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, hairy, sticky, which crawls
sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, which has no cry, but which has a
look, and is so terrible that no one has ever beheld it; he calls this
monster "the deaf thing." The search for these "deaf things" among
the stones is a joy of formidable nature. Another pleasure consists in
suddenly prying up a paving-stone, and taking a look at the wood-lice.
Each region of Paris is celebrated for the interesting treasures which
are to be found there. There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the
Ursulines, there are millepeds in the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in
the ditches of the Champs-de-Mars