The gamin—the street Arab—of Paris is the dwarf of the giant.
Let us not exaggerate, this cherub of the gutter sometimes has a shirt,
but, in that case, he owns but one; he sometimes has shoes, but then
they have no soles; he sometimes has a lodging, and he loves it, for he
finds his mother there; but he prefers the street, because there he
finds liberty. He has his own games, his own bits of mischief, whose
foundation consists of hatred for the bourgeois; his peculiar
metaphors: to be dead is _to eat dandelions by the root_; his own
occupations, calling hackney-coaches, letting down carriage-steps,
establishing means of transit between the two sides of a street in
heavy rains, which he calls _making the bridge of arts_, crying
discourses pronounced by the authorities in favor of the French people,
cleaning out the cracks in the pavement; he has his own coinage, which
is composed of all the little morsels of worked copper which are found
on the public streets. This curious money, which receives the name of
_loques_—rags—has an invariable and well-regulated currency in this
little Bohemia of children.
Lastly, he has his own fauna, which he observes attentively in the
corners; the lady-bird, the death’s-head plant-louse, the
daddy-long-legs, “the devil,” a black insect, which menaces by twisting
about its tail armed with two horns. He has his fabulous monster, which
has scales under its belly, but is not a lizard, which has pustules on
its back, but is not a toad, which inhabits the nooks of old lime-kilns
and wells that have run dry, which is black, hairy, sticky, which
crawls sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, which has no cry, but which
has a look, and is so terrible that no one has ever beheld it; he calls
this monster “the deaf thing.” The search for these “deaf things” among
the stones is a joy of formidable nature. Another pleasure consists in
suddenly prying up a paving-stone, and taking a look at the wood-lice.
Each region of Paris is celebrated for the interesting treasures which
are to be found there. There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the
Ursulines, there are millepeds in the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in
the ditches of the Champs-de-Mars.
As far as sayings are concerned, this child has as many of them as
Talleyrand. He is no less cynical, but he is more honest. He is endowed
with a certain indescribable, unexpected joviality; he upsets the
composure of the shopkeeper with his wild laughter. He ranges boldly
from high comedy to farce.
A funeral passes by. Among those who accompany the dead there is a
doctor. “Hey there!” shouts some street Arab, “how long has it been
customary for doctors to carry home their own work?”
Another is in a crowd. A grave man, adorned with spectacles and
trinkets, turns round indignantly: “You good-for-nothing, you have
seized my wife’s waist!”—“I, sir? Search me!”