[Illustration: Little Gavroche]
Eight or nine years after the events narrated in the second part of
this story, people noticed on the Boulevard du Temple, and in the
regions of the Château-d’Eau, a little boy eleven or twelve years of
age, who would have realized with tolerable accuracy that ideal of the
gamin sketched out above, if, with the laugh of his age on his lips, he
had not had a heart absolutely sombre and empty. This child was well
muffled up in a pair of man’s trousers, but he did not get them from
his father, and a woman’s chemise, but he did not get it from his
mother. Some people or other had clothed him in rags out of charity.
Still, he had a father and a mother. But his father did not think of
him, and his mother did not love him.
He was one of those children most deserving of pity, among all, one of
those who have father and mother, and who are orphans nevertheless.
This child never felt so well as when he was in the street. The
pavements were less hard to him than his mother’s heart.
His parents had despatched him into life with a kick.
He simply took flight.
He was a boisterous, pallid, nimble, wide-awake, jeering, lad, with a
vivacious but sickly air. He went and came, sang, played at hopscotch,
scraped the gutters, stole a little, but, like cats and sparrows, gayly
laughed when he was called a rogue, and got angry when called a thief.
He had no shelter, no bread, no fire, no love; but he was merry because
he was free.
When these poor creatures grow to be men, the millstones of the social
order meet them and crush them, but so long as they are children, they
escape because of their smallness. The tiniest hole saves them.
Nevertheless, abandoned as this child was, it sometimes happened, every
two or three months, that he said, “Come, I’ll go and see mamma!” Then
he quitted the boulevard, the Cirque, the Porte Saint-Martin, descended
to the quays, crossed the bridges, reached the suburbs, arrived at the
Salpêtrière, and came to a halt, where? Precisely at that double number
50-52 with which the reader is acquainted—at the Gorbeau hovel.
At that epoch, the hovel 50-52 generally deserted and eternally
decorated with the placard: “Chambers to let,” chanced to be, a rare
thing, inhabited by numerous individuals who, however, as is always the
case in Paris, had no connection with each other. All belonged to that
indigent class which begins to separate from the lowest of petty
bourgeoisie in straitened circumstances, and which extends from misery
to misery into the lowest depths of society down to those two beings in
whom all the material things of civilization end, the sewer-man who
sweeps up the mud, and the rag-picker who collects scraps.
The “principal lodger” of Jean Valjean’s day was dead and had been
replaced by another exactly like her. I know not what philosopher has
said: “Old women are never lacking.”
This new old woman was named Madame Bourgon, and had nothing remarkable
about her life except a dynasty of three paroquets, who had reigned in
succession over her soul.
The most miserable of those who inhabited the hovel were a family of
four persons, consisting of father, mother, and two daughters, already
well grown, all four of whom were lodged in the same attic, one of the
cells which we have already mentioned.
At first sight, this family presented no very special feature except
its extreme destitution; the father, when he hired the chamber, had
stated that his name was Jondrette. Some time after his moving in,
which had borne a singular resemblance to _the entrance of nothing at
all_, to borrow the memorable expression of the principal tenant, this
Jondrette had said to the woman, who, like her predecessor, was at the
same time portress and stair-sweeper: “Mother So-and-So, if any one
should chance to come and inquire for a Pole or an Italian, or even a
Spaniard, perchance, it is I.”
This family was that of the merry barefoot boy. He arrived there and
found distress, and, what is still sadder, no smile; a cold hearth and
cold hearts. When he entered, he was asked: “Whence come you?” He
replied: “From the street.” When he went away, they asked him: “Whither
are you going?” He replied: “Into the streets.” His mother said to him:
“What did you come here for?”
This child lived, in this absence of affection, like the pale plants
which spring up in cellars. It did not cause him suffering, and he
blamed no one. He did not know exactly how a father and mother should
be.
Nevertheless, his mother loved his sisters.
We have forgotten to mention, that on the Boulevard du Temple this
child was called Little Gavroche. Why was he called Little Gavroche?
Probably because his father’s name was Jondrette.
It seems to be the instinct of certain wretched families to break the
thread.
The chamber which the Jondrettes inhabited in the Gorbeau hovel was the
last at the end of the corridor. The cell next to it was occupied by a
very poor young man who was called M. Marius.
Let us explain who this M. Marius was.
BOOK SECOND—THE GREAT BOURGEOIS