Page 979 - les-miserables

CHAPTER II

SOME OF HIS PARTICULAR

CHARACTERISTICS

The gamin—the street Arab—of Paris is the dwarf of the
giant.
Let us not exaggerate, this cherub of the gutter sometimes
has a shirt, but, in that case, he owns but one; he sometimes
has shoes, but then they have no soles; he sometimes has a
lodging, and he loves it, for he finds his mother there; but
he prefers the street, because there he finds liberty. He has
his own games, his own bits of mischief, whose foundation
consists of hatred for the bourgeois; his peculiar metaphors:
to be dead is to eat dandelions by the root; his own occupa-
tions, calling hackney-coaches, letting down carriage-steps,
establishing means of transit between the two sides of a
street in heavy rains, which he calls making the bridge of
arts, crying discourses pronounced by the authorities in
favor of the French people, cleaning out the cracks in the
pavement; he has his own coinage, which is composed of all
the little morsels of worked copper which are found on the
public streets. This curious money, which receives the name

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