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_ 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 good-for-nothing,
you have seized my wife's waist!"--"I, sir? Search me!" _
Read next: VOLUME III: BOOK FIRST - PARIS STUDIED IN ITS ATOM: CHAPTER III. He is Agreeable
Read previous: VOLUME III: BOOK FIRST - PARIS STUDIED IN ITS ATOM: CHAPTER I. Parvulus
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