Gavroche risks gathering ammunition and is shot dead

Gavroche’s ammunition run turns a child’s daring into a direct service to the insurgents at the barricade. He leaves cover to strip cartridges from the dead in the street, and the smoke that obscures the fighting briefly lets him turn exposure into an advantage.

The sortie for ammunition

Courfeyrac spots someone below the barricade, outside and under fire. It is Gavroche, who has taken a bottle basket from the cabaret and gone out through an opening in the barricade. He is calmly emptying the cartridge pouches of National Guards killed on the embankment of the redoubt. The scene’s composure is striking: while bullets make the street a lethal place, Gavroche treats the task as practical work, gathering ammunition for the defenders.

The scale of the opportunity is also the measure of the danger. About twenty dead lie along the street, with about twenty cartridge pouches among them; for the barricade, those pouches mean a supply of cartridges. Smoke hangs between the tall buildings, thick enough to dim the daylight and make it difficult for the fighters to see from one end of the short street to the other. That obscurity, apparently useful to the forces preparing to assault the barricade, also gives Gavroche cover.

Small enough to advance beneath the smoke without being seen, he empties the first seven or eight pouches with little danger. His movements are variously low and sudden: he crawls flat on his stomach, runs on all fours, carries the basket in his teeth, wriggles, slips, and winds between one dead man and another. The narration likens his quick handling of a pouch to a monkey opening a nut, an image that makes his nimbleness vivid without diminishing the risk. From the barricade, the insurgents dare not call to him to come back, since a shout might draw the enemy’s attention to his position.

Defiance in the open street

Gavroche presses farther along the street until the gun smoke thins. There, marksmen behind a raised barricade of paving stones and others gathered at the street corner can at last make out something moving. As Gavroche empties the cartridges from a sergeant’s pouch beside a milestone, a bullet strikes the dead man. He answers the interruption with a joke, then a second shot sparks against the paving stones and a third overturns his basket. Seeing that the shots come from the suburban forces, he rises instead of retreating.

Standing with his hands on his hips and his eyes fixed on the National Guards firing at him, Gavroche sings. His refrain blames Voltaire, and then Rousseau, for the world’s troubles. The taunt makes his song an act of defiance, not merely a distraction: he faces the marksmen openly while the ammunition he has gathered remains the purpose of his sortie. The scene holds the insurgents in anxious silence; they watch from the barricade but cannot safely call him back.

For a time, he turns the exchange into a perilous game. He answers each volley with another verse, ducks and springs between doorways and hiding places, vanishes and reappears, and even mocks the gunfire with gestures. The soldiers and National Guards keep aiming and missing; Gavroche keeps emptying pouches and filling his basket. The narrator sets the child’s apparent delight against the barricade’s fear, likening him to a sparrow pecking at hunters. His agility seems to outstrip the bullets, but the repeated near-misses only sharpen the danger: each moment of evasion leaves him exposed again in the street.

The fatal reversal

A bullet finally catches Gavroche. He staggers and falls, drawing a cry from the entire barricade, but the fall does not yet end his defiance. He sits upright on the pavement, blood running in a long line across his face, raises both arms, and looks toward the shooter. Then he resumes the same song, beginning again with his fall and once more blaming Voltaire. The refrain that had mocked the marksmen now accompanies his wound: even struck down, he answers the violence with the voice he had used to taunt it.

A second bullet from the same shooter cuts the song short. Gavroche falls face down on the pavement and does not move again. The abruptness of his death breaks the scene’s pattern of apparent escapes: the boy who had repeatedly vanished and reappeared among the volleys can no longer rise. The narration calls his departing spirit small yet great, holding together the child’s physical vulnerability and the scale of his courage. His ammunition run has supplied the barricade, but its final image is not the basket or the cartridges: it is a defiant song stopped in mid-line.

The dead and the living

The ammunition run binds the scene’s usefulness to its horror: the dead guards’ pouches become a supply for the barricade, while a bullet striking the sergeant’s corpse shows how the street remains under fire even where no living fighter stands. Gavroche moves among bodies first as a scavenger for the insurgents and then as a target himself. The episode’s grim exchange—war matériel recovered from the dead, a child exposed in retrieving it—makes his practical service inseparable from the cost of the fighting.