Les Miserables, Wilbour Translation

IN summer, he transforms himself into a frog; and in the evening, at nightfall, opposite the bridges of Austerlitz and Jena, from the coal rafts and washerwomen's boats, he plunges head-foremost into the Seine, and into all sorts of infractions of the laws of modesty and the police.

Sometimes this gnat it is thus that he styles himself can read; sometimes he can write; he always knows how to scrawl. He gets by some unknown and mysterious mutual instruction, all talents which may be useful in public affairs; from 1815 to 1830, he imitated the call of the turkey; from 1830 to 1848, he scratched a pear on the walls. One summer evening, Louis Philippe returning to the palace on foot, saw one of them, a little fellow, so high, sweating and stretching upon tiptoe, to make a charcoal sketch of a gigantic pear, on one of the pillars of the Neuilly gateway; the king, with that good nature which he inherited 'from Henry IV., helped the boy, completed the pear, and gave the youngster a gold Louis, saying: "The pear's on that, too! " The gamin loves uproar. Violence and noise please him. He execrates " the " cures. One day, in the Rue de l'Universite, one of these young scamps was making faces at the porte-cochere of No. 69. " Why are you doing that at this door? " asked a passer-by. The boy replied: "There's a cure there." It was, in fact, the residence of the Papal Nuncio. Nevertheless, whatever may be the Voltairean tendencies of the gamin, should an occasion present itself to become a choirboy, he would, very likely, accept, and in such case would serve the mass properly. There are two things of which he is the Tantalus, which he is always wishing for, but never attains to overthrow the government, and to get his trousers mended.