who was coming down through the Rue Menilmontant, holding in his hand a branch of blossoming laburnum which he had just plucked on the heights of Belleville, caught sight of an old holster-pistol in the show-window of a bric-a-brac merchant''s shop.
"Mother What''s-your-name, I''m going to borrow your machine."
And off he ran with the pistol.
Two minutes later, a flood of frightened bourgeois who were fleeing through the Rue Amelot and the Rue Basse, encountered the lad brandishing his pistol and singing:-- La nuit on ne voit rien,
Le jour on voit tres bien,
D''un ecrit apocrypha
Le bourgeois s''ebouriffe,
Pratiquez la vertu,
Tutu, chapeau pointu![44]
[44] At night one sees nothing, by day one sees very well; the bourgeois gets flurried over an apocryphal scrawl, practice virtue, tutu, pointed hat!
It was little Gavroche on his way to the wars.
On the boulevard he noticed that the pistol had no trigger.
Who was the author of that couplet which served to punctuate his march, and of all the other songs which he was fond of singing on occasion? We know not.
Who does know?
Himself, perhaps.
However, Gavroche was well up in all the popular tunes in circulation, and he mingled with them his own chirpings.
An observing urchin and a rogue, he made a potpourri of the voices of nature and the voices of Paris.