how ridiculous they are! We’ll go and see the
man-skeleton. And then I’ll take you to the play. I’ll take you to see
Frédérick Lemaître. I have tickets, I know some of the actors, I even
played in a piece once. There were a lot of us fellers, and we ran
under a cloth, and that made the sea. I’ll get you an engagement at my
theatre. We’ll go to see the savages. They ain’t real, those savages
ain’t. They wear pink tights that go all in wrinkles, and you can see
where their elbows have been darned with white. Then, we’ll go to the
Opera. We’ll get in with the hired applauders. The Opera claque is well
managed. I wouldn’t associate with the claque on the boulevard. At the
Opera, just fancy! some of them pay twenty sous, but they’re ninnies.
They’re called dishclouts. And then we’ll go to see the guillotine
work. I’ll show you the executioner. He lives in the Rue des Marais.
Monsieur Sanson. He has a letter-box at his door. Ah! we’ll have famous
fun!”
At that moment a drop of wax fell on Gavroche’s finger, and recalled
him to the realities of life.
“The deuce!” said he, “there’s the wick giving out. Attention! I can’t
spend more than a sou a month on my lighting. When a body goes to bed,
he must sleep. We haven’t the time to read M. Paul de Kock’s romances.
And besides, the light might pass through the cracks of the
porte-cochère, and all the bobbies need to do is to see it.”
“And then,” remarked the elder timidly,—he alone dared talk to
Gavroche, and reply to him, “a spark might fall in the straw, and we
must look out and not burn the house down.”
“People don’t say ‘burn the house down,’” remarked Gavroche, “they say
‘blaze the crib.’”
The storm increased in violence, and the heavy downpour beat upon the
back of the colossus amid claps of thunder. “You’re taken in, rain!”
said Gavroche. “It amuses me to hear the decanter run down the legs of
the house. Winter is a stupid; it wastes its merchandise, it loses its
labor, it can’t wet us, and that makes it kick up a row, old
water-carrier that it is.”
This allusion to the thunder, all the consequences of which Gavroche,
in his character of a philosopher of the nineteenth century, accepted,
was followed by a broad flash of lightning, so dazzling that a hint of
it entered the belly of the elephant through the crack. Almost at the
same instant, the thunder rumbled with great fury. The two little
creatures uttered a shriek, and started up so eagerly that the network
came near being displaced, but Gavroche turned his bold face to them,
and took advantage of the clap of thunder to burst into a laugh.
“Calm down, children. Don’t topple over the edifice. That’s fine,
first-class thunder; all right. That’s no slouch of a streak of
lightning. Bravo for the good God! Deuce take it! It’s almost as good
as it is at the Ambigu.”
That said, he restored order in the netting, pushed the two children
gently down on the bed, pressed their knees, in order to stretch them
out at full length, and exclaimed:—
“Since the good God is lighting his candle, I can blow out mine. Now,
babes, now, my young humans, you must shut your peepers. It’s very bad
not to sleep. It’ll make you swallow the strainer, or, as they say, in
fashionable society, stink in the gullet. Wrap yourself up well in the
hide! I’m going to put out the light. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” murmured the elder, “I’m all right. I seem to have feathers
under my head.”
“People don’t say ‘head,’” cried Gavroche, “they say ‘nut’.”
The two children nestled close to each other, Gavroche finished
arranging them on the mat, drew the blanket up to their very ears, then
repeated, for the third time, his injunction in the hieratical tongue:—
“Shut your peepers!”
And he snuffed out his tiny light.
Hardly had the light been extinguished, when a peculiar trembling began
to affect the netting under which the three children lay.
It consisted of a multitude of dull scratches which produced a metallic
sound, as if claws and teeth were gnawing at the copper wire. This was
accompanied by all sorts of little piercing cries.
The little five-year-old boy, on hearing this hubbub overhead, and
chilled with terror, jogged his brother’s elbow; but the elder brother
had already shut his peepers, as Gavroche had ordered. Then the little
one, who could no longer control his terror, questioned Gavroche, but
in a very low tone, and with bated breath:—
“Sir?”
“Hey?” said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.
“What is that?”
“It’s the rats,” replied Gavroche.
And he laid his head down on the mat again.
The rats, in fact, who swarmed by thousands in the carcass of the
elephant, and who were the living black spots which we have already
mentioned, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle, so long as
it had been lighted; but as soon as the cavern, which was the same as
their city, had returned to darkness, scenting what the good
story-teller Perrault calls “fresh meat,” they had hurled themselves in
throngs on Gavroche’s tent, had climbed to the top of it, and had begun
to bite the meshes as though seeking to pierce this new-fangled trap.
Still the little one could not sleep.
“Sir?” he began again.
“Hey?” said Gavroche.
“What are rats?”
“They are mice.”
This explanation reassured the child a little. He had seen white mice
in the course of his life, and he was not afraid of them. Nevertheless,
he lifted up his voice once more.
“Sir?”
“Hey?” said Gavroche again.
“Why don’t you have a cat?”
“I did have one,” replied Gavroche, “I brought one here, but they ate
her.”
This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the little
fellow began to tremble again.
The dialogue between him and Gavroche began again for the fourth time:—
“Monsieur?”
“Hey?”
“Who was it that was eaten?”
“The cat.”
“And who ate the cat?”
“The rats.”
“The mice?”
“Yes, the rats.”
The child, in consternation, dismayed at the thought of mice which ate
cats, pursued:—
“Sir, would those mice eat us?”
“Wouldn’t they just!” ejaculated Gavroche.
The child’s terror had reached its climax. But Gavroche added:—
“Don’t be afraid. They can’t get in. And besides, I’m here! Here, catch
hold of my hand. Hold your tongue and shut your peepers!”
At the same time Gavroche grasped the little fellow’s hand across his
brother. The child pressed the hand close to him, and felt reassured.
Courage and strength have these mysterious ways of communicating
themselves. Silence reigned round them once more, the sound of their
voices had frightened off the rats; at the expiration of a few minutes,
they came raging back, but in vain, the three little fellows were fast
asleep and heard nothing more.
The hours of the night fled away. Darkness covered the vast Place de la
Bastille. A wintry gale, which mingled with the rain, blew in gusts,
the patrol searched all the doorways, alleys, enclosures, and obscure
nooks, and in their search for nocturnal vagabonds they passed in
silence before the elephant; the monster, erect, motionless, staring
open-eyed into the shadows, had the appearance of dreaming happily over
his good deed; and sheltered from heaven and from men the three poor
sleeping children.
In order to understand what is about to follow, the reader must
remember, that, at that epoch, the Bastille guard-house was situated at
the other end of the square, and that what took place in the vicinity
of the elephant could neither be seen nor heard by the sentinel.
Towards the end of that hour which immediately precedes the dawn, a man
turned from the Rue Saint-Antoine at a run, made the circuit of the
enclosure of the column of July, and glided between the palings until
he was underneath the belly of the elephant. If any light had
illuminated that man, it might have been divined from the thorough
manner in which he was soaked that he had passed the night in the rain.
Arrived beneath the elephant, he uttered a peculiar cry, which did not
belong to any human tongue, and which a paroquet alone could have
imitated. Twice he repeated this cry, of whose orthography the
following barely conveys an idea:—
“Kirikikiou!”
At the second cry, a clear, young, merry voice responded from the belly
of the elephant:—
“Yes!”
Almost immediately, the plank which closed the hole was drawn aside,
and gave passage to a child who descended the elephant’s leg, and fell
briskly near the man. It was Gavroche. The man was Montparnasse.
As for his cry of _Kirikikiou_,—that was, doubtless, what the child had
meant, when he said:—
“You will ask for Monsieur Gavroche.”
On hearing it, he had waked with a start, had crawled out of his
“alcove,” pushing apart the netting a little, and carefully drawing it
together again, then he had opened the trap, and descended.
The man and the child recognized each other silently amid the gloom:
Montparnasse confined himself to the remark:—
“We need you. Come, lend us a hand.”
The lad asked for no further enlightenment.
“I’m with you,” said he.
And both took their way towards the Rue Saint-Antoine, whence
Montparnasse had emerged, winding rapidly through the long file of
market-gardeners’ carts which descend towards the markets at that hour.
The market-gardeners, crouching, half-asleep, in their wagons, amid the
salads and vegetables, enveloped to their very eyes in their mufflers
on account of the beating rain, did not even glance at these strange
pedestrians.
CHAPTER III—THE VICISSITUDES OF FLIGHT
This is what had taken place that same night at the La Force:—
An escape had been planned between Babet, Brujon, Guelemer, and
Thénardier, although Thénardier was in close confinement. Babet had
arranged the matter for his own benefit, on the same day, as the reader
has seen from Montparnasse’s account to Gavroche. Montparnasse was to
help them from outside.
Brujon, after having passed a month in the punishment cell, had had
time, in the first place, to weave a rope, in the second, to mature a
plan. In former times, those severe places where the discipline of the
prison delivers the convict into his own hands, were composed of four
stone walls, a stone ceiling, a flagged pavement, a camp bed, a grated
window, and a door lined with iron, and were called _dungeons_; but the
dungeon was judged to be too terrible; nowadays they are composed of an
iron door, a grated window, a camp bed, a flagged pavement, four stone
walls, and a stone ceiling, and are called _chambers of punishment_. A
little light penetrates towards midday. The inconvenient point about