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LITTLE GAVROCHE
Eight or nine years after the events narrated in the second
part of this story, people noticed on the Boulevard du Temple,
and in the regions of the Chateau-d'Eau, a little boy eleven or
twelve years of age, who would have realized with tolerable accuracy
that ideal of the gamin sketched out above, if, with the laugh
of his age on his lips, he had not had a heart absolutely sombre
and empty. This child was well muffled up in a pair of man's trousers,
but he did not get them from his father, and a woman's chemise,
but he did not get it from his mother.
Some people or other had clothed him in rags out of charity.
Still, he had a father and a mother. But his father did not
think of him, and his mother did not love him.
He was one of those children most deserving of pity, among
all, one of those who have father and mother, and who are orphans
nevertheless.
This child never felt so well as when he was in the street.
The pavements were less hard to him than his mother's heart.
His parents had despatched him into life with a kick.
He simply took flight.
He was a boisterous, pallid, nimble, wide-awake, jeering,
lad, with a vivacious but sickly air.
He went and came, sang, played at hopscotch, scraped the gutters,
stole a little, but, like cats and sparrows, gayly laughed when
he was called a rogue, and got angry when called a thief.
He had no shelter, no bread, no fire, no love; but he was
merry because he was free.
When these poor creatures grow to be men, the millstones of
the social order meet them and crush them, but so long as they
are children, they escape because of their smallness.
The tiniest hole saves them.
Nevertheless, abandoned as this child was, it sometimes happened,
every two or three months, that he said, "Come, I'll go and
see mamma!" Then he quitted the boulevard, the Cirque, the
Porte Saint-Martin, descended to the quays, crossed the bridges,
reached the suburbs, arrived at the Salpetriere, and came to a
halt, where?
Precisely at that double number 50-52 with which the reader
is acquainted-- at the Gorbeau hovel.
At that epoch, the hovel 50-52 generally deserted and eternally
decorated with the placard:
"Chambers to let," chanced to be, a rare thing,
inhabited by numerous individuals who, however, as is always the
case in Paris, had no connection with each other. All belonged
to that indigent class which begins to separate from the lowest
of petty bourgeoisie in straitened circumstances, and which extends
from misery to misery into the lowest depths of society down to
those two beings in whom all the material things of civilization
end, the sewer-man who sweeps up the mud, and the ragpicker who
collects scraps.
The "principal lodger" of Jean Valjean's day was
dead and had been replaced by another exactly like her.
I know not what philosopher has said:
"Old women are never lacking."
This new old woman was named Madame Bourgon, and had nothing
remarkable about her life except a dynasty of three paroquets,
who had reigned in succession over her soul.
The most miserable of those who inhabited the hovel were a
family of four persons, consisting of father, mother, and two
daughters, already well grown, all four of whom were lodged in
the same attic, one of the cells which we have already mentioned.
At first sight, this family presented no very special feature
except its extreme destitution; the father, when he hired the
chamber, had stated that his name was Jondrette.
Some time after his moving in, which had borne a singular
resemblance to the entrance of nothing at all, to borrow the memorable
expression of the principal tenant, this Jondrette had said to
the woman, who, like her predecessor, was at the same time portress
and stair-sweeper: "Mother So-and-So, if any one should chance
to come and inquire for a Pole or an Italian, or even a Spaniard,
perchance, it is I."
This family was that of the merry barefoot boy.
He arrived there and found distress, and, what is still sadder,
no smile; a cold hearth and cold hearts.
When he entered, he was asked: "Whence come you?"
He replied:
"From the street."
When he went away, they asked him:
"Whither are you going?"
He replied: "Into the streets."
His mother said to him:
"What did you come here for?"
This child lived, in this absence of affection, like the pale
plants which spring up in cellars.
It did not cause him suffering, and he blamed no one.
He did not know exactly how a father and mother should be.
Nevertheless, his mother loved his sisters.
We have forgotten to mention, that on the Boulevard du Temple
this child was called Little Gavroche.
Why was he called Little Gavroche?
Probably because his father's name was Jondrette.
It seems to be the instinct of certain wretched families to
break the thread.
The chamber which the Jondrettes inhabited in the Gorbeau
hovel was the last at the end of the corridor.
The cell next to it was occupied by a very poor young man
who was called M. Marius.
Let us explain who this M. Marius was.
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