POETRY. THE INFLUENCE OF AN ACADEMICIAN ON THIS POETRY
At the instant when the insurrection, arising from the shock of the
populace and the military in front of the Arsenal, started a movement
in advance and towards the rear in the multitude which was following
the hearse and which, through the whole length of the boulevards,
weighed, so to speak, on the head of the procession, there arose a
frightful ebb. The rout was shaken, their ranks were broken, all ran,
fled, made their escape, some with shouts of attack, others with the
pallor of flight. The great river which covered the boulevards divided
in a twinkling, overflowed to right and left, and spread in torrents
over two hundred streets at once with the roar of a sewer that has
broken loose.
At that moment, a ragged child who was coming down through the Rue
Ménilmontant, holding in his hand a branch of blossoming laburnum which
he had just plucked on the heights of Belleville, caught sight of an
old holster-pistol in the show-window of a bric-à-brac merchant’s shop.
“Mother What’s-your-name, I’m going to borrow your machine.”
And off he ran with the pistol.
Two minutes later, a flood of frightened bourgeois who were fleeing
through the Rue Amelot and the Rue Basse, encountered the lad
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!44
It was little Gavroche on his way to the wars.
On the boulevard he noticed that the pistol had no trigger.
Who was the author of that couplet which served to punctuate his march,
and of all the other songs which he was fond of singing on occasion? We
know not. Who does know? Himself, perhaps. However, Gavroche was well
up in all the popular tunes in circulation, and he mingled with them
his own chirpings. An observing urchin and a rogue, he made a potpourri
of the voices of nature and the voices of Paris. He combined the
repertory of the birds with the repertory of the workshops. He was
acquainted with thieves, a tribe contiguous to his own. He had, it
appears, been for three months apprenticed to a printer. He had one day
executed a commission for M. Baour-Lormian, one of the Forty. Gavroche
was a gamin of letters.
Moreover, Gavroche had no suspicion of the fact that when he had
offered the hospitality of his elephant to two brats on that
villainously rainy night, it was to his own brothers that he had played
the part of Providence. His brothers in the evening, his father in the
morning; that is what his night had been like. On quitting the Rue des
Ballets at daybreak, he had returned in haste to the elephant, had
artistically extracted from it the two brats, had shared with them some
sort of breakfast which he had invented, and had then gone away,
confiding them to that good mother, the street, who had brought him up,
almost entirely. On leaving them, he had appointed to meet them at the
same spot in the evening, and had left them this discourse by way of a
farewell: “I break a cane, otherwise expressed, I cut my stick, or, as
they say at the court, I file off. If you don’t find papa and mamma,
young ’uns, come back here this evening. I’ll scramble you up some
supper, and I’ll give you a shakedown.” The two children, picked up by
some policeman and placed in the refuge, or stolen by some mountebank,
or having simply strayed off in that immense Chinese puzzle of a Paris,
did not return. The lowest depths of the actual social world are full
of these lost traces. Gavroche did not see them again. Ten or twelve
weeks had elapsed since that night. More than once he had scratched the
back of his head and said: “Where the devil are my two children?”
In the meantime, he had arrived, pistol in hand, in the Rue du
Pont-aux-Choux. He noticed that there was but one shop open in that
street, and, a matter worthy of reflection, that was a pastry-cook’s
shop. This presented a providential occasion to eat another
apple-turnover before entering the unknown. Gavroche halted, fumbled in
his fob, turned his pocket inside out, found nothing, not even a sou,
and began to shout: “Help!”
It is hard to miss the last cake.
Nevertheless, Gavroche pursued his way.
Two minutes later he was in the Rue Saint-Louis. While traversing the
Rue du Parc-Royal, he felt called upon to make good the loss of the
apple-turnover which had been impossible, and he indulged himself in
the immense delight of tearing down the theatre posters in broad
daylight.
A little further on, on catching sight of a group of
comfortable-looking persons, who seemed to be landed proprietors, he
shrugged his shoulders and spit out at random before him this mouthful
of philosophical bile as they passed:
“How fat those moneyed men are! They’re drunk! They just wallow in good
dinners. Ask ’em what they do with their money. They don’t know. They
eat it, that’s what they do! As much as their bellies will hold.”