Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [324]
It was this netting which took the place of curtains.
Gavroche removed the stones a little which kept down the netting in front, and the two folds of the trellis which lay one over the other opened.
“Mômes, on your hands and knees!” said Gavroche.
He made his guests enter into the cage carefully, then he went in after them, creeping, pulled back the stones, and hermetically closed the opening.
They were all three stretched upon the straw.
Small as they were, none of them could have stood up in the alcove. Gavroche still held the cellar-rat in his hand.
“Now,” said he, “pioncez! [sleep] I am going to suppress the candelabra.”
“Monsieur,” inquired the elder of the two brothers, of Gavroche, pointing to the netting, “what is that?”
“That,” said Gavroche, “is for the rats, pioncez!”
The two children looked with a timid and stupefied respect upon this intrepid and inventive being, a vagabond like them, isolated like them, wretched like them, who was something wonderful and all-powerful, who seemed to them supernatural, and whose countenance was made up of all the grimaces of an old mountebank mingled with the most natural and most pleasant smile.
“Monsieur,” said the elder timidly, “you are not afraid then of the sergents de ville?”
Gavroche merely answered:
“Môme! we don’t say sergents de ville, we say cognes.”
The smaller boy had his eyes open, but he said nothing. As he was on the edge of the mat, the elder being in the middle, Gavroche tucked the blanket under him as a mother would have done, and raised the mat under his head with some old rags in such a way as to make a pillow for the môme. Then he turned towards the elder:
“Eh! we are pretty well off here!”
“Oh, yes,” answered the elder, looking at Gavroche with the expression of a rescued angel.
The two poor little soaked children were beginning to get warm.
“Ah, now,” continued Gavroche, “what in the world were you crying for?”
And pointing out the little one to his brother:
“A youngster like that, I don’t say, but a big boy like you to cry is silly; it makes you look like a calf.”
“Well,” said the child, “we had no room, no place to go.”
“Brat!” replied Gavroche, “we don’t say a room, we say a piolle.”
“And then we were afraid to be all alone like that in the night.”
“We don’t say night, we say sorgue.”
“Thank you, monsieur,” said the child.
“Listen to me,” continued Gavroche, “you must never whine any more for anything. I will take care of you. You will see what fun we have. In summer we will go to the Glacière with Navet, a comrade of mine, we will go in swimming in the Basin, we will run on the track before the Bridge of Austerlitz all naked, that makes the washerwomen mad. They scream, they scold, if you only knew how funny they are! We will go to see the skeleton man. He is alive. At the Champs-Elysées. That parishioner is as thin as anything. And then I will take you to the theatre. I will take you to see Frederic Lemaitre.ep I have tickets, I know the actors, I even acted once in a play. We were mômes so high, we ran about under a cloth, that made the sea. I will have you hired at my theatre. We will go and see the savages. They’re not real, those savages. They have red tights which wrinkle, and you can see their elbows darned with white thread. After that we will go to the Opera. We will go in with the claqueurs. The claque at the Opera is very select. I wouldn’t go with the claque on the boulevards. At the Opera, just think, there are some who pay twenty