One of my favorite chapters in Les Miserables is one describing the concept of the Parisian gamin: a term coined by Hugo for what’s essentially a street urchin, a la Oliver Twist. It’s to introduce one of my favorite characters, a gamin named Gavroche. I loved his incessant energy, his childlike self-importance, and his kindness hidden behind playful snark. Although he is small, Hugo sees the gamine as important enough to devote a wonderful chapter to describing the term. Why? Because, “The gamin embodies Paris and Paris embodies the world.”

So to understand the city, and I suppose the world, I wanted to understand Paris through the perspective of a gamin. And as a gamin, a personification. Before I go on, I have to note that when I speak of gamins and Gavroche I speak of the fictional idea of the gamin and not the very real experience of actual homelessness in Paris. One is a concept and archetype of fiction and the other is a very different experience that is not representative of whimsy, or wonder, or any characteristic of the gamin that I will attempt to describe.

Anyway, Gavroche is a child of the streets, “If you were to ask that huge city, ‘what is that?’ it would reply, ‘That’s my little one.’”. Gavroche is something like a prince, he commands the crevices, and corners, and side streets. He lives in the limerance of the public street instead of inside: everywhere and nowhere at once.

The latter is a feeling I often experience when traveling. Wandering into every store and bistro trying to get as much of a Parisian experience as possible despite my achieving feet. The novelty of every detail is exciting but also a reminder that I’m a tourist, I don’t quite belong.

That sense only intensified when I was stuck in Saint-Germain during a vicious downpour without an umbrella. I was forty-five minutes away from my apartment and too far from the nearest metro station to avoid getting soaked. I spent about an hour hurring into any dry alcove, pretending I belonged in bistros I wasn’t a customer in, slipping into any open shop I could find until I was kicked out. Watching the street crouched on the ground and from behind secret entrances to dry alcoves made me wonder if this is how Gavroche experienced Paris. Darting from the public street to secret places only known to him safely out of sight.

But the gamin does not limit himself to the side streets. “Try to think of something that Paris does not have.” Hugo dares. It’s not unearned confidence. There’s an overwhelming sense of possibility here because there’s so much squeezed in one city block. Like Paris, the gamin feels boundless. Gavroche does not feel like he isn’t worthy of anywhere. Nothing is off-limits. Not even the giant plaster elephant monument Napoleon once placed at the Bastille (yes, it was real, look it up), without any reverence or fielty, he uses it’s interior as his secret hideout. This has a political undertone to it. “He sometimes has a home… but he prefers the street because there he finds freedom.” In studying the French Revolution it seems that French history often has patterns of trading discomfort for the pursuit of freedom and the mistrust of boundaries.

The gamin’s sense of limitless is also reflected in the experience of the city streets. The winding quality of the streets, the way you can walk through a nondescript door into a massive courtyard or unexpected art museum that’s invisible from the street, the way I walked around the Marais for two hours and realized I only saw a tiny slice of it.

Another sense of expanse in this city is the possibility of contradiction and contrast. Gavroche is uncivil and rough, he has a “hatred of the respectable citizen” and “fishes in the gutter” but he is also a respectable citizen when he spends a few sous to go to the theater. In the popular American imagination, Paris is a flawless postcard of uniform cream colored avenues and adorable terraces. It meets that expectation but as this is an actual city there are trashbags, and litter, and scaffolding leaned up against luxury boutiques and quaint apartment windows overflowing with postcard-perfect bougainvilleas.

It has a history of both great sophistication and ruthlessness: in school I was taught of much of French history as both a role model and a cautionary tale. It’s strange to stand around the Place de la Concorde near quaint bistros and a museum housing Monet and other quintessential markers of sophistication while thinking about how rivers of blood ran through the cobblestone.

On that note of the theater, the gamin appreciates the finer things. Hugo said “Give a person the unnecessary and deprive him of the essential, what you have is the gamin.” In the downpour many Parisians were not worried about seeking shelter. Most preferred to get cold and soaked if it meant savoring their outdoor table at a bistro with their friends. I think in many other places they would grumble and get in their cars with the heat cranked to max or demand an inside seat. The street might be cleared within an hour. And there’s a sense of indulgence in nicheness and beauty for the sake of beauty.

Walking around Saint-Germain, I passed by countless art galleries and shops selling just one item: handmade pottery, door handles, combs, handmade custom wallpaper. All with limited hours and a nice clientele. Some were luxury but others weren’t at all. Things that probably aren’t as profitable as a supermarket or a Home Goods, but that indulge small moments of beauty and excitement.

We can attempt to define the gamin but the gamin is so vast and contradictory that perhaps, like Paris, it is undefinable. But I think Hugo’s characterization of it it as a child with endless possibility and spirit because everything is unknown and in front of them might be a good place to start.