This strange utterance had a remarkable effect on the boy. He turned and looked alertly about him, and seeing a policeman standing with his back to them not far away he uttered a grunt of enlightenment, quickly suppressed, and shook Montparnasse by the hand.
‘Well, good night, I must take these kids along to my place. And by the way, if you need me some night that’s where you’ll find me. I live on the first floor. There’s no hall-porter. Ask for Monsieur Gavroche.’
‘Thanks,’ said Montparnasse.
They then parted, Montparnasse making for the Grève and Gavroche for the Bastille. The younger of the two little boys, who was being pulled along by his brother, who was being pulled along by Gavroche, looked round several times for a last glimpse of the Punch and Judy man.
The clue to the cryptic utterance which had warned Gavroche of the presence of a policeman was contained in the repetition of the syllable ‘dig’, either within a word or as a link between two words, meaning, ‘Watch out. We can’t talk here.’ It also contained an elegant literary allusion which escaped Gavroche. The words my ‘dogue’, my ‘dague’, and my ‘digue’, meaning ‘my dog, my dagger, and my woman’, were slang of the Temple quarter, commonly used by fairground buskers and camp-followers in the grand siècle, when Molière wrote and Callot drew.
Twenty years ago there was still to be seen, in the south-east corner of the Place de la Bastille, near the canal-port dug out of the former moat of the prison-fortress, a weird monument which has vanished from the memory of present-day Parisians but which deserves to have left some trace of itself, for it sprang from the mind of a member of the Institute, none other than the Commander-in-Chief of the Army in Egypt.
We use the word ‘monument’, although in fact it was no more than a preliminary sketch; but a sketch on the grand scale, the prodigious corpse of a Napoleonic aspiration which successive adverse winds have borne further and further away from us until it has lapsed into history; but the sketch had a look of permanence which was in sharp contrast to its provisional nature. It was an elephant some forty feet high, constructed of wood and plaster, with a tower the size of a house on its back, that once had been roughly painted green but was now blackened by wind and weather. Outlined against the stars at night, in that open space, with its huge body and trunk, its crenellated tower, its four legs like temple columns, it was an astonishing and impressive spectacle. No one knew precisely what it meant. It was in some sort a symbol of the popular will, sombre, enigmatic, and immense; a sort of powerful and visible ghost confronting the invisible spectre of the Bastille.
Few strangers came to view the monster, and the people in the street scarcely glanced at it. It was crumbling to bits, the fallen plaster leaving great wounds in its flanks. The ‘aediles’, to use the fashionable term, had forgotten about it since 1814. It stood gloomily in its corner, enclosed in a rotting wooden fence soiled by countless drunken cab-drivers, with cracks in its belly, a lath of wood protruding from its tail and tall grass growing between its feet; and since the ground level of the space around it had, by that gradual process common to the soil of all great cities, risen in the past thirty years, it seemed to be standing in a hollow, as though the earth were subsiding beneath it. It was crude, despised, repulsive, and defiant; unsightly to the fastidious, pitiful to the thinker, having about it a contradictory quality of garbage waiting to be swept away and majesty waiting to be beheaded.
As we have said, its aspect changed at night. Night is the true setting for all things that are ghosts. As darkness fell the venerable monster was transformed; amid the serenity of the gathering gloom it acquired a placid and awe-inspiring splendour. Being of the past it belonged to the night; and darkness befitted its nobility.
The ponderous, uncouth, almost misshapen monument, which was certainly majestic and endowed with a sort of savage and magnificent gravity, has since disappeared to make way for the sort of gigantic cooking-stove adorned with a chimney which has replaced the sombre fortress with its nine towers, rather as the era of the bourgeoisie has replaced feudalism. It is very proper that a cooking-stove should be the symbol of an epoch that derives its power from a cook-pot This epoch will pass – indeed, is already passing. We are beginning to grasp the fact that although power can be contained in a boiler, mastery exists only in the brain: in other words, that it is ideas, not locomotives, that move the world. To harness locomotives to the ideas is good; but do not let us mistake the horse for the rider.
To return to the Place de la Bastille, the architect of the elephant achieved something greater in plaster, whereas the architect of the chimney-pot achieved something insignificant in bronze.
In 1832 the chimney-pot, that failed memorial to a failed revolution, grandiloquently baptized the July Column, was – and for our part we regret it – enveloped in a vast array of scaffolding and surrounded by a plank fence, which further isolated the elephant. It was to this deserted corner of the square, dimly lit by a distant streetlamp, that the urchin Gavroche brought the two ‘kids’.
May we here break off our narrative to recall that we are dealing with a matter of fact, and that twenty years ago the magistrates tried the case of a child, charged with vagabondage and damaging a public monument, who had been found asleep inside the Elephant of the Bastille.
To proceed. When they reached the monster, Gavroche, conscious of the effect the very large may have on the very small, said reassuringly:
‘Don’t be afraid, young ‘uns.’
He slipped into the enclosure through a gap in the surrounding fence and helped the little boys through. They followed him in silence, both somewhat apprehensive but trusting to this tattered Samaritan who had given them bread and promised them shelter for the night. There was a ladder lying along the fence, used by workmen in a nearby builder’s yard. Gavroche hoisted it up with a remarkable display of energy and set it against one of the elephant’s front legs. At the top a rough aperture in the creature’s belly was visible. Gavroche pointed to this and to the ladder and said:
‘Up you go, and inside!’
The little boys exchanged terrified glances.
‘What! Mean to say you’re scared?’ exclaimed Gavroche. ‘Well, I’ll show you.’
Without deigning to use the ladder he shinned up the rough leg and in no time had reached the aperture, into which he disappeared like a lizard vanishing into a crevice. A moment later the little boys saw the white blur of his face peering down at them out of darkness.
‘Well, come on up,’ he called, ‘and see how nice it is. You go first,’ he added to the elder boy. ‘I’ll lend you a hand.’
The little boys nudged one another, at once scared and heartened; besides which, it was raining heavily. The elder decided to chance it, and at the sight of him on the ladder, while he himself was left alone between the beast’s great feet, the younger came near to bursting into tears but did not dare. The elder boy climbed unsteadily while Gavroche encouraged him with a flow of instructions like a fencing-master with a class, or a muleteer with a pack of mules.
‘Don’t be afraid. That’s the way. Now your other foot. Now your hands. That’s it. Well done!’ Directly he came within reach Gavroche grabbed him by the arm and pulled him towards himself. ‘Fine!’ he said. The boy was through the entrance.
‘Now wait here,’ said Gavroche. ‘Be so good as to take a seat, Monsieur.’
He slipped out again, slid down the elephant’s leg with the nimbleness of a monkey, landed on his feet in the grass, picked up the five-year-old, set him halfway up the ladder, and climbed up behind him, calling to the older boy, ‘I’ll push, and when he gets to the top you pull!’
The younger boy was pushed, lugged, heaved, and bundled through the aperture almost before he knew where he was, and Gavroche, after kicking away the ladder so that it fell on the grass, clapped his hands and cried:
‘We’ve done it, and long live General Lafayette!’ After which outburst he said formally: ‘Gentlemen, welcome to my abode.’
The unforeseen usefulness of the superfluous! The charity of great matters, the kindness of giants! That extravagant monument to the fantasy of an emperor had become the hide-out of an urchin. The pigmy was accepted and sheltered by the colossus. Citizens in their Sunday clothes passing the Elephant of the Bastille might glance at it in dull-eyed indifference saying, ‘What use is it?’ But it served to protect a homeless, parentless youngster against wind and hail and frost, to preserve him from the slumber in the mud which causes fever and the slumber in the snow which causes death. It housed the innocent rejected by society, and thus in some degree atoned for society’s guilt, affording a retreat to one to whom all other doors were closed. It seemed indeed that the crumbling, scabby monster, neglected, despised, and forgotten, a sort of huge beggar crying in vain for the alms of a friendly look, had taken pity on that other beggar, the waif without shoes to his feet or a roof to his head, clad in rags, blowing on numbed fingers, living on such scraps as came his way. That was the use of the Bastille elephant. Napoleon’s notion, disdained by men, had been adopted by God, and what could only have been pretentious had been made august. To complete his design the Emperor would have needed copper and marble, porphyry and gold; for God the structure of wood and plaster sufficed. The Emperor had a lordly dream: in that prodigious elephant, bearing its armoured tower and lashing its trunk, he had thought to embody the soul of the people: God had done something greater with it, He had made it a dwelling for a child.
The aperture by which Gavroche had entered was scarcely visible from outside, being, as we have said, hidden under the belly of the elephant and so narrow that only a cat or a small boy could have got through it.
‘To start with,’ said Gavroche, ‘we must tell the doorkeeper that we are not at home.’ And diving into the darkness with the ease of one familiar with his surroundings, he produced a plank with which to cover the hole.
He vanished again, and the little boys heard the hiss of a match-stick plunged in a bottle of phosphorus. The chemical match did not then exist: in those days the lighter invented by Fumade represented progress.
A sudden glow caused them to blink. Gavroche had lighted one of the lengths of string soaked in resin which are known as ‘rats tails’, and this, although it gave out more smoke than light, made the elephant’s interior dimly visible.
Gavroche’s two guests gazed about them with something of the feelings of a person inside the great wine-barrel of Heidelberg, or better, the feelings Jonah must have experienced when he found himself inside the whale. They were enclosed in what looked like a huge skeleton. A long beam overhead, to which massive side-members were attached at regular intervals, represented the backbone and ribs, with plaster stalactites hanging from them like entrails; and everywhere there were gteat spiders’ webs like dusty diaphragms. Here and there in the corners were patches of black that seemed to be alive and had changed their position with sudden, startled movements. The litter fallen from the back of the elephant on to its stomach had evened out the concavity of the latter, so that one could walk on it as though on a floor.
The younger of the little boys was clinging to his brother. He whispered:
‘It’s so dark!’
This drew an outburst from Gavroche. Their state of petrified alarm called for a sharp rebuke.
‘What was that?’ he demanded. ‘Is somebody complaining? Isn’t this good enough for you? Perhaps you’d rather have the Tuileries? But I’m no royal lackey, let me, tell you, so you might as well stop whimpering.’
A touch of roughness is salutary to weak nerves. The boys drew closer to Gavroche and, touched by the gesture of confidence, his manner changed.
‘Lummox,’ he said gently to the younger, ‘it’s outside that it’s dark. It’s raining outside, but not in here. The wind’s blowing but here you don’t feel it. There are mobs of people outside, but in here there’s no one to bother you. And outside there isn’t even a moon, but here we’ve got a light. What more do you want?’
They began to look less apprehensively about them, but Gavroche did not allow them much time to inspect the premises. ‘This way,’ he said, and thrust them towards what we have great pleasure in calling his bedchamber.
He had an excellent bed, complete with mattress and coverlet in a curtained sleeping-alcove. The mattress was a piece of straw matting and the coverlet a large blanket of rough wool, warm and almost new. The alcove was devised as follows:
Three thin upright posts, two in front and one at the back, were firmly embedded in the rubble of the floor – that is to say, of the elephant’s stomach – and joined with cord at the top so as to form a pyramidal framework. Over this framework wire-netting was draped, carefully stretched and nailed here and there, so as to enclose the whole of it. An array of large stones held it down to the floor and ensured that nothing could get in. The netting, which took the place of curtains, was of the kind used in aviaries, so that Gavroche’s bed was in fact in a cage. The general effect was like an Eskimo’s tent.
Slightly moving one or two stones, Gavroche drew back two strips of netting and said to the little boys: ‘Crawl in on hands and knees.’ Having seen them inside, he followed them in, also crawling, and then replaced the stones to secure the entrance. The three of them lay down on the mattress. Small though the two boys were, neither could have stood upright in the cage.
Gavroche was still carrying the rat’s tail. ‘Silence, everyone,’ he said. ‘I’m going to dowse the glim.’
But the elder boy pointed to the netting and asked:
‘Please, sir, what’s that for?’
‘To keep the rats out,’ said Gavroche gravely, ‘And now, silence.’
However, in consideration of their youth and inexperience, he deigned to give his guests a little added information.
‘It comes out of the Jardin des Plantes, out of the zoo. They’ve got all kinds of stuff. You’ve only got to climb a wall or go in at a window and you can get anything you want.’ While he was speaking he was folding the coverlet about the younger boy, who murmured drowsily, ‘It’s ever so warm.’ He looked complacently at the coverlet.
‘That comes out of the Jardin des Plantes too, out of the monkey-house.’
He drew the elder boy’s attention to the mat on which they were lying, which was very thick and excellently made.
‘I got that from the giraffe.’
After a pause he went on: ‘The animals had all these things. I pinched them from them, but they didn’t mind. I said they were for the elephant.’
Again he was silent and then he summed the matter up:
‘You skip over walls and who cares about the government? That’s the way it is.’
The little boys were gazing in awed admiration at this intrepid and resourceful adventurer who was a vagabond like themselves, a pauper as lonely and vulnerable as they, but who in their eyes appeared an almost supernatural being, a man of power with the leers and grimaces of a circus clown and the gentlest and most innocent of smiles.
‘Please, sir,’ said the elder shyly, ‘aren’t you afraid of the police?’
‘We don’t call them police,’ said Gavroche tersely. ‘We call them cops.’
The younger boy’s eyes were still open although he was saying nothing. Since he was at the edge of the mat, with his brother in the middle, Gavroche solicitously reached across to make sure that he was properly covered and thrust a few old rags under his head to serve him as pillow. He turned back to the other boy.
‘We’re pretty well off here, eh?’
‘It’s wonderful,’ the boy said, with a look of overflowing gratitude. As their soaked clothing dried both boys were beginning to feel warm.
‘And now,’ said Gavroche, ‘perhaps you’ll tell me what you two were crying about.’ He jerked his thumb towards the younger. ‘A kid his age, that’s excusable; but a big chap like you, blubbering away like a calf, you ought to be ashamed.’
‘Well,�
� protested the older boy, ‘but we hadn’t any home to go to.’
‘You don’t call it home,’ said Gavroche. ‘You call it your shack.’
‘And we were scared of being out all night.’
‘In the glim,’ said Gavroche. ‘Now, you listen to me. I don’t want any more complaints. From now on I’m looking after you and we’re going to have a fine time. You’ll see. In the summer we’ll go to La Glacière with Mavet, who’s a mate of mine, and bathe in the river and run naked along the bank by the Austerlitz bridge, just to annoy the washerwomen. The things they shout at you, it’s as good as a pantomime! And we’ll go and see the human skeleton. There’s one on the Champs-Élysées, a real, live man as thin as a skeleton. And I’ll take you to the theatre, to the Frédérick-Lemaître. I get tickets, see, because I know the company. In fact, I acted in one of their plays. A gang of boys like me, we crawled about under a canvas to make it look like the sea. Maybe I’ll be able to get you both a job. And we’ll see the old Indians. Mark you, they aren’t real Indians. They wear pink tights that wrinkle and you can see where they’ve been darned. And we’ll go to the Opéra, we’ll go into the gallery with the claque. It’s a very good claque at the Opéra. I wouldn’t want to go with the boulevard theatre claques. But at the Opéra some of them even pay, as much as twenty sous. But that’s soft – the dummies, we call them. And we’ll go and watch someone being guillotined, and you’ll see the Public Executioner, Monsieur Sanson. He lives in the Rue des Marais and he has a letter-box in his door. You’ll seel We’ll have a high old time!’
At this moment a drop of wax fell on Gavroche’s finger, bringing him back to earth.
‘Bigre! The taper’s burning down. We have to watch it. I can’t afford more than a sou a month for lighting. When you turn in you go to sleep, you don’t sit up reading the novels of Monsieur Paul de Kock. Besides which the light might show through the door and then we’d have the cops after us.’
Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774) Page 98
