بخش 4 کتاب 15

BOOK FIFTEEN

THE RUE DE L’HOMME-ARMÉ

A BLABBER OF A BLOTTER

WHAT ARE A city’s convulsions next to the riots of the soul? One man on his own is even deeper than the whole populace put together. Jean Valjean, at that very moment, was in the grip of a frightening upheaval. All the bottomless pits had opened up again inside him. He, too, shuddered, like Paris, on the brink of a mighty and obscure revolution. A few hours had been enough. His destiny and his conscience had abruptly clouded over. Of him, too, as of Paris, you could say that the two principles were having a face-off. The white angel and the black angel were about to go head to head on a bridge over an abyss. Which of the two will push the other over? Who will win?

The night before that same day, June 5, Jean Valjean, accompanied by Cosette and Toussaint, had moved to the rue de l’Homme-Armé. A twist of fate awaited him there.

Cosette had not left the rue Plumet without a show of resistance. For the first time since they had lived together, side by side, Cosette’s will and Jean Valjean’s will had revealed themselves to be distinct, and had, if not clashed, then at least been at variance. There had been objections on one side and inflexibility on the other. That abrupt advice, “Clear out,” tossed at Jean Valjean by an unknown person, had alarmed him to the point of making him uncompromising. He believed himself to have been tracked down and pursued. Cosette had had to yield.

Both had arrived at the rue de l’Homme-Armé without opening their mouths or saying a word, each absorbed in their personal preoccupations; Jean Valjean so anxious he didn’t see Cosette’s sadness, Cosette so sad she didn’t see Jean Valjean’s anxiety.

Jean Valjean had brought Toussaint along, which he had never done in his previous absences. He anticipated that he would perhaps not return to the rue Plumet, and he could not leave Toussaint behind or tell her his secret. Besides, he felt that she was devoted and reliable. Between servant and master, treachery begins with curiosity. Now, Toussaint, as though predestined to be Jean Valjean’s servant, was not curious. She stuttered in her Barneville peasant’s talk: “I’m ever the same; I do whatever I do; the remainder is not my work.” (That’s how I am; I do my job; the rest is not my affair.) In this departure from the rue Plumet, which had almost amounted to flight, Jean Valjean had taken nothing except the small embalmed case christened by Cosette “the inseparable.” Packed trunks would have required carriers and carriers are witnesses. They called a fiacre to the gate on the rue de Babylone and off they went.

It was only with great difficulty that Toussaint had obtained permission to bundle up a bit of linen and clothing and a few toiletries. Cosette herself had only taken her stationery and her blotter.

To make doubly sure of the likelihood that no one would see them disappear into the shadows, Jean Valjean had arranged things so as not to leave the villa on the rue Plumet until the close of day, which had left Cosette time to write her note to Marius. They had arrived at the rue de l’Homme-Armé after dark. They had gone to bed in silence.

The accommodation in the rue de l’Homme-Armé was located off a rear courtyard, on the second floor, and consisted of two bedrooms, a dining room, and a kitchen off the dining room, with a closet under the stairs where there was a camp bed that fell to Toussaint. The dining room doubled as an antechamber and divided the two bedrooms. The apartment was provided with all the necessary utensils.

We are reassured almost as crazily as we are alarmed; it’s human nature. Hardly had Jean Valjean been in the rue de l’Homme-Armé five minutes than his anxiety lifted, and by degrees, blew over. There are places that have a calming effect that works more or less mechanically on the mind. A dark street, quiet residents, and Jean Valjean felt strangely infected by tranquillity in this laneway of old Paris, so narrow it was barred to carriages by a crossbeam placed across two posts, deaf and dumb in the middle of the noisy city, crepuscular in broad daylight, and incapable, so to speak, of emotion between its two rows of tall century-old houses that hold their peace like the old folk they are. There is stagnant oblivion in this street. Jean Valjean could breathe there. How could anyone find him there?

His first concern was to see that “the inseparable” was stowed by his side.

He slept well. Night counsels; we might add: Night pacifies. The next morning, he woke up almost lighthearted. He found the dining room charming when it was hideous, furnished with an old round table, a low sideboard surmounted by a slanting mirror, a worm-eaten armchair, and a few chairs stacked with Toussaint’s bundles. Through an opening in one of these bundles you could see Jean Valjean’s National Guard uniform.

As for Cosette, she had had Toussaint bring her a bouillon in her room and only put in an appearance in the evening.

At around five o’clock, Toussaint, who was bustling about, very busy with this little move, had laid out cold chicken on the dining table, which Cosette, out of deference to her father, had consented to look at.

That done, Cosette had pleaded a persistent migraine, said good night to Jean Valjean and shut herself up in her room. Jean Valjean had wolfed down a chicken wing and, with his elbows on the table, putting his mind gradually to rest, was regaining his sense of security.

While he was enjoying this sober meal, he had vaguely picked up, once or twice, Toussaint’s stuttering as she said to him: “Monsieur, there is a row, they’re fighting in Paris.” But absorbed as he was in a whole host of inner thoughts, he had not paid much attention. To tell the truth, he hadn’t really heard. He got up and started to pace from the window to the door and from the door to the window, calmer and calmer.

With this calmness, Cosette, his sole concern, came flooding back into his mind. Not that he was worried about this migraine of hers, a minor attack of nerves, a young girl’s sulks, a momentary cloud that would disappear in a day or two; but he was thinking of the future, and as usual, he thought about it sweetly, with pleasure.

After all, he could see no obstacle to their happy life’s resuming its normal course. At certain moments, everything seems impossible; at others, it all seems so easy; Jean Valjean was in one of those happy moments—they normally follow the bad ones, as day follows night, according to that law of succession and contrast that is the very basis of nature and that superficial minds call antithesis. In this peaceful street where he had taken refuge, Jean Valjean let go of all that had been troubling him for some time. Just because he had seen so many dark clouds, he could now begin to see a bit of blue sky up ahead. Having got away from the rue Plumet without any complications or incidents was already a step in the right direction.

Perhaps it would be wise to leave the country, if only for a few months, and go abroad to London. Well, then, they would go. Whether they were in France or England, what did it matter, as long as he had Cosette by his side? Cosette was his nation. Cosette was all he needed to be happy; the idea that he was perhaps not all Cosette needed to be happy, this idea that had once given him fever and insomnia, simply did not occur to him. He was enjoying the collapse of all his past pain and he was full of optimism. Cosette, being by his side, seemed to him to belong to him, an optical illusion that everyone has experienced. He arranged in his head, with the greatest possible ease, the trip to England with Cosette, and he saw his felicity rebuild itself, no matter where, from the standpoint of his waking dream.

While he slowly paced up and down, his gaze suddenly fell on something strange. He saw opposite him, in the slanting mirror on top of the sideboard, these four lines which he could distinctly read: My beloved, alas! My father wants us to leave right away. We will be at the rue de l’Homme-Armé, no. 7, this evening. In a week we will be in England. Cosette. June 4.

Jean Valjean froze, aghast.

On arriving, Cosette had placed her blotter on the sideboard in front of the mirror and, completely lost in her painful anguish, had left it there, without even realizing that she had left it wide open, and open precisely at the page on which she had pressed, to dry them, those four lines written by her and which she had entrusted to the young workman passing by in the rue Plumet. The writing had left its imprint on the blotter. The mirror reflected the writing.

The result was what is known in geometry as a symmetrical image; the writing reversed on the blotter showed itself the right way round in the mirror and ran in the right direction. And Jean Valjean had before his eyes the letter written the night before by Cosette to Marius. It was simple and it was devastating.

Jean Valjean went to the mirror. He reread the four lines, but he did not believe it. They had the effect on him of an apparition seen in a flash of lightning. It was a hallucination. It was impossible. It was not.

Little by little his perception became more precise; he looked at Cosette’s blotter and awareness of reality came back to him. He snatched the blotter and said: “That comes from this.” He feverishly examined those four lines imprinted on the blotter, the reversal of the letters turning it into bizarre scribble that he couldn’t make head or tail of. So he told himself: “But it doesn’t mean anything, there’s nothing written there.” And he breathed deeply with inexpressible relief. Who has not felt ridiculous joy like that in moments of horror? The soul does not give in to despair without exhausting all possible illusions.

He held the blotter in his hand and contemplated it, stupidly happy, almost ready to laugh at the hallucination he’d been hoodwinked by. All of a sudden his eyes fell on the mirror again and again he saw the vision. The four lines stood out in the mirror with a sharpness that was inexorable. This time it was not a mirage. The second occurrence of a vision is a reality; it was palpable, it was writing corrected in a mirror. He finally understood.

Jean Valjean tottered, dropped the blotter, and fell into the old armchair next to the sideboard, his head down, his eyes glassy, half-crazed. He told himself it was all too clear and that the world’s light was forever eclipsed and that Cosette had written that to somebody. Then he heard his soul, which had become black and terrible again, let out a muffled roar in the darkness. Try and take away the dog the lion has in its cage!

What was odd and sad was that, at that moment, Marius did not yet have Cosette’s letter; chance had treacherously brought it to Jean Valjean before handing it over to Marius.

Until that day, Jean Valjean had never been defeated by any ordeal. He had been subjected to horrific trials and tribulations; not a single assault and battery of an ill-starred life had ever been spared him; the ferocity of fate, armed with every act of vengeance and every kind of social scorn, had taken him up and hounded him relentlessly. He had not backed down or flinched before any of it. He had accepted, when he had to, every violent blow; he had sacrificed his inviolability as a man redeemed, surrendered his freedom, risked his neck, lost everything, been to hell and back, and had remained disinterested and stoical, to the point where at times you might have thought him dissociated from himself in the manner of a martyr. His conscience, battle-hardened against all possible assaults by adversity, might seem forever impregnable. Well, then, anyone who had seen deep inside him at that moment would have been forced to admit that he had taken a terrible beating and was failing.

For, of all the tortures that he had suffered in this long testing that destiny had subjected him to, this one was the most awful. Never had such a vise had him in its grip. He felt the mysterious stirrings of all his latent sensibilities. He felt the tug of an unknown feeling. Alas, the supreme ordeal, better still, the only ordeal, is the loss of the one you love.

Poor old Jean Valjean, of course, loved Cosette only as a father; but, as we noted earlier, into this fatherly love his lonely single status in life had introduced every other kind of love; he loved Cosette as his daughter, and he loved her as his mother, and he loved her as his sister; and, as he had never had either a lover or a wife, as nature is a creditor that does not accept nonpayment, that particular feeling, too, the most indestructible of all, had thrown itself in with the rest, vague, ignorant, heavenly, angelic, divine; less a feeling than an instinct, less an instinct than an attraction, imperceptible and invisible but real; and love, truly called, lay in his enormous tenderness for Cosette the way a vein of gold lies in the mountain, dark and virginal.

We should bear in mind that state of the heart that we have already mentioned. Marriage between them was out of the question, even that of souls; and yet it is certain that their destinies had joined together as one. Except for Cosette, that is, except for a child, Jean Valjean had never, in all his long life, known anything about love. Serial passions and love affairs had not laid those successive shades of green over him, fresh green on top of dark green, that you notice on foliage that has come through winter and on men that have passed their fifties. In short, and we have insisted on this more than once, this whole inner fusion, this whole set, the result of which was lofty virtue, had wound up making Jean Valjean a father for Cosette. A strange father, forged out of the grandfather, son, brother, and husband that were all in Jean Valjean; a father in whom there was even a mother; a father who loved Cosette and worshipped her, and for whom that child was light, was home, was his homeland, was paradise.

So when he saw that it was all over, that she was escaping from him, that she was slipping through his fingers, that she was hiding, that she was a cloud, she was water, when he had this shattering evidence before his very eyes: “another is the one her heart yearns for, another is the hope of her life; there is the beloved, I am only the father; I no longer exist”; when he could no longer doubt, when he said to himself, “She’s going away out of me!” the pain he felt was beyond endurance. To have done all he had done only to come to this! And, what! Be nothing! At that point, as we said, he gave a shudder of revolt. He felt even the roots of his hair stand on end with the rousing of egotism, and his ego howled in the abyss of his soul.

You can collapse inside. A despairing certainty does not penetrate a man without pushing aside and sundering certain deep features that are sometimes the man himself. When pain reaches that level, all the forces of a person’s conscience stampede. Such crises are fatal. Not many of us emerge from them in our right minds and firm in our sense of duty. When the limit of suffering is exceeded, the most imperturbable virtue is rocked. Jean Valjean grabbed the blotter again and convinced himself once more. He stayed hunched, and as though turned to stone, over those four indisputable lines, his eyes staring; and such a heavy cloud formed inside him that you could believe that the man’s entire innards were falling apart.

He studied this revelation, through the magnification of reverie, in apparent yet frightening calm, for it is a fearful thing when a man’s calmness achieves the coldness of a statue.

He measured the appalling turn his fate had taken without his suspecting it; he recalled his fears of the previous summer, so crazily dispelled; he recognized the edge of the abyss; it was still the same; only Jean Valjean was no longer on the brink, he was at the bottom.

An unheard-of and heartrending thing, he had fallen in without realizing. The whole light of his life had gone out and he had believed he could still see the sun.

His instinct was swift and sure. He put together certain circumstances, certain dates, certain blushes and pallors of Cosette’s, and he said to himself: “It was him.” The divination of despair is a sort of mysterious bow that never misses the mark. In his first conjecture, he hit on Marius. He did not know the name, but he found the man immediately. He distinctly saw, at the bottom of the implacable evocation of memory, the unknown prowler of the Luxembourg, that miserable seeker of flings, that ne’er-do-well of romance, that lovelorn imbecile, that coward, for it is a form of cowardice to come and make eyes at girls who have by their side their father who loves them.

After he had fully decided that it was that young man who was at the bottom of this situation, and that it all stemmed from there, he, Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had done so much work on his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve all life, all misery, and all unhappiness in love—he looked inside himself and saw there a spectre, Hate.

Great pain brings great weariness with it. It dampens the will to live. The man it enters feels something go out of him. In youth its visit is gloomy; later, it is sinister. Alas, when your blood is hot, when your hair is black, when your head sits straight on your shoulders like a flame on a flare, when the scroll of destiny is still almost unrolled, when your heart, full of a love that is sanctioned, can still beat in a way that calls forth another’s heartbeats, when you have all the time in the world ahead of you to mend, when all women are there, and all smiles and all the future, and the whole horizon, when the force of life is at its fullest—if despair is an appalling thing even so, what is it in old age, when the years hurtle on, bleaker and bleaker, to that twilight hour when you begin to see the stars of the grave!

While he was musing, Toussaint came in. Jean Valjean got up and asked her: “Whereabouts is it? Do you know?” Toussaint, astonished, could only answer: “Sorry?”

Jean Valjean went on: “Didn’t you tell me a moment ago that there was fighting?” “Ah, yes, Monsieur!” replied Toussaint. “It’s over by Saint-Merry.”

There are certain mechanical motions that come to us, even unwittingly, from our deepest thoughts. It was no doubt under the impulse of such a motion of which he was barely aware that Jean Valjean found himself five minutes later on the street.

He was bareheaded, sitting on his doorstep. He seemed to be listening. Night had come.

THE KID AS THE ENEMY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

HOW MUCH TIME did he spend like this? What were the ebbs and flows of his tragic meditation? Did he straighten up? Did he remain slumped? Was he buckled so far as to break? Could he straighten up again and regain a foothold on something solid in his conscience? He himself probably could not have said.

The street was deserted. A few anxious bourgeois rapidly returning home scarcely looked his way in passing. It’s every man for himself in times of peril. The lamplighter came along as usual and lit the streetlamp that stood exactly opposite the door of no. 7, and went away again. Jean Valjean, to anyone examining him in the shadows, would not have looked like he was alive. He just sat there, on his doorstep, stock-still like a spectre made of ice. Despair causes us to freeze. You could hear the tocsin and vague stormy noises. In the middle of all this convulsive clamour, with the bell and the riot sounding together, the clock at Saint-Paul struck eleven, gravely, taking its time, for the tocsin is man and the hour is God. The passing of the hour had no effect on Jean Valjean; Jean Valjean did not budge. Yet, almost at that very moment, a brusque explosion erupted over by Les Halles, followed by a second explosion, even more violent; it was most likely the attack on the barricade of the rue de la Chanvrerie which we just saw Marius repel. At this double detonation, whose fury seemed intensified by the stupor of the night, Jean Valjean came to his senses; he shot up in the direction the noise had come from; then he fell back down on the doorstep, folded his arms, and his head dropped slowly back down onto his chest.

He resumed his dark dialogue with himself.

All of a sudden he raised his eyes. Someone was walking in the street. He heard footsteps close by, he looked, and, by the light of the streetlamp, on the side of the street that ends in the Archives, he saw a face that was pale, young, and radiant.

Gavroche had just reached the rue de l’Homme-Armé. Gavroche was gazing up in the air as though looking for something. He saw Jean Valjean perfectly well, but he took no notice of him.

After looking up in the air, Gavroche looked down at the ground; he stood on tiptoes and groped around the doors and windows of the ground floors; they were all shut, locked and bolted. After checking five or six housefronts barricaded in this fashion, the kid shrugged his shoulders and tackled the matter with himself in these terms: “I’ll be buggered!” Then he started looking up in the air again.

Jean Valjean who, a moment before, in the state of mind he was in, would not have spoken to or even answered anyone, found himself irresistibly driven to address this child.

“Little one,” he said, “what’s the matter?”

“What the matter is, is that I’m hungry,” answered Gavroche bluntly. And he added: “Little one yourself.” Jean Valjean fumbled in his fob pocket and pulled out a five-franc piece. But Gavroche, who was of the wagtail species and flitted from one move to the next fast, had just picked up a stone. He had noticed the streetlamp.

“Hey,” he said, “you’ve still got your streetlamps over here. You’re out of order, my friends. It’s downright disorderly. Smash that for me.” And he threw the stone at the lamp whose glass fell with such a racket that the bourgeois huddled behind their curtains in the house opposite shrieked: “It’s ‘93 all over again!” The lamplight flickered wildly and went out. The street suddenly went black.

“That’s it, old street,” said Gavroche. “Put your nightcap on.”

And turning to Jean Valjean: “What d’you call that gigantic monument you’ve got at the end of the street? It’s the Archives, isn’t it? I need you to knock off a bit of those silly great columns down there for me and be good enough to make me a barricade with ‘em.” Jean Valjean went over to Gavroche.

“Poor boy,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper, adding to himself, “he’s hungry.” And he put the hundred-sou piece in the boy’s hand.

Gavroche stuck his head up, amazed by the size of this gros sou; he looked at it in the dark, and the whiteness of the gros sou dazzled him. He knew about five-franc coins by hearsay; their reputation pleased him; he was enchanted to see one so close. He said: “Let’s have a look at the tiger.” He studied it for a few moments in ecstasy; then he turned toward Jean Valjean and handed him back the coin, saying magisterially: “Bourgeois, I’d rather smash lanterns. Take your wild beast back. No one corrupts me. It’s got five claws; but it won’t scratch me.” “Do you have a mother?” asked Jean Valjean.

Gavroche replied: “Maybe more than you have.”

“Well, then,” Jean Valjean continued, “keep the money for your mother.”

Gavroche felt stirred. Besides, he had just noticed that the man talking to him had no hat and that inspired his confidence.

“Say,” he said, “it’s not to stop me smashing streetlamps or anything?”

“Smash away.”

“You’re all right,” said Gavroche.

And he put the five-franc piece in one of his pockets. His confidence growing, he said: “Are you from this street?” “Yes, why?”

“Can you show me which one’s number seven?”

“Why number seven?”

Here the boy stopped. He feared he might have said too much, he raked his hair hard with his nails and refrained from saying more than: “Ah, there it is.” A bright idea popped into Jean Valjean’s head. Anguish produces such lucidity. He said to the boy: “So it’s you, is it? You’ve brought me the letter I’m waiting for?”

“You?” said Gavroche. “You’re not a woman.”

“The letter’s for Mademoiselle Cosette, isn’t it?”

“Cosette?” growled Gavroche. “Yes, I think it’s some funny name like that.” “Well, then,” Jean Valjean went on, “I’m the one who’s supposed to hand her the letter. Give it to me.” “In that case, you must know I’ve been sent from the barricade?”

“Of course,” said Jean Valjean.

Gavroche buried his fist in another of his pockets and pulled out a note folded in four.

Then he gave the military salute.

“Respect to the dispatch,” he said. “It comes from the provisional government.” “Give it to me,” said Jean Valjean.

Gavroche held the note up above his head.

“Don’t go getting the idea that this is a love letter. It’s for a woman, but it’s for the people. We men, we’re fighting men, and we respect the sex. We’re not like in high society where there are nobs who send sweet nothings to slack cows.” “Give it to me.”

“Actually,” Gavroche continued, “you look to me to be a good sort of geezer.” “Give it to me quick.”

“Take it.”

And he handed Jean Valjean the note.

“And get a move on, Monsieur Thingummyjig, because Mamselle Thingummyjigette is waiting.” Gavroche was very pleased with himself for having come up with this line.

Jean Valjean went on: “Should the answer be sent to Saint-Merry?”

“If you do that,” declared Gavroche, “you’d be making the bungle commonly known as a howler. That letter comes from the barricade in the rue de la Chanvrerie and I’m going back there now. Bonsoir, citizen.” And with that, Gavroche spun on his heel and went, or, to be more accurate, zoomed off in the direction he had come from like a bird that has escaped. He dived back into the darkness as though boring through it, with the rigid speed of a projectile; the little rue de l’Homme-Armé became silent and solitary once more; in the blink of an eye, that strange child, who had both shadow and dream in him, had sunk into the mist of those rows of black houses and been lost there like smoke in the dark; and you might well think he’d blown away and vanished if, a few minutes after he disappeared, a resounding noise of breaking glass and the splendid crash of a streetlamp shattering onto the pavement had not brusquely woken up the indignant bourgeois once more. It was Gavroche going down the rue du Chaume.

WHILE COSETTE AND TOUSSAINT ARE SLEEPING

JEAN VALJEAN WENT HOME with the letter from Marius.

He groped his way upstairs, pleased with the darkness like an owl holding his prey, opened and softly closed his door, listened to hear if there was any sound, assured himself that, as far as he could tell, Cosette and Toussaint were sleeping, plunged three or four matches into the bottle of the Fumade tinderbox before he could get the spark to ignite, his hand was shaking so much, for what he had just done smacked of stealing. Finally, his candle lit, he leaned on the table, unfolded the piece of paper, and read.

In the throes of violent emotions, you do not read, you wrestle to the ground, so to speak, the piece of paper you are holding, you strangle it like a victim, you crush it, you dig your nails into it with your anger or your delight; you race to the end, you jump to the beginning; attention is feverish; it understands the essential, overall, more or less; but then it seizes on a point and all the rest disappears. In Marius’s note to Cosette, Jean Valjean saw only these words: “I am dying … When you read these lines, my soul will be near you …” In the face of those two lines, he felt a horrible giddiness; he remained for a moment apparently crushed by the emotional shift that was happening inside him, he looked at Marius’s note in a sort of drunken stupor; he had before his eyes that splendour, the death of the hated being.

He let out a hideous cry of inner joy. So it was over. The end had come sooner than he would have dared hope. The being in the way of his destiny was about to disappear. He was going away of his own accord, freely, in good faith. Without him, Jean Valjean, having to do anything to provoke it, without its being his fault in any way, “that man” was going to die. Perhaps he was already dead, even.—Here he started to calculate in his fever.—No. He is not dead yet. The letter was clearly written for Cosette to read first thing in the morning; since those two discharges went off between eleven and midnight, nothing has happened; the barricade will not be seriously attacked until daybreak; but that doesn’t matter, from the moment “that man” gets mixed up in this war, he’s lost; he’s caught in the machinery.—Jean Valjean felt himself released. So he was going to find himself alone with Cosette again. The competition was about to end. The future was about to begin again. All he had to do was keep this note in his pocket. Cosette would never know what had happened to “that man.” “All I have to do is let things take their course. That man can’t escape. If he isn’t dead yet, he soon will be, that’s for sure. What happiness!” All this gone over inside, he became gloomy. Then he went downstairs and woke up the porter.

About an hour later, Jean Valjean left in full National Guard regalia, and armed. The porter had easily been able to dig up in the neighbourhood what he needed to complete his gear. He had a loaded musket and a cartridge pouch full of cartridges. He headed toward Les Halles.

GAVROCHE’S EXCESSIVE ZEAL

MEANWHILE GAVROCHE HAD just had an adventure.

After conscientiously stoning the streetlamp in the rue du Chaume, he came to the rue des Vieilles-Haudriettes, and not seeing any “cat” there, thought it a good opportunity to strike up a song. Far from being slowed down by the singing, his pace picked up. He began sowing these incendiary couplets all the way along the sleeping or terrified houses: The bird sounds off in the bowers

And reckons that yesterday Atala

Went off with a Russian.

Where have all the beautiful girls gone,

Lon la.

My friend Pierrot, you’re babbling,

Because the other day Mila

Tapped her window and called me.

Where have all the beautiful girls gone,

Lon la.

The hussies are very nice

Their poison that bewitches me

Would intoxicate Monsieur Orfila.

Where have all the beautiful girls gone,

Lon la.

I love love and its tiffs,

I love Agnes, I love Pamela,

Lise will get burned if she stirs me up.

Where have all the beautiful girls gone,

Lon la.

Once, when I saw the mantillas

Of Suzette and of Zéila,

My soul melted in their folds.

Where have all the beautiful girls gone,

Lon la.

Love shines in the shadows,

And dresses Lola’s hair with roses,

I’d go down to hell for that.

Where have all the beautiful girls gone,

Lon la.

Jeanne, you get dressed at your mirror!

One fine day my heart will fly away;

I think it’s Jeanne who has it.

Where have all the beautiful girls gone,

Lon la.

At night, as I leave the lancers

I show the stars Stella

And I tell them: look at her.

Where have all the beautiful girls gone,

Lon la.1

While he sang, Gavroche was lavish with pantomime. Gesture is the basis of the refrain. His face was an inexhaustible repertory of masks and he made grimaces more convulsive and more fantastic than the mouths that washing torn in a heavy wind makes. Unfortunately, as he was alone and it was night-time, all this was neither seen nor seeable. So many treasures are lost.

Suddenly he stopped in his tracks.

“Let’s cut the romance,” he said.

His catlike eyes had made out in the recess of a porte cochère what is known in painting as a group; that is, a being and a thing. The thing was a cart, the being was a peasant from Auvergne sleeping in it.

The handles of the cart were resting on the pavement and the head of the Auvergnat was leaning on the tailboard of the cart. His body was curled up on this inclined plane and his feet touched the ground.

Gavroche, with his experience of the things of this world, knew a drunk when he saw one. It was some carter from around there who had drunk too much and was now sleeping too much.

“This,” said Gavroche, “is what summer nights are good for. The Auvergnat is dozing in his cart. We’ll take the cart for the Republic and we’ll leave the Auvergnat to his monarchy.” He had had a bright idea: “This cart will go nicely on our barricade.”

The Auvergnat was snoring.

Gavroche gently pulled the cart by the rear end and the Auvergnat by the front end, that is, by the feet; and soon the imperturbable Auvergnat was lying flat on the ground. The cart had been freed.

Gavroche was used to confronting the unexpected at every turn and always had everything on him. He fumbled in one of his pockets and pulled out a scrap of paper and a stub of a red pencil nicked from some carpenter.

He wrote: “French Republic. Received your cart.”

And he signed: “Gavroche.”

That done, he stuck the piece of paper in the pocket of the still-snoring Auvergnat’s velvet waistcoat, took hold of the shaft with both hands, and left, heading for Les Halles, steering the cart in front of him at a fast clip in a glorious triumphal breach of the peace.

This was perilous. There was a post at the Imprimerie Royale. Gavroche had forgotten about it. This post was occupied by National Guards from the suburbs. A certain alertness was beginning to rouse the squad, and heads were lifting from off camp beds. Two streetlamps broken one after the other, that song sung at the top of someone’s lungs, was a lot for such lily-livered streets, full of people who just wanted to go to sleep at sundown and who clapped their snuffers over their candles so early. For an hour the kid had been making as much racket in this peaceful arrondissement as a fly in a bottle. The suburban sergeant listened. He waited. He was a prudent man.

The furious sound of the cart bowling along filled up the measure of waiting allowable and drove the sergeant to attempt a reconnaissance.

“There’s a whole gang of them out there!” he said. “Let’s tread carefully.” It was clear that the hydra of anarchy was out of the box and that it was wreaking havoc in the quartier. And the sergeant ventured out of the station soundlessly.

All of a sudden, just as Gavroche was about to turn out of the rue des Vieilles-Haudriettes wheeling his cart, he came face-to-face with a uniform, a shako, a plume, and a musket. For the second time, he stopped in his tracks.

“Say,” said Gavroche. “If it isn’t the man himself. Hello, law and order.” The moments when Gavroche was stumped for words were short and quickly thawed.

“Where are you going, you lout?” cried the sergeant.

“Citizen,” said Gavroche, “I haven’t called you a bourgeois yet. So why are you insulting me?” “Where are you going, you tramp?”

“Monsieur,” Gavroche went on, “you might have been a man of wit yesterday, but you were clearly relieved of duties today.” “I asked you where you’re going, you scoundrel.”

Gavroche replied: “You speak so nicely. Really, no one would guess your age. You should sell all your hair at a hundred francs apiece. That’d give you five hundred francs.” “Where are you going? Where are you going? Where are you going, you cur?” Gavroche retorted: “What a vile way to talk. The next time someone gives you a suck on their tit, they should wipe your mouth cleaner.” The sergeant crossed his bayonet.

“For the last time, are you going to tell me where you are going, you miserable little bastard?” “My dear general,” said Gavroche, “I’m going to fetch the doctor for my wife who’s in labour.” “To arms!” yelled the sergeant.

To save yourself by using what has sunk you, that is the masterpiece of a great man; Gavroche was able to sum up the whole situation at a glance. It was the cart that had compromised him, it was the cart that would protect him.

Just as the sergeant was about to swoop down on Gavroche, the cart, turned into a projectile and launched with all the kid’s might, rolled furiously on top of him and hit him right in the guts; the sergeant fell over backward into the gutter while his gun went off in the air.

At the sergeant’s cry, the men from the post swarmed out; the gunshot triggered a general random discharge, following which they reloaded their weapons and started all over again. This blindman’s buff–style musketry went on for a good fifteen minutes and killed several panes of glass.

Meanwhile Gavroche, who had madly retraced his steps, stopped five or six streets away and sat down panting on the curbstone at the corner of the Enfants Rouges. He cocked his ear.

After getting his breath for a few minutes, he turned round to where the shooting was raging, brought his left hand up to his nose and thrust it forward three times while smacking the back of his head with his right hand; a sovereign gesture in which the Parisian gamin has condensed all French irony and which is obviously effective since it has already lasted half a century.

This gaiety was disturbed by a bitter reflection.

“Yes,” he said, “here I am tittering and killing myself laughing and overflowing with mirth, but I’ve lost time, I’m going to have to make a detour. If only I make it to the barricade in time!” Without further ado, he resumed his course. And as he ran: “Hang on, where was I?” he said.

He started singing that song again, hurtling headlong into the streets, and the song receded into the darkness: But there are more Bastilles left,

And I’m going to put a stop

To law and order, voilà.

Where have all the beautiful girls gone,

Lon la.

Anyone for a game of skittles?

This old world will collapse one day

When the big ball rolls.

Where have all the beautiful girls gone,

Lon la.

Good ancient people, with thrusts of your crutches

We’ll smash up this Louvre where

The monarchy pranced around in its flounces.

Where have all the beautiful girls gone,

Lon la.

We’ve broken down the gates;

King Charles the Tenth that day

Held up badly and his head came off.

Where have all the beautiful girls gone,

Lon la.2

The post’s show of arms was not without results. The cart was conquered, the drunk taken prisoner. One was impounded; the other was later tried half-heartedly before a court-martial as an accomplice. The public administration of the day thereby proved its tireless zeal in defending society.

Gavroche’s adventure, which remained in the traditions of the Temple quartier, is one of the most terrible memories of the old bourgeois of the Marais and is entitled in their reminiscences: “Night Attack on the Post of the Imprimerie Royale.”