BOOK FIRST.--PARIS STUDIED
IN ITS ATOM
CHAPTER I PARVULUS
Paris has a child,
and the forest
has a bird;
the bird
is called the sparrow;
the child
is called the gamin.
Couple these two ideas
which contain,
the one all the furnace,
the other all the dawn;
strike these two sparks together,
Paris,
childhood;
there leaps
out from
them a little being.
Homuncio,
Plautus would say.
This little being is joyous.
He has
not food every day,
and he
goes to the play
every evening,
if he sees good.
He has no shirt
on his body,
no shoes on his feet,
no roof over his head;
he is
like the flies of heaven,
who have
none of these things.
He is
from seven
to thirteen years of age,
he lives in bands,
roams the streets,
lodges in the open air,
wears an old pair
of trousers
of his father's,
which descend below his heels,
an old hat of
some other father,
which descends below his ears,
a single suspender
of yellow listing;
he runs,
lies in wait,
rummages about,
wastes time,
blackens pipes,
swears like a convict,
haunts the wine-shop,
knows thieves,
calls gay women thou,
talks slang,
sings obscene songs,
and has no evil
in his heart.
This is
because he
has in
his heart
a pearl,
innocence;
and pearls
are not
to be dissolved in mud.
So long as man
is in his childhood,
God wills
that he shall be innocent.
If one were to ask
that enormous city:
"What is this?"
she would reply:
"It is my little one."
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 occupations,
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 of loques
--rags--
has an invariable
and well-regulated currency
in this little Bohemia
of children.
Lastly,
he has his own fauna,
which he
observes attentively in the corners;
the lady-bird,
the death's-head plant-louse,
the daddy-long-legs,
"the devil,"
a black insect,
which menaces
by twisting
about its tail
armed with two horns.
He has his fabulous monster,
which has scales
under its belly,
but is not a lizard,
which has pustules
on its back,
but is not a toad,
which inhabits the nooks
of old lime-kilns
and wells
that have run dry,
which is black,