Lisette

Chapter 26 ~ I Can Sit Down When I Likes, and Nobody Can't Order Me About

I headed back towards the Jardin des Plantes, walking along next to the Seine, to go and find Gavroche at his usual haunt near the Place de la Bastille. With Grantaire's training, and the time that had passed since running into Montparnasse, I was feeling somewhat more confident again in walking around Paris on my own. The nightmares hadn't ceased, but I was determining not to let them control me. Having found Gavroche hanging around on the Pont d'Austerlitz and bought lunch from a nearby bakery, we headed back the way I had come, to the Salpêtrière district.

We found the sewer hunter, or shore worker, as he preferred to be known in a courtyard  small and dark, surrounded by lofty wooden houses, with jutting upper stories that made them feel as though they were about to tumble down. Many of the inhabitants had returned from their various employments, and some quarrel had arisen among a few of them. The court was so thronged with spectators of the fight that I had to stand at the entrance, unable to force my way through, though Gavroche took advantage of his small size to wriggle through and see what was going on. People thronged every window above - there must have been some hundreds of people collected there, and yet all were inhabitants of this very court, for the noise of the quarrel had not yet reached the street. On my wondering at the number, the shore worker explained: "You see, miss, there's more than 30 houses in this here court, and there's not less than eight rooms in every house; now there's nine or ten people in some of the rooms, I knows, but just say four in every room, and calculate what that there comes to." I did, and found it, to my surprise, to be 960. "Well," he continued, chuckling and rubbing his hands in evident delight at the result, "you may as well just tack a couple a hundred on to the tail o' them for make-weight, as we're not werry pertikler about a hundred or two one way or the other in these here places."

With the noise of the fight dying down, Gavroche returned, and we followed the man up three flights of narrow stairs that creaked and trembled at every footstep, into his ill-furnished garret, where he gave us the following account:

"I was born in La Havre, but afore I recollects anythink, we came to Paris. The first thing I remembers is being down on the shore up to my knees in mud, and a gitting down deeper and deeper every minute till I was picked up by one of the shore-workers. I used to git down there every day, to look at the ships and boats a sailing up and down; I'd niver be tired a looking at them at that time. At last father 'prenticed me to a blacksmith, and then I couldn't git down to the river when I liked, so I got to hate the forge and the fire, and blowing the bellows, and couldn't stand the confinement no how,—at last I cuts and runs. After some time they gits me back ag'in, but I cuts ag'in. I was determined not to stand it.

"I wouldn't go home for fear I'd be sent back, so I goes down to the shore and there I sits near half the day, when who should I see but the old un as had picked me up out of the mud when I was a sinking. I tells him all about it, and he takes me home along with hisself, and gits me a bag and an o, and takes me out next day, and shows me what to do, and shows me the dangerous places, and the places what are safe, and how to rake in the mud for rope, and bones, and iron, and that's the way I comed to be a shore-worker.

"Lor' bless you, I've worked at it for more nor twenty year. I know places where you'd go over head and ears in the mud, and jist alongside on 'em you may walk as safe as you can on this floor. But it don't do for a stranger to try it, he'd wery soon git in, and it's not so easy to git out agin, I can tell you. I stay'd with the old un a long time, and we used to git lots o' tin, specially when we'd go to work the sewers. I liked that well enough. I could git into small places where the old un couldn't, and when I'd got near the grating in the street, I'd search about in the bottom of the sewer; I'd put down my arm to my shoulder in the mud and bring up shillings and half-crowns, and lots of coppers, and plenty other things. I once found a silver jug as big as a quart pot, and often found spoons and knives and forks and every thing you can think of.