Читать книгу Les Misérables, v. 3 - Victor Hugo, Clara Inés Bravo Villarreal - Страница 4

Paris begins with the badaud and ends with the gamin: two beings of which no other city is capable; the passive acceptance which is satisfied with looking, and the inexhaustible initiative; Prudhomme and Fouillou. Paris alone has that in its natural history: all the monarchy is in the badaud, all the anarchy is in the gamin. This pale child of the faubourgs of Paris lives, and is developed, and grows up in suffering, a thoughtful witness in the presence of social realities and human things. He believes himself reckless, but is not so: he looks on, ready to laugh, but also ready for something else. Whoever you may be who call yourself prejudice, abuses, ignominy, oppression, iniquity, despotism, injustice, fanaticism, or tyranny, take care of the yawning gamin.

This little fellow will grow. Of what clay is he made? Of anything. Take a handful of mud, a breath, and you have Adam. It is sufficient for a God to pass, and God has ever passed over the gamin. Fortune toils for this little being, though by the word fortune we mean to some extent chance. Will this pygmy, moulded in the coarse common clay, ignorant, uneducated, brutal, violent, and of the populace, be an Ionian or a Bœotian? Wait a while, dum currit rota, and the genius of Paris, that demon which creates children of accident and men of destiny, will behave exactly contrary to the Latin potter, and make an amphora out of the earthenware jar.