Les Misérables
the octogenarian:—
“M. Mabeuf, go to your home.”
“Why?”
“There’s going to be a row.”
“That’s well.”
“Thrusts with the sword and firing, M. Mabeuf.”
“That is well.”
“Firing from cannon.”
“That is good. Where are the rest of you going?”
“We are going to fling the government to the earth.”
“That is good.”
And he had set out to follow them. From that moment forth he had not
uttered a word. His step had suddenly become firm; artisans had offered
him their arms; he had refused with a sign of the head. He advanced
nearly to the front rank of the column, with the movement of a man who
is marching and the countenance of a man who is sleeping.
“What a fierce old fellow!” muttered the students. The rumor spread
through the troop that he was a former member of the Convention,—an old
regicide. The mob had turned in through the Rue de la Verrerie.
Little Gavroche marched in front with that deafening song which made of
him a sort of trumpet.
He sang:
“Voici la lune qui paraît,
Quand irons-nous dans la forêt?
Demandait Charlot à Charlotte.
Tou tou tou
Pour Chatou.
Je n’ai qu’un Dieu, qu’un roi, qu’un liard, et qu’une botte.
“Pour avoir bu de grand matin
La rosée à même le thym,
Deux moineaux étaient en ribotte.
Zi zi zi
Pour Passy.
Je n’ai qu’un Dieu, qu’un roi, qu’un liard, et qu’une botte.
“Et ces deux pauvres petits loups,
Comme deux grives étaient soûls;
Un tigre en riait dans sa grotte.
Don don don
Pour Meudon.
Je n’ai qu’un Dieu, qu’un roi, qu’un liard, et qu’une botte.
“L’un jurait et l’autre sacrait.
Quand irons nous dans la forêt?
Demandait Charlot à Charlotte.
Tin tin tin
Pour Pantin.
Je n’ai qu’un Dieu, qu’un roi, qu’un liard, et qu’une botte.”46
They directed their course towards Saint-Merry.
CHAPTER VI—RECRUITS
The band augmented every moment. Near the Rue des Billettes, a man of
lofty stature, whose hair was turning gray, and whose bold and daring
mien was remarked by Courfeyrac, Enjolras, and Combeferre, but whom
none of them knew, joined them. Gavroche, who was occupied in singing,
whistling, humming, running on ahead and pounding on the shutters of
the shops with the butt of his triggerless pistol; paid no attention to
this man.
It chanced that in the Rue de la Verrerie, they passed in front of
Courfeyrac’s door.
“This happens just right,” said Courfeyrac, “I have forgotten my purse,
and I have lost my hat.”
He quitted the mob and ran up to his quarters at full speed. He seized
an old hat and his purse.
He also seized a large square coffer, of the dimensions of a large
valise, which was concealed under his soiled linen.
As he descended again at a run, the portress hailed him:—
“Monsieur de Courfeyrac!”
“What’s your name, portress?”
The portress stood bewildered.
“Why, you know perfectly well, I’m the concierge; my name is Mother
Veuvain.”
“Well, if you call me Monsieur de Courfeyrac again, I shall call you
Mother de Veuvain. Now speak, what’s the matter? What do you want?”
“There is some one who wants to speak with you.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is he?”
“In my lodge.”
“The devil!” ejaculated Courfeyrac.
“But the person has been waiting your return for over an hour,” said
the portress.
At the same time, a sort of pale, thin, small, freckled, and youthful
artisan, clad in a tattered blouse and patched trousers of ribbed
velvet, and who had rather the air of a girl accoutred as a man than of
a man, emerged from the lodge and said to Courfeyrac in a voice which
was not the least in the world like a woman’s voice:—
“Monsieur Marius, if you please.”
“He is not here.”
“Will he return this evening?”
“I know nothing about it.”
And Courfeyrac added:—
“For my part, I shall not return.”
The young man gazed steadily at him and said:—
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“Where are you going, then?”
“What business is that of yours?”
“Would you like to have me carry your coffer for you?”
“I am going to the barricades.”
“Would you like to have me go with you?”
“If you like!” replied Courfeyrac. “The street is free, the pavements
belong to every one.”
And he made his escape at a run to join his friends. When he had
rejoined them, he gave the coffer to one of them to carry. It was only
a quarter of an hour after this that he saw the young man, who had
actually followed them.
A mob does not go precisely where it intends. We have explained that a
gust of wind carries it away. They overshot Saint-Merry and found
themselves, without precisely knowing how, in the Rue Saint-Denis.
BOOK TWELFTH—CORINTHE
CHAPTER I—HISTORY OF CORINTHE FROM ITS FOUNDATION
The Parisians who nowadays on entering on the Rue Rambuteau at the end
near the Halles, notice on their right, opposite the Rue Mondétour, a
basket-maker’s shop having for its sign a basket in the form of
Napoleon the Great with this inscription:—
NAPOLEON IS MADE
WHOLLY OF WILLOW,
have no suspicion of the terrible scenes which this very spot witnessed
hardly thirty years ago.
It was there that lay the Rue de la Chanvrerie, which ancient deeds
spell Chanverrerie, and the celebrated public-house called _Corinthe_.
The reader will remember all that has been said about the barricade
effected at this point, and eclipsed, by the way, by the barricade
Saint-Merry. It was on this famous barricade of the Rue de la
Chanvrerie, now fallen into profound obscurity, that we are about to
shed a little light.
May we be permitted to recur, for the sake of clearness in the recital,
to the simple means which we have already employed in the case of
Waterloo. Persons who wish to picture to themselves in a tolerably
exact manner the constitution of the houses which stood at that epoch
near the Pointe Saint-Eustache, at the northeast angle of the Halles of
Paris, where to-day lies the embouchure of the Rue Rambuteau, have only
to imagine an N touching the Rue Saint-Denis with its summit and the
Halles with its base, and whose two vertical bars should form the Rue
de la Grande-Truanderie, and the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and whose
transverse bar should be formed by the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie. The
old Rue Mondétour cut the three strokes of the N at the most crooked
angles. So that the labyrinthine confusion of these four streets
sufficed to form, on a space three fathoms square, between the Halles
and the Rue Saint-Denis on the one hand, and between the Rue du Cygne
and the Rue des Prêcheurs on the other, seven islands of houses, oddly
cut up, of varying sizes, placed crosswise and hap-hazard, and barely
separated, like the blocks of stone in a dock, by narrow crannies.
We say narrow crannies, and we can give no more just idea of those
dark, contracted, many-angled alleys, lined with eight-story buildings.
These buildings were so decrepit that, in the Rue de la Chanvrerie and
the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie, the fronts were shored up with beams
running from one house to another. The street was narrow and the gutter
broad, the pedestrian there walked on a pavement that was always wet,
skirting little stalls resembling cellars, big posts encircled with
iron hoops, excessive heaps of refuse, and gates armed with enormous,
century-old gratings. The Rue Rambuteau has devastated all that.
The name of Mondétour paints marvellously well the sinuosities of that
whole set of streets. A little further on, they are found still better
expressed by the _Rue Pirouette_, which ran into the Rue Mondétour.
The passer-by who got entangled from the Rue Saint-Denis in the Rue de
la Chanvrerie beheld it gradually close in before him as though he had
entered an elongated funnel. At the end of this street, which was very
short, he found further passage barred in the direction of the Halles
by a tall row of houses, and he would have thought himself in a blind
alley, had he not perceived on the right and left two dark cuts through
which he could make his escape. This was the Rue Mondétour, which on
one side ran into the Rue de Prêcheurs, and on the other into the Rue
du Cygne and the Petite-Truanderie. At the bottom of this sort of
cul-de-sac, at the angle of the cutting on the right, there was to be
seen a house which was not so tall as the rest, and which formed a sort
of cape in the street. It is in this house, of two stories only, that
an illustrious wine-shop had been merrily installed three hundred years
before. This tavern created a joyous noise in the very spot which old
Theophilus described in the following couplet:—
Là branle le squelette horrible
D’un pauvre amant qui se pendit.47
The situation was good, and tavern-keepers succeeded each other there,
from father to son.
In the time of Mathurin Regnier, this cabaret was called the
_Pot-aux-Roses_, and as the rebus was then in fashion, it had for its
sign-board, a post (_poteau_) painted rose-color. In the last century,
the worthy Natoire, one of the fantastic masters nowadays despised by
the stiff school, having got drunk many times in this wine-shop at the
very table where Regnier had drunk his fill, had painted, by way of
gratitude, a bunch of Corinth grapes on the pink post. The keeper of
the cabaret, in his joy, had changed his device and had caused to be
placed in gilt letters beneath the bunch these words: “At the Bunch of
Corinth Grapes” (_“Au Raisin de Corinthe”_). Hence the name of
Corinthe. Nothing is more natural to drunken men than ellipses. The
ellipsis is the zig-zag of the phrase. Corinthe gradually dethroned the
Pot-aux-Roses. The last proprietor of the dynasty, Father Hucheloup, no
longer acquainted even with the tradition, had the post painted blue.
A room on the ground floor, where the bar was situated, one on the
first floor containing a billiard-table, a wooden spiral staircase
piercing the ceiling, wine on the tables, smoke on the walls, candles
in broad daylight,—this was the style of this cabaret. A staircase with
a trap-door in the lower room led to the cellar. On the second floor
were the lodgings of the Hucheloup family. They were reached by a
staircase which was a ladder rather than a staircase, and had for their
entrance only a private door in the large room on the first floor.
Under the roof, in two mansard attics, were the nests for the servants.
The kitchen shared the ground floor with the tap-room.
Father Hucheloup had, possibly, been born a chemist, but the fact is
that he was a cook; people did not confine themselves to drinking alone
in his wine-shop, they also ate there. Hucheloup had invented a capital
thing which could be eaten nowhere but in his house, stuffed carps,
which he called _carpes au gras_. These were eaten by the light of a
tallow candle or of a lamp of the time of Louis XVI., on tables to
which were nailed waxed cloths in lieu of table-cloths. People came
thither from a distance. Hucheloup, one fine morning, had seen fit to
notify passers-by of this “specialty”; he had dipped a brush in a pot
of black paint, and as he was an orthographer on his own account, as
well as a cook after his own fashion, he had improvised on his wall
this remarkable inscription:—
CARPES HO GRAS.
One winter, the rain-storms and the showers had taken a fancy to
obliterate the S which terminated the first word, and the G which began
the third; this is what remained:—
CARPE HO RAS.
Time and rain assisting, a humble gastronomical announcement had become
a profound piece of advice.
In this way it came about, that though he knew no French, Father
Hucheloup understood Latin, that he had evoked philosophy from his
kitchen, and that, desirous simply of effacing Lent, he had equalled
Horace. And the striking thing about it was, that that also meant: