2.M.1.2. SOME OF HIS PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS
THE gamin — the street Arab — of Paris is the dwarf of the
giant.
Let us not exaggerate, this cherub of the gutter sometimes
has a shirt, but, in that case, he owns but one; he sometimes
has shoes, but then they have no soles; he sometimes has a
lodging, and he loves it, for he finds his mother there; but he
prefers the street, because there he finds liberty. He has his
own games, his own bits of mischief, whose foundation consists
of hatred for the bourgeois; his peculiar metaphors: to be
dead is to eat dandelions by the root; his own
occupations, calling
hackney-coaches, letting down carriage-steps, establishing
means of transit between the two sides of a street in heavy
rains, which he calls making the bridge of arts, crying
discourses
pronounced by the authorities in favor of the French
people, cleaning out the cracks in the pavement; he has his
own coinage, which is composed of all the little morsels of
worked copper which are found on the public streets. This
curious money, which receives the name of loques — rags
— has
an invariable and well-regulated currency in this little Bohemia
of children.
Lastly, he has his own fauna, which he observes
attentively
in the corners; the lady-bird, the death's-head plant-louse, the
daddy-long-legs, "the devil," a black insect, which menaces by
twisting about its tail armed with two horns. He has his
fabulous monster, which has scales under its belly, but is not
a lizard, which has pustules on its back, but is not a toad,
which inhabits the nooks of old lime-kilns and wells that have
run dry, which is black, hairy, sticky, which crawls sometimes
slowly, sometimes rapidly, which has no cry, but which has a
look, and is so terrible that no one has ever beheld it; he calls
this monster "the deaf thing." The search for these "deaf
things" among the stones is a joy of formidable nature.
Another pleasure consists in suddenly prying up a paving-stone,
and taking a look at the wood-lice. Each region of
Paris is celebrated for the interesting treasures which are to be
found there. There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the
Ursulines, there are millepeds in the Pantheon, there are
tadpoles
in the ditches of the Champs-de-Mars.
As far as sayings are concerned, this child has as many of
them as Talleyrand. He is no less cynical, but he is more
honest.
He is endowed with a certain indescribable, unexpected
joviality; he upsets the composure of the shopkeeper with his
wild laughter. He ranges boldly from high comedy to farce.
A funeral passes by. Among those who accompany the
dead there is a doctor. "Hey there!" shouts some street
Arab, "how long has it been customary for doctors to carry
home their own work?"
Another is in a crowd. A grave man, adorned with
spectacles
and trinkets, turns round indignantly: "You goodfor-nothing,
you have seized my wife's waist!" — "I, sir?
Search me!"