Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [322]
Lying by the side of the fence was a ladder, which, by day, was used by the working-men of the neighbouring wood-yard. Gavroche lifted it with singular vigour, and set it up against one of the elephant’s forelegs. About the point where the ladder ended, a sort of black hole could be distinguished in the belly of the colossus.
Gavroche showed the ladder and the hole to his guests, and said to them:
“Mount and enter.”
The two little fellows looked at each other in terror.
“You are afraid, mômes!” exclaimed Gavroche.
And he added:
“You shall see.”
He clasped the elephant’s wrinkled foot, and in a twinkling, without deigning to make use of the ladder, he reached the crevice. He entered it as an adder glides into a hole, and disappeared, and a moment afterwards the two children saw his pallid face dimly appearing like a faded and wan form, at the edge of the hole full of darkness.
“Well,” cried he, “why don’t you come up, momignards? you’ll see how nice it is! Come up,” said he, to the elder, “I will give you a hand.”
The little ones urged each other forward. The gamin made them afraid and reassured them at the same time, and then it was raining very hard. The elder ventured. The younger, seeing his brother go up, and himself left all alone between the paws of this huge beast, had a great desire to cry, but he did not dare.
The elder clambered up the rounds of the ladder. He tottered badly. Gavroche, while he was on his way, encouraged him with the exclamations of a fencing master to his scholars, or of a muleteer to his mules:
“Don’t be afraid!”
“That’s it!”
“Come on!”
“Put your foot there!”
“Your hand here!”
“Be brave!”
And when he came within his reach he caught him quickly and vigorously by the arm and drew him up.
“Gulped!” said he.
The môme had passed through the crevice.
“Now,” said Gavroche, “wait for me. Monsieur, have the kindness to sit down.”
And, going out by the crevice as he had entered, he let himself glide with the agility of a monkey along the elephant’s leg, he dropped upon his feet in the grass, caught the little five-year-old by the waist and set him half way up the ladder, then he began to mount up behind him, crying to the elder:
“I will push him; you pull him.”
In an instant the little fellow was lifted, pushed, dragged, pulled, stuffed, crammed into the hole without having had time to know what was going on. And Gavroche, entering after him, pushing back the ladder with a kick so that it fell upon the grass, began to clap his hands, and cried:
“Here we are! Hurrah for General Lafayette!”
This explosion over, he added:
“Brats, you are in my house.”
Gavroche was in fact at home.
O unexpected utility of the useless! charity of great things! goodness of giants! This monstrous monument which had contained a thought of the emperor, had become the box of a gamin. The môme had been accepted and sheltered by the colossus. The bourgeois in their Sunday clothes, who passed by the elephant of the Bastille, frequently said, eyeing it scornfully with their goggle eyes: “What’s the use of that?” The use of it was to save from the cold, the frost, the hail, the rain, to protect from the wintry wind, to preserve from sleeping in the mud, which breeds fever, and from sleeping in the snow, which breeds death, a little being with no father or mother, with no bread, no clothing, no asylum. The use of it was to receive the innocent whom society repulsed. The use of it was to diminish the public crime. It was a den open for him to whom all doors were closed. It seemed as if the miserable old mastodon, invaded by vermin and oblivion, covered with warts, mould, and ulcers, tottering, worm-eaten, abandoned, condemned, a sort of colossal beggar asking in vain the alms of a benevolent look in the middle of the Square, had taken pity itself on this other beggar, the poor pigmy who went with no shoes to his feet, no roof over his head, blowing his fingers, clothed in rags, fed upon