To sum it all up once more, the Paris gamin of to-day, like the græculus of Rome in days gone by, is the infant populace with the wrinkle of the old world on his brow.
The gamin is a grace to the nation, and at the same time a disease; a disease which must be cured, how? By light. Light renders healthy. Light kindles. All generous social irradiations spring from science, letters, arts, education. Make men, make men.
Give them light that they may warm you.
Sooner or later the splendid question of universal education will present itself with the irresistible authority of the absolute truth; and then, those who govern under the superintendence of the French idea will have to make this choice; the children of France or the gamins of Paris; flames in the light or will-o’-the-wisps in the gloom.
The gamin expresses Paris, and Paris expresses the world. For Paris is a total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. The whole of this prodigious city is a foreshortening of dead manners and living manners.
He who sees Paris thinks he sees the bottom of all history with heaven and constellations in the intervals.
Paris has a capital, the Town-Hall, a Parthenon, Notre-Dame, a Mount Aventine, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, an Asinarium, the Sorbonne, a Pantheon, the Pantheon, a Via Sacra, the Boulevard des Italiens, a temple of the winds, opinion; and it replaces the Gemoniæ by ridicule.
Its majo is called 'faraud,' its Transteverin is the man of the faubourgs, its hammal is the market-porter, its lazzarone is the pègre, its cockney is the native of Ghent. Everything that exists elsewhere exists at Paris.
The fishwoman of Dumarsais can retort on the herb-seller of Euripides, the discobols Vejanus lives again in the Forioso, the tight-rope dancer.