The bullets flew after him, he was more nimble than they.
He played a fearful game of hide and seek with death; every time that the flat-nosed face of the spectre approached, the urchin administered to it a fillip.
One bullet, however, better aimed or more treacherous than the rest, finally struck the will-o’-the-wisp of a child.
Gavroche was seen to stagger, then he sank to the earth.
The whole barricade gave vent to a cry; but there was something of Ant?us in that pygmy; for the gamin to touch the pavement is the same as for the giant to touch the earth; Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he remained in a sitting posture, a long thread of blood streaked his face, he raised both arms in the air, glanced in the direction whence the shot had come, and began to sing:
“I have fallen to the earth,
‘Tis the fault of Voltaire;
With my nose in the gutter,
‘Tis the fault of . . . ”
He did not finish.
A second bullet from the same marksman stopped him short.
This time he fell face downward on the pavement, and moved no more.
This grand little soul had taken its flight.
CHAPTER XVI—HOW FROM A BROTHER ONE BECOMES A FATHER
At that same moment, in the garden of the Luxembourg,—for the gaze of the drama must be everywhere present,—two children were holding each other by the hand.
One might have been seven years old, the other five.
The rain having soaked them, they were walking along the paths on the sunny side; the elder was leading the younger; they were pale and ragged; they had the air of wild birds.
The smaller of them said: “I am very hungry.”
The elder, who was already somewhat of a protector, was leading his brother with his left hand and in his right he carried a small stick.
They were alone in the garden.
The garden was deserted, the gates had been closed by order of the police, on account of the insurrection.
The troops who had been bivouacking there had departed for the exigencies of combat.
How did those children come there?
Perhaps they had escaped from some guard-house which stood ajar; perhaps there was in the vicinity, at the Barriere d’Enfer; or on the Esplanade de l’Observatoire, or in the neighboring carrefour, dominated by the pediment on which could be read: Invenerunt parvulum pannis involutum, some mountebank’s booth from which they had fled; perhaps they had, on the preceding evening, escaped the eye of the inspectors of the garden at the hour of closing, and had passed the night in some one of those sentry-boxes where people read the papers?
The fact is, they were stray lambs and they seemed free.
To be astray and to seem free is to be lost.
These poor little creatures were, in fact, lost.
These two children were the same over whom Gavroche had been put to some trouble, as the reader will recollect. Children of the Thenardiers, leased out to Magnon, attributed to M. Gillenormand, and now leaves fallen from all these rootless branches, and swept over the ground by the wind.
Their clothing, which had been clean in Magnon’s day, and which had served her as a prospectus with M. Gillenormand, had been converted into rags.
Henceforth these beings belonged to the statistics as “Abandoned children,” whom the police take note of, collect, mislay and find again on the pavements of Paris.
It required the disturbance of a day like that to account for these miserable little creatures being in that garden. If the superintendents had caught sight of them, they would have driven such rags forth.
Poor little things do not enter public gardens; still, people should reflect that, as children, they have a right to flowers.
These children were there, thanks to the locked gates.
They were there contrary to the regulations.
They had slipped into the garden and there they remained.
Closed gates do not dismiss the inspectors, oversight is supposed to continue, but it grows slack and reposes; and the inspectors, moved by the public anxiety and more occupied with the outside than the inside, no longer glanced into the garden, and had not seen the two delinquents.
It had rained the night before, and even a little in the morning.
But in June, showers do not count for much.
An hour after a storm, it can hardly be seen that the beautiful blonde day has wept.
The earth, in summer, is as quickly dried as the cheek of a child.
At that period of the solstice, the light of full noonday is, so to speak, poignant.
It takes everything.
It applies itself to the earth, and superposes itself with a sort of suction.
One would say that the sun was thirsty.
A shower is but a glass of water; a rainstorm is instantly drunk up.
In the morning everything was dripping, in the afternoon everything is powdered over.
Nothing is so worthy of admiration as foliage washed by the rain and wiped by the rays of sunlight; it is warm freshness.
The gardens and meadows, having water at their roots, and sun in their flowers, become perfuming-pans of incense, and smoke with all their odors at once.
Everything smiles, sings and offers itself.
One feels gently intoxicated.