Chapter 161 Thirteen Gavroche the Younger

About eight or nine years after the events mentioned in the second part of this story, people often saw an eleven or twelve-year-old boy in the area of ​​Damiao Road and Shuita, talking about the things that are often seen at his age. He smiles, but he is absolutely depressed and empty in his heart. If he is not like that, he will quite correctly embody the image of the wild boy we sketched earlier.The child was indeed wearing a pair of grown-up trousers, but not his father's, and a woman's gown, but not his mother's.Some irrelevant people put him in such rags for kindness.He is not without parents.But his father didn't care about him, and his mother didn't love him at all.This is the kind of orphaned child who deserves pity.

The boy had always felt that the street was his only place to live.The paving stones were not as hard as his mother's heart. His parents had already kicked him into life. He also flew away without caring. It was a rowdy, blue-faced, lithe, alert, tongue-in-cheek, quick-witted, and sickly child.He went, came, sang, played money throwing games, dug the gutter, and occasionally stole some small things, but just like a kitten and sparrow, secretly playing, people called him naughty, he laughed and called him Hooligans get angry.He has no shelter, no bread, no fire, no warmth, but he is happy because he is free.

Such poor little tricks, once grown up, are almost always crushed by the millstone of the social order, but so long as they are children and small, they escape.Any little gap saved them. However, although the child was helpless, every two or three months, he would occasionally say: "Well, I'm going to see mother!" And he left the road, the circus, the St. Along the river, across the bridge, into the suburbs, past the women's workhouse, where is it?It is precisely the double-numbered door familiar to the readers, No. 50-52, Gorbo's old house. The hovel at Nos. 50-52 was often vacant and always had a sign saying ROOMS FOR RENT.At this time, it is strange to say that there are several people living there, and those few people have nothing to do with each other, and have nothing to do with each other, as is often the case in Paris.They all belonged to that class of abject poverty, beginning with the petty bourgeois who were extremely poor, and then gradually from misery to misery, down to the bottom of society, and continued with the sewer workers who cleared the mud and the rag dealers who collected old clothes. Two careers that don't get the benefits of civilization end up.

The "second landlord" of Jean Valjean's time was dead, and she was replaced by a fellow of the same type.I don't know any philosopher who said: "There is never a shortage of old wives." This new old woman was called Mother Birgon, and in her life she had three parrots, successively ruling her soul, and nothing else worth mentioning. Among the residents of that dilapidated house, the poorest was a family of four. The father, mother and two already grown daughters lived together in the same dilapidated house, one of the dilapidated ones we have already talked about. room.

The family, at first glance, seemed to have nothing special about it, except for the embarrassment of poverty. The head of the family, when he first rented the house, called himself Jondrette.The situation of his moving is surprisingly similar to a thought-provoking sentence from the second landlord, which is "nothing has moved in." Let's borrow that sentence here.Soon after settling down, this Jondrette said to the woman who was the doorkeeper, the sweeper of the stairs, and the oldest resident of the resident: "I said mother, if anyone comes to find a Pole or an Italian or Spaniard, that's me."

This is the home of the happy barefoot child.When he got there, all he saw was poor and miserable, and what was even more uncomfortable was that he couldn't see a smile. What he felt was the cold air in the hearth and the heart of his relatives.When he went in, he was asked, "Where are you from?" He replied, "From the street." When he left, he was asked, "Where are you going?" He replied, "To the street." His mother also said to him, "What are you doing here?" Thus the child lived without love, like yellow grass in a cellar.He didn't feel bad about it, and he didn't blame anyone.He had no idea what parents were supposed to be like.

Nevertheless, his mother loved his two older sisters. We forgot to mention that on the Rue des Temples they called the boy Little Gavroche.Why is he called Gavroche?Probably because his father's name was Jondrette. Severing kinship seems to be the instinct of some poor people. The room in which Jondrette lived in the poor house was the last one at the bottom of the passage.In the little room next to it lived a very poor young man named Monsieur Marius. Let's talk about who this M. Marius is.