Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [321]
“Why! it is bread, very good bread of the second quality.”
“You mean larton brutal, ”en replied Gavroche, with a calm cold disdain. “White bread, boy! larton savonné! I am treating.”
The baker could not help smiling, and while he was cutting the white bread, he looked at them in a compassionate manner which offended Gavroche.
“Come, paper cap!” said he, “what are you fathoming us like that for?”
All three placed end to end would hardly have made a fathom.
When the bread was cut, the baker put the sou in his drawer, and Gavroche said to the two children:
“Morfilez.”
The little boys looked at him confounded.
Gavroche began to laugh:
“Ah! stop, that is true, they don’t know yet, they are so small.”
And he added:
“Eat.”
At the same time he handed each of them a piece of bread.
And, thinking that the elder, who appeared to him more worthy of his conversation, deserved some special encouragement and ought to be relieved of all hesitation in regard to satisfying his appetite, he added, giving him the largest piece:
“Stick that in your gun.”
There was one piece smaller than the other two; he took it for himself.
The poor children were starving, Gavroche included. While they were wolfing down the bread, they encumbered the shop of the baker who, now that he had received his pay, was regarding them ill-humouredly.
“Let’s go back into the street,” said Gavroche.eo
They went on in the direction of the Bastille.
From time to time when they were passing before a lighted shop, the smaller one stopped to look at the time by a lead watch suspended from his neck by a string.
“Here is decidedly a real ninny,” said Gavroche.
Then he thoughtfully muttered between his teeth:
“It’s all the same, if I had any mômes, I would hug them tighter than this.”
Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southeast corner of the Place de la Bastille, near the canal basin dug in the ancient ditch of the prison citadel, a grotesque monument which has now faded away from the memory of Parisians, and which is worthy to leave some trace, for it was an idea of the “member of the Institute, General-in-Chief of the Army of Egypt.”
We say monument, although it was only a rough model. But this rough model itself, a huge plan, a vast carcass of an idea of Napoleon which two or three successive gusts of wind had carried away and thrown each time further from us, had become historical, and had acquired a definiteness which contrasted with its provisional aspect. It was an elephant, forty feet high, constructed of framework and masonry, bearing on its back its tower, which resembled a house, formerly painted green by some house-painter, now painted black by the sun, the rain, and the weather. In that open and deserted corner of the square, the broad front of the colossus, his trunk, his tusks, his size, his enormous rump, his four feet like columns, produced at night, under the starry sky, a startling and terrible outline. One knew not what it meant. It was a sort of symbol of the force of the people. It was gloomy, enigmatic, and immense. It was a mysterious and mighty phantom, visibly standing by the side of the invisible spectre of the Bastille.
It was towards this corner of the square, dimly lighted by the reflection of a distant lamp, that the gamin directed the two “mômes.”
We must be permitted to stop here long enough to declare that we are within the simple reality, and that twenty years ago the police tribunals would have had to condemn upon a complaint for vagrancy and breach of a public monument, a child who should have been caught sleeping in the interior even of the elephant of the Bastille. This fact stated, we continue.
As they came near the colossus, Gavroche comprehended the effect which the infinitely great may produce upon the infinitely small, and said:
“Brats! don’t be frightened.”
Then he entered through a gap in the fence into the inclosure of the elephant, and helped the mômes to crawl through the breach. The two children, a little frightened, followed Gavroche without