Thus the years passed and Cosette grew into girlhood.
PART THREE
MARIUS
Book One
Paris in Microcosm
I
Parvulus
PARIS HAD her especial child and the woods have their especial bird. The bird is the sparrow, and the child is the street-urchin.
Paris and childhood, the heat of the furnace and the light of the dawn. Strike the two together and the spark you will draw from them is a small live person – homuncio, as Plautus would say.
A small, happy person. He does not eat every day but he goes to the play every evening if he chooses. He has no shirt to his back, no shoes on his feet, no roof over his head; like the flies, he does without these things. He is aged between seven and thirteen, lives in a gang, haunts the streets, sleeps in the open, wears a pair of his father’s old trousers which come down to his heels, an old hat belonging to some other father which comes down below his ears, a single brace with a yellow border. He bustles about, keeps his eyes open, rummages everywhere, squanders time, hangs round the cafés, knows thieves and is familiar with trollops, talks argot, sings obscene ditties and has no evil in him. In his heart there is a pearl of innocence, and pearls do not dissolve in mud. While man is still a child God keeps him innocent.
If you ask the great city, ‘Who is this person?,’ she will answer, ‘He’s my child.’
II
Some of his characteristics
The Paris urchin is the dwarf born of a giantess.
Let us not exaggerate. This gutter-innocent may sometimes have a shirt, but if so only one; he may have boots, but they lack soles. He may have a dwelling, which he loves because there his mother awaits him; but he prefers the streets, because there he finds freedom. He has his own games and his own enmities, with hatred of the bourgeois at the bottom of them. He has his own metaphors: to die is ‘to eat dandelion root’. He has his employments; he fetches cabs and lets down their steps, sweeps muddy crossings in the rain (making a pont des arts, as he terms it), repeats the latest official pronouncement for the benefit of the general public, cleans out the weeds that grow between paving-stones. He has his own money consisting of any scrap of worked metal picked up in public places. This strange currency, known to him as loques, is strictly valued and controlled in his child’s bohemia.
He has his own fauna which he minutely scrutinizes in dark corners, all manner of insects, ‘death’s-head bugs’, ‘scavengers’, and ‘devils’ – the last a species of black beetle with a menacing two-pronged tail. He has his fabulous monster, with a scaly stomach and horned back but neither a lizard nor a toad, a loathsome black and slimy creature inhabiting old chalk-pits and quarries which moves on its belly, sometimes slowly and sometimes fast, which utters no sound but is always on the watch, and is so terrible that no one has ever set eyes on it. He calls this ‘le sourd’, which may be interpreted as ‘the soundless’. To search for sourds among the stones is a daring enterprise. Another amusement is to lift up a paving-stone and study the wood-lice. Every part of Paris is known to him for the interesting things that may be found there. There are earwigs in the timber-yards near the Ursulines, centipedes in the Pantheon, tadpoles in the ditches of the Champ de Mars.
When it comes to repartee the urchin is as gifted as Talleyrand, no less cynical but more honest. He has a talent for unpredictable mirth. He startles shopkeepers with sudden laughter, a ribaldry ranging from high comedy to farce.
A funeral passes, with a doctor among the mourners. ‘Hey!’ yells the urchin. ‘When did the doctors start delivering their own work?’ A grave-faced citizen among the onlookers, adorned with spectacles and a fob, swings round in a fury.
‘Rascal, you pinched my wife!’
‘What me, Monsieur? Search me!’
III
His pleasures
Of an evening, by virtue of the pennies he always manages to pick up, homuncio goes to the theatre, and in crossing the threshold he is transformed. The urchin becomes a god. A theatre is like a ship capsized with its hold uppermost; and this hold, the gallery, is the place of the gods. The god is to the urchin what the butterfly is to the grub, the same being borne on air. He has only to be there, radiating happiness with all his aptitude for enthusiasm and delight, the clapping of his hands like the beating of wings, for that congested ship’s hold, squalid, foetid, hideous, and unhealthy, to become a Paradise.
Give a youngster what is superfluous, deprive him of what is needful, and you have an urchin.
The urchin does not lack literary instinct, but – it may be admitted with appropriate regrets – he has little classical bent. His nature is not that of an academic. To give an example, his admiration for that esteemed actress, Mademoiselle Mars, was tinged with irony. He called her Mademoiselle Huche, or, as it might be, Mademoiselle All Right.
He squeals, leers, reviles and quarrels, wears child’s clothing under the tattered gown of a philosopher, fishes in the gutters, hunts in the sewers, haunts the street corners with his ribaldry, his laughter and his malice, whistles, sings, applauds, derides, finds without seeking, knows what he does not know, is at once a Spartan and a pickpocket, mad to the point of wisdom, lyrical to the point of lewdness, squatting on Olympus, wallowing in the mire and emerging decked with stars.
The Paris urchin is Rabelais in miniature. Little amazes him and still less impresses him. He scorns superstition, deflates exaggeration, laughs at mystery, sticks out his tongue at ghosts, brings pretension down to earth, caricatures the over-blown epic. Not because he is lacking in poetry, far from it; but for the solemn vision he substitutes his own irreverent fancy. Confronted by the giant Adamastor he would say, ‘Blimey, a circus clown!’
IV
His uses
Paris begins with its strollers and ends with its street-urchins, two species produced by no other town. Passive acceptance content merely to look on, and inexhaustible enterprise; Respectability and Riot. In no other town are these so much a part of the natural scene. All monarchy is in the stroller, all anarchy in the urchin.
This pale-faced child of the Paris back streets lives and grows, gets all tied up and then finds his feet, in hardship, in the presence of social and human realities of which he is the perceptive witness. He thinks himself heedless but is not. He watches prepared to laugh, but prepared also for other things. You who are Prejudice, Abuse, Ignominy, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice, Fanaticism, beware of the wide-eyed urchin. He will grow up.
He is born of the rankest clay, but a handful of mud and a breath created Adam. It sufficed for a god to pass. A god has always passed by the urchin, Destiny is at work upon him, and the word, gamin, as we use it, contains the element of Chance. This pigmy shaped of common earth, ignorant, unlettered, uncouth, vulgar, mob-made, what will he grow into, an Ionian or a Boeotian? We must await the turning of the wheel, the spirit of Paris, the demon which creates both children of hazard and Men of Destiny, refining the potter’s work, making an amphora out of a common jug.
V
His limits
The urchin loves the town but he also loves solitude, having in him something of the sage – urbis amator, like Fuscus, and ruris amator, like Flaccus.
To wander in contemplation, that is to say, to loiter, is for a philosopher an excellent way of passing the time, and particularly in that bastard countryside, ugly as a rule but fascinating for its twofold nature, which surrounds many large cities, and notably Paris. To observe those outskirts is to observe an amphibious world, trees giving way to rooftops, grass to pavements, furrowed fields to streets of shops, rutted lanes to human passions, murmurous nature to the clamour of mankind; and this is of extraordinary interest. Hence the fascination, for those of a thoughtful mind, of a stroll through unattractive regions to which only one adjective, sad, can be applied.
The writer of these lines was for many years an explorer of the outskirts of Paris, the gateways to the city, and they have left him with many memories.
Patches of worn grass, stony paths, chalk and clay and rubble; the harsh monotony of fallow and untilled land; the early crops of market-gardeners seen suddenly in a sheltered place; the mingling of wilderness and order; the rough clearings where the drummers of the garrison parade, setting up a stuttering imitation of battle; places that are solitudes by day and the haunts of footpads, death-traps by night; the ramshackle windmill of which the sails still turn; the apparatus of a stone-quarry; the drinking-booth by the cemetery; the mysterious charm of high, shady walls cutting squarely into great stretches of wasteland bathed in sunshine and alive with butterflies – all these things attracted him.
Very few people know those singular places – la Glacière, la Canette, the hideous Grenelle wall pock-marked with cannon-fire, Mont-Parnasse, la Fosse-aux-Loups, les Aubiers on the bank of the Marne, Montsouris, la Tombe-Issoire, and the Pierre-Plate de Châtillon where there is a worked-out quarry now only used for growing mushrooms, with a trap-door of rotting planks leading into it. The countryside of Rome is one idea and the surroundings of Paris are another; to see no more than the prospect of fields, houses, and trees is to be confined to the surface, for all aspects of things are thoughts of God. The place where country merges into town is always impregnated with an underlying melancholy, nature and humankind join voices and local characteristics appear.
Anyone who has wandered as we have done in those solitudes on the outskirts of our suburbs, which may be termed the limbo of Paris, will have encountered here and there, in the most deserted spots and at the most unexpected moments, tumultuous groups of pale-faced, ragged, unwashed children, intent upon their own pursuits, amid the wild flowers in the shadow of a neglected hedge or a mouldering wall. They are the runaway children of the very poor, the outer boulevards their dwelling-place and this limbo their private domain. They are perpetual truants, artlessly singing their repertoire of scabrous songs, living their true life here, far from any supervision, in the gentle light of May or June; clustered in a circle round a hole in the ground into which they flip marbles with their thumb, quarrelling over farthings, rowdy, carefree, neglected, and happy. But at the sight of you they remember that they have business to transact and a living to earn; they offer to sell you an old woollen stocking filled with beetles, or a bunch of lilac. These little bands of children are among the charms, at once delightful and heart-breaking, of the outskirts of Paris.
And sometimes amid the cluster of boys there will be girls as well – their sisters, perhaps? – some of them quite big girls, lean and sunburnt, freckle-faced, wearing headgear of grasses or poppies, gay, wild-looking and barefoot. One sees them eating cherries in the long grass, and in the evening one hears their laughter. These groups, seen bathed in the warm sun of midday, or half-seen in the dark, linger in the thoughts and memories of the wanderer.
Paris is the centre, its environs the circumference, of the whole world for these children. They never venture beyond, being no more able to leave the atmosphere of Paris than a fish is able to leave the water. For them nothing exists two leagues beyond the city gates. Ivry, Gentilly, Arcueil, Belleville, Aubervilliers, Menilmontant, Choisy-le-Roi, Billancourt, Meudon, Issy, Vanvres, Sèvres, Puteaux, Neuilly, Gennevilliers, Colombes, Romainville, Chatou, Asnières, Bougival, Nanterre, Enghien, Noisy-le-Sec, Nogent, Gournay, Drancy, Gonesse – these are the bounds of the Universe.
VI
A fragment of history
At the period of this tale, which after all is not very remote, there was not to be found, as there is today, a sergent de ville at the corner of every street (a benefaction we have no time to discuss.) Vagabond children were numerous in Paris. The statistics show that on an average 260 homeless children were rounded up every year in un-enclosed areas, on building sites and under the arches of the bridges. One of these rookeries, which is still famous, produced the ‘swallows of the Pont d’Arcole’. This, it may be remarked, is the most disastrous of all social ills. All adult crime has its source in the vagabondage of the young.
Nevertheless we may except Paris, and in some degree, despite what we have said, the exception is justified. Whereas in every other great city the forgotten child becomes the deboshed man, and whereas nearly everywhere the child left to his own devices becomes rootless and immersed in open vice which destroys in him all conscience and sense of probity, the Paris urchin, we insist, however footloose and disreputable he may appear on the surface, remains in himself almost unspoiled. It is a magnificent phenomenon, splendidly manifest in the honesty of our popular revolutions, a kind of incorruptibility born of the instinct that resides in the air of Paris like salt in the waters of the ocean. To breathe Paris is to preserve one’s soul.
But to say this is in no way to lessen the pang that assails us whenever we set eyes on one of those children who seem to trail behind them the shreds of a broken family. It is nothing very uncommon in our present state of civilization, incomplete as it still is, for disrupted households to disperse in darkness, no longer knowing what has become of the children, and leaving them on the public highways. Hence those obscure destinies. It is called, for the sad event has acquired a phrase of its own, ‘being thrown on the Paris streets’.
Be it said in passing that abandoning children was not discouraged under the old monarchy. A touch of Egypt and Bohemia among the lower orders suited the book of those in high places. Hatred of popular education had become a dogma. What purpose was served by ‘semi-literacy’? Such was the principle. But the vagabond child is the corollary of the unlettered child.
Moreover the monarchy sometimes needed children and scoured the streets for them. Louis XIV, to go back no further, had to build a fleet. It was a necessary measure, but consider what it entailed. No fleet of sailing vessels, dependent on the wind, could exist without attendant vessels propelled by other means to tow them to their moorings and link them with the shore. Oared galleys were to the fleet of those days what steam-tugs are to the fleet of today. But the galleys needed crews, that is to say, convicts, galley-slaves. Colbert, through the provincial governors and parliaments, created as many convicts as possible, and the magistrates gave him every assistance. The man who failed to raise his hat at the passing of a procession was judged to be a Huguenot and sent to the galleys. Any child found loitering in the streets, provided he was over the age of fifteen and homeless, went to the galleys. A great reign; a great century.
Under Louis XV children disappeared in Paris, kidnapped by the police for reasons that remain a mystery. Hideous tales were whispered of the King’s ‘purple baths’. Barbier refers naïvely to these matters. It happened sometimes that the press-gangs, or exempt-gangs, took children possessing parents, for want of others. The parents invoked the law, Parliament intervened – and who was hanged? Not the press-gangs but the parents.
VII
Urchin classification
The street-urchins of Paris, the gaminerie, are almost a caste of which it may be said, ‘not everyone can join’. The word itself, gamin, was printed for the first time in 1834, in a small work entitled Claude Gueux, thus passing from popular slang into the literary language. Its use occasioned some scandal, but it came to be accepted.
The attributes entitling a gamin to the esteem of his fellows are very varied. We know of one who was greatly honoured and admired because he had seen a man fall from the top of one of the towers of Notre Dame; another hero succeeded in getting into the back-yard where the statues intended for the dome of the Invalides were temporarily housed and had ‘swiped’ a bit of lead; a third had seen a coach overturn, and a fourth ‘knew’ a soldier who had nearly knocked out a citizen’s eye. The first of these instances accounts for a characteristic flight of urchin-rhetoric: ‘Coo, aren’t I unlucky – never even seen anyone fall off a fifth floor!’
There is an old country jest that is not without eloquence. ‘Père So-and-so, your wife has died of her illness. Why did you not send for the doctor?’ … ‘What would you, Monsieur? The poor have to attend to their own dying
.’ But if this retort embodies all the sardonic acceptance of the peasantry, the free-thinking anarchy of the Paris urchin is certainly contained in the following. A condemned man on his way to the scaffold was listening in the tumbril to his confessor. An urchin yelled: ‘He’s talking to a sky-pilot, the dirty funk!’
A degree of audacity in religious matters improves the urchin’s standing. To be strong-minded is important. To attend executions becomes a duty. You look at the guillotine and laugh. You give it all sorts of nicknames – ‘The last course’, ‘the last mouthful’, ‘the grunter’, ‘old Mother Nowhere’, and so on. To be sure of missing nothing you climb walls or trees, or on to balconies or roofs. The urchin is a born steeplejack, no more afraid of chimney-tops than a sailor is of a mast. No fair-ground equals La Grève, the place of execution, and Sanson, the executioner, and the Abbé Montès are the true celebrities. You hoot the victim to encourage him, and sometimes you admire him. The youthful Lacenaire* uttered the following prophetic words after watching the atrocious Dautun die bravely: ‘I was jealous of him.’ All the guillotine’s victims are well-remembered, their memory handed down, their bearing, even to the clothes they wore.
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