📖 Les Misérables – Tome III : Marius | Victor Hugo 🌟
In this third volume of Les Misérables, Victor Hugo takes us to the heart of a tormented era, where individual destinies mingle with the upheavals of History. ‘Marius’ tells the story of the encounter between an idealistic young man, marked by deep political convictions , and the world of Les Misérables, through the persistent shadow of Jean Valjean. Between the budding love for the mysterious Cosette, revolutionary ideals and personal sacrifices, this part of the work immerses us in a vibrant but fragile Paris. Prepare to discover a story where human passions and social struggles intertwine with poignant intensity. Chapter 1. Parvulus. Paris has a child and the forest has a bird; the bird is called the sparrow; the child is called the kid. Couple these two ideas which contain, one all the furnace, the other all the dawn, clash these sparks, Paris, childhood; From it springs a little being. Homuncio, Plautus would say. This little being is joyful. He does not eat every day and he goes to the theatre, if he pleases, every evening. He has no shirt on his body, no shoes on his feet, no roof over his head; he is like the flies in the sky who have none of these things. He is seven to thirteen years old, lives in bands, walks the streets, lodges in the open air, wears his father’s old trousers that come down below his heels, some other father’s old hat that comes down below his ears, a single yellow selvedge suspender, runs, watches, searches, wastes time, blows pipes, swears like a damned man, haunts the tavern, knows thieves, addresses girls informally, speaks slang, sings obscene songs, and has nothing bad in his heart. It is that he has in his soul a pearl, innocence, and pearls do not dissolve in the mud. As long as man is a child, God wants him to be innocent. If one were to ask the enormous city: What is this? it would answer: It is my little one. Chapter 2. Some of its particular signs. The boy of Paris is the dwarf of the giantess. Let us not exaggerate, this cherub of the brook sometimes has a shirt but then he has only one; he sometimes has shoes, but then they have no soles; he sometimes has a home, and he loves it, because he finds his mother there; but he prefers the street, because he finds freedom there. He has his own games, his own mischiefs whose background is hatred of the bourgeoisie; his own metaphors; to be dead is called eating dandelions by the root; his own trades, bringing cabs , lowering the running boards of carriages, establishing tolls from one side of the street to the other in heavy rain, what he calls making bridges of arts, shouting out speeches made by the authorities in favor of the French people, scraping the gaps between the paving stones; he has his own currency, which is made up of all the small pieces of shaped copper that can be found on the public highway. This curious currency, which is called loques, has an invariable and very well-regulated rate in this little bohemian community of children. Finally, he has his own fauna, which he studiously observes in corners; the beast of God, the death’s-head aphid, the grim reaper, the devil, a black insect that threatens by twisting its tail armed with two horns. He has his fabulous monster that has scales under its belly and is not a lizard, that has pustules on its back and is not a toad, that inhabits the holes of old lime kilns and dried-up cesspools, black, hairy, slimy, crawling, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, that does not cry out , but that looks, and that is so terrible that no one has ever seen it; he calls this monster the deaf man. Looking for deaf people in stones is a pleasure of the formidable kind. Another pleasure is to suddenly lift a paving stone and see woodlice. Every region of Paris is famous for the interesting finds that can be made there. There are earwigs in the Ursuline construction sites, there are centipedes At the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in the ditches of the Champ de Mars. As for words, this child has as many as Talleyrand. He is no less cynical, but he is more honest. He is gifted with some unexpected joviality; he astounds the shopkeeper with his mad laughter. His range goes gaily from high comedy to farce. A funeral passes. Among those accompanying the dead man, there is a doctor. “Look,” cries a kid, “since when do doctors put off their work?” Another is in a crowd. A grave man, adorned with spectacles and trinkets, turns around indignantly: “Scoundrel, you’ve just taken my wife’s waist. ” “Me, sir! Search me.” Chapter 3. He is pleasant. In the evening, thanks to a few sous that he always manages to procure, the homuncio enters a theater. Crossing this magic threshold, he is transfigured; he was the kid, he becomes the titi. Theaters are a kind of upturned ship with the hold on top. It is in this hold that the titi is crammed. The titi is to the kid what the moth is to the larva; the same being flown and hovering. It is enough that he be there, with his radiance of happiness, with his power of enthusiasm and joy, with his clapping of hands which resembles a beating of wings, for this narrow, fetid, dark, sordid, unhealthy, hideous, abominable hold to be called Paradise. Give a being the useless and take away the necessary, and you will have the kid.
The kid is not without some literary intuition. His tendency, we say with the appropriate amount of regret, would not be classical taste. He is, by his nature, not very academic. So, to give an example, the popularity of Miss Mars among this small audience of stormy children was seasoned with a touch of irony. The kid called her Miss Muche. This being bawls, mocks, banters, fights, has rags like a toddler and rags like a philosopher, fishes in the sewer, hunts in the cesspool, extracts gaiety from filth, whips crossroads with his verve, sneers and bites, whistles and sings, cheers and yells, tempers Alleluia with Matanturlurette, chants all the rhythms from De Profundis to Chienlit, finds without searching, knows what he ignores, is Spartan to the point of swindling, is mad to the point of wisdom, is lyrical to the point of filth, would squat on Olympus, wallows in the manure and emerges covered in stars. The Parisian boy is Rabelais as a child. He is not happy with his trousers if there is no watch fob. He is little surprised, even less frightened, sings of superstitions, deflates exaggerations, jokes about mysteries, sticks his tongue out at ghosts, depoeticizes stilts, introduces caricature into epic exaggerations. It is not that he is prosaic; far from it; but he replaces the solemn vision with farcical phantasmagoria. If Adamastor appeared to him, the kid would say: Look! Bogey! Chapter 4. He can be useful. Paris begins with the onlooker and ends with the kid, two beings of which no other city is capable; passive acceptance that is content to watch, and inexhaustible initiative; Prudhomme and Fouillou. Paris alone has this in its natural history. All monarchy is in the onlooker. All anarchy is in the kid. This pale child from the suburbs of Paris lives and develops, knots and unknots himself in suffering, in the presence of social realities and human things, a thoughtful witness. He believes himself to be carefree; he is not. He watches, ready to laugh; ready for something else too. Whoever you are, whoever you call Prejudice, Abuse, Ignominy, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice, Fanaticism, Tyranny, beware of the gaping kid. This little one will grow up. What clay is he made of? The first mud that comes along. A handful of mud, a breath, and there is Adam. It is enough for a god to pass by. A god has always passed over the kid. Fortune works on this little being. By this word fortune, we mean a little adventure. This pygmy kneaded in the same coarse common earth, ignorant, illiterate, bewildered, vulgar, populist, will he be an Ionian or a Boeotian? Wait, currit persona, the spirit of Paris, this demon who creates children of chance and men of destiny, unlike the Latin potter, makes an amphora out of the jug. Chapter 5. Its borders. The kid loves the city, he also loves solitude, having something wise in him. Urbis amator, like Fuscus; ruris amator, like Flaccus. To wander dreamily, that is to say to stroll, is a good use of time for the philosopher; particularly in this kind of slightly mongrel countryside, rather ugly, but bizarre and composed of two natures, which surrounds certain large cities, notably Paris. To observe the suburbs is to observe the amphibian. End of trees, beginning of roofs, end of grass, beginning of pavement, end of furrows, beginning of shops, end of ruts, beginning of passions, end of divine murmur, beginning of human rumor; hence an extraordinary interest. Hence, in these unattractive places, forever marked by the passer-by with the epithet: sad, the walks, apparently aimless, of the dreamer. The writer of these lines was for a long time a prowler of barriers in Paris, and for him it is a source of profound memories. This short grass, these stony paths, this chalk, these marls, these plasters, these harsh monotonies of wastelands and fallow lands, the early vegetable plants of the market gardeners suddenly glimpsed in the background, this mixture of the wild and the bourgeois, these vast deserted corners where the drums of the garrison noisily hold school and make a sort of stammering of battle, these Thebaids by day, cut-throat by night, the gangly mill turning in the wind, the extraction wheels of the quarries, the open-air taverns at the corner of the cemeteries, the mysterious charm of the great dark walls cutting squarely through immense wastelands flooded with sunlight and full of butterflies, all this attracted him. Almost no one on earth knows these singular places, the Glacière, the Cunette, the hideous wall of Grenelle spotted with bullets, Mont-Parnasse, the Fosse-aux-Loups, the Aubiers on the banks of the Marne, Montsouris, the Tombe-Issoire, the Pierre-Plate of Châtillon where there is an old exhausted quarry which is now only used to grow mushrooms, and which is closed at ground level by a trapdoor of rotten planks. The countryside of Rome is one idea, the suburbs of Paris is another; to see in what a horizon offers us nothing but fields, houses or trees is to remain on the surface; all aspects of things are thoughts of God. The place where a plain joins a city is always imbued with some kind of penetrating melancholy. Nature and humanity speak to you there at once. Local originalities appear there. Anyone who has wandered like us in these solitudes adjacent to our suburbs that one could call the limbo of Paris, has glimpsed here and there, in the most abandoned place, at the most unexpected moment, behind a thin hedge or in the corner of a gloomy wall, children, grouped tumultuously, fetid, muddy, dusty, disheveled, bristling, playing at pigoche crowned with cornflowers. They are all the little escapees of poor families. The outer boulevard is their breathable environment; the suburbs belong to them. There they play truant there forever . There they sing ingenuously their repertoire of filthy songs. They are there, or rather, they exist there, far from any view, in the soft light of May or June, kneeling around a hole in the ground, chasing marbles with their thumbs, fighting over pennies, irresponsible, flown away, let loose, happy; and, as soon as they see you, they remember that they have an industry, and that they have to earn their living, and they offer you an old stocking for sale. wool full of cockchafers or a tuft of lilacs. These encounters with strange children are one of the charming, and at the same time poignant, graces of the environs of Paris. Sometimes, in these heaps of boys, there are little girls—are they their sisters?—almost young girls, thin, feverish, tanned gloves, marked with freckles, wearing heads of rye and poppies, gay, haggard, barefoot. We see some eating cherries in the wheat. In the evening we hear them laughing. These groups, warmly lit by the full light of midday or glimpsed in the twilight, occupy the dreamer for a long time, and these visions mingle with his dream. Paris, center, the suburbs, circumference; this is the whole earth for these children . They never venture beyond. They can no more escape from the Parisian atmosphere than fish can escape from water. For them, two leagues from the barriers, there is nothing left. Ivry, Gentilly, Arcueil, Belleville, Aubervilliers, Ménilmontant, Choisy-le-Roi, Billancourt, Meudon, Issy, Vanves, Sèvres, Puteaux, Neuilly, Gennevilliers, Colombes, Romainville, Chatou, Asnières, Bougival, Nanterre, Enghien, Noisy-le-Sec, Nogent, Gournay, Drancy, Gonesse, that is where the universe ends. Chapter 6. A little history. At the time, almost contemporary, in which the action of this book takes place, there was not, as there is today, a policeman on every street corner (a blessing that it is not time to discuss); stray children abounded in Paris. Statistics give an average of two hundred and sixty homeless children picked up annually by police patrols in unfenced areas, in houses under construction, and under bridge arches. One of these nests, which has become famous, produced the swallows of the Arcole bridge. This, moreover, is the most disastrous of social symptoms. All human crimes begin with the vagrancy of the child. Let us, however, except Paris. To a relative extent, and notwithstanding the memory we have just recalled, the exception is just. While in any other large city a vagrant child is a lost man, while, almost everywhere, the child left to his own devices is in some way devoted and abandoned to a sort of fatal immersion in public vices which devours his honesty and conscience, the kid of Paris, let us insist, so rough and so damaged on the surface, is internally almost intact. A magnificent thing to note, and one that shines forth in the splendid probity of our popular revolutions, is that a certain incorruptibility results from the idea that is in the air of Paris like salt in the water of the ocean. Breathing Paris preserves the soul. What we are saying here takes nothing away from the pang of heart that one feels each time one meets one of these children around whom it seems that one sees floating the threads of the broken family. In today’s civilization, still so incomplete, it is not a very abnormal thing that these fractured families empty themselves into the shadows, no longer knowing quite what has become of their children, and letting their entrails fall on the public highway. Hence obscure destinies. This is called, for this sad thing has given rise to expression, being thrown on the pavement of Paris. Incidentally, these abandonments of children were not discouraged by the old monarchy. A little bit of Egypt and Bohemia in the lower regions accommodated the higher spheres, and suited the powerful. Hatred of the education of the children of the people was a dogma. What good were half-enlightenments? Such was the watchword. Now the errant child is the corollary of the ignorant child. Besides, the monarchy sometimes needed children, and then it scoured the streets. Under Louis XIV, in order not to go back any further, the king wanted, with good reason, to create a fleet. The idea was good. But let us consider the means. No fleet if, alongside the sailing ship, the plaything of the wind, and to tow it when necessary, we do not have the ship that goes where it wants, either by oar or by steam; the galleys were then to the navy what steamers are today. So galleys were needed; but the galley only moves by the galley slave; so galley slaves were needed. Colbert had the provincial intendants and the parliaments make as many convicts as he could. The judiciary was very complacent about it. A man kept his hat on his head before a procession, a Huguenot attitude; he was sent to the galleys. We met a child in the street, provided he was fifteen years old and did not know where to sleep, he was sent to the galleys. Great reign; great century. Under Louis XV, children disappeared in Paris; the police kidnapped them, we do not know for what mysterious purpose. Monstrous conjectures about the king’s purple baths were whispered with horror. Barbier speaks naively of these things. It sometimes happened that the exempts, short of children, took some who had fathers. The fathers, desperate, ran after the exempts. In such cases, parliament intervened, and had who hanged? The exempts? No. The fathers. Chapter 7. The gamin would have his place in the classifications of India. Parisian gaminerie is almost a caste. One could say: not everyone can be one. This word, gamin, was printed for the first time and arrived from popular language into literary language in 1834. It was in a pamphlet entitled Claude Gueux that this word made its appearance. The scandal was intense. The word has passed. The elements that constitute the respect of the gamins among themselves are very varied. We knew and practiced one who was highly respected and admired for having seen a man fall from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame; another, for having managed to penetrate into the backyard where the statues of the dome of the Invalides were temporarily placed and having stolen some lead from them; a third, for having seen a stagecoach overturn; yet another, because he knew a soldier who had nearly put out the eye of a bourgeois. This explains this exclamation of a Parisian boy, a profound epiphoneme at which the common people laugh without understanding it: — Good God! How unhappy I am! to think that I have not yet seen someone fall from a fifth! (Ai-je is pronounced j’ai-ty; cinquième is pronounced cintième.) Certainly, this is a fine peasant saying: Father so-and-so, your wife died of her illness; why didn’t you send for a doctor? What do you expect, sir, we poor people are dying ourselves. But if all the mocking passivity of the peasant is in this word, all the free-thinking anarchy of the suburban kid is, surely , in this other. A man condemned to death in the cart listens to his confessor. The child from Paris cries out: – He’s talking to his priest. Oh! the capon! A certain audacity in religious matters enhances the kid. Being strong-minded is important. Attending executions is a duty. We point at the guillotine and laugh. We call it all sorts of nicknames: – End of the soup, – Grumpy, – Mother in the Blue (in the sky), – The last mouthful, – etc., etc. To miss nothing of the thing, we climb walls, we hoist ourselves onto balconies, we climb trees, we hang from railings, we cling to chimneys. The kid is born a roofer just as he is born a sailor. A roof doesn’t scare him any more than a mast. No celebration is worth the Grève. Samson and Abbé Montés are the real popular names. The patient is booed to encourage him. He is sometimes admired. Lacenaire, a kid, seeing the dreadful Dautun die bravely, said this phrase that has a future: “I was jealous of him.” In childishness, we don’t know Voltaire, but we know Papavoine. We mix politicians with assassins in the same legend . We have the traditions of everyone’s last garment. We know that Tolleron had a chauffeur’s cap, Avril a otter cap, Louvel a round hat, that old Delaporte was bald and bareheaded, that Castaing was all pink and very pretty, that Bories had a romantic goatee, that Jean Martin had kept his suspenders, that Lecouffé and his mother were quarreling.– Don’t blame yourselves for your basket, a kid shouted to them. Another, to see Debacker pass, too small in the crowd, notices the lantern on the platform and climbs up. A gendarme, stationed there, frowns.–Let me get on, Mr. gendarme, says the kid. And to soften the authority, he adds: I won’t fall.–I don’t care if you fall, replies the gendarme. In childishness, a memorable accident is highly valued. One reaches the summit of respect if one happens to cut oneself very deeply, to the bone. The fist is not a mediocre element of respect. One of the things that the kid says most willingly is: I’m pretty strong, go! –Being left-handed makes you very enviable. Squinting is an esteemed thing. Chapter 8. Where we will read a charming word from the last king. In the summer, he transforms himself into a frog; and in the evening, at nightfall, in front of the bridges of Austerlitz and Jena, from the top of the coal trains and the laundress boats, he throws himself headlong into the Seine and into all possible infractions of the laws of modesty and the police. However, the police officers are watching, and the result is a highly dramatic situation which once gave rise to a fraternal and memorable cry; this cry, which was famous around 1830, is a strategic warning from kid to kid; It is punctuated like a verse of Homer, with a notation almost as inexpressible as the Eleusinian chant of the Panathenaea, and we find in it the ancient Evohe. Here it
is:– Ahoy, Tweety, Ahoy! There’s the flu, there’s the sting, take your zarts and go away, go through the sewer! Sometimes this gnat–that’s how he calls himself–knows how to read; sometimes he knows how to write, always he knows how to scribble. He does not hesitate to give himself, by some mysterious mutual teaching, all the talents that can be useful to public affairs: from 1815 to 1830, he imitated the cry of the turkey; from 1830 to 1848, he scribbled a pear on the walls. One summer evening, Louis-Philippe, walking home , saw one, very small, about this tall, sweating and reaching up to burn a gigantic pear on one of the pillars of the Neuilly gate; the king, with that good nature which came to him from Henri IV, helped the boy, finished the pear, and gave the child a louis, saying to him: The pear is also on that. The boy likes the uproar. A certain violent state pleases him. He loathes priests. One day, on the rue de l’université, one of these young rascals was thumbing his nose at the carriage entrance of number 69. “Why are you doing that at that door?” a passer-by asked him. The child replied: “There is a priest there. It is there, in fact, that the papal nuncio lives.” However, whatever the Voltairianism of the boy, if the opportunity arises to be an altar boy, he may accept, and in this case he serves mass politely. There are two things of which he is the Tantalus and which he always desires without ever achieving: to overthrow the government and to have his trousers mended. The boy in the perfect state possesses all the police sergeants of the city of Paris, and always knows, when he meets one, how to put the name under the figure. He counts them on the tip of his finger. He studies their morals and has special notes on each one. He reads the souls of the police like an open book. He will tell you fluently and without flinching: –So-and-so is a traitor; –so-and-so is very wicked; –so-and-so is great; –so-and-so is ridiculous; (all these words, traitor, wicked, great, ridiculous, have a particular meaning in his mouth) – this one imagines that the Pont-Neuf is his and prevents people from walking on the cornice outside the parapets; that one has the mania of pulling people’s ears etc., etc… Chapter 9. The Old Soul of Gaul. There was something of that child in Poquelin, son of Les Halles; there was some in Beaumarchais. Childishness is a nuance of the Gallic spirit. Mixed with common sense, it sometimes adds strength, like alcohol to wine. Sometimes it is a defect. Homer harps on, fine; one could say that Voltaire is childish. Camille Desmoulins was from the suburbs. Championnet, who brutalized miracles, came from the streets of Paris; he had, as a child, flooded the porticoes of Saint-Jean de Beauvais and Saint-Etienne du Mont; he had spoken familiarly enough to the shrine of Saint Geneviève to give orders to the phial of Saint Janvier. The Parisian child is respectful, ironic, and insolent. He has bad teeth because he is malnourished and his stomach is suffering, and beautiful eyes because he is witty. Jehovah present, he would hop the steps of paradise. He is strong in flip-flops. All growth is possible for him. He plays in the gutter and straightens himself up by rioting; his effrontery persists in the face of machine-gun fire; he was a rascal, he is a hero; like the little Theban, he shakes the lion’s skin; the drummer Bara was a boy from Paris; he shouts: Forward! like the horse in Scripture says: Vah! and in a minute, he goes from brat to giant. This child of the mire is also the child of the ideal. Measure this span which goes from Molière to Bara. All in all, and to summarize everything in a word, the boy is a being who amuses himself, because he is unhappy. Chapter 10. Ecce Paris, ecce homo. To sum it all up again, the Parisian kid today, like the gracculus of Rome in the past, is the child people with the wrinkle of the old world on their foreheads. The kid is a blessing for the nation, and at the same time a disease. A disease that must be cured. How? With light. Light cleanses. Light ignites. All generous social radiations come from science, literature, the arts, and teaching. Make men, make men. Enlighten them so that they may warm you. Sooner or later the splendid question of universal education will arise with the irresistible authority of absolute truth; and then those who govern under the surveillance of the French idea will have to make this choice: the children of France, or the kids of Paris; flames in the light or will-o’-the-wisps in the darkness. The kid expresses Paris, and Paris expresses the world. For Paris is a totality. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. This whole prodigious city is a shortcut of dead morals and living morals . Whoever sees Paris believes he sees the underside of all history with sky and constellations in the intervals. Paris has a Capitol, the Hôtel de Ville, a Parthenon, Notre-Dame, an Aventine Hill, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, an Asinarium, the Sorbonne, a Pantheon, the Pantheon, a Sacred Way, the Boulevard des Italiens, a Tower of the Winds, public opinion; and it replaces the grievances with ridicule. Its majo is called the faraud, its transteverin is called the faubourien, its hammal is called the fort of the halle, its lazzarone is called the underworld, its cockney is called the dandy. Everything that is elsewhere is in Paris. Dumarsais’s fishwife can give the reply to Euripides’ herb seller, the discus thrower Vejanus lives again in the tightrope walker Forioso, Therapontigonus Miles would take arm in arm the grenadier Vadeboncoeur, Damasippe the second-hand dealer would be happy among the bric-a-brac merchants, Vincennes would seize Socrates just as the Agora would lock up Diderot, Grimod de la Reynière discovered roast beef with suet just as Curtillus had invented the roast hedgehog, we see the trapeze that is in Plautus reappearing under the balloon of the Arc de l’Étoile , the sword eater of Poecile encountered by Apuleius is a sword swallower on the Pont-Neuf, the nephew of Rameau and Curculion the parasite make a pair, Ergasilius would be presented at Cambacérès by d’Aigrefeuille; the four dandies of Rome, Alcesimarchus, Phoedromus, Diabolus and Argirippe descend from the Courtille in Labatut’s post-chaise ; Aulus Gellus did not stop any longer before Congrio than Charles Nodier before Polichinelle; Marton is not a tigress, but Pardalisca was not a dragon; Pantolabus the clown jokes at the English café Nomentanus the reveler, Hermogenes is a tenor at the Champs-Élysées, and, around him, Thrasius the beggar, dressed as a Bobèche, collects; the importunate person who stops you at the Tuileries by the button of your coat makes you repeat after two thousand years Thesprion’s apostrophe : quis properantem me prehendit pallio? Suresnes wine parodies Alban wine, Desaugiers’ red rim balances Balatron’s large cup, Père-Lachaise exhales under the night rains the same gleams as the Esquilia, and the poor man’s grave bought for five years is worth the Slave’s hired beer. Look for something that Paris does not have. Trophonius’s vat contains nothing that is not in Mesmer’s tub; Ergaphilos is resurrected in Cagliostro; the Brahmin Vasaphanta is incarnated in the Count of Saint-Germain; the cemetery of Saint-Médard performs miracles just as good as the Oumoumié mosque in Damascus. Paris has an Aesop who is Mayeux, and a Canidie who is Mademoiselle Lenormand. It is frightened like Delphi by the dazzling realities of vision; it makes tables turn like Dodona the tripods. He puts the grisette on the throne as Rome puts the courtesan there; and, all in all, if Louis XV is worse than Claude, Madame Dubarry is better than Messalina. Paris combines in an unheard-of type, who lived and whom we have rubbed shoulders with, Greek nudity, Hebrew ulcer and Gascon gibes. He mixes Diogenes, Job and Paillasse, dresses a spectre in old issues of the Constitutionnel, and makes Chodruc Duclos. Although Plutarch says: the tyrant hardly ages, Rome, under Sulla as under Domitian, resigned itself and willingly put water in its wine. The Tiber was a Lethe, if we are to believe the somewhat doctrinaire praise given to it by Varus Vibiscus: Contra Gracchos Tiberim habemus. Bibere Tiberim, id est seditionem oblivisci. Paris drinks a million liters of water a day, but that doesn’t stop him from beating the general alarm and ringing the tocsin on occasion. Apart from that, Paris is good-natured. He accepts everything royally; he is not picky about Venus; his callipygian is Hottentot; provided he laughs, he grants amnesty; ugliness cheers him, deformity dismays him, vice distracts him; be funny, and you can be a joker; even hypocrisy, that supreme cynicism, does not revolt him; he is so literary that he does not hold his nose in front of Basil, and he is no more scandalized by Tartuffe’s prayer than Horace is alarmed by Priapus’s hiccups. No feature of the universal face is missing from Paris’s profile. The Mabille ball is not the Polymnia dance of the Janiculum, but the dress-seller there watches over the Lorette exactly as the matchmaker Staphyla watched the virgin Planesium. The barrier of Combat is not a Colosseum, but one is ferocious there as if Caesar were watching. The Syrian hostess has more grace than Mother Saguet, but, if Virgil haunted the Roman cabaret, David d’Angers, Balzac and Charlet sat down at the Parisian dive. Paris reigns. Geniuses blaze there, red tails prosper there. Adonai passes there on his chariot with twelve wheels of thunder and lightning; Silenus makes his entrance there on his donkey. Silenus, read Ramponneau. Paris is synonymous with Cosmos. Paris is Athens, Rome, Sybaris, Jerusalem, Pantin. All civilizations are there in brief, all barbarities too. Paris would be very sorry not to have a guillotine. A little Place de Grève is good. What would all this eternal celebration be without this seasoning? Our laws have wisely provided for it, and, thanks to them, this axe drips on this Shrove Tuesday. Chapter 11. To mock, to reign. No limit in Paris, no. No city has had this domination which sometimes flouts those it subjugates. To please you, O Athenians! cried Alexander. Paris does more than the law, it makes fashion; Paris does more than fashion, it makes routine. Paris can be stupid if it pleases, it sometimes allows itself this luxury; then the universe is stupid with it; then Paris wakes up, rubs its eyes, says: How stupid I am! and bursts out laughing in the face of the human race. What a marvel such a city is! Strange thing that this grandiose and this burlesque make good neighbors, that all this majesty is not disturbed by all this parody, and that the same mouth can blow today in the bugle of the last judgment and tomorrow in the onion flute! Paris has a sovereign joviality. His gaiety is lightning and his farce holds a scepter. His hurricane sometimes comes from a grimace. His explosions, his days, his masterpieces, his prodigies, his epics, go to the ends of the universe, and his nonsense too. His laughter is a volcano’s mouth that splashes the whole earth. His jokes are sparks. He imposes on peoples his caricatures as well as his ideal; the highest monuments of human civilization accept his ironies and lend their eternity to his pranks. He is superb; he has a prodigious July 14th that delivers the globe; he makes all nations take the Tennis Court oath; his night of August 4th dissolves in three hours a thousand years of feudalism; he makes his logic the muscle of unanimous will; he multiplies himself in all forms of the sublime. he fills with his light Washington, Kosciusko, Bolivar, Botzaris, Riego, Bem, Manin, Lopez, John Brown, Garibaldi; he is everywhere where the future is lit up, in Boston in 1779, on the island of Leon in 1820, in Pesth in 1848, in Palermo in 1860; he whispers the powerful slogan: Liberty, in the ear of the American abolitionists grouped at the ferry of Harper’s Ferry, and in the ear of the patriots of Ancona assembled in the shadows at the Archi, in front of the Gozzi inn, at the edge of the sea; he creates Canaris; he creates Quiroga; he creates Pisacane; he shines the great on the earth; it is by going where his breath pushes them that Byron dies at Missolonghi and that Mazet dies in Barcelona; he is a tribune under the feet of Mirabeau and a crater under the feet of Robespierre; his books, his theater, his art, his science, his literature, his philosophy, are the manuals of the human race; he has Pascal, Régnier, Corneille, Descartes, Jean-Jacques, Voltaire for every minute, Molière for every century; he makes his language speak to the universal mouth, and this language becomes a verb; he constructs in all minds the idea of progress; the liberating dogmas that he forges are for generations bedside swords, and it is with the soul of his thinkers and his poets that all the heroes of all peoples have been made since 1789; that does not prevent him from being childish; and this enormous genius that we call Paris, while transfiguring the world with his light, carbonizes the nose of Bouginier on the wall of the temple of Theseus and writes Crédeville the thief on the Pyramids. Paris always shows its teeth; when it is not grumbling, it laughs. Such is this Paris. The smoke from its roofs is the idea of the universe. A pile of mud and stones if you will, but, above all, a moral being. It is more than great, it is immense. Why? Because it dares. To dare; progress comes at this price. All sublime conquests are more or less the price of boldness. For the revolution to be, it is not enough for Montesquieu to foresee it, for Diderot to preach it, for Beaumarchais to announce it, for Condorcet to calculate it, for Arouet to prepare it, for Rousseau to premeditate it; Danton must dare it. The cry: Audacity! is a Fiat Lux. For the forward march of the human race, there must be permanent proud lessons of courage on the summits. Temerities dazzle history and are one of the great clarity of man. The dawn dares when it rises. To try, to brave, to persist, to persevere, to be true to oneself, to take destiny hand to hand, to astonish catastrophe by the little fear it causes us, sometimes to confront unjust power, sometimes to insult drunken victory, to stand firm, to stand up; this is the example that people need, and the light that electrifies them. The same formidable flash goes from Prometheus’ torch to Cambronne’s mouth-burner. Chapter 12. The future latent in the people. As for the Parisian people, even when they are grown up, they are always the child; to paint the child is to paint the city; and this is why we have studied this eagle in this frank sparrow. It is especially in the suburbs, let us insist, that the Parisian race appears; there is the pure blood; there is the true physiognomy; There this people works and suffers, and suffering and work are the two figures of man. There are deep quantities of unknown beings swarming with the strangest types from the unloader of the Râpée to the knacker of Montfaucon. Fex urbis, cries Cicero; mob, adds Burke indignantly; peat, multitude, populace. These words are quickly said. But so be it. What does it matter? What does it matter if they go barefoot? They cannot read; too bad. Will you abandon them for that? Will you make their distress a curse? Cannot light penetrate these masses? Let us return to this cry: Light! and persist in it! Light! light!–Who knows if these opacities will not become transparent? Are not revolutions transfigurations? Go, philosophers, teach, enlighten, light up, think aloud, speak aloud, run joyfully in the great sun, fraternize with the public squares, announce the good news, lavish alphabets, proclaim rights, sing the Marseillaises, sow enthusiasm, tear green branches from the oaks. Make the idea a whirlwind. This crowd can be sublimated. Let us know how to use this vast blaze of principles and virtues which sparkles, bursts and quivers at certain times. These bare feet, these bare arms, these rags, this ignorance, these abjections, this darkness, can be used in the conquest of the ideal. Look among the people and you will perceive the truth. This vile sand which you trample underfoot, let it be thrown into the furnace, let it melt and boil there, it will become splendid crystal, and it is thanks to it that Galileo and Newton will discover the stars. Chapter 13. Little Gavroche. About eight or nine years after the events recounted in the second part of this story, a little boy of eleven or twelve years old was noticed on the Boulevard du Temple and in the region of Château-d’Eau who would have quite correctly realized this ideal of the boy sketched above, if, with the laughter of his age on his lips, he had not had an absolutely dark and empty heart. This child was indeed dressed in a man’s trousers, but he did not get them from his father, and in a woman’s camisole, but he did not get them from his mother. Ordinary people had dressed him in rags out of charity. Yet he had a father and a mother. But his father did not think of him and his mother did not love him . He was one of those children worthy of pity above all who have a father and a mother and who are orphans. This child never felt so well as in the street. The pavement was less hard on him than his mother’s heart. His parents had thrown him into life with a kick. He had simply taken flight. He was a noisy, pale, lively, alert, mocking boy, with a lively and sickly air. He came and went, sang, played at being a scamp, scratched in the streams, stole a little, but like cats and sparrows, gaily, laughed when they called him a rogue, got angry when they called him a rogue. He had no shelter, no bread, no fire, no love; but he was joyful because he was free. When these poor beings are men, the millstone of social order almost always meets them and grinds them down, but as long as they are children, they escape, being small. The slightest hole saves them. Yet, however abandoned this child was, it sometimes happened, every two or three months, that he would say: Look, I’m going to see Mama! Then he would leave the boulevard, the Cirque, the Porte Saint-Martin, go down to the quays, cross the bridges, reach the suburbs, reach the Salpêtrière, and arrive where? Precisely at this double number 50-52 that the reader knows, at the Gorbeau hovel. At that time, hovel 50-52, usually deserted and eternally decorated with the sign: Rooms to let, was, a rare thing, inhabited by several individuals who, moreover, as is always the case in Paris, had no connection or relationship with each other. They all belonged to that indigent class which begins with the lowest embarrassed petty bourgeois and which extends from misery to misery in the lowest depths of society until they reach those two beings to whom all the material things of civilization come to an end, the sewerman who sweeps the mud and the rag-picker who gathers the rags. The principal tenant of Jean Valjean’s time had died and had been replaced by just the same. I don’t know which philosopher said: There is never a lack of old women. This new old woman was called Madame Burgon, and had nothing remarkable in her life except a dynasty of three parrots, which had successively reigned over her soul. The most miserable among those who inhabited the hovel were a family of four, the father, the mother and two daughters already quite grown up, all four lodged in the same garret, one of those cells of which we have already spoken. This family offered at first sight nothing very particular except its extreme destitution. The father, when renting the room, had said his name was Jondrette.
Some time after moving in, which had singularly resembled, to borrow the memorable expression of the principal tenant, the entrance to nothing at all, this Jondrette had said to this woman who, like her predecessor, was at the same time doorkeeper and swept the stairs: “Mother so-and-so, if anyone came by chance to ask for a Pole or an Italian, or perhaps a Spaniard, it would be me.” This family was the family of the merry barefoot. He arrived there and found poverty, distress, and, what is sadder, no smile; a cold in the hearth and a cold in the hearts. When he came in, they asked him: “Where do you come from?” He answered: “From the street.” When he left, they asked him: “Where are you going?” he answered: “Into the street.” His mother said to him: “What are you doing here?” This child lived in this absence of affection, like those pale weeds that grow in cellars. He didn’t suffer from being like this and didn’t hold it against anyone. He didn’t know exactly what a father and mother should be like. Besides, his mother loved his sisters. We forgot to mention that on the Boulevard du Temple they called this child little Gavroche. Why was he called Gavroche? Probably because his father was called Jondrette. Breaking the thread seems to be the instinct of certain poor families. The room the Jondrettes lived in in the Gorbeau hovel was the last one at the end of the corridor. The cell next door was occupied by a very poor young man who was called Marius. Let’s tell you what Monsieur Marius was. Book Two–The Grand Bourgeois Chapter 14. Ninety Years Old and Thirty-Two Teeth. On Rue Boucherat, Rue de Normandie and Rue de Saintonge, there are still a few old inhabitants who have kept the memory of a man called M. Gillenormand, and who speak of him with complacency. This man was old when they were young. This silhouette, for those who look melancholically at this vague swarm of shadows that we call the past, has not yet completely disappeared from the labyrinth of streets near the Temple to which, under Louis XIV, the names of all the provinces of France were attached , just as the streets of the new Tivoli district have nowadays been given the names of all the capitals of Europe; a progression, by the way, where progress is visible. M. Gillenormand, who could not have been more alive in 1831, was one of those men who have become curious to see solely because they have lived a long time, and who are strange because they once resembled everyone else and now they resemble no one. He was a peculiar old man, and truly a man of another age, the true, complete and somewhat haughty bourgeois of the eighteenth century, wearing his good old bourgeoisie with the air with which marquises wore their marquisate. He was over ninety, walked straight, spoke loudly, saw clearly, drank deeply, ate, slept, and snored. He had his thirty-two teeth. He only wore glasses for reading. He was in a mood for love, but said that for the past ten years he had decidedly and completely renounced women. He could no longer please, he said; he did not add: I am too old, but: I am too poor. He said: If I were not ruined… hey! – He had, in fact, only an income of about fifteen thousand pounds left. His dream was to inherit an inheritance and have a hundred thousand francs a year to have mistresses. He did not belong, as one sees, to that puny variety of octogenarians who, like M. de Voltaire, have been dying all their lives; his longevity was not a cracked pot; this spry old man had always been in good health. He was superficial, quick, easily angered. He flew into a rage at every turn, most often at odds with the truth. When he was contradicted, he raised his cane; he beat people, as in the great century. He had a daughter of over fifty, unmarried, whom he thrashed very severely when he became angry, and whom he would gladly have whipped. She gave him the impression of being eight years old. He would energetically slap his servants and say: Ah! carogne! One of his oaths was: By the pantoufloche of the pantouflochade! He had singular tranquillity ; he had himself shaved every day by a barber who had been mad, and who hated him, being jealous of M. Gillenormand because of his wife, a pretty, coquettish barber. M. Gillenormand admired his own discernment in all things, and declared himself very sagacious; here is one of his words: I have, in truth, some penetration; I am able to say, when a flea bites me, from which woman it comes. The words he uttered most often were: the sensitive man and nature. He did not give to this last word the grand meaning that our era has given it. But he made it enter in his own way into his little fireside satires: “Nature,” he said, “so that civilization may have a little of everything, gives it even specimens of amusing barbarism. Europe has samples of Asia and Africa, in small format. The cat is a drawing-room tiger, the lizard is a pocket crocodile. The dancers at the Opera are pink savages. They do not eat men, they gnaw them. Or, the magicians! they change them into oysters, and swallow them. The Caribbeans leave only the bones, they leave only the shell. Such are our customs. We do not devour, we gnaw; we do not exterminate, we scratch. Chapter 15. Like master, like home. He lived in the Marais, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, nº 6. The house was his. This house has since been demolished and rebuilt, and the number has probably been changed in those numbering revolutions that the streets of Paris undergo. He occupied a large old apartment on the first floor, between the street and the gardens, furnished to the ceiling with large Gobelins and Beauvais tapestries representing shepherdess; the subjects of the ceilings and panels were repeated in small on the armchairs. He enveloped his bed with a vast nine-leaf screen in Coromandel lacquer. Long, diffuse curtains hung from the windows and made large, very magnificent broken folds. The garden immediately beneath his windows was connected to the one at the corner by means of a staircase of twelve or fifteen steps, very cheerfully ascended and descended by this good man. Besides a library adjoining his room, he had a boudoir which he held dear, a gallant retreat upholstered with a magnificent hanging of fleur-de-lis and flowered straw made on the galleys of Louis XIV and ordered by M. de Vivonne from his convicts for his mistress. M. Gillenormand had inherited this from a fierce maternal great-aunt, who died at the age of one hundred. He had had two wives. His manners were somewhere between the courtier he had never been and the gentleman of the court he might have been. He was gay, and affectionate when he wanted to be. In his youth, he had been one of those men who are always deceived by their wives and never by their mistresses, because they are at once the most sullen husbands and the most charming lovers there are. He was a connoisseur of painting. He had in his room a marvelous portrait of who knows who, painted by Jordaens, done with broad brushstrokes, with millions of details, in a jumbled and haphazard manner. M. Gillenormand’s clothing was not the Louis XV suit, nor even the Louis XVI suit; it was the costume of the Incredibles of the Directory. He had thought himself very young until then and had followed the fashions. His coat was of light cloth, with spacious lapels, a long codpiece, and large steel buttons. With that, racing breeches and buckled shoes. He always put his hands in his pockets. He said with authority: The French Revolution is a bunch of scoundrels. Chapter 16. Luc-Esprit. At the age of sixteen, one evening at the Opera, he had the honor of being ogled at the same time by two beauties then mature and famous and sung by Voltaire, Camargo and Sallé. Caught between two fires, he had made a heroic retreat towards a little dancer, a girl called Nahenry, who was sixteen like him, obscure as a cat, and with whom he was in love. He was full of memories. He exclaimed: “How pretty she was, that Guimard-Guimardini-Guimardinette, the last time I saw her at Longchamps, curled with strong feelings, with her turquoise come-and-sees, her dress the color of newly arrived people, and her muff of agitation!” In his adolescence he had worn a jacket by Nain-Londrin, of which he spoke willingly and effusion. “I was dressed like a Turk from the Levantine Levant,” he said. Madame de Boufflers, having seen him by chance when he was twenty, had called him a charming fool. He was scandalized by all the names he saw in politics and in power, finding them base and bourgeois. He read the newspapers, the news papers, the gazettes, as he called them, stifling bursts of laughter. Oh! he said, what kind of people are these! Corbière! Humann! Casimir-Perier! That’s a minister for you.” I imagine this in a newspaper: M. Gillenormand, minister! That would be a farce. Well! They are so stupid that it would be fine! He cheerfully called everything by the word clean or dirty and was not embarrassed in front of women. He said coarse things, obscenities and filth with something calm and unsurprised that was elegant. He was the no-nonsense of his century. It is noteworthy that the time of circumlocutions in verse was the time of crudeness in prose. His godfather had predicted that he would be a man of genius, and had given him these two significant first names: Luc-Esprit. Chapter 17. Aspiring centenarian. He had won prizes in his childhood at the college of Moulins where he was born, and he had been crowned by the hand of the Duke of Nivernais whom he called the Duke of Nevers. Neither the Convention nor the death of Louis XVI, nor Napoleon, nor the return of the Bourbons, nothing had been able to erase the memory of this coronation. The Duke of Nevers was for him the great figure of the century. What a charming great lord, he said, and how good he looked with his blue ribbon! In the eyes of M. Gillenormand, Catherine II had repaired the crime of the partition of Poland by purchasing the secret of the golden elixir from Bestuchef for three thousand rubles. At this, he became animated: “The golden elixir,” he cried, “Bestuchef’s yellow tincture, General Lamotte’s drops, were, in the eighteenth century, at one louis for a half-ounce bottle, the great remedy for the catastrophes of love, the panacea against Venus.” Louis XV sent two hundred bottles of it to the Pope. He would have been greatly exasperated and driven out of his element if he had been told that the elixir of gold was nothing other than iron perchloride. M. Gillenormand adored the Bourbons and abhorred 1789; he constantly recounted how he had escaped during the Terror, and how it had taken a great deal of gaiety and wit not to have his head cut off. If some young man took it into his head to praise the Republic in his presence, he would turn blue and become so irritated that he fainted. Sometimes he would allude to his age of ninety , and say: I hope I shall not see ninety-three twice . At other times, he would tell people that he intended to live to a hundred years. Chapter 18. Basque and Nicolette. He had theories. Here is one: When a man passionately loves women, and he himself has a wife of his own whom he cares little for, ugly, surly, legitimate, full of rights, perched on the code and jealous when necessary, he has only one way to get out of it and have peace, it is to leave his wife the purse strings. This abdication makes him free. The woman then occupies herself, becomes passionate about handling cash , turns her fingers green with grey, undertakes the training of sharecroppers and the training of farmers, summons attorneys, presides over notaries, harangues notaries, visits attorneys, follows trials, draws up leases , dictates contracts, feels sovereign, sells, buys, regulates, orders, promises and compromises, binds and rescinds, yields, concedes and retrocedes, arranges, disturbs, hoards, spends, she does stupid things, masterful and personal happiness, and that consoles. While her husband disdains her, she has the satisfaction of ruining her husband. This theory, Mr. Gillenormand had applied to himself, and it had become his story. His wife, the second, had managed his fortune in such a way that M. Gillenormand, when one fine day he found himself a widower, had just enough to live on, by investing almost everything in a life annuity, about fifteen thousand francs of income, three-quarters of which were to expire with him. He had not hesitated, little concerned with the worry of leaving an inheritance. Besides, he had seen that patrimonies had adventures, and, for example, became national property; he had witnessed the avatars of the consolidated third, and he had little faith in the ledger. – Rue Quincampoix, all that! he said. His house on the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, as we have said, belonged to him. He had two servants, a male and a female. When a servant entered his house, M. Gillenormand renamed him. He gave the men the name of their province: Nîmois, Comtois, Poitevin, Picard. His last valet was a fat, exhausted, and wheezy man of fifty-five, incapable of running twenty paces, but, as he was born in Bayonne, M. Gillenormand called him Basque. As for the maids, all were called Nicolette at his house (even Magnon, who will be mentioned later). One day a proud cook, a cordon bleu, from a high race of concierges, presented herself. “How much do you want to earn a month?” M. Gillenormand asked him. “Thirty francs.” “What is your name?” “Olympie.” “You You will have fifty francs, and your name will be Nicolette. Chapter 19. Where we glimpse Magnon and her two little ones. In M. Gillenormand’s case, pain translated into anger; he was furious at being desperate. He had all the prejudices and took all the licenses. One of the things that made up his outward relief and his inner satisfaction was, as we have just indicated, having remained a veritable gallant, and energetically passing himself off as such. He called this having a royal reputation. Royal renown sometimes brought him singular windfalls. One day , a large newborn boy was brought to his house in a hamper, like a cloyster bed of oysters, crying the devil and duly wrapped in swaddling clothes, which a servant who had been expelled six months earlier had attributed to him. M. Gillenormand was then his perfect eighty-fourth year. Indignation and outcry in those around him. And who did this impudent hussy hope to make believe this? What audacity! What abominable slander! Mr. Gillenormand, for his part, was not at all angry. He looked at the jersey with the amiable smile of a good man flattered by slander, and said to the audience: “Well, what? What is it? What is it? What is it? You are marveling at it , and, in truth, like some ignorant people.” Monsieur the Duke of Angoulême, bastard of His Majesty Charles IX, married at the age of eighty-five a fifteen-year-old slut, Monsieur Virginal, Marquis d’Alluye, brother of Cardinal de Sourdis, Archbishop of Bordeaux, had at the age of eighty-three from a chambermaid of Madame Presidente Jacquin a son, a true son of love, who was a Knight of Malta and a Councillor of State of the Sword; one of the great men of this century, Abbé Tabaraud, is the son of a man of eighty-seven. These things are nothing out of the ordinary. And the Bible then! On this, I declare that this little gentleman is not mine. Let him be taken care of. It is not his fault.–The procedure was good-natured. The creature, the one who was called Magnon, sent him a second letter the following year. It was still a boy. For once, Mr. Gillenormand capitulated. He handed the two children over to the mother, agreeing to pay eighty francs a month for their upkeep, on the condition that the said mother would not do it again. He added: I understand that the mother treats them well. I will go and see them from time to time. Which he did. He had a brother who was a priest, who had been rector of the Poitiers academy for thirty-three years, and had died at the age of seventy-nine. I lost him young, he said. This brother, of whom little is remembered, was a peaceful miser who, as a priest, believed himself obliged to give alms to the poor he met, but he never gave them anything but demonetized coins or sous, thus finding a way to go to hell by the road to paradise. As for the elder Mr. Gillenormand, he did not haggle over alms and gave willingly, and nobly. He was kind, abrupt, charitable, and if he had been rich, his inclination would have been the magnificent. He wanted everything that concerned him to be done grandly, even the rogueries. One day, in an estate, having been robbed by a businessman in a gross and visible manner, he uttered this solemn exclamation: “Fie! This is badly done! I am truly ashamed of this ribaldry. Everything has degenerated in this century, even the rogues. Morbleu! This is not how one should rob a man of my sort. I am robbed as in a wood, but badly robbed. Sylvae sint consule dignae!” He had had, as we have said, two wives; of the first a daughter who had remained a daughter, and of the second another daughter, who died around the age of thirty, who had married by love or chance or otherwise a soldier of fortune who had served in the armies of the Republic and the Empire, had received the cross at Austerlitz and had been made colonel at Waterloo. It is the shame of my family, said the old bourgeois. He took a lot of tobacco, and had a grace particular to rumple his lace jabot with the back of his hand. He believed very little in God. Chapter 20. Rule: Receive no one except in the evening. Such was M. Luc-Esprit Gillenormand, who had not lost his hair, more gray than white, and always wore his hair in dog ears. In short, and with all that, venerable. He had the air of the eighteenth century: frivolous and grand. In the early years of the Restoration, M. Gillenormand, who was still young,–he was only seventy-four years old in 1814,–had lived in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, rue Servandoni, near Saint-Sulpice. He had retired to the Marais only when he had left the world, well after his eightieth birthday. And when he left the world, he had walled himself up in his habits. The main one, and one he adhered to invariably, was to keep his door absolutely closed during the day, and never receive anyone, for any business whatsoever, except in the evening. He dined at five o’clock, and then his door was open. It was the fashion of his century, and he would not budge from it. “Day is roguish,” he said, “and deserves only a closed shutter. Respectable people light up their spirits when the zenith lights up its stars.” And he barricaded himself for everyone, even for the king. The old elegance of his time. Chapter 21. The two do not make a pair. As for M. Gillenormand’s two daughters, we have just spoken of them. They were born ten years apart. In their youth they had borne very little resemblance to each other, and, in character as well as in face, had been as little like sisters as possible. The younger sister was a charming soul turned toward all that is light, occupied with flowers, verses, and music, soaring into glorious spaces, enthusiastic, ethereal, ideally betrothed from childhood to a vague heroic figure. The elder also had her chimera; she saw in the azure a supplier, some good fat, very rich munitionary, a splendidly stupid husband, a millionaire made man, or else, a prefect; the receptions of the prefecture, an antechamber usher with a chain around his neck, the official balls, the harangues of the town hall, being Madame Prefect, these swirled in her imagination. The two sisters thus lost themselves, each in her dream, at the time when they were young girls. Both had wings, one like an angel, the other like a goose. No ambition is fully realized, here below at least. No paradise becomes earthly in the age in which we live. The younger sister had married the man of her dreams, but she was dead. The elder sister had not married. At the time she entered the story we are telling, she was an old virtuous woman, an incombustible prude, with one of the sharpest noses and one of the most obtuse minds one could see. A characteristic detail: outside the close family, no one had ever known her first name. They called her Mademoiselle Gillenormand the Elder. In terms of singing, Mademoiselle Gillenormand the Elder would have given points to a miss. It was modesty pushed to the black. She had a dreadful memory in her life: one day, a man had seen her garter. Age had only increased this pitiless modesty. Her wimple was never opaque enough, and never rose high enough. She multiplied clasps and pins where no one thought to look. The characteristic of prudishness is to put more sentries on duty the less threatened the fortress is. However, whoever can explain these old mysteries of innocence, she allowed herself to be embraced without displeasure by a lancer officer who was her great-nephew and whose name was Théodule. In spite of this favored lancer, the label: Prude, under which we have classified her, suited her perfectly. Miss Gillenormand was a kind of twilight soul. Prudishness is a half-virtue and a half-vice. She added bigotry to prudishness, a matching lining. She was a member of the Brotherhood of the Virgin, wore a white veil on certain feast days, muttered special prayers, revered the Holy Blood, venerated the Sacred Heart, spent hours in contemplation before a Rococo-Jesuit altar in a chapel closed to the common faithful, and there let her soul soar among small clouds of marble and through great rays of gilded wood. She had a friend from the chapel, an old virgin like herself, called Mlle Vaubois, absolutely dazed, and next to whom Mlle Gillenormand had the pleasure of being an eagle. Apart from the Agnus Dei and the Ave Maria, Mlle Vaubois knew nothing except the different ways of making jam. Mlle Vaubois, perfect in her way, was the ermine of stupidity without a single speck of intelligence. Let’s face it, as she grew older, Mlle Gillenormand had won rather than lost. This is the fact of passive natures. She had never been wicked, which is a relative goodness; and then, the years wear away the angles, and the softening of duration had come to her. She was sad with an obscure sadness of which she herself did not have the secret. There was in her whole person the stupor of a life ended which had not begun.
She kept house for her father. M. Gillenormand had his daughter near him as we have seen that Monseigneur Bienvenu had his sister near him. These households of an old man and an old maid are not rare and always have the touching aspect of two weaknesses which lean on each other. There was also in the house, between this old maid and this old man, a child, a little boy always trembling and mute before M. Gillenormand. M. Gillenormand never spoke to this child except in a stern voice and sometimes with a raised cane: “Here!” Sir!–Scamp, rascal, come closer!–Answer, you rascal!–Let me see you, you scoundrel! etc., etc. He idolized him. He was his grandson. We will find this child again. Book Three–The Grandfather and the Grandson Chapter 22. An Old Salon. When M. Gillenormand lived on Rue Servandoni, he frequented several very good and very noble salons. Although a bourgeois, M. Gillenormand was received. As he had twofold wit, first the wit that he had, then the wit that was attributed to him, he was even sought after, and celebrated. He went nowhere unless he dominated there. There are people who want influence at all costs and to be taken care of; where they cannot be oracles, they become jokers. M. Gillenormand was not of this nature; his dominance in the royalist salons he frequented cost his self-respect nothing. He was an oracle everywhere. He sometimes stood up to M. de Bonald, and even to M. Bengy-Puy-Vallée. Around 1817, he invariably spent two afternoons a week in a house in his neighborhood, rue Férou, at the home of Madame la Baronne de T., a worthy and respectable person whose husband had been, under Louis XVI, French ambassador to Berlin. Baron de T., who during his lifetime gave passionately to ecstasies and magnetic visions, had died ruined in emigration, leaving, for all his fortune, in ten handwritten volumes bound in red morocco and gilt-edged, very curious memoirs on Mesmer and his tub. Madame de T. had not published the memoirs out of dignity, and supported herself with a small income, which had somehow survived. Madame de T. lived far from the court, a very mixed world, she said, in a noble, proud and poor isolation. A few friends met twice a week around her widow’s fire and this constituted a pure royalist salon. Tea was taken there , and, depending on whether the mood was for elegy or dithyramb, groans or cries of horror about the century were uttered, on the charter, on the Buonapartists, on the prostitution of the cordon bleu to the bourgeoisie, on the Jacobinism of Louis XVIII, and people talked there in whispers about the hopes that Monsieur gave, since Charles Chapter 23. They received with transports of joy the songs of the fishmongers where Napoleon was called Nicolas. Duchesses, the most delicate and charming women in the world, went into ecstasies over verses like this one addressed to the federals: Push into your pants The end of the shirt that hangs from you. Let no one say that the patriots Have hoisted the white flag! They amused themselves with puns that were believed to be terrible, with innocent wordplay that was supposed to be poisonous, with quatrains, even with couplets; thus on the Dessolles ministry, a moderate cabinet of which MM. Decazes and Deserre: To strengthen the throne, shaken on its foundation, We must change soil, and greenhouse, and hut. Or we would fashion the list of the Chamber of Peers, an abominably Jacobin chamber, and we would combine alliances of names on this list, so as to make, for example, phrases like this: Damas, Sabran, Gouvion Saint-Cyr. All gaily. In that world, we parodied the Revolution. We had I don’t know what inclinations to sharpen the same anger in the opposite direction. We sang our little Ça ira: Ah! ça ira! ça ira! ça ira The buonapartists with the lantern! Songs are like the guillotine; they cut off indifferently, today this head, tomorrow that one. It’s only a variation. In the Fualdès affair, which is from this period, 1816, people took sides with Bastide and Jausion, because Fualdès was a Buonapartist. They called the liberals, the brothers and friends; it was the last degree of insult. Like certain church steeples, the salon of Madame la Baronne de T. had two roosters. One was M. Gillenormand, the other was the Count of Lamothe-Valois, about whom people whispered with a sort of consideration: You know? He’s the Lamothe of the necklace affair. Parties have these singular amnesties. Let us add this: in the bourgeoisie, honored positions are diminished by overly easy relationships; one must be careful about who one admits; just as there is a loss of heat in the vicinity of those who are cold, there is a decrease in consideration in the approach of despised people. The old world above stood above this law as it did all others. Marigny, brother of Pompadour, has his entrances at the home of M. le Prince de Soubise. Although? No, because. Du Barry, godfather of Vaubernier, is very welcome at the home of M. le Maréchal de Richelieu. This world is Olympus. Mercury and the Prince de Guéménée are at home there. A thief is admitted, provided he is a god. The Count de Lamothe, who in 1815 was an old man of seventy-five , had nothing remarkable about him except his silent and sententious air, his cold and angular face, his perfectly polite manners, his coat buttoned up to the tie, and his long legs always crossed in long, flabby trousers the color of burnt sienna. His face was the color of his trousers. This M. de Lamothe was counted in this salon, because of his celebrity, and, strange to say, but true, because of the name of Valois. As for M. Gillenormand, his consideration was absolutely of good quality. He was authoritative. He had, light as he was and without it costing anything to his gaiety, a certain manner of being, imposing, dignified, honest and bourgeoisly haughty; and his great age added to this. One is not a century with impunity. The years end by making around a head a venerable tangle. He had, moreover, those words which are quite the spark of the old rock. Thus when the King of Prussia, after having restored Louis XVIII, came to visit him under the name of Count of Ruppin, he was received by the descendant of Louis XIV somewhat like Marquis of Brandenburg and with the most delicate impertinence. M. Gillenormand approved.–All kings who are not the King of France, he said, are provincial kings. One day this question was made in his presence and this response:–To what then was the editor of the Courrier français condemned?–To be suspended.–Sus est de trop, observed Gillenormand. Words of this kind establish a situation. At a te deum anniversary of the return of the Bourbons, seeing M. de Talleyrand pass, he said: Here is his excellency, Evil. M. Gillenormand usually came accompanied by his daughter, that tall young lady who was then over forty and looked fifty, and by a handsome little boy of seven, white, pink, fresh, with happy and trusting eyes, who never appeared in this room without hearing all the voices buzzing around him: How pretty he is! What a pity! Poor child! This child was the one we mentioned a moment ago. He was called—poor child—because his father was a brigand from the Loire. This brigand from the Loire was the son-in-law of M. Gillenormand who has already been mentioned, and whom M. Gillenormand called the shame of his family.
Chapter 24. One of the red specters of that time. Someone who had passed through the little town of Vernon at that time and had walked there on that beautiful monumental bridge which will soon be succeeded, we hope, by some hideous wire bridge, might have noticed, by letting his eyes fall from the top of the parapet, a man of about fifty years old wearing a leather cap, dressed in trousers and a jacket of coarse gray cloth, to which was sewn something yellow which had been a red ribbon, wearing clogs, tanned by the sun, his face almost black and his hair almost white, a large scar on his forehead continuing onto his cheek, bent, stooped, aged before his time, walking almost every day, a spade and a billhook in his hand, in one of those compartments surrounded by walls which adjoin the bridge and which border like a chain of terraces the left bank of the Seine, charming enclosures full of flowers from which one would say, if they were much larger: they are gardens, and, if they were a little smaller: they are bouquets. All these enclosures end at one end at the river and at the other at a house. The man in the jacket and clogs of whom we have just spoken lived around 1817 in the narrowest of these enclosures and the humblest of these houses. He lived there alone, and solitary, silently and poorly, with a woman who was neither young nor old, neither beautiful nor ugly, neither peasant nor bourgeois, who served him. The square of land he called his garden was famous in the city for the beauty of the flowers he grew there. Flowers were his occupation. By dint of work, perseverance, attention and buckets of water, he had succeeded in creating after the creator, and he had invented certain tulips and certain dahlias which seemed to have been forgotten by nature. He was ingenious; He had outstripped Soulange Bodin in the formation of small clumps of heather earth for the cultivation of rare and precious shrubs from America and China. From daybreak in summer, he was in his paths, pricking, pruning, weeding, watering, walking among his flowers with an air of kindness, sadness and gentleness, sometimes dreamy and motionless for hours on end, listening to the song of a bird in a tree, the twittering of a child in a house, or else his eyes fixed on the end of a blade of grass on some drop of dew which the sun made into a carbuncle. He had a very meager table, and drank more milk than wine. A brat made him give in, his servant scolded him. He was timid to the point of seeming fierce, rarely went out, and saw no one except the poor who knocked at his door and his priest, Abbé Mabeuf, a good old man. Yet if residents of the town or foreigners, the first to come, curious to see his tulips and roses, came to ring at his little house, he opened his door with a smile. He was the brigand of the Loire. Someone who, at the same time, had read the military memoirs, the biographies, the Moniteur and the bulletins of the Grand Army, could have been struck by a name that comes up quite often, the name of Georges Pontmercy. Very young, this Georges Pontmercy was a soldier in the Saintonge regiment. The Revolution broke out. The Saintonge regiment was part of the Army of the Rhine. For the old regiments of the monarchy kept their provincial names, even after the fall of the monarchy, and were not enlisted until 1794. Pontmercy fought at Speyer, Worms, Neustadt, Turkheim, Alzey, and Mainz, where he was one of the two hundred who formed Houchard’s rearguard. He held out, as the twelfth, against the corps of the Prince of Hesse, behind the old rampart of Andernach, and only fell back on the main body of the army when the enemy cannon had opened the breach from the parapet cordon to the diving slope. He was under Kléber at Marchiennes and at the battle of Mont-Palissel, where he suffered a broken arm from a biscay. Then he crossed to the Italian border and was one of the thirty grenadiers who defended the Tende Pass with Joubert. Joubert was appointed adjutant-general and Pontmercy second lieutenant. Pontmercy was at Berthier’s side in the midst of the grapeshot on that day at Lodi, which made Bonaparte say: Berthier was a gunner, a cavalryman, and a grenadier. He saw his former general Joubert fall at Novi, at the moment when, saber raised, he shouted: Forward! Having embarked with his company for the needs of the campaign in a barge which was going from Genoa to I no longer know which small port on the coast, he fell into a wasp’s nest of seven or eight English sails. The Genoese commander wanted to throw the cannons into the sea, hide the soldiers in the steerage and slip into the shadows like a merchant ship. Pontmercy had the colors struck on the halyard of the flagpole, and proudly passed under the guns of the British frigates. Twenty leagues away, his audacity increasing, with his barge he attacked and captured a large English transport carrying troops to Sicily, so laden with men and horses that the vessel was packed to the coamings.
In 1805, he was in the Mahler division that captured Günzburg from Archduke Ferdinand. At Weltingen, he received in his arms, under a hail of bullets, Colonel Maupetit, mortally wounded at the head of the 9th Dragoons. He distinguished himself at Austerlitz in this admirable march in echelon made under enemy fire. When the cavalry of the Russian Imperial Guard crushed a battalion of the 4th Line, Pontmercy was among those who took revenge and overthrew this guard. The Emperor awarded him the cross. Pontmercy successively saw Wurmser taken prisoner in Mantua, Melas in Alexandria, Mack in Ulm. He was part of the eighth corps of the Grand Army that Mortier commanded and which captured Hamburg. Then he passed into the 55th line, which was the old Flanders regiment. At Eylau, he was in the cemetery where the heroic Captain Louis Hugo, uncle of the author of this book, supported alone with his company of eighty-three men, for two hours, the entire effort of the enemy army. Pontmercy was one of the three who came out of this cemetery alive. He was from Friedland. Then he saw Moscow, then the Berezina, then Lutzen, Bautzen, Dresden, Wachau, Leipzig, and the defiles of Gelenhausen; then Montmirail, Château-Thierry, Craon, the banks of the Marne, the banks of the Aisne and the formidable position of Laon. At Arnay-le-Duc, as captain, he sabre-ratted ten Cossacks, and saved, not his general, but his corporal. He was hacked to death on this occasion, and twenty-seven splinters were taken from his left arm alone . Eight days before the capitulation of Paris, he had just exchange with a comrade and enter the cavalry. He had what was called in the old regime the double-hand, that is to say an equal aptitude to handle, as a soldier, the saber or the rifle, as an officer, a squadron or a battalion. It is from this aptitude, perfected by military education, that certain special weapons were born, the dragoons, for example, which are at the same time cavalry and infantry. He accompanied Napoleon to the island of Elba. At Waterloo, he was a squadron leader of cuirassiers in the Dubois brigade. It was he who took the flag of the Lüneburg battalion. He came to throw the flag at the feet of the Emperor. He was covered in blood. He had received, while tearing the flag, a saber blow across the face. The Emperor, pleased, shouted to him: You are a colonel, you are a baron, you are an officer of the Legion of Honor! Pontmercy replied: Sire, I thank you for my widow. An hour later, he fell into the ravine of Ohain. Now , who was this Georges Pontmercy? It was the same brigand of the Loire. We have already seen something of his story. After Waterloo, Pontmercy, pulled, as we remember, from the sunken road of Ohain, had managed to rejoin the army, and had dragged himself from ambulance to ambulance to the cantonments of the Loire. The Restoration had put him on half-pay, then sent him into residence, that is to say, under surveillance, at Vernon. King Louis XVIII, considering as null and void everything that had been done in the Hundred Days, had recognized neither his status as officer of the Legion of Honor, nor his rank of colonel, nor his title of baron. He, for his part, neglected no opportunity to sign himself Colonel Baron Pontmercy. He had only an old blue coat, and he never went out without attaching to it the rosette of an officer of the Legion of Honor. The king’s prosecutor warned him that the public prosecutor would prosecute him for illegally wearing this decoration. When this notice was given to him by an unofficial intermediary, Pontmercy replied with a bitter smile: I don’t know if it is I who no longer understand French, or if it is you who no longer speak it, but the fact is that I do not understand. Then he went out for eight days in a row with his rosette. No one dared to worry him. Two or three times the minister of war and the general commanding the department wrote to him with this address: To Monsieur le commandant Pontmercy. He returned the letters unopened . At this same time, Napoleon on Saint Helena was treating in the same way the missives of Sir Hudson Lowe addressed to General Bonaparte. Pontmercy had ended up, let us be clear, by having in his mouth the same saliva as his emperor. Thus there were in Rome some Carthaginian soldiers prisoners who refused to salute Flaminius and who had a little of the soul of Hannibal. One morning, he met the king’s attorney in a street in Vernon, went to him, and said to him: “Monsieur le procureur du roi, am I allowed to wear my scar?” He had nothing, except his very meager half-pay as a squadron leader. He had rented the smallest house he could find in Vernon. He lived there alone, as we have just seen. Under the Empire, between two wars, he had found the time to marry Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The old bourgeois, indignant at heart, had consented with a sigh and saying: “The greatest families are forced to do it.” In 1815, Madame Pontmercy, a woman in every way admirable, elevated and rare and worthy of her husband, had died, leaving a child. This child would have been the colonel’s joy in his solitude; but the grandfather had imperiously demanded his grandson, declaring that if he were not given him, he would disinherit him. The father had given in for the sake of the child, and, unable to have his child, he had taken to loving flowers. He had, moreover, renounced everything, neither stirring nor conspiring. He divided his thoughts between the innocent things he did and the great things he had done. He spent his time hoping for a carnation or remembering Austerlitz. M. Gillenormand had no relationship with his son-in-law. The colonel was a bandit to him, and he was a fool to the colonel. M. Gillenormand never spoke of the colonel, except sometimes to make mocking allusions to his barony. It was expressly agreed that Pontmercy would never attempt to see his son or speak to him, under penalty of being returned to him, chased away and disinherited. For the Gillenormands, Pontmercy was a plague victim. They intended to raise the child as they saw fit. The colonel was perhaps wrong to accept these conditions, but he accepted them, believing he was doing the right thing and sacrificing only himself. Father Gillenormand’s inheritance was small, but the inheritance of the elder Miss Gillenormand was considerable. This aunt, who had remained a daughter, was very rich on her mother’s side, and her sister’s son was her natural heir. The child, whose name was Marius, knew that he had a father, but nothing more. No one spoke to him about it. However, in the world to which his grandfather led him, the whispers, the half-words, the winks , had eventually made their way into the little boy’s mind; he had ended up understanding something, and as he naturally took in, by a sort of slow infiltration and penetration, the ideas and opinions which were, so to speak, his breathable environment, he came little by little to think of his father only with shame and a heavy heart. While he was growing up like this, every two or three months, the colonel would escape, come furtively to Paris like a convict breaking his ban, and go and post himself at Saint-Sulpice, at the hour when Aunt Gillenormand was taking Marius to mass. There, trembling lest the aunt turn around, hidden behind a pillar, motionless, not daring to breathe, he would watch his child. This scarred man was afraid of this old maid. From this very source had come his affair with the curé of Vernon, M. l’abbé Mabeuf. This worthy priest was the brother of a churchwarden of Saint-Sulpice, who had several times noticed this man contemplating this child, and the scar on his cheek, and the large tear in his eyes. This man who looked so much like a man and who wept like a woman had struck the churchwarden. This face had remained in his mind. One day, having gone to Vernon to see his brother, he met Colonel Pontmercy on the bridge and recognized the man from Saint-Sulpice. The churchwarden spoke to the priest about it, and both of them, under some pretext, paid a visit to the colonel. This visit led to others. The colonel, at first very closed, ended up opening up, and the priest and the churchwarden came to know the whole story, and how Pontmercy was sacrificing his happiness for the future of his child. This made the priest take him into veneration and tenderness, and the colonel, for his part, took a liking to the priest. Besides, when by chance they are both sincere and good, nothing penetrates and amalgamates more easily than an old priest and an old soldier. At bottom, they are the same man. One devoted himself to the fatherland below, the other to the fatherland above; no other difference. Twice a year, on January 1st and on St. George’s Day, Marius wrote his father letters of duty that his aunt dictated, and that looked as if they had been copied from some form; that was all that M. Gillenormand tolerated; and the father replied with very tender letters that the grandfather put in his pocket without reading them. Chapter 25. Requiescant. Madame de T.’s drawing-room was all that Marius Pontmercy knew of the world. It was the only window through which he could look into life. This window was dark, and he came to him through this skylight more cold than heat, more night than day. This child, who was nothing but joy and light upon entering this strange world, soon became sad, and, what is even more contrary to this age, serious. Surrounded by all these imposing and singular people, he looked around him with serious astonishment. Everything combined to increase this stupor in him. There were in Madame de T.’s salon some very venerable old noble ladies who were called Mathan, Noah, Lévis, which was pronounced Levi, Cambis, which was pronounced Cambyses. These ancient faces and biblical names mingled in the child’s mind with his Old Testament, which he was learning by heart, and when they were all there, seated in a circle around a dying fire, barely lit by a lamp veiled in green, with their severe profiles, their gray or white hair, their long robes of another age of which only the lugubrious colors could be distinguished, letting fall at rare intervals words at once majestic and fierce, little Marius looked at them with frightened eyes, believing he saw, not women, but patriarchs and magi, not real beings, but phantoms. Among these phantoms were several priests, regulars of this old salon, and a few gentlemen; the Marquis de Sassenaye, secretary of Madame de Berry’s commands, the Viscount de Valory, who published monorhymed odes under the pseudonym of Charles-Antoine, the Prince de Beauffremont who, quite young, had a grizzled head and a pretty and witty wife whose scarlet velvet robes with gold twists, very low-cut, frightened these shadows, the Marquis de Coriolis d’Espinouse, the man in France who best knew proportionate politeness, the Count d’Amendre, the good man with the benevolent chin, and the Chevalier de Port-de-Guy, pillar of the library of the Louvre, called the King’s cabinet. M. de Port-de-Guy, bald and rather aged than old, recounted that in 1793, at the age of sixteen, he had been put in the galleys as a draft dodger, and shoed with an octogenarian, the Bishop of Mirepoix, also a draft dodger, but as a priest, while he was one as a soldier. This was in Toulon. Their function was to go at night to collect from the scaffold the heads and bodies of those guillotined that day; they carried these dripping trunks on their backs, and their red galley-slave capes had a crust of blood behind their necks, dry in the morning, damp in the evening. These tragic tales abounded in Madame de T.’s salon; and by dint of cursing Marat there, people applauded Trestaillon. A few deputies of the untraceable type played their whist there, M. Thibord du Chalard, M. Lemarchant de Gomicourt, and the famous mocker of the right, M. Cornet-Dincourt. The bailiff of Ferrette, with his short trousers and thin legs, sometimes crossed this room on his way to M. de Talleyrand’s. He had been the companion of pleasure of M. le Comte d’Artois, and, unlike Aristotle crouching under Campaspe, he had made Guimard walk on all fours, and in this way showed to the centuries a philosopher avenged by a bailiff. As for the priests, they were Abbé Halma, the same one to whom M. Larose, his collaborator at the Foudre, said: Bah! who is there who is not fifty years old? A few youngsters perhaps! Abbot Letourneur, preacher to the king, Abbot Frayssinous, who was not yet a count, a bishop, a minister, or a peer, and who wore an old cassock with missing buttons, and Abbot Keravenant, parish priest of Saint-Germain des Prés; plus the papal nuncio, then Monsignor Macchi, archbishop of Nisibi, later cardinal, remarkable for his long, pensive nose, and another monsignor thus titled: Abbate Palmieri, domestic prelate, one of the seven participating protonotaries of the Holy See, canon of the distinguished Liberian basilica, advocate of the saints, postulatore di santi, which relates to matters of canonization and means to almost master of requests of the section of paradise; finally two cardinals, M. de la Luzerne and M. de Clermont-Tonnerre. M. Cardinal de la Luzerne was a writer and was to have, a few years later , the honor of signing articles in the Conservateur side by side with Chateaubriand; M. de Clermont-Tonnerre was archbishop of Toulouse, and often came on vacation to Paris to see his nephew the Marquis de Tonnerre, who was minister of the navy and war. Cardinal de Clermont-Tonnerre was a cheerful little old man showing his red stockings under his tucked-up cassock; He had the specialty of hating the encyclopedia and of playing billiards madly, and the people who, at that time, passed on summer evenings in rue Madame, where the Hôtel de Clermont-Tonnerre was then, stopped to hear the clash of the balls, and the shrill voice of the cardinal shouting to his conclavist, Monseigneur Cottret, bishop in partibus of Caryste: Mark, Abbot, I carambole. The Cardinal of Clermont-Tonnerre had been brought to Madame de T. by his most intimate friend, M. de Roquelaure, former bishop of Senlis and one of the forty. M. de Roquelaure was considerable for his height and for his assiduity at the academy; Through the glass door of the room next to the library where the French Academy then held its sessions, the curious could every Thursday contemplate the former Bishop of Senlis, usually standing, freshly powdered, in purple stockings, and with his back to the door, apparently to better show off his little collar. All these ecclesiastics, although most of them courtiers as much as churchmen, added to the gravity of T.’s salon, including five peers of France, the Marquis de Vibraye, the Marquis de Talaru, the Marquis d’Herbouville, the Viscount Dambray and the Duke of Valentinois, accentuated the lordly aspect. This Duke of Valentinois, although Prince of Monaco, that is to say, a foreign sovereign prince, had such a high opinion of France and the peerage that he saw everything through them. It was he who said: The cardinals are the peers of France of Rome, the lords are the peers of France of England. Moreover, for in this century revolution must be everywhere, this feudal salon was, as we have said, dominated by a bourgeois. M. Gillenormand reigned there. This was the essence and quintessence of white Parisian society . Renown people, even royalists, were kept in quarantine there. There is always anarchy in renown. Chateaubriand, entering there, would have had the effect of Père Duchêne. A few rallied, however, penetrated, by tolerance, into this orthodox world. Count Beugnot was received there with correction. The noble salons of today no longer resemble those salons. The Faubourg Saint-Germain of today reeks of personage. The royalists of today are demagogues, let us say it to their praise. At Madame de T.’s, the world being superior, taste was exquisite and haughty, under a great flourish of politeness. The habits there included all sorts of involuntary refinements which were the old regime itself, buried, but alive. Some of these habits, in language especially, seemed bizarre. Superficial connoisseurs would have taken for province what was only antiquated. A woman was called Madame la Générale. Madame la Colonelle was not entirely unusual. The charming Madame de Léon, doubtless in memory of the Duchesses de Longueville and de Chevreuse, preferred this appellation to her title of Princess. The Marquise de Créquy, too, had called herself Madame la Colonelle. It was this little high society that invented at the Tuileries the refinement of always saying when speaking to the king in private, “the king in the third person” and never “your majesty,” the qualification “your majesty” having been sullied by the usurper. There, facts and men were judged. The century was mocked, which dispensed with understanding it. People helped each other in astonishment. communicated the amount of light one had. Methuselah informed Epimenides. The deaf brought the blind up to date. The time elapsed since Coblentz was declared null and void . Just as Louis XVIII was, by the grace of God, in the twenty-fifth year of his reign, the émigrés were, by right, in the twenty-fifth year of their adolescence. Everything was harmonious; nothing was too lively; speech was barely a breath; the newspaper, in keeping with the drawing-room, seemed like a papyrus. There were young people, but they were a little dead. In the antechamber, the liveries were old-fashioned. These people, completely faded, were served by servants of the same kind. All this seemed to have lived a long time ago, and to be stubbornly opposed to the sepulchre. Preserve, Conservation, Conservator, that was almost the whole dictionary. To be in good odor, was the question. There were indeed spices in the opinions of these venerable groups, and their ideas smelled of vetiver. It was a mummy world. The masters were embalmed, the servants were stuffed. A worthy old marquise, an emigrant and ruined, having only one maid left, continued to say: My people. What were people doing in Madame de T.’s salon? They were ultra. To be ultra; this word, although what it represents may not have disappeared, this word no longer has any meaning today. Let us explain it. To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the scepter in the name of the throne and the miter in the name of the altar; it is to mistreat the thing that one is dragging; it is to kick in the harness; it is to quarrel at the stake over the degree of cooking of the heretics; It is to reproach the idol for its lack of idolatry; it is to insult through excess of respect; it is to find in the pope not enough papism, in the king not enough royalty, and too much light in the night; it is to be dissatisfied with alabaster, snow, the swan and the lily in the name of whiteness; it is to be a partisan of things to the point of becoming their enemy; it is to be so strongly for, that one is against. The ultra spirit especially characterizes the first phase of the Restoration. Nothing in history has resembled this quarter of an hour which begins in 1814 and which ends around 1820 with the advent of M. de Villèle, the practical man of the right. These six years were an extraordinary time, at once brilliant and gloomy, laughing and dark, lit as if by the radiance of dawn and at the same time covered in the darkness of the great catastrophes that still filled the horizon and were slowly sinking into the past. There was there, in this light and in this shadow, a whole little world, new and old, buffoonish and sad, juvenile and senile, rubbing their eyes; nothing resembles awakening like returning; a group that looked at France with humor and that France looked at with irony; good old marquis owls full of the streets, the returned and the revenants, the ci-devant stupefied by everything, brave and noble gentlemen smiling to be in France and crying too, delighted to see their homeland again, despairing at never finding their monarchy again; the nobility of the crusades spitting on the nobility of the Empire, that is to say, the nobility of the sword; the historical races having lost the sense of history; the sons of Charlemagne’s companions disdaining Napoleon’s companions. The swords, as we have just said, returned insults; the sword of Fontenoy was laughable and was only a rusty one; the sword of Marengo was odious and was only a saber. Formerly, yesterday was ignored. We no longer had the feeling of what was great, nor the feeling of what was ridiculous. There was someone who called Bonaparte Scapin. This world is no more. Nothing, let us repeat, remains of it today. When we take some figure from it by chance and try to revive it in thought, It seems strange to us, like an antediluvian world. It is because it too was swallowed up by a flood. It disappeared under two revolutions. What floods ideas are! How quickly they cover everything they are tasked with destroying and burying, and how promptly they create frightening depths! Such was the physiognomy of the salons of those distant and candid times when M. Martainville had more wit than Voltaire. These salons had a literature and a politics of their own. People believed in Fiévée there. M. Agier ruled there. They commented on M. Colnet, the book-selling publicist of the Quai Malaquais. Napoleon was fully Ogre de Corse there. Later, the introduction into history of M. le Marquis de Buonaparte, lieutenant general of the king’s armies, was a concession to the spirit of the century. These salons were not pure for long. As early as 1818, a few doctrinaires began to emerge, a disturbing nuance. Their way was to be royalists and apologize for it. Where the ultras were very proud, the doctrinaires were a little ashamed. They had wit; they had silence; their political dogma was suitably stiff with arrogance; they had to succeed. They indulged, usefully, in excesses of white ties and buttoned coats. The wrong, or misfortune, of the doctrinaire party was to create old youth. They assumed the poses of sages. They dreamed of grafting a tempered power onto the absolute and excessive principle. They opposed, and sometimes with rare intelligence, to the demolishing liberalism a conservative liberalism. We heard them say: Thanks for royalism! It has rendered more than one service. It has brought back tradition, worship, religion, respect. It is faithful, brave, chivalrous, loving, devoted. He comes to mix, albeit reluctantly, with the new greatness of the nation the secular greatness of the monarchy. He is wrong not to understand the Revolution, the Empire, glory, liberty, young ideas, young generations, the century. But this wrong that he has towards us, do we not sometimes have it towards him? The Revolution, of which we are the heirs, must have the intelligence of everything. To attack royalism is the opposite of liberalism. What a mistake! And what blindness! Revolutionary France lacks respect for historical France, that is to say, for its mother, that is to say, for itself. After September 5, the nobility of the monarchy is treated as after July 8, the nobility of the Empire was treated. They were unjust to the eagle, we are unjust to the fleur-de-lis. So we always want to have something to proscribe! De-gilding the crown of Louis XIV, scraping the coat of arms of Henri IV, is that really useful? We mock Mr. de Vaublanc who erased the Ns from the Pont d’Iéna! What was he doing? What we are doing. Bouvines belongs to us like Marengo. The fleurs-de-lis are ours like the Ns. It is our heritage. What is the point of diminishing it? We must not deny the fatherland in the past any more than in the present. Why not want all of history? Why not love all of France? This is how the doctrinaires criticized and protected royalism, unhappy at being criticized and furious at being protected. The ultras marked the first era of royalism; the congregation characterized the second. Passion was succeeded by skill. Let us limit this sketch here. In the course of this story, the author of this book has encountered on his path this curious moment of contemporary history; he must have taken a passing glance and traced some of the singular features of this society, now unknown. But he does so quickly and without any bitter or derisory thoughts. Memories, affectionate and respectful, because they touch on his mother , attach him to this past. Besides, let us say it, this same little world had its grandeur. We can smile at it, but we can neither despise nor hate it. It was the France of yesteryear. Marius Pontmercy, like all children, pursued an ordinary education. When he left the care of Aunt Gillenormand, his grandfather entrusted him to a worthy professor of the purest classical innocence. This young soul, which was opening up, went from a prude to a pedant. Marius spent his college years, then he entered law school. He was a royalist, fanatical, and austere. He had little love for his grandfather, whose gaiety and cynicism offended him, and he was gloomy toward his father. He was, moreover, an ardent and cold boy, noble, generous, proud, religious, exalted; dignified to the point of harshness, pure to the point of savagery. Chapter 26. End of the Brigand. The completion of Marius’s classical studies coincided with M. Gillenormand’s departure from the world. The old man said goodbye to the Faubourg Saint-Germain and Madame de T.’s salon, and came to settle in the Marais in his house on the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. There he had as servants, besides the porter, that chambermaid Nicolette who had succeeded Magnon, and that breathless and wheezy Basque mentioned above. In 1827, Marius had just reached his seventeenth year. As he was coming home one evening, he saw his grandfather holding a letter in his hand. “Marius,” said M. Gillenormand, “you will leave tomorrow for Vernon. ” “Why?” said Marius. “To see your father.” Marius trembled. He had thought of everything, except this, that one day he might have to see his father. Nothing could be more unexpected, more surprising, and, let’s say, more disagreeable for him. It was distance forced into rapprochement. It wasn’t grief, no, it was a chore. Marius, beyond his motives of political antipathy, was convinced that his father, the sabreur, as M. Gillenormand called him in his gentler days, did not love him; this was obvious, since he had abandoned him thus and left him to others. Not feeling loved, he did not love. Nothing could be simpler, he said to himself. He was so stupefied that he did not question M. Gillenormand. The grandfather continued: “It seems he is ill. He is asking for you.” And after a silence he added: “Leave tomorrow morning. I believe there is a carriage in the Cour des Fontaines that leaves at six o’clock and arrives in the evening. Take it.” He says it is urgent. Then he crumpled the letter and put it in his pocket. Marius could have left that same evening and been with his father the next morning. At that time, a stagecoach from the Rue du Bouloi was making the journey from Rouen at night and passing through Vernon. Neither M. Gillenormand nor Marius thought to inquire. The next day, at dusk, Marius arrived in Vernon. The candles were beginning to light. He asked the first passer-by who came along: Monsieur Pontmercy’s house . For in his mind, he was of the opinion of the Restoration, and he, too, did not recognize his father as either a baron or a colonel. He was shown the house. He rang; a woman came to open the door, a small lamp in her hand. “Monsieur Pontmercy?” said Marius. The woman remained motionless. “Is it here?” asked Marius. The woman nodded her head. “Could I speak to him?” The woman nodded. “But I am his son,” continued Marius. “He is waiting for me. ” “He is no longer waiting for you,” said the woman. Then he noticed that she was crying. She pointed to the door of a low room. He entered. In this room, lit by a tallow candle placed on the mantelpiece, there were three men: one standing, one kneeling , and one on the ground, lying full length on the floor in his shirt. The one on the ground was the colonel. The other two were a doctor and a priest, who was praying. The colonel had been suffering from cerebral fever for three days. At the beginning of the illness, having a bad feeling, he had written to Mr. Gillenormand to ask for his son. The illness had worsened. The very evening of Marius’s arrival at Vernon, the colonel had had a fit of delirium; he had gotten up from his bed in spite of the maid, crying: “My son is not coming! I’m going to meet him!” Then he had left his room and fallen on the floor of the antechamber. He had just expired. They had called the doctor and the priest. The doctor had arrived too late, the priest had arrived too late. The son also had arrived too late. In the twilight of the candle, a large tear could be seen on the cheek of the colonel, lying pale and lying, which had flowed from his dead eye. The eye was out, but the tear had not dried. This tear was the delay of his son. Marius considered this man whom he was seeing for the first time, and for the last, this venerable and manly face, these open eyes which did not look, this white hair, these robust limbs on which one could distinguish here and there brown lines which were saber blows and a kind of red star which were bullet holes. He considered this gigantic gash which imprinted heroism on this face where God had imprinted goodness. He thought that this man was his father and that this man was dead, and he remained cold. The sadness he felt was the sadness he would have felt before any other man whom he had seen lying dead. Mourning, a poignant mourning, was in this room. The servant was lamenting in a corner, the priest was praying, and one could hear him sobbing, the doctor was wiping his eyes; the corpse itself was weeping. This doctor, this priest, and this woman looked at Marius through their affliction without saying a word; it was he who was the stranger. Marius, too little moved, felt ashamed and embarrassed by his attitude; he had his hat in his hand, he let it fall to the ground, in order to make people believe that the pain was taking away his strength to hold it. At the same time, he felt a kind of remorse and he despised himself for acting thus. But was it his fault? He didn’t love his father, really! The colonel left nothing. The sale of the furniture barely paid for the burial. The servant found a scrap of paper which she gave to Marius. There was this, written in the colonel’s hand: — For my son: — The emperor made me baron on the battlefield of Waterloo. Since the Restoration disputes this title for which I paid with my blood, my son will take it and wear it. It goes without saying that he will be worthy of it. Behind, the colonel had added: At that same battle of Waterloo, a sergeant saved my life. This man’s name is Thénardier. In recent times, I believe he ran a small inn in a village near Paris, in Chelles or Montfermeil. If my son meets him, he will do Thénardier all the good he can. Not out of religion for his father, but because of that vague respect for death which is always so imperative in the heart of man, Marius took this paper and locked it away. Nothing remained of the colonel. M. Gillenormand had his sword and uniform sold to the second-hand dealer. The neighbors ransacked the garden and plundered the rare flowers. The other plants became brambles and brushwood, or died. Marius had only remained forty-eight hours in Vernon. After the burial, he had returned to Paris and had recovered his rights, without thinking more about his father than if he had never lived. In two days the colonel had been buried, and in three days forgotten. Marius had a crepe on his hat. That was all. Chapter 27. Usefulness of going to mass to become a revolutionary. Marius had kept the religious habits of his childhood. One Sunday when he had gone to hear mass at Saint-Sulpice, at the same chapel of the Virgin where his aunt had taken him when he was little, being that day distracted and dreamy more than usual, he had placed himself behind a pillar and kneeling, without paying attention, on a chair made of Utrecht velvet on the back of which was written this name: Monsieur Mabeuf, churchwarden. The mass had barely begun when an old man came forward and said to Marius: “Sir, this is my place.” Marius moved aside eagerly, and the old man took his chair again. When the mass was over, Marius had remained thoughtful a few steps away; the old man approached him again and said to him: “I beg your pardon, sir, for having disturbed you just now and for disturbing you again at this moment; but you must have found me annoying, I must explain to you. ” “Sir,” said Marius, “it is useless. ” “Yes!” replied the old man, “I do not want you to have a bad opinion of me. You see, I like this place. It seems to me that the mass is better there. Why? I will tell you.” It was to this place that I saw come for ten years, every two or three months regularly, a poor, good father who had no other opportunity and no other way to see his child, because, for family arrangements, he was prevented from doing so. He came at the hour when he knew his son was being taken to Mass. The little one had no idea that his father was there. He perhaps didn’t even know that he had a father, the innocent one! The father, himself, stood behind a pillar so that no one would see him. He looked at his child, and he wept. He adored this little one, this poor man! I saw that. This place became as if sanctified for me, and I got into the habit of coming there to hear Mass. I prefer it to the pew where I would have the right to be as a churchwarden. I even knew this unfortunate gentleman a little. He had a stepfather, a rich aunt, relatives, I don’t quite remember, who threatened to disinherit the child if he, the father, saw him. He had sacrificed himself so that his son would one day be rich and happy. He was separated from him because of his political opinion. Certainly I approve of political opinions, but there are people who don’t know when to stop. My God! because a man was at Waterloo, he’s not a monster; you don’t separate a father from his child for that. He was a colonel of Bonaparte’s. He’s dead, I think. He lived at Vernon where my brother, the priest, is, and his name was something like Pontmarie or Montpercy….–He had, by Jove, a fine saber stroke. “Pontmercy?” said Marius, turning pale. “Exactly. Pontmercy. Did you know him?” “Sir,” said Marius, “it was my father.” The old churchwarden clasped his hands and cried: “Ah! You are the child! Yes, that’s it, he must be a man now . Well! Poor child, you can say that you had a father who loved you well!” Marius offered his arm to the old man and led him back to his home. The next day, he said to M. Gillenormand: “We have arranged a hunting party with some friends. Will you allow me to be absent for three days? ” “Four!” replied the grandfather. “Go, enjoy yourself.” And, winking, he said quietly to his daughter: “Some love affair!” Chapter 28. What it is like to have met a churchwarden. Where Marius went, we will see a little later. Marius was away for three days, then he returned to Paris, went straight to the library of the law school, and asked for the collection of the Moniteur. He read the Moniteur, he read all the histories of the Republic and the empire, the Memorial of Saint Helena, all the memoirs, the newspapers, the bulletins, the proclamations; he devoured everything. The first time he came across his father’s name in the bulletins of the Grand Army, he was feverish for a whole week. He went to see the generals under whom Georges Pontmercy had served, among others Count H. The churchwarden Mabeuf, whom he had gone to see again, had told him about the life of Vernon, the colonel’s retirement, his flowers, his solitude. Marius arrived at to know fully this rare, sublime and gentle man, this kind of lion-lamb who had been his father. However, occupied with this study which took up all his moments as well as all his thoughts, he hardly saw the Gillenormands anymore. At mealtimes, he appeared; then they looked for him, he was no longer there. The aunt grumbled. Father Gillenormand smiled. Bah! bah! it’s the time of little girls!–Sometimes the old man added:–Devil! I thought it was a gallantry, it seems that it is a passion. It was a passion indeed. Marius was in the process of adoring his father. At the same time an extraordinary change was taking place in his ideas. The phases of this change were numerous and successive. As this is the history of many minds of our time, we believe it useful to follow these phases step by step and to indicate them all. This story which he had just set his eyes on frightened him. The first effect was dazzling. The Republic, the empire, had been for him until then only monstrous words . The Republic, a guillotine in the twilight; the empire, a saber in the night. He had just looked there, and where he expected to find only a chaos of darkness, he had seen, with a sort of unheard-of surprise mingled with fear and joy, stars sparkling, Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, Danton, and a sun rising, Napoleon. He did not know where he stood. He recoiled, blinded by the brightness. Little by little, the astonishment passed, he accustomed himself to these radiances, he considered the actions without vertigo, he examined the characters without terror; the revolution and the empire were placed luminously in perspective before his visionary pupil; he saw each of these two groups of events and men summed up in two enormous facts; the Republic in the sovereignty of civil law restored to the masses, the empire in the sovereignty of the French idea imposed on Europe; he saw the great figure of the people emerge from the revolution and the great figure of France from the empire. He declared to himself in his conscience that all this had been good. What his dazzlement neglected in this first, much too synthetic, appreciation, we do not believe it necessary to indicate here. It is the state of a spirit on the move that we are observing. Not all progress is made in one step. That said, once and for all, for what precedes as for what follows, we continue. He then realized that until that moment he had understood his country no more than he had understood his father. He had known neither one nor the other, and he had had a sort of voluntary night over his eyes. He saw now; and on the one hand he admired, on the other he adored. He was full of regrets and remorse, and he thought with despair that all that he had in his soul, he could no longer say it now except to a tomb! Oh! if his father had existed, if he had still had him, if God in his compassion and in his goodness had allowed that this father were still alive, how he would have run, how he would have rushed, how he would have cried to his father: Father! Here I am! It is I! I have the same heart as you! I am your son! How he would have kissed his white head, flooded his hair with tears, contemplated his scar, pressed his hands, adored his clothes, kissed his feet! Oh! why had this father died so soon, before his time, before justice, before the love of his son! Marius had a continual sob in his heart which said at every moment: alas! At the same time, he became more truly serious, more truly grave, more sure of his faith and his thought. At every moment, glimmers of truth came to complete his reason. There was something like an inner growth taking place within him. He felt a sort of natural enlargement brought to him by these two things, new to him, his father and his country. As when one has a key, everything opened; he explained to himself what he had hated, he understood what he had abhorred; he now saw clearly the providential, divine and human meaning of the great things he had been taught to detest and the great men he had been taught to curse. When he thought of his previous opinions, which were only yesterday and yet which already seemed so ancient to him, he was indignant and he smiled. From the rehabilitation of his father he had naturally passed to the rehabilitation of Napoleon. Yet, this, let us say, had not been achieved without labor. From childhood he had been imbued with the judgments of the party of 1814 on Bonaparte.
Now, all the prejudices of the Restoration, all its interests, all its instincts, tended to disfigure Napoleon. It loathed him even more than Robespierre. It had quite skillfully exploited the nation’s fatigue and the hatred of mothers. Bonaparte had become a sort of almost fabulous monster, and, in order to paint him for the imagination of the people, which, as we indicated just now , resembles the imagination of children , the party of 1814 successively brought forth all the frightening masks, from that which is terrible while remaining grandiose to that which is terrible while becoming grotesque, from Tiberius to Bogeyman. Thus, when speaking of Bonaparte, one was free to sob or burst out laughing, provided that hatred played the bass. Marius had never had—about this man, as he was called—other ideas in his mind. They had combined with the tenacity which was in his nature. There was in him a stubborn little man who hated Napoleon. In reading history, in studying it especially in the documents and materials, the veil which covered Napoleon in Marius’s eyes was gradually torn away. He glimpsed something immense, and suspected that he had been mistaken until that moment about Bonaparte as about everything else; every day he saw better; and he began to climb slowly, step by step, at first almost reluctantly, then with intoxication and as if drawn by an irresistible fascination, first the dark steps, then the dimly lit steps, finally the luminous and splendid steps of enthusiasm. One night, he was alone in his little room under the roof. His candle was lit; he was reading, leaning on his table beside his open window. All sorts of reveries came to him from space and mingled with his thoughts. What a spectacle the night is! You hear dull noises without knowing where they come from, you see Jupiter, 1200 times bigger than the earth, glowing like an ember, the azure is black, the stars shine, it is formidable. He read the bulletins of the great Army, those heroic stanzas written on the battlefield; he saw in them at intervals the name of his father, always the name of the emperor; the whole great empire appeared to him; he felt as if a tide were swelling within him and rising; it seemed to him at times that his father was passing near him like a breath, and speaking in his ear; he was gradually becoming strange; he thought he heard the drums, the cannon, the trumpets, the measured step of the battalions, the dull and distant gallop of the cavalry; from time to time his eyes rose towards the sky and saw the colossal constellations shining in the bottomless depths, then they fell back on the book and there they saw other colossal things moving confusedly. His heart was heavy. He was transported, trembling, panting; Suddenly, without knowing himself what was in him and what he was obeying, he stood up, stretched out his two arms outside the window, stared fixedly into the shadow, the silence, the dark infinity, the eternal immensity, and cried: Long live the emperor! From that moment on, everything was said. The ogre of Corsica,–the usurper,–the tyrant,–the monster who was the lover of his sisters,–the histrion who took lessons from Talma,–the poisoner of Jaffa,–the tiger,–Buonaparte,–all this vanished, and gave way in his mind to a vague and brilliant radiance in which shone from an inaccessible height the pale marble phantom of Caesar. The emperor had been for his father only the beloved captain whom one admires and to whom one devotes oneself; he was for Marius something more. He was the predestined builder of the French group succeeding the Roman group in the domination of the universe. He was the prodigious architect of a collapse, the continuator of Charlemagne, of Louis XI, of Henri IV, of Richelieu, of Louis XIV and of the Committee of Public Safety, having without doubt his stains, his faults and even his crime, that is to say, being a man; but august in his faults, brilliant in his stains, powerful in his crime. He was the predestined man who had forced all nations to say: – the great nation. He was even better; he was the very incarnation of France, conquering Europe with the sword he held and the world with the light he cast. Marius saw in Bonaparte the dazzling spectre that would always stand on the frontier and guard the future. Despot, but dictator; despot resulting from a Republic and summing up a revolution. Napoleon became for him the man-people as Jesus is the man-God. We see, like all newcomers to a religion, his conversion intoxicated him, he rushed into adhesion and went too far. His nature was like this: once on a slope, it was almost impossible for him to stop. Fanaticism for the sword won him over and complicated in his mind the enthusiasm for the idea. He did not realize that along with genius, and pell-mell, he admired strength, that is to say, he placed in the two compartments of his idolatry, on one side what is divine, on the other what is brutal. In many respects, he had begun to err differently. He admitted everything. There is a way of encountering error by going to the truth. He had a sort of violent good faith that took everything as a whole. In the new path he had entered, in judging the wrongs of the old regime as in measuring the glory of Napoleon, he neglected the extenuating circumstances. Whatever the case, a prodigious step had been taken. Where he had formerly seen the fall of the monarchy, he now saw the advent of France. His orientation had changed. What had been the west was the east. He had turned around. All these revolutions were taking place within him without his family suspecting it . When, in this mysterious work, he had completely lost his old skin of Bourbon and Ultra, when he had stripped off the aristocrat, the Jacobite and the royalist, when he was fully revolutionary, profoundly democratic, and almost republican, he went to an engraver on the Quai des Orfèvres and ordered a hundred cards bearing this name: Baron Marius Pontmercy. This was only a very logical consequence of the change that had taken place within him, a change in which everything gravitated around his father. Only, as he knew no one, and could not sow these cards at any doorman’s, he put them in his pocket. By another natural consequence, as he drew closer to his father, to his memory, and to the things for which the colonel had fought for twenty-five years, he moved further away from his grandfather. As we have said, for a long time M. Gillenormand’s mood had not pleased him. There were already between them all the dissonances of a serious young man and a frivolous old man. Géronte’s gaiety shocks and exasperates Werther’s melancholy. As long as the same political opinions and the same ideas had been common to them, Marius had met there with M. Gillenormand as on a bridge. When this bridge fell, the abyss was made. And
then, above all, Marius felt inexpressible movements of revolt at the thought that it was M. Gillenormand who, for stupid motives, had pitilessly torn him away from the colonel, thus depriving the father of the child and the child of the father. Through his piety for his father, Marius had almost come to aversion for his grandfather. None of this, moreover, as we have said, betrayed itself on the outside. Only he was becoming colder and colder; laconic at meals, and rare in the house. When his aunt scolded him for it, he was very gentle and gave as pretexts his studies, lessons, examinations, conferences, etc. The grandfather did not deviate from his infallible diagnosis: “In love! I know. Marius was occasionally absent. Where is he going like that?” the aunt would ask. On one of these trips, always very short, he had gone to Montfermeil to obey the instructions his father had left him, and he had sought out the former sergeant of Waterloo, the innkeeper Thénardier. Thénardier had gone bankrupt, the inn was closed, and no one knew what had become of him. For this search, Marius was away from home for four days. “Decidedly,” said the grandfather, “he is making a fuss. It had been noticed that he wore on his chest and under his shirt something tied around his neck with a black ribbon. Chapter 29. Some petticoat. He was a great-grandnephew of M. Gillenormand’s on his father’s side, and who led, outside the family and far from all domestic hearths, the life of a garrison. Lieutenant Théodule Gillenormand fulfilled all the conditions required to be what one calls a handsome officer. He had the figure of a young lady, a victorious way of carrying his saber, and a hooked mustache. He
came very rarely to Paris, so rarely that Marius had never seen him. The two cousins knew each other only by name. Théodule was, we believe we have said, the favorite of Aunt Gillenormand, who preferred him because she did not see him. Not seeing people allows one to suppose them to be all perfections. One morning, the elder Miss Gillenormand had returned home as moved as her placidity could be. Marius had just asked his grandfather for permission to take a little trip, adding that he intended to leave that very evening. “Go!” the grandfather had replied, and M. Gillenormand had added aside, pushing his two eyebrows upwards on his forehead: “He sleeps out repeatedly.” Miss Gillenormand had gone back up to her room, very intrigued, and had thrown into the staircase this exclamation point: “That’s strong!” and this question mark: “But where is he going?” She glimpsed some more or less illicit affair of the heart, a woman in the shadows, a rendezvous, a mystery, and she would not have been sorry to stick her glasses in there. The tasting of a mystery is like the first taste of a scandal; holy souls do not dislike that. There is in the secret compartments of bigotry some curiosity for scandal. She was therefore prey to the vague appetite for knowing a story. To distract herself from this curiosity which agitated her a little beyond her usual habit, she had taken refuge in her talents, and she had begun to festoon with cotton on cotton one of those embroideries of the Empire and the Restoration where there are many cabriolet wheels. A sullen work, a surly workman. She had been several hours in her chair when the door opened. Mademoiselle Gillenormand raised her nose; Lieutenant Théodule was in front of her, and was giving her the orderly salute . She gave a cry of happiness. One is old, one is prudish, one is devout, one is the aunt; but it is always pleasant to see a lancer enter one’s room. “You here, Théodule!” she cried. “By the way, aunt.” “But kiss me. ” “There!” said Théodule. And he kissed her. Aunt Gillenormand went to her desk and opened it. “Will you stay with us at least all week? ” “Aunt, I’m leaving again this evening. ” “Not possible! ” “Mathematically! ” “Stay, my little Théodule, I beg you. ” “The heart says yes, but the orders say no. The story is simple. We ‘re being moved to a different garrison; we were at Melun, we’re being put at Gaillon. To go from the old garrison to the new one, we have to go through Paris. I said: I’m going to see my aunt. ” “And here’s for your trouble.” She put ten louis in his hand. “You mean for my pleasure, dear aunt.” Théodule kissed her a second time, and she had the joy of having her neck a little grazed by the braid of her uniform. “Are you traveling on horseback with your regiment?” she asked. “No, aunt. I wanted to see you. I have special permission. My Grosseur is driving my horse; I’m going by stagecoach. And speaking of which, I must ask you something. ” “What?” “So my cousin Marius Pontmercy is traveling too?” “How do you know that?” asked the aunt, suddenly tickled to the quick with curiosity. “When I arrived, I went to the stagecoach to reserve a place in the coupé.
” “Well?” “A traveler had already come to reserve a place on the top-deck. I saw his name on the slip.” ” What name? ” “Marius Pontmercy. ” “The bad fellow!” cried the aunt. “Ah! your cousin isn’t a tidy fellow like you. To think he’s going to spend the night in the stagecoach! ” “Like me.” “But you, it’s out of duty; he’s out of disorder. ” “Good heavens!” said Théodule. Here, something happened to the elder Miss Gillenormand; she had an idea. If she had been a man, she would have struck her forehead. She addressed Théodule: “Do you know that your cousin doesn’t know you? ” “No. I’ve seen him; but he never deigned to notice me. ” “So you’re going to travel together like that?” “Him on the open-top, me in the coupé. ” “Where is this diligence going? ” “To Les Andelys. ” “So that’s where Marius is going? ” “Unless, like me, he stops on the way. I’m getting off at Vernon to catch the Gaillon connection. I know nothing of Marius’s itinerary. ” “Marius! What an ugly name! What idea did they have to call him Marius! While you, at least, are called Théodule! ” “I’d rather be called Alfred,” said the officer. “Listen, Théodule.” “I’m listening, aunt.” “Pay attention. ” “I’m paying attention. ” “Are you there? ” “Yes. ” “Well, Marius is absent. ” “Eh! eh! He’s traveling. ” “Ah! ah! He’s sleeping out. ” “Oh! oh! ” “We’d like to know what’s going on.” Théodule replied with the calm of a tanned man: “Some petticoat. ” And with that laugh between leather and flesh that reveals certainty, he added: “A little girl. ” “It’s obvious,” cried the aunt, who thought she heard M. Gillenormand speak, and who felt her conviction spring irresistibly from the word “girl,” accentuated in almost the same way by the great-uncle and the great-nephew. She continued: “Do us a favor. Follow Marius a little. He doesn’t know you; it will be easy for you. Since there’s a little girl, try to see the little girl.” You will write us the little story. It will amuse the grandfather. Théodule did not have an excessive taste for this kind of watch; but he was very touched by the ten louis, and he believed he saw a possible continuation. He accepted the commission and said: “As you please, aunt.” And he added to himself: “Here I am, a duenna.” Mademoiselle Gillenormand kissed him. “It is not you, Théodule, who would commit such pranks. You obey discipline, you are a slave to orders, you are a man of scruples and duty, and you would not leave your family to go see a creature. The lancer made the satisfied grimace of Cartouche praised for his probity. Marius, the evening following this dialogue, boarded the stagecoach without suspecting that he had a supervisor. As for the supervisor, the first thing he did was fall asleep. The sleep was complete and conscientious. Argus snored all night. At daybreak, the driver of the stagecoach shouted: “Vernon! Vernon relay! The travelers for Vernon!” And Lieutenant Théodule woke up. “Good,” he grumbled, still half asleep, “this is where I’m getting off.” Then, his memory gradually clearing itself, the effect of waking up, he thought of his aunt, the ten louis, and the account he had taken upon himself to give of Marius’s actions. This made him laugh. He may no longer be in the carriage, he thought, while buttoning up his uniform jacket. He may have stopped at Poissy; he may have stopped at Triel; if he didn’t get off at Meulan, he may have gotten off at Mantes, unless he got off at Rolleboise, or pushed on to Pacy, with the choice of turning left on Évreux or right on Laroche-Guyon. Run after her, aunt. What the devil am I going to write to her, the good old woman? At that moment a pair of black trousers coming down from the top hatchback appeared at the window of the coupé. “Could it be Marius?” said the lieutenant. ” It was Marius.” A little peasant girl, at the bottom of the carriage, mingling with the horses and postilions, was offering flowers to the travelers. “Blossom your ladies, ” she cried. Marius approached her and bought the most beautiful flowers from her stall. “This time,” said Théodule, jumping out of the coupé, “that stings me. Who on earth is he going to take these flowers to? It takes a proudly pretty woman for such a beautiful bouquet. I want to see her.” And, no longer by mandate now, but out of personal curiosity, like those dogs who hunt for their own gain, he began to follow Marius. Marius paid no attention to Théodule. Elegant women were getting out of the diligence; he did not look at them. He seemed to see nothing around him. “Is he in love!” thought Théodule. Marius headed towards the church. “Wonderful,” said Théodule to himself. “The church! That’s it.” Rendezvous seasoned with a little Mass are the best. Nothing is more exquisite than a glance that passes over the good Lord. Arriving at the church, Marius did not enter, but turned behind the apse. He disappeared around the corner of one of the buttresses of the apse. “The rendezvous is outside,” said Théodule. “Let’s see the little girl.” And he advanced on the tips of his boots toward the corner where Marius had turned. Arriving there, he stopped, stupefied. Marius, his forehead in his two hands, was kneeling in the grass over a grave. He had plucked the petals from his bouquet. At the end of the grave, on a bulge that marked his head, there was a black wooden cross with this name in white letters: Colonel Baron Pontmercy. Marius could be heard sobbing. The little girl was a tomb. Chapter 30. Marble against granite. This was where Marius had come the first time he was away from Paris. This was where he returned every time M. Gillenormand said: He’s sleeping out. Lieutenant Théodule was completely disconcerted by this unexpected elbowing of a sepulchre; he experienced an unpleasant and singular sensation which he was incapable of analyzing, and which consisted of respect for a tomb mixed with respect for a colonel. He stepped back, leaving Marius alone in the cemetery, and there was discipline in this retreat. Death appeared to him with large epaulettes, and he almost gave him a military salute. Not knowing what to write to his aunt, he took the decided not to write anything at all; and probably nothing would have resulted from the discovery made by Théodule about Marius’s loves, if, by one of those mysterious arrangements so frequent in chance, the scene at Vernon had not almost immediately had a sort of repercussion in Paris. Marius returned from Vernon early on the third day, went down to his grandfather’s house, and, tired from two nights spent in the diligence, feeling the need to make up for his insomnia with an hour of swimming school, went quickly up to his room, took only the time to take off his traveling frock coat and the black cord he had around his neck, and went to the baths. M. Gillenormand, up early like all healthy old men , had heard him come in and had hurried up, as fast as he could with his old legs, the attic stairs where Marius lived, in order to embrace him, and to question him in the embrace, and to find out a little where he came from. But the adolescent had taken less time to come down than the octogenarian to come up, and when Father Gillenormand entered the attic, Marius was no longer there. The bed was not made up, and on the bed were spread out unsuspectingly the frock coat and the black cord. “I like that better,” said M. Gillenormand. And a moment later he made his entrance into the drawing-room where the elder Mlle Gillenormand was already seated, embroidering her cabriolet wheels. The entrance was triumphant. M. Gillenormand held the frock coat in one hand and the neck ribbon in the other , and cried: “Victory! We are going to penetrate the mystery! We are going to know the end of the end, we are going to feel the libertinages of our sly one! Here we are at the very heart of the novel. I have the portrait! ” Indeed, a box of black shagreen, rather like a medallion, was suspended from the cord. The old man took this box and considered it for some time without opening it, with that air of voluptuousness, rapture, and anger of a poor starving devil watching an admirable dinner pass under his nose that would not be for him. “For this is obviously a portrait. I know something about it. It goes tenderly to the heart. How stupid they are! Some abominable goton, which probably makes one shudder! Young people have such bad taste today! ” “Come now, father,” said the old maid. The box opened by pressing a spring. They found nothing there but a carefully folded piece of paper. “From the same to the same,” said M. Gillenormand, bursting into laughter. “I know what it is. A love letter! ” “Ah! Let’s read it!” said the aunt. And she put on her glasses. They unfolded the paper and read this: “For my son. The Emperor made me a baron on the battlefield of Waterloo. Since the Restoration disputes this title for which I paid with my blood, my son will take it and wear it. It goes without saying that he will be worthy of it. ” What the father and daughter experienced cannot be described. They felt frozen as if by the breath of a death’s head. They did not exchange a word. Only M. Gillenormand said in a low voice, as if speaking to himself: “It is the handwriting of that swordsman.” The aunt examined the paper, turned it over this way and that, then put it back in the box. At the same moment, a small, long, square packet wrapped in blue paper fell from a pocket of the frock coat. Mademoiselle Gillenormand picked it up and unfolded the blue paper. It was Marius’s hundred cards. She passed one to M. Gillenormand, who read: Baron Marius Pontmercy. The old man rang. Nicolette came. M. Gillenormand took the cord, the box, and the frock coat, threw everything on the floor in the middle of the room, and said: “Take these clothes away.” A good hour passed in the deepest silence. The old man and the spinster sat with their backs to each other, and were each thinking, on their own, probably the same things. At the end of this hour, Aunt Gillenormand said: “Nice!” A few moments later, Marius appeared. He was coming back. Even before he had crossed the threshold of the drawing-room, he saw his grandfather holding one of his cards in his hand and who, on seeing him, exclaimed with his air of bourgeois and sneering superiority which was something crushing: “Well! well! well! well! well! you are a baron now. I compliment you. What does that mean?” Marius blushed slightly, and replied: “It means that I am my father’s son.” M. Gillenormand stopped laughing and said harshly: “Your father is me.” “My father,” Marius continued, his eyes lowered and his expression severe, “was a humble and heroic man who gloriously served the Republic and France, who was great in the greatest history that men have ever made, who lived a quarter of a century in bivouac, by day under grapeshot and bullets, by night in the snow, in the mud, in the rain, who took two flags, who received twenty wounds, who died in oblivion and abandonment, and who never had but one fault, that of loving too much two ingrates, his country and me!” It was more than M. Gillenormand could take. At this word, the Republic, he rose, or rather, stood up. Each of the words that Marius had just uttered had had on the face of the old royalist the effect of the puffs of a forge bellows on a burning brand. From dark he had become red, purple-red, and flaming purple . “Marius!” he cried. “Abominable child! I don’t know what your father was! I don’t want to know! I don’t know anything and I don’t know ! But what I do know is that there were never anyone but wretches among all those people! They were all beggars, murderers, redcaps, thieves! I say all! I say all! I know no one! I say all! Do you hear, Marius! You see, you ‘re as much a baron as my slipper! They were all bandits who served Robespierre! All brigands who served Bu-o-na-parté! All traitors who betrayed, betrayed, betrayed their legitimate king! All cowards who fled before the Prussians and the English at Waterloo!” That’s what I know. If your father is down there, I don’t know, I ‘m sorry, too bad, your servant! In turn, it was Marius who was the firebrand, and M. Gillenormand who was the bellows. Marius trembled in all his limbs, he didn’t know what to do, his head was burning. He was the priest who watches all his hosts being thrown to the wind, the fakir who sees a passerby spit on his idol. It was impossible that such things could have been said with impunity in his presence. But what could be done? His father had just been trampled underfoot and stamped in his presence, but by whom? By his grandfather. How could he avenge one without insulting the other? It was impossible that he should insult his grandfather, and it was equally impossible that he should not avenge his father. On one side a sacred tomb, on the other white hair. He was drunk and staggering for a few moments, with all this whirlwind in his head; Then he raised his eyes, looked fixedly at his grandfather, and cried in a thunderous voice: “Down with the Bourbons, and that fat pig Louis XVIII!” Louis XVIII had been dead for four years, but that was all the same to him. The old man, scarlet as he was, suddenly became whiter than his hair. He turned towards a bust of M. le Duc de Berry which was on the mantelpiece and bowed to it profoundly with a sort of singular majesty. Then he went twice, slowly and silently, from the fireplace to the window and from the window to the fireplace, crossing the whole room and making the floor creak like a walking stone figure . The second time, he leaned towards his daughter, who was watching this shock with the stupor of an old sheep, and said to her with a smile: with an almost calm smile. “A baron like Monsieur and a bourgeois like me cannot stay under the same roof.” And suddenly, straightening up, pale, trembling, terrible, his forehead enlarged by the frightening radiance of anger, he stretched out his arm towards Marius and shouted to him: “Go away.” Marius left the house. The next day, M. Gillenormand said to his daughter: “You will send sixty pistoles every six months to this bloodthirster, and you will never speak to me about him.” Having an immense remaining fury to spend and not knowing what to do with it, he continued to say “you” to his daughter for more than three months. Marius, for his part, had left indignant. A circumstance that must be mentioned had further aggravated his exasperation. There are always these small fatalities that complicate domestic dramas. The grievances increase, although ultimately the wrongs are not increased. In hastily carrying Marius’s clothes back to his room on his grandfather’s orders, Nicolette had, without realizing it, dropped, probably in the attic staircase, which was dark, the black shagreen medallion containing the paper written by the colonel. Neither this paper nor this medallion could be found. Marius was convinced that Monsieur Gillenormand, from that day on he no longer called him by anything else, had thrown his father’s will into the fire. He knew by heart the few lines written by the colonel, and, consequently, nothing was lost. But the paper, the writing, this sacred relic, all this was his very heart. What had been done with it? Marius had gone away, without saying where he was going, and without knowing where he was going, with thirty francs, his watch, and a few clothes in an overnight bag . He had climbed into a cabriolet, taken it on time , and headed off at random toward the Latin country. What would become of Marius? Book Four–The Friends of the ABC Chapter 31. A group that almost became historic. At that apparently indifferent time, a certain revolutionary thrill was vaguely running. Breaths, returned from the depths of 89 and 92, were in the air. Youth was, let us be allowed the word, in the process of changing. We were being transformed, almost without suspecting it, by the very movement of time. The needle that moves on the dial also moves in souls. Each one took the step forward that he had to take. The royalists became liberals, the liberals became democrats. It was like a rising tide complicated by a thousand ebbs; the characteristic of ebbs is to make mixtures; hence very singular combinations of ideas. Napoleon and liberty were both adored. We are making history here. These were the mirages of that time. Opinions go through phases. Voltairean royalism, a bizarre variety, had a no less strange counterpart, Bonapartist liberalism. Other groups of minds were more serious. There, the principle was probed; there, they attached themselves to the law. They were passionate about the absolute, they glimpsed infinite realizations; the absolute, by its very rigidity, pushes minds toward the azure and makes them float in the unlimited. Nothing is like dogma to give birth to dreams. And nothing is like dreams to engender the future. Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow. The opinions put forward had double meanings. A beginning of mystery threatened the established order, which was suspect and devious. A sign of the highest revolutionary degree. The ulterior motive of power meets in the undermining the ulterior motive of the people. The incubation of insurrections provides a counterpoint to the premeditation of coups d’état. There were not yet in France then those vast underlying organizations like the German Tugendbund and Italian Carbonarism: but here and there obscure, branching out excavations. La Cougourde was emerging in Aix; there was in Paris, among other affiliations of this kind, the society of the Friends of the ABC. What were the Friends of the ABC? a society whose aim was, in appearance, the education of children, in reality the recovery of men. They declared themselves the friends of the ABC.– The Abased, it was the people. They wanted to raise them up. A pun that would be wrong to laugh at. Puns are sometimes serious in politics; witness the Castratus ad castra which made Narses an army general; witness: Barbari and Barberini; witness: Fueros y Fuegos; witness: Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram, etc., etc. The friends of the ABC were few in number. It was a secret society in its embryonic state; we would almost say a coterie, if the coteries resulted in heroes. They met in Paris in two places, near the market halls, in a cabaret called Corinthe, which will be discussed later, and near the Pantheon in a small café on the Place Saint-Michel called the Café Musain, now demolished; the first of these meeting places was adjacent to the workers, the second to the students. The usual meetings of the Friends of the ABC were held in a back room of the Café Musain. This room, quite far from the café, to which it communicated by a very long corridor, had two windows and an exit with a hidden staircase onto the little Rue des Grès. People smoked there, drank there, played there, laughed there. They talked very loudly about everything, and in low voices about other things. Nailed to the wall, a sufficient clue to arouse the flair of a police officer, was an old map of France under the Republic. Most of the Friends of the ABC were students, in cordial agreement with a few workers. Here are the names of the main ones. They belong to a certain extent to history: Enjolras, Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Courfeyrac, Bahorel, Lesgle or Laigle, Joly, Grantaire. These young people formed a sort of family among themselves, through their friendship. All of them, except Laigle, were from the south. This group was remarkable. It has vanished into the invisible depths that are behind us. At the point of this drama that we have reached, it is perhaps not useless to direct a ray of light on these young heads before the reader sees them sink into the shadow of a tragic adventure. Enjolras, whom we named first, we will see why later, was an only son and rich. Enjolras was a charming young man, capable of being terrible. He was angelically handsome. He was fierce Antinous. One would have said, seeing the pensive reverberation of his gaze, that he had already, in some previous existence, crossed the revolutionary apocalypse. He had the tradition as a witness. He knew all the small details of the great thing. Pontifical and warlike nature, strange in an adolescent. He was an officiant and militant; from the immediate point of view, a soldier of democracy; above the contemporary movement, a priest of the ideal. He had deep eyes, a slightly red eyelid, a thick and easily disdainful lower lip, a high forehead. A lot of forehead in a face is like a lot of sky on a horizon. Like certain young men of the beginning of this century and the end of the last century who were illustrious early, he had an excessive youth, fresh as in young girls, although with hours of pallor. Already a man, he still seemed a child. His twenty-two years seemed seventeen. He was grave, he did not seem to know that there was on earth a being called woman. He had only one passion, the right, only one thought, to overthrow the obstacle. On the Aventine Hill, he would have been Gracchus; in the Convention, he would have been Saint-Just. He hardly saw the roses, he ignored spring, he did not hear the birds sing; the throat Evadne’s nude would not have moved him more than Aristogeiton; for him, as for Harmodius, flowers were only good for hiding the sword. He was severe in joys. Before everything that was not the Republic, he chastely lowered his eyes. He was the marble lover of Liberty. His speech was fiercely inspired and had a tremor of a hymn. He had unexpected openings of wings. Woe to the love affair that would have risked itself on his side! If some grisette from the Place Cambrai or the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais, seeing this face of a college escapee, this page’s neckline, these long blond eyelashes, these blue eyes, this hair tumultuous in the wind, these rosy cheeks, these new lips, these exquisite teeth, had had an appetite for all this dawn, and had come to try her beauty on Enjolras, a surprising and formidable look would have abruptly shown her the abyss, and would have taught her not to confuse the formidable cherub of Ezekiel with the gallant cherub of Baumarchais. Next to Enjolras who represented the logic of the revolution, Combeferre represented its philosophy. Between the logic of the revolution and its philosophy, there is this difference: its logic can conclude in war, while its philosophy can only lead to peace. Combeferre completed and rectified Enjolras. He was less high and broader. He wanted the minds to be poured with the broad principles of general ideas; he said: Revolution, but civilization; and around the sheer mountain he opened the vast blue horizon. From there, in all of Combeferre’s views, something accessible and practicable. The revolution with Combeferre was more breathable than with Enjolras. Enjolras expressed its divine right, and Combeferre its natural right. The first was linked to Robespierre; the second bordered on Condorcet. Combeferre lived more than Enjolras the life of everyone. If it had been given to these two young men to reach history, one would have been the just one, the other the wise one. Enjolras was more virile, Combeferre was more human. Homo and Vir, that was indeed their nuance. Combeferre was gentle as Enjolras was severe, by natural whiteness. He liked the word citizen, but he preferred the word man. He would have willingly said: Hombre, like the Spaniards. He read everything, went to the theaters, followed public lectures, learned from Arago the polarization of light, was passionate about a lesson in which Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had explained the double function of the external carotid artery and the internal carotid artery, one which makes the face, the other which makes the brain; he was informed, followed science step by step, confronted Saint-Simon with Fourier, deciphered hieroglyphs, broke the stones he found and reasoned geology, drew a silkworm moth from memory, pointed out mistakes in French in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie, studied Puységur and Deleuze, affirmed nothing, not even miracles, denied nothing, not even ghosts, leafed through the collection of the Moniteur, dreamed. He declared that the future is in the hand of the schoolmaster, and was concerned with questions of education. He wanted society to work tirelessly to raise the intellectual and moral level, to monetize science, to put ideas into circulation, to the growth of the mind in youth, and he feared that the current poverty of methods, the misery of the literary point of view limited to two or three classical centuries, the tyrannical dogmatism of official pedants, scholastic prejudices and routines would end up making our colleges artificial oyster beds. He was learned, purist, precise, polytechnic, a picker, and at the same time thoughtful to the point of chimera, his friends said. He believed in all dreams: railways, the elimination of suffering in surgical operations, the fixation of the image of the dark room, the electric telegraph, the direction of balloons. Moreover, he was not afraid of the citadels built on all sides against the human race by superstitions, despotisms and prejudices. He was one of those who think that science will eventually turn the tide. Enjolras was a leader, Combeferre was a guide. One would have liked to fight with one and march with the other. It is not that Combeferre was not capable of fighting, he did not refuse to take the obstacle hand to hand and attack it with force and by explosion; but to put the human race little by little, by the teaching of axioms and the promulgation of positive laws, in accord with its destinies, that pleased him better; and, between two glares, his inclination was more for illumination than for conflagration. A fire can make a dawn no doubt, but why not wait for daybreak? A volcano illuminates, but dawn illuminates even better. Combeferre perhaps preferred the whiteness of beauty to the blaze of the sublime. A clarity clouded by smoke, a progress bought by violence, only half satisfied this tender and serious spirit. A headlong rush of a people into truth, a 93, frightened him; however, stagnation repelled him even more; he felt putrefaction and death in it; all things considered, he preferred foam to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the cesspool, and the Niagara Falls to Lake Montfaucon. In short, he wanted neither halt nor haste. While his tumultuous friends, chivalrously enamored of the absolute, adored and called for splendid revolutionary adventures, Combeferre was inclined to let progress take place, good progress, cold perhaps, but pure; methodical, but irreproachable; phlegmatic, but imperturbable. Combeferre would have knelt and joined his hands so that the future might arrive with all its candor, and so that nothing might disturb the immense virtuous evolution of the people. Good must be innocent, he repeated constantly. And indeed, if the greatness of the revolution is to gaze fixedly at the dazzling ideal and to fly there through the thunderbolts, with blood and fire in its talons, the beauty of progress is to be without stain; and there is between Washington who represents the one and Danton who incarnates the other, the difference which separates the angel with swan wings from the angel with eagle wings. Jean Prouvaire was an even more softened nuance than Combeferre. He was called Jehan, by that little momentary fantasy which mingled with the powerful and profound movement from which emerged the so necessary study of the Middle Ages. Jean Prouvaire was in love, cultivated a pot of flowers, played the flute, wrote verses, loved the people, pitied the woman, wept over the child, confused in the same confidence the future and God, and blamed the revolution for having brought down a royal head, that of André Chénier. He had a voice usually delicate and suddenly virile. He was well-read to the point of erudition, and almost an orientalist. He was good above all else; and, a simple thing for those who know how much goodness borders on greatness, in terms of poetry he preferred the immense. He knew Italian, Latin, Greek and Hebrew; and this served him well in reading only four poets: Dante, Juvenal, Aeschylus and Isaiah. In French, he preferred Corneille to Racine and Agrippa d’Aubigné to Corneille. He would stroll happily through fields of wild oats and cornflowers, and would occupy himself with clouds almost as much as with events. His mind had two attitudes, one on the side of man, the other on the side of God; he studied, or he contemplated. All day long he would delve into social questions: wages, capital, credit, marriage, religion, freedom of thought, freedom of love, education, penalty, poverty, association, property, production and distribution, the enigma below which covers the human anthill of shadow; and in the evening, he looked at the stars, those enormous beings. Like Enjolras, he was rich and an only child. He spoke softly, inclined his head, lowered his eyes, smiled with embarrassment, dressed badly, looked awkward, blushed at nothing, was very shy. Besides, intrepid. Feuilly was a fan-maker, orphaned of father and mother, who earned three francs a day with difficulty, and who had only one thought, to deliver the world. He had another preoccupation: to educate himself; what he also called liberating himself. He had taught himself to read and write; everything he knew, he had learned alone. Feuilly had a generous heart. He had an immense embrace. This orphan had adopted the people. Missing his mother, he had meditated on his homeland. He did not want there to be a man on earth without a country. He brooded within himself, with the profound divination of the common man, what we call today the idea of nationalities. He had learned history expressly to be indignant with full knowledge of the facts. In this young circle of utopians, especially concerned with France, he represented the outside. His specialty was Greece, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Italy. He pronounced these names constantly, appropriately and inappropriately, with the tenacity of the law. Turkey over Greece and Thessaly, Russia over Warsaw, Austria over Venice, these rapes exasperated him. Above all, the great assault of 1772 stirred him up. Truth in indignation, there is no more sovereign eloquence, he was eloquent with that eloquence. He never tired of that infamous date, 1772, of that noble and valiant people suppressed by treason, of that Crime of Three, of that monstrous ambush , prototype and patron of all those frightening suppressions of states which, since then, have struck several noble nations, and have, so to speak, erased their birth certificate. All contemporary social attacks derive from the partition of Poland. The partition of Poland is a theorem of which all current political crimes are the corollaries. Not a despot, not a traitor, for a century now, who has not aimed, approved, countersigned and initialed, ne varietur, the partition of Poland. When one examines the file of modern betrayals, this one appears first. The Congress of Vienna consulted this crime before committing its own. 1772 sounds the death knell, 1815 is the slaughter. Such was Feuilly’s usual text. This poor worker had made himself the guardian of justice, and it rewarded him by making him great. Indeed, there is eternity in law. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be Teutonic. Kings lose their labor and their honor there. Sooner or later, the submerged homeland floats to the surface and reappears. Greece becomes Greece again; Italy becomes Italy again. The protest of law against fact persists forever. The theft of a people does not expire . These lofty swindles have no future. One does not mark off a nation like a handkerchief. Courfeyrac had a father named M. de Courfeyrac. One of the false ideas of the bourgeoisie of the Restoration in matters of aristocracy and nobility was to believe in the particle. The particle, as we know, has no meaning. But the bourgeoisie of the time of Minerva held this poor man in such high esteem that they felt obliged to abdicate him. M. de Chauvelin called himself M. Chauvelin, M. de Caumartin, M. Caumartin, M. de Constant de Rebecque, Benjamin Constant, M. de Lafayette, M. Lafayette. Courfeyrac had not wanted to remain behind, and was simply called Courfeyrac. We could almost, as far as Courfeyrac is concerned, stop there, and limit ourselves to saying as for the rest: Courfeyrac, see Tholomyès. Courfeyrac indeed had this youthful verve that one could call the beauty of the devil of the mind. Later, this fades like the kindness of the kitten, and all this grace results, on two feet, in the bourgeois, and, on four legs, in the tomcat. This kind of mind, the generations which pass through the schools, the successive levies of youth, transmit it, and pass it from hand to hand, quasi cursores, almost always the same; so that, as we have just indicated, the first comer who had listened to Courfeyrac in 1828 would have thought he was hearing Tholomyès in 1817. Only Courfeyrac was a good fellow. Under the apparent similarities of the external mind, the difference between Tholomyès and him was great. The latent man which existed in them was in the first quite different from in the second. There was in Tholomyès a prosecutor and in Courfeyrac a paladin. Enjolras was the leader. Combeferre was the guide, Courfeyrac was the center. The others gave more light, he gave more heat; the fact is that he had all the qualities of a center, roundness and radiance. Bahorel had figured in the bloody tumult of June 1822, on the occasion of the burial of young Lallemand. Bahorel was a good-natured being who kept bad company, brave, a spendthrift, prodigal and bordering on generosity, talkative and bordering on eloquence, bold and bordering on effrontery; the best possible devil’s dough; having reckless waistcoats and scarlet opinions; a big-time rowdy, that is to say, loving nothing so much as a quarrel, if not a riot, and nothing so much as a riot, if not a revolution; always ready to break a tile, then to unpave a street, then to demolish a government, to see the effect; eleventh-year student. He smelled the law, but he didn’t do it. He had taken for his motto: lawyer never, and for his coat of arms a night table in which one glimpsed a square cap. Every time he passed in front of the law school, which happened rarely, he buttoned his frock coat, the overcoat had not yet been invented, and he took hygienic precautions. He said of the school gate: what a fine old man! and of the dean, Mr. Delvincourt: what a monument! He saw in his classes subjects for songs and in his professors occasions for caricatures. He ate a rather large pension, something like three thousand francs, doing nothing. He had peasant parents in whom he had managed to instill respect for their son. He said of them: They are peasants, not bourgeois; that’s why they have intelligence. Bahorel, a man of caprice, was scattered over several cafes; the others had habits, he didn’t. He loitered. To wander is human, to loiter is Parisian. Deep down, a penetrating mind, and more of a thinker than he seemed. He served as a link between the Friends of the ABC and other groups still unformed, but which were to take shape later. There was in this conclave of young heads a bald member. The Marquis d’Avaray, whom Louis XVIII made duke for having helped him into a cabriolet on the day he emigrated, recounted that in 1814, on his return to France, as the king disembarked at Calais, a man presented him with a petition. “What do you ask for?” said the king. “Sire, a post office .” “What is your name?” “The Eagle.” The king frowned, looked at the signature on the petition, and saw the name written as follows: Lesgle. This un-Bonapartist spelling touched the king , and he began to smile. Sire, continued the man with the petition, my ancestor was a dog-boy, nicknamed Lesgueules. This nickname made my name. My name is Lesgueules, by contraction Lesgle, and by corruption L’Aigle.–This made the king complete his smile. Later, he gave the man the post office of Meaux, on purpose or by mistake. The bald member of the group was the son of this Lesgle, or Lègle, and signed Lègle (from Meaux). His comrades, to cut it short, called him Bossuet. Bossuet was a cheerful boy who was unhappy. His specialty was not succeeding at anything. On the other hand, he laughed at everything. At twenty-five, he was bald. His father had finally acquired a house and a field; but he, the son, had been in a hurry to lose that field and that house in a false speculation. He had nothing left. He had knowledge and wit, but he miscarried. Everything was lacking, everything deceived him; what he built collapsed on him. If he split wood, he cut off a finger. If he had a mistress, he soon discovered that he also had a friend. At any moment some misfortune befell him; hence his joviality. He said: I live under the roof of falling tiles. Little surprised, for for him the accident was the one predicted, he took the bad luck in serenity and smiled at the teasing of destiny like someone who understands a joke. He was poor, but his pocket of good humor was inexhaustible. He quickly reached his last penny, never his last burst of laughter. When adversity entered his home, he cordially greeted this old acquaintance, he slapped catastrophes on the stomach; he was so familiar with Fate that he called it by its nickname . “Good morning, Guignon,” he would say to it. These persecutions of fate had made him inventive. He was full of resources. He had no money, but he found ways to spend wildly when he pleased. One night, he went so far as to eat a hundred francs at a supper with a slut, which inspired in him, in the middle of the orgy, these memorable remarks: “Girl of five louis, pull me off my boots.” Bossuet was slowly moving toward the legal profession; he was studying law, like Bahorel. Bossuet had little home; sometimes none at all. He stayed sometimes with one person, sometimes with another, most often with Joly. Joly was studying medicine. He was two years younger than Bossuet. Joly was the young imaginary invalid. What he had gained from medicine was to be more sick than a doctor. At twenty-three, he believed himself to be valetudinarian and spent his life looking at his tongue in the mirror. He maintained that man magnetizes himself like a needle, and in his room he put his bed to the south and his feet to the north, so that, at night, the circulation of his blood would not be hindered by the great magnetic current of the globe. In storms, he felt his pulse. Besides , the most cheerful of all. All these inconsistencies, young, manic, puny, joyful, made good bedfellows, and the result was an eccentric and agreeable being whom his comrades, prodigal of winged consonants, called Jolllly. “You can fly on four Ls,” Jean Prouvaire told him. Joly had the habit of touching his nose with the end of his cane, which is the sign of a sagacious mind. All these young people, so diverse, and of whom, in short, one should only speak seriously, had the same religion: Progress. All were the direct sons of the French Revolution. The most frivolous became solemn when pronouncing this date: 89. Their fathers according to the flesh were or had been Feuillants, Royalists, Doctrinaires; it mattered little; this jumble prior to them, who were young, did not concern them; the pure blood of principles flowed in their veins. They attached themselves without any intermediate nuance to incorruptible law and absolute duty. Affiliated and initiated, they sketched out the ideal underground. Among all these passionate hearts and all these convinced minds, there was a skeptic. How did he get there? By juxtaposition. This skeptic was called Grantaire, and usually signed with this rebus: R. Grantaire was a man who was careful not to believe in anything . He was, moreover, one of the students who had learned the most during their courses in Paris; he knew that the best coffee was at Café Lemblin, and the best billiards at the Café Voltaire, that one found good pancakes and good girls at the Ermitage on the Boulevard du Maine, chickens à la crapaudine at Mère Saguet’s, excellent matelotes barrière de la Cunette, and a certain little white wine barrière du Combat. For everything, he knew the right places; in addition, the savate and the chausson, a few dances, and he was a profound batonniste. On top of that, a great drinker. He was disproportionately ugly; the prettiest boot-stitcher of that time, Irma Boissy, indignant at his ugliness, had pronounced this sentence: Grantaire is impossible; but Grantaire’s conceit was not disconcerted. He looked tenderly and fixedly at all the women, seeming to say of them all: if I wanted! and trying to make his comrades believe that he was generally in demand. All these words: people’s rights, human rights, social contract, French Revolution, Republic, democracy, humanity, civilization, religion, progress, were, for Grantaire, very close to meaning nothing at all. He smiled at them. Skepticism, that decay of intelligence, had not left a single complete idea in his mind. He lived with irony. This was his axiom: There is only one certainty, my full glass. He mocked all devotions in all parties, both brother and father, both young Robespierre and Loizerolles. “They are well advanced from being dead,” he cried. He said of the crucifix: “Here is a gallows that has succeeded.” A womanizer, a gambler, a libertine, often drunk, he gave these young dreamers the displeasure of singing incessantly: “I love girls and I love good wine. ” Air: “Long live Henry IV.” Besides, this skeptic had a fanaticism. This fanaticism was neither an idea nor a dogma, nor an art, nor a science; it was a man: Enjolras. Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras. To whom did this anarchic doubter rally in this phalanx of absolute minds? To the most absolute. In what way did Enjolras subjugate him? By ideas? No. By character. A phenomenon often observed. A skeptic who adheres to a believer is as simple as the law of complementary colors. What we lack attracts us. No one loves the day like the blind. The dwarf adores the drum major. The toad always has its eyes on the sky; why? to see the bird fly. Grantaire, within whom doubt crawled, liked to see faith soaring in Enjolras. He needed Enjolras. Without his clearly realizing it and without thinking of explaining it to himself, this chaste, healthy, firm, upright, hard, candid nature charmed him. He instinctively admired its opposite. His soft, sagging, dislocated, sick, deformed ideas were attached to Enjolras like a backbone. His moral spine was supported by this firmness. Grantaire, near Enjolras, became someone again. He himself was, moreover, composed of two apparently incompatible elements. He was ironic and cordial. His indifference was loving. His mind did without belief and his heart could not do without friendship. A profound contradiction; for an affection is a conviction. His nature was like that. There are men who seem born to be the reverse side, the inside, the reverse. They are Pollux, Patroclus, Nisus, Eudamidas, Ephestion, Pechméia. They only live on the condition of being leaned against another ; their name is a sequence, and is only written preceded by the conjunction and; their existence is not their own; it is the other side of a destiny that is not theirs. Grantaire was one of these men. He was the reverse of Enjolras. One could almost say that affinities begin with the letters of the alphabet. In the series, O and P are inseparable. You can, as you wish, pronounce O and P, or Orestes and Pylades. Grantaire, a true satellite of Enjolras, inhabited this circle of young people; he lived there; he only enjoyed himself there; he followed them everywhere. His joy was to see these silhouettes come and go in the fumes of wine. He was tolerated for his good humor. Enjolras, a believer, disdained this skeptic, and, sober, this drunkard. He granted him a little haughty pity. Grantaire was a Pylades not accepted. Always bullied by Enjolras, harshly rejected, rejected and returning, he said of Enjolras: What beautiful marble! Chapter 32. Funeral oration of Blondeau, by Bossuet. One certain afternoon, which had, as we shall see, some coincidence with the events recounted above, Laigle de Meaux was monthly leaning against the doorframe of the Café Musain. He looked like a caryatid on vacation; he wore nothing but his reverie. He was looking at the Place Saint-Michel. Leaning back is a way of lying upright that is not hated by dreamers. Laigle de Meaux was thinking, without melancholy, about a little mishap that had befallen him the day before yesterday at law school, and which modified his personal plans for the future, plans that were, moreover, rather indistinct. Reverie does not prevent a cabriolet from passing, and the dreamer from noticing the cabriolet. Laigle de Meaux, whose eyes were wandering in a sort of diffuse stroll, perceived, through this somnambulism, a two-wheeled vehicle moving along the square, which was going at a walking pace, and as if undecided. Who did this cabriolet want? Why was it going at a walking pace? Laigle looked inside. Inside, beside the coachman, was a young man, and in front of this young man a rather large sleeping bag. The bag showed to passers-by this name written in large black letters on a card sewn into the fabric: Marius Pontmercy. This name made Laigle change his attitude. He stood up and addressed the young man in the cabriolet with this apostrophe: “Monsieur Marius Pontmercy!” The cabriolet, which had been called, stopped. The young man, who also seemed to be in deep thought, looked up . “Huh?” he said. “You are Monsieur Marius Pontmercy? ” “No doubt. ” “I was looking for you,” continued Laigle de Meaux. “How so?” asked Marius; for it was he, in fact, coming out of his grandfather’s house, and before him was a figure he was seeing for the first time. “I don’t know you. ” “I don’t know you either,” replied Laigle. Marius thought it was a meeting with a joker, the beginnings of a hoax in the middle of the street. He was not in an easy mood at that moment. He frowned. Laigle de Meaux, imperturbable, continued: “You weren’t at school the day before yesterday? ” “That’s possible.” “That’s certain. ” “You’re a student?” asked Marius. “Yes, sir. Like you. The day before yesterday I entered the school by chance. You know, one sometimes has ideas like that. The professor was taking the roll. You know they’re very ridiculous at this time. The third time you miss the roll, they strike you off the list. Sixty francs down the drain. ” Marius began to listen. Laigle continued: “It was Blondeau taking the roll. You know Blondeau, he has a very sharp and very mischievous nose, and he delights in sniffing out the absentees. He slyly began with the letter P. I wasn’t listening, not being compromised by that letter. The roll wasn’t going badly. No radiation. The universe was present. Blondeau was sad. I said to myself: Blondeau, my love, you won’t be performing the slightest bit today.” Suddenly Blondeau calls Marius Pontmercy. No one answers. Blondeau, full of hope, repeats louder: Marius Pontmercy. And he takes up his pen. Sir, I have guts. I quickly said to myself: Here is a good boy who will be struck off. Be careful. This is a real living person who is not exact. This is not a good student. This is not a leaden bottom, a student who studies, a pedantic youngster, strong in science, literature, theology and wisdom, a of these stupid minds dressed to the nines; one pin per faculty. He is an honorable lazybones who loiters, who practices vacationing, who cultivates grisette, who courts the beauties, who is perhaps at this very moment at my mistress’s. Let us save him. Death to Blondeau! At that moment, Blondeau dipped his pen black with erasures in ink, ran his tawny eye over the audience, and repeated for the third time: Marius Pontmercy! I answered: Present! That means you have not been struck off. “Sir!” said Marius. “And that I have been,” added Laigle de Meaux. “I do not understand you,” said Marius. Laigle continued: “Nothing could be simpler. I was near the pulpit to answer and near the door to escape. The professor was looking at me with a certain fixity. Suddenly, Blondeau, who must be the clever nose Boileau speaks of, jumps to the letter L. L is my letter. I am from Meaux, and my name is Lesgle. “The Eagle!” interrupted Marius, “what a fine name! ” “Sir, Blondeau comes to this fine name and cries: Laigle!” I answer: “Present!” Then Blondeau looks at me with the gentleness of a tiger, smiles, and says: “If you are Pontmercy, you are not Laigle.” A phrase that seems disparaging to you, but was only dismal to me. Having said that, he strikes me out. Marius exclaimed. “Sir, I am mortified…” “Above all,” interrupted Laigle, “I ask to embalm Blondeau in a few sentences of heartfelt praise. I assume him dead.” There would not be much to change in his thinness, his pallor, his coldness, his stiffness, and his odor. And I say: Erudimini qui judicatis terram. Here lies Blondeau, Blondeau the Nose, Blondeau Nasica, the ox of discipline, bos disciplinæ, the mastiff of the order, the angel of the roll call, who was straight, square, exact, rigid, honest and hideous. God struck him off as he struck me off. Marius continued: “I am sorry…” “Young man,” said Laigle de Meaux, “let this be a lesson to you. In the future, be punctual. ” “I truly apologize to you a thousand times over.” “Don’t risk having your neighbor struck off again. ” “I am in despair… ” Laigle burst out laughing. “And I, delighted. I was on the verge of becoming a lawyer. This erasure saves me. I renounce the triumphs of the bar.” I will not defend the widow and I will not attack the orphan. No more toga, no more probation. There is my radiation obtained. It is to you that I owe it, Monsieur Pontmercy. I intend to pay you a solemn visit of thanks. Where do you live? “In this cabriolet,” said Marius. “A sign of opulence,” replied Laigle calmly. “I congratulate you. You have a rent of nine thousand francs a year there.” At that moment Courfeyrac was leaving the café. Marius smiled sadly: “I have been in this rent for two hours and I long to get out; but it is a matter like that, I do not know where to go. ” “Sir,” said Courfeyrac, “come to my house. ” “I would have priority,” observed Laigle, “but I have no place of my own. ” “Be quiet, Bossuet,” continued Courfeyrac. “Bossuet,” said Marius, “but I thought your name was Laigle.”
“From Meaux,” replied Laigle; “metaphorically, Bossuet.” Courfeyrac got into the cabriolet. “Coachman,” he said, “Hôtel de la Porte-Saint-Jacques. ” And that same evening, Marius was installed in a room at the Hôtel de la Porte-Saint-Jacques, side by side with Courfeyrac. Chapter 33. Marius’s astonishments. In a few days, Marius was Courfeyrac’s friend. Youth is the season of prompt healing and rapid healing. Marius, near Courfeyrac, breathed freely, something quite new to him. Courfeyrac did not ask him any questions. He did not even think about it. At that age, faces say everything at once. Speech is useless. There is a young man of whom one could say that his physiognomy is talkative. One look at each other, we know each other. One morning, however, Courfeyrac suddenly threw this question at him: “By the way, do you have a political opinion?” “Well!” said Marius, almost offended by the question. “What are you? ” “Democratic Bonapartist. ” “A reassured shade of mousey gray,” said Courfeyrac. The next day, Courfeyrac introduced Marius to the Café Musain. Then he whispered in his ear with a smile: “I must give you your entries into the revolution.” And he led him into the room of the Friends of the ABC . He introduced him to the other comrades, saying in a low voice this simple ” me” that Marius did not understand: “A student.” Marius had fallen into a wasp’s nest of minds. Besides, although silent and grave, he was neither the least winged nor the least armed. Marius, until then solitary and inclined to monologue and asides by habit and taste, was a little startled by this flock of young people around him. All these diverse initiatives both solicited and tore at him. The tumultuous coming and going of all these minds at liberty and at work made his ideas whirl. Sometimes, in the confusion, they went so far from him that he had difficulty finding them again. He heard talk of philosophy, literature, art, history, religion, in an unexpected way. He glimpsed strange aspects; and since he did not put them into perspective, he was not sure of not seeing chaos. In leaving his grandfather’s opinions for his father’s, he had believed himself to be settled; he suspected now, with uneasiness and without daring to admit it to himself, that he was not. The angle from which he saw everything was beginning to shift again. A certain oscillation set all the horizons of his brain in motion. A strange inner commotion . He almost suffered from it. It seemed that for these young people there were no consecrated things . Marius heard, on every subject, singular language , embarrassing for his still timid mind. A playbill appeared, adorned with the title of a tragedy from the old repertoire, called classical. “Down with the tragedy dear to the bourgeoisie!” Bahorel shouted. And Marius heard Combeferre reply: “You are wrong, Bahorel. The bourgeoisie loves tragedy, and on this point the bourgeoisie must be left alone. Tragedy with a wig has its reason for being, and I am not one of those who, following Aeschylus, contest its right to exist. There are sketches in nature; there are , in creation, ready-made parodies; A beak that isn’t a beak, wings that aren’t wings, fins that aren’t fins, legs that aren’t legs, a painful cry that makes you want to laugh, that’s the duck. Now, since poultry exists alongside birds, I don’t see why classical tragedy shouldn’t exist opposite ancient tragedy. Or perhaps it was by chance that Marius was passing Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau between Enjolras and Courfeyrac. Courfeyrac took his arm. “Pay attention. This is Rue Plâtrière, now called Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, because of a strange couple who lived there some sixty years ago. They were Jean-Jacques and Thérèse. From time to time, little beings were born there. Thérèse gave birth to them, Jean-Jacques gave birth to them again. And Enjolras was rude to Courfeyrac.” –Silence before Jean-Jacques! I admire that man. He has disowned his children, fine; but he has adopted the people. None of these young people uttered this word: the emperor. Jean Prouvaire alone sometimes said Napoleon; all the others said Bonaparte. Enjolras pronounced it Buonaparte. Marius was vaguely astonished. Initium sapientiæ. Chapter 34. The back room of the Café Musain. One of the conversations between these young people, which Marius witnessed and in which he sometimes intervened, was a veritable shock to his spirit. It was happening in the back room of the Café Musain. Nearly all the Friends of the ABC were gathered that evening. The oil lamp was solemnly lit. They were talking about this and that, without passion and loudly. Except for Enjolras and Marius, who were silent, everyone harangued a little at random. Chats between comrades sometimes have these peaceful tumults. It was as much a game and a jumble as a conversation. Words were thrown at each other that were caught. They chatted in the four corners. No woman was allowed in this back room, except Louison, the dishwasher from the café, who crossed it from time to time on her way from the laundry to the laboratory. Grantaire, completely drunk, deafened the corner he had taken over. He reasoned and talked at the top of his lungs, he shouted: “I’m thirsty.” Mortals, I have a dream: that the ton from Heidelberg has a stroke, and is one of the dozen leeches that will be applied to it. I would like to drink. I wish to forget life. Life is a hideous invention of I know not who. It lasts nothing and is worthless . We break our necks living. Life is a setting where there are few practicalities. Happiness is an old frame painted on one side only. Ecclesiastes says: all is vanity; I think like that fellow who perhaps never existed. Zero, not wanting to go naked, clothed himself in vanity. O vanity! dressing up everything with grand words! A kitchen is a laboratory, a dancer is a teacher, a mountebank is a gymnast, a boxer is a pugilist, an apothecary is a chemist, a wigmaker is an artist, a waster is an architect, a jockey is a sportsman, a woodlouse is a pterygibranch. Vanity has a reverse and a front; the front is stupid, it is the Negro with his glass beads; the reverse is foolish, it is the philosopher with his rags. I weep over the one and I laugh at the other. What we call honors and dignities, and even honor and dignity, are generally in chrysocale. Kings play with human pride. Caligula made a horse consul; Charles II made a sirloin knight. Now drape yourself between the consul Incitatus and the baronet Roastbeef. As for the intrinsic value of people, it is hardly more respectable. Listen to the panegyric that the neighbor makes of the neighbor. White on white is ferocious; if the lily spoke, how it would arrange the dove! A bigot who chatters of a devout woman is more poisonous than the asp and the blue kipper. It is a pity that I am ignorant, for I could tell you a host of things; but I know nothing. For example, I have always had wit; when I was a pupil of Gros, instead of scribbling little pictures, I spent my time stealing apples; rapin is the male of rapine. That for me; as for you others, you are as good as me. I don’t care about your perfections, excellences and qualities. Every quality falls into a fault; the thrifty borders on the miser, the generous borders on the prodigal, the brave borders on the bravado; whoever says very pious says a bit of a bigot; There are just as many vices in virtue as there are holes in Diogenes’s cloak. Who do you admire, the slain or the killer, Caesar or Brutus? Generally, one is for the killer. Long live Brutus! He killed. That is what virtue is. Virtue, yes, but madness too. There are strange stains on these great men. The Brutus who killed Caesar was in love with a statue of a little boy. This statue was by the Greek sculptor Strongylion, who had also sculpted that figure of an Amazon called Belle-Jambe, Eucnemos, which Nero took with him on his travels. This Strongylion left only two statues that brought Brutus and Nero into agreement; Brutus was in love with one and Nero with the other. All history is nothing but a long rehash. One century is the plagiarist of the other. The Battle of Marengo copies the Battle of Pydna; Clovis’ Tolbiac and Austerlitz Napoleon and his wife are as alike as two drops of blood. I care little for victory. Nothing is as stupid as winning; true glory is convincing. But try to prove something! You are content to succeed, what mediocrity! and to conquer, what misery! Alas, vanity and cowardice everywhere. Everything obeys success, even grammar. Si volet usus, said Horace. Therefore, I disdain the human race. Shall we descend to the game altogether? Do you want me to start admiring peoples? What people, if you please? Is it Greece? The Athenians, those Parisians of old, killed Phocion, as Coligny would say, and flattered tyrants to the point that Anacephorus said of Pisistratus: His urine attracts bees. The most important man in Greece for fifty years was that grammarian Philetas, who was so small and slight that he was obliged to weight his shoes to keep from being blown away by the wind. In the largest square in Corinth there was a statue sculpted by Silanion and catalogued by Pliny; this statue represented Episthates. What did Episthates do? He invented the leg-trip. This sums up Greece and glory. Let us move on to others. Shall I admire England? Shall I admire France? France? Why? Because of Paris? I have just told you my opinion of Athens. England? Why? Because of London? I hate Carthage. And then, London, the metropolis of luxury, is the chief town of misery. In the parish of Charing Cross alone, there are a hundred deaths of hunger every year. Such is Albion. I add, to cap it all, that I saw an Englishwoman dancing with a crown of roses and blue glasses. So a groing for England! If I don’t admire John Bull, I will admire Brother Jonathan? I have little taste for this slave brother. Take away time is money, what remains of England? Take away cotton is king, what remains of America? Germany is lymph; Italy is bile. Shall we go into ecstasies over Russia? Voltaire admired her. He also admired China. I agree that Russia has its beauties, among other things a strong despotism; but I pity the despots. They have delicate health. A beheaded Alexis, a stabbed Peter, a strangled Paul, another Paul flattened with a boot heel, various Ivans with their throats cut, several Nicholases and Basils poisoned, all this indicates that the palace of the emperors of Russia is in a flagrantly unsanitary condition. All civilized peoples offer this detail to the thinker’s admiration: war; now war, civilized war, exhausts and totalizes all forms of banditry, from the brigandage of the trabucaires in the gorges of Mount Jaxa to the marauding of the Comanche Indians in the Doubtful Pass. Bah! you will tell me, is Europe worth more than Asia? I agree that Asia is a farce; But I don’t really see what you have to laugh at the great lama for, you peoples of the West who have mixed into your fashions and your elegances all the complicated filth of majesty, from Queen Isabella’s dirty shirt to the dauphin’s commode. Gentlemen of mankind, I tell you to stop! It is in Brussels that the most beer is consumed, in Stockholm the most brandy , in Madrid the most chocolate, in Amsterdam the most gin, in London the most wine, in Constantinople the most coffee, in Paris the most absinthe; these are all useful notions. Paris wins, in short. In Paris, even the rag-and-bone men are sybarites; Diogenes would have liked to be a rag-and-bone man in Place Maubert as much as a philosopher in Piraeus. Learn this again: the rag-and-bone men’s taverns are called bibines; the most famous are La Casserole and L’Abattoir. So, oh guinguettes, goguettes, bouchons, caboulots, bouibouis, mastroquets, bastringues, manezingues, bibines of the rag-pickers, caravanserais of the caliphs, I attest to you, I am a voluptuous, I eat at Richard’s for forty sous a head, I need Persian carpets to roll up there Naked Cleopatra! Where’s Cleopatra? Ah! It’s you, Louison. Hello. Thus poured out words, catching the dishwasher as he passed, in his corner of the back room, Musain, a more than drunk Grantaire. Bossuet, stretching out his hand towards him, tried to silence him, and Grantaire started again with renewed vigor: “Eagle of Meaux, hands off. You don’t make any impression on me with your gesture of Hippocrates refusing Artaxerxes’ bric-a-brac. I’ll spare you the trouble of calming me down. Besides, I’m sad. What do you want me to tell you? Man is bad, man is deformed. The butterfly is successful, man is a failure. God missed that animal. A crowd is a selection of ugliness. The first comer is a wretch. Woman rhymes with infamous. Yes, I have the spleen, complicated by melancholy, with nostalgia, plus hypochondria, and I squirm, and I rage, and I yawn, and I get bored, and I knock myself out, and I get bored! God damn it! –Silence then, capital R! resumed Bossuet, who was discussing a point of law with the crowd, and who was more than half-heartedly engaged in a sentence of judicial slang, the end of which was as follows: –…And as for me, although I am hardly a lawyer and at most an amateur prosecutor, I maintain this: that according to the custom of Normandy, on Michaelmas, and for each year, an Equivalent should be paid for the benefit of the lord, except for other rights, by each and every one, both owners and those seized of inheritance, and this, for all emphyteusis, leases, alleux, domanial and domanial, mortgage and hypothecal contracts …. –Echoes, plaintive nymphs, hummed Grantaire. Very close to Grantaire, on an almost silent table, a sheet of paper, an inkwell and a quill between two small glasses announced that a vaudeville was beginning. This important matter was being discussed in low voices, and the two working heads touched: “Let’s start by finding the names. When you have the names, you find the subject. ” “That’s right. Dictate. I’ll write. ” “Monsieur Dorimon? ” “Rentier? ” “No doubt. ” “His daughter, Célestine. ” “…tine. After that? ” “Colonel Sainval. ” “Sainval is worn out. I’d say Valsin.” Beside the aspiring vaudevillians, another group, which was also taking advantage of the hubbub to speak quietly, was discussing a duel. An old man, thirty years old, was advising a young man, eighteen, and explaining to him what kind of adversary he was dealing with: “The devil! Be careful. He’s a fine swordsman. His play is clear.” He’s got attack, no wasted feints, wrist, sparkle, lightning, the right parry, and mathematical ripostes, by Joly! And he ‘s left-handed. In the corner opposite Grantaire, Joly and Bahorel were playing dominoes and talking about love. “You’re happy,” said Joly. “You have a mistress who’s always laughing. ” “She’s making a mistake,” replied Bahorel. “The mistress you’re wrong to laugh at. It encourages you to cheat on her. Seeing her happy takes away your remorse; if you see her sad, you realize it. ” “Ungrateful! A woman who laughs is so good! And you never quarrel! ” “That’s due to the treaty we made. When we made our little holy alliance, we each assigned our own border, which we never cross. What’s on the north side belongs to Vaud, the wind side to Gex.” Hence peace. –Peace is digesting happiness. –And you, Jolllly, where are you with your quarrel with miss… you know who I mean? –She sulks at me with cruel patience. –Yet you are a touching lover of thinness. –Alas! –In your place, I would leave her there. –It’s easy to say. –And to do. Isn’t her name Musichetta? –Yes. Ah! my poor Bahorel, she’s a superb girl, very literary, with small feet, small hands, dressing well, white, plump, with the eyes of a fortune teller. I’m crazy about her. –My dear fellow, then you have to please her, be elegant, and make some knockabout effects. Buy me a good pair of woolen leather trousers at Staub’s. That ‘ll do. –How much? shouted Grantaire. The third corner was in the grip of a poetic discussion. Pagan mythology clashed with Christian mythology. It was about Olympus, which Jean Prouvaire, out of romanticism itself, took his side. Jean Prouvaire was only timid when he was at rest. Once excited, he would burst out, a sort of gaiety accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was both laughing and lyrical: –Let’s not insult the gods, he would say. Perhaps the gods haven’t gone away. Jupiter doesn’t seem dead to me. The gods are dreams, you say. Well, even in nature, as it is today, after the flight of these dreams, we find all the great old pagan myths. A mountain with the profile of a citadel, like the Vignemale, for example, is still for me the headdress of Cybele; it has not been proven to me that Pan does not come at night to blow into the hollow trunks of the willows, stopping the holes one after the other with his fingers; and I always believed that Io had something to do with the Pissevache waterfall. In the last corner, they were talking politics. They were mistreating the charter granted. Combeferre was supporting it weakly, Courfeyrac was attacking it energetically. There was on the table an unfortunate copy of the famous Charter-Touquet. Courfeyrac had seized it and was shaking it, mixing the quivering of this sheet of paper with his arguments. –First, I don’t want kings. Even from an economic point of view, I don’t want it; a king is a parasite. You don’t get a king for free. Listen to this: The high cost of kings. At the death of Francis I, the public debt in France was thirty thousand livres a year; at the death of Louis XIV, it was two billion six hundred million at twenty-eight livres per mark, which in 1760, according to Desmarets, was equivalent to four billion five hundred million, and which would be equivalent today to twelve billion. Secondly, with all due respect to Combeferre, a granted charter is a poor expedient for civilization. Saving the transition, softening the passage, cushioning the shock, making the nation pass imperceptibly from monarchy to democracy by the practice of constitutional fictions, detestable reasons all that! No! no! let us never enlighten the people in the wrong light. Principles wither and pale in your constitutional cellar. No degradation. No compromise. No grant from the king to the people. In all these grants, there is an article 14. Beside the hand that gives, there is the claw that takes away. I flatly refuse your charter. A charter is a mask; the lie is underneath. A people who accept a charter abdicates. The right is only the right in its entirety. No! No charter! It was winter; two logs crackled in the fireplace. It was tempting, and Courfeyrac could not resist it. He crumpled the poor Charter-Touquet in his fist and threw it into the fire. The paper blazed. Combeferre philosophically watched the burning of Louis XVIII’s masterpiece, and said only: “The charter transformed into flame.” And the sarcasms, the sallies, the jibes, that French thing we call enthusiasm, that English thing we call humor, good and bad taste, good and bad reasons, all the crazy rockets of dialogue, rising at once and crossing from all points of the room, made a sort of joyful bombardment above the heads . Chapter 35. Broadening of the Horizon. The clashes of young minds among themselves have this admirable quality that one can never foresee the spark or guess the flash. What will burst forth soon? one does not know. The burst of laughter comes from tenderness. At the buffoonish moment, seriousness enters. Impulses depend on the first word that comes along. Everyone’s verve is sovereign. A joke is enough to open the field to the unexpected. These are conversations with abrupt turns where the perspective suddenly changes. Chance is the machinist of these conversations. A severe thought, strangely emerging from a clatter of words, suddenly crossed the melee of words where Grantaire, Bahorel, Prouvaire, Bossuet, Combeferre and Courfeyrac were confusedly clashing. How does a sentence arise in the dialogue? How is it that it suddenly underlines itself in the attention of those who hear it? We have just said it, no one knows. In the midst of the hubbub, Bossuet suddenly ended some apostrophe to Combeferre with this date. –June 18, 1815: Waterloo. At the name Waterloo, Marius, leaning on a table near a glass of water, removed his wrist from under his chin and began to stare fixedly at the audience. “Pardieu,” cried Courfeyrac (Parbleu, at that time, was falling into disuse), “this number 18 is strange, and strikes me. It is the fatal number of Bonaparte. Put Louis in front and Brumaire behind, and you have the whole destiny of the man, with this expressive particularity that the beginning is followed by the end.” Enjolras, until then mute, broke the silence and addressed Courfeyrac with these words: “You mean the crime by expiation.” This word, crime, exceeded the measure of what Marius, already very moved by the sudden evocation of Waterloo, could accept . He stood up, walked slowly towards the map of France spread out on the wall, at the bottom of which was an island in a separate compartment. He placed his finger on this compartment and said: “Corsica. A small island that made France great.” It was a breath of icy air. Everyone stopped. They felt that something was about to begin. Bahorel, replying to Bossuet, was in the process of assuming a torso pose that he was holding on to. He abandoned it to listen. Enjolras, whose blue eye was fixed on no one and seemed to be contemplating the void, replied without looking at Marius: “France has no need of Corsica to be great. France is great because it is France. Quia nominor leo. ” Marius felt no inclination to retreat; He turned to Enjolras, and his voice burst out with a vibration that came from the trembling of his entrails: “God forbid that I should diminish France! But it is not diminishing it to amalgamate Napoleon with it. Ah, let us talk. I am a newcomer among you, but I confess that you surprise me. Where are we? Who are we? Who are you? Who am I? Let us explain ourselves about the emperor. I hear you say Buonaparte, accentuating the u like royalists. I warn you that my grandfather does even better; he says Buonaparté. I thought you were young people. Where do you put your enthusiasm? And what do you do with it? Who do you admire if you do not admire the emperor? And what more do you need ? If you do not want that great man, what great men will you want? He had everything. He was complete. He had in his brain the cube of human faculties. He made codes like Justinian, he dictated like Caesar, his conversation mixed Pascal’s lightning with Tacitus’ thunderbolt, he made history and he wrote it, his bulletins are Iliads, he combined Newton’s cipher with Mahomet’s metaphor, he left behind him in the East words as large as the pyramids; at Tilsit he taught majesty to the emperors, at the Academy of Sciences he gave a reply to Laplace, at the Council of State he stood up to Merlin, he gave a soul to the geometry of some and the quarrel of others, he was a jurist with the prosecutors and sidereal with the astronomers; like Cromwell blowing out a candle on two, he would go to the Temple to haggle over a curtain tassel; he saw everything, he knew everything; which did not prevent him from laughing a good-natured laugh at the cradle of his little child; and suddenly, terrified Europe listened, armies were marching, artillery parks were rolling, bridges of boats were stretching over the rivers, clouds of cavalry were galloping in the hurricane, cries, trumpets, trembling of thrones everywhere, the borders of kingdoms swayed on the map, one could hear the sound of a superhuman sword coming out of its scabbard, one could see him, standing upright on the horizon with a blaze in his hand and a gleam in his eyes, unfurling his two wings in the thunder, the great Army and the old guard, and he was the archangel of war! All were silent, and Enjolras bowed his head. Silence always has the effect of acquiescence or a kind of backing into a corner. Marius, almost without taking a breath, continued with increased enthusiasm: “Let us be fair, my friends! To be the empire of such an emperor, what a splendid destiny for a people, when that people is France and adds its genius to the genius of this man!” To appear and reign, to march and triumph, to have all the capitals as stages, to take your grenadiers and make them kings, to decree the fall of dynasties, to transfigure Europe at a fast pace, to make it felt, when you threaten, that you are putting your hand on the pommel of the sword of God, to follow in a single man Hannibal, Caesar and Charlemagne, to be the people of someone who mixes with all your dawns the brilliant announcement of a battle won, to have as your alarm clock the cannon of the Invalides, to throw into abysses of light prodigious words which blaze forever, Marengo, Arcole, Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram! to make constellations of victories blossom at every moment at the zenith of the centuries, to give the French Empire as a counterpart to the Roman Empire, to be the great nation and give birth to the great Army, to make its legions fly across the earth as a mountain sends its eagles on all sides, to conquer, to dominate, to strike down, to be in Europe a sort of people gilded by force of glory, to sound through history a fanfare of titans, to conquer the world twice, by conquest and by dazzling, that is sublime; and what is greater ? “To be free,” said Combeferre. Marius in his turn lowered his head. This simple and cold word had pierced his epic effusion like a blade of steel, and he felt it vanish within him. When he raised his eyes, Combeferre was no longer there. Probably satisfied with his reply to the apotheosis, he had just left, and everyone, except Enjolras, had followed him. The room had emptied. Enjolras, left alone with Marius, looked at him gravely. Marius, however, having somewhat gathered his ideas, did not consider himself beaten; there was in him a remnant of ebullition which was doubtless going to be translated into syllogisms deployed against Enjolras, when suddenly someone was heard singing on the stairs as he left. It was Combeferre, and this is what he was singing: If Caesar had given me Glory and war, And that I had to leave My mother’s love I would say to the great Caesar: Take back your scepter and your chariot, I love my mother better, oh ford! I love my mother better. The tender and fierce accent with which Combeferre sang it gave this verse a sort of strange grandeur. Marius, thoughtful and staring at the ceiling, repeated almost mechanically: My mother?… At that moment, he felt Enjolras’s hand on his shoulder. “Citizen,” Enjolras said to him, “my mother is the Republic.” Chapter 36. Res angusta. This evening left Marius with a profound shock and a sad darkness in his soul. He felt what the earth perhaps feels at the moment where it is opened with the iron to deposit the grain of wheat; it feels only the wound; the thrill of the germ and the joy of the fruit only come later. Marius was gloomy. He had barely formed a faith; was it then necessary to reject it already? He affirmed to himself that it was not. He declared to himself that he did not want to doubt, and he began to doubt in spite of himself. To be between two religions, one from which one has not yet emerged, the other into which one has not yet entered, is unbearable; and these twilights only please bat souls. Marius was a frank pupil, and he needed true light. The half-lights of doubt hurt him. However much he wanted to remain where he was and to stop there, he was irresistibly compelled to continue, to advance, to examine, to think, to walk further. Where would this lead him? He feared, after having taken so many steps that had brought him closer to his father, that he would now take steps that would distance him from him. His unease increased with all the reflections that came to him. The escarpment was looming around him. He was in disagreement with neither his grandfather nor his friends; reckless for the one, backward for the others; and he recognized himself doubly isolated, on the side of old age, and on the side of youth. He stopped going to the Café Musain. In this troubled state of his conscience, he hardly thought any more of certain serious aspects of existence. The realities of life cannot be forgotten. They came suddenly to nudge him . One morning, the master of the hotel entered Marius’s room and said to him: “Monsieur Courfeyrac has answered for you. ” “Yes. ” “But I would need money.” “Ask Courfeyrac to come and speak to me,” said Marius. When Courfeyrac came, the host left them. Marius told him what he hadn’t thought of telling him yet, that he was as if alone in the world and had no relatives. “What will become of you?” said Courfeyrac. “I don’t know,” replied Marius. “What are you going to do? ” “I don’t know. ” “Do you have any money? ” “Fifteen francs. ” “Would you like me to lend you some? Never. ” “Do you have any clothes? ” “Here. ” “Do you have any jewelry? ” “A watch. ” “Silver? ” “Gold. Here it is. ” “I know a clothes merchant who will take your frock coat and trousers. ” “That’s good.” “You’ll only have trousers, a waistcoat, a hat, and a coat. ” “And my boots. ” “What! You won’t go barefoot?” What opulence! –That will be enough. –I know a watchmaker who will buy your watch. –That’s good. –No, it’s not good. What will you do afterward? –Whatever it takes. Anything honest at least. –Do you know English? –No. –Do you know German? –No.
–Too bad. –Why? –It’s because a friend of mine, a bookseller, is making a kind of encyclopedia for which you could have translated German or English articles. It’s poorly paid, but you can live. –I’ll learn English and German. –And in the meantime? –In the meantime, I’ll eat my clothes and my watch. They called the clothes merchant. He bought the cast-off for twenty francs. They went to the watchmaker. He bought the watch for forty-five francs. “That’s not bad,” Marius said to Courfeyrac as they returned to the hotel. ” With my fifteen francs, that makes eighty francs. ” “And the hotel bill?” observed Courfeyrac. “Oh, I forgot,” said Marius. The host presented his bill, which had to be paid immediately. It came to seventy francs. “I have ten francs left,” said Marius. “The devil,” said Courfeyrac, “you’ll eat five francs while you will learn English, and five francs while you learn German. That would be swallowing a language very quickly or a hundred- sou piece very slowly. However, Aunt Gillenormand, a rather good person in sad circumstances, had finally dug up Marius’s lodgings. One morning, as Marius was returning from school, he found a letter from his aunt and the sixty pistoles, that is to say, six hundred francs in gold in a sealed box. Marius sent the thirty louis back to his aunt with a respectful letter in which he declared that he had means of existence and could henceforth meet all his needs. At that moment, he had three francs left. The aunt did not inform the grandfather of this refusal for fear of further exasperating him. Besides, had he not said: Let no one ever speak to me of this blood-drinker! Marius left the hotel at the Porte Saint-Jacques, not wanting to get into debt. Book Five–Excellency of Misfortune Chapter 37. Marius indigent. Life became harsh for Marius. Eating his clothes and his watch was nothing. He ate that inexpressible thing called mad cow. A horrible thing, which contains days without bread, nights without sleep, evenings without candles, the hearth without fire, weeks without work, the future without hope, the coat with a hole in the elbow, the old hat that makes young girls laugh, the door that one finds closed in the evening because one does not pay one’s rent, the insolence of the porter and the tavern-keeper, the sneers of the neighbors, the humiliations, the repressed dignity, the accepted ordinary tasks, the disgusts, the bitterness, the despondency. Marius learned how one devoured all this, and how these were often the only things one had to devour. At that moment in life when man needed pride because he needed love, he felt mocked because he was poorly dressed, and ridiculous because he was poor. At the age when youth swells your heart with imperial pride, he more than once lowered his eyes to his holey boots, and he knew the unjust shames and poignant blushes of poverty. Admirable and terrible trial from which the weak emerge infamous, from which the strong emerge sublime. Crucible into which destiny casts a man, whenever it wishes to have a scoundrel or a demigod. For many great deeds are accomplished in small struggles. There are stubborn and unknown braveries that defend themselves step by step in the shadows against the fatal invasion of necessities and turpitudes. Noble and mysterious triumphs that no eye sees, that no fame pays for, that no fanfare salutes. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields that have their heroes; obscure heroes sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes. Firm and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always stepmother, is sometimes mother; destitution gives birth to the power of soul and spirit; distress is the nurse of pride; misfortune is good milk for the magnanimous. There was a time in Marius’s life when he swept his landing, when he bought a sou’s worth of Brie cheese at the greengrocer’s, when he waited for the dark to fall before sneaking into the baker’s and buying a loaf of bread, which he then furtively carried off to his attic, as if he had stolen it. Sometimes one would see slipping into the corner butcher’s shop, amidst the jeering cooks who elbowed him, an awkward young man carrying books under his arm, who had a timid and furious air, who on entering would take his hat off his sweat-beaded forehead , make a low bow to the astonished butcher’s wife, another bow to the butcher’s boy, ask for a mutton chop, pay six or seven sous for it, wrap it in paper, put it under his arm between two books, and go away. It was Marius. With this chop, which he cooked it himself, he lived for three days. The first day he ate the meat, the second day he ate the fat, the third day he gnawed the bone. Several times Aunt Gillenormand made attempts, and sent him the sixty pistoles. Marius constantly sent them back, saying that he needed nothing. He was still in mourning for his father when the revolution we have described took place in him. Since then, he had never taken off his black clothes. However, his clothes left him. A day came when he no longer had a suit. The trousers still fit. What to do? Courfeyrac, to whom he had on his part rendered some good offices, gave him an old suit. For thirty sous, Marius had it returned by some porter , and it was a new suit. But this suit was green. So Marius did not go out again until after nightfall. This meant that his suit was black. Always wanting to be in mourning, he dressed in nightwear . Through all this, he had himself received as a lawyer. He was supposed to live in Courfeyrac’s room, which was decent and where a certain number of law books supported and completed by volumes of mismatched novels constituted the library required by the regulations. He had his letters addressed to Courfeyrac. When Marius became a lawyer, he informed his grandfather in a cold letter, but full of submission and respect. M. Gillenormand took the letter with a trembling, read it, and threw it, torn in four, into the basket. Two or three days later, Mademoiselle Gillenormand heard her father who was alone in his room and who was talking aloud. This happened to him every time he was very agitated. She listened; the old man was saying: “If you were not an imbecile, you would know that one cannot be both a baron and a lawyer.” Chapter 38. Poor Marius. It is with poverty as with everything. It manages to become possible. It ends up taking a form and composing itself. We vegetate, that is to say, we develop in a certain puny way, but sufficient for life. This is how Marius Pontmercy’s existence had been arranged: He had emerged from the narrowest, the defile widened a little before him.
By dint of labor, courage, perseverance and will, he had managed to earn about seven hundred francs a year from his work. He had learned German and English. Thanks to Courfeyrac, who had put him in touch with his friend the bookseller, Marius fulfilled the modest role of utility in the literature-bookselling business. He made prospectuses, translated newspapers, annotated editions, compiled biographies, etc. Net product, year in year out, seven hundred francs. He lived on it. Not bad. How? We will tell. Marius occupied in the Gorbeau hovel, for the annual price of thirty francs, a chimneyless hovel called a study where there was, in fact, only the bare essentials in terms of furniture. This furniture was his. He paid three francs a month to the old principal tenant to come and sweep the hovel and bring him every morning a little hot water , a fresh egg, and a one-sou loaf of bread. From this bread and this egg, he ate breakfast. His lunch varied from two to four sous, depending on whether the eggs were expensive or cheap. At six o’clock in the evening, he went down to the Rue Saint-Jacques to dine at Rousseau’s, opposite Basset, the print dealer on the corner of the Rue des Mathurins. He did not eat soup. He had a six-sou meat dish, a half-dish of vegetables for three sous, and a three-sou dessert. For three sous, bread at will. As for wine, he drank water. Paying at the counter, where Madame Rousseau, at that time always fat and still fresh, sat majestically, he gave the waiter a sou, and Madame Rousseau gave him a smile. Then he went away. For sixteen sous, he had had a smile and a dinner. This Rousseau restaurant, where so few bottles and so many carafes were emptied, was even more of a tranquilizer than a restaurant. It no longer exists today. The master had a fine nickname; he was called Rousseau the Aquatic. Thus, lunch four sous, dinner sixteen sous; his food cost him twenty sous a day; which made three hundred and sixty-five francs a year. Add the thirty francs rent and the thirty-six francs for the old woman, plus a few small expenses; for four hundred and fifty francs, Marius was fed, housed, and served. His clothing cost him one hundred francs, his linen fifty francs, his laundry fifty francs, the whole did not exceed six hundred and fifty francs. He had fifty francs left. He was rich. He occasionally lent ten francs to a friend; Courfeyrac had once been able to borrow sixty francs from him. As for the heating, not having a fireplace, Marius had simplified it. Marius always had two sets of clothes; one old, for every day, the other brand new, for special occasions. Both were black. He had only three shirts, one on him, one in his chest of drawers, the third at the laundress’s. He renewed them as they wore out. They were usually torn, which made him button his coat up to his chin. It had taken years for Marius to reach this flourishing situation . Harsh years; difficult, some to go through, others to climb. Marius had not failed for a single day. He had suffered everything, in terms of destitution; he had done everything, except debts. He bore this testimony to himself that he had never owed anyone a penny. For him, a debt was the beginning of slavery. He even said to himself that a creditor is worse than a master; for a master only owns your person, a creditor owns your dignity and can slap it. Rather than borrow, he did not eat. He had had many days of fasting. Feeling that all ends touch and that, if one is not careful, the lowering of fortune can lead to baseness of soul, he jealously guarded his pride. Such a formula or such an action which, in any other situation, would have seemed deferential to him, seemed to him platitude, and he straightened up. He risked nothing, unwilling to back down. He had a sort of severe blush on his face. He was timid to the point of harshness. In all his trials he felt encouraged and sometimes even carried by a secret force which he had within him. The soul helps the body, and at certain moments lifts it up. It is the only bird which supports its cage. Beside the name of his father, another name was engraved in Marius’s heart, the name of Thénardier. Marius, in his enthusiastic and grave nature , surrounded with a sort of halo the man to whom, in his thoughts, he owed his father’s life, that intrepid sergeant who had saved the colonel amidst the cannonballs and bullets of Waterloo. He never separated the memory of that man from the memory of his father, and he united them in his veneration. It was a sort of two-tiered cult, the high altar for the colonel, the low altar for Thénardier. What redoubled the tenderness of his gratitude was the idea of the misfortune into which he knew Thénardier had fallen and been engulfed. Marius had learned at Montfermeil of the ruin and bankruptcy of the unfortunate innkeeper. Since then he had made unheard-of efforts to trace him and try to reach him in that dark abyss of misery into which Thénardier had disappeared. Marius had scoured the whole country; He had been to Chelles, Bondy, Gournay, Nogent, Lagny. For three years he had worked tirelessly, spending the little money he had saved on these explorations. No one had been able to give him any news of Thénardier; he was believed to have gone into a foreign country. His creditors had also sought him out, with less love than Marius, but with as much determination, and had not could lay his hands on him. Marius blamed himself and almost blamed himself for not succeeding in his search. It was the only debt the Colonel had left him, and Marius considered it an honor to pay it. – What! he thought, when my father lay dying on the battlefield, Thénardier, he, knew how to find him through the smoke and the shrapnel and carry him off on his shoulders, and yet he owed him nothing, and I, who owe so much to Thénardier, would not know how to join him in this shadow where he is dying and bring him back from death to life in my turn! Oh! I will find him! – To find Thénardier indeed, Marius would have given one of his arms, and, to lift him out of misery, all his blood. To see Thénardier again, to render some service to Thénardier, to say to him: You do not know me, well, I know you! I am here! Have me!—it was Marius’s sweetest and most magnificent dream . Chapter 39. Marius grown up. At that time, Marius was twenty years old. It had been three years since he had left his grandfather. They had remained on the same terms on both sides , without attempting reconciliation and without seeking to see each other again. Besides, seeing each other again, what good was it? To clash? Which would have won over the other? Marius was the bronze vessel, but Father Gillenormand was the iron pot. Let’s face it, Marius had misunderstood his grandfather’s heart. He had imagined that M. Gillenormand had never loved him, and that this short, hard, laughing fellow, who swore, shouted, stormed, and raised his cane, had for him at most only that affection, at once light and severe, of the Gerontes in a comedy. Marius was mistaken. There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson. Basically, as we have said, M. Gillenormand idolized Marius. He idolized him in his own way, accompanied by slaps and even slaps; but, with the child gone, he felt a black emptiness in his heart. He demanded that no one speak of him again, regretting to himself that he was so well obeyed. At first he hoped that this Buonapartist, this Jacobin, this terrorist, this Septembriseur would return. But weeks passed, months passed, years passed; to M. Gillenormand’s great despair, the bloodsucker did not reappear. “I could not do otherwise than chase him away,” the grandfather said to himself, and he asked himself: if I had to do it all over again, would I do it again? His pride immediately answered yes, but his old head, which he nodded silently, sadly answered no. He had his hours of despondency. He missed Marius. Old people need affection as much as sunshine. It is warmth. However strong his nature, the absence of Marius had changed something in him. For nothing in the world would he have wanted to take a step towards this little rascal , but he suffered. He never asked about him, but he always thought of him. He lived, more and more withdrawn, in the Marais. He was still, as before, gay and violent, but his gaiety had a convulsive hardness as if it contained pain and anger, and his violence always ended in a sort of sweet and somber dejection. He sometimes said: “Oh! if he came back, what a good slap I would give him!” As for the aunt, she thought too little to love much; Marius was nothing more to her than a sort of vague, black silhouette; and she had ended up caring much less about him than about the cat or the parrot that she probably had. What increased Father Gillenormand’s secret suffering was that he kept it entirely within himself and gave no hint of it. His grief was like those newly invented furnaces that burn their smoke. Sometimes it happened that unwelcome officials spoke to her about Marius, and asked her: “What is he doing, or what is becoming of him?” Your grandson, sir? The old bourgeois would reply, with a sigh, if he was too sad, or with a flick of his cuff, if he wanted to appear cheerful: Baron Pontmercy is pleading in some corner. While the old man was regretting, Marius was applauding himself. Like all good hearts, misfortune had taken away his bitterness. He thought of M. Gillenormand only with gentleness, but he had insisted on receiving nothing more from the man who had been bad for his father. This was now the mitigated translation of his first indignations. Besides, he was happy to have suffered, and to suffer still. It was for his father. The harshness of his life satisfied and pleased him. He said to himself with a sort of joy that it was the least he could do; that it was an expiation; that without it, he would have been punished, differently and later, for his impious indifference to his father and to such a father; that it would not have been just for his father to have had all the suffering, and he nothing; what, moreover, were his labors and his destitution compared to the heroic life of the colonel? that finally, his only way of getting closer to his father and of resembling him was to be valiant against poverty as he had been brave against the enemy; and that this was doubtless what the colonel had meant by the words: he will be worthy of it. Words that Marius continued to carry, not on his chest, the colonel’s writing having disappeared, but in his heart. And then, the day his grandfather had driven him out, he was still only a child, now he was a man. He felt it. Poverty, let us insist, had been good to him. Poverty in youth, when it succeeds, has this magnificent quality: it turns the whole will toward effort and the whole soul toward aspiration. Poverty immediately lays bare material life and makes it hideous; hence inexpressible impulses toward the ideal life. The rich young man has a hundred brilliant and coarse distractions, horse racing, hunting, dogs, tobacco, gambling, good meals, and the rest; occupations of the lower sides of the soul at the expense of the higher and more delicate sides. The poor young man takes pains to have his bread; he eats; when he has eaten, he has nothing left but daydreaming. He goes to the free shows that God gives; he looks at the sky, space, the stars, the flowers, the children, the humanity in which he suffers, the creation in which he shines. He looks so much at humanity that he sees the soul, he looks so much at creation that he sees God.
He dreams, and he feels great; he dreams again, and he feels tender. From the selfishness of the suffering man, he passes to the compassion of the meditating man. An admirable feeling bursts forth in him, self-forgetfulness and pity for all. Thinking of the countless pleasures that nature offers, gives, and lavishes on open souls and refuses to closed souls, he comes to pity, he, a millionaire of intelligence, the millionaires of money. All hatred leaves his heart as all clarity enters his mind. Besides, is he unhappy? No. The misery of a young man is never miserable. The first young boy who comes along, however poor he may be, with his health, his strength, his brisk walk , his bright eyes, his warmly circulating blood, his black hair, his fresh cheeks, his rosy lips, his white teeth, his pure breath, will always be the envy of an old emperor. And then every morning he goes back to earning his bread; and while his hands earn bread, his spine gains pride, his brain gains ideas. His work finished, he returns to ineffable ecstasies, to contemplations, to joys; he lives with his feet in afflictions, in obstacles, on the pavement, in brambles, sometimes in the mud; his head in the light. He is firm, serene, gentle, peaceful, attentive, serious, content with little, benevolent; and he blesses God for having given him these two riches that many rich people lack, the work that makes them free and the thought that makes them worthy. This was what had happened to Marius. He had even, to tell the truth, gone a little too far into contemplation. From the day he had managed to earn his living with some certainty, he had stopped there, finding it good to be poor, and cutting back on work to give to thought. That is to say, he sometimes spent entire days in thought, plunged and engulfed like a visionary in the silent pleasures of ecstasy and inner radiance. He had thus posed the problem of his life: to work as little as possible on material work in order to work as much as possible on intangible work; in other words, to give a few hours to real life, and throw the rest into infinity. He did not realize, believing he lacked nothing, that contemplation thus understood ended up being one of the forms of laziness; that he had been content to master the first necessities of life, and that he was resting too soon. It was obvious that, for this energetic and generous nature, this could only be a transitory state, and that at the first shock against the inevitable complications of destiny, Marius would wake up. In the meantime, although he was a lawyer and whatever Father Gillenormand thought, he did not plead, he did not even plead. Daydreaming had diverted him from pleading. Haunting lawyers, following the court, looking for causes, boredom. Why do it? He saw no reason to change his livelihood. This obscure, commercial bookstore had ended up providing him with secure work, work requiring little labor, which, as we have just explained, was enough for him. One of the booksellers for whom he worked, Mr. Magimel, I believe, had offered to take him in, to give him good lodgings, to provide him with regular work, and to give him fifteen hundred francs a year. To be well housed! Fifteen hundred francs! No doubt. But to give up his freedom! To be a pawnbroker! A sort of hired man of letters! In Marius’s mind , by accepting, his position became better and worse at the same time, he gained well-being and lost dignity; it was a complete and beautiful misfortune which changed into an ugly and ridiculous embarrassment; something like a blind man who would become one-eyed. He refused. Marius lived alone. Because of this taste he had for remaining outside everything, and also because he had been too frightened, he had decidedly not joined the group presided over by Enjolras. We had remained good comrades; we were ready to help each other on occasion in every possible way; but nothing more. Marius had two friends, a young man, Courfeyrac, and an old man, M. Mabeuf. He leaned toward the old man. First of all, he owed him the revolution that had taken place within him; he owed him the fact that he had known and loved his father. He operated on my cataract, he said. Certainly, this churchwarden had been decisive. It was not, however, that M. Mabeuf had been on this occasion anything other than the calm and impassive agent of providence. He had enlightened Marius by chance and without knowing it, as does a candle that someone brings; he had been the candle and not the someone. As for Marius’s internal political revolution, M. Mabeuf was quite incapable of understanding it, of wanting it, and of directing it. As we shall meet M. Mabeuf again later, a few words are not useless. Chapter 40. M. Mabeuf. The day when M. Mabeuf said to Marius: Certainly, I approve of political opinions, he was expressing the true state of his mind. All political opinions were indifferent to him, and he approved them all without distinction, so that they would leave him alone, as the Greeks called the Furies the beautiful, the good, the charming, the Eumenides. M. Mabeuf’s political opinion was to passionately love plants, and especially books. He possessed like everyone else his ending in iste, without which no one could have lived at that time, but he was neither a royalist, nor a Bonapartist, nor a Chartist, nor an Orléanist, nor anarchist; he was a bookish man. He did not understand why men should occupy themselves in hating each other over nonsense like the charter, democracy, legitimacy, the monarchy, the Republic, etc., when in this world there were all sorts of mosses, grasses and shrubs that they could look at, and piles of folios and even thirty-twos that they could leaf through. He took great care not to be useless; having books did not prevent him from reading, being a botanist did not prevent him from being a gardener. When he had known Pontmercy, there had been this sympathy between the colonel and himself, that what the colonel did for flowers, he did for fruit. M. Mabeuf had succeeded in producing seed pears as tasty as the pears of Saint-Germain; it was from one of his combinations that was born, it seems, the October mirabelle plum, famous today, and no less fragrant than the summer mirabelle plum. He went to mass more out of gentleness than devotion, and then because, loving the faces of men, but hating their noise, he only found them gathered together and silent in church. Feeling that he had to be something in the state, he had chosen the career of churchwarden. Besides, he had never succeeded in loving any woman as much as a tulip bulb or any man as much as an elzevir. He was long past sixty when one day someone asked him: “Have you never married?” “I forgot,” he said. When it sometimes happened to him—to whom does it not happen?—to say: “Oh! if I were rich!”—it was not while eyeing a pretty girl, like Father Gillenormand, but while contemplating a book. He lived alone, with an old housekeeper. He was a bit of a chiragre, and when he slept his old fingers, stiff with rheumatism, would arch in the folds of his sheets. He had written and published a Flora of the environs of Cauteretz with colored plates, a rather esteemed work of which he owned the copperplates and which he sold himself. People came two or three times a day to ring at his house in the rue Mézières for this. He earned a good two thousand francs a year from it; That was about all his fortune. Although poor, he had had the talent to build up, through patience, deprivation, and time, a precious collection of rare copies of all kinds. He never went out with more than one book under his arm and often returned with two. The only decoration in the four rooms on the ground floor which, with a small garden, made up his home, were framed herbariums and engravings by old masters. The sight of a saber or a rifle froze him. In his life, he had never been near a cannon, not even at the Invalides. He had a passable stomach, a brother priest, completely white hair, no teeth in his mouth or in his mind, a trembling throughout his body, a Picard accent, a childish laugh, easy fright, and the air of an old sheep. With that, there was no other friendship or habit among the living than an old bookseller at the Porte Saint-Jacques named Royol. He dreamed of naturalizing indigo in France. His servant was also a variety of innocence. The poor good old woman was a virgin. Sultan, her tomcat, who could have meowed Allegri’s Miserere in the Sistine Chapel, had filled her heart and was enough for the amount of passion that was in her. None of her dreams had reached man. She had never been able to get past her cat. She had, like him, whiskers. Her glory was in her bonnets, always white. She spent her time on Sundays after mass counting her laundry in her trunk and spreading dresses in a piece that she bought and never had made. She knew how to read. M. Mabeuf had nicknamed her Mother Plutarch. M. Mabeuf had taken a liking to Marius, because Marius, being young and gentle, warmed his old age without frightening his timidity. Youth with gentleness has on old men the effect of the sun without the wind. When Marius was saturated with military glory, gunpowder, marches and counter-marches, and all those prodigious battles in which his father had given and received such great saber blows, he would go to see M. Mabeuf, and M. Mabeuf would speak to him of the hero from the point of view of flowers. Around 1830, his brother the priest had died, and almost immediately, as when night falls, the whole horizon had darkened for M. Mabeuf. A bankruptcy—a notary—deprived him of a sum of ten thousand francs, which was all he owned from his brother and himself. The July Revolution brought a crisis to the bookstore. In times of hardship, the first thing that doesn’t sell is a Flore. The Flore from the Cauteretz area stopped short. Weeks went by without a buyer. Sometimes M. Mabeuf would start at the sound of a doorbell. “Sir,” Mother Plutarch would say to him sadly, “it’s the water carrier.” In short, one day M. Mabeuf left the Rue Mézières, abdicated the duties of churchwarden, renounced Saint-Sulpice, sold a part, not of his books, but of his prints—the thing he cared about least —and went to live in a small house on the Boulevard Montparnasse, where, moreover, he only stayed for three months, for two reasons: firstly, the ground floor and the garden cost three hundred francs, and he didn’t dare put more than two hundred francs toward his rent; secondly, being near the Fatou shooting range, he heard pistol shots all day long, which was unbearable to him. He took his Flora, his copperplates, his herbariums, his portfolios and his books, and settled near the Salpêtrière in a kind of cottage in the village of Austerlitz, where he had for fifty crowns a year three rooms and a garden enclosed by a hedge with a well. He took advantage of this move to sell almost all his furniture. The day he moved into this new home, he was very cheerful and hammered the nails himself to hang the engravings and the herbariums, he dug his garden the rest of the day, and, in the evening, seeing that Mother Plutarch looked gloomy and thoughtful, he tapped her on the shoulder and said to her with a smile: “Bah! We have indigo! ” Only two visitors, the bookseller at the Porte Saint-Jacques and Marius, were allowed to see him in his cottage at Austerlitz, a noisy name which was, to tell the truth, rather disagreeable to him. Moreover, as we have just indicated, minds absorbed in wisdom, or in madness, or, as often happens, in both at once, are only very slowly permeable to the things of life. Their own destiny is distant from them. The result of these concentrations is a passivity which, if it were reasoned, would resemble philosophy. We decline, we descend, we flow, we even collapse, without really noticing it. This always ends, it is true, in an awakening, but a late one. In the meantime, it seems that we are neutral in the game being played between our happiness and our unhappiness. We are the stake, and we watch the game with indifference. Thus, through this obscuration which was gathering around him, all his hopes being extinguished one after the other, M. Mabeuf had remained serene, a little childishly, but very profoundly. His habits of mind had the back and forth of a pendulum. Once wound by an illusion, he would go on for a very long time, even when the illusion had disappeared. A clock does not stop short at the precise moment when one loses the key. M. Mabeuf had innocent pleasures. These pleasures were inexpensive and unexpected; the slightest chance provided them. One day the mother Plutarch was reading a novel in a corner of the room. She read aloud, finding that she understood better that way. To read aloud is to affirm one’s reading to oneself. There are people who read very aloud and who seem to give themselves their word of honor regarding what they read. Mother Plutarch was reading with that energy from the novel she was holding in her hand. M. Mabeuf heard without listening. While reading, Mother Plutarch came to this sentence. It was about a dragoon officer and a beauty: …The beauty sulked, and the dragon… Here she stopped to wipe her glasses. “Buddha and the Dragon,” M. Mabeuf continued in a low voice. “Yes, it’s true, there was a dragon who, from the depths of his cavern, threw flames from his mouth and burned the sky.” Several stars had already been set ablaze by this monster, which, moreover, had tiger claws. Buddha went into his lair and succeeded in converting the dragon. That’s a good book you’re reading there, Mother Plutarch. There is no more beautiful legend. And M. Mabeuf fell into a delicious reverie. Chapter 41. Poverty, a good neighbor of misery. Marius had a liking for this candid old man who slowly saw himself seized by poverty, and who gradually came to be astonished, without yet becoming saddened. Marius met Courfeyrac and sought out M. Mabeuf. Very rarely, however, once or twice a month, at most. Marius’s pleasure was to take long walks alone on the outer boulevards, or on the Champ de Mars, or in the less frequented alleys of the Luxembourg. He sometimes spent half a day looking at a market gardener’s garden, the lettuce patches, the chickens in the manure, and the horse turning the wheel of the noria. Passersby looked at him with surprise, and some found his attire suspicious and his expression sinister. He was only a poor young man, dreaming without object. It was during one of his walks that he had discovered the Gorbeau hovel, and, the isolation and the cheapness tempting him, he had lodged there. He was known there only by the name of Monsieur Marius. Some of his father’s former generals or former comrades had invited him, when they knew him, to come and see them. Marius had not refused. These were opportunities to talk about his father. He
went from time to time to see Count Pajol, General Bellavesne, General Fririon, at the Invalides. Music was played there , there was dancing. On those evenings, Marius put on his new suit. But he never went to these soirées or balls except on days when it was freezing, for he could not afford a carriage and he would only arrive in boots like mirrors. He sometimes said, but without bitterness: “Men are made in such a way that, in a drawing-room, you can be muddy everywhere, except on your shoes. There, to welcome you well, they only ask one irreproachable thing: your conscience? No, your boots.” All passions, other than those of the heart, dissipate in reverie. Marius’s political fevers had vanished there. The revolution of 1830, by satisfying and calming him, had helped. He remained the same, except for his temper. He still had the same opinions, only they had softened. Strictly speaking, he no longer had opinions, he had sympathies. What party was he on? The party of humanity. In humanity he chose France; in the nation he chose the people; in the people he chose woman. It was there above all that his pity lay. Now he preferred an idea to a fact, a poet to a hero, and he admired even more a book like Job than an event like Marengo. And then when, after a day of meditation, he returned in the evening along the boulevards and through the branches of the trees he perceived the bottomless space, the nameless gleams, the abyss, the shadow, the mystery, everything that is only human seemed very small to him. He believed he was, and perhaps had indeed arrived at, the truth of human life and philosophy, and he had ended up looking at little more than the sky, the only thing that truth can see from the bottom of its well. This did not prevent him from multiplying plans, combinations, scaffolding, projects for the future. In this state of reverie, an eye that had looked into Marius’s interior would have been dazzled by the purity of this soul. Indeed, if it were given to our eyes of flesh to see into the conscience of others, we would judge a man much more surely by what he dreams than by what he thinks. There is will in thought, there is none in dreams. The dream, which is entirely spontaneous, takes and keeps, even in the gigantic and the ideal, the shape of our spirit. Nothing springs more directly and sincerely from the very depths of our souls than our thoughtless and immeasurable aspirations toward the splendors of destiny. In these aspirations, far more than in composed, reasoned, and coordinated ideas, we can find the true character of each man. Our chimeras are what most resembles us . Each one dreams of the unknown and the impossible according to his nature. Toward the middle of this year 1831, the old woman who served Marius told him that his neighbors, the miserable Jondrette household, were going to be evicted . Marius, who spent almost all his days outside, barely knew he had neighbors. “Why are they evicting them?” he said. “Because they don’t pay their rent. They owe two installments. ” “How much is it? ” “Twenty francs,” said the old woman. Marius had thirty francs in reserve in a drawer. “Here,” he said to the old woman, “here are twenty-five francs.” Pay for these poor people, give them five francs, and don’t say it’s me. Chapter 42. The Substitute. Chance would have it that the regiment of which Lieutenant Théodule was a part came to garrison Paris. This gave rise to a second idea for Aunt Gillenormand. She had, once, imagined having Théodule watch over Marius; she plotted to have Théodule succeed Marius. Just in case, and in case the grandfather had the vague need of a young face in the house, these rays of dawn are sometimes gentle on ruins, it was expedient to find another Marius. So be it, she thought, it’s a simple erratum like the ones I see in books: Marius, read Théodule. A great-nephew is almost the equivalent of a grandson; in the absence of a lawyer, one takes a lancer. One morning, when M. Gillenormand was reading something like the Quotidienne, his daughter came in and said to him in her sweetest voice, for it was about her favorite: “My father, Théodule will come this morning to pay his respects. ” “Who is that, Théodule? ” “Your great-nephew. ” “Ah!” said the grandfather. Then he went back to reading, no longer thinking about the great-nephew who was just any Théodule, and soon became very angry, which almost always happened to him when he was reading. The paper he was holding, a royalist by the way, it goes without saying, announced for the next day, without any amenity, one of the minor daily events of Paris at that time: –That the students of the schools of law and medicine were to meet on the Place du Panthéon at noon;–to deliberate.–It concerned one of the questions of the moment, the artillery of the National Guard, and a conflict between the Minister of War and the citizen militia concerning the cannons parked in the courtyard of the Louvre. The students were to deliberate on this. It did not take much more to inflate M. Gillenormand. He thought of Marius, who was a student, and who, probably, would go, like the others, to deliberate, at noon, on the Place du Panthéon. As he was having this painful dream, Lieutenant Théodule entered, dressed in bourgeois, which was clever, and discreetly introduced by Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The lancer had reasoned as follows: –The old druid did not invest everything in life annuities. It is well worth disguising oneself as a commoner from time to time. Mademoiselle Gillenormand said aloud to her father: –Théodule, your great-nephew. And, in a low voice, to the lieutenant: –Approve everything. And withdrew. The lieutenant, little accustomed to such venerable encounters, stammered somewhat timidly: Good morning, uncle, and made a mixed salute composed of the involuntary and mechanical outline of the military salute completed in a bourgeois salute. –Ah! it’s you; that’s good, sit down, said the grandfather. Having said this, he completely forgot the lancer. Théodule sat down, and M. Gillenormand stood up. M. Gillenormand began to pace up and down, his hands in his pockets, talking aloud and tormenting with his old, irritated fingers the two watches he had in his two fobs. –This bunch of brats! They’re meeting in the Place du Panthéon! Virtue of my darling! Little rascals who were in wet nurses yesterday! If you pressed their noses, milk would come out! And they’re deliberating tomorrow at noon! Where are we going? Where are we going? It’s clear we’re heading for the abyss. That’s where the descamisados have led us! The citizen artillery! Deliberating on the citizen artillery! Going off to jabber in the open air to the crackers of the National Guard! And who are they going to be there with? Just imagine where Jacobinism leads. I’ll bet you anything, a million to a thousand, that there will be only ex-convicts and freed convicts there. Republicans and galley slaves are just one nose and one handkerchief. Carnot said: Where do you want me to go, traitor? Fouché replied: Wherever you want, imbecile! That’s what republicans are. “That’s true,” said Théodule. M. Gillenormand half turned his head, saw Théodule, and continued: “When you think that this rascal had the villainy to become a carbonaro! Why did you leave my house? To go and become a republican. Pssst! First of all, the people don’t want your Republic, they don’t want it, they have common sense, they know very well that there have always been kings and that there always will be, they know very well that the people, after all, are only the people, they scream about your Republic, do you hear, you idiot! Is that horrible enough, that whim? Falling in love with Père Duchêne, making eyes at the guillotine, singing romances and playing the guitar under the balcony of 93, it’s enough to spit on all these young people, they’re so stupid! They’re all there. Not one escapes. You only have to breathe the air that passes in the street to be insane. The nineteenth century is poison. The first rascal who comes along lets his goatee grow, thinks he’s a real joker, and leaves you with the old parents. It’s republican, it’s romantic. What is this, romantic? Do me the kindness to tell me what it is? All the madness possible. A year ago, it suited you at Hernani. I’m asking you, Hernani! Antitheses! Abominations that aren’t even written in French! And then we have cannons in the courtyard of the Louvre. Such are the brigandages of these times. “You’re right, uncle,” said Théodule. M.
Gillenormand continued: “Cannons in the courtyard of the Museum! What for? Cannon, what do you want from me? So you want to machine-gun the Apollo Belvedere? What have the gargoyles got to do with the Venus de Medici? Oh! these young people of today, all rascals! What a nonentity their Benjamin Constant is! And those who aren’t scoundrels are idiots !” They do everything they can to be ugly, they are badly dressed, they are afraid of women, they have around their petticoats a beggar’s air that makes the young girls burst out laughing; on my word of honor, They look like the poor ashamed of love. They are deformed, and they complete themselves by being stupid; they repeat the puns of Tiercelin and Potier, they have sackcloth clothes, groom’s waistcoats, shirts of coarse linen, trousers of coarse cloth, boots of coarse leather, and the chirping resembles the plumage. One could use their jargon to resole their clogs. And all this inept brat has political opinions. It should be strictly forbidden to have political opinions. They create systems, they remake society, they demolish the monarchy, they knock down all the laws, they put the attic in the place of the cellar and my porter in the place of the king, they shake up Europe from top to bottom, they rebuild the world, and they have the good fortune to look slyly at the legs of the laundresses getting back into their carts! Ah! Marius! ah! You beggar! Go and shout in public! Discuss, debate, take measures! They call that measures, good heavens! Disorder shrinks and becomes silly. I’ve seen chaos, I see waste. Schoolchildren deliberating on the National Guard, that wouldn’t be seen among the Ogibbewas and the Cadodaches! The savages who go around stark naked, their heads combed like a shuttlecock , with a club in their paw, are less brutal than these bachelors! Four-penny brats! They act like they’re listening and orderly! They deliberate and reason! It’s the end of the world. It’s obviously the end of this miserable terracotta globe. A final hiccup was needed , France is pushing it. Deliberate, my rascals! These things will happen as long as they go reading the newspapers under the arcades of the Odéon. It costs them a penny, and their common sense, and their intelligence, and their heart, and their soul, and their mind. You get out of there, and clear out of your family’s house. All the newspapers are the plague; all of them, even the White Flag! After all, Martainville was a Jacobin! Ah! Good heavens! You’ll be able to boast of having driven your grandfather to despair, you! “That’s obvious,” said Théodule. And, taking advantage of M. Gillenormand’s gasping for breath, the lancer added masterfully: “There should be no other newspaper than the Moniteur and no other book than the Military Yearbook.” M. Gillenormand continued: “It’s like their Sieyès! A regicide ending up in a senator! For that’s always how they end up. They slash themselves with the citizen’s familiar form of address to get themselves called Monsieur le Comte. Monsieur le Comte, as big as your arm, September bores! The philosopher Sieyès! I do myself the justice that I have never cared more for the philosophies of all these philosophers than for the spectacles of the grimacer of Tivoli! I once saw the senators passing along the Quai Malaquais in violet velvet coats strewn with bees and hats in the style of Henri IV. They were hideous. They looked like the monkeys of the tiger’s court. Citizens, I declare to you that your progress is madness, that your humanity is a dream, that your revolution is a crime, that your Republic is a monster, that your young virgin France is emerging from the brothel, and I support it to all of you, whoever you may be, whether you are publicists, whether you are economists, whether you are lawyers, whether you are more knowledgeable about liberty, equality, and fraternity than the blade of the guillotine! I tell you that, my good men! “Parbleu,” cried the lieutenant, “that is admirably true.” Mr. Gillenormand interrupted a gesture he had begun, turned around, looked fixedly at the lancer Théodule between the two eyes, and said to him: –You are an imbecile. Book Six–The Conjunction of Two Stars Chapter 43. The Sobriquet: Mode of Formation of Family Names. Marius at that time was a handsome young man of medium height, with thick, very black hair, a high and intelligent forehead, and his nostrils open and passionate, with a sincere and calm air, and on his whole face something haughty, thoughtful, and innocent. His profile, all the lines of which were rounded without ceasing to be firm, had that Germanic sweetness which had penetrated into the French physiognomy through Alsace and Lorraine, and that complete absence of angles which made the Sicambri so recognizable among the Romans and which distinguishes the leonine race from the aquiline race. He was at that season of life when the minds of thinking men are composed, almost in equal proportions, of depth and naivety. Given a serious situation, he had all that was necessary to be stupid; with one more turn of the key , he could be sublime. His manners were reserved, cold, polite, not very open. As his mouth was charming, his lips the rosiest and his teeth the whitest in the world, his smile corrected what was severe in his whole physiognomy. At times , there was a singular contrast between that chaste brow and that voluptuous smile. He had small eyes and large gazes. In the time of his worst misery, he noticed that young girls turned around when he passed, and he ran away or hid, with a heavy heart. He thought they were looking at him for his old clothes and laughing at them; the fact is that they were looking at him for his grace and dreaming of it. This silent misunderstanding between him and the pretty passers-by had made him fierce. He chose none of them, for the excellent reason that he fled from them all. He lived like this indefinitely—stupidly, said Courfeyrac. Courfeyrac also said to him:—Do not aspire to be venerable (for they addressed each other informally; sliding into informality is the slope of young friendships). My dear fellow, a word of advice. Don’t read so much in books and look a little more at the sluts. Naughty girls have their good points, oh Marius! By dint of running away and blushing, you will become stupid. Other times Courfeyrac met him and said to him: “Good morning, Monsieur l’Abbé.” When Courfeyrac had said something like this to him, Marius spent a week avoiding women more than ever, young and old, and he avoided Courfeyrac into the bargain. Yet there were two women in all of creation whom Marius did not flee from and whom he took no notice of. In truth, he would have been very surprised if he had been told that they were women. One was the old bearded woman who swept his room and who made Courfeyrac say: Seeing that his servant is wearing his beard, Marius is not wearing his own. The other was a sort of little girl whom he saw very often and whom he never looked at. For more than a year, Marius had noticed in a deserted alley of the Luxembourg Gardens, the alley which runs along the parapet of the Pépinière, a man and a very young girl almost always sitting side by side on the same bench , at the most solitary end of the alley, on the side of the Rue de l’Ouest. Each time that chance, which mixes with the walks of people whose eyes have turned inward, brought Marius into this alley, and it was almost every day, he found this couple there. The man could have been about sixty years old, he seemed sad and serious; his whole person presented that robust and tired aspect of retired soldiers. If he had had a decoration, Marius would have said: he is an old officer. He had a kind air, but unapproachable, and he never fixed his gaze on anyone’s gaze. He wore blue trousers, a blue frock coat and a wide-brimmed hat, which always looked new, a black tie and a Quaker shirt, that is to say, dazzling white, but of coarse linen. A grisette passing near him one day said: “There’s a very clean widower.” He had very white hair. The first time the young girl who accompanied him came to sit down with him on the bench that they seemed to have adopted, it was a girl of thirteen or fourteen, thin, to the point of being almost ugly, awkward, insignificant, and who perhaps promised to have rather beautiful eyes. Only they were always raised with a sort of unpleasant assurance. She had that old and childish dress of convent boarders; a badly cut dress of thick black merino. They had the air of father and daughter. Marius examined for two or three days this old man who was not yet an old man and this little girl who was not yet a person, then he paid no more attention to them. They for their part seemed not even to see him. They chatted among themselves with a peaceful and indifferent air. The girl chatted incessantly, and gaily. The old man spoke little, and, at times, he fixed on her eyes filled with an ineffable paternity. Marius had acquired the mechanical habit of walking along this path. He invariably found them there. This is how it happened: Marius most readily arrived at the end of the path opposite their bench. He walked the entire length of the path, passed in front of them, then returned to the end by which he had come, and began again. He made this back and forth five or six times during his walk, and this walk five or six times a week without them , these people and he, having exchanged a greeting. This person and this young girl, although they appeared and perhaps because they appeared to avoid glances, had naturally somewhat aroused the attention of the five or six students who strolled from time to time along the Pépinière, the studious ones after their lessons, the others after their game of billiards. Courfeyrac, who was one of the last, had observed them for some time, but finding the girl ugly, he had quickly and carefully moved away. He had fled like a Parthian, calling them a nickname. Struck only by the little girl’s dress and the old man’s hair, he had called the girl Mademoiselle Lanoire and the father Monsieur Leblanc, so that, no one knowing them, in the absence of the name, the nickname had become law. The students said: “Ah! Monsieur Leblanc is at his desk!” and Marius, like the others, had found it convenient to call this unknown gentleman Monsieur Leblanc. We will do as they did, and say Monsieur Leblanc for the convenience of this story. Marius saw them like this almost every day at the same time during the first year. He found the man to his liking, but the girl rather gloomy.
Chapter 44. Lux facta est. The second year, precisely at the point in this story where the reader has reached, it happened that this habit of the Luxembourg was interrupted, without Marius himself knowing why, and that he was nearly six months without setting foot in his path. One day at last he returned there. It was a serene summer morning, Marius was as joyful as one is when the weather is fine. It seemed to him that he had in his heart all the songs of the birds that he heard and all the pieces of the blue sky that he saw through the leaves of the trees. He went straight to his path, and when he reached the end, he saw, still on the same bench, this familiar couple. Only, when he approached, it was indeed the same man; but it seemed to him that it was no longer the same girl. The person he saw now was a tall and beautiful creature having all the most charming forms of woman at that precise moment when they are still combined with all the most naive graces of the child; fleeting and pure moment that can only be expressed by these two words: fifteen years. They were admirable chestnut hair tinged with golden veins, a forehead that seemed made of marble, cheeks that seemed made of a rose leaf, a pale incarnate, a moving whiteness, an exquisite mouth from which the smile emerged like a clarity and the words like music, a head that Raphael would have given to Mary placed on a neck that Jean Goujon would have given to Venus. And, so that nothing was lacking in this ravishing face, the nose was not beautiful, it was pretty; neither straight nor curved, neither Italian nor Greek; it was the Parisian nose; that is to say, something spiritual, fine, irregular and pure, which drives painters to despair and charms poets. When Marius passed near her, he could not see her eyes which were constantly lowered. He saw only her long chestnut eyelashes filled with shadow and modesty. This did not prevent the beautiful child from smiling while listening to the white-haired man who spoke to her, and nothing was more ravishing than this fresh smile with lowered eyes. At first, Marius thought it was another daughter of the same man, probably a sister of the first. But when the invariable habit of walking brought him back to the bench for the second time, and he examined her carefully, he recognized that it was the same one. In six months the little girl had become a young woman; that was all. Nothing is more frequent than this phenomenon. There is a moment when girls blossom in the blink of an eye and suddenly become roses. Yesterday they were left as children, today they are found disturbing. This one had not only grown, she had idealized herself. As three days in April are enough for certain trees to be covered with flowers, six months had been enough for her to clothe herself in beauty. Her own April had come. One sometimes sees people who, poor and mean, seem to wake up, pass suddenly from indigence to splendor, spend all sorts of money, and suddenly become brilliant, prodigal, and magnificent. This is due to an income pocketed; it was due yesterday. The young girl had received her semester. And then she was no longer the boarder with her plush hat, her merino dress, her school shoes, and her red hands; taste had come to her with beauty; she was a well-dressed person with a sort of simple, rich, and unpretentious elegance. She wore a black damask dress, a cape of the same material, and a white crepe hat. Her white gloves showed the delicacy of her hand as it played with the handle of a Chinese ivory parasol, and her silk brodequin outlined the smallness of her foot. When one passed near her, her whole attire exhaled a young and penetrating perfume. As for the man, he was still the same. The second time Marius came near her, the young girl raised her eyelids. Her eyes were of a deep, celestial blue, but in this veiled azure there was still only the gaze of a child. She looked at Marius with indifference, as she would have looked at the kid running under the sycamores, or the marble vase that cast a shadow on the bench; and Marius for his part continued his walk, thinking of something else . He passed four or five more times near the bench where the young girl was, but without even turning his eyes towards her. The following days, he returned as usual to the Luxembourg, as usual, he found the father and daughter there, but he paid no more attention to them. He thought no more of this girl when she was beautiful than he thought of her when she was ugly. He passed very close to the bench where she was, because that was his habit. Chapter 45. Effect of Spring. One day, the air was warm, the Luxembourg was flooded with shade and sun, the sky was pure as if angels had washed it in the morning, the sparrows were uttering little cries in the depths of the chestnut trees, Marius had opened his whole soul to nature, he thought of nothing, he lived and he breathed, he passed near this bench, the young girl raised her eyes to him, their two gazes met. What was there this time in the young girl’s gaze? Marius could not have said. There was nothing and there was everything. It was a strange flash. She lowered her eyes, and he continued on his way. What he had just seen was not the simple, ingenuous eye of a child; it was a mysterious abyss that had half-opened, then abruptly closed again. There comes a day when every young girl looks like that. Woe to him who finds himself there! This first glance of a soul that does not yet know itself is like dawn in the sky. It is the awakening of something radiant and unknown. Nothing can convey the dangerous charm of this unexpected glow that suddenly and vaguely illuminates adorable darkness and is composed of all the innocence of the present and all the passion of the future. It is a sort of indecisive tenderness that reveals itself at random and waits. It is a trap that innocence sets without knowing it and in which it captures hearts without wanting to and without knowing it. It is a virgin who looks like a woman. It is rare that a profound reverie is not born from this look wherever it falls. All purity and all candor are concentrated in this celestial and fatal ray which, more than the best-crafted glances of coquettes, has the magic power to suddenly make bloom in the depths of a soul this dark flower, full of perfumes and poisons, which we call love. In the evening, upon returning to his attic, Marius cast his eyes on his clothing, and perceived for the first time that he had the uncleanliness, the impropriety, and the incredible stupidity to go for a walk in the Luxembourg in his everyday clothes, that is to say, with a hat broken near the strap, heavy carter’s boots, black trousers white at the knees, and a pale black coat at the elbows. Chapter 46. Beginning of a serious illness. The next day, at the usual hour, Marius took from his wardrobe his new coat, his new trousers, his new hat, and his new boots; he dressed himself in this complete panoply, put on gloves, a prodigious luxury, and went to the Luxembourg. On the way, he met Courfeyrac, and pretended not to see him. Courfeyrac, on returning home, said to his friends: I just saw Marius’s new hat and new coat, and Marius was inside. He was probably going to take an exam. He looked quite stupid. Arriving at the Luxembourg, Marius walked around the pond and looked at the swans, then he remained for a long time in contemplation before a statue whose head was completely black with mold and which was missing a hip. Near the pond was a forty-year-old, pot-bellied bourgeois who was holding a little five-year-old boy by the hand and saying to him: “Avoid excesses. My son, keep an equal distance from despotism and anarchy.” Marius listened to this bourgeois. Then he walked around the pond once more . Finally, he headed towards his path, slowly and as if he were going there reluctantly. One would have said that he was both forced and prevented from going there. He was completely unaware of all this, and thought he was doing what he did every day. As he emerged into the aisle, he saw Mr. Leblanc and the young girl on their bench at the other end . He buttoned his coat to the top, stretched it across his chest so that it would not crease, examined with a certain complacency the shiny reflections of his trousers, and walked onto the bench. There was an attack in this march and certainly a desire for conquest. I say therefore: he walked onto the bench, as I would say: Hannibal marched on Rome. Besides, there was nothing but mechanical in all his movements, and he had in no way interrupted the usual preoccupations of his mind and his work. He was thinking at that moment that the Baccalaureate Manual was a stupid book and that it must have been written by rare idiots to be analyzed as a masterpiece of the human mind three tragedies by Racine and only one comedy by Molière. He had a high-pitched whistle in his ear. As he approached the bench, he stretched out the folds of his coat, and his eyes fixed on the young girl. It seemed to him that she filled the entire end of the path with a vague blue glow. As he approached, his pace slowed more and more. When he reached a certain distance from the bench, well before reaching the end of the path, he stopped, and he himself could not know how it was that he turned back. He did not even say to himself that he was not going all the way. The young girl could barely see him from afar and see how handsome he looked in his new clothes. However, he held himself very straight, so as to look good in case someone behind him happened to look at him. He reached the opposite end, then came back, and this time he approached a little closer to the bench. He even came to within three intervals of trees, but there he felt somehow impossible to go any further, and he hesitated. He had thought he saw the young girl’s face leaning toward him. However, he made a manly and violent effort, overcame the hesitation, and continued to go forward. A few seconds later, he passed in front of the bench, straight and firm, red to the ears, without daring to cast a glance to the right or to the left, his hand in his coat like a statesman. At the moment he passed—under the cannon of the square—he felt a frightful beating of his heart. She was wearing her damask dress and her crepe hat as the day before. He heard an ineffable voice which must have been hers. She was talking quietly. She was very pretty. He felt it, although he did not try to see her. – She could not, however, he thought, prevent herself from having esteem and consideration for me if she knew that I am the true author of the dissertation on Marcos Obregon de la Ronda that Monsieur François de Neufchâteau put, as being his, at the head of his edition of Gil Blas! He passed the bench, went to the end of the path which was very close, then retraced his steps and passed again in front of the beautiful girl. This time he was very pale. Besides, he felt nothing but very unpleasant. He moved away from the bench and the young girl, and, while turning his back on her, he imagined that she was looking at him, and this made him stumble. He no longer tried to approach the bench, he stopped about halfway down the aisle, and there, something he never did, he sat down, glancing sideways, and thinking, in the most indistinct depths of his mind, that after all it was difficult for the people whose white hat and black dress he admired to be absolutely indifferent to his shiny trousers and new suit. After a quarter of an hour he stood up, as if he were about to start walking again towards the bench, which was surrounded by a halo. However, he remained standing and motionless. For the first time in fifteen months he told himself that this gentleman who sat there every day with his daughter had no doubt noticed him from his side and probably found his assiduity strange. For the first time, too, he felt a certain irreverence in calling this stranger, even in the secrecy of his thoughts, by the nickname of M. Leblanc. He remained like this for a few minutes with his head bowed, making drawings in the sand with a stick he had in his hand. Then he turned abruptly in the direction opposite the bench, M. Leblanc and his daughter, and returned home. That day he forgot to go to dinner. At eight o’clock in the evening he realized it , and as it was too late to go down to the Rue Saint-Jacques, he said, and he ate a piece of bread. He did not go to bed until he had brushed his coat and folded it carefully . Chapter 47. Various thunderbolts fell upon Mame Bougon. The next day, Mame Bougon—that is what Courfeyrac called the old doorkeeper-head-tenant-housekeeper of the Gorbeau hovel; she was actually called Madame Burgon, as we have seen, but that iron-breaker Courfeyrac respected nothing—Mame Bougon, stupefied, noticed that Monsieur Marius was still coming out in his new suit. He returned to the Luxembourg, but he did not go further than his bench halfway down the aisle. He sat there as he had the day before, looking from afar and clearly seeing the white hat, the black dress, and above all the blue glow. He did not move from it, and did not return home until the doors of the Luxembourg were closed. He did not see Monsieur Leblanc and his daughter withdraw. He concluded that they had left the garden by the gate on the Rue de l’Ouest. Later, a few weeks later, when he thought about it, he could never remember where he had dined that evening. The next day, it was the third day, Mame Bougon was struck down. Marius went out in his new coat. “Three days in a row!” she cried. She tried to follow him, but Marius walked nimbly and with immense strides; he was a hippopotamus chasing a chamois. She lost sight of him in two minutes and came home breathless, three-quarters suffocated by her asthma, furious. “If it makes any sense,” she grumbled, “to put on your best clothes every day and make people run around like that! Marius had gone to the Luxembourg. The young girl was there with M. Leblanc. Marius approached as close as he could, pretending to read a book, but he still remained a long way off, then returned to sit on his bench where he spent four hours watching the sparrows hopping up and down the path, which seemed to him to be mocking him. A fortnight passed in this way. Marius no longer went to the Luxembourg Palace to walk, but to sit there always in the same place and without knowing why. Once there, he no longer moved. He put on his new coat every morning so as not to show himself, and he started again the next day. She was decidedly of a marvelous beauty. The only remark that could be made that resembled a criticism was that the contradiction between her sad look and her joyful smile gave her face something a little lost, which meant that at certain moments this sweet face became strange without ceasing to be charming. Chapter 48. Taken Prisoner. One of the last days of the second week, Marius was sitting as usual on his bench, holding in his hand an open book of which he had not turned a page for two hours. Suddenly he started. Something was happening at the end of the aisle. M. Leblanc and his daughter had just left their bench, the daughter had taken the father’s arm, and the two of them were slowly walking towards the middle of the aisle where Marius was. Marius closed his book, then he opened it again, then he forced himself to read. He was trembling. The halo came straight towards him. “Ah! My God!” he thought, “I’ll never have time to assume an attitude.” Meanwhile, the white-haired man and the young girl were advancing. It seemed to him that it had lasted a century and that it was only a second. “What are they doing here?” he asked himself. “What! She’s going to pass by here!” His feet will walk on this sand, in this path, two steps from me! He was upset, he would have liked to be very handsome, he would have liked to have the cross! He heard the soft and measured sound of their footsteps approaching. He imagined that M. Leblanc was throwing him irritated glances. Is this gentleman going to speak to me ? he thought. He lowered his head; when he raised it, they were very close to him. The young girl passed, and as she passed she looked at him. She looked at him fixedly, with a pensive sweetness that made one shiver Marius from head to toe. It seemed to him that she was reproaching him for having gone so long without coming to her and that she was saying to him: It is I who have come. Marius remained dazzled by those pupils full of rays and abysses. He felt a fire burning in his brain. She had come to him, what joy! And then, how she had looked at him! She seemed to him more beautiful than he had ever seen her before. Beautiful with a beauty at once feminine and angelic, with a complete beauty that would have made Petrarch sing and Dante kneel. It seemed to him that he was swimming in the blue sky. At the same time he was horribly upset, because there was dust on his boots. He thought he was sure that she had looked at his boots too. He followed her with his eyes until she had disappeared. Then he began to walk around the Luxembourg like a madman. It is likely that at times he laughed to himself and spoke aloud. He was so dreamy around the nannies that each one believed he was in love with her. He left the Luxembourg, hoping to find her in a street. He crossed paths with Courfeyrac under the arcades of the Odéon and said to him: Come and dine with me. They went to Rousseau’s and spent six francs. Marius ate like an ogre. He gave six sous to the waiter. At dessert he said to Courfeyrac: Have you read the newspaper? What a beautiful speech Audry de Puyraveau made! He was madly in love. After dinner, he said to Courfeyrac: I’ll pay for the show. They went to the Porte-Saint-Martin to see Frédérick in the Auberge des Adrets. Marius was enormously amused. At the same time, he became more savage. On leaving the theater, he refused to look at the garter of a milliner who was spanning a stream, and Courfeyrac, having said: I would gladly put this woman in my collection, almost horrified him. Courfeyrac had invited him to lunch at the Café Voltaire the next day. Marius went there, and ate even more than the day before. He was very thoughtful and very gay. One would have said that he seized every opportunity to burst out laughing . He tenderly embraced some provincial who was introduced to him. A circle of students had gathered around the table and they had talked about the nonsense paid for by the state that is spouted from the pulpit at the Sorbonne, then the conversation had turned to the mistakes and omissions of dictionaries and Quicherat prosodies. Marius interrupted the discussion to exclaim: “It is nevertheless very pleasant to have the cross! ” “That is funny!” said Courfeyrac in a low voice to Jean Prouvaire. “No,” replied Jean Prouvaire, “that’s serious. It was serious indeed. Marius was in that first violent and charming hour that begins great passions. A look had done all that. When the mine is loaded, when the fire is ready, nothing is simpler . A look is a spark. It was over. Marius loved a woman. His destiny was entering the unknown. Women’s looks resemble certain seemingly tranquil and formidable cogs. We pass by them every day peacefully and with impunity , without suspecting anything. There comes a time when we even forget that this thing is there. We go, we come, we dream, we talk, we laugh. Suddenly we feel seized. It’s over. The cog holds you, the look has taken hold of you. It has taken hold of you, no matter where or how, by some part of your thoughts that was lingering, by some distraction you had. You are lost. You will be lost entirely.” A chain of mysterious forces takes hold of you. You struggle in vain. No more human help is possible. You will fall from gear to gear, from anguish to anguish, from torture to torture, you, your mind, your fortune, your future, your soul; and, depending on whether you are in the power of a wicked creature or a noble heart, you will not escape of this frightening machine, disfigured by shame or transfigured by passion. Chapter 49. Adventures of the letter U given over to conjecture. Isolation, detachment from everything, pride, independence, a taste for nature, the absence of daily and material activity, life in itself, the secret struggles of chastity, the benevolent ecstasy before all creation, had prepared Marius for this possession which is called passion. His worship of his father had gradually become a religion, and, like all religions, had withdrawn to the depths of the soul. Something was needed in the foreground. Love came. A whole month passed, during which Marius went every day to the Luxembourg. When the time came, nothing could hold him back. “He is on duty,” said Courfeyrac. Marius lived in raptures. It is certain that the young girl was looking at him. He had finally grown bolder and approached the bench. However, he no longer passed in front of it, obeying both the instinct of timidity and the instinct of prudence of lovers. He judged it useful not to attract the attention of the father. He combined his stations behind the trees and the pedestals of the statues with a profound Machiavellianism, so as to be seen as much as possible by the young girl and to let himself be seen as little as possible by the old gentleman. Sometimes for whole half-hours, he remained motionless in the shadow of some Leonidas or Spartacus, holding in his hand a book above which his eyes, gently raised, sought the beautiful girl, and she, for her part, turned her charming profile towards him with a vague smile. While talking as naturally and calmly as possible with the white-haired man, she pressed all the reveries on Marius with a virginal and passionate eye. An ancient and immemorial game that Eve knew from the first day of the world and that every woman knows from the first day of life! Her mouth replied to one and her gaze replied to the other. It must be believed, however, that Mr. Leblanc ended up noticing something, because often, when Marius arrived, he got up and began to walk. He had left their accustomed place and had adopted, at the other end of the aisle, the bench next to the Gladiator, as if to see if Marius would follow them there. Marius did not understand, and made this mistake. The father began to become inaccurate, and no longer brought his daughter every day. Sometimes he came alone. Then Marius did not stay. Another mistake. Marius did not pay attention to these symptoms. From the phase of timidity he had passed, a natural and fatal progress, to the phase of blindness. His love grew. He dreamed of her every night. And then an unexpected happiness had happened to him , adding fuel to the fire, redoubling the darkness in his eyes. One evening, at dusk, he had found on the bench that M. Leblanc and his daughter had just left, a handkerchief. A very simple handkerchief without embroidery, but white, fine, and which seemed to him to exhale ineffable scents. He seized it with rapture. This handkerchief was marked with the letters UF ; Marius knew nothing of this beautiful child, neither her family, nor her name, nor her home; these two letters were the first thing he seized about her, adorable initials on which he immediately began to build his scaffolding. U was obviously the first name. Ursule! he thought, what a delicious name! He kissed the handkerchief, sucked it, put it on his heart, on his flesh, during the day, and at night under his lips to fall asleep. “I feel all her soul in it!” he cried. This handkerchief belonged to the old gentleman who had simply dropped it from his pocket. In the days following his discovery, he showed himself in Luxembourg only by kissing the handkerchief and pressing it to his heart. The beautiful child did not understand anything and showed him this with signs. imperceptible. –Oh modesty! said Marius. Chapter 50. Even the invalids can be happy. Since we have mentioned the word modesty, and since we are hiding nothing, we must say that once, however, through her ecstasies, her Ursula gave her a very serious grievance. It was one of those days when she persuaded M. Leblanc to leave the bench and walk along the path. There was a brisk meadow breeze that stirred the tops of the plane trees. The father and daughter, arm in arm, had just passed in front of Marius’s bench. Marius had risen behind them and was following them with his gaze, as is fitting in this state of a distraught soul. Suddenly a gust of wind, more cheerful than the others, and probably charged with the business of spring, flew from the nursery, fell upon the path, enveloped the young girl in a ravishing shiver worthy of the nymphs of Virgil and the fauns of Theocritus, and lifted her dress, that dress more sacred than that of Isis, almost to the height of the garter. A leg of exquisite form appeared. Marius saw it. He was exasperated and furious. The young girl had quickly lowered her dress with a divinely frightened movement , but he was no less indignant. He was alone in the path, it is true. But there could have been someone. And if there had been someone! Can one understand such a thing! What she has just done is horrible! Alas! the poor child had done nothing; There was only one culprit, the wind; but Marius, in whom trembled confusedly the Bartholo that is in Cherubino, was determined to be discontented, and was jealous of his shadow. It is in fact thus that the bitter and bizarre jealousy of the flesh awakens in the human heart, and imposes itself, even without right . Besides, even apart from this jealousy, the sight of this charming leg had held nothing agreeable for him; the white stocking of the first woman who came along would have given him more pleasure. When his Ursule, having reached the end of the path, retraced her steps with M. Leblanc and passed in front of the bench where Marius had sat down again, Marius threw her a gruff and ferocious look. The young girl made that little straightening of her back accompanied by a raising of the eyelids which means: Well, what is the matter with him? This was their first quarrel. Marius had barely finished making this scene with his eyes when someone crossed the aisle. It was an invalid, all bent over, all wrinkled and all white, in Louis XV uniform, having on his chest the small oval plaque of red cloth with crossed swords, the soldier’s cross of Saint-Louis, and adorned in addition with a sleeve of coat without arms inside, a silver chin and a wooden leg. Marius thought he could see that this being had an extremely satisfied air. It even seemed to him that the old cynic, while hobbling beside him, had given him a very fraternal and very joyful wink, as if some chance had brought it about that they could be on good terms and that they had enjoyed some good fortune together. What was there to be so pleased about, this wreck of Mars? What had happened between this wooden leg and the other? Marius reached the height of jealousy. “Perhaps he was there!” he said to himself; “perhaps he saw!” And he felt like exterminating the invalid.
With the help of time, all sharpness is blunted. This anger of Marius against Ursula, however just and legitimate it was, passed. He ended by forgiving; but it was a great effort; he sulked for three days. However, through all this and because of all this, the passion grew and became mad. Chapter 51. Eclipse. We have just seen how Marius had discovered, or thought he had discovered, that Her name was Ursula. Appetite comes with loving. To know that Her name was Ursula was already a lot; it was little. Marius had devoured this happiness in three or four weeks . He wanted another. He wanted to know where she lived. He had made a first mistake: falling into the trap of the Gladiator’s bench. He had made a second: not staying at the Luxembourg when M. Leblanc came there alone. He made a third. Immense. He followed Ursule. She lived on Rue de l’Ouest, at the least frequented part of the street, in a new three-story house of modest appearance. From that moment on, Marius added to his happiness of seeing her in the Luxembourg the happiness of following her home. His hunger increased. He knew her name, her nickname at least, the charming name, the true name of a woman; he knew where she lived; he wanted to know who she was. One evening, after he had followed them home and seen them disappear under the carriage entrance, he entered after them and said valiantly to the porter: “Is this the gentleman from the first floor who has just returned? ” “No,” replied the porter. “It’s the gentleman from the third floor. Another step taken.” This success emboldened Marius. “In front?” he asked. “By Jove!” said the porter, “the house is built only on the street. ” “And what is this gentleman’s condition?” replied Marius. “He’s a rentier, sir. A very good man, and one who does good to the unfortunate, although not rich. ” “What is his name?” continued Marius. The porter raised his head and said: “Is this gentleman an informer?” Marius went away rather sheepishly, but very delighted. He was moving forward. “Good,” he thought. I know that her name is Ursule, that she is the daughter of a man of means, and that she lives there, on the third floor, rue de l’Ouest. The next day, M. Leblanc and his daughter made only a brief appearance at the Luxembourg; they left when it was broad daylight. Marius followed them to rue de l’Ouest as he had become accustomed to doing. Arriving at the carriage entrance, M. Leblanc made his daughter go in front, then stopped before crossing the threshold, turned around, and looked fixedly at Marius. The next day, they did not come to the Luxembourg. Marius waited in vain all day. At nightfall, he went to rue de l’Ouest, and saw a light in the windows of the third floor. He walked under these windows until the light was extinguished. The next day, there was no one at the Luxembourg. Marius waited all day, then went to do his night watch under the windows. This took him until ten o’clock in the evening. His dinner became what it could. Fever nourishes the sick man and love the lover. Eight days passed in this way. M. Leblanc and his daughter no longer appeared at the Luxembourg. Marius made sad conjectures; he did not dare watch the carriage entrance during the day. He was content to go at night to contemplate the reddish light of the panes. He saw shadows passing through at times, and his heart beat. On the eighth day, when he arrived under the windows, there was no light. “Look!” he said, “the lamp is not yet lit. Yet it is dark. Could they have gone out? He waited. Until ten o’clock. Until midnight. Until one in the morning. No light came on in the windows of the third floor and no one came into the house. He left in a very gloomy mood. The next day—for he lived only from tomorrow to tomorrow, there was, so to speak, no more today for him—the next day he found no one at the Luxembourg, he was expecting it; at dusk, he went to the house. No light at the windows; the shutters were closed; the third floor was completely dark. Marius knocked at the carriage entrance, entered, and said to the porter: “The gentleman on the third floor? ” “Moved,” replied the porter. Marius staggered and said weakly: “Since when? ” “Yesterday.” –Where does he live now? –I don’t know. –So he didn’t leave his new address? –No. And the porter, looking up, recognized Marius. –Well! It’s you! he said, are you really a little quick-witted? Book Seven — Boss-Minette Chapter 52. Mines and Miners. Human societies all have what is called in the theaters a third underside. The social soil is mined everywhere, sometimes for good, sometimes for evil. These works overlap. There are the upper mines and the lower mines. There is an up and a down in this obscure subsoil which sometimes collapses beneath civilization, and which our indifference and carelessness trample underfoot. The Encyclopedia, in the last century, was a mine, almost open-air . Darkness, those somber incubators of primitive Christianity, were only waiting for an opportunity to explode under the Caesars and flood the human race with light. For in sacred darkness there is latent light. Volcanoes are full of a shadow capable of blazing. All lava begins as night. The catacombs, where the first mass was said, were not only the cellar of Rome, they were the underground of the world. Beneath the social construction, that complicated marvel of a hovel, there are excavations of all kinds. There is the religious mine, the philosophical mine, the political mine, the economic mine, the revolutionary mine. One pickaxe with the idea, another pickaxe with the number, another pickaxe with anger. People call and answer each other from one catacomb to another. Utopias travel underground in these conduits. They branch out in all directions. They sometimes meet there, and fraternize there. Jean-Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends him his lantern. Sometimes they fight there. Calvin takes Socin by the hair. But nothing stops or interrupts the tension of all these energies toward the goal, and the vast simultaneous activity, which comes and goes, rises, descends, and rises again in these darknesses, and which slowly transforms the above from below and the outside from within; an immense unknown swarm. Society barely suspects this digging which leaves its surface and changes its entrails. So many subterranean levels , so many different works, so many diverse extractions. What comes out of all these deep excavations? The future. The deeper one goes, the more mysterious the workers are. Up to a degree that the social philosopher knows how to recognize, the work is good; beyond this degree, it is doubtful and mixed; lower, it becomes terrible. At a certain depth, the excavations are no longer penetrable to the spirit of civilization, the limit breathable to man is exceeded; a beginning of monsters is possible. The descending ladder is strange; and each of these rungs corresponds to a floor where philosophy can take root, and where one meets one of these workers, sometimes divine, sometimes deformed. Below John Huss, there is Luther; below Luther, there is Descartes; below Descartes, there is Voltaire; below Voltaire, there is Condorcet; below Condorcet, there is Robespierre; below Robespierre, there is Marat; below Marat, there is Babeuf. And it continues. Lower down, confusedly, at the limit which separates the indistinct from the invisible, one perceives other dark men, who perhaps do not yet exist. Those of yesterday are specters; those of tomorrow are larvae. The mind’s eye distinguishes them obscurely. The embryonic work of the future is one of the philosopher’s visions. A world in limbo in the fetal state, what an incredible silhouette! Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, are there too, in lateral saps. Certainly, although a divine invisible chain binds together without their knowledge all these underground pioneers, who, almost always, believe themselves isolated, and those who are not, their works are very diverse, and the light of some contrasts with the blaze of others. Some are heavenly, others are tragic. Yet, whatever the contrast, all these workers, from the highest to the most nocturnal, from the wisest to the maddest, have a similarity, and this is it: selflessness. Marat forgets himself like Jesus. They leave themselves aside, they omit themselves, they do not think of themselves. They see something other than themselves. They have a gaze, and this gaze seeks the absolute. The first has the whole sky in his eyes; the last, however enigmatic he may be, still has under his brow the pale clarity of infinity. Venerate, whatever he does, whoever has this sign: the star pupil. The shadow pupil is the other sign. With it begins evil. Before him who has no gaze, dream and tremble. The social order has its black miners. There is a point where deepening is burial, and where the light goes out. Below all these mines we have just indicated, below all these galleries, below this entire immense subterranean vein system of progress and utopia, much further into the earth, lower than Marat, lower than Babeuf, lower, much lower, and without any relation to the upper floors, there is the last mine. A formidable place. This is what we have called the third below. It is the pit of darkness. It is the cellar of the blind. Inferi. This communicates with the abysses. Chapter 53. The low ground. There disinterestedness vanishes. The demon vaguely takes shape; each for himself. The eyeless self howls, searches, gropes and gnaws. The social Ugolino is in this abyss. The fierce silhouettes that prowl in this pit, almost beasts, almost ghosts, are not concerned with universal progress, they are ignorant of the idea and the word, they are concerned only with individual satisfaction. They are almost unconscious, and there is within them a sort of frightening effacement. They have two mothers, both stepmothers, ignorance and misery. They have a guide, need; and, for all forms of satisfaction, appetite. They are brutally voracious, that is to say ferocious, not in the manner of the tyrant, but in the manner of the tiger. From suffering these larvae pass to crime; fatal filiation, dizzying engendering, logic of the shadow. What crawls in the third social underground is no longer the stifled claim of the absolute; it is the protest of matter. Man becomes a dragon there. To be hungry, to be thirsty, that is the starting point; To be Satan is the point of arrival. From this cave comes Lacenaire. We have just seen, in the fourth book, one of the compartments of the upper mine, of the great political, revolutionary and philosophical undermining. There, as we have just said, everything is noble, pure, worthy, honest. There, certainly, one can be mistaken, and one is mistaken; but error is venerable there because it implies heroism. The whole of the work that is done there has a name: Progress. The time has come to glimpse other depths, the hideous depths. There is beneath society, let us insist on this, and, until the day when ignorance is dispelled, there will be the great cavern of evil. This cave is below all and is the enemy of all. It is hatred without exception. This cave knows no philosophers. Its dagger has never sharpened a pen. Its darkness has no relation to the sublime darkness of the writing desk. The fingers of the night that clench beneath this suffocating ceiling have never leafed through a book or unfolded a newspaper. Babeuf is an exploiter for Cartouche! Marat is an aristocrat for Schinderhannes. This cellar aims at the collapse of everything.
Everything. Including the superior saps, which it loathes. It does not undermine not only, in its hideous swarming, the current social order; it undermines philosophy, it undermines science, it undermines law, it undermines human thought, it undermines civilization, it undermines revolution, it undermines progress. It is simply called theft, prostitution, murder and assassination. It is darkness, and it wants chaos. Its vault is made of ignorance. All the others, those above, have only one goal, to suppress it. This is what philosophy and progress tend towards, by all their organs at once, by the improvement of reality as well as by the contemplation of the absolute . Destroy the cellar Ignorance, you destroy the mole Crime. Let us condense into a few words part of what we have just written. The only social peril is the Shadow. Humanity is identity. All men are the same clay. No difference, here below at least, in predestination. Same shadow before, same flesh during, same ashes after. But ignorance mixed with human paste blackens it. This incurable blackness reaches the inside of man and becomes Evil. Chapter 54. Babet, Gueulemer, Claquesous and Montparnasse. A quartet of bandits, Claquesous, Gueulemer, Babet and Montparnasse, governed the third underground of Paris from 1830 to 1835. Gueulemer was a demoted Hercules. His lair was the sewer of the Arche-Marion. He was six feet tall, with marble pectorals, bronze biceps, the breathing of a cavern, the torso of a colossus, the skull of a bird. One thought one saw the Farnese Hercules dressed in ticking trousers and a cotton velvet jacket. Gueulemer, built in this sculptural way, could have tamed monsters; he had found it shorter to be one. Low forehead, broad temples, less than forty years old and crow’s feet, coarse, short hair, a bushy cheek, a boar’s beard; you can see the man from here. His muscles demanded work, his stupidity didn’t want it. He was a lazy force. He was an assassin by nonchalance. People thought he was a Creole. He had probably had some contact with Marshal Brune, having been a porter in Avignon in 1815. After this training, he had become a bandit. Babet’s diaphanousness contrasted with Gueulemer’s meat. Babet was thin and learned. He was transparent, but impenetrable. One could see the light through his bones, but nothing through his pupil. He declared himself a chemist. He had been a clown at Bobèche’s and a doorman at Bobino’s. He had played vaudeville at Saint-Mihiel. He was a man of intentions, a smooth talker, who emphasized his smiles and quoted his gestures. His business was selling plaster busts and portraits of the head of state in the open air. He also pulled teeth. He had exhibited phenomena at fairs and owned a booth with a trumpet, and this poster: Babet, dental artist, member of the academies, conducts physical experiments on metals and metalloids, extracts teeth, and takes on the stumps abandoned by his colleagues. Price: one tooth, one franc fifty centimes; two teeth, two francs; three teeth, two francs fifty. Take advantage of the opportunity. (This take advantage of the opportunity meant: have as many as possible pulled out.) He had been married and had children. He did not know what had become of his wife and children. He had lost them as one loses one’s handkerchief. A great exception in the obscure world of which he was a part, Babet read the newspapers. One day, while he had his family with him in his mobile shack, he had read in the Messenger that a woman had just given birth to a sufficiently viable child, with a calf’s muzzle, and he had exclaimed: That’s a fortune! It’s not my wife who would have the sense to give me a child like that!
Since then, he had left everything to undertake Paris. Expression of his. What was Claquesous? It was night. He was waiting to show that the sky was smeared with black. In the evening he came out of a hole into which he returned before daybreak. Where was this hole? No one knew. In the most complete darkness, he spoke to his accomplices only with his back turned. Was his name Claquesous? No. He said: My name is Not-at-all. If a candle came along, he put on a mask. He was a ventriloquist. Babet said: Claquesous is a nocturnal with two voices. Claquesous was vague, wandering, terrible. No one was sure that he had a name, Claquesous being a nickname; no one was sure that he had a voice, his stomach speaking more often than his mouth; no one was sure that he had a face, no one having ever seen anything but his mask. He disappeared like a faint; his apparitions were emergences from the earth. A lugubrious being, that was Montparnasse. Montparnasse was a child; less than twenty years old, with a pretty face, lips that resembled cherries , charming black hair, the clarity of spring in his eyes; he had every vice and aspired to every crime. The digestion of evil gave him an appetite for the worst. He was the boy turned rogue, and the rogue turned scarp. He was kind, effeminate, graceful, robust, soft, ferocious. He had the brim of his hat turned up on the left to make room for the tuft of hair, according to the style of 1829. He lived by stealing violently.
His frock coat was of the best cut, but threadbare. Montparnasse was a fashion plate in poverty and committing murders. The cause of all this adolescent’s outrages was the desire to be well dressed. The first grisette who had said to him: You are handsome, had cast the stain of darkness into his heart, and had made a Cain of this Abel. Finding himself pretty, he had wanted to be elegant; but the first elegance is idleness; the idleness of a poor man is crime. Few prowlers were as feared as Montparnasse. At eighteen, he already had several corpses behind him. More than one passer-by with outstretched arms lay in the shadow of this wretch, his face in a pool of blood. Curly, pomaded, pinched at the waist, woman’s hips, the bust of a Prussian officer, the murmur of admiration of the girls on the boulevard around him, his cravat skillfully knotted, a puzzle in his pocket, a flower in his buttonhole; such was this mirliflore of the sepulchre. Chapter 55. Composition of the troupe. The four of them formed a sort of Proteus, winding through the police and trying to escape Vidocq’s prying eyes under various guises, tree, flame, fountain, lending each other their names and tricks, hiding in their own shadows, secret boxes and asylums for each other, undoing their personalities as one removes one’s false nose at a masked ball, sometimes simplifying themselves to the point of being one, sometimes multiplying to the point that Coco-Lacour himself took them for a crowd. These four men were not four men; they were a sort of mysterious four-headed thief working on a grand scale in Paris; they were the monstrous polyp of evil inhabiting the crypt of society. Thanks to their ramifications, and to the underlying network of their relationships, Babet, Gueulemer, Claquesous and Montparnasse had the general enterprise of the ambushes in the department of the Seine. They carried out a coup d’état from below on the passerby. Those who came up with ideas of this kind, men with nocturnal imaginations, turned to them for execution. The four rogues were provided with the framework, and they took charge of the staging. They worked from a script. They were always in a position to lend a proportionate and suitable staff to any attack that needed a helping hand and was sufficiently lucrative. When a crime was in need of help, they sublet accomplices. They had a troupe of dark actors at the disposal of all the cave tragedies. They usually met at nightfall, the hour of their awakening, in the steppes near the Salpêtrière. There, they conferred. They had the twelve dark hours before them; they regulated their use. Patron-Minette, such was the name given in the underground circulation to the association of these four men. In the old whimsical popular language which is disappearing every day, Patron-Minette means morning, just as Entre chien et loup means evening. This appellation, Patron-Minette, probably came from the hour at which their work ended, dawn being the moment when ghosts vanish and bandits separate. These four men were known under this rubric. When the president of the assizes visited Lacenaire in his prison, he questioned him about a misdeed which Lacenaire denied. “Who did this?” asked the president. Lacenaire gave this answer, enigmatic for the magistrate, but clear for the police: “It may be Patron-Minette. One can sometimes guess a play from the names of the characters; one can in the same way almost assess a gang on the list of bandits. Here, for these names float in the special memories, are the appellations to which Patron-Minette’s principal associates responded: Panchaud, called Printanier, called Bigrenaille. Brujon. (There was a Brujon dynasty; we do not give up saying a word about it.) Boulatruelle, the road mender already glimpsed. Laveuve. Finistère. Homère Hogu, negro. Mardisoir. Dépêche. Fauntleroy, called Bouquetière. Glorieux, freed convict. Barrecarrosse, called Monsieur Dupont. Lesplanade-du-Sud. Poussagrive. Carmagnolet. Kruideniers, called Bizarro. Mangedentelle. Feet-in-the-air. Half-farthings, called Two-billion. Etc., etc. We pass over them, and not the worst. These names have figures. They express not only beings, but species. Each of these names corresponds to a variety of these misshapen mushrooms from the underside of civilization. These beings, not lavish with their faces, were not those one sees passing in the streets. During the day, tired of the wild nights they had, they went to sleep, sometimes in the plaster kilns, sometimes in the abandoned quarries of Montmartre or Montrouge, sometimes in the sewers. They buried themselves. What has become of these men? They still exist. They have always existed. Horace speaks of them: Ambubaiarum collegia, phannacopolae, mendici, mimae; and, as long as society is what it is, they will be what they are. Under the dark ceiling of their cellar, they are forever reborn from the social oozing. They return, ghosts, always identical; only they no longer bear the same names and they are no longer in the same skins. The individuals extirpated, the tribe subsists. They always have the same faculties. From the crook to the prowler, the race remains pure. They guess the purses in the pockets, they sniff out the watches in the fobs. Gold and silver have a smell for them. There are naive bourgeois of whom one could say that they seem robbable . These men patiently follow these bourgeois. At the passage of a stranger or a provincial, they have spider-like tremors. These men, when, around midnight, on a deserted boulevard, one meets them or glimpses them, are frightening. They do not seem men, but forms made of living mist; It seems that they usually form a block with the darkness, that they are not distinct from it, that they have no other soul than the shadow, and that it is momentarily, and to live for a few minutes of a monstrous life, that they have disintegrated from the night. What does it take to make these larvae vanish? Light. Light in floods. Not a bat can resist the dawn. Enlighten society Below. Book Eight–The Bad Poor Chapter 56. Marius, looking for a girl in a hat, meets a man in a cap. Summer passed, then autumn; winter came. Neither M. Leblanc nor the young girl had set foot in the Luxembourg again. Marius had only one thought, to see that sweet and adorable face again. He was still searching, he was searching everywhere; he found nothing. He was no longer Marius the enthusiastic dreamer, the resolute, ardent and firm man, the bold provocateur of destiny, the brain that built future upon future, the young mind cluttered with plans, projects, prides, ideas and desires; he was a lost dog. He fell into a black sadness. It was over. Work repelled him, walking tired him, solitude bored him; The vast nature, once so full of forms, lights, voices, advice, perspectives, horizons, teachings, was now empty before him. It seemed to him that everything had disappeared. He was always thinking, for he could not do otherwise; but he no longer enjoyed his thoughts. To everything they constantly proposed to him quietly, he replied in the shadows: What’s the point? He reproached himself a hundred times. Why did I follow her? I was so happy just to see her! She looked at me, wasn’t that immense? She seemed to love me. Wasn’t that all? What did I want to have? There is nothing after that. I was absurd. It’s my fault, etc., etc. Courfeyrac, to whom he confided nothing, it was his nature, but who guessed a little of everything, it was his nature too, had begun by congratulating him on being in love, while being astonished at it; then, seeing Marius fallen into this melancholy, he had ended by saying to him: “I see that you have been simply an animal. Here, come to the Chaumière!” Once, trusting in a beautiful September sun, Marius had let himself be led to the ball at Sceaux by Courfeyrac, Bossuet and Grantaire, hoping, what a dream! that he would perhaps find her there. Of course, he did not see the one he was looking for. “And yet it is here that one finds all lost women,” Grantaire grumbled aside. Marius left his friends at the ball and returned on foot, alone, weary, feverish, his eyes troubled and sad in the night, dazed by the noise and dust of the joyful cuckoos full of singing creatures who were returning from the party and passing by him, discouraged, inhaling to refresh his head the acrid scent of the walnut trees along the road. He began to live more and more alone, lost, overwhelmed, lost in his inner anguish, pacing back and forth in his grief like a wolf in a trap, searching everywhere for the absent one, stupefied with love. Another time, he had an encounter that had produced a singular effect on him. He had passed in the small streets near the Boulevard des Invalides a man dressed like a workman and wearing a cap with a long peak that revealed strands of very white hair. Marius was struck by the beauty of this white hair and considered this man who was walking slowly and as if absorbed in painful meditation. Strangely enough, he seemed to recognize M. Leblanc. It was the same hair, the same profile, as far as the cap allowed it to be seen, the same appearance, only sadder. But why these workman’s clothes? What did that mean? What did this disguise signify? Marius was very astonished. When he came to , his first impulse was to start following this man; who knows if he had not finally found the trace he was looking for? In any case, he had to see the man again closely and clear up the enigma. But he thought of this idea too late; the man was already gone. He had taken some small side street, and Marius could not find him. This encounter preoccupied him for a few days, then faded away. After all, he said, it’s probably only a resemblance. Chapter 57. Discovery. Marius had never stopped living in the Gorbeau hovel. He paid no attention to anyone there. At that time, in truth, there were no other inhabitants in that hovel except himself and the Jondrettes, whose rent he had once paid, without ever having spoken to the father or the daughters. The other tenants had moved out or died, or had been evicted for lack of payment. One day that winter, the sun had shown itself a little in the afternoon, but it was February 2, that ancient Candlemas day whose treacherous Sun, precursor of a six- week cold, inspired Mathieu Laensberg to write these two lines that have rightly remained classics: Whether it shines or whether it shines, The bear returns to its cave. Marius had just left his. Night was falling. It was time to go to dinner; for it had been necessary to start eating again, alas! O infirmities of ideal passions! He had just crossed the threshold of his door, which Mame Bougon was sweeping at that very moment while uttering this memorable monologue: “What is cheap now? Everything is dear. Only the pain in the world is cheap; it is for nothing, the pain in the world! ” Marius walked slowly up the boulevard towards the barrier in order to reach the Rue Saint-Jacques. He walked thoughtfully, his head bowed. Suddenly he felt himself elbowed in the mist; he turned around, and saw two young girls in rags, one tall and thin, the other a little shorter, who were passing quickly, out of breath, frightened, and as if they were running away; They were coming to meet him, had not seen him, and had bumped into him as they passed. Marius could make out in the twilight their livid faces, their disheveled heads, their disheveled hair, their hideous bonnets, their ragged skirts, and their bare feet. As they ran, they talked to each other. The tallest said in a very low voice: “The cops came. They almost caught me in the semicircle. ” The other replied: “I saw them. I ran, ran, ran!” Marius understood, through this sinister jargon, that the gendarmes or the police officers had almost seized these two children, and that these children had escaped. They went under the trees of the boulevard behind him, and for a few moments made a sort of vague whiteness in the darkness which faded. Marius stopped for a moment. He was about to continue on his way when he noticed a small grayish package on the ground at his feet. He bent down and picked it up. It was a kind of envelope that appeared to contain papers. “Well,” he said, “those unfortunate women must have dropped that!” He retraced his steps, called out, and could not find them again; he thought they were already far away, put the package in his pocket, and went off to dinner. On the way, he saw in an alleyway off the Rue Mouffetard a child’s coffin covered with a black cloth, placed on three chairs and lit by a candle. The two girls from the twilight came back to his mind. “Poor mothers!” he thought. “There is one thing sadder than seeing one’s children die; that is to see them live badly.” Then these shadows that varied his sadness left his thoughts, and he fell back into his usual preoccupations. He began to think again of his six months of love and happiness in the open air and in broad daylight under the beautiful trees of the Luxembourg. –How dark my life has become! he said to himself. Young girls always appear to me. Only formerly they were angels; now they are ghouls. Chapter 58. Quadrifrons. In the evening, as he was undressing for bed, his hand found in the pocket of his coat the package he had picked up on the boulevard. He had forgotten it. He thought it would be useful to open it, and that this package perhaps contained the address of these young girls, if, in reality, it belonged to them, and in any case the information necessary to return it to the person who had lost it. He undid the envelope. It was not sealed and contained four letters, also not sealed. The addresses were put inside. All four gave off a smell of horrible tobacco. The first letter was addressed: to Madame, Madame la Marquise de Grucheray, square opposite the Chamber of Deputies, No. … Marius told himself that he would probably find there the information he was looking for, and that besides, since the letter was not sealed, it was likely that it could be read without inconvenience. It was worded thus: Madame la Marquise, The virtue of clemency and pity is that which unites society most closely. Express your Christian sentiment, and cast a compassionate glance upon this unfortunate Spaniard, victim of loyalty and attachment to the sacred cause of legitimacy, for which he paid with his blood, devoted his entire fortune to defend this cause, and today finds himself in the greatest misery. There is no doubt that your honorable person will grant him assistance to preserve an extremely difficult existence for a soldier of education and honor full of wounds. Count in advance on the humanity that animates you and on the interest that Madame la Marquise has for such an unfortunate nation. Their prayer will not be in vain, and their gratitude will preserve their charming memory. With my respectful sentiments with which I have the honor to be, Madam, Don Alvarez, Spanish captain of the cavalry, royalist refugee in France who is traveling for his homeland and lacks the resources to continue his journey. No address was attached to the signature. Marius hoped to find the address in the second letter, which was addressed: To Madame, Madame the Countess of Montvernet, Rue Cassette, No. 9. Here is what Marius read: Madame the Countess, I am an unfortunate mother of six children, the youngest of whom is only eight months old. I have been ill since my last child, abandoned by my husband for five months, having no resources in the world, in the most terrible poverty. In the hope of Madame the Countess, she has the honor to be, Madame, with deep respect, Femme Balizard. Marius moved on to the third letter, which was, like the previous ones, a petition; it read: Monsieur Pabourgeot, Elector, wholesale hosier, Rue Saint-Denis at the corner of Rue aux Fers. I take the liberty of addressing this letter to you to ask you to grant me the precious favor of your sympathy and to take an interest in a man of letters who has just sent a drama to the Théâtre-Français. The subject is historical, and the action takes place in Auvergne at the time of the Empire. The style, I believe, is natural, laconic, and may have some merit. There are verses to be sung in four places. The comic, the serious, the unexpected, are mixed with the variety of characters and a tinge of romanticism spread lightly throughout the plot which moves mysteriously, and will, through striking twists and turns, unravel in the midst of several brilliant scenes. My main goal is to satisfy the desire which gradually animates the man of our century, that is to say, fashion, this caprising and bizarre weather vane which changes almost with each new wind. Despite these qualities, I have reason to fear that the jealousy and selfishness of privileged authors will lead to my exclusion from the theatre, for I am not unaware of the setbacks with which newcomers are subjected. Mr. Pabourgeot, your just reputation as an enlightened protector of gloves of letters emboldens me to send you my daughter who will explain to you our destitute situation, lacking bread and fire in this winter season. To tell you that I beg you to accept the homage that I wish to pay you for my drama and all those that I will write, is to prove to you how much I aspire to the honor of sheltering myself under your aegis, and of adorning my writings with your name. If you deign to honor me with the most modest offering, I will immediately set about making a coin of verses to pay you my tribute of gratitude. This coin, which I will try to make as perfect as possible, will be sent to you before being inserted at the beginning of the drama and delivered on stage. To Monsieur, and Madame Pabourgeot, My most respectful respects. Genflot, man of letters. PS Even if it is only forty sous. Excuse me for sending my daughter and not presenting myself, but sad reasons for my dress do not allow me, alas! to go out… Marius finally opened the fourth letter. It was addressed: To the benevolent gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. It contained these few lines: Benevolent man, If you deign to accompany my daughter, you will see a miserable calamity , and I will show you my certificates. At the sight of these writings your generous soul will be moved by a feeling of sensitive benevolence, for true philosophers always experience strong emotions. Agree, compassionate man, that one must feel the most cruel need, and that it is very painful, in order to obtain some relief, to have it attested by authority as if one were not free to suffer and die of starvation while waiting for our misery to be alleviated. Fates are very fatal for some and too prodigal or too protective for others. I await your presence or your offering, if you deign to make it, and I beg you to accept the respectful sentiments with which I honor myself to be, a truly magnanimous man, your very humble and very obedient servant, P. Fabantou, dramatic artist. After reading these four letters, Marius did not find himself much further ahead than before. First, none of the signatories gave their address. Second, they seemed to come from four different individuals, Don Alvarès, the woman Balizard, the poet Genflot, and the dramatic artist Fabantou, but these letters offered the strange thing of being that they were all four written in the same handwriting. What could be concluded from this, if not that they came from the same person? Furthermore, and this made the conjecture more likely, the paper, coarse and yellowed, was the same for all four, the smell of tobacco was the same, and, although they had obviously tried to vary the style, the same spelling mistakes recurred with profound tranquility , and the man of letters Genflot was no more exempt from them than the Spanish captain. To strive to guess this little mystery was a useless effort. If it had not been a discovery, it would have seemed like a hoax. Marius was too sad to take well even a chance joke and to lend himself to the game that the pavement of the street seemed to want to play with him . It seemed to him that he was playing blind man’s buff between these four letters that were mocking him. Nothing, moreover, indicated that these letters belonged to the young girls whom Marius had met on the boulevard. After all, they were papers of no obvious value. Marius put them back in the envelope, threw everything in a corner, and went to bed. Around seven o’clock in the morning, he had just gotten up and had breakfast, and he was trying to get to work when there was a gentle knock at his door. As he owned nothing, he never took out his key, except sometimes, very rarely, when he was working on some urgent task. Besides, even when he was away, he left his key in the lock. “They ‘ll rob you,” said Mame Bougon. “What?” said Marius. “The fact is, however, that one day someone had stolen an old pair of boots from him, to Mame Bougon’s great triumph. There was a second knock, as soft as the first. ” Come in,” said Marius. The door opened. “What do you want, Mame Bougon?” asked Marius, without taking his eyes off the books and manuscripts he had on his table. A voice, which was not Mame Bougon’s, answered: “Pardon, sir… ” It was a dull, broken, strangled, raspy voice, the voice of an old man hoarse with brandy and rogome. Marius turned quickly and saw a young girl. Chapter 59. A Rose in Misery. A very young girl was standing in the half-open door. The skylight of the attic where daylight was breaking was directly opposite the door and lit up this figure with a pale light. She was a gaunt, puny, emaciated creature; nothing but a chemise and a skirt over a shivering, icy nakedness. A string for a belt, a string for a headdress, pointed shoulders emerging from the chemise, a blond and lymphatic pallor, earthy clavicles, red hands , a half-open and degraded mouth, missing teeth, a dull, bold, and low eye, the form of an aborted young girl and the look of a corrupt old woman; fifty years mingled with fifteen; one of those beings who are at once weak and horrible and who make shudder those whom they do not make cry. Marius had risen and regarded with a sort of stupor this being, almost like the shadowy forms which cross dreams. What was especially poignant was that this girl had not come into the world to be ugly. In her early childhood, she must even have been pretty. The grace of age still struggled against the hideous old age anticipated by debauchery and poverty. A remnant of beauty was dying on this sixteen-year-old face, like the pale sun that fades beneath dreadful clouds at the dawn of a winter’s day. This face was not entirely unknown to Marius. He thought he remembered having seen it somewhere. “What do you want, mademoiselle?” he asked. The young girl replied in her drunken galley-slave voice: “It’s a letter for you, Monsieur Marius. ” She called Marius by his name; he could not doubt that it was with him she had to do; but who was this girl? How did she know his name? Without waiting for him to tell her to come forward, she entered. She entered resolutely, looking with a sort of heart-wrenching assurance at the entire room and the unmade bed. Her feet were bare. Large holes in her petticoat revealed her long legs and thin knees. She was shivering. She was holding a letter in her hand, which she presented to Marius. Marius, upon opening the letter, noticed that the large, enormous sealing wafer was still wet. The message could not have come from far away. He read: My kind neighbor, young man! I have learned of your kindness to me, that you paid my rent six months ago . I bless you, young man. My eldest daughter will tell you that we have been without a morsel of bread for two days, four people, and my wife is ill. If I am not above it in my thoughts, I believe I must hope that your generous heart will be humanized at this statement and will subdue you with the desire to be propitious to me by deigning to lavish me with a small favor. I am with the distinguished consideration that one owes to the benefactors of humanity, Jondrette. PS–My daughter will await your orders, dear Monsieur Marius. This letter, in the midst of the obscure adventure that had occupied Marius since the previous evening, was a candle in a cellar. Everything was suddenly lit up. This letter came from where the other four had come from. It was the same handwriting, the same style, the same spelling, the same paper, the same smell of tobacco. There were five missives, five stories, five names, five signatures, and only one signatory. The Spanish captain Don Alvarès, the unfortunate Mother Balizard, the dramatic poet Genflot, the old actor Fabantou were all four called Jondrette, if indeed Jondrette himself was called Jondrette. For quite a long time already since Marius had lived in the hovel, he had had, as we have said, only very rare occasions to see, to glimpse even his very small neighbors. His mind was elsewhere, and where the mind is, there is the sight. He must have more than once passed the Jondrettes in the corridor or on the stairs; but for him they were only silhouettes; he had paid so little attention to it that the previous evening he had bumped into the Jondrette girls on the boulevard without recognizing them , for it was obviously they, and it was with great difficulty that the latter, who had just entered his room, had awakened in him, through disgust and pity, a vague memory of having met her elsewhere.
Now he saw everything clearly. He understood that his neighbor Jondrette’s industry in his distress was to exploit the charity of benevolent people, that he procured addresses, and that he wrote under assumed names to people he judged rich and pitiful letters that his daughters carried, at their own risk and peril, for this father had reached the point where he was risking his daughters; he was playing a game with destiny and he was putting them to the game. Marius understood that probably, judging by their flight the day before, by their breathlessness, by their terror, and by those slang words he had heard, these unfortunate women were still engaged in who knows what dark trades, and that from all this, there had resulted, in the midst of human society as it is made, two miserable beings who were neither children, nor girls, nor women, a kind of impure and innocent monsters produced by misery. Sad creatures without name, without age, without sex, to whom neither good nor evil are possible, and who, on leaving childhood, already have nothing left in this world, neither freedom, nor virtue, nor responsibility. Souls that bloomed yesterday, faded today, like those flowers fallen in the street that all the mud withers while waiting for a wheel to crush them. Meanwhile, while Marius fixed an astonished and sorrowful gaze on her, the young girl walked back and forth in the attic with the audacity of a ghost. She moved about without a care for her nudity. At times, her undone and torn chemise fell almost to her waist. She moved the chairs, she disturbed the toilet articles placed on the chest of drawers, she touched Marius’s clothes, she rummaged around what was in the corners. “Look,” she said, “you have a mirror!” And she hummed, as if she were alone, snatches of vaudeville, playful refrains that her guttural and hoarse voice made lugubrious. Beneath this boldness there pierced a certain constraint, anxiety, and humiliation. Effrontery is a shame. Nothing was more gloomy than to see her frolic and flutter, so to speak, about the room with the movements of a bird startled by the day, or one with a broken wing. One felt that with other conditions of education and destiny, the gay and free manner of this young girl could have been something sweet and charming. Never among animals does the creature born to be a dove change into an osprey. This is only seen among men. Marius was thinking, and let her do it. She approached the table. “Ah!” she said, “books! ” A gleam crossed her glassy eye. She continued, and her accent expressed that happiness of boasting about something, to which no human being is insensitive: “I know how to read.” She quickly seized the book open on the table, and read quite fluently: …General Bauduin received the order to take with the five battalions of his brigade the castle of Hougomont which is in the middle of the plain of Waterloo… She broke off: “Ah! Waterloo! I know that. It’s a battle in the times. My father was there. My father served in the armies. We’re pretty Bonapartist at home, come on! Waterloo is against the English.” She put down the book, took a quill, and cried: “And I know how to write too! ” She dipped the quill in ink, and turning to Marius: “Would you like to see? Here, I’ll write a word to see.” And before he had time to reply, she wrote on a sheet of white paper that was in the middle of the table: The cops are here. Then, throwing down the pen: “There are no spelling mistakes. You can look. We have received an education, my sister and I. We have not always been as we are. We were not made…” Here she stopped, fixed her dull eyes on Marius, and burst out laughing, saying with an intonation that contained all the anguish stifled by all the cynicism: “Bah!” And she began to hum these words to a cheerful tune: “I’m hungry, father. No cooking. I’m cold, mother. No knitting. Shiver, Lolotte! Sob, Jacquot! ” Hardly had she finished this verse than she cried out: “Do you ever go to the play, Monsieur Marius? I do.” I have a little brother who is friends with artists and who sometimes gives me tickets. For example, I don’t like gallery benches. It’s awkward, it’s uncomfortable. There are sometimes fat people there; there are also people who smell bad. Then she looked at Marius, assumed a strange air, and said to him: “Do you know, Monsieur Marius, that you are a very handsome boy?” And at the same time the same thought came to them both, which made her smile and made him blush. She approached him and placed a hand on his shoulder. “You don’t pay attention to me, but I know you, Monsieur Marius. I meet you here on the stairs, and then I see you go into the house of a man named Father Mabeuf who lives near Austerlitz, sometimes, when I’m walking that way. It suits you very well, your disheveled hair. ” Her voice tried to be very soft and only managed to be low. Some of the words were lost in the journey from the larynx to the lips, as on a keyboard where notes are missing. Marius had gently drawn back. “Mademoiselle,” he said with his cold gravity, “I have a package here which , I believe, is yours. Allow me to give it to you.” And he handed her the envelope containing the four letters. She clapped her hands and cried: “We’ve looked everywhere!” Then she quickly seized the package and undid the envelope, saying : “Good heavens! Have we looked, my sister and I? And it was you who found it! On the boulevard, wasn’t it? It must be on the boulevard? You see, it fell out when we were running. It was my little sister who did the silly thing. When we got home, we couldn’t find it.” Since we didn’t want to be beaten, since it was useless, completely useless, absolutely useless, we said at home that we had taken the letters to the people and that we had been told nix! There they are, those poor letters! And how did you know they were mine? Oh! yes, by the handwriting! So it was you we bumped into as we passed yesterday evening. You couldn’t see, you know! I said to my sister: Is it a gentleman? My sister told me said: I think it’s a gentleman! Meanwhile, she had unfolded the petition addressed to the benevolent gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. “Here!” she said, “it’s the one for that old man who goes to mass. By the way, it’s time. I’ll take it to him. Perhaps he’ll give us something to eat.” Then she began to laugh again, and added: “Do you know what it will be like if we eat today? It will mean that we will have had our lunch from the day before yesterday, our dinner from the day before yesterday, our lunch from yesterday, our dinner from yesterday, all at once , this morning. Here! By Jove! If you’re not happy, die, you dogs! ” This made Marius remember what the unfortunate woman had come to look for at his house. He searched in his waistcoat, but found nothing. The young girl continued, and seemed to speak as if she were no longer aware that Marius was there. –Sometimes I go out in the evening. Sometimes I don’t come back. Before coming here, last winter we used to stay under the arches of the bridges. We huddled together so as not to freeze. My little sister cried. Water, how sad it is! When I thought of drowning, I said: No, it’s too cold. I go out alone when I want, I sometimes sleep in the ditches. Do you know, at night, when I walk along the boulevard, I see the trees like forks, I see houses all black as big as the towers of Notre-Dame, I imagine that the white walls are the river, I say to myself: Look, there’s water there! The stars are like lanterns of illumination, they look as if they were smoking and the wind was extinguishing them, I am stunned, as if I had horses blowing in my ear; even though it’s night, I hear barrel organs and the mechanics of spinning mills, do I know? I think they’re throwing stones at me, I run away without knowing, everything spins, everything spins. When you haven’t eaten, it’s very funny. And she looked at him with a bewildered air. By dint of digging and deepening his pockets, Marius had finally collected five francs sixteen sous. It was at that moment all he possessed in the world. – Here’s still my dinner for today, he thought, tomorrow we’ll see. – He took the sixteen sous and gave the five francs to the girl. She took the coin. – Well, she said, it’s sunny! And as if this sun had the property of melting avalanches of slang in his brain, she continued: – Five francs! Shiny! A monarch! In this pot! It’s so shabby! You’re a good man. I’ll give you my heart. Bravo, fanandels! Two days of pevois! And meatloaf! And fricotmar! We’ll have a good meal! And good slop! She pulled her shirt up over her shoulders, made a low bow to Marius, then a familiar sign with her hand, and went to the door, saying : “Good morning, sir. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to find my old man.” As she passed , she noticed a dried-out crust of bread on the chest of drawers, moldering in the dust; she threw herself on it and bit into it, grumbling: “It’s good! It’s hard! It’s breaking my teeth!” Then she went out. Chapter 60. The Judas of Providence. Marius had lived for five years in poverty, in destitution, even in distress, but he realized that he had not known true misery. He had just seen true misery. It was this larva that had just passed before his eyes. Indeed, whoever has seen only the misery of man has seen nothing, one must see the misery of woman; whoever has seen only the misery of woman has seen nothing, one must see the misery of the child. When man has reached his last extremities, he arrives at the same time at his last resources. Woe to the defenseless beings around him! Work, wages, bread, fire, courage, good will, everything is lacking at once. The clarity of day seems to fade outside, the moral light fades inside; in these shadows, man encounters the weakness of woman and child, and violently bends them to ignominies. Then all horrors are possible. Despair is surrounded by fragile partitions which all give way to vice or crime. Health, youth, honor, the holy and fierce delicacies of the still new flesh, the heart, virginity, modesty, this epidermis of the soul, are sinisterly handled by this groping which seeks resources, which encounters opprobrium, and which accommodates itself to it. Fathers, mothers, children, brothers, sisters, men, women, daughters, adhere and aggregate almost like a mineral formation, in this misty promiscuity of sexes, kinships, ages, infamies, innocences. They crouch, leaning against each other, in a kind of slum destiny. They look at each other lamentably. Oh, the unfortunates! How pale they are! How cold they are! It seems as if they were on a planet much further from the sun than we are. This young girl was for Marius a sort of envoy of darkness. She revealed to him a whole hideous side of the night. Marius almost reproached himself for the preoccupations of reverie and passion which had prevented him until that day from casting a glance at his neighbors. Having paid their rent was a mechanical movement, everyone would have had this movement; but he, Marius, should have done better. What! Only a wall separated him from these abandoned beings, who lived groping in the night, apart from the rest of the living, he rubbed shoulders with them, he was in a way, he, the last link of the human race that they touched, he heard them living or rather moaning beside him, and he took no notice! Every day at every moment, through the wall, he heard them walking, going, coming, talking, and he did not listen! And in these words there were groans, and he did not even listen to them! His thoughts were elsewhere, on dreams, on impossible radiances, on loves in the air, on madness; and yet human creatures, his brothers in Jesus Christ, his brothers in the people, were dying beside him! dying uselessly! He was even part of their misfortune, and he aggravated it. For if they had had another neighbor, a less chimerical and more attentive neighbor, an ordinary and charitable man, evidently their poverty would have been noticed, their signals of distress would have been perceived, and perhaps long ago they would have been taken in and saved! No doubt they seemed very depraved, very corrupt, very debased, even very odious, but they are rare, those who have fallen without being degraded; besides, there is a point where the unfortunate and the infamous mingle and merge into a single word, a fatal word, the wretched; whose fault is it? And then, is it not when the fall is deeper that charity must be greater? While giving himself this moral lesson, for there were occasions when Marius, like all truly honest hearts, was his own teacher, and scolded himself more than he deserved, he considered the wall that separated him from the Jondrettes, as if he could have passed through this partition his pitying gaze and gone to warm these unfortunates. The wall was a thin sheet of plaster supported by laths and joists, and which, as we have just read, allowed the sound of words and voices to be perfectly distinguished. One would have to be the dreamy Marius not to have noticed it yet. No paper was stuck on this wall, neither on the Jondrettes’ side, nor on Marius’s side; its crude construction was visible. Almost without being aware of it, Marius examined this partition; sometimes reverie examines, observes and scrutinizes as thought would. Suddenly he raised, he had just noticed near the top, near the ceiling, a triangular hole resulting from three slats which left a gap between them. The plasterwork which must have filled this gap was missing, and by climbing onto the chest of drawers one could see through this opening into the Jondrette’s attic. Compassion has and must have its curiosity. This hole made a kind of peephole. It is permissible to look treacherously at misfortune in order to help it.–Let us see what these people are like, thought Marius, and where they are. He climbed the chest of drawers, brought his eye close to the crevice and looked. Chapter 61. The Wild Man in the Lair. Cities, like forests, have their lairs where all that is most wicked and most formidable is hidden. Only, in cities, what hides thus is ferocious, filthy and small, that is to say ugly; In the forests, what hides is ferocious, wild, and grand, that is to say, beautiful. Lairs for lairs, those of beasts are preferable to those of men. Caves are better than hovels. What Marius saw was a hovel. Marius was poor, and his room was destitute; but, just as his poverty was noble, his attic was clean. The hovel into which his gaze plunged at that moment was abject, dirty, fetid, foul, dark, sordid. For all furniture, a straw chair, a crippled table, a few old shards, and in two corners two indescribable pallets; for all light, a four-paned attic window, draped in cobwebs. There came through this skylight just enough daylight for a man’s face to appear like a ghost’s. The walls had a leprous appearance, and were covered with seams and scars like a face disfigured by some horrible disease. A rheumy dampness oozed from it. One could distinguish crudely charcoaled obscene drawings . The room Marius occupied had a dilapidated brick floor; it was neither tiled nor planked; one walked raw on the ancient plaster of the hovel, which had turned black underfoot. On this uneven floor, where the dust was as if encrusted, and which had only one virginity, that of the broom, clustered capriciously constellations of old slippers, slippers, and hideous rags; moreover, this room had a fireplace; so it was rented for forty francs a year. There was everything in this fireplace: a stove, a pot, broken planks, rags hanging from nails, a birdcage, ashes, and even a little fire. Two embers were smoking sadly there. One thing that added to the horror of this garret was that it was large. It had projections, angles, black holes, eaves, bays, and promontories. From there, hideous, unfathomable corners where it seemed that spiders as big as a fist, woodlice as wide as a foot, and perhaps even some monstrous human beings must be huddled. One of the pallets was near the door, the other near the window. Both touched the chimney at one end and faced Marius. In a corner near the opening through which Marius looked, hung on the wall in a black wooden frame a colored engraving at the bottom of which was written in large letters: THE DREAM. It represented a sleeping woman and a sleeping child, the child on the woman’s knees , an eagle in a cloud with a crown at the bottom, and the woman removing the crown from the child’s head, without waking up ; in the background Napoleon in a state of glory was leaning on a large blue column with a yellow capital decorated with this inscription: MARINGO. AUSTERLITS. IENA. WAGRAMME. ELOT. Above this frame, a kind of wooden panel longer than it was wide was placed on the ground and leaning on an inclined plane against the wall. It looked like a picture turned upside down , a stretcher probably daubed on the other side, some trumeau detached from a wall and forgotten there in waiting to be hung up. Near the table, on which Marius saw a pen, ink, and paper, sat a man of about sixty, small, thin, livid, haggard, with a delicate, cruel, and anxious air; a hideous scoundrel. Lavater, if he had considered this face, would have found the vulture mixed with the prosecutor; the bird of prey and the man of quarrel making each other ugly and completing each other, the man of quarrel making the ignoble bird of prey, the bird of prey making the horrible man of quarrel. This man had a long gray beard. He was dressed in a woman’s shirt that revealed his hairy chest and his bare arms bristling with gray hair. Under this shirt, muddy trousers and boots were visible , from which the toes of his feet protruded. He had a pipe in his mouth and was smoking. There was no more bread in the hovel, but there was still tobacco. He was writing, probably some letter like the ones Marius had read . On the corner of the table could be seen an old, mismatched reddish volume , and the format, which was the old duodecimo of the reading rooms, revealed a novel. On the cover was spread this title printed in large capital letters: GOD, THE KING, HONOR AND THE LADIES, BY DUCRAY-DUMINIL. 1814. As he wrote, the man spoke aloud, and Marius heard his words: “To think that there is no equality, even when one is dead! Just look at Père-Lachaise! The great, the rich, are at the top, in the avenue of acacias, which is paved. They can get there by carriage. The little ones, the poor people, the unfortunate, in other words!” They are put downstairs , where there is mud up to their knees, in the holes, in the damp. They are put there so that they spoil more quickly! You can’t go and see them without sinking into the earth. Here he stopped, banged his fist on the table, and added, gritting his teeth: “Oh! I could eat the world! ” A fat woman who might have been forty or a hundred was squatting near the fireplace on her bare heels. She too was dressed only in a chemise and a knitted petticoat patched with pieces of old cloth. A coarse linen apron hid half of the petticoat. Although this woman was bent and hunched over, one could see that she was very tall. She was a sort of giantess next to her husband. She had frightful hair of a reddish-blond color, turning gray, which she moved from time to time with her enormous, shiny hands with flat nails. Beside her lay on the ground, wide open, a volume of the same size as the other, and probably from the same novel. On one of the pallets, Marius glimpsed a sort of tall, pale little girl sitting, almost naked and with her feet dangling, who seemed neither to be listening, nor to see, nor to be alive. The younger sister, no doubt, of the one who had come to his house. She looked eleven or twelve years old. On close examination, one could tell that she was indeed fourteen. It was the child who had said the previous evening on the boulevard: I’ve run! run! run! She was one of that puny species that stays late for a long time, then grows quickly and suddenly. It is poverty that makes these sad human plants. These creatures have neither childhood nor adolescence. At fifteen, they look twelve, at sixteen, they look twenty. Today little girls, tomorrow women. It seems as if they were leaping over life, to have finished more quickly. At that moment, this being looked like a child. Besides, there was no evidence of any work in this dwelling; not a loom, not a spinning wheel, not a tool. In a corner there were some scrap iron of a dubious appearance. It was that gloomy laziness which follows despair and precedes agony. Marius contemplated for some time this funereal interior, more frightening than the interior of a tomb, for one could feel the human soul stirring there and life palpitating. The attic, the cellar, the dungeon where certain paupers crawl at the lowest level of the social edifice, is not quite the sepulchre, it is its antechamber; but, like those rich people who display their greatest magnificence at the entrance to their palace, it seems that death, which is right next door, places its greatest miseries in this vestibule. The man was silent, the woman did not speak, the young girl did not seem to breathe. One could hear the pen screaming on the paper. The man grumbled, without ceasing to write: “Scoundrel! scoundrel! everything is scoundrel!” This variation on Solomon’s epiphoneme drew a sigh from the woman. “Little friend, calm down,” she said. “Don’t hurt yourself, darling. You are too good to write to all these people, my man.” In misery, bodies press against each other, as in the cold, but hearts drift apart. This woman, to all appearances, must have loved this man with the amount of love that was in her; but probably, in the daily and reciprocal reproaches of a terrible distress weighing on the whole group, that had died out. There was nothing left in her for her husband but ashes of affection. Yet the caressing appellations, as often happens, had survived. She said to him: Darling, boyfriend, my man, etc. ,
by mouth, her heart falling silent. The man had resumed writing. Chapter 62. Strategy and Tactics. Marius, his chest oppressed, was about to come down from the kind of observatory he had improvised for himself, when a noise attracted his attention and made him remain in his place. The door of the attic had just opened abruptly. The eldest daughter appeared on the threshold. On her feet were large men’s shoes stained with mud that had seeped up to her red ankles, and she was covered with an old, tattered cloak that Marius had not seen on her an hour before, but which she had probably left at his door to inspire more pity, and which she must have picked up on leaving. She entered, pushed the door behind her, stopped to catch her breath, for she was quite out of breath, then cried with an expression of triumph and joy: “He’s coming!” The father turned his eyes, the woman turned her head, the little sister did not move. “Who?” asked the father. “The gentleman! “The philanthropist? “Yes. “From the church of Saint-Jacques? “Yes.
“That old man? ” Yes . ” And he’s coming? “He’s following me. ” “Are you sure? ” “I’m sure.” ” There, really, he’s coming? ” “He’s coming in a cab.” “In a cab. It’s Rothschild! ” The father stood up. “How are you sure? If he’s coming in a cab, how is it that you arrived before him? Did you at least give him the address? Did you tell him the last door at the end of the corridor on the right? I hope he’s not mistaken! So you found him at the church? Did he read my letter? What did he say to you? ” “Ta, ta, ta!” said the girl, “how you gallop, good man! Here: I went into the church, he was in his usual place, I curtseyed to him , and I gave him the letter, he read it, and he said to me: Where do you live, my child? I said: Sir, I’ll take you.” He said to me: No, give me your address, my daughter has some shopping to do, I ‘ll take a car, and I’ll arrive at your house at the same time as you. I gave him the address. When I told him the house, he seemed surprised and hesitated for a moment, then he said: It’s all the same, I’ll go. After mass, I saw him leave the church with his daughter, I saw them get into the cab. And I told him the last door at the end of the corridor on the right. –And what tells you he’ll come? –I just saw the cab arriving on the Rue du Petit-Banquier. That’s why I ran. –How do you know it’s the same cab? –Because I noticed the number, then! –What’s that number? –440. –Good, you’re a clever girl. The girl looked boldly at her father, and, pointing to the shoes on her feet: –A clever girl, it’s possible. But I say I won’t wear those shoes again, and I don’t want them anymore, for my health first, and for cleanliness second. I know nothing more annoying than soles that squeak and go ghee, ghee, ghee, all along the road. I prefer to go barefoot. “You’re right,” replied the father in a gentle tone that contrasted with the girl’s harshness, “but they wouldn’t let you into churches. The poor must have shoes. One doesn’t go barefoot to God,” he added bitterly. Then returning to the subject that preoccupied him: “And you’re sure, are you sure, that he ‘s coming?
” “He’s behind my heels,” she said. The man stood up. There was a sort of illumination on his face. “My wife!” he cried, “do you hear? There’s the philanthropist. Put out the fire.” The astonished mother did not move. The father, with the agility of a mountebank, seized a splintered pot that was on the mantelpiece and threw water on the embers. Then, addressing his eldest daughter: “You! Pull the straw off the chair! ” Her daughter did not understand. He grabbed the chair and with a kick of his heel he made it into a straw chair. His leg went through. While withdrawing his leg, he asked his daughter: “Is it cold? ” “Very cold. It’s snowing.” The father turned to the younger daughter who was on the pallet near the window and shouted to her in a thunderous voice: “Quick! Get out of bed, you lazy girl! You’ll never do anything! Break a window!” The little girl threw herself out of bed, shivering. “Break a window!” he continued. The child remained speechless. “Do you hear me?” repeated the father, “I tell you to break a window!” The child, with a sort of terrified obedience, stood on tiptoe and punched a windowpane. The window shattered and fell with a loud noise. “Good,” said the father. He was grave and abrupt. His gaze quickly scanned every corner of the attic. He was like a general making final preparations just as the battle was about to begin. The mother, who had not yet said a word, stood up and asked in a slow, muffled voice whose words seemed to come out frozen: “Darling, what do you want to do? ” “Get into bed,” replied the man. The intonation did not admit of deliberation. The mother obeyed and threw herself heavily onto one of the pallets. Meanwhile, a sob could be heard in a corner. “What is it?” cried the father. The younger daughter, without leaving the shadows where she had huddled, showed her bloody fist. By breaking the window she had injured herself; she had gone near her mother’s pallet, and she was weeping silently. It was the mother’s turn to sit up and cry: “You see! The stupid things you do! By breaking your window, she cut herself! “So much the better!” said the man, “it was planned. ” “What? So much the better?” resumed the woman. “Peace!” replied the father, “I am suppressing the freedom of the press.” Then, tearing the woman’s shirt from his body, he made a scrap of cloth and quickly wrapped it around the girl’s bleeding wrist. This done, his eye fell on the torn shirt with satisfaction. “And the shirt too,” he said. “It all looks good.” An icy breeze whistled at the window and entered the room. The mist From outside, it penetrated and expanded like a whitish wadding vaguely unraveled by invisible fingers. Through the broken pane, one could see the snow falling. The cold promised the day before by the Candlemas sun had indeed arrived. The father looked around him as if to make sure he had forgotten nothing. He took an old shovel and spread ashes on the wet embers so as to hide them completely. Then, getting up and leaning against the fireplace: “Now,” he said, “we can receive the philanthropist.” Chapter 63. The Ray in the Den. The big girl came over and placed her hand on her father’s. “Feel how cold I am,” she said. “Bah!” replied the father, “I’m much colder than that.” The mother shouted impetuously: “You always have everything better than the others, you! Even the bad. ” “Down with it!” said the man. The mother, looked at in a certain way, fell silent. There was a moment of silence in the dive. The eldest daughter was carelessly cleaning the hem of her cloak, the younger sister continued to sob; the mother had taken her head in both hands and was covering it with kisses, saying to her in a low voice: “My darling, I beg you, it will be nothing, don’t cry, you’ll upset your father. ” “No!” cried the father, “on the contrary! Sob! Sob! That’s good.” Then, returning to the eldest: “Oh, but! He’s not coming! If he weren’t coming! I would have put out my fire, smashed my chair, torn my shirt and broken my windowpane for nothing! “And hurt the little one!” murmured the mother. “Do you know,” continued the father, “that it’s freezing cold in this devil’s attic? If that man didn’t come! Oh!” There! he keeps us waiting! he says to himself: Well! They will wait for me! That’s what they are here for! Oh! I hate them, and how I would strangle them with jubilation, joy, enthusiasm and satisfaction, these rich people! All these rich people! These so-called charitable men, who make disputes, who go to mass, who give themselves over to the priesthood, preach, preach, in the skullcaps, and who think they are above us, and who come to humiliate us, and bring us clothes! as they say! rags that aren’t worth four sous, and bread! That’s not what I want, you bunch of scoundrels! It’s money! Ah! Money! Never! Because they say we would go and drink it, and that we are drunkards and idlers! And them! What are they then, and what were they in their time? Thieves! They would not have become rich without it! Oh! they should take society by the four corners of the cloth and throw everything into the air! Everything would break, it’s possible, but at least no one would have anything, that would be a gain! — But what is he doing, your benevolent gentleman’s muzzle? Will he come? Perhaps the animal has forgotten the address! Let’s wager that this old beast…. At that moment there was a light knock at the door; the man rushed in and opened it, crying with deep bows and smiles of adoration: — Come in, sir! Deign to come in, my respectable benefactor, as well as your charming young lady. A man of a middle age and a young girl appeared on the threshold of the attic. Marius had not left his place. What he felt at that moment escapes human language. It was She. Anyone who has loved knows all the radiant meanings contained in the four letters of this word: She. It was indeed she. Marius could barely distinguish her through the luminous vapor that had suddenly spread over his eyes. It was this sweet absent being, this star that had shone on him for six months, it was this pupil, this forehead, this mouth, this beautiful vanished face that had made the night by leaving. The vision had eclipsed, it reappeared! She reappeared in this shadow, in this garret, in this deformed hovel, in this horror! Marius trembled desperately. What! It was she! The palpitations of his heart troubled his vision. He felt ready to burst into tears. What! He saw her again at last after having sought her for so long! It seemed to him that he had lost his soul and had just found her again. She was still the same, only a little pale; her delicate face was framed in a violet velvet hat, her waist was hidden beneath a black satin pelisse. Under her long dress one could glimpse her little foot enclosed in a silk boot. She was still accompanied by M. Leblanc. She had taken a few steps into the room and had placed a rather large package on the table. The elder Jondrette had withdrawn behind the door and was gazing with a somber eye at this velvet hat, this silk mantle, and this charming, happy face. Chapter 64. Jondrette Almost Cries. The hovel was so dark that people coming from outside felt as if they were entering it as if they were entering a cellar. The two newcomers therefore advanced with a certain hesitation, barely distinguishing vague shapes around them, while they were perfectly seen and examined by the eyes of the attic dwellers, accustomed to this twilight. M.
Leblanc approached with his kind and sad look, and said to Father Jondrette: “Sir, you will find in this package new clothes, stockings, and woolen blankets. ” “Our angelic benefactor has lavished us,” said Jondrette, bowing to the ground. “Then, leaning down to whisper to his eldest daughter, while the two visitors were examining this lamentable interior, he added quietly and quickly: “Huh? What was I saying? Rags! No money. They are all the same!” By the way, how was the letter to that old fool signed? “Fabantou,” replied the girl. “The dramatic artist, good!” It was a good thing for Jondrette, for at that very moment M. Leblanc turned towards him and said to him with the air of someone who is searching for a name: “I see that you are very much to be pitied, sir…” “Fabantou,” replied Jondrette quickly. “Monsieur Fabantou, yes, that’s it, I remember.” “A dramatic artist, sir, and one who has had some success. ” Here Jondrette evidently thought the moment had come to seize the philanthropist. He cried out with a tone of voice that was at once the boast of a juggler at the fairs and the humility of a beggar on the highway: “Student of Talma, sir! I am a pupil of Talma! Fortune smiled on me once. Alas! now it is misfortune’s turn.” See, my benefactor, no bread, no fire. My poor children have no fire! My only chair is ragged! A broken pane! Because of the weather ! My wife is in bed! Ill! “Poor woman!” said M. Leblanc. “My child is injured!” added Jondrette. The child, distracted by the arrival of the strangers, had begun to contemplate the young lady and had stopped sobbing. “Cry! Cry!” said Jondrette in a low voice. At the same time, he pinched her sore hand. All this with the talent of a conjurer. The little girl cried aloud. The adorable young girl whom Marius called his Ursula in his heart approached quickly: “Poor dear child!” she said. “See, my beautiful young lady,” continued Jondrette, “her wrist is bleeding! It was an accident that happened while working under a machine to earn six sous a day.” We may have to cut off his arm! “Really?” said the old gentleman, alarmed. The little girl, taking this word seriously, began to sob even more. “Alas, yes, my benefactor!” replied the father. For some moments, Jondrette had been considering the philanthropist in a strange manner. While speaking, he seemed to scrutinize him attentively as if he were trying to collect souvenirs. Suddenly, taking advantage of a moment when the newcomers were questioning the little girl with interest about her injured hand, he passed near his wife who was in her bed with a crushed and stupid air, and said to her quickly and very quietly: “Just look at that man!” Then turning towards M. Leblanc, and continuing his lamentation: “Look, sir! I have, for all my clothing, only one of my wife’s shirts! And all torn! In the heart of winter. I cannot go out for lack of an outfit. If I had the least outfit, I would go and see Mademoiselle Mars who knows me and loves me very much. Doesn’t she still live in the Rue de la Tour-des-Dames? Do you know, sir? We played together in the provinces. I shared her laurels.” Célimène would come to my aid, sir! Elmire would give alms to Bélisaire! But no, nothing! And not a penny in the house! My sick wife, not a penny! My dangerously injured daughter, not a penny! My wife is choking. It’s her age, and then her nervous system has gotten involved. She would need help, and my daughter too! But the doctor! But the pharmacist! How can I pay? Not a penny! I would kneel before a tithe, sir! That’s what the arts are reduced to! And do you know, my charming young lady , and you, my generous protector, do you know, you who breathe virtue and goodness, and who perfume this church where my poor daughter, coming to pray, sees you every day?… For I raise my daughters in religion, sir. I didn’t want them to take to the theater. Ah! The rogues! Let me see them flinch! I’m not joking! I give them loads of nonsense about honor, morality, virtue! Ask them. It has to go straight. They have a father. They’re not one of those unfortunate women who start out without a family and end up marrying the public. You’re Miss Nobody, you become Mrs. Everyman. Crebleur! Not that in the Fabantou family! I intend to educate them virtuously, and for them to be honest, and for them to be kind, and for them to believe in God! Sacred name! Well, sir, my worthy sir, do you know what’s going to happen tomorrow? Tomorrow is February 4th, the fatal day, the last deadline my landlord gave me; If I haven’t paid it tonight , tomorrow my eldest daughter, myself, my wife with her fever, my child with his injury, we will all four be driven out of here, and thrown out, into the street, onto the boulevard, without shelter, in the rain, on the snow. There you go, sir. I owe four terms, a year! that is to say, about sixty francs. Jondrette was lying. Four terms would have only made forty francs, and he couldn’t owe four, since it hadn’t been six months since Marius had paid two. M. Leblanc took five francs from his pocket and put them on the table. Jondrette had time to mutter in his eldest daughter’s ear: “You scoundrel! What does he want me to do with his five francs? That doesn’t pay for my chair and my tile! Go ahead and spend!” Meanwhile, M. Leblanc had taken off a large brown frock coat that he wore over his blue frock coat and thrown it over the back of the chair. “Monsieur Fabantou,” he said, “I have only these five francs with me, but I am going to take my daughter home and I will return this evening; is it not this evening that you must pay?” Jondrette’s face lit up with a strange expression. He replied quickly: “Yes, my respectable sir. At eight o’clock I must be at my landlord’s. ” “I will be here at six o’clock, and I will bring you the sixty francs. ” “My benefactor!” cried Jondrette, distraught. And he added in a low voice: “Look at him well, my wife!” M. Leblanc had taken the beautiful young girl’s arm again and was turning towards the door: “See you this evening, my friends,” he said. “Six o’clock?” said Jondrette. “Six o’clock sharp.” At that moment the overcoat left on the chair caught the eyes of the elder Jondrette. “Sir,” she said, “you’re forgetting your frock coat. ” Jondrette directed a withering look at his daughter, accompanied by a formidable shrug of the shoulders. M. Leblanc turned and replied with a smile: “I’m not forgetting it, I’m leaving it. ” “Oh, my protector,” said Jondrette, “my august benefactor, I’m bursting into tears! Allow me to escort you to your cab. ” “If you go out,” replied M. Leblanc, “put on that overcoat. It’s really very cold.” Jondrette didn’t need to be told twice. He quickly put on the brown frock coat. And the three of them went out, Jondrette preceding the two strangers. Chapter 65. Rates for the stage-managed cabriolets: two francs an hour. Marius had missed nothing of this whole scene, and yet in reality he had seen nothing of it. His eyes had remained fixed on the young girl, his heart had, so to speak, seized and enveloped her entirely from her first step into the attic. During the entire time she had been there, he had lived that life of ecstasy which suspends material perceptions and precipitates the whole soul onto a single point. He contemplated, not this girl, but this light which wore a satin pelisse and a velvet hat. The star Sirius had entered the room and he would not have been more dazzled. While the young girl opened the package, unfolded the clothes and blankets, questioned the sick mother kindly and the wounded child tenderly, he watched her every movement, he tried to listen to her words. He knew her eyes, her forehead, her beauty, her height, her gait, but he didn’t know the sound of her voice. He had thought he had caught a few words once in the Luxembourg, but he wasn’t absolutely sure. He would have given ten years of his life to hear her, to be able to carry a little of that music into his soul. But everything was lost in the pitiful displays and Jondrette’s trumpet blasts . This mingled real anger with Marius’s rapture. He brooded over her. He couldn’t imagine that it was really this divine creature he saw in the midst of these filthy beings in this monstrous hovel. It seemed to him that he saw a hummingbird among toads. When she left, he had only one thought: to follow her, to stick to her trail, to leave her only knowing where she lived, not to lose her again at least after having so miraculously found her! He jumped down from the chest of drawers and took his hat. As he put his hand to the bolt of the lock and was about to go out, a reflection stopped him. The corridor was long, the staircase steep, Jondrette talkative, M. Leblanc had doubtless not yet got back into the carriage; if, on turning around in the corridor, or on the staircase, or on the threshold, he saw him, Marius, in this house, obviously he would be alarmed and find a way to escape him again, and it would be all over once again. What to do? Wait a little? But during this wait, the carriage could leave. Marius was perplexed. At last he took a risk and left his room. There was no one left in the corridor. He ran to the staircase. There was no one on the staircase. He went downstairs in haste, and arrived on the boulevard in time to see a cab turn the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier and re-enter Paris. Marius rushed in that direction. Arriving at the corner of the boulevard, he saw the cab again, which was rapidly descending the Rue Mouffetard; the cab was already very far away, no way of catching up with it; what? running after it? impossible; and besides, from the carriage one would certainly notice an individual running at full speed in pursuit of the cab, and the father would recognize him. At that moment, chance Unheard of and marvelous, Marius saw a cabriolet passing empty on the boulevard. There was only one course to take: get into this cabriolet and follow the cab. This was safe, efficient, and without danger. Marius signaled to the coachman to stop and shouted: “On time! ” Marius was without a tie; he was wearing his old work coat with some buttons missing; his shirt was torn at one of the folds on his chest. The coachman stopped, winked, and extended his left hand toward Marius, gently rubbing his index finger with his thumb. “What?” said Marius. “Pay in advance,” said the coachman. Marius remembered that he only had sixteen sous on him. “How much?” he asked. “Forty sous. ” “I’ll pay when I get back.” The coachman, for all reply, whistled the air of La Palisse and whipped his horse. Marius watched the cabriolet drive away with a bewildered air. For the twenty-four sous he lacked, he lost his joy, his happiness, his love! He fell back into darkness! He had seen and he was becoming blind again! He thought bitterly, and, it must be said, with deep regret, of the five francs he had given that very morning to that miserable girl. If he had had those five francs, he would have been saved, he would have been reborn, he would have emerged from limbo and darkness, he would have emerged from isolation, from spleen, from widowhood; he would have reconnected the black thread of his destiny with that beautiful golden thread which had just floated before his eyes and broken once again. He returned to the hovel in despair. He could have told himself that M. Leblanc had promised to return in the evening, and that he would only have to take a better approach this time to follow him; but in his contemplation, he had hardly heard. As he was about to go up the stairs, he saw on the other side of the boulevard, along the deserted wall of the Rue de la Barrière des Gobelins, Jondrette, wrapped in the philanthropist’s overcoat, talking to one of those men of disturbing appearance who are commonly called barrier prowlers; people with ambiguous faces, suspicious monologues, who have an air of bad thought, and who quite habitually sleep during the day, which suggests that they work at night. These two men, talking motionless under the snow that was falling in whirlwinds, formed a group that a policeman would certainly have observed, but which Marius hardly noticed. However, whatever his painful preoccupation, he could not help thinking that this barrier prowler to whom Jondrette was speaking resembled a certain Panchaud, called Printanier, called Bigrenaille, whom Courfeyrac had once shown him and who was considered a rather dangerous night-time wanderer in the neighborhood. We have seen the name of this man in the previous book. This Panchaud, called Printanier, called Bigrenaille, later figured in several criminal trials and has since become a famous rogue. He was still then only a famous rogue. Today he is a tradition among bandits and escarpes. He was a school of thought towards the end of the last reign. And in the evening, at nightfall, at the time when groups form and speak quietly to each other, they would talk about him at La Force in the lion’s den. In this prison, at the very spot where the latrine canal ran under the patrol path, which was used for the incredible escape in broad daylight of thirty prisoners in 1843, one could even read, above the date of these latrines, his name, PANCHAUD, boldly engraved by him on the patrol wall in one of his escape attempts. In 1832, the police were already watching him, but he had not yet seriously begun. Chapter 66. Offers of Service from Misery to Pain. Marius climbed the stairs of the hovel with slow steps; just as he was about to return to his cell, he saw behind him in the corridor the elder Jondrette following him. This girl was odious to see, It was she who had her five francs; it was too late to ask her for them again; the cabriolet was no longer there, the cab was very far away. Besides, she would not give them back. As for questioning her about the residence of the people who had come just now, it was useless; it was obvious that she did not know, since the letter signed Fabantou was addressed to the benevolent gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. Marius entered his room and pushed his door behind him. It did not close; he turned around and saw a hand holding the door half-open. “What is it?” he asked. “Who is there? It was the Jondrette girl. ” “Is it you?” Marius continued almost harshly, “always you! What do you want from me?” She seemed thoughtful and did not look. She no longer had her morning assurance. She had not entered and was standing in the shadow of the corridor, where Marius could see her through the half-open door. “Oh, will you answer?” said Marius. “What do you want from me?” She raised her dull eye to him, in which a kind of light seemed to flicker vaguely, and said to him: “Monsieur Marius, you look sad. What is the matter with you? ” “Me!” said Marius. “Yes, you. ” “I have nothing. ” “Yes! “No. ” “I tell you I do! ” “Leave me alone!” Marius pushed the door open again; she continued to hold it. “Here,” she said, “you are wrong. Although you are not rich, you have been kind this morning. Be so again now. You have given me something to eat; now tell me what is the matter with you. You are unhappy , that is obvious. I would not want you to be unhappy.” What must be done for this? Can I be of any use? Employ me. I’m not asking for your secrets, you won’t need to tell me, but still I can be useful. I can certainly help you, since I help my father. When you have to deliver letters, go to houses, ask door to door, find an address, follow someone, that’s what I’m good for. Well, you can tell me what you have, I’ll go and talk to the people. Sometimes someone talking to people is enough to find out things, and everything is arranged. Use me. An idea crossed Marius’s mind. What branch does one disdain when one feels one is falling? He approached the Jondrette. “Listen…” he said to her. She interrupted him with a flash of joy in her eyes. “Oh! yes, speak to me informally! I like that better.” “Well,” he continued, “you brought this old gentleman here with his daughter…. ” “Yes. ” “Do you know their address? ” “No.
” “Find it for me. ” Jondrette’s eyes, from gloomy, had become joyful, from joyful they became somber. “Is that what you want?” she asked. “Yes. ” “Do you know them? ” “No.” “That is to say,” she continued quickly, “you don’t know her, but you want to know her. ” This “the” which had become “the” had something significant and bitter about it. “Well, can you?” said Marius. “Can you get the beautiful young lady’s address?” There was still a nuance in the beautiful young lady’s words that bothered Marius. He continued: “Well, it doesn’t matter! The address of the father and daughter. Their address, what!” She looked at him fixedly. “What will you give me? ” “Anything you want!” “Anything I want? ” “Yes. ” “You’ll have the address.” She lowered her head, then with a sudden movement she pulled the door shut. Marius found himself alone. He fell onto a chair, his head and both elbows on his bed, lost in thoughts he could not grasp and as if prey to a dizziness. Everything that had happened since morning, the appearance of the angel, his disappearance, what this creature had just told him, a glimmer of hope floating in an immense despair, this is what confusedly filled his brain. Suddenly he was violently torn from his reverie. He heard Jondrette’s high, harsh voice pronounce these words full of the strangest interest for him: “I tell you that I am sure of it and that I recognized him. Who was Jondrette talking about? He had recognized whom? M. Leblanc? The father of his Ursule? What! Did Jondrette know him? Was Marius going to have in this sudden and unexpected way all the information without which his life was obscure to himself? Was he going to know at last who he loved, who was this young girl? Who was his father? Was the shadow so thick that covered them about to clear? Was the veil about to be torn? Ah! heavens! He leaped, rather than climbed, onto the chest of drawers and resumed his place near the small window in the partition. He saw again the interior of the Jondrette dive. Chapter 67. Use of M. Leblanc’s five-franc piece. Nothing had changed in the appearance of the family, except that the wife and daughters had dipped into the bundle and put on woolen stockings and camisoles . Two new blankets were thrown over the two beds. The Jondrette had evidently just returned. He was still out of breath from outside. His daughters were near the fireplace, sitting on the floor, the eldest bandaging the younger’s hand. His wife seemed to have collapsed on the pallet near the fireplace with an astonished face. Jondrette paced up and down the attic with great strides. He had extraordinary eyes. The wife, who seemed timid and stupefied in front of her husband, ventured to say to him: “What, really? Are you sure?” –Sure! Eight years ago! But I recognize him! Ah! I recognize him! I recognized him at once! What, it didn’t jump out at you? –No. –But I told you, though: be careful! But it’s the size, it’s the face, hardly older, there are people who don’t age, I don’t know how they do it; it’s the sound of the voice. He’s better dressed, that’s all! Ah! You mysterious old devil, I’ve got you, go! He stopped and said to his daughters: –Go away, you others!–It’s funny that it didn’t jump out at you. They stood up to obey. The mother stammered: –With his bad hand? –The air will do him good, said Jondrette. Go. It was obvious that this man was one of those to whom one doesn’t talk back . The two girls went out. Just as they were about to go through the door, the father held the eldest daughter by the arm and said with a particular accent: “You will be here at five o’clock sharp. Both of you. I shall need you. ” Marius redoubled his attention. Left alone with his wife, Jondrette resumed walking in the room and circled it two or three times in silence. Then he spent a few minutes tucking the hem of the woman’s shirt he was wearing into the waistband of his trousers. Suddenly he turned towards Jondrette, crossed his arms, and cried: “And do you want me to tell you something? The young lady…” “Well, what!” rejoined the woman, “the young lady?” Marius could not doubt it, it was indeed she they were talking about. He listened with burning anxiety. His whole life was in his ears. But Jondrette had leaned forward and spoken quietly to his wife. Then he stood up and finished aloud: “It’s her! ” “That?” said the wife. “That!” said the husband. No expression could convey what was in the mother’s id. It was surprise, rage, hatred, anger, mixed and combined in a monstrous intonation. It had only taken a few words spoken, of the name no doubt, that her husband had whispered in her ear, so that this fat, dozing woman would wake up, and from being repulsive would become frightful. “Not possible!” she cried. “When I think that my daughters go barefoot and don’t have a dress to wear! What! A satin pelisse, a velvet hat, boots, and everything! For more than two hundred francs’ worth of clothes! How one would think she was a lady! No, you’re mistaken! But first of all, the other one was dreadful, this one isn’t bad! She’s really not bad! It can’t be her! ” “I tell you it’s her. You’ll see.” At this absolute affirmation, Jondrette raised her large, red, blond face and looked at the ceiling with a deformed expression. At that moment she seemed to Marius even more formidable than her husband. She was a sow with the look of a tigress. “What!” she continued, “that horrible beautiful young lady who looked at my daughters with such pity, that would be that slut! Oh! I would like to rip her belly out with my hoofs!” She jumped out of bed and remained standing for a moment, her hair disheveled, her nostrils flaring, her mouth half open, her fists clenched and thrown back. Then she let herself fall back onto the pallet. The man walked back and forth without paying any attention to his female. After a few moments of this silence, he approached Jondrette and stopped before her, his arms crossed, as before. “And do you want me to tell you one more thing? ” “What?” she asked. He answered in a short, low voice: “It’s because my fortune is made.” Jondrette looked at him with that look which means: Is the one who speaks to me going mad? He continued: “Thunder! I’ve been a parishioner of the starve-if-you-have-a-fire-freeze-if-you-have-bread parish for quite a long time now! I’ve had enough of misery! My burden and the burden of others! I’m not joking anymore, I don’t find it funny anymore, enough puns, good God! No more jokes, eternal father! I want to eat my fill, I want to drink my thirst! To gorge! To sleep! To do nothing! I want to have my turn, me, look! before I die! I want to be a bit of a millionaire.” He went around the dive and added: “Like the others. ” “What do you mean?” asked the woman. He shook his head, winked, and raised his voice like a physicist at a crossroads about to give a demonstration: “What do I mean? Listen!” “Shh!” muttered Jondrette, not so loud! If it’s business we mustn’t hear. “Well! Who’s that? The neighbor? I saw him go out just now. Besides , can he hear, that big idiot? And then I tell you, I saw him go out. ” However, by a sort of instinct, Jondrette lowered his voice, not enough, however, for his words to escape Marius. A favorable circumstance, which had allowed Marius to miss nothing of this conversation, was that the falling snow muffled the noise of the cars on the boulevard. This is what Marius heard: “Listen carefully. He’s taken, the Croesus! That’s all. It’s already done. Everything’s arranged. I’ve seen people. He’ll come this evening at six o’clock. Bring his sixty francs, you scoundrel!” Did you see how I slapped that on you, my sixty francs, my landlord, my February 4th! It’s not even a term! How stupid! So he’ll come at six o’clock! That’s the time the neighbor went to dinner. Mother Burgon washes the dishes in town. There’s no one in the house. The neighbor never comes home before eleven o’clock. The little girls will keep watch. You ‘ll help us. He’ll do it. “And if he doesn’t?” asked the woman. Jondrette made a sinister gesture and said, “We’ll do it.” And he burst out laughing. It was the first time Marius had seen him laugh. This laughter was cold. and soft, and made one shiver. Jondrette opened a cupboard near the fireplace and took out an old cap, which he put on his head after brushing it with his sleeve. “Now,” he said, “I’m going out. I still have people to see. Good people. You ‘ll see how it works out. I’ll be out as short a time as possible. It’s a good move. Guard the house.” And, with both fists in the two gussets of his trousers, he remained thoughtful for a moment, then cried: “Do you know how lucky he is that he didn’t recognize me! If he had recognized me on his side, he wouldn’t have come back. He was getting away from us! It was my beard that saved me! My romantic goatee! My pretty little romantic goatee!” And he started laughing again. He went to the window. The snow was still falling and streaked the gray sky. “What a terrible weather!” he said. Then, crossing the frock coat: “The skin is too wide.” “It doesn’t matter,” he added, “he did damn well to leave it for me, the old rascal! Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to get out, and everything would still have been missing! What do things depend on, though!
” And, pushing the cap down over his eyes, he went out. He had barely had time to take a few steps outside when the door opened again and his tawny, intelligent profile reappeared through the opening. “I forgot,” he said. “You’ll have a charcoal stove.” And he threw the five-franc piece the philanthropist had left him into his wife’s apron . “A charcoal stove?” asked the woman. “Yes. ” “How many bushels? ” “Two good ones. ” “That will be thirty sous. With the rest I’ll buy something for dinner. ” “Hell no. ” “Why? ” “Don’t go spending the hundred-sou piece. ” “Why?” –Because I’ll have something to buy of my own. –What? –Something. –How much will you need? –Where is there an ironmonger around here? –Rue Mouffetard. –Ah yes, on the corner of a street, I see the shop. –But tell me how much you’ll need for what you have to buy? –Fifty sous and three francs. –There won’t be any fat left for dinner. –Today is not the time to eat. There are better things to do. –That’s enough, my darling. With this word from his wife, Jondrette closed the door, and this time Marius heard her footsteps recede into the corridor of the hovel and quickly descend the stairs. One o’clock was striking at that moment in Saint-Médard. Chapter 68. Solus cum solo, in loco remoto, non cogitabuntur orare pater noster. Marius, thoughtful as he was, was, as we have said, a firm and energetic nature. The habits of solitary meditation, by developing in him sympathy and compassion, had perhaps diminished his capacity for irritation, but left intact his capacity for indignation; he had the benevolence of a Brahmin and the severity of a judge; he had pity on a toad, but he was crushing a viper. Now, it was into a viper’s hole that his gaze had just plunged; it was a nest of monsters that he had before his eyes. “We must set foot on these wretches,” he said. None of the enigmas he hoped to see dispelled had been cleared up; on the contrary, all had perhaps thickened; he knew nothing more about the beautiful child of the Luxembourg and the man he called M. Leblanc, except that Jondrette knew them. Through the dark words that had been spoken, he could only distinctly see one thing: that an ambush was being prepared, an obscure but terrible ambush; that they were both in great danger, she probably, her father certainly; that they had to be saved; that the hideous schemes of the Jondrettes had to be foiled and the web of these spiders broken. He watched the Jondrette woman for a moment. She had pulled an old tin stove out of a corner and was rummaging through some scrap metal. He got down from the chest of drawers as quietly as he could, taking care not to make a sound. In his dread of what was about to happen and in the horror with which the Jondrette women had filled him, he felt a sort of joy at the idea that he might perhaps be able to render such a service to the woman he loved.
But how could he do this? Warn the people who were threatened? Where could he find them? He didn’t know their address. They had reappeared for a moment before his eyes, then plunged back into the immense depths of Paris. Wait for M. Leblanc at the door at six o’clock in the evening, just as he arrived, and warn him of the trap? But Jondrette and his men would see him lying in wait, the place was deserted, they would be stronger than him, they would find a way to seize him or drive him away, and the one Marius wanted to save would be lost. One o’clock had just struck, the ambush was to be carried out at six o’clock. Marius had five hours before him. There was only one thing to do. He put on his passable coat, tied a scarf around his neck, took his hat, and went out, making no more noise than if he had been walking on moss with bare feet. Besides, Jondrette continued to rummage in his scrap metal. Once outside the house, he reached the Rue du Petit-Banquier. He was towards the middle of this street near a very low wall which one could climb over in certain places and which opened onto a vacant lot, he walked slowly, preoccupied as he was, the snow muffled his steps; Suddenly he heard voices talking very close to him. He turned his head, the street was deserted, there was no one there, it was broad daylight, and yet he could clearly hear voices. He had the idea of looking over the wall he was passing by. There were indeed two men leaning against the wall, sitting in the snow and talking to each other in low voices. These two figures were unknown to him. One was a bearded man in a blouse and the other a long-haired man in rags. The bearded man had a Greek skullcap, the other was bare-headed and had snow in his hair. By putting his head above them, Marius could hear. The long-haired man nudged the other with his elbow and said: “With Patron-Minette, it can’t be missed. ” “Do you think so?” said the bearded man; and the long-haired man continued: “It will be a bundle of five hundred francs for each of them, and the worst that can happen: five years, six years, ten years at the most! ” The other replied with some hesitation and shivering under his Greek cap: “That’s a real thing. You can’t go against such things. ” “I tell you that the matter cannot fail,” the long-haired man continued. ” Father Thing’s maringotte will be harnessed.” Then they began to talk about a melodrama they had seen the day before at the Gaîté. Marius continued on his way. It seemed to him that the obscure words of these men, so strangely hidden behind this wall and crouching in the snow, were perhaps not without some connection with Jondrette’s abominable projects. That must be the matter. He headed towards the Faubourg Saint-Marceau and asked in the first shop he came across where there was a police commissioner. He was directed to Rue de Pontoise and number 14. Marius went there. And passing a baker, he bought a two-sou loaf and ate it, foreseeing that he would not have dinner. On the way, he did justice to providence. He reflected that, if he had not given his five francs in the morning to the Jondrette girl, he would have followed Mr. Leblanc’s cab, and consequently ignored everything, that nothing would have prevented the Jondrettes from ambush, and that Mr. Leblanc was lost, and no doubt his daughter with him. Chapter 69. In which a police officer punches a lawyer twice. Arriving at number 14, Rue de Pontoise, he went up to the first floor and asked for the police commissioner. “The police commissioner isn’t here,” said a random office boy ; “but there’s an inspector who’s replacing him. Would you like to speak to him? Is it urgent? ” “Yes,” said Marius. The office boy showed him into the commissioner’s office. A tall man was standing there behind a grille, leaning against a stove, and with both hands raising the sides of a large, three-collared carrick. He had a square face, a thin, firm mouth, thick, very fierce, grizzled whiskers, and a look that would turn your pockets inside out. One might have said of that look, not that it penetrated, but that it searched. This man didn’t look much less ferocious or much less formidable than Jondrette; the mastiff is sometimes no less disquieting to encounter than the wolf. “What do you want?” he said to Marius, without adding “sir. ” “Mr. Police Commissioner? ” “He’s away. I’m replacing him. ” “It’s on a very secret matter. ” “Then speak. ” “And very urgent. ” “Then speak quickly.” This man, calm and abrupt, was at once frightening and reassuring. He inspired fear and confidence. Marius told him the story.–That a person he only knew by sight was to be lured into an ambush that very evening;–that living in the room next to the lair, he, Marius Pontmercy, lawyer, had heard the whole plot through the partition;–that the villain who had devised the trap was a man named Jondrette;–that he would have accomplices, probably barrier prowlers, among others a certain Panchaud, called Printanier, called Bigrenaille;–that Jondrette’s daughters would be keeping watch;–that there was no way of warning the threatened man, since they didn’t even know his name;–and that finally all this was to take place at six o’clock in the evening at the most deserted point of the Boulevard de l’Hôpital, in the house at number 50-52. At this number, the inspector raised his head and said coldly: “So it’s in the room at the end of the corridor? ” “Precisely,” said Marius, and added: “Do you know this house?” The inspector remained silent for a moment, then replied, warming the heel of his boot at the stove’s vent: “Apparently.”
He continued under his breath, speaking less to Marius than to his tie: “There must be a bit of Patron-Minette in there.” This word struck Marius. “Patron-Minette,” he said. “I have indeed heard that word pronounced.” And he told the inspector the dialogue between the long-haired man and the bearded man in the snow behind the wall on the Rue du Petit-Banquier. The inspector grumbled: “The long-haired man must be Brujon, and the bearded man must be Demi-Liard,” said Deux-Milliards. He had lowered his eyelids again and was meditating. “As for Father Thing, I can see him. I’ve just burned my carrick. They always make too much fire in those damned stoves. Number 50-52. Formerly Gorbeau’s property. ” Then he looked at Marius. “You only saw that bearded man and that long-haired one? ” “And Panchaud. ” “You didn’t see some kind of devilish little dandy prowling around there? ” “No.” “Nor a great big, solid mass that looks like the elephant in the Jardin des Plantes? ” “No.” “Nor a clever one that looks like an old-fashioned redtail? ” “No.”
“As for the fourth, no one sees him, not even his adjutants, clerks, and employees. It’s hardly surprising that you didn’t see him. ” “No. What are all those beings,” asked Marius, “what are they?” The inspector replied: “Besides, it’s not their time.” He fell silent again, then continued: –50-52. I know the shack. There’s no way we can hide in it. inside without the artists noticing. Then they would have to cancel the vaudeville. They are so modest! The public bothers them. Not that, not that. I want to hear them sing and make them dance. This monologue finished, he turned to Marius and asked him, looking at him fixedly: “Will you be afraid?” “Of what?” said Marius. “Of these men? ” “No more than of you!” replied Marius harshly, who was beginning to notice that this spy had not yet addressed him as sir. The inspector looked at Marius even more fixedly and continued with a sort of sententious solemnity. “You speak like a brave man and like an honest man. Courage does not fear crime, and honesty does not fear authority.” Marius interrupted him: “All right; but what do you intend to do?” The inspector merely replied: “The tenants of that house have master keys to get into their homes at night. You must have one? ” “Yes,” said Marius. “Do you have it with you? ” “Yes. ” “Give it to me,” said the inspector. Marius took his key from his waistcoat, handed it to the inspector, and added: “If you believe me, you will come in force.” The inspector gave Marius the look Voltaire gives a provincial academician who has suggested a rhyme; he plunged his two hands, which were enormous, into the two pockets of his carrick, and drew out two small steel pistols, one of those pistols called “coups de poing.” He presented them to Marius, saying quickly and curtly: “Take this. Go home. Hide in your room. Let people think you’re out. They are loaded. Each with two bullets.” You will observe, there is a hole in the wall, as you told me. People will come. Let them go a little. When you judge the thing to be right, and it is time to stop it, you will fire a pistol shot . Not too soon. The rest is up to me. A pistol shot in the air, at the ceiling, anywhere. Above all not too soon. Wait until there is a beginning of execution, you are a lawyer, you know what that is like. Marius took the pistols and put them in the side pocket of his coat. “It makes a bump like that, it is obvious,” said the inspector. “Put them in your pockets instead.” Marius hid the pistols in his pockets. “Now,” continued the inspector, “there is not a minute to lose for anyone. What time is it? Two thirty. Is it for seven o’clock? ” “Six o’clock,” said Marius. “I have time,” the inspector continued, “but I only have time. Don’t forget anything I told you. Bang. A pistol shot. ” “Don’t worry,” replied Marius. And as Marius put his hand to the latch of the door to leave, the inspector called out to him: “By the way, if you need me between now and then, come or send here. You should send for Inspector Javert. ” Chapter 70. Jondrette does his shopping. A few moments later, around three o’clock, Courfeyrac happened to be passing by Rue Mouffetard in the company of Bossuet. The snow was getting heavier and filling the air. Bossuet was saying to Courfeyrac: “Seeing all these snowflakes falling, you’d think there was a plague of white butterflies in the sky.” Suddenly, Bossuet saw Marius coming up the street towards the barrier and looking peculiar. “Look!” exclaimed Bossuet. Marius! “I saw him,” said Courfeyrac. “Let’s not talk to him. ” “Why? ” “He’s busy. ” “What? ” “Can’t you see the look on his face? ” “What look? ” “He looks like someone who’s following someone. ” “That’s true,” said Bossuet. “Look at the eyes he’s making!” continued Courfeyrac. “But who the devil is he following? ” “Some cutesy-looking-girl-in-a-flowery-bonnet! He’s in love.” “But,” observed Bossuet, “I don’t see any mimi, nor any goton, nor any flowered bonnet in the street. There isn’t a woman. ” Courfeyrac looked, and cried: “He’s following a man! ” A man, indeed, wearing a cap, and whose gray beard could be seen although he was only seen from behind, was walking about twenty paces in front of Marius. This man was dressed in a brand new frock coat, too big for him, and in dreadful trousers in tatters all blackened by mud. Bossuet burst out laughing. “What is that man? ” “That?” resumed Courfeyrac, “he’s a poet. Poets quite readily wear the trousers of rabbit-skin merchants and the frock coats of peers of France.” “Let’s see where Marius is going,” said Bossuet, “let’s see where this man is going, let’s follow them, eh? ” “Bossuet!” cried Courfeyrac, “eagle of Meaux! You are a prodigious brute. Following a man who follows a man! ” They retraced their steps. Marius had indeed seen Jondrette pass by on the Rue Mouffetard, and was spying on him. Jondrette went ahead of him without suspecting that someone was already watching him. He left the Rue Mouffetard, and Marius saw him enter one of the most hideous hovels on the Rue Gracieuse. He stayed there for about a quarter of an hour , then returned to the Rue Mouffetard. He stopped at an ironmonger’s who was at that time at the corner of the Rue Pierre-Lombard, and a few minutes later, Marius saw him come out of the shop, holding in his hand a large cold chisel with a whitewood handle, which he hid under his frock coat. At the height of the Rue du Petit-Gentilly, he turned left and quickly reached the Rue du Petit-Banquier. Day was falling, the snow that had stopped for a moment had just started again. Marius lay in ambush at the very corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier, which was deserted as always, and he did not follow Jondrette there. It was a good thing he did, for, having reached the low wall where Marius had heard the long-haired man and the bearded man talking, Jondrette turned around, made sure that no one was following him or seeing him, then climbed over the wall, and disappeared. The vacant lot bordered by this wall communicated with the backyard of a disreputable former car-renting business that had gone bankrupt and who still had a few old car-storage trucks under sheds. Marius thought it wise to take advantage of Jondrette’s absence to return; besides, the hour was getting late; Every evening, Mame Burgon, when leaving to go and wash the dishes in town, used to lock the door of the house, which was always closed at dusk. Marius had given his key to the police inspector; it was therefore important that he hurry. Evening had come; night was almost closed; there was now, on the horizon and in the immensity, only one point lit by the sun, it was the moon. It was rising red behind the low dome of the Salpêtrière. Marius strode back to No. 50-52. The door was still open when he arrived. He climbed the stairs on tiptoe and slipped along the wall of the corridor to his room. This corridor, it will be remembered, was lined on both sides with attics, all at that moment to let and empty. Mame Burgon usually left the doors open. As he passed one of these doors, Marius thought he saw in the uninhabited cell four motionless men’s heads, vaguely whitened by the remnants of daylight falling through a skylight. Marius didn’t try to see, not wanting to be seen. He managed to get back into his room unnoticed and silently. It was time. A moment later, he heard Mame Burgon leaving and the door of the house closing.
Chapter 71. Where the song will be found again to an English tune fashionable in 1832. Marius sat up on his bed. It could have been five thirty. Only half an hour separated him from what was about to happen. He heard his arteries beating like the ticking of a watch in the darkness. He thought of this double march which was taking place at this moment in the darkness, crime advancing on one side, justice coming from the other. He was not afraid, but he could not think without a certain shudder of the things which were about to happen. Like all those who are suddenly assailed by a surprising adventure, this whole day had the effect of a dream on him, and, in order not to believe himself prey to a nightmare, he needed to feel in his pockets the cold of the two steel pistols. It was no longer snowing; the moon, brighter and brighter, was emerging from the mists, and its light mingled with the white reflection of the fallen snow gave the room a twilight appearance. There was light in the Jondrette hovel. Marius saw the hole in the partition shining with a red light which seemed bloody to him. It was true that this light could hardly be produced by a candle. Besides, there was no movement at the Jondrettes’, no one stirred, no one spoke, not a breath, the silence was icy and profound, and without this light one would have thought one was standing beside a sepulchre. Marius gently took off his boots and pushed them under his bed . A few minutes passed. Marius heard the downstairs door turn on its hinges, a heavy, quick step mounted the stairs and ran down the corridor, the latch of the den was raised with a noise; it was Jondrette coming in. Immediately several voices were raised. The whole family was in the attic. Only they were silent in the absence of the master like the wolf cubs in the absence of the wolf. “It’s me,” he said. “Good evening, Father-in-law!” the girls yelped. “Well?” said the mother. “Everything’s fine with Papa,” replied Jondrette, “but my feet are as cold as a dog.” Well, that’s it, you’re dressed. You’ll have to inspire confidence. “All ready to go out. ” “You won’t forget anything I told you? You’ll do everything? ” “Don’t worry. ” “It’s just that…” said Jondrette. And he didn’t finish his sentence. Marius heard him put something heavy on the table, probably the scissors he had bought. “Oh, did we eat here?” continued Jondrette. “Yes,” said his mother, “I had three large potatoes and some salt. I took advantage of the fire to cook them. ” “Good,” replied Jondrette. “Tomorrow I’ll take you to dinner with me. There will be a duck and accessories. You’ll dine like Charles-Dix. Everything ‘s fine!”
Then he added, lowering his voice. “The mousetrap is open. The cats are here.” He lowered his voice again and said: “Put that in the fire.” Marius heard the clicking of coal being struck with tongs or an iron tool, and Jondrette continued: “Have you greased the door hinges so they don’t make any noise? ” “Yes,” replied the mother. “What time is it?” ” Six o’clock almost. Half past seven just struck at Saint-Médard. ” “The devil!” said Jondrette. “The little ones must go and keep watch. Come on, you others, listen here. ” There was a whisper. Jondrette’s voice rose again: “Has Burgon gone?” “Yes,” said the mother. “Are you sure there’s no one at the neighbor’s? ” “He hasn’t come home all day, and you know very well that it’s his dinner time. ” “Are you sure? ” “Sure.” “It doesn’t matter,” Jondrette continued, “there’s no harm in going to his house to see if he’s there. My daughter, take the candle and go there.” Marius dropped to his hands and knees and silently crawled under his bed. He had barely curled up there when he saw a light through the cracks in his door. “P’pa,” a voice called out, “he’s out.” He recognized the voice of the eldest daughter. “Have you been in?” asked the father. “No,” replied the daughter, “but since his key is in his door, he’s went out. The father shouted: “Come in anyway.” The door opened, and Marius saw the tall Jondrette enter, a candle in her hand. She was like in the morning, only even more frightening in this light. She walked straight to the bed. Marius had an inexpressible moment of anxiety, but there was a mirror nailed to the wall near the bed; that was where she was going. She stood on tiptoe and looked at herself in it. A sound of rustling iron could be heard in the next room. She smoothed her hair with the palm of her hand and smiled at the mirror while humming in her broken, sepulchral voice: ” Our loves lasted a whole week, Ah! How short are the moments of happiness! To adore each other for eight days, it was well worth it! The time of love should last forever! Should last forever! should last forever!” Meanwhile, Marius trembled. It seemed impossible to him that she could not hear his breathing. She went to the window and looked out, speaking aloud with that half-mad air she had. “How ugly Paris is when he’s put on a white shirt!” she said. She returned to the mirror and made faces at herself again, looking at herself successively from the front and from a three-quarter view. “Well!” cried the father, “what are you doing? ” “I’m looking under the bed and under the furniture,” she replied, continuing to arrange her hair, “there’s no one there. ” “You fool!” yelled the father. “Here at once! And let’s not waste time. ” “I’m going! I’m going!” she said. “There’s no time for anything in their shack!” She hummed: “You’re leaving me to go to glory, My sad heart will follow your steps everywhere.” She took one last look in the mirror and went out, closing the door behind her. A moment later, Marius heard the sound of the two girls’ bare feet in the corridor and Jondrette’s voice calling to them: “Be very careful! One on the side of the barrier, the other at the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier. Don’t lose sight of the door of the house for a minute, and if you see anything, right here! Four at a time! You have a key to get in. ” The eldest daughter grumbled: “Standing guard barefoot in the snow!” “Tomorrow you’ll have scarab-colored silk boots!” said the father. They went downstairs, and a few seconds later, the sound of the downstairs door closing announced that they were outside. There was no one left in the house but Marius and the Jondrettes; and probably also the mysterious beings glimpsed by Marius in the twilight behind the door of the uninhabited attic. Chapter 72. Use of Marius’s five-franc piece. Marius judged that the time had come to resume his place at his observatory. In the blink of an eye, and with the agility of his age, he was near the hole in the partition. He looked. The interior of the Jondrette lodgings presented a singular appearance, and Marius explained to himself the strange brightness he had noticed there. A candle burned in a verdigris candlestick, but it was not this which really lit the room. The whole hovel was as if illuminated by the reverberation of a rather large tin stove placed in the fireplace and filled with lighted coal; the stove that the Jondrette had prepared that morning. The coal was hot and the stove was red, a blue flame danced there and helped to distinguish the shape of the chisel Jondrette had bought on the rue Pierre-Lombard, which was reddening as it was sunk in the embers. In a corner near the door, and as if arranged for some intended purpose, were seen two piles, one of which appeared to be a pile of scrap iron, the other a pile of ropes. All this, for someone who had known nothing of what was about to happen, would have made the mind float between a very sinister idea and a very simple one. The den thus lit resembled more a forge than a mouth of hell, But Jondrette, in that light, looked more like a demon than a blacksmith. The heat of the brazier was such that the candle on the table melted on the side of the stove and burned itself out at an angle. An old, dull copper lantern, worthy of Diogenes become Cartouche, stood on the mantelpiece. The stove, placed in the hearth itself, beside the almost extinguished embers, sent its steam up the chimney flue and gave off no odor. The moon, entering through the four panes of the window, threw its whiteness into the purple and blazing attic, and to the poetic mind of Marius, pensive even at the moment of action, it was like a thought of heaven mingled with the deformed dreams of earth. A breath of air, penetrating through the broken pane, helped to dissipate the smell of coal and to conceal the stove. The Jondrette den was, if we recall what we have said about the Gorbeau hovel, admirably chosen to serve as the scene for a violent and dark deed and as the setting for a crime. It was the most remote room in the most isolated house on the most deserted boulevard in Paris. If the ambush did not exist, it would have been invented there. The entire thickness of a house and a crowd of uninhabited rooms separated this den from the boulevard, and the only window it had looked out onto vast wastelands enclosed by walls and palisades. Jondrette had lit his pipe, sat down on the ragged chair, and was smoking. His wife was speaking to him in a low voice. If Marius had been Courfeyrac, that is to say, one of those men who laugh on all occasions in life, he would have burst out laughing when his gaze fell on the Jondrette woman. She wore a black hat with feathers, quite similar to the hats worn by the heralds at the coronation of Charles X, an immense tartan shawl over her knitted petticoat, and the men’s shoes her daughter had disdained that morning. It was this attire that had drawn from Jondrette the exclamation: “Good! You’ve dressed yourself! You’ve done well. You must be able to inspire confidence!” As for Jondrette, he had not taken off the new, oversized surtout that M. Leblanc had given him, and his costume continued to offer that contrast of frock coat and trousers which, in Courfeyrac’s eyes, constituted the ideal of the poet. Suddenly Jondrette raised his voice: “By the way! I’m thinking of it. In this weather, he’ll be coming in a cab. Light the lantern, take it, and go downstairs. You’ll stand behind the door below.” The moment you hear the carriage stop, you will open it immediately, he will get in, you will light him on the stairs and in the corridor, and while he is coming in here, you will go back down quickly, you will pay the coachman, and you will send the cab away. “And money?” asked the woman. Jondrette rummaged in his trousers, and gave her five francs. “What is that?” she cried. Jondrette replied with dignity: “It is the monarch that the neighbor gave this morning.” And he added: “Do you know? We need two chairs here. ” “Why? ” “To sit on.” Marius felt a shiver run through his loins when he heard Jondrette make this peaceful reply: “Pardieu! I will fetch you the neighbor’s.” And with a quick movement she opened the door of the dive and went out into the corridor. Marius did not have the physical time to get down from the chest of drawers, go to his bed and hide there. “Take the candle,” cried Jondrette. “No,” she said, “that would embarrass me, I have to carry the two chairs. It’s moonlight.” Marius heard Mother Jondrette’s heavy hand fumbling for her key in the darkness. The door opened. He remained rooted to his place with shock and stupor. Mother Jondrette came in. The attic skylight let a ray of moonlight pass between two large patches of shadow. One of these patches of shadow completely covered the wall against which Marius was leaning, so that he disappeared into it. Mother Jondrette looked up, did not see Marius, took the two chairs, the only ones Marius possessed, and left, letting the door fall noisily behind her. She went back into the den: “Here are the two chairs. ” “And here is the lantern,” said the husband. “Come down quickly.” She hastily obeyed, and Jondrette remained alone. He arranged the two chairs on either side of the table, turned the chisel over in the brazier, placed an old screen in front of the fireplace, which hid the stove, then went to the corner where the pile of ropes was and bent down as if to examine something. Marius then recognized that what he had taken for a shapeless heap was a very well-made rope ladder with wooden rungs and two crampons for hanging it. This ladder and some large tools, real masses of iron, which were mixed in with the heap of scrap iron piled up behind the door, were not in the Jondrette dive that morning and had evidently been brought there in the afternoon, during Marius’s absence. “They are edge-cutter’s tools,” thought Marius. If Marius had been a little more learned in this genre, he would have recognized, in what he took for edge-cutter’s tools, certain instruments capable of forcing a lock or picking a door, and others capable of cutting or slicing, the two families of sinister tools that thieves call cadets and fauchants. The fireplace and the table with the two chairs were precisely opposite Marius. The stove being hidden, the room was lit only by the candle; the smallest shard on the table or on the mantelpiece cast a long shadow. A spilt water jug masked half a wall. There was in this room an indescribable hideous and menacing calm. One felt there the expectation of something dreadful. Jondrette had let his pipe go out, a grave sign of preoccupation, and had come to sit down again. The candle made the fierce and fine angles of his face stand out. He had frowns and abrupt flourishes of his right hand as if he were responding to the last advice of a gloomy interior monologue. In one of those obscure replies he made to himself, he quickly brought the table drawer towards him, took out a long kitchen knife which was hidden there and tested its edge on his fingernail. This done, he put the knife back in the drawer, which he pushed back. Marius, for his part, seized the pistol which was in his right pocket, withdrew it, and cocked it. As the pistol cocked, it made a small, clear, dry sound. Jondrette started and half rose in his chair: “Who’s there?” he cried. Marius held his breath, Jondrette listened for a moment, then began to laugh, saying: “How stupid of me! It’s the partition that’s creaking.” Marius kept the pistol in his hand. Chapter 73. Marius’s two chairs face each other. Suddenly the distant and melancholy vibration of a bell shook the panes. Six o’clock struck at Saint-Médard. Jondrette marked each stroke with a nod of his head. When the sixth struck, he snuffed out the candle with his fingers. Then he began to walk about the room, listened in the corridor, walked, listened again: “I hope he comes!” he grumbled; then he returned to his chair. He had hardly sat down again when the door opened. Mother Jondrette had opened it and remained in the corridor, making a horrible, amiable grimace, which was illuminated from below by one of the holes in the dim lantern . “Come in, sir,” she said. “Come in, my benefactor,” repeated Jondrette, rising hastily. M. Leblanc appeared. He had an air of serenity which made him singularly venerable. He placed four louis on the table. “Monsieur Fabantou,” he said, “here is your rent and your first needs. We will see afterward. ” “God reward you, my generous benefactor!” said Jondrette; and, quickly approaching his wife: “Send the cab back!” She slipped away while her husband was lavishing greetings and offering a chair to Monsieur Leblanc. A moment later she returned and whispered in his ear: “It is done. The snow, which had been falling continuously since morning, was so deep that no one had heard the cab arrive, and no one heard it leave. Meanwhile, Monsieur Leblanc had sat down. Jondrette had taken possession of the other chair opposite Monsieur Leblanc. Now, to form an idea of the scene which is to follow, let the reader picture in his mind the icy night, the solitudes of the Salpêtrière covered with snow, and white in the moonlight like immense shrouds, the nightlight brightness of the street lamps reddening here and there these tragic boulevards and the long rows of black elms, not a passerby perhaps for a quarter of a league around, the Gorbeau hovel at its highest point of silence, horror and night, in this hovel, in the midst of these solitudes, in the midst of this shadow, the vast Jondrette garret lit by a candle, and in this hovel two men seated at a table, M. Leblanc tranquil, Jondrette smiling and frightful, Jondrette, the mother wolf, in a corner, and, behind the partition, Marius invisible, standing, not missing a word, not missing a movement, his eye on the watch, pistol in hand. Marius, for the rest, felt only horror, but no fear. He gripped the butt of the pistol and felt reassured. “I’ll arrest this wretch whenever I want,” he thought. He felt the police somewhere there in ambush, waiting for the agreed signal and ready to extend their arms. He hoped, moreover, that from this violent encounter between Jondrette and M. Leblanc some light would spring forth on everything he had an interest in knowing. Chapter 74. Concerning Oneself with Dark Backgrounds. Hardly seated, M. Leblanc turned his eyes toward the empty pallets. “How is the poor little wounded girl?” he asked. “Unwell,” replied Jondrette with a heartbroken and grateful smile, “very unwell, my worthy sir. Her elder sister took her to La Bourbe to be dressed. You will see them; they will be back presently. ” “Madame Fabantou seems better to me?” continued M. Leblanc, casting his eyes on the strange attire of the Jondrette, who, standing between him and the door, as if she were already guarding the exit, regarded him in a threatening and almost combative posture. “She is dying,” said Jondrette. “But what do you expect, sir? She has so much courage, that woman! She is not a woman, she is an ox. ” The Jondrette, touched by the compliment, exclaimed with the simpering of a flattered monster: “You are always too good for me, Monsieur Jondrette! ” “Jondrette,” said M. Leblanc, “I thought your name was Fabantou?” “Fabantou, said Jondrette!” the husband quickly resumed. “An artist’s nickname!” And, throwing his wife a shrug of the shoulders that M. Leblanc did not see, he continued with an emphatic and caressing inflection of his voice: “Ah! It’s that we’ve always made good bedfellows, this poor darling and I! What would be left for us if we didn’t have that! We are so unhappy, my respectable sir! We have arms, no work! We have heart, no work! I don’t know how the government arranges this, but, on my word of honor, sir, I ‘m not a Jacobin, sir, I’m not a bousingot, I don’t want them any harm, but if I were the ministers, on my most sacred word, things would be different. For example, I wanted my daughters to learn the craft of cardboard making. You will say to me: What! A trade? Yes! A trade! A simple trade! A livelihood! What a fall, my benefactor! What a degradation when we have been what we were! Alas! nothing remains to us of our time of prosperity! Only one thing, a painting which I hold dear, but which I would nevertheless get rid of, for one must live! item, one must live! While Jondrette was speaking, with a sort of apparent disorder which detracted nothing from the thoughtful and sagacious expression of his countenance, Marius raised his eyes and perceived at the back of the room someone he had not yet seen. A man had just entered, so quietly that the door hinges had not been heard turning. This man wore a purple knitted waistcoat, old, worn, stained, cut and making gaping mouths at every fold, wide cotton velvet trousers, clog slippers on his feet, no shirt, his neck bare, his arms bare and tattooed, and his face smeared with black. He had sat silently with his arms crossed on the nearest bed, and, as he was standing behind Jondrette, he was only dimly distinguishable. That sort of magnetic instinct which alerts the eye made M. Leblanc turn almost at the same time as Marius. He could not help a movement of surprise which did not escape Jondrette. “Ah! I see!” cried Jondrette, buttoning himself with a complacent air . “Are you looking at your frock coat? It suits me! My goodness, it suits me!
” “Who is that man?” said M. Leblanc. “That!” said Jondrette, “he’s a neighbor. Don’t pay any attention. ” The neighbor had a singular appearance. However, chemical factories abound in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. Many factory workers may have black faces. Mr. Leblanc ‘s whole person exuded a candid and intrepid confidence. He continued: “Pardon me, what were you saying to me, Mr. Fabantou? ” “I was telling you, sir and dear protector,” replied Jondrette, leaning his elbows on the table and contemplating Mr. Leblanc with fixed and tender eyes rather like the eyes of a boa constrictor, “I was telling you that I had a painting to sell.” There was a slight noise at the door. A second man had just entered and sat down on the bed behind Jondrette. Like the first, he had bare arms and a mask of ink or soot. Although this man had literally slipped into the room, he could not prevent Mr. Leblanc from seeing him. “Don’t be careful,” said Jondrette. “They are people of the house. I was saying, then, that I had a painting left, a precious painting….–Here, sir, see.” He got up, went to the wall at the bottom of which was placed the panel we have spoken of, and turned it over, while leaving it leaning against the wall. It was something in fact that resembled a painting and that the candle lit up more or less. Marius could not make out anything about it, Jondrette being placed between the painting and him; only he glimpsed a crude scribble, and a sort of principal figure illuminated with the garish crudeness of fairground canvases and screen paintings . “What is this?” asked M. Leblanc. Jondrette exclaimed: “A painting by a master, a painting of great value, my benefactor! I hold it as dear as my two daughters, it brings back memories! But, as I have told you and I will not go back on it, I am so unhappy that I would get rid of it.” Whether by chance, or because he was beginning to feel uneasy, while examining the picture, Mr. Leblanc’s gaze returned to the back of the room. There were now four men, three sitting on the bed, one standing near the doorframe, all four bare-armed, motionless, their faces smeared with black. One of those on the bed was leaning against the wall, his eyes closed, and one would have said he was asleep. This one was old; his white hair on his black face was horrible. The other two seemed young. One was bearded, the other hairy. Neither had shoes; those who didn’t were barefoot . Jondrette noticed that M. Leblanc’s eye was fixed on these men. “They’re friends. They’re neighbors,” he said. “They’re smeared because they work in the coalfield. They’re smokers. Don’t worry about it, my benefactor, but buy my painting. Have pity on my misery. I won’t sell it to you for much. How much do you value it? ” “But,” said M. Leblanc, looking Jondrette between the eyes, like a man on his guard, “it’s some tavern sign. It’s worth a good three francs. ” Jondrette replied gently: “Have you got your wallet there? I’d be happy with a thousand crowns.” M.
Leblanc stood up, leaned against the wall, and quickly looked around the room. He had Jondrette on his left, near the window, and Jondrette and the four men on his right, near the door. The four men did not move and did not even seem to see him; Jondrette had begun to speak again in a plaintive tone, with such a vague eye and such a pitiful intonation that M. Leblanc could have believed that what he saw was simply a man who had gone mad with poverty . “If you do not buy my picture, dear benefactor,” said Jondrette, “I am without resources; I have nothing left but to throw myself into the river. When I think that I wanted to teach my two daughters how to make semi-fine cardboard, how to make Christmas boxes. Well !” You need a table with a board at the bottom so the glasses don’t fall to the floor, you need a stove made for that purpose, a pot with three compartments for the different degrees of strength the glue must have depending on whether it is used for wood, paper, or fabric, a knife for cutting the cardboard, a mold for adjusting it, a hammer for nailing the steel, brushes, the devil, do I know? And all that to earn four sous a day! And we work fourteen hours! And each box passes through the worker’s hands thirteen times! And wet the paper! And not stain anything! And keep the glue hot! The devil, I tell you! Four sous a day! How do you expect us to live? While speaking, Jondrette did not look at M. Leblanc who was watching him. M. Leblanc’s eye was fixed on Jondrette and Jondrette’s eye on the door. Marius’s breathless attention went from one to the other. M. Leblanc seemed to be asking himself: Is he an idiot? Jondrette repeated two or three times with all sorts of varied inflections in the drawling and supplicating style: I have nothing left to do but throw myself into the river! I went down three steps the other day to do that near the Austerlitz bridge! Suddenly his dull eyes lit up with a hideous blaze, this little man stood up and became frightening, he took a step towards M. Leblanc and shouted to him in a thunderous voice: “That’s not all there is to it! Do you recognize me?” Chapter 75. The Ambush. The door of the attic had just opened abruptly, and revealed three men in blue linen blouses, masked with black paper masks . The first was thin and had a long, iron-tipped cudgel; the second, who was a sort of colossus, carried, by the middle of the handle and with the axe at the bottom, a maul for knocking out oxen. The third, a man with stocky shoulders, less thin than the first, less massive than the second, held in his fist an enormous key stolen from some prison gate. It seems that it was the arrival of these men that Jondrette was awaiting. A rapid dialogue ensued between him and the man with the cudgel, the thin one. “Is everything ready?” said Jondrette. “Yes,” replied the thin man. “Where is Montparnasse? ” “The young leading man stopped to talk to your daughter.” “Which one?” “The eldest. ” “Is there a cab downstairs? ” “Yes .” ” Is the carriage harnessed? ” “Harnessed. ” “Two good horses? ” ” Excellent. ” “Is it waiting where I said it should wait? ” “Yes. ” “Good,” said Jondrette. M. Leblanc was very pale. He looked at everything in the dive around him like a man who understands where he has fallen, and his head, turned in turn towards all the heads around him, moved on his neck with an attentive and astonished slowness, but there was nothing in his expression that resembled fear. He had made the table an improvised refuge; and this man who, a moment before, had looked like nothing more than a good old man, had suddenly become a sort of athlete, and was placing his sturdy fist on the back of his chair with a formidable and surprising gesture. This old man, so firm and so brave in the face of such danger, seemed to be one of those natures that are courageous as they are good, easily and simply. The father of a woman we love is never a stranger to us. Marius felt proud of this stranger. Three of the bare-armed men of whom Jondrette had said: “They are smoke-makers,” had taken from the pile of scrap metal, one a large pair of shears, another a pair of weighing pliers, the third a hammer, and had placed themselves across the door without uttering a word. The old man remained on the bed, and had only opened his eyes. Jondrette sat down beside him. Marius thought that in a few seconds the moment to intervene would have arrived, and he raised his right hand toward the ceiling, in the direction of the corridor, ready to fire his pistol. Jondrette, his conversation with the man with the cudgel over, turned again to M. Leblanc and repeated his question, accompanying it with that low, contained, and terrible laugh of his: “You don’t recognize me then?” M. Leblanc looked him in the face and replied: “No.” Then Jondrette came to the table. He leaned over the candle, crossing his arms, bringing his angular and ferocious jaw close to M. Leblanc’s calm face , and advancing as far as he could without M. Leblanc recoiling, and, in that posture of a wild beast about to bite, he cried: “My name is not Fabantou, my name is not Jondrette, my name is Thénardier! I am the innkeeper of Montfermeil! Do you hear clearly? Thénardier! Now do you recognize me?” An imperceptible flush passed over M. Leblanc’s brow, and he replied without his voice trembling or rising, with his usual placidity: “No more.” Marius did not hear this reply. Anyone who had seen him at that moment in that darkness would have seen him haggard, stupid, and thunderstruck. At the moment when Jondrette had said: “My name is Thénardier,” Marius had trembled all over and had leaned against the wall as if he had felt the cold of a sword blade through his heart. Then his right arm, ready to release the signal shot, had slowly lowered, and at the moment when Jondrette had repeated, “Do you hear clearly, Thénardier?” Marius’s failing fingers had dropped the pistol. Jondrette, in revealing who he was, had not moved M. Leblanc, but he had upset Marius. This name of Thénardier, which M. Leblanc did not seem to know, Marius knew it. Let us remember what this name was for him! This name, he had carried it on his heart, written in his father’s will! He carried it in the depths of his thoughts, in the depths of his memory, in this sacred recommendation: A man named Thénardier saved my life. If my son meets him, he will do him all the good he can. This name, we remember, was one of the pieties of his soul; he mixed it with the name of his father in his worship. What! this was this Thénardier, this was this innkeeper of Montfermeil whom he had In vain and for so long sought! He finally found him, and how! This savior of his father was a bandit! This man, to whom Marius burned to devote himself, was a monster! This liberator of Colonel Pontmercy was in the process of committing an attack whose form Marius did not yet see very clearly, but which resembled an assassination! And on whom, good God! What fatality! What a bitter mockery of fate! His father ordered him from the depths of his coffin to do all the good possible to Thénardier, for four years Marius had had no other idea than to pay this debt to his father, and, at the moment when he was about to have a brigand seized by justice in the midst of a crime, destiny cried out to him: it is Thénardier! The life of his father, saved in a hail of grapeshot on the heroic field of Waterloo, he was finally going to pay it to this man, and pay for it from the scaffold! He had promised himself, if ever he found this Thénardier, to approach him only by throwing himself at his feet, and he found him indeed, but to deliver him to the executioner! His father said to him: Help Thénardier! and he responded to this adored and holy voice by crushing Thénardier! To give as a spectacle to his father in his tomb the man who had snatched him from death at the risk of his life, executed in the Place Saint-Jacques by the act of his son, of this Marius to whom he had bequeathed this man! and what a mockery to have so long carried on his breast the last wishes of his father written by his hand only to do horribly the exact opposite! But, on the other hand, to witness this ambush and not prevent it! What! to condemn the victim and spare the assassin! could one be held to any gratitude towards such a wretch? All the ideas Marius had had for four years were, as it were, pierced through and through by this unexpected blow. He shuddered. Everything depended on him. He held in his hand, without their knowledge, these beings who were stirring there before his eyes. If he fired the pistol, M. Leblanc was saved and Thénardier was lost; if he did not fire it, M. Leblanc was sacrificed and, who knows? Thénardier escaped. Precipitate one, or let the other fall! Remorse on both sides. What to do? What to choose? Break the most pressing memories , so many profound commitments made to himself, the holiest duty, the most venerated text! Break his father’s will, or allow a crime to be committed! It seemed to him on the one hand that he heard his Ursule imploring him for his father, and on the other the colonel recommending Thénardier to him. He felt mad. His knees gave way beneath him. And he didn’t even have time to deliberate, so furious was the scene before his eyes rushing on. It was like a whirlwind he thought he was master of and which was carrying him away. He was on the point of fainting. Meanwhile, Thénardier, we will call him nothing else from now on, was pacing back and forth in front of the table in a sort of madness and frenzied triumph. He took the candle in his fist and placed it on the mantelpiece with such a violent rap that the wick almost went out and the tallow splashed the wall. Then he turned to Monsieur Leblanc, horrified, and spat out this: “Flambé! fumé! fricassé! à la topaudo!” And he started walking again, in full explosion. “Ah!” he cried, “I’ve found you at last, Monsieur Philanthropist! Monsieur Washed-up Millionaire! Monsieur Doll-Giver! Old Jocrisse! Ah!” You don’t recognize me! No, it wasn’t you who came to Montfermeil, to my inn, eight years ago, on Christmas night 1823! It wasn’t you who took Fantine’s child, the Lark, from my house! It wasn’t you who had a yellow carrick! No! And a bundle full of rags in your hand like this morning at my house! Say , my wife! It’s her mania, it seems, to carry bundles full of woolen stockings into people’s houses! Charitable old fellow, go! Is it that you are a hosier, Mr. Millionaire? You give the poor your shop stock, holy man! What a tightrope walker! Ah! You don’t recognize me? Well, I recognize you, I recognized you immediately as soon as you stuck your nose in here. Ah! We ‘ll see at last that it’s not all rosy to go like that into people’s houses, under the pretext that they are inns, in shabby clothes, with the air of a pauper, that he would have been given a penny, to deceive people, to act generous, to take their livelihood, and to threaten in the woods, and that one is not free to bring back afterwards, when the people are ruined, an oversized frock coat and two nasty hospital blankets, old beggar, child thief! He stopped, and seemed for a moment to be talking to himself. One would have said that his fury was falling like the Rhone into some hole; Then, as if he were finishing out loud the things he had just been saying to himself in a low voice, he banged his fist on the table and shouted: “With his good-natured air!” And addressing Mr. Leblanc: “By Jove! You made fun of me once. You are the cause of all my misfortunes! You had for fifteen hundred francs a girl I had, and who certainly belonged to rich people, and who had already brought me a lot of money, and from whom I was to draw enough to live all my life! A girl who would have compensated me for all I lost in that abominable tavern where they held sterling sabbats and where I ate all my holy rags like an imbecile! Oh! I wish all the wine that was drunk at my house had been poison to those who drank it! Anyway! Say! You must have thought me a joke when you went off with the Lark!” You had your club in the forest! You were the strongest. Revenge. I’m the one with the trump card today! You’re done for, my good man! Oh, but I’m laughing. Really, I’m laughing! Did he fall for it! I told him I was an actor, that my name was Fabantou, that I had played a comedy with Miss Mars, with Miss Muche, that my landlord wanted to be paid tomorrow , February 4, and he didn’t even see that it’s January 8 and not February 4 that’s a deadline! Absurd idiot! And those four nasty Philippes he brought me! Scoundrel! He didn’t even have the heart to go as far as a hundred francs! And how he gave in to my platitudes! It amused me. I said to myself: Ganache! Go on, I’ve got you. I’ll lick your paws this morning! I’ll gnaw your heart out tonight! Thénardier stopped. He was out of breath. His small, narrow chest heaved like a forge bellows. His eye was full of that ignoble happiness of a weak, cruel, and cowardly creature, who can at last overcome what she has feared and insult what she has flattered, the joy of a dwarf who puts his heel on Goliath’s head, the joy of a jackal who begins to tear apart a sick bull, dead enough to no longer defend itself, alive enough to still suffer. M. Leblanc did not interrupt him, but said to him when he stopped: “I don’t know what you mean. You’re mistaken. I am a very poor man and nothing less than a millionaire. I don’t know you . You take me for someone else. ” “Ah!” grumbled Thénardier, “the good swing! You insist on this joke! You’re floundering, old man! Ah! Don’t you remember? You don’t see who I am!” “Pardon me, sir,” replied M. Leblanc with a polite accent that had something strange and powerful about it at such a moment, “I see that you are a bandit. Who has not noticed, odious beings have their susceptibilities, monsters are ticklish.” At this word “bandit,” Thénardier’s wife threw herself out of bed, Thénardier seized his chair as if he were going to break it in his hands. “Don’t move, you!” he shouted to his wife; and, turning to M. Leblanc: “Bandit! Yes, I know that’s what you call us, gentlemen.” Rich people! Look! It’s true, I’ve gone bankrupt, I’m hiding, I have no bread, I have no money, I’m a bandit! I haven’t eaten for three days, I’m a bandit! Ah! You warm your feet, you others, you have Sakoski pumps, you have padded frock coats, like archbishops, you live on the first floor in houses with porters, you eat truffles, you eat bunches of asparagus for forty francs in January, peas, you stuff yourselves, and when you want to know if it’s cold, you look in the newspaper to see what the engineer Chevalier’s thermometer says. We! We are the thermometers! We don’t need to go and see on the quay at the corner of the Clock Tower how many degrees of cold there are, we feel the blood congeal in our veins and the ice reach our hearts, and we say: There is no God! And you come into our caves, yes, into our caves, to call us bandits! But we will eat you! But we will devour you, poor little things! Mr. Millionaire! Know this: I was an established man, I was licensed, I was an elector, I am a bourgeois, I! and perhaps you are not one, you! Here Thénardier took a step towards the men who were near the door, and added with a shudder: “When I think that he dares come and speak to me as if to a cobbler!” Then, addressing Mr. Leblanc with a resurgence of frenzy: “And know this also, Mr. Philanthropist!” I’m not a shady man, me! I’m not a man whose name no one knows and who comes to kidnap children from houses! I’m a former French soldier, I should be decorated! I was at Waterloo, me! and I saved in battle a general called the Count of I don’t know what! He told me his name; but his bitchy voice was so weak that I didn’t hear it. I only heard Merci. I would have preferred his name to his thanks. That would have helped me to find him. This painting that you see, and which was painted by David at Bruqueselles, do you know who it represents? It represents me. David wanted to immortalize this feat of arms. I have this general on my back, and I carry him through the grapeshot. That’s the story. He never even did anything for me, this general; he was no better than the others! I nevertheless saved his life at the risk of my own, and I have my pockets full of certificates! I am a soldier of Waterloo, a thousand names of names! And now that I have had the kindness to tell you all this, let’s finish, I must have money, I must have a lot of money, I must have an enormous amount of money, or I will exterminate you, by God’s thunder! Marius had regained some control over his anxieties, and was listening. The last possibility of doubt had just vanished. This was indeed the Thénardier of the will. Marius shuddered at this reproach of ingratitude addressed to his father and which he was on the point of justifying so fatally. His perplexities redoubled. Besides, there was in all these words of Thénardier, in the accent, in the gesture, in the look which made flames spring from each word, there was in this explosion of an evil nature showing everything, in this mixture of boasting and abjection, of pride and pettiness, of rage and stupidity, in this chaos of real grievances and false feelings, in this shamelessness of a wicked man savoring the voluptuousness of violence, in this brazen nudity of an ugly soul, in this conflagration of all sufferings combined with all hatreds, something which was hideous as evil and poignant as truth. The master painting, the painting by David which he had proposed to buy from M. Leblanc, was, the reader has guessed, nothing other than the sign of his tavern, painted, one remembers, by himself, the only debris which he would have retained from his shipwreck at Montfermeil. As he had ceased to intercept Marius’s visual ray, Marius could now consider this thing, and in this whitewash he really recognized a battle, a background of smoke, and a man carrying another. It was the group of Thénardier and Pontmercy, the savior sergeant, the saved colonel. Marius was as if drunk, this painting was in some way his living father, it was no longer the sign of the Montfermeil cabaret, it was a resurrection, a tomb was half- opening there, a ghost was rising from it. Marius heard his heart ringing in his temples, he had the cannon of Waterloo in his ears, his bloody father vaguely painted on this sinister panel frightened him, and it seemed to him that this formless silhouette was staring at him fixedly. When Thénardier had recovered his breath, he fixed his blood-red eyes on M. Leblanc, and said to him in a low, curt voice: “What have you to say before we put you in a shambles?” M. Leblanc was silent. In the midst of this silence a hoarse voice launched from the corridor this lugubrious sarcasm: “If wood has to be split, I’m here!” It was the man with the maul, who was making merry. At the same time, an enormous, bristling, earthy face appeared at the door with a frightful laugh that showed not teeth, but fangs. It was the face of the man with the maul. “Why did you take off your mask?” Thénardier shouted at him furiously. “Just for fun,” replied the man. For some moments, M. Leblanc seemed to be following and watching every movement of Thénardier, who, blinded and dazzled by his own rage, was pacing back and forth in the den with the confidence of feeling the door guarded, of holding an unarmed man armed, and of being nine against one, supposing that the Thénardier woman counted for only one man. In his apostrophe to the man with the maul, he turned his back on M. Leblanc. M.
Leblanc seized this moment, pushed the chair back with his foot, the table with his fist, and in one bound, with prodigious agility, before Thénardier had time to turn around, he was at the window. Opening it, climbing the sill, stepping over it, all took a second. He was halfway out when six sturdy fists seized him and forcefully dragged him back into the den. It was the three smoke-makers who had sprung upon him. At the same time, Thénardier had grabbed him by the hair. At the stamping that began, the other bandits came running from the corridor. The old man who was on the bed and who seemed drunk, got off the pallet and arrived staggering, a road-mender’s hammer in his hand. One of the smoke-makers, whose besmeared face was lit by the candle, and in whom Marius, despite this besmearing, recognized Panchaud, called Printanier, called Bigrenaille, was raising above M. Leblanc’s head a kind of stunner made of two lead balls at the two ends of an iron bar. Marius could not resist this spectacle. “My father,” he thought, ” forgive me!” And his finger sought the trigger of the pistol. The shot was about to be fired when Thénardier’s voice cried: “Don’t hurt him!” This desperate attempt by the victim, far from exasperating Thénardier, had calmed him. There were two men in him, the ferocious man and the skillful man. Until that moment, in the overflowing of triumph, before the prey slain and not moving, the ferocious man had dominated; when the victim struggled and seemed to want to fight, the skillful man reappeared and gained the upper hand. “Don’t hurt him!” he repeated. And, without suspecting it, for his first success, he stopped the pistol ready to fire and paralyzed Marius for whom the urgency disappeared, and who, faced with this new phase, saw no inconvenience in waiting any longer. Who knows if some chance might not arise that would deliver him from the dreadful alternative of letting Ursule’s father perish or losing the colonel’s savior? A Herculean struggle had begun. With a blow to the chest M. Leblanc had sent the old man rolling to the middle of the room, then with two backhands had knocked down two other assailants, and he held one under each of his knees; the wretches groaned under this pressure as if under a granite millstone; but the other four had seized the formidable old man by the arms and the back of the neck and held him crouching over the two fallen smoke-makers. Thus, master of some and mastered by others, crushing those below and suffocating under those above, vainly shaking off all the efforts that were heaped upon him, M. Leblanc disappeared under the horrible group of bandits like a wild boar under a howling heap of mastiffs and bloodhounds. They managed to overthrow him onto the bed nearest the window and held him there in check. Thenardier had not let go of his hair. “You,” said Thénardier, “don’t interfere. You’ll tear your shawl.” The Thénardier obeyed, as the she-wolf obeys the wolf, with a growl. “You others,” continued Thénardier, “search him.” M. Leblanc seemed to have given up resistance. They searched him. He had nothing on him but a leather purse containing six francs and his handkerchief. Thénardier put the handkerchief in his pocket. “What! No wallet?” he asked. “Nor a watch,” replied one of the smoke-makers. ” It doesn’t matter,” murmured the masked man who held the big key in a ventriloquist’s voice, “he’s a rough old fellow!” Thénardier went to the corner of the door and took out a bundle of ropes, which he threw to them. “Tie him to the foot of the bed,” he said. And, seeing the old man who had remained stretched out across the room from Mr. Leblanc’s blow and who was not moving: “Is Boulatruelle dead?” he asked. “No,” replied Bigrenaille, “he’s drunk. ” “Sweep him into a corner,” said Thénardier. “Two of the smokers pushed the drunkard with their feet near the pile of scrap metal. “Babet, why did you bring so many?” said Thénardier in a low voice to the man with the stick, “it was useless. ” “What do you want?” replied the man with the stick, “they all wanted in. The season is bad. There’s no business.” The pallet on which Mr. Leblanc had been knocked down was a kind of hospital bed carried on four rough uprights of barely squared wood. Mr. Leblanc let him do it. The brigands tied him firmly, standing with his feet on the ground, to the bedpost furthest from the window and closest to the fireplace. When the last knot was tightened, Thénardier took a chair and sat down almost opposite M. Leblanc. Thénardier no longer resembled himself ; in a few moments his countenance had changed from unbridled violence to quiet and cunning gentleness. Marius could hardly recognize in this polite office-man’s smile the almost bestial mouth that had been frothing a moment before; he regarded with stupor this fantastic and disturbing metamorphosis, and he felt what a man would feel who saw a tiger change into a lawyer. “Monsieur … ” said Thénardier . And, waving aside the brigands who still had their hands on M. Leblanc, “Go away a little and let me talk with the gentleman.” They all withdrew to the door. He continued: “Sir, you were wrong to try to jump out of the window. You could have broken a leg. Now, if you will allow me, we will talk quietly. First I must tell you something I made, namely that you have not yet uttered the slightest cry.” Thénardier was right; this detail was real, although it had escaped Marius in his confusion. M. Leblanc had barely uttered a few words without raising his voice, and even in his struggle near the window with the six bandits, he had maintained the most profound and singular silence. Thénardier continued: “My God! If you had just cried ‘thief,’ I would not have found inappropriate! To the murderer! That is said on the occasion, and, as for me, I would not have taken it in bad part. It is quite simple that one makes a little noise when one finds oneself with people who do not inspire sufficient confidence in one. You had done it and one would not have disturbed you. One would not even have gagged you. And I will tell you why. It is that this room here is very deaf. It has only that going for it, but it has that. It is a cellar. If one fired a bomb there it would make for the nearest guardhouse the noise of a drunkard snoring. Here the cannon would go boom and the thunder would go poof. It is a comfortable accommodation. But still, you did not shout, that is better, I compliment you on it, and I will tell you what I conclude from it. My dear sir, when one shouts, what comes? the police. And after the police? Justice. Well, you didn’t shout; it’s because you don’t care any more than we do about seeing justice and the police arrive. It’s because,—I’ve suspected it for a long time,—you have some interest in hiding something . For our part, we have the same interest. So we can understand each other. While speaking thus, it seemed that Thénardier, his pupil fixed on M. Leblanc, was trying to drive the sharp points that came out of his eyes into the conscience of his prisoner. Besides, his language, marked by a sort of moderate and sly insolence, was reserved and almost chosen, and in this wretch who was just now only a brigand one now sensed the man who studied to be a priest. The silence which the prisoner had maintained, this precaution which went so far as to forget even the care of his life, this resistance opposed to the first movement of nature, which is to utter a cry, all this, it must be said, since the remark had been made, was importunate to Marius, and astonished him painfully. The well-founded observation of Thénardier still obscured for Marius the mysterious depths beneath which hid this grave and strange figure to which Courfeyrac had cast the nickname of Monsieur Leblanc. But, whoever he was, bound with ropes, surrounded by executioners, half-plunged, so to speak, into a pit which sank beneath him a step at every moment, before the fury as before the gentleness of Thénardier, this man remained impassive; and Marius could not help admiring at such a moment this superbly melancholy face. He was evidently a soul inaccessible to terror and not knowing what it is to be distraught. He was one of those men who master the astonishment of desperate situations. However extreme the crisis, however inevitable the catastrophe, there was nothing in it of the agony of the drowned man opening horrible eyes underwater. Thénardier rose without affectation, went to the fireplace, moved the screen, which he propped against the neighboring pallet, and thus unmasked the stove full of burning embers in which the prisoner could perfectly see the chisel, reddened to white and pricked here and there with little scarlet stars. Then Thénardier came and sat down again near M. Leblanc. “I will continue,” he said. “We can come to an understanding. Let us arrange this amicably.” I was wrong to get carried away just now, I don’t know where I was thinking, I went much too far, I said extravagant things. For example, because you are a millionaire, I told you that I was demanding money, a lot of money, an immense amount of money. That would not be reasonable. My God, you may be rich, but you have your responsibilities, who doesn’t? I don’t want to ruin you, I’m not a flesh-eater after all. I’m not one of those people who, because they have the advantage of position, take advantage of it to be ridiculous. Look, I’ll put in some of my own and make a sacrifice of my side. I simply need two hundred thousand francs. M. Leblanc didn’t say a word. Thénardier continued: “You see that I’m not putting too much water in my wine. I don’t know the state of your fortune, but I know that you don’t look at money, and a benevolent man like you can easily give two hundred thousand francs to a father who is not happy. Certainly you are reasonable too, you didn’t imagine that I would take the trouble I did today, and that I would organize this evening’s thing, which is a job well done, by the admission of all these gentlemen, to end up asking you for enough to go and drink red wine for fifteen and eat veal at Desnoyers. Two hundred thousand francs, that’s worth that. Once this trifle is out of your pocket, I tell you that everything is said and done and that you have nothing to fear from a pinch.” You will say to me: But I do not have two hundred thousand francs on me. Oh! I am not exaggerating. I do not demand that. I ask only one thing of you. Be kind enough to write what I am going to dictate to you. Here Thénardier interrupted himself, then he added, emphasizing the words and throwing a smile towards the stove: “I warn you that I would not admit that you do not know how to write. A Grand Inquisitor could have envied this smile. Thénardier pushed the table close to M. Leblanc, and took the inkstand, a quill, and a sheet of paper from the drawer which he left half-open and where the long blade of the knife gleamed. He placed the sheet of paper in front of M. Leblanc. “Write,” he said. The prisoner finally spoke. “How do you want me to write? I am tied up. ” “That is true, pardon!” said Thénardier, “you are quite right.” And turning to Bigrenaille: “Untie the gentleman’s right arm.” Panchaud, called Printanier, called Bigrenaille, carried out Thénardier ‘s order . When the prisoner’s right hand was free, Thénardier dipped the pen in ink and presented it to him. “Note well, sir, that you are in our power, at our discretion, absolutely at our discretion, that no human power can get you out of here, and that we would be truly sorry to be forced to resort to unpleasant extremities. I know neither your name nor your address; but I warn you that you will remain tied up until the person charged with carrying the letter you are going to write has returned. Now please write. ” “What?” asked the prisoner. “I dictate.” M. Leblanc took the pen. Thénardier began to dictate: “My daughter… ” The prisoner started and raised his eyes to Thénardier. “Put on my dear daughter,” said Thénardier. M. Leblanc obeyed. Thénardier continued: “Come at once…” He broke off: “You’re on first name terms with her, aren’t you?” “Who?” asked M. Leblanc. “Of course!” said Thénardier, “the little one, the Lark. ” M. Leblanc replied without the slightest apparent emotion: “I don’t know what you mean. ” “Go on,” said Thénardier; and he began to dictate again: “Come at once. I absolutely need you. The person who gives you this note is responsible for bringing you to me. I’m waiting for you. Come with confidence. ” M. Leblanc had written everything down. Thénardier continued: “Ah! Erase, come with confidence; that might suggest that the matter is not entirely simple and that distrust is possible.” M. Leblanc crossed out the three words. “Now,” continued Thénardier, “sign. What is your name?” The prisoner put down the pen and asked: “Who is this letter for?” “You know that very well,” replied Thénardier. “For the little girl. I have just told you.” It was obvious that Thénardier avoided naming the young girl in question. He said the Lark, he said the little girl, but he did not pronounce the name. The precaution of a clever man keeping his secret in front of his accomplices. To say the name would have been to reveal the whole matter to them, and to tell them more than they needed to know. He continued: “Sign. What is your name? ” “Urbain Fabre,” said the prisoner. Thénardier, with the movement of a cat, plunged his hand into his pocket and took out the handkerchief seized from M. Leblanc. He looked for the mark and held it up to the candle. “UF That’s it. Urbain Fabre. Well, sign UF .” The prisoner signed. “As it takes both hands to fold the letter, give it, I’ll fold it. ” This done, Thénardier continued: “Put the address. Mademoiselle Fabre, at your home. I know you live not far from here, near Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, since that’s where you go to mass every day, but I don’t know in which street.” I see you understand your situation. As you didn’t lie about your name, you won’t lie about your address. Put it down yourself. The prisoner remained thoughtful for a moment, then he took up his pen again and wrote: “Mademoiselle Fabre, at Monsieur Urbain Fabre’s, rue Saint-Dominique-d’Enfer, no. 17. ” Thénardier seized the letter with a sort of feverish convulsion. “My wife!” he cried. The Thénardier woman ran up. “Here is the letter. You know what you have to do. A cab is downstairs. Go at once, and come back the same way.” And addressing the man with the maul: “You, since you’ve taken off your muffler, accompany the bourgeoise. You will get in behind the cab. Do you know where you left the maringotte? ” “Yes,” said the man. And, setting his maul in a corner, he followed the Thénardier. As they were leaving, Thénardier put his head through the half -open door and shouted into the corridor: “Above all, don’t lose the letter! Remember that you have two hundred thousand francs on you. ” The Thénardier’s hoarse voice replied: “Don’t worry. I put it in my stomach.” A minute had not passed when the crack of a whip was heard, which diminished and quickly died away. “Good!” grumbled Thénardier. “They’re going at a good pace. At this gallop, the bourgeoise will be back in three-quarters of an hour. ” He pulled a chair up to the fireplace and sat down, crossing his arms and presenting his muddy boots to the stove. “My feet are cold,” he said. There were only five bandits left in the den with Thénardier and the prisoner . These men, through the masks or the black glue that covered their faces and made them, at the choice of fear, coal miners, negroes or demons, had a numb and gloomy air, and one felt that they were carrying out a crime like a task, calmly, without anger and without pity, with a sort of boredom. They were huddled in a corner like brutes and kept silent. Thénardier was warming his feet. The prisoner had fallen back into his taciturnity. A somber calm had succeeded the fierce uproar that had filled the garret a few moments before. The candle, where a large mushroom cloud had formed, barely lit the immense hovel, the brazier had faded, and all these monstrous heads made deformed shadows on the walls and ceiling. One could hear no other sound than the peaceful breathing of the drunken old man who was sleeping. Marius waited, in an anxiety that everything increased. The enigma was more impenetrable than ever. What was this little girl that Thénardier had also named the Lark? Was she his Ursule? The prisoner had not seemed moved by this word, the Lark, and had replied as naturally as possible: I don’t know what you mean. On the other hand, the two letters UF were explained, it was Urbain Fabre, and Ursule was no longer called Ursule. This was what Marius saw most clearly. A sort of dreadful fascination held him. Nailed to the place from which he observed and dominated this whole scene. He was there, almost incapable of thought or movement, as if annihilated by such abominable things seen up close. He waited, hoping for some incident, anything, unable to gather his thoughts and not knowing what course to take. “In any case,” he said, “if the Lark is her, I will see it clearly, because Thénardier will bring her here. Then everything will be said, I will give my life and my blood if necessary, but I will free her! Nothing will stop me. ” Nearly half an hour passed like this. Thénardier seemed absorbed in a dark meditation. The prisoner did not move. However, Marius thought at intervals and for some moments he heard a small dull noise from the prisoner’s side. Suddenly Thénardier addressed the prisoner: “Monsieur Fabre, here, I might as well tell you right away.” These few words seemed to begin to clarify things. Marius listened. Thénardier continued: “My wife will return, don’t be impatient. I think that the Lark is truly your daughter, and I find it quite simple that you keep her. Only, listen a little. With your letter, my wife will go and find her. I told my wife to dress, as you saw, so that your young lady can follow without difficulty. They will both get into the cab with my companion behind. There is somewhere outside a barrier a horse-drawn carriage drawn by two very good horses. Your young lady will be taken there. She will get out of the cab. My companion will get into the horse-drawn carriage with her, and my wife will come back here to tell us: It’s done. As for your young lady, we won’t harm her ; the horse-drawn carriage will take her to a place where she will be safe, and as soon as you have given me the two hundred thousand francs, she will be returned to you.” If you have me arrested, my comrade will give the Lark a helping hand. That’s it. The prisoner didn’t say a word. After a pause, Thénardier continued: “It’s simple, as you see. There will be no harm if you don’t want there to be harm. I’m telling you the story. I’m warning you so you know. ” He stopped, the prisoner didn’t break the silence, and Thénardier continued: “As soon as my wife returns and tells me: The Lark is on its way, we’ll let you go, and you’ll be free to go and sleep at home . You see we had no bad intentions.” Dreadful images flashed through Marius’s mind. What! This young girl they were kidnapping, they weren’t going to bring her back? One of those monsters was going to carry her off into the shadows? Where?… What if it was her! And it was clear that it was her! Marius felt his heartbeat stop. What was to be done? Fire the pistol? Bring all these wretches into the hands of justice? But the dreadful man with the maul would still be beyond all reach with the young girl, and Marius thought of Thénardier’s words, whose bloody meaning he glimpsed: “If you have me arrested, my comrade will give the Lark a helping hand.” Now it was not only by the colonel’s will, but by his own love, by the peril of the one he loved, that he felt himself held back. This dreadful situation, which had already lasted for more than an hour, changed its aspect every moment. Marius had the strength to review successively all the most poignant conjectures, seeking hope and finding none. The tumult of his thoughts contrasted with the funereal silence of the lair. In the midst of this silence, the sound of the staircase door opening and then closing was heard. The prisoner stirred in his bonds. “Here’s the bourgeoise,” said Thénardier. He had hardly finished when, indeed, the Thénardier woman rushed into the room, red, out of breath, panting, her eyes blazing, and shouted, slapping her big hands on both thighs at once: “False address!” The bandit she had brought with her appeared behind her and came to retrieve her maul. “False address?” repeated Thénardier. She continued: “Nobody! Rue Saint-Dominique, number seventeen, no Monsieur Urbain Fabre! We don’t know what it is!” She stopped, choking, then continued: “Monsieur Thénardier! That old man made you pose! You’re too good, you see! I would have cut his ass in four to begin with! And if he had played the bad guy, I would have cooked him alive ! He would have had to talk, and say where the girl is, and say where the loot is! That’s how I would have handled it, me!” They are quite right to say that men are more stupid than women! Nobody! Number seventeen! It’s a big carriage entrance! No Monsieur Fabre, rue Saint-Dominique! And belly to the ground, and tip for the coachman, and everything! I spoke to the porter and the portress, who is a beautiful, strong woman, they don’t know that! Marius breathed. She, Ursule, or the Lark, the one he no longer knew what to call, was saved. While his exasperated wife vociferated, Thénardier sat down on the table; he remained for a few moments without uttering a word, swinging his right leg as it dangled, and considering the chafing dish with an air of wild reverie. Finally he said to the prisoner with a slow and singularly ferocious inflection : “A false address? What did you hope for?” “To gain time!” cried the prisoner in a ringing voice. And at the same moment he shook his bonds; they were cut. The prisoner was now tied to the bed by only one leg. Before the seven men had time to recognize each other and spring forward, he had bent down under the fireplace, stretched out his hand toward the stove, then straightened up, and now Thénardier, the Thénardier woman, and the bandits, driven back by the shock to the back of the dive, were looking at him in stupor, raising above his head the red-hot chisel from which fell a sinister light, almost free and in a formidable attitude. The judicial inquiry, to which the ambush at the Gorbeau hovel subsequently gave rise, established that a large penny, cut and worked in a particular way, was found in the attic when the police raided it; this large penny was one of those marvels of industry that the patience of the penal colony engenders in the darkness and for the darkness, marvels which are nothing other than instruments of escape. These hideous and delicate products of a prodigious art are to jewelry what the metaphors of slang are to poetry. There are Benvenuto Cellinis in the penal colony, just as there are Villons in language. The unfortunate man who yearns for deliverance finds a way, sometimes without tools, with a eustache, with an old knife, to saw a penny into two thin blades, to hollow out these two blades without touching the monetary imprints, and to make a screw thread on the edge of the penny so as to make the blades adhere again. This can be screwed and unscrewed at will; it is a box. In this box, a watch spring is hidden, and this well-handled watch spring cuts through caliber shackles and iron bars. It is believed that this unfortunate convict possesses only a penny; no, he possesses freedom. It was a penny of this kind which, in subsequent police searches, was found open and in two pieces in the den under the pallet near the window. A small blue steel saw was also discovered which could be hidden in the penny. It is probable that at the time when the bandits searched the prisoner, he had this penny on him which he managed to hide in his hand, and that afterwards, having his right hand free, he unscrewed it, and used the saw to cut the ropes which were tying him up, which would explain the slight noise and imperceptible movements that Marius had noticed. Unable to bend down for fear of betraying himself, he had not cut the ties on his left leg. The bandits had recovered from their first surprise. “Don’t worry,” Bigrenaille said to Thénardier. “He’s still holding on by one leg, and he won’t leave. I’ll answer for that. I’m the one who tied that leg up for him. ” However, the prisoner raised his voice: “You are unfortunate people, but my life is not worth defending so much . As for you imagining that you would make me talk, that you would make me write what I don’t want to write, that you would make me say what I don’t want to say…” He raised the sleeve of his left arm and added: “Here.” At the same time, he stretched out his arm and placed on the bare flesh the burning chisel he held in his right hand by the wooden handle. The shuddering of burning flesh was heard, the smell peculiar to torture chambers spread through the hovel. Marius reeled, distraught with horror, the brigands themselves shuddered, the strange old man’s face barely contracted, and, while the red-hot iron sank into the smoking wound, impassive and almost august, he fixed on Thénardier his beautiful, hateless gaze in which suffering vanished in a serene majesty. In great and lofty natures, the revolts of the flesh and the senses, prey to physical pain, bring out the soul and make it appear on the brow, just as the rebellions of the soldiery force the captain to show himself. “Wretches,” he said, “do not be any more afraid of me than I am afraid of you.” And tearing the chisel from the wound, he threw it through the window, which had remained open. The horrible burning tool disappeared into the night, whirling, and fell far away, extinguishing itself in the snow. The prisoner continued: “Do with me what you will.” He was unarmed. “Grab him!” said Thénardier. Two of the brigands laid their hands on his shoulder, and the masked man with the ventriloquist’s voice stood opposite him, ready to blow his skull open with a wrench at the slightest movement. At the same time, Marius heard below him, at the bottom of the partition, but so close that he could not see those who were speaking, this conversation exchanged in low voices: “There is only one thing left to do. “Cut him out! ” “That’s it.” It was the husband and wife holding council. Thénardier walked slowly to the table, opened the drawer, and took out the knife. Marius was twisting the hilt of the pistol. Unheard-of perplexity. For an hour there had been two voices in his conscience, one telling him to respect his father’s will, the other crying out to him to help the prisoner. These two voices continued without interruption their struggle which was putting him in agony. He had vaguely hoped until this moment to find a way to reconcile these two duties, but nothing possible had emerged. Meanwhile, the danger pressed on, the last limit of waiting had been passed, a few steps from the prisoner Thénardier was thinking, knife in hand. Marius, bewildered, cast his eyes around him, the last mechanical resource of despair. Suddenly he shuddered. At his feet, on his table, a bright ray of full moonlight shone and seemed to show him a sheet of paper. On this sheet he read this line written in large letters that very morning by the eldest of the Thénardier daughters: –The axeheads are there. An idea, a clarity crossed Marius’s mind; it was the means he was looking for, the solution to this dreadful problem which tortured him, to spare the assassin and save the victim. He knelt on the chest of drawers, stretched out his arm, seized the sheet of paper, gently detached a piece of plaster from the partition, wrapped it in the paper, and threw all through the crevice in the middle of the hovel. It was time. Thénardier had conquered his last fears or scruples and was heading towards the prisoner. “Something falling!” cried Thénardier. “What is it?” said the husband. The wife had rushed forward and picked up the plaster wrapped in paper. She handed it to her husband. “Where did it come from?” asked Thénardier. “Of course!” said the wife, “where do you think it got in? It came through the window. ” “I saw it go by,” said Bigrenaille. Thénardier quickly unfolded the paper and held it up to the candle. “It’s in Éponine’s handwriting. Devil!” He signaled to his wife, who came up quickly and showed her the line written on the sheet of paper, then added in a dull voice: “Quick! The ladder!” Let’s leave the bacon in the trap and get out of here! “Without cutting the man’s neck?” asked Thénardier. “We haven’t time. ” “Which way?” continued Bigrenaille. “Through the window,” replied Thénardier. “Since Ponine threw the stone through the window, it’s because the house isn’t surrounded on that side.” The masked man with the ventriloquist’s voice placed his big key on the ground, raised his two arms in the air, and quickly closed his hands three times without saying a word. It was like the signal for all hands on deck in a carriage. The brigands who held the prisoner let him go; in the blink of an eye the rope ladder was unrolled from the window and firmly attached to the sill by the two iron crampons. The prisoner paid no attention to what was happening around him. He seemed to be dreaming or praying. As soon as the ladder was fixed, Thénardier shouted: “Come on! Bourgeoisie!” And he rushed toward the window. But as he was about to step over, Bigrenaille grabbed him roughly by the collar. “No, come on, you old joker! After us! ” “After us!” yelled the bandits. “You’re children,” said Thénardier, “we’re wasting time. The rails are on our heels. ” “Well,” said one of the bandits, “let’s draw lots to see who gets through first. ” Thénardier exclaimed: “Are you mad! Are you crazy! What a bunch of simpletons! Wasting time, aren’t you? Drawing lots, aren’t you? With a wet finger! With a short straw! Writing our names! Putting them in a cap!… ” “Do you want my hat?” shouted a voice from the doorway. Everyone turned around. It was Javert. He was holding his hat in his hand and holding it out, smiling. Chapter 76. One should always begin by arresting the victims. Javert, at nightfall, had posted men and ambushed himself behind the trees on the Rue de la Barrière des Gobelins, which faces the Gorbeau hovel on the other side of the boulevard. He had begun by opening his pocket to put in the two young girls charged with watching the approaches to the dive. But he had only caught Azelma. As for Éponine, she was not at her post, she had disappeared and he had not been able to seize her. Then Javert had stopped, listening for the agreed signal. The comings and goings of the cab had greatly agitated him. Finally he had grown impatient, and, sure that there was a nest there, sure of being in good luck, having recognized several of the bandits who had entered, he had finally decided to get in without waiting for the pistol shot. It will be remembered that he had Marius’s master key. He had arrived just in time. The terrified bandits threw themselves on the weapons they had abandoned in every corner at the moment of escape. In less than a second, these seven men, dreadful to behold, grouped themselves in a defensive posture, one with his maul, another with his key, another with his deadening iron, the others with shears, pliers and hammers, Thénardier with his knife in his hand. The Thénardier seized an enormous paving stone which was in the corner of the window and which served as a stool for his daughters. Javert put his hat back on his head, and took two steps into the room, arms crossed, cane under his arm, sword in its scabbard. “Halt!” he said. “You won’t go through the window, you’ll go through the door. It’s less unhealthy. There are seven of you, there are fifteen of us. Let’s not huddle like Auvergnats. Let’s be nice. ” Bigrenaille took a pistol he kept hidden under his blouse and put it in Thénardier’s hand, saying in his ear: “It’s Javert. I don’t dare shoot that man. Do you dare? ” “Of course!” replied Thénardier. “Well, shoot.” Thénardier took the pistol and aimed at Javert. Javert, who was three steps away, looked at him fixedly and simply said: “Don’t shoot, go! Your shot will miss.” Thénardier pulled the trigger. The shot misfired. “I told you so!” said Javert. Bigrenaille threw his cudgel at Javert’s feet. “You are the emperor of the devils! I surrender. ” “And you?” Javert asked the other bandits. They replied: “So do we.” Javert left calmly: “That’s it, that’s fine, I said so, we’re being nice. ” “I only ask one thing,” continued Bigrenaille, “that no one refuse me tobacco while I’m in solitary confinement. ” “Granted,” said Javert. And turning and calling behind him: “Come in now!” A squad of police sergeants with swords in hand and agents armed with cudgels and clubs rushed in at Javert’s call. The bandits were garroted. This crowd of men, barely lit by a candle, filled the lair with shadow. “Thumbs up, everyone!” cried Javert. “Come a little closer!” cried a voice that was not a man’s voice, but which no one could have said was a woman’s. The Thénardier woman had taken refuge in one of the corners of the window, and it was she who had just uttered this roar. The police and the policemen fell back. She had thrown off her shawl and kept her hat on; her husband, crouching behind her, almost disappeared under the fallen shawl, and she covered him with her body, raising the paving stone with both hands above her head with the swing of a giantess about to throw a rock. “Watch out!” she cried. They all fell back towards the corridor. A wide gap opened in the middle of the garret. The Thénardier woman glanced at the bandits who had allowed themselves to be tied up and murmured in a guttural and hoarse accent: “Cowards!” Javert smiled and advanced into the empty space that Thénardier was watching with her two eyes. “Don’t come any closer, go away,” she cried, “or I’ll crush you! ” “What a grenadier!” Javert said. “Mother! You have a beard like a man, but I have claws like a woman.” And he continued to advance. Thénardier, disheveled and terrible, spread her legs, arched back, and frantically threw the paving stone at Javert’s head. Javert bent over. The paving stone flew over him, struck the back wall, from which it knocked down a large plasterwork, and returned, ricocheting from corner to corner through the dive, fortunately almost empty, to die at Javert’s heels. At the same moment, Javert reached the Thénardier couple. One of his large hands fell on the wife’s shoulder and the other on the husband’s head. “Thumbs!” he shouted. The policemen returned in a crowd, and in a few seconds Javert’s order was executed. The broken Thénardier looked at her garroted hands and those of her husband, fell to the ground and cried out in tears: “My daughters! ” “They are in the shade,” said Javert. Meanwhile, the officers had noticed the drunkard asleep behind the door and were shaking him. He awoke, stammering: “Is it over, Jondrette? ” “Yes,” replied Javert. The six garroted bandits were standing; moreover, they still had their ghostly expressions; three smeared in black, three masked. “Keep your masks on,” said Javert. And, reviewing them with the look of Frederick II at the Potsdam parade, he said to the three con artists: “Good morning, Bigrenaille. Good morning, Brujon. Good morning, Deux-Milliards.” Then, turning towards the three masks, he said to the man with the mallet: “Good morning, Gueulemer.” And to the man with the cudgel: “Good morning, Babet.” And to the ventriloquist: “Hello, Claquesous.” At that moment, he perceived the bandits’ prisoner who, since the police officers had entered, had not uttered a word and was standing with his head bowed. “Untie the gentleman!” said Javert, “and let no one come out!” Having said this, he seated himself sovereignly at the table, where the candle and the writing-desk had remained, took a stamped piece of paper from his pocket and began his report. When he had written the first lines, which were nothing but formulas always the same, he raised his eyes: “Bring forward this gentleman whom these gentlemen had tied up. ” The officers looked around them. “Well,” asked Javert, “where is he then? The prisoner of the bandits, M. Leblanc, M. Urbain Fabre, the father of Ursule or of the Lark, had disappeared. The door was guarded, but the window was not. As soon as he saw himself untied, and while Javert was giving his report, he took advantage of the disturbance, the tumult, the congestion, the darkness, and a moment when attention was not fixed on him, to spring out of the window. An officer ran to the skylight and looked. No one could be seen outside. The rope ladder was still trembling. “The devil!” Javert said between his teeth, “this must be the best!” Chapter 77. The Little One Who Screamed in Volume Two. The day after these events had taken place in the house on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital, a child, who seemed to be coming from the direction of the Pont d’Austerlitz, was coming up the right-hand side street in the direction of the Fontainebleau barrier. It was after dark. This child was pale, thin, dressed in rags, wearing canvas trousers in February, and was singing at the top of his lungs. At the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier, a bent old woman was rummaging through a pile of rubbish by the light of the street lamp; the child bumped into her as he passed, then recoiled, crying: “Look! I thought that was an enormous, an enormous dog!” He pronounced the word enormous for the second time with a mocking swell of voice that capital letters would express well enough: an enormous, an ENORMOUS dog! The old woman straightened up furiously. “You mustard-head!” she grumbled. “If I hadn’t been leaning over, I know where I would have kicked you! ” The child was already at a distance. “Kisss! kisss!” he said. “After that, perhaps I wasn’t mistaken.” The old woman, suffocated with indignation, stood up completely, and the glow of the lantern illuminated her livid face, all hollowed out with angles and wrinkles, with crow’s feet joining the corners of her mouth. Her body was lost in the shadows and only her head was visible . It looked like the mask of Decrepitude cut out by a gleam in the night. The child looked at her. “Madame,” he said, “is not the kind of beauty that would suit me.” He continued on his way and began to sing again: King Hoofwhip Went hunting, Hunting crows… At the end of these three verses, he stopped. He had arrived in front of number 50-52, and, finding the door closed, he had begun to beat it with his feet, resounding and heroic kicks, which revealed the man’s shoes he was wearing rather than the child’s feet he had. Meanwhile, this same old woman whom he had met at the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier was running up behind him, shouting and making excessive gestures. “What is it? What is it? Good Lord! They’re breaking down the door! They’re tearing down the house!” The kicks continued. The old woman was shouting herself hoarse. “Do they arrange buildings like this now?” Suddenly she stopped. She had recognized the kid. “What! It’s that devil! ” “Look, it’s the old woman,” said the child. “Hello, Burgonmuche. I ‘ve come to see my ancestors. ” The old woman replied, with a composite grimace, an admirable improvisation of hatred taking advantage of decrepitude and ugliness, which was unfortunately lost in the darkness: “There’s no one here, you oaf.” “Bah!” resumed the child, “where is my father? ” “At La Force. ” “Look! And my mother? ” “At Saint-Lazare. ” “Well! And my sisters? ” “At Madelonnettes.” The child scratched the back of his ear, looked at Mame Burgon, and said: “Ah!” Then he pirouetted on his heels, and a moment later, the old woman who had remained on the doorstep heard him singing in his clear, young voice as he sank beneath the black elms shivering in the winter wind: King Hoofwhip Went hunting, Hunting crows, Mounted on stilts. When one passed underneath, One paid him two sous. Thus closes this third volume, where Marius, caught between his ideals, his love for Cosette, and the shadows of the past, embodies the eternal conflict between the intimate and the collective. Victor Hugo leaves us on the threshold of decisive events, where each choice shapes a destiny and resonates in history. Through these pages, the greatness and fragility of the human soul are expressed in all their force, reminding us that love and justice are often inseparable from sacrifice. An essential step in this monumental fresco, where each ending already carries the seeds of the upheavals to come.
Plongez au cœur de l’un des plus grands chefs-d’œuvre de Victor Hugo avec *Les Misérables – Tome III : Marius* 🌟. Ce tome nous entraîne dans le destin bouleversant de Marius Pontmercy, jeune idéaliste partagé entre son amour pour la belle Cosette et son engagement politique dans une France agitée. 💔🇫🇷
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– La jeunesse et les convictions de Marius, entre idéaux révolutionnaires et quête d’identité 🔥
– La tendre et émouvante romance entre Marius et Cosette 💕
– Les intrigues poignantes autour de Jean Valjean et de son lourd passé 🕊️
– Les bouleversements historiques qui secouent Paris et changent à jamais le destin des personnages 🏛️
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– Une immersion totale dans le Paris du XIXe siècle 🏙️
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-📖 Les Misérables Tome I : Fantine – Victor Hugo ✨ [https://youtu.be/tYTtwllcF14]
-📖 Les Misérables – Tome II: Cosette ✨ Victor Hugo [https://youtu.be/TXKQ8iRTpsM]
-📖 Les Misérables – Tome III : Marius | Victor Hugo 🌟 [https://youtu.be/boYFIB43VxU]
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