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SOME OF HIS PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS
The gamin--the street Arab--of Paris is the dwarf of the
giant.
Let us not exaggerate, this cherub of the gutter sometimes
has a shirt, but, in that case, he owns but one; he sometimes
has shoes, but then they have no soles; he sometimes has a lodging,
and he loves it, for he finds his mother there; but he prefers
the street, because there he finds liberty.
He has his own games, his own bits of mischief, whose foundation
consists of hatred for the bourgeois; his peculiar metaphors:
to be dead is to eat dandelions by the root; his own occupations,
calling hackney-coaches, letting down carriage-steps, establishing
means of transit between the two sides of a street in heavy rains,
which he calls making the bridge of arts, crying discourses pronounced
by the authorities in favor of the French people, cleaning out
the cracks in the pavement; he has his own coinage, which is composed
of all the little morsels of worked copper which are found on
the public streets. This curious money, which receives the name
of loques--rags--has an invariable and well-regulated currency
in this little Bohemia of children.
Lastly, he has his own fauna, which he observes attentively
in the corners; the lady-bird, the death's-head plant-louse, the
daddy-long-legs, "the devil," a black insect, which
menaces by twisting about its tail armed with two horns.
He has his fabulous monster, which has scales under its belly,
but is not a lizard, which has pustules on its back, but is not
a toad, which inhabits the nooks of old lime-kilns and wells that
have run dry, which is black, hairy, sticky, which crawls sometimes
slowly, sometimes rapidly, which has no cry, but which has a look,
and is so terrible that no one has ever beheld it; he calls this
monster "the deaf thing."
The search for these "deaf things" among the stones
is a joy of formidable nature.
Another pleasure consists in suddenly prying up a paving-stone,
and taking a look at the wood-lice. Each region of Paris is celebrated
for the interesting treasures which are to be found there.
There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the Ursulines, there
are millepeds in the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in the ditches
of the Champs-de-Mars.
As far as sayings are concerned, this child has as many of
them as Talleyrand.
He is no less cynical, but he is more honest. He is endowed
with a certain indescribable, unexpected joviality; he upsets
the composure of the shopkeeper with his wild laughter. He ranges
boldly from high comedy to farce.
A funeral passes by.
Among those who accompany the dead there is a doctor.
"Hey there!" shouts some street Arab, "how
long has it been customary for doctors to carry home their own
work?"
Another is in a crowd.
A grave man, adorned with spectacles and trinkets, turns round
indignantly:
"You good-for-nothing, you have seized my wife's waist!"--"I,
sir?
Search me!"
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