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Cherub of the Gutter
This is an image of Gavroche
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"He was
a boisterous, pallid, nimble, wide awake, rougish urchin, with
an air at once vivacious and sickly. He went, came, sang, played
pitch and toss, scraped the gutters, stole a little, but he did
it gaily like the cats and the sparrows, laughed when people
called him an errand-boy, and got angry when they called him
a ragamuffin. He had no shelter, no food, no fire, no love, but
he was light-hearted because he was free."
-Les
Misérables, Marius, Book I
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| This image is of Gavroche,
a street urchin who turned to the streets instead of being corrupted
by his father, Thenardier, and his gang of criminals. Hugo highlighted
Gavroche's generosity as shown in this image as he took two young
boys under his wing, giving them advice, comfort, and a place
to sleep. |
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This image of Gavroche aiding his brothers
by buying them a meal, quite unaware of their relationship to
him, underlines a social tragedy - the disintegration of the
family under the pressures of poverty. His comment on his two
lost charges, "All the same, if I had children, I would
take better care of them than that," is a masterpiece of
social irony. This street urchin, to whom society had never given
any material help or moral training, had a far deeper compassion
for childhood as well as a sharp sense of his moral responsibility
toward the unprotected than the average French citizen.
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Hugo portrayed street urchins as good-hearted
children who were more unfortunate than criminal. He allowed
that the street urchin was often denied a spot in any one class
of people. "The Parisian order of gamins is almost
a caste. One might say: nobody wants to have anything to do with
them." (Hugo, p. 509)
Hugo praised the street urchin for being strong-minded and being
capable of getting out of "scrapes". Hugo also called
on his bourgeois readers to empathize with the situation of the
gamin. "The gamin is a beauty and, at the same time,
a disease of the nation - a disease that must be cured."
(Hugo,p.513)
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