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By Root 1441 0

is often accompanied with keen and sharp north winds, by which one is not exactly frozen, but frost-bitten; these winds, which mar the most beautiful days, have precisely the effect of those currents of cold air which enter a warm room through the cracks of an ill-closed window or door. It seems as if the dreary door of winter were partly open and the wind were coming in at it. In the spring of 1832, the time when the first great epidemic of this century broke out in Europe, these winds were sharper and more piercing than ever. A door still more icy than that of winter was ajar. The door of the sepulchre. The breath of the cholera was felt in those cold north winds.

In the meteorological point of view, these winds had this peculiarity, that they did not exclude a strong electric tension. Storms accompanied by thunder and lightning were frequent during this time.

One evening when these winds were blowing harshly, to that degree that January seemed returned, and the bourgeois had resumed their cloaks, little Gavroche, always shivering cheerfully under his rags, was standing, as if in ecstasy, before a wig-maker’s shop in the neighbourhood of the Orme Saint Gervais. He was adorned with a woman’s woollen shawl, picked up nobody knows where, of which he had made a muffler. Little Gavroche appeared to be intensely admiring a wax bride, with a décolleté and a head-dress of orange flowers, which was revolving behind the sash, exhibiting between two lamps, its smile to the passers-by; but in reality he was watching the shop to see if he could not “filch” a cake of soap from the front, which he would afterwards sell for a sou to a hairdresser in the banlieue. It often happened that he breakfasted upon one of these cakes. He called this kind of work, for which he had some talent, “shaving the barbers.”

As he was contemplating the bride and squinting at the cake of soap, he muttered between his teeth: “Tuesday. It isn’t Tuesday. Is it Tuesday? Perhaps it is Tuesday. Yes, it is Tuesday.”

Nobody ever discovered to what this monologue related.

If, perchance, this soliloquy referred to the last time he had dined it was three days before, for it was then Friday.

The barber in his shop, warmed by a good stove, was shaving a customer and casting from time to time a look towards this enemy, this frozen and brazen gamin, who had both hands in his pockets, but his wits evidently out of their sheath.

While Gavroche was examining the bride, the windows, and the Wind sor soap, two children of unequal height, rather neatly dressed, and still smaller than he, one appearing to be seven years old, the other five, timidly turned the knob of the door and entered the shop, asking for something, charity, perhaps, in a plaintive manner which rather resembled a groan than a prayer. They both spoke at once and their words were unintelligible because sobs choked the voice of the younger, and the cold made the elder’s teeth chatter. The barber turned with a furious face, and without leaving his razor, crowding back the elder with his left hand and the little one with his knee, pushed them into the street and shut the door saying:

“Coming and freezing people for nothing!”

The two children went on, crying. Meanwhile a cloud had come up; it began to rain.

Little Gavroche ran after them and accosted them:

“What is the matter with you, little brats?”

“We don’t know where to sleep,” answered the elder.

“Is that all?” said Gavroche. “That is nothing. Does anybody cry for that? You aren’t lost puppies.”

And assuming, through his slightly bantering superiority, a tone of softened authority and gentle protection:

“Momacques, come with me.”

“Yes, monsieur,” said the elder.

And the two children followed him as they would have followed an archbishop. They had stopped crying.

Gavroche led them up the Rue Saint Antoine in the direction of the Bastille.

Gavroche, as he travelled on, cast an indignant and retrospective glance at the barber’s shop.

“He has no heart, that merlan,” he muttered. “He is an Angliche.”ej

A girl, seeing them all three marching in