Just the same. He wears the same reminiscence of a hat, the same remnants of trowsers, the same shirt with holes torn in it in the same places, the flag of distress floats from the same quarter, if, indeed, the shirt is long enough to boast a lower end, and the bare feet in the summer, and the dilapidated shoes in the winter, are the same. It is not the same boy, but it is the boy cast in the same mold, and with all the others, subject to the same conditions, and consequently exactly like as peas.
Nature makes men in molds. Noblemen’s sons have something in their make-up besides their clothes, and so have the children of poverty. A pallet in a garret, or, more usually, the bare floor; a crust, or the core of an apple at rare and uncertain intervals, are as certain to produce one typical face and a typical body as luxurious beds and rich food do another.
WHAT BECOMES OF THE GAMIN.
The Parisian gamins are alike wherever you see them, for they all come from one stock, and are all brought up in one way. So nearly are they alike that the old saying might well be reversed. Instead of its being “It’s a wise child that knows its own father,” it should read “It’s a wise mother that knows her own child.” With these waifs, a child’s knowing, or even guessing, at its own father, would be an idea utterly chimerical.
Yet they are good-natured, and even kind to each other. There are girl vagabonds and girl waifs as well as boy waifs. The boys are wonderfully good to the little homeless girls who are too Arab-like to go to the retreats provided for them by the Government. If the boy has a warm place under a bridge or over a lime kiln, he gives it up to the wandering female rat, with as much chivalry as any grand Seigneur could display, and he shares with her the result of his predatory excursions, even going a trifle more hungry himself that she may not entirely starve. They are always hungry—it is only a question of how hungry they may be.
What becomes of them? I don’t know. Sometimes they get into other ways and grow into respectable citizens. Occasionally one of them is sufficiently tamed to learn a trade, if some citizen picks him up and cares for him, and now and then a street boy or girl drifts, by accident, into a profession and becomes eminent. The great French actress, Rachel, was a street girl, whose only fortune was her guitar, and whose living was made by singing in front of cafés. By hook or crook she got upon the stage, and once there her genius made her way for her. The Frenchman cares nothing for birth or position in the matter of genius. He wants good singing and good acting, and he cares not whether the singer or actor comes from the gutter or the palace. If from the gutter, the genius which delights him removes the slime, and he does it even greater honor than as though it had been pushed by more favorable circumstances.
Rachel not only made a world-wide fame, but she raised her family, all of whom were as poor and low down as herself, to the very heights of French grandeur. One of the Felix girls—that is their name—is now the wealthy and prosperous manufacturer of a face powder, which is the delight of the upper classes. With the shrewdness of the Israelite, she did not go into groceries or such trifles. She knew the French people too well. She invented a face powder and hair restorative, and waxed rich. She will marry her daughters to noblemen, and possibly Kings may spring from a line that once was delighted with a sou thrown into the gutter for them to scramble for.
One of the great chocolate manufacturers, whose name is known wherever there is civilization, who counts his residences by the dozen, and his wealth by millions, was a gamin till he was eighteen.
Some of them, like Rachel, from their intense love of the drama, get to be actors, when they are old enough. Some of them become rag-pickers, or work into other employments of a semi-vagabondizing nature; some of them become thieves, and take in all the range of crime from picking a pocket to committing murder, and numbers of them go into the army and navy.
But these instances are comparatively rare. The gamin grows, as a rule, into a vagabond, the vagabond into a criminal, and the criminal either ends at the guillotine or in the prison hospital. A lucky chance may graft something better on them, or a revolution may afford them opportunities for distinction in a military way, but those so promoted are exceptions. The rule is quite the other way.