He combined the repertory of the birds with the repertory of the workshops. He was acquainted with thieves, a tribe contiguous to his own. He had, it appears, been for three months apprenticed to a printer. He had one day executed a commission for M. Baour-Lormian, one of the Forty.
Gavroche was a gamin of letters.
Moreover, Gavroche had no suspicion of the fact that when he had offered the hospitality of his elephant to two brats on that villainously rainy night, it was to his own brothers that he had played the part of Providence.
His brothers in the evening, his father in the morning; that is what his night had been like. On quitting the Rue des Ballets at daybreak, he had returned in haste to the elephant, had artistically extracted from it the two brats, had shared with them some sort of breakfast which he had invented, and had then gone away, confiding them to that good mother, the street, who had brought him up, almost entirely.
On leaving them, he had appointed to meet them at the same spot in the evening, and had left them this discourse by way of a farewell:
"I break a cane, otherwise expressed, I cut my stick, or, as they say at the court, I file off.
If you don''t find papa and mamma, young ''uns, come back here this evening.
I''ll scramble you up some supper, and I''ll give you a shakedown."