بخش 4 کتاب 6

BOOK SIX

PETIT-GAVROCHE

NASTY TRICK OF THE WIND

SINCE 1823, WHILE the greasy spoon of Montfermeil was gradually going under and sinking, not into the bottomless pit of bankruptcy, but into the cesspool of petty debt, the Thénardier couple had had two more children, both male. That made five: two girls and three boys. It was a lot.

Mother Thénardier ditched the last two, while they were still very young and little, through a singular stroke of luck.

Ditched is the right word. There was only a tiny fragment of maternal instinct in that woman. And she is not the only example of the phenomenon I can think of. Like the maréchale de la Mothe-Houdancourt,1 mother Thénardier was a mother only as far as her daughters were concerned. Her maternity ended there, her hatred of the human race began with her sons. When it came to her sons, her viciousness knew no bounds and her heart was sealed off as though by a bleak stone wall. As we saw, she detested the eldest boy; she execrated the other two. Why? Because. The most terrible of motives and the most unarguable of answers: Because. “I don’t need a pack of screaming brats,” their mother would say.

We should explain how the Thénardiers managed to divest themselves of their youngest children and even to make a profit in so doing.

The Magnon woman we mentioned a few pages back is the same one who had managed to get good old Gillenormand to pay an allowance to the two children she had. She lived on the quai des Célestins, at the corner of that ancient rue du Petit-Musc, which has done what it could to come up smelling like roses despite the odour of its bad reputation. You will recall the great croup epidemic of thirty-five years ago, which devastated the quartiers bordering the Seine in Paris and which gave medical science the opportunity to conduct large-scale experiments testing the effectiveness of inhalations of alum, happily replaced today with tincture of iodine applied externally. In that epidemic, mother Magnon had lost her two boys the same day, one in the morning, the other in the evening, when they were still mere toddlers. It was a blow. Those children were precious to their mother; they represented eighty francs a month. Those eighty francs were paid most punctually, on behalf of Monsieur Gillenormand, by his rent collector, Monsieur Barge, a retired bailiff in the rue du Roi-de-Sicile. With the children dead, the endowment was buried. Mother Magnon sought an expedient. In that shady freemasonry of evil of which she was a part, everything is known, secrets are kept, and they all help each other out. Mother Magnon required two children; mother Thénardier had two. Same sex, same ages. Good arrangement for one, good investment for the other. The little Thénardier boys became the little Magnon boys. Mother Magnon left the quai des Célestins and went to live in the rue Clocheperce. In Paris, the identity that binds an individual to themselves snaps from one street to the next.

The registry office, not being tipped off, did not intervene, and the substitution was carried out as straightforwardly as could be. Only, Thénardier demanded, for this loan of the children, ten francs a month, which mother Magnon promised and even paid. It goes without saying that Monsieur Gillenormand continued to come up with the money. He went every six months to see the little boys, and did not see the change. “Monsieur,” mother Magnon would say to him, “don’t they take after you!” Thénardier, to whom metamorphoses came easily, seized the opportunity to become Jondrette. His two daughters and Gavroche had barely had time to notice that they had two little brothers. At a certain level of misery a sort of spectral indifference comes over you and you regard other human beings as worms. Your nearest and dearest are often no more to you than vague shadows you can barely make out against the nebulous background of life and that easily slip back and disappear into invisibility.

The evening of the day she had delivered her two little boys to mother Magnon, with the firm intention of giving them up for good, mother Thénardier had, or pretended she had, a scruple. She said to her husband: “But this is abandoning your own children, this is!” Thénardier, magisterial and phlegmatic, cauterized this scruple with this sentence: “Jean-Jacques Rousseau went one better!” The mother went from scruple to anxiety: “But what if the police come pestering us? What we’ve done here, Monsieur Thénardier, tell me, then, is it allowed?” Thénardier answered: “Everything is allowed. Everyone’ll think it’s for the good. Anyway, no one’s interested in taking a close look at kids who don’t have a single sou.” La Magnon was a sort of fashion plate of crime. She liked to tart herself up. She shared her lodgings, furnished in a manner both lavish and wretched, with a skillful English thief who had gone French. This Englishwoman, who had been naturalized a Parisienne, and who was respectable through her extremely rich connections, was intimately acquainted with the medals of the Bibliothèque and the diamonds of Mademoiselle Mars, and was later famous in the judicial records. She was known as Mamselle Miss.

The two little boys who had accrued to mother Magnon had nothing to complain about. Recommended by the eighty francs, they were handled with care, like all that is exploited for money; not too badly turned out, not too badly fed, treated almost like “little gentlemen,” better off with the false mother than with the real one. Mother Magnon played the lady and never spoke slang in front of them.

They spent several years in this way. Thénardier had high hopes for them. One day he was moved to say to mother Magnon, who was bringing him his monthly ten francs: “The ‘father’ should give them an education.” Suddenly, these two poor children, until then fairly well protected, even though it was by their sorry fate, were abruptly hurled at life and forced to start living it.

A mass arrest of miscreants like the arrest at the Jondrette garret, necessarily complicated by later searches and incarcerations, is a real disaster for this hideous occult subculture that lives beneath public society; an episode of the kind involves a whole chain of collapses in this gloomy netherworld. The Thénardier catastrophe produced the Magnon catastrophe.

One day, shortly after mother Magnon had handed Éponine the note about the rue Plumet, the police suddenly descended on the rue Clocheperce; mother Magnon was seized along with Mamselle Miss, and the entire household, which was suspect, was hauled in. The two little boys were playing in the backyard at the time and saw nothing of the raid. When they tried to get back in, they found the door locked and the house empty. A cobbler whose shop was opposite called them over and handed them a piece of paper that their “mother” had left for them. On the piece of paper was an address: Monsieur Barge, rent collector, rue du Roi-de-Sicile, no. 8. The man from the shop told them: “You don’t live here anymore. Go there. It’s very close. The first street on the left. Ask your way there using this note.” The two boys took off, the elder leading the younger and holding in his hand the note that was supposed to be their guide. He was cold and his little fingers were numb and had trouble hanging on to the bit of paper. At the bend in the rue Clocheperce, a gust of wind ripped it from him and, as night was falling, the boy could not find it again.

They began to wander aimlessly through the streets.

IN WHICH PETIT-GAVROCHE PUTS NAPOLÉON THE GREAT TO GOOD USE

SPRING IN PARIS is pretty often swept by bitterly cold and biting north winds that don’t so much freeze you as chill you to the bone; these north winds, which mar the most beautiful days, have the exact effect of the drafts of cold air that rush into a warm room through gaps in a window or a door not properly closed. It feels like the gloom-laden door of winter has remained ajar and that that is where the wind is coming from. In the spring of 1832, a time when the first great epidemic of the century1 broke out in Europe, the north winds were sharper and more piercing than ever. A door even more icy than winter’s was ajar. The door of the sepulchre. You could feel the breath of cholera in those north winds.

From the meteorological perspective, the cold winds had the peculiarity of not excluding a high electrical pressure. Storms accompanied by thunder and lightning frequently broke at the time.

One evening when the north winds were whistling rudely, so much so that it felt like January was back and the bourgeois grabbed their coats again, Petit-Gavroche, shivering gaily as always in his rags, was standing in apparent rapture in front of a wigmaker’s shop over l’Orme-Saint-Gervais way. He was decked out in a woman’s woolen shawl, picked up who knows where, and had turned it into a muffler. Petit-Gavroche looked for all the world to be lost in admiration of a wax bride in a low-cut gown with orange blossoms in her hair, which was revolving in the window, flashing her smile at the passersby between two “peepers”—oil lamps; but in reality he was observing the shop in order to see if he couldn’t “lift” a cake of soap from the front window, which he would then go and sell for a sou to a “fence”—who called himself a “hairdresser”—in the suburbs. He often breakfasted on such a cake. He called this type of work, for which he had real talent, “shaving the barbers.” While he was gazing at the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he was muttering between clenched teeth: “Tuesday … It can’t be Tuesday … Is it Tuesday? … Maybe it is Tuesday … Yes, it’s Tuesday.” No one ever knew what this monologue was about. If, by chance, it had to do with the last time he had eaten, then that was three days before, for it was now Friday.

The barber, in his shop heated by a good hot stove, was shaving a customer and throwing a look from time to time at this enemy, this cocky little kid frozen stiff, who may have had both hands in his pockets but had obviously unsheathed and sharpened his wits.

While Gavroche was studying the bride, the shop window, and the Windsor soaps, two children of different heights, fairly neatly dressed and even smaller than he was, one looking to be about seven, the other five, timidly turned the door handle and went into the shop asking for who knows what, charity perhaps, in a plaintive murmur more like a moan than a prayer. Both boys spoke at once and their words were unintelligible because sobs choked the younger one’s voice and the cold made the elder one’s teeth chatter. The barber wheeled around with a look of fury on his face and, without letting go of his razor, shoved the elder boy back with his left hand and the little one with his knee, pushing them out into the street; then he shut his door in a huff: “Letting in the cold for nothing!” The two children went on their way again, crying. But a cloud had come up; it started to rain. Petit-Gavroche ran after them: “What’s the matter, then, kids?” “We’ve got nowhere to sleep,” said the older one.

“Is that all?” said Gavroche. “That’s nothing. Is that anything to cry about? What a pair of ninnies!” And adopting a tone of tender authority and gentle protectiveness from the heights of his slightly grumpy superiority, he continued: “Little girls, come with me.” “Yes, Monsieur,” said the elder.

And the two children followed him as they would have followed an archbishop. They had stopped crying. Gavroche took them up the rue Saint-Antoine in the direction of the Bastille.

As he headed off, Gavroche cast an indignant backward glance at the barber’s shop.

“It’s got no heart, that cold fish of a barber,” he growled. “He’s a Brit.”

A girl, seeing them walking in single file, all three of them, with Gavroche in the lead, let out a great guffaw. This guffaw was wanting in respect for the group.

“Good day, Mamselle Back-of-a-Bus,” Gavroche said to her.

A moment later, the wigmaker came back to him and he added: “I got the wrong beast; he isn’t a cold fish, he’s a snake. Wigmaker, I’ll go and get a smithy and I’ll have ‘im put a rattle on your tail for you.” The wigmaker had made him aggressive. Leaping over a gutter, he shouted at a bearded woman porter worthy of meeting Faust on the Brocken,2 with her broom in her hand.

“Madame,” he said to her, “you’ve come out with your horse, then, have you?”

And on that note, he splashed the patent leather boots of a passerby.

“Little stinker!” yelled the passerby, furious.

Gavroche poked his nose out of his shawl.

“Monsieur has a complaint?”

“About you!” said the man.

“The office is closed,” said Gavroche. “I can’t receive any more complaints.”

Meanwhile, as he continued up the street, he noticed a girl of about thirteen or fourteen, frozen stiff under a porte cochère and begging, her clothes so short you could see her knees. The little girl was beginning to be too big a girl for that. Growing plays such tricks on you. Your skirt becomes too short the moment your nakedness becomes indecent.

“Poor girl!” said Gavroche. “It doesn’t even have any drawers. Here, take this at least.” And, unwinding all that fine wool he had around his neck, he threw it over the thin blue shoulders of the beggar girl and the muffler turned back into a shawl again. The girl looked at him in amazement and received the shawl in silence. At a certain level of distress, the poor, in their stupor, no longer bemoan the bad and are no longer thankful for the good.

That done:

“Brrrrr!” said Gavroche, shivering for all he was worth, for he was colder than Saint Martin, who at least managed to keep half his cloak.3 At that “Brrrrr!” the shower redoubled in fury and raged. Bad skies such as this one punish good deeds.

“Now what!” cried Gavroche. “What can this mean? It’s raining again! God Almighty, if this continues, I’m cancelling my subscription.” And he set off again.

“Never mind,” he went on, casting a glance at the beggar girl who was snuggling into the shawl. “At least one of us has a flash fur.” And, glaring at the cloud, he cried: “So put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

The two children fell in behind him.

As they were passing one of those thick grated trellises that indicate a baker’s shop, for bread is placed like gold behind iron bars, Gavroche turned round: “Listen, kids, have we dined?” “Monsieur,” replied the elder boy, “we haven’t eaten since early this morning.”

“Are you without father or mother, then?” Gavroche pursued grandly.

“Begging your pardon, Monsieur, we have Papa and Maman, but we don’t know where they are.” “Sometimes that’s better than knowing,” said Gavroche, who was a thinker.

“It’s been two hours now,” continued the elder boy, “that we’ve been walking, we’ve been looking everywhere for a snack but we can’t find anything.” “I know,” said Gavroche. “The dogs eat everything.”

He went on after a pause: “So! We’ve lost our progenitors. We don’t know what we’ve done with them. That won’t do, kids. It’s not too bright to lose the old folks like that. Ah, you’ve just got to swallow it.” Apart from this, he asked them no questions. To be homeless, what could be more natural? The elder of the two kids, who had almost completely reverted to the ready insouciance of childhood, let out this exclamation: “It’s funny, all the same. Maman said she’d take us to get blessed palms on Palm Sunday.” “You don’t say,” replied Gavroche.

“Maman,” the elder boy went on, “is a lady who lives with Mamselle Miss.”

“I’ll be blowed,” Gavroche fired back.

Meanwhile he had stopped and for a few minutes had been feeling and fumbling in all kinds of recesses in his rags. Finally he raised his head trying to look merely satisfied but looking perfectly triumphant.

“Let’s stay calm, little nippers. Here is enough for supper for three.”

And he pulled a sou out of one of his pockets. Without giving the two little boys time to be impressed, he pushed them both ahead of him into the baker’s shop and slapped his sou on the counter, shouting: “Garçon! Five centimes’ worth of bread.” The baker, who was the master in person, took a loaf of bread and a knife.

“Cut it into three, garçon!” Gavroche went on, adding with dignity: “There are three of us.” And seeing that the baker, after carefully eyeing the three diners, had grabbed an unbleached loaf, he stuck his finger right up his nose with a snort as imperious as if he had a pinch of Frederick the Great’s snuff at the end of it, and he flung this indignant yell right in the baker’s face: “Whathahellsat?” Those of our readers who may be tempted to interpret Gavroche’s shouted question to the baker as a Russian or Polish word or one of those savage cries the Iowas and the Botocudos4 hurl at each other from opposite banks of some river in the wilderness, are hereby warned that it is a word they say every day (they, our readers) and that it stands for the phrase: What the hell is that? The baker understood perfectly and replied: “Why, it’s bread! Very good second-class bread.” “You mean rock-hard black dodger,” Gavroche retorted, calmly and coldly contemptuous. “White bread, garçon! Fluffy white bread! It’s my treat.” The baker could not help smiling, and as he cut the white loaf, he studied them in a compassionate way that riled Gavroche.

“Hey, baker’s boy!” he shouted. “What are you giving us the once-over for like that?” Placed end to end, the three of them would not have come to more than six feet.

When the bread was cut, the baker put the sou away and Gavroche said to the two little boys: “Tuck in.” The little boys looked at him, speechless. Gavroche chortled: “Oh, silly me, it’s true they don’t know yet, they’re too little!” And he translated: “Eat.”

He handed each of them a chunk of bread at the same time.

And, thinking that the elder boy, who struck him as the more worthy of his conversation, merited some special encouragement and should be relieved of all hesitation in satisfying his appetite, he added as he gave him the biggest piece: “Shove this in your gob.” One piece was noticeably smaller than the other two; he took that one for himself.

The poor boys were starving, Gavroche included. While they were tearing into their bread, they were cluttering up the shop and the baker, now that he had been paid, was giving them cranky looks.

“Let’s hit the street again,” said Gavroche.

They headed once more toward the Bastille.

From time to time, as they passed shop windows all lit up, the littler one would stop to check the time on a lead watch hanging from his neck by a string.

“That one’s a ninny, all right,” said Gavroche.

Then, pensive, he muttered through his teeth: “All the same, if I had kids, I’d keep ‘em on a tighter rein than that.” As they were polishing off their bread and coming to the corner of the dismal rue des Ballets at the end of which the low forbidding grated door of La Force could be seen, someone said: “Hey, Gavroche, is that you?” “Hey, Montparnasse, is that you?” Gavroche replied.

It was a man who had accosted the kid and this man was none other than Montparnasse, disguised behind blue spectacles but recognizable to Gavroche.

“I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!” Gavroche went on. “You’ve got a coat the colour of a flaxseed poultice and blue specs like a doctor. You’ve got class, cross my old man’s heart!” “Shhhh!” said Montparnasse. “Not so loud.”

And he swiftly pulled Gavroche away from the shop lights.

The two little boys trotted along behind mechanically, holding each other by the hand.

When they were under the black archivolt of a porte cochère, out of sight and out of the rain, they spoke again: “You know where I’m goin’?” asked Montparnasse.

“To the Abbey of You’ll-be-sorry-you-climbed-up-the-scaffold,” said Gavroche.

“Joker!”

Montparnasse went on: “I’m goin’ to find Babet.”

“Ah!” said Gavroche. “So her name’s Babet.”

Montparnasse lowered his voice.

“Not her, him.”

“Ah, Babet!”

“Yes, Babet.”

“I thought he was locked up.”

“He picked the lock,” Montparnasse shot back.

And he quickly told the kid that, that same day, in the morning, Babet had been transferred to the Conciergerie5 and had escaped by turning left instead of right in “the halls of justice.” Gavroche had to admire the man’s cunning.

“What an artist!” he said.

Montparnasse added a few details about Babet’s breakout and ended with: “Oh, but that’s not all!” Gavroche, though listening, had grabbed a walking stick that Montparnasse was holding in his hand; he had mechancially tugged the top bit and the blade of a dagger had appeared.

“Ah!” he said, swiftly shoving the dagger back in, “I see you brought your gendarme disguised as a bourgeois.” Montparnasse gave him a wink.

“Blast!” Gavroche said. “So you’re going to have a brawl with the cops?”

“Hard to say,” said Montparnasse, sounding indifferent. “It’s always good to have a pin on you.” Gavroche insisted: “What are you up to tonight, then?”

Montparnasse again adopted a serious tone and, swallowing every consonant, he said: “Things.” And, brusquely changing the subject: “By the way!”

“What?”

“Something that happened the other day. Just think. I meet a bourgeois gent. He hands me a sermon and his purse as presents. I put the purse in my pocket. A minute later, I feel around and there’s nothing there.” “But the sermon,” quipped Gavroche.

“What about you?” continued Montparnasse. “Where are you off to right now?”

Gavroche showed his two protégés and said: “I’m going to put these children to bed.” “Bed? Where’s that?”

“My place.”

“Your place? Where’s that?”

“My place.”

“You got a place, then?”

“Yep, I’ve got a place.”

“And where is this place of yours?”

“In the elephant,” said Gavroche.

Montparnasse, although by nature not easily amazed, couldn’t prevent himself from exclaiming: “In the elephant!” “Why, yes, in the elephant!” Gavroche shot back. “Whaddovit?”

This is another word in that language that nobody writes but everybody speaks. Whaddovit means: What of it?

The kid’s profound observation brought Montparnasse back to calm and common sense. He seemed to regard Gavroche’s abode more highly.

“I see!” he said. “Of course, the elephant … Is it cosy?”

“Very cosy,” said Gavroche. “Cosy as anything. There are no drafts like under bridges.” “How do you get in?”

“I get in.”

“You mean there’s a hole?” asked Montparnasse.

“For crying out loud! Yes! But you’re not allowed to tell. It’s between the front legs. The squealers haven’t spotted it.” “And you climb up? Right, I get it.”

“There’s a knack, crick, crack, in no time at all, you’re up and you’re on your own.” After a pause, Gavroche added: “For the little ones I’ll use a ladder.”

Montparnasse started to laugh.

“Where the hell did you pick up these little pipsqueaks?”

Gavroche answered guilelessly: “They’re little nippers a wigmaker gave me as a present.” Meanwhile Montparnasse had come over all pensive.

“You recognized me without too much trouble,” he muttered.

He took two small objects out of his pocket that were simply two bits of quill wrapped in cotton and he introduced one into each nostril. This gave him a different nose.

“That changes you,” said Gavroche. “You’re not nearly as ugly. You ought to keep those things up your beak all the time.” Montparnasse was a pretty boy, but Gavroche was a scoffer.

“Joking aside,” Montparnasse asked, “how do I look?”

The sound of his voice was also different. In the twinkling of an eye, Montparnasse had become unrecognizable.

“Oh! Do Punchinello for us!” cried Gavroche.

The two little boys, who hadn’t been listening to anything till then, busy as they were picking their own noses, came closer at the sound of that name and gazed at Montparnasse with dawning joy and admiration.

Unfortunately Montparnasse had other things to worry about.

He clapped his hand on Gavroche’s shoulder and spoke, emphasizing every word: “Listen to what I tell you, boy, if I was out in the square with my digger and my dagger and my dugs and you were to lavish ten sous on me I wouldn’t mind singing for my supper, but it’s not Mardi Gras yet.” This bizarre phrase had a strange effect on the boy. He spun on his heel, ran his small bright eyes all around him with keen attentiveness and spotted, a few feet away, a police constable with his back to them. Gavroche let out an “Ah, right!” that he immediately bit off, and shaking Montparnasse’s hand: “Well, then, good night, I’m off to my elephant with my toddlers. Just supposing you need me one night, you know where to find me. I reside on the mezzanine level. There is no porter, you will ask for Monsieur Gavroche.” “Right you are,” said Montparnasse.

And they went their separate ways, Montparnasse worming his way toward the place de Grève and Gavroche toward the Bastille. The little five-year-old, dragged along by his brother who was dragged along by Gavroche, turned his head several times to watch “Punchinello” walking away behind him.

The garbled sentence, by means of which Montparnasse had warned Gavroche of the presence of the police constable, contained no other talisman than the syllable dig repeated five or six times in different forms. That syllable dig, not voiced on its own but artfully combined with other words in a sentence, means: Watch out, we can’t talk freely. There was as well in Montparnasse’s sentence a literary beauty that was lost on Gavroche. “My digger, my dagger and my dugs” was a slang phrase from the Temple quartier that signifies my dog, my knife, and my wife, and was very much in use among the clowns and the commedia dell’arte red-tails of the grand siècle,6 when Molière wrote and Callot drew.

Twenty years ago, you could still see at the southeast corner of the place de la Bastille, near the dock of the canal dug out of the old moat of the prison-citadel, a bizarre monument that has already been wiped from the memory of Parisians yet that deserved to leave a trace there, for it was something that a member of the Institut, commander in chief of the Army of Egypt,7 no less, had come up with.

We say monument though it was only a model. But this model itself, a wondrous first draft, the grandiose carcass of an idea of Napoléon’s that two or three successive gusts of wind had whisked away and deposited each time further away from us, had become historic and had taken on something indefinably final that contrasted with its provisional look. It was an elephant forty feet high, built out of plaster on a timber framework and carrying on its back a tower that resembled a house. It was once painted green by some dauber but was now painted black by the sun, the rain, the weather. In this deserted and open corner of the square, at night, the broad forehead of the colossus, its trunk, its tusks, its tower, its enormous rump, its four legs like columns, was startling and terrible, silhouetted against the starry sky. No one knew what it meant. It was a sort of symbol of the force of the people. It was grim, enigmatic, immense. It was a mysterious and mighty phantom, one visible, standing next to the invisible spectre of the Bastille.

Few foreigners visited this edifice, no one walking by looked up at it. It fell into ruin; every season, bits of plaster broke off its flanks, leaving grisly wounds. The “aediles,” as town councillors are called in elegant patois, had left it to rot since 1814. It stood there, in its corner, mournful, diseased, disintegrating, surrounded by a rotting paling fence pissed on at every turn by drunken coach-drivers; cracks zigzagged up its belly, a lath stuck out of its tail, weeds were pushing up between its legs; and as the level of the square had been rising all around for thirty years, due to that slow yet never-ending movement that imperceptibly raises the ground of great cities, it now stood in a dip as though the earth were subsiding under it. It was filthy, despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly in the eyes of the bourgeois, melancholy in the eyes of the thinker. It had a feel of rubbish about to be swept out of the way and a feel of a royal majesty about to be decapitated.

It looked different at night, though, as we were saying. Night is the true medium for all that is shadowy. As soon as twilight fell, the old elephant was transfigured; it took on a peaceful yet awesome look in the formidable serenity of the darkness. Being a thing of the past, it was one with the night; and this obscurity suited its grandeur.

This monument, stiff, squat, heavy, harsh, austere, almost deformed, but most certainly majestic and stamped with a kind of magnificent wild gravity, has vanished, allowing to reign in peace the sort of gigantic stove, capped with its stovepipe, that replaced the sombre fortress with its nine towers a bit the way the bourgeoisie has replaced the feudal system. It is only natural that a stove be the symbol of an era whose power is contained in a cooking pot. This era will pass, is already passing; we are beginning to understand that, if there may be some force in a boiler, there can only be power in a brain; in other words, that what leads and pulls the world along is not locomotives, it is ideas. Harness locomotives to ideas, by all means; but don’t mistake the cart for the horse.

Be that as it may, to go back to the place de la Bastille, the architect of the elephant had managed to make something grand out of plaster; the architect of the stovepipe has succeeded in making something paltry out of bronze.

In 1832, this stovepipe,8 since baptized with the sonorous name of the July Column, this failed monument of an aborted revolution, was still wrapped in a facing of tall scaffolding, which we, for our part, regret, and by a huge wooden fence that put the finishing touches on the elephant’s isolation.

It was toward this corner of the square, so dimly lit by the reflection of a distant streetlamp, that the boy directed the two “toddlers.” Kindly allow us to stop here and remind you that we are within the bounds of reality, plain and simple, and that twenty years ago the criminal courts actually sentenced a child caught sleeping9 inside the elephant of the Bastille for vagrancy and for trespassing on a public monument. This fact noted, we push on.

As they approached the colossus, Gavroche realized the effect that the infinitely big can have on the infinitely small and he said: “Nippers! Don’t be frightened.” Then he slipped through a gap in the fence and entered the elephant’s enclosure and helped the little ones to step over the breach. The two boys were a tad frightened, but they followed Gavroche without a word, trusting this little saviour in rags who had given them bread and promised them a place to sleep.

There was a ladder lying along the fence, which workers on the nearby site used in the daytime. Gavroche lifted it with remarkable vigour and propped it against one of the elephant’s front legs. Near the point where the ladder ended, you could see a sort of black hole in the colossus’s belly. Gavroche pointed out the ladder and the hole for his guests and said to them: “Climb up and go in.” The two little boys looked at each other, terrified.

“Don’t tell me you’re frightened, little nippers!” cried Gavroche.

And he added: “Watch this.”

He hugged the elephant’s rough foot and in the twinkling of an eye, without deigning to use the ladder, he had shinnied up and reached the crevice. He slipped in the way a grass snake slides into a crack, kept going, and a moment later the two boys vaguely made out his whitish head as it popped out, a pale and wan disk, at the edge of the hole full of darkness.

“What are you waiting for!” he cried. “Up you come, kidlingtons! You’ll see how cosy it is! You go first!” he said to the elder boy. “I’ll give you a hand.” The little boys nudged each other; the urchin frightened them and reassured them at the same time and then, it was raining hard. The elder one decided to take the plunge. The younger one, seeing his brother climb up and himself left standing all alone between the paws of that huge beast, felt a great desire to cry but he didn’t dare.

The elder boy climbed up the rungs of the ladder, wobbling away; Gavroche encouraged him all the way with the rallying cries of a fencing master to his students or of a mule driver to his mules: “Don’ be frightened!”

“That’s it!”

“Put your foot there!”

“Your hand here.”

“Keep going!”

And when he was within reach, he grabbed him swiftly and vigorously by the arm and pulled him up.

“One down!” he said.

The nipper slipped in through the hole.

“Now,” said Gavroche, “wait for me. Monsieur, be good enough to take a seat.”

And, coming out of the gap the way he had gone in, he let himself slide down the entire length of the elephant’s leg, with the agility of a monkey, fell on his feet in the grass, grabbed the little five-year-old by the waist and planted him right in the middle of the ladder, then began to climb up behind him, calling out to the elder boy: “I’ll push him, you pull him.” In a flash the little one had been lifted, pushed, dragged, pulled, crammed, stuffed into the hole before he had time to know what was happening, and Gavroche, coming in after him and kicking away the ladder with his heel so that it fell on the lawn, started clapping his hands and yelled: “Here we are, then! Long live General Lafayette!” This explosion over, he added: “Welcome, little mites, this is my home.”

This was, indeed, Gavroche’s home.

O, the unforeseen usefulness of the useless! The charity of big things! The goodness of giants! This outsize monument that had once held an idea of the emperor’s had become a poky home for a little street kid. The nipper had been accepted and sheltered by the colossus. The bourgeois in their Sunday best who passed in front of the Bastille elephant liked to say, looking it up and down derisively with their bulging bug-eyes: “What’s the use of that?” Its use was to save from the cold, the frost, the hail, the rain, to protect from the winter wind, to keep from sleeping in the mud that brings fever and from sleeping in the snow that brings death, a little being with no father or mother, with no bread, with no clothes, with no refuge. Its use was to take in the innocent that society drove out. Its use was to lessen society’s sin. It was a retreat open to one to whom all doors were closed. It seemed that the miserable old mastodon, invaded by vermin and oblivion, covered in warts, patches of mould and ulcers, tottering, worm-eaten, abandoned, condemned, a kind of colossal beggar asking in vain for the alms of a benevolent look in the middle of the crossroads, had alone taken pity on this other beggar, on this poor pygmy who went off with no shoes on his feet, with no roof over his head, blowing on his fingers to warm them, dressed in rags, fed by what everyone else throws out. That was the use of the elephant of the Bastille. This idea of Napoléon’s, scorned by men, had been taken up by God. What would have been merely illustrious had become august. To achieve what he had in mind, the emperor would have needed porphyry, bronze, iron, gold, marble; to God, the old assemblage of boards, joists, and plaster was enough. The emperor had had an idea of genius; in this titanic elephant, armoured, tremendous, holding up its trunk, carrying its tower and causing joyous invigorating water to spurt all around him, he wanted to embody the people; God had made something grander out of it, he had housed a child in it.

The hole Gavroche had slipped through was scarcely visible on the outside, hidden as it was, as we said, under the belly of the elephant and so small that hardly anything but cats and little nippers could have got through.

“Let’s start,” said Gavroche, “by telling the porter that we’re not in.”

And diving into the dark confidently like a man who knows his apartment, he took a board and blocked the hole with it.

Gavroche dived back into the dark. The children heard the sputtering of a matchstick thrust into a phosphorous bottle. The chemical match did not yet exist; the Fumade lighter was the height of progress in those days.

A sudden brightness made them blink; Gavroche had just lit one of those bits of string doused in resin that are known as “cellar rats.” The cellar rat, which smoked more than it shed light, made the inside of the elephant dimly visible.

Gavroche’s two guests looked around them and felt something of what a person would feel shut up in the great tun of Heidelberg10 or, more to the point, what Jonas must have felt inside the belly of the biblical whale.11 A whole gigantic skeleton appeared to them and wrapped them round. Above, a long dark wooden beam, from which massive curved beams shot out at regular intervals, represented the backbone with its ribs; stalactites of plaster hung down from it like viscera and from one rib to the next vast spiderwebs made dusty diaphragms. You could see here and there in the corners big blackish spots that looked like they were alive and that changed places quickly in sudden startled motion.

The debris that had fallen off the back of the elephant onto its belly had filled up the concave space so that you could walk around as though on a floor.

The smaller boy huddled close to his brother and said in a little voice: “It’s dark.” This word made Gavroche shout out loud. The petrified look on the two nippers’ faces made it necessary to give them a shock.

“What’s got into you?” he yelled. “Are we complaining? Are we turning up our noses? Is it the Tuileries you’re after? You’re not a pair of snobs, are you? Tell me. I must warn you, I’m not part of that pack of ninnies. Heavens, don’t tell me you two little nippers have grown too big for your boots?” A bit of rough treatment is a good antidote to terror. It is reassuring. The two little boys moved in closer to Gavroche again.

Gavroche was moved in a fatherly way by such trust and shifted “from serious to soft” as he spoke to the smaller boy: “Silly!” he said to him, imparting a caressing nuance to the insult. “It’s outside that it’s dark. Outside it’s raining, here it’s not raining; outside it’s cold, here there isn’t a puff of wind; outside there’s heaps of people, here there’s no one; outside there isn’t even a moon, here there’s my candle, by jingo!” The two little boys began to look at the apartment with less fright; but Gavroche did not give them a spare moment to think.

“Quick!” he said.

And he pushed them toward what we are very happy to be able to call the back of the room. That was where his bed was. Gavroche’s bed had everything. Meaning, there was a mattress, a cover, and an alcove with curtains. The mattress was a straw mat, the cover was a fairly voluminous loose skirt of coarse grey wool that was very warm and almost new.

The alcove was like this:

Three fairly long poles, rammed into the rubble on the ground and solidly reinforced, that is, sunk into the elephant’s belly, two in front, one at the back, and tied together by a rope at the top so as to form a pyramid. This pyramid supported brass wire netting that was simply hung over this structure, but artistically arranged and held in place by iron wire straps in such a way as to entirely wrap around the three poles. A ring of heavy stones pinned the netting to the ground all around in such a way as to let nothing through. This netting was nothing other than a bit of the copper mesh that is used for cladding aviaries in zoos. Gavroche’s bed sat under the mesh as in a cage. The whole setup was like an Eskimo tent. It was this mesh that took the place of curtains.

Gavroche moved some of the stones that held the mesh down in front and the two overlapping panels of the trellis moved apart.

“Kids, down on all fours!” said Gavroche.

He got his guests into the cage carefully, then crawled in after them, put the stones back together and hermetically sealed the opening.

They were all three stretched out on the mat. Little as they were, not one of them could have stood up in the alcove. Gavroche was still holding the cellar rat in his hand.

“Now,” he said, “get some shut-eye! I’m going to dim the candelabra.”

“Monsieur,” the elder of the brothers asked Gavroche, pointing to the mesh, “what is that?” “That,” said Gavroche gravely, “is for the rats. Get some shut-eye!”

Though he did feel obliged to add a few words by way of educating these beings of such tender age and so he went on: “All that’s from the Jardin des Plantes. It’s all used for the wild animals. Reckonairs [I reckon there’s] a shopful of stuff. Allyaftado [all you have to do] is hop over a wall, climb through a window, and slide under a door. You can take as much as you like.” Talking all the while, he pulled the cover up over the tiny one who murmured: “Oh, that’s nice! It’s so warm!” Gavroche looked with satisfaction at the cover.

“That’s also from the Jardin des Plantes,” he said. “I took it off the monkeys.”

And showing the elder boy the mat on which he was lying, a good thick mat, beautifully made, he added: “This, this was the giraffe’s.” After a pause, he continued: “The animals had all this. I took it off them. They didn’t mind. I told them: It’s for the elephant.” He was silent again and then he resumed: “We hop over walls and we don’t give two hoots about the government. And that’s that.” The two boys studied, with a shy and stunned respect, this intrepid and inventive being, a vagabond like them, on his own like them, puny like them, who had something both wretched and all-powerful about him, and who seemed to them supernatural, with his face that could pull all the grimaces of an old fairground entertainer and that was lit up by the most guileless and charming smile.

“Monsieur,” the elder boy said bashfully, “aren’t you afraid of policemen, then?” Gavroche merely answered: “You baby! We don’t say policemen, we say cops.”

The tiny one had his eyes open, but he didn’t say a word. As he was on the edge of the mat, the elder being in the middle, Gavroche tucked the cover round him the way a mother would have done and raised the mat under his head with old rags to make the little nipper a pillow. Then he turned to the elder boy: “Eh? We’re pretty cosy in here!” “Oh, yes!” answered the elder boy, gazing at Gavroche with the expression of a rescued angel.

The two poor little soaked children began to warm up.

“Ah, so,” said Gavroche, “what was all that crying about?”

And jerking his thumb at the little one: “A little mite like that, that’s different; but a big boy like you, crying, that’s idiotic; it makes you look like a blubbering dumb cluck.” “But, golly,” said the boy, “we didn’t have a home to go to anymore.”

“Little nipper!” Gavroche went on. “We don’t say home, we say digs.”

“And then, we were frightened of being all alone at night.”

“We don’t say night, we say curfew.”

“Thank you, Monsieur,” said the boy.

“Listen,” Gavroche went on, “you mustn’t whinge about anything ever again. I’ll look after you. We’ll have such fun. You’ll see. In summer, we’ll go to La Glacière with Turnip, a mate of mine, we’ll go swimming in the canal, we’ll run stark naked over the tracks in front of the pont d’Austerlitz—that gets the washerwomen in a real lather. They yell and carry on, if you only knew what a scream they are! We’ll go and see the skeleton man. He’s alive. At the Champs-Élysées. He’s as skinny as anything, that character. And then I’ll take you to a show. I’ll take you to see Frédérick Lemaître. I’ve got tickets, I know the actors, I even acted in a play once. We were nippers about so high, we ran around under a cloth—and that was the sea. I’ll have you signed on at my theatre. We’ll go and see the savages. They’re not real, these particular savages. They’ve got pink tights that get all wrinkled, and you can see that their elbows are darned with white thread. After that, we’ll go to the Opéra. We’ll go in with the hired claquers. The claque at the Opéra is most select. I wouldn’t hang around with the claquers on the boulevards.12 At the Opéra, can you imagine, there are people who pay twenty sous, but they’re noodles. They’re known as drips … And then we’ll go and watch the guillotine in action. I’ll take you to see the executioner. He lives in the rue des Marais. Monsieur Sanson. There’s a letter box on his door. Ah, we’ll have such a good time!” At that moment, a drop of wax fell on Gavroche’s finger and brought him back to life’s realities.

“Ow!” he said. “That’s it for the wick. Be careful! I can’t put more than a sou a month into my lighting. When you go to bed, you’ve got to sleep. We don’t have the time to read the novels of Monsieur Paul de Kock.13 Anyway, the light could get under the cracks in the porte cochère and all the cops’d have to do is look.” “And then,” timidly observed the elder boy, the only one who dared chat with Gavroche and answer him back, “a spark might fall on the straw, we have to be careful not to burn the house down.” “We don’t say burn the house down,” said Gavroche. “We say heat up the stew.”

The storm got much worse. You could hear, through the rolls of thunder, the heavy downpour battering the colossus’s back.

“Hammer away, rain!” said Gavroche. “I really like hearing the whole jugful running all the way down the legs of the house. Winter’s a brute; it loses its load, it goes to all that trouble for nothing, it can’t wet us, and that makes it grumble, that old water porter up there!” This allusion to thunder, all of whose consequences Gavroche, in his capacity as a philosopher of the nineteenth century, accepted, was followed by a flash of lightning so dazzling that something of it came in through the crack in the elephant’s belly. Almost at the same time the thunder growled—and furiously at that. The two little boys let out a howl and shot to their feet so fast that the netting was almost knocked over; but Gavroche turned his bold little face toward them and took advantage of the thunderclap to burst out laughing.

“Steady on, children. Let’s not bring the house down. Now that’s what I call thunder! Fantastic! That was no damp squib. Good for you, Lord! By jingo! It’s almost as good as at the Théâtre Ambigu.”14 That said, he put the netting right, gently pushed the two little boys back down on the bed, pressed down on their knees to stretch them out to their full length and cried out: “Since the good Lord’s lighting his candle, I can blow mine out. Children, it’s time to sleep, my young human beings. It’s very bad not to sleep. It turns you into a smelly arse, or, as they say out there in the world of grown-ups, it makes your gob reek. Wrap yourselves up nice and tight in your fur coats! It’s lights out. Everyone all right?” “Yes,” murmured the elder boy, “I’m all right. It’s like I’ve got feathers under my head.” “We don’t say head,” cried Gavroche. “We say noggin.”

The two boys cuddled up together. Gavroche finished arranging them on the mat and pulled the cover right up to their ears, then repeated for the third time the injunction in hieratic tongue: “Get some shut-eye!” And with that, he blew out the candle.

Hardly was the light extinguished when a weird tremor began shaking the netting the three children were lying under. There was a series of muffled rubbing noises that gave out a metallic sound as though claws and teeth were grinding the copper wire. This was accompanied by all kinds of sharp little cries.

The little boy of five, hearing this racket above his head and frozen stiff with terror, gave his older brother a dig with his elbow, but the older brother was already “getting some shut-eye,” as Gavroche had ordered him to do. So the little boy, frightened out of his wits, dared to address Gavroche, though in a barely audible voice, holding his breath in: “Monsieur?” “Eh?” said Gavroche, who had just shut his eyes.

“What’s that?”

“It’s the rats,” replied Gavroche.

And he laid his head back on the mat.

Actually, the rats, which congregated in the thousands in the carcass of the elephant and which were the live black spots we spoke of above, had been holding back out of respect for the flame of the candle while it was burning, but as soon as this cavern, which was like their city, had been returned to the night, smelling what the good storyteller Perrault calls “fresh meat,”15 they had made a mad dash en masse for Gavroche’s tent, had clambered to the top, and were biting into the mesh as though they were trying to break through this new style of mosquito net.

Still the little boy could not get to sleep: “Monsieur?” he started again.

“Eh?” said Gavroche.

“What are rats?”

“Mice.”

This explanation reassured the little boy a bit. He had seen white mice in his lifetime and he hadn’t been frightened of them. Yet he piped up again: “Monsieur?” “Eh?” said Gavroche again.

“Why don’t you have a cat?”

“I did have one,” replied Gavroche. “I brought one back here, but they ate it on me.” This second explanation undid the work of the first and the little boy began to tremble again. The dialogue between him and Gavroche resumed for the fourth time.

“Monsieur!”

“Eh?”

“Who was it who got eaten?”

“The cat.”

“Who was it who ate the cat?”

“The rats.”

“The mice?”

“Yes, the rats.”

The little boy, appalled at these mice that eat cats, persisted: “Monsieur, would they eat us, those mice there?” “Naturally!” said Gavroche.

The little boy’s terror reached a peak. But Gavroche added: “Don’t be afraid! They can’t get in. And anyhow, I’m here! Here, hold my hand. Now shut up and get some shut-eye!” At the same time Gavroche reached out over his brother and took the little one’s hand. The little boy pressed his hand against him, and felt reassured. Courage and strength have mysterious circuits. Silence once more settled in around them, the sound of voices had startled and scattered the rats; in just a few minutes they were back and made a mighty racket, but the three little nippers, deeply immersed in sleep, no longer heard a thing.

The hours of the night flew by; darkness covered the immense place de la Bastille, a winter wind joined the rain and blew in gusts, patrols ferreted around doorways, alleyways, enclosures, hidden corners, and looking for nocturnal vagrants, passed silently by the elephant; the monster, standing motionless, its eyes open in the dark, looked as though it were dreaming, satisfied with its good deed, and went on sheltering the three poor sleeping boys from the heavens and from men.

To understand what is about to follow, we have to remember that at this time the Bastille guardhouse was located on the other side of the square and that what happened near the elephant could not be seen or heard by the sentinel.

Toward the end of the hour just before dawn, a man came running out of the rue Saint-Antoine, crossed the square, ran round the big enclosure of the July Column, and slipped through the palings of the fence and up under the belly of the elephant. If any light, however dim, had shone on this man, you would have guessed he had spent the night in the rain—he was soaked through. Once he was under the elephant, he let fly with a bizarre cry that doesn’t belong to any human tongue and that only a parakeet could reproduce. Twice he repeated this cry, which might be transcribed as follows, though this gives only the merest idea of how it sounded: “Kirikikiou!” At the second cry, a bright cheery young voice answered from the belly of the elephant: “Yes.” Almost immediately, the board that closed the hole shifted, opening the way to a child who slid down the elephant’s leg and dropped lightly by the man’s side. This was Gavroche. The man was Montparnasse.

As for the cry, kirikikiou, that was doubtless what the boy meant when he said, “Just ask for Monsieur Gavroche.” On hearing it, he had woken up with a start. Had crawled out of his “alcove,” parting the mesh a little before carefully closing it again, then opened the trapdoor and come down.

The man and the boy silently acknowledged each other in the night; all Montparnasse said was: “We need you. Come and give us a hand.” The gamin did not ask for further clarification.

“Here I am,” he said.

And they both set off toward the rue Saint-Antoine, from which Montparnasse had emerged, quickly wending their way through the long line of carts belonging to the market gardeners who head for the markets at that hour.

The market gardeners, squatting in back of their carts among the lettuces and vegetables, half-asleep, buried up to their eyeballs because of the driving rain, didn’t even look at this odd pair going past.

THE UPS AND DOWNS OF ESCAPE

THIS IS WHAT took place that same night at La Force:

A breakout had been planned jointly by Babet, Brujon, Gueulemer, and Thénardier, even though Thénardier was in solitary. Babet had carried out his part of the business that same day, as we saw according to the story Montparnasse told Gavroche.

Montparnasse was supposed to help them from the outside.

Brujon, having spent a month in a correctional chamber, had had the time while he was there, first, to plait a rope, second, to perfect a plan. In days gone by these austere places where prison discipline leaves a prisoner alone with himself consisted of four stone walls, a stone ceiling, a flagstone floor, a camp bed, a barred window, and an iron-clad door, and was called a dungeon; but the dungeon was judged too horrible; now the cell consists of an iron-clad door, a barred window, a camp bed, a flagstone floor, a stone ceiling, and four stone walls and is called a correctional chamber. A streak of daylight comes in around noon. The problem with these chambers, which, as you see, are nothing like dungeons, is that they leave a body to ponder when they should be putting it to work.

So, Brujon had pondered, and he had emerged from the correctional chamber with a rope. As he had the reputation of being extremely dangerous in the Charlemagne yard, he was put in the New Building. The first thing he found in the New Building was Gueulemer, the second was a nail; Gueulemer meant crime, a nail meant liberty.

It’s time we got a better purchase on Brujon. He looked delicate, with his pale complexion and his profoundly premeditated languor, but he was actually a lusty strapping lad, well-bred and intelligent, a thief with a melting look in his eyes and an atrocious grin. The melting look was a result of his will but the grin was a result of his nature. His initial studies in his art focused on roofs; he had caused great progress to be made in the industry of lead lifters, who strip off roofing and peel off guttering by means of the process known as “cooking with double the fat.” What wound up making the moment favourable for a breakout was that roofers were, at that very moment, repointing and relaying a section of the slate tiles on the prison roof. The Saint-Bernard yard was no longer absolutely cut off from the Charlemagne yard or from the Saint-Louis yard. There were scaffolding and ladders up there; in other words, bridges and stairways to deliverance.

The New Building, which was, in fact, the most decrepit and crack-riddled building in the world, was the prison’s weak spot. Its walls were so eaten away by saltpetre that the vaults of the dormitories had had to be completely lined in wood because stones were breaking away and falling on the inmates as they lay in their beds. Despite its dilapidated state, they made the mistake of locking up in the New Building the most alarming of the accused, sticking what is known in prison parlance as “the hard cases” in there.

The New Building contained four dormitories, one on top of the other, and an attic on the very top known as the Bel-Air. A wide chimney, probably left over from some ancient kitchen of the ducs de La Force, started at ground level and passed through the next four floors, dividing all the dormitories in half, like a sort of flattened pillar, before boring through the roof.

Gueulemer and Brujon were in the same dormitory. They had been put on the bottom floor as a precaution. Chance would have it that the heads of their beds leaned against the chimney flue. Thénardier found himself precisely above them in the attic described as the Bel-Air.

The passerby who stops at the rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine, after the fire station, outside the porte cochère of the bathhouse, sees a courtyard full of flowers and shrubs in tubs, at the back of which sits a little white rotunda, with two wings, brightened up by green shutters, the bucolic dream of Jean-Jacques. Not more than ten years ago, towering above this rotunda, was an enormous black wall, bare and ghastly, which it rested against. This was the wall of the covered way that encircled La Force.

The wall behind the rotunda was like Milton glimpsed behind Berquin.1

High as it was, the wall was overshadowed by an even blacker roof that could be seen beyond it. This was the roof of the New Building. You could see four dormer windows there fitted with bars; these were the windows of the Bel-Air. A chimney poked through the roof; this was the chimney that passed through the dormitories.

The Bel-Air, the attic of the New Building, was a sort of great gallery with a steeply pitched roof, sealed with triple grilles and with metal-backed doors studded with enormous nails. When you entered by the north end, you had the four dormer windows on your left, and on your right, facing the dormer windows, four good-sized square cages, spaced apart and separated by narrow passageways, built out of masonry to elbow height and the rest out of iron bars right up to the roof.

Thénardier had been in solitary confinement in one of these cages since the night of February 3. They never did find out how, and through whose connivance, he had managed to procure for himself and hide a bottle of that wine invented, they say, by Desrues, which has a narcotic mixed in with it and which the Endormeurs gang,2 the “dopers,” made famous.

There are traitors employed in lots of prisons, half jailors, half thieves, who help in breakouts, who sell their disloyal services to the police and make a fair bit on the side out of the rotten eggs thrown in the police wagon.

So, the self-same night that Petit-Gavroche had picked up the two stray boys, Brujon and Gueulemer, who knew that Babet had escaped that very morning and was waiting for them in the street along with Montparnasse, quietly got out of bed and started to drill through the chimney flue that their beds touched with the nail Brujon had found. The rubble fell on Brujon’s bed without a sound. The squalls combined with the thunder to rattle the doors on their hinges and made an appalling and very convenient racket inside the prison. Those of the inmates who woke up pretended to go back to sleep and let Gueulemer and Brujon get on with the job. Brujon was deft; Gueulemer was strong. Before any sound had reached the guard, who was lying in a grated cell that looked onto the dormitory, the wall was drilled through, the chimney scaled, the wire-mesh grille that shut off the upper opening of the flue forced, and the two fearsome villains were on the roof. The rain and the wind grew wilder, the roof was slippery.

“What a good night for a getaway!” said Brujon.

A chasm six feet wide and eighty feet deep lay between them and the encircling prison wall. At the bottom of this chasm they could see a sentry’s fusil gleaming in the darkness. They tied one end of the rope Brujon had woven in his dungeon to the stumps of the chimney bars they had just twisted off, threw the other end over the encircling wall, leaped over the chasm in a single bound, hung on tight to the top of the wall, clambered over it, let themselves slide, one at a time, down the rope onto a little roof that abutted the bathhouse, pulled in their rope, jumped down into the bathhouse courtyard, crossed it, pushed open the porter’s transom, next to which hung his cord, pulled the cord, opened the porte cochère, and found themselves in the street.

It was not yet three quarters of an hour since they had got out of bed in the gloom, their nail in hand, their scheme in mind.

A few seconds later, they had caught up with Babet and Montparnasse as they prowled the neighbourhood.

In pulling in their rope, they had broken it and a bit had remained tied to the chimney on the roof. Otherwise they had sustained no real damage, apart from more or less entirely skinning their hands.

That night, Thénardier had been tipped off, they never could shed light on how, and he stayed awake. Toward one o’clock in the morning, the night being pitch black, he saw on the roof, in the rain and howling wind, two shadows flit past the dormer window opposite his cage. One of them stopped long enough for a quick look. It was Brujon. Thénardier recognized him and that was all he needed: he understood.

Thénardier, flagged as a killer and held for laying an ambush at night with force of arms, was kept under constant surveillance. A guard, who was relieved every two hours, strode with loaded fusil in front of his cage. The Bel-Air was lit by a wall lamp. The prisoner had a pair of irons on his feet weighing fifty pounds each. Every day at four in the afternoon a warder escorted by two mastiffs—this was still the practice in those days—entered his cage, deposited by his bed a two-pound loaf of black bread, a jug of water, and a bowl full of thin bouillon with a few broadbeans swimming in it, checked his irons, and banged on the bars. This man came back twice in the night, with his mastiffs.

Thénardier had obtained permission to keep a sort of iron dowel which he used to pin his bread to a crack in the wall, “so,” he said, “the rats can’t get it.” As Thénardier was kept under constant surveillance, no one had raised any objection to this dowel. Yet later it was recalled that one of the warders had said: “It’d be better only letting him have a wooden dowel.” At two o’clock in the morning, the guard, who was an old soldier, was changed and replaced by a conscript. A few seconds later, the man with the dogs paid his visit and went off without noticing anything peculiar except that the “tenderfoot” was too young and looked like “a real hick.” Two hours later, at four o’clock, when they came to relieve the conscript, he was found fast asleep, slumped on the ground in a heap next to Thénardier’s cage. As for Thénardier, he was no longer there. His broken irons lay on the tiles. There was a hole in the top of his cage and, above that, another hole in the roof. A plank had been ripped off his bed and no doubt carted away, for it was never found. They also seized from the cell a half-empty bottle containing the remains of the laced wine with which the soldier had been knocked out. The soldier’s bayonet had disappeared.

As all this was being discovered, Thénardier was believed to be well beyond all reach. The truth is that, while he was no longer in the New Building, he was still in grave danger. He had not yet made a clear getaway.

When he had got as far as the roof of the New Building, Thénardier had found the remains of Brujon’s rope hanging from the bars of the chimney pot. But this remnant was far too short for him to be able to escape over the encircling wall as Brujon and Gueulemer had done.

When you turn out of the rue des Ballets and into the rue du Roi-de-Sicile, you run into a squalid recess almost immediately. There was a house there last century of which only the back wall remains, a genuine hovel wall rising to a height of three stories between the neighbouring buildings. This ruin is recognizable by two big square windows that can still be seen there; the one halfway up, closest to the gable on the right, is barred by a worm-eaten joist propped against the wall like an upright beam. Through these windows you could once see a thick high dismal wall that was a section of the covered way that surrounded La Force.

The hole that the demolished house left in the street is half-filled by a rotten paling fence, propped up by five stone posts. Hidden in this enclosure is a small lean-to of a shack, propped against the fragment of the ruin that remains standing. The paling fence has a gate that, a few years ago, was shut only by a latch.

It was on top of this ruin that Thénardier lobbed a little after three in the morning.

How did he get there? That is what no one has ever been able to explain or work out. The lightning must have both hindered and helped him at once. Did he use the roofers’ ladders and scaffolding to go from roof to roof, from enclosure to enclosure, from compartment to compartment, to the buildings of the Charlemagne yard, followed by the buildings of the Saint-Louis yard, the encircling wall, and from there, to the hovel on the rue du Roi-de-Sicile? But there were gaps in this route that seemed to rule it out as impossible. Did he lay down the plank from his bed as a bridge from the Bel-Air to the covered way of the encircling wall, and did he then set about crawling on his stomach along the top of the covered way, all the way round the prison as far as the ruin of a hovel? But the wall of the covered way of La Force followed a jagged and uneven line; it had ups and downs, it dipped down at the fire station, it rose up again at the bathhouse, it was intersected by buildings, it was not the same height at the Hôtel Lamoignon as on the rue Pavée, it had sudden drops and right angles everywhere; and then, the sentries would have seen the fugitive’s black silhouette; on that score, the route taken by Thénardier still remains virtually inexplicable. Either way, flight is impossible. Thénardier, fired by that terrifying thirst for liberty that turns precipices into mere ditches, iron gates into willow fences, a legless cripple into an athlete, a gout sufferer into a bird, stupidity into instinct, instinct into intelligence, and intelligence into genius—had Thénardier invented and improvised a third way out? No one ever knew.

You can’t always take in the wonders of escape. The man who breaks out, we repeat, is a man inspired; there is starlight and lightning in the mysterious glow of flight; the straining after deliverance is no less amazing than the flapping after the sublime; and we say of a thief who got away: How did he manage to scale that roof? just as we say of Corneille: How did he come up with the famous line in Horace, “He should have died!”—“Qu’il mourut”?3 Be that as it may, dripping with sweat, drenched with rain, his clothes in tatters, his hands skinned raw, his elbows bleeding, his knees torn to shreds, Thénardier had reached what children, in their figurative language, call “the sharp edge” of the wall of the ruin, he had lain on it stretched out to full length and there, at that point, his strength had failed him. A sheer escarpment three stories high separated him from the pavement in the street.

The rope he had was too short.

He waited there, pale, exhausted, despairing of any hope he had had, still covered by night but aware that day was about to dawn, horrified by the notion that in a few moments’ time, he would be hearing the nearby clock of Saint Paul4 chiming four, the hour when the sentry would be relieved and when he would be found sound asleep outside his cage under the hole punched through the roof. By the light of the streetlamps he gazed in stupefaction at the terrible depth of the drop, at the wet black pavement, that longed-for and appalling pavement that spelled both death and freedom.

He asked himself if his three accomplices in escape had succeeded, if they had waited, and if they would come to his aid. He listened. Apart from a patrol, no one had passed in the street while he had been there. Nearly all the market gardeners from Montreuil, Charonne, Vincennes, and Bercy descended on the markets via the rue Saint-Antoine.

Four o’clock rang out. Thénardier gave a start. A few moments later, the crazy and confused hubbub that follows the discovery of a breakout erupted in the prison. The noise of doors opening and shutting, the squeal of gates on their hinges, the tumult of the guards, the raucous shouts of the gatekeepers, the jarring of the butts of muskets on the courtyard pavements reached him. Lights bobbed up and down in the barred windows of the dormitories, a torch ran over the attic of the New Building, the firemen from the station next door had been called in. Their helmets, which the torch lit up in the rain, came and went all along the roofs. At the same time, Thénardier saw that a wan streak of light was turning the bottom of the sky mournfully white behind the Bastille.

He was on top of a wall ten inches wide, stretched out in the downpour, with two chasms to both left and right, unable to move, dizzy with the prospect of falling and horrified at the certainty of being arrested, and his thoughts, like the pendulum of a clock, swung from one of these notions to the other. “Dead if I fall, nabbed if I stay put.” In his anguish, he suddenly saw, the street being still completely dark, a man, who was sliding along the walls and who had come from the direction of the rue Pavée, stop in the hollow above which Thénardier was suspended, so to speak. This man was joined by a second man who walked with the same cautiousness, then by a third, then by a fourth. When these men had met up, one of them raised the latch on the gate in the fence and all four slipped into the enclosure where the shack was. They found themselves exactly below Thénardier. The men had obviously chosen the hollow so that they could talk without being seen by anyone going past or by the sentry guarding the gate of La Force a few feet away. We should add that the rain kept this sentry blockaded in his sentry box. Thénardier, not being able to make out their faces, cocked his ear at their words with the desperate attention of a luckless lowlife who feels he is sunk.

Suddenly Thénardier saw something like hope flash before his eyes, for the men were talking slang. The first man was saying, low but distinctly: “Let’s beat it. What’re we coolin’ our ‘eels in this ‘ole icigo for?” The second replied: “It’s pissing down fit to put out the devil’s bonfire. The cops are onto us, to boot, and there’s a gunner on the lookout. We’re gonna get ourselves put back in the slammer killin’ time ‘ere icicaille.” Those two words icigo and icicaille, which both mean ici (here), and which belong, the first to the argot of the barrières, the second to the argot of the Temple,5 were beacons of light for Thénardier. At icigo he recognized Brujon, who was a prowler of the barrières, and at icicaille, Babet, who, among all his other trades, had been a junk dealer at the Temple.

The antique argot of the grand siècle is now spoken only at the Temple, and Babet was actually the only person who spoke it really purely. Without that icicaille Thénardier would not have recognized him, for he had completely disguised his voice.

Meanwhile, the third man piped up: “What’s the hurry? Let’s wait a bit. Who’s to say he doesn’t need us?” At this, which was merely French, Thénardier recognized Montparnasse, whose elegance consisted in understanding all varieties of slang but speaking none.

As for the fourth, he kept quiet, but his vast shoulders gave him away. Thénardier did not hesitate. It was Gueulemer.

Brujon spat back almost impetuously, though still in a low voice: “What are you yammering on about? The innkeeper wasn’t able to make a break for it. He hasn’t got the knack, end of story! Rip up his shirt and carve up his sheets to twist himself a hangman’s friend, belt a few portholes in the door, cook up some false dog tags, knock up a few open sesames, snip his fetters, chuck his twister outside, lie low, keep under cover, you’ve got to be smart to last! The old bugger can’t ‘a been up to it, he doesn’t know how to use the old elbow grease!” Babet added, sticking to the classic wisecracking slang Poulailler and Cartouche6 used to speak, and which is to the bold, new, coloured, and risqué slang Brujon used what the language of Racine is to the language of André Chénier:7 “Your barkeep must’ve been caught in the act on the stairs. You gotta be one jump ahead. He’s an amateur. He’s let ‘imself get played for a sap by some flatfoot, maybe even by a stool pigeon, and they’ve pulled a fast one on him. Cock an ear, Montparnasse, d’you hear all the yapping in the clink? You saw all those fireflies. He’s been busted again! So now he’ll be doing his twenty long ones. I don’t want to get the wind up, I’m no chicken, that’s a known fact, but we can’t lounge around here all day—otherwise they’ll have our hides. Don’t blow a gasket, come with us, let’s hit the bottle together.” “You don’t leave your friends in the lurch,” snapped Montparnasse.

“I’m telling you, he’s been nicked!” Brujon persisted. “At the hour that jangles, the innkeeper isn’t worth a bent sou! There’s nothin’ we can do about it. So let’s make ourselves scarce. I keep thinkin’ some cop’s got me by the tail.” Montparnasse only put up a show of resistance after this; the fact is that the four men, with the loyalty of villains who never abandon each other, had prowled around La Force all night, regardless of the danger, in the hope that Thénardier would pop up on top of a wall somewhere. But the night really was becoming too much now, the rain was bucketing down so heavily it cleared the streets, the cold was creeping up on them, their clothes were soaked, their shoes had holes in them and were taking on water, the alarming uproar that had just broken out in the prison meant hope was fading, fear was returning. All this drove them to beat a retreat. Montparnasse himself, though in a way practically Thénardier’s son-in-law, gave in. A moment more and they would have left. Thénardier gasped for breath on his wall like the shipwrecked survivors from the Medusa8 on their raft, seeing the ship that had appeared vanish over the horizon.

He did not dare call out to them—a cry overheard would mean all would be lost. He had an idea, a last one, a flash of light; he grabbed the bit of Brujon’s rope he had shoved in his pocket after having untied it from around the chimney of the New Building, and threw it into the fenced-off enclosure.

The rope fell at their feet.

“A widow!” said Babet, using the Temple slang for a rope.

“My twister!” said Brujon, using the barrières word.

“The innkeeper’s here,” said Montparnasse.

They looked up. Thénardier poked his head out a little.

“Quick!” said Montparnasse. “Have you got the other bit of rope, Brujon?”

“Yep.”

“Tie the two bits together, we’ll throw him the rope, he’ll fix it to the wall, he’ll have enough to get down with.” Thénardier risked raising his voice.

“I’m frozen stiff.”

“We’ll warm you up.”

“I can’t move.”

“You only have to let yourself slide down, we’ll catch you.”

“My hands are numb.”

“Just tie the rope to the wall.”

“I couldn’t.”

“One of us has to climb up,” said Montparnasse.

“Three stories!” cried Brujon.

An old plaster pipe that had served a stove once used to heat the shack crept all the way up the wall almost to the point where Thénardier could be seen. This stovepipe, at the time seriously damaged and split, has long since fallen off, but you can still see a few traces of it. It was extremely narrow.

“You could climb up there,” said Montparnasse.

“Up that pipe?” cried Babet. “What a funnyman! Not on your nelly!” Using the Temple slang for child, he added, “It needs a shaver.” “It needs a nipper,” Brujon chimed in with the barrières slang.

“Where’ll we find a little mite?” said Gueulemer.

“Wait,” said Montparnasse. “I know just the thing.”

He gently opened the fence gate a fraction, checked to see if anyone was passing in the street, carefully stepped out, shutting the door behind him, and ran off in the direction of the Bastille.

Seven or eight minutes went by—eight thousand centuries for Thénardier; Babet, Brujon, and Gueulemer kept their mouths shut; finally the gate opened again and Montparnasse reappeared, out of breath and with Gavroche in tow. The rain continued to keep the street entirely deserted.

Petit-Gavroche stepped into the enclosure and looked at these crooks’ faces calmly. Water was dripping off his hair. Gueulemer spoke to him: “Nipper, are you a man?” Gavroche shrugged his shoulders and answered: “A kid like yours truly is a proper jock, and jocks like you lot are kids.” “This little shaver sure has the gift of the gab!” cried Babet.

“The Paris kid isn’t knocked up out of damp chaff,” added Brujon.

“What do you want me to do?” said Gavroche.

Montparnasse answered: “Climb up this pipe.”

“With this widow,” said Babet.

“Then tie the twister,” continued Brujon.

“To the top of the perch,” Babet finished, meaning the top of the wall.

“To the pole in the peephole,” added Brujon, meaning the crosspiece of the window.

“And then?” said Gavroche.

“That’s it!” said Gueulemer.

The kid examined the rope, the pipe, the wall, the windows and made that inexpressibly scornful sound with his lips that signifies: “Is that all?” “There’s a man up there you’ll be saving,” resumed Montparnasse.

“Will you do it?” Brujon added.

“Nitwit!” replied the child, as though the question was ridiculous; and, with that, he took off his shoes.

Gueulemer picked Gavroche up with one hand, dropped him on the roof of the shack, whose worm-eaten boards buckled under the boy’s weight, and handed him the rope that Brujon had tied together again in Montparnasse’s absence. The gamin headed for the stovepipe, which he could easily squeeze into thanks to a gaping hole level with the shack roof. Just as he was about to climb up, Thénardier, who saw salvation coming at him, bringing him life, leaned over the edge of the wall; the first glimmer of daylight lit up his brow, which was bathed in sweat, his livid cheekbones, his tapered savage nose, his bristly grey beard, and Gavroche recognized him: “Hang on!” he said. “That’s my father … Oh, well! Can’t be helped.” And carrying the rope in his teeth, he resolutely began the ascent.

He reached the top of the ruin, straddled the wall like a horse, and firmly knotted the rope to the upper crosspiece of the window frame.

A moment later, Thénardier was down on the street.

As soon as his feet hit the ground, as soon as he felt he was out of danger, he was no longer tired, or frozen stiff, or shivering; the horrible things he’d just been through evaporated like a puff of smoke, all that strange ferocious intelligence roused itself again and found it was on its feet and free, ready to forge ahead. And here is the first thing the man said: “Now, who are we going to eat?” There is no point in explaining the meaning of this horribly transparent phrase that signifies at once to kill, to murder, and to rob. To eat, real meaning: to devour.

“Let’s go to ground good and proper,” said Brujon. “Let’s wind up quick smart and go our separate ways. There was a bit of business in the rue Plumet that sounded good—deserted street, isolated house, rotten old gate on a garden, women on their own.” “Well, then! Why not?” asked Thénardier.

“Your fairy princess, Éponine, had a bit of a sniff around,” Babet went on.

“And she took Magnon a biscuit!” Gueulemer chipped in. “Nothin’ worth knockin’ off there.” “The fairy princess is no dunce,” said Thénardier. “But we should go and have a look.” “Too right,” said Brujon. “We should go and have a look.”

Meanwhile, none of the men seemed to see Gavroche, who, while this confabulation was taking place, had gone and sat on one of the fence posts; he waited a few moments, maybe for his father to look his way, then he put his shoes back on and said: “Is that it? You don’t need me any more, men? There you are, then, you’re out of the woods. I’ll be off. I’ve got to go and get my nippers up.” And off he went. The five men filed through the fence, one after the other.

When Gavroche had disappeared at the turn of the rue des Ballets, Babet took Thénardier aside: “Did you get a good look at that shaver?” he asked him.

“What shaver?”

“The shaver who climbed up the wall and brought you the rope.”

“Not really.”

“Well, I don’t know, but it seems to me that that’s your son.”

“Bah!” said Thénardier. “D’you think so?”

And off he went.