Gavroche replied with great simplicity:— “They are some brats that a wig-maker made me a present of.”
Meanwhile, Montparnasse had fallen to thinking:—
“You recognized me very readily,” he muttered.
He took from his pocket two small objects which were nothing more than two quills wrapped in cotton, and thrust one up each of his nostrils.
This gave him a different nose.
“That changes you,” remarked Gavroche, “you are less homely so, you ought to keep them on all the time.”
Montparnasse was a handsome fellow, but Gavroche was a tease.
“Seriously,” demanded Montparnasse, “how do you like me so?”
The sound of his voice was different also.
In a twinkling, Montparnasse had become unrecognizable.
“Oh! Do play Porrichinelle for us!” exclaimed Gavroche.
The two children, who had not been listening up to this point, being occupied themselves in thrusting their fingers up their noses, drew near at this name, and stared at Montparnasse with dawning joy and admiration.
Unfortunately, Montparnasse was troubled.
He laid his hand on Gavroche’s shoulder, and said to him, emphasizing his words:
“Listen to what I tell you, boy! if I were on the square with my dog, my knife, and my wife, and if you were to squander ten sous on me, I wouldn’t refuse to work, but this isn’t Shrove Tuesday.”
This odd phrase produced a singular effect on the gamin.
He wheeled round hastily, darted his little sparkling eyes about him with profound attention, and perceived a police sergeant standing with his back to them a few paces off.
Gavroche allowed an:
“Ah! good!” to escape him, but immediately suppressed it, and shaking Montparnasse’s hand:—
“Well, good evening,” said he, “I’m going off to my elephant with my brats.
Supposing that you should need me some night, you can come and hunt me up there.
I lodge on the entresol.
There is no porter.
You will inquire for Monsieur Gavroche.”
“Very good,” said Montparnasse.
And they parted, Montparnasse betaking himself in the direction of the Greve, and Gavroche towards the Bastille.
The little one of five, dragged along by his brother who was dragged by Gavroche, turned his head back several times to watch
“Porrichinelle” as he went.
The ambiguous phrase by means of which Montparnasse had warned Gavroche of the presence of the policeman, contained no other talisman than the assonance dig repeated five or six times in different forms.
This syllable, dig, uttered alone or artistically mingled with the words of a phrase, means:
“Take care, we can no longer talk freely.”
There was besides, in Montparnasse’s sentence, a literary beauty which was lost upon Gavroche, that is mon dogue, ma dague et ma digue, a slang expression of the Temple, which signifies my dog, my knife, and my wife, greatly in vogue among clowns and the red-tails in the great century when Moliere wrote and Callot drew.
Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southwest corner of the Place de la Bastille, near the basin of the canal, excavated in the ancient ditch of the fortress-prison, a singular monument, which has already been effaced from the memories of Parisians, and which deserved to leave some trace, for it was the idea of a “member of the Institute, the General-in-chief of the army of Egypt.”
We say monument, although it was only a rough model.
But this model itself, a marvellous sketch, the grandiose skeleton of an idea of Napoleon’s, which successive gusts of wind have carried away and thrown, on each occasion, still further from us, had become historical and had acquired a certain definiteness which contrasted with its provisional aspect.
It was an elephant forty feet high, constructed of timber and masonry, bearing on its back a tower which resembled a house, formerly painted green by some dauber, and now painted black by heaven, the wind, and time.
In this deserted and unprotected corner of the place, the broad brow of the colossus, his trunk, his tusks, his tower, his enormous crupper, his four feet, like columns produced, at night, under the starry heavens, a surprising and terrible form.
It was a sort of symbol of popular force.
It was sombre, mysterious, and immense.
It was some mighty, visible phantom, one knew not what, standing erect beside the invisible spectre of the Bastille.
Few strangers visited this edifice, no passer-by looked at it.
It was falling into ruins; every season the plaster which detached itself from its sides formed hideous wounds upon it.
“The ?diles,” as the expression ran in elegant dialect, had forgotten it ever since 1814.
There it stood in its corner, melancholy, sick, crumbling, surrounded by a rotten palisade, soiled continually by drunken coachmen; cracks meandered athwart its belly, a lath projected from its tail, tall grass flourished between its legs; and, as the level of the place had been rising all around it for a space of thirty years, by that slow and continuous movement which insensibly elevates the soil of large towns, it stood in a hollow, and it looked as though the ground were giving way beneath it.
It was unclean, despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly in the eyes of the bourgeois, melancholy in the eyes of the thinker.
There was something about it of the dirt which is on the point of being swept out, and something of the majesty which is on the point of being decapitated.
As we have said, at night, its aspect changed.
Night is the real element of everything that is dark.
As soon as twilight descended, the old elephant became transfigured; he assumed a tranquil and redoubtable appearance in the formidable serenity of the shadows.
Being of the past, he belonged to night; and obscurity was in keeping with his grandeur.