Trevanian's Works/Street of the Four Winds - Internet Edition/An Excerpt

A Gutter Snipe

Monsieur Grasse's view of himself as a clever old Parisian hawk preparing to feast on goose à la Provençale suggests a useful avian metaphor for the inhabitants of that Paris in which our young Basque now found himself. We have witnessed his encounter with a brace of those proud, preening popinjays of High Fashion who drive their glistening tilburys along the avenues, reins dangling loosely from well-groomed hands, lazy-lidded eyes sliding over the polloi with unutterable contempt. The fathers of these wastrels are the flint-eyed eagles of Commerce who prey on the toil and ingenuity of others, ripping Profit from the body of Labour and carrying the still-dripping morsels back to their luxurious aeries to plop them into the upturned, gaping maws of their squawking young. Living in symbiotic association with these predators of Enterprise are the rapacious vultures of the Law who descend in fluttering flocks to batten on the orts of success and the spoils of disaster alike. Both eagle and vulture excite their flaccid flesh with the poules of Paris-flighty, fluffy young women from the under classes who exchange the warmth of their thighs for snug nests and gaudy plumage-in perference to their own comfortable plump-breasted bourgeoise hens who spend their days cooing over their broods and waddling about on daily rounds of visits, pecking at bits of gossip and clucking in righteous disapproval. Then there is the Academy, blinking owls of sage appearance, but dazed by the bright light of any new artistic dawn. And the raucous magpies of the stock market; and the kept canaries in ornate cages who sing upon command but never fly free; and the peacocks of the royal court strutting and displaying, so over-bred that they must be fed by others; and the albatrosses of the ancien régime hanging around the neck of Progress; and the buzzards of journalism picking at the carcass of yesterday's scandals. But of all this swarming flock, the quintessentially Parisian species is the snipe, the gutter-snipe, that sassy, irreverent child-of-the-streets; quick of hand, slick of wit, foul of mouth; thief, clown, mimic, irritant; but above all amused observer and relentless critic of the passing parade.

As chance would have it, one such urchin, known to god and Man only as 'the Snipe', had chosen the Street of the Four Winds as his feeding ground. This Snipe had many perches, but no nest. It slept in doorways and sheds, crevices and crannies, its choice depending on the weather, its mood, and the relative strength of locks and hasps. Shopkeepers of the district lived in dread of its adroit talons which could make an apple or a turnip disappear under their very eyes. Honest householders viewed it as a damaging example to their children, with its cocky swagger, its vulgar speech, and its total lack of humility in the presence of his betters. In fact, of all who lived in that impoverished quartier, only the struggling young artists who had been attracted thither by cheap housing and romantic tradition treated the Snipe with fraternity, even affection, accepting him as both mascot and symbol. They delighted in his bravado and his scathing tongue, in his frank disrespect for authority in all its guises, and above all for the indomitable independence expressed in every feature of his delightfully ugly face, with its green wide-set eyes, its crooked gash of a grin extending from one protuberant ear to the other, its upturned bulb of a nose, and its thatch of mud-coloured hair that had never known the oppression of brush or comb.

How old was this gutter-snipe? Not even he could say, precisely. The death of his mother was beyond the reach of his memory; and the drunkard father who had carried him about the streets when he was a baby, clothed only in thin rags in the cruellest winter cold so that his shivering would wring pity from the hearts of the passers-by, had long ago been killed in a knife-fight in a nameless back alley. Let us give the Snipe…oh, say…thirteen years? When his elastic face was animated with joy or mischief, he seemed no more than seven or eight, but when his features were slack with despair or taut with hunger, he could have passed for an ancient dwarf. Yes, let's give him thirteen years-a fairly ripe age for these homeless children of the streets who seldom live to see twenty.

How did this bird of passage survive? What was its diet? In what plumage did it clothe itself? Well, with the Snipe everything was the best…or the worst. Because he sustained himself by theft, he sometimes dined on a rich pâté pinched from the counter of an elegant charcuterie across the river, but this delicacy would most likely be spread on a crust of stale bread he had found in a pile of garbage and brushed off, more or less carefully. At times, his pockets bulged with pomegranates; at other times, he munched a raw potato. He could remember once feasting on a whole roasted partridge liberated from a spit at a fair booth. He could also recall shivering in mid-winter in a lean-to behind a tannery where he discovered the gustatory potential of strips of raw leather, which he pronounced not at all that bad, especially when enhanced by the sauce of ravenous hunger. The Snipe's diet eschewed that mundane middle ground between banquet and garbage, between the exquisite and the execrable.

In speech, no less than in diet, the Snipe fluctuated between the gutter and the gods, sometimes expressing himself in his own splendidly profane argot, then instantly slipping into inflated turns of speech overheard from pompous actors taking a breath of air in theatre alleys, or from students gathered in wineshops to batter ideas with words. These orotund flights of language were imprinted whole and undigested on his mind with that facility of memory common to the illiterate.

It was the Snipe's boast that he was so clever a thief that he had never-not once!-been apprehended in the course of his unorthodox commercial ventures. Sadly, this central tenet of the lad's self-promulgated legend was not true. Indeed, upon one occasion he had been obliged to hide himself in a disused warehouse for almost a week, slipping out only at night to scavenger what he could, because he had been pounded in the face by the fists of a shop-keeper and his wife for stealing a turnip, and he his pride would not allow him to show himself on the streets until the bruises and swelling had gone from his mouth and nose, for to do so would have been to admit that he had been caught. A reputation is a responsibility.

And his clothing? It was analogous to both his diet and his speech, a mixture of the splendid and the scrofulous. To scan his raiment from top to toe, we find his untameable mat of hair stuffed into a once-fine beaver hat that undergone the indignity of being run over by a brewery waggon, but which he wears cocked forward at a sassy angle. His coat had once been a swallow-tailed extravagance in emerald brocade, but its ex-owner would surely lament the raffish cachet lent to it by time, damage, and filth. Beneath this coat is the pride of the gamin's wardrobe, an embroidered waistcoat that shows traces of once having been scarlet and gold. True, its buttons have been snipped off and transferred to some newer garment, and they have been replaced by thongs of string; and true, it must have been made for a very short, very fat man, for at no point does it come into contact with Snipe's narrow chest; but so taken is the Snipe by this bit of elegance, that he often poses with his fist on his hip, the swallow-tailed coat swept back to reveal the glories of his embroidered waistcoat. As to his pantaloons… Alas, the accretions of mud that double the weight of their once-fine fabric contribute little to the over-all effect. In addition, they are far too big to stay up without being bunched about his slim hips by a piece of rope, a discomfort he avoids by pinning them directly to the inside of his waistcoat, and his body moves freely within their amplitude like the clapper in the great bell of Notre-Dame. The problem of their excessive length solved itself when his constant treading on the flopping cuffs finally wore them through. His boots are a testament to both his social adaptability and the catholicity of his taste, for one is a stout brogan of yellowish leather that would not have been out of place on the foot of a dock-worker, while the other is an evening pump of black calf of such fine quality that it would never have been discarded, had not its sole developed a disconcerting habit of flopping noisily from its torn stitching. The fact that both these shoes had been lasted for a left foot might have been a source of discomfort, were they not so voluminous as to give his feet perfect freedom within, although it was tiring to have to grip with his toes like a perching bird to avoid walking out of them.