Page 1629 - les-miserables

cedes the dawn, a man turned from the Rue Saint-Antoine
at a run, made the circuit of the enclosure of the column
of July, and glided between the palings until he was under-
neath the belly of the elephant. If any light had illuminated
that man, it might have been divined from the thorough
manner in which he was soaked that he had passed the night
in the rain. Arrived beneath the elephant, he uttered a pe-
culiar cry, which did not belong to any human tongue, and
which a paroquet alone could have imitated. Twice he re-
peated this cry, of whose orthography the following barely
conveys an idea:—
‘Kirikikiou!’
At the second cry, a clear, young, merry voice responded
from the belly of the elephant:—
‘Yes!’
Almost immediately, the plank which closed the hole
was drawn aside, and gave passage to a child who descend-
ed the elephant’s leg, and fell briskly near the man. It was
Gavroche. The man was Montparnasse.
As for his cry of Kirikikiou,—that was, doubtless, what
the child had meant, when he said:—
‘You will ask for Monsieur Gavroche.’
On hearing it, he had waked with a start, had crawled out
of his ‘alcove,’ pushing apart the netting a little, and care-
fully drawing it together again, then he had opened the trap,
and descended.
The man and the child recognized each other silent-
ly amid the gloom: Montparnasse confined himself to the
remark:—

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