Les Misérables
cartridge-boxes of the National Guardsmen who had been killed on the
slope of the redoubt, into his basket.
“What are you doing there?” asked Courfeyrac.
Gavroche raised his face:—
“I’m filling my basket, citizen.”
“Don’t you see the grape-shot?”
Gavroche replied:
“Well, it is raining. What then?”
Courfeyrac shouted:—“Come in!”
“Instanter,” said Gavroche.
And with a single bound he plunged into the street.
It will be remembered that Fannicot’s company had left behind it a
trail of bodies. Twenty corpses lay scattered here and there on the
pavement, through the whole length of the street. Twenty cartouches for
Gavroche meant a provision of cartridges for the barricade.
The smoke in the street was like a fog. Whoever has beheld a cloud
which has fallen into a mountain gorge between two peaked escarpments
can imagine this smoke rendered denser and thicker by two gloomy rows
of lofty houses. It rose gradually and was incessantly renewed; hence a
twilight which made even the broad daylight turn pale. The combatants
could hardly see each other from one end of the street to the other,
short as it was.
This obscurity, which had probably been desired and calculated on by
the commanders who were to direct the assault on the barricade, was
useful to Gavroche.
Beneath the folds of this veil of smoke, and thanks to his small size,
he could advance tolerably far into the street without being seen. He
rifled the first seven or eight cartridge-boxes without much danger.
He crawled flat on his belly, galloped on all fours, took his basket in
his teeth, twisted, glided, undulated, wound from one dead body to
another, and emptied the cartridge-box or cartouche as a monkey opens a
nut.
They did not dare to shout to him to return from the barricade, which
was quite near, for fear of attracting attention to him.
On one body, that of a corporal, he found a powder-flask.
“For thirst,” said he, putting it in his pocket.
By dint of advancing, he reached a point where the fog of the fusillade
became transparent. So that the sharpshooters of the line ranged on the
outlook behind their paving-stone dike and the sharpshooters of the
banlieue massed at the corner of the street suddenly pointed out to
each other something moving through the smoke.
At the moment when Gavroche was relieving a sergeant, who was lying
near a stone door-post, of his cartridges, a bullet struck the body.
“Fichtre!” ejaculated Gavroche. “They are killing my dead men for me.”
A second bullet struck a spark from the pavement beside him.—A third
overturned his basket.
Gavroche looked and saw that this came from the men of the banlieue.
He sprang to his feet, stood erect, with his hair flying in the wind,
his hands on his hips, his eyes fixed on the National Guardsmen who
were firing, and sang:
“On est laid à Nanterre,
C’est la faute à Voltaire;
Et bête à Palaiseau,
C’est la faute à Rousseau.”
“Men are ugly at Nanterre,
’Tis the fault of Voltaire;
And dull at Palaiseau,
’Tis the fault of Rousseau.”
Then he picked up his basket, replaced the cartridges which had fallen
from it, without missing a single one, and, advancing towards the
fusillade, set about plundering another cartridge-box. There a fourth
bullet missed him, again. Gavroche sang:
“Je ne suis pas notaire,
C’est la faute à Voltaire;
Je suis un petit oiseau,
C’est la faute à Rousseau.”
“I am not a notary,
’Tis the fault of Voltaire;
I’m a little bird,
’Tis the fault of Rousseau.”
A fifth bullet only succeeded in drawing from him a third couplet.
“Joie est mon caractère,
C’est la faute à Voltaire;
Misère est mon trousseau,
C’est la faute à Rousseau.”
“Joy is my character,
’Tis the fault of Voltaire;
Misery is my trousseau,
’Tis the fault of Rousseau.”
Thus it went on for some time.
It was a charming and terrible sight. Gavroche, though shot at, was
teasing the fusillade. He had the air of being greatly diverted. It was
the sparrow pecking at the sportsmen. To each discharge he retorted
with a couplet. They aimed at him constantly, and always missed him.
The National Guardsmen and the soldiers laughed as they took aim at
him. He lay down, sprang to his feet, hid in the corner of a doorway,
then made a bound, disappeared, reappeared, scampered away, returned,
replied to the grape-shot with his thumb at his nose, and, all the
while, went on pillaging the cartouches, emptying the cartridge-boxes,
and filling his basket. The insurgents, panting with anxiety, followed
him with their eyes. The barricade trembled; he sang. He was not a
child, he was not a man; he was a strange gamin-fairy. He might have
been called the invulnerable dwarf of the fray. The bullets flew after
him, he was more nimble than they. He played a fearful game of hide and
seek with death; every time that the flat-nosed face of the spectre
approached, the urchin administered to it a fillip.
One bullet, however, better aimed or more treacherous than the rest,
finally struck the will-o’-the-wisp of a child. Gavroche was seen to
stagger, then he sank to the earth. The whole barricade gave vent to a
cry; but there was something of Antæus in that pygmy; for the gamin to
touch the pavement is the same as for the giant to touch the earth;
Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he remained in a sitting
posture, a long thread of blood streaked his face, he raised both arms
in the air, glanced in the direction whence the shot had come, and
began to sing:
“Je suis tombé par terre,
C’est la faute à Voltaire;
Le nez dans le ruisseau,
C’est la faute à . . . “
“I have fallen to the earth,
’Tis the fault of Voltaire;
With my nose in the gutter,
’Tis the fault of . . . ”
He did not finish. A second bullet from the same marksman stopped him
short. This time he fell face downward on the pavement, and moved no
more. This grand little soul had taken its flight.
CHAPTER XVI—HOW FROM A BROTHER ONE BECOMES A FATHER
At that same moment, in the garden of the Luxembourg,—for the gaze of
the drama must be everywhere present,—two children were holding each
other by the hand. One might have been seven years old, the other five.
The rain having soaked them, they were walking along the paths on the
sunny side; the elder was leading the younger; they were pale and
ragged; they had the air of wild birds. The smaller of them said: “I am
very hungry.”
The elder, who was already somewhat of a protector, was leading his
brother with his left hand and in his right he carried a small stick.
They were alone in the garden. The garden was deserted, the gates had
been closed by order of the police, on account of the insurrection. The
troops who had been bivouacking there had departed for the exigencies
of combat.
How did those children come there? Perhaps they had escaped from some
guard-house which stood ajar; perhaps there was in the vicinity, at the
Barrière d’Enfer; or on the Esplanade de l’Observatoire, or in the
neighboring carrefour, dominated by the pediment on which could be
read: _Invenerunt parvulum pannis involutum_, some mountebank’s booth
from which they had fled; perhaps they had, on the preceding evening,
escaped the eye of the inspectors of the garden at the hour of closing,
and had passed the night in some one of those sentry-boxes where people
read the papers? The fact is, they were stray lambs and they seemed
free. To be astray and to seem free is to be lost. These poor little
creatures were, in fact, lost.
These two children were the same over whom Gavroche had been put to
some trouble, as the reader will recollect. Children of the
Thénardiers, leased out to Magnon, attributed to M. Gillenormand, and
now leaves fallen from all these rootless branches, and swept over the
ground by the wind. Their clothing, which had been clean in Magnon’s
day, and which had served her as a prospectus with M. Gillenormand, had
been converted into rags.
Henceforth these beings belonged to the statistics as “Abandoned
children,” whom the police take note of, collect, mislay and find again
on the pavements of Paris.
It required the disturbance of a day like that to account for these
miserable little creatures being in that garden. If the superintendents
had caught sight of them, they would have driven such rags forth. Poor
little things do not enter public gardens; still, people should reflect
that, as children, they have a right to flowers.
These children were there, thanks to the locked gates. They were there
contrary to the regulations. They had slipped into the garden and there
they remained. Closed gates do not dismiss the inspectors, oversight is
supposed to continue, but it grows slack and reposes; and the
inspectors, moved by the public anxiety and more occupied with the
outside than the inside, no longer glanced into the garden, and had not
seen the two delinquents.
It had rained the night before, and even a little in the morning. But
in June, showers do not count for much. An hour after a storm, it can
hardly be seen that the beautiful blonde day has wept. The earth, in
summer, is as quickly dried as the cheek of a child. At that period of
the solstice, the light of full noonday is, so to speak, poignant. It
takes everything. It applies itself to the earth, and superposes itself
with a sort of suction. One would say that the sun was thirsty. A
shower is but a glass of water; a rainstorm is instantly drunk up. In
the morning everything was dripping, in the afternoon everything is
powdered over.
Nothing is so worthy of admiration as foliage washed by the rain and
wiped by the rays of sunlight; it is warm freshness. The gardens and
meadows, having water at their roots, and sun in their flowers, become
perfuming-pans of incense, and smoke with all their odors at once.
Everything smiles, sings and offers itself. One feels gently
intoxicated. The springtime is a provisional paradise, the sun helps
man to have patience.
There are beings who demand nothing further; mortals, who, having the
azure of heaven, say: “It is enough!” dreamers absorbed in the
wonderful, dipping into the idolatry of nature, indifferent to good and
evil, contemplators of cosmos and radiantly forgetful of man, who do
not understand how people can occupy themselves with the hunger of
these, and the thirst of those, with the nudity of the poor in winter,
with the lymphatic curvature of the little spinal column, with the
pallet, the attic, the dungeon, and the rags of shivering young girls,
when they can dream beneath the trees; peaceful and terrible spirits
they, and pitilessly satisfied. Strange to say, the infinite suffices
them. That great need of man, the finite, which admits of embrace, they
ignore. The finite which admits of progress and sublime toil, they do
not think about. The indefinite, which is born from the human and
divine combination of the infinite and the finite, escapes them.
Provided that they are face to face with immensity, they smile. Joy
never, ecstasy forever. Their life lies in surrendering their
personality in contemplation. The history of humanity is for them only
a detailed plan. All is not there; the true All remains without; what
is the use of busying oneself over that detail, man? Man suffers, that
is quite possible; but look at Aldebaran rising! The mother has no more
milk, the new-born babe is dying. I know nothing about that, but just
look at this wonderful rosette which a slice of wood-cells of the pine
presents under the microscope! Compare the most beautiful Mechlin lace
to that if you can! These thinkers forget to love. The zodiac thrives
with them to such a point that it prevents their seeing the weeping
child. God eclipses their souls. This is a family of minds which are,