Finally, at the mature age of eight, or thereabouts, he leaves his mother; or, rather, some night he does not come home. He has found a dry place under an arch to sleep, or a hole in the docks, and he has associated with him other boys of the same breed; now he is an independent citizen.
His mother knows the way of the world, and she goes right on, sure that her child is living, and, in his way, well.
He occasionally goes to see her, till she moves some time suddenly, and is lost to him in the great desert.
He probably never sees her again. If she gets on well and keeps her health she dies finally in a hospital—if not, a plunge in the Seine ends her struggles with a very hard world. Not infrequently his last look at her is taken in the Morgue.
While he is a boy he leads a very independent and happy life. He toils not, neither does he spin; he does not dine at the Maison Doree; nor does he drink champagne or burgundy. He drinks wine when he can get it, and water from the public fountain when he cannot. He eats black bread when he has a sou to buy it with; lacking the sou, there are always opportunities to steal an apple, and failing in that, there are apple cores to be picked up on the streets.
As for clothing, very little does him; very little, but where he obtains that little, I have never been able to ascertain. He gets it, though, somehow, each article in the suit coming from a different source, and all just strong enough to hold together. A picturesque vagabond it makes of him.
His conversation is something wonderful. There isn’t a slang phrase in French that he has not, and as the mothers are of all nations, he has made piratical excursions into other languages, and has the worst of them all. He can swear very well in English, not the unctuous, brutal oaths of the American or Englishman, for even a Parisian gamin has taste, but English oaths lose none of their strength in him. He ornaments them, but not to the degree of weakening.
No Frenchman would ever think of chaffing a gamin twice, for he knows by bitter experience that the gamin always gets the best of it, and the first and last time he tried it he retired with everybody laughing but himself and the boy. He did not laugh, because the boy had routed him, horse, foot and dragoon—the boy did not, because to have laughed would have been undignified, and lessened the effect of his wordy victory. He professed to sympathize with his victim, which was adding insult to injury.
In this matter of talk the very cabmen are afraid of him, and the policemen dread him. It is his delight to catch a policeman or a soldier in a position where he cannot move, and to cover him with not exactly abuse, but what the English call chaff. He makes the poor fellow ridiculous; he sets a crowd laughing at him, and does it in perfect safety, too, for the official cannot leave his post to capture and punish him, and if he could it would do no good. The urchin is as slippery as an eel, and as fleet as an antelope. He can slip through the crowd and be a safe distance long before the encumbered man has made up his mind to go for him.
These boys make up no small portion of every mob that has devastated Paris for centuries, and popular risings are altogether too common for comfort in that excitable city. In all the revolutions these little fellows have handled muskets and pikes, and made much of them. The gamin was foremost in the mob that leveled the Bastille to the ground, and when that monument of irresponsible tyranny was in ruins the dead bodies of hundreds of them were found underneath them, and the living bodies of hundreds of others waved their crownless hats over the smoking debris. There never has been a barricade erected that had not gamins behind it, boys of fourteen, fighting as coolly and steadily as grizzled veterans of sixty.