Brick Club 5.1.15, 5.1.16
Gavroche makes the same choice that everyone on the barricades has been coerced toward: buying scant minutes of time with unimaginable sacrifice. It’s being in a position where you’re forced to claw and scrape out any forward progress. And whether it’s you or someone standing in your way, something has to give. For every cartridge Gavroche manages to gather, “there is another who will do us no more harm.” That same thesis showing up again. I can’t directly compare this to Enjolras, but, at some point, the distinction between distributing bullets and firing them isn’t meaningful. Think of it as the difference between attack and defense, one bolsters your allies, the other eliminates your enemies, but both ultimately have the same result.
It’s also worth thinking about the difference in consequence. In one sense, Gavroche gets the worse outcome, death is much worse than a grim conscience. But, from a more spiritual perspective, dying without the mark of the sin of murder on your soul is imminently preferable, and we already know that Enjolras has judged himself for his actions.
This is…a much worse scene than even Jehan’s execution. Jehan was killed as an enemy combatant and an active threat and was not a child. His last words were a rallying cry to revolution, Gavroche’s are a playful song (not without its allusions of course). “It was the sparrow pecking at the hunters…The National Guards and the soldiers laughed as they aimed at him.” The Guard is playing a game and for all that Gavroche is teasing, he’s not playing with them. As soon as he’s hit, his song takes a deliberate shift in tone, “I have fallen to the earth…with my nose in the gutter.” C'est la faute à les gardes nationaux. There’s so much imagery of flight and falling, sinking only to rise again. Even when Gavroche falls for the last time, he isn’t grounded, “that great soul had taken flight.”
“To be wandering and to seem free is to be lost.” Oof. There’s something laughably ironic about the public gardens only being accessible to those who can afford private space. No poor homeless children allowed in this public space.
The gardens come back. “In the morning all is streaming, in the afternoon all is dusty. Nothing is so admirable as a verdure washed by the rain and wiped by the sunbeam.” I like the phrase “pitilessly content,” to describe this type of person who ignores “sublime toil” in favor of the infinite. It has less to do with being literally absorbed to distraction by the immensity of nature and the cosmos, and a lot more to do with being in such a position where one can ignore the context and subsequent impact of their thoughts and actions. You don’t get to believe that you have an entirely objective existence, it only means you’ve never looked down before. This feels like a critique of religion, philosophy, and science all in one go.
That contrast is then brilliantly played out in the following anecdote. In the garden, “He who was there breathed happiness; life was sweet; all this nature exhaled candor, help assistance, paternity, caress, dawn…you felt the prodigality of the inexhaustible…God was serving up the universal repast.” But for the two starving orphans who are technically not even allowed in this garden. A bourgeois father counsels his son to feed the swans, “Be humane. We must take pity on the animals,” before even considering the hungry children he has seen and dismissed. The fact that he’s described to be “always smiling” reminded me of “magnificent egotists of the infinite, tranquil spectators of grief…who are determined to be happy until the light of the stars and the song of the birds are exhausted.” Continuing the extended metaphor, the bourgeois and his son flee the gardens when clouds of smoke blot out the sky and the din of revolution drowns out the birdsong. “Stick that in your gun,” indeed.
