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He took from his pocket two small objects which were nothing
more than two quills wrapped in cotton, and thrust one up each
of his nostrils. This gave him a different nose.
"That changes you," remarked Gavroche, "you
are less homely so, you ought to keep them on all the time."
Montparnasse was a handsome fellow, but Gavroche was a tease.
"Seriously," demanded Montparnasse, "how do
you like me so?"
The sound of his voice was different also.
In a twinkling, Montparnasse had become unrecognizable.
"Oh!
Do play Porrichinelle for us!" exclaimed Gavroche.
The two children, who had not been listening up to this point,
being occupied themselves in thrusting their fingers up their
noses, drew near at this name, and stared at Montparnasse with
dawning joy and admiration.
Unfortunately, Montparnasse was troubled.
He laid his hand on Gavroche's shoulder, and said to him,
emphasizing his words:
"Listen to what I tell you, boy! if I were on the square
with my dog, my knife, and my wife, and if you were to squander
ten sous on me, I wouldn't refuse to work, but this isn't Shrove
Tuesday."
This odd phrase produced a singular effect on the gamin. He
wheeled round hastily, darted his little sparkling eyes about
him with profound attention, and perceived a police sergeant standing
with his back to them a few paces off.
Gavroche allowed an: "Ah! good!" to escape him,
but immediately suppressed it, and shaking Montparnasse's hand:--
"Well, good evening," said he, "I'm going off
to my elephant with my brats.
Supposing that you should need me some night, you can come
and hunt me up there.
I lodge on the entresol. There is no porter.
You will inquire for Monsieur Gavroche."
"Very good," said Montparnasse.
And they parted, Montparnasse betaking himself in the direction
of the Greve, and Gavroche towards the Bastille.
The little one of five, dragged along by his brother who was
dragged by Gavroche, turned his head back several times to watch
"Porrichinelle" as he went.
The ambiguous phrase by means of which Montparnasse had warned
Gavroche of the presence of the policeman, contained no other
talisman than the assonance dig repeated five or six times in
different forms. This syllable, dig, uttered alone or artistically
mingled with the words of a phrase, means:
"Take care, we can no longer talk freely." There
was besides, in Montparnasse's sentence, a literary beauty which
was lost upon Gavroche, that is mon dogue, ma dague et ma digue,
a slang expression of the Temple, which signifies my dog, my knife,
and my wife, greatly in vogue among clowns and the red-tails in
the great century when Moliere wrote and Callot drew.
Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southwest
corner of the Place de la Bastille, near the basin of the canal,
excavated in the ancient ditch of the fortress-prison, a singular
monument, which has already been effaced from the memories of
Parisians, and which deserved to leave some trace, for it was
the idea of a "member of the Institute, the General-in-chief
of the army of Egypt."
We say monument, although it was only a rough model.
But this model itself, a marvellous sketch, the grandiose
skeleton of an idea of Napoleon's, which successive gusts of wind
have carried away and thrown, on each occasion, still further
from us, had become historical and had acquired a certain definiteness
which contrasted with its provisional aspect.
It was an elephant forty feet high, constructed of timber
and masonry, bearing on its back a tower which resembled a house,
formerly painted green by some dauber, and now painted black by
heaven, the wind, and time.
In this deserted and unprotected corner of the place, the
broad brow of the colossus, his trunk, his tusks, his tower, his
enormous crupper, his four feet, like columns produced, at night,
under the starry heavens, a surprising and terrible form.
It was a sort of symbol of popular force. It was sombre, mysterious,
and immense.
It was some mighty, visible phantom, one knew not what, standing
erect beside the invisible spectre of the Bastille.
Few strangers visited this edifice, no passer-by looked at
it. It was falling into ruins; every season the plaster which
detached itself from its sides formed hideous wounds upon it.
"The aediles," as the expression ran in elegant
dialect, had forgotten it ever since 1814.
There it stood in its corner, melancholy, sick, crumbling,
surrounded by a rotten palisade, soiled continually by drunken
coachmen; cracks meandered athwart its belly, a lath projected
from its tail, tall grass flourished between its legs; and, as
the level of the place had been rising all around it for a space
of thirty years, by that slow and continuous movement which insensibly
elevates the soil of large towns, it stood in a hollow, and it
looked as though the ground were giving way beneath it.
It was unclean, despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly in the
eyes of the bourgeois, melancholy in the eyes of the thinker.
There was something about it of the dirt which is on the point
of being swept out, and something of the majesty which is on the
point of being decapitated. As we have said, at night, its aspect
changed.
Night is the real element of everything that is dark.
As soon as twilight descended, the old elephant became transfigured;
he assumed a tranquil and redoubtable appearance in the formidable
serenity of the shadows. Being of the past, he belonged to night;
and obscurity was in keeping with his grandeur.
This rough, squat, heavy, hard, austere, almost misshapen,
but assuredly majestic monument, stamped with a sort of magnificent
and savage gravity, has disappeared, and left to reign in peace,
a sort of gigantic stove, ornamented with its pipe, which has
replaced the sombre fortress with its nine towers, very much as
the bourgeoisie replaces the feudal classes.
It is quite natural that a stove should be the symbol of an
epoch in which a pot contains power. This epoch will pass away,
people have already begun to understand that, if there can be
force in a boiler, there can be no force except in the brain;
in other words, that which leads and drags on the world, is not
locomotives, but ideas.
Harness locomotives to ideas,-- that is well done; but do
not mistake the horse for the rider.
At all events, to return to the Place de la Bastille, the
architect of this elephant succeeded in making a grand thing out
of plaster; the architect of the stove has succeeded in making
a pretty thing out of bronze.
This stove-pipe, which has been baptized by a sonorous name,
and called the column of July, this monument of a revolution that
miscarried, was still enveloped in 1832, in an immense shirt of
woodwork, which we regret, for our part, and by a vast plank enclosure,
which completed the task of isolating the elephant.
It was towards this corner of the place, dimly lighted by
the reflection of a distant street lamp, that the gamin guided
his two "brats."
The reader must permit us to interrupt ourselves here and
to remind him that we are dealing with simple reality, and that
twenty years ago, the tribunals were called upon to judge, under
the charge of vagabondage, and mutilation of a public monument,
a child who had been caught asleep in this very elephant of the
Bastille. This fact noted, we proceed.
On arriving in the vicinity of the colossus, Gavroche comprehended
the effect which the infinitely great might produce on the infinitely
small, and said:--
"Don't be scared, infants."
Then he entered through a gap in the fence into the elephant's
enclosure and helped the young ones to clamber through the breach.
The two children, somewhat frightened, followed Gavroche without
uttering a word, and confided themselves to this little Providence
in rags which had given them bread and had promised them a shelter.
There, extended along the fence, lay a ladder which by day
served the laborers in the neighboring timber-yard. Gavroche raised
it with remarkable vigor, and placed it against one of the elephant's
forelegs.
Near the point where the ladder ended, a sort of black hole
in the belly of the colossus could be distinguished.
Gavroche pointed out the ladder and the hole to his guests,
and said to them:--
"Climb up and go in."
The two little boys exchanged terrified glances.
"You're afraid, brats!" exclaimed Gavroche.
And he added:--
"You shall see!"
He clasped the rough leg of the elephant, and in a twinkling,
without deigning to make use of the ladder, he had reached the
aperture.
He entered it as an adder slips through a crevice, and disappeared
within, and an instant later, the two children saw his head, which
looked pale, appear vaguely, on the edge of the shadowy hole,
like a wan and whitish spectre.
"Well!" he exclaimed, "climb up, young 'uns!
You'll see how snug it is here!
Come up, you!" he said to the elder, "I'll lend
you a hand."
The little fellows nudged each other, the gamin frightened
and inspired them with confidence at one and the same time, and
then, it was raining very hard.
The elder one undertook the risk. The younger, on seeing his
brother climbing up, and himself left alone between the paws of
this huge beast, felt greatly inclined to cry, but he did not
dare.
The elder lad climbed, with uncertain steps, up the rungs
of the ladder; Gavroche, in the meanwhile, encouraging him with
exclamations like a fencing-master to his pupils, or a muleteer
to his mules.
"Don't be afraid!--That's it!--Come on!--Put your feet
there!-- Give us your hand here!--Boldly!"
And when the child was within reach, he seized him suddenly
and vigorously by the arm, and pulled him towards him.
"Nabbed!" said he.
The brat had passed through the crack.
"Now," said Gavroche, "wait for me.
Be so good as to take a seat, Monsieur."
And making his way out of the hole as he had entered it, he
slipped down the elephant's leg with the agility of a monkey,
landed on his feet in the grass, grasped the child of five round
the body, and planted him fairly in the middle of the ladder,
then he began to climb up behind him, shouting to the elder:--
"I'm going to boost him, do you tug."
And in another instant, the small lad was pushed, dragged,
pulled, thrust, stuffed into the hole, before he had time to recover
himself, and Gavroche, entering behind him, and repulsing the
ladder with a kick which sent it flat on the grass, began to clap
his hands and to cry:--
"Here we are!
Long live General Lafayette!"
This explosion over, he added:--
"Now, young 'uns, you are in my house."
Gavroche was at home, in fact.
Oh, unforeseen utility of the useless!
Charity of great things! Goodness of giants!
This huge monument, which had embodied an idea of the Emperor's,
had become the box of a street urchin. The brat had been accepted
and sheltered by the colossus. The bourgeois decked out in their
Sunday finery who passed the elephant of the Bastille, were fond
of saying as they scanned it disdainfully with their prominent
eyes:
"What's the good of that?" It served to save from
the cold, the frost, the hail, and rain, to shelter from the winds
of winter, to preserve from slumber in the mud which produces
fever, and from slumber in the snow which produces death, a little
being who had no father, no mother, no bread, no clothes, no refuge.
It served to receive the innocent whom society repulsed.
It served to diminish public crime. It was a lair open to
one against whom all doors were shut. It seemed as though the
miserable old mastodon, invaded by vermin and oblivion, covered
with warts, with mould, and ulcers, tottering, worm-eaten, abandoned,
condemned, a sort of mendicant colossus, asking alms in vain with
a benevolent look in the midst of the cross-roads, had taken pity
on that other mendicant, the poor pygmy, who roamed without shoes
to his feet, without a roof over his head, blowing on his fingers,
clad in rags, fed on rejected scraps. That was what the elephant
of the Bastille was good for. This idea of Napoleon, disdained
by men, had been taken back by God. That which had been merely
illustrious, had become august. In order to realize his thought,
the Emperor should have had porphyry, brass, iron, gold, marble;
the old collection of planks, beams and plaster sufficed for God.
The Emperor had had the dream of a genius; in that Titanic
elephant, armed, prodigious, with trunk uplifted, bearing its
tower and scattering on all sides its merry and vivifying waters,
he wished to incarnate the people.
God had done a grander thing with it, he had lodged a child
there.
The hole through which Gavroche had entered was a breach which
was hardly visible from the outside, being concealed, as we have
stated, beneath the elephant's belly, and so narrow that it was
only cats and homeless children who could pass through it.
"Let's begin," said Gavroche, "by telling the
porter that we are not at home."
And plunging into the darkness with the assurance of a person
who is well acquainted with his apartments, he took a plank and
stopped up the aperture.
Again Gavroche plunged into the obscurity.
The children heard the crackling of the match thrust into
the phosphoric bottle. The chemical match was not yet in existence;
at that epoch the Fumade steel represented progress.
A sudden light made them blink; Gavroche had just managed
to ignite one of those bits of cord dipped in resin which are
called cellar rats.
The cellar rat, which emitted more smoke than light, rendered
the interior of the elephant confusedly visible.
Gavroche's two guests glanced about them, and the sensation
which they experienced was something like that which one would
feel if shut up in the great tun of Heidelberg, or, better still,
like what Jonah must have felt in the biblical belly of the whale.
An entire and gigantic skeleton appeared enveloping them.
Above, a long brown beam, whence started at regular distances,
massive, arching ribs, represented the vertebral column with its
sides, stalactites of plaster depended from them like entrails,
and vast spiders' webs stretching from side to side, formed dirty
diaphragms. Here and there, in the corners, were visible large
blackish spots which had the appearance of being alive, and which
changed places rapidly with an abrupt and frightened movement.
Fragments which had fallen from the elephant's back into his
belly had filled up the cavity, so that it was possible to walk
upon it as on a floor.
The smaller child nestled up against his brother, and whispered
to him:--
"It's black."
This remark drew an exclamation from Gavroche.
The petrified air of the two brats rendered some shock necessary.
"What's that you are gabbling about there?" he exclaimed.
"Are you scoffing at me?
Are you turning up your noses? Do you want the tuileries?
Are you brutes?
Come, say!
I warn you that I don't belong to the regiment of simpletons.
Ah, come now, are you brats from the Pope's establishment?"
A little roughness is good in cases of fear.
It is reassuring. The two children drew close to Gavroche.
Gavroche, paternally touched by this confidence, passed from
grave to gentle, and addressing the smaller:--
"Stupid," said he, accenting the insulting word,
with a caressing intonation, "it's outside that it is black.
Outside it's raining, here it does not rain; outside it's
cold, here there's not an atom of wind; outside there are heaps
of people, here there's no one; outside there ain't even the moon,
here there's my candle, confound it!"
The two children began to look upon the apartment with less
terror; but Gavroche allowed them no more time for contemplation.
"Quick," said he.
And he pushed them towards what we are very glad to be able
to call the end of the room.
There stood his bed.
Gavroche's bed was complete; that is to say, it had a mattress,
a blanket, and an alcove with curtains.
The mattress was a straw mat, the blanket a rather large strip
of gray woollen stuff, very warm and almost new.
This is what the alcove consisted of:--
Three rather long poles, thrust into and consolidated, with
the rubbish which formed the floor, that is to say, the belly
of the elephant, two in front and one behind, and united by a
rope at their summits, so as to form a pyramidal bundle.
This cluster supported a trellis-work of brass wire which
was simply placed upon it, but artistically applied, and held
by fastenings of iron wire, so that it enveloped all three holes.
A row of very heavy stones kept this network down to the floor
so that nothing could pass under it. This grating was nothing
else than a piece of the brass screens with which aviaries are
covered in menageries.
Gavroche's bed stood as in a cage, behind this net.
The whole resembled an Esquimaux tent.
This trellis-work took the place of curtains.
Gavroche moved aside the stones which fastened the net down
in front, and the two folds of the net which lapped over each
other fell apart.
"Down on all fours, brats!" said Gavroche.
He made his guests enter the cage with great precaution, then
he crawled in after them, pulled the stones together, and closed
the opening hermetically again.
All three had stretched out on the mat.
Gavroche still had the cellar rat in his hand.
"Now," said he, "go to sleep!
I'm going to suppress the candelabra."
"Monsieur," the elder of the brothers asked Gavroche,
pointing to the netting, "what's that for?"
"That," answered Gavroche gravely, "is for
the rats.
Go to sleep!"
Nevertheless, he felt obliged to add a few words of instruction
for the benefit of these young creatures, and he continued:--
"It's a thing from the Jardin des Plantes.
It's used for fierce animals. There's a whole shopful of them
there.
All you've got to do is to climb over a wall, crawl through
a window, and pass through a door. You can get as much as you
want."
As he spoke, he wrapped the younger one up bodily in a fold
of the blanket, and the little one murmured:--
"Oh! how good that is!
It's warm!"
Gavroche cast a pleased eye on the blanket.
"That's from the Jardin des Plantes, too," said
he.
"I took that from the monkeys."
And, pointing out to the eldest the mat on which he was lying,
a very thick and admirably made mat, he added:--
"That belonged to the giraffe."
After a pause he went on:--
"The beasts had all these things.
I took them away from them. It didn't trouble them.
I told them:
`It's for the elephant.'"
He paused, and then resumed:--
"You crawl over the walls and you don't care a straw
for the government. So there now!"
The two children gazed with timid and stupefied respect on
this intrepid and ingenious being, a vagabond like themselves,
isolated like themselves, frail like themselves, who had something
admirable and all-powerful about him, who seemed supernatural
to them, and whose physiognomy was composed of all the grimaces
of an old mountebank, mingled with the most ingenuous and charming
smiles.
"Monsieur," ventured the elder timidly, "you
are not afraid of the police, then?"
Gavroche contented himself with replying:--
"Brat!
Nobody says `police,' they say `bobbies.'"
The smaller had his eyes wide open, but he said nothing. As
he was on the edge of the mat, the elder being in the middle,
Gavroche tucked the blanket round him as a mother might have done,
and heightened the mat under his head with old rags, in such a
way as to form a pillow for the child.
Then he turned to the elder:--
"Hey!
We're jolly comfortable here, ain't we?"
"Ah, yes!" replied the elder, gazing at Gavroche
with the expression of a saved angel.
The two poor little children who had been soaked through,
began to grow warm once more.
"Ah, by the way," continued Gavroche, "what
were you bawling about?"
And pointing out the little one to his brother:--
"A mite like that, I've nothing to say about, but the
idea of a big fellow like you crying!
It's idiotic; you looked like a calf."
"Gracious, replied the child, "we have no lodging."
"Bother!" retorted Gavroche, "you don't say
`lodgings,' you say `crib.'"
"And then, we were afraid of being alone like that at
night."
"You don't say `night,' you say `darkmans.'"
"Thank you, sir," said the child.
"Listen," went on Gavroche, "you must never
bawl again over anything. I'll take care of you.
You shall see what fun we'll have. In summer, we'll go to
the Glaciere with Navet, one of my pals, we'll bathe in the Gare,
we'll run stark naked in front of the rafts on the bridge at Austerlitz,--that
makes the laundresses raging. They scream, they get mad, and if
you only knew how ridiculous they are! We'll go and see the man-skeleton.
And then I'll take you to the play. I'll take you to see Frederick
Lemaitre.
I have tickets, I know some of the actors, I even played in
a piece once.
There were a lot of us fellers, and we ran under a cloth,
and that made the sea. I'll get you an engagement at my theatre.
We'll go to see the savages. They ain't real, those savages
ain't. They wear pink tights that go all in wrinkles, and you
can see where their elbows have been darned with white.
Then, we'll go to the Opera.
We'll get in with the hired applauders.
The Opera claque is well managed. I wouldn't associate with
the claque on the boulevard.
At the Opera, just fancy! some of them pay twenty sous, but
they're ninnies. They're called dishclouts.
And then we'll go to see the guillotine work. I'll show you
the executioner.
He lives in the Rue des Marais. Monsieur Sanson.
He has a letter-box at his door.
Ah! we'll have famous fun!"
At that moment a drop of wax fell on Gavroche's finger, and
recalled him to the realities of life.
"The deuce!" said he, "there's the wick giving
out.
Attention! I can't spend more than a sou a month on my lighting.
When a body goes to bed, he must sleep.
We haven't the time to read M. Paul de Kock's romances.
And besides, the light might pass through the cracks of the
porte-cochere, and all the bobbies need to do is to see it."
"And then," remarked the elder timidly,--he alone
dared talk to Gavroche, and reply to him, "a spark might
fall in the straw, and we must look out and not burn the house
down."
"People don't say `burn the house down,'" remarked
Gavroche, "they say `blaze the crib.'"
The storm increased in violence, and the heavy downpour beat
upon the back of the colossus amid claps of thunder. "You're
taken in, rain!" said Gavroche.
"It amuses me to hear the decanter run down the legs
of the house.
Winter is a stupid; it wastes its merchandise, it loses its
labor, it can't wet us, and that makes it kick up a row, old water-carrier
that it is."
This allusion to the thunder, all the consequences of which
Gavroche, in his character of a philosopher of the nineteenth
century, accepted, was followed by a broad flash of lightning,
so dazzling that a hint of it entered the belly of the elephant
through the crack. Almost at the same instant, the thunder rumbled
with great fury. The two little creatures uttered a shriek, and
started up so eagerly that the network came near being displaced,
but Gavroche turned his bold face to them, and took advantage
of the clap of thunder to burst into a laugh.
"Calm down, children.
Don't topple over the edifice.
That's fine, first-class thunder; all right.
That's no slouch of a streak of lightning.
Bravo for the good God!
Deuce take it!
It's almost as good as it is at the Ambigu."
That said, he restored order in the netting, pushed the two
children gently down on the bed, pressed their knees, in order
to stretch them out at full length, and exclaimed:--
"Since the good God is lighting his candle, I can blow
out mine. Now, babes, now, my young humans, you must shut your
peepers. It's very bad not to sleep.
It'll make you swallow the strainer, or, as they say, in fashionable
society, stink in the gullet. Wrap yourself up well in the hide!
I'm going to put out the light. Are you ready?"
"Yes," murmured the elder, "I'm all right.
I seem to have feathers under my head."
"People don't say `head,'" cried Gavroche, "they
say `nut'."
The two children nestled close to each other, Gavroche finished
arranging them on the mat, drew the blanket up to their very ears,
then repeated, for the third time, his injunction in the hieratical
tongue:--
"Shut your peepers!"
And he snuffed out his tiny light.
Hardly had the light been extinguished, when a peculiar trembling
began to affect the netting under which the three children lay.
It consisted of a multitude of dull scratches which produced
a metallic sound, as if claws and teeth were gnawing at the copper
wire. This was accompanied by all sorts of little piercing cries.
The little five-year-old boy, on hearing this hubbub overhead,
and chilled with terror, jogged his brother's elbow; but the elder
brother had already shut his peepers, as Gavroche had ordered.
Then the little one, who could no longer control his terror, questioned
Gavroche, but in a very low tone, and with bated breath:--
"Sir?"
"Hey?" said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.
"What is that?"
"It's the rats," replied Gavroche.
And he laid his head down on the mat again.
The rats, in fact, who swarmed by thousands in the carcass
of the elephant, and who were the living black spots which we
have already mentioned, had been held in awe by the flame of the
candle, so long as it had been lighted; but as soon as the cavern,
which was the same as their city, had returned to darkness, scenting
what the good story-teller Perrault calls "fresh meat,"
they had hurled themselves in throngs on Gavroche's tent, had
climbed to the top of it, and had begun to bite the meshes as
though seeking to pierce this new-fangled trap.
Still the little one could not sleep.
"Sir?" he began again.
"Hey?" said Gavroche.
"What are rats?"
"They are mice."
This explanation reassured the child a little.
He had seen white mice in the course of his life, and he was
not afraid of them. Nevertheless, he lifted up his voice once
more.
"Sir?"
"Hey?" said Gavroche again.
"Why don't you have a cat?"
"I did have one," replied Gavroche, "I brought
one here, but they ate her."
This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the
little fellow began to tremble again.
The dialogue between him and Gavroche began again for the
fourth time:--
"Monsieur?"
"Hey?"
"Who was it that was eaten?"
"The cat."
"And who ate the cat?"
"The rats."
"The mice?"
"Yes, the rats."
The child, in consternation, dismayed at the thought of mice
which ate cats, pursued:--
"Sir, would those mice eat us?"
"Wouldn't they just!" ejaculated Gavroche.
The child's terror had reached its climax.
But Gavroche added:--
"Don't be afraid.
They can't get in.
And besides, I'm here! Here, catch hold of my hand.
Hold your tongue and shut your peepers!"
At the same time Gavroche grasped the little fellow's hand
across his brother.
The child pressed the hand close to him, and felt reassured.
Courage and strength have these mysterious ways of communicating
themselves.
Silence reigned round them once more, the sound of their voices
had frightened off the rats; at the expiration of a few minutes,
they came raging back, but in vain, the three little fellows were
fast asleep and heard nothing more.
The hours of the night fled away.
Darkness covered the vast Place de la Bastille.
A wintry gale, which mingled with the rain, blew in gusts,
the patrol searched all the doorways, alleys, enclosures, and
obscure nooks, and in their search for nocturnal vagabonds they
passed in silence before the elephant; the monster, erect, motionless,
staring open-eyed into the shadows, had the appearance of dreaming
happily over his good deed; and sheltered from heaven and from
men the three poor sleeping children.
In order to understand what is about to follow, the reader
must remember, that, at that epoch, the Bastille guard-house was
situated at the other end of the square, and that what took place
in the vicinity of the elephant could neither be seen nor heard
by the sentinel.
Towards the end of that hour which immediately precedes the
dawn, a man turned from the Rue Saint-Antoine at a run, made the
circuit of the enclosure of the column of July, and glided between
the palings until he was underneath the belly of the elephant.
If any light had illuminated that man, it might have been divined
from the thorough manner in which he was soaked that he had passed
the night in the rain.
Arrived beneath the elephant, he uttered a peculiar cry, which
did not belong to any human tongue, and which a paroquet alone
could have imitated.
Twice he repeated this cry, of whose orthography the following
barely conveys an idea:--
"Kirikikiou!"
At the second cry, a clear, young, merry voice responded from
the belly of the elephant:--
"Yes!"
Almost immediately, the plank which closed the hole was drawn
aside, and gave passage to a child who descended the elephant's
leg, and fell briskly near the man.
It was Gavroche.
The man was Montparnasse.
As for his cry of Kirikikiou,--that was, doubtless, what the
child had meant, when he said:--
"You will ask for Monsieur Gavroche."
On hearing it, he had waked with a start, had crawled out
of his "alcove," pushing apart the netting a little,
and carefully drawing it together again, then he had opened the
trap, and descended.
The man and the child recognized each other silently amid
the gloom: Montparnasse confined himself to the remark:--
"We need you.
Come, lend us a hand."
The lad asked for no further enlightenment.
"I'm with you," said he.
And both took their way towards the Rue Saint-Antoine, whence
Montparnasse had emerged, winding rapidly through the long file
of market-gardeners' carts which descend towards the markets at
that hour.
The market-gardeners, crouching, half-asleep, in their wagons,
amid the salads and vegetables, enveloped to their very eyes in
their mufflers on account of the beating rain, did not even glance
at these strange pedestrians.
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