Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [323]
The hole by which Gavroche had entered was a break hardly visible from the outside, concealed as it was, and as we have said under the belly of the elephant, and so narrow that hardly anything but cats and mômes could have passed through.
“Let us begin,” said Gavroche, “by telling the porter that we are not in.”
And plunging into the darkness with certainty, like one who is familiar with his room, he took a board and stopped the hole.
Gavroche plunged again into the darkness. The children heard the sputtering of the taper plunged into the phosphoric bottle. The chemical taper was not yet in existence; the Fumade tinder-box represented progress at that period.
A sudden light made them wink; Gavroche had just lighted one of those bits of string soaked in resin which are called cellar-rats. The cellar-rats, which made more smoke than flame, rendered the inside of the elephant dimly visible.
Gavroche’s two guests looked about them, and felt something like what one would feel who should be shut up in the great tun of Heidelberg, or better still, what Jonah must have felt in the Biblical belly of the whale. An entire gigantic skeleton appeared to them, and enveloped them. Above, a long dusky beam, from which projected at regular distances massive encircling timbers, represented the vertebral column with its ribs, stalactites of plaster hung down like the viscera, and from one side to the other huge spider-webs made dusty diaphragms. Here and there in the corners great blackish spots were seen, which had the appearance of being alive, and which changed their places rapidly with a wild and startled motion.
The debris fallen from the elephant’s back upon his belly had filled up the concavity, so that they could walk upon it as upon a floor.
The smaller one hugged close to his brother and said in a low tone:
“It’s dark.”
This word made Gavroche cry out. The petrified air of the two mômes rendered a shock necessary.
“What’s your point?” he exclaimed. “Are we kidding around? Are we being fussy? Must you have the Tuileries? would you be fools? Say, I warn you that I do not belong to the regiment of ninnies. Are you the brats of the pope’s headwaiter?”
A little roughness is good for a person who’s afraid. It is reassuring. The two children came close to Gavroche.
Gavroche, paternally softened by this confidence, passed “from the grave to the gentle,” and addressing himself to the smaller:
“Goosy,” said he to him, accenting the insult with a caressing tone, “it is outside that it is dark. Outside it rains, here it doesn’t rain; outside it is cold, here there isn’t a speck of wind; outside there are heaps of folks, here there isn’t anybody; outside there isn’t even a moon, here there is my candle, by jinks!”
The two children began to regard the apartment with less fear; but Gavroche did not allow them much longer leisure for contemplation.
“Quick,” said he.
And he pushed them towards what we are very happy to be able to call the bottom of the chamber.
His bed was there.
Gavroche’s bed was complete. That is to say, there was a mattress, a covering, and an alcove with curtains.
The mattress was a straw mat, the covering a large blanket of coarse grey wool, very warm and almost new. The alcove was like this:
Three rather long laths, sunk and firmly settled into the rubbish of the floor, that is to say of the belly of the elephant, two in front and one behind, and tied together