بخش 4 کتاب 11

BOOK ELEVEN

THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE

SOME INSIGHTS INTO THE ORIGINS OF GAVROCHE’S POETRY—INFLUENCE OF AN ACADEMICIAN ON THIS POETRY AT THE INSTANT that the insurrection, arising from the clash between the people and the troops in front of the Arsenal, inspired a backing-off in the multitude who were following the hearse and who, all the way along the boulevards, weighed, so to speak, on the head of the convoy, there was a terrible backward surge. The crowd rocked, the rows broke up, everyone ran, took to their heels, escaped, some with battle cries, others with the pallor of flight. The great river that covered the boulevards split in the twinkling of an eye, overflowing to left and right and pouring in torrents down two hundred streets at once, streaming like water through opened sluice gates. At that moment a ragged little boy, who was coming down the rue Ménilmontant holding in his hand a branch of laburnum in bloom which he had just picked on the heights of Belleville, caught sight of an old horse pistol in the shopwindow of a bric-a-brac dealer’s. He threw his flowering branch on the pavement and said: “Mother Whatsit, I think I’ll just borrow your thingy.” And he ran off with the pistol.

Two minutes later, a flood of terrified bourgeois fleeing down the rue Amelot and the rue Basse ran into the boy brandishing his pistol and singing: You can’t see a thing at night,

Of a day, all’s clear and bright,

A spurious note

Gets your burgher by the throat,

So please be good

Pointy-hatted hood!1

It was little Gavroche going off to war.

It wasn’t till he was on the boulevard that he saw that the pistol had no hammer.

Who wrote this refrain that helped him keep time as he walked along—and all the other songs that, on occasion, he liked to sing? We have no idea. Who knows? Maybe he did. In any case Gavroche was up with all the popular ditties in circulation and he put in his own babble to boot. An imp and a little devil, he made a medley of the voices of nature and the voices of Paris. He combined the repertoire of the birds with the repertoire of the workshops. He knew some artists’ apprentices, a tribe closely related to his own. He had been, it seems, an apprentice printer for three months. One day he had done an errand for Monsieur Baour-Lormian,2 one of the Forty. Gavroche was a gamin of letters.

Besides, Gavroche had no idea that on that horrible rainy night when he had offered two little mites the hospitality of his elephant, it was for his own brothers that he had played the part of Providence. His brothers in the evening, his father next morning; such had been his night. When he came out of the rue des Ballets just after dawn, he had rushed back to the elephant, had artfully extracted the two little boys, had shared whatever he was able to invent for breakfast, then gone off again, handing them over to that excellent mother, the street, who had more or less raised him. As he was leaving them, he arranged to meet them that same evening at the same place, and had left them with these words by way of goodbye: “I’m going to beat it, in other words, I’m taking off, or, as they say at court, I’ll skedaddle. Kidlingtons, if you don’t find Mummy and Daddy, come back this evening. I’ll rustle up some tucker for you and put you up for the night.” The two little boys, picked up by some police officer and parked at the station, or stolen by some travelling showman, or simply lost in the vast Chinese puzzle that is Paris, had not returned. The dregs of our current social world are full of such lost traces. Gavroche had not seen them again. Ten or twelve weeks had gone by since that night. More than once he had scratched his head and asked himself: “Where the devil are my two children?” Meanwhile, pistol in hand, he had reached the rue du Pont-aux-Choux. He noticed that there was only one shop open in that street and, something that gave pause for thought, it was a patisserie. This was a heaven-sent opportunity to eat another apple turnover before launching into the unknown. Gavroche stopped, patted his sides, fumbled in his fob gusset, turned his pockets inside out, found nothing, not a sou, and began to shout: “Help!” It is hard to miss out on the greatest cake there is.

Gavroche went on his way, anyway.

Two minutes later he was in the rue Saint-Louis. Crossing the rue du Parc-Royal, he felt the need to compensate himself for the impossible apple turnover and so gave himself the immense pleasure of tearing down the theatre posters in broad daylight.

A bit farther along, seeing a group of well-heeled burghers go by who looked to him to be men of property, he shrugged his shoulders and randomly spat out this mouthful of philosophical bile: “These rich bastards, God they’re fat! They stuff themselves. They wallow in fine dinners. Ask them what they do with their money. They haven’t got a clue. They eat it, that’s what they do with it! Gone with the wind of the gut.” GAVROCHE ON THE MARCH

WAVING A HAMMERLESS—“dogless”—pistol around in your hand in the middle of the street is such a public service that Gavroche felt his verve increasing with each step. He shouted, between the snatches of the “Marseillaise” that he was singing: “All’s well. My left paw hurts like blazes, my rheumatism’s killing me, but I am happy, citizens. All the bourgeois have to do is behave themselves, I’ll belt out a few subversive lines for them. What are stool pigeons? They’re dogs, by jingo! But let’s have a bit of respect for dogs. I could use a dog myself on my pistol. I’ve come from the boulevard, my friends, it’s getting hot, it’s simmering along nicely, it’s nearly on the boil. Time to give the pot a good skim. Forward, men! Let impure blood flood our furrows!1 I give my life for the homeland, I’ll never see my concubine again, hey nonny-nonny, all over, yes. Ninny! Gone! But who cares, long live joy! Let’s have it out, damn it! I’ve had a gutful of despotism.” At that instant, the horse of a National Guard lancer riding past came crashing down, Gavroche laid his pistol on the ground and pulled the man up, then he helped pull up the horse. After which he picked up his pistol and continued on his way.

In the rue de Thorigny all was peace and quiet. This apathetic stillness, peculiar to the Marais, contrasted with the vast surrounding uproar. Four gossips were jabbering away on a doorstop. Scotland has its trios of witches,2 but Paris has its quartets of gossips; and the “thou shalt be king hereafter,” hurled at Macbeth on the heath at Armuyr, would be just as ominous hurled at Bonaparte in Baudoyer Square. The croaking would be more or less the same.

The gossips of the rue de Thorigny were exclusively caught up in their own affairs. Three of them were porters and the other one, with her sack and her hook, was the rag-and-bone dealer–cum–rubbish collector that is known as a chiffonnière.

They seemed, all four of them, to be standing at the four corners of old age—decay, decrepitude, ruin, and sorrow.

The rag-and-bone woman was humble. In this all-weather world, the rag-and-bone woman greets, the porter protects. It all depends on where the concierge draws the boundary line, for the pickings may be big or small, according to the whim of whoever is sweeping the rubbish into a pile. Even a broom can show goodwill.

This particular rag-and-bone woman was a grateful old sack and she smiled—what a smile!—to the three porter women. The talk ran along the following lines: “Heavens, so your cat’s still mean?”

“My God, cats, you know, are the natural enemy of dogs. It’s the dogs that have something to complain about.” “People, too.”

“And yet cat fleas don’t go after people.”

“That’s not the trouble, dogs—dogs is dangerous. I remember one year when there was so many dogs they were forced to put it in the papers. It was the days when they had great big sheep in the Tuileries that used to pull the little carriage of the king of Rome. You remember the king of Rome?” “Me, I was fond of the duc de Bordeaux.”

“Me, I knew Louis XVII.3 I prefer Louis XVII.”

“Meat’s dear, Ma Patagon!”

“Ah, don’t talk to me about meat, the butcher’s is shocking. Truly shocking. All they’ve got now is tough old leftovers.” Here the rag-and-bone woman broke in: “Ladies, trade’s poor. The rubbish piles are woeful. No one’s throwing anything away these days. They eat everything.” “There’s poorer folks than you, Vargoulême.”

“Well, that’s true,” replied the rag-and-bone woman deferentially. “Me, I’ve got a job.” There was a pause and the rag-and-bone woman, yielding to that need for display that is at the bottom of mankind, added: “In the morning when I get home, I go through the sack, I take me peck [probably pick], I do me sortie [probably sorting]. I end up with great heaps in me room. I put the rags in a basket, the scraps in a tub, the linen in me cupboard, the woolens in me chest of drawers, the old papers in a corner of the window, anything worth eating in me bowl, the bits of glass in the fireplace, the old shoes behind the door, and the bones under me bed.” Gavroche, who had stopped behind, was listening: “Hey, old girls,” he said, “what business do you have talking politics?” A volley assailed him, composed of a quadruple hissing and booing.

“There’s another little stinker for you!”

“What’s he got in his mitt, then? A pistol!”

“I ask you, a slip of a kid like that!”

“It’s not happy unless it’s knocking over authority.” Gavroche, contemptuous, restricted himself, by way of retort, to lifting his nose with his thumb while opening his hand completely.

The rag-and-bone woman cried: “Cheeky little tramp!” The one who answered to the name of Patagon clapped her hands together, scandalized: “There’s going to be trouble, that’s for sure. That little shyster next door with his goatee, I see him go past every morning with a young thing in a pink cap on his arm, today I saw him go past and he was giving his arm to a musket. Ma Bacheux reckons there was a revolution just this last week at … at … at … Where’s that cow of a place! Pontoise. And then, this look-at-me here, with his pistol, this horrible little twerp! Apparently there are cannons all over the Célestins. What do you want the government to do with little wastrels who’ve got nothing better to do than think of ways to upset everyone, just when things were starting to quiet down a bit again after all the troubles we’ve had. Lord Almighty, that poor queen I seen go by in the cart! And it’s all going to send the prices up. It’s a disgrace! No doubt about it, I’ll be going to see you guillotined, you little swine!” “You’re sniffling, old girl,” said Gavroche. “Blow your hooter, why don’t you.” And he moved on. When he had got to the rue Pavée, the rag-and-bone woman came back into his mind and he uttered this soliloquy: “You are wrong to insult revolutionaries, mother Gutter-Sweep. This pistol here is to act on your behalf. It’s so you have more stuff worth eating in your sack.” All of a sudden he heard a noise behind him; it was the porter woman, Patagon, who had followed him and who, from a distance, was showing him her fist and shouting: “You are nothing but a bastard!” “As for that,” said Gavroche, “I am—profoundly—indifferent.” Soon after, he was passing the Hôtel Lamoignon.4 There, he let out this call: “En route for battle!” And he was overcome by a fit of melancholy. He looked at his pistol with an air of reproach as though he was trying to soften it.

“I go off,” he said, “but you can’t go off.”

One dog may distract attention from another. A very skinny poodle had just walked past. Gavroche was moved to pity.

“You poor little pooch,” he said to it, “did you swallow a barrel, then, for your ribs to be sticking out everywhere like that.” Then he headed for the Orme-Saint-Gervais.

A WIGMAKER’S JUST INDIGNATION

THE WORTHY WIGMAKER who had chased away the two little boys to whom Gavroche had opened the elephant’s paternal intestines was at this moment in his shop busy shaving an old legionnaire who had served under the Empire. They were chatting. The wigmaker had naturally spoken to the veteran about the riot, then about General Lamarque, and from Lamarque they had come to the emperor. Hence a conversation between a barber and a soldier which Prudhomme,1 had he been there, would have embellished with a flourish or two and called “Dialogue of the Razor and the Sabre.” “Monsieur,” said the wigmaker, “how did the emperor mount his horse?” “Badly. He didn’t know how to fall. So he never did.” “Did he have beautiful horses? He must have had beautiful horses?” “The day he gave me the cross, I noticed his nag. She was a racing mare, all white. She had wide-set ears, a deep saddle, a fine head with a black mark like a star, a very long neck, strongly jointed knees, protruding ribs, sloping shoulders, a powerful rump. A bit over fifteen hands high.” “A nice horse,” said the wigmaker.

“It was His Majesty’s animal.”

The wigmaker felt that after those words a small pause was appropriate, which he observed, and then resumed: “The emperor was only ever wounded once, Monsieur, isn’t that so?” The old soldier replied in the calm and sovereign tone of one who was there: “In the heel. At Ratisbon.2 I never saw him so spruced up as that day. He was as shiny as a pin.” “What about you, Monsieur le vétéran, you must have been wounded quite a bit?” “Me?” said the soldier. “Ah, nothing much. At Marengo I caught a couple of sabre slashes on the back of the neck, a bullet in my right arm at Austerlitz, another in my left hip at Jena, a jab with a bayonet at Friedland—here—in Moscow, seven or eight thrusts of a lance here, there, and everywhere, in Lutzen a shell burst and crushed a finger … Ah! and then at Waterloo a Biscay musket ball in the thigh. That’s about it.” “What a beautiful thing,” cried the wigmaker in a Pindaric3 tone, “to die on the field of battle! Me, word of honour, rather than croak in the cot, of illness, slowly, a bit more every day, with drugs and poultices and syringes and the doctor, I’d rather catch a cannonball in the guts!” “You’re not squeamish,” said the soldier.

He had only just finished when a dreadful crash shook the shop. One of the windowpanes in the shop front had suddenly been shattered. The wigmaker went white.

“My God!” he yelped. “There’s one now!”

“What?”

“A cannonball.”

“Here it is,” said the soldier.

And he picked up something that was rolling on the ground. It was a pebble.

The wigmaker ran to the broken window and saw Gavroche running away as fast as his legs would carry him toward the Saint-Jean market. As he was going past the wigmaker’s, Gavroche, who had the two little kids on his mind, had not been able to resist the desire to greet him and had thrown a stone through his window.

“You see that!” screamed the wigmaker, who had gone from white to purple. “He makes trouble for the heck of it. What did anyone ever do to that kid anyway?” THE BOY MARVELS AT THE OLD MAN

MEANWHILE GAVROCHE, AT the Saint-Jean market, where the guards posted were already disarmed, had joined up with a gang led by Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Feuilly. They were more or less armed. Bahorel and Jean Prouvaire caught up with them and swelled their number. Enjolras had a double-barrelled fowling piece, Combeferre a National Guard fusil bearing the number of the legion, as well as two pistols in his belt that his unbuttoned overcoat revealed, Jean Prouvaire an old cavalry carbine, Bahorel a hunting rifle, and Courfeyrac was waving around an unsheathed sword cane. Feuilly, a drawn sabre in his hand, was marching in front crying: “Long live Poland!”1 They were coming from the quai Morland, cravatless, hatless, breathless, soaked by the rain, lightning in their eyes. Gavroche calmly accosted them.

“Where are we going?”

“Come along,” said Courfeyrac.

Behind Feuilly, Bahorel was marching, or rather, bounding, a fish in the water of the riot. He was wearing a crimson waistcoat and he was swearing like a trooper. One passerby was bowled over by his waistcoat and cried out, frantic: “Here come the reds!” “The red, the reds!” replied Bahorel. “What are you frightened of, my good bourgeois. You won’t see me trembling at the sight of a red poppy, Little Red Riding Hood does not inspire me with horror. Bourgeois, believe me, we ought to leave fear of red to horned beasts.” He eyed a bit of wall plastered with the most pacific sheet of paper in the world, an authorization to eat eggs, the pastoral letter for Lent from the archbishop of Paris to his “flock.” Bahorel shouted: “Flock—that’s a polite way of saying sheep.” And he ripped the pastoral letter off the wall. This won Gavroche over. From that moment, Gavroche began to study Bahorel closely.

“Bahorel,” observed Enjolras, “you’re wrong. You should have left that pastoral letter alone, that’s not what we’re about, you’re wasting your anger on nothing. Hold your fire. You don’t shoot outside the ranks any more with your soul than you do with your gun.” “To each his own, Enjolras,” Bahorel shot back. “This bishop’s prose shocks me, I want to be able to eat eggs without someone authorizing me to do so. You, you’re the burning-ice type; me, I have fun. Besides, I’m not wasting my anger, I’m just warming up; and if I rip up pastoral letters, by Hercules! it’s only to work up an appetite.” That word, Hercules, struck Gavroche. He was always looking for any opportunity to educate himself and this ripper-upper of posters had gained his esteem. He asked him: “What does that mean, Hercules?” Bahorel answered: “It means ‘holy hell’ in Latin.”

Here Bahorel recognized a pale young man with a black beard at a window, watching them go past, probably a Friend of the ABC. He shouted to him: “Quick! cartridges! para bellum.”2 “Bel homme—handsome! It’s true,” said Gavroche, who now understood Latin.

A boisterous cortège accompanied them, students, artists, young men affiliated with the Cougourde d’Aix, workers, dockers, armed with clubs and bayonets, some like Combeferre with pistols stuck in their trousers. An old man, who looked really old, was marching with this band. He had no weapon and was rushing so as not to be left behind, although he looked lost in thought. Gavroche spotted him: “Whassat?” he said to Courfeyrac.

“Some old man.”

It was Monsieur Mabeuf.

THE OLD MAN

HERE’S WHAT HAD happened:

Enjolras and his friends were on the boulevard Bourdon near the grain warehouses just as the dragoons had charged. Enjolras, Courfeyrac, and Combeferre were among those who took to the rue Bassompierre shouting: “To the barricades!” In the rue Lesdiguières they had run into an old man walking along.

What got their attention was that this old man was zigzagging from one side of the street to the other as if he were drunk. On top of that, he had his hat in his hand even though it had rained all morning and it was raining pretty hard at that very moment. Courfeyrac had recognized old Mabeuf. He knew him from having seen him many times walking Marius to the front door. Knowing the peaceful and more than shy habits of the old churchwarden bookworm, and amazed to see him in the midst of all the mayhem, two feet from the cavalry charges, almost in the middle of a fusillade, bareheaded in the pouring rain and strolling among the bullets, he went over to him, and the twenty-five-year-old rioter and the octogenarian had exchanged this dialogue: “Monsieur Mabeuf, go home.”

“Why?”

“There’s going to be some strife.”

“Good.”

“Sword thrusts and gunshot, Monsieur Mabeuf.”

“Good.”

“Cannon fire.”

“Good. Where are you off to, you fellows?”

“We’re off to overthrow the government.”

“Good.”

And he started to follow them. From that moment, he had not said a word. His stride suddenly became firm, a few workmen had offered him their arm but he had refused with a shake of the head. He had surged ahead practically to the front of the column, his movements both those of a man on the march and of a sleeping man, at once.

“There’s a great old militant for you!” mumured the students. The rumour rippled through the crowd that he was a former member of the Convention, an old regicide.

The company had turned into the rue de la Verrerie. Little Gavroche marched at the head singing this song at the top of his lungs, like a kind of bugler. He sang: Here’s the moon coming out

Let’s go to the forest round about.

Charlot said to Charlotte.

Tou tou tou

For Chatou.

I have only one God, one king, one sou, and one boot.

Early in the morning, having fasted,

Two sparrows drank the dew

On the thyme and got plastered.

Zi zi zi

For Passy.

I have only one God, one king, one sou, and one boot.

And those two poor wolf cubs

Were stewed like two grubs;

In his lair a tiger had a good hoot.

Don don don

For Meudon.

I have only one God, one king, one sou, and one boot.

One swore and the other cursed

We’ll go to the forest or I’ll burst.

Charlot said to Charlotte.

Tin tin tin

For Pantin.

I have only one God, one king, one sou, and one boot.1 They made their way toward Saint-Merry.

RECRUITS

THE BAND WAS growing by the second. Near the rue des Billettes, a tall man, greying, whose rough and reckless mien Courfeyrac, Enjolras, and Combeferre remarked on, but whom none of them knew, joined them. Gavroche, busy singing, whistling, humming, charging ahead and banging shop shutters with the butt of his hammerless pistol, paid the man no attention.

As it happened, in the rue de la Verrerie, they went past Courfeyrac’s door.

“This is a stroke of luck,” said Courfeyrac. “I forgot my purse and I lost my hat.” He peeled off from the crowd and bounded upstairs to his place four steps at a time. He grabbed an old hat and his purse. He also grabbed a fairly large square box the size of a big suitcase that was hidden in his dirty washing. As he was running back down again the concièrge hailed him.

“Monsieur de Courfeyrac!”

“Portress, what is your name?” Courfeyrac shot back.

The portress was baffled.

“Why, you know very well, I’m the concierge, my name is mother Veuvain.” “Well, then, if you call me Monsieur de Courfeyrac again, I’ll call you mother de Veuvain. Now speak, what is it? What’s up?” “There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.”

“Who’s that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are they?”

“In my lodge.”

“Blast them!” said Courfeyrac.

“But he’s been waiting for over an hour for you to come back!” the portress insisted.

At the same time, a sort of young workman, thin, pale, small, freckled, dressed in a torn smock and patched-up corduroy trousers, who looked more like a girl playing a boy than a man, came out of the lodge and told Courfeyrac in a voice that was certainly not in any way like a woman’s voice: “Monsieur Marius, please?” “He’s not in.”

“Will he be back this evening?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

Courfeyrac added: “As for me, I won’t be back.”

The young man looked him steadily in the eye and asked him: “Why’s that?” “Because.”

“Where are you off to, then?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Would you like me to carry your box?”

“I’m off to the barricades.”

“Would you like me to go with you?”

“If you like!” answered Courfeyrac. “The street’s free, the cobblestones belong to everyone.” And he ran off to catch up with his friends. When he caught up with them, he gave the box to one of them to carry. It was only a good fifteen minutes later that he saw that the young man had, indeed, tagged along behind.

A crowd that gathers does not exactly go where it would like. We explained that it is swept along by the wind. They passed Saint-Merry and found themselves, without really knowing how, in the rue Saint-Denis.