Les Misérables
great city felt something which was, perhaps, stronger than itself. It
was afraid.
Closed doors, windows, and shutters were to be seen everywhere, in the
most distant and most “disinterested” quarters. The courageous took to
arms, the poltroons hid. The busy and heedless passer-by disappeared.
Many streets were empty at four o’clock in the morning.
Alarming details were hawked about, fatal news was disseminated,—that
_they_ were masters of the Bank;—that there were six hundred of them in
the Cloister of Saint-Merry alone, entrenched and embattled in the
church; that the line was not to be depended on; that Armand Carrel had
been to see Marshal Clausel and that the Marshal had said: “Get a
regiment first”; that Lafayette was ill, but that he had said to them,
nevertheless: “I am with you. I will follow you wherever there is room
for a chair”; that one must be on one’s guard; that at night there
would be people pillaging isolated dwellings in the deserted corners of
Paris (there the imagination of the police, that Anne Radcliffe mixed
up with the Government was recognizable); that a battery had been
established in the Rue Aubry le Boucher; that Lobau and Bugeaud were
putting their heads together, and that, at midnight, or at daybreak at
latest, four columns would march simultaneously on the centre of the
uprising, the first coming from the Bastille, the second from the Porte
Saint-Martin, the third from the Grève, the fourth from the Halles;
that perhaps, also, the troops would evacuate Paris and withdraw to the
Champ-de-Mars; that no one knew what would happen, but that this time,
it certainly was serious.
People busied themselves over Marshal Soult’s hesitations. Why did not
he attack at once? It is certain that he was profoundly absorbed. The
old lion seemed to scent an unknown monster in that gloom.
Evening came, the theatres did not open; the patrols circulated with an
air of irritation; passers-by were searched; suspicious persons were
arrested. By nine o’clock, more than eight hundred persons had been
arrested, the Prefecture of Police was encumbered with them, so was the
Conciergerie, so was La Force.
At the Conciergerie in particular, the long vault which is called the
Rue de Paris was littered with trusses of straw upon which lay a heap
of prisoners, whom the man of Lyons, Lagrange, harangued valiantly. All
that straw rustled by all these men, produced the sound of a heavy
shower. Elsewhere prisoners slept in the open air in the meadows, piled
on top of each other.
Anxiety reigned everywhere, and a certain tremor which was not habitual
with Paris.
People barricaded themselves in their houses; wives and mothers were
uneasy; nothing was to be heard but this: “Ah! my God! He has not come
home!” There was hardly even the distant rumble of a vehicle to be
heard.
People listened on their thresholds, to the rumors, the shouts, the
tumult, the dull and indistinct sounds, to the things that were said:
“It is cavalry,” or: “Those are the caissons galloping,” to the
trumpets, the drums, the firing, and, above all, to that lamentable
alarm peal from Saint-Merry.
They waited for the first cannon-shot. Men sprang up at the corners of
the streets and disappeared, shouting: “Go home!” And people made haste
to bolt their doors. They said: “How will all this end?” From moment to
moment, in proportion as the darkness descended, Paris seemed to take
on a more mournful hue from the formidable flaming of the revolt.
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
Ménilmontant, 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-à-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 très bien,
D’un écrit apocryphe
Le bourgeois s’ébouriffe,
Pratiquez la vertu,
Tutu, chapeau pointu!44
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.”
CHAPTER II—GAVROCHE ON THE MARCH
The brandishing of a triggerless pistol, grasped in one’s hand in the
open street, is so much of a public function that Gavroche felt his
fervor increasing with every moment. Amid the scraps of the
Marseillaise which he was singing, he shouted:—
“All goes well. I suffer a great deal in my left paw, I’m all broken up
with rheumatism, but I’m satisfied, citizens. All that the bourgeois
have to do is to bear themselves well, I’ll sneeze them out subversive
couplets. What are the police spies? Dogs. And I’d just like to have
one of them at the end of my pistol. I’m just from the boulevard, my
friends. It’s getting hot there, it’s getting into a little boil, it’s
simmering. It’s time to skim the pot. Forward march, men! Let an impure
blood inundate the furrows! I give my days to my country, I shall never
see my concubine more, Nini, finished, yes, Nini? But never mind! Long
live joy! Let’s fight, crebleu! I’ve had enough of despotism.”
At that moment, the horse of a lancer of the National Guard having
fallen, Gavroche laid his pistol on the pavement, and picked up the
man, then he assisted in raising the horse. After which he picked up
his pistol and resumed his way. In the Rue de Thorigny, all was peace
and silence. This apathy, peculiar to the Marais, presented a contrast
with the vast surrounding uproar. Four gossips were chatting in a
doorway.
Scotland has trios of witches, Paris has quartettes of old gossiping
hags; and the “Thou shalt be King” could be quite as mournfully hurled
at Bonaparte in the Carrefour Baudoyer as at Macbeth on the heath of
Armuyr. The croak would be almost identical.
The gossips of the Rue de Thorigny busied themselves only with their
own concerns. Three of them were portresses, and the fourth was a
rag-picker with her basket on her back.
All four of them seemed to be standing at the four corners of old age,
which are decrepitude, decay, ruin, and sadness.
The rag-picker was humble. In this open-air society, it is the
rag-picker who salutes and the portress who patronizes. This is caused
by the corner for refuse, which is fat or lean, according to the will
of the portresses, and after the fancy of the one who makes the heap.
There may be kindness in the broom.
This rag-picker was a grateful creature, and she smiled, with what a
smile! on the three portresses. Things of this nature were said:—
“Ah, by the way, is your cat still cross?”
“Good gracious, cats are naturally the enemies of dogs, you know. It’s
the dogs who complain.”
“And people also.”
“But the fleas from a cat don’t go after people.”
“That’s not the trouble, dogs are dangerous. I remember one year when
there were so many dogs that it was necessary to put it in the
newspapers. That was at the time when there were at the Tuileries great
sheep that drew the little carriage of the King of Rome. Do you
remember the King of Rome?”
“I liked the Duc de Bordeau better.”
“I knew Louis XVIII. I prefer Louis XVIII.”
“Meat is awfully dear, isn’t it, Mother Patagon?”
“Ah! don’t mention it, the butcher’s shop is a horror. A horrible