I. A MALEVOLENT TRICK OF THE WIND



SINCE 1823, and while the Momfermeil chop-house was gradually foundering and being swal-
lowed up, not in the abyss of a bankruptcy, but in the sink of petty debts, the Thenar-
dier couple had had two more children; both male. This made five; two girls and three boys.
It was a good many.

The Thenardiess had disembarrassed herself of the two last, while yet at an early age and
quite small, with singular good fortune.

Disembarrassed is the word. There was in this woman but a fragment of nature. A phenome-
non, moreover, of which there is more than one example. Like Madame la Marechale de La
Mothe Houdancourt, the Thenardiess was a mother only to her daughters. Her maternity
ended there. Her hatred of the human race began with her boys. On the side towards her
sons, her malignity was precipitous, and her heart had at that spot a fearful escarpment.
As we have seen, she detested the eldest; she execrated the two others. Why? Because. The
most terrible of motives and the most unanswerable of responses: Because. "I have no use
for a squalling pack of children," said this mother.

We must explain how the Thenardiers had succeeded in disencumbering themselves of their
two youngest children, and even in deriving a profit from them.

This Magnon girl, spoken of some pages back, was the same who had succeeded in getting her
two children endowed by goodman Gillenormand. She lived on the Quai des Celestins, at the
corner of that ancient Rue du Petit 'Muse which has done what it could to change its evil
renown into good odour. Many will remember that great epidemic of croup which desolated,
thirty-five years ago, the quarters bordering on the Seine at Paris, and of which science
took advantage to experiment on a large scale as to the efficacy of insufflations of alum,
now so happily replaced by the tincture of iodine externally applied.

In that epidemic. Magnon lost her two boys, still very young, on the same clay, one in
the morning, the other at night. This was a blow. These children were precious to their
mother; they represented eighty f rancs a month. These eighty francs were paid with great
exactness, in the name of M. Gillenormand, by his rent-agent, M. Barge, retired constable,
Rue du Roi de Sidle. The children dead, the income was buried. Magnon sought for an exped-
ient. In that dark masonry of evil of which she was a part, everything is known, secrets
are kept, and each aids the other. Magnon needed two children! the Thenardiess had two.
Same sex, same age. Good arrangement for one, good investment for the other. The little
Thenardiers became the little Magnons. Magnon left the Quai des Celestins and went to
live in the Rue Clocheperce. In Paris, the identity which binds an
individual to himself is broken from one street to another.

The government, not being notified, did not object, and the substitution took place in
the most natural way in the world. Only Thenardier demanded, for this loan of children,
ten francs a month, which Magnon promised, and even paid. It need not be said that Mon-
sieur Gillenormand continued to pay. He came twice a year to see the little ones. He did
not perceive the change. 'Monsieur," said Magnon to him, "how much they look like you."

Thenardier, to whom avatars were easy, seized this opportunity to become Jondrette. His
two girls and Cravrcche had hardly had time to perceive that they had two little brothers.
At a certain depth of misery, men are possessed by a sort of spectral indifference, and
look upon their fellow beings as upon goblins. Your nearest relatives are often but
vague forms of shadow for you, hardly distinct from the nebulous background of life,
and easily reblended with the invisible.

On the evening of the day she had delivered her two little ones to Magnon, expressing
her willingness freely to renounce them forever, the Thenardiess had, or feigned to
have, a scruple. She said to her husband: "But this is abandoning one's children!"
Thenardier, magisterial and phlegmatic, cauterised the scruple with this phrase: "Jean
Jacques Rousseau did better!" From scruple the mother passed to anxiety: "But
suppose the police come to torment us? What we have done here, Monsieur Thenardier,
say now, is it lawful?" Thenardier answered: "Everything is lawful. Nobody will see
it but the sky. Moreover, with children who have not a son, nobody has any interest
to look closely into it."

Magnon had a kind of elegance in crime. She made a toilette. She shared her rooms, fur-
nished in a gaudy yet wretched style, with a shrewd Frenchified English thief. This
naturalised Parisian English woman; recommendable by very rich connections, intimately
acquainted with the medals of the Bibliotheque and the diamonds of Mademoiselle Mars,
afterwards bedame famous in the. judicial records. She was called Mamselle Miss.

The two little ones who had fallen to Magnon had nothing to complain of. Recommended
by the eighty. francs; they were taken care of, as everything is which is a matter of
business; not badly clothed, not badly fed, treated almost like "little gentlemen." better
with the false mother than with the true. Magnon acted the lady and did not talk argot
before them.

They passed some years thus: Thenardier augured well of it. It occurred to him one day to
say to Magnon who brought him his monthly ten francs, "The father must give them an e-
ducation."

Suddenly, these two poor children, till then well cared for, even by their ill fortune, were
abruptly thrown out into life, and compelled to begin it.

A numerous arrest of malefactors like that of the Jondrette garret, necessarily complicated
with ulterior searches and seizures, is really a disaster for this hideous occult counter-
society which lives beneath public society; an event like this involves every description
of misfortune in that gloomy world. The catastrophe of the Thenardiers produced the cata-
strophe of Magnon.

One day, a short time after Magnon handed Eponine the note relative to the Rue Plumet, there
was a sudden descent of the police in the Rue Clocheperce. Magnon was arrested as well as
Mamselle Miss, and the whole household, which was suspicious. was included in the haul.
The two little boys were playing at the time in a backyard, and saw nothing of the raid.
When they wanted to go in, they found the door closed and the house empty. A cobbler, whose
shop was opposite, called them and handed them a paper which "their mother" had left for
them. On the paper there was an address: M. Barge, rent-agent, Rue du Roi de Sidle, No. 8.
The man of the shop said to them: "You don't live here any more. Go there --it is near by--
the first street to the left. Ask your way with this paper."

The children started, the elder leading the younger, and holding in his hand the paper which
was to be their guide. lie was cold, and his benumbed little fingers had but an awkward
grasp. and held the paper loosely. As they were turning out of the Rue Clocheperce, a gust
of wind snatched it from him, and, as night was coming on, the child could not find it again.

They began to wander, as chance led them, in the streets.



II. IN WHICH LITTLE GAVROCHE TAKES ADVANTAGE OF NAPOLEON THE GREAT


SPRING in Pais is often accompanied with keen and sharp north winds, by which one is not
exactly frozen. but frost-bitten; these winds, which mar the most beautiful days, have pre-
cisely the effect of those currents of cold air which enter a warm room through the cracks
of an ill-closed window or door. It seems as if the dreary door of winter were partly open
and the wind were coming in at it. In the spring of 1832, the time when the first great epi-
demic of this century broke out in Europe, these winds were sharper and more piercing than
ever. A door still more icy than that of winter was ajar. The door of the sepulchre. The
breath of the cholera was felt in those winds.

In the meteorological point of view, these cold winds had this peculiarity, that they did
not exclude a strong electric tension. Storms accompanied by thunder and lightning were
frequent during this time.

One evening when these winds were blowing harshly, to that degree that January seemed re-
turned, and the bourgeois had resumed their cloaks, little Gavroche, always shivering cheer-
fully under his rags, was standing, as if in ecstasy, before a wig-maker's shop in the neigh-
bourhood of the Orme. Saint Gervais. He was adorned with a woman's woollen shawl, picked up
nobody knows where, of which be had made a muffler. Little Gavroche appeared to be intensely
admiring a wax bride, with bare neck and a head-dress of orange flowers, which was revolving
behind the sash, exhibiting between two lamps, its smile to the passers; but in reality he
was watching the shop to see if he could not "chiper" a cake of soap from the front, which
he would afterwards sell for a sou to a hairdresser in the banlieue. It often happened that
he breakfasted upon one of these cakes. He called this kind of work, for which he had some
talent, "shaving the barbers."

As he was contemplating the bride and squinting at the cake of soap, he muttered between his
teeth: "Tuesday. It isn't Tuesday. Is it Tuesday? Perhaps it is Tuesday. Yes, it is Tuesday."

Nobody ever discovered to what this monologue related.

If, perchance, this soliloquy referred to the last time he had dined it was three days be-
fore, for it was then Friday.

The barber in his shop, warmed by a good stove, was shaving a customer and casting from time
to time a look towards this enemy, this frozen and brazen gamin, who had both hands in his
pockets, but his wits evidently out of their sheath.

While Gavroche was examining the bride, the windows, and the Windsor soap, two children of
unequal height, rather neatly dressed, and still smaller than he, one appearing to be seven
years old, the other five, timidly turned the knob of the door and entered the shop, asking
for something, charity, perhaps, in a plaintive manner which rather resembled a groan than
a prayer. They both spoke at once and their words were unintelligible because sobs choked
the voice of the younger, and the cold made the elder's teeth chatter. The barber turned
with a furious face, and without leaving his razor, crowding back the elder with his left
hand and the little one with his , knee, pushed them into the street and shut the door say-
ing:

"Coming and freezing people for nothing!"

The two children went on, crying. Meanwhile a cloud had come up; it began to rain.

Little Gavroche ran after them and accosted them:

"What is the matter with you, little brats?"

"We don't know where to sleep," answered the elder.

"Is that all?" said Gavroche. "That is nothing. Does anybody cry for that? Are they cana-
ries then?"

And assuming, through his slightly bantering superiority, a tone of softened authority and
gentle protection:

"Momacques, come with me."

"Yes, monsieur," said the elder.

And the two children followed him as they would have followed an archbishop. They had stop-
ped crying.

Gavroche led them up the Rue Saint Antoinein the direction of the Bastille.

Gavroche, as he travelled on, cast an indignant and retrospective glance at the barber's
shop.

"He has no heart, that merlan,"he muttered. "He is an Angliche."

A girl, seeing them all three marching in a row, Gavroche at the head, broke into a loud
laugh. This laugh was lacking in respect for the group.

"Good day, Mamselle Omnibus," said Gavroche to her.

A moment afterwards, the barber recurring to him, he added:

"I am mistaken in the animal; he isn't a merlan, he is a snake. Wig-maker, I am going after
a locksmith, and I will have a rattle made for your tail.

This barber had made him aggressive. He apostrophised, as he leaped across a brook, a port-
ress with a beard fit to meet Faust upon the Brocken, who had her broom in her hand.

"Madame," said he to her, "you have come out with your horse, have you?"

And upon this, he splashed the polished boots of a passer with mud.

"Whelp!" cried the man, furious.

Gavroche lifted his nose above his shawl.

"Monsieur complains?"

"Of you!" said the passer.

"The bureau is closed," said Gavroche. "I receive no more complaints."

Meanwhile, continuing up the street, he saw, quite frozen under a porte-cochere, a beggar
girl of thirteen or fourteen, whose clothes,: were so short that her knees could be seen.
The little girl was beginning to be too big a girl for that. Growth plays you such tricks.
The skirt becomes short at the moment that nudity becomes indecent.

"Poor girl!" said Gavroche. "She hasn't even any breeches. But here, take this."

And, taking off all that good woollen which he had about his neck, he threw it upon the
bony and purple shoulders of the beggar girl, where the muffler became a shawl.

The little girl looked at him with an astonished appearance, and received the shawl in si-
lence. At a certain depth of distress, the poor, in their stupor, groan no longer over
evil, and are no longer thankful for good.

This done:

"Brrr!" said Gavroche, shivering worse than St. Martin, who, at least, kept half his cloak.

At this brrr! the storm, redoubling its fury, became violent. These malignant skies punish
good actions.

"Ah," exclaimed Gavroche, "what does this mean? It rains again! Good God, if this continues,
I withdraw my subscription." And he continued his walk.

"It's all the same," added he, casting a glance at the beggar girl who was cuddling herself
under the shawl, `there is somebody who has a famous peel."

And, looking at the cloud, he cried:

"Caught!"

The two children limped along behind him.

As they were passing by one of those thick grated lattices which indicate a baker's shop,
for bread like gold is kept behind iron gratings, Gavroche turned:

"Ah, ha, momes, have we dined?"

"Monsieur," answered the elder, "we have not eaten since early this morning."

"You are then without father or mother?" resumed Gavroche, majestically.

"Excuse us, monsieur, we have a papa and mamma, but we don't know where they are."

"Sometimes that's better than knowing," said Gavroche, who was a thinker.

"It is two hours now," continued the elder, "that we have been walking; we have been looking
for things in every corner, but.we can find nothing."

"I know," said Gavroche. "The dogs eat up everthing." He resumed, after a moment's silence:

"Ah! we have lost our authors. We don't know now what we have done with them. That won't do,
gamins. It is stupid to get lost like that for people of any age. Ah, yes, we must licher for all that.

Still he asked them no questions. To be without a home, what could be more natural?

The elder of the two momes, almost entirely restored to the quick unconcern of childhood,
made this exclamation:

"It is very queer for all that. Mamma, who promised to take us to look for some blessed box,
on Palm Sunday."

"News," answered Gavroche.

"Mamma," added the elder, "is a lady who liveS with Mamselle Miss."

"Tanflute," replied Gavroche.

Meanwhile he had stopped, and for a few minutes he had been groping and fumbling in all sorts
of recesses which he had in his rags.

Finally he raised his head with an air which was only intended for one of satisfaction, but
which was in reality, triumphant.

"Let us compose ourselves, momignards. Here is enough for supper for three."

And he took a sou from one of his pockets.

Without giving the two little boys time for amazement, he pushed them both before him into
the baker's shop, and laid his sou on the counter, crying:

"Boy! five centimes' worth of bread."

The man, who was the master baker himself. took a loaf and a knife.

"In three pieces, boy!" resumed Gavroche, and he added with dignity:

"There are three of us."

And seeing that the baker, after having examined the three cos-tumes, had taken a black
loaf, he thrust his finger deep into his nose with a respiration as imperious as if he had had
the great Frederick's pinch of snuff at the end of his thumb, and threw full in the baker's
face this indignant apostrophe:

"Whossachuav?"

Those of our readers who may be tempted to see in this summons of Gavroche to the baker
a Russian or Polish word, or one of those savage cries which the Iowas and the Botocudos hurl
at each other from one bank of a stream to the other in their solitudes, are informed that it
is a phrase which they use every day (they, our readers), and which takes the place of this
phrase: what is that you have? The baker understood perfectly well, and answered:

"Why! it is bread, very good bread of the second quality." "You mean larton brutal,"' re-
plied Gavroche, with a calm cold disdain. "White bread, boy! larton savonne 1 I am treating."
The baker could not help smiling, and while he was cutting the white bread, he looked at
them in a compassionate manner which offended Gavroche.

"Come, paper cap!" said he, "what are you fathoming us like that for?"

All three placed end to end would hardly have made a fathom. When the bread was cut, the bak-
er put the sou'in his drawer, and Gavroche said to the two children:

"Morfilez."

The little boys looked at him confounded.

Gavroche began to laugh:

"Ah! stop, that is true, they don't know yet, they are so small." And he added:

"Eat."

At the same time he handed each of them a piece of bread.

And, thinking. that the elder, who appeared to him more worthy of his conversation, deserved
some special encouragement and ought to be relieved of all hesitation in regard to satisfying
his appetite, he added, giving him the largest piece:

"Stick that in your gun."

There was one piece smaller than the other two; he took it for himself.

The poor children were starving, Gavroche include. While they were tearing the bread with
their fine teeth, they encumbered the shop of the baker who, now that he had received his
pay, was regarding them ill-humouredly.

"Come into the street," said Gavroche.

They went on in the direction of the Bastille.

From time to time when they were passing before a lighted shop, the smaller one stopped to
look at the time by a leaden watch suspended from his neck by a string.

"Here is decidedly a real canary," said Gavroche.

Then he thoughtfully muttered between his teeth:

"It's all the same, if I had any momes, I would hug them tighter than this."

As they finished their pieces of bread and reached the corner of that gloomy Rue des Ballets,
at the end of which the low and forbidding wicket of La Force is seen:

"Hullo, is that you, Gavroche?" said somebody.

"Hullo' is that you, Montparnasse?" said Gavroche.

A man had just accosted the gamin, and this man was none other than Montparnasse, disguised
with blue eye-glasses, but recognisable by Gavroche.

"Mastiff!" continued Gavroche, "you have a peel the colour of a flaxseed poultice and blue
spectacles like a doctor. You are in style, 'pon the word of an old man."

"Hush!" said Montparnasse, "not so loud."

And he hastily drew Gavroche out of the light of the shops. The two little boys followed
mechanically, holding each other by the hand.

When they were under the black arch of a porte-cochere, sheltered from sight. and from the
rain:

"Do you know where I am going?" inquired Montparnasse.

"To the Abbey of Monte a Regret," said Gavroche.

"Joker!"

And Montparnasse continued:

"I am going to find Babet."

"Ah!" said Gavroche, "her name is Babet."

Montparnasse lowered his voice.

"Not her, his."

"Ah, Babet!"

"Yes, Babet."

"I thought be was buckled."

"He has slipped the buckle," answered Montparnasse.

And he rapidly related to the gamin that, on the morning of that very day, Babet, having been
transferred to the Conciergerie, had escaped by turning to the left instead of turning to the
right in "the vestibule of the Examination hall."

Gavroche admired the skill.

"What a dentist!" said he.

Montparnasse added a few particulars in regard to Babet's escape and finished with:

"Oh! that is not all."

Gavroche, while listening, had caught hold of a cane which Montparnasse had in his hand, he
had pulled mechanically on the upper part, and the blade of a dagger appeared.

"Ah!" said he, pushing the dagger back hastily, "you have brought your gendarme disguised
as a bourgeois."

Montparnasse gave him a wink.

"The deuce!" resumed Gavroche, "then you are going to have a tussle with the cognes?"

"We don't know, ' answered Montparnasse with an indifferent air. "It is always well to have
a pin about you."

Gavroche insisted:

"What is it you are going to do tonight?"

Montparnasse took tip the serious line anew and said, biting his syllables:

"Several things."

And abruptly changing the conversation:

"By the way!"

"What?'

"A story of the other day: Just think of it. I meet a bourgeois. He makes me a present of a
sermon and his purse. I put that in my pocket. A minute afterwards I feel in my pocket. There
is nothing there."

"Except the sermon," said Gavroche.

"But you," resumed Montparnasse, "where are you going now?" Gavroche showed his two proteges
and said:

"I am going to put these children to bed."

"Where do they sleep?"

"At my house

"Your house. Where is that?'

"At my house."

"You have a room them?"

"Yes, I have a room."

"And where is your room r'

"In the elephant," said Gavroche.

Montparnasse, although by nature not easily astonished, could not restrain an exclamation:

"In the elephant?'

"Well, yes, in the elephant?" replied Gavroehe, "whossematmthat?"

This is also a word in the language which nobody write and which everybody uses. Whosst-
matruthat, signifies what is the matter with that?

The profound observation of the gamin recalled Montparnasse to calmness and to good sense.
He appeared to return to more respectful sentiments for Gavroche's lodging.

'Indeed!" said he, "yes, the elephant. Are you well off there?

"Very well," said Gavroche. "There, really chenument. There are no draughts of wind as there
are under the bridges."

"How do you get in?"

"I get in."

"There is a hole then?' inquired Montparnasse.

"Zounds! But it musn't be told. It is between the forelegs:The coqueurs haven't seen it."

And you climb up? Yes, I understand."

"In a twinkling, crick, crack, it is done, all alone."

After a moment, Gavroche added:

"For these little boys I shall have a ladder."

Montparnasse began to laugh:

"Where the devil did you get these brats?" .

Gavroche simply answered:

"They are some momichards a wig-maker made me a present of."

Meanwhile Montparnasse had become thoughtful.

"You recognised me very easily," he murmured.

He took from his pocket two little objects which were nothing but two quills wrapped in cot-
ton and introduced one into each nostril. This made him a new nose.

"That changes you," said Gavroche, "you are not so ugly, you ought to keep so all the time."

Montparnasse was a handsome fellow, but Gavroche was a scoffer.

"Joking aside," asked Montparnasse, "how do you like that?" It was also another sound of voice.
In the twinkling of an eye,

Montparnasse had become unrecognisable.

"Oh! play us Punchinello!" exclaimed Gavroche.

The two little ones, who had not been listening till now, they had themselves been so busy
in stuffing their fingers into their noses, were attracted by this name and looked upon Mon-
tparnasse with dawning joy and admiration.

Unfortunately Montparnasse was anxious.

He laid his hand on Gavroche's shoulder and said to him, dwelling upon his words:

"Listen to a digression, boy, if I were on the Square, with my dogue, my dague, and my digue,
and if you were so prodigal as to offer me twenty great sous, I shouldn't refuse to goupiner
for them, but we are not on Mardi Gras."

This grotesque phrase produced a singular effect upon the gamin. He turned hastily, cast his
small sparkling eyes about him with intense attention, and perceived, within a few steps, a
sergent de ville, whose back was turned to them. Gavroche let an "ah, yes!" escape him,
which he suppressed upon the spot, and shaking Montparnasse's hand:

"Well, good night," said he, "I am going to my elephant with my momes. On the supposition
that you should need me some night, you will come and find me there. I live in the second
story. There is no porter. You would ask for Monsieur Gavroche."

"All right," said Montparnasse.

And they separated, Montparnasse making his way towards the Gtive and Gavroche towards the
Bastille. The little five-year-old drawn along by his brother, whom Gavroche was drawing along,
turned his head back several times to see "Punchinello" going away.

The unintelligent phrase by which Montparnasse had warned Gavroehe of the presence of the
sergentde vine, contained no other talisman than the syllable dig repeated five or six times
under various forms. This syllable dig, not pronounced singly, but artistically mingled with
the words of a phrase, means: Take rare, toe cannot talk freely. There was furthertore in
Montparnasse's phrase a literary beauty which escaped Gavroche, that is nee dogue, my dope,
and my digne, an expression of the argot of the Temple, which signifies my dog, may knife,
and my wife, very'much used among the Pitres and the Queues Rouges of the age of Louis XIV.,
when Moliere wrote and Callot drew.

Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southeast corner of the Place de la Bas-
tille, near the canal basin dug in the ancient ditch of the prison citadel, a grotesque mon-
ument which has now faded away from the memory of Parisians, and which is worthy . to leave
some trace, for it was an idea of the "member of the Institute, General-in-Chief of the Army
of Egypt."

We say monument, although it was only a rough model. But this rough model itself, a huge plan,
a vast carcass of an idea of Napoleon which two or three successive gusts of wind had carried
away and thrown each time further from us, had become historical, and had acquired a definite-
ness which contrasted with its provisional aspect. It was an elephant, forty feet high, con-
structed of framework and masonry, bearing on its back its tower, which resembled a house,
formerly painted green by some house-painter, now painted black by the sun, the rain, and the
weather. In that open and deserted corner of the Square, the broad front of the colossus, his
trunk, his tusks, his size, his enormous rump, his four feet like columns, produced at night,
under the starry sky, a startling and terrible outline. One knew not what it meant. It was a
sort of symbol of the force of the people. It was gloomy, enigmatic, and immense. It was a
mysterious and mighty phantom, visibly standing by the side of the invisible spectre of the
Bastille.

Few strangers visited this edifice, no passer-by looked at it. It was falling into ruin; e-
very season, the mortar which was detached from its sides made hideous wounds upon
it. "The aediles," as they say in fashionable dialect, had forgotten it since 1814. It was
there in its corner, gloomy, diseased, crumbling, surrounded by a rotten railing, continu-
ally besmeared by drunken coachmen; crevices marked up the belly, a lath was sticking out
from the tail, the tall grass ran far up between its legs; and as the level of the square
had been rising for thirty years all about it, by that slow and continuous movement which
insensibly raises the soil of great cities, it was in a hollow, and it seemed as if the
earth sank under it. It was huge, contemned. repulsive, and superb; ugly to the eye of
the bourgeois; melancholy to the eye of the thinker. It partook, to some extent, of a
filth soon to be swept away, and, to some extent, of a majesty soon to be decapitated.

As we have said, night changed its appearance: Night is the true medium for everything
which is shadowy. As soon as twilight fell, the old elephant became transfigured; he a-
ssumed a tranquil and terrible form in the fearful serenity of the darkness. Being of
the past, he was of the night; and this obscurity was fitting to his greatness.

This monument, rude, squat, clumsy, harsh, severe, almost deformed, but certainly maj-
estic, and impressed with a sort of magnificent and savage seriousness, has disappeared,
leaving a peaceable reign to the kind of gigantic stove, adorned with its stove-pipe,
which has taken the place of the forbidding nine-towered fortress, almost as the bourge-
oisie replaces feudality. It is very natural that a stove should be the symbol of an e-
poch of which a tea-kettle contains the power. This period will pass away, it is already
passing away; we are beginning to understand that, if there may be force in a boiler,
there can be power only in a brain; in other words, that what leads and controls the
world, is not locomotives, but ideas. Harness the locomotives to the ideas, very well;
but do not take the horse for the horseman.

However, this may be, to return to the Place de la Bastille, the architect of the ele-
phant had succeeded in making something grand with plaster; the architect of the stove-
pipe has succeeded in making something petty with bronze.

This stove-pipe, which was baptised with a sonorous name, and called the Column of July,
this would-be monument of an abortive resolution, was still, in 1832, enveloped in an
immense frame-work covering, Which we for our part still regret, and by a large board
in-closure, which completed the isolation of the elephant.

It was towards this corner of the square, dimly lighted by the reflection of a distant
lamp, that the gamin directed the two "momes."

We must be permitted to stop here long enough to declare that we are within the simple
reality, and that twenty years ago the police tribunals would have had to condemn upon
a complaint for vagrancy and breach of a public monument, a child who should have been
caught sleeping in the interior even of the elephant of the Bastille. This fact stated,
we continue.

As they came near thecolossus, Gavroche comprehended the effect which the infinitely
great may produce upon the infinitely small, and said:

"Brats! don't be frightened."

Then he entered through a gap in the fence into the inclosure of the elephant, and help-
ed the momes to crawl through the breach. The two children, a little frightened, followed
Gavroche without saying a word, and trusted themselves to that little Providence in rags
who had given them bread and promised them a lodging.

Lying by the side of the fence was a ladder, which, by day, was used by the working-men
of the neighbouring wood-yard. Gavroche lifted it with singular vigour, and set it up a-
gainst one of the ele-phant's forelegs. About the point where the ladder ended, a sort
of black hole could be distinguished in the belly of the colossus.

Gavroche showed the ladder and the hole to his guests, and said to than:

"Mount and enter."

The two little fellows looked at each other in terror. "You are afraid, momes!" ex-
claimed Gavroche.

And he added:

"You shall see."

He clasped the elephant's wrinkled foot, and in a twinkling, without deigning to make
use of the ladder, he reached the crevice. He entered it as an adder glides into a hole,
and disappeared, and a moment afterwards the two children saw his pallid face dimly ap-
pearing.like a faded and wan form, at the edge of the hole full of darkness.

"Well," cried he, "why don't you come up, momignards? you'll see how nice it is! Come
up," said he, to the elder, "I will give you a hand."

The little ones urged each other forward. The gamin made them afraid and reassured them
at the same time, and then it rained very hard. The elder ventured.

The younger, seeing his brother go up, and himself left all alone between the paws of
this huge beast, had a great desire to cry, but he did not dare.

The elder clambered up the rounds of the ladder. He tottered badly. Gavroche, while he
was on his way, encouraged him with the exclamations of a fencing master to his scholars,
or of a muleteer to his mules:

"Don't be afraid!"

"That's it!"

"Come on!"

"Put your foot there!"

"Your hand here!"

"Be brave!"

And when he came within his reach he caught him quickly and vigorously by the arm and drew
him up.

"Gulped!" said he.

The mome had passed through the crevice.

"Now," said Gavroche, "wait for me.Monsieur, have the kindness to sit down."

And, going out by the crevice as he had entered, he let himself glide with the agility of
a monkey along the elephant's leg. he dropped upon his feet in the grass, caught the lit-
tle five-year-old by the waist and set him half way up the ladder, then he began to mount
up behind him, crying to the elder.

"I will push him; you pull him."

In an instant the little fellow was lifted, pushed, dragged, pulled, stuffed, crammed into
the hole without having had time to know what was going on. And Gavrochc, entering after
him, pushing back the ladder with a kick so that it fell upon the grass, began, to clap
his hands, and cried:

"Here we are! Hurrah for General Lafayette!"

This explosion over, he added:

"Brats, you are in my house."

Gavroche was in fact at home.

O unexpected utility of the useless! charity of great things! goodness of giants! This mon-
strous monument which had contained a thought of the emperor, had become the box of a
gamin. The mome had been accepted and sheltered by the colossus. The bourgeois in their
Sunday clothes, who passed by the elephant of the Bastille, frequently said, eyeing it
scornfully with their goggle eyes: "What's the use of that?" The use of it was to save
from the cold, the frost, the hail, the rain, to protect from the wintry wind, to pre-
serve from sleeping in the mud, which breeds fever, and from sleeping in the snow, which
breeds death, a little being with no father or mother, with no bread, no clothing, no a-
sylum. The use of it was to receive the innocent whom society repelled. The use of it
was to diminish the public crime. It was a den open for him to whom all doors were
closed. It seemed as if the miserable old mastodon, invaded by vermin and oblivion,
covered with warts, mould, and ulcers, tottering, worm-eaten, abandoned, condemned,
a sort of colossal beggar asking in vain the alms of a benevolent look in the middle of
the Square, had taken pity itself on this other beggar, the poor pigmy who went with no
shoes to his feet, no roof over his head, blowing his fingers, clothed in rags, fed upon
what is thrown away. This was the use of the elephant of the Bastille. This idea of Nap-
oleon, disdained by men, had been taken up by God. That which had been illustrious only,
had become august. The emperor must have had, to realise what he meditated, porphyry,
brass, iron, gold, marble; for God the old assemblage of boards, joists, and plaster
was enough. The emperor had had a dream of genius; in this titanic elephant, armed,
prodigious, brandishing his trunk, bearing his tower, and making the joyous and vivi-
fying waters gush out on all sides about him, he desired to incarnate the people. God
had done a grander thing with it, has lodged a child.

The hole by which Gavroche had entered was a break hardly visible from the outside, con-
cealed as it was, and as we have said, under the belly of the elephant, and so narrow
that hardly anything but cats and momes could have passed through.

"Let us begin," said Gavrochc, "by telling the porter that we are not in."

And plunging into the obscurity with certainty, like one who familiar with his room,
he took a board and stopped the hole.

Gavroche plunged again into the obscurity. The children heard the sputtering of the taper
plunged into the phosphoric bottle. The chemical taper was not yet in existence; the Fu-
made tinder-box represented progress at that period.

A sudden light made them wink; Gavroche had just lighted one of those bits of string
soaked in resin which are called cellar-rats. The cellar-rats, which made more smoke
than flame, rendered the inside of the elephant dimly visible.

Gavroche's two guests looked about them, and felt something like what one would feel
who should be shut up in the great tun of Heidelberg, or better still, what Jonah must
have felt in the Biblical belly of the whale. An entire and gigantic skeleton appeared
to them, and enveloped them. Above, a long dusky beam, from which projected at regular
distances massive encircling timbers, represented the vertebral column with its ribs,
stalactites of plaster hung down like the viscera, and from one side to the other huge
spider-webs made dusty diaphragms. Here and there in the corners great blackish spots
were seen, which had the appearance of being alive, and which changed their places rap-
idly with a wild and startled motion.

The debris fallen from the elephant's back upon his belly had filled up the concavity,
so that they could walk upon it as upon a floor.

The smaller one hugged close to his brother and said in a low tone:

"It is dark."

This word made Gavroche cry out. The petrified air of the two momes rendered a shock
necessary.

"What is that you are driving at?" he exclaimed. "Are we humbugging? are we becoming
the disgusted? Must you have the Tuileries? would you be fools? Say, I inform you that I
do not belong to the regiment of ninnies. Are you the brats of the pope's headwaiter?"

A little roughness is good for alarm. It is reassuring. The two children came close to Gav-
roche.

Gavroche, paternally softened by this confidence, passed "from the grave to the gentle,"
and addressing himself to the smaller:

"Goosy," said he to him, accenting the insult with a caressing tone, "it is outside that it
is dark. Outside it rains, here it doesn't rain; outside it is cold, here there isn't a speck
of wind; outside there are heaps of folks, here there isn't anybody; outside there isn't
even a moon, here there is my candle, by jinks!"

The two children began to regard the apartment with less fear; Gavroche did not allow
them much longer leisure for consideration.

"Quick," said he.

And he pushed them towards what we are very happy to be able to call the bottom of the
chamber.

His bed was there.

Gavroche's bed was complete. That is to say, there was a mat-tress, a covering, and an
alcove with curtains.

The mattress was a straw mat, the covering a large blanket of coarse grey wool, very warm
and almost new. The alcove was like this:

Three rather long laths, sunk and firmly settled into the rubbish of the floor, that is
to say of the belly of the elephant, two in front and one behind, and tied together by a
string at the top, so as to form a pyrimidal frame. This frame supported a fine trellis
of brass wire which was simply hung over it, but artistically applied and kept in
in place by fastenings of iron wire, in such a way that it entirely enveloped the three
laths. A row of large stones fixed upon the ground all about this trellis so as to let
nothing pass. This trellis was nothing more nor less than a fragment of those copper
nettings which are used to cover the bird-houses in menageries. Gavroche s bed under
this netting was as if in a cage. Altogether it was like an Esquimaux tent.

It was this netting which took the place of curtains.

Gavroche removed the stones a little which kept down the netting in front, and the two
folds of the trellis which lay one over the other opened.

"Momes, on your hands and knees!" said Gavroche.

He made his guests enter into the cage carefully, then he went in after them, creeping,
pulled back the stones, and hermetically closed the opening.

They were all three stretched upon the straw.

Small as they were, none of than could have stood up in the alcove. Gavroche still held
the cellar rat in his hand.

"Now," said he, "pioncez! I am going to suppress the candelabra."

"Monsieur," inquired the elder of the two brothers, of Gavroche, pointing to the netting,
"what is that?"

"That," said Gavroche, "is for the rats, pioncez!"

However, he felt it incumbent upon him to add a few words for the instruction of these
beings of a tender age, and he continued:

"They are things from the Jardin des Plantes. They are used for ferocious animals. Tsaol
(it is a whole) magazine full of them. Tsony (it is only) to mount over a wall, climb by
a window and pass under a door. You get as much as you want."

While he was talking, he wrapped a fold of the coverlid about the smaller one, who mur-
mured:

"Oh! that is good it is warm!"

Gavroche looked with satisfaction upon the coverlid.

"That is also from the Jardin des Plantes," said he. "I took that from the monkeys."

And, showing the elder the mat upon which he was lying, a very thick mat and admirably
made, he added:

"That was the giraffe's."

After a pause, he continued:

"The beasts had all this. I took it from them. They didn't care. I told them: It is for
the elephant."

He was silent again and resumed:

"We get over the walls and we make fun of the government. That's all."

The two children looked with a timid and stupefied respect upon this intrepid and inven-
tive being, a vagabond like them, isolated like than, wretched like them, who was some-
thing wonderful and all-powerful, who seemed to them supernatural, and whose countenance
was made up of all the grimaces of an old mountebank mingled with the most natural and
most pleasant smile.

"Monsieur," said the elder timidly, "you are not afraid then of the sergents de ville?"

Gavroche merely answered:

"Mome! we don't say sergents de ville, we say cognes."

The smaller boy had his eyes open, but he said nothing. As be was on the edge of the mat,
the elder being in the middle, Gavroche tucked the coverlid under him as a mother would
have don; and raised the mat under his head with some old rags in such a way as to make
a pillow for the intuit. Then he turned towards the elder:

"Eh! we are pretty well off, here!"

"Oh, yes," answered the elder, looking at Gavroche with the expression of a rescued
angel.

The two poor little soaked children were beginning to get warm.

"Ah, now," continued Gavroche, "what in the world were you crying for?"

And pointing out the little one to his brother:

"A youngster like that, I don't say, but a big boy like you, to cry is silly; it makes
you look like a calf."

"Well," said the child, "we had no room, no place to go."

"Brat!" replied Gavroche, "we don't say a room, we say a piolle."

"And then we were afraid to be all alone like that in the night."

"We don't say night, we say sorgue."

"Thank you monsieur," said the child.

"Listen to me," continued Gavroche, "you must never whine any more for anything. I will
take care of you. You will see what fun we have. In summer we will go to the Glaciere
with Navet, a comrade of mine, we will go in swimming in the Basin, we will run on the
track before the Bridge of Austerlitz all naked, that makes the washerwomen mad. They
scream, they scold, if you only knew how funny they are I We will go to see the skeleton
man. He is alive. At the Champs Elysees. That parishioner is as thin as anything. And
then I will take you to the theatre. I will take you to Frederick Lemaitre's. I have
tickets, I know the actors, I even played once in a piece. We were momes so high, we
ran about under a cloth, that made the sea. I will have you engaged at my theatre. We
will go and see the savages. They're not real, those savages. They have red tights which
wrinkle, and you can see their elbows darned with white thread. After that, we will go
to the Opera. We will go in with the claqueurs. The claque at the Opera is very select.
I wouldn't go with the claque on the boulevards. At the Opera, just think, there are
some who pay twenty sons, but they are fools. They call them dishclouts. And then we
will go to see the guillotining. I will show you the executioner. He lives in the Rue
des Marias. Monsieur Sermon. There is a letterbox on his door. Oh! we have famous fun?'

At this moment, a drop of wax fell upon Gavroche's finger, and recalled him to the real-
ities of life.

"The deuce!" said he, "there's the match used up. Attention! I can't spend more than a
sou a month for my illumination. When we go to bed, we must go to sleep. We haven't time
to read the romances of Monsieur Paul de Kock. Besides the light might show through the
cracks of the porte-cochere, and the costs couldn't help seeing."

And then," timidly observed the elder who alone dared to talk with Gavroche and reply to
him, "a spark might fall into the straw, we must take care not to burn the house up."

"We don't say burn the house," said Gavrochc, "we say riffauder the Bocard."

The storm redoubled. They heard, in the intervals of the thunder, the tempest beating a-
gainst the back of the colossus.

"Pour away, old rain!" said Gavroche. "It does amuse me to hear the decanter emptying
along the house's legs. Winter is a fool; he throws away his goods, he loses his trouble,
he can't wet us, and it makes him grumble, the old water-porter!"

This allusion to thunder, all the consequences of which Gavroche accepted as a philosopher
of the nineteenth century, was followed by a very vivid flash, so blinding that something
of it entered by the crevice into the belly of the elephant. Almost at the same instant
the thunderburst forth very furiously. The two little boys uttered a cry, and rose so
quickly that the trellis was almost thrown out of place; but Gavroche turned his bold
face towards them and took advantage of the clap of thunder to burs tinto a laugh.

"Be calm, children. Don't upset the edifice. That was fine thunder give us some more.
That wasn't any fool of a flash. Bravo God! by jinks! that is most as good as it is at
the theatre."

This said, he restored order in the trellis, gently pushed the It children to the head
of the bed, pressed their knees to stretch the out at full length, and exclaimed:

"As God is lighting his candle, I can blow out mine. Children, must sleep, my young hu-
mans. It is very bad not to 'sleep. It wont make you schlinguer in your strainer, or, as
the big bugs say, stinl in your jaws. Wind yourselves up well in the peel! I'm going to
extinguish. Are you all right?"

"Yes," murmured the elder, 'I am right. I feel as if I had feathers under my head."

"We don't say head," cried Gavroche, "we say tronche."

The two children hugged close to each other. Gavroche finished arranging them upon the
mat, and pulled the coverlid up to their cars, then repeated for the third time the in-
junction in hieratic language:

"Pioncez!"

And he blew out the taper.

Hardly was the light extinguished when a singular tremor began to agitate the trellis
under which the three children were lying. It was a multitude of dull rubbings, which
gave a metallic sound, as if claws and teeth were grinding the copper wire. This was
accompanied by all sorts of little sharp cries.

The little boy of five, hearing this tumult over his head, and shivering with fear,
pushed the elder brother with his elbow, but the elder brother had already "pionce,"
according to Gavroche's order. Then the little boy, no longer capable of fearing him,
ventured to accost Gavroche, but very low, and holding his breath:

"Monsieur?"

"Hey?" said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.

"What is that?"

"It is the rats," answered Gavroche.

And be laid his head again upon the mat.

The rats, in fact, which swarmed by thousands in the carcase of the elephant, and which
were those living black spots of ‘vlikli ace have spoken, had been held in awe by the
flame of the candle so long as it burned, but as soon as this cavern, which was, as it
were. their city, had been restored to night, smelling there what te fod storyteller
Perrault calls "some fresh meat," they had rushehd inocn ma,Fse upon Gatroche's tent,
climbed to the top, and were biting its meshes as if they were seeking to get through
this new-fashioned mosquito bar.

Still the little boy did not go to sleep.

"Monsieur!" he said again,

"Hey?" said Gavrocbe.

"What are the rats?"

"They are mice."

This explanation reassured the child a little. He had seen some white mice in the course
of his life, and he was not afraid of them. However, he raised his voice again:

"Monsieur?"

"Hey?" replied Gavroclie.

"Why don't you have a cat?"

"I had one," answered Gavroche, "I brought one here, but they ate her up for me."

This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the little fellow again began
to treMble. The dialogue between him and Gavroche was resumed for the fourth time.

"Monsieur!"

"Hey?"

"Who was it that was eaten up?"

"The cat."

"Who was it that ate the cat?"

"The rats."

"The mice?"

"Yes, the rats."

The child, dismayed by these mice who ate Gus, continued: "Monsieur, would those mice
eat us?

"Golly!" said Gavroche.

The child's terror was complete. But Gavroche added:

"Don't he afraid! they cant get in. And when I am here. Here, take hold of any hand. Be
still and pioncez"

Gavroche at the same time took the little fellow's hand across his brother. The child
clasped his band against his body, and felt safe. Courage and strength have such myster-
ious communications. It was once more silent about them, the sound of voices had start-
led and driven away the rats; in a few minutes they might have returned and done their
worst in vain, the three momes, plunged in slumber, heard nothing more.

The hours of the night passed away. Darkness covered the immense Place de la Bastille;
a wintry wind, which mingled with the rain, blew in gusts, the patrolmen ransacked the
doors, alleys, yards, and dark corners, and, looking for nocturnal vagabonds, passed
silently by the elephant; the monster, standing, motionless, with open eyes in the dark-
ness, appeared to be in reverie and well satisfied with his good deeds, and he sheltered
from the heavens and from men the three poor sleeping children.

To understand what follows, we must remember that at that period the guard-house of the
Bastille was situated at the other extremity of the Square, and that what occurred near
the elephant could neither be seen nor heard by the sentinel.

Towards the end of the hour which immediately precedes day-break, a man turned out of
the Rue Saint Antoine, running, crossed the Square, turned the great inclosure of the
Column of July, and glided between the palisades under the belly of the elephant Had any
light whatever shone upon this man, from his thoroughly wet cloth; ing, one would have
guessed that he had passed the night in the rain. When under the elephant he raised a
protesque call, which belongs to no human language and which a parrot alone could repro-
duce. He twice repeated this call, of which the following orthography gives but a very
imperfect idea:

"Kirikikiou!"

At the second call, a clear, cheerful young voice answered from the belly of the elephant:

"Yes!"

Almost immediately the board which closed the hole moved away, and gave passage to a child,
who descended along the elephant's leg and dropped lightly near the man. It was Gavroche.
The man was Montparnasse.

As to this call, kirikikiou it was undoubtedly what the child meant by, You will ask for
Monsieur Gavroche.

On hearing it he had waked with a spring, crawled out of his "alcove," separating the net-
ting a little, which he afterwards carefully closed again, then he had opened the trap and
descended.

The man and the child recognised each other silently in the dark; Montparnasse merely said:

"We need you. Come and give us a lift."

The gamin did not ask any other explanation.

"I'm on hand," said he.

And they both took the direction of the Rue Saint Antoine. whence Montparnasse came, wind-
ing their way rapidly through the long file of market waggons which go down at that hour
towards the market.

The market gardeners, crouching among the salads and vegetables, half asleep, buried up to
the eyes in the boots of their waggons ' on account of the driving rain, did not even notice
these strange
passengers.



III. THE FORTUNES AND MISFORTUNES OF ESCAPE



WHAT had taken place that same night at La Force was this:

An escape had been concerted beturecn Babet, Brujon, Gueulemer, and Thenardier, although
Thenardier was in solitary. Baba had done the business for himself during the day, as we
have seen from the account of Montparnasse to Gavroche. Montparnasse was to help them
from without.

Brujon, having spent a month in a chamber of punishment, had had time, first, to twist a
rope, secondly, to perfect a plan. Formerly these stern cells in which the discipline of
the prison delivers the condemned to himself, were composed of four stone walls, a ceiling
of stone, a pavement of tiles, a camp bed, a grated air-hole, a double iron door, and were
called dungeons; but the dungeon has been thought too horrible; now it is composed of an
iron door, a grated air-hole, a camp bed, a pavement of tiles, a ceiling of stone, four
stone walls, and it is called chamber of punishment. There is a .little light in them about
noon. The inconvenience of these chambers which, as we see, are not dungeons, is that they
allow beings to reflect who should be made to work.

Brujon then had reflected, and he had gone out of the chamber of punishment with a rope.
As he was reputed very dangerous in the Charlemagne Court, he was put into the Batiment
Neuf. The first thing which he found in the Batiment Neuf was Gueulemer, the second was
a nail; Gueulemer, that is to say crime, a nail, that is to say liberty.

Brujon, of whom it is time to give a complete idea, was, with an appearance of delicate
complexion and a profoundly premeditated languor, a polished, gallant, intelligent robber,
with an enticing look and an atrocious smile. His look was a result of his will, and his
smile of his nature. His first studies in his an were directed towards roofs; he had made
a great improvement in the business of the lead strippers who despoil roofings and distrain
eaves by the process called: the double fat.

What rendered the moment peculiarly favourable for an attempt at escape, was that some
workmen were taking off and relaying, at that very time, a part of the slating of the prison.
The Cour Saint Bernard was not entirely isolated from the Charlemagne Court and the Cour
Saint Louis. There were scaffoldings and ladders up aloft; in other words, bridges and stair-
ways leading towards deliverance.

Batiment Neuf, the most cracked and decrepit affair in the world, was the weak point of
the prison. The walls were so much corroded by saltpetre that they had been obliged to put
a facing of wood over the arches of the dormitories, because the stones detached themselves
and fell upon the beds of the prisoners. Notwithstanding this decay, the blunder was commit-
ted of shutting up in the Batiment Neuf the most dangerous of the accused, of putting "the
hard cases" in there, as they say in prison language.

The Batiment Neuf contained four dormitories one above the other and an attic which was
called the Bel Air. A large chimney probably of some ancient kitchen of the Dukes de La Force,
starter from the ground floor, passed through the four stories, cutting it two all the dorm-
itories in which it appeared to be a kind of flattened pillar, and went out through the roof.

Gueulemer and Brujon were in the same dormitory. They had been put into the lower story by
precaution. It happened that the heads of their beds rested against the flue of the chimney.

Thenardier was exactly above them in the attic known as the Bel Air.

The passer who stops in the Rue Culture Sainte Catherine beyond the barracks of the firemen,
in front of the porte-cochere of the bath-house, sees a yard full of flowers and shrubs in
boxes, at the further end of which is a little white rotunda with two wings en. livened by
green blinds, the bucolic dream of Jean Jacques. Not more than ten years ago, above this ro-
tunda there arose a black wall, enormous, hideous, and bare, against which it was built. This
was the encircling wall of La Force.

This wall, behind this rotunda, was Milton seen behind Berquin.

High as it was, this wall was over-topped by a still blacker roof which could be seen behind.
This was the roof of the Batiment Neuf. You noticed in it four dormer windows with gratings;
these were the windows of the Bel Air. A chimney pierced the roof, the chimney which passed
through the dormitories.

The Bel Air, this attic of the Batiment Neuf, was a kind of large garret hall, closed with
triple gratings and double sheet iron doors studded with monstrous nails. Entering at the
north endt you had on your left the four windows, and on your right, opposite the windows,
four large square cages, with spaces between, separated ti narrow passages, built breast-
high of masonry with bars of iron to the roof.

Thenardier had been in solitary in one of these cages since the night of the 3rd of February.
Nobody has ever discovered how, or by what contrivance, he had succeeded in procuring and
hiding a bottle of that wine invented, it is said, by Desrues, with which a narcotic is mix-
ed, and which the band of the Endornseurs has rendered celebrated.

There are in many prisons treacherous employees, half ktlleta and half thieves, who aid in
escapes, who sell a faithless senate to the police, and who make much more than their salary.

On this same night, then, on which little Gavroche had picked up the two wandering children,
Brujon and Gueulemer, knowing that Babet, who had escaped that very morning, was waiting for
them in the street as well as Alontparnasse, got up softly and begins to pierce the flue of
the chimney which touched their beds, with the nail which Brujon had found. The fragments
fell upon Bmjon's bed, so that nobody heard them. The hail storm and the thunder shook the
doors upon their hinges, and made a frightful and convenient uproar in the prison. Those of
the prisoners who awoke made a feint of going to sleep again, and let Gueulcmer and Brujon
alone. Brujon was adroit; Gueulemer was vigorous. Before any sound had reached the watchman
who was lying in the grated cell with a win-dow opening into the sleeping room, the wall
was pierced, the chimney scaled, the iron trellis which closed the upper orifice of the
flue forced, and the two formidable bandits were upon the roof. The rain and the wind re-
doubled, the roof was slippery.

"What a good sorgue for a crampe," ("What a good night for an escape") said Brujon.

A gulf of six feet wide and eighty feet deep separated than from the encircling wall. At the
bottom of this gulf they saw a sentinel's musket gleaming in the obscurity. They fastened one
end of the rope which Brujon had woven in his cell, to the stumps of the bars. of the chimney
which they had just twisted off, threw the other end over the encircling wall, cleared the
gulf at a bound, clung to the coping of the wall, bestrode it, let themselves glide one after
the other down along the rope upon a little roof which adjoined the bathhouse, pulled down
their rope, leaped into the bath-house yard, crossed it, pushed open the porter's slide, near
which hung the cord, pulled the cord, opened the portocochere, and were in the street.

It was not three-quarters of an hour since they bad risen to their feet on their beds in the
darkness, their nail in hand, their project in their heads.

A few moments afterwards they had rejoined Babet and Montparnasse, who were prowling about
the neighbourhood.

In drawing down their rope, they had broken it, and there was a piece remaining fastened to
the chimney on the roof. They had re. ceived no other damage than having pretty thoroughly
skinned their hands.

That night Thenardier had received a warning, it never could be ascertained in what manner,
and did not go to sleep.

About one o'clock in the morning, the night being very dark, he saw two shadows passing on
the roof, in the rain and in the raging wind, before the window opposite his cage. One stop-
ped at the win. dow long enough for a look. It was Brujon. Thanardier recognised him, and
understood. That was enough for him. Thenardier, described as an assassin, and detained under
the charge of lying in wait by night with twee and arms, was kept constantly in sight. A sen-
tinel, who was relieved every two hours, marched with loaded gun before his cage. The Bel Air
was lighted by a reflector. The prisoner had irons on his feet weighing fifty pounds. Every
day, at four o'clock in the afternoon, a warden, escorted by two dogs--this was customary at
that period--entered his cage, laid down near his bed a two pound loaf of black bread, a jug
of water, and a dish full of very thin soup in which a few beans were swimming, examined his
irons, and struck upon the bars. This man, with his dogs, returned twice in the night.

Thenardier had obtained permission to keep a kind of an iron spike which he used to nail his bread
into a crack in the wall, "in order," said he, "to preserve it from the rats." As Thenardier was
constantly in sight, they imagined no danger from this spike. How: ever, it was remembered after-
wards that a warden had said: "It would be better to let him have nothing but a wooden pike." At
two o'clock in the morning, the sentinel, who was an old soldier, was relieved, and his place was
taken by a conscript. A few moments afterwardst the man with the dogs made his visit, and went
away without noticing anything, except the extreme youth and the "peasant air" of the "greenhorn."
Two hours afterwards, at four o'clock, when they came to relieve the conscript, they found him a-
sleep, and lying on the ground like a log near Thenardier's cage. As to Thenardier, be was not
there. His broken irons were on the floor. There was a hole in the ceiling of his cage, and above,
another hole in the roof. A board had been torn from his bed, and doubtless carried away, for it
was not found again. There was also seized in the cell a half empty bottle, containing the rest
of the drugged wine with which the soldier had been put to sleep. The soldiers bayonet had disap-
peared.

At the moment of this discovery, it was supposed that Thenardier was out of all reach. The real-
ity is, that he was no longer in the Batiment Neuf, but that he was still in great danger.

Thenardier on reaching the roof of the Batiment Neuf, found the remnant of Brujon's cord hanging
to the bars of the upper trap of the chimney, but this broken end being much too short, he was un-
able to escape over the sentry's!nth as Brujon and Gueulemer kid done.

On turning from the Rue des Ballets into the Rue du Roi de Sick, on the right you meet almost im-
mediately with a dirty recess. There was a house there in the last century, of which only the rear
wall remains, a genuine ruin wall which rises to the height of the third story among the neigh-
bouring buildings. This ruin can be recognised by two large square windows which may still be
seen; the one in the middle, nearer the right gable, is crossed by a worm-eaten joist fitted like
a cap-piece for a shore. Through these windows could formerly be discerned a high and dismal wall,
which was a part of the encircling wall of La Force.

The void which the demolished house left upon the street is half filled by a palisade fence of
rotten boards, supported by five stone posts. Hidden in this inclosure is a little shanty built
against that part of.the ruin which remains standing. The fence has a gate width a few years ago
was fastened only by a latch.

Thenardier was upon the crest of this and a little after three o'clock in the morning.

How had he got there? That is what nobody has ever been able to explain or understand. The light-
ning must have both confused and helped him. Did house the ladders and the scaffoldings of the
slaters to get from roof to roof, from inclosure to inclosure, from compartment to compartment,
to the buildings of the Charlemagne counsthen the buildings of the Cour Saint Lows, the encirc-
ling wall, and from thence to the ruin on the Rue du Roi dc Sicile? But there were gaps in this
route which seemed to render it impossible. Did lie lay down the plank from his bed as a bridge
from the roof of the lid Air to the encircling wall, and did he crawl on his belly along the cop-
ing of the wall, all round the prison as far as the ruin? But the encircling wall of La Force
followed an indented and uneven line, it rose and fell. it sank down to the barracks of the fire-
men, it rose up to the bathing-house, it was cut by buildings, it was not of the same height on
the Hotel eamokmon as on the Rue Payee, it had slopes and right angles everywhere; and then the
sentinels would have seen the dark outline of the fugitive; on this supposition again, the route
taken by Thenardier is still almost inexplicable. By either way, an impossible flight. Had Then-
ardier, illuminated by that fearful thirst for liberty which changes precipices into ditches and
gratings into osier screens, a cripple into an athlete, an old gouty into a bird, stupidity into
instinct, instinct into intelligence, and intelligence into genius, had Thenardier invented and
extemporised a third method? It has never been known.

One cannot always comprehend the marvels of escape. The man who escapes, let us repeat,
is inspired; there is something of the star and the lightning in the mysterious gleam of flight;
the effort towards deliverance is not less surprising than the flight towards the sublime; and
we say of an escaped robber: How did he manage to scale that roof? just as it is said of Cor-
neille: Where did he learn that he would die?

However this may be, dripping with sweat, soaked through by the rain, his clothes in strips, his
hands skinned, his elbows bleeding, his knees torn, Thenardier had reached what children, in
their figurative language, call the edge of the wall of the ruin, he had stretched himself on it
at full length, and there his strength failed him. A steep escarpment, three stories high, sep-
arated him from the pavement of the street.

The rope which he had was too short.

He was waiting there, pale, exhausted, having lost all the hope which he had had, still covered
by night, but saying to himself that day was just about to dawn, dismayed at the idea of hearing
in a few moments the neighbouring clock of Saint Paul's strike four, the hour when they would
come to relieve the sentinel and would find him asleep under the broken roof, gazing with a kind
of stupor through the fearful depth, by the glimmer of the lamps, upon the wet and black pave-
ment, that longed for yet terrible pavement which was death yet which was liberty.

He asked himself if his three accomplices in escape had succeeded, if they had heard him, and if
they would come to his aid. He listened. Except a patrolman, nobody had passed through the street
since he had been there. Nearly all the travel of the gardeners of Montreal!

Charonne, Vincennes, and Betty to the Market, is through the Rue Saint Antoine.

The clock struck four. Thenardier shuddered. A few moments afterwards, that wild and confused
noise which follows upon the discovery of an escape, broke out in the prison. The sounds of doors
opening and shutting, the grinding of gratings upon their hinges, the tumult in the guard-house,
the harsh calls of the gate-keepers, the sound of the butts of muskets upon the pavement of the
yards reached him. Lights moved up and down in the grated windows of the dormitories, a torch
ran along the attic of the Bfititnent Neuf, the firemen of the barracks alongside had been call-
ed. Their caps, which the torches lighted up in the rain, were going to and fro along the roofs.
At the same time Thenardier saw in the direction of the Bastille a whitish cloud throwing a
dismal pallor over the lower part of the sky.

He was on the top of a wall ten inches wide, stretched out beneath the storm, with two precipices,
at the right and at the left, unable to stir, giddy at the prospect of falling, and horror-strick-
en at the catainty of arrest, and his thoughts, like the pendulum of a clock, went from one of
these ideas to the other: "Dead if I fall, taken if I stay."

In this anguish, he suddenly saw, the street being still wrapped in. obscurity, a man who was
gliding. along the walls, and who ame from the direction of the Rue Payee, stop in the recess
above which Thenardier was as it were suspended. This man was joined br, second, who was walk-
ing with the same precaution, then by a third, then by a fourth. When the men were together,
one of them lifted the latch of the gate in the fence, and they all four entered the inclosurc
of the shanty. They were exactly under Thatudim These men had evidently selected this recess so
as to be able to talk without being seen by the passers or by the sentinel who guards the gate
of La Force a few steps off. It must also be stated that the rain kept this sentinel blockaded
in his sentry-box. Thenardier, not being able to distinguish their fates, listened to their
words with the desperate attention of a wretch who feels that he is lost.

Something which resembled hope passed before Thenardier's eyes; these men spoke argot.

The first said, in a low voice, but distinctly:

Something which resembled hope passed before Thenardier's eyes; these men spoke argot.

"Decorrons. What is it we maguillems irigo?"'

The second answered:

"Il lansquine enough to put out the rife of the rabonin. And then the coqueere are
going by, there is a grivier there who carries a gaffe, shall we let them embalm us icicaille?"'

These are two words, ieigo and icicaille, which both main iri [here], and which be-
long, the first to the argot of the Derrieres, the second to the argot of the Temple,
were revelations to Themtrdier. By ieigo he riscd Brujon, who was a prowler of the
Derrieres, and by ickai/efrigbet, who, among all his other trades, had been a second-
hand dealer at the Temple.

The ancient argot of the age of Louis XIV., is now spoken only at the Temple. and Babe
was the only one who spoke it mutepurely. Without incaille, Thinardier would not have
recognised hint, for he had entirely disguised his voice.

Meanwhile the third put in a word:

"Nothing is urgent yet, let us wait a little. How do we know that he doesn't need our
help?"

By this, which was only French, Thonardier recognised Mont-parnasse, whose elegance
consisted in understanding all argots and speaking none.

As to the fourth, he was silent, but his huge shoulders betrayed him. Thenardier had
no hesitation. It was Gueulemer.

Brujon replied almost impetuously, but stilt in a low voice:

"'What is it you bonnez us there? The tapissier couldn't draw his crampe. He don't know
the true, indeed! Bouliner his limaceand faucher his empaffes, maquiller a tortouse,
caler boulins in the lourdes, braser The taffes, magnifier earoubles, Anther the Bards,
balance his torionsc outside, panguer himself, ramonfier himself, one niust be a mark!!
The old man couldn't do it, he don't know how to posepinerr a

Babet added, still in that prudent, classic argot which was spoken by Poulailler and
Cartouche, and which is to the bold, new, strongly-coloured, and hazardous argot which
Brujon used, what the language of Racine is to the language of Andre Chains:

"Your orgue tapissier must have been made marron on the stairs. One must be arcasien,. He
is a galifard. He has been played the harnache by a roussin, perhaps even by a roussi, who
has beaten him comtois. Lend your oche, Montparnasse, do you hear those criblements in
the college? You. have seen all those camoufles, He has tombe, come! He must be left
to draw his twenty longes. I have no taf, I am no taffeur, that is colombe, but there is
nothing more but to make the lezards, or otherwise they will make us gambiller for it.
Don't renauder, come with nousiergue. Let us go and picter a rouillarde encible.

"Friends are not left in difficulty," muttered Montparnasse.

"I bonds you that he is azalade," replied Brujon. "At the hour which loque,the mpissier
isn't worth a brogue/ We an do nothing here. likarrons. I expect every moment that a cope
will charm me in toper 2

Montparnasse resisted now but feebly; the truth is, that these four men, with that faith-
fulness which bandits exhibit in never abandoning each other, had been prowling all night
about La Force at whatever risk, in hope of seeing Thenardier rise above some wall. But
the night which was becoming really too fine, it was storming enough to keep all the streets
empty, the cold which was growing upon them, their soaked clothing, their wet shoes, the a-
larming uproar. which had just broken out in the prison, the passing hours, the patrolmen
they had met, hope deporting, fear returning, all this unpelkd them to retreat. Montparnasse
himself, who was, perhaps, to some slight extent a son-in-law of Thenardier, yielded. A mo-
ment more, they were gone. Thenardier gasped upon his wall like .the ship wrecked sailors
of the If Idasc on their raft when they saw the skip which had appeared, vanish in the horizon.

He dared not call them, a cry overheard might destroy all; he lad an idea, a final one, a
flash of light; he took from his pocket the end of Brujon's rope, which he had detached
from the chimney of the Bailment Neuf, and threw it into the inclosure.

This rope fell at their feet.

"A widow!" said Bohm

"My tortouse!" said Brujon.

"There is the innkeeper,' said Montparnasse.

They raised their eyes. Thenardier advanced his head a Hale. "Ouick!" said Montparnasse,
"have you the other end of the rope, Brujon?"

"Ares:

"Tie the two ends together, we will throw him the rope, he will fasten it to the wall, he
will have enough to get down."

Thenardier ventured to speak:

"I am benumbed."

"We will warm you."

"I can't stir."

"Let yourself slip down, we will catch you."

"My hands are stiff."

"Only tie the rope to the wall."

"I can't."

"One of us must get up," said Montparnasse.

"Three stories!" said Brujon.

An old plaster flue, which had served for a stove which had formerly been in use in the shan-
ty, crept along the wall, rising almost to the spot at which they saw Thenardier. This flue,
then very much cracked and full of seams, has since fallen, but its traces can still be seen.
It was very small.

"We could get up by that," said Montparnasse.

"By that flue!" exclaimed Babet, "an orguc,' never! it would take a mien." 2

"It would take a mome," added Brujon.

"Where can we find a brat?" said Gueulemer.

"Wait," said Montparnasse, "I have the thing."

He opened the gate of the fence softly, made sure that nobody was passing in the street, went
out carefully, shut the door after him, and started on a run in the direction of the Bastille.

Seven or eight minutes elapsed, eight thousand centuries to Thenardier; Babet, Brujon, and
Gueulemer kept their teeth clenched; the door at last opened again, and Montparnasse appeared,
out of breath, with Gavroche. The rain still kept the street entirely empty.

Little Gavroche entered the inclosure and looked upon these bandit forms with a quiet air. The
water was dripping from his hair. Gueulemer addressed him:

"Brat, are you a man?"

Gavioche shrugged his shoulders and answered:

'A mome like mezig is an orgue, and orgues like vousailles are momes."'

"How the mion plays with the spittoon!"' exclaimed Babel.

"The mome patinois isn't maquille of fertille lansquinee," added Brujon.

"What is it you want?" said Gavroche.

Montparnasse answered:

To climb up by this flue."

"With this widow," 3 said 33abet.

"And ligotcr the tortonsc," continued Brujon.

"To the mottt6 of the montant," 6 resumed 13abet.

"To the pica of the vanternc," added Brujon.

"And then?" said Gavroche.

"That's all!" said Gueulemer.

The gamin examined the rope, the flue, the wall, the windoits, and made that inexpressible
and disdainful sound with the lips which signifies:

"What's that?"

"There is a man up there whom you will save," replied Monk parnasse.

"Will you?" added Brujon.

"Goosy!" answered the child, as if the question appeared to him absurd; and he took off his
shoes.

Gueulemer caught up Gavroche with one hand, put him on the roof of the shanty, the worm-ea-
ten boards of which bent beneath the child's weight, and handed him the rope which Brujon
had tied together during the absence of Montparnasse. The gamin went towards the flue, which
it was easy to enter, thanks to a large hole at the roof. Just as he was about to start, Then-
ardier, who saw safety and life approaching, bent over the edge of the wall; the first gleam
of day lighted up his forehead reeking with sweat, his livid checks, his thin and savage nose,
his grey bristly beard, and Gavroche recognised him:

"Hold on!" said he, "it is my father!--Well, that don't hinder!"

And taking the rope in his teeth, he resolutely commenced the ascent.

He reached the top of the ruin, bestrode the old wall liken horse, and tied the rope firmly
to the upper cross-bar of the window.

A moment afterwards Thettardier was in the street.

As soon as he had touched the pavement, as soon as he felt himself out of danger, he was no
longer either fatigued, benumbed. or trembling; the terrible things through which he had pass-
ed vanished like a whiff of smoke, all that strange and ferocious intellect awoke, and found
itself erect and free, ready to march forward. The man's first words were these:

"Now, who are we going to eat?"

It is needless to explain the meaning of this frightfully transparent word, which signifies
all at once to kill, to assassinate, and to plunder. Eat, real meaning: devour.

"Let us hide first," said Brujon, "finish in three words and we will separate immediately.
There was an affair which had a good look in the Rue Plumet, a deserted street, an isolated
house, an old rusty grating upon a garden, some lone women."

"Well, why not?" inquired Thenarcher.

"Your fee, Eponine, has been to see the thing," answered Babet.

"And she brought a biscuit to Magnon," added Gueulemer, "nothing to mequiller there."'

"The fee isn't loffe," said Thenardier. "Still we must see."

"Yes, yes," said Brujon, "we must see."

Meantime none of these men appeared longer to see Gavroche who, during this colloquy, had seat-
ed himself upon one of the stone supports of the fence; he waited a few minutes, perhaps for
his father to turn towards him, then he put on his shoes, and said:

"It is over? you have no more use for me? men! you are out of your trouble. I am going. I must
go and get my maim up."

And he went away.

The five men went out of the inclosure one after another.

When Gavroche had disappeared at the turn of the Rue des Bal-lets, Babet took Thamidier aside.

"Did you notice that mien?" he asked him.

"What ration?"

"The mien who climbed up the wall and brought you the rope."

"Not much."

"Well, I don't know, but it seems to nie that it is your son."

"Pshaw!" said Thenardier, "do you think so?"

BOOK SIXTH:
LITTLE GAVROCHE