When the Pup Grows up

"Just as Gavroche was relieving a sergeant who lay near a stone-block, of his cartridges, a ball struck the body.

'The deuce!' said Gavroche. 'So they are killing my dead for me.'

A second ball splintered the pavement beside him. A third upset his basket.

Gavroche looked and saw that it came form the baulieue.

He rose up straight, on his feet, his hair in the wind, his hands upon his hips, his eye fixed upon the National Guards who were firing, and he sang:

On est laid a Nanterre,

C'est la faute a Voltaire,

Et bete a Palaiseau,

Cest la faute a Rousseau.

Then he picked up his basket, put into it the cartridges which had fallen out, without losing a single one, and advancing towards the fusillade, began to empty another cartridge-box." - Les Misérables

     This is possibly my favorite part of Les Mis. I find it hilarious, and beautiful, and darkly disturbing. Gavroche is the urchin, kicked out of his family and forced to live on the street. He takes it upon himself to collect cartridges to support the revolutionaries, and sneaks through the barricade to do so.

     I love his exclamation of "the deuce," his twisted argot way of shouting "what the hell!" So they are killing the dead. He ignores the fact that the shot was for him, and mocks them, mocks their war and the futility of it. Killing the dead. But even that's not enough. He stands and sings to them, fighting their shots with couplets as he comes closer.

"The people in Nanterre are ugly, 
It's Voltaire's fault,
And stupid in Palaiseau, 
It's Rousseau's fault."

     He hides and dances around, closer to them, and continues to sing. "Happy is my character," he tells them, "Misery is my possession." He laughs, disappears, reappears, escapes, returns. And the insurgents were scared. Racked with anxieties of fighting, they became panicked by the boy, the child, the strange fairy, the dwarf, dancing and singing through the fog, running faster than their bullets. They knew not what he was. And they fired. A young boy became an enemy. 

     They shot him in the face, and he starts his last couplet, "La nez dans le ruisseau, my nose is in the creek," and dies before his can blame his death, the fighting, all of the misery on Voltaire and Rousseau.