CHAPTER I.
THE ORIGIN OF THE POETRY OF GAVROCHE
AND THE INFLUENCE OF AN ACADEMICIAN UPON IT.
At the moment when the insurrection, breaking out through the collisionbetween the people and the troops in front of the Arsenal, produceda retrograde movement in the multitude that followed the hearse, andwhich pressed with the whole length of the boulevards upon the head ofthe procession, there was a frightful reflux. The ranks were broken,and all ran or escaped, some with cries of attack, others with thepallor of flight. The great stream which covered the boulevards dividedin a second, overflowed on the right and left, and spread in torrentsover two hundred streets at once, as if a dyke had burst. At thismoment a ragged lad who was coming down the Rue Ménilmontant, holdingin his hand a branch of flowering laburnum which he had picked on theheights of Belleville, noticed in the shop of a dealer in bric-à-bracan old hostler pistol. He threw his branch on the pavement, andcried,--
"Mother What's-your-name, I'll borrow your machine."
And he ran off with the pistol. Two minutes after, a crowd offrightened cits, flying through the Rue Amelot and the Rue Basse, metthe lad, who was 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!"
It was little Gavroche going to the wars; on the boulevard he noticedthat his pistol had no hammer. Who was the composer of this coupletwhich served to punctuate his march, and all the other songs whichhe was fond of singing when he had a chance? Who knows? Himself,perhaps. Besides, Gavroche was acquainted with all the popular tunesin circulation, and mingled with them his own chirping, and, as ayoung vagabond, he made a _pot-pourri_ of the voices of nature andthe voices of Paris. He combined, the repertoire of the birds withthat of the studios, and he was acquainted with artists' students, atribe contiguous to his own. He had been for three months, it appears,apprenticed to a painter, and had one day delivered a message for M.Baour Lormian, one of the Forty; Gavroche was a gamin of letters.
Gavroche did not suspect, by the way, that on that wretched rainynight, when he offered the hospitality of his elephant to the two boys,he was performing the offices of Providence to his two brothers. Hisbrothers in the evening, his father in the morning,--such had been hisnight. On leaving the Rue des Ballets at dawn, he hurried back to theelephant, artistically extracted the two boys, shared with them thesort of breakfast which he had invented, and then went away, confidingthem to that good mother, the street, who had almost brought himselfup. On leaving them he appointed to meet them on the same spot atnight, and left them this speech as farewell,--"I am going to cut mystick, otherwise to say, I intend to bolt, or as they say at court, Ishall make myself scarce. My brats, if you do not find papa and mamma,come here again to-night. I will give you your supper and put you tobed." The two lads, picked up by some policeman and placed at thestation, or stolen by some mountebank, or simply lost in that Chinesepuzzle, Paris, did not return. The substrata of the existing socialworld are full of such lost traces. Gavroche had not seen them again,and ten or twelve weeks had elapsed since that night. More than once hehad scratched his head and asked himself, "Where the deuce are my twochildren?"
He reached the Rue du Pont aux Choux, and noticed that there was onlyone shop still open in that street, and it was worthy of reflectionthat it was a confectioner's. It was a providential opportunity to eatone more apple-puff before entering the unknown. Gavroche stopped, feltin his pockets, turned them inside out, found nothing, not even a sou,and began shouting, "Help!" It is hard to go without the last cake,but for all that Gavroche went on his way. Two minutes after he was inthe Rue St. Louis, and on crossing the Rue du Parc Royal he felt thenecessity of compensating himself for the impossible apple-puff, andgave himself the immense treat of tearing down in open daylight theplay-bills. A little farther on, seeing a party of stout gentry whoappeared to him to be retired from business, he shrugged his shouldersand spat out this mouthful of philosophic bile,--
"How fat annuitants are! they wallow in good dinners. Ask them whatthey do with their money, and they don't know. They eat it, eat theirbellyful."