e began to climb up behind him, shouting to the elder:--
"I''m going to boost him, do you tug."
And in another instant, the small lad was pushed, dragged, pulled, thrust, stuffed into the hole, before he had time to recover himself, and Gavroche, entering behind him, and repulsing the ladder with a kick which sent it flat on the grass, began to clap his hands and to cry:--
"Here we are!
Long live General Lafayette!"
This explosion over, he added:--
"Now, young ''uns, you are in my house."
Gavroche was at home, in fact.
Oh, unforeseen utility of the useless!
Charity of great things! Goodness of giants!
This huge monument, which had embodied an idea of the Emperor''s, had become the box of a street urchin. The brat had been accepted and sheltered by the colossus. The bourgeois decked out in their Sunday finery who passed the elephant of the Bastille, were fond of saying as they scanned it disdainfully with their prominent eyes:
"What''s the good of that?" It served to save from the cold, the frost, the hail, and rain, to shelter from the winds of winter, to preserve from slumber in the mud which produces fever, and from slumber in the snow which produces death, a little being who had no father, no mother, no bread, no clothes, no refuge.
It served to receive the innocent whom society repulsed.