BOOK XV.

THE RUE DE L'HOMME ARMÉ.

I. BLOTTING, BLABBING

II. THE GAMIN THE ENEMY OF LAMPS

III. WHILE COSETTE AND TOUSSAINT SLEEP

IV. GAVROCHE'S EXCESS OF ZEAL

ILLUSTRATIONS.

"ONE MORNING WHEN THE SUN WAS SHINING, AND BOTH

WERE ON THE GARDEN STEPS" Vol. IV. Frontispiece

Drawn by G. Jeanniot.

RECRUITS

Drawn by G. Jeanniot.

THE RUE PLUMET IDYLL

AND

THE RUE ST. DENIS EPIC.

BOOK I.

SOME PAGES OF HISTORY.

CHAPTER I.

WELL CUT OUT.

1831 and 1832, the two years immediately attached to the revolution

of July, contain the most peculiar and striking moments of history;

and these two years, amid those that precede and follow them, stand

out like mountains. They possess the true revolutionary grandeur, and

precipices may be traced in them. The social masses, the foundations of

civilization, the solid group of superimposed and adherent interests,

and the secular profiles of the ancient Gallic formations, appear and

disappear every moment through the stormy clouds of systems, passions,

and theories. These apparitions and disappearances were called

resistance and movement, but at intervals truth, the daylight of the

human soul, flashes through all.

This remarkable epoch is so circumscribed, and is beginning to become

so remote from us, that we are able to seize its principal outlines. We

will make the attempt. The Restoration was one of those intermediate

phases which are so difficult to define, in which are fatigue, buzzing,

murmurs, sleep, and tumult, and which, after all, are nought but

the arrival of a great nation at a halting-place. These epochs are

peculiar, and deceive the politician who tries to take advantage of

them. At the outset the nation only demands repose; there is but one

thirst, for peace, and only one ambition, to be small,--which is the

translation of keeping quiet. "Great events, great accidents, great

adventures, great men,--O Lord! we have had enough of these, and more

than enough." Cæsar would be given for Prusias, and Napoleon for the

Roi d'Yvetôt, who was "such a merry little king." Folk have been

marching since daybreak and arrive at the evening of a long and rough

journey; they made their first halt with Mirabeau, the second with

Robespierre, and the third with Napoleon, and they are exhausted.

Everybody insists on a bed.

Worn-out devotions, crying heroisms, gorged ambitions, and made

fortunes, seek, claim, implore, and solicit,--what? A resting-place,

and they have it. They take possession of peace, tranquillity, and

leisure, and feel satisfied. Still, at the same time certain facts

arise, demand recognition, and knock at doors on their side. These

facts have emerged from revolutions and wars; they exist, they live,

and have the right,--the right of installing themselves in society,

which they do; and in the majority of instances facts are the

quarter-masters that only prepare a billet for principles.

In such a case, this is what occurs to political philosophers: at

the same time as wearied men claim rest, accomplished facts demand

guarantees, for guarantees for facts are the same thing as repose for

men. It is this that England asked of the Stuart after the Protector,

and what France asked of the Bourbons after the Empire. These

guarantees are a necessity of the times, and they must be granted.

The Princes concede them, but in reality it is the force of things

that gives them. This is a profound truth and worth knowing, which the

Stuarts did not suspect in 1662, and of which the Bourbons did not even

gain a glimpse in 1814.

The predestined family which returned to France when Napoleon collapsed

had the fatal simplicity of believing that it gave, and that it could

take back what it had once given; that the Bourbon family possessed

the right divine, and France possessed nothing, and that the political

right conceded in the charter of Louis XVIII. was nothing else but

a branch of the divine right, detached by the House of Bourbon and

graciously permitted to the people up to the day when the king thought

proper to clutch it again. Still, from the displeasure which the gift

caused it, the Bourbon family ought to have felt that it did not

emanate from it. It behaved in a grudging way to the 19th century, and

looked with an ugly smile at every expansion of the nation. To employ a

trivial, that is to say, a popular and true phrase, it was crabbed, and

the people noticed it.

The Government believed that it had strength because the Empire had

been removed before it, like a stage scene; but it did not perceive

that it had been produced in the same way, nor see that it was held

in the same hand which had removed Napoleon. It believed that it had

roots, because it was the past, and was mistaken: it formed a portion

of the past, but the whole of the past was France; and the roots of

French society were not in the Bourbons, but in the nation. These

obscure and tenacious roots did not constitute the right of a family,

but the history of a people, and were everywhere, except under the

throne. The House of Bourbon had been for France the illustrious and

blood-stained knot of her history, but was no longer the principal

element of her destiny or the necessary basis of her policy. She could

do without the Bourbons as she had done for two-and-twenty years:

there was a solution of continuity, but they did not suspect it. And

how could they suspect it, when they imagined that Louis XVII. reigned

at the 9th Thermidor, and that Louis XVIII. was reigning at the day

of Marengo? Never, since the origin of history, have princes been

so blind in the presence of history and that portion of the divine

authority which facts contain and promulgate. Never had the nether

claim, which is called the right of kings, denied to such a condition

the supreme right. It was a capital error that led this family to

lay their hand again on the "granted" guarantees in 1814, or on the

concessions, as they entitled them. It is a sad thing that what they

called their concessions were our conquests, and what they called

our encroachments were our rights. When the hour appeared to have

arrived, the Restoration, supposing itself victorious over Bonaparte,

and rooted in the country, that is to say, believing itself strong and

profound, suddenly made up its mind, and risked its stake. One morning

it rose in the face of France, and, raising its voice, contested the

collective title, and the individual title, the sovereignty of the

nation, and the liberty of the citizen. In other terms, it denied the

nation what made it a nation, and the citizen what made him a citizen.

This is the substratum of those famous decrees which are called the

"Ordonnances" of July. The Restoration fell, and fell justly. Still,

let us add, it was not absolutely hostile to all the forms of progress,

and grand things were accomplished while it stood aloof. During the

Restoration the nation had grown accustomed to calm discussion, which

the Republic had been deficient in, and to grandeur in peace, which

was not known under the Empire. France, strong and free, had been an

encouraging example for the other nations of Europe. Under Robespierre

the Revolution ruled; under Bonaparte, cannon; while in the reigns of

Louis XVIII. and Charles X. the turn arrived for intellect to speak.

The wind ceased, and the torch was re-illumined, while a pure mental

light played round the serene crests. It was a magnificent, useful, and

delightful spectacle; and for fifteen years those great principles,

which are so old for the thinker, so new for the statesman,--equality

before the law, liberty of conscience, freedom of the press and

speech, and the accessibility of all fitting men to office,--could be

seen at work in a reign of peace, and publicly. Things went on thus

till 1830, and the Bourbons were an instrument of civilization which

broke in the hands of Providence.

The fall of the Bourbons was full of grandeur, not on their side,

but on that of the nation. They left the throne with gravity, but

without authority; their descent into night was not one of those

solemn disappearances which impart a sombre emotion to history, and it

was neither the spectral calmness of Charles I. nor the eagle cry of

Napoleon. They went away, that was all; they deposited the crown and

did not retain the glory, and though they were dignified, they were

not august, and they were to a certain extent false to the majesty

of their misfortune. Charles X., having a round table cut square

during the Cherbourg voyage, seemed more anxious about the imperilled

etiquette than the crumbling monarchy. This diminution saddened the

devoted men who were attached to the Bourbons personally, and the

serious men who honored their race. The people behaved admirably,

however, and the nation, attacked one morning by a species of royalist

insurrection, felt themselves so strong that they displayed no anger.

They defended themselves, restrained themselves, and restored things to

their place; the government in the law, the Bourbons in exile, alas!

and stopped there. They took the old King Charles X. off the daïs

which had sheltered Louis XIV., and gently placed him on the ground,

and they only touched the royal persons cautiously and sorrowfully.

It was not one man, or a few men, but France, united France, France

victorious, and intoxicated by its victory, which appeared to

remember, and practised in the eyes of the whole world, the serious

remarks of Guillaume du Vair after the day of the Barricades. "It is

easy for those who have been accustomed to obtain the favors of the

great, and leap like a bird from branch to branch, from a low to a

flourishing fortune, to show themselves bold against their prince in

his misfortunes; but for my part the fortune of my kings will be ever

venerable to me, and principally of those who are in affliction." The

Bourbons bore away with them respect, but not regret; as we have said,

their misfortune was greater than themselves, and they faded away on

the horizon.

The revolution of July at once found friends and enemies in the whole

world; the former rushed toward it enthusiastically and joyfully, while

the latter turned away, each according to its nature. The princes

of Europe, the owls of this dawn, at the first moment closed their

eyes, which were hurt and stupefied, and only opened them again to

menace,--it is a terror easy to understand and a pardonable anger.

This strange revolution had scarcely required a blow, and had not

even done conquered royalty the honor of treating it as an enemy and

shedding its blood. In the sight of despotic governments which also

have an interest in liberty calumniating itself, the revolution of

July had the fault of being formidable and remaining gentle, but no

attempt was made or prepared against it. The most dissatisfied and

irritated persons saluted it; for whatever their selfishness or rancor

may be, men feel a mysterious respect issue from events in which they

feel the co-operation of some one who labors higher than man. The

revolution of July is the triumph of right overthrowing fact, and is

a thing full of splendor. Hence came the brilliancy of the revolution

of 1830, and at the same time their mildness, for right that triumphs

has no need to be violent. Right is justice and truth, and it is the

property of right to remain eternally beautiful and pure. Fact, even

the most necessary in appearance and best accepted by contemporaries,

if it only exist as fact, and contain too little right, is no right at

all, and is infallibly destined to become, with the duration of time,

misshapen, foul, and perhaps even monstrous. If we wish to discover at

one glance what a degree of ugliness fact can attain, when looked at

through the distance of centuries, let us regard Machiavelli. He is

not an evil genius, a demon, or a cowardly and servile writer: he is

nothing but the fact, and not merely the Italian fact, but the European

fact, the fact of the sixteenth century. He appears hideous, and is so

in the presence of the moral idea of the 19th century. This struggle

between right and fact has endured since the origin of societies. It is

the task of wise men to terminate the duel, amalgamate the pure idea

with human reality, and to make right penetrate fact and fact right

pacifically.

CHAPTER II.

BADLY STITCHED.

But the task of wise men differs greatly from that of clever men, and

the revolution of 1830 quickly stopped; for when a revolution has run

ashore, the clever men plunder the wreck. Clever men in our century

have decreed themselves the title of statesmen, so that the phrase

has eventually become a bit of slang. For it must not be forgotten

that where there is only cleverness, littleness necessarily exists,

and to say "the clever" is much like saying the "mediocrities." In

the same way the word "statesman" is often equivalent to saying

"traitor." If we believe clever men, then revolutions like that of

July are severed arteries, and a rapid ligature is required. Right, if

too loudly proclaimed, begins to give way, and hence so soon as right

is substantiated the State must be strengthened, and when liberty

is injured attention must be turned to power. Here wise men, though

they have not yet separated from clever men, begin to distrust them.

Power, very good! But, in the first place, what is power; and secondly,

whence does it come? The clever men do not appear to hear the muttered

objection and continue their manœuvres. According to politicians who

ingeniously place a mask of necessity upon profitable fiction, the

first want of a people after a revolution, if that people form part of

a monarchical continent, is to obtain a dynasty. In this way they say

peace is secured after the revolution, that is to say, the necessary

time for repairing the house and dressing the wounds. A dynasty hides

the scaffolding and covers the hospital. Now, it is not always easy

to obtain a dynasty, although the first man of genius or the first

adventurer met with is sufficient to make a king. You have in the first

case Bonaparte, and in the second Iturbide. But the first family come

across is not sufficient to form a dynasty, for there is necessarily

a certain amount of antiquity required as a race, and the wrinkle of

centuries cannot be improvised.

If we place ourselves at the standpoint of statesmen, with all due

reserves of course, what are the qualities of a king who issues

from a revolution? He may be, and it is useful that he should be,

revolutionary; that is to say, have played a personal part in the

revolution, have become either compromised or renowned in it, and

have wielded the axe or drawn the sword. What are the qualities of a

dynasty? It must be national; that is to say, distantly revolutionary,

not through acts done, but through ideas accepted. It must be composed

of the past and be historical, and of the future and be sympathetic.

All this explains why the first revolutions are satisfied with finding

a man, Napoleon or Cromwell, while the second are determined on finding

a family, like the House of Brunswick or the House of Orléans. Royal

houses resemble those Indian fig-trees, each branch of which bends

down, becomes rooted in the ground, and grows into a fig-tree. Each

branch of the family may become a dynasty, on the sole condition that

it bends down to the people. Such is the theory of clever men.

This, then, is the great art,--to give success the sound of a

catastrophe, so that those who profit by it may also tremble at it;

to season every step taken with fear; to increase the curve of the

transition until progress is checked; to spoil this daybreak, denounce

and retrench the roughness of enthusiasm; to cut angles and nails; to

pad the triumph, muffle the right, roll the giant people in flannel,

and put it to bed at full speed; to place this excess of health under

medical treatment, and regard Hercules as a convalescent; to dilute

the event in expediency, and offer to minds thirsting for the ideal

this weak nectar; to take precautions against extreme success, and

provide the revolution with a sunshade. 1830 practised this theory,

which had already been applied to England by 1688. 1830 is a revolution

arrested half-way, and a moiety of progress is almost right. Now, logic

ignores this as absolutely as the sun ignores a rush-light. Who check

revolutions half-way? The bourgeoisie. Why? Because the bourgeoisie

represent satisfied self-interest. Yesterday appetite was felt, to-day

fulness, and to-morrow satiety. The phenomenon of 1814, after Napoleon,

was reproduced in 1830 after Charles X. Attempts have been made, though

wrongly, to convert the bourgeoisie into a class, but they are merely

the contented portion of the population. The bourgeois is a man who

has at last time to sit down, and a chair is not a caste. But through

a desire to sit down too soon, the progress of the human race may be

arrested, and this has frequently been the fault of the bourgeoisie;

and people are not a class because they commit a fault, and selfishness

is not one of the divisions of the social order. However, as we must

be just even towards selfishness, the condition for which that portion

of the nation called the bourgeoisie yearned after the shock of 1830

was not inertness, which is complicated with indifference and sloth,

and contains a little shame; nor was it sleep, which presupposes a

momentary oblivion accessible to dreams, but it was a halt. This word

contains a double, singular, and almost contradictory meaning, for it

implies troops on the march, that is to say, movement, and a stop-page,

that is to say, rest. A halt is the restoration of strength, it is

repose armed and awake, it is the accomplished fact, posting its

sentries and standing on guard. A halt presupposes a combat yesterday

and a combat to-morrow,--it is the interlude between 1830 and 1848.

What we here call combat may also be called progress. Hence the

bourgeoisie as well as the statesmen required a man who expressed

the idea of a halt, an "although-because," a composite individuality

signifying revolution and stability; in other words, strengthening

the present by the evident compatibility of the past with the future.

This man was found "ready-made," and his name was Louis Philippe

d'Orléans. The 221 made Louis Philippe king, and Lafayette undertook

the coronation. He named him "the best of Republics," and the Town Hall

of Paris was substituted for the Cathedral of Rheims. This substitution

of a half-throne for a complete throne was "the work of 1830." When

the clever men had completed their task, the immense fault of their

solution was apparent; all this had been done beyond the pale of

absolute right, which shouted, "I protest!" and then, formidable thing,

receded into the darkness.

CHAPTER III.

LOUIS PHILIPPE.

Revolutions have a terrible arm and a lucky hand; they hit hard and

choose well. Even when incomplete, bastardized, and reduced to the

state of a younger revolution, like that of 1830, they nearly always

retain sufficient providential light not to fall badly, and their

eclipse is never an abdication. Still, we must not boast too loudly,

for revolutions themselves are mistaken, and grave errors have been

witnessed ere now. Let us return to 1830, which was fortunate in its

deviation. In the establishment which was called order after the

revolution was cut short, the king was worth more than the Royalty.

Louis Philippe was a rare man.

Son of a father to whom history will certainly grant extenuating

circumstances, but as worthy of esteem as his father was of blame;

possessing all the private virtues and several of the public virtues;

careful of his health, his fortune, his person, and his business

affairs; knowing the value of a minute, but not always the value of

a year; sober, serious, peaceful, and patient; a good man and a good

prince; sleeping with his wife, and having in his palace lackeys

whose business it was to show the conjugal couch to the cits,--a

regular ostentation which had grown useful after the old illegitimate

displays of the elder branch; acquainted with all the languages of

Europe, and, what is rarer still, with all the languages of all the

interests, and speaking them; an admirable representative of the

"middle classes," but surpassing them, and in every way greater;

possessing the excellent sense, while appreciating the blood from

which he sprang, of claiming merit for his personal value, and very

particular on the question of his race by declaring himself an Orléans

and not a Bourbon; a thorough first prince of the blood, so long as he

had only been Most Serene Highness, but a frank bourgeois on the day

when he became His Majesty; diffuse in public, and concise in private

life; branded as a miser, but not proved to be one; in reality, one

of those saving men who are easily prodigal to satisfy their caprices

or their duty; well read and caring but little for literature; a

gentleman but not a cavalier; simple, calm, and strong; adored by his

family and his household; a seductive speaker, a statesman who had

lost his illusions, cold-hearted, swayed by the immediate interest,

governing from hand to mouth; incapable of rancor and of gratitude;

pitilessly employing superiorities upon mediocrities, and clever in

confounding by parliamentary majorities those mysterious unanimities

which growl hoarsely beneath thrones; expansive, at times imprudent in

his expansiveness, but displaying marvellous skill in his imprudence;

fertile in expedients, faces, and masks; terrifying France by Europe,

and Europe by France; loving his country undeniably, but preferring

his family; valuing domination more than authority, and authority

more than dignity; a temperament which has this mournful feature

about it, that by turning everything to success it admits of craft

and does not absolutely repudiate baseness, but at the same time has

this advantage, that it preserves politics from violent shocks, the

State from fractures, and society from catastrophes; minute, correct,

vigilant, attentive, sagacious, and indefatigable; contradicting

himself at times, and belying himself; bold against Austria at Ancona,

obstinate against England in Spain, bombarding Antwerp and paying

Pritchard; singing the Marseillaise with conviction; inaccessible

to despondency, to fatigue, to a taste for the beautiful and ideal,

to rash generosity, to Utopias, chimeras, anger, vanity, and fear;

possessing every form of personal bravery; a general at Valmy, a

private at Jemmappes; eight times attacked by regicides, and always

smiling; brave as a grenadier, and courageous as a thinker; merely

anxious about the chances of a European convulsion, and unfitted for

great political adventures; ever ready to risk his life, but not his

work; disguising his will in influence for the sake of being obeyed

as an intellect rather than as king; gifted with observation and not

with divination; paying but slight attention to minds, but a good judge

of men,--that is to say, requiring to see ere he could judge; endowed

with prompt and penetrating sense, practical wisdom, fluent tongue,

and a prodigious memory, and incessantly drawing on that memory,

his sole similitude with Cæsar, Alexander, and Napoleon; knowing

facts, details, dates, and proper names, but ignorant of the various

passions and tendencies of the crowd, the internal aspirations and

concealed agitation of minds,--in one word, of all that may be called

the invisible currents of consciences; accepted by the surface, but

agreeing little with the lower strata of French society; getting out of

scrapes by skill; governing too much and not reigning sufficiently; his

own Prime Minister; excellent in the art of setting up the littleness

of realities as an obstacle to the immensity of ideas; mingling with

a true creative faculty of civilization, order, and organization, I

do not know what pettifogging temper and chicanery; the founder of

a family and at the same time its man-of-law; having something of

Charlemagne and something of an attorney in him; but, on the whole,

as a lofty and original figure, as a prince who managed to acquire

power in spite of the anxiety of France, and influence in spite of the

jealousy of Europe,--Louis Philippe would be ranked among the eminent

men of his age, and among the most illustrious governors known in

history, if he had loved glory a little, and had a feeling for what is

grand to the same extent that he had a feeling for what is useful.

Louis Philippe had been handsome, and when aged, remained graceful:

though not always admired by the nation he was always so by the mob,

for he had the art of pleasing and the gift of charm. He was deficient

in majesty, and neither wore a crown though king, nor displayed white

hair though an old man. His manners belonged to the ancient régime,

and his habits to the new,--a mixture of the noble and the citizen

which suited 1830. Louis Philippe was transition on a throne, and

retained the old pronunciation and orthography, which he placed at the

service of modern opinions: he was fond of Poland and Hungary, but

he wrote "les Polonois," and pronounced, "les Hongrais." He wore the

uniform of the National Guard like Charles X., and the ribbon of the

Legion of Honor like Napoleon. He went but rarely to Mass, not at all

to the chase, and never to the opera: he was incorruptible by priests,

whippers-in, and ballet girls, and this formed part of his citizen

popularity. He had no Court, and went out with an umbrella under his

arm, and this umbrella for a long time formed part of his _nimbus_. He

was a bit of a mason, a bit of a gardener, and a bit of a surgeon: he

bled a postilion who had fallen from his horse, and no more thought of

going out without his lancet than Henry III. would without his dagger.

The Royalists ridiculed this absurd king, the first who shed blood in

order to cure.

A deduction must be made in the charges which history brings against

Louis Philippe, and they formed three different columns, each of which

gives a different total,--one accusing royalty, the second the reign,

and the third the king. Democratic right confiscated, progress made the

second interest, the protests of the streets violently repressed, the

military execution of insurrections, revolt made to run the gauntlet,

the Rue Transnonain, the councils of war, the absorption of the real

country in the legal country, and the government on joint account with

three hundred thousand privileged persons--are the deeds of royalty:

Belgium refused, Algeria too harshly conquered with more of barbarity

than civilization, like India by the English, the breach of faith to

Abd-el-Kader, Blaye, Deutz bought and Pritchard paid--are chargeable to

the reign; while the policy which cares more for the family than the

nation belongs to the king. As we see, when the deductions have been

made, the charge against the king is reduced; but his great fault was

that he was modest in the name of France. Whence comes this fault?

Louis Philippe was a king who was too much a father, and this

incubation of a family which is intended to produce a dynasty is

frightened at everything, and does not like to be disturbed. Hence

arises excessive timidity, which is offensive to a nation which has

July 14th in its civil traditions and Austerlitz in its military

annals. However, when we abstract public duties, which should ever

be first fulfilled, the family deserved Louis Philippe's profound

tenderness for it. This domestic group was admirable, and combined

virtue with talent. One of the daughters of Louis Philippe, Marie

d'Orléans, placed the name of her race among artists as Charles

d'Orléans had done among the poets, and she created from her soul a

statue which she called Joan of Arc. Two of Louis Philippe's sons

drew from Metternich this demagogic praise: "They are young men

whose like can be found nowhere, and such princes as were never seen

before." Here is the truth, without extenuating or setting down

aught in malice, about Louis Philippe. It was his good fortune to

be in 1830 the Prince Égalité, to bear within him the contradiction

between the Restoration and the Revolution, to possess that alarming

revolutionary side which becomes reassuring in the governor: and there

was never a more complete adaptation of the man to the event, for

one entered the other and the incarnation took place. Louis Philippe

is 1830 made man, and he had also on his side that great designation

to a throne, exile. He had been proscribed, wandering, and poor, and

had lived by his own labor. In Switzerland, this heir to the richest

princely domains of France was obliged to sell a horse, in order to

eat; at Reichenau, he had given mathematical lessons while his sister

Adelaide was embroidering and sewing. These souvenirs blended with a

king rendered the bourgeoisie enthusiastic. With his own hands he had

demolished the last iron cage at Mont St. Michel, erected by Louis

XI. and employed by Louis XV. He was the companion of Dumouriez and

the friend of Lafayette; he had belonged to the Jacobin Club, and

Mirabeau had tapped him on the shoulder, and Danton said to him, "Young

man." At the age of twenty-four in '93, when M. de Chartres, he had

witnessed from an obscure gallery in the Convention, the trial of

Louis XVI., so well named "that poor tyrant." The blind clairvoyance

of the revolution breaking royalty in the king, and the king with

royalty, while hardly observing the man in the fierce crushing of the

idea; the vast storm of the Convention Tribune; Capet not knowing

what to answer; the frightful and stupefied vacillation of this royal

head before the raging blast; the relative innocence of all mixed up

in this catastrophe, of those who condemned as well as of him who

was condemned,--he, Louis Philippe, had looked at these things and

contemplated these vertigos; he had seen centuries appear at the bar

of the Convention; he had seen behind Louis XVI., that unfortunate

and responsible victim, the real culprit, monarchy, emerging from

the darkness, and he retained in his soul a respectful terror of

this immense justice of the people which is almost as impersonal as

the justice of God. The traces which the revolution left upon him

were prodigious, and his memory was a living imprint of these great

years, minute by minute. One day, in the presence of a witness whose

statements we cannot doubt, he corrected from memory the entire letter

A in the list of the Constituent Assembly.

Louis Philippe was an open-air king; during his reign the press was

free, debates were free, conscience and speech were free. The Laws

of September had a clear track. Though he knew the corrosive power

of light upon privileges, he left his throne exposed to the light,

and history will give him credit for this honorable behavior. Louis

Philippe, like all historic men who have quitted the stage, is at the

present day being tried by the human conscience, but this trial has not

yet gone through its first stage. The hour when history speaks with its

venerable and free accent has not yet arrived for him; the moment has

not yet come for the final judgment. Even the stern and illustrious

historian, Louis Blanc, has recently toned down his first verdict.

Louis Philippe was elected by the two hundred and twenty-one deputies

in 1830, that is to say, by a semi-Parliament and a semi-revolution;

and, in any case, we cannot judge him here philosophically, without

making some reservations in the name of the absolute democratic

principle. In the eyes of the absolute, everything is usurpation which

is outside of these two rights,--first, the right of man and in the

next place the right of the people; but what we are able to say at

present is, that in whatever way we may regard him, Louis Philippe,

taken by himself, and looked at from the stand-point of human goodness,

will remain, to employ the old language of old history, one of the

best princes that ever sat on a throne. What has he against him? This

throne; take the king away from Louis Philippe and the man remains.

This man is good, at times so good as to be admirable. Often in the

midst of the gravest cares, after a day's struggle, after the whole

diplomacy of the Continent, he returned to his apartments at night;

and then, though exhausted by fatigue and want of sleep, what did he?

He would take up a list of sentences and spend the night in revising

a criminal trial, considering that it was something to hold his own

against Europe, but even greater to tear a culprit from the hands of

the executioner. He obstinately resisted his keeper of the seals, and

disputed the scaffold inch by inch with his attorney-generals, those

"chatterers of the law," as he called them. At times piles of sentences

covered his table, and he examined them all, and felt an agony at

the thought of abandoning these wretched condemned heads. One day he

said to the witness whom we just now quoted, "I gained seven of them

last night." During the earlier years of his reign the penalty of

death was, as it were, abolished, and the re-erection of the scaffold

was a violence done to the king. As the Grève disappeared with the

elder branch, a bourgeois Grève was established under the name of the

Barrière St. Jacques, for "practical men" felt the necessity of a

quasi-legitimate guillotine. This was one of the victories of Casimir

Perier, who represented the narrow side of the bourgeoisie, over Louis

Philippe, who represented the liberal side. The king annotated Beccaria

with his own hand, and after the Fieschi machine he exclaimed, "What

a pity that I was not wounded, for then I could have shown mercy!"

Another time, alluding to the resistance offered by his ministers, he

wrote with reference to a political culprit, who is one of the most

illustrious men of the day, "His pardon is granted, and all that I

have to do now is to obtain it." Louis Philippe was as gentle as Louis

IX., and as good as Henri IV., and in our opinion, in history, where

goodness is the rare pearl, to have been good is almost better than to

have been great.

As Louis Philippe has been sternly judged by some, and perhaps harshly

by others, it is very simple that a man, himself a phantom at the

present day, who knew that king, should offer his testimony for him in

the presence of history; this testimony, whatever its value may be, is

evidently, and before all, disinterested. An epitaph written by a dead

man is sincere; one shadow may console another shadow, for sharing the

same darkness gives the right to praise, and there is no fear that it

will ever be said of two tombs in exile,--this man flattered the other.

CHAPTER IV.

CRACKS IN THE FOUNDATION.

At this moment, when the drama we are recounting is about to enter

one of those tragic clouds which cover the beginning of the reign of

Louis Philippe, it is quite necessary that this book should give an

explanation about that king. Louis Philippe had entered upon the royal

authority without violence or direct action on his part, through a

revolutionary change of wind, which was evidently very distinct from

the real object of the revolution, but in which he, the Duc d'Orléans,

had no personal initiative. He was born a prince, and believed

himself elected king; he had not given himself these functions,

nor had he taken them; they were offered to him and he accepted,

convinced--wrongly as we think, but still convinced--that the offer

was in accordance with right, and the acceptance in harmony with duty.

Hence came an honest possession, and we say in all conscience that,

as Louis Philippe was honest in the possession, and democracy honest

in its attack, the amount of terror disengaged from social struggles

cannot be laid either on the king or the democracy. A collision of

principles resembles a collision of elements; ocean defends the water

and the hurricane the air; the king defends royalty, democracy defends

the people; the relative, which is monarchy, resists the absolute,

which is the republic; society bleeds from this conflict, but what is

its suffering to-day will be its salvation at a later date; and in

any case those who struggle must not be blamed, for one party must be

mistaken. Right does not stand, like the Colossus of Rhodes, on two

shores at once, with one foot in the republic, the other in royalty,

but is indivisible, and entirely on one side; those who are mistaken

are honestly mistaken, and a blind man is no more a culprit than a

Vendean is a brigand. We must, therefore, only impute these formidable

collisions to the fatality of things, and, whatever these tempests may

be, human irresponsibility is mixed up with them.

Let us finish our statement: The Government of 1830 had a hard life

of it from the beginning, and born yesterday it was obliged to combat

to-day. Scarce installed, it felt everywhere the vague movements of

faction beneath the foundation of July, which had so recently been

laid, and was still anything but solid. Resistance sprang up on the

morrow, and might, perhaps, have been born on the day before, and

from month to month the hostility increased, and instead of being

dull became patent. The revolution of July, frowned upon by kings out

of France, was diversely interpreted in France. God imparts to men

His will visible in events, an obscure text written in a mysterious

language. Men at once make themselves translations of it,--hasty,

incorrect translations, full of errors, gaps, and misunderstandings.

Very few minds comprehend the divine language; the more sagacious, the

calmer, and the more profound decipher slowly, and when they arrive

with their version, the work has been done long before; there are

already twenty translations offered for sale. From each translation

springs a party, and from each misunderstanding a failure, and each

party believes that it has the only true text, and each faction

believes that it possesses the light. Often enough power itself is

a faction, and there are in revolutions men who swim against the

current; they are the old parties. As revolutions issue from the right

to revolt, the old parties that cling to heirdom by grace of God

fancy that they have a right to revolt against them; but this is an

error, for in revolutions the rebel is not the people but the king.

Revolution is precisely the contrary of revolt; every revolution, being

a normal accomplishment, contains its legitimacy within itself, which

false revolutionists sometimes dishonor, but which endures even when

sullied, and survives even when bleeding. Revolutions issue, not from

an accident, but a necessity; for they are a return from the factitious

to the real, and they take place because they must take place.

The old legitimist parties did not the less assail the revolution

of 1830 with all the violence which springs from false reasoning.

Errors are excellent projectiles, and they skilfully struck it at

the spot where it was vulnerable,--the flaw in its cuirass, its want

of logic,--and they attacked this revolution in its royalty. They

cried to it, "Revolution, why this king?" Factions are blind men who

aim accurately. This cry the revolutionists also raised, but coming

from them it was logical. What was blundering in the legitimists

was clear-sightedness in the democrats; 1830 had made the people

bankrupt, and indignant democracy reproached it with the deed. The

establishment of July struggled between these attacks, made by the past

and the future; it represented the minute contending on one side with

monarchical ages, on the other with eternal right; and then, again,

1830, no longer a revolution, and becoming a monarchy, was obliged

to take precedence of Europe, and it was a further difficulty to

maintain peace, for a harmony desired against the grain is often more

onerous than a war. From this sullen conflict, ever muzzled but ever

grumbling, emerged armed peace, that ruinous expedient of civilization

suspecting itself. The royalty of July reared in the team of European

cabinets, although Metternich would have liked to put a kicking-strap

upon it. Impelled by progress in France, it impelled in its turn the

slowly-moving European monarchies, and while towed, it towed too.

At home, however, pauperism, beggary, wages, education, the penal

code, prostitution, the fall of woman, wealth, misery, production,

consumption, division, exchange, money, capital, the rights of capital,

and the rights of labor,--all these questions were multiplied above

society, and formed a crushing weight. Outside of political parties,

properly so called, another movement became manifest, and a philosophic

fermentation responded to the democratic fermentation, and chosen

minds felt troubled like the crowd,--differently, but quite as much.

Thinking men meditated, while the soil, that is to say, the people,

traversed by revolutionary currents, trembled beneath them with vague

epileptic shocks. These thinkers, some isolated, but others assembled

in families and almost in communities, stirred up social questions

peacefully but deeply; they were impassive miners, who quietly

hollowed their galleries beneath volcanoes, scarce disturbed by the

dull commotions and the fires of which they caught a glimpse. This

tranquillity was not the least beautiful spectacle of this agitated

epoch, and these men left to political parties the question of rights,

to trouble themselves about the question of happiness. What they

wished to extract from society was the welfare of man; hence they

elevated material questions, and questions about agriculture, trade,

and commerce, almost to the dignity of a religion. In civilization,

such as it has been constituted a little by God and a great deal by

man, instincts are combined, aggregated, and amalgamated so as to form

a real hard rock, by virtue of a law of dynamics which is carefully

studied by social economists, those geologists of politics. These men,

who grouped themselves under different appellations, but who may all

be designated by the generic title of socialists, tried to pierce this

rock and cause the living waters of human felicity to gush forth; their

labors embraced all questions, from that of the scaffold to that of

war, and they added to the rights of man as proclaimed by the French

revolutions, the rights of the woman and the child.

For various reasons we cannot thoroughly discuss here, from the

theoretical point of view, the questions raised by socialism, and we

limit ourselves to an indication of them. All the questions which the

socialists proposed--laying aside cosmogonic visions, reverie, and

mysticism--may be carried back to two original problems, the first of

which is, to produce wealth, and the second, to distribute it. The

first problem contains the question of labor, the second the question

of wages; in the first, the point is the employment of strength, and

in the second, the distribution of enjoyments. From a good employment

of strength results public power, and from a good distribution of

enjoyments individual happiness. By good distribution we mean, not

equal, but equitable, distribution, for the first equality is equity.

From these two things--combined public power abroad and individual

happiness at home--results social prosperity; that is to say, man

happy, the citizen free, and the nation great.

England solves the first of these two problems,--she creates wealth

admirably, but distributes it badly. This solution, which is completely

on one side, fatally leads her to these two extremes,--monstrous

opulence and monstrous misery; all the enjoyments belong to the few,

all the privations to the rest, that is to say, to the people, and

privileges, exceptions, monopoly, and feudalism spring up from labor

itself. It is a false and dangerous situation to base public power on

private want, and to root the grandeur of the state in the sufferings

of the individual; it is a badly composed grandeur, in which all the

material elements are combined, in which no moral element enters.

Communism and the agrarian law fancy that they solve the second

question, but they are mistaken. Their distribution kills production,

and equal division destroys emulation and consequently labor. It is

a distribution made by the butcher who slaughters what he divides.

Hence it is impossible to be satisfied with these pretended solutions,

for killing riches is not distributing them. The two problems must

be solved together in order to be properly solved; the two solutions

demand to be combined, and only form one. If you solve but the first of

these problems you will be Venice, you will be England; you will have,

like Venice, an artificial power, like England, a material power, and

you will be the wicked rich man; you will perish by violence, as Venice

died, or by bankruptcy, as England will fall; and the world will leave

you to die and fall, because it allows everything to die and fall which

is solely selfishness, and everything which does not represent a virtue

or an idea to the human race. Of course it will be understood that by

the words Venice and England we do not mean the peoples, but the social

constructions; the oligarchies that weigh down the nations, but not the

nations themselves. Nations ever have our respect and sympathy. Venice,

as a people, will live again; England, as the aristocracy, will fall,

but England the nation is immortal. This said, let us continue.

Solve the two problems, encourage the rich and protect the poor,

suppress misery, put an end to the unjust exhaustion of the weak by

the strong, bridle the iniquitous jealousy which the man still on

the road feels for him who has reached the journey's end, adjust

mathematically and paternally the wage to the labor, blend gratuitous

and enforced education with the growth of childhood and render science

the basis of manhood, develop intelligence while occupying the arms,

be at once a powerful people and a family of happy men, democratize

property, not by abolishing but by universalizing it, so that every

citizen without exception may be a land-owner,--an easier task than

it may be supposed,--in two words, know how to produce wealth and to

distribute it, and you will possess at once material greatness and

moral greatness, and be worthy to call yourself France. Such was what

socialism, above and beyond a few mistaken sects, said; this is what it

sought in facts and stirred up in minds: they were admirable efforts

and sacred attempts!

These doctrines, theories, and resistances; the unexpected necessity

for the statesman of settling with the philosophers; glimpses caught

of confused evidences; a new policy to create, agreeing with the old

world, while not disagreeing too greatly from the revolutionary ideal,

a situation in which Lafayette must be used to defend Polignac, the

intuition of progress apparent behind the riots, the chambers, and the

street; the king's faith in the revolution; rivalries to be balanced

around him, possibly some eventual resignation sprung from the vague

acceptance of a definite and superior right; his wish to remain here,

his race, his family affections, his sincere respect for the people,

and his own honesty,--all these painfully affected Louis Philippe, and

at times, though he was so strong and courageous, crushed him beneath

the difficulty of being a king. He felt beneath his feet a formidable

disintegration, which, however, was not a crumbling to dust, as France

was more France than ever. Dark storm-clouds were collected on the

horizon; a strange, gradually increasing shadow was extended over men,

things, and ideas; it was a shadow that sprang from anger and systems.

Everything that had been hastily suppressed stirred and fermented,

and at times the conscience of the honest man held its breath, as

there was such an uneasy feeling produced by this atmosphere, in which

sophisms were mixed with truths. Minds trembled in the social anxiety,

like leaves on the approach of a storm, and the electric tension was

such that at some moments the first-comer, a stranger, would produce a

flash, but then the twilight obscurity fell over the whole scene again.

At intervals, deep and muttered rolling allowed an opinion to be formed

of the amount of lightning which the cloud must contain.

Twenty months had scarce elapsed since the revolution of July, and

the year 1832 opened with an imminent and menacing appearance. The

distress of the people, workmen without bread; the Prince of Condé

suddenly departed from the world; Brussels expelling the Nassaus,

as Paris had done the Bourbons; Belgium offering itself to a French

prince and given to an English prince; the Russian hatred of Nicholas;

behind us two demons of the South, Ferdinand in Spain and Miguel in

Portugal; the earth trembling in Italy; Metternich stretching out his

hand over Bologna; France confronting Austria at Ancona; in the North

the sinister sound of a hammer, enclosing Poland again in its coffin;

throughout Europe angry eyes watching France; England, a suspicious

ally, prepared to push any one who staggered and to throw herself on

him who fell; the Peerage taking refuge behind Beccaria to refuse four

heads to the law; the fleurs-de-lys erased from the king's coaches;

the cross dragged from Notre Dame; Lafayette enfeebled, Laffitte

ruined; Benjamin Constant dead in poverty; Casimir Perier dead in

the exhaustion of power; a political and a social disease declaring

themselves simultaneously in the two capitals of the kingdom,--one the

city of thought, the other the city of toil; in Paris a civil war,

in Lyons a servile war; and in both cities the same furnace-glow, a

volcanic purple on the brow of the people; the South fanaticized,

the West troubled, the Duchesse de Berry in the Vendée; plots,

conspiracies, insurrections, and cholera adding to the gloomy rumor of

ideas the gloomy tumult of events.

CHAPTER V.

FACTS FROM WHICH HISTORY IS DERIVED BUT WHICH HISTORY IGNORES.

Toward the end of April matters became aggravated, and the fermentation

assumed the proportions of an ebullition. Since 1830 there had been

small partial revolts, quickly suppressed, but breaking out again,

which were the sign of a vast subjacent conflagration, and of something

terrible smouldering. A glimpse could be caught of the lineaments of a

possible revolution, though it was still indistinct and badly lighted.

France was looking at Paris, and Paris at the Faubourg St. Antoine.

The Faubourg St. Antoine, noiselessly heated, had begun to boil.

The wine-shops in the Rue de Charonne were grave and stormy, though

the conjunction of these two epithets applied to wine-shops appears

singular. The Government was purely and simply put upon its trial on

this, and men publicly discussed whether "they should fight or remain

quiet." There were back-rooms in which workmen swore to go into the

streets at the first cry of alarm, "and fight without counting their

enemies." Once they had taken the pledge, a man seated in a corner of

the wine-shop shouted in a sonorous voice, "You hear! You have sworn!"

Sometimes they went up to a private room on the first floor, where

scenes almost resembling masonic ceremonies took place, and the novice

took oaths, "in order to render a service to himself as well as to

the fathers of families,"--such was the formula. In the tap-rooms,

"subversive" pamphlets were read, and, as a secret report of the day

says, "they spurned the Government." Remarks like the following could

be heard: "I do not know the names of the chief, we shall not know the

day till two hours beforehand." A workman said, "We are three hundred,

let us each subscribe ten sous, and we shall have one hundred and fifty

francs, with which to manufacture bullets and gunpowder." Another said,

"I do not ask for six months, I do not ask for two. Within a fortnight

we shall be face to face with the government, for it is possible to do

so with twenty-five thousand men." Another said, "I do not go to bed at

nights now, for I am making cartridges." From time to time well-dressed

men came, feigning embarrassment and having an air of command,

and shook hands with the more important and then went away, never

staying longer than ten minutes; significant remarks were exchanged

in whispers, "The plot is ripe, the thing is ready,"--to borrow the

remark of one of the audience, "this was buzzed by all present."

The excitement was so great that one day a workman said openly in a

wine-shop, "But we have no weapons," to which a comrade replied, "The

soldiers have them," unconsciously parodying Bonaparte's proclamation

to the army of Italy. "When they had any very great secret," a report

adds, "they did not communicate it," though we do not understand

what they could conceal after what they had said. The meetings were

sometimes periodical; at certain ones there were never more than eight

or ten members present, and they were always the same, but at others

any one who liked went in, and the room was so crowded that they were

obliged to stand; some went there through enthusiasm and passion,

others "because it was the road to their work." In the same way as

during the revolution, there were female patriots in these wine-shops,

who kissed the new-comers.

Other expressive facts were collected: thus a man went into a

wine-shop, drank, and went away, saying, "Wine-dealer, the revolution

will pay what is due." Revolutionary agents were nominated at a

wine-shop opposite the Rue de Charonne, and the ballot was made in

caps. Workmen assembled at a fencing-master's who gave lessons in

the Rue de Cotte. There was a trophy of arms, made of wooden sabres,

canes, cudgels, and foils. One day the buttons were removed from the

foils, and a workman said, "We are five-and-twenty, but they do not

reckon upon me, as they consider me a machine." This man was at a

later date Quénisset. Things that were premeditated gradually assumed

a strange notoriety; a woman who was sweeping her door said to another

woman, "They have been making cartridges for a long time past." In

the open streets proclamations addressed to the National Guards of

the departments were read aloud, and one of them was signed, "Burtot,

wine-dealer."

One day a man with a large beard and an Italian accent leaped on

a bench at the door of a dram-shop in the Marché Lenoir, and began

reading a singular document, which seemed to emanate from some occult

power. Groups assembled around him and applauded, and the passages

which most excited the mob were noted down at the time. "Our doctrines

are impeded, our proclamations are torn down, our bill-posters watched

and thrown into prison.... The collapse in cottons has brought over

to us a good many conservatives.... The future of the people is being

worked out in our obscure ranks.... These are the terms laid down,

action or reaction, revolution or counter-revolution, for in our age

no one still believes in inertia or immobility. For the people, or

against the people, that is the question, and there is no other.... On

the day when we no longer please you, break us, but till then aid us

to progress." All this took place in broad daylight. Other facts, of

even a more audacious nature, appeared suspicious to the people, owing

to their very audacity. On April 4, 1832, a passer-by leaped on the

bench at the corner of the Rue Sainte Marguerite, and shouted, "I am

a Babouviste," but under Babœuf the people scented Gisquet. Among

other things this man said: "Down with property! The opposition of the

Left is cowardly and treacherous: when they wish to be in the right,

they preach the revolution; they are democratic that they may not be

defeated, and royalist so that they need not fight. The republicans are

feathered beasts; distrust the republicans, citizen-workmen!" "Silence,

citizen-spy!" a workman shouted, and this put an end to the speech.

Mysterious events occurred. At nightfall a workman met a "well-dressed"

man near the canal, who said to him, "Where art thou going, citizen?"

"Sir," the workman answered, "I have not the honor of knowing you"--"I

know thee, though;" and the man added, "Fear nothing, I am the agent of

the committee, and it is suspected that thou art not to be trusted. But

thou knowest that there is an eye upon thee, if thou darest to reveal

anything." Then he shook the workman's hand and went away, saying,

"We shall meet again soon." The police, who were listening, overheard

singular dialogues, not only in the wine-shops but in the streets.

"Get yourself ready soon," said a weaver to a cabinet-maker. "Why so?"

"There will be shots to fire." Two passers-by in rags exchanged the

following peculiar remarks, which were big with an apparent Jacquerie:

"Who governs us?" "It is Monsieur Philippe." "No, the bourgeoisie."

It would be an error to suppose that we attach a bad sense to the

word "Jacquerie;" the Jacques were the poor. Another time a man was

heard saying to his companion, "We have a famous plan of attack."

Of a private conversation between four men seated in a ditch near

the Barrière du Trône only the following was picked up: "Everything

possible will be done to prevent him walking about Paris any longer."

"Who is the _he_?" there is a menacing obscurity about it. The

"principal chiefs," as they were called in the faubourg, kept aloof,

but were supposed to assemble to arrange matters at a wine-shop near

the Point St. Eustache. A man of the name of Aug, chief of the society

for the relief of tailors, was supposed to act as central intermediary

between the chiefs and the Faubourg St. Antoine. Still, a considerable

amount of obscurity hangs over these chiefs, and no fact could weaken

the singular pride in the answer made at a later date, by a prisoner

brought before the Court of Peers.

"Who was your chief?"

"I did not know any, and I did not recognize any."

As yet they were but words, transparent but vague, at times mere rumors

and hearsays, but other signs arrived ere long. A carpenter, engaged

in the Rue de Rueilly in nailing up a fence round a block of ground

on which a house was being built, found on the ground a piece of a

torn letter, on which the following lines were still legible: "... The

Committee must take measures to prevent recruiting in the sections for

the different societies;" and as a postscript, "We have learned that

there are guns at No. 5, Rue du Faubourg, Poissonnière, to the number

of five or six thousand, at a gunmaker's in the yard. The Section

possesses no arms." What startled the carpenter, and induced him to

show the thing to his neighbors, was that a few paces farther on he

found another paper, also torn, and even more significant, of which we

reproduce the shape, owing to the historic interest of these strange

documents.

┌───┬───┬───┬───┬─────────────────────────────────────────┐

│ Q │ C │ D │ E │ Apprenez cette liste par cœur. Après │

│ │ │ │ │ vous la déchirerez: Les hommes admis │

│ │ │ │ │ en feront autant lorsque vous leur │

│ │ │ │ │ aurez transmis des ordres. │

│ │ │ │ │ Salut et Fraternité. │

│ │ │ │ │ u og a¹ fe L. │

└───┴───┴───┴───┴─────────────────────────────────────────┘

Persons at that time on the scent of this discovery did not learn

till a later date the meaning of the four capitals,--_Quinturions,

Centurions, Décurions_, and _Éclaireurs_, or the sense of the letters

_u og a¹ fe_, which were a date, and indicated "this 15th April,

1832." Under each capital letter were written names followed by very

characteristic remarks. Thus, "Q. Bannerel, 8 guns, 83 cartridges. A

safe man.--C. Boubière, 1 pistol, 40 cartridges.--D. Rollet, 1 foil,

1 pistol, 1 lb. gunpowder.--E. Tessin, 1 sabre, 1 cartouche-box.

Punctual.--Terreur, 8 guns. Brave," etc. Lastly, this carpenter found

in the same enclosure a third paper, on which was written in pencil,

but very legibly, this enigmatical list.

Unité. Blanchard: Arbre sec. 6.

Barra. Sixteen. Sall au Comte.

Kosciusko. Aubry the butcher?

J. J. R.

Caius Graccus.

Right of revision. Dufond. Four.

Downfall of the Girondists. Derbac. Maubuée.

Washington. Pinson. 1 pist. 86 cart.

Marseillaise.

Sovereignty of the people. Michel. Quincampoix. Sabre.

Hoche.

Marceau. Plato. Arbre Sec.

Warsaw, Tilly, crier of the _Populaire_.

The honest citizen in whose hands this list remained learned its

purport. It seems that the list was the complete nomenclature of the

sections of the fourth arrondissement of the Society of the Rights of

Man, with the names and addresses of the chiefs of sections. At the

present day, when these obscure facts have become historic, they may be

published. We may add that the foundation of the Society of the Rights

of Man seems to have been posterior to the date on which this paper was

found, and so it was possibly only a sketch. After propositions and

words and written information, material facts began to pierce through.

In the Rue Popincourt, at the shop of a broker, seven pieces of paper,

all folded alike, were found in a drawer; these papers contained

twenty-six squares of the same gray paper, folded in the shape of

cartridges, and a card on which was written:--

Saltpetre . . . . . . 12 oz.

Sulphur . . . . . . 2 "

Charcoal . . . . . . 2 1/2 "

Water . . . . . . . . 2 "

The report of the seizure showed that there was a strong smell of

gunpowder in the drawer.

A mason, returning home after his day's work, left a small parcel

on the bench near the bridge of Austerlitz. It was carried to the

guard-house and opened, and from it were taken two printed dialogues

signed "Lahautière," a song called "Workmen, combine!" and a tin box

full of cartridges. A workman drinking with his comrade bade him feel

how hot he was; and the other noticed a pistol under his jacket. In a

ditch on the boulevard between Père Lachaise and the Barrière du Trône,

some children, playing at the most deserted spot, discovered under a

heap of rubbish a bag containing a bullet mould, a mandrel for making

cartridges, a pouch in which there were some grains of gunpowder, and

an iron ladle on which were evident signs of melted lead. Some police

agents suddenly entering at five A.M. the room of one Pardon, who was

at a later date a sectionist belonging to the Barricade Merry section,

found him sitting on his bed with cartridges in his hand, which he

was in the act of making. At the hour when workmen are generally

resting, two men were noticed to meet between the Picpus and Charenton

barrières, in a lane running between two walls. One took a pistol from

under his blouse, which he handed to the other; as he gave it him he

noticed that the perspiration on his chest had dampened the gunpowder,

he therefore filled the pan afresh, and the two men thereupon parted.

A man of the name of Gallas, afterwards killed in the April affair in

the Rue Beaubourg, used to boast that he had at home seven hundred

cartridges and twenty-four gun flints. One day the Government received

information that arms and two hundred thousand cartridges had just been

distributed in the faubourg, and the next week thirty thousand more

cartridges were given out. The remarkable thing was that the police

could not seize any of them; but an intercepted letter stated: "The day

is not far distant when eighty thousand patriots will be under arms in

four hours."

All this fermentation was public, we might almost say calm, and the

impending insurrection prepared its storm quietly in the face of the

Government. No singularity was lacking in this crisis, which was still

subterranean, but already perceptible. The citizens spoke peacefully

to the workmen of what was preparing. They said, "How is the revolt

going on?" in the same tone as they could have said, "How is your

wife?" A furniture broker in the Rue Moreau asked, "Well, when do

you attack?" and another shop-keeper said, "They will attack soon,

I know it. A month ago there were fifteen thousand of you, and now

there are twenty-five thousand." He offered his gun, and a neighbor

offered a pocket pistol which was marked for sale at seven francs. The

revolutionary fever spread, and no point of Paris or of France escaped

it. The artery throbbed everywhere, and the network of secret societies

began spreading over the country like the membranes which spring up

from certain inflammations, and are formed in the human body. From the

Association of the Friends of the People, which was at the same time

public and secret, sprang the Society of the Rights of Man, which dated

one of its orders of the day, "Pluviose, year 40 of the republican

era," which was destined even to survive the decrees of the Court of

Assizes pronouncing its dissolution, and did not hesitate to give to

its sections significant titles like the following: "Pikes. The Tocsin.

The Alarm Gun. The Phrygian Cap. January 21. The Beggars. The Vagrants.

March forward. Robespierre. The Level. Ça ira."

The Society of the Rights of Man engendered the Society of Action,

composed of impatient men who detached themselves and hurried forward.

Other associations tried to recruit themselves in the great mother

societies: and the sectionists complained of being tormented. Such

were the "Gaulish Society" and the "Organizing Committee of the

Municipalities;" such the associations for the "Liberty of the Press,"

for "Individual Liberty," for the "Instruction of the People," and

"Against Indirect Taxes." Next we have the Society of Equalitarian

Workmen divided into three fractions,--the Equalitarians, the

Communists, and the Reformers. Then, again, the Army of the Bastilles,

a cohort possessing military organization, four men being commanded by

a corporal, ten by a sergeant, twenty by a sub-lieutenant, and forty

by a lieutenant; there were never more than five men who knew each

other. This is a creation where precaution is combined with audacity,

and which seems to be stamped with the genius of Venice. The central

committee which formed the head, had two arms,--the Society of Action

and the Army of the Bastilles. A legitimist association, the "Knights

of Fidelity," agitated among these republican affiliations, but was

denounced and repudiated. The Parisian societies ramified through the

principal cities. Lyons, Nantes, Lille, and Marseilles, had their

Society of the Rights of Man, The Charbonnière, and the Free Men. Aix

had a revolutionary society called the Cougourde. We have already

mentioned that name.

At Paris the Faubourg Marceau buzzed no less than the Faubourg St.

Antoine, and the schools were quite as excited as the faubourgs.

A coffee-shop in the Rue Saint Hyacinthe, and the Estaminet des

Sept Billards in the Rue des Mathurins St. Jacques, served as the

gathering-place for the students. The Society of the Friends of the A.

B. C. affiliated with the Mutualists of Angers, and the Cougourde of

Aix assembled, as we have seen, at the Café Musain. The same young men

met, as we have also said, at a wine-shop and eating-house near the Rue

Montdétour, called Corinthe. These meetings were secret, but others

were as public as possible, and we may judge of their boldness by this

fragment from an examination that was held in one of the ulterior

trials. "Where was the meeting held?" "In the Rue de la Paix." "At

whose house?" "In the street." "What sections were there?" "Only one."

"Which one?" "The Manuel section." "Who was the chief?" "Myself." "You

are too young to have yourself formed this serious resolve of attacking

the Government. Whence came your instructions?" "From the central

committee." The army was undermined at the same time as the population,

as was proved at a later date by the movements of Béford, Luneville,

and Épinal. Hopes were built on the 52d, 5th, 8th, and 37th regiments,

and on the 20th light infantry. In Burgundy and the southern towns the

tree of liberty was planted, that is to say, a mast surmounted by a red

cap.

Such was the situation.

This situation, as we said at the commencement, the Faubourg St.

Antoine rendered keen and marked more than any other group of the

population. This was the stitch in the side. This old faubourg, peopled

like an ant-heap, laborious, courageous, and passionate as a hive of

bees, quivered in expectation and the desire of a commotion. All was

agitation there, but labor was not suspended on that account. Nothing

could give an idea of these sharp and sombre faces; there were in

this faubourg crushing distress hidden under the roofs of houses, and

also ardent and rare minds. It is especially in the case of distress

and intelligence that it is dangerous for extremes to meet. The

Faubourg St. Antoine had other causes for excitement, as it received

the counter-stroke of commercial crisis, bankruptcies, stoppages, and

cessation of work, which are inherent in all political convulsions. In

revolutionary times misery is at once the cause and the effect, and the

blow which it deals falls upon itself again. This population, full of

haughty virtue, capable of the highest amount of latent caloric, ever

ready to take up arms, prompt to explode, irritated, profound, and

undermined, seemed to be only waiting for the fall of a spark. Whenever

certain sparks float about the horizon, driven by the wind of events,

we cannot help thinking of the Faubourg St. Antoine and the formidable

chance which has placed at the gates of Paris this powder-magazine of

sufferings and ideas.

The wine-shops of the Antoine suburb, which have been more than once

referred to in this sketch, possess an historic notoriety. In times of

trouble people grow intoxicated in them more on words than wine; and a

species of prophetic spirit and an effluvium of the future circulates

there, swelling hearts and ennobling minds. These wine-shops resemble

the taverns on the Mons Aventinus, built over the Sibyl's cave and

communicating with the sacred blasts of the depths,--taverns in which

the tables were almost tripods, and people drank what Ennius calls the

Sibylline wine. The Faubourg St. Antoine is a reservoir of the people,

in which the revolutionary earthquake makes fissures, through which the

sovereignty of the people flows. This sovereignty can act badly, it

deceives itself like other things, but even when led astray it remains

grand. We may say of it, as of the blind Cyclops, "Ingens." In '93,

according as the idea that floated was good or bad, or according as it

was the day of fanaticism or enthusiasm, savage legions or heroic bands

issued from this faubourg. Savage,--let us explain that word. What did

these bristling men want, who, in the Genesis of the revolutionary

chaos, rushed upon old overthrown Paris in rags, yelling and ferocious,

with uplifted clubs and raised pikes? They wanted the end of

oppression, the end of tyranny, the end of the sword, work for the man,

instruction for the child, social gentleness for the woman, liberty,

equality, fraternity, bread for all, the idea for all, the Edenization

of the world, and progress; and this holy, good, and sweet thing called

progress, they, driven to exasperation, claimed terribly with upraised

weapons and curses. They were savages, we grant, but the savages of

civilization. They proclaimed the right furiously, and wished to

force the human race into Paradise, even were it through trembling

and horror. They seemed barbarians, and were saviors; they demanded

light while wearing the mask of night. Opposite these men,--stern and

frightful we admit, but stern and frightful for good,--there are other

men, smiling, embroidered, gilded, be-ribboned, in silk stockings,

with white feathers, yellow gloves, and kid shoes, who, leaning upon a

velvet-covered table near a marble chimney-piece, gently insist on the

maintenance and preservation of the past, of the middle ages; of divine

right, of fanaticism, of ignorance, of slavery, of the punishment

of death, and of war; and who glorify in a low voice and with great

politeness the sabre, the pyre, and the scaffold. For our part, were we

compelled to make a choice between the barbarians of civilization and

the civilized of barbarism, we would choose the barbarians. But, thanks

be to Heaven, another choice is possible; no fall down an abyss is

required, either in front or behind, neither despotism nor terrorism.

We wish for progress on a gentle incline, and God provides for this.

Reducing inclines is the whole policy of God.

CHAPTER VI.

ENJOLRAS AND HIS LIEUTENANTS.

Shortly after this period, Enjolras made a sort of mysterious census,

as if in the view of a possible event. All were assembled in council at

the Café Musain. Enjolras spoke, mingling a few half-enigmatical but

significant metaphors with his words:

"It behooves us to know where we are, and on whom we can count. If

we want combatants we must make them; and there is no harm in having

weapons to strike with. Passers-by always run a greater chance of being

gored when there are bulls in the road than when there are none. So,

suppose we count the herd. How many are there of us? This task must

not be deferred till to-morrow, for revolutionists must always be in a

hurry, as progress has no time to lose. Let us distrust the unexpected,

and not allow ourselves to be taken unawares; we have to go over all

the seams which we have sewn, and see whether they hold; and the job

must be done to-day. Courfeyrac, you will see the Polytechnic students,

for this is their day for going out. Feuilly, you will see those of

La Glacière, and Combeferre has promised to go to the Picpus. Bahorel

will visit the Estrapade. Prouvaire, the masons are growing lukewarm,

so you will obtain us news from the lodge in the Rue de Grenelle St.

Honoré. Joly will go to Dupuytren's clinical lecture, and feel the

pulse of the medical scholars, while Bossuet will stroll round the

courts and talk with the law students. I take the Cougourde myself."

"That is all settled," said Courfeyrac.

"No. There is another very important matter."

"What is it?" Combeferre asked

"The Barrière du Maine."

Enjolras was absorbed in thought for a moment, and then continued,--

"At the Barrière du Maine are stone-cutters and painters, an

enthusiastic body, but subject to chills. I do not know what has been

the matter with them for some time past, but they are thinking of other

things. They are dying out, and they spend their time in playing at

dominoes. It is urgent to go and talk to them rather seriously, and

they meet at Richefeu's, where they may be found between twelve and one

o'clock. Those ashes must be blown up, and I had intended to intrust

the task to that absent fellow Marius, who is all right, but no longer

comes here. I need some one for the Barrière du Maine, and have no one

left."

"Why, I am here," said Grantaire.

"You?"

"I."

"You indoctrinate republicans? you warm up chilled hearts in the name

of principles?"

"Why not?"

"Can you possibly be fit for anything?"

"Well, I have a vague ambition to be so."

"You believe in nothing."

"I believe in you."

"Grantaire, will you do a service?"

"Any one; clean your boots."

"Well, do not meddle in our affairs, sleep off your absinthe."

"You are an ungrateful fellow, Enjolras!"

"You be the man capable of going to the Barrière du Maine!"

"I am capable of going down the Rue des Grès, crossing St. Michael's

Square, cutting through the Rue Monsieur le Prince, taking the Rue

de Vaugirard, passing the Carmelites, turning into the Rue d'Assas,

arriving at the Rue Cherche Midi, leaving behind me the Council of War,

stepping across the Rue des Vieilles-Tuileries, following the main

road, going through the gate and entering Richefeu's. I am capable of

all that, and so are my shoes."

"Do you know the men at Richefeu's?"

"Not much."

"What will you say to them?"

"Talk to them about Robespierre, Danton, and principles."

"You!"

"I. You really do not do me justice, for when I make up my mind to

it I am terrible. I have read Prudhomme, I know the social contract,

and have by heart my constitution of the year II. 'The liberty of the

citizen ends where the liberty of another citizen begins.' Do you take

me for a brute? I have an old assignat in my draw,--The Rights of Man,

the sovereignty of the people, sapristi! I am a bit of a Hébertist

myself. I can discourse splendid things for six hours at a stretch,

watch in hand."

"Be serious," said Enjolras.

"I am stern," Grantaire answered.

Enjolras reflected for a few seconds, and then seemed to have made up

his mind.

"Grantaire," he said gravely, "I consent to try you. You shall go to

the Barrière du Maine.".

Grantaire lodged in a furnished room close to the Café Musain. He went

away and returned five minutes after--he had been home to put on a

waistcoat of the Robespierre cut.

"Red," he said on entering, and looked intently at Enjolras.

Then he energetically turned back on his chest the two scarlet points

of the waistcoat, and, walking up to Enjolras, whispered in his ear,

"Never fear!" He boldly cocked his hat, and went out. A quarter of an

hour after, the back-room of the Café Musain was deserted, and all the

Friends of the A. B. C. were going in various directions about their

business. Enjolras, who had reserved the Cougourde for himself, was

the last to leave. The Members of the Aix Cougourde who were in Paris

assembled at that period on the plain of Issy, in one of the abandoned

quarries so numerous on that side of Paris.

Enjolras, while walking toward the meeting-place, took a mental review

of the situation. The gravity of the events was visible, for when

the facts which are the forerunners of latent social disease move

heavily, the slightest complication checks and impedes their action. It

is a phenomenon from which collapse and regeneration issue. Enjolras

caught a glimpse of a luminous upheaving behind the dark clouds of

the future. Who knew whether the moment might not be at hand when the

people would seize their rights once again? What a splendid spectacle!

the revolution majestically taking possession of France once more,

and saying to the world, "To be continued to-morrow!" Enjolras was

satisfied, for the furnace was aglow, and he had at that self-same

moment a gunpowder train of friends scattered over Paris. He mentally

compared Combeferre's philosophic and penetrating eloquence, Feuilly's

cosmopolitan enthusiasm, Courfeyrac's humor, Bahorel's laugh, Jean

Prouvaire's melancholy, Joly's learning, and Bossuet's sarcasms,

to a species of electrical flash, which produced fire everywhere

simultaneously. All were at work, and most certainly the result

would respond to the effort. That was good, and it made him think of

Grantaire. "Ah," he said to himself, "the Barrière du Maine is hardly

at all out of my way, so suppose I go on to Richefeu's and see what

Grantaire is doing, and how far he has got."

It was striking one by the Vaugirard church when Enjolras reached

Richefeu's. He pushed open the door, went in, folded his arms, and

looked about the room, which was full of tables, men, and tobacco

smoke. A voice was audible in this fog, sharply interrupted by another

voice,--it was Grantaire talking with some opponent of his. Grantaire

was seated opposite another man, at a marble table covered with sawdust

and studded with dominoes. He smote the marble with his fist, and this

is what Enjolras heard:--

"Double six."

"A four."

"The pig! I haven't any left."

"You are dead. A two."

"A six."

"A three."

"An ace."

"My set."

"Four points."

"With difficulty."

"It is yours."

"I made an enormous mistake."

"You are getting on all right."

"Fifteen."

"Seven more."

"That makes me twenty-two [pensively]. Twenty-two!"

"You did not expect the double six. Had I played it at first it would

have changed the whole game."

"Double two."

"An ace."

"An ace! well, a five!"

"I haven't one."

"You played first, I believe?"

"Yes."

"A blank."

"What luck he has! Ah! you have luck; [a long reverie] a two."

"An ace."

"I've neither a five nor an ace. It is stupid for you."

"Domino!"

"Oh, the deuce!"

BOOK II.

ÉPONINE.

CHAPTER I.

THE LARK'S FIELD.

Marius witnessed the unexpected dénouement of the snare upon whose

track he had placed Javert, but the Inspector had scarce left the

house, taking his prisoners with him in three hackney coaches, ere

Marius stepped out of the house in his turn. It was only nine in the

evening, and Marius went to call on Courfeyrac, who was no longer the

imperturbable inhabitant of the Pays Latin. He had gone to live in the

Rue de la Verrière, "for political reasons;" and this district was one

of those in which insurrectionists of the day were fond of installing

themselves. Marius said to Courfeyrac, "I am going to sleep here,"

and Courfeyrac pulled off one of his two mattresses, laid it on the

ground, and said, "There you are!" At seven o'clock the next morning

Marius returned to No. 50-52, paid his quarter's rent, and what he owed

to Mame Bougon, had his books, bed, table, chest-of-drawers, and two

chairs, placed on a truck, and went away without leaving his address;

so that, when Javert returned in the morning to question Marius about

the events of the previous evening, he only found Mame Bougon, who said

to him, "Gone away." Mame Bougon was convinced that Marius was in some

way an accomplice of the robbers arrested the previous evening. "Who

would have thought it!" she exclaimed to the portresses of the quarter,

"a young man whom you might have taken for a girl!"

Marius had two reasons for moving so promptly, the first was that he

now felt a horror of this house, in which he had seen so closely,

and in all its most repulsive and ferocious development, a social

ugliness more frightful still, perhaps, than the wicked rich man,--the

wicked poor man. The second was that he did not wish to figure at the

trial,--which would in all probability ensue,--and be obliged to give

evidence against Thénardier. Javert believed that the young man, whose

name he forgot, had been frightened and had run away, or else had not

even returned home; he made some efforts, however, to find him, which

were unsuccessful. A month elapsed, then another. Marius was still

living with Courfeyrac, and had learned from a young barrister, an

habitual walker of the Salle des Pas Perdus, that Thénardier was in

solitary confinement, and every Monday he left a five-franc piece for

him at the wicket of La Force. Marius, having no money left, borrowed

the five francs of Courfeyrac; it was the first time in his life that

he borrowed money. These periodical five francs were a double enigma

for Courfeyrac who gave them, and for Thénardier who received them.

"Where can they go to?" Courfeyrac thought. "Where can they come from?"

Thénardier asked himself.

Marius, however, was heart-broken, for everything had disappeared again

through a trap-door. He saw nothing ahead of him, and his life was once

more plunged into the mystery in which he had been groping. He had seen

again momentarily and very closely the girl whom he loved, the old man

who appeared her father,--the strange beings who were his only interest

and sole hope in this world,--and at the moment when he fancied that he

should grasp them, a breath had carried off all these shadows. Not a

spark of certainty and truth had flashed even from that most terrific

collision, and no conjecture was possible. He no longer knew the name

of which he had felt so certain, and it certainly was not Ursule, and

the Lark was a nickname; and then, what must he think of the old man?

Did he really hide himself from the police? The white-haired workman

whom Marius had met in the vicinity of the Invalides reverted to his

mind, and it now became probable that this workman and M. Leblanc were

one and the same. He disguised himself then, and this man had his

heroic side and his equivocal side. Why did he not call for help? why

did he fly? was he, yes or no, the father of the girl? and, lastly, was

he really the man whom Thénardier fancied he recognized? Thénardier

might have been mistaken. These were all so many insoluble problems.

All this, it is true, in no way lessened the angelic charm of the

maiden of the Luxembourg. Poignant distress,--Marius had a passion in

his heart, and night over his eyes. He was impelled, he was attracted,

and he could not stir; all had vanished, except love, and he had lost

the sudden instincts and illuminations of even that love. Usually, this

flame which burns us enlightens us a little, and casts some useful

light without, but Marius no longer even heard the dumb counsel of

passion. He never said to himself, Suppose I were to go there, or try

this thing or the other? She whom he could no longer call Ursule was

evidently somewhere, but nothing advised Marius in what direction he

should seek her. All his life was now summed up in two words,--absolute

uncertainty, in an impenetrable fog,--and though he still longed to see

her, he no longer hoped it. As a climax, want returned, and he felt

its icy breath close to him and behind him. In all these torments,

and for a long time, he had discontinued his work, and nothing is

more dangerous than discontinued work; for it is a habit which a man

loses,--a habit easy to give up, but difficult to re-acquire.

A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic taken in discreet

doses. It lulls to sleep the at times harsh fevers of the working

brain, and produces in the mind a soft and fresh vapor which correct

the too sharp outlines of pure thought, fills up gaps and spaces here

and there, and rounds the angles of ideas. But excess of reverie

submerges and drowns, and woe to the mental workman who allows

himself to fall entirely from thinking into reverie! He believes that

he can easily rise again, and says that, after all, it is the same

thing. Error! Thought is the labor of the intellect, and reverie its

voluptuousness; substituting reverie for thought is like confounding a

person with his nutriment. Marius, it will be remembered, began with

that; passion arrived, and finished by hurling him into objectless

and bottomless chimeras. In such a state a man only leaves his home

to go and dream, and it is an indolent childishness, a tumultuous

and stagnant gulf, and in proportion as work diminishes, necessities

increase. This is a law; man in a dreamy state is naturally lavish and

easily moved, and the relaxed mind can no longer endure the contracted

life. There is, in this mode of existence, good mingled with evil,

for if the softening be mournful, the generosity is healthy and good.

But the poor, generous, and noble-minded man who does not work is

ruined; the resources dry up, and necessity arises. This is a fatal

incline, on which the most honest and the strongest men are dragged

down like the weakest and the most vicious, and which leads to one

of two holes,--suicide or crime. Through going out to dream, a day

arrives when a man goes out to throw himself into the water. Excess of

dreaminess produces such men as Escousse and Libras. Marius went down

this incline slowly, with his eyes fixed upon her whom he no longer

saw. What we have just written seems strange, and yet it is true,--the

recollection of an absent being is illumined in the gloom of the heart;

the more it disappears the more radiant it appears, and the despairing

and obscure soul sees this light on its horizon, the star of its inner

night. She was Marius's entire thought, he dreamed of nothing else.

He felt confusedly that his old coat was becoming an outrageous coat,

and that his new coat was growing an old coat, that his boots were

wearing out, that his hat was wearing out, that his shirts were wearing

out,--that is to say, that his life was wearing out; and he said to

himself, Could I but see her again before I die!

One sole sweet idea was left him, and it was that she had loved him,

that her glance had told him so; and that she did not know his name

but that she knew his soul, and that however mysterious the spot might

be where she now was, she loved him still. Might she not be dreaming

of him as he was dreaming of her? At times in those inexplicable hours

which every loving heart knows, as he had only reason to be sad, and

yet felt within him a certain quivering of joy, he said to himself,

"Her thoughts are visiting me," and then added, "Perhaps my thoughts

also go to her." This illusion, at which he shook his head a moment

after, sometimes, however, contrived to cast rays which resembled hope

into his soul at intervals. Now and then, especially at that evening

hour which most saddens dreamers, he poured out upon virgin paper

the pure, impersonal, and ideal reveries with which love filled his

brain. He called this "writing to her." We must not suppose, however,

that his reason was in disorder, quite the contrary. He had lost the

faculty of working and going firmly toward a determined object, but he

retained clear-sightedness and rectitude more fully than ever. Marius

saw by a calm and real, though singular, light, all that was taking

place before him, even the most indifferent men and facts, and spoke

correctly of everything with a sort of honest weariness and candid

disinterestedness. His judgment, almost detached from hope, soared far

above him. In this state of mind nothing escaped him, nothing deceived

him, and he discovered at each moment the bases of life,--humanity and

destiny. Happy, even in agony, is the man to whom God has granted a

soul worthy of love and misfortune! He who has not seen the things of

this world and the heart of man in this double light has seen nothing

of the truth and knows nothing.

The soul that loves and suffers is in a sublime state.

Days succeeded each other, and nothing new occurred; it really seemed

to him that the gloomy space which he still had to traverse was

becoming daily reduced. He fancied that he could already see distinctly

the brink of the bottomless abyss.

"What!" he repeated to himself, "shall I not see her again before that

takes place?"

After going up the Rue St. Jacques, leaving the barrière on one side,

and following for some distance the old inner boulevard, you reach the

Rue de la Santé, then the Glacière, and just before coming to the small

stream of the Gobelins, you notice a sort of field, the only spot on

the long and monotonous belt of Parisian boulevards, where Ruysdael

would be tempted to sit down. I know not whence the picturesque aspect

is obtained, for you merely see a green field crossed by ropes, on

which rags hang to dry; an old house built in the time of Louis XIII.,

with its high-pitched roof quaintly pierced with garret-windows;

broken-down grating; a little water between poplar trees; women's

laughter and voices; on the horizon you see the Pantheon, the tree of

the Sourds-Muets, the Val de Grâce, black, stunted, fantastic, amusing,

and magnificent, and far in the background the stern square towers of

Notre Dame. As the place is worth the trouble of visiting, no one goes

there; scarce a cart or a wagon passes in a quarter of an hour. It once

happened that Marius's solitary rambles led him to this field, and on

that day there was a rarity on the boulevard, a passer-by. Marius,

really struck by the almost savage grace of the field, asked him: "What

is the name of this spot?"

The passer-by answered, "It is the Lark's field;" and added, "It was

here that Ulbach killed the shepherdess of Ivry."

But, after the words "the Lark," Marius heard no more, for a word at

times suffices to produce a congelation in a man's dreamy condition:

the whole thought is condensed round an idea, and is no longer capable

of any other perception. The Lark, that was the appellation which

had taken the place of Ursule in the depths of Marius's melancholy.

"Stay," he said, with that sort of unreasoning stupor peculiar to such

mysterious asides, "this is her field, I shall learn here where she

lives." This was absurd but irresistible, and he came daily to this

Lark's field.

CHAPTER II.

CRIMES IN EMBRYO INCUBATED IN PRISONS.

Javert's triumph at the Maison Gorbeau had seemed complete, but was not

so. In the first place, and that was his chief anxiety. Javert had not

been able to make a prisoner of the prisoner; the assassinated man who

escapes is more suspicious than the assassin, and it was probable that

this personage, such a precious capture for the bandits, might be an

equally good prize for the authorities. Next, Montparnasse slipped out

of Javert's clutches, and he must wait for another opportunity to lay

hands on that "cursed dandy." Montparnasse, in fact, having met Éponine

on the boulevard, keeping watch, went off with her, preferring to play

the Nemorino with the daughter rather than Schinderhannes with the

father, and it was lucky for him that he did so, as he was now free. As

for Éponine, Javert "nailed" her, but it was a poor consolation, and

sent her to join Azelma at the Madelonnettes. Lastly, in the drive from

No. 50-52 to La Force, one of the chief men arrested, Claquesous, had

disappeared. No one knew how he did it, and the sergeants and agents

did not at all understand it; he had turned into vapor, slipped through

the handcuffs, and passed through a crack in the coach; but no one

could say anything except that on reaching the prison there was no

Claquesous. There was in this either enchantment or a police trick. Had

Claquesous melted away in the darkness like a snow-flake in the water?

Was there an unavowed connivance on the part of the agents? Did this

man belong to the double enigma of disorder and order? Had this Sphynx

its front paws in crimes, and its hind paws in the police? Javert did

not accept these combinations, and struggled against such compromises;

but his squad contained other inspectors besides himself, and though

his subordinates, perhaps more thoroughly initiated in the secrets of

the Préfecture, and Claquesous was such a villain that he might be a

very excellent agent. To be on such intimate juggling relations with

the night is excellent for plunder and admirable for the police, and

there are double-edged rogues of the sort. However this might be,

Claquesous was lost and could not be found, and Javert seemed more

irritated than surprised. As for Marius, "that scrub of a lawyer who

was probably frightened," and whose name he had forgotten, Javert did

not trouble himself much about him, and besides, a lawyer can always be

found. But, was he only a lawyer?

The examination began, and the magistrate thought it advisable not

to put one of the members of the Patron Minette band in solitary

confinement, as it was hoped he might chatter. This was Brujon,

the hairy man of the Rue du Petit Banquier; he was turned into the

Charlemagne Court, and the eyes of the spies were kept upon him.

This name of Brujon is one of the recollections of La Force. In the

hideous yard called the Bâtiment Neuf,--which the governor named the

Court of St. Bernard, and the robbers christened the Lion's Den,--and

on the wall covered with scars and leprosy, that rose on the left to

the height of the roof, and close to a rusty old iron gate which led

to the old chapel of the ducal house of La Force, converted into a

sleeping-ward for prisoners, there might have been seen, twelve years

ago, a species of Bastille, clumsily engraved with a nail in the stone,

and beneath it this signature,--

BRUJON, 1811.

The Brujon of 1811 was the father of the Brujon of 1832. The latter,

of whom we could only catch a glimpse in the Gorbeau trap, was a very

crafty and artful young fellow, with a downcast and plaintive air. It

was in consequence of this air that the magistrate turned him loose,

believing him more useful in the Charlemagne yard than in a secret

cell. Robbers do not interrupt their labors because they are in the

hands of justice, and do not trouble themselves about such a trifle.

Being in prison for one crime does not prevent another being commenced.

There are artists who have a picture in the Exhibition, but for all

that work at a new one in their studio. Brujon seemed stupefied by

prison; he might be seen standing for hours in the yard near the

canteen man's stall, contemplating like an idiot the mean tariff of

prices of the canteen which began with "garlic, fifty-two centimes,"

and ended with "cigar, five centimes." Or else he passed his time in

trembling, shaking his teeth, declaring he had the fever, and inquiring

whether one of the twenty-six beds in the Infirmary were vacant.

All at once, toward the second half of February, 1832, it was

discovered that Brujon, the sleepy-looking man, had had three messages

delivered, not in his own name, but in those of his comrades, by the

prison porters. These messages had cost him fifty sous altogether,

an exorbitant sum, which attracted the sergeant's attention. After

making inquiries and consulting the tariff of messages hung up in the

prisoners' visiting room, this authority found out that the fifty

sous were thus divided,--one message to the Panthéon, ten sous; one

to Val de Grâce, fifteen sous; and one to the Barrière de Grenelle,

twenty-five sous, the latter being the dearest in the whole list. Now

at these very places resided these very dangerous prowlers at the

barrière, Kruideniers _alias_ Bizarro, Glorious an ex-convict, and

Stop-the-coach, and the attention of the police was directed to these

through this incident. It was assumed that these men belonged to Patron

Minette, of which band two chiefs, Babet and Gueulemer, were locked up.

It was supposed that Brujon's messages, which were not delivered at the

houses, but to persons waiting in the street, contained information

about some meditated crime. The three ruffians were arrested, and the

police believed they had scented some machination of Brujon's.

A week after these measures had been taken, a night watchman who was

inspecting the ground-floor sleeping ward of the Bâtiment Neuf, was

just placing his chestnut in the box (this was the method employed

to make sure that the watchmen did their duty properly; every hour a

chestnut must be dropped into all the boxes nailed on the doors of

the sleeping wards), when he saw through the peep-hole Brujon sitting

up in bed and writing something. The watchman went in, Brujon was

placed in solitary confinement for a month, but what he had written

could not be found. Hence the police were just as wise as before. One

thing is certain, that on the next day a "postilion" was thrown from

Charlemagne into the Lion's Den over the five-storied building that

separated the two yards. Prisoners give the name of "postilion" to a

ball of artistically moulded bread, which is sent to "Ireland," that

is to say, thrown from one yard into another. This ball falls into

the yard, the man who picks it up opens it and finds in it a note

addressed to some prisoner in the yard. If it be a prisoner who finds

the note he delivers it to the right address; if it be a guard, or one

of those secretly-bought prisoners, called "sheep" in prisons, and

"foxes" at the galleys, the note is carried to the wicket and delivered

to the police. This time the postilion reached its address, although

the man for whom it was intended was at the time in a separate cell.

This person was no other than Babet, one of the four heads of Patron

Minette. It contained a rolled-up paper, on which only two lines were

written.

"Babet, there's a job to be done in the Rue Plumet, a gate opening on

the garden."

It was what Brujon had written during the night. In spite of male

and female searchers, Babet contrived to send the note from La Force

to the Salpêtrière to a "lady friend" of his locked up there. She in

her turn handed the note to a girl she knew, of the name of Magnon,

whom the police were actively seeking, but had not yet arrested. This

Magnon, of whose name the reader has already caught a glimpse, was

closely connected with the Thénardiers, as we shall show presently,

and by going to see Éponine was able to serve as a bridge between the

Salpêtrière and the Madelonnettes. At this very period Éponine and

Azelma were discharged for want of evidence, and when Éponine went out,

Magnon, who was watching for her at the gate of the Madelonnettes,

handed her the note from Brujon to Babet, with instructions to look

into the affair. Éponine went to the Rue Plumet, recognized the grating

and the garden, observed the house, watched for some days, and then

carried to Magnon a biscuit, which the latter sent to Babet's mistress

at the Salpêtrière. A biscuit, in the dark language of prisons, means,

"Nothing to be done."

In less than a week from this, Babet and Brujon happened to meet, as

one was going before the magistrate, the other returning. "Well,"

Brujon asked, "the Rue P.?" "Biscuit," Babet answered. Thus the

fœtus of crime engendered by Brujon at La Force became abortive;

but this abortion had consequences, for all that, perfectly foreign to

Brujon's plans, as will be seen. In fancying we are tying one thread we

often tie another.

CHAPTER III.

FATHER MABŒUF HAS AN APPARITION.

Marius no longer called on any one, but at times he came across Father

Mabœuf. While Marius was slowly descending the mournful steps

which might be called the cellar stairs, and lead to places without

light, on which you hear the footsteps of the prosperous above your

head, M. Mabœuf was also descending. The Flora of Cauteretz did not

sell at all now, and the indigo experiments had not been successful

in the little garden of Austerlitz, which was badly situated. M.

Mabœuf could only cultivate in it a few rare plants which are fond

of moisture and shade. For all that, though, he was not discouraged;

he had obtained a strip of ground at the Jardin des Plantes in a good

situation, for making "at his own charge" experiments on indigo. To do

this he pledged the plates of his _Flora_, and he reduced his breakfast

to two eggs, of which he left one for his old servant, whose wages he

had not paid for fifteen months past. And very frequently his breakfast

was his sole meal. He no longer laughed with his childish laugh, he had

grown morose, and declined to receive visitors, and Marius did well not

to call on him. At times, at the hour when M. Mabœuf proceeded to

the Jardin des Plantes, the old man and the young man passed each other

on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital; they did not speak, and merely shook

their heads sorrowfully. It is a sad thing that there comes a moment

when misery unknots friendships. There were two friends: there are two

passers-by!

Royol the publisher was dead, and now M. Mabœuf knew nothing but

his books, his garden, and his indigo; these were the three shapes

which happiness, pleasure, and hope had assumed for him. They were

sufficient to live for, and he would say to himself: "When I have made

my blue-balls, I shall be rich; I will redeem my plates from the Mont

de Piété, bring my _Flora_ into fashion again with charlatanism, the

big drum, and advertisements in the papers, and buy, I know where, a

copy of Pierre de Medine's "Art of Navigation," with woodcuts, edition

1539." In the mean while, he toiled all day at his indigo patch, and at

night went home to water his garden and read his books. M. Mabœuf at

this period was close on eighty years of age.

One evening he had a strange apparition. He had returned home while it

was still daylight, and found that Mother Plutarch, whose health was

not so good as it might be, had gone to bed. He dined upon a bone on

which a little meat remained and a lump of bread which he had found

on the kitchen table, and was seated on a stone post which acted as

a bench in his garden. Near this bench there was, after the fashion

of old kitchen-gardens, a sort of tall building of planks in a very

rickety condition, a hutch on the ground-floor, and a store-room on

the first floor. There were no rabbits in the hutch, but there were

a few apples, the remnant of the winter stock, in the store-room. M.

Mabœuf was reading, with the help of his spectacles, two books which

interested him greatly, and also, a thing more serious at his age,

preoccupied him. His natural timidity rendered him prone to accept

superstitions. The first of these books was the celebrated treatise of

President Delancre, "On the Inconstancy of Spirits," and the other was

the quarto work of Mutor de la Rubaudière, "On the Devils of Vauvert

and the Goblins of la Bièvre." The latter book interested him the more,

because his garden had been in olden times one of the places haunted by

the goblins. Twilight was beginning to whiten what is above and blacken

what is below. While reading, M. Mabœuf looked over the book which

he held in his hand at his plants, and among others at a magnificent

rhododendron which was one of his consolations. Four days of wind and

sun had passed without a drop of rain, the stems were bending, the buds

drooping, the leaves falling, and they all required watering; this

rhododendron especially looked in a very sad way. M. Mabœuf was one

of those men for whom plants have souls; he had been at work all day

in his indigo patch, and was worn out with fatigue, but for all that

he rose, laid his books on the bench, and walked in a bent posture and

with tottering steps, up to the well. But when he seized the chain

he had not sufficient strength to unhook it; he then turned and took

a glance of agony at the sky, which was glittering with stars. The

evening had that serenity which crushes human sorrow under a lugubrious

and eternal joy. The night promised to be as dry as the day had been.

"Stars everywhere!" the old man thought, "not the smallest cloud! not a

drop of water!"

And his head, which had been raised a moment before, fell again on his

chest, then he looked once more at the sky, murmuring,--

"A little dew! a little pity!"

He tried once again to unhook the well-chain, but could not succeed; at

this moment he heard a voice, saying,--

"Father Mabœuf, shall I water the garden for you?" At the same

time a sound like that of a wild beast breaking through was heard

in the hedge, and he saw a tall thin girl emerge, who stood before

him, looking at him boldly. She looked less like a human being than

some form engendered of the darkness. Before Father Mabœuf, whom,

as we said, a trifle terrified, found time to answer a syllable,

this creature, whose movements had in the gloom a sort of strange

suddenness, had unhooked the chain, let down and drawn up the bucket,

and filled the watering-pot; and the old gentleman saw this apparition,

which was barefooted and wore a ragged skirt, running along the

flower-beds and distributing life around her. The sound of the water

pattering on the leaves filled M. Mabœuf's soul with ravishment,

and the rhododendron now seemed to him to be happy. The first bucket

emptied, the girl drew a second, then a third, and watered the whole

garden. To see her moving thus along the walks in which her outline

appeared quite black, and waving on her long thin arms her ragged

shawl, she bore a striking resemblance to a bat. When she had finished,

Father Mabœuf went up to her with tears in his eyes, and laid his

hand on her forehead.

"God will bless you," he said, "you are an angel, since you take care

of flowers."

"No," she replied, "I am the Devil, but I don't care."

The old man continued, without waiting for or hearing the reply,--

"What a pity that I am so unhappy and so poor, and can do nothing for

you!"

"You can do something," she said.

"What is it!"

"Tell me where M. Marius lives."

The old man did not understand.

"What Monsieur Marius?"

He raised his glassy eyes and seemed seeking something which had

vanished.

"A young man who used to come here."

"Ah, yes!" he exclaimed, "I know whom you mean. Wait a minute! Monsieur

Marius, Baron Marius Pontmercy, pardieu! lives, or rather he does not

live--well, I do not know."

While speaking, he had stooped to straighten a rhododendron branch, and

continued,--

"Ah yes, I remember now. He passes very frequently along the boulevard,

and goes in the direction of the Lark's field in the Rue Croulebarbe.

Look for him there, he will not be difficult to find."

When M. Mabœuf raised his head again, he was alone, and the girl had

disappeared. He was decidedly a little frightened.

"Really," he thought, "if my garden were not watered, I should fancy

that it was a ghost."

An hour after, when he was in bed, this idea returned to him, and while

falling asleep, he said to himself confusedly at the disturbed moment

when thought gradually assumes the form of dream in order to pass

through sleep, like the fabulous bird which metamorphoses itself into a

fish to cross the sea,--

"Really now, this affair greatly resembles what La Rubaudière records

about the goblins. Could it have been a ghost?"

CHAPTER IV.

MARIUS HAS AN APPARITION.

A few days after this visit of a ghost to Father Mabœuf,--it was

on a Monday, the day of the five-franc piece which Marius borrowed of

Courfeyrac for Thénardier,--Marius placed the coin in his pocket, and

before carrying it to the prison, resolved to "take a little walk,"

hoping that on his return this would make him work. It was, however,

eternally thus. As soon as he rose, he sat down before a book and

paper to set about some translation, and his work at this time was the

translation into French of a celebrated German quarrel, the controversy

between Gans and Savigny. He took up Gans, he took up Savigny, read

four pages, tried to write one but could not, saw a star between his

paper and himself, and got up from his chair, saying, "I will go out,

that will put me in the humor," and he proceeded to the Lark's field,

where he saw the star more than ever, and Gans and Savigny less. He

went home, tried to resume his task, and did not succeed; he could

not join a single one of the threads broken in his brain, and so said

to himself, "I will not go out to-morrow, for it prevents me from

working." But he went out every day.

He lived in the Lark's field more than at Courfeyrac's lodging, and

his right address was Boulevard de la Santé, at the seventh tree past

the Rue Croulebarbe. On this morning he had left the seventh tree and

was seated on the parapet of the bridge over the little stream. The

merry sunbeams were flashing through the expanded and luminous leaves.

He thought of "Her," and his reverie, becoming a reproach, fell back

on himself; he thought bitterly of the indolence and mental paralysis

which were gaining on him, and of the night which constantly grew

denser before him, so that he could no longer even see the sun. Still,

through this painful evolution of indistinct ideas which was not even

a soliloquy, as action was so weak in him, and he had no longer the

strength to try to feel sad; through this melancholy absorption, we

say, sensations from without reached him. He heard behind, below, and

on both sides of him, the washerwomen of the Gobelins beating their

linen, and above him the birds twittering and singing in the elms. On

one side the sound of liberty, happy carelessness, and winged leisure,

on the other the sound of labor. Two joyous sounds made him think

deeply and almost reflect. All at once he heard amid his depressed

ecstasy a voice he knew, that said,--

"Ah, here he is!"

He raised his eyes and recognized the unhappy girl who had come to

him one morning, Éponine, the elder of Thénardier's daughters; he now

knew what her name was. Strange to say, she had grown poorer and more

beautiful, two things which he had not thought possible. She had

accomplished a double progress, toward light and toward distress. Her

feet were bare and her clothes torn, as on the day when she so boldly

entered his room, but the tatters were two months older, the holes

larger, and the rags filthier. She had the same hoarse voice, the same

forehead wrinkled and bronzed by exposure, the same free, absent, and

wandering look, but she had, in addition, on her countenance, something

startled and lamentable, which passing through prisons adds to misery.

She had pieces of straw and hay in her hair, not that, like Ophelia,

she had gone mad through contagion with Hamlet's lunacy, but because

she had slept in some stable-loft.

And with all that she was beautiful. What a star thou art, O youth!

She had stopped in front of Marius with a little joy on her livid face,

and something like a smile, and it was some minutes ere she could speak.

"I have found you!" she said at last. "Father Mabœuf was right, it

was in this boulevard! How I have sought you, if you only knew! Do

you know that I have been in quod for a fortnight? They let me go as

there was no charge against me, and besides I had not attained years of

discretion by two months. Oh, how I have looked for you the last six

weeks! So you no longer live down there?"

"No," said Marius.

"Ah, I understand, on account of that thing; well, such disturbances

are unpleasant, and you moved. Hilloh, why do you wear an old hat like

that? A young man like you ought to be handsomely dressed. Do you

know, Monsieur Marius, that M. Mabœuf calls you Baron Marius,--I

forget what, but you are not a Baron, are you? Barons are old swells,

who walk in front of the Luxembourg Palace, where there is the most

sun, and read the _Quotidienne_ for a sou. I went once with a letter

for a Baron who was like that, and more than a hundred years of age.

Tell me, where do you live now?"

Marius did not answer.

"Ah," she added, "you have a hole in your shirt-front, I must mend it

for you."

Then she continued with an expression which gradually grew gloomier,--

"You do not seem pleased to see me?"

Marius held his tongue. She was also silent for a moment, and then

exclaimed,--

"If I liked, I could compel you to look pleased."

"What do you mean?" Marius asked.

She bit her lip, and apparently hesitated, as if suffering from some

internal struggle. At length she seemed to make up her mind.

"All the worse, but no matter, you look sad and I wish you to be

pleased, only promise me, though, that you will laugh, for I want to

see you laugh and hear you say, 'Ah! that is famous!' Poor Monsieur

Marius! you know you promised you would give me all I wanted."

"Yes, but speak, can't you?"

She looked at Marius intently and said, "I have the address."

Marius turned pale, and all his blood flowed to his heart.

"What address?"

"The address which you asked me for;" and she added, as if with a great

effort, "the address,--you surely understand?"

"Yes," stammered Marius.

"The young lady's."

These words uttered, she heaved a deep sigh. Marius leaped from the

parapet on which he was sitting, and wildly seized her hand.

"Oh, lead me to it! Tell me! Ask of me what you please! Where is it?"

"Come with me," she answered; "I don't exactly know the street or the

number, and it is quite on the other side of town; but I know the house

well, and will take you to it."

She withdrew her hand, and continued in a tone which would have made an

observer's heart bleed, but did not at all affect the intoxicated and

transported lover,--

"Oh, how pleased you are!"

A cloud passed over Marius's forehead, and he clutched Éponine's arm.

"Swear one thing."

"Swear?" she said. "What do you mean by that? Indeed, you want me to

swear?"

And she burst into a laugh.

"Your father! Promise me, Éponine,--swear to me that you will never

tell your father that address."

She turned to him with an air of stupefaction. "Éponine! how do you

know that is my name?"

"Promise me what I ask you."

But she did not seem to hear him.

"That is nice! You called me Éponine!"

Marius seized both her arms.

"Answer me in Heaven's name! Pay attention to what I am saying,--swear

to me that you will not tell your father the address which you know."

"My father?" she remarked, "oh, yes, my father. He's all right in a

secret cell. Besides, what do I care for my father?"

"But you have not promised!" Marius exclaimed.

"Let me go!" she said, as she burst into a laugh; "how you are shaking

me! Yes, yes, I promise it; I swear it! How does it concern me? I will

not tell my father the address. There, does that suit you; is that it?"

"And no one else?" said Marius.

"And no one else."

"Now," Marius continued, "lead me there."

"At once?"

"Yes."

"Come on! Oh, how glad he is!" she said.

A few yards farther on she stopped.

"You are following me too closely, Monsieur Marius; let me go on in

front and do you follow me, as if you were not doing so. A respectable

young man like you must not be seen with such a woman as I am."

No language could render all that was contained in the word "woman,"

thus pronounced by this child. She went a dozen paces and stopped

again. Marius rejoined her, and she said to him aside without turning

to him,--

"By the bye, you know that you promised me something?"

Marius felt in his pocket; he had nothing in the world but the

five-franc piece destined for Father Thénardier, but he laid the coin

in Éponine's hand. She let it slip through her fingers on the ground,

and looking at him frowningly said,--

"I do not want your money."

BOOK III.

THE HOUSE OF THE RUE PLUMET.

CHAPTER I.

THE MYSTERIOUS HOUSE.

About the middle of the last century a president of the Parliament of

Paris who kept a mistress under the rose--for at that day the nobility

displayed their mistresses and the bourgeois concealed theirs--had "une

petite maison" built in the Faubourg St. Germain, in the deserted Rue

Blomet, which is now called Rue Plumet, and not far from the spot which

was formerly known as the "Combat des Animaux." This house consisted

of a pavilion only one story in height, there were two sitting-rooms

on the ground-floor, two bedrooms on the first, a kitchen below, a

boudoir above, an attic beneath the roof, and the whole was surrounded

by a large garden with railings looking out on the street. This was

all that passers-by could see. But behind the pavilion was a narrow

yard, with an outhouse containing two rooms, where a nurse and a child

could be concealed if necessary. In the back of this outhouse was a

secret door leading into a long, paved, winding passage, open to the

sky, and bordered by two lofty walls. This passage, concealed with

prodigious art, and, as it were, lost between the garden walls, whose

every turn and winding it followed, led to another secret door, which

opened about a quarter of a mile off almost in another quarter, at the

solitary end of the Rue de Babylone. The president went in by this

door, so that even those who might have watched him, and observed that

he mysteriously went somewhere every day, could not have suspected that

going to the Rue de Babylone was going to the Rue Blomet. By clever

purchases of ground, the ingenious magistrate had been enabled to make

this hidden road upon his own land, and consequently uncontrolled.

At a later date he sold the land bordering the passage in small lots

for gardens, and the owners of these gardens on either side believed

that they had a parting-wall before them, and did not even suspect

the existence of this long strip of pavement winding between two

walls among their flower-beds and orchards. The birds alone saw this

curiosity, and it is probable that the linnets and tomtits of the last

century gossiped a good deal about the President.

The pavilion, built of stone, in the Mansard taste, and panelled and

furnished in the Watteau style, rock-work outside, old-fashioned

within, and begirt by a triple hedge of flowers, had something

discreet, coquettish, and solemn about it, befitting the caprices of

love and a magistrate. This house and this passage, which have now

disappeared, still existed fifteen years ago. In 1793 a brazier bought

the house for the purpose of demolishing it, but as he could not pay,

the nation made him bankrupt, and thus it was the house that demolished

the brazier. Since then the house bad remained uninhabited, and fell

slowly into ruins, like every residence to which the presence of man

no longer communicates life. The old furniture was left in it, and

the ten or twelve persons who pass along the Rue Plumet were informed

that it was for sale or lease by a yellow and illegible placard which

had been fastened to the garden gate since 1810. Toward the end of

the Restoration the same passers-by might have noticed that the bill

had disappeared, and even that the first-floor shutters were open.

The house was really occupied, and there were short curtains at the

windows, a sign that there was a lady in the house. In October, 1829,

a middle-aged man presented himself and took the house as it stood,

including of course the outhouse and the passage leading to the Rue

de Babylone, and he had the two secret doors of this passage put in

repair. The house was still furnished much as the president had left

it, so the new tenant merely ordered a few necessary articles, had the

paving of the yard put to rights, new stairs put in, and the windows

mended, and eventually installed himself there with a young girl and

an old woman, without any disturbance, and rather like a man slipping

in than one entering his own house. The neighbors, however, did not

chatter, for the simple reason that he had none.

The tenant was in reality Jean Valjean, and the girl was Cosette. The

domestic was a female of the name of Toussaint, whom Jean Valjean had

saved from the hospital and wretchedness, and who was old, rustic, and

stammered,--three qualities which determined Jean Valjean on taking her

with him. He hired the house in the name of M. Fauchelevent, annuitant.

In all we have recently recorded, the reader will have doubtless

recognized Valjean even sooner than Thénardier did. Why had he left

the convent of the Little Picpus, and what had occurred there? Nothing

had occurred. It will be borne in mind that Jean Valjean was happy in

the convent, so happy that his conscience at last became disturbed by

it. He saw Cosette daily, he felt paternity springing up and being

developed in him more and more; he set his whole soul on the girl; he

said to himself that she was his, that no power on earth could rob him

of her, that it would be so indefinitely, that she would certainly

become a nun, as she was daily gently urged to it, that henceforth

the convent was the world for him as for her, that he would grow old

in it and she grow up, that she would grow old and he die there; and

that, finally, no separation was possible. While reflecting on this,

he began falling into perplexities: he asked himself if all this

happiness were really his, if it were not composed of the happiness of

this child, which he confiscated and deprived her of, and whether this

were not a robbery? He said to himself that this child had the right

to know life before renouncing it, that depriving her beforehand, and

without consulting her, of all joys under the pretext of saving her

from all trials, and profiting by her ignorance and isolation to make

an artificial vocation spring up in her, was denaturalizing a human

creature and being false to God. And who knew whether Cosette, some day

meditating on this, and feeling herself a reluctant nun, might not grow

to hate him? It was a last thought, almost selfish and less heroic than

the others, but it was insupportable to him. He resolved to leave the

convent.

He resolved, and recognized with a breaking heart that he must do

so. As for objections, there were none, for six years of residence

between these walls, and of disappearance, had necessarily destroyed

or dispersed the element of fear. He could return to human society at

his ease, for he had grown old and all had changed. Who would recognize

him now? And then, looking at the worst, there was only danger for

himself, and he had not the right to condemn Cosette to a cloister, for

the reason that he had been condemned to the galleys; besides, what

is danger in the presence of duty? Lastly, nothing prevented him from

being prudent and taking precautions; and as for Cosette's education,

it was almost completed and terminated. Once the resolution was formed,

he awaited the opportunity, which soon offered: old Fauchelevent died.

Jean Valjean requested an audience of the reverend prioress, and told

her that as he had inherited a small property by his brother's death,

which would enable him to live without working, he was going to leave

the convent, and take his daughter with him; but as it was not fair

that Cosette, who was not going to profess, should have been educated

gratuitously, he implored the reverend prioress to allow him to offer

the community, for the five years which Cosette had passed among them,

the sum of five thousand francs. It was thus that Jean Valjean quitted

the Convent of the Perpetual Adoration.