CHAPTER I.

LES MISÉRABLES.

BY

VICTOR HUGO.

PART THIRD.

MARIUS.

AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY SIR LASCELLES WRAXALL.

BOSTON:

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

1887.

[Illustration: MARIUS]

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

MARIUS.

BOOK I.

PARIS STUDIED IN ITS GAMIN.

I. PARVULUS

II. THE GAMIN'S CHARACTERISTICS

III. HE IS AGREEABLE

IV. HE MAY BE USEFUL

V. HIS CONFINES

VI. A BIT OF HISTORY

VII. THE GAMIN WOULD HAVE HIS PLACE IN INDIAN CASTES

VIII. A CHARMING ANECDOTE OF THE LAST KING

IX. THE OLD SOUL OF GAUL

X. ECCE PARIS, ECCE HOMO

XI. THE REIGN OF RIDICULE

XII. THE FUTURE LATENT IN THE PEOPLE

XIII. LITTLE GAVROCHE

BOOK II.

LE GRAND BOURGEOIS.

I. NINETY YEARS AND TWO-AND-THIRTY TEETH

II. LIKE MASTER, LIKE HOME

III. LUC ESPRIT

IV. AN ASPIRING CENTENARIAN

V. BASQUE AND NICOLETTE

VI. MAGNON AND HER TWO LITTLE ONES

VII. RULE: NO ONE RECEIVED UNTIL EVENING

VIII. TWO DO NOT MAKE A PAIR

BOOK III.

GRANDFATHER AND GRANDSON.

I. AN OLD DRAWING-ROOM

II. A RED SPECTRE OF THAT DAY

III. REQUIESCANT!

IV. THE END OF THE BRIGAND

V. MARIUS MEETS A CHURCHWARDEN

VI. WHAT RESULTED FROM MEETING A CHURCHWARDEN

VII. SOME PETTICOAT

VIII. MARBLE AGAINST GRANITE

BOOK IV.

THE FRIENDS OF THE A. B. C.

I. A GROUP THAT NEARLY BECAME HISTORICAL

II. BOSSUET'S FUNERAL ORATION ON BLONDEAU

III. MARIUS IS ASTONISHED

IV. THE BACK ROOM OF THE CAFÉ MUSAIN

V. ENLARGEMENT OF THE HORIZON

VI. RES ANGUSTA

BOOK V.

THE GOOD OF MISFORTUNE.

I. MARIUS IS INDIGENT

II. MARIUS POOR

III. MARIUS GROWS

IV. M. MABŒUF

V. POVERTY A GOOD NEIGHBOR TO MISERY

VI. THE SUBSTITUTE

BOOK VI.

THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO STARS.

I. NICKNAMES AND SURNAMES

II. LUX FACTA EST

III. THE EFFECT OF SPRING

IV. BEGINNING OF A GREAT MALADY

V. MAME BOUGON IS THUNDER-STRUCK

VI. TAKEN PRISONER

VII. ADVENTURES OF THE LETTER "U" LEFT TO CONJECTURES

VIII. EVEN INVALIDS MAY BE LUCKY

IX. ECLIPSE

BOOK VII.

PATRON MINETTE.

I. MINES AND MINERS

II. THE BOTTOM

III. BABET, GUEULEMER, CLAQUESOUS, AND MONTPARNASSE

IV. COMPOSITION OF THE TROOP

BOOK VIII.

THE EVIL POOR.

I. MARIUS LOOKING FOR A GIRL'S BONNET MEETS A MAN'S CAP

II. MARIUS FINDS SOMETHING

III. FOUR LETTERS

IV. A ROSE IN WRETCHEDNESS

V. A PROVIDENTIAL PEEP-HOLE

VI. THE WILD-BEAST MAN IN HIS LAIR

VII. STRATEGY AND TACTICS

VIII. A SUNBEAM IN THE GARRET

IX. JONDRETTE ALMOST CRIES

X. THE TARIFF OF CAB-FARES

XI. WRETCHEDNESS OFFERS HELP TO SORROW

XII. THE USE OF M. LEBLANC'S FIVE-FRANC PIECE

XIII. PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT

XIV. A POLICE-AGENT GIVES A LAWYER TWO "KNOCK-ME-DOWNS"

XV. JONDRETTE MAKES HIS PURCHASE

XVI. A SONG TO AN ENGLISH AIR POPULAR IN 1832

XVII. THE USE OF MARIUS'S FIVE-FRANC PIECE

XVIII. THE TWO CHAIRS FACE TO FACE

XIX. TREATING OF DARK DEPTHS

XX. THE TRAP

XXI. ALWAYS BEGIN BY ARRESTING THE VICTIMS

XXII. THE LITTLE CHILD WHO CRIED IN VOLUME SECOND

ILLUSTRATIONS

LE GRAND BOURGEOIS Vol. III. Frontispiece

Drawn by G. Jeanniot.

BEGINNING OF A GREAT MALADY

Drawn by G. Jeanniot.

MARIUS

BOOK I.

PARIS STUDIED IN ITS GAMIN.

CHAPTER I.

PARVULUS.

Paris has a child and the forest has a bird; the bird is called a

sparrow, the child is called a gamin. Couple these two ideas, the one

which is all furnace, the other all dawn; bring the two sparks, Paris

and childhood, into collision, and a little being is produced,--a

_homuncio_, as Plautus would say.

This little being is joyous; he does not eat every day, and he goes

to the theatre every night if he thinks proper. He has no shirt on

his body, no shoes on his feet, and no covering on his head; he is

like the flies, which have none of those things. He is from seven to

thirteen years of age, lives in gangs, rambles about the streets,

lodges in the open air, wears an old pair of his father's trousers,

which descend lower than his heels, an old hat belonging to some other

father, which comes below his ears, and one yellow list brace. He runs,

watches, begs, kills time, colors pipes, swears like a fiend, haunts

the wine-shop, knows thieves, is familiar with women of the town, talks

slang, sings filthy songs, and has nothing bad in his heart; for he has

in his soul a pearl, Innocence; and pearls are not dissolved by mud.

So long as the man is a child, God desires that he should be innocent.

If we were to ask the enormous city, "What is this creature?" it would

reply, "It is my little one."

CHAPTER II.

THE GAMIN'S CHARACTERISTICS.

The gamin of Paris is the dwarf of the giantess. Let us not exaggerate:

this cherub of the gutter has sometimes a shirt, but in that case has

only one; he has shoes at times, but then they have no soles; he has

at times a home, and likes it, for he finds his mother there; but he

prefers the street, because he finds liberty there. He has games of

his own, and his own tricks, of which hatred of the respectable class

constitutes the basis, and he has metaphors of his own,--thus, to be

dead, he calls eating dandelions by the root. He has trades of his

own,--fetching hackney coaches, letting down steps, imposing tolls

from one side of the street to the other in heavy showers, which he

calls making _ponts des arts_, and shouting out speeches made by the

authorities in favor of the French people. He has also a currency

of his own, composed of all the little pieces of copper that can be

picked up in the streets. This curious money, which takes the name of

_loques,_ has an unvarying and well-established value in this childish

Bohemia.

Lastly, he has a fauna of his own, which he studiously observes in

every hole and corner,--the Lady-bird, the death's-head moth, the

daddy long-legs, and the "devil," a black insect which threatens by

writhing its tail, and which is armed with two horns. He has his

fabulous monster, which has scales on its belly and is not a lizard,

and spots on its back but is not a frog; it lives in holes in old

lime-kilns and dried-up wells; it is black, hairy, slimy, and crawls

about, at one moment slowly, at another quickly; it utters no sound,

but looks so terrible that no one has ever seen it. This monster he

calls _le sourde,_ and looking for it under stones is a pleasure of a

formidable nature. Another pleasure is suddenly to raise a paving-stone

and look at the woodlice. Every region of Paris is interesting for the

celebrated "finds" which may be made in them; thus, there are earwigs

in the timber-yards of the Ursulines, centipedes at the Panthéon, and

tadpoles in the ditches of the Champs de Mars.

As for witticisms, this child is as full of them as Talleyrand; but

though no less cynical, he is more honest. He is gifted with an

unforeseen joviality, and startles the shop-keeper by his mad laugh.

His range extends from genteel comedy to farce. A funeral passes, and

among the persons following is a physician. "Hilloh!" shouts a gamin,

"when did the doctors begin to carry home their own work?"

Another is in a crowd. A serious man, adorned with spectacles and

watch-seals, turns indignantly: "You scoundrel, what do you mean by

taking my wife's waist?" "I, sir? Search me!"

CHAPTER III.

HE IS AGREEABLE.

At night, thanks to a few half-pence which he always contrives to

procure, the _homuncio_ enters a theatre. On crossing this magical

threshold he becomes transfigured; he was a gamin, and he becomes the

_titi_. Theatres are like overturned vessels, which have their hold in

the air, and the titis congregate in the hold. The titi is to the gamin

as the butterfly to the chrysalis,--the same being, but now flying and

hovering. It is sufficient for him to be present, with his radiant

happiness, his power of enthusiasm and delight, and the clapping of his

hands, which resembles the flapping of wings; and the narrow, fetid,

obscure, dirty, unhealthy, hideous, abominable hold is at once called

Paradise.

Give a being what is useless, and deprive him of what is necessary, and

you will have the gamin. He possesses some literary intuition, and his

tastes,--we confess it with all proper regret,--are not classical. He

is by nature but little of an academician.

This being bawls, shouts, ridicules, and fights; wears patches like

a babe, and rags like a philosopher; fishes in the gutter, sports in

the sewers, extracts gayety from filth, grins and bites, whistles

and sings, applauds and hisses, tempers the Hallelujah Chorus with

Matanturlurette, hums every known tune, finds without looking, knows

what he is ignorant of, is a Spartan in filching, is foolish even to

wisdom, is lyrical even to dirt, would squat upon Olympus, wallows on

the dungheap and emerges covered with stars. The gamin of Paris is the

boy Rabelais.

He is not satisfied with his trousers if they have no watch-pockets.

He is surprised at little, and frightened by less; he sings down

superstitions, reduces exaggerations, puts out his tongue at ghosts,

depoetizes stilts, and introduces caricature into the most serious

affairs. It is not that he is prosaic, far from it; but he substitutes

a farcical phantasmagoria for solemn vision. If Adamastor were to

appear to him, the gamin would say, "Hilloh, old Bogy!"

CHAPTER IV.

HE MAY BE USEFUL.

Paris begins with the badaud and ends with the gamin: two beings

of which no other city is capable; the passive acceptance which is

satisfied with looking, and the inexhaustible initiative; Prudhomme

and Fouillou. Paris alone has that in its natural history: all the

monarchy is in the badaud, all the anarchy is in the gamin. This pale

child of the faubourgs of Paris lives, and is developed, and grows up

in suffering, a thoughtful witness in the presence of social realities

and human things. He believes himself reckless, but is not so: he looks

on, ready to laugh, but also ready for something else. Whoever you may

be who call yourself prejudice, abuses, ignominy, oppression, iniquity,

despotism, injustice, fanaticism, or tyranny, take care of the yawning

gamin.

This little fellow will grow. Of what clay is he made? Of anything.

Take a handful of mud, a breath, and you have Adam. It is sufficient

for a God to pass, and God has ever passed over the gamin. Fortune

toils for this little being, though by the word fortune we mean to some

extent chance. Will this pygmy, moulded in the coarse common clay,

ignorant, uneducated, brutal, violent, and of the populace, be an

Ionian or a Bœotian? Wait a while, _dum currit rota_, and the genius

of Paris, that demon which creates children of accident and men of

destiny, will behave exactly contrary to the Latin potter, and make an

amphora out of the earthenware jar.

CHAPTER V.

HIS CONFINES.

The gamin loves the town, but he loves solitude as well, for there

is something of the sage in him: he is _urbis amator_ like Fuscus,

and _ruris amator_ like Flaccus. To wander about dreamily, that is,

to lounge, is an excellent employment of time for the philosopher,

particularly in that slightly bastard sort of country, ugly enough,

but strange and composed of two natures, that surrounds certain large

cities, and notably Paris. Observing the suburbs is looking at an

amphibious scene; it is the end of the trees and the beginning of the

roofs, the end of the grass and the beginning of the pavement, the end

of the furrows and the beginning of the shops, the end of the beaten

paths and the beginning of passions, the end of the divine murmur and

the beginning of human reason, and all this produces an extraordinary

interest; and such is the motive of the apparently objectless walks of

the dreamer in those unattractive parts which the passer-by at once

brands with the title of "dull."

The author of these lines was for a long time a prowler about the

suburbs of Paris, and it is a source of profound recollection for him.

The worn grass, the stony path, the chalk, the marl, the plaster, the

rough monotony of ploughed and fallow land, the young market-garden

plants suddenly noticed in a hollow, the mixture of the wild and the

tame, the vast deserted nooks in which the garrison drummers hold their

noisy school, these Thebaïds by day and cut-throat dens by night, the

tottering mill turning in the wind, the drawing-wheels of the quarries,

the wine-shops at the corners of the cemeteries, the mysterious charm

of the tall dark walls cutting at right angles immense open fields

bathed in sunshine and full of butterflies,--all this attracted him.

Hardly any one knows those singular spots,--la Glacière, la Cimette,

the hideous wall of Grenelle pock-marked with bullets, the Mont

Parnasse, the Fosse aux Loups, the Tombe Issoire, or the Pierre Plate

de Chatillon, where there is an old exhausted quarry, which is now

only employed to grow mushrooms, and is closed by a heap of rotten

boards flush with the ground. The Campagna of Rome is an idea, and

the banlieue of Paris is another: to see in what an horizon offers

us nought but fields, houses, or trees, is to remain on the surface;

for all the aspects of things are the thoughts of God. The spot where

a plain forms its junction with a town is always imprinted with a

species of penetrating melancholy; for nature and humanity address you

simultaneously, and local peculiarities make their appearance there.

Any one who has wandered as we have in those solitudes contiguous to

our suburbs which might be called the Limbos of Paris has seen here

and there, at the most deserted spot, and at the most unexpected

moment, behind a scrubby hedge, or in the corner of some melancholy

wall, children grouped tumultuously, fetid, muddy, dusty, unkempt, and

ragged, playing together, wreathed with corn-flowers. They are the

little runagates of poor families: this external boulevard is their

breathing medium, and the banlieue belongs to them, and they eternally

play truant in it. They ingenuously sing there their repertory of

unclean songs. They are there, or, to speak more correctly, they dwell

there, far from any eye, in the gentle warmth of May or June. Circling

round a hole in the ground and snapping marbles, like irresponsible,

freed, and happy beings, so soon as they perceive you they remember

that they have a trade and must gain their livelihood, and they offer

to sell you an old wool stocking full of may-bugs, or a spray of lilac.

Such a meeting with chance children is one of the charming and yet

poignant graces of the environs of Paris.

Sometimes there are girls among the heap of boys,--are they their

sisters?--almost grown up, thin, feverish, sunburnt and freckled,

crowned with wheat-ears and poppies, gay, haggard, and barefooted. You

may see them eating cherries among the wheat, and at night hear them

laugh. These groups, warmly illumined by the bright light of mid-day,

or seen in the twilight, for a long time occupy the dreamer, and these

visions are mingled with his dreams.

Paris is the centre, the banlieue is the circumference,--that is, the

whole earth, for these children. They never venture beyond it, and can

no more leave the Parisian atmosphere than fish can live out of water.

With them there is nothing beyond two leagues from the barrière; Ivry,

Gentilly, Arcueil, Belleville, Aubervilliers, Ménilmontant, Choisy le

Roi, Bellancourt, Meudon, Issy, Vauvres, Sèvres, Puteaux, Neuilly,

Gennevilliers, Colombes, Romainville, Chalon, Asnières, Bougival,

Nanterre, Enghien, Noisy-le-sec, Nogent, Gournay, Drancy, and Gonesse,

--at these places their universe ends.

CHAPTER VI.

A BIT OF HISTORY.

At the epoch almost contemporary with the action of this book there

was not, as at the present day, a policeman at every street corner (a

blessing which we have no time to discuss), and wandering children

abounded in Paris. Statistics give us an average of two hundred and

sixty shelterless children picked up annually by the police of that

day in unenclosed fields, in houses building, and under the arches

of bridges. One of these nests, which became famous, produced "the

swallows of the Rue d'Arcole." This, by the way, is the most disastrous

of social symptoms, for all the crimes of the man begin with the

vagabondage of the lad.

We must except Paris, however, and in a relative degree, and in spite

of the statistics we have just quoted, the exception is fair. While in

any other great city a vagabond child is a ruined man, while nearly

everywhere the boy left to himself is to some extent devoted and left

to a species of fatal immersion in public vice, which destroys honor

and conscience within him, the gamin of Paris, though externally so

injured, is internally almost intact. It is a magnificent thing to be

able to say, and one revealed in the splendid probity of our popular

revolutions, that a certain incorruptibility emanates from the idea

which is in the atmosphere of Paris, as from the salt which is in the

ocean water. Breathing Paris preserves the soul.

But what we have just stated does not in any way decrease the

heart-contraction which we feel every time we meet one of these lads,

around whom we fancy that we can see the threads of the broken family

fluttering. In our present civilization, which is still so incomplete,

it is not a very abnormal fact that families thus broken up should not

know what becomes of their children, and allow their own flesh and

blood to fall upon the highway. Hence come these obscure destinies; and

this sad thing has become proverbial, and is known as "being cast on

the pavement of Paris."

Let us remark parenthetically that such desertion of children was

not discouraged by the old monarchy. A little of the Bohemian and

Egyptian element in the lower classes suited the higher spheres, and

the powerful ones profited by it. Hatred of national education was

a dogma; of what good were half-lights? Such was the sentence, and

the vagabond boy is the corollary of the ignorant boy. Besides, the

monarchy sometimes wanted lads, and then it skimmed the streets. In

the reign of Louis XIV., to go no farther back, the King wished,

rightly enough, to create a fleet. The idea was good; but let us look

at the means. No fleet is possible unless you have by the side of the

sailing-vessels, which are the plaything of the winds, vessels which

can be sent wherever may be necessary, or be used as tugs, impelled

by oars or steam; and in those days galleys were to the navy what

steam-vessels now are. Hence galleys were needed; but galleys are only

moved through the galley-slave, and hence the latter must be procured.

Colbert ordered the Provincial intendants and parliaments to produce

as many convicts as they could, and the magistrates displayed great

complaisance in the matter. A man kept on his hat when a procession

passed; that was a Huguenot attitude, and he was sent to the galleys.

A boy was met in the street; provided that he was fifteen years of age

and had no place to sleep in, he was sent to the galleys. It was a

great reign, a great age.

In the reign of Louis XV. children disappeared in Paris; the police

carried them off and no one knew for what mysterious employment.

Monstrous conjectures were whispered as to the King's purple baths. It

sometimes happened that when boys ran short, the exempts seized such as

had parents, and the parents, in their despair, attacked the exempts.

In such a case Parliament interfered and hanged--whom, the exempts? No,

the fathers.

CHAPTER VII.

THE GAMIN WOULD HAVE HIS PLACE IN INDIAN CASTES.

The Parisian gamin almost forms a caste, and we might say that a boy

does not become so by wishing. The word _gamin_ was printed for the

first time, and passed from the populace into literature, in 1834. It

made its first appearance in a work called "Claude Gueux." The scandal

was great, but the word has remained. The elements that constitute the

consideration of gamins among one another are very varied. We knew

and petted one, who was greatly respected and admired because he had

seen a man fall off the towers of Notre Dame; another, because he had

managed to enter the back-yard in which the statues of the dome of the

Invalides were temporarily deposited, and steal lead off them; another,

because he had seen a diligence upset; another, because he knew a

soldier who had all but put out the eye of a civilian. This explains

the exclamation of the Parisian gamin, at which the vulgar laughed

without understanding its depth: "Dieu de Dieu! how unlucky I am! Just

think that I never saw anybody fall from a fifth floor!" Assuredly it

was a neat remark of the peasant's: "Father So-and-so, your wife has

died of her illness: why did you not send for a doctor?"--

"What would you have, sir? We poor people die of ourselves." But if all

the passiveness of the peasant is contained in this remark, all the

free-thinking anarchy of the faubourien will be found in the following:

A man condemned to death is listening to the confessor in the cart, and

the child of Paris protests,--"He is talking to the skull-cap. Oh, the

capon!"

A certain boldness in religious matters elevates the gamin, and it is

important for him to be strong-minded. Being present at executions is

a duty with him. He points at the guillotine and laughs at it, and

calls it by all sorts of pet names,--end of the soup; the grumbler;

the sky-blue mother; the last mouthful, etc. In order to lose none

of the sight, he climbs up walls, escalades balconies, mounts trees,

hangs to gratings, and clings to chimney-pots. A gamin is born to be

a slater, as another is to be a sailor, and he is no more frightened

at a roof than at a mast. No holiday is equal to the Grève, and Samson

and the Abbé Montes are the real popular fêtes. The sufferer is hooted

to encourage him, and is sometimes admired. Lacenaire, when a gamin,

seeing the frightful Dautrem die bravely, uttered a remark which

contained his future,--"I was jealous of him." In gamindom Voltaire is

unknown, but Papavoine is famous. Politicians and murderers are mingled

in the same legend, and traditions exist as to the last garments of

all. They know that Tolleron had a nightcap on, Avril a fur cap, Louvel

a round hat; that old Delaporte was bald and bareheaded, Castaing

rosy-cheeked and good-looking, and that Boriès had a romantic beard;

Jean Martin kept his braces on, and Lecouffé and his mother abused

each other. "Don't quarrel about your basket," a gamin shouted to them.

Another little fellow climbed up a lamp-post on the quay, in order to

watch Debacker pass, and a gendarme posted there frowned at him. "Let

me climb up, M'sieu le Gendarme;" and to soften the man in authority,

he added,--"I shall not fall." "What do I care whether you fall or

not?" the gendarme replied.

Among the gamins a memorable accident is highly esteemed, and a lad

attains the summit of consideration if he give himself a deep cut "to

the bone." The fist is no small element of success, and one of the

things which a gamin is very fond of saying is, "I am precious strong."

To be left-handed renders you enviable, while squinting is held in

great esteem.

CHAPTER VIII.

A CHARMING ANECDOTE OF THE LAST KING.

In summer he is metamorphosed into a frog, and from afternoon to

nightfall, before the Austerlitz and Jena bridges, from the top of

coal-rafts and washer-women's boats, dives into the Seine, with all

possible infractions of the laws of decency and of the police. Still,

the police are on the watch, and hence results a highly dramatic

situation, which once gave rise to a paternal and memorable cry.

This cry, which became celebrated about 1830, is a strategic warning

from gamin to gamin; it can be scanned like a verse of Homer, with

a notation almost as indescribable as the Eleusiac song of the

Panathenæa, in which the ancient Evohé may be traced.--"Ohe, Titi,

ohéée, here's the sergeant, pack up your traps, and be off through the

sewer!"

Sometimes this gad-fly--that is the name he gives himself--can read,

sometimes he can write, and draw after a fashion. He does not hesitate

to acquire, by some mysterious mutual instruction, all the talents

which may be useful to the public cause. From 1815 to 1830 he imitated

the cry of a turkey; from 1830 to 1848 he drew a pear upon the walls.

One summer evening, Louis Philippe, returning home on foot, saw a

very little scamp struggling to raise himself high enough to draw

with charcoal a gigantic pear on the pillar of the Neuilly gates,

and the King, with that kindness which he inherited from Henri IV.,

helped the gamin to finish the pear and gave him a louis, saying, "The

pear is on that too." The gamin likes a commotion, and any violent

condition pleases him. He execrates the curés. One day in the Rue de

l'Université, one of these young scamps put his finger to his nose in

front of the driveway of No. 69. "Why are you doing that at that gate?"

a passer-by asked him. The lad answered, "A curé lives there." The

Papal Nuncio in fact resided there. Still, however great the gamin's

Voltairianism may be, if the opportunity is offered him of being a

chorister, he may possibly accept, and in that case assists civilly

at mass. There are two things of which he is the Tantalus, and which

he constantly desires without ever being able to attain them,--to

overthrow the government and have his trousers reseated. The gamin in

a perfect state is acquainted with all the police of Paris, and when

he meets one, can always give a name to his face. He numbers them on

his fingers, studies their names, and has his special notes about

each. He reads the minds of the police like an open book, and will say

curiously and without hesitating,--"So-and-so is a _traitor_, So-and-so

is _very wicked_, So-and-so is _great,_ So-and-so is _ridiculous_" (the

italicized words have all a peculiar meaning in his mouth). This one

believes that the Pont Neuf belongs to him, and prevents _the world_

from walking on the cornice outside the parapet; another has a mania

for pulling the ears of _persons_, etc. etc.

CHAPTER IX

THE OLD SOUL OF GAUL.

This lad may be traced in Poquelin, a son of the Halles, and again

in Beaumarchais; for gaminerie is a tinge of the Gallic temper. When

blended with common sense, it at times adds strength, in the same way

as alcohol when mixed with wine; at other times it is a fault. Homer,

it is true, repeats himself, and we might say that Voltaire plays the

gamin. Camille Desmoulins was a faubourien. Championnet, who abused

miracles, issued from the pavement of Paris; when quite a lad, he

"inundated the porticos" of St. Jean de Beauvais and St. Étienne du

Mont, and was on such familiar terms with the shrine of Saint Geneviève

as eventually to give his orders to the vial of Saint Januarius.

The Parisian gamin is respectful, ironical, and insolent. He has bad

teeth because he is badly fed and his stomach suffers, and fine eyes

because he has talent. He would hop up the steps of Paradise in the

very presence of Jehovah. He is clever at the savate, and all creeds

are possible to him. He plays in the gutter, and draws himself up at

the sound of an émeute; his effrontery cannot be subdued by grape-shot;

he was a vagabond and becomes a hero, and, like the little Theban,

he shakes the lion's skin. Barra the drummer was a Parisian gamin; he

shouted, "Forward!" and in an instant became a giant. This child of the

mud is also the child of the ideal; to see this we need only measure

the distance between Molière and Barra.

In a word, the gamin is a being who amuses himself because he is

unhappy.

CHAPTER X.

ECCE PARIS, ECCE HOMO.

The gamin of Paris at the present day, like the Græculus of Rome in

former time, is the youthful people with the wrinkle of the old world

on its forehead. The gamin is a grace for a nation, and at the same

time a malady,--a malady which must be cured. In what way? By light;

for light is sanitary and illumining.

All the generous social irradiations issue from science, letters, the

arts, and instruction. Make men, make men. Enlighten them in order that

they may warm you. Sooner or later the splendid question of universal

instruction will be asked with the irresistible authority of absolute

truth; and then those who govern under the surveillance of French ideas

will have to make a choice between children of France and gamins of

Paris, between flames in light and will-o'-the-wisps in the darkness.

The gamin expresses Paris, and Paris expresses the world. For Paris is

a total; it is the ceiling of the human race, and the whole of this

prodigious city is an epitome of dead manners and living manners.

The man who sees Paris imagines that he sees universal history, with

sky and constellations in the intervals. Paris has a Capitol, the

Town Hall; a Parthenon, Notre Dame; a Mons Aventinus, the Faubourg

St. Antoine; an Asinarium, the Sorbonne; a Pantheon, the Panthéon; a

Via Sacra, the Boulevard des Italians; a Tower of the Winds, public

opinion; and ridicule has been substituted for the Gemoniæ. Its majo

is called the "faraud," its Transteverine is called the faubourien,

its hammal the "fort de la Halle," its lazzarone the "pegre," and its

cockney the "Gandin." All that is elsewhere is in Paris. Dumarsais'

fish-fag can give a reply to the herb-seller of Euripides; Vejanus the

discobolus lives again in the rope-dancer Forioso; Therapontigonus

Miles could walk arm-in-arm with Grenadier Vadeboncœur; Damasippus the

broker would be happy among the dealers in _bric-à-brac;_ Vincennes

would hold Socrates under lock, just as the Agora would pounce on

Diderot; Grimod de la Reynière discovered roast-beef with tallow, in

the same way as Curtillus invented roast hedgehog. We have seen the

trapeze of which we read in Plautus reappear under the balloon of the

Arc de l'Étoile; the sword-swallower of Pœcile met by Apuleius is a

swallower of sabres on the Pont Neuf; Rameau's nephew and Curculion

the parasite form a pair; Ergasites would have himself introduced to

Cambaceres by d'Aigre feuille; the four fops of Rome, Alcesimarchus,

Phœdromus, Dicabolus, and Argiryppus descend the Courtille in Labatut's

post-chaise; Aulus Gellius stopped before Congrio no longer than

Charles Nodier did before Punchinello; Marton is not a tigress, but

Pardalisca was not a dragon. Pantolabus humbugs Nomentamus the gourmet

at the Café Anglais; Hermogenes is the Tenor in the Champs Élysées,

and Thrasius the beggar, dressed as Bobêche, carries round the hat for

him; the troublesome fellow who catches hold of your coat-button in

the Tuileries makes you repeat after two thousand years the apostrophe

of Thesperon,--_Quis properantem me prehendit pallio_? The wine of

Suresne is a parody of the wine of Alba; Père Lachaise exhales in the

night showers the same gleams as the Esquiliæ; and the poor man's grave

bought for five years is quite equal to the hired coffin of the slave.

Seek for anything which Paris has not. The tub of Trophonius contains

nothing which is not in Mesmer's trough; Ergaphilas is resuscitated

in Cagliostro; the Brahmin Vasaphanta is incarcerated in the Count

de St. Germain; and the cemetery of Saint Médard performs quite as

good miracles as the Oumoumie Mosque at Damascus. Paris has an Æsop

in Mayeux, and a Canidia in Mademoiselle Lenormand; it is startled as

Delphi was by the flaming realities of the vision; it makes tables

turn as Dodona did tripods; it places a grisette upon a throne as

Rome placed a courtesan; and, after all, if Louis XV. is worse than

Claudius, Madame Dubarry is better than Messalina. Paris combines in

an extraordinary type what has lived and what we have elbowed,--Greek

nudity, the Hebrew ulcer, and Gascon puns. It mixes up Diogenes, Job,

and Paillasse, dresses a ghost in old numbers of the _Constitutionnel,_

and makes Chodrucnito a Duclos. Although Plutarch says that "the

tyrant never goes to sleep," Rome, under Sylla as under Domitian,

was resigned, and liked to mix water with its wine. The Tiber was a

Lethe, if we may believe the somewhat doctrinaire eulogium which Varus

Vibiscus made of it: _Contra Gracchos Tiberim habemus. Bibere Tiberim,

id est seditionem oblivisci_. Paris drinks a million quarts of water a

day; but that does not prevent it from beating the tattoo and ringing

the alarm-bell when the opportunity offers.

With this exception, Paris is good-natured. It accepts everything

royally; it is not difficult in the matter of its Venus; its Callipyge

is a Hottentot; provided that it laughs, it forgives; ugliness amuses

it, deformity does it good, and vice distracts it; if you are droll

you may be a scoundrel; even hypocrisy, that supreme cynicism, does

not revolt it; it is so literary that it does not hold its nose on

passing Basile, and is no more scandalized by Tartuffe's prayer than

Horace was terrified by the "hiccough" of Priapus. No feature of the

human face is wanting in the profile of Paris; the Mabille ball is

not the Polyhymnian dance of the Janiculum, but the wardrobe-dealer

has her eyes fixed on the Lorette there, exactly as the procuress

Staphyla watched the Virgin Planesium. The Barrière des Combats is not

a Coliseum, but people are as ferocious there as if Cæsar were looking

on. The Syrian hostess has more grace than Mother Saguet; but if Virgil

frequented the Roman wine-shop, David of Angers, Balzac, and Charlet

have seated themselves in Parisian pot-houses. Paris reigns, geniuses

flash in it, and red-tails prosper. Adonaïs passes through it in his

twelve-wheeled car of thunder and lightning, and Silenus makes his

entrance on his barrel. For Silenus read Ramponneau.

Paris is the synonym of Cosmos; Paris is Athens, Rome, Sybaris,

Jerusalem, and Pantin. All civilizations are found there abridged,

but so are all barbarisms. Paris would be very sorry not to have a

guillotine; a little of the Place de Grève is useful, for what would

this eternal festival be without that seasoning? The laws have wisely

provided for that, and, thanks to them, the knife drains drops of blood

upon this Mardi-Gras.

CHAPTER XI

THE REIGN OF RIDICULE.

There are no limits to Paris; and no other city has held this sway,

which at times derides those whom it holds in subjection. "To please

you, O Athenians!" Alexander exclaimed. Paris makes more than the

law, for it sets the fashion; and it makes more than fashion, for it

produces routine. Paris may be stupid, if it think proper; at times

it indulges in that luxury, and then the universe is stupid with it;

but Paris soon wakes up, rubs its eyes, says, "How stupid I am!" and

laughs in the face of the human race. What a marvel such a city is!

How strange it is to find this grandeur and this buffoonery side by

side; to see how all this majesty is not deranged by this parody, and

the same mouth to-day blowing the trumpet of the last judgment, and

to-morrow a penny whistle! Paris has a sovereign gayety; but the gayety

is lightning, and its farce holds a sceptre. Its hurricane at times

issues from a furnace; its explosions, its days, its masterpieces,

its prodigies, its epics, go to the end of the world, and so do its

cock-and-bull tales. Its laugh is the crater of a volcano which

bespatters the world, and its jokes are sparks of fire. It imposes

upon nations its caricatures as well as its ideal, and the loftiest

monuments of human civilization accept its ironies and lend their

eternity to its jokes. It is superb; it has a prodigious July 14, which

delivers the globe; its night of August 4 dissolves in three hours a

thousand years of feudalism; it makes with its logic the muscle of the

unanimous will; it multiplies itself in every form of sublimity; it

fills with its lustre Washington, Kosciusko, Bolivar, Bozzaris, Riégo,

Bem, Manin, Lopez, John Brown, and Garibaldi. It is found wherever

the future bursts into a flash,--at Boston in 1779, at the Isle of

Leon in 1820, at Pesth in 1848, at Palermo in 1860; it whispers the

powerful watchword "Liberty" in the ear of the American abolitionists

assembled at Harper's Ferry, and in that of the patriots of Ancona

assembled in the darkness before the Gozzi inn, on the sea-shore; it

creates Canaris, it creates Quiroga, it creates Pisacane, it radiates

grandeur upon the earth; it was by going whither its blast impelled

him that Byron died at Missolonghi, and Mazet at Barcelona; it is

a tribune under the feet of Mirabeau, and a crater under those of

Robespierre; its books, plays, art, science, literature, and philosophy

are the manuals of the human race; it has Pascal, Regnier, Corneille,

Descartes, and Jean Jacques; Voltaire for any moment, Molière for all

ages; it makes the universal mouth speak its language; it constructs

in every mind the idea of progress; the liberating dogmas which it

fuses are well-tried friends for generations, and it is with the mind

of its thinkers and its poets that all the heroes of all nations have

been formed since 1789. Still, this does not prevent it from playing

the gamin; and the enormous genius which is called Paris, while

transfiguring the world with its light, draws Bouginier's nose with

charcoal on the wail of the Temple of Theseus, and writes Crédeville

Voleur upon the Pyramids.

Paris constantly shows its teeth, and when it is not scolding it is

laughing; such is Paris. The smoke from its chimneys constitutes the

ideas of the universe; it is a pile of mud and stones if you like, but

it is, before all, a moral being. It is more than grand, it is immense;

and why? Because it dares. Daring is the price paid for progress. All

sublime contests are more or less the rewards of boldness. For the

Revolution to take place, it was not enough that Montesquieu should

foresee it, Diderot preach it, Beaumarchais announce it, Condorcet

calculate it, Arouet prepare it, and Rousseau premeditate it,--it was

necessary that Danton should dare it.

The cry "Audace!" is a _Fiat lux_. In order that the human race may

progress, it must have proved lessons of courage permanently before

it. Rashness dazzles history, and is one of the great brightnesses of

man. The dawn dares when it breaks. To attempt, to brave, persist,

and persevere, to be faithful to one's self, to wrestle with destiny,

to astound the catastrophe by the slight fear which it causes us, at

one moment to confront unjust power, at another to insult intoxicated

victory, to hold firm and withstand,--such is the example which people

need and which electrifies them. The same formidable flash goes from

the torch of Prometheus to the short clay pipe of Cambronne.

CHAPTER XII.

THE FUTURE LATENT IN THE PEOPLE.

As for the Parisian people, even when full grown, it is always the

gamin. Depicting the lad is depicting the city, and that is the reason

why we have studied the eagle in the sparrow.

The Parisian race, we say again, is found most truly in the faubourg;

there it is pure-blooded, there we find the real physiognomy, there

the people work and suffer, and toil and suffering are the two faces

of the man. There are there immense numbers of strange beings, among

whom may be found the wildest types, from the porter of la Râpée to the

quarryman of Montfauçon. _Fœx urbis_, Cicero exclaims; "Mob," Burke

adds, indignantly; a crowd, a multitude, a population,--these words

are quickly uttered; but no matter! what do I care that they go about

barefoot? They cannot read; all the worse. Will you abandon them on

that account? Will you convert their distress into a curse? Cannot

light penetrate these masses? Let us revert to that cry of light,

and insist upon it, light, light! who knows whether this opaqueness

may not become transparent? For are not revolutions themselves

transfigurations? Come, philosophers, teach, enlighten, illumine,

think aloud, speak loudly, run joyfully into the sunshine, fraternize

with the public places, announce the glad tidings, spread alphabets

around, proclaim the right, sing the Marseillaise, sow enthusiasm, and

pluck green branches from the oaks. Make a whirlwind of the idea. This

crowd may be sublimated, so let us learn how to make use of that vast

conflagration of principles and virtues which crackles and bursts into

a flame at certain hours. These bare feet, these naked arms, these

rags, this ignorance, this abjectness, this darkness, may be employed

for the conquest of the ideal. Look through the people, and you will

perceive the truth; the vile sand which you trample under foot, when

cast into the furnace and melted will become splendid crystal, and by

its aid Galileo and Newton discover planets.

CHAPTER XIII.

LITTLE GAVROCHE.

Eight or nine years after the events recorded in the second portion of

this story, there might be noticed on the Boulevard du Temple and in

the regions of the Château d'Eau, a boy of about eleven or twelve years

of age, who would have tolerably well realized the ideal of a gamin

as sketched above, had he not had, with the smile of his age on his

lips, a heart absolutely gloomy and void. This child was dressed in a

man's trousers, but he had not got them from his father, and a woman's

jacket, which did not come from his mother. Some persons had clothed

him in rags out of charity. Yet he had a father and a mother, but his

father did not think of him and his mother did not love him. He was one

of those children worthy of pity before all, who have father and mother

and are orphans.

This child was never so comfortable anywhere as in the street, for

the paving-stones were less hard to him than his mother's heart. His

parents had kicked him out into life, and he had simply tried his

wings. He was a noisy, pale, active, sharp, impudent lad, with a

cunning and sickly look. He came and went, sang, played at hop-scotch,

searched the gutters, pilfered a little, but gayly, like cats and

sparrows, laughed when he was called a scamp, and felt angry when

called a thief. He had no bed, no bread, no fire, no love: but he was

happy because he was free. When these poor beings are men, the mill

of social order nearly always crushes them: but so long as they are

children they escape because they are small. The slightest hole saves

them.

Still, abandoned as this child was, it happened every two or three

months that he said,--"Well, I'll go and see mamma." Then he quitted

the boulevard, the circus, the Porte St. Martin, went along the quay,

crossed the bridge, reached the Salpêtrière, and arrived where? Exactly

at that double No. 50-52, which the reader knows,--the Maison Gorbeau.

At this period No. 50-52, which was habitually deserted and eternally

decorated with a bill of "Lodgings to Let," was, strange to say,

inhabited by several persons who had no acquaintance with each other,

as is always the case in Paris. All belonged to that indigent class

which begins with the last small tradesman in difficulties, and is

prolonged from wretchedness to wretchedness to those two beings to whom

all the material things of civilization descend,--the scavenger and the

rag-picker.

The chief lodger of Jean Valjean's day was dead, and her place had been

taken by another exactly like her. I forget now what philosopher said,

"There is never any want of old women." This new old woman was called

Madame Burgon, and had nothing remarkable in her life save a dynasty of

three parrots, which had successively reigned over her soul. The most

wretched of all the persons inhabiting the house were a family of four

persons, father, mother, and two nearly grown-up daughters, all four

living in the same attic, one of the cells to which we have alluded.

This family offered at the first glance nothing very peculiar beyond

its poverty; and the father, on hiring the room, stated that his

name was Jondrette. A short time after he moved in, which had borne

a striking resemblance--to employ the memorable remark of the chief

lodger--to the coming in of nothing at all, this Jondrette had said to

the woman, who, like her predecessor, was also portress and swept the

stairs, "Mother So-and-so, if any one were to ask by chance for a Pole,

or an Italian, or perhaps a Spaniard, I am the party."

This was the family of the merry little vagabond. He joined it, and

found distress, and, what is sadder still, not a smile; a cold hearth

and cold heart. When he entered, they asked him, "Where do you come

from?" and he answered, "From the street:" when he went away, "Where

are you going?" and he answered, "To the street." His mother would

say to him, "What do you want here?" The boy lived in this absence

of affection like the pale grass which grows in cellars. He was not

hurt by its being so, and was not angry with any one: he did not know

exactly how a father and mother ought to be. Moreover, his mother loved

his sisters.

We have forgotten to mention that on the boulevard the lad was called

Little Gavroche. Why was he called Gavroche? Probably because his

father's name was Jondrette. Breaking the thread seems the instinct of

some wretched families. The room which the Jondrettes occupied at the

Maison Gorbeau was the last in the passage, and the cell next to it was

occupied by a very poor young man of the name of Monsieur Marius. Let

us state who this Monsieur Marius was.

BOOK II.

LE GRAND BOURGEOIS.

CHAPTER I.

NINETY YEARS AND TWO-AND-THIRTY TEETH.

There are still a few persons residing in the Rue Boucherat, Rue de

Normandie, and Rue de Saintonge, who can remember a gentleman of the

name of M. Gillenormand, and speak kindly about him. This good man was

old when they were young. This profile has not entirely disappeared,

with those who look sadly at the vague congregation of shadows called

the past, from the labyrinth of streets near the Temple, which in the

reign of Louis XIV. received the names of all the provinces of France,

exactly in the same way as in our time the names of all the capitals

of Europe have been given to the streets in the new Tivoli quarter; a

progression, by the bye, in which progress is visible.

M. Gillenormand, who was most lively in 1831, was one of those men

who have become curious to look on solely because they have lived a

long time, and are strange because they once resembled everybody and

now no longer resemble any one. He was a peculiar old man, and most

certainly the man of another age, the genuine, perfect bourgeois of

the 18th century, who carried his honest old bourgeoisie with the same

air as Marquises did their marquisate. He had passed his ninetieth

year, walked upright, talked loudly, saw clearly, drank heartily, and

ate, slept, and snored. He still had his two-and-thirty teeth, and

only wore spectacles to read with. He was of an amorous temper, but

said that for the last ten years he had decidedly and entirely given

up the sex. "He could not please," he said: and he did not add "I am

too old," but "I am too poor. If I were not ruined--he, he, he!" In

fact, all that was left him was an income of about fifteen thousand

francs. His dream was to make a large inheritance, and have one hundred

thousand francs a year, in order to keep mistresses. As we see, he

did not belong to that weak variety of octogenarians, who, like M. de

Voltaire, were dying all their life; his longevity was not that of the

cracked jug, and this jolly old gentleman had constantly enjoyed good

health. He was superficial, rapidly and easily angered, and he would

storm at the slightest thing, most usually an absurd trifle. When he

was contradicted, he raised his cane and thrashed his people, as folk

used to do in the great age. He had a daughter, upwards of fifty years

of age and unmarried, whom he gave a hearty thrashing to when he was

in a passion, and whom he would have liked to whip, for he fancied her

eight years of age. He boxed his servant's ears energetically, and

would say, "Ah, carrion!" One of his oaths was, "By the _pantoflouche_

of the _pantouflochade_!" His tranquillity was curious; he was shaved

every morning by a barber who had been mad and who detested him, for

he was jealous of M. Gillenormand on account of his wife, who was a

pretty little coquette. M. Gillenormand admired his own discernment in

everything, and declared himself extremely sagacious. Here is one of

his remarks,--"I have in truth some penetration. I am able to say, when

a flea bites me, from what woman I caught it." The words he employed

most frequently were "the sensitive man" and "nature," but he did not

give to the latter word the vast acceptation of our age. But there was

a certain amount of homeliness in his satirical remarks. "Nature," he

would say, "anxious that civilization may have a little of everything,

even gives it specimens of amusing barbarism. Europe has specimens of

Asia and Africa in a reduced size; the cat is a drawing-room tiger,

the lizard a pocket crocodile. The ballet girls at the opera are

pink savages; they do not eat men, but they live on them: the little

magicians change them into oysters and swallow them. The Caribs

only leave the bones, and they only leave the shells. Such are our

manners; we do not devour, but we nibble; we do not exterminate, but we

scratch."

CHAPTER II.

LIKE MASTER, LIKE HOME.

He lived in the Marais, at No. 6 Rue des Filles de Calvaire, and the

house belonged to him. This house has since been pulled down and

rebuilt, and the number has probably been changed in the numbering

revolutions which the streets of Paris undergo. He occupied an old

and vast suite of rooms on the first floor, furnished up to the

ceiling with large Gobelins and Beauvais tapestry, representing

shepherd scenes; the subjects of the ceiling and panels were repeated

in miniature upon the chairs. He surrounded his bed with an immense

screen of Coromandel lacquer-work; long curtains hung from the windows,

and made very splendid, large, broken folds. The garden immediately

under the windows was reached by a flight of twelve or fifteen steps

running from one of them, which the old gentleman went up and down

very nimbly. In addition to a library adjoining his bed-room, he had

a boudoir, which he was very fond of, a gallant withdrawing-room

hung with a magnificent fleur-de-lysed tapestry, made in the galleys

of Louis XIV., which M. de Vivonne had ordered of his convicts for

his mistress. M. Gillenormand inherited this from a stern maternal

great-aunt, who died at the age of one hundred. He had had two wives.

His manners were midway between those of the courtier, which he had

never been, and of the barrister, which he might have been. He was gay

and pleasing when he liked; in his youth he had been one of those men

who are always deceived by their wives and never by their mistresses,

because they are at once the most disagreeable husbands and the most

charming lovers imaginable. He was a connoisseur of pictures, and had

in his bed-room a marvellous portrait of somebody unknown, painted by

Jordaens with bold strokes of the brush, and with an infinitude of

details. M. Gillenormand's coat was not in the style of Louis XV.,

or even Louis XVI., but it was in the style of the exquisites of the

Directory. He had believed himself quite a youth at that time, and

followed the fashions. His coat was of light cloth with large cuffs, a

long codfish tail, and large steel buttons. Add to these knee-breeches

and buckle-shoes. He always had his hands in his fobs, and said

authoritatively, "The French Revolution is a collection of ruffians."

CHAPTER III.

LUC ESPRIT.

At the age of sixteen, when at the opera one night, he had the honor of

being examined simultaneously by two beauties, at that time, celebrated

and sung by Voltaire,--la Camargo, and la Salle. Caught between two

fires, he beat an heroic retreat towards a little dancing--girl of

the name of Naheury, sixteen years of age, like himself, obscure as a

cat, of whom he was enamoured. He abounded in recollections, and would

exclaim, "How pretty that Guimard-Guimardini-Guimardinette was, the

last time I saw her at Longchamps, with her hair dressed in 'sustained

feelings,' her 'come and see them' of turquoises, her dress of the

color of 'newly-arrived people,' and her muff of 'agitation.'" He had

worn in his youth a jacket of Nain-Londeur, to which he was fond of

alluding: "I was dressed like a Turk of the Levantine Levant." Madame

Boufflers, seeing him accidentally when he was twenty years of age,

declared him to be "a charming madcap." He was scandalized at all

the names he saw in politics and power, and considered them low and

bourgeois. He read the journals, the _newspapers,_ the _gazettes_, as

he called them, and burst into a laugh. "Oh!" he would say, "who are

these people? Corbière! Humann! Casimir Périer! There's a ministry for

you! I can imagine this in a paper,--M. Gillenormand, Minister; it

would be a farce, but they are so stupid that it might easily happen."

He lightly called everything by its proper or improper name, and was

not checked by the presence of ladies; and he uttered coarseness,

obscenity, and filth with a peculiarly calm and slightly amazed accent

in which was elegance. Such was the loose manner of the age. It is to

be remarked that the season of circumlocution in verse was that of

crudities in prose. His grandfather had predicted that he would be a

man of genius, and gave him the two significant Christian names, Luc

Esprit.

CHAPTER IV.

AN ASPIRING CENTENARIAN,

He gained prizes in his youth at the college of Moulins, in which town

he was born, and was crowned by the hand of the Due de Nivernais,

whom he called the Due de Nevers. Neither the Convention, the death

of Louis XVI., Napoleon, nor the return of the Bourbons, had effaced

the recollection of this coronation. The Due de Nevers was to him the

grand figure of the age. "What a charming nobleman!" he would say, "and

how well his blue ribbon became him!" In the eyes of M. Gillenormand,

Catherine II. repaired the crime of the division of Poland by

purchasing of Bestucheff, for three thousand roubles, the secret of the

elixir of gold, and on this point he would grow animated. "The elixir

of gold!" he would exclaim. "Bestucheff's yellow tincture and the

drops of General Lamotte were, in the 18th century, at one louis the

half-ounce bottle, the grand remedy for love catastrophes, the panacea

against Venus. Louis XV. sent two hundred bottles of it to the Pope."

He would have been greatly exasperated had he been told that the gold

elixir is nothing but perchloride of iron. M. Gillenormand adored the

Bourbons, and held 1789 in horror; he incessantly described in what

way he had escaped during the Reign of Terror, and how he had been

obliged to display great gayety and wit in order not to have his head

cut off. If any young man dared in his presence to praise the Republic,

he turned blue, and grew so angry as almost to faint. Sometimes he

alluded to his ninety years, and said, "I trust that I shall not see

ninety-three twice." At other times, he informed persons that he

intended to live to be a hundred.

CHAPTER V.

BASQUE AND NICOLETTE.

He had his theories; here is one of them: "When a man passionately

loves women, and himself has a wife for whom he cares little,--a wife

that is ugly, legitimate, full of her rights, reliant on the Code, and

jealous when she likes to be so, he has only one way of getting out

of the hobble and living at peace; it is to leave his purse--strings

to his wife. This abdication renders him free; the wife is henceforth

occupied, grows passionately fond of handling specie, verdigrises her

fingers, undertakes to instruct the peasants and train the farmers,

harangues the notaries, visits their offices, follows the course of

lawsuits, draws up leases, dictates contracts, knows she is absolute,

sells, buys, regulates, orders, promises and compromises, yields,

concedes and recedes, arranges, deranges, saves, and squanders; she

commits follies, and this affords her supreme personal pleasure and

consolation. While her husband disregards her she has the satisfaction

of ruining her husband." This theory M. Gillenormand applied to

himself, and it became his history. His wife, the second one, managed

his fortune in such a manner that one fine day when he found himself

a widower, he had just enough to live on, by buying an annuity, three

fourths of which would expire with him. He had not hesitated, for he

did not care much about leaving anything to his heir, and, besides,

he had seen that patrimonies had their adventures, and, for instance,

became "National Property;" he had seen the avatars of the three per

cent consols, and put but little faith in the great Book. "All that

is Rue Quincampoix!" he would say. His house in the Rue des Filles du

Calvaire belonged, as we stated, to him, and he had, two servants,

"a he and a she." When a servant came into his house M. Gillenormand

rechristened him, and gave the men the name of their province, Nîmois,

Comtois, Poitevin, or Picard. His last valet was a fat cunning man of

fifty-five, incapable of running twenty yards; but as he was born at

Bayonne, M. Gillenormand called him Basque. As for the maid-servants,

he called them all Nicolette (even la Magnon, to whom we shall

allude directly). One day a bold cook, a Cordon Bleu, of the proud

concierge race, presented herself "What wages do you expect a month?"

M. Gillenormand asked her. "Thirty francs." "What is your name?"

"Olympie." "I will give you forty, and call you Nicolette."

CHAPTER VI.

MAGNON AND HER TWO LITTLE ONES.

In Gillenormand sorrow was translated into choler; he was furious at

being in despair. He had every prejudice and took every license. One

of the things of which he composed his external relief and internal

satisfaction was, as we have indicated, having remained a gay fellow,

and passing energetically for such. He called this having a "royal

renown," but this renown at times brought him into singular scrapes.

One day a big baby, wrapped in rags and crying lustily, was brought

to him in a basket, which a maid-servant, discharged six months

previously, attributed to him. M. Gillenormand was at that time past

his eighty-fourth year, and people around him became indignant and

clamorous. "Does the impudent wench expect to make anybody believe

this? What audacity! What an abominable calumny!" M. Gillenormand,

however, did not feel at all angry. He looked at the brat with the

amiable smile of a man flattered by the calumny, and said to the

company, "Well, what is the matter? Is there anything so wonderful

in it, that you should stand there like stuck pigs and display your

ignorance? M. le Duc d'Angoulême, bastard of his Majesty Charles IX.,

married at the age of eighty-five a girl of fifteen; Monsieur Virginal,

Marquis d'Alleuze, and brother of Cardinal de Sourdis, Archbishop of

Bordeaux, had at the age of eighty-three by the lady's-maid of Madame

Jacquin, the President's wife, a genuine love-child, who was a Knight

of Malta, and Member of the Privy Council. One of the great men of

this age, Abbé Tabaraud, is the son of a man of eighty-seven years of

age. These things are common enough. And then take the Bible! After

this, I declare that this little gentleman is none of mine; but take

care of him, for it is not his fault." The creature, the aforesaid

Magnon, sent him a second parcel the next year, also a boy, and M.

Gillenormand thought it time to capitulate. He sent the two brats to

their mother, agreeing to pay eighty francs a month for their support,

but on condition that the mother was not to begin again. He added, "I

expect that the mother will treat them well, and I shall go and see

them now and then," which he did. He had a brother, a priest, who was

for three-and-thirty years Rector of the Poitiers academy, and died

at the age of seventy-nine. "I lost him when quite young," he would

say. This brother, who is not much remembered, was a great miser, who,

as he was a priest, thought himself bound to give alms to the poor he

met, but he never gave them aught but bad or called-in money, thus

finding means of going to Hades by the road to Paradise. As for M.

Gillenormand the elder, he gave alms readily and handsomely; he was

benevolent, brusque, and charitable, and had he been rich his downfall

would have been magnificent. He liked everything that concerned him

to be done grandly; even when he was swindled one day, having been

plundered in the matter of an inheritance by a man of business in a

clumsy and obvious manner, he made the solemn remark, "Sir, that was

done very awkwardly, and I feel ashamed of such clumsiness. Everything

has degenerated in this age, even the swindlers. Morbleu! a man of

my stamp ought not to be robbed in that way; I was plundered as if I

were in a wood, but badly plundered, _sylvœ sint consule dignœ!_" He

had married twice, as we said; by his first wife he had a girl, who

remained an old maid, and by the second another girl, who died at the

age of thirty, and who married through love, or chance, or otherwise, a

soldier of fortune who had served in the armies of the Republic and the

Empire, won the cross at Austerlitz, and his colonel's commission at

Waterloo. "He is the disgrace of my family," the old gentleman used to

say. He took a great dial of snuff, and had a peculiarly graceful way

of shaking his shirt-frill with the back of his hand. He believed very

little in God.

CHAPTER VII

RULE: NO ONE RECEIVED UNTIL EVENING.

Such was M. Luc Esprit Gillenormand, who had not lost his hair,

which was rather gray than white, and always wore it in dog's

ears,--altogether venerable. He was a man of the 18th century,

frivolous and great. In 1814, and the early years of the

Restoration, M. Gillenormand, who was still a youth,--he was only

seventy-four,--resided in the Rue Sirvandoni, Faubourg St. Germain.

He only retired to the Marais on leaving society, that is to say,

long after his eightieth year, and on leaving the world he immured

himself in his habits; the chief one, and in that he was invariable,

was to keep his door closed by day and receive nobody, no matter the

nature of his business, till night. He dined at five, and then his

door was thrown open; it was the fashion of his century, and he did

not like to give it up. "Day is low," he would say, "and only deserves

closed shutters." People of fashion light up their wit when the zenith

illumines its stars, and he barricaded himself against everybody, even

had it been the King; such was old-time elegance.

CHAPTER VIII.

TWO DO NOT MAKE A PAIR.

As for M. Gillenormand's two daughters, they were born at an interval

of ten years. In their youth they had been very little alike, and

both in character and face were as little sisters as was possible.

The younger was a charming creature, who turned to the light, loved

flowers, poetry, and music, was enthusiastic, ethereal, and mentally

betrothed from her youth up to some heroic figure. The elder had her

chimera too; she saw in the azure an army-contractor, some fat and

very rich man, a splendidly stupid husband, a million converted into

a man, or else a prefect; the reception at the prefecture, an usher

in the ante-room with a chain round his neck, the official balls, the

addresses at the mansion-house to be "Madame la Prefête,"--all this

buzzed in her imagination. The two sisters wandered each in her own

reverie, at the period when they were girls, and both had wings,--the

one those of an angel, the other those of a goose.

No ambition is fully realized, at least not in this nether world, and

no paradise becomes earthly in our age. The younger married the man of

her dreams, but she was dead, while the elder did not marry. At the

period when she enters into our narrative, she was an old virtue, an

incombustible prude, with one of the most acute noses and most obtuse

intellects imaginable. It is a characteristic fact that, beyond her

family, no one had ever known her family name; she was called Mlle.

Gillenormand the elder. In the matter of cant, Mlle. Gillenormand could

have given points to a Miss. It was modesty pushed to the verge of the

impure. She had one frightful reminiscence in her life,--one day a man

saw her garter.

Age had only heightened this pitiless modesty,--her chemisette was

never sufficiently opaque, and never was high enough. She multiplied

brooches and pins at places where no one dreamed of looking. The

peculiarity of prudery is to station the more sentries the less the

fortress is menaced. Still, let who will explain these old mysteries of

innocence, she allowed herself to be kissed without displeasure by an

officer in the Lancers, who was her grand-nephew, and Théodule by name.

In spite of this favored Lancer, however, the ticket of "Prude," which

we have set upon her, suited her exactly. Mlle. Gillenormand's was a

species of twilight soul, and prudery is a semi-virtue and a semi-vice.

She added to prudery the congenial lining of bigotry; she belonged to

the Sisterhood of the Virgin, wore a white veil on certain saints'

days, muttered special orisons, revered "the holy blood," venerated

"the sacred heart," remained for hours in contemplation before a

rococo-Jesuit altar in a closed chapel, and allowed her soul to soar

among the little marble clouds and through the large beams of gilt

wood.

She had a chapel friend, an old maid like herself, of the name of Mlle.

Vaubois, absolutely imbecile, and by whose side Mlle. Gillenormand had

the pleasure of being an eagle. Beyond Agnus Deis and Ave Marias, Mlle.

Vaubois knew nothing except the different ways of making preserves.

Perfect of her kind, she was the ermine of stupidity, without a single

spot of intelligence. We must add that Mlle. Gillenormand rather

gained than lost by growing old. She had never been wicked, which is a

relative goodness; and then years abrade angles, and time had softened

her. She had an obscure melancholy, of which she did not herself

possess the secret, and about her entire person there was the stupor

of a finished life which has not begun. She kept house for her father;

such families, consisting of an old man and an old maid, are not rare,

and have the ever-touching appearance of two weaknesses supporting each

other.

There was also in this house a child,--a little boy,--who was always

trembling and dumb in the old gentleman's presence. M. Gillenormand

never spoke to this boy except with a stern voice, and at times with

upraised cane. "Come here, sir,--scamp, scoundrel, come here,--answer

me, fellow,--let me see you, vagabond!" etc., etc. He adored him; it

was his grandson, and we shall meet him again.

Book III.

GRANDFATHER AND GRANDSON.

CHAPTER I.

AN OLD DRAWING--BOOM.

When M. Gillenormand lived in the Rue Servandoni, he frequented

several very good and highly noble salons. Although a bourgeois, M.

Gillenormand was welcome in them, and as he had a two-fold stock

of wit, namely, that which he had, and that attributed to him, he

was sought after and made much of. There are some people who desire

influence and to be talked about, no matter what price they pay;

and when they cannot be oracles, they make themselves buffoons.

M. Gillenormand was not of that nature; and his domination in the

Royalist drawing-rooms which he frequented did not cost him any of his

self-respect. He was an oracle everywhere; and at times he held his own

against M. de Bonald, and even M. Bengy-Puy-Vallée.

About 1817, he invariably spent two afternoons a week at the house of

the Baronne de T----, a worthy and respectable person whose husband

had been, under Louis XVI., Ambassador to Berlin. The Baron de T----,

who, when alive, was passionately devoted to magnetic ecstasies and

visions, died abroad a ruined man, leaving as his sole fortune ten

MS. volumes bound in red Morocco and gilt-edged, which contained very

curious memoirs about Mesmer and his trough. Madame de T---- did not

publish these memoirs through dignity, and lived on a small annuity,

which survived no one knew how. Madame de T---- lived away from Court,

"which was a very mixed society," as she said, in noble, proud, and

poor isolation. Some friends collected twice a week round her widow's

fire, and this constituted a pure Royalist salon. Tea was drunk,

and people uttered there, according as the wind blew to elegiacs or

dithyrambics, groans or cries of horror about the age, the charter, the

Buonapartists, the prostitution of the Cordon Bleu to untitled persons,

and the Jacobinism of Louis XVIII.; and they also whispered about the

hopes which Monsieur, afterwards Charles X., produced.

Low songs, in which Napoleon was called Nicholas, were greeted here

with transports of delight. Duchesses, the most charming and delicate

of ladies, went into ecstasies there about couplets like the following,

which were addressed to the "Federals":

"Renfoncez dans vos culottes

Le bout d'chemise qui vous pend.

Qu'on n'dis pas qu'les patriotes

Ont arboré l'drapeau blanc!"

They amused themselves with puns which they fancied tremendous, with

innocent jokes which they supposed venomous, with quatrains and even

distichs; here is one on the Dessolles Ministry, the moderate cabinet

of which Mons. Decazes and Deserre formed part:--

"Pour raffermir le trône ébranlé sur sa base,

Il faut changer de sol, et de serre et de case;"

or else they played upon the list of the House of Peers, "an abominably

Jacobin chamber," and combined names on this list so as to form, for

instance, phrases like the following: "Damas, Sabran, Gouvion de St.

Cyr." In this society the Revolution was parodied, and they had some

desire to sharpen the same passions in the contrary sense, and sang

their _ça, ira_.

"Ah! ça ira! ça ira! ça ira!

Les buonapartist' à la lanterne!"

Songs are like the guillotine,--they cut off indiscriminately to-day

this head, and to-morrow that. It is only a variation. In the Fualdès

affair, which belongs to this period (1816), they sided with Bastide

and Jansion, because Fualdès was "buonapartiste," They called the

Liberals friends and brothers, and that was the last degree of insult.

Like some church-steeples, the salon of the Baronne de T---- had

two cocks: one was M. Gillenormand, the other the Comte de Lamothe

Valois, of whom they whispered with a species of respect,--"You know?

the Lamothe of the necklace business,"--parties have these singular

amnesties.

Let us add this; in the bourgeoisie, honored situations are lessened by

too facile relations, and care must be taken as to who is admitted.

In the same way as there is a loss of caloric in the vicinity of

cold persons, there is a diminution of respect on the approach of

despised persons. The old high society held itself above this law,

as above all others; Marigny, brother of the Pompadour, visited the

Prince de Soubise, not although, but because, he was her brother. Du

Barry, godfather of the Vaubernier, is most welcome at the house of

the Maréchal de Richelieu. That world is Olympus, and Mercury and the

Prince de Guemenée are at home in it. A robber is admitted to it,

provided he be a god.

The Comte de Lamothe, who, in 1815, was seventy-five years of age, had

nothing remarkable about him beyond his silent and sententious air, his

angular and cold face, his perfectly polite manners, his coat buttoned

up to the chin, and his constantly crossed legs, covered with trousers

of the color of burnt Sienna. His face was the same color as his

trousers. This M. de Lamothe was esteemed in this salon on account of

his "celebrity," and, strange to say, but true, on account of his name

of Valois.

As for M. Gillenormand, the respect felt for him was of perfectly

good alloy. He was an authority; in spite of his levity, he had a

certain imposing, worthy, honest, and haughty manner, which did not

at all injure his gayety, and his great age added to it. A man is not

a century with impunity, and years eventually form a venerable fence

around a head. He made remarks, too, which had all the sparkle of the

old régime. Thus, when the King of Prussia, after restoring Louis

XVIII., paid him a visit under the name of the Comte de Ruppin, he

was received by the descendant of Louis XIV. somewhat as if he were

Marquis de Brandebourg, and with the most delicate impertinence. M.

Gillenormand approved of it. "All kings who are not King of France,"

he said, "are provincial kings." One day the following question was

asked, and answer given in his presence,--"What has been done about the

editor of the _Courrier Français?"_ "He is to be changed." "There's a

_c_ too much," M. Gillenormand dryly observed. At an anniversary Te

Deum for the return of the Bourbons, on seeing M. de Talleyrand pass,

he said,--"There's his Excellency the Devil."

M. Gillenormand was generally accompanied by his daughter, a tall young

lady, who at that time was forty and looked fifty; and by a pretty boy

of nine years of age, red and white, fresh, with happy, confident eyes,

who never appeared in this drawing-room without hearing all the voices

buzz around him,--"How pretty he is! What a pity, poor boy!" This lad

was the one to whom we referred just now, and he was called "poor boy"

because he had for father "a brigand of the Loire." This brigand was

that son-in-law of M. Gillenormand, who has already been mentioned, and

whom the old gentleman called the "disgrace of his family."

CHAPTER II.

A RED SPECTRE OF THAT DAY.

Any one who had passed at that period through the little town of

Vernon, and walked on the handsome stone bridge, which, let us hope,

will soon be succeeded by some hideous wire bridge, would have noticed,

on looking over the parapet, a man of about fifty, wearing a leathern

cap, and trousers and jacket of coarse gray cloth, to which something

yellow, which had been a red ribbon, was sewn, with a face tanned by

the sun, and almost black, and hair almost white, with a large scar on

his forehead and running down his cheek, bowed and prematurely aged,

walking almost every day, spade and pick in hand, in one of the walled

enclosures near the bridge, which border, like a belt of terraces, the

left bank of the Seine. There are delicious enclosures full of flowers,

of which you might say, were they much larger, "They are gardens,"

and if they were a little smaller, "They are bouquets." All these

enclosures join the river at one end and a house at the other. The

man in the jacket and wooden shoes, to whom we have alluded, occupied

in 1817 the narrowest of these enclosures and the smallest of these

houses. He lived there alone and solitary, silently and poorly, with a

woman who was neither young nor old, neither pretty nor ugly, neither

peasant nor bourgeoise, who waited on him. The square of land which

he called his garden was celebrated in the town for the beauty of the

flowers he cultivated, and they were his occupation.

Through his toil, perseverance, attention, and watering-pot, he had

succeeded in creating after the Creator; and he had invented sundry

tulips and dahlias which seemed to have been forgotten by nature. He

was ingenious, and preceded Soulange Bodin in the formation of small

patches of peat-soil for the growth of the rare and precious shrubs

of America and China. From daybreak in summer he was in his walks,

pricking out, clipping, hoeing, watering, or moving among his flowers,

with an air of kindness, sorrow, and gentleness. At times he would

stand thoughtful and motionless for hours, listening to the song of

a bird in a tree, the prattle of a child in a house, or else gazing

at a drop of dew on a blade of grass, which the sun converted into a

carbuncle. He lived very poorly, and drank more milk than wine: a child

made him give way, and his servant scolded him. He was timid to such an

extent that he seemed stern, went out rarely, and saw no one but the

poor, who tapped at his window, and his curé, Abbé Mabœuf, a good old

man. Still, if the inhabitants of the town or strangers, curious to see

his roses or tulips, came and tapped at his little door, he opened it

with a smile. He was the brigand of the Loire.

Any one who, at the same time, read military memoirs and biographies,

the _Moniteur_ and the bulletins of the great army, might have been

struck by a name which pretty often turns up, that of George Pontmercy.

When quite a lad this Pontmercy was a private in the Saintonge

regiment, and when the Revolution broke out, this regiment formed

part of the army of the Rhine, for the regiments of the Monarchy kept

their provincial names even after the fall of the Monarchy, and were

not brigaded till 1794. Pontmercy fought at Spires, Worms, Neustadt,

Turkheim, Alzey, and at Mayence, where he was one of the two hundred

who formed Houchard's rear-guard. He, with eleven others, held out

against the corps of the Prince of Hesse behind the old rampart of

Andernach, and did not fall back on the main body until the enemy's

guns had opened a breach from the parapet to the talus. He was under

Kléber at Marchiennes, and at the fight of Mont Palissel, where his

arm was broken by a rifle-ball; then he went to the frontier of Italy,

and was one of the thirty who defended the Col de Tenda with Joubert.

Joubert was appointed adjutant-general, and Pontmercy sub-lieutenant;

he was by Berthier's side amid the grape-shot on that day of Lodi which

made Bonaparte say, "Berthier was gunner, trooper, and grenadier." He

saw his old general Joubert fall at Novi at the moment when he was

shouting, with uplifted sabre, "Forward!" Having embarked with his

company on board a cutter which sailed from Genoa to some little port

of the coast, he fell into a wasps' nest of seven or eight English

sail. The Genoese commandant wished to throw his guns into the sea,

hide the soldiers in the hold, and pass like a merchant vessel; but

Pontmercy had the tricolor flag hoisted at the peak, and proudly

passed under the guns of the British frigates. Twenty leagues farther

on, his audacity increasing, he attacked and captured a large English

transport conveying troops to Sicily, and so laden with men and horses

that the vessel's deck was almost flush with the sea. In 1805 he

belonged to Malher's division, which took Gunzbourg from the Archduke

Ferdinand, and at Wettingen he caught in his arms, amid a shower of

bullets, Colonel Maupilet, who was mortally wounded at the head of

the 9th Dragoons. He distinguished himself at Austerlitz in that

admirable march in columns of companies performed under the enemy's

fire; and when the Russian Imperial Horse Guards destroyed one of the

battalions of the 4th line Infantry, Pontmercy was among those who

took their revenge, and drove back these Guards. For this the Emperor

gave him the Cross. Pontmercy saw in turn Wurmser made prisoner at

Mantua, Mélas at Alessandria, and Mack at Ulm, and he belonged to

the 8th corps of the grand army which Mortier commanded, and which

took Hamburg. Then he joined the 55th regiment of the line, which was

the old regiment of Flanders; at Eylau, he was in the cemetery where

the heroic Captain Louis Hugo, uncle of the author of this book,

withstood, with his company of eighty-three men, for two hours, the

whole effort of the enemy's army. Pontmercy was one of the three who

left this cemetery alive. He was at Friedland; then he saw Moscow, the

Beresina, Lutzen, Bautzen, Dresden, Wacha, Leipsic, and the defiles

of Gelnhausen; then at Montmereil, Château-Thierry, Craon, the banks

of the Marne, the banks of the Aisne, and the formidable position

of Laon. At Arnay le Duc, as captain, he sabred ten Cossacks, and

saved not his general, but his corporal; he was cut to pieces on this

occasion, and seven-and-twenty splinters were taken out of his left arm

alone. Eight days before the capitulation of Paris he exchanged with

a comrade and entered the cavalry; for he had what was called under

the old régime a "double hand;" that is to say, an equal aptitude in

handling, as private, a sabre or musket, as officer, a squadron or a

company. From this aptitude, improved by military education, special

arms sprang, for instance, the dragoons, who are at once cavalry and

infantry. He accompanied Napoleon to Elba, and at Waterloo was a Major

of cuirassiers in Dubois' brigade. It was he who took the colors of the

Limburg battalion, and himself threw them at the Emperor's feet. He was

covered with blood; for, on seizing the colors, he received a sabre-cut

across the face. The Emperor, who was pleased, cried out to him, "You

are a Colonel, a Baron, and officer of the Legion of Honor!" Pontmercy

answered,--"Sire, I thank you on behalf of my widow." An hour later he

fell into the ravine of Ohain. And now who was this George Pontmercy?

He was the same brigand of the Loire.

We have already seen some portion of his history. After Waterloo,

Pontmercy, drawn as we remember out of the sunken road of Ohain,

succeeded in rejoining the army, and dragged himself from ambulance

to ambulance as far as the cantonments of the Loire. The Restoration

put him on half-pay, and then sent him to Vernon, under honorable

surveillance. King Louis XVIII., regarding all that was done in the

Hundred Days as if it had not happened, recognized neither his quality

as officer of the Legion of Honor, nor his commission as Colonel, nor

his title as Baron. He for his part neglected no opportunity to sign

himself, "Colonel Baron de Pontmercy." He had only one old blue coat,

and never went out without attaching to it the rosette of the Legion

of Honor. The King's attorney advised him that he would be tried for

illegally wearing this decoration; and when this hint was given him by

an officious intermediator, Pontmercy replied, with a bitter smile,

"I do not know whether it is I that no longer understand French, or

whether you are not speaking it, but the fact remains the same: I do

not understand you." Then he went out for eight days in succession with

his rosette, and the authorities did not venture to interfere with

him. Twice or thrice the Minister of War or the General commanding

the department wrote to him with the following superscription: "M. le

Commandant Pontmercy," and he sent back the letters unopened. At the

same moment Napoleon at St. Helena was treating in the same fashion

the missives of Sir Hudson Lowe, addressed to "General Bonaparte."

If we may be forgiven the remark, Pontmercy finished by having the

same saliva in his mouth as the Emperor. There were also at Rome,

Carthaginian prisoners who refused to salute Flaminius, and had a

little of Hannibal's soul in them.

One morning he met the King's attorney in a street of Vernon, went up

to him, and said, "Monsieur le Procureur du Roi, am I allowed to wear

my scar?"

He had nothing but his scanty half-pay as Major, and he had taken the

smallest house in Vernon, where he lived alone, in what way we have

just seen. Under the Empire and between two wars he found time to

marry Mlle. Gillenormand. The old bourgeois, who was indignant in his

heart, concluded with a sigh and saying, "The greatest families are

forced into it." In 1815, Madame Pontmercy, a most admirable woman in

every respect, and worthy of her husband, died, leaving a child. This

child would have been the Colonel's delight in his solitude; but the

grandfather imperiously claimed him, declaring that if he were not

given up to him he would disinherit him. The father yielded for the

sake of the little one, and, unable to love his son, he took to loving

flowers.

He had, however, given up everything, and did not join the opposition

or conspire. He shared his thoughts between the innocent things he did

and the great things he had done, and he spent his time in hoping for

a carnation or calling to mind Austerlitz. M. Gillenormand kept up no

relations with his son-in-law; the Colonel was to him a "bandit," and

he was for the Colonel an "ass." M. Gillenormand never spoke about the

Colonel, except at times to make mocking allusions to "his barony." It

was expressly stipulated that Pontmercy should never attempt to see his

son or speak to him, under penalty of having him thrown on his hands

disinherited. To the Gillenormands, Pontmercy was a plague patient, and

they intended to bring up the child after their fashion. The Colonel

perhaps did wrong in accepting these terms, but he endured them, in the

belief that he was acting rightly, and only sacrificing himself.

The inheritance of the grandfather was a small matter, but that of

Mlle. Gillenormand the elder was considerable, for this aunt was very

rich on her mother's side, and her sister's son was her natural heir.

The boy, who was called Marius, knew that he had a father, but nothing

more, and no one opened his lips to him on the subject. Still, in the

society to which his grandfather took him, the whisperings and winks

eventually produced light in the boy's mind; he understood something at

last, and, as he naturally accepted, by a species of infiltration and

slow penetration, the ideas and opinions which were, so to speak, his

breathing medium, he gradually came to think of his father only with

shame.

While he was thus growing up in this way, the Colonel every two or

three months came furtively to Paris, like a convict who is breaking

his ban, and posted himself at St. Sulpice, at the hour when Aunt

Gillenormand took Marius to Mass. Trembling lest the aunt should turn

round, concealed behind a pillar, motionless, and scarce daring to

breathe, he looked at this boy; the scarred warrior was frightened at

this old maid.

Prom this very circumstance emanated his friendship with the Abbé

Mabœuf, Curé of Vernon. This worthy priest had a brother, churchwarden

of St. Sulpice, who had several times noticed this man contemplating

his child, and the scar on his cheek, and the heavy tear in his eye.

This man, who looked so thoroughly a man, and who wept like a child,

struck the churchwarden, and this face adhered to his memory. One day

when he went to Vernon to see his brother he met on the bridge Colonel

Pontmercy, and recognized his man of St. Sulpice. The churchwarden

told the affair to the Curé, and both made some excuse to pay a visit

to the Colonel. This visit led to others; and the Colonel, though at

first very close, eventually opened his heart, and the Curé and the

churchwarden learned the whole story, and how Pontmercy sacrificed his

own happiness to the future of his child. The result was that the Curé

felt a veneration and tenderness for him, and the Colonel, on his side,

took the Curé into his affection. By the way, when both are equally

sincere and good, no men amalgamate more easily than an old priest and

an old soldier, for they are the same men at the bottom. One devotes

himself to his country down here, the other to his country up there;

that is the sole difference.

Twice a year, on January 1st, and Saint George's day, Marius wrote his

father letters dictated by his aunt, and which looked as if copied from

a handbook, for that was all M. Gillenormand tolerated; and the father

sent very affectionate replies, which the grandfather thrust into his

pocket without reading.

CHAPTER III.

REQUIESCANT!

The salon of Madame de T---- was all that Marius Pontmercy knew of the

world, and it was the sole opening by which he could look out into

life. This opening was gloomy, and more cold than heat, more night

than day, reached him through this trap. This boy, who was all joy and

light on entering the strange world, became thus, in a short time, sad,

and what is more contrary still to his age, serious. Surrounded by all

these imposing and singular persons, he looked about him with serious

astonishment, and all contributed to augment his stupor. There were in

Madame de T----'s drawing-room old, noble, and very venerable ladies,

who called themselves Mathau, Noé, Levis (pronounced Levi), and Cambis,

(pronounced Cambyse). These ancient faces and these Biblical names were

mingled in the boy's mind with his Old Testament, which he learned by

heart, and when they were all present, seated in a circle round an

expiring fire, scarce illumined by a green-shaded lamp, with their

severe faces, their gray or white hair, their long dresses of another

age, in which only mournful colors could be seen, and uttering at

lengthened intervals words at once majestic and stern, little Marius

regarded them with wandering eyes and fancied that he saw not women,

but patriarchs, and Magi,--not real beings, but ghosts.

With these ghosts were mingled several priests, habitués of this old

salon, and a few gentlemen: the Marquis de Sass----, secretary to

Madame de Berry; the Vicomte de Val----, who published odes under the

pseudonym of Charles Antoine; the Prince de Beauff----, who, though

still young, had a gray head and a pretty, clever wife, whose dress

of scarlet velvet, with gold embroidery, cut very low in the neck,

startled this gloom; the Marquis de C----, d'E----, the Frenchman, who

was most acquainted with "graduated politeness;" the Comte d'Am----,

a gentleman with a benevolent chin; and the Chevalier de Port de Guy,

the pillar of the library of the Louvre, called the King's Cabinet. M.

de Port de Guy, bald and rather aging than old, used to tell how in

1793, when he was sixteen years of age, he was placed in the hulks as

refractory, and chained to an octogenarian, the Bishop of Mirepoix,

also a refractory, but as priest, while he was so as soldier. It

was at Toulon, and their duty was to go at night to collect on the

scaffold the heads and bodies of persons guillotined during the day.

They carried these dripping trunks on their backs, and their red

jackets had behind the nape of the neck a crust of blood, which was

dry in the morning and moist at night. These tragical narratives

abounded in the salon of Madame de T----, and through cursing Marat

they came to applaud Trestaillon. A few deputies of the "introuvable"

sort played their rubber of whist there; for instance, M. Thibord

du Chalard, M. Lemarchant de Gomicourt, and the celebrated jester of

the right division, M. Cornet Dincourt. The Bailiff of Ferrette, with

his knee-breeches and thin legs, at times passed through this room,

when proceeding to M. de Talleyrand's; he had been a companion of the

Comte d'Artois, and acting in the opposite way to Aristotle reclining

on Campaspe, he had made the Guimard crawl on all fours, and thus

displayed to ages a philosopher avenged by a bailiff.

As for the priests, there was the Abbé Halma, the same to whom M.

Larose, his fellow-contributor on _la Foudre_, said, "Stuff, who is

not fifty years of age? a few hobble-de-hoys, perhaps." Then came the

Abbé Letourneur, preacher to the King; the Abbé Frayssinous, who at

that time was neither Bishop, Count, Minister, nor Peer, and who wore a

soutane, from which buttons were absent; and the Abbé Keravenant, Curé

of St. Germain des Prés. To them must be added the Papal Nuncio, at

that date Monsignore Macchi, Archbishop of Nisibi, afterwards Cardinal,

and remarkable for his long pensive nose; and another Monsignore, whose

titles ran as follow: Abbate Palmieri, domestic Prelate, one of the

seven Prothonotaries sharing in the Holy See, Canon of the glorious

Liberian Basilica, and advocate of the Saints, _postulatore Dei Santi_,

an office relating to matters of canonization, and meaning very nearly,

Referendary to the department of Paradise. Finally, two Cardinals, M.

de la Luzerne, and M. de Cl---- T----. The Cardinal de Luzerne was

an author, and was destined to have the honor a few years later of

signing articles in the _Conservateur_ side by side with Chateaubriand;

M. de Cl---- T----, was Archbishop of Toulouse, and frequently spent

the summer in Paris with his nephew the Marquis de T----, who had been

Minister of the Navy and of War. The Cardinal de Cl---- T---- was a

merry little old gentleman, who displayed his red stockings under

his tucked-up cassock. His specialty was hating the Encyclopædia and

playing madly at billiards; and persons who on summer evenings passed

along the Rue M----, where M. de Cl---- T---- then resided, stopped to

listen to the sound of the balls and the sharp voice of the Cardinal

crying to his Conclavist Monseigneur Cottret, Bishop _in partibus_

of Caryste, "Mark me a carom, Abbé." The Cardinal de Cl---- T----

had been introduced to Madame de T---- by his most intimate friend,

M. de Roquelaure, ex-Bishop of Senlis and one of the Forty. M. de

Roquelaure was remarkable for his great height and his assiduity at

the Academy. Through the glass door of the room adjoining the library,

in which the French Academy at that time met, curious persons could

contemplate every Thursday the ex-Bishop of Senlis, usually standing

with hair freshly powdered, in violet stockings, and turning his back

to the door, apparently to display his little collar the better. All

these ecclesiastics, although mostly courtiers as much as churchmen,

added to the gravity of the salon, to which five Peers of France, the

Marquis de Vib----, the Marquis de Tal----, the Marquis d'Herb----,

the Vicomte Damb----, and the Duc de Val----, imparted the lordly

tone. This Duc de Val----, though Prince de Mon----, that is to say,

a foreign sovereign prince, had so lofty an idea of France and the

Peerage, that he looked at everything through them. It was he who said,

"The Cardinals are the French Peers of Rome, and the Lords are the

French Peers of England." Still, as in the present age the Revolution

must be everywhere, this feudal salon was ruled, as we have seen, by M.

Gillenormand, a bourgeois.

It was the essence and quintessence of white Parisian society, and

reputations, even Royalist ones, were kept in quarantine there, for

there is always anarchy in reputation. Had Chateaubriand come in he

would have produced the effect of Père Duchêne. Some converts, however,

entered this orthodox society through a spirit of toleration. Thus

the Comte Beug---- was admitted for the purpose of correction. The

"noble" salons of the present day in no way resemble the one which I am

describing, for the Royalists of to-day, let us say it in their praise,

are demagogues. At Madame de T----'s the society was superior, and the

taste exquisite and haughty beneath a grand bloom of politeness. The

habits there displayed all sorts of involuntary refinement, which was

the ancient régime itself, which lived though interred. Some of these

habits, especially in conversation, seemed whimsical, and superficial

persons would have taken for provincialism what was merely antiquated.

They called a lady "Madame la Générale," and "Madame la Colonelle" had

not entirely been laid aside. The charming Madame de Léon, doubtless

remembering the Duchesses de Longueville and de Chevreuse, preferred

that appellation to her title of Princess, and the Marquise de Créquy

was also called "Madame la Colonelle."

It was this small high society which invented at the Tuileries the

refinement of always speaking of the King in the third person, and

never saying, "Your Majesty," as that qualification had been "sullied

by the usurper." Facts and men were judged there, and the age was

ridiculed--which saved the trouble of comprehending it. They assisted

one another in amazement, and communicated mutually the amount of

enlightenment they possessed. Methusalem instructed Epimenides,--the

deaf put the blind straight. The time which had elapsed since Coblenz

was declared not to have passed, and in the same way as Louis XVIII.

was _Dei gratia_ in the twenty-fifth year of his reign, the _émigrés_

were _de jure_ in the twenty-fifth year of their adolescence.

Everything harmonized there: no one was too lively, the speech was

like a breath, and the newspapers, in accordance with the salon,

seemed a papyrus. The liveries in the ante-room were old, and these

personages who had completely passed away were served by footmen of the

same character. All this had the air of having lived a long time and

obstinately struggling against the tomb. To Conserve, Conservation,

Conservative, represented nearly their entire dictionary, and "to be in

good odor" was the point. There were really aromatics in the opinions

of these venerable groups, and their ideas smelt of vervain. It was

a mummy world, in which the masters were embalmed and the servants

stuffed. A worthy old Marchioness, ruined by the emigration, who had

only one woman-servant left, continued to say, "My people."

What did they do in Madame de T----'s salon? They were ultra. This

remark, though what it represent has possibly not disappeared, has no

meaning at the present day, so let us explain it To be ultra is going

beyond; it is attacking the sceptre in the name of the throne and

the mitre in the name of the altar; it is mismanaging the affair you

have in hand; it is kicking over the traces; it is disputing with the

executioner about the degree of roasting which heretics should undergo;

it is reproaching the idol for its want of idolatry; it is insulting

through excess of respect; it is finding in the Pope insufficient

Papism, in the King too little royalty, and too much light in the

night; it is being dissatisfied with alabaster, snow, the swan, and the

lily, on behalf of whiteness; it is being a partisan of things to such

a pitch that you become their enemy; it is being so strong for, that

you become against.

The ultra spirit specially characterizes the first phase of the

Restoration. Nothing in history ever resembled that quarter of an hour

which begins in 1814 and terminates in 1820, with the accession of M.

de Villèle, the practical man of the Right. These six years were an

extraordinary moment, at once noisy and silent, silent and gloomy,

enlightened, as it were, by a beam of dawn, and covered, at the same

time, by the darkness of the great catastrophe which still filled the

horizon, and was slowly sinking into the past. There was in this

light and this shadow an old society and a new society, buffoon and

melancholy, juvenile and senile, and rubbing its eyes, for nothing

is so like a re-awaking as a return. There were groups that regarded

France angrily and which France regarded ironically; the streets full

of honest old Marquis-owls, returned and returning, "ci-devants,"

stupefied by everything; brave and noble gentlemen smiling at being in

France and also weeping at it, ravished at seeing their country again,

and in despair at not finding their monarchy; the nobility of the

Crusades spitting on the nobility of the Empire, that is to say, of the

sword; historic races that had lost all feeling of history; the sons of

the companions of Charlemagne disdaining the companions of Napoleon.

The swords, as we have said, hurled insults at one another; the sword

of Fontenoy was ridiculous, and only a bar of rusty iron; the sword of

Marengo was odious, and only a sabre. The olden times misunderstood

yesterday, and no one had a feeling of what is great or what is

ridiculous. Some one was found to call Bonaparte Scapin. This world no

longer exists, and nothing connected with it, let us repeat, remains

at the present day. When we draw out of it some figure hap-hazard, and

try to bring it to bear again mentally, it seems to us as strange as

the antediluvian world; and, in fact, it was also swallowed up by a

deluge and disappeared under two revolutions. What waves ideas are! How

quickly do they cover whatever they have a mission to destroy and bury,

and how promptly do they produce unknown depths!

Such was the physiognomy of the salon in those distant and candid days

when M. Martainville had more wit than Voltaire. These salons had

a literature and politics of their own: people in them believed in

Fiévée, and M. Agier laid down the law there. M. Colnet, the publisher

and bookseller of the Quai Malaquais, was commented on, and Napoleon

was fully the ogre of Corsica there. At a later date the introduction

into history of M. le Marquis de Buonaparté, Lieutenant-General of the

armies of the King, was a concession to the spirit of the age. These

salons did not long remain pure, and in 1818 a few doctrinaires, a very

alarming tinge, began to culminate in them. In matters of which the

ultras were very proud, the doctrinaires were somewhat ashamed; they

had wit, they had silence, their political dogma was properly starched

with hauteur, and they must succeed. They carried white neck-cloths and

buttoned coats to an excessive length, though it was useful. The fault

or misfortune of the doctrinaire party was in creating old youth: they

assumed the posture of sages, and dreamed of grafting a temperate power

upon the absolute and excessive principle. They opposed, and at times

with rare sense, demolishing liberalism by conservative liberalism;

and they might be heard saying: "Have mercy on Royalism, for it has

rendered more than one service. It brought back traditions, worship,

religion, and respect. It is faithful, true, chivalrous, loving, and

devoted, and has blended, though reluctantly, the secular grandeurs of

the Monarchy with the new grandeurs of the nation. It is wrong in not

understanding the Revolution, the Empire, glory, liberty, young ideas,

young generations, and the age; but do we not sometimes act quite as

wrongly against it? The Revolution of which we are the heirs ought

to be on good terms with everything. Attacking the Royalists is the

contrary of liberalism; what a fault and what blindness! Revolutionary

France fails in its respect to historic France; that is to say, to its

mother, to itself. After September 5th, the nobility of the Monarchy

were treated like the nobility of the Empire after July 8th; they were

unjust to the eagle and we are unjust to the _fleur-de-lys_. There must

be, then, always something to proscribe! Is it very useful to ungild

the crown of Louis XIV., and scratch off the escutcheon of Henri IV.?

We sneer at M. de Vaublanc, who effaced the N's from the bridge of

Jena; but he only did what we are doing. Bouvines belongs to us as

much as Marengo, and the _fleur-de-lys_ are ours, like the N's. They

constitute our patrimony; then why should we diminish it? The country

must be no more denied in the past than in the present; why should we

not have a grudge with the whole of history? Why should we not love

the whole of France?" It was thus that the doctrinaires criticised and

protected the Royalists, who were dissatisfied at being criticised, and

furious at being protected.

The ultras marked the first epoch of the Revolution, and the

Congregation characterized the second; skill succeeded impetuosity. Let

us close our sketch at this point.

In the course of his narrative, the author of this book found on his

road this curious moment of contemporary history, and thought himself

bound to take a passing glance at it, and retrace some of the singular

features of this society, which is unknown at the present day. But

he has done so rapidly, and without any bitter or derisive idea, for

affectionate and respectful reminiscences, connected with his mother,

attach him to this past. Moreover, let him add, this little world had a

grandeur of its own, and though we may smile at it, we cannot despise

or hate it. It was the France of other days.

Marius Pontmercy, like most children, received some sort of education.

When he left the hands of Aunt Gillenormand, his grandfather intrusted

him to a worthy professor of the finest classical innocence. This

young mind, just expanding, passed from a prude to a pedant. Marius

spent some years at college, and then entered the law-school; he was

royalist, fanatic, and austere. He loved but little his grandfather,

whose gayety and cynicism ruffled him, and he was gloomy as regarded

his father. In other respects, he was an ardent yet cold, noble,

generous, proud, religious, and exalted youth; worthy almost to

harshness, and fierce almost to savageness.

CHAPTER IV.

THE END OF THE BRIGAND.

The conclusion of Marius's classical studies coincided with M.

Gillenormand's retirement from society; the old gentleman bade farewell

to the Faubourg St. Germain and Madame de T----'s drawing-room, and

proceeded to establish himself in the Marais at his house in the Rue

des Filles du Calvaire. His servants were, in addition to the porter,

that Nicolette who succeeded Magnon, and that wheezing, short-winded

Basque, to whom we have already alluded. In 1827 Marius attained his

seventeenth year; on coming home one evening he saw his grandfather

holding a letter in his hand.

"Marius," said M. Gillenormand, "you will start to-morrow for Vernon."

"What for?" Marius asked.

"To see your father."

Marius trembled, for he had thought of everything excepting this,--that

he might one day be obliged to see his father. Nothing could be more

unexpected, more surprising, and, let us add, more disagreeable for

him. It was estrangement forced into approximation, and it was not an

annoyance so much as a drudgery. Marius, in addition to his motives of

political antipathy, was convinced that his father, the trooper, as M.

Gillenormand called him in his good-tempered days, did not love him;

that was evident, as he had abandoned him thus and left him to others.

Not feeling himself beloved, he did not love; and he said to himself

that nothing could be more simple. He was so stupefied that he did not

question his grandfather, but M. Gillenormand continued,--

"It seems that he is ill, and asks for you."

And after a silence he added,--

"Start to-morrow morning. I believe there is a coach which leaves at

six o'clock and gets to Vernon at nightfall. Go by it, for he says that

the matter presses."

Then he crumpled up the letter and put it in his pocket. Marius

could have started the same night, and have been with his father

the next morning; a diligence at that time used to run at night to

Rouen, passing through Vernon. But neither M. Gillenormand nor Marius

dreamed of inquiring. On the evening of the following day Marius

arrived at Vernon, and asked the first passer-by for the house of

"Monsieur Pontmercy;" for in his mind he was of the same opinion as

the Restoration, and did not recognize either his father's Barony or

Colonelcy. The house was shown him; he rang, and a woman holding a

small hand-lamp opened the door for him.

"Monsieur Pontmercy?" Marius asked.

The woman stood motionless.

"Is this his house?" Marius continued.

The woman shook her head in the affirmative.

"Can I speak to him?"

The woman made a negative sign.

"Why, I am his son," Marius added; "and he expects me."

"He no longer expects you," the woman said.

Then he noticed that she was crying; she pointed to the door of a

parlor, and he went in. In this room, which was lighted by a tallow

candle placed on the mantel-piece, there were three men, one standing,

one on his knees, and one lying full length upon the floor in his

shirt. The one on the floor was the Colonel; the other two were a

physician and a priest praying. The Colonel had been attacked by a

brain fever three days before, and having a foreboding of evil, he

wrote to M. Gillenormand, asking for his son. The illness grew worse,

and on the evening of Marius' arrival at Vernon the Colonel had an

attack of delirium. He leaped out of bed, in spite of the maid-servant,

crying, "My son does not arrive, I will go to meet him." Then he left

his bed-room, and fell on the floor of the ante-room; he had just

expired. The physician and the curé were sent for, but both arrived too

late; the son had also arrived too late. By the twilight gleam of the

candle, a heavy tear, which had fallen from the Colonel's dead eye,

could be noticed on his pallid cheek. The eye was lustreless, but the

tear had not dried up. This tear was his son's delay.

Marius gazed upon this man whom he saw for the first time and the

last, upon this venerable and manly face, these open eyes which no

longer saw, this white hair, and the robust limbs upon which could

be distinguished here and there brown lines which were sabre-cuts,

and red stars which were bullet-holes. He gazed at the gigantic scar

which imprinted heroism on this face, upon which God had imprinted

gentleness. He thought that this man was his father, and that this man

was dead, and he remained cold. The sorrow he felt was such as he would

have felt in the presence of any other man whom he might have seen

lying dead before him.

Mourning and lamentation were in this room. The maid-servant was

weeping in a corner, the priest was praying, and could be heard

sobbing, the physician wiped his eyes, and the corpse itself wept. The

physician, priest, and woman looked at Marius through their affliction

without saying a word, for he was the stranger. Marius, who was so

little affected, felt ashamed and embarrassed at his attitude, and he

let the hat which he held in his hand fall on the ground, in order to

induce a belief that sorrow deprived him of the strength to hold it. At

the same time he felt a species of remorse, and despised himself for

acting thus. But was it his fault? he had no cause to love his father.

The Colonel left nothing, and the sale of the furniture scarce covered

the funeral expenses. The maid-servant found a scrap of paper, which

she handed to Marius. On it were the following lines, written by the

Colonel:--

"_For my son_. The Emperor made me a Baron on the field of Waterloo,

and as the Restoration contests this title, which I purchased with

my blood, my son will assume it and wear it. Of course he will be

worthy of it." On the back the Colonel had added, "At this same battle

of Waterloo a sergeant saved my life; his name is Thénardier, and I

believe that he has recently kept a small inn in a village near Paris,

either Chelles or Montfermeil. If my son meet this Thénardier he will

do all he can for him."

Not through any affection for his father, but owing to that vague

respect for death which is ever so imperious in the heart of man,

Marius took this paper and put it away. Nothing was left of the

Colonel. M. Gillenormand had his sword and uniform sold to the Jews;

the neighbors plundered the garden and carried off the rare flowers,

while the others became brambles and died. Marius remained only

forty-eight hours in Vernon. After the funeral he returned to Paris and

his legal studies, thinking no more of his father than if he had never

existed. In two days the Colonel was buried, and in three forgotten.

Marius had a crape on his hat, and that was all.

CHAPTER V.

MARIUS MEETS A CHURCHWARDEN.

Marius had retained the religious habits of his childhood. One

Sunday, when he went to hear Mass at St. Sulpice, in the Chapel of

the Virgin to which his aunt took him when a boy, being on that day

more than usually absent and thoughtful, he placed himself behind

a pillar, and knelt, without paying attention to the fact, upon a

Utrecht velvet chair, on the back of which was written, "Monsieur

Mabœuf, Churchwarden." The Mass had scarce begun when an old gentleman

presented himself, and said to Marius,--

"This is my place, sir."

Marius at once stepped aside, and the old gentleman took his seat. When

Mass was ended Marius stood pensively for a few moments, till the old

gentleman came up to him and said,--

"I ask your pardon, sir, for having disturbed you just now, and for

troubling you afresh at this moment; but you must have considered me

ill-bred, and so I wish to explain the matter to you."

"It is unnecessary, sir," said Marius.

"No, it is not," the old man continued, "for I do not wish you to

have a bad opinion of me. I am attached to this seat, and it seems

to me that the Mass is better here, and I will tell you my reason.

To this spot I saw during ten years, at regular intervals of two or

three months, a poor worthy father come, who had no other opportunity

or way of seeing his son, because they were separated through family

arrangements. He came at the hour when he knew that his son would

be brought to Mass. The boy did not suspect that his father was

here--perhaps did not know, the innocent, that he had a father. The

latter kept behind a pillar so that he might not be seen, looked at his

child and wept; for the poor man adored him, as I could see. This spot

has become, so to speak, sanctified for me, and I have fallen into the

habit of hearing Mass here. I prefer it to the bench to which I should

have a right as churchwarden. I even knew the unfortunate gentleman

slightly. He had a father-in-law, a rich aunt, and other relatives,

who threatened to disinherit the boy if the father ever saw him, and

he sacrificed himself that his son might one day be rich and happy.

They were separated through political opinions, and though I certainly

approve of such opinions, there are persons who do not know where to

stop. Good gracious! because a man was at Waterloo he is not a monster;

a father should not be separated from his child on that account. He

was one of Bonaparte's colonels, and is dead, I believe. He lived at

Vernon, where I have a brother who is curé, and his name was something

like Pontmarie or Montpercy. He had, on my word, a great sabre-cut."

"Pontmercy," Marius said, turning pale.

"Precisely, Pontmercy; did you know him?"

"He was my father, sir."

The old churchwarden clasped his hands and exclaimed,--

"Ah! you are the boy! Yes, yes, he would be a man now. Well, poor boy!

you may say that you had a father who loved you dearly."

Marius offered his arm to the old gentleman and conducted him to his

house. The next day he said to M. Gillenormand,--

"Some friends of mine have arranged a shooting-party; will you allow me

to go away for three days?"

"Four," the grandfather answered; "go and amuse yourself." And he

whispered to his daughter with a wink, "Some love affair!"

CHAPTER VI.

WHAT RESULTED FROM MEETING A CHURCHWARDEN.

Where Marius went we shall learn presently. He was away three days,

then returned to Paris, went straight to the library of the Law-school

and asked for a file of the _Moniteur_. He read it; he read all the

histories of the Republic and the Empire; the Memorial of St. Helena,

all the memoirs, journals, bulletins, and proclamations,--he fairly

devoured them. The first time he came across his father's name in a

bulletin of the grand army he had a fever for a whole week. He called

upon the generals under whom George Pontmercy had served; among others,

Count H----. The churchwarden, whom he saw again, told him of the life

at Vernon, the Colonel's retirement, his flowers, and his solitude.

Marius had at last a perfect knowledge of this rare, sublime, and

gentle man, this species of lion-lamb, who had been his father.

While occupied with this study, which filled all his moments as well as

all his thoughts, he scarce ever saw the Gillenormands. He appeared at

meals, but when sought for after them he could not be found. His aunt

sulked, but old Gillenormand smiled. "Stuff, stuff, it is the right

age!" At times the old man would add, "Confound it! I thought that it

was an affair of gallantry, but it seems that it is a passion." It was

a passion in truth, for Marius was beginning to adore his father.

At the same time an extraordinary change took place in his ideas,

and the phases of this change were numerous and successive. As this

is the history of many minds in our day, we deem it useful to follow

these phases step by step, and indicate them all. The history he had

just read startled him, and the first effect was bedazzlement. The

Republic, the Empire, had hitherto been to him but monstrous words,--

the Republic a guillotine in the twilight; the Empire a sabre in the

night. He had looked into it, and where he had only expected to find

a chaos of darkness he had seen, with a species of extraordinary

surprise, mingled with fear and delight, stars flashing,--Mirabeau,

Vergniaud, St. Just, Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, and Danton,--and

a sun rise, Napoleon. He knew not where he was, and he recoiled,

blinded by the brilliancy. Gradually, when the first surprise had worn

off, he accustomed himself to this radiance. He regarded the deed

without dizziness, and examined persons without terror; the Revolution

and the Empire stood out in luminous perspective before his visionary

eyeballs; he saw each of these two groups of events and facts contained

in two enormous facts: the Revolution in the sovereignty of civic right

restored to the masses, the Empire in the sovereignty of the French

idea imposed on Europe; he saw the great figure of the people emerge

from the Revolution, the great figure of France from the Empire, and

he declared to himself on his conscience that all this was good.

What his bedazzlement neglected in this first appreciation, which was

far too synthetical, we do not think it necessary to indicate here. We

are describing the state of a mind advancing, and all progress is not

made in one march. This said, once for all, as to what precedes and

what is to follow, we will continue.

He then perceived that up to this moment he had no more understood his

country than he had his father. He had known neither the one nor the

other, and he had spread a species of voluntary night over his eyes.

He now saw; and on one side he admired, on the other he adored. He was

full of regret and remorse, and he thought with despair that he could

only tell to a tomb all that he had in his mind. Oh, if his father were

alive, if he had him still, if God in His compassion and His goodness

had allowed this father to be still alive, how he would have flown, how

he would have cried to his father,--"Father, here I am, it is I! I have

the same heart as you! I am your son!" How he would have kissed his

white head, bathed his hair with his tears, gazed at his scar, pressed

his hand, adored his clothes, and embraced his feet! Oh, why did this

father die so soon, before justice had been done him, before he had

known his son's love? Marius had a constant sob in his heart, which

said at every moment, "Alas!" At the same time he became more truly

serious, more truly grave, more sure of his faith and his thoughts.

At each instant beams of light arrived to complete his reason, and

a species of internal growth went on within him. He felt a natural

aggrandizement produced by the two things so new to him,--his father

and his country.

As a door can be easily opened when we hold the key, he explained

to himself what he had hated, and understood what he had abhorred.

Henceforth he saw clearly the providential, divine, and human meaning,

the great things which he had been taught to detest, and the great men

whom he had been instructed to curse. When he thought of his previous

opinions, which were but of yesterday, and which yet seemed to him

so old, he felt indignant and smiled. From the rehabilitation of his

father he had naturally passed to that of Napoleon; but the latter,

we must say, was not effected without labor. From childhood he had

been imbued with the judgments of the party of 1814 about Bonaparte;

now, all the prejudices of the Restoration, all its interests, and

all its instincts, tended to disfigure Napoleon, and it execrated

him, even more than Robespierre. It had worked rather cleverly upon

the weariness of the nation and the hatred of mothers. Bonaparte had

become a species of almost fabulous monster, and in order to depict

him to the imagination of the people, which, as we said just now,

resembles that of children, the party of 1814 brought forward in turn

all the frightful masques, from that which is terrible while remaining

grand, down to that which is terrible while becoming grotesque,--from

Tiberius down to old Bogy. Hence, in speaking of Bonaparte, people were

at liberty to sob or burst with laughter, provided that hatred sung

the bass. Marius had never had on the subject of--that man, as he was

called--any other ideas but these in his mind, and they were combined

with his natural tenacity. He was a headstrong little man, who hated

Napoleon.

On reading history, on studying before all documents and materials, the

veil which hid Napoleon from Marius's sight was gradually rent asunder;

he caught a glimpse of something immense, and suspected that up to this

moment he had been mistaken about Bonaparte, as about all the rest;

each day he saw more clearly, and he began climbing slowly, step by

step, at the beginning almost reluctantly, but then with intoxication,

and as if attracted by an irresistible fascination, first the gloomy

steps, then the dimly-lighted steps, and at last the luminous and

splendid steps of enthusiasm.

One night he was alone in his little garret, his candle was lighted,

and he was reading at a table by the open window. All sorts of reveries

reached him from the space, and were mingled with his thoughts. What

a spectacle is night! We hear dull sounds and know not whence they

come; we see Jupiter, which is twelve hundred times larger than the

earth glowing like a fire-ball; the blue is black, the stars sparkle,

and the whole forms a formidable sight. He was reading the bulletins

of the grand army, those Homeric strophes written on the battle-field;

he saw in them at intervals the image of his father, and ever that

of the Emperor; the whole of the great Empire was before him; he

felt, as it were, a tide within him swelling and mounting; it seemed

at moments as if his father passed close to him like a breath, and

whispered in his ear; little by little he grew strange, he fancied

he could hear drums, cannon, and bugles, the measured tread of the

battalions, and the hollow distant gallop of the cavalry; from time

to time his eyes were raised and surveyed the colossal constellations

flashing in the profundities, and then they fell again upon the book,

and he saw in that other colossal things stirring confusedly. His heart

was contracted, he was transported, trembling, and gasping; and all

alone, without knowing what was within him or what he obeyed, he rose,

stretched his arms out of the window, looked fixedly at the shadow, the

silence, the dark infinitude, the eternal immensity, and shouted, "Long

live the Emperor!"

From this moment it was all over. The ogre of Corsica, the usurper,

the tyrant, the monster who was the lover of his own sisters, the

actor who took lessons of Talma, the prisoner of Jaffa, the tiger,

Buonaparte,--all this faded away and made room in his mind for a

radiance in which the pale marble phantom of Cæsar stood out serenely

at an inaccessible height. The Emperor had never been to his father

more than the beloved captain whom a man admires and for whom he

devotes himself; but to Marius he was far more. He was the predestined

constructor of the French group which succeeded the Roman group in

the dominion of the universe; he was the prodigious architect of

an earthquake, the successor of Charlemagne, Louis XI., Henri IV.,

Richelieu, Louis XIV., and the Committee of Public Safety. He had

doubtless his spots, his faults, and even his crimes, that is to say,

he was a man; but he was august in his faults, brilliant in his spots,

and powerful in his crime. He was the predestined man who compelled

all nations to say,--"The great nation." He was even more; he was the

very incarnation of France, conquering Europe by the sword he held,

and the world by the lustre which he emitted. Marius saw in Bonaparte

the dazzling spectre which will ever stand on the frontier and guard

the future. He was a despot, but a dictator,--a despot resulting from

a republic and completing a revolution. Napoleon became for him the

man-people, as the Saviour is the man-God.

As we see, after the fashion of all new converts to a religion, his

conversion intoxicated him and he dashed into faith and went too far.

His nature was so; once upon an incline, it was impossible to check

himself. Fanaticism for the sword seized upon him, and complicated

in his mind the enthusiasm for the idea. He did not perceive that he

admired force as well as genius, that is to say, filled up the two

shrines of his idolatry,--on one side that which is divine, on the

other that which is brutal. He also deceived himself on several other

points, though in a different way; he admitted everything. There is a

way of encountering error by going to meet the truth, and by a sort

of violent good faith, which accepts everything unconditionally. Upon

the new path he had entered, while judging the wrongs of the ancient

régime and measuring the glory of Napoleon, he neglected attenuating

circumstances.

However this might be, a prodigious step was made; where he had once

seen the downfall of monarchy he now saw the accession of France. The

points of his moral compass were changed, and what had once been sunset

was now sunrise; and all these revolutions took place in turns, without

his family suspecting it. When, in this mysterious labor, he had

entirely lost his old Bourbonic and Ultra skin, when he had pulled off

the aristocrat, the Jacobite, and the Royalist, when he was a perfect

Revolutionist, profoundly democratic, and almost republican, he went to

an engraver's and ordered one hundred cards, with the address, "Baron

Marius Pontmercy." This was but the logical consequence of the change

which had taken place in him,--a change in which everything gravitated

round his father. Still, as he knew nobody and could not show his cards

at any porter's lodge, he put them in his pocket.

By another natural consequence, in proportion as he drew nearer to his

father, his memory, and the things for which the Colonel had fought

during five-and-twenty years, he drew away from his grandfather. As we

said, M. Gillenormand's humor had not suited him for a long time past,

and there already existed between them all the dissonances produced

by the contact of a grave young man with a frivolous old man. The

gayety of Géronte offends and exasperates the melancholy of Werther.

So long as the same political opinions and ideas had been common to

them, Marius met his grandfather upon them as on a bridge; but when the

bridge fell there was a great gulf between them. And then, before all

else, Marius had indescribable attacks of revolt when he reflected

that it was M. Gillenormand who, through stupid motives, pitilessly

tore him from the Colonel, thus depriving father of son, and son of

father. Through his reverence for his father, Marius had almost grown

to have an aversion for his grandfather.

Nothing of this, however, was revealed in his demeanor; he merely

became colder than before, laconic at meals, and rarely at home. When

his aunt scolded him for it he was very gentle, and alleged as excuse

his studies, examinations, conferences, etc. The grandfather, however,

still adhered to his infallible diagnostic,--"He is in love; I know the

symptoms." Marius was absent every now and then.

"Where can he go?" the aunt asked.

In one of his trips, which were always very short, he went to

Montfermeil in order to obey his father's intimation, and sought for

the ex-Sergeant of Waterloo, Thénardier the landlord. Thénardier had

failed, the public-house was shut up, and no one knew what had become

of him. In making this search Marius remained away for four days.

"He is decidedly getting out of order," said the grandfather.

They also fancied they could notice that he wore under his shirt

something fastened round his neck by a black ribbon.

CHAPTER VII.

SOME PETTICOAT.

We have alluded to a lancer: he was a great-grand-nephew of M.

Gillenormand's, on the father's side, who led a garrison life, far away

from the domestic hearth. Lieutenant Théodule Gillenormand fulfilled

all the conditions required for a man to be a pretty officer: he

had a young lady's waist, a victorious way of clanking his sabre,

and turned-up moustaches. He came very rarely to Paris, so rarely

that Marius had never seen him, and the two cousins only knew each

other by name. Théodule was, we think we said, the favorite of Aunt

Gillenormand, who preferred him because she never saw him; for not

seeing people allows of every possible perfection being attributed to

them.

One morning Mlle. Gillenormand the elder returned to her apartments, as

much affected as her general placidity would allow. Marius had again

asked his grandfather's permission to make a short trip, adding that

he wished to start that same evening. "Go," the grandfather answered;

and he added to himself, as he pursed up his eye, "Another relapse of

sleeping from home." Mile. Gillenormand went up to her room greatly

puzzled, and cast to the stair-case case this exclamation, "It's too

much!" and this question, "But where is it that he goes?" She caught a

glimpse of some more or less illicit love adventure, of a woman in the

shadow, a meeting, a mystery, and would not have felt vexed to have a

closer peep at it through her spectacles. Scenting a mystery is like

the first bite at a piece of scandal, and holy souls do not detest

it. In the secret compartments of bigotry there is some curiosity for

scandal.

She was, therefore, suffering from a vague appetite to learn a story.

In order to distract this curiosity, which agitated her a little beyond

her wont, she took refuge in her talents, and began festooning with

cotton upon cotton one of those embroideries of the Empire and the

Restoration, in which there are a great many cabriolet wheels. It was

a clumsy job, and the workwoman was awkward. She had been sitting over

it for some hours when the door opened. Mlle. Gillenormand raised her

nose, and saw Lieutenant Théodule before her, making his regulation

salute. She uttered a cry of delight; for a woman may be old, a prude,

devout, and an aunt, but she is always glad to see a lancer enter her

room.

"You here, Théodule!" she exclaimed.

"In passing, my dear aunt."

"Well, kiss me."

"There," said Théodule, as he kissed her. Aunt Gillenormand walked to

her secretaire and opened it.

"You will stop the week out?"

"My dear aunt, I am off again to-night."

"Impossible!"

"Mathematically."

"Stay, my little Théodule, I beg of you."

"The heart says Yes, but duty says No. The story is very simple; we are

changing garrison; we were at Melun, and are sent to Gaillon. In order

to go to the new garrison we were obliged to pass through Paris, and I

said to myself, 'I will go and see my aunt.'"

"And here's for your trouble."

And she slipped ten louis into his hand.

"You mean to say for my pleasure, dear aunt."

Théodule kissed her a second time, and she had the pleasure of having

her neck slightly grazed by his gold-laced collar.

"Are you travelling on horseback, with your regiment?"

"No, my aunt: I have come to see you by special permission. My servant

is leading my horse, and I shall travel by the diligence. By the way,

there is one thing I want to ask you."

"What is it?"

"It appears that my cousin Marius Pontmercy is going on a journey too?"

"How do you know that?" the aunt said, her curiosity being greatly

tickled.

"On reaching Paris I went to the coach-office to take my place in the

_coupé_."

"Well?"

"A traveller had already taken a seat in the Impériale, and I saw his

name in the way-bill: it was Marius Pontmercy."

"Oh, the scamp!" the aunt exclaimed. "Ah! your cousin is not a

steady lad like you. To think that he is going to pass the night in a

diligence!"

"Like myself."

"You do it through duty, but he does it through disorder."

"The deuce!" said Théodule.

Here an event occurred to Mlle. Gillenormand the elder: she had an

idea. If she had been a man she would have struck her forehead. She

addressed Théodule.

"You are aware that your cousin does not know you?"

"I have seen him, but he never deigned to notice me."

"Where is the diligence going to?"

"To Andelys."

"Is Marius going there?"

"Unless he stops on the road, like myself. I get out at Vernon, to take

the Gaillon coach. I know nothing about Marius's route."

"Marius! what an odious name! What an idea it was to call him that!

Well, your name, at least, is Théodule."

"I would rather it was Alfred," the officer said.

"Listen, Théodule; Marius absents himself from the house."

"Eh, eh!"

"He goes about the country."

"Ah, ah!"

"He sleeps out."

"Oh, oh!"

"We should like to know the meaning of all this."

Théodule replied, with the calmness of a bronze man, "Some petticoat!"

And with that inward chuckle which evidences a certainty, he added, "a

girl!"

"That is evident!" the aunt exclaimed, who believed that she heard M.

Gillenormand speaking, and who felt his conviction issue irresistibly

from that word "girl," accentuated almost in the same way by

grand-uncle and grand-nephew. She continued,--

"Do us a pleasure by following Marius a little. As he does not know

you, that will be an easy matter. Since there is a girl in the case,

try to get a look at her, and write and tell us all about it, for it

will amuse grandfather."

Théodule had no excessive inclination for this sort of watching, but

he was greatly affected by the ten louis, and he believed he could see

a possible continuation of such gifts. He accepted the commission, and

said, "As you please, aunt," and added in an aside, "I am a Duenna now!"

Mlle. Gillenormand kissed him.

"You would not play such tricks as that, Théodule, for you obey

discipline, are the slave of duty, and a scrupulous man, and would

never leave your family to go and see one of those creatures."

The lancer made the satisfied grimace of Cartouche when praised for his

probity.

Marius, on the evening that followed this dialogue, got into the

diligence, not suspecting that he was watched. As for the watcher, the

first thing he did was to fall asleep, and his sleep was complete and

conscientious. Argus snored the whole night. At daybreak the guard

shouted, "Vernon; passengers for Vernon, get out here!" and Lieutenant

Théodule got out.

"All right," he growled, still half asleep, "I get out here."

Then his memory growing gradually clearer, he thought of his aunt,

the ten louis, and the account he had promised to render of Marius's

sayings and doings. This made him laugh.

"He is probably no longer in the coach," he thought, while buttoning

up his jacket. "He may have stopped at Poissy, he may have stopped at

Triel; if he did not get out at Meulan, he may have done so at Mantes,

unless he stopped at Rolleboise, or only went as far as Passy, with the

choice of turning on his left to Évreux, or on his right to Laroche

Guyon. Run after him, my aunt. What the deuce shall I write to the old

lady?"

At this moment the leg of a black trouser appeared against the

window-pane of the _coupé_.

"Can it be Marius?" the Lieutenant said.

It was Marius. A little peasant girl was offering flowers to the

passengers, and crying, "Bouquets for your ladies." Marius went up to

her, and bought the finest flowers in her basket.

"By Jove!" said Théodule, as he leaped out of the _coupé_, "the affair

is growing piquant. Who the deuce is he going to carry those flowers

to? She must be a deucedly pretty woman to deserve so handsome a

bouquet. I must have a look at her."

And then he began following Marius, no longer by order, but through

personal curiosity, like those dogs which hunt on their own account.

Marius paid no attention to Théodule. Some elegant women were getting

out of the diligence, but he did not look at them; he seemed to see

nothing around him.

"He must be preciously in love," Théodule thought. Marius proceeded

towards the church.

"That's glorious!" Théodule said to himself; "the church, that's the

thing. Rendezvous spiced with a small amount of Mass are the best.

Nothing is so exquisite as an ogle exchanged in the presence of the

Virgin."

On reaching the church, Marius did not go in, but disappeared behind

one of the buttresses of the apse.

"The meeting outside," Théodule said; "now for a look at the girl."

And he walked on tiptoe up to the corner which Marius had gone round,

and on reaching it stopped in stupefaction. Marius, with his forehead

in both his hands, was kneeling in the grass upon a tomb, and had

spread his flowers out over it. At the head of the grave was a cross

of black wood, with this name in white letters,--"COLONEL BARON

PONTMERCY." Marius could be heard sobbing.

The girl was a tomb.

CHAPTER VIII

MARBLE AGAINST GRANITE.

It is hither that Marius had come the first time that he absented

himself from Paris; it was to this spot he retired each time that

M. Gillenormand said,--"He sleeps out." Lieutenant Théodule was

absolutely discountenanced by this unexpected elbowing of a tomb, and

felt a disagreeable and singular sensation, which he was incapable

of analyzing, and which was composed of respect for a tomb, mingled

with respect for a colonel. He fell back, leaving Marius alone in the

cemetery, and there was discipline in this retreat; death appeared

to him wearing heavy epaulettes, and he almost gave it the military

salute. Not knowing what to write to his aunt, he resolved not to write

at all; and there would probably have been no result from Théodule's

discovery of Marius's amour had not, by one of those mysterious

arrangements so frequent in accident, the scene at Vernon had almost

immediately a sort of counterpart in Paris.

Marius returned from Vernon very early on the morning of the third

day, and wearied by two nights spent in a diligence, and feeling

the necessity of repairing his want of sleep by an hour's swimming

exercise, he hurried up to his room, only took the time to take off

his travelling coat and the black ribbon which he had round his neck,

and went to the bath. M. Gillenormand, who rose at an early hour like

all old men who are in good health, heard him come in, and hastened

as quick as his old legs would carry him up the stairs leading to

Marius's garret, in order to welcome him back, and try and discover his

movements. But the young man had taken less time in descending than the

octogenarian in ascending, and when Father Gillenormand entered the

garret Marius was no longer there. The bed had been unoccupied, and on

it lay the coat and black ribbon unsuspectingly.

"I prefer that," said M. Gillenormand, and a moment later he entered

the drawing-room, where Mlle. Gillenormand the elder was already seated

embroidering her cabriolet wheels. The entrance was triumphant; M.

Gillenormand held in one hand the coat, in the other the neck-ribbon,

and shouted,--

"Victory! we are going to penetrate the mystery, we are going to know

the cream of the joke, we are going to lay our hands on the libertinage

of our cunning gentleman. Here is the romance itself, for I have the

portrait."

In fact, a box of shagreen leather, much like a miniature, was

suspended from the ribbon. The old man took hold of this box, and

looked at it for some time without opening, with the air of pleasure,

eagerness, and anger of a poor starving fellow who sees a splendid

dinner, of which he will have no share, carried past under his nose.

"It is evidently a portrait, and I am up to that sort of thing. It

is worn tenderly on the heart,--what asses they are! Some abominable

wench, who will probably make me shudder; for young men have such bad

tastes now-a-days."

"Let us look, father," the old maid said.

The box opened by pressing a spring, but they only found in it a

carefully folded-up paper.

"_From the same to the same_" said M. Gillenormand, bursting into a

laugh. "I know what it is,--a billet-doux!"

"Indeed! let us read it," said the aunt; and she put on her spectacles.

They unfolded the paper and read as follows,--

"_For my son_. The Emperor made me a Baron on the field of Waterloo,

and as the Restoration contests this title which I purchased with my

blood, my son will assume it and wear it; of course he will be worthy

of it."

What the father and daughter felt, it is not possible to describe; but

they were chilled as if by the breath of a death's-head. They did not

exchange a syllable. M. Gillenormand merely said in a low voice, and as

if speaking to himself, "It is that trooper's handwriting." The aunt

examined the slip of paper, turned it about in all directions, and then

placed it again in the box.

At the same instant a small square packet wrapped up in blue paper fell

from a pocket of the great-coat. Mlle. Gillenormand picked it up and

opened the blue paper. It contained Marius's one hundred cards, and she

passed one to M. Gillenormand, who read, "Baron Marius Pontmercy." The

old man rang, and Nicolette came in. M. Gillenormand took the ribbon,

the box, and the coat, threw them on the ground in the middle of the

room, and said,--

"Remove that rubbish."

A long hour passed in the deepest silence; the old man and the old

maid were sitting back to back and thinking, probably both of the

same things. At the end of this hour, Mlle. Gillenormand said,--"Very

pretty!" A few minutes after, Marius came in; even before he crossed

the threshold he perceived his grandfather holding one of his cards in

his hand. On seeing Marius he exclaimed, with his air of bourgeois and

grimacing superiority, which had something crushing about it,--

"Stay! stay! stay! stay! stay! You are a Baron at present; I must

congratulate you. What does this mean?"

Marius blushed slightly, and answered,--

"It means that I am my father's son."

M. Gillenormand left off laughing, and said harshly, "I am your father."

"My father," Marius continued with downcast eyes and a stern air,

"was an humble and heroic man, who gloriously served the Republic of

France, who was great in the greatest history which men have ever

made, who lived for a quarter of a century in a bivouac, by day under

a shower of grape-shot and bullets, and at night in snow, mud, wind,

and rain. He was a man who took two flags, received twenty wounds, died

in forgetfulness and abandonment, and who had never committed but one

fault, that of loving too dearly two ungrateful beings,--his country

and myself."

This was more than M. Gillenormand could bear; at the word Republic he

had risen, or, more correctly, sprung up. Each of the words that Marius

had just uttered had produced on the old gentleman's face the same

effect as the blast of a forge-bellows upon a burning log. From gloomy

he became red, from red, purple, and from purple, flaming.

"Marius," he shouted, "you abominable boy! I know not who your father

was, and do not wish to know. I know nothing about it, but what I do

know is, that there never were any but scoundrels among all those

people; they were all rogues, assassins, red-caps, robbers! I say all,

I say all! I know nobody! I say all; do you understand me, Marius? You

must know that you are as much a Baron as my slipper is! They were

all bandits who served Robespierre! they were all brigands who served

B-u-o-naparté! all traitors who betrayed, betrayed, betrayed their

legitimate king! all cowards who ran away from the Prussians and the

English at Waterloo! That is what I know. If Monsieur your father was

among them, I am ignorant of the fact, and am sorry for it. I am your

humble servant!"

In his turn, Marius became the brand, and M. Gillenormand the

bellows. Marius trembled all over, he knew not what to do, and his

head was a-glow. He was the priest who sees his consecrated wafers

cast to the wind, the Fakir who notices a passer-by spit on his

idol. It was impossible that such things could be said with impunity

in his presence, but what was he to do? His father had just been

trampled under foot, and insulted in his presence; but by whom? By

his grandfather. How was he to avenge the one without outraging the

other? It was impossible for him to insult his grandfather, and equally

impossible for him not to avenge his father. On one side was a sacred

tomb, on the other was white hair. He tottered for a few moments like a

drunken man, then raised his eyes, looked fixedly at his grandfather,

and shouted in a thundering voice,--

"Down with the Bourbons, and that great pig of a Louis XVIII.!"

Louis XVIII. had been dead four years, but that made no difference

to him. The old man, who had been scarlet, suddenly became whiter

than his hair. He turned to a bust of the Duc de Berry which was

on the mantel-piece, and bowed to it profoundly with a sort of

singular majesty. Then he walked twice, slowly and silently, from the

mantel-piece to the window, and from the window to the mantel-piece,

crossing the whole room, and making the boards creak as if he were a

walking marble statue. The second time he leaned over his daughter, who

was looking at the disturbance with the stupor of an old sheep, and

said to her with a smile which was almost calm,--

"A Baron like this gentleman and a bourgeois like myself can no longer

remain beneath the same roof."

And suddenly drawing himself up, livid, trembling, and terrible, with

his forehead dilated by the fearful radiance of passion, he stretched

out his arm toward Marius, and shouted, "Begone!"

Marius left the house, and on the morrow M. Gillenormand said to his

daughter,--

"You will send every six months sixty pistoles to that blood-drinker,

and never mention his name to me."

Having an immense amount of fury to expend, and not knowing what to

do with it, he continued to address his daughter as "you" instead of

"thou" for upwards of three months.

Marius, on his side, left the house indignant, and a circumstance

aggravated his exasperation. There are always small fatalities of this

nature to complicate domestic dramas: the anger is augmented although

the wrongs are not in reality increased. In hurriedly conveying, by

the grandfather's order, Marius's rubbish to his bed-room, Nicolette,

without noticing the fact, let fall, probably on the attic stairs,

which were dark, the black shagreen case in which was the paper written

by the Colonel. As neither could be found, Marius felt convinced that

"Monsieur Gillenormand"--he never called him otherwise from that

date--had thrown "his father's will" into the fire. He knew by heart

the few lines written by the Colonel, and consequently nothing was

lost: but the paper, the writing, this sacred relic,--all this was his

heart. What had been done with it?

Marius went away without saying where he was going and without knowing,

with thirty francs, his watch, and some clothes in a carpet-bag. He

jumped into a cabriolet, engaged it by the hour, and proceeded at

random towards the Pays Latin. What would become of Marius?

BOOK IV.

THE FRIENDS OF THE A. B. C.

CHAPTER I.

A GROUP THAT NEARLY BECAME HISTORICAL.

At this epoch, which was apparently careless, a certain revolutionary

quivering was vaguely felt. There were breezes in the air which

returned from the depths of '89 and '92; and the young men, if we may

be forgiven the expression, were in the moulting stage. Men became

transformed, almost without suspecting it, by the mere movement of

time, for the hand which moves round the clock-face also moves in

the mind. Each took the forward step he had to take; the Royalists

became liberals, and the Liberals democrats. It was like a rising tide

complicated by a thousand ebbs, and it is the peculiarity of ebbs to

cause things to mingle. Hence came very singular combinations of ideas,

and men adored liberty and Napoleon at the same time. We are writing

history here, and such were the mirages of that period. Opinions pass

through phases, and Voltairian royalism, a strange variety, had a no

less strange pendant in Bonapartist liberalism.

Other groups of minds were more serious; at one spot principles

were sounded, and at another men clung to their rights. They became

impassioned for the absolute, and obtained glimpses of infinite

realizations; for the absolute, through its very rigidity, causes

minds to float in the illimitable ether. There is nothing like the

dogma to originate a dream, and nothing like a dream to engender the

future; the Utopia of to-day is flesh and bone to-morrow. Advanced

opinions had a false bottom, and a commencement of mystery threatened

"established order," which was suspicious and cunning. This is a most

revolutionary sign. The after-thought of the authorities meets in the

sap the after-thought of the people, and the incubation of revolutions

is the reply to the premeditation of Coups d'État. There were not as

yet in France any of those vast subjacent organizations, like the

Tugenbund of Germany or the Carbonari of Italy; but here and there were

dark subterranean passages with extensive ramifications. The Cougourde

was started at Aix; and there was at Paris, among other affiliations of

this nature, the society of the Friends of the A. B. C.

Who were the Friends of the A. B. C.? A society whose ostensible object

was the education of children, but the real one the elevation of men.

They called themselves friends of the A. B. C.; the _Abaissé_ was the

nation, and they wished to raise it. It would be wrong to laugh at this

pun, for puns at times are serious in politics; witnesses of this are

the _Castratus ad castra_, which made Narses general of an army; the

_Barbari_ and _Barberini; fueros fuegos; tu es Petrus et super hanc

Petram_, etc., etc. The Friends of the A. B. C. were few in number; it

was a secret society, in a state of embryo, and we might almost call it

a coterie, if coteries produced heroes. They assembled at two places

in Paris,--at a cabaret called _Corinthe_ near the Halles, to which

we shall revert hereafter; and near the Panthéon, in a small café on

the Place St. Michel, known as the Café Musain, and now demolished: the

first of these meeting-places was contiguous to the workmen, and the

second to the students. The ordinary discussions of the Friends of the

A. B. C. were held in a back room of the Café Musain. This room, some

distance from the coffee-room, with which it communicated by a very

long passage, had two windows and an issue by a secret staircase into

the little Rue des Grés. They smoked, drank, played, and laughed there;

they spoke very loudly about everything, and in a whisper about the

other thing. On the wall hung an old map of France under the Republic,

which would have been a sufficient hint for a police-agent.

Most of the Friends of the A. B. C. were students, who maintained

a cordial understanding with a few workmen. Here are the names

of the principal members, which belong in a certain measure to

history,--Enjolras, Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Courfeyrac,

Bahorel, Lesgle or Laigle, Joly, and Grantaire. These young men formed

a species of family through their friendship, and all came from the

South, excepting Laigle. This group is remarkable, although it has

vanished in the invisible depths which are behind us. At the point

of this drama which we have now attained, it will not be labor lost,

perhaps, to throw a ray of light upon these heads, before the reader

watches them enter the shadows of a tragical adventure.

Enjolras, whom we named first, it will be seen afterwards why, was an

only son, and rich. He was a charming young man, capable of becoming

terrible; he was angelically beautiful, and looked like a stern

Antinous. On noticing the pensive depth of his glance you might have

fancied that he had gone through the revolutionary apocalypse in some

preceding existence. He knew the traditions of it like an eye-witness,

and was acquainted with all the minor details of the great thing. His

was a pontifical and warlike nature, strange in a young man; he was a

churchman and a militant; from the immediate point of view a soldier of

democracy, but, above the contemporary movement, a priest of the ideal.

He had a slightly red eyelid, a thick and easily disdainful lower lip,

and a lofty forehead; a good deal of forehead on a face is like a good

deal of sky in an horizon. Like certain young men of the beginning of

the present century and the end of the last, who became illustrious

at an early age, he looked excessively young, and was as fresh as a

school-girl, though he had his hours of pallor. Although a man, he

seemed still a boy, and his two-and-twenty years looked like only

seventeen; he was serious, and did not appear to know that there was

on the earth a being called woman. He had only one passion, justice,

and only one thought, overthrowing the obstacle. On the Mons Aventinus,

he would have been Gracchus; in the Convention, he would have been St.

Just. He scarcely noticed roses, was ignorant of spring, and did not

hear the birds sing; the bare throat of Evadne would have affected him

as little as it did Aristogiton; to him, as to Harmodius, flowers were

only good to conceal the sword. He was severe in his pleasures, and

before all that was not the Republic he chastely lowered his eyes; he

was the marble lover of liberty. His language had a sharp inspiration

and a species of rhythmic strain. Woe to the love which risked itself

in his direction! If any grisette of the Place Cambray or the Rue St.

Jean de Beauvais, seeing this figure just escaped from college, with a

neck like that of a page, long light lashes, blue eyes, hair floating

wildly in the breeze, pink cheeks, cherry lips, and exquisite teeth,

had felt a longing for all this dawn, and tried the effect of her

charms upon Enjolras, a formidable look of surprise would have suddenly

shown her the abyss, and taught her not to confound the avenging cherub

of Ezekiel with the gallant cherub of Beaumarchais.

By the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of the Revolution,

Combeferre represented its philosophy. Between the logic and the

philosophy of revolutions there is this difference, that the logic

may conclude in war, while its philosophy can only lead to peace.

Combeferre completed and rectified Enjolras; he was not so tall, but

broader. He wished that the extended principles of general ideas should

be poured over minds, and said, "Revolution but civilization!" and he

opened the vast blue horizon around the peaked mountain. Hence there

was something accessible and practicable in all Combeferre's views;

and the Revolution with him was fitter to breathe than with Enjolras.

Enjolras expressed its divine right and Combeferre its natural right;

and while the former clung to Robespierre, the latter bordered upon

Condorcet. Combeferre loved more than Enjolras the ordinary life of

mankind; and if these two young men had gained a place in history, the

one would have been the just man, the other the sage. Enjolras was

more manly, Combeferre more humane, and the distinction between them

was that between _homo_ and _vir_. Combeferre was gentle as Enjolras

was stern, through natural whiteness; he loved the word citizen,

but preferred man, and would willingly have said _Hombre_, like the

Spaniards. He read everything, went to the theatres, attended the

public lectures, learned from Arago the polarization of light, and grew

quite excited about a lecture in which Geoffroy St. Hilaire explained

the double functions of the external and internal carotid arteries, the

one which makes the face, and the other which produces the brain; he

was conversant with, and followed, science step by step, confronted St.

Simon with Fourier, deciphered hieroglyphics, broke pebbles which he

found, drew from memory a bombyx butterfly, pointed out the errors in

French in the Dictionary of the Academy, studied Puységur and Deleuze,

affirmed nothing, not even miracles, denied nothing, not even ghosts,

turned over the file of the _Moniteur_ and reflected. He declared that

the future is in the hand of the schoolmaster, and busied himself with

educational questions. He wished that society should labor without

relaxation at the elevation of the intellectual and moral standard,

at coining science, bringing ideas into circulation, and making the

minds of youth grow; and he feared that the present poverty of methods,

the wretchedness from the literary point of view of confining studies

to two or three centuries called classical, the tyrannical dogmatism

of official pedants, scholastic prejudices, and routine would in

the end convert our colleges into artificial oyster-beds. He was

learned, a purist, polite, and polytechnic, a delver, and at the time

pensive, "even to a chimera," as his friends said. He believed in all

dreams,--railways, the suppression of suffering in surgical operations,

fixing the image of the camera obscura, electric telegraphy, and the

steering of balloons. He was but slightly terrified by the citadels

built on all sides against the human race by superstitions, despotisms,

and prejudices; for he was one of those men who think that science will

in the end turn the position. Enjolras was a chief, and Combeferre

a guide; you would have liked to fight under one and march with the

other. Not that Combeferre was incapable of fighting, he did not refuse

to seize obstacles round the waist and attack them by main force; but

it pleased him better to bring the human race into harmony with its

destiny gradually, by the instruction of axioms and the promulgation

of positive laws; and with a choice between two lights, his inclination

was for illumination rather than fire. A fire may certainly produce a

dawn, but why not wait for daybreak? A volcano illumines, but the sun

does so far better. Combeferre perhaps preferred the whiteness of the

beautiful to the flashing of the sublime; and a brightness clouded by

smoke, a progress purchased by violence, only half satisfied his tender

and serious mind. A headlong hurling of a people into the truth, a

'93, startled him; still, stagnation was more repulsive to him, for he

smelt in it putrefaction and death. Altogether he liked foam better

than miasma, and preferred the torrent to the sewer, and the Falls of

Niagara to the Lake of Montfauçon. In a word, he desired neither halt

nor haste; and while his tumultuous friends, who were chivalrously

attracted by the absolute, adored and summoned the splendid

revolutionary adventurer, Combeferre inclined to leave progress, right

progress, to act: it might be cold but it was pure, methodical but

irreproachable, and phlegmatic but imperturbable. Combeferre would

have knelt down and prayed that this future might arrive with all its

candor, and that nothing might disturb the immense virtuous evolution

of the peoples. "The good must be innocent," he repeated incessantly.

And in truth, if the grandeur of the revolution is to look fixedly at

the dazzling ideal, and fly toward it through the lightning, with blood

and fire in the claws, the beauty of progress is to be unspotted; and

there is between Washington, who represents the one, and Danton, who

is the incarnation of the other, the same difference as that which

separates the angel with the swan's wings from the angel with the

eagle's wings.

Jean Prouvaire was of an even softer tinge than Combeferre; he was

called "Jehan," through that little momentary fantasy which was

blended with the powerful and profound movement from which issued

the study of the Middle Ages, so essential. Jean Prouvaire was in

love, cultivated a pot of flowers, played the flute, wrote verses,

loved the people, pitied women, wept over children, confounded in the

same confidence the future and God, and blamed the Revolution for

having caused a royal head to fall, that of André Chénier. He had a

voice which was habitually delicate, and suddenly became masculine;

he was erudite, and almost an Orientalist. He was good before all,

and through a motive which those will easily understand who know how

closely goodness borders on grandeur,--he loved immensity in poetry. He

knew Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and he employed his knowledge

to read only four poets,--Dante, Juvenal, Æschylus, and Isaiah. In

French he preferred Corneille to Racine, and Agrippa d'Aubigné to

Corneille. He was fond of strolling about the fields of wild oats and

corn-flowers, and occupied himself with clouds almost as much as with

events. His mind had two attitudes,--one turned to man, the other to

God; he either studied or contemplated. The whole day long he studied

social questions,--wages, capital, credit, marriage, religion, liberty

of thought, liberty of love, education, the penal code, wretchedness,

partnership, property, production, and division, that enigma of the

lower world which casts a shadow over the human ant-heap, and at night

he looked at the stars, those enormous beings. Like Enjolras, he was

rich, and an only son; he talked softly, hung his head, looked down,

smiled with an embarrassed air, dressed badly, had an awkward gait,

blushed at a nothing, and was very timid; with all that he was intrepid.

Feuilly was a journeyman fan-maker, doubly an orphan, who laboriously

earned three francs a day, and had only one idea,--to deliver the

world. He had another preoccupation as well, instructing himself, which

he called self-deliverance. He had taught himself to read and write,

and all that he knew he had learned alone. Feuilly had a generous

heart, and hugged the world. This orphan had adopted the peoples,

and as he had no mother, he meditated on his country. He had wished

that there should not be in the world a man who had no country, and

he brooded over what we now call the "idea of nationalities" with the

profound divination of the man of the people. He had studied history

expressly that he might be indignant with a knowledge of the fact, and

in this youthful assembly of Utopians who were specially interested

about France, he represented the foreign element. His specialty was

Greece, Poland, Roumania, Hungary, and Italy; he pronounced these

names incessantly, in season and out of season, with the tenacity of

right. The violations committed by Turkey on Greece and Thessaly, of

Russia on Warsaw, and Austria on Venice, exasperated him, and above

all the great highway robbery of 1772 aroused him. There can be no

more sovereign eloquence than truth in indignation; and he was eloquent

with that eloquence. He never left off talking about the infamous

date 1772, the noble and valiant people suppressed by treachery, this

crime committed by three accomplices, and the monstrous ambush, which

is the prototype and pattern of all those frightful suppressions of

states, which have since struck several nations, and have, so to speak,

erased their name from the baptismal register. All the social assaults

of the present day emanate from the division of Poland, and it is a

theorem to which all our political crimes are corollaries. There is

not a despot or a traitor who for a century past has not revised,

confirmed, countersigned, and margined with the words _ne varietur_,

the division of Poland. When we consult the list of modern treasons

this appears the first, and the Congress of Vienna consulted this crime

ere it consummated its own; 1772 sounds the view-halloo, and 1815

witnesses the quarry of the stag. Such was Feuilly's usual text. This

poor workman had made himself the guardian of Justice, and she rewarded

him by making him grand. In truth, there is an eternity in justice,

and Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be Teutonic. Kings

lose their time and their honor over such things. Sooner or later the

submerged country floats on the surface and reappears. Greece becomes

Greece once more, and Italy, Italy. The protest of right against deeds

persists forever, and there is no law of limitations for the robbery of

a nation. Such superior swindles have no future, and the mark cannot

be taken out of a nation like a handkerchief.

Courfeyrac had a father who was known as M. de Courfeyrac. One of the

incorrect ideas of the bourgeoisie of the Restoration in the matter

of the aristocracy and the nobility was a belief in the particle. The

particle, as we know, has no meaning but the bourgeois of the time of

the _Minerve_ esteemed this poor _de_ so highly that persons thought

themselves obliged to abdicate it. M. de Chauvelin called himself M.

Chauvelin; M. de Caumartin, M. Caumartin; M. de Constant de Rebecque,

Benjamin Constant, and M. de Lafayette, M. Lafayette. Courfeyrac was

unwilling to remain behindhand, and called himself Courfeyrac quite

short. As concerns this gentleman, we might almost stop here and

content ourselves with saying as to the rest, in Courfeyrac you see

Tholomyès; Courfeyrac, in fact, had those sallies of youth which might

be called a mental _beauté du diable_. At a later date this expires

like the prettiness of the kitten; and all this grace produces, upon

two feet the bourgeois, and on four paws the tom-cat.

The generations which pass through the schools, and the successive

levies of youth, transmit this species of wit from one to the other,

and pass it from hand to hand, _quasi cursores_, nearly always the

same; so that, as we have said, the first comer who had listened to

Courfeyrac in 1828 might have fancied he was hearing Tholomyès in 1817.

The only thing was that Courfeyrac was an honest fellow, and beneath

an apparent external similitude, the difference between Tholomyès and

himself was great, and the latent man who existed within them was quite

different in the former from what it was in the latter. In Tholomyès

there was an attorney, and in Courfeyrac a Paladin; Enjolras was the

chief, Combeferre the guide, and Courfeyrac the centre. The others gave

more light, but he produced more heat; and he had in truth all the

qualities of a centre, in the shape of roundness and radiation.

Bahorel had been mixed up in the sanguinary tumult of June, 1822, on

the occasion of the burial of young Lallemand. Bahorel was a being of

good temper and bad company, brave and a spendthrift, prodigal and

generous, chattering and eloquent, bold and insolent, and the very best

clay for the devils moulding imaginable. He displayed daring waistcoats

and scarlet opinions; he was a turbulent on a grand scale, that is

to say, that he liked nothing so much as a quarrel unless it were an

émeute, and nothing so much as an émeute except a revolution. He was

ever ready to break a pane of glass, tear up the paving-stones, and

demolish a government, in order to see the effect; he was a student

in his eleventh year. He sniffed at the law, but did not practise it,

and he had taken as his motto, "Never a lawyer," and as his coat of

arms a night-table surmounted by a square cap. Whenever he passed in

front of the law-school, which rarely happened to him, he buttoned up

his frock-coat and took hygienic precautions. He said of the school

gate, "What a fierce old man!" and of the Dean M. Devincourt, "What a

monument!" He found in his lectures a subject for coarse songs, and

in his professors an occasion for laughter. He spent in doing nothing

a very considerable allowance, something like three thousand francs.

His parents were peasants in whom he had inculcated a respect for their

son. He used to say of them, "They are peasants, and not towns-people,

that is why they are so intelligent." Bahorel, as a capricious man,

visited several cafés; and while the others had habits he had none. He

strolled about: to err is human, to stroll is Parisian. Altogether, he

had a penetrating mind, and thought more than people fancied. He served

as the connecting link between the Friends of the A. B. C. and other

groups which were still unformed, but which were to be constituted at a

later date.

There was in this assembly of young men a bald-headed member. The

Marquis d'Avaray, whom Louis XVIII. made a duke because he helped him

to get into a hired cab on the day when he emigrated, used to tell how,

when the King landed in 1814 at Calais upon his return to France, a man

handed him a petition.

"What do you want?" the King said.

"A postmastership, Sire."

"What is your name?"

"L'Aigle."

The King frowned, but looked at the signature of the petition, and

read the name thus written, LESGLE. This, anything but Bonapartist

orthography, touched the King, and he began smiling. "Sire," the man

with the petition went on, "my ancestor was a whipper-in of the name

of Lesgueules, and my name came from that. I called myself Lesgueules,

by contraction Lesgle, and by corruption L'Aigle." This remark caused

the King to smile still more, and at a later date he gave the man the

post-office at Meaux, purposely or through a mistake. The bald Mentor

of the group was son of this Lesgle or Legle, and signed himself Legle

(of Meaux.) His comrades, to shorten this, called him Bossuet.

Bossuet was a merry fellow, who was unlucky, and his specialty was to

succeed in nothing. _Per contra_, he laughed at everything. At the

age of five-and-twenty he was bald; his father left him a house and a

field; but the son knew nothing so pressing as to lose them both in a

swindling speculation, and nothing was left him. He had learning and

sense, but miscarried; he failed in everything, and everything cozened

him; whatever he built up broke down under him. If he chopped wood,

he cut his fingers; and if he had a mistress, he speedily discovered

that she had also a friend. At every moment some misfortune happened to

him, and hence came his joviality; and he used to say, "I live under

the roof of falling tiles." Feeling but slight astonishment, for every

accident was foreseen by him, he accepted ill-luck serenely, and smiled

at the pin-pricks of destiny like a man who is listening to a good

joke. He was poor, but his wallet of good-temper was inexhaustible; he

speedily reached his last halfpenny, but never his last laugh. When

adversity entered his room he bowed to his old acquaintance cordially;

he tickled catastrophes in the ribs, and was so familiar with fatality

as to call it by a nickname.

These persecutions of fate had rendered him inventive, and he was full

of resources. He had no money, but contrived to make "an unbridled

outlay" whenever he thought proper. One night he went so far as to

devour a hundred francs in a supper with a girl, which inspired him in

the middle of the orgie with the memorable remark, "Fille de cinq Louis

(Saint Louis), pull off my boots." Bossuet was advancing slowly to the

legal profession, and studied law much after the fashion of Bahorel.

Bossuet had but little domicile, at times none at all, and he lived

first with one and then with the other, but most frequently with Joly.

Joly was a student of medicine, of two years' younger standing than

Bossuet, and was the young imaginary sick man. What he had gained by

his medical studies was to be more a patient than a doctor, for at the

age of twenty-three he fancied himself a valetudinarian, and spent

his life in looking at his tongue in a mirror. He declared that a man

becomes magnetized like a needle, and in his room he placed his bed

with the head to the south and the feet to the north, so that at night

the circulation of his blood might not be impeded by the great magnetic

current of the globe. In storms he felt his pulse, but for all that was

the gayest of all. All these incoherences, youth, mania, dyspepsia, and

fun, lived comfortably together, and the result was an eccentric and

agreeable being, whom his comrades, lavish of liquid consonants, called

Jolllly. Joly was accustomed to touch his nose with the end of his

cane, which is the sign of a sagacious mind.

All these young men, who differed so greatly, and of whom, after all,

we must speak seriously, had the same religion,--Progress. They were

all the direct sons of the French Revolution, and the lightest among

them became serious when pronouncing the date of '89. Their fathers in

the flesh were, or had been, _feuilleants_, royalists, or doctrinaires,

but that was of little consequence; this pell-mell, anterior to

themselves, who were young, did not concern them, and the pure blood

of principles flowed in their veins; they attached themselves, without

any intermediate tinge, to incorruptible right and absolute duty.

Confederates and initiated, they secretly sketched the ideal.

Amid all these impassioned hearts and convinced minds there was a

sceptic. How did he get there? Through juxtaposition. The name of

this sceptic was Grantaire, and he usually wrote it after the manner

of a rebus: R--(Grand R., i. e. Grantaire). Grantaire was a man who

carefully avoided believing in anything; he was, however, one of these

students who had learned the most during a Parisian residence. He knew

that the best coffee was at Lemblier's, and the best billiard-table

at the Café Voltaire; that excellent cakes and agreeable girls could

be found at the Hermitage on the Boulevard du Maine, spatch-cocks at

Mother Saquet's, excellent matelottes at the Barrière de la Cunette,

and a peculiar white wine at the Barrière du Combat. Besides all

this, he was a mighty drinker. He was abominably ugly, and Irma

Boissy, the prettiest boot-stitcher of that day, in her indignation

at his ugliness, passed the verdict,--"Grantaire is impossible." But

Grantaire's fatuity was not disconcerted by this. He looked tenderly

and fixedly at every woman, and assumed an expression of "If I only

liked!" and he tried to make his companions believe that he was in

general request with the sex.

All such words as rights of the people, rights of man, the social

contract, the French Revolution, republic, democracy, humanity,

civilization, progress, had as good as no meaning with Grantaire, and

he smiled at them. Scepticism, that curse of the intellect, had not

left him one whole idea in his mind. He lived in irony, and his axiom

was, "There is only one thing certain, my full glass." He ridiculed

every act of devotion in every party,--the brother as much as the

father, young Robespierre as heartily as Loizerolles. "They made great

progress by dying," he would exclaim; and would say of the crucifix,

"There is a gallows which was successful." Idler, gambler, libertine,

and often intoxicated, he annoyed these young democrats by incessantly

singing, "_J'aimons les filles et j'aimons le bon vin_" to the tune of

"Long live Henri IV."

This sceptic, however, had a fanaticism; it was neither an idea, a

dogma, an act, nor a sense: it was a man,--Enjolras. Grantaire admired,

loved, and revered Enjolras. Whom did this anarchical doubter cling to

in this phalanx of absolute minds? To the most absolute. In what way

did Enjolras subjugate him,--by ideas? No, but by character. This is a

frequently-observed phenomenon, and a sceptic who clings to a believer

is as simple as the law of complementary colors. What we do not possess

attracts us; no one loves daylight like the blind man; the dwarf adores

the drum-major, and the frog has its eyes constantly fixed on heaven

to see the bird fly. Grantaire, in whom doubt grovelled, liked to see

faith soaring in Enjolras, and he felt the want of him, without clearly

understanding it, or even dreaming of explaining the fact to himself.

This chaste, healthy, firm, upright, harsh, and candid nature charmed

him, and he instinctively admired his opposite. His soft, yielding,

dislocated, sickly, and shapeless ideas attached themselves to Enjolras

as to a spinal column, and his mental vertebra supported itself by

this firmness. Grantaire, by the side of Enjolras, became somebody

again; and he was, moreover, himself composed of two apparently

irreconcilable elements,--he was ironical and cordial. His mind could

do without belief, but his heart could not do without friendship. This

is a profound contradiction, for an affection is a conviction; but his

nature was so. There are some men apparently born to be the reverse

of the coin, and their names are Pollux, Patroclus, Nisus, Eudamidas,

Ephestion, and Pechmeja. They only live on the condition of being

backed by another man; their name is a continuation, and is never

written except preceded by the conjunction _and_; their existence is

not their own, but is the other side of a destiny which is not theirs.

Grantaire was one of these men.

We might almost say that affinities commence with the letters of

the alphabet, and in the series, O and P are almost inseparable. You

may, as you please, say O and P, or Orestes and Pylades. Grantaire,

a true satellite of Enjolras, dwelt in this circle of young men; he

lived there, he solely enjoyed himself there, and he followed them

everywhere. His delight was to see their shadows coming and going

through the fumes of wine, and he was tolerated for his pleasant

humor. Enjolras, as a believer, disdained this sceptic, and as a sober

man loathed this drunkard, but he granted him a little haughty pity.

Grantaire was an unaccepted Pylades: constantly repulsed by Enjolras,

harshly rejected, and yet returning, he used to say of him, "What a

splendid statue!"

CHAPTER II.

BOSSUET'S FUNERAL ORATION ON BLONDEAU.

On a certain afternoon, which, as we shall see, has some coincidence

with the events recorded above, Laigle de Meaux was sensually leaning

against the door-post of the Café Musain. He looked like a caryatid out

for a holiday, and having nothing to carry but his reverie. Leaning on

one's shoulder is a mode of lying down upright which is not disliked by

dreamers. Laigle de Meaux was thinking, without melancholy, of a slight

misadventure which had occurred to him on the previous day but one at

the Law-school, and modified his personal plans for the future, which,

as it was, were somewhat indistinct.

Reverie does not prevent a cabriolet from passing, or a dreamer from

noticing the cabriolet. Laigle, whose eyes were absently wandering, saw

through this somnambulism a two-wheeled vehicle moving across the Place

St. Michel at a foot-pace and apparently undecided. What did this cab

want? Why was it going so slowly? Laigle looked at it, and saw inside a

young man seated by the side of the driver, and in front of the young

man a carpet-bag. The bag displayed to passers-by this name, written in

large black letters on the card sewn to the cloth, MARIUS PONTMERCY.

This name made Laigle change his attitude: he drew himself up, and

shouted to the young man in the cab, "M. Marius Pontmercy!"

The cab stopped, on being thus hailed, and the young man, who also

appeared to be thinking deeply, raised his eyes.

"Hilloh!" he said.

"Are you M. Pontmercy?"

"Yes."

"I was looking for you," Laigle of Meaux continued.

"How so?" asked Marius, for it was really he, who had just left his

grandfather's and had before him a face which he saw for the first

time. "I do not know you."

"And I don't know you either."

Marius fancied that he had to do with a practical joker, and, as he was

not in the best of tempers at the moment, frowned. Laigle imperturbably

continued,--

"You were not at lecture the day before yesterday!"

"Very possibly."

"It is certain."

"Are you a student?" Marius asked.

"Yes, sir, like yourself. The day before yesterday I entered the

Law-school by chance; as you know, a man has an idea like that

sometimes. The Professor was engaged in calling over the names, and you

are aware how ridiculously strict they are in the school at the present

moment. Upon the third call remaining unanswered, your name is erased

from the list, and sixty francs are gone."

Marius began to listen, and Laigle continued,--

"It was Blondeau who was calling over. You know Blondeau has a pointed

and most malicious nose, and scents the absent with delight. He

craftily began with the letter P, and I did not listen, because I was

not compromised by that letter. The roll-call went on capitally, there

was no erasure, and the universe was present. Blondeau was sad, and

I said to myself aside, 'Blondeau, my love, you will not perform the

slightest execution to-day,' All at once Blondeau calls out, 'Marius

Pontmercy!' No one answered, and so Blondeau, full of hope, repeats in

a louder voice,'Marius Pontmercy!' and takes up his pen. I have bowels,

sir, and said to myself hurriedly, 'The name of a good fellow is going

to be erased. Attention! he is not a proper student, a student who

studies, a reading man, a pedantic sap, strong in science, literature,

theology, and philosophy. No, he is an honorable idler, who lounges

about, enjoys the country, cultivates the grisette, pays his court to

the ladies, and is perhaps with my mistress at this moment. I must save

him: death to Blondeau!' At this moment Blondeau dipped his pen, black

with erasures, into the ink, looked round his audience, and repeated

for the third time, 'Marius Pontmercy!' I answered,'Here!' and so your

name was not erased."

"Sir!" Marius exclaimed.

"And mine was," Laigle of Meaux added.

"I do not understand you," said Marius.

Laigle continued,--

"And yet it was very simple. I was near the desk to answer, and near

the door to bolt. The Professor looked at me with a certain fixedness,

and suddenly Blondeau, who must be the crafty nose to which Boileau

refers, leaps to the letter L, which is my letter, for I come from

Meaux, and my name is L'Aigle."

"L'Aigle!" Marius interrupted, "what a glorious name!"

"Blondeau arrives, sir, at that glorious name, and exclaims 'L'Aigle!'

I answer,'Here!' Then Blondeau looks at me with the gentleness of a

tiger, smiles, and says,--'If you are Pontmercy you are not Laigle, 'a

phrase which appears offensive to you, but which was only lugubrious

for me. After saying this, he erased me."

Marius exclaimed,--

"I am really mortified, sir--"

"Before all," Laigle interrupted, "I ask leave to embalm Blondeau

in a few phrases of heart-felt praise. I will suppose him dead, and

there will not be much to alter in his thinness, paleness, coldness,

stiffness, and smell, and I say, _Erudimini qui judicatis terram_. Here

lies Blondeau the nosy, Blondeau Nasica, the ox of discipline, _bos

disciplinœ_, the mastiff of duty, the angel of the roll-call, who was

straight, square, exact, rigid, honest, and hideous. God erased him as

he erased me."

Marius continued, "I am most grieved--"

"Young man," said Laigle, "let this serve you as a lesson; in future be

punctual."

"I offer you a thousand apologies."

"And do not run the risk of getting your neighbor erased."

"I am in despair--"

Laigle burst into a laugh. "And I am enchanted. I was on the downward

road to become a lawyer, and this erasure saves me. I renounce the

triumphs of the bar. I will not defend the orphan or attack the widow.

I have obtained my expulsion, and I am indebted to you for it, M.

Pontmercy. I intend to pay you a solemn visit of thanks. Where do you

live?"

"In this cab," said Marius.

"A sign of opulence," Laigle remarked calmly; "I congratulate you, for

you have apartments at nine thousand francs a year."

At this moment Courfeyrac came out of the café Marius smiled sadly.

"I have been in this lodging for two hours, and am eager to leave it;

but I do not know where to go."

"Come home with me," Courfeyrac said to him.

"I ought to have the priority," Laigle observed; "but then I have no

home."

"Hold your tongue, Bossuet," Courfeyrac remarked.

"Bossuet!" said Marius. "Why, you told me your name was Laigle."

"Of Meaux," Laigle answered; "metaphorically, Bossuet."

Courfeyrac got into the cab.

"Hôtel de la Porte St Jacques, driver," he said.

The same evening Marius was installed in a room in this house, next

door to Courfeyrac.

CHAPTER III.

MARIUS IS ASTONISHED.

In a few days Marius was a friend of Courfeyrac, for youth is the

season of prompt weldings and rapid cicatrizations. Marius by the side

of Courfeyrac breathed freely, a great novelty for him. Courfeyrac

asked him no questions, and did not even think of doing so, for at that

age faces tell everything at once, and words are unnecessary. There are

some young men of whose countenances you may say that they gossip,--you

look at them and know them. One morning, however, Courfeyrac suddenly

asked him the question,--

"By the way, have you any political opinion?"

"Of course!" said Marius, almost offended by the question.

"What are you?"

"Bonapartist democrat."

"The gray color of the reassured mouse," Courfeyrac remarked.

On the next day he led Marius to the Café Musain, and whispered in his

ear with a smile, "I must introduce you to the Revolution," and he led

him to the room of the Friends of the A. B. C. He introduced him to his

companions, saying in a low voice, "A pupil," which Marius did not at

all comprehend Marius had fallen into a mental wasps' nest, but though

he was silent and grave, he was not the less winged and armed.

Marius, hitherto solitary, and muttering soliloquies and asides through

habit and taste, was somewhat startled by the swarm of young men around

him. The tumultuous movement of all these minds at liberty and at work

made his ideas whirl, and at times, in his confusion, they flew so

far from him that he had a difficulty in finding them again. He heard

philosophy, literature, art, history, and religion spoken of in an

unexpected way; he caught a glimpse of strange aspects, and as he did

not place them in perspective, he was not sure that he was not gazing

at chaos. On giving up his grandfather's opinions for those of his

father, he believed himself settled; but he now suspected, anxiously,

and not daring to confess it to himself, that it was not so. The angle

in which he looked at everything was beginning to be displaced afresh,

and a certain oscillation shook all the horizons of his brain. It was a

strange internal moving of furniture, and it almost made him ill.

It seemed as if there were no "sacred things" for these young men,

and Marius heard singular remarks about all sorts of matters which

were offensive to his still timid mind. A play-bill came under notice,

adorned with the title of an old stock tragedy, of the so-called

classical school. "Down with the tragedy dear to the bourgeois!"

Bahorel shouted, and Marius heard Combeferre reply,--

"You are wrong, Bahorel. The cits love tragedy, and they must be left

at peace upon that point. Periwigged tragedy has a motive, and I am

not one of those who for love of Æschylus contests its right to exist.

There are sketches in nature and ready-made parodies in creation; a

beak which is no beak, wings which are no wings, gills which are no

gills, feet which are no feet, a dolorous cry which makes you inclined

to laugh,--there you have the duck. Now, since poultry exist by the

side of the bird, I do not see why classic tragedy should not exist

face to face with ancient tragedy."

Or else it happened accidentally that Marius passed along the Rue Jean

Jacques Rousseau between Enjolras and Courfeyrac, and the latter seized

his arm.

"Pay attention I this is the Rue Plûtrière, now called Rue Jean Jacques

Rousseau, on account of a singular family that lived here sixty years

back, and they were Jean Jacques and Thérèse. From time to time little

creatures were born; Thérèse fondled them, and Jean Jacques took them

to the Foundling."

And Enjolras reproved Courfeyrac.

"Silence before Jean Jacques! I admire that man. I grant that he

abandoned his children, but he adopted the people."

Not one of these young men ever uttered the words,--the Emperor;

Jean Prouvaire alone sometimes said Napoleon; all the rest spoke of

Bonaparte. Enjolras pronounced it _Buonaparte_. Marius was vaguely

astonished.--_Initium sapientiœ_

CHAPTER IV.

THE BACK ROOM OF THE CAFÉ MUSAIN.

One of the conversations among the young men at which Marius was

present, and in which he mingled now and then, was a thorough shock

for his mind. It came off in the back room of the Café Musain, and

nearly all the Friends of the A. B. C. were collected on that occasion,

and the chandelier was solemnly lighted. They talked about one thing

and another, without passion and with noise, and with the exception

of Enjolras and Marius, who were silent, each harangued somewhat

hap-hazard. Conversations among chums at times display these peaceful

tumults. It was a game and a jumble as much as a conversation; words

were thrown and caught up, and students were talking in all the four

corners.

No female was admitted into this back room, excepting Louison, the

washer-up of caps, who crossed it from time to time to go from the

wash-house to the "laboratory." Grantaire, who was perfectly tipsy, was

deafening the corner he had seized upon, by shouting things, reasonable

and unreasonable, in a thundering voice:--

"I am thirsty, mortals; I have dreamed that the tun of Heidelberg had

a fit of apoplexy, and that I was one of the dozen leeches applied to

it. I want to drink, for I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous

invention of somebody whom I am unacquainted with. It lasts no time and

is worth nothing, and a man breaks his neck to live. Life is a scenery

in which there are no practicables, and happiness is an old side-scene

only painted on one side. Ecclesiastes says, 'All is vanity,' and I

agree with the worthy gentleman, who possibly never existed. Zero, not

liking to go about naked, clothed itself in vanity. Oh, vanity! the

dressing up of everything in big words! A kitchen is a laboratory, a

dancer a professor, a mountebank a gymnast, a boxer a pugilist, an

apothecary a chemist, a barber an artist, a bricklayer an architect,

a jockey a sportsman, and a woodlouse a pterygibranch. Vanity has an

obverse and a reverse; the obverse is stupid,--it is the negro with

his glass beads; the reverse is ridiculous,--it is the philosopher

in his rags. I weep over the one and laugh at the other. What are

called honors and dignities, and even honor and dignity, are generally

pinchbeck. Kings make a toy of human pride. Caligula made a horse a

consul, and Charles II. knighted a sirloin of beef. Drape yourselves,

therefore, between the consul Incitatus and the baronet Roastbeef. As

to the intrinsic value of people, it is not one bit more respectable;

just listen to the panegyric which one neighbor makes of another. White

upon white is ferocious. If the lily could talk, how it would run down

the dove; and a bigoted woman talking of a pious woman is more venomous

than the asp and the whip-snake. It is a pity that I am an ignoramus,

for I would quote a multitude of things; but I know nothing. But for

all that I have always had sense; when I was a pupil of Gros, instead

of daubing sketches, I spent my time in prigging apples. _Rapin_ is

the male of _rapine_. So much for myself; but you others are as good

as I, and I laugh at your perfections, excellency, and qualities, for

every quality has its defect. The saving man is akin to the miser, the

generous man is very nearly related to the prodigal, and the brave

man trenches on the braggart. When you call a man very pious, you

mean that he is a little bigoted, and there are just as many vices

in virtue as there are holes in the mantle of Diogenes. Which do you

admire, the killed or the killer, Cæsar or Brutus? People generally

stick up for the killer: Long live Brutus! for he was a murderer. Such

is virtue; it may be virtue, but it is folly at the same time. There

are some queer spots on these great men; the Brutus who killed Cæsar

was in love with the statue of a boy. This statue was made by the Greek

sculptor Strongylion, who also produced that figure of an Amazon called

Finelegs, Euchnemys, which Nero carried about with him when travelling.

This Strongylion only left two statues, which brought Brutus and Nero

into harmony; Brutus was in love with one and Nero with the other.

History is but one long repetition, and one century is a plagiarism of

another. The battle of Marengo is a copy of the battle of Pydna; the

Tolbiae of Clovis and the Austerlitz of Napoleon are as much alike as

two drops of blood. I set but little value on victory. Nothing is so

stupid as conquering; the true glory is convincing. But try to prove

anything; you satisfy yourself with success; what mediocrity! and

with conquering; what a wretched trifle! Alas! vanity and cowardice

are everywhere, and everything obeys success, even grammar. _Si volet

usus_, as Horace says. Hence I despise the whole human race. Suppose

we descend from universals to particulars? Would you wish me to begin

admiring the peoples? What people, if you please? Is it Greece,--the

Athenians? Parisians of former time killed Phocion, as you might say

Coligny, and adulated tyrants to such a pitch that Anacephorus said

of Pisistratus, 'His urine attracts the bees.' The most considerable

man in Greece for fifty years was the grammarian Philetas, who was so

short and small that he was obliged to put lead in his shoes to keep

the wind from blowing him away. On the great square of Corinth there

was a statue sculptured by Selamon, and catalogued by Pliny, and it

represented Episthatus. What did Episthatus achieve? He invented the

cross-buttock. There you have a summary of Greece and glory, and now

let us pass to others. Should I admire England? Should I admire France?

France, why,--on account of Paris? I have just told you my opinion of

the Athenians. England, why,--on account, of London? I hate Carthage,

and, besides, Loudon, the metropolis of luxury, is the headquarters of

misery: in the single parish of Charing Cross one hundred persons die

annually of starvation. Such is Albion, and I will add, as crowning

point, that I have seen an Englishwoman dancing in a wreath of roses

and with blue spectacles. So, a groan for England. If I do not admire

John Bull, ought I to admire Brother Jonathan with his peculiar

institution? Take away 'Time is money,' and what remains of England?

Take away 'Cotton is king,' and what remains of America? Germany is

lymph and Italy bile. Shall we go into ecstasies about Russia? Voltaire

admired that country, and he also admired China. I allow that Russia

has its beauties, among others a powerful despotism; but I pity the

despots, for they have a delicate health. An Alexis decapitated, a

Peter stabbed, a Paul strangled, another Paul flattened out with

boot-heels, sundry Ivans butchered, several Nicholases and Basils

poisoned,--all this proves that the palace of the Emperor of Russia is

in a flagrantly unhealthy condition. All the civilized nations offer to

the admiration of the thinker one detail, war: now, war, civilized war,

exhausts and collects all the forms of banditism, from the brigandages

of the trabuceros in the gorges of Mont Jaxa down to the forays of the

Comanche Indians in the Doubtful Pass. 'Stuff!' you will say to me,

'Europe is better than Asia after all,' I allow that Asia is absurd,

but I do not exactly see what cause you have to laugh at the Grand

Lama, you great western nations, who have blended with your fashions

and elegances all the complicated filth of majesty, from the dirty

chemise of Queen Isabelle down to the _chaise percée_ of the Dauphin.

At Brussels the most beer is consumed, at Stockholm the most brandy, at

Madrid the most chocolate, at Amsterdam the most gin, at London the

most wine, at Constantinople the most coffee, and at Paris the most

absinthe,--these are all useful notions. Paris, after all, bears away

the bell, for in that city the very rag-pickers are sybarites: and

Diogenes would as soon have been a rag-picker on the Place Maubert as

a philosopher at the Piræus. Learn this fact also: the wine-shops of

the rag-pickers are called 'bibines,' and the most celebrated are the

_Casserole_ and the _Abattoir_. Therefore O restaurants, wine-shops,

music-halls, tavern-keepers, brandy and absinthe dispensers,

boozing-kens of the rag-pickers, and caravansaries of caliphs, I call

you to witness, I am a voluptuary. I dine at Richard's for fifty sous,

and I want Persian carpets in which to roll the naked Cleopatra. Where

is Cleopatra? Ah, it is you, Louison. Good-evening."

Thus poured forth Grantaire, more than drunk, as he seized the

plate-washer as she passed his corner. Bossuet, stretching out his

hand toward him, strove to make him be silent, but Grantaire broke out

afresh:--

"Eagle of Meaux, down with your paws! You produce no effect upon

me with your gesture of Hippocrates refusing the _bric-à-brac_

of Artaxerxes. You need not attempt to calm me; and besides, I

am melancholy. What would you have me say? Man is bad, man is a

deformity; the butterfly is a success, but man a mistake. God made

a failure with that animal. A crowd is a choice of uglinesses: the

first comer is a scoundrel. _Femme_ rhymes with _infâme._ Yes, I have

the spleen, complicated with melancholy, home-sickness, and a dash

of hypochondria, and I fret, I rage, I yawn, I weary myself, I bore

myself, and I find it horribly dull."

"Silence, Big R," Bossuet remarked again, who was discussing a legal

point with some chums, and was sunk to his waist in a sentence of

judicial slang, of which the following is the end:--

"For my part, although I am scarce an authority, and at the most an

amateur lawyer, I assert this, that, according to the terms of the

customs of Normandy, upon the Michaelmas day and in every year an

equivalent must be paid to the lord of the manor, by all and singular,

both by landowners and tenants, and that for every freehold, long

lease, mortgage--"

"Echo, plaintive nymph!" Grantaire hummed, dose to Grantaire, at an

almost silent table, a quire of paper, an inkstand, and a pen between

two small glasses announced that a farce was being sketched out. This

great affair was discussed in a low voice, and the heads of the workers

almost touched.

"Let us begin with the names, for when you have the names you have the

plot."

"That is true: dictate, and I will write."

"Monsieur Dorimon?"

"An annuitant?"

"Of course. His daughter Celestine."

"-tine. Who next?"

"Colonel Sainval."

"Sainval is worn out. Say Valsin."

By the side of these theatrical aspirants another group, which also

took advantage of the noise to talk low, were discussing a duel.

An old student of thirty was advising a young man of eighteen, and

explaining with what sort of adversary he had to deal.

"Hang it! you will have to be careful, for he is a splendid swordsman.

He can attack, makes no useless feints, has a strong wrist, brilliancy,

and mathematical parries. And then he is left-handed."

In the corner opposite to Grantaire, Joly and Bahorel were playing at

dominos and talking of love affairs.

"You are happy," said Joly; "you have a mistress who is always

laughing."

"It is a fault she commits," Bahorel answered; "a man's mistress does

wrong to laugh, for it encourages him to deceive her, for seeing her

gay saves you from remorse. If you see her sad you have scruples of

conscience."

"Ungrateful man! a woman who laughs is so nice, and you never quarrel."

"That results from the treaty we made; on forming our little holy

alliance, we gave each other a frontier which we never step beyond.

Hence comes peace."

"Peace is digesting happiness."

"And you, Jolllly, how does your quarrel stand with Mamselle--you know

whom I mean?"

"Oh! she still sulks with a cruel patience."

"And yet you are a lover of most touching thinness."

"Alas!"

"In your place, I would leave her."

"It's easy to say that."

"And to do. Is not her name Musichetta?"

"Yes; ah, my dear Bahorel, she is a superb girl, very literary, with

little hands and feet, dresses with taste, is white and plump, and has

eyes like a gypsy fortune-teller. I am wild about her."

"My dear boy, you must please her; be fashionable, and make your knees

effective. Buy fine trousers of Staub."

"At how much?" cried Grantaire.

In the third corner a poetical, discussion was going on, and Pagan

Mythology was quarrelling with Christian Mythology. The point was

Olympus, whose defence Jean Prouvaire undertook through his romantic

nature. Jean Prouvaire was only timid when in repose; once excited, he

broke out into a species of gayety, accentuated his enthusiasm, and he

was at once laughing and lyrical.

"Let us not insult the gods," he said, "for perhaps they have not all

departed, and Jupiter does not produce the effect of a dead man upon

me. The gods are dreams, you say; well, even in nature such as it is at

the present day, and after the flight of these dreams, we find again

all the old Pagan myths. A mountain with the profile of a citadel, like

the Vignemale, for instance, is still for me the head-dress of Cybele.

It has not yet been proved to me that Pan does not come at night to

whistle in the hollow trunks of the willows, while stopping their holes

with his fingers in turn, and I have ever believed that he had some

connection with the cascade of Pissevache."

In the last corner politics were being discussed, and the conceded

charter was abused. Combeferre supported it feebly, while Courfeyrac

attacked it energetically. There was on the table an unlucky copy of

the Charte Touquet. Courfeyrac had seized it and was shaking it, mixing

with his argument the rustling of this sheet of paper.

"In the first place, I do not want kings; even from the economic point

of view alone I do not want them, for a king is a parasite, and there

are no gratis monarchs. Listen to this,--kings are an expensive

luxury. On the death of Francis I. the public debt of France was thirty

thousand livres; on the death of Louis XIV. it was two milliards six

hundred millions, at twenty-eight livres the marc, which in 1740 was

equivalent, according to Desmarets, to four milliards five hundred

millions, and at the present day would be equal to twelve milliards.

In the second place,--no offence to Combeferre,--a conceded charter

is a bad expedient of civilization, for saving the transaction,

softening the passage, deadening the shock, making the nation pass

insensibly from monarchy to democracy by the practice of constitutional

fictions,--all these are detestable fictions. No, no; let us never

give the people a false light, and principles pine and grow pale

in your constitutional cellar. No bastardizing, no compromise, no

concession, from a king to people! In all these concessions there is

an Article XIV., and by the side of the hand that gives is the claw

that takes back again. I distinctly refuse your charter; for a charter

is a mask, and there is falsehood behind it. A people that accepts a

charter abdicates, and right is only right when entire. No charter,

then, I say."

It was winter time, and two logs were crackling on the hearth; this was

tempting, and Courfeyrac did not resist. He crumpled up the poor Charte

Touquet and threw it in the fire; the paper blazed, and Combeferre

philosophically watched the masterpiece of Louis XVIII. burning,

contenting himself with saying,--

"The charter metamorphosed into flame."

And sarcasms, sallies, jests, that French thing which is called

_entrain_, that English thing which is called humor, good taste and

bad, sound and unsound reasoning, all the rockets of dialogue ascending

together and crossing each other in all parts of the room, produced

above their heads a species of merry explosion.

CHAPTER V.

ENLARGEMENT OF THE HORIZON.

The collision of young minds has this admirable thing about it, that

the spark can never be foreseen or the lightning divined. What will

shoot forth presently, no one knows. The burst of laughter is heard,

and at the next moment seriousness makes its entrance. The impetus is

given by the first word that comes, and everybody's fancy reigns. A

joke suffices to open an unforeseen subject. The conversation takes a

sudden turn, and the perspective changes all at once. Chance is the

scene-shifter of conversations. A stern thought, which strangely issued

from a clash of words, suddenly flashed through the medley in which

Grantaire, Bahorel, Prouvaire, Bossuet, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac were

blindly slashing and pointing. How is it that a phrase suddenly springs

up in conversation, and underlines itself at once in the attention of

those who trace it? As we have just said, no one knows. In the midst

of the general confusion Bossuet concluded some remark he made to

Combeferre with the date, "June 18, 1815, Waterloo."

At this name of Waterloo, Marius, who had been leaning over a glass

of water, removed his hand from under his chin, and began looking

intently at the company.

"Pardieu!" Courfeyrac exclaimed (_Parbleu_ at this period was beginning

to grow out of fashion). "That number eighteen is strange, and strikes

me, for it is Bonaparte's fatal number. Place Louis before and Brumaire

behind, and you have the man's whole destiny, with this expressive

peculiarity, that the beginning is closely pursued by the end."

Enjolras, who had hitherto been dumb, now broke the silence, and said,--

"Courfeyrac, you mean the crime by the expiation."

This word _crime_ exceeded the measure which Marius, who was already

greatly affected by this sudden reference to Waterloo, could accept. He

rose, walked slowly to the map of France hanging on the wall, on the

bottom of which could be seen an island in a separate compartment; he

placed his finger on this and said,--

"Corsica, a small island which made France very great."

This was the breath of frozen air; all broke off, for they felt that

something was about to begin. Bahorel, who was assuming a victorious

attitude in answering Bossuet, gave it up in order to listen; and

Enjolras, whose blue eye was fixed on no one and seemed to be examining

space, answered without looking at Marius,--

"France requires no Corsica to be great. France is great because she is

France, _quia nominor leo._"

Marius felt no desire to give way; he turned to Enjolras, and his

voice had a strange vibration, produced by his internal emotion.

"Heaven forbid that I should diminish France; but it is not diminishing

her to amalgamate Napoleon with her. Come, let us talk; I am a

new-comer among you, but I confess that you astonish me. Where are we?

who are we? who are you? who am I? Let us come to an understanding

about the Emperor. I hear you call him Buonaparte, laying a stress on

the _u_, like the Royalists, but I must tell you that toy grandfather

does better still, for he says, 'Buonaparté'. I fancied you young men,

but where do you keep your enthusiasm, and what do you do with it? Whom

do you admire, if it is not the Emperor, and what more do you want?

If you will not have that great man, what great man would you have?

He had everything; he was complete, and in his brain was the cube of

human faculties. He made codes like Justinian, and dictated like Cæsar;

his conversation blended the lightning of Pascal with the thunder of

Tacitus; he made history and wrote it, and his bulletins are Iliads; he

combined the figures of Newton with the metaphor of Mahomet. He left

behind him in the East words great as the Pyramids; at Tilsit he taught

majesty to Emperors; at the Academy of Sciences he answered Laplace;

at the Council of State he held his own against Merlin; he gave a

soul to the geometry of one and to the sophistry of others; he was

legist with the lawyers, sidereal with the astronomers. Like Cromwell,

blowing out one of two candles, he went to the Temple to bargain for

a curtain tassel; he saw everything, knew everything, but that did

not prevent him from laughing heartily by the cradle of his new-born

son. And all at once startled Europe listened, armies set out, parks

of artillery rolled along, bridges of boats were thrown over rivers,

clouds of cavalry galloped in the hurricane, and shouts, bugles, and

the crashing of thrones could be heard all around! The frontiers of

kingdoms oscillated on the map, the sound of a super-human sword being

drawn from its scabbard could be heard, and he was seen, standing erect

on the horizon, with a gleam in his hand, and a splendor in his eyes,

opening in the thunder his two wings, the grand army and the old Guard.

He was the archangel of war!"

All were silent, and Enjolras hung his head. Silence always produces

to some extent the effect of acquiescence, or a species of setting the

back against the wall. Marius, almost without drawing breath, continued

with increased enthusiasm,--

"Let us be just, my friends! What a splendid destiny it is for a

people to be the empire of such an Emperor, when that people is France

and adds its genius to the genius of that man! To appear and reign;

to march and triumph; to have as bivouacs every capital; to select

grenadiers and make kings of them; to decree the downfall of dynasties;

to transfigure Europe at double-quick step; to feel when you threaten

that you lay your hand on the sword-hilt of God; to follow in one

man Hannibal, Cæsar, and Charlemagne; to be the people of a ruler

who accompanies your every daybreak with the brilliant announcement

of a battle gained; to be aroused in the morning by the guns of the

Invalides; to cast into the abysses of light prodigious words which are

eternally luminous,--Marengo, Areola, Austerlitz, Jena, and Wagram! to

produce at each moment on the zenith of centuries constellations of

victories: to make the French Empire a counterpart of the Roman Empire;

to be the great nation, and give birth to the great army; to send

legions all over the world, as the mountain sends its eagles in all

directions to conquer, rule, and crush; to be in Europe a people gilded

by glory; to sound a Titanic flourish of trumpets through history; to

conquer the world twice, by conquest and by amazement,--all this is

sublime, and what is there greater?"

"To be free!" said Combeferre.

Marius in his turn hung his head. This simple and cold remark had

traversed his epical effusion like a steel blade, and he felt it

fainting away within him. When he raised his eyes, Combeferre was no

longer present; probably satisfied with his reply to the apotheosis,

he had left the room, and all excepting Enjolras had followed him.

Enjolras, alone with Marius, was looking at him gravely. Marius,

however, having slightly collected his ideas, did not confess himself

defeated, and he was in all probability about to begin afresh upon

Enjolras, when he suddenly heard some one singing on the staircase. It

was Combeferre, and this is what he sung:--

"Si César m'avait donné

La gloire et la guerre,

Et qu'il me fallut quitter

L'amour de ma mère,

Je dirais an grand César:

Reprends ton sceptre et ton char,

J'aime mieux ma mère, ô gué!

J'aime mieux ma mère!"

The tender and solemn accent with which Combeferre sang this verse

imparted to it a species of strange grandeur. Marius, with his eye

pensively fixed on the ceiling, repeated almost mechanically, "My

mother!"

At this moment he felt Enjolras' hand on his shoulder.

"Citizen," he said to him, "my mother is the Republic."

CHAPTER VI.

RES ANGUSTA.

This evening left a sad obscurity and a profound shock in the mind of

Marius, and he felt what the earth probably feels when it is opened by

the plough-share that the grain may be deposited; it only feels the

wound, and the joy of giving birth does not arrive till later.

Marius was gloomy; he had only just made himself a faith, and must he

reject it again? He declared to himself that he would not: he resolved

not to doubt, and began doubting involuntarily. To stand between two

religions, one of which you have not yet lost, and the other which

you have not yet entered, is unendurable, and twilight only pleases

bat-like souls. Marius had an open eyeball and wanted true light; and

the semi-lustre of doubt hurt him. Whatever might be his desire to

remain where he was and cling to it, he was invincibly constrained to

continue, to advance, to think, to go farther. Whither would this lead

him? He feared lest, after taking so many steps which had drawn him

near his father, he was now going to take steps which would carry him

away from him. His discomfort increased with all the reflections that

occurred to him, and an escarpment became formed around him. He agreed

neither with his grandfather nor his friends; he was rash for the one

and backward for the others; and he found himself doubly isolated,--on

the side of old age and on the side of youth. He left off going to the

Café Musain.

In the troubled state of his conscience he did not think at all of

certain serious sides of existence; but the realities of life will not

allow themselves to be forgotten, and so they suddenly came to jog his

memory. One morning the landlord came into Marius's room, and said to

him,--

"Monsieur Courfeyrac recommended you?"

"Yes."

"But I want my money."

"Ask Courfeyrac to come and speak to me," said. Marius.

When Courfeyrac arrived the landlord left them, and Marius told his

friend what he had not dreamed of telling him yet,--that he was, so to

speak, alone in the world, and had no relations.

"What will become of you?" said Courfeyrac.

"I do not know," Marius answered.

"What do you intend doing?"

"I do not know."

"Have you any money?"

"Fifteen francs."

"Are you willing to borrow from me?"

"Never."

"Have you clothes?"

"There they are."

"Any jewelry?"

"A gold watch."

"I know a second-hand clothesman who will take your overcoat and a pair

of trousers."

"Very good."

"You will only have a pair of trousers, a waistcoat, a hat, and coat

left."

"And my boots."

"What? You will not go barefoot? What opulence!"

"That will be enough."

"I know a jeweller who will buy your watch."

"All right."

"No, it is not all right; what will you do after?"

"Anything I can that is honest."

"Do you know English?"

"No."

"Or German?"

"No."

"All the worse."

"Why so?"

"Because a friend of mine, a publisher, is preparing a sort of

Encyclopædia, for which you could have translated English or German

articles. The pay is bad, but it is possible to live on it."

"I will learn English and German."

"And in the mean while?"

"I will eat my clothes and my watch."

"The clothes-dealer was sent for, and gave twenty francs for the coat

and trousers; next they went to the jeweller's, who bought the watch

for forty-five francs.

"That's not so bad," said Marius to Courfeyrac, on returning to the

hotel; "with my fifteen francs that makes eighty."

"And your bill here?" Courfeyrac observed.

"Oh, I forgot that," said Marius.

The landlord presented his bill, which Marius was bound to pay at once;

it amounted to seventy francs.

"I have ten francs left," said Marius.

"The deuce!" Courfeyrac replied; "you will spend five francs while

learning English, and five while learning German. That will be

swallowing a language very quickly, or a five-franc piece very slowly."

In the mean time Aunt Gillenormand, who was a good soul in the main

upon sad occasions, discovered her nephew's abode, and one morning,

when Marius returned from college, he found a letter from his aunt and

the "sixty pistoles," that is to say, six hundred francs in gold, in

a sealed-up box. Marius sent the thirty louis back to his aunt with a

respectful note, in which he stated that he would be able in future

to take care of himself--at that moment he had just three francs

left. The aunt did not tell grandpapa of this refusal, through fear

of raising his exasperation to the highest pitch; besides, had he not

said, "Never mention that blood-drinker's name in my presence"? Marius

quitted the Hôtel of the Porte St. Jacques, as he did not wish to run

into debt.

BOOK V.

THE GOOD OF MISFORTUNE.

CHAPTER I.

MARIUS IS INDIGENT.

Life became severe for Marius: eating his clothes and his watch was

nothing, but he also went through that indescribable course which is

called "roughing it." This is a horrible thing, which contains days

without bread, nights without sleep, evenings without candle, a house

without fire, weeks without work, a future without hope, a threadbare

coat, an old hat at which the girls laugh, the door which you find

locked at night because you have not paid your rent, the insolence

of the porter and the eating-house keeper, the grins of neighbors,

humiliations, dignity trampled under foot, any sort of Work accepted,

disgust, bitterness, and desperation. Marius learned how all this is

devoured, and how it is often the only thing which a man has to eat. At

that moment of life when a man requires pride because he requires love,

he felt himself derided because he was meanly dressed, and ridiculous

because he was poor. At the age when youth swells the heart with an

imperial pride, he looked down more than once at his worn-out boots,

and knew the unjust shame and burning blushes of wretchedness. It is an

admirable and terrible trial, from which the weak come forth infamous

and the strong sublime. It is the crucible into which destiny throws a

man whenever it wishes to have a scoundrel or a demigod.

For man's great actions are performed in minor struggles. There are

obstinate and unknown braves who defend themselves inch by inch

in the shadows against the fatal invasion of want and turpitude.

They are noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye sees, no renown

rewards, and no flourish of trumpets salutes. Life, misfortune,

isolation, abandonment, and poverty are battle-fields which have their

heroes,--obscure heroes who are at times greater than illustrious

heroes. Firm and exceptional natures are thus created: misery, which

is nearly always a step-mother, is at times a mother: want brings

forth the power of soul and mind: distress is the nurse of pride, and

misfortune is an excellent milk for the magnanimous.

There was a time in Marius's life when he swept his own landing, when

he bought a halfpenny-worth of Brie cheese of the fruiterer, when he

waited till nightfall to go into the baker's and buy a loaf, which

he carried stealthily to his garret as if he had stolen it. At times

there might have been seen slipping into the butcher's shop at the

corner, among the gossiping cooks who elbowed him, a young awkward

man with books under his arm, who had a timid and impetuous air, who

on entering removed his hat from his dripping forehead, made a deep

bow to the astonished butcher's wife, another to the foreman, asked

for a mutton-chop, paid three or four pence, wrapped the chop in

paper, placed it between two books under his arm, and went away. It

was Marius; and on this chop, which he cooked himself, he lived for

three days. On the first day he ate the lean, on the second he ate

the fat, and on the third he gnawed the bone. Several times did Aunt

Gillenormand make tentatives and send him the sixty pistoles, but

Marius always returned them, saying that he wanted for nothing.

He was still in mourning for his father when the revolution we have

described took place within him, and since then he had not left off

black clothes, but the clothes left him. A day arrived when he had no

coat, though his trousers would still pass muster. What was he to do?

Courfeyrac, to whom he on his side rendered several services, gave him

an old coat. For thirty sous Marius had it turned by some porter, and

it became a new coat. But it was green, and Marius henceforth did not

go out till nightfall, which caused his coat to appear black. As he

still wished to be in mourning, he wrapped himself in the night.

Through all this he contrived to pass his examination. He was supposed

to inhabit Courfeyrac's rooms, which were decent, and where a certain

number of legal tomes, supported by broken-backed volumes of novels,

represented the library prescribed by the regulations. He had his

letters addressed to Courfeyrac's lodgings. When Marius was called to

the bar, he informed his grandfather of the fact in a cold letter,

which, however, was full of submission and respect, M. Gillenormand

took the letter with a trembling hand, read it, tore it in four

parts, and threw them into the basket. Two or three days later Mlle.

Gillenormand heard her father, who was alone in his room, talking

aloud, which always happened when he was agitated. She listened and

heard the old gentleman say, "If you were not an ass, you would know

that you cannot be at the same time a Baron and a lawyer."

CHAPTER II.

MARIUS POOR.

It is the same with misery as with everything else,--in the end it

becomes possible, it assumes a shape. A man vegetates, that is to say,

is developed in a certain poor way, which is, however, sufficient for

life. This is the sort of existence which Marius Pontmercy had secured.

He had got out of the narrowest part, and the defile had grown slightly

wider before him. By labor, courage, perseverance, and his will, he

contrived to earn about seven hundred francs a year by his work. He

had taught himself English and German, and, thanks to Courfeyrac, who

introduced him to his friend the publisher, he filled the modest post

of hack in his office. He wrote prospectuses, translated newspapers,

annotated editions, compiled biographies, and one year with another his

net receipts were seven hundred francs. He lived upon them,--how? Not

badly, as we shall show.

Marius occupied at No. 50-52, for the annual rent of thirty francs, a

garret without a fire-place, which was called a "cabinet," and only

contained the indispensable articles of furniture, and this furniture

was his own. He paid three francs a month to the old principal lodger

for sweeping out his room, and bringing him every morning a little

hot water, a new-laid egg, and a sou roll. On this roll and egg he

breakfasted, and the outlay varied from two to four sous, according as

eggs were dear or cheap. At six in the evening he went to the line St.

Jacques to dine at Rousseau's, exactly opposite Bassets, the print-shop

at the corner of the Rue des Mathurins. He did not eat soup, but he

ordered a plate of meat for six sous, half a plate of vegetables for

three sous, and dessert three sous. For three sous he had as much

bread as he liked, and for wine he drank water. On paying at the bar,

where Madame Rousseau, at that period a fat and good-looking dame,

was majestically enthroned, he gave a sou for the waiter and Madame

Rousseau gave him a smile. Then he went away; for sixteen sous he had

a smile and a dinner. This Rousseau restaurant, where so few bottles

and so many water-jugs were emptied, was rather a sedative than a

restorer. It no longer exists, but the master used to have a wonderful

nickname,--he was called Rousseau the aquatic.

Thus, with breakfast four sous, dinner sixteen, his food cost him three

hundred and sixty-five francs a year. Add thirty francs for rent and

the thirty-six francs for the old woman, and a few minor expenses,

and for four hundred and fifty francs Marius was boarded, lodged, and

served. His clothes cost him a hundred francs, his linen fifty, his

washing fifty, but the whole did not exceed six hundred and fifty

francs. He had fifty left, and was rich: at times he would lend ten

francs to a friend, and Courfeyrac once actually borrowed sixty francs

of him. As for heating, as Marius had no chimney, he "simplified" it.

Marius always had two complete suits; one old, for every-day wear,

and the other new, for occasions, and both were black. He had but

three shirts,--one on, one in the drawer, and one at the wash,--and he

renewed them as they became worn out. As they were usually torn, he had

a fashion of buttoning up his coat to the chin.

It had taken Marius years to reach this flourishing condition,--rude

and difficult years, in which he underwent great struggles; but he had

not failed to himself a single day. As regarded want, he had suffered

everything and he had done everything except run into debt. He gave

himself the credit of never having owed a farthing to any one, for

to him debt was the beginning of slavery. He said to himself that a

creditor is worse than a master; for a master only holds your person,

while a creditor holds your dignity and may insult it. Sooner than

borrow he did not eat, and he had known many days of fasting. Knowing

that unless a man is careful, reduction of fortune may lead to baseness

of soul, he jealously watched over his pride: many a remark or action

which, under other circumstances, he would have regarded as deference,

now seemed to him platitudes, and he refrained from them. He ventured

nothing, as he did not wish to fall back; he had on his face a stern

blush, and he was timid almost to rudeness. In all his trials he felt

encouraged, and to some extent supported, by a secret force within

him; for the soul helps the body and at times raises it, and is the

only bird that upholds its cage.

By the side of his father's name, another name was engraved on Marius's

heart, that of Thénardier. Marius, in his grave and enthusiastic

nature, enveloped in a species of glory the man to whom he owed his

father's life, that intrepid sergeant who saved his colonel among the

balls and bullets of Waterloo. He never separated the memory of this

roan from that of his father, and he associated them in his veneration:

it was a species of shrine with two steps,--the high altar for the

Colonel, the low one for Thénardier. What doubled the tenderness of

his gratitude was the thought of the misfortune into which he knew

that Thénardier had fallen and was swallowed up. Marius had learned at

Montfermeil the ruin and bankruptcy of the unfortunate landlord, and

since then had made extraordinary efforts to find his trail, and try to

reach him in the frightful abyss of misery through which Thénardier had

disappeared. Marius went everywhere: he visited Chelles, Bondy, Gournay

Nogent, and Lagny; and obstinately continued his search for three

years, spending in these explorations the little money he saved. No one

was able to give him the slightest information of Thénardier, and it

was supposed he had gone to a foreign country. His creditors had sought

him too, with less love, but quite as much perseverance, as Marius,

and had been unable to lay hands on him. Marius accused and felt angry

with himself for not succeeding in his search; it was the only debt

the Colonel left him, and he felt bound in honor to pay it. "What!"

he thought, "when my father lay dying on the battle-field, Thénardier

contrived to find him in the midst of the smoke and grape-shot, and

carried him off on his shoulders, although he owed him nothing; while

I, who owe so much to Thénardier, am unable to come up with him in the

shadow where he is dying of want, and in my turn bring him back from

death to life. Oh, I will find him!" In fact, Marius would have given

one of his arms to find Thénardier, and his last drop of blood to save

him from want; and his sweetest and most magnificent dream was to see

Thénardier, do him some service, and say to him,--"You do not know me,

but I know you: I am here, dispose of me as you please."

CHAPTER III.

MARIUS GROWS.

At this period Marius was twenty years of age, and he had left his

grandfather's house for three. They remained on the same terms, without

attempting a reconciliation or trying to meet. What good would it have

been to meet,--to come into collision again? Which of them would have

got the better? Marius was the bronze vessel, but Father Gillenormand

was the iron pot.

We are bound to say that Marius was mistaken as to his grandfather's

heart; he imagined that M. Gillenormand had never loved him, and

that this sharp, harsh, laughing old gentleman, who cursed, shouted,

stormed, and raised his cane, only felt for him at the most that light

and severe affection of the Gerontes in the play. Marius was mistaken;

there are fathers who do not love their children; but there is not a

grandfather who does not adore his grandson. In his heart, as we said,

M. Gillenormand idolized Marius: he idolized him, it is true, after his

fashion, with an accompaniment of abuse and even of blows, but when the

lad had disappeared he felt a black gap in his heart; he insisted upon

his name not being mentioned, but regretted that he was so strictly

obeyed. At the outset he hoped that this Buonapartist, this Jacobin,

this terrorist, this Septembrist would return; but weeks passed, months

passed, years passed, and, to the great despair of M. Gillenormand,

the blood-drinker did not reappear. "I could not do otherwise, though,

than turn him out," the grandfather said; and asked himself, "If it

were to be done again, would I do it?" His pride at once answered Yes;

but his old head, which he silently shook, sorrowfully answered, No. He

had his hours of depression, for he missed Marius, and old men require

affection as much as they do the sun to warm them. However strong he

might naturally be, the absence of Marius had changed something in him;

for no consideration in the world would he have taken a step towards

the "little scamp," but he suffered. He lived in greater retirement

than ever at the Marais; he was still gay and violent as of yore, but

his gayety had a convulsive harshness, as if it contained grief and

passion, and his violence generally terminated with a sort of gentle

and sombre depression. He would say to himself at times,--"Oh, if he

were to come back, what a hearty box of the ears I would give him!"

As for the aunt, she thought too little to love much; to her Marius

was only a black and vague profile, and in the end she paid much less

attention to him than to the cat or the parrot which it is probable she

possessed. What added to Father Gillenormand's secret suffering was

that he shut it up within himself, and did not allow it to be divined.

His chagrin was like one of those newly-invented furnaces which

consume their own smoke. At times it happened that officious friends

would speak to him about Marius, and ask, "How is your grandson, and

what is he doing?" The old bourgeois would answer, with a sigh if he

were sad, or with a flip to his frill if he wished to appear gay,

"Monsieur le Baron Pontmercy practises law in some corner."

While the old gentleman regretted, Marius applauded himself. As is the

case with all good hearts, misfortune had freed him from bitterness;

he thought of M. Gillenormand gently, but he was resolved never to

accept anything from a man _who had been unjust to his father_. This

was the mitigated translation of his first indignation. Moreover, he

was glad that he had suffered, and was still suffering, for he did so

for his father. The hardness of his life satisfied and pleased him,

and he said to himself with a sort of joy that _it was the least he_

could do, and that it was an expiation; that, were it not so, he would

have been punished more hereafter for his impious indifference toward

his father, and such a father,--that it would not have been just for

his father to have all the suffering and he none; and, besides, what

were his toil and want when compared with the Colonel's heroic life?

Lastly, that his only way of approaching his father, and resembling

him, was to be valiant against indigence, as he had been brave against

the enemy, and that this was doubtless what the Colonel meant by the

words, _He will be worthy of it_,--words which Marius continued to

bear, not on his chest, as the Colonel's letter had disappeared, but

in his heart. And then, again, on the day when his grandfather turned

him out he was only a boy, while now he was a man and felt he was so.

Misery--we lay a stress on the fact--had been kind to him; for poverty

in youth, when it succeeds, has the magnificent result of turning the

whole will to effort and the whole soul to aspiration. Poverty at

once lays bare material life and renders it hideous; and hence come

indescribable soarings toward the ideal life. The rich young man has

a thousand brilliant and coarse amusements,--races, shooting, dogs,

tobacco, gambling, good dinners, and so on, which are occupations

of the lower part of the mind at the expense of the higher and more

delicate part. The poor young man has to work for his bread, and

when he has eaten, he has only reverie left him. He goes to the free

spectacles which God gives; he looks at the sky, space, the stars,

the flowers, the children, the humanity in which he is suffering,

and the creation in which he radiates. He looks so much at humanity

that he sees the soul, and so much at creation that he sees God. He

dreams, and feels himself great; he dreams again, and feels himself

tender. From the egotism of the man who suffers, he passes to the

compassion of the man who contemplates, and an admirable feeling is

aroused in him,--forgetfulness of self and pity for all. On thinking

of the numberless enjoyments which nature offers, gives, and lavishes

on open minds, and refuses to closed minds, he, the millionnaire of

intellect, learns to pity the millionnaire of money. Hatred departs

from his heart in proportion as brightness enters his mind. Moreover,

was he unhappy? No, for the wretchedness of a young man is never

wretched. Take the first lad who passes, however poor he may be, with

his health, his strength, his quick step, his sparkling eyes, his

blood circulating warmly, his black hair, his ruddy cheeks, his coral

lips, his white teeth, and his pure breath, and he will ever be an

object of envy to an old Emperor. And then, each morning he goes to

earn his livelihood, and while his hands earn bread, his spine gains

pride, and his brain ideas. When his work is ended, he returns to

ineffable ecstasy, to contemplation, and joy; he lives with his feet in

affliction, in obstacles, on the pavement, in the brambles, or at times

in the mud, but his head is in the light He is firm, serene, gentle,

peaceful, attentive, serious, satisfied with a little, and benevolent;

and he blesses God for having given him two riches which rich men often

want,--labor which makes him free, and thought that renders him worthy.

This is what went on in Marius, and, truth to tell, he inclined almost

too much to the side of contemplation. From the day when he felt

tolerably certain of a livelihood, he stopped there, thinking it good

to be poor, and taking from labor hours which he gave to thought. That

is to say, he spent entire days now and then in dreaming, plunged like

a visionary into the silent delights of ecstasy. He had thus arranged

the problem of his life; to toil as little as possible at the material

task in order to work as much as possible on the impalpable task,--in

other words, to devote a few hours to real life, and throw the rest

into infinity. He did not perceive, as he fancied that he wanted for

nothing, that contemplation, thus understood, ended by becoming one of

the forms of indolence; that he had contented himself with subduing the

absolute necessities of life, and that he was resting too soon.

It was evident that for such a generous and energetic nature as

his, this could only be a transitional state, and that at the first

collision with the inevitable complications of destiny Marius would

wake up. In the mean while, though, he was called a barrister, and

whatever Father Gillenormand might think, he did not practise. Reverie

had turned him away from pleading. It was a bore to flatter attorneys,

attend regularly at the palace and seek for briefs. And why should he

do so? He saw no reason to change his means of existence; his obscure

task was certain, he had but little labor over it, and, as we have

explained, he considered his income satisfactory. One of the publishers

for whom he worked, M. Magimel, I think, offered to take him into his

house, lodge him comfortably, find him regular work, and pay him one

thousand five hundred francs a year. To be comfortably lodged and

have one thousand five hundred francs a year! doubtless agreeable

things, but then, to resign his liberty, to be a hired servant, a

sort of literary clerk! In the opinion of Marius, if he accepted, his

position would become better and worse; he would gain comfort and lose

dignity; he would exchange a complete and fine misfortune for an ugly

and ridiculous constraint; it would be something like a blind man who

became one-eyed. So he declined the offer.

Marius lived in solitude; through the inclination he had to remain

outside everything, and also through the commotion he had undergone, he

held aloof from the society presided over by Enjolras. They remained

excellent friends, and ready to help each other when the opportunity

offered, but nothing more. Marius had two friends, one, young

Courfeyrac, the other, old M. Mabœuf, and he inclined to the latter.

In the first place, he owed to him the revolution which had taken

place in him, and his knowledge and love of his father. "He operated

on me for the cataract," he would say. Certainly, this churchwarden

had been decisive: but for all that, M. Mabœuf had only been in this

affair the calm and impassive agent of Providence. He had enlightened

Marius accidentally and unconsciously, just as a candle does which some

one brings into a room; but he had been the candle, and not the some

one. As for the internal political revolution which had taken place in

Marius, M. Mabœuf was entirely incapable of understanding, wishing, or

directing it. As we shall meet M. Mabœuf again hereafter, a few remarks

about him will not be thrown away.

CHAPTER IV.

M. MABŒUF.

On the day when M. Mabœuf said to Marius, "I certainly approve of

political opinions," he expressed the real state of his mind. All

political opinions were a matter of indifference to him, and he

approved of them all without distinction, that they might leave him at

peace, just as the Greeks called the Furies--"the lovely, the kind, the

exquisite"--the Eumenides. M. Mabœuf's political opinion was to love

plants passionately and books even more. He possessed, like everybody

else, his termination in _ist,_ without which no one could have lived

at that day; but he was neither Royalist, Bonapartist, Chartist,

Orleanist, nor Anarchist,--he was a botanist.

He did not understand how men could come to hate each other for trifles

like the charter, democracy, legitimacy, monarchy, the republic, etc.,

when there were in the world all sorts of mosses, grasses, and plants

which they could look at, and piles of folios, and even 32mos, whose

pages they could turn over. He was very careful not to be useless: his

having books did not prevent him reading them, and being a botanist

did not prevent him being a gardener. When he knew Colonel Pontmercy,

there was this sympathy between them, that the Colonel did for flowers

what he did for fruits, M. Mabœuf had succeeded in producing pears as

sweet as those of St. Germain; it is one of those combinations from

which sprang, as it seems, the autumn Mirabelle plum, which is still

celebrated, and no less perfumed than the summer one. He attended Mass

more through gentleness than devotion, and because, while he loved

men's faces but hated their noise, he found them at church congregated

and silent; and feeling that he must hold some position in the State,

he selected that of churchwarden. He had never succeeded in loving any

woman so much as a tulip bulb, or any man so much as an Elzevir. He had

long passed his sixtieth year, when some one asked him one day, "How is

it that you never married?" "I forgot it," he said. When he happened

to say,--and to whom does it not happen?--"Oh, if I were rich!" it

was not when ogling a pretty girl, like Father Gillenormand, but when

contemplating a quarto. He lived alone with an old housekeeper; he was

rather gouty, and when he slept, his old chalk-stoned fingers formed

an arch in the folds of the sheets. He had written and published a

"Flora of the Environs of Cauteretz," with colored plates,--a work of

some merit, of which he possessed the plates, and sold it himself.

People rang at his door in the Rue Mézières two or three times a day

to buy a copy; he made a profit of about two thousand francs a year

by the book, and that was nearly his whole fortune. Although poor, he

had contrived by patience and privations, and with time, to form a

valuable collection of all sorts of rare examples. He never went out

without a book under his arm, and frequently returned with two. The

sole ornaments of his four rooms on the ground-floor, which, with a

small garden, formed his lodging, were herbals and engravings by old

masters. The sight of a musket or a sabre froze him, and in his life

he had never walked up to a cannon, not even at the Invalides. He had

a tolerable stomach, a brother a curé very white hair, no teeth left

in his mouth or in his mind, a tremor all over him, a Picard accent, a

childish laugh, and the air of an old sheep. With all he had no other

friend among the living than an old bookseller at the Porte St. Jacques

of the name of Royol; and the dream of his life was to naturalize

indigo in France.

His maid-servant was also a variety of innocence. The good woman was an

old maid, and Sultan, her tom-cat, who might have meowed the Allegri

Miserere in the Sistine Chapel, filled her heart, and sufficed for

the amount of passion within her. Not one of her dreams had ever gone

so far as a man, and had not got beyond her cat; like him, she had

moustaches. Her glory was perfectly white caps, and she spent her time

on Sunday, after Mass, in counting the linen in her box, and spreading

on her bed the gowns which she bought in the piece, and never had made

up. She knew how to read, and M. Mabœuf had christened her Mother

Plutarch.

M. Mabœuf had taken a fancy to Marius, because the young man, being

young and gentle, warmed his old age without startling his timidity.

Youth, combined with gentleness, produces on aged people the effect

of sun without wind. When Marius was saturated with military glory,

gunpowder, marches and counter-marches, and all the prodigious battles

in which his father gave and received such mighty sabre-cuts, he went

to see M. Mabœuf, who talked to him about the hero in his connection

with flowers.

About the year 1830 his brother the curé died, and almost immediately

after, as when night arrives, the entire horizon became dark for M.

Mabœuf. The bankruptcy of a notary despoiled him of ten thousand

francs, all he possessed of his brother's capital and his own, while

the revolution of July produced a crisis in the book trade. In times

of pressure the first thing which does not sell is a _Flora_, and that

of the Environs of Cauteretz stopped dead. Weeks passed without a

purchaser. At times M. Mabœuf started at the sound of the house bell,

but Mother Plutarch would say to him sadly, "It is the water-carrier,

sir." In a word, M. Mabœuf left the Rue Mézières one day, abdicated

his office as churchwarden, gave up St. Sulpice, sold a portion, not

of his books, but of his engravings, for which he cared least, and

installed himself in a small house on the Boulevard Montparnasse,

where, however, he only remained three months, for two reasons,--in the

first place, the ground-floor and garden cost three hundred francs,

and he did not dare set aside more than two hundred francs for rent;

and secondly, as he was close to the Fatou shooting-gallery, he heard

pistol-shots, which he could not endure. He carried off his _Flora_,

his copper-plates, his herbals, port-folios, and books and settled down

near the Salpêtrière, in a sort of hut, in the village of Austerlitz,

where he rented for fifty crowns a year three rooms, a garden enclosed

by a hedge, and a well. He took advantage of this removal to sell

nearly all his furniture. On the day when he entered his new house he

was in very good spirits, and drove in with his own hands the nails on

which to hang the engravings; he dug in his garden for the rest of the

day, and at night, seeing that Mother Plutarch had an anxious look and

was thoughtful, he tapped her on the shoulder and said with a smile,

"We have the indigo!" Only two visitors, the publisher and Marius, were

allowed admission to his hut of Austerlitz,--a rackety name, by the

way, which was most disagreeable to him.

As we have remarked, things of this world permeate very slowly brains

absorbed in wisdom, or mania, or, as often happens, in both at

once, and their own destiny is remote from them. The result of such

concentrations is a passiveness which, were it of a reasoning nature,

would resemble philosophy. Men decline, sink, glide out, and even

collapse, without exactly noticing, though this always ends with a

re-awaking, but one of a tardy character. In the mean while it appears

as if they are neutral in the game which is being played between their

happiness and misery; they are the stakes, and look on at the game with

indifference. It was thus that M. Mabœuf remained rather childishly

but most profoundly serene, in the obscurity that was enveloping him

gradually, and while his hopes were being extinguished in turn. The

habits of his mind had the regular movement of a clock, and when he

was once wound up by an illusion he went for a very long time, even

when the illusion had disappeared. A clock does not stop at the precise

moment when the key is lost.

M. Mabœuf had innocent pleasures, which cost but little and were

unexpected, and the slightest accident supplied him with them. One day

Mother Plutarch was reading a novel in the corner of the room; she was

reading aloud, for she fancied that she understood better in that way.

There are some persons who read very loud, and look as if they were

pledging themselves their word of honor about what they are reading.

Mother Plutarch read her novel with an energy of this nature, and M.

Mabœuf listened to her without hearing. While reading, Mother Plutarch

came to the following passage, relating to a bold dragoon and a gushing

young lady:--

"La belle bouda, et Le Dragon--"

Here she broke off to wipe her spectacles.

"Bouddha and the dragon," M. Mabœuf repeated in a low voice; "yes, that

is true; there was a dragon, which lived in a cavern, belched flames,

and set fire to the sky. Several stars had already been burned up by

this monster, which had tiger-claws, by the bye, when Bouddha went into

its den and succeeded in converting the dragon. That is an excellent

book you are reading, Mother Plutarch, and there cannot be a finer

legend."

And M. Mabœuf fell into a delicious reverie.

CHAPTER V.

POVERTY A GOOD NEIGHBOR TO MISERY.

Marius felt a liking for this candid old man, who saw himself slowly

assailed by poverty and yet was not depressed by it. Marius met

Courfeyrac and sought M. Mabœuf--very rarely, however--once or twice

a month at the most. Marius's delight was to take long walks alone,

either on the external boulevards at the Champ de Mars, or in the

least frequented walks of the Luxembourg. He often spent half a day in

looking at a kitchen-garden, the patches of lettuce, the fowls on the

dungheap, and the horse turning the wheel of the chain-pump. Passers-by

looked at him with surprise, and some thought his dress suspicious and

his face dangerous, while it was only a poor young man thinking without

an object It was in one of these walks that he discovered the Maison

Gorbeau, and the isolation and the cheapness tempting him, he took a

room there. He was only known by the name of M. Marius.

Some of his father's old generals and old comrades invited him to

come and see them, when they knew him, and Marius did not refuse, for

there were opportunities to speak about his father. He called thus

from time to time upon Count Pajol, General Bellavesne, and General

Fririon at the Invalides. There was generally music and dancing, and on

such evenings Marius put on his best suit; but he never went to such

parties except on days when it was freezing tremendously hard, for

he could not pay for a vehicle, and he would not go unless his boots

were like looking-glasses. He would say at times, though not at all

bitterly, "Men are so constituted that in a drawing-room you may have

mud everywhere except on your boots. In order to give you a proper

reception only one irreproachable thing is expected from you--is it

your conscience? No, your boots."

All passions, saving those of the heart, are dissipated in reverie.

The political fever of Marius had vanished, and the revolution of 1830

had aided in this, by satisfying and calming him. He had remained the

same, except in his passion; he still held the same opinions, but they

were softened down. Properly speaking, he no longer had opinions, but

sympathies. To what party did he belong? To that of humanity. For

humanity he selected France; in the nation he chose the people; and in

the people, woman, and his pity was mainly given to her. At the present

time he preferred an idea to a fact, a poet to a hero, and he admired

a book like Job even more than an event like Marengo; and when after a

day of meditation he returned along the boulevard and saw through the

trees the illimitable space, the nameless gleams, the abyss, shadow,

and mystery, all that was only human seemed to him infinitely little.

He believed that he had--and probably he had--reached the truth of life

and of human philosophy; and ended by gazing at nothing but the sky,

the only thing which truth can see from the bottom of her well.

This did not prevent him from multiplying plans, combinations,

scaffolding, and projects for the future. In this state of reverie,

any eye which had seen into Marius's interior would have been dazzled

by the purity of his mind. In fact, if our eyes of the flesh were

allowed to peer into the consciences of our neighbor, a man could be

judged far more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks.

There is a volition in thought, but there is none in a dream, and

the latter, which is entirely spontaneous, assumes and retains, even

in the gigantic and the ideal, the image of our mind. Nothing issues

more directly and more sincerely from the bottom of our soul than

our unreflecting and disproportioned aspirations for the splendors

of destiny. The true character of every man could be found in these

aspirations far more certainly than in arranged, reasoned, and

co-ordinated ideas. Our chimeras are the things which most resemble

ourselves, and each man dreams of the unknown and the impossible

according to his nature.

About the middle of the year 1831 the old woman who waited on Marius

told him that his neighbors, the wretched Jondrette family, were going

to be turned out. Marius, who spent nearly his whole time out of doors,

scarce knew that he had neighbors.

"Why are they turned out?" he asked.

"Because they do not pay their rent, and owe two quarters."

"How much is it?"

"Twenty francs," said the old woman.

Marius had thirty francs in reserve in a drawer.

"Here are twenty-five francs," he said to the woman; "pay the rent of

the poor people, give them five francs, and do not tell them where the

money comes from."

CHAPTER VI.

THE SUBSTITUTE.

Accident decreed that the regiment to which Théodule belonged should

be quartered in Paris. This was an opportunity for Aunt Gillenormand

to have a second idea; her first one had been to set Théodule watching

Marius, and she now plotted to make him succeed him. In the event

of the grandfather feeling a vague want for a youthful face in the

house--for such rays of dawn are sometimes sweet to ruins--it was

expedient to find another Marius. "Well," she thought, "it is only

a simple erratum, such as I notice in books, for _Marius_ read

_Théodule._ A grand-nephew is much the same as a grandson, after all,

and in default of a barrister you can take a lancer."

One morning when M. Gillenormand was going to read something like the

_Quotidienne_, his daughter came in and said in her softest voice, for

the interests of her favorite were at stake,--

"Papa, Théodule is coming this morning to pay his respects to you."

"Who's Théodule?"

"Your grand-nephew."

"Ah!" said the old gentleman.

Then he began reading, thought no more of the grand-nephew, who was

only some Théodule, and soon became angry, which nearly always happened

when he read. The paper he held, a Royalist one we need hardly say,

announced for the morrow, without any amenity, one of the daily

events of Paris at the time, that the pupils of the schools of law

and medicine would assemble in the Place du Panthéon--to deliberate.

The affair was one of the questions of the moment, the artillery of

the National Guard, and a conflict between the war minister and the

"Citizen Militia," on the subject of guns parked in the courtyard of

the Louvre. The students were going to "deliberate" on this, and it did

not require much more to render M. Gillenormand furious. He thought of

Marius, who was a student, and who would probably go, like the others,

"to deliberate at mid-day in the Place du Panthéon."

While he was making these painful reflections lieutenant Théodule came

in, dressed in mufti, which was clever, and was discreetly introduced

by Mlle. Gillenormand. The lancer had reasoned thus: "The old Druid has

not sunk all his money in annuities, and so it is worth the while to

disguise one's self as a _pékin_ now and then." Mlle. Gillenormand said

aloud to her father,--

"Théodule, your grand-nephew."

And in a whisper to the Lieutenant,--"Assent to everything."

And she retired.

The Lieutenant, but little accustomed to such venerable meetings,

stammered, with some timidity, "Good-morning, uncle," and made a bow

which was composed of the involuntary and mechanical military salute

blended with a bourgeois greeting.

"Ah, it's you, very good, sit down," said the ancestor, and after

saying this he utterly forgot the lancer. Théodule sat down, and M.

Gillenormand got up. He began walking up and down the room, with his

hands in his pockets, talking aloud, and feeling with his old irritated

fingers the two watches which he wore in his two fobs.

"That heap of scamps! so they are going to meet in the Place du

Panthéon! _Vertu de ma mie_! little ragamuffins who were at nurse

yesterday! if you were to squeeze their noses the milk would run out!

And they are going to deliberate to-morrow! Where are we going? Where

are we going? It is clear that we are going to the abyss, and the

_descamisados_ have led us to it. The citizen artillery! deliberate

about the citizen artillery! go and chatter in the open air about the

squibs of the National Guard! And whom will they meet there? Just let

us see to what Jacobinism leads. I will wager whatever you like, a

million against a counter, that there will be only liberated convicts

and pickpockets there; for the Republicans and the galley-slaves are

like one nose and one handkerchief. Carnot used to say, 'Where do

you want me to go, traitor?' and Fouché answer, 'Wherever you like,

imbecile!' That is what the Republicans are."

"That is true," said Théodule.

M. Gillenormand half turned his head, saw Théodule, and went on,--

"And then to think that that scamp had the villany to become a

Republican! For what have you left my house? To become a Republican!

Pest! In the first place, the people do not want your republic, for

they are sensible, and know very well that there always have been

kings, and always will be, and they know, after all, that the people

are only the people, and they laugh at your republic, do you hear,

idiot? Is not such a caprice horrible,--to fall in love with Père

Duchêne, to ogle the guillotine, to sing romances, and play the

guitar under the balcony of '93? Why, all these young men ought to be

spat upon, for they are so stupid! They are all caught, and not one

escapes, and they need only inhale the air of the street to go mad.

The 19th century is poison; the first-comer lets his goat's beard

grow, fully believes that he is a clever dog, and looks down on his

old parents,--for that is republican, it is romantic. Just be good

enough to tell me what that word romantic means? Every folly possible.

A year ago they went to see _Hernani_. Just let me ask you--_Hernani!_

antitheses, abominations, which are not even written in French. And

then there are cannon in the court-yard of the Louvre; such is the

brigand-age of the present age."

"You are right, uncle," said Théodule.

M. Gillenormand continued,--

"Guns in the court-yard of the Museum! what to do? Cannon, what do you

want of me? Do you wish to fire grape-shot at the Apollo Belvidere?

What have serge-cartridges to do with the Venus de Medici? Oh, the

young men of the present day are ragamuffins, and this Benjamin

Constant is not much! And those who are not villains are gawkies!

They do all they can to make themselves ugly; they dress badly, they

are afraid of women, and they have an imploring air about a petticoat

that makes the wenches burst out laughing; on my word of honor, you

might call them love's paupers, ashamed to beg. They are deformed, and

perfect it by being stupid; they repeat the jokes of Tiercelin and

Potier; they wear sack-coats, hostlers' waistcoats, trousers of coarse

cloth, boots of coarse leather, and their chatter resembles their

plumage,--their jargon might be employed to sole their boots. And all

these silly lads have political opinions, and it ought to be strictly

prohibited. They manufacture systems, they remodel society, they

demolish the monarchy, upset all laws, put the garret in the place of

the cellar, and my porter in the place of the king; they upset Europe

from one end to the other, build up the world again, and their amours

consist in looking sheepishly at the legs of the washerwomen as they

get into their carts. Ah, Marius! ah, scoundrel! to go and vociferate

in the public square! to discuss, debate, and form measures--they call

them measures. Great gods! why, disorder is decreasing and becoming

silly. I have seen chaos and I now see a puddle. Scholars deliberating

about the National Guard! Why, that could not be seen among the

Ojibbeways or the Cadodaches! The savages who go about naked, with

their noddles dressed like a racket-bat, and with a club in their paw,

are not such brutes as these bachelors, twopenny-halfpenny brats, who

dare to decree and order, deliberate and argue! Why, it is the end of

the world; it is evidently the end of this wretched globe; it wanted

a final shove, and France has given it. Deliberate, my scamps! These

things will happen so long as they go to read the papers under the

arcades of the Odéon; it costs them a son, and their common sense,

and their intelligence, and their heart, and their soul, and their

mind. They leave that place, and then bolt from their family. All the

newspapers are poison, even the _Drapeau Blanc,_ and Martainville was

a Jacobin at heart. Ah, just Heaven! you can boast of having rendered

your grandfather desperate!"

"That is quite plain," said Théodule.

And taking advantage of the moment during which M. Gillenormand was

recovering breath, the lancer added magisterially,--

"There ought to be no other paper but the _Moniteur,_ and no other book

but the Army List."

M. Gillenormand went on,--

"It is just like their Sièyes,--a regicide who became a senator!

for they always end with that. They scar themselves with citizen

familiarity, that they may be called in the long run Monsieur le Comte.

Monsieur le Comte with a vengeance! slaughterers of September! The

philosopher Sièyes! I do myself the justice of saying that I never

cared any more for the philosophy of all these philosophers than I

did for the spectacles of the grimacers at Tivoli. One day I saw the

Senators pass along the Quay Malaquais, in violet velvet cloaks studded

with bees, and wearing Henri IV. hats; they were hideous, and looked

like the apes of the tigers' court. Citizens, I declare to you that

your progress is a madness, that your humanity is a dream, that your

Revolution is a crime, that your Republic is a monster, that your young

Virgin France emerges from a brothel; and I sustain it against you all.

No matter whether you are journalists, social economists, lawyers, and

greater connoisseurs of liberty, equality, and fraternity, than the

cut-throat of the guillotine! I tell you this plainly, my good fellows."

"Parbleu!" the Lieutenant cried, "that is admirably true!"

M. Gillenormand interrupted a gesture which he had begun, turned round,

gazed intently at Théodule the lancer, between the eyes, and said to

him,--

"You are an ass!"

BOOK VI.

THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO STARS.

CHAPTER I.

NICKNAMES AND SURNAMES.

Marius at this period was a handsome young man of middle height, with

very black hair, a lofty and intelligent forehead, open and impassioned

nostrils, a sincere and calm air, and something haughty, pensive, and

innocent was spread over his whole face. His profile, in which all

the lines were rounded without ceasing to be firm, had that Germanic

gentleness which entered France through Alsace and Lorraine, and that

absence of angles which renders it so easy to recognize the Sicambri

among the Romans, and distinguishes the leonine from the aquiline race.

He had reached the season of life when the mind of men is composed of

depth and simplicity in nearly equal proportions. A serious situation

being given, he had all that was necessary to be stupid, but, with one

more turn of the screw, he could be sublime. His manner was reserved,

cold, polite, and unexpansive; but, as his mouth was beautiful, his

lips bright vermilion, and his teeth the whitest in the world, his

smile corrected any severity in his countenance. At certain moments

this chaste forehead and voluptuous smile offered a strange contrast.

He had a small eye and a noble glance.

In the period of his greatest need he remarked that people turned to

look at him when he passed, and he hurried away or hid himself, with

death in his soul. He thought that they were looking at his shabby

clothes and laughing at them; but the fact is, they were looking at

his face, and thinking about it. This silent misunderstanding between

himself and pretty passers-by had rendered him savage, and he did not

select one from the simple reason that he fled from all. He lived thus

indefinitely--stupidity, said Courfeyrac, who also added,--"Do not

aspire to be venerable, and take one bit of advice, my dear fellow. Do

not read so many books, and look at the wenches a little more, for they

have some good about them. Oh, Marius! you will grow brutalized if you

go on shunning women and blushing."

On other occasions, Courfeyrac, when he I met him, would say,

"Good-morning, Abbé." When Courfeyrac had made any remark of this

nature, Marius for a whole week would shun women, young and old more

than ever, and Courfeyrac in the bargain. There were, however, in the

whole immense creation, two women whom Marius did not shun, or to whom

he paid no attention. To tell the truth, he would have been greatly

surprised had any one told him that they were women. One was the

hairy-faced old woman who swept his room, and induced Courfeyrac to

remark,--"Seeing that his servant wears her beard, Marius does not

wear his;" the other was a young girl whom he saw very frequently and

did not look at. For more than a year Marius had noticed in a deserted

walk of the Luxembourg--the one which is bordered by the Parapet de la

Pepinière--a man and a very young lady nearly always seated side by

side at the most solitary end of the walk, near the Rue de l'Ouest.

Whenever that chance, which mingles with the promenades of people whose

eye is turned inwards, led Marius to this walk, and that was nearly

daily, he met this couple again. The man seemed to be about sixty

years of age; he appeared sad and serious, and the whole of his person

presented the robust and fatigued appearance of military men who have

retired from service. If he had worn a decoration, Marius would have

said, "He is an old officer." He looked kind, but unapproachable, and

never fixed his eye on that of another person. He wore blue trousers,

a coat of the same color, and a broad-brimmed hat, all of which were

constantly new, a black cravat, and a quaker's, that is to say,

dazzlingly white, but very coarse shirt. A grisette who passed him one

day said, "What a nice strong widower!" His hair was very white.

The first time that the young lady who accompanied him sat down

with him upon the bench, which they seemed to have adopted, she was

about thirteen or fourteen, so thin as to be almost ugly, awkward,

insignificant, and promising to have perhaps very fine eyes some day;

still they were always raised to the old gentleman with a species of

displeasing assurance. She wore the garb, at once old and childish,

of boarders at a convent,--a badly-cut dress of coarse black merino.

They looked like father and daughter. Marius examined for two or three

days the old man, who was not yet aged, and this little girl, who was

not yet a maiden, and then paid no further attention to them. They,

on their side, seemed not even to see him, and talked together with a

peaceful and careless air. The girl talked incessantly and gayly, the

old man spoke but little, and at times he fixed upon her eyes filled

with ineffable paternity. Marius had formed the mechanical habit of

walking in this alley, and invariably found them there. This is how

matters went on:--

Marius generally arrived by the end of the walk farthest from the

bench; he walked the whole length, passed them, then turned back to

the end by which he had arrived, and began again. He took this walk

five or six times nearly every day in the week, but these persons and

himself never even exchanged a bow. The man and the girl, though they

appeared, and perhaps because they appeared, to shun observation, had

naturally aroused to some little extent the attention of some students,

who walked from time to time along La Pepinière,--the studious after

lectures, the others after their game of billiards. Courfeyrac, who

belonged to the latter, had watched them for some time, but finding the

girl ugly, he got away from them very rapidly, firing at them like a

Parthian a sobriquet. Being solely struck by the dress of the girl and

the old man's hair, he christened the former Mlle. Lanoire, and the

father Monsieur Leblanc, so that, as no one knew them otherwise, this

name adhered to them in the absence of a better one. The students said,

"Ah, M. Leblanc is at his bench;" and Marius, like the rest, found it

convenient to call this strange gentleman M. Leblanc. We will follow

their example. Marius saw them nearly daily, at the same hour, during a

year; he considered the man agreeable, but the girl rather insipid.

CHAPTER II.

LUX FACTA EST.

In the second year, just at the point of our story which the reader

has how reached, it happened that Marius broke off his daily walk in

the Luxembourg, without exactly knowing why, and was nearly six months

without setting foot in the garden. One day, however, he returned to

it; it was a beauteous summer day, and Marius was joyous, as men are

when the weather is fine. He felt as if he had in his heart all the

birds' songs that he heard, and all the patches of blue sky of which he

caught a glimpse between the leaves. He went straight to "his walk,"

and when he reached the end he noticed the well-known couple seated on

the same bench; but when he drew near he found that while it was the

same man, it did not seem to be the same girl. The person he now saw

was a tall and lovely creature, possessing the charming outlines of the

woman, at the precise moment when they are still combined with the most

simple graces of the child,--a fugitive and pure moment which can alone

be rendered by the two words "fifteen years." He saw admirable auburn

hair tinted with streaks of gold, a forehead that seemed made of

marble, cheeks that seemed made of a rose-leaf,--a pale flesh tint,--an

exquisite mouth, from which a smile issued like a flash and words

like music, and a head which Raphael would have given to a Virgin,

set upon a neck which Jean Goujon would have given to a Venus. And,

that nothing might be wanting in this ravishing face, the nose was not

beautiful, but pretty, neither straight nor bent, neither Italian nor

Greek; it was the Parisian nose, that is to say, something witty, fine,

irregular, and pure, which is the despair of painters and the charm of

poets.

When Marius passed her he could not see her eyes, which she constantly

drooped; he only saw her long brown eyelashes, pervaded with shade and

modesty. This did not prevent the lovely girl from smiling while she

listened to the white-haired man who was speaking to her, and nothing

could be so ravishing as this fresh smile with the downcast eyes. At

the first moment Marius thought that it was another daughter of the

old gentleman's,--a sister of the former. But when the invariable

habit of his walk brought him again to the bench, and he examined her

attentively, he perceived that it was the same girl. In six months the

girl had become a maiden, that was all; and nothing is more frequent

than this phenomenon. There is a moment in which girls expand in

the twinkling of an eye and all at once become roses; yesterday you

left them children, to-day, you find them objects of anxiety. This

girl had not only grown, but was idealized; as three days in April

suffice to cover some trees with flowers, six months had sufficed

to clothe her with beauty; her April had arrived. We sometimes see

poor and insignificant persons suddenly wake up, pass from indigence

to opulence, lay out money in all sorts of extravagance, and become

brilliant, prodigal, and magnificent. The reason is that they have just

received their dividends; and the girl had been paid six months' income.

And then she was no longer the boarding--school Miss, with her plush

bonnet, merino dress, thick shoes, and red hands; taste had come to her

with beauty, and she was well dressed, with a species of simple, rich,

and unaffected elegance. She wore a black brocade dress, a cloak of the

same material, and a white crape bonnet; her white gloves displayed

the elegance of her hand, which was playing with the ivory handle of a

parasol, and her satin boot revealed the smallness of her foot; when

you passed her, her whole toilette exhaled a youthful and penetrating

perfume. As for the man, he was still the same. The second time that

Marius passed, the girl raised her eyelids, and he could see that her

eyes were of a deep cerulean blue, but in this veiled azure there was

only the glance of a child. She looked at Marius carelessly, as she

would have looked at the child playing under the sycamores, or the

marble vase that threw a shadow over the bench; and Marius continued

his walk, thinking of something else. He passed the bench four or

five times, but did not once turn his eyes toward the young lady. On

the following days he returned as usual to the Luxembourg; as usual

he found the "father and daughter" there, but he paid no further

attention to them. He thought no more of the girl now that she was

lovely than he had done when she was ugly; and though he always passed

very close to the bench on which she was sitting, it was solely the

result of habit.

CHAPTER III.

THE EFFECT OF SPRING.

One day the air was warm, the Luxembourg was inundated with light

and shade, the sky was as pure as if the angels had washed it that

morning, the sparrows were twittering shrilly in the foliage of the

chestnut-trees, and Marius opened his whole soul to nature. He was

thinking of nothing; he loved and breathed; he passed by the bench;

the young lad; raised her eyes to him and their two glances met. What

was there this time in her look? Marius could not have said: there was

nothing and there was everything; it was a strange flash. She let her

eyes fall, and he continued his walk. What he had just seen was not the

simple and ingenuous eye of a child, but a mysterious gulf, the mouth

of which had opened and then suddenly closed again. There is a day on

which every maiden looks in this way, and woe to the man on whom her

glance falls!

This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like dawn

in the heavens; it is the awakening of something radiant and unknown.

Nothing can express the mysterious charm of this unexpected flash which

suddenly illumines the adorable darkness, and is composed of all the

innocence of the present and all the passion of the future. It is a

sort of undecided tenderness, which reveals itself accidentally and

waits; it is a snare which innocence sets unconsciously, and in which

it captures hearts without wishing or knowing it. It is a virgin who

looks at you like a woman. It is rare for a profound reverie not to

spring up wherever this flame falls; all purity and all candor are

blended in this heavenly and fatal beam, which possesses, more than

the best-managed ogles of coquettes, the magic power of suddenly

causing that dangerous flower, full of perfume and poison, called love,

suddenly to expand in the soul.

On returning to his garret in the evening, Marius took a glance

at his clothes, and perceived for the first time that he had been

guilty of the extraordinary impropriety and stupidity of walking

in the Luxembourg in his "every-day dress;" that is to say, with a

broken-brimmed hat, clumsy boots, black trousers white at the knees,

and a black coat pale at the elbows.

CHAPTER IV.

BEGINNING OF A GREAT MALADY.

The next day, at the accustomed hour, Marius took out of the drawers

his new coat, his new trousers, his new hat, and his new boots;

he dressed himself in this complete panoply, put on gloves,--an

extraordinary luxury,--and went off to the Luxembourg. On the road he

met Courfeyrac, and pretended not to see him. Courfeyrac on reaching

home said to his friends,--

"I have just met Marius's new hat and new coat and Marius inside them.

He was going, I fancy, to pass some examination, for he looked so

stupid."

On reaching the Luxembourg Marius walked round the basin and gazed

at the swans; then he stood for a long time contemplating a statue

all black with mould, and which had lost one hip. Near the basin was

a comfortable bourgeois of about forty, holding by the hand a little

boy, and saying to him,--"Avoid all excesses, my son; keep at an

equal distance from despotism and anarchy." Marius listened to this

bourgeois, then walked once again round the basin, and at length

proceeded toward "his walk" slowly, and as if regretfully. He seemed

to be at once forced and prevented from going, but he did not explain

this to himself, and fancied he was behaving as he did every day. On

turning into the walk he saw M. Leblanc and the young lady at the other

end, seated on "their bench." He buttoned up his coat to the top,

pulled it down so that it should make no creases, examined with some

complacency the lustre of his trousers, and marched upon the bench.

There was attack in this march, and assuredly a desire for conquest,

and hence I say that he marched upon this bench, as I would say

Hannibal marched on Rome.

Still, all his movements were mechanical, and he had not in any way

altered the habitual preoccupation of his mind and labors. He was

thinking at this moment that the _Manuel de Baccalaureat_ was a stupid

book, and that it must have been edited by wondrous ignoramuses, who

analyzed as masterpieces of the human mind three tragedies of Racine

and only one comedy of Molière. He had a shrill whistling in his ear,

and while approaching the bench he pulled down his coat, and his eyes

were fixed on the maiden. He fancied that she filled the whole end of

the walk with a vague blue light. As he drew nearer his pace gradually

decreased. On coming within a certain distance of the bench, though

still some distance from the end of the walk, he stopped, and did not

know how it was that he turned back. The young lady was scarce able to

notice him, and see how well he looked in his new suit. Still he held

himself very erect, for fear any one behind might be looking at him.

He reached the opposite end, then returned, and this time approached

a little nearer to the bench. He even got within the distance of

three trees, but then he felt an impossibility of going farther,

and hesitated. He fancied he could see the young lady's face turned

toward him; however, he made a masculine, violent effort, subdued his

hesitation, and continued to advance. A few moments after he passed in

front of the bench, upright and firm, but red up to the ears, and not

daring to take a glance either to the right or left, and with his hand

thrust into his coat like a statesman. At the moment when he passed

under the guns of the fort he felt his heart beat violently. She was

dressed as on the previous day, and he heard an ineffable voice which

must "be her voice." She was talking quietly, and was very beautiful;

he felt it, though he did not attempt to look at her, "and yet," he

thought, "she could not fail to have esteem and consideration for me

if she knew that I am the real author of the dissertation on Marcos

Obregon de La Ronda, which M. Francois de Neufchâteau appropriated, at

the beginning of his edition of _Gil Bias_."

He passed the bench, went to the end of the walk which was close by,

then turned and again passed the young lady. This time he was very

pale, and his feelings were most disagreeable. He went away from the

bench and the maiden, and while turning his back, he fancied that she

was looking at him, and this made him totter. He did not again attempt

to pass the bench; he stopped at about the middle of the walk and then

sat down,--a most unusual thing for him,--taking side glances, and

thinking in the innermost depths of his mind that after all it was

difficult for a person whose white bonnet and black dress he admired to

be absolutely insensible to his showy trousers and new coat. At the end

of a quarter of an hour he rose, as if about to walk toward this bench

which was surrounded by a glory, but he remained motionless. For the

first time in fifteen months he said to himself that the gentleman who

sat there daily with his daughter must have noticed him, and probably

considered his assiduity strange. For the first time, too, he felt

it was rather irreverent to designate this stranger, even in his own

thoughts, by the nickname of M. Leblanc.

He remained thus for some minutes with hanging head, making sketches in

the sand with the stick he held in his hand. Then he suddenly turned in

the direction opposed to the bench and went home. That day he forgot to

go to dinner; he noticed the fact at eight in the evening, and, as it

was too late to go to the Rue St. Jacques, he ate a lump of bread. He

did not go to bed till he had brushed and carefully folded up his coat.

CHAPTER V.

MAME BOUGON IS THUNDER-STRUCK,

The next day, Mame Bougon,--it was thus that Courfeyrac called the

old portress, principal lodger, and charwoman, of No. 50-52, though

her real name was Madame Bourgon, as we have stated; but that scamp

of a Courfeyrac respected nothing,--Mame Bougon, to her stupefaction,

noticed that Marius again went out in his best coat. He returned to

the Luxembourg, but did not go beyond his half-way bench; he sat down

there, as on the previous day, regarding from a distance, and seeing

distinctly, the white bonnet, the black dress, and, above all, the

blue radiance. He did not move or return home till the gates of the

Luxembourg were closed. He did not see M. Leblanc and his daughter go

away, and hence concluded that they left the garden by the gate in

the Rue de l'Ouest. Some weeks after, when reflecting on the subject,

he could never remember where he dined that day. On the next day, the

third, Mame Bougon received another thunder-stroke; Marius went out in

his new coat. "Three days running!" she exclaimed. She tried to follow

him, but Marius walked quickly, and with immense strides: it was a

hippopotamus attempting to overtake a chamois. She lost him out of

sight in two minutes, and went back panting, three parts choked by her

asthma, and furious. "What sense is there," she growled, "in putting on

one's best coat every day, and making people run like that!"

Marius had gone to the Luxembourg, where M. Leblanc and the young lady

were already. Marius approached as near to them as he could, while

pretending to read his book, though still a long distance off, and

then sat down on his bench, where he spent four hours in watching the

sparrows, which he fancied were ridiculing him, hopping about in the

walk. A fortnight passed in this way; Marius no longer went to the

Luxembourg to walk, but always to sit down at the same spot, without

knowing why. Arriving, he did not stir. He every morning put on his new

coat, although he did not show himself, and began again on the morrow.

She was decidedly, marvellously beautiful; the sole remark resembling

a criticism that could be made was that the contradiction between her

glance, which was sad, and her smile, which was joyous, gave her face

a slightly startled look, which at times caused this gentle face to

become strange without ceasing to be charming.

CHAPTER VI.

TAKEN PRISONER.

On one of the last days of the second week Marius was as usual seated

on his bench, holding in his hand an open book in which he had not

turned a page for several months, when he suddenly started; an event

was occurring at the end of the walk. M. Leblanc and his daughter had

left their bench, the girl was holding her father's arm, and both were

proceeding slowly toward the middle of the walk where Marius was. He

shut his book, then opened it again and tried to read, but he trembled,

and the glory came straight toward him. "Oh, Heaven!" he thought, "I

shall not have the time to assume an attitude." The white-haired man

and the girl, however, advanced; it seemed to him as if this lasted

an age, and it was only a second. "What do they want here?" he asked

himself. "What! she is going to pass here; her feet will tread this

sand, this walk, two paces from me!" He was quite upset; he would

have liked to be very handsome, and have the cross. He heard the soft

measured sound of their footsteps approaching him, and he imagined

that M. Leblanc glanced at him irritably. "Is this gentleman going to

speak to me?" he thought. He hung his head, and when he raised it

again they were close to him. The girl passed, and in passing looked

at him,--looked at him intently, with a thoughtful gentleness which

made Marius shudder from head to foot. It seemed to him as if she

reproached him for keeping away from her so long, and was saying, "I

have come instead." Marius was dazzled by these eyeballs full of beams

and abysses. He felt that his brain was on fire. She had come toward

him--what joy!--and then, she had looked at him. She appeared to him

lovelier than she had ever been,--lovely with a beauty at once feminine

and angelic, a perfect beauty, which would have made Petrarch sing and

Dante kneel. He felt as if he were floating in the blue sky, but at the

same time he was horribly annoyed because he had dust on his boots, and

he felt sure that she had looked at his boots too.

He looked after her till she disappeared, and then walked about the

garden like a maniac. He probably at times laughed to himself and

talked aloud. He was so pensive near the nursery-maids that each of

them fancied him in love with her. He quitted the Luxembourg, hoping

to meet her again in the street. He met Courfeyrac under the arcades

of the Pantheon, and said to him, "Come and dine with me." They went

to Rousseau's and spent six francs. Marius ate like an ogre, and gave

six sous to the waiter. After dinner he said to Courfeyrac, "Have

you read the papers? What a fine speech Audry de Puyraveau made!"

He was distractedly in love. He then said to Courfeyrac, "Let us go

to the theatre,--I'll pay." They went to the Porte St. Martin to

see Frederick in the "Auberge des Adrets," and Marius was mightily

amused. At the same time he became more virtuous than ever. On leaving

the theatre he refused to look at the garter of a dressmaker who was

striding across a gutter, and Courfeyrac happening to say, "I should

like to place that woman in my collection," he almost felt horrified.

Courfeyrac invited him to breakfast next morning at the Café Voltaire.

He went there, and ate even more than on the previous day. He was

thoughtful and very gay, and seemed to take every opportunity to laugh

noisily. A party of students collected round the table and spoke of the

absurdities paid for by the State, which are produced from the pulpit

of the Sorbonne, and then the conversation turned to the faults and

gaps in dictionaries. Marius interrupted the discussion by exclaiming,

"And yet it is very agreeable to have the cross."

"That is funny!" Courfeyrac whispered to Jean Prouvaire.

"No, it is serious," the other answered.

It was in truth serious; Marius had reached that startling and charming

hour which commences great passions. A look had effected all this. When

the mine is loaded, when the fire is ready, nothing is more simple,

and a glance is a spark. It was all over; Marius loved a woman, and

his destiny was entering the unknown. The glance of a woman resembles

certain wheels which are apparently gentle but are formidable: you

daily pass by their side with impunity, and without suspecting

anything, and the moment arrives when you even forget that the thing

is there. You come, you go, you dream, you speak, you laugh, and all

in a minute you feel yourself caught, and it is all over with you. The

wheel holds you, the glance has caught you; it has caught, no matter

where or how, by some part of your thought which dragged after you, or

by some inattention on your part. You are lost, and your whole body

will be drawn in; a series of mysterious forces seizes you, and you

struggle in vain, for human aid is no longer possible. You pass from

cog-wheel to cog-wheel, from agony to agony, from torture to torture,

--you and your mind, your fortune, your future, and your soul; and,

according as you are in the power of a wicked creature or of a noble

heart, you will issue from this frightful machinery either disfigured

by shame or transfigured by passion.

CHAPTER VII.

ADVENTURES OF THE LETTER "U" LEFT TO CONJECTURES.

Isolation, separation from everything, pride, independence, a taste for

nature, the absence of daily and material labor, the soul-struggles

of chastity, and his benevolent ecstasy in the presence of creation,

had prepared Marius for that possession which is called passion. His

reverence for his father had gradually become a religion, and, like all

religions, withdrew into the depths of the soul: something was wanting

for the foreground, and love came. A whole month passed, during which

Marius went daily to the Luxembourg: when the hour arrived nothing

could stop him. "He is on duty," Courfeyrac said. Marius lived in

rapture, and it is certain that the young lady looked at him. In the

end he had grown bolder, and went nearer the bench; still he did not

pass in front of it, obeying at once the timid instincts and prudent

instincts of lovers. He thought it advisable not to attract the

father's attention, and hence arranged his stations behind trees and

the pedestals of statues, with profound Machiavellism, so as to be

seen as much as possible by the young lady and as little as possible

by the old gentleman. At times he would be standing for half an hour

motionless in the shadow of some Leonidas or Spartacus, holding in one

hand a book, over which his eyes, gently raised, sought the lovely

girl; and she, for her part, turned her charming profile toward him

with a vague smile. While talking most naturally and quietly with the

white-haired man, she fixed upon Marius all the reveries of a virginal

and impassioned glance. It is an old and immemorial trick which Eve

knew from the first day of the world, and which every woman knows from

the first day of her life. Her mouth replied to the one and her eye

answered the other.

It must be supposed, however, that M. Leblanc eventually noticed

something, for frequently when Marius arrived he got up and began

walking. He left their accustomed seat, and adopted at the other end of

the walk the bench close to the Gladiator, as if to see whether Marius

would follow them. Marius did not understand it, and committed this

fault. "The father" began to become unpunctual, and no longer brought

"his daughter" every day. At times he came alone, and then Marius did

not stop, and this was another fault. Marius paid no attention to these

symptoms: from the timid phase he had passed by a natural and fatal

progress into a blind phase. His love was growing, and he dreamed of

it every night, and then an unexpected happiness occurred to him, like

oil on fire, and redoubled the darkness over his eyes. One evening at

twilight he found on the bench which "M. Leblanc and his daughter" had

just quitted, a simple, unembroidered handkerchief, which, however, was

white and pure, and seemed to him to exhale ineffable odors. He seized

it with transport, and noticed that it was marked with the letters "U.

F." Marius knew nothing about the lovely girl, neither her family, her

name, nor her abode; these two letters were the first thing of hers

which he seized,--adorable initials, upon which he at once began to

erect his scaffolding. "U" was evidently the Christian name: "Ursule!"

he thought; "what a delicious name!" He kissed the handkerchief, smelt

it, placed it on his heart during the day, and at night upon his lips

to go to sleep.

"I can see her whole soul!" he exclaimed.

This handkerchief belonged to the old gentleman, who had simply let it

fall from his pocket. On the following days, when Marius went to the

Luxembourg, he kissed the handkerchief, and pressed it to his heart.

The lovely girl did not understand what this meant, and expressed her

surprise by imperceptible signs.

"Oh, modesty!" said Marius.

CHAPTER VIII.

EVEN INVALIDS MAY BE LUCKY.

Since we have uttered the word _modesty_, and as we conceal nothing,

we are bound to say, however, that notwithstanding his ecstasy, on

one occasion "his Ursule" caused him serious vexation. It was on one

of the days when she induced M. Leblanc to leave the bench and walk

about. There was a sharp spring breeze which shook the tops of the

plane-trees; and father and daughter, arm in arm, had just passed in

front of Marius, who rose and watched them, as was fitting for a man in

his condition. All at once a puff of wind, more merry than the rest,

and probably ordered to do the business of spring, dashed along the

walk, enveloped the maiden in a delicious rustling worthy of the nymphs

of Virgil and the Fauns of Theocritus, and raised her dress--that dress

more sacred than that of Isis--almost as high as her garter. A leg of

exquisite shape became visible. Marius saw it, and he was exasperated

and furious. The maiden rapidly put down her dress, with a divinely

startled movement, but he was not the less indignant. There was no

one in the walk, it was true, but there might have been somebody; and

if that somebody had been there! Is such a thing conceivable? What

she has just done is horrible! Alas! the poor girl had done nothing,

and there was only one culprit, the wind; but Marius, in whom faintly

quivered the Bartholo which is in Cherubino, was determined to be

dissatisfied, and was jealous of his shadow; it is thus, in fact,

that the bitter and strange jealousy of the flesh is aroused in the

human heart, and dominates it, even unjustly. Besides, apart from his

jealousy, the sight of this charming leg was not at all agreeable to

him, and any other woman's white stocking would have caused him more

pleasure.

When "his Ursule," after reaching the end of the walk, turned back

with M. Leblanc, and passed in front of the bench on which Marius was

sitting, he gave her a stern, savage glance. The girl drew herself

slightly up, and raised her eyelids, which means, "Well, what is the

matter now?" This was their first quarrel. Marius had scarce finished

upbraiding her in this way with his eyes, when some one crossed the

walk. It was a bending invalid, all wrinkled and white, wearing the

uniform of Louis XV., having on his chest the little oval red cloth

badge with crossed swords, the soldier's cross of Saint Louis, and

decorated besides with an empty coat-sleeve, a silver chin, and a

wooden leg. Marius fancied he could notice that this man had an air

of satisfaction; it seemed to him that the old cynic, while hobbling

past him, gave him a fraternal and extremely jovial wink, as if some

accident had enabled them to enjoy in common some good thing. Why was

this relic of Mars so pleased? What had occurred, between this wooden

leg and the other? Marius attained the paroxysm of jealousy, "He was

perhaps there," he said to himself; "perhaps he saw," and he felt

inclined to exterminate the invalid.

With the help of time every point grows blunted, and Marius's anger

with "Ursule," though so just and legitimate, passed away. He ended by

pardoning her; but it was a mighty effort, and he sulked with her for

three days. Still, through all this, and owing to all this, his passion

increased, and became insane.

CHAPTER IX.

ECLIPSE.

We have seen how Marius discovered, or fancied he had discovered, that

her name was Ursule. Appetite comes while loving, and to know that her

name was Ursule was a great deal already, but it was little. In three

or four weeks Marius had devoured this happiness and craved another; he

wished to know where she lived. He had made the first fault in falling

into the trap of the Gladiator's bench; he had committed a second by

not remaining at the Luxembourg when M. Leblanc went there alone;

and he now committed a third, an immense one,--he followed "Ursule."

She lived in the Rue de l'Ouest, in the most isolated part, in a new

three-storied house of modest appearance. From this moment Marius added

to his happiness of seeing her at the Luxembourg the happiness of

following her home. His hunger increased; he knew what her name was,

her Christian name at least, the charming, the real name of a woman;

he knew where she lived; and he now wanted to know who she was. One

evening after following them home, and watching them disappear in the

gateway, he went in after them, and valiantly addressed the porter.

"Is that the gentleman of the first floor who has just come in?"

"No," the porter answered, "it is the gentleman of the third floor."

Another step made! This success emboldened Marius.

"Front?" he asked.

"Hang it!" said the porter, "our rooms all look on the street."

"And what is the gentleman?" Marius continued.

"He lives on his property. He is a very good man, who does a deal of

good to the unhappy, though he is not rich."

"What is his name?" Marius added.

The porter raised his head and said,--

"Are you a police spy, sir?"

Marius went off much abashed, but highly delighted, for he was

progressing.

"Good!" he thought; "I know that her name is Ursule, that she is the

daughter of a retired gentleman, and that she lives there, on a third

floor in the Rue de l'Ouest."

On the morrow M. Leblanc and his daughter made but a short appearance

at the Luxembourg, and went away in broad daylight. Marius followed

them to the Rue de l'Ouest, as was his habit, and on reaching the

gateway M. Leblanc made his daughter go in first, then stopped, turned,

and looked intently at Marius. The next day they did not come to the

Luxembourg, and Marius waited in vain the whole day. At nightfall he

went to the Rue de l'Ouest, and noticed a light in the third-floor

windows, and he walked about beneath these windows till the light

was extinguished. The next day there was no one at the Luxembourg;

Marius waited all day, and then went to keep his night-watch under the

windows. This took him till ten o'clock, and his dinner became what

it could; for fever nourishes the sick man and love the lover. Eight

days passed in this way, and M. Leblanc and his daughter did not again

appear at the Luxembourg. Marius made sorrowful conjectures, for he did

not dare watch the gateway by day; he contented himself with going at

night to contemplate the reddish brightness of the window-panes. He saw

shadows pass now and then, and his heart beat.

On the eighth day, when he arrived beneath the windows, there was no

light. "What!" he said to himself, "the lamp is not lighted! can they

have gone out?" He waited till ten o'clock, till midnight, till one

o'clock, but no light was kindled at the third-floor windows, and

nobody entered the house. He went away with very gloomy thoughts.

On the morrow--for he only lived from morrow to morrow, and he had

no to-day, so to speak--he saw nobody at the Luxembourg, as he

expected, and at nightfall he went to the house. There was no light

at the windows, the shutters were closed, and the third floor was all

darkness. Marius rapped, walked in, and said to the porter,--

"The gentleman on the third floor?"

"Moved," the porter answered.

Marius tottered, and asked feebly,--

"Since when?"

"Yesterday."

"Where is he living now?"

"I do not know."

"Then he did not leave his new address?"

"No."

And the porter, raising his nose, recognized Marius.

"What! it's you, is it?" he said; "why, you must really be a police

spy."

BOOK VII

PATRON MINETTE.

CHAPTER I.

MINES AND MINERS.

Human societies have ever what is called in theatres "un troisième

dessous," and the social soil is everywhere undermined, here for good

and there for evil. These works are upon one another; there are upper

mines and lower mines, and there is a top and bottom in this obscure

sub-soil, which at times gives way beneath the weight of civilization,

and which our indifference and carelessness trample under foot. The

Encyclopædia was in the last century an almost open mine, and the

darkness, that gloomy brooder of primitive Christianity, only awaited

an occasion to explode beneath the Cæsars and inundate the human race

with light. For in the sacred darkness there is latent light, and the

volcanoes are full of a shadow which is capable of flashing, and all

lava begins by being night. The catacombs in which the first Mass was

read were not merely the cellar of Rome but also the vault of the world.

There are all sorts of excavations beneath the social building, that

marvel complicated by a hovel; there is the religious mine, the

philosophic mine, the political mine, the social economic mine, and the

revolutionary mine. One man picks with the idea, another with figure,

another with auger, and they call to and answer each other from the

catacombs. Utopias move in subterranean passages and ramify in all

directions; they meet there at times and fraternize. Jean Jacques

lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends him his lantern in turn; at

times, though, they fight, and Calvin clutches Socinus by the hair. But

nothing arrests or interrupts the tension of all their energies toward

the object, and the vast simultaneous energy, which comes and goes,

ascends, descends, and reascends, in the obscurity, and which slowly

substitutes top for bottom and inside for out; it is an immense and

unknown ant-heap. Society hardly suspects this excavation, which leaves

no traces on its surface and yet changes its insides; and there are as

many different works and varying extractions as there are subterranean

tiers. What issues from all these deep excavations? The future.

The deeper we go the more mysterious the mines become. To a certain

point which the social philosopher is able to recognize the labor is

good; beyond that point it is doubtful and mixed, and lower still

it becomes terrible. At a certain depth the excavations can no

longer be endured by the spirit of civilization, and man's limit of

breathing is passed: a commencement of monsters becomes possible.

The descending ladder is strange, and each rung corresponds with a

stage upon which philosophy can land, and meet one of these miners,

who are sometimes divine, at others deformed. Below John Huss there

is Luther; below Luther, Descartes; below Descartes, Voltaire; below

Voltaire, Condorcet; below Condorcet, Robespierre; below Robespierre,

Marat; and below Marat, Babeuf; and so it goes on. Lower still we

notice confusedly, at the limit which separates the indistinct from the

invisible, other gloomy men, who perhaps do not yet exist: those of

yesterday are spectres, those of the morrow grubs. The mental eye can

only distinguish them obscurely, and the embryonic labor of the future

is one of the visions of the philosopher. A world in limbo at the fœtus

stage--what an extraordinary sketch! St Simon, Owen, and Founder are

also there in the side-passages.

Assuredly, although a divine and invisible chain connects together

without their cognizance all these subterranean miners, who nearly

always fancy themselves isolated but are not so, their labors vary

greatly, and the light of the one contrasts with the dazzle of the

other: some are celestial and others tragical. Still, however great

the contrast may be, all these laborers, from the highest to the most

nocturnal, from the wisest down to the maddest, have a similitude

in their disinterestedness: they leave themselves on one side, omit

themselves, do not think of themselves, and see something different

from themselves. They have a glance, and that glance seeks the

absolute; the first has heaven in his eyes, and the last, however

enigmatical he may be, has beneath Ids eyebrow the pale brightness of

infinity. Venerate every man, no matter what he may be doing,--any

man who has the sign, a starry eyeball. The dark eyeball is the other

sign, and with it evil begins. Before the man who has this look, think

and tremble. Social order has its black miners. There is a point where

profundity is burial and where light is extinguished. Below all these

mines which we have indicated,--below all these galleries, below all

this immense subterranean arterial system of progress and Utopia, far

deeper in the ground, below Marat, below Babeuf, much, much lower,

there is the last passage, which has no connection with the upper

drifts. It is a formidable spot, and what we termed the _troisième

dessous_. It is the grave of darkness and the cave of the blind,

_Inferi_, and communicates with the abysses.

CHAPTER II.

THE BOTTOM.

Here disinterestedness fades away, and the dream is vaguely sketched.

Every one for himself. The eyeless I yells, seeks, gropes, and

groans: the social Ugolino is in this gulf. The ferocious shadows

which prowl about this grave, almost brutes, almost phantoms, do

not trouble themselves about human progress; they are ignorant of

ideas and language, and thus they care for nought beyond individual

gratification. They are almost unconscious, and there is within them

a species of frightful obliteration. They have two mothers, both

step-mothers,--ignorance and wretchedness. They have for their guide

want, and for all power of satisfaction appetite; they are brutally

voracious, that is to say, ferocious,--not after the fashion of the

tyrant, but that of the tiger. From suffering these grubs pass to

crime,--it is a fetal affiliation, a ghastly propagation, the logic of

darkness; what crawls in the lowest passage is no longer the stifled

demand of the absolute, but the protest of matter. Man becomes a dragon

then; his starting-point is to be hungry and thirsty, and his terminus

is to be Satan. Lacenaire issued from this cave.

We have just seen one of the compartments of the upper mine, the great

political, revolutionary, and philosophic sap. There, as we said, all

is noble, pure, worthy, and honest: men may be mistaken in it, and are

mistaken, but the error must be revered, because it implies so much

heroism, and the work performed there has a name,--Progress. The moment

has now arrived to take a glance at other and hideous depths. There is

beneath society, and there ever will be, till the day when ignorance

is dissipated, the great cavern of evil. This cavern is below all the

rest, and the enemy of all; it is hatred without exception. This cavern

knows no philosophers, and its dagger never made a pen, while its

blackness bears no relation with the sublime blackness of the inkstand.

The fingers of night, which clench beneath this asphyxiating roof,

never opened a book or unfolded a newspaper. Babeuf is to Cartouche a

person who takes advantage of his knowledge, and Marat an aristocrat

in the sight of Schinderhannes, and the object of this cavern is the

overthrow of everything.

Of everything,--including the upper levels, which it execrates. It not

only undermines in its hideous labor the existing social order, but it

undermines philosophy, science, the law, human thought, civilization,

revolution, and progress, and it calls itself most simply, robbery,

prostitution, murder, and assassination. It is darkness, and desires

chaos, and its roof is composed of ignorance. All the other mines

above it have only one object, to suppress it; and philosophy and

progress strive for this with all their organs simultaneously, by the

amelioration of the real, as well as the contemplation of the ideal.

Destroy the cave, Ignorance, and you destroy the mole, Crime. Let us

condense in a few words a portion of what we have just written. The

sole social evil is darkness; humanity is identity, for all men are

of the same clay, and in this nether world, at least, there is no

difference in predestination; we are the same shadow before, the same

flesh during, and the same ashes afterwards: but ignorance, mixed with

the human paste, blackens it, and this incurable blackness enters man

and becomes Evil there.

CHAPTER III.

BABET, GUEULEMER, CLAQUESOUS, AND MONTPARNASSE.

A quartette of bandits, Babet, Gueulemer, Claquesous, and Montparnasse,

governed, from 1830 to 1835, the lowest depths of Paris. Gueulemer was

a Hercules out of place, and his den was the Arche-Marion sewer. He was

six feet high, had lungs of marble, muscles of bronze, the respiration

of a cavern, the bust of a colossus, and a bird's skull. You fancied

you saw the Farnèse Hercules, attired in ticking trousers and a

cotton-velvet jacket. Gueulemer built in this mould might have subdued

monsters, but he had found it shorter to be one. A low forehead, wide

temples, under forty years of age, but with crow's-feet, rough short

hair, and a bushy beard,--you can see the man. His muscles demanded

work, and his stupidity would not accept it: he was a great slothful

strength, and an assassin through nonchalance. People believed him to

be a Creole, and he had probably laid his hands upon Marshal Brune when

massacred, as he was a porter at Avignon in 1815. From that stage he

had become a bandit.

Babet's transparency contrasted with the meat of Gueulemer; he was

thin and learned,--transparent but impenetrable: you might see the

light through his bones, but not through his eyes. He called himself a

chemist, had been a clown with Bobêche and a harlequin with Bobino, and

had played in the vaudeville at St. Mihiel. He was a man of intentions,

and a fine speaker, who underlined his smiles and placed his gestures

between inverted commas. His trade was to sell in the open air plaster

busts and portraits of the "chief of the State," and, in addition, he

pulled teeth out. He had shown phenomena at fairs, and possessed a

booth with a trumpet and the following show-board,--"Babet, dentist,

and member of the academies, performs physical experiments on metals

and metalloids, extirpates teeth, and undertakes stumps given up by

the profession. Terms: one tooth, one franc fifty centimes; two teeth,

two francs; three teeth, two francs fifty centimes. Take advantage of

the opportunity." (The last sentence meant, Have as many teeth pulled

out as possible.) He was married and had children, but did not know

what had become of wife or children: he had lost them, just as another

man loses his handkerchief. Babet was a high exception in the obscure

world to which he belonged, for he read the newspapers. One day, at the

time when he still had his family with him in his caravan, he read in

the _Moniteur_ that a woman had just been delivered of a child with a

calf's snout, and exclaimed, "There's a fortune! My wife would not have

the sense to produce me a child like that!" Since then he had given up

everything to "undertake Paris:" the expression is his own.

What was Claquesous? He was night; and never showed himself till the

sky was bedaubed with blackness. In the evening he emerged from a

hole, to which he returned before daybreak. Where was this hole? No one

knew. In the greatest darkness, and when alone with his accomplices,

he turned his back when he spoke to them. Was his name Claquesous? No:

he said, "My name is Not-at-all." If a candle were brought in he put

on a mask, and he was a ventriloquist into the bargain, and Babet used

to say, "Claquesous is a night-bird with two voices." Claquesous was

vague, wandering, and terrible: no one was sure that he had a name,

for Claquesous was a nickname; no one was sure that he had a voice,

for his stomach spoke more frequently than his mouth; and no one was

sure that he had a face, as nothing had ever been seen but his mask. He

disappeared like a ghost, and when he appeared he seemed to issue from

the ground.

Montparnasse was a sorry sight. He was a lad not yet twenty, with a

pretty face, lips that resembled cherries, beautiful black hair, and

the brightness of spring in his eyes: he had every vice, and aspired to

every crime, and the digestion of evil gave him an appetite for worse.

He was the gamin turned pickpocket, and the pickpocket had become a

garroter. He was genteel, effeminate, graceful, robust, soft, and

ferocious. The left-hand brim of his hat was turned up to make room for

the tuft of hair, in the style of 1829. He lived by robbery committed

with violence, and his coat was cut in the latest fashion, though worn

at the seams. Montparnasse was an engraving of the fashions, in a state

of want, and committing murders. The cause of all the attacks made by

this young man was a longing to be well dressed: the first grisette

who said to him, "You are handsome," put the black spot in his heart,

and made a Cain of this Abel. Finding himself good-looking, he wished

to be elegant, and the first stage of elegance is idleness: but the

idleness of the poor man is crime. Few prowlers were so formidable

as Montparnasse, and at the age of eighteen he had several corpses

behind him. More than one wayfarer lay in the shadow of this villain

with outstretched arms, and with his face in a pool of blood. Curled,

pomaded, with his waist pinched in, the hips of a woman, the bust of a

Prussian officer, the buzz of admiration of the girls of the boulevard

around him, a carefully-tied cravat, a life-preserver in his pocket,

and a flower in his buttonhole,--such was this dandy of the tomb.

CHAPTER IV.

COMPOSITION OF THE TROOP.

These four bandits formed a species of Proteus, winding through the

police ranks and striving to escape the indiscreet glances of Vidocq

"under various shapes,--tree, flame, and fountain,"--borrowing one

another's names and tricks, asylums for one another, laying aside

their personality as a man removes a false nose at a masquerade; at

times simplifying themselves so as to be only one man, at others

multiplying themselves to such an extent that Coco-Latour himself took

them for a mob. These four men were not four men; they were a species

of four-headed robber working Paris on a grand scale; the monstrous

polype of evil inhabiting the crypt of society. Owing to their

ramifications and the subjacent network of their relations, Babet,

Gueulemer, Claquesous, and Montparnasse had the general direction of

all the foul play in the department of the Seine. The finders of ideas

in this style, the men with nocturnal imaginations, applied to them

to execute them; the four villains were supplied with the canvas, and

they produced the scenery. They were always in a position to supply a

proportionate and proper staff for every robbery which was sufficiently

lucrative and required a stout arm. If a crime were in want of persons

to carry it out, they sub-let the accomplices, and they always had a

band of actors at the service of all the tragedies of the caverns.

They generally met at nightfall, the hour when they awoke, on the

steppes that border the Salpêtrière. There they conferred, and,

as they had the twelve dark hours before them, they settled their

employment. _Patron Minette_ was the name given in the subterranean

lurking-places to the association of these four men. In the old and

fantastic popular language, which is daily dying out, Patron Minette

signifies the morning, just as "between dog and wolf" signifies night.

This appellation was probably derived from the hour when their work

finished, for dawn is the moment for spectres to fade away and for

bandits to part. These four men were known by this title. When the

President of the Assizes visited Lacenaire in prison, he questioned

him about a crime which the murderer denied. "Who committed it?" the

President asked; and Lacenaire gave this answer, which was enigmatical

for the magistrate, but clear for the police,--"It is, perhaps, Patron

Minette."

The plot of a play may be at times divined from the list of names; and

a party of bandits may perhaps be appreciated in the same way. Here are

the names to which the principal members of Patron Minette answered,

exactly as they survive in special memoirs.

Panchaud called Spring, _alias_ Bigrenaille, Brujon (there was a

dynasty of Brujons, about whom we may still say a word); Boulatruelle,

the road-mender, of whom we have caught a glimpse; Laveuve; Finistère;

Homer-Hogu, a negro; Tuesday night; Make haste; Fauntleroy, _alias_

Flower-girl; Glorious, a liberated convict; Stop the coach, _alias_

Monsieur Dupont; The Southern Esplanade; Poussagrive; Carmagnolet;

Kruideniers, _alias_ Bizarro; Lace-eater; Feet in the air; Half

farthing, _alias_ Two Milliards, etc. etc.

These names have faces, and express not merely beings but species. Each

of these names responds to a variety of the poisonous fungi which grow

beneath human civilization. These beings, very careful about showing

their faces, were not of those whom we may see passing by day, for at

that period, weary of their night wanderings, they went to sleep in the

lime-kilns, the deserted quarries of Montmartre or Montrouge, or even

in the snow. They ran to earth.

What has become of these men? They still exist, and have ever existed.

Horace alludes to them in his _Ambubaiarum collegia, pharmacopolœ,

mendici, mimœ_, and so as long as society is what it is they will be

what they are. Under the obscure vault of their cellar they are even

born again from the social leakage; they return as spectres, but ever

identical. The only difference is that they no longer bear the same

names and are no longer in the same skins; though the individuals are

extirpated, the tribe exists. They have always the same qualities,

and from vagrant to prowler, the race ever remains pure. They guess

purses in pockets and scent watches in fobs; and gold and silver have

a peculiar smell for them. There are simple cits of whom we might say

that they have a robbable look, and these men patiently follow these

cits. When a foreigner or a countryman passes, they quiver like the

spider in its web.

These men, when we catch a glimpse of them upon a deserted boulevard

at midnight, are frightful; they do not seem to be men, but forms made

of living fog; we might say that they are habitually a portion of the

darkness, that they are not distinct, that they have no other soul but

shadow, and that they have become detached from night momentarily, and

in order to live a monstrous life for a few moments. What is required

to make these phantoms vanish? light, floods of light. Not a single bat

can resist the dawn. Light up the lower strata of society.

BOOK VIII.

THE EVIL POOR.

CHAPTER I.

MARIUS LOOKING FOR A GIRL'S BONNET MEETS A MAN'S CAP.

Summer passed away, then autumn and winter arrived. Neither M. Leblanc

nor the young lady had set foot again in the Luxembourg, while Marius

had but one thought, that of seeing again this sweet and adorable face.

He sought it ever, he sought it everywhere, but found nothing. He was

no longer Marius the enthusiastic dreamer, the resolute, ardent, and

firm man, the bold challenger of destiny, the brain that built up

future upon future, the young mind encumbered with plans, projects,

pride, ideas, and resolves,--he was a lost dog. He fell into a dark

sorrow, and it was all over with him; work was repulsive, walking

fatigued him, and solitude wearied him. Mighty nature, once so full

of forms, brightness, voices, counsel, perspectives, horizons, and

instruction, was now a vacuum before him; and he felt as if everything

had disappeared. He still thought, for he could not do otherwise, but

no longer took pleasure in his thoughts. To all that they incessantly

proposed to him in whispers, he answered in the shadow, "What use is

it?" He made himself a hundred reproaches. "Why did I follow her? I

was so happy merely in seeing her! She looked at me, and was not that

immense? She looked as if she loved me, and was not that everything? I

wanted to have what? There is nothing beyond that, and I was absurd. It

is my fault," etc. etc. Courfeyrac, to whom he confided nothing, as was

his nature, but who guessed pretty nearly all, for that was his nature

too, had begun by congratulating him on being in love, and made sundry

bad jokes about it. Then, on seeing Marius in this melancholy state, he

ended by saying to him, "I see that you have simply been a fool; come

to the Chaumière."

Once, putting confidence in a splendid September sun, Marius allowed

himself to be taken to the ball of Sceaux by Courfeyrac, Bossuet, and

Grantaire, hoping--what a dream!--that he might find her there. Of

course he did not see the lady whom he sought; "and yet this is the

place where all the lost women can be found," Grantaire growled aside.

Marius left his friends at the ball, and returned afoot, alone, tired,

feverish, with eyes troubled and sad, in the night, stunned with noise

and dust by the many vehicles full of singing beings who were returning

from the holiday, and who passed him. He was discouraged, and in order

to relieve his aching head, inhaled the sharp smell of the walnut-trees

on the road-side. He began living again more than ever in solitude,

crushed, giving way to his internal agony, walking up and down like

a wolf caught in a trap, everywhere seeking the absent one, and

brutalized by love.

Another time he had a meeting which produced a strange effect upon

him. In the little streets adjoining the Boulevard des Invalides he

passed a man dressed like a workman, and wearing a deep-peaked cap,

under which white locks peered out. Marius was struck by the beauty of

this white hair, and looked at the man, who was walking slowly, and as

if absorbed in painful meditation. Strange to say, he fancied that he

could recognize M. Leblanc,--it was the same hair, the same profile, as

far as the peak allowed him to see, and the same gait, though somewhat

more melancholy. But why this work-man's clothing? What was the meaning

of this disguise? Marius was greatly surprised, and when he came to

himself again his first impulse was to follow this man, for he might,

perhaps, hold the clew which he had so long been seeking. At any rate,

he must have a close look at the man, and clear up the enigma; but he

hit on this idea too late, for the man was no longer there. He had

turned into some side street, and Marius was unable to find him again.

This meeting troubled him for some days, and then faded away. "After

all," he said to himself, "it is probably only a resemblance."