Page 997 - les-miserables

knows how to read; sometimes he knows how to write; he
always knows how to daub. He does not hesitate to acquire,
by no one knows what mysterious mutual instruction, all
the talents which can be of use to the public; from 1815 to
1830, he imitated the cry of the turkey; from 1830 to 1848,
he scrawled pears on the walls. One summer evening, when
Louis Philippe was returning home on foot, he saw a little
fellow, no higher than his knee, perspiring and climbing up
to draw a gigantic pear in charcoal on one of the pillars of
the gate of Neuilly; the King, with that good-nature which
came to him from Henry IV., helped the gamin, finished the
pear, and gave the child a louis, saying: ‘The pear is on that
also.’[19] The gamin loves uproar. A certain state of violence
pleases him. He execrates ‘the cures.’ One day, in the Rue de
l’Universite, one of these scamps was putting his thumb to
his nose at the carriage gate of No. 69. ‘Why are you doing
that at the gate?’ a passer-by asked. The boy replied: ‘There
is a cure there.’ It was there, in fact, that the Papal Nuncio
lived.
[19] Louis XVIII. is represented in comic pictures of that
day as having a pear-shaped head.
Nevertheless, whatever may be the Voltairianism of the
small gamin, if the occasion to become a chorister presents
itself, it is quite possible that he will accept, and in that case
he serves the mass civilly. There are two things to which he
plays Tantalus, and which he always desires without ever at-
taining them: to overthrow the government, and to get his
trousers sewed up again.
The gamin in his perfect state possesses all the policemen

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