the
trumpets, the drums, the firing, and, above all, to that lamentable
alarm peal from Saint-Merry.

They waited for the first cannon-shot. Men sprang up at the corners of
the streets and disappeared, shouting: "Go home!" And people made haste
to bolt their doors. They said: "How will all this end?" From moment to
moment, in proportion as the darkness descended, Paris seemed to take on
a more mournful hue from the formidable flaming of the revolt.

BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE

CHAPTER I--SOME EXPLANATIONS WITH REGARD TO THE ORIGIN OF GAVROCHE'S
POETRY. THE INFLUENCE OF AN ACADEMICIAN ON THIS POETRY

At the instant when the insurrection, arising from the shock of the
populace and the military in front of the Arsenal, started a movement
in advance and towards the rear in the multitude which was following the
hearse and which, through the whole length of the boulevards, weighed,
so to speak, on the head of the procession, there arose a frightful ebb.
The rout was shaken, their ranks were broken, all ran, fled, made their
escape, some with shouts of attack, others with the pallor of flight.
The great river which covered the boulevards divided in a twinkling,
overflowed to right and left, and spread in torrents over two hundred
streets at once with the roar of a sewer that has broken loose.

At that moment, a ragged child who was coming down through the Rue
Menilmontant, holding in his hand a branch of blossoming laburnum which
he had just plucked on the heights of Belleville, caught sight of an old
holster-pistol in the show-window of a bric-a-brac merchant's shop.

"Mother What's-your-name, I'm going to borrow your machine."

And off he ran with the pistol.

Two minutes later, a flood of frightened bourgeois who were fleeing
through the Rue Amelot and the Rue Basse, encountered the lad
brandishing his pistol and singing:--

La nuit on ne voit rien,
Le jour on voit tres bien,
D'un ecrit apocrypha
Le bourgeois s'ebouriffe,
Pratiquez la vertu,
Tutu, chapeau pointu![44]

It was little Gavroche on his way to the wars.

On the boulevard he noticed that the pistol had no trigger.

Who was the author of that couplet which served to punctuate his march,
and of all the other songs which he was fond of singing on occasion? We
know not. Who does know? Himself, perhaps. However, Gavroche wa