illainous teeth, because he is badly fed and his stomach suffers, and
handsome eyes because he has wit. If Jehovah himself were present, he
would go hopping up the steps of paradise on one foot. He is strong on
boxing. All beliefs are possible to him. He plays in the gutter, and
straightens himself up with a revolt; his effrontery persists even in
the presence of grape-shot; he was a scapegrace, he is a hero; like the
little Theban, he shakes the skin from the lion; Barra the drummer-boy
was a gamin of Paris; he Shouts: "Forward!" as the horse of Scripture
says "Vah!" and in a moment he has passed from the small brat to the
giant.

This child of the puddle is also the child of the ideal. Measure that
spread of wings which reaches from Moliere to Barra.

To sum up the whole, and in one word, the gamin is a being who amuses
himself, because he is unhappy.

CHAPTER X--ECCE PARIS, ECCE HOMO

To sum it all up once more, the Paris gamin of to-day, like the
graeculus of Rome in days gone by, is the infant populace with the
wrinkle of the old world on his brow.

The gamin is a grace to the nation, and at the same time a disease; a
disease which must be cured, how? By light.

Light renders healthy.

Light kindles.

All generous social irradiations spring from science, letters, arts,
education. Make men, make men. Give them light that they may warm
you. Sooner or later the splendid question of universal education will
present itself with the irresistible authority of the absolute truth;
and then, those who govern under the superintendence of the French idea
will have to make this choice; the children of France or the gamins of
Paris; flames in the light or will-o'-the-wisps in the gloom.

The gamin expresses Paris, and Paris expresses the world.

For Paris is a total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. The whole
of this prodigious city is a foreshortening of dead manners and living
manners. He who sees Paris thinks he sees the bottom of all history with
heaven and constellations in the intervals. Paris has a capital, the
Town-Hall, a Parthenon, Notre-Dame, a Mount Aventine, the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine, an Asinarium, the Sorbonne, a Pantheon, the Pantheon, a
Via Sacra, the Boulevard des Italiens, a temple of the winds, opinion;
and it replaces the Gemoniae by ridicule. Its majo is called "faraud,"
its Transteverin is the man of the faubourgs, its hammal is the
market-porter, its lazzarone is the pegre, its co