As we said, at night its appearance changed; for night is the real medium of everything which is shadow. So soon as twilight set in the old elephant was transfigured; and it assumed a placid and redoubtable appearance in the formidable serenity of the darkness. As it belonged to the past it belonged to night, and this obscurity suited its grandeur. This monument, rude, broad, heavy, rough, austere, and almost shapeless, but most assuredly majestic, and imprinted with a species of magnificent and savage gravity, has disappeared to allow the sort of gigantic stove adorned with its pipe to reign in peace, which was substituted for the frowning fortalice with its nine towers much in the same way as the bourgeoisie are substituted for feudalism. It is very simple that a stove should be the symbol of an epoch in which a copper contains the power. This period will pass away; it is already passing away. People are beginning to understand that if there may be strength in a boiler there can only be power in a brain; in other words, that what leads and carries away the world is not locomotives, but ideas. Attach locomotives to ideas, and then it is all right; but do not take the horse for the rider. However this may be, to return to the Bastille square, the architect of the elephant managed to produce something grand with plaster, while the architect of the stove-pipe has succeeded in making something little out of bronze. This stove-pipe, which was christened a sonorous name and called the Column of July, this spoiled monument of an abortive revolution, was still wrapped up, in 1832, in an immense sheet of carpentry-work,--which we regret for our part,--and a vast enclosure of planks, which completed the isolation of the elephant. It was to this corner of this square, which was scarce lighted by the reflection of a distant oil-lamp, that the gamin led the two urchins. (Allow us to interrupt our narrative here, and remind our readers that we are recording the simple truth; and that twenty years ago a boy, who was caught sleeping in the inside of the elephant of the Bastille, was brought before the police on the charge of vagabondage and breaking a public monument.) On coming near the colossus, Gavroche understood the effect which the infinitely great may produce on the infinitely little, and said,-- "Don't be frightened, brats."