In Which the Reader Will Find a Charming Saying of the Last King — Les Misérables

In summer, he metamorphoses himself into a frog. In the evening, from the tops of coal wagons and the washerwomen's boats in front of the bridges of Austerlitz and Jena, he hurls himself headlong into the Seine. The police keep an eye on him. The result is a highly dramatic situation and a fraternal cry celebrated about 1830, a strategic warning from gamin to gamin: Ohe, Titi, oheee! Here comes the bobby, here comes the p'lice, pick up your duds and be off, through the sewer with you!

Sometimes this gnat knows how to read. Sometimes he knows how to write. He always knows how to daub. 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 helped the gamin, finished the pear, and gave the child a louis, saying: The pear is on that also. The gamin loves uproar. He execrates the priests. 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? There is a priest there. It was there that the Papal Nuncio lived.

Nevertheless, 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 attaining them: to overthrow the government, and to get his trousers sewed up again. The gamin in his perfect state possesses all the policemen of Paris, and can always put the name to the face. He reads the souls of the police like an open book.