بخش 3 کتاب 1

PART THREE

MARIUS

BOOK ONE

PARIS STUDIED DOWN TO ITS MINUTEST ATOM

PARVULUS

PARIS HAS A boy and the forest has a bird; the bird is called a sparrow and the boy is called a ragamuffin imp, a street urchin: le gamin.

Put these two ideas together, the one containing all the heat of a furnace, the other, all the light of dawn, strike these two sparks together—Paris, boyhood—and a small being will flare up as a result. Homuncio,2 as Plautus would say.

This small being is bursting with joy. He doesn’t eat every day but he goes to a show every night, if he feels like it. He doesn’t have a shirt on his back, or shoes on his feet, or a roof over his head; he’s like the flies in the air—they don’t have any of that, either. He is somewhere between seven and thirteen years of age, lives in packs, wears his feet out walking, sleeps in the open, wears an old pair of trousers of his father’s that come down over his heels, an old hat from some other father that comes down over his ears, a single brace with yellowing edges; he runs around, on the lookout, on the take, killing time; primes pipes, swears like one of the damned, haunts cabarets, knows thieves, is on intimate terms with the streetwalkers, talks slang, sings dirty ditties, and hasn’t got a nasty bone in his body. This is because he has a pearl in his soul, innocence, and pearls do not dissolve in mud. As long as man is a child, God would like him to be innocent.

If you were to ask this vast city, “What on earth is that?” it would answer, “That’s my boy.”

A FEW OF HIS DISTINGUISHING MARKS

THE LITTLE TRAMP—the gamin de Paris—is the giant city’s dwarf.1

Let’s not get carried away. This cherub of the gutter2 does sometimes have a shirt, but then only one; he does sometimes have shoes, but then they don’t have soles; he does sometimes have a place to stay, and he loves it, for that is where he finds his mother, but he prefers the street, for that is where he finds his freedom. He has his own games, his own pranks basically fuelled by hatred of the bourgeois; his own metaphors—he calls being dead “eating dandelions by the root”; his own occupations, such as hailing cabs, fiacres,3 letting down carriage steps, collecting tolls for getting people from one side of the street to the other in heavy rains, which he calls “doing the pont des arts,” crying out the speeches made by the powers that be in favour of the French people, scraping out the gaps between cobblestones; he has his own currency, which consists of all the tiny bits of beaten copper you can find on the public thoroughfare. This curious currency, which goes by the name of loques, or tatters, enjoys an invariable and highly regulated exchange rate within this little bohemia of children.

Last, he has his own fauna, which he studiously observes in corners: the ladybird, the death’s-head plant louse, the daddy longlegs, a black insect known as “the devil,” which has a tail armed with two horns that it twists when it wants to be menacing. He has his fabulous monster4 that has scales on its belly but is not a lizard, that has pustules on its back but is not a toad, that lives in the holes of old lime kilns and dried-out cesspools, black, hairy, slimy, slithering, now slow, now fast, that does not cry but just looks, and is so terrible no one has ever seen it; he calls this monster “deafy.” Looking for deafies among stones is a pleasure of the thrilling kind. Another pleasure is to suddenly lift up a cobblestone and see wood lice. Every part of Paris is famous for the interesting finds you can make there. There are earwigs in the Ursulines depots, there are millipedes at the Panthéon, there are tadpoles in the moats of the Champ de Mars.

As for words, this child is on a par with Talleyrand.5 He is just as cynical, too, but more honest. He is endowed with an incredible and unpredictable cheerfulness; he stuns the shopkeeper with his fits of laughter. His range goes merrily from high comedy to farce.

A funeral passes. Among those accompanying the dead there is a doctor.

“Hey!” cries a gamin. “Since when do doctors lug their work around?”

Another one is in a crowd. A grave-looking man, adorned with spectacles and a bracelet with lucky charms, whips round indignantly: “You little swine! You just pinched my wife’s ‘waist.’”

“Me, Monsieur! Search me.”

HE IS NICE

OF AN EVENING, thanks to the few sous he always manages to scrape together for himself, this homuncio steps into a theatre. In crossing that magic threshold, he is transfigured; he was a guttersnipe, he becomes a cocky Parisian theatregoer. Theatres are like upside-down ships with the hold on top. It is up into this hold that this Artful Dodger piles. The cocky Parisian theatregoer is to the gamin what the moth is to the grub: the same creature taking wing and soaring. All he has to do is be there, with his radiant happiness, with his powerful enthusiasm and joy, with his hands clapping like beating wings, for this cramped, fetid, dark, sordid, insalubrious, awful, abominable hold to turn into paradise—the Gods.

Give a being what is useless and take away from him what is essential and you have the gamin.

The gamin is not without literary intuition. What he tends to go in for, and we say this with the proper dose of regret, is not in the classical taste. He is not, by nature, especially academic. Which is why, to give an example, the popularity of Mademoiselle Mars1 among this little audience of stormy children was seasoned with a hint of irony. The gamin called her Mademoiselle Mache—lamb’s lettuce.

This specimen heckles, jeers, sneers, likes a good brawl, wears a toddler’s tatters and the rags of a philosopher, fishes in the sewer, hunts in the cesspool, digs gaiety out of muck, lashes the highways and byways with his verve, sniggers and bites, boos and sings, applauds and hurls abuse, tempers the Hallelujah with Tirralirra-by-the-river, belts out every tune from De Profundis to carnival numbers,2 finds without having to look, knows what he does not know, is spartan to the point of fraud, is mad to the point of wisdom, is lyrical to the point of being foul. Would squat even on Olympus, wallows in dung and comes out of it covered in stars. The gamin de Paris is Rabelais3 as a boy.

He isn’t happy with his trousers unless they have a fob pocket.

Nothing much fazes him, still less frightens him, he derides superstition, deflates exaggeration, makes a mockery of mysteries, pokes his tongue out at ghosts, knocks people off their high horses, caricatures epic aggrandizement. Not that he’s prosaic, far from it; but he swaps the solemn vision for comical fantasies. If Adamastor,4 the giant, were to pop up in front of him, the gamin would say: “Well, well! A little nipper!” HE CAN BE USEFUL

PARIS BEGINS WITH the dawdling onlooker and ends with the gamin, two beings that no other town is capable of; the passive acceptance that makes a person happy just to look on, and inexhaustible initiative; Prudhomme and Fouillou.1 Paris alone boasts such native fauna. The monarchy begins and ends in the ambulatory onlooker. Anarchy begins and ends in the gamin.

This wan child of the working-class faubourgs of Paris lives and grows, ties himself in knots and “pulls through” in suffering, a thoughtful witness to social realities and human affairs, and he doesn’t miss a trick. He believes that he himself is unconcerned; but he is not. He watches, ready to have a laugh; ready for other things, too. Whoever you are, you who go by the name of Prejudice, Abuse, Ignominy, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice, Fanaticism, Tyranny, watch out for the wide-eyed gamin.

This little kid will grow up.

What clay is he made of? Of the first lump of muck that turns up in the gutter. A handful of mud, a breath of air and voilà, Adam. All that is needed is for a god to pass. A god has always passed over the gamin. Fortune plays a hand in this small creature. By that word fortune we mean there is an element of luck. Will this pygmy, kneaded in nothing but common dirt, pig ignorant, illiterate, dim-witted, vulgar, crude, grow into an Ionian or a Boeotian?2 Wait, currit rota! The wheel turns. The spirit of Paris, that demon that creates children of chance and men of destiny, unlike the Latin potter, turns the common or garden-variety jug into an amphora.

HIS BOUNDARIES

THE GAMIN LOVES the city, he also loves solitude, having something of the sage in him. Urbis amator, like Fuscus; ruris amator, like Flaccus.1

Wandering around musing, in other words dawdling, is a good way to spend time for a philosopher; particularly in that funny, rather ugly semi-rural landscape, with its odd, dual nature, that surrounds certain big cities, notably Paris. To observe the urban outskirts is to observe the amphibian. End of trees, beginning of roofs, end of grass, beginning of pavement, end of furrows, beginning of shops, end of ruts, beginning of passions, end of divine murmuring, beginning of human racket; whence the extraordinary interest.

And whence the seemingly aimless promenades of the thinker, in these rather uninviting places forever branded by passersby with the epithet sad.

The person writing these lines was for a long time a prowler of the barrières of Paris and for him that prowling is a source of indelible memories. The bald turf, the rocky paths, the chalk, the limey clay, the rubble, the harsh monotony of fallow land and uncultivated land, the early fruit and vegetable crops of the market gardeners suddenly appearing under cover somewhere, that blend of the wild and the primly bourgeois, the vast deserted recesses where the garrison drums hold noisy lessons, reproducing the stammering staccato of battle, these places that are solitary retreats during the day, death traps at night, the spindly mill turning in the wind, the excavation wheels of the stone quarries, the open-air bars on cemetery corners, the mysterious charm of the great dark walls that cut through vast wastelands flooded with sunlight and full of butterflies—all this drew him.

There is hardly anyone on earth who knows these singular places, Glacière, Cunette, the hideous Grenelle wall riddled with bullet holes, Montparnasse, the Fosse-aux-Loups, the Aubiers on the banks of the Marne, Montsouris, the Tombe-Issoire, the Pierre-Plate de Châtillon,2 where there is an old exhausted quarry that only serves now to push up mushrooms and is shut off at ground level by a trapdoor of rotten boards. The campagna around Rome is one thing, the suburbs of Paris another; to see nothing in what a horizon offers us but fields, houses, or trees is to stick to the surface, for all aspects of things are God’s thoughts. The place where a plain meets a town is always impregnated with some indefinable but penetrating melancholy. Nature and humanity speak to you there at the same time. Local peculiarities flourish.

Anyone who has wandered around as we have through these lonely spots on the fringe of our faubourgs, and that we might lump together as the limbo of Paris, would have glimpsed here and there, dotted about in the most abandoned spots, at the most unexpected moments, behind a scrawny hedge or in the angle of some grimy wall, boisterous groups of children, whey-faced, covered in mud, covered in dust, scruffy, dishevelled, playing jacks, crowned with cornflowers. Little as they are, they are all runaways from poor families. Outside on the boulevard is where they can breathe; the suburban fringe belongs to them. That is where they skip school all day, permanently. It is where they innocently belt out their repertoire of dirty songs. It is where they are, or better still, where they exist, far from all eyes, in the delicious May or June sun, kneeling around a hole in the ground, flicking marbles with their thumbs, squabbling over worthless coins, carefree, carried away, unbridled, happy. But as soon as they spot you, they remember they have a trade and that they have to make a living and they offer to sell you an old woolen stocking full of cockchafers or a clump of lilac. These encounters with strange children are one of the charms of the outskirts of Paris, lovely and poignant at the same time.

Sometimes, in the heaps of boys, there are a few little girls—their sisters?—who are almost big girls, skinny, feverish, covered in sunburn, dusted with freckles, with spikes of rye and poppies in their hair, gay, wild-eyed, barefoot. You see them eating cherries in the wheat fields. At night, you hear them laughing. These groups, warmly lit in the full blaze of noon or half-glimpsed at twilight, keep the dreamer busy for a long while and such visions find their way into his dreams.

Paris, centre; outskirts, circumference—to these children this is the whole world. They never risk going beyond it. They can no more live out of the atmosphere of Paris than fish can live out of water. For them, there is nothing two leagues past its gates. Ivry, Gentilly, Arcueil, Belleville, Aubervilliers, Ménilmontant, Choisy-le-Roi, Billancourt, Meudon, Issy, Vanves, Sèvres, Puteaux, Neuilly, Gennevilliers, Colombes, Romainville, Chatou, Asnières, Bougival, Nanterre, Enghien, Noisy-le-Sec, Nogent, Gournay, Drancy, Gonesse3—this is where the world ends.

A BIT OF HISTORY

AT THE TIME when the action of this book occurred, which is, after all, virtually contemporary, there was not, as there is today, a police officer on every street corner (an advantage there is no time to discuss here); Paris was crawling with stray children. Statistics show an average of two hundred and sixty homeless children were picked up annually by police on the beat in open terrain, in houses under construction, and under the arches of bridges. One such nest that has remained famous produced “the swallows of the pont d’Arcole.”1 This is, of course, the most disastrous social symptom. All the crimes of the man begin in the straying of the child.

We should except Paris, though. Relatively speaking, and notwithstanding the memories just called to mind, the exception is only fair. Whereas in any other big city a child vagabond means a lost man, whereas almost everywhere the child left to his own devices is practically dedicated and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in out-and-out vices that eat away at his honesty and even at his conscience, the gamin de Paris, we must insist, no matter how rough and damaged on the surface, is more or less intact on the inside. Something that is wonderful to note, and that bursts out in the splendid probity of our popular revolutions, is that a certain incorruptibility results from ideas that are in the air of Paris the way salt is in the ocean. To breathe Paris preserves the soul.

What we are saying here in no way detracts from the pang you feel every time you run into one of these children who seem to have the cut ties of the broken home floating all around them. In today’s civilization, still so incomplete, it is not so unusual to see such breakdowns, with families falling apart in the shadows, parents having little idea of what has become of their children and spilling their guts on the public highway. Hence dark destinies. This is known, for this sad business has led to the coining of a phrase, “to be thrown out on the streets of Paris.” We should just say in passing that such abandonment of children was not discouraged by the erstwhile monarchy. A touch of Egypt and Bohemia in the lower orders accommodated the upper spheres and suited the purposes of the high and mighty. Hate-filled opposition to the education of lower-class children was a dogma. What was the good of “a little learning”? That was the catchcry. Well, the stray child is the corollary of the ignorant child.

Besides, the monarchy sometimes needed children, and when it did, it skimmed the street.

Louis XIV, to go no further back in time, wanted to build a naval fleet.2 For very good reason—nothing wrong with the idea. But let’s just look at the way they went about it. No fleet can exist unless, alongside the sailing ship, which is a plaything of the wind, you have a ship that can go wherever it likes, either by means of oars or by means of steam, in order to tow this sailing ship if need be. In those days, galleys were to the navy what steamers are today. So there had to be galleys; but a galley can only be moved by galley slaves; so there had to be galley slaves. Colbert made sure as many galley slaves as possible were churned out by provincial intendants and the parliaments.3 The judges were more than happy to oblige. If a man kept his hat on his head before a procession, as the Huguenots did, he was sent to the galleys. If a boy was caught on the street, as long as he was at least fifteen years old and had nowhere to lay his head, he was sent to the galleys. Great reign; great age.

Under Louis XV, children disappeared in Paris, kidnapped by the police for no one knows what mysterious purpose. People whispered in horror of monstrous possibilities involving the king’s blood-red baths. Barbier4 speaks naïvely of these matters. It sometimes happened that the press-gangs, known as the exempt-gangs, when they were short on children, took some that had fathers. The fathers ran after the exempt-gangs in desperation. In such cases the parliament intervened and hanged—who? the exempt-gangs? No. The fathers.

THE GAMIN WOULD HAVE HIS PLACE IN THE CASTE SYSTEM OF INDIA

THE GAMINERIE OF Paris—the Parisian order of gamins—is almost a caste. You could say, not everyone can get in.

The word gamin was printed for the first time, thereby passing from the vernacular into the language of literature, in 1834. It is in a little work entitled Claude Gueux1 that the word makes its appearance. It created a real scandal. But the word was adopted.

The things that attract esteem for a gamin among his cohorts are very varied. We knew and had dealings with one who was very much respected and very much admired for having seen a man fall from the top of one of the towers of Notre-Dame; another, for having managed to get into a rear courtyard where the statues from the dome of the Invalides had been temporarily deposited and having “swiped” a bit of the lead off one; a third, for having seen a coach tip over; yet another, because he “knew” a soldier who had almost knocked out some bourgeois gent’s eye.

This explains that exclamation of the Parisian gamin, a profound epiphenomenon that the vulgar laugh at without understanding: “Hell’s bells! Talk about unlucky! To think I still ain’t seen anyone falling out of a fiff floor!” (Haven’t pronounced “ain’t” and fifth pronounced “fiff.”) There is such a thing as fine peasant talk and the following is an example: “Father So-and-so, your wife has died of her illness; why didn’t you send for a doctor?”

“Why d’yer think, Monsieur? We poor people have t’ die fer ourseln.” But if all the taunting passivity of the peasant is packed into that expression, all the freethinking anarchy of the cheeky suburban nipper is packed, indubitably, into this other. A man in the cart taking him to the gallows is listening to his confessor. The child of Paris shouts a protest: “He’s talking to his sacristy rat. God, what a scaredy-cat!” A certain boldness in religious matters enlivens the gamin. Being strong-minded is important.

Attending executions constitutes a duty. You point out the guillotine to each other and laugh. You have all kinds of pet names for it: Bottom of the Soup, Crankypants, The Mother in the Blue Yonder (in the sky), The Last Mouthful, etc., etc. So as not to miss anything, you scale walls, hoist yourself up onto balconies, climb trees, hang off railings, cling to chimneys. The gamin is a born roofer just as he is a born sailor. A roof doesn’t frighten him any more than a mast. No festival comes near La Grève.2 Sanson and the abbé Montès3 are the true stars. You boo the victim to encourage him. Sometimes you admire him. Lacenaire as a gamin saw the awful Dautun die bravely and came out with this expression that was to have quite a future: “I was jealous of him.” In the order of gamins, you don’t know Voltaire, but you know Papavoine. You put “politicals” in the same basket as murderers. You have traditions based on the last clothes worn by all of them. You know that Tolleron wore a driver’s cap, Avril a cap of otter skin, Louvel a round hat, that old Delaporte was bald and bareheaded, that Castaing was all pink and pretty as a rose, that Bories had a romantic goatee, that Jean-Martin kept his braces on, that Lecouffé and his mother were arguing. “Don’t fight over spilt milk,” one gamin yelled at them. Another gamin, wanting to see Debacker4 go past and being too little to see anything in the crowd, spotted a lamppost on the quai and started climbing it. A gendarme stationed there scowled at him. “Let me climb up, M’sieur Gendarme,” said the gamin. And to soften up the authority figure he added: “I won’t fall.” “I couldn’t care less if you fall or not,” answered the gendarme.

In the gaminerie, a memorable accident is highly prized. You attain the height of esteem if you manage to cut yourself badly, “to the bone.”

The fist is not a bad way to achieve respect, either. One thing the gamin most likes saying is: “I’m as strong as all get-out, I am!” To be left-handed5 makes you most enviable. To squint is highly rated.

IN WHICH YOU WILL READ A DELIGHTFUL SAYING OF THE KING’S

IN SUMMER, HE turns into a frog; and in the evening, at nightfall, down by the bridges of Austerlitz and Iéna, from the top of coal barges and the boats of washerwomen,1 he plunges headfirst into the Seine—and into all possible infringements of the laws of modesty and of the police. But police officers are on the lookout and there ensues a highly dramatic situation, of the kind that once gave rise to a memorable fraternal cry. This cry, which was famous around 1830, was a strategic warning telegraphed from gamin to gamin; it scans like lines of Homer, with a notation almost as inexpressible as the Eleusinian lamentations of the Panathenaea,2 and it brings the antique “Evoe” to mind. Here’s how it goes: “Yoo-hoo! Joker! Yoooo-hooo! There’s flatfoots about, there’s cops, grab yer gear and beat it, cut through the sewer!” Sometimes this kid—for that is what this midget likes to go by—can read, sometimes he can write; he can always scrawl. He doesn’t hesitate to endow himself, by we know not what mysterious mutual instruction, with all those talents that can be so useful in public life: From 1815 to 1830, he imitated the call of the turkey; from 1830 to 1848, he scrawled pears on walls.3 One summer evening, Louis-Philippe was coming home on foot and saw a gamin, a tiny little thing knee-high to a grasshopper, sweating away, stretching high up on tiptoe to charcoal in a gigantic pear on one of the pillars of the Neuilly gate; the king, with that easy good nature that he got from Henri IV, helped the little lad, finished the pear for him and gave the boy a gold louis, telling him, “The pear’s on that, too.”4 The gamin loves uproar. A certain violent state pleases him. He loathes curés.5 One day in the rue de l’Université,6 one of these little rascals was making faces at the porte cochère of no. 69. “What are you doing that to the door for?” a passerby asked. The boy replied: “There’s a curé in there.” The papal nuncio does, in fact, reside at that address. Yet, whatever the gamin’s Voltairean tendencies, if the occasion presents itself to become a choirboy, he may very well take it up, and if he does, he serves perfectly politely at mass. He is like Tantalus7 when it comes to two overriding ambitions that constantly elude him: to overthrow the government and to patch up his trousers.

The gamin at his best is on top of all the police constables of Paris and can always put a name to a face when he meets one. He ticks them off on his fingers. He studies their ways and keeps special tabs on every one of them. He can read the soul of a policeman like an open book and will tell you frankly and without batting an eyelid: “So-and-so is a traitor … so-and-so is a nasty piece of work … so-and-so is terrific … so-and-so is a joke”—all these terms, traitor, nasty piece of work, terrific, a joke, have a specific, accepted meaning in his mouth. “This one thinks he owns the Pont-Neuf8 and stops society strolling along the cornice outside the parapets”; “that one is always pulling a person’s ears,” and so on, and so forth.

THE OLD SOUL OF GAUL

THERE WAS SOMETHING of this little urchin in Poquelin, son of Les Halles;1 there was something of him in Beaumarchais.2 Gaminerie is a tonal variation on the Gallic spirit. Mixed with common sense, it occasionally reinforces it, as alcohol fortifies wine. Sometimes it is a defect. Homer goes on and on, we know; and you could say Voltaire plays the gamin—he gamines. Camille Desmoulins3 was from the suburbs. Championnet,4 who abused miracles, was a child of the streets of Paris; when still very little, he flooded the porticoes of Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais and Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, and he was on such intimate terms with Saint Geneviève’s shrine as to order about Saint Januarius’s glass vial, causing the blood to suddenly liquefy at will.

The gamin de Paris is respectful, ironic, and insolent. He has horrible teeth because he is malnourished and his stomach suffers, but he has beautiful eyes because he has wit. Faced with Jehovah himself, he would hop up the steps of paradise. He is strong on French boxing. There is nothing he could not grow into. He plays in the gutter and rises up out of it in revolt; his effrontery persists in the face of grapeshot; he was once a little guttersnipe, he is now a hero; just like the Theban boy,5 he shakes the lion’s skin; the drummer Barra6 was a gamin de Paris; he yells “Forward, march!” the way the warhorse in the Scriptures7 says “Ha!” and in a second goes from a waif to a giant.

This child of the quagmire is also a child of the ideal. Just try and measure the range that can go from Molière to Barra.

At the end of the day, and to cut a long story short, the gamin is a specimen that amuses himself because he is unhappy.

ECCE PARIS, ECCE HOMO1

TO SUM UP once more, the gamin de Paris today, like the graeculus of Rome2 in days gone by, is the man of the people as a child, with the wrinkles of the old world on his forehead.

The gamin is a national treasure and, at the same time, a disease. A disease that must be cured. How? By light.

Light purifies.

Light enlightens.

All the generous radiance society spreads stems from science, letters, the arts, learning. Make men, make real men. Enlighten them if you want them to warm you. Sooner or later the magnificent matter of universal education will come up with the irresistible authority of absolute truth; and when it does, those that rule under the watchful eye of the French ideal of enlightenment will have to make the following choice: the children of France or the street urchins of Paris; flames in the light of day or will-o’-the-wisps in the dark.

The gamin embodies Paris and Paris embodies the world.

For Paris is what it all adds up to. Paris is the ceiling over the human race. This whole prodigious city is a condensation of dead customs and creeds and living customs and creeds. Whoever sees Paris feels like they have seen the hidden side of the whole of history with the sky and the constellations in the gaps in between. Paris has its Capitol, the Hôtel de Ville; a Parthenon, Notre-Dame; an Aventine Hill, the faubourg Saint-Antoine; an Asinarium, the Sorbonne; a Pantheon, the Panthéon;3 a Via Sacra, the boulevard des Italiens; a Tower of the Winds, public opinion, which has replaced the Gemoniae with public ridicule. Its majordomo is the vulgar dandy, its transteverino is the working-class suburbanite, its native bearer is the Les Halles market porter, its lazzarone is the underworld, its cockney is the fop. Everything found elsewhere is found in Paris. The fishwife of Dumarsais could hold her own with Euripides’ herb-hawker, the discus thrower Vejanus is resurrected in Forioso the tightrope walker, Therapontigonus Miles would go arm in arm with the grenadier Vadeboncoeur, Damasippus the junk dealer would be happy among the curiosity shops, Vincennes would get stuck into Socrates, just as the Agora would put Diderot behind bars, Grimod de la Reynière came up with roast beef with Yorkshire pudding just the way Curtullis invented roast hedgehog; we see popping up once more under the Arc de Triomphe at L’Étoile the same trapeze that is in Plautus, the sword-eater of the Poecilium encountered by Apuleius is the sabre-swallower on the Pont-Neuf, Rameau’s nephew and Curculion the parasite4 are a perfect match, Ergasilus would get himself introduced into Cambacérès’s circle by d’Aigrefeuille; the four muscadins of Rome, Alcesimarchus, Phoedromus, Diabolus, and Argyrippe, go down to the Courtille in Labatut’s post chaise; Aulus Gellius did not linger in front of Congrio any longer than Charles Nodier in front of Punch and Judy; Marton is not a tigress, but Pardalisca was not a dragon, either; Pantolabus the buffoon sends up Nomentanus the high roller at the Café Anglais,5 Hermogenus is a tenor on the Champs-Élysées and, around him, Thrasius the beggar, decked out as Bobèche, the Empire theatre clown lingering on in the Restoration, passes the hat around; the pest who buttonholes you in the Tuileries makes you repeat Thesprion’s remark, two thousand years down the track: Quis properantem me prehendit pallio?;6 the wine of Suresnes parodies the wine of Alba, and Désaugier’s red rim matches Balatron’s balloon glass; the rain at night in Père-Lachaise gives off the same sheen as the Esquilies, and the pauper’s grave leased for five years is the equivalent of the hired coffin of the slave.

Try and find something Paris does not have. Trophonius’s vat holds nothing not found in Mesmer’s tub; Ergaphilas is resurrected in Cagliostro; the Brahmin Vasaphanta is incarnated in the comte de Saint-Germain; Saint-Médard Cemetery supplies miracles every bit as good as those of the Umumiya mosque of Damascus.

Paris has an Aesop and it is Mayeux, and a Canidia and it is Mademoiselle Lenormand,7 the fortune-teller. It takes fright like Delphos at the blinding realities of vision; it rocks tables around at séances8 just as Dodona did using tripods. It puts a grisette on the throne9 just as Rome did a courtesan; and, all things considered, if Louis XV was worse than Claudius, Madame Du Barry was better than Messalina.10 Paris combines Greek nudity, Jewish rancor, and Gascon jeering and comes up with an unheard-of character, who is real enough; indeed, we have rubbed shoulders with him. He is a blend of Diogenes, Job, and Paillasse, the clown, dresses a spectre in old numbers of the Constitutionnel and does a Chodruc Duclos.

Though Plutarch says “the tyrant hardly ever ages,” Rome, under Sulla as under Domitian, resigned itself and happily added water to its wine. The Tiber turned into a Lethe, if we are to believe the somewhat doctrinaire praise Varus Vibiscus heaped on it: Contra Gracchos Tiberim habemus. Bibere Tiberum, id est seditionem oblivisci.11 Paris drinks a million litres of water a day, but that does not stop it from sounding the call to arms and ringing the tocsin on occasion.

Apart from that, Paris is easygoing. It regally accepts everything, and it doesn’t make trouble when it comes to Venus. Its Callipygian is Hottentot; as long as it is laughing, it will grant amnesty: Ugliness cheers it up, deformity has it in stitches, vice entertains it; be funny and you can get away with murder. Even hypocrisy, the ultimate cynicism, does not put it off; it is so literary that it won’t hold its nose when faced by Basilius, and it is no more scandalized by Tartuffe’s posturing than Horace was shocked by Priapus’ “hiccups.”12 No feature of the universal face is lacking in Paris’s profile. The bal Mabille may not be the Polyhymnian dance on the Janiculum, but the toilet scalper devours the strumpet there with her eyes exactly the way the procuress Staphyla eyed the virgin Planesium. The barrière du Combat may not be a Coliseum, but they are as ferocious there as if Caesar were looking on. The Syrian hostess is more graceful than mother Saguet, but if Virgil haunted the Roman watering holes, David d’Angers, Balzac, and Charlet13 have sat down in the greasy spoons of Paris. Paris reigns supreme. Geniuses blaze away there, red tails prosper. Adonaïs passes through on his twelve-wheeled chariot of thunder and lightning; Silenus makes his entrance on his donkey. For Silenus, read Ramponneau.

Paris is synonymous with the cosmos. Paris is Athens, Rome, Sybaris, Jerusalem, Pantin. All civilizations are there in condensed form—and all the barbarisms with them. Paris would be really furious if it didn’t have a guillotine.

A bit of a place de Grève is a good thing. What would this whole endless feast be without such seasoning? Our laws have wisely provided for it, and thanks to them, the blade drips over the Mardi Gras.

RAILING, REIGNING

PARIS KNOWS NO bounds. No other city has enjoyed the kind of domination that sometimes scoffs at those it subjugates. “To please you, O Athenians!” cried Alexander.1 Paris does more than lay down the law, it dictates the fashion; Paris does more than dictate the fashion, it lays down the routine. Paris can be stupid if it sees fit; it sometimes offers itself that luxury—in which case, the world is stupid with it. Paris wakes up, rubs its eyes, and says: “What an idiot I am!” and bursts out laughing in the face of the human race. What a wonderful town! How strange that such grandiosity and such burlesque get on so well together, that all the majesty is not ruffled by all the parody, and that the same mouth that blows the bugle of the Last Judgement today can blow the fife tomorrow! Paris has inimitable good cheer. Its gaiety is like lightning and its farce holds a sceptre. Its hurricanes sometimes blow up from a grimace. Its explosions, its bad days, its masterpieces, its wonders, its epics spread to the ends of the earth—and so do its cock-and-bull skits. Its laugh is the mouth of a volcano that spatters the whole world. Its wisecracks are flying sparks. It imposes its caricatures on the people as much as its ideals; the most noble monuments of human civilization accept its sarcastic comments and lend their eternity to its risqué remarks. It is superb; it has a wondrous Bastille Day that sets the entire globe free; it sees to it that all the nations take the Tennis Court Oath;2 its night of August 43 dissolves a thousand years of feudalism in three hours; it makes its logic the muscle of universal will; it proliferates in all forms of the sublime; it fills with its light Washington, Kościuszko, Bolívar, Botzaris, Riego, Bem, Manin, López, John Brown, Garibaldi;4 it is everywhere that the future flares up, in Boston in 1779, on the isle of Léon in 1820, in Pesth in 1848, in Palermo in 1860;5 it whispers that potent watchword Liberty in the ear of the American Abolitionists gathered below Harper’s Ferry, and in the ear of the patriots of Ancona assembled in the dark at the Archi, outside Gozzi Inn, along the seafront; it inspires Canaris; it inspires Quiroga; it inspires Pisicane; it beams greatness over the globe; it is by going where its breath drives them that Byron dies at Missolonghi6 and Mazet dies in Barcelona;7 it is a rostrum under Mirabeau’s feet and a crater under the feet of Robespierre;8 its books, its theatre, its art, its science, its literature, its philosophy, are the manuals of the whole human race; it has a Pascal, Régnier, Corneille, Descartes, Rosseau, Voltaire, for every moment, a Molière9 for every age; it causes its language to be spoken by the world’s mouth and that language becomes the Word; it sets up the idea of Progress in all minds; the dogmas of liberation that it forges are for whole generations bedside swords, and it is with the soul of its thinkers and its poets that all the heroes of all the peoples of the world have been made since 1789. But this does not prevent it from playing the gamin, for this huge genius that we call Paris, even while transfiguring the world by its light, draws Bouginier’s nose in charcoal on the wall of Theseus’ temple and scrawls Crédéville is a thief 10 on the Pyramids.

Paris always bares its teeth; when it’s not rousing, it’s laughing.

Such is Paris. The smoke from its rooftops is the ideas of the universe. A pile of mud or stones, if you like—but, above all else, a moral entity. It is more than great, it is immense. Why? Because it dares.

To dare—progress comes at this price.

All the sublime conquests are more or less the rewards of daring. For the Revolution to happen, it is not enough for Montesquieu to see it coming, for Diderot to preach it, for Beaumarchais to announce it, for Condorcet to plan it, for Arouet to pave the way for it, for Rousseau to premeditate it. Danton11 has to dare it.

The cry, “Daring!” is a fiat lux. 12 The onward march of the human race requires that proud lessons in courage sit permanently on the peaks. Daring deeds dazzle history and are guiding lights for mankind. Dawn dares when it rises. To attempt, to brave, to persist, to persevere, to be true to oneself, to tackle destiny in hand-to-hand combat, to flummox catastrophe by fearlessness before it, to now confront unjust power, now deride intoxicated victory, to hold steady, to stand firm—that is the example the people need, and the light that galvanizes them. The same formidable lightning flashes from the torch of Prometheus to Cambronne’s stunted pipe.13 THE FUTURE LATENT IN THE PEOPLE

AS FOR THE people of Paris, the grown man always remains, at heart, a gamin. To paint the portrait of the child is to paint the portrait of the city, and it is for this reason that we have studied the eagle in this candid little sparrow.

It is especially in the faubourgs, we must insist, that the Parisian race appears. This is where the thoroughbred is; this is where the true features of the breed are to be found; this is where the people work and suffer, and this suffering and work are the two faces of the man. The place is teeming with heaps of unknown beings, the strangest specimens from the stevedore of La Rapée to the knacker of Montfaucon. Fex urbis, cries Cicero;1 mob, adds Burke,2 indignant. Riffraff, mob, rabble—those words are easily said. But so be it. What does it matter? What do I care if they go about barefoot? Too bad if they can’t read. Are you going to abandon them for that? Are you going to turn their distress into a curse? Can’t the light penetrate the teeming masses? Let’s get back to that cry: Let there be light! And let’s stick to it! Light! Light! Who knows if these opaque walls won’t become transparent? Aren’t revolutions transfigurations? Off you go, philosophers—teach, enlighten, fire up, think out loud, speak out loud, go on joyful romps in broad daylight, fraternize in public places, bring glad tidings, spray alphabets lavishly all over the place, proclaim rights, sing Marseillaises, sow enthusiasm, rip green branches off the oaks. Whip up ideas into a whirlwind. The hordes can be made sublime. Let’s learn how to use this vast blaze of principles and virtues that crackles and flames out and occasionally sputters. These bare feet, these bare arms, these rags, this ignorance, this abjectness, this darkness, can be put to work in the conquest of the ideal. Look through the people and you will see the truth. This vile sand that you trample beneath your feet, throw it into the furnace, and if it melts there and boils, it will become sparkling crystal. And it is thanks to this that Galileo and Newton will discover the stars.

PETIT-GAVROCHE

ABOUT EIGHT OR nine years1 after the events recounted in the second part of this story, people noticed, on the boulevard du Temple and in the area around the Château-d’Eau, a boy of eleven or twelve who would have matched the perfect gamin as sketched above if only, despite the laughter of his age that was on his lips, his heart had not been absolutely dark and empty. This child was indeed decked out in a pair of men’s trousers, but he did not get these from his father, and a woman’s camisole, but he did not get that from his mother. Perfect strangers had dressed him in rags out of charity. And yet he did have a father and a mother. But his father never gave him a thought and his mother did not love him. Of all the children with fathers and mothers, he was one of those who most deserve pity, for they are actually orphans.

This boy never felt as good as when he was on the streets. The pavement was not as hard to him as his mother’s heart.

His parents had thrust him at life with a good swift kick in the pants. He had quite simply taken wing. He was a boisterous, wan, agile, bright, cocky boy, with a lively yet sickly look. He came and went, sang, played pitch and toss, scratched about in the gutter, did a bit of stealing—only, like cats and sparrows, gaily—laughed when people called him a little scallywag, got cross when people called him a lout. He had no roof over his head, no bread, no fire, no love, but he was jubilant because he was free.

When these poor beings have grown into men, the millstone of the social order almost always catches up with them and grinds them to a pulp, but while they are still children, they escape, being little. The tiniest hole saves them.

Yet, as abandoned as this child was, every two or three months or so he would say: “Hey, I think I’ll go and see Maman!” He would then quit the boulevard, the Cirque, the Porte Saint-Martin,2 and duck down to the quais, cross over the bridges, reach the faubourgs, get as far as La Salpêtrière, and arrive—where? Precisely at that double no. 50–52 that the reader is familiar with—the Gorbeau slum.

In those days, the slum at 50–52, normally deserted and permanently decorated with the sign ROOMS TO LET, found itself in the rare situation of being occupied by several individuals who, as always happens in Paris, what is more, bore no connection and no relationship to each other. All belonged to that indigent class that starts with the petit bourgeois struggling to make ends meet, and keeps spiraling down all the rungs of poverty to the very dregs of society, right down to the two specimens in whom all the material things of civilization end—the sewer worker who sweeps up the muck and the rag-and-bone merchant who picks through the trash.

The “chief tenant” from the days of Jean Valjean had died and been replaced by another woman exactly the same. I can’t remember which philosopher it was who said: There is never any shortage of old women.

This new old woman was called Madame Burgon and there was nothing remarkable about her life except for a dynasty of three parrots which had successively ruled her heart.

The most wretched of those who lived in the slum were a family of four, father, mother, and two girls already fairly grown up, all four sleeping in the same garret, one of those cells we have already discussed.

This family did not stand out in any way at first except by its extreme destitution; in renting the room, the father had said his name was Jondrette. Some time after moving in, a process that looked strangely like “nothing at all moving in,” to borrow the memorable expression of the chief tenant, this Jondrette had told the woman, who, like her predecessor, acted as concierge at the same time and swept the stairs: “Mother So-and-so, if anyone happens to turn up and asks for a Pole or an Italian, or maybe a Spaniard, that’ll be me.” This family was the family of the cheeky little barefoot tramp. Whenever he went there, he was greeted by poverty, distress, and, sadder still, never a smile; cold hearth, cold hearts. Whenever he stepped inside, they would ask him: “Where the hell’ve you come from?” He would answer: “The street.” Whenever he turned to go, they would ask him: “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” He would answer: “The street.” His mother would say to him: “What the hell’d you come here for?” The boy lived in this lack of affection like pale grass that crops up in cellars. He did not suffer by being in this situation and he did not blame anybody. He had no idea what a father and mother should be like.

Besides, his mother loved his sisters.

We forgot to say that on the boulevard du Temple, the boy was known as Petit-Gavroche. Why did he call himself Gavroche—meaning urchin? Probably because his father called himself Jondrette.

To cut ties seems to be an instinct with certain dirt-poor families.

The room the Jondrettes lived in at the Gorbeau slum was the last one at the end of the corridor. The cell next door was occupied by a very poor young man named Monsieur Marius.

Let’s see who Monsieur Marius was.