LAST KING
In summer, he metamorphoses himself into a frog; and in the evening,
when night is falling, in front of the bridges of Austerlitz and Jena,
from the tops of coal wagons, and the washerwomen’s boats, he hurls
himself headlong into the Seine, and into all possible infractions of
the laws of modesty and of the police. Nevertheless the police keep an
eye on him, and the result is a highly dramatic situation which once
gave rise to a fraternal and memorable cry; that cry which was
celebrated about 1830, is a strategic warning from gamin to gamin; it
scans like a verse from Homer, with a notation as inexpressible as the
eleusiac chant of the Panathenæa, and in it one encounters again the
ancient Evohe. Here it is: “Ohé, Titi, ohééé! Here comes the bobby,
here comes the p’lice, pick up your duds and be off, through the sewer
with you!”
Sometimes this gnat—that is what he calls himself—knows how to read;
sometimes he knows how to write; he always knows how to daub. He does
not hesitate to acquire, by no one knows what mysterious mutual
instruction, all the talents which can be of use to the public; from
1815 to 1830, he imitated the cry of the turkey; from 1830 to 1848, he
scrawled pears on the walls. One summer evening, when Louis Philippe
was returning home on foot, he saw a little fellow, no higher than his
knee, perspiring and climbing up to draw a gigantic pear in charcoal on
one of the pillars of the gate of Neuilly; the King, with that
good-nature which came to him from Henry IV., helped the gamin,
finished the pear, and gave the child a louis, saying: “The pear is on
that also.”19 The gamin loves uproar. A certain state of violence
pleases him. He execrates “the curés.” One day, in the Rue de
l’Université, one of these scamps was putting his thumb to his nose at
the carriage gate of No. 69. “Why are you doing that at the gate?” a
passer-by asked. The boy replied: “There is a curé there.” It was
there, in fact, that the Papal Nuncio lived.
Nevertheless, whatever may be the Voltairianism of the small gamin, if
the occasion to become a chorister presents itself, it is quite
possible that he will accept, and in that case he serves the mass
civilly. There are two things to which he plays Tantalus, and which he
always desires without ever attaining them: to overthrow the
government, and to get his trousers sewed up again.
The gamin in his perfect state possesses all the policemen of Paris,
and can always put the name to the face of any one which he chances to
meet. He can tell them off on the tips of his fingers. He studies their
habits, and he has special notes on each one of them. He reads the
souls of the police like an open book. He will tell you fluently and
without flinching: “Such an one is a _traitor_; such another is very
_malicious_; such another is _great_; such another is _ridiculous_.”
(All these words: traitor, malicious, great, ridiculous, have a
particular meaning in his mouth.) That one imagines that he owns the
Pont-Neuf, and he prevents _people_ from walking on the cornice outside
the parapet; that other has a mania for pulling _person’s_ ears; etc.,
etc.