This rough, squat, heavy, hard, austere, almost misshapen, but assuredly majestic monument, stamped with a sort of magnificent and savage gravity, has disappeared, and left to reign in peace, a sort of gigantic stove, ornamented with its pipe, which has replaced the sombre fortress with its nine towers, very much as the bourgeoisie replaces the feudal classes.
It is quite natural that a stove should be the symbol of an epoch in which a pot contains power.
This epoch will pass away, people have already begun to understand that, if there can be force in a boiler, there can be no force except in the brain; in other words, that which leads and drags on the world, is not locomotives, but ideas.
Harness locomotives to ideas,—that is well done; but do not mistake the horse for the rider.
At all events, to return to the Place de la Bastille, the architect of this elephant succeeded in making a grand thing out of plaster; the architect of the stove has succeeded in making a pretty thing out of bronze.
This stove-pipe, which has been baptized by a sonorous name, and called the column of July, this monument of a revolution that miscarried, was still enveloped in 1832, in an immense shirt of woodwork, which we regret, for our part, and by a vast plank enclosure, which completed the task of isolating the elephant.
It was towards this corner of the place, dimly lighted by the reflection of a distant street lamp, that the gamin guided his two “brats.”
The reader must permit us to interrupt ourselves here and to remind him that we are dealing with simple reality, and that twenty years ago, the tribunals were called upon to judge, under the charge of vagabondage, and mutilation of a public monument, a child who had been caught asleep in this very elephant of the Bastille.
This fact noted, we proceed.
On arriving in the vicinity of the colossus, Gavroche comprehended the effect which the infinitely great might produce on the infinitely small, and said:—
“Don’t be scared, infants.”
Then he entered through a gap in the fence into the elephant’s enclosure and helped the young ones to clamber through the breach.
The two children, somewhat frightened, followed Gavroche without uttering a word, and confided themselves to this little Providence in rags which had given them bread and had promised them a shelter.
There, extended along the fence, lay a ladder which by day served the laborers in the neighboring timber-yard.
Gavroche raised it with remarkable vigor, and placed it against one of the elephant’s forelegs.
Near the point where the ladder ended, a sort of black hole in the belly of the colossus could be distinguished.
Gavroche pointed out the ladder and the hole to his guests, and said to them:—
“Climb up and go in.”
The two little boys exchanged terrified glances.
“You’re afraid, brats!” exclaimed Gavroche. And he added:— “You shall see!”
He clasped the rough leg of the elephant, and in a twinkling, without deigning to make use of the ladder, he had reached the aperture.
He entered it as an adder slips through a crevice, and disappeared within, and an instant later, the two children saw his head, which looked pale, appear vaguely, on the edge of the shadowy hole, like a wan and whitish spectre.
“Well!” he exclaimed, “climb up, young ‘uns!
You’ll see how snug it is here!
Come up, you!” he said to the elder,
“I’ll lend you a hand.”
The little fellows nudged each other, the gamin frightened and inspired them with confidence at one and the same time, and then, it was raining very hard.
The elder one undertook the risk.
The younger, on seeing his brother climbing up, and himself left alone between the paws of this huge beast, felt greatly inclined to cry, but he did not dare.
The elder lad climbed, with uncertain steps, up the rungs of the ladder; Gavroche, in the meanwhile, encouraging him with exclamations like a fencing-master to his pupils, or a muleteer to his mules.
“Don’t be afraid!—That’s it!—Come on!—Put your feet there!—Give us your hand here!—Boldly!”
And when the child was within reach, he seized him suddenly and vigorously by the arm, and pulled him towards him.
“Nabbed!” said he.
The brat had passed through the crack.
“Now,” said Gavroche, “wait for me.
Be so good as to take a seat, Monsieur.”
And making his way out of the hole as he had entered it, he slipped down the elephant’s leg with the agility of a monkey, landed on his feet in the grass, grasped the child of five round the body, and planted him fairly in the middle of the ladder, then he began to climb up behind him, shouting to the elder:—
“I’m going to boost him, do you tug.”
And in another instant, the small lad was pushed, dragged, pulled, thrust, stuffed into the hole, before he had time to recover himself, and Gavroche, entering behind him, and repulsing the ladder with a kick which sent it flat on the grass, began to clap his hands and to cry:—
“Here we are!
Long live General Lafayette!”
This explosion over, he added:—
“Now, young ‘uns, you are in my house.”
Gavroche was at home, in fact.
Oh, unforeseen utility of the useless!
Charity of great things!
Goodness of giants!
This huge monument, which had embodied an idea of the Emperor’s, had become the box of a street urchin.
The brat had been accepted and sheltered by the colossus.
The bourgeois decked out in their Sunday finery who passed the elephant of the Bastille, were fond of saying as they scanned it disdainfully with their prominent eyes: