Les Misérables, v. 4

"I'll push him and you'll pull him."

In a second the little fellow was pushed up, dragged, pulled, and drawn through the hole before he knew where he was; and Gavroche, entering after him, kicked away the ladder, which fell in the grass, and clapped his hands as he shouted, "There we are! Long live General Lafayette!" This explosion over, he added, "Brats, you are in my house."

Gavroche was, in fact, at home. Oh, unexpected utility of the useless! Oh, charity of great things! Oh, goodness of the giants! This huge monument, which had contained a thought of the Emperor, had become the lodging of a gamin. The brat had been accepted and sheltered by the colossus. The cits in their Sunday clothes who passed by the elephant of the Bastille were prone to say, as they measured it with a contemptuous look from the eyes flush with their head, Of what service is that? It served to save from cold, from frost, from damp and rain; to protect from the winter wind; to preserve from sleeping in the mud, which entails fever, and from sleeping in the snow, which causes death, a little fatherless and motherless boy without bread, clothes, or shelter. It served to shelter the innocent boy whom society repulsed. It served to diminish the public wrong. It was a lair opened to him against whom all doors were closed. It seemed as if the old wretched mastodon, attacked by vermin and oblivion, covered with warts, mould, and ulcers, tottering, crumbling, abandoned, and condemned, – a species of colossal mendicant asking in vain the alms of a benevolent glance in the midst of the highway, – had taken pity on this other beggar, the poor pygmy who walked about without shoes on his feet, without a ceiling over his head, blowing his fingers, dressed in rags, and supporting life on what was thrown away. This is of what use the elephant of the Bastille was; and this idea of Napoleon, disdained by men, had been taken up again by God. What had only been illustrious had become august. The Emperor would have needed, in order to realize what he meditated, porphyry, bronze, iron, gold, and marble; but for God the old collection of planks, beams, and plaster was sufficient. The Emperor had had a dream of genius. In this Titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, raising its trunk, and spouting all around glad and living waters, he wished to incarnate the people; and God had made a greater thing of it, for He lodged a child in it.

The hole by which Gavroche entered was a breach scarce visible from the outside, as it was concealed, as we said, under the elephant's belly, and so narrow that only cats and boys could pass through it.

"Let us begin," said Gavroche, "by telling the porter that we are not at home."

And plunging into the darkness with certainty like a man who knows every corner of the room, he took a plank and stopped up the hole. Gavroche plunged again into the darkness; the children heard the fizzing of a match dipped into the bottle of phosphorus, – for lucifer matches did not yet exist, and the Fumade fire-producer represented progress at that day. A sudden light made them wink. Gavroche had lit one of those bits of string dipped in pitch which are called "cellar rats;" and this thing, which smoked more than it illumined, rendered the inside of the elephant indistinctly visible. Gavroche's two guests looked around them, and had much such a feeling as any one would have if shut up in the Heidelberg tun, or, better still, what Jonas must have experienced in the biblical belly of the whale. An entire gigantic skeleton was visible to them and enveloped them; above their heads a long brown beam, from which sprang at regular distances massive cross-bars, represented the spine with the ribs; stalactites of plaster hung down like viscera, and vast spider webs formed from one side to the other dusty diaphragms. Here and there in corners could be seen large black spots which seemed alive, and changed places rapidly with a quick and startled movement. The pieces which had fallen from the elephant's back on its belly had filled up the concavity, so that it was possible to walk on it as on a flooring. The youngest lad nudged his brother and said, —

"It is black."

This remark made Gavroche cry out, for the petrified air of the two lads rendered a check necessary.

"What's that you give me?" he shouted; "do you gab? You have dislikes, eh! I suppose you want the Tuileries? Are you brutes? Tell me, but I warn you that I do not belong to the regiment of spoonies. Well, to hear you talk one would think that your father was a prince of the blood."

A little roughness is good in terror, for it reassures; the two children drew nearer to Gavroche, who, affected paternally by this confidence, passed from sternness to gentleness, and addressing the younger lad, —

"Blockhead," he said, toning down the insult with a caressing inflection of the voice, "it is outside that it's black. Outside it rains, and here it does not rain; outside it is cold, and here there is not a breath of wind; outside there is a heap of people, and here there's nobody; outside there's not even the moon, and here there's a candle, the deuce take it all!"

The two lads began looking round the apartment with less terror, but Gavroche did not allow them any leisure for contemplation.

"Quick," he said.

And he thrust them toward what we are very happy to call the end of the room, where his bed was. Gavroche's bed was perfect, that is to say, there was a mattress, a coverlet, and an alcove with curtains. The mattress was a straw mat, and the coverlet was a rather wide wrapper of coarse gray wool, very warm, and nearly new. This is what the alcove was, – three long props were driven securely into the plaster soil, that is to say, the elephant's belly, two in front and one behind, and were fastened by a cord at the top, so as to form a hollow pyramid. These props supported a grating of brass wire, simply laid upon them, but artistically fastened with iron wire, so that it entirely surrounded the three poles. A row of large stones fastened the lattice-work down to the ground, so that nothing could pass; and this lattice was merely a piece of the brass-work put up in aviaries in menageries. Gavroche's bed was under the wire-work as in a cage, and the whole resembled an Esquimaux's tent. Gavroche moved a few of the stones that held down the lattice-work in front, and shouted to the lads, —

"Now then, on all fours."

He made his guests enter the cage cautiously, then went in after them, brought the stones together again, and hermetically closed the opening. They lay down all three on the mat, and though they were all so short, not one of them could stand upright in the alcove. Gavroche still held the "cellar rat" in his hand.

"Now," he said, "to roost; I am going to suppress the chandelier."

"What is that, sir?" the elder of the lads asked Gavroche, pointing to the brass grating.

"That," said Gavroche, gravely, "is on account of the rats. Go to roost!"

Still he thought himself obliged to add a few words of instruction for these young creatures, and continued, —

"It comes from the Jardin des Plantes, and is employed to guard ferocious animals. There is a whole store-house full; you have only to climb over a wall, crawl through a window, and pass under a door, and you can have as much as you like."

While speaking he wrapped up the little boy in the blanket, who murmured, —

"Oh, that is nice, it's so warm!"

Gavroche took a glance of satisfaction at the coverlet.

"That also comes from the Jardin des Plantes," he said, "I took it from the monkeys."

And pointing out to the elder one the straw mat on which he was lying, which was very thick and admirably made, he added, —

"That belonged to the giraffe."

After a pause he continued, —

"The beasts had all those things, and I took them from them; they were not at all angry, for I told them that I wanted them for the elephant."

There was another interval of silence, after which he continued, "You climb over walls and snap your fingers at the Government."

The two lads gazed with a timid and stupefied respect at this intrepid and inventive being, a vagabond like them, isolated like them, weak like them, who had something admirable and omnipotent about him, who appeared to them supernatural, and whose face was composed of all the grimaces of an old mountebank, mingled with the simplest and most charming smile.

"Then, sir," the elder lad said timidly, "you are not afraid of the policemen?"

Gavroche limited himself to answering, —

"Brat! we don't say 'policemen,' we say 'slops.'"

The younger had his eyes wide open, but said nothing; as he was at the edge of the mat, the elder being in the centre, Gavroche tucked in the coverlet around him as a mother would have done, and raised the mat under his head with old rags, so as to make him a pillow. Then he turned to the elder boy, —

"Well! it is jolly here, eh?"

"Oh, yes!" the lad answered, as he looked at Gavroche with the expression of a saved angel.

The two poor little fellows, who were wet through, began to grow warm again.

"By the bye," Gavroche went on, "why were you blubbering?"

And pointing to the younger boy he said to his brother, —

"A baby like that, I don't say no; but for a tall chap like you to cry is idiotic, you look like a calf."

"Well, sir," the lad said, "we hadn't any lodging to go to."

"Brat," Gavroche remarked, "we don't say 'lodging,' but 'crib.'"

"And then we felt afraid of being all alone like that in the night."

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

"Thank you, sir," said the boy.

"Listen to me," Gavroche went on. "You must never blubber for anything. I'll take care of you, and you'll see what fun we shall have. In summer we'll go to the Glacière with Navet, a pal of mine; we'll bathe in the dock, and run about naked on the timber floats in front of the bridge of Austerlitz, for that makes the washerwomen rage. They yell, they kick, and, Lord! if you only knew how ridiculous they are! We'll go and see the skeleton man; he's alive at the Champs Élysées, and the cove is as thin as blazes. And then I will take you to the play, and let you see Frederick Lemaître; I get tickets, for I know some actors, and even performed myself once in a piece. We were a lot of boys who ran about under a canvas, and that made the sea. I will get you an engagement at my theatre. We will go and see the savages, but they ain't real savages, they wear pink fleshing which forms creases, and you can see repairs made at their elbows with white thread. After that we will go to the Opera, and enter with the claquers. The claque at the Opera is very well selected, though I wouldn't care to be seen with the claque on the boulevard. At the Opera, just fancy, they're people who pay their twenty sous, but they are asses, and we call them dish-clouts. And then we will go and see a man guillotined, and I'll point out the executioner to you, Monsieur Sanson; he lives in the Rue de Marais, and he's got a letter-box at his door. Ah! we shall amuse ourselves famously."

At this moment a drop of pitch fell on Gavroche's hand, and recalled him to the realities of life.

"The devil," he said, "the match is wearing out. Pay attention! I can't afford more than a sou a month for lighting, and when people go to bed they are expected to sleep. We haven't the time to read M. Paul de Kock's romances. Besides, the light might pass through the crevices of the gate, and the slops might see it."

"And then," timidly observed the elder lad, who alone dared to speak to Gavroche and answer him, "a spark might fall on the straw, and we must be careful not to set the house on fire."

"You mustn't say 'set the house on fire,'" Gavroche remarked, "but 'blaze the crib.'"

The storm grew more furious, and through the thunder-peals the rain could be heard pattering on the back of the colossus.

"The rain's sold!" said Gavroche. "I like to hear the contents of the water-bottle running down the legs of the house. Winter's an ass; it loses its time, it loses its trouble; it can't drown us, and so that is the reason why the old water-carrier is so growling with us."

This allusion to the thunder, whose consequences Gavroche, in his quality as a nineteenth-century philosopher, accepted, was followed by a lengthened flash, so dazzling that a portion of it passed through the hole in the elephant's belly. Almost at the same moment the thunder roared, and very furiously. The two little boys uttered a cry, and rose so quickly that the brass grating was almost thrown down; but Gavroche turned toward them his bold face, and profited by the thunder-clap to burst into a laugh.

"Be calm, children, and do not upset the edifice. That's fine thunder of the right sort, and it isn't like that humbugging lightning. It's almost as fine as at the 'Ambigu.'"

This said, he restored order in the grating, softly pushed the two lads on to the bed, pressed their knees to make them lie full length, and cried, —

"Since le Bon Dieu is lighting his candle, I can put out mine. Children, my young humans, we must sleep, for it's very bad not to sleep. It makes you stink in the throat, as people say in fashionable society. Wrap yourselves well up in the blanket, for I am going to put the light out; are you all right?"

"Yes," said the elder boy, "I'm all right, and feel as if I had a feather pillow under my head."

"You mustn't say 'head,'" Gavroche cried, "but 'nut.'"

The two lads crept close together; Gavroche made them all right on the mat, and pulled the blanket up to their ears; then he repeated for the third time in the hieratic language, "Roost."

And he blew out the rope's end. The light was scarce extinguished ere a singular trembling began to shake the trellis-work under which the three children were lying. It was a multitude of dull rubbings which produced a metallic sound, as if claws and teeth were assailing the copper wire, and this was accompanied by all sorts of little shrill cries. The little boy of five years of age, hearing this noise above his head, and chilled with terror, nudged his elder brother, but he was "roosting" already, as Gavroche had ordered him; then the little one, unable to hold out any longer for fright, dared to address Gavroche, but in a very low voice and holding his breath.

"Sir?"

"Hilloh!" said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.

"What is that?"

"It's the rats," Gavroche answered.

And he laid his head again on the mat. The rats, which were really by thousands in the elephant's carcass, and were the live black spots to which we have alluded, had been held in check by the flame of the link so long as it was alight; but as soon as this cavern, which was, so to speak, their city, had been restored to night, sniffing what that famous story-teller, Perrault, calls "fresh meat," they rushed in bands to Gavroche's tent, climbed to the top, and were biting the meshes, as if trying to enter this novel sort of trap. In the mean while the little one did not sleep.

"Sir?" he began again.

"Well?" Gavroche asked.

"What are rats?"

"They're mice."

This explanation slightly reassured the child, for he had seen white mice in his life, and had not been afraid of them; still, he raised his voice again.

"Sir?"

"Well?" Gavroche repeated.

"Why don't you keep a cat?"

"I had one," Gavroche answered; "I brought it here, but they ate it for me."

This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the child began trembling once more; the dialogue between him and Gavroche was resumed for the fourth time.

"Sir?"

"Well?"

"What was eaten?"

"The cat."

"What ate the cat?"

"The rats."

"The mice?"

"Yes, the rats."

The child, terrified by these mice which ate the cats, continued, —

"Would those mice eat us?"

"Oh, Lord, yes!" Gavroche said.

The child's terror was at its height, but Gavroche added, —

"Don't be frightened, they cant get in. And then, I am here. Stay; take my hand, hold your tongue, and sleep."

Gavroche at the same time took the boy's hand across his brother, and the child pressed the hand against his body and felt reassured; for courage and strength have mysterious communications. Silence had set in again around them, the sound of voices had startled and driven away the rats; and when they returned a few minutes later and furiously attacked, the three boys, plunged in sleep, heard nothing more. The night hours passed away; darkness covered the immense Bastille Square. A winter wind, which was mingled with the rain, blew in gusts. The patrols examined doors, enclosures, and dark corners, and, while searching for nocturnal vagabonds, passed silently before the elephant; the monster, erect and motionless, with its eyes open in the darkness, seemed to be dreaming, as if satisfied at its good deed, and sheltered from the sky and rain the three poor sleeping children. In order to understand what is going to follow, it must be remembered that at this period the main-guard of the Bastille was situated at the other end of the square, and that what took place near the elephant could neither be prevented nor heard by the sentry. Toward the end of the hour which immediately precedes daybreak, a man came running out of the Rue St. Antoine, crossed the square, went round the great enclosure of the Column of July, and slipped through the palings under the elephant's belly. If any light had fallen on this man, it might have been guessed from his thoroughly drenched state that he had passed the night in the rain. On getting under the elephant he uttered a peculiar cry, which belongs to no human language, and which a parrot alone could reproduce. He repeated twice this cry, of which the following orthography scarce supplies any idea, "Kirikikiou!" At the second cry a clear, gay, and young voice answered from the elephant's belly, "Yes!" Almost immediately the plank that closed the whole was removed, and left a passage for a lad, who slid down the elephant's leg and fell at the man's feet. It was Gavroche, and the man was Montparnasse. As for the cry of "Kirikikiou," it was doubtless what the lad meant to say by, "You will ask for Monsieur Gavroche." On hearing it, he jumped up with a start, crept out of his alcove by moving the grating a little, and then carefully closing it again, after which he opened the trap and went down. The man and the child silently recognized each other in the night, and Montparnasse confined himself to saying, —

"We want you, come and give us a lift."

The gamin asked for no other explanation.

"Here I am," he said.

And the pair proceeded toward the Rue St. Antoine, whence Montparnasse had come, winding rapidly through the long file of market-carts which were coming into town at the time. The gardeners, lying on their wagons among their salads and vegetables, half asleep, and rolled up to the eyes in their great-coats, owing to the beating rain, did not even look at these strange passers-by.

CHAPTER III

INCIDENTS OF AN ESCAPE

This is what occurred on this same night at La Force. An escape had been concerted between Babet, Brujon, Gueulemer, and Thénardier, although Thénardier was in secret confinement. Babet had managed the affair on his own account during the day, as we heard from Montparnasse's narrative to Gavroche, and Montparnasse was to help them outside. Brujon, while spending a month in a punishment room, had time, first, to make a rope, and, secondly, to ripen a plan. Formerly, these severe places, in which prison discipline leaves the prisoner to himself, were composed of four stone walls, a stone ceiling, a brick pavement, a camp-bed, a grated sky-light, and a gate lined with iron, and were called dungeons; but the dungeon was considered too horrible, so now it is composed of an iron gate, a grated sky-light, a camp-bed, a brick pavement, a stone ceiling, four stone walls, and it is called a "punishment room." A little daylight is visible about midday. The inconvenience of these rooms, which, as we see, are not dungeons, is to leave beings to think who ought to be set to work. Brujon therefore reflected, and he left the punishment room with a cord. As he was considered very dangerous in the Charlemagne yard, he was placed in the Bâtiment Neuf, and the first thing he found there was Gueulemer, the second a nail, – Gueulemer, that is to say, crime; and a nail, that is to say, liberty.

Brujon, of whom it is time to form a complete idea, was, with the appearance of a delicate complexion and a deeply premeditated languor, a polished, intelligent robber, who possessed a caressing look and an atrocious smile. His look was the result of his will, and his smile the result of his nature. His first studies in his art were directed to roofs; and he had given a great impulse to the trade of lead-stealers, who strip roofs and carry away gutters by the process called au gras double. What finally rendered the moment favorable for an attempted escape was that workmen were at this very moment engaged in relaying and re-tipping a part of the prison slates. The St. Bernard was not absolutely isolated from the Charlemagne and St. Louis yards, for there were on the roof scaffolding and ladders, – in other words, bridges and staircases, on the side of deliverance. The Bâtiment Neuf, which was the most cracked and decrepit affair possible to imagine, was the weak point of the prison. Saltpetre had so gnawed the walls that it had been found necessary to prop up and shore the ceilings of the dormitories; because stones became detached and fell on the prisoners' beds. In spite of this antiquity, the error was committed of confining in there the most dangerous prisoners, and placing in it the "heavy cases," as is said in the prison jargon. The Bâtiment Neuf contained four sleeping-wards, one above the other, and a garret-floor called "Le Bel Air." A large chimney-flue, probably belonging to some old kitchen of the Dues de la Force, started from the ground-floor, passed through the four stories, cut in two the sleeping-wards, in which it figured as a sort of flattened pillar, and issued through a hole in the roof. Gueulemer and Brujon were in the same ward, and had been placed through precaution on the ground-floor. Accident willed it that the head of their beds rested against the chimney-flue. Thénardier was exactly above their heads in the garret called Bel Air.

The passer-by who stops in the Rue Culture Sainte Catherine, after passing the fire-brigade station, and in front of the bath-house gateway, sees a court-yard full of flowers and shrubs in boxes, at the end of which is a small white rotunda with two wings, enlivened by green shutters, – the bucolic dream of Jean Jacques. Not ten years ago there rose above this rotunda a black, enormous, frightful, naked wall, which was the outer wall of La Force. This wall behind this rotunda was like a glimpse of Milton caught behind Berquin. High though it was, this wall was surmounted by an even blacker roof, which could be seen beyond, – it was the roof of the Bâtiment Neuf.

Four dormer-windows protected by bars could be seen in it, and they were the windows of Bel Air; and a chimney passed through the roof, which was the chimney of the sleeping-wards. Bel Air, the attic-floor of the Bâtiment Neuf, was a species of large hall, closed with triple gratings and iron-lined doors, starred with enormous nails. When you entered by the north end, you had on your left the four dormers, and on your right facing these, four square and spacious cages, separated by narrow passages, built up to breast-height of masonry, and the rest to the roof of iron bars. Thénardier had been confined in solitary punishment since the night of February 3. It was never discovered how, or by what connivance, he succeeded in procuring and concealing a bottle of that prepared wine, invented, so it is said, by Desrues, in which a narcotic is mixed, and which the band of the Endormeurs rendered celebrated. There are in many prisons treacherous turnkeys, half jailers, half robbers, who assist in escapes, sell to the police a faithless domesticity, and "make the handle of the salad-basket dance."

On this very night, then, when little Gavroche picked up the two straying children, Brujon and Gueulemer, who knew that Babet, who had escaped that same morning, was waiting for them in the street with Montparnasse, gently rose, and began breaking open with a nail which Brujon had found the stove-pipe against which their beds were. The rubbish fell on Brujon's bed, so that it was not heard; and the gusts of wind mingled with the thunder shook the doors on their hinges, and produced a frightful and hideous row in the prison. Those prisoners who awoke pretended to fall asleep again, and left Brujon and Gueulemer to do as they pleased; and Brujon was skilful, and Gueulemer was vigorous. Before any sound had reached the watchman sleeping in the grated cell which looked into the ward, the wall was broken through, the chimney escaladed, the iron trellis-work which closed the upper opening of the flue forced, and the two formidable bandits were on the roof. The rain and the wind were tremendous, and the roof was slippery.