Page 1618 - les-miserables

he wished to incarnate the people. God had done a grander
thing with it, he had lodged a child there.
The hole through which Gavroche had entered was a
breach which was hardly visible from the outside, being
concealed, as we have stated, beneath the elephant’s belly,
and so narrow that it was only cats and homeless children
who could pass through it.
‘Let’s begin,’ said Gavroche, ‘by telling the porter that we
are not at home.’
And plunging into the darkness with the assurance of a
person who is well acquainted with his apartments, he took
a plank and stopped up the aperture.
Again Gavroche plunged into the obscurity. The children
heard the crackling of the match thrust into the phosphoric
bottle. The chemical match was not yet in existence; at that
epoch the Fumade steel represented progress.
A sudden light made them blink; Gavroche had just
managed to ignite one of those bits of cord dipped in resin
which are called cellar rats. The cellar rat, which emitted
more smoke than light, rendered the interior of the elephant
confusedly visible.
Gavroche’s two guests glanced about them, and the sen-
sation which they experienced was something like that
which one would feel if shut up in the great tun of Heidel-
berg, or, better still, like what Jonah must have felt in the
biblical belly of the whale. An entire and gigantic skeleton
appeared enveloping them. Above, a long brown beam,
whence started at regular distances, massive, arching ribs,
represented the vertebral column with its sides, stalac-

1618 Les Miserables