Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [325]
At this moment, a drop of wax fell upon Gavroche’s finger, and recalled him to the realities of life.
“The deuce!” said he, “there’s the match used up. Attention! I can’t spend more than a sou a month for my lighting. When we go to bed, we must go to sleep. We haven’t time to read the romances of Monsieur Paul de Kock. Besides the light might show through the cracks of the porte-cochère, and the cognes couldn’t help seeing.”
“And then,” timidly observed the elder who alone dared to talk with Gavroche and reply to him, “a spark might fall into the straw, we must take care not to burn the house up.”
“We don’t say burn the house,” said Gavroche, “we say riffauder the bocard.”
The storm redoubled. They heard, in the intervals of the thunder, the tempest beating against the back of the colossus.
“Pour away, old rain!” said Gavroche. “It does amuse me to hear the decanter emptying along the house’s legs. Winter is a fool; he throws away his goods, he loses his trouble, he can’t wet us, and it makes him grumble, the old water-carrier!”
This allusion to thunder, all the consequences of which Gavroche accepted as a philosopher of the nineteenth century, was followed by a very vivid flash, so blinding that something of it entered by the crevice into the belly of the elephant. Almost at the same instant the thunder burst forth very furiously. The two little boys uttered a cry, and rose so quickly that the trellis was almost thrown out of place; but Gavroche turned his bold face towards them, and took advantage of the clap of thunder to burst into a laugh.
“Be calm, children. Don’t upset the edifice. That was fine thunder; give us some more. That wasn’t any fool of a flash. Bravo God! by jinks! that is most as good as it is at the theatre.”
This said, he restored order in the trellis, gently pushed the two children to the head of the bed, pressed their knees to stretch them out at full length, and exclaimed:
“As God is lighting his candle, I can blow out mine. Children, we must sleep, my young humans. It is very bad not to sleep. It would make you schlinguer in your strainer, or, as the big bugs say, stink in your jaws. Wind yourselves up well in the peel! I’m going to extinguish. Are you all right?”
“Yes,” murmured the elder, “I am right. I feel as if I had feathers under my head.”
“We don’t say head,” cried Gavroche, “we say tronche.”
The two children hugged close to each other. Gavroche finished arranging them upon the mat, and pulled the blanket up to their ears, then repeated for the third time the injunction in hieratic language:
“Pioncez!”
And he blew out the taper.
Hardly was the light extinguished when a singular tremor began to agitate the trellis under which the three children were lying. It was a multitude of dull rubbings, which gave a metallic sound, as if claws and teeth were grinding the copper wire. This was accompanied by all sorts of little sharp cries.
The little boy of five, hearing this tumult over his head, and shivering with fear, pushed the elder brother with his elbow, but the elder brother had already “pioncé, according to Gavroche’s order. Then the little boy, no longer capable of fearing him, ventured to accost Gavroche, but very low, and holding his breath:
“Monsieur?”
“Hey?” said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.
“What is that?”
“It is the rats,” answered Gavroche.
And he laid his head again upon the mat.
The rats, in fact, which swarmed by thousands in the carcass of the elephant, and which were those living black spots of which we have spoken, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle so long as it burned, but as soon as this cavern, which was, as it were, their city, had been restored to night, smelling there what the good storyteller Perrault calls “some fresh meat,” they had rushed in en masse upon Gavroche’s tent, climbed to the