s well
up in all the popular tunes in circulation, and he mingled with them his
own chirpings. An observing urchin and a rogue, he made a potpourri of
the voices of nature and the voices of Paris. He combined the repertory
of the birds with the repertory of the workshops. He was acquainted with
thieves, a tribe contiguous to his own. He had, it appears, been
for three months apprenticed to a printer. He had one day executed a
commission for M. Baour-Lormian, one of the Forty. Gavroche was a gamin
of letters.

Moreover, Gavroche had no suspicion of the fact that when he had offered
the hospitality of his elephant to two brats on that villainously
rainy night, it was to his own brothers that he had played the part of
Providence. His brothers in the evening, his father in the morning;
that is what his night had been like. On quitting the Rue des Ballets
at daybreak, he had returned in haste to the elephant, had artistically
extracted from it the two brats, had shared with them some sort of
breakfast which he had invented, and had then gone away, confiding
them to that good mother, the street, who had brought him up, almost
entirely. On leaving them, he had appointed to meet them at the same
spot in the evening, and had left them this discourse by way of a
farewell: "I break a cane, otherwise expressed, I cut my stick, or, as
they say at the court, I file off. If you don't find papa and mamma,
young 'uns, come back here this evening. I'll scramble you up some
supper, and I'll give you a shakedown." The two children, picked up by
some policeman and placed in the refuge, or stolen by some mountebank,
or having simply strayed off in that immense Chinese puzzle of a Paris,
did not return. The lowest depths of the actual social world are full of
these lost traces. Gavroche did not see them again. Ten or twelve weeks
had elapsed since that night. More than once he had scratched the back
of his head and said: "Where the devil are my two children?"

In the meantime, he had arrived, pistol in hand, in the Rue du
Pont-aux-Choux. He noticed that there was but one shop open in that
street, and, a matter worthy of reflection, that was a pastry-cook's
shop. This presented a providential occasion to eat another
apple-turnover before entering the unknown. Gavroche halted, fumbled in
his fob, turned his pocket inside out, found nothing, not even a sou,
and began to shout: "Help!"

It is hard to miss the last cake.

Nevertheless, Gavroc