Jean Valjean fancied that it was Javert’s intention to conduct him on
foot to the post of the Blancs-Manteaux or to the post of the Archives,
both of which are close at hand.
They entered the street. It was deserted as usual. Javert followed Jean
Valjean. They reached No. 7. Jean Valjean knocked. The door opened.
“It is well,” said Javert. “Go upstairs.”
He added with a strange expression, and as though he were exerting an
effort in speaking in this manner:
“I will wait for you here.”
Jean Valjean looked at Javert. This mode of procedure was but little in
accord with Javert’s habits. However, he could not be greatly surprised
that Javert should now have a sort of haughty confidence in him, the
confidence of the cat which grants the mouse liberty to the length of
its claws, seeing that Jean Valjean had made up his mind to surrender
himself and to make an end of it. He pushed open the door, entered the
house, called to the porter who was in bed and who had pulled the cord
from his couch: “It is I!” and ascended the stairs.
On arriving at the first floor, he paused. All sorrowful roads have
their stations. The window on the landing-place, which was a
sash-window, was open. As in many ancient houses, the staircase got its
light from without and had a view on the street. The street-lantern,
situated directly opposite, cast some light on the stairs, and thus
effected some economy in illumination.
Jean Valjean, either for the sake of getting the air, or mechanically,
thrust his head out of this window. He leaned out over the street. It
is short, and the lantern lighted it from end to end. Jean Valjean was
overwhelmed with amazement; there was no longer any one there.
Javert had taken his departure.
CHAPTER XII—THE GRANDFATHER
Basque and the porter had carried Marius into the drawing-room, as he
still lay stretched out, motionless, on the sofa upon which he had been
placed on his arrival. The doctor who had been sent for had hastened
thither. Aunt Gillenormand had risen.
Aunt Gillenormand went and came, in affright, wringing her hands and
incapable of doing anything but saying: “Heavens! is it possible?” At
times she added: “Everything will be covered with blood.” When her
first horror had passed off, a certain philosophy of the situation
penetrated her mind, and took form in the exclamation: “It was bound to
end in this way!” She did not go so far as: “I told you so!” which is
customary on this sort of occasion. At the physician’s orders, a camp
bed had been prepared beside the sofa. The doctor examined Marius, and
after having found that his pulse was still beating, that the wounded
man had no very deep wound on his breast, and that the blood on the
corners of his lips proceeded from his nostrils, he had him placed flat
on the bed, without a pillow, with his head on the same level as his
body, and even a trifle lower, and with his bust bare in order to
facilitate respiration. Mademoiselle Gillenormand, on perceiving that
they were undressing Marius, withdrew. She set herself to telling her
beads in her own chamber.
The trunk had not suffered any internal injury; a bullet, deadened by
the pocket-book, had turned aside and made the tour of his ribs with a
hideous laceration, which was of no great depth, and consequently, not
dangerous. The long, underground journey had completed the dislocation
of the broken collar-bone, and the disorder there was serious. The arms
had been slashed with sabre cuts. Not a single scar disfigured his
face; but his head was fairly covered with cuts; what would be the
result of these wounds on the head? Would they stop short at the hairy
cuticle, or would they attack the brain? As yet, this could not be
decided. A grave symptom was that they had caused a swoon, and that
people do not always recover from such swoons. Moreover, the wounded
man had been exhausted by hemorrhage. From the waist down, the
barricade had protected the lower part of the body from injury.
Basque and Nicolette tore up linen and prepared bandages; Nicolette
sewed them, Basque rolled them. As lint was lacking, the doctor, for
the time being, arrested the bleeding with layers of wadding. Beside
the bed, three candles burned on a table where the case of surgical
instruments lay spread out. The doctor bathed Marius’ face and hair
with cold water. A full pail was reddened in an instant. The porter,
candle in hand, lighted them.
The doctor seemed to be pondering sadly. From time to time, he made a
negative sign with his head, as though replying to some question which
he had inwardly addressed to himself.
A bad sign for the sick man are these mysterious dialogues of the
doctor with himself.
At the moment when the doctor was wiping Marius’ face, and lightly
touching his still closed eyes with his finger, a door opened at the
end of the drawing-room, and a long, pallid figure made its appearance.
This was the grandfather.
The revolt had, for the past two days, deeply agitated, enraged and
engrossed the mind of M. Gillenormand. He had not been able to sleep on
the previous night, and he had been in a fever all day long. In the
evening, he had gone to bed very early, recommending that everything in
the house should be well barred, and he had fallen into a doze through
sheer fatigue.
Old men sleep lightly; M. Gillenormand’s chamber adjoined the
drawing-room, and in spite of all the precautions that had been taken,
the noise had awakened him. Surprised at the rift of light which he saw
under his door, he had risen from his bed, and had groped his way
thither.
He stood astonished on the threshold, one hand on the handle of the
half-open door, with his head bent a little forward and quivering, his
body wrapped in a white dressing-gown, which was straight and as
destitute of folds as a winding-sheet; and he had the air of a phantom
who is gazing into a tomb.
He saw the bed, and on the mattress that young man, bleeding, white
with a waxen whiteness, with closed eyes and gaping mouth, and pallid
lips, stripped to the waist, slashed all over with crimson wounds,
motionless and brilliantly lighted up.
The grandfather trembled from head to foot as powerfully as ossified
limbs can tremble, his eyes, whose corneæ were yellow on account of his
great age, were veiled in a sort of vitreous glitter, his whole face
assumed in an instant the earthy angles of a skull, his arms fell
pendent, as though a spring had broken, and his amazement was betrayed
by the outspreading of the fingers of his two aged hands, which
quivered all over, his knees formed an angle in front, allowing,
through the opening in his dressing-gown, a view of his poor bare legs,
all bristling with white hairs, and he murmured:
“Marius!”
“Sir,” said Basque, “Monsieur has just been brought back. He went to
the barricade, and....”
“He is dead!” cried the old man in a terrible voice. “Ah! The rascal!”
Then a sort of sepulchral transformation straightened up this
centenarian as erect as a young man.
“Sir,” said he, “you are the doctor. Begin by telling me one thing. He
is dead, is he not?”
The doctor, who was at the highest pitch of anxiety, remained silent.
M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with an outburst of terrible laughter.
“He is dead! He is dead! He is dead! He has got himself killed on the
barricades! Out of hatred to me! He did that to spite me! Ah! You
blood-drinker! This is the way he returns to me! Misery of my life, he
is dead!”
He went to the window, threw it wide open as though he were stifling,
and, erect before the darkness, he began to talk into the street, to
the night:
“Pierced, sabred, exterminated, slashed, hacked in pieces! Just look at
that, the villain! He knew well that I was waiting for him, and that I
had had his room arranged, and that I had placed at the head of my bed
his portrait taken when he was a little child! He knew well that he had
only to come back, and that I had been recalling him for years, and
that I remained by my fireside, with my hands on my knees, not knowing
what to do, and that I was mad over it! You knew well, that you had but
to return and to say: ‘It is I,’ and you would have been the master of
the house, and that I should have obeyed you, and that you could have
done whatever you pleased with your old numskull of a grandfather! you
knew that well, and you said:
“No, he is a Royalist, I will not go! And you went to the barricades,
and you got yourself killed out of malice! To revenge yourself for what
I said to you about Monsieur le Duc de Berry. It is infamous! Go to bed
then and sleep tranquilly! he is dead, and this is my awakening.”
The doctor, who was beginning to be uneasy in both quarters, quitted
Marius for a moment, went to M. Gillenormand, and took his arm. The
grandfather turned round, gazed at him with eyes which seemed
exaggerated in size and bloodshot, and said to him calmly:
“I thank you, sir. I am composed, I am a man, I witnessed the death of
Louis XVI., I know how to bear events. One thing is terrible and that
is to think that it is your newspapers which do all the mischief. You
will have scribblers, chatterers, lawyers, orators, tribunes,
discussions, progress, enlightenment, the rights of man, the liberty of
the press, and this is the way that your children will be brought home
to you. Ah! Marius! It is abominable! Killed! Dead before me! A
barricade! Ah, the scamp! Doctor, you live in this quarter, I believe?
Oh! I know you well. I see your cabriolet pass my window. I am going to
tell you. You are wrong to think that I am angry. One does not fly into
a rage against a dead man. That would be stupid. This is a child whom I
have reared. I was already old while he was very young. He played in
the Tuileries garden with his little shovel and his little chair, and
in order that the inspectors might not grumble, I stopped up the holes
that he made in the earth with his shovel, with my cane. One day he
exclaimed: Down with Louis XVIII.! and off he went. It was no fault of
mine. He was all rosy and blond. His mother is dead. Have you ever
noticed that all little children are blond? Why is it so? He is the son
of one of those brigands of the Loire, but children are innocent of
their fathers’ crimes. I remember when he was no higher than that. He
could not manage to pronounce his Ds. He had a way of talking that was
so sweet and indistinct that you would have thought it was a bird
chirping. I remember that once, in front of the Hercules Farnese,
people formed a circle to admire him and marvel at him, he was so
handsome, was that child! He had a head such as you see in pictures. I
talked in a deep voice, and I frightened him with my cane, but he knew
very well that it was only to make him laugh. In the morning, when he
entered my room, I grumbled, but he was like the sunlight to me, all
the same. One cannot defend oneself against those brats. They take hold
of you, they hold you fast, they never let you go again. The truth is,
that there never was a cupid like that child. Now, what can you say for
your Lafayettes, your Benjamin Constants, and your Tirecuir de
Corcelles who have killed him? This cannot be allowed to pass in this
fashion.”
He approached Marius, who still lay livid and motionless, and to whom
the physician had returned, and began once more to wring his hands. The
old man’s pallid lips moved as though mechanically, and permitted the
passage of words that were barely audible, like breaths in the death
agony:
“Ah! heartless lad! Ah! clubbist! Ah! wretch! Ah! Septembrist!”
Reproaches in the low voice of an agonizing man, addressed to a corpse.
Little by little, as it is always indispensable that internal eruptions
should come to the light, the sequence of words returned, but the
grandfather appeared no longer to have the strength to utter them, his
voice was so weak, and extinct, that it seemed to come from the other
side of an abyss:
“It is all the same to me, I am going to die too, that I am. And to
think that there is not a hussy in Paris who would not have been
delighted to make this wretch happy! A scamp who, instead of amusing
himself and enjoying life, went off to fight and get himself shot down
like a brute! And for whom? Why? For the Republic! Instead of going to
dance at the Chaumière, as it is the duty of young folks to do! What’s
the use of being twenty years old? The Republic, a cursed pretty folly!
Poor mothers, beget fine boys, do! Come, he is dead. That will make two
funerals under the same carriage gate. So you have got yourself
arranged like this for the sake of General Lamarque’s handsome eyes!
What had that General Lamarque done to you? A slasher! A chatter-box!
To get oneself killed for a dead man! If that isn’t enough to drive any
one mad! Just think of it! At twenty! And without so much as turning
his head to see whether he was not leaving something behind him! That’s
the way poor, good old fellows are forced to die alone, nowadays.
Perish in your corner, owl! Well, after all, so much the better, that
is what I was hoping for, this will kill me on the spot. I am too old,
I am a hundred years old, I am a hundred thousand years old, I ought,
by rights, to have been dead long ago. This blow puts an end to it. So
all is over, what happiness! What is the good of making him inhale
ammonia and all that parcel of drugs? You are wasting your trouble, you
fool of a doctor! Come, he’s dead, completely dead. I know all about
it, I am dead myself too. He hasn’t done things by half. Yes, this age
is infamous, infamous and that’s what I think of you, of your ideas, of
your systems, of your masters, of your oracles, of your doctors, of
your scape-graces of writers, of your rascally philosophers, and of all
the revolutions which, for the last sixty years, have been frightening
the flocks of crows in the Tuileries! But you were pitiless in getting
yourself killed like this, I shall not even grieve over your death, do
you understand, you assassin?”
At that moment, Marius slowly opened his eyes, and his glance, still
dimmed by lethargic wonder, rested on M. Gillenormand.
“Marius!” cried the old man. “Marius! My little Marius! my child! my
well-beloved son! You open your eyes, you gaze upon me, you are alive,
thanks!”
And he fell fainting.
BOOK FOURTH—JAVERT DERAILED
CHAPTER I
Javert passed slowly down the Rue de l’Homme Armé.
He walked with drooping head for the first time in his life, and
likewise, for the first time in his life, with his hands behind his
back.
Up to that day, Javert had borrowed from Napoleon’s attitudes, only
that which is expressive of resolution, with arms folded across the
chest; that which is expressive of uncertainty—with the hands behind
the back—had been unknown to him. Now, a change had taken place; his
whole person, slow and sombre, was stamped with anxiety.
He plunged into the silent streets.
Nevertheless, he followed one given direction.
He took the shortest cut to the Seine, reached the Quai des Ormes,
skirted the quay, passed the Grève, and halted at some distance from
the post of the Place du Châtelet, at the angle of the Pont Notre-Dame.
There, between the Notre-Dame and the Pont au Change on the one hand,
and the Quai de la Mégisserie and the Quai aux Fleurs on the other, the
Seine forms a sort of square lake, traversed by a rapid.
This point of the Seine is dreaded by mariners. Nothing is more
dangerous than this rapid, hemmed in, at that epoch, and irritated by
the piles of the mill on the bridge, now demolished. The two bridges,
situated thus close together, augment the peril; the water hurries in
formidable wise through the arches. It rolls in vast and terrible
waves; it accumulates and piles up there; the flood attacks the piles
of the bridges as though in an effort to pluck them up with great
liquid ropes. Men who fall in there never reappear; the best of
swimmers are drowned there.
Javert leaned both elbows on the parapet, his chin resting in both
hands, and, while his nails were mechanically twined in the abundance
of his whiskers, he meditated.
A novelty, a revolution, a catastrophe had just taken place in the
depths of his being; and he had something upon which to examine
himself.
Javert was undergoing horrible suffering.
For several hours, Javert had ceased to be simple. He was troubled;
that brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; that
crystal was clouded. Javert felt duty divided within his conscience,
and he could not conceal the fact from himself. When he had so
unexpectedly encountered Jean Valjean on the banks of the Seine, there
had been in him something of the wolf which regains his grip on his
prey, and of the dog who finds his master again.
He beheld before him two paths, both equally straight, but he beheld
two; and that terrified him; him, who had never in all his life known
more than one straight line. And, the poignant anguish lay in this,
that the two paths were contrary to each other. One of these straight
lines excluded the other. Which of the two was the true one?
His situation was indescribable.
To owe his life to a malefactor, to accept that debt and to repay it;
to be, in spite of himself, on a level with a fugitive from justice,
and to repay his service with another service; to allow it to be said
to him, “Go,” and to say to the latter in his turn: “Be free”; to
sacrifice to personal motives duty, that general obligation, and to be
conscious, in those personal motives, of something that was also
general, and, perchance, superior, to betray society in order to remain
true to his conscience; that all these absurdities should be realized
and should accumulate upon him,—this was what overwhelmed him.
One thing had amazed him,—this was that Jean Valjean should have done
him a favor, and one thing petrified him,—that he, Javert, should have
done Jean Valjean a favor.
Where did he stand? He sought to comprehend his position, and could no
longer find his bearings.
What was he to do now? To deliver up Jean Valjean was bad; to leave
Jean Valjean at liberty was bad. In the first case, the man of
authority fell lower than the man of the galleys, in the second, a
convict rose above the law, and set his foot upon it. In both cases,
dishonor for him, Javert. There was disgrace in any resolution at which
he might arrive. Destiny has some extremities which rise
perpendicularly from the impossible, and beyond which life is no longer
anything but a precipice. Javert had reached one of those extremities.
One of his anxieties consisted in being constrained to think. The very
violence of all these conflicting emotions forced him to it. Thought
was something to which he was unused, and which was peculiarly painful.
In thought there always exists a certain amount of internal rebellion;
and it irritated him to have that within him.
Thought on any subject whatever, outside of the restricted circle of
his functions, would have been for him in any case useless and a
fatigue; thought on the day which had just passed was a torture.
Nevertheless, it was indispensable that he should take a look into his
conscience, after such shocks, and render to himself an account of
himself.
What he had just done made him shudder. He, Javert, had seen fit to
decide, contrary to all the regulations of the police, contrary to the
whole social and judicial organization, contrary to the entire code,
upon a release; this had suited him; he had substituted his own affairs
for the affairs of the public; was not this unjustifiable? Every time
that he brought himself face to face with this deed without a name
which he had committed, he trembled from head to foot. Upon what should
he decide? One sole resource remained to him; to return in all haste to
the Rue de l’Homme Armé, and commit Jean Valjean to prison. It was
clear that that was what he ought to do. He could not.
Something barred his way in that direction.
Something? What? Is there in the world, anything outside of the
tribunals, executory sentences, the police and the authorities? Javert
was overwhelmed.
A galley-slave sacred! A convict who could not be touched by the law!
And that the deed of Javert!
Was it not a fearful thing that Javert and Jean Valjean, the man made
to proceed with vigor, the man made to submit,—that these two men who
were both the things of the law, should have come to such a pass, that
both of them had set themselves above the law? What then! such
enormities were to happen and no one was to be punished! Jean Valjean,
stronger than the whole social order, was to remain at liberty, and he,
Javert, was to go on eating the government’s bread!
His reverie gradually became terrible.
He might, athwart this reverie, have also reproached himself on the
subject of that insurgent who had been taken to the Rue des
Filles-du-Calvaire; but he never even thought of that. The lesser fault
was lost in the greater. Besides, that insurgent was, obviously, a dead
man, and, legally, death puts an end to pursuit.
Jean Valjean was the load which weighed upon his spirit.
Jean Valjean disconcerted him. All the axioms which had served him as
points of support all his life long, had crumbled away in the presence
of this man. Jean Valjean’s generosity towards him, Javert, crushed
him. Other facts which he now recalled, and which he had formerly
treated as lies and folly, now recurred to him as realities. M.
Madeleine reappeared behind Jean Valjean, and the two figures were
superposed in such fashion that they now formed but one, which was
venerable. Javert felt that something terrible was penetrating his
soul—admiration for a convict. Respect for a galley-slave—is that a
possible thing? He shuddered at it, yet could not escape from it. In
vain did he struggle, he was reduced to confess, in his inmost heart,
the sublimity of that wretch. This was odious.
A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict,
returning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity
to vengeance, preferring to ruin himself rather than to ruin his enemy,
saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, more
nearly akin to an angel than to a man. Javert was constrained to admit
to himself that this monster existed.
Things could not go on in this manner.
Certainly, and we insist upon this point, he had not yielded without
resistance to that monster, to that infamous angel, to that hideous
hero, who enraged almost as much as he amazed him. Twenty times, as he
sat in that carriage face to face with Jean Valjean, the legal tiger
had roared within him. A score of times he had been tempted to fling
himself upon Jean Valjean, to seize him and devour him, that is to say,
to arrest him. What more simple, in fact? To cry out at the first post
that they passed:—“Here is a fugitive from justice, who has broken his
ban!” to summon the gendarmes and say to them: “This man is yours!”
then to go off, leaving that condemned man there, to ignore the rest
and not to meddle further in the matter. This man is forever a prisoner
of the law; the law may do with him what it will. What could be more
just? Javert had said all this to himself; he had wished to pass
beyond, to act, to apprehend the man, and then, as at present, he had
not been able to do it; and every time that his arm had been raised
convulsively towards Jean Valjean’s collar, his hand had fallen back
again, as beneath an enormous weight, and in the depths of his thought
he had heard a voice, a strange voice crying to him:—“It is well.
Deliver up your savior. Then have the basin of Pontius Pilate brought
and wash your claws.”
Then his reflections reverted to himself and beside Jean Valjean
glorified he beheld himself, Javert, degraded.
A convict was his benefactor!
But then, why had he permitted that man to leave him alive? He had the
right to be killed in that barricade. He should have asserted that
right. It would have been better to summon the other insurgents to his
succor against Jean Valjean, to get himself shot by force.
His supreme anguish was the loss of certainty. He felt that he had been
uprooted. The code was no longer anything more than a stump in his
hand. He had to deal with scruples of an unknown species. There had
taken place within him a sentimental revelation entirely distinct from
legal affirmation, his only standard of measurement hitherto. To remain
in his former uprightness did not suffice. A whole order of unexpected
facts had cropped up and subjugated him. A whole new world was dawning
on his soul: kindness accepted and repaid, devotion, mercy, indulgence,
violences committed by pity on austerity, respect for persons, no more
definitive condemnation, no more conviction, the possibility of a tear
in the eye of the law, no one knows what justice according to God,
running in inverse sense to justice according to men. He perceived amid
the shadows the terrible rising of an unknown moral sun; it horrified
and dazzled him. An owl forced to the gaze of an eagle.
He said to himself that it was true that there were exceptional cases,
that authority might be put out of countenance, that the rule might be
inadequate in the presence of a fact, that everything could not be
framed within the text of the code, that the unforeseen compelled
obedience, that the virtue of a convict might set a snare for the
virtue of the functionary, that destiny did indulge in such ambushes,
and he reflected with despair that he himself had not even been
fortified against a surprise.
He was forced to acknowledge that goodness did exist. This convict had
been good. And he himself, unprecedented circumstance, had just been
good also. So he was becoming depraved.
He found that he was a coward. He conceived a horror of himself.
Javert’s ideal, was not to be human, to be grand, to be sublime; it was
to be irreproachable.
Now, he had just failed in this.
How had he come to such a pass? How had all this happened? He could not
have told himself. He clasped his head in both hands, but in spite of
all that he could do, he could not contrive to explain it to himself.
He had certainly always entertained the intention of restoring Jean
Valjean to the law of which Jean Valjean was the captive, and of which
he, Javert, was the slave. Not for a single instant while he held him
in his grasp had he confessed to himself that he entertained the idea
of releasing him. It was, in some sort, without his consciousness, that
his hand had relaxed and had let him go free.
All sorts of interrogation points flashed before his eyes. He put
questions to himself, and made replies to himself, and his replies
frightened him. He asked himself: “What has that convict done, that
desperate fellow, whom I have pursued even to persecution, and who has
had me under his foot, and who could have avenged himself, and who owed
it both to his rancor and to his safety, in leaving me my life, in
showing mercy upon me? His duty? No. Something more. And I in showing
mercy upon him in my turn—what have I done? My duty? No. Something
more. So there is something beyond duty?” Here he took fright; his
balance became disjointed; one of the scales fell into the abyss, the
other rose heavenward, and Javert was no less terrified by the one
which was on high than by the one which was below. Without being in the
least in the world what is called Voltairian or a philosopher, or
incredulous, being, on the contrary, respectful by instinct, towards
the established church, he knew it only as an august fragment of the
social whole; order was his dogma, and sufficed for him; ever since he
had attained to man’s estate and the rank of a functionary, he had
centred nearly all his religion in the police. Being,—and here we
employ words without the least irony and in their most serious
acceptation, being, as we have said, a spy as other men are priests. He
had a superior, M. Gisquet; up to that day he had never dreamed of that
other superior, God.
This new chief, God, he became unexpectedly conscious of, and he felt
embarrassed by him. This unforeseen presence threw him off his
bearings; he did not know what to do with this superior, he, who was
not ignorant of the fact that the subordinate is bound always to bow,
that he must not disobey, nor find fault, nor discuss, and that, in the
presence of a superior who amazes him too greatly, the inferior has no
other resource than that of handing in his resignation.
But how was he to set about handing in his resignation to God?
However things might stand,—and it was to this point that he reverted
constantly,—one fact dominated everything else for him, and that was,
that he had just committed a terrible infraction of the law. He had
just shut his eyes on an escaped convict who had broken his ban. He had
just set a galley-slave at large. He had just robbed the laws of a man
who belonged to them. That was what he had done. He no longer
understood himself. The very reasons for his action escaped him; only
their vertigo was left with him. Up to that moment he had lived with
that blind faith which gloomy probity engenders. This faith had quitted
him, this probity had deserted him. All that he had believed in melted
away. Truths which he did not wish to recognize were besieging him,
inexorably. Henceforth, he must be a different man. He was suffering
from the strange pains of a conscience abruptly operated on for the
cataract. He saw that which it was repugnant to him to behold. He felt
himself emptied, useless, put out of joint with his past life, turned
out, dissolved. Authority was dead within him. He had no longer any
reason for existing.
A terrible situation! to be touched.
To be granite and to doubt! to be the statue of Chastisement cast in
one piece in the mould of the law, and suddenly to become aware of the
fact that one cherishes beneath one’s breast of bronze something absurd
and disobedient which almost resembles a heart! To come to the pass of
returning good for good, although one has said to oneself up to that
day that that good is evil! to be the watch-dog, and to lick the
intruder’s hand! to be ice and melt! to be the pincers and to turn into
a hand! to suddenly feel one’s fingers opening! to relax one’s
grip,—what a terrible thing!
The man-projectile no longer acquainted with his route and retreating!
To be obliged to confess this to oneself: infallibility is not
infallible, there may exist error in the dogma, all has not been said
when a code speaks, society is not perfect, authority is complicated
with vacillation, a crack is possible in the immutable, judges are but
men, the law may err, tribunals may make a mistake! to behold a rift in
the immense blue pane of the firmament!
That which was passing in Javert was the Fampoux of a rectilinear
conscience, the derailment of a soul, the crushing of a probity which
had been irresistibly launched in a straight line and was breaking
against God. It certainly was singular that the stoker of order, that
the engineer of authority, mounted on the blind iron horse with its
rigid road, could be unseated by a flash of light! that the immovable,
the direct, the correct, the geometrical, the passive, the perfect,
could bend! that there should exist for the locomotive a road to
Damascus!
God, always within man, and refractory, He, the true conscience, to the
false; a prohibition to the spark to die out; an order to the ray to
remember the sun; an injunction to the soul to recognize the veritable
absolute when confronted with the fictitious absolute, humanity which
cannot be lost; the human heart indestructible; that splendid
phenomenon, the finest, perhaps, of all our interior marvels, did
Javert understand this? Did Javert penetrate it? Did Javert account for
it to himself? Evidently he did not. But beneath the pressure of that
incontestable incomprehensibility he felt his brain bursting.
He was less the man transfigured than the victim of this prodigy. In
all this he perceived only the tremendous difficulty of existence. It
seemed to him that, henceforth, his respiration was repressed forever.
He was not accustomed to having something unknown hanging over his
head.
Up to this point, everything above him had been, to his gaze, merely a
smooth, limpid and simple surface; there was nothing incomprehensible,
nothing obscure; nothing that was not defined, regularly disposed,
linked, precise, circumscribed, exact, limited, closed, fully provided
for; authority was a plane surface; there was no fall in it, no
dizziness in its presence. Javert had never beheld the unknown except
from below. The irregular, the unforeseen, the disordered opening of
chaos, the possible slip over a precipice—this was the work of the
lower regions, of rebels, of the wicked, of wretches. Now Javert threw
himself back, and he was suddenly terrified by this unprecedented
apparition: a gulf on high.
What! one was dismantled from top to bottom! one was disconcerted,
absolutely! In what could one trust! That which had been agreed upon
was giving way! What! the defect in society’s armor could be discovered
by a magnanimous wretch! What! an honest servitor of the law could
suddenly find himself caught between two crimes—the crime of allowing a
man to escape and the crime of arresting him! everything was not
settled in the orders given by the State to the functionary! There
might be blind alleys in duty! What,—all this was real! was it true
that an ex-ruffian, weighed down with convictions, could rise erect and
end by being in the right? Was this credible? were there cases in which
the law should retire before transfigured crime, and stammer its
excuses?—Yes, that was the state of the case! and Javert saw it! and
Javert had touched it! and not only could he not deny it, but he had
taken part in it. These were realities. It was abominable that actual
facts could reach such deformity. If facts did their duty, they would
confine themselves to being proofs of the law; facts—it is God who
sends them. Was anarchy, then, on the point of now descending from on
high?
Thus,—and in the exaggeration of anguish, and the optical illusion of
consternation, all that might have corrected and restrained this
impression was effaced, and society, and the human race, and the
universe were, henceforth, summed up in his eyes, in one simple and
terrible feature,—thus the penal laws, the thing judged, the force due
to legislation, the decrees of the sovereign courts, the magistracy,
the government, prevention, repression, official cruelty, wisdom, legal
infallibility, the principle of authority, all the dogmas on which rest
political and civil security, sovereignty, justice, public truth, all
this was rubbish, a shapeless mass, chaos; he himself, Javert, the spy
of order, incorruptibility in the service of the police, the bull-dog
providence of society, vanquished and hurled to earth; and, erect, at
the summit of all that ruin, a man with a green cap on his head and a
halo round his brow; this was the astounding confusion to which he had
come; this was the fearful vision which he bore within his soul.
Was this to be endured? No.
A violent state, if ever such existed. There were only two ways of
escaping from it. One was to go resolutely to Jean Valjean, and restore
to his cell the convict from the galleys. The other....
Javert quitted the parapet, and, with head erect this time, betook
himself, with a firm tread, towards the station-house indicated by a
lantern at one of the corners of the Place du Châtelet.
On arriving there, he saw through the window a sergeant of police, and
he entered. Policemen recognize each other by the very way in which
they open the door of a station-house. Javert mentioned his name,
showed his card to the sergeant, and seated himself at the table of the
post on which a candle was burning. On a table lay a pen, a leaden
inkstand and paper, provided in the event of possible reports and the
orders of the night patrols. This table, still completed by its
straw-seated chair, is an institution; it exists in all police
stations; it is invariably ornamented with a box-wood saucer filled
with sawdust and a wafer box of cardboard filled with red wafers, and
it forms the lowest stage of official style. It is there that the
literature of the State has its beginning.
Javert took a pen and a sheet of paper, and began to write. This is
what he wrote:
A FEW OBSERVATIONS FOR THE GOOD OF THE SERVICE.
“In the first place: I beg Monsieur le Préfet to cast his eyes on
this.
“Secondly: prisoners, on arriving after examination, take off their
shoes and stand barefoot on the flagstones while they are being
searched. Many of them cough on their return to prison. This entails
hospital expenses.
“Thirdly: the mode of keeping track of a man with relays of police
agents from distance to distance, is good, but, on important occasions,
it is requisite that at least two agents should never lose sight of
each other, so that, in case one agent should, for any cause, grow weak
in his service, the other may supervise him and take his place.
“Fourthly: it is inexplicable why the special regulation of the prison
of the Madelonettes interdicts the prisoner from having a chair, even
by paying for it.
“Fifthly: in the Madelonettes there are only two bars to the canteen,
so that the canteen woman can touch the prisoners with her hand.
“Sixthly: the prisoners called barkers, who summon the other prisoners
to the parlor, force the prisoner to pay them two sous to call his name
distinctly. This is a theft.
“Seventhly: for a broken thread ten sous are withheld in the weaving
shop; this is an abuse of the contractor, since the cloth is none the
worse for it.
“Eighthly: it is annoying for visitors to La Force to be obliged to
traverse the boys’ court in order to reach the parlor of
Sainte-Marie-l’Égyptienne.
“Ninthly: it is a fact that any day gendarmes can be overheard
relating in the court-yard of the prefecture the interrogations put by
the magistrates to prisoners. For a gendarme, who should be sworn to
secrecy, to repeat what he has heard in the examination room is a grave
disorder.
“Tenthly: Mme. Henry is an honest woman; her canteen is very neat; but
it is bad to have a woman keep the wicket to the mouse-trap of the
secret cells. This is unworthy of the Conciergerie of a great
civilization.”
Javert wrote these lines in his calmest and most correct chirography,
not omitting a single comma, and making the paper screech under his
pen. Below the last line he signed:
“JAVERT,
“Inspector of the 1st class.
“The Post of the Place du Châtelet.
“June 7th, 1832, about one o’clock in the morning.”
Javert dried the fresh ink on the paper, folded it like a letter,
sealed it, wrote on the back: _Note for the administration_, left it on
the table, and quitted the post. The glazed and grated door fell to
behind him.
Again he traversed the Place du Châtelet diagonally, regained the quay,
and returned with automatic precision to the very point which he had
abandoned a quarter of an hour previously, leaned on his elbows and
found himself again in the same attitude on the same paving-stone of
the parapet. He did not appear to have stirred.
The darkness was complete. It was the sepulchral moment which follows
midnight. A ceiling of clouds concealed the stars. Not a single light
burned in the houses of the city; no one was passing; all of the
streets and quays which could be seen were deserted; Notre-Dame and the
towers of the Court-House seemed features of the night. A street
lantern reddened the margin of the quay. The outlines of the bridges
lay shapeless in the mist one behind the other. Recent rains had
swollen the river.
The spot where Javert was leaning was, it will be remembered, situated
precisely over the rapids of the Seine, perpendicularly above that
formidable spiral of whirlpools which loose and knot themselves again
like an endless screw.
Javert bent his head and gazed. All was black. Nothing was to be
distinguished. A sound of foam was audible; but the river could not be
seen. At moments, in that dizzy depth, a gleam of light appeared, and
undulated vaguely, water possessing the power of taking light, no one
knows whence, and converting it into a snake. The light vanished, and
all became indistinct once more. Immensity seemed thrown open there.
What lay below was not water, it was a gulf. The wall of the quay,
abrupt, confused, mingled with the vapors, instantly concealed from
sight, produced the effect of an escarpment of the infinite. Nothing
was to be seen, but the hostile chill of the water and the stale odor
of the wet stones could be felt. A fierce breath rose from this abyss.
The flood in the river, divined rather than perceived, the tragic
whispering of the waves, the melancholy vastness of the arches of the
bridge, the imaginable fall into that gloomy void, into all that shadow
was full of horror.
Javert remained motionless for several minutes, gazing at this opening
of shadow; he considered the invisible with a fixity that resembled
attention. The water roared. All at once he took off his hat and placed
it on the edge of the quay. A moment later, a tall black figure, which
a belated passer-by in the distance might have taken for a phantom,
appeared erect upon the parapet of the quay, bent over towards the
Seine, then drew itself up again, and fell straight down into the
shadows; a dull splash followed; and the shadow alone was in the secret
of the convulsions of that obscure form which had disappeared beneath
the water.
BOOK FIFTH—GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER
CHAPTER I—IN WHICH THE TREE WITH THE ZINC PLASTER APPEARS AGAIN
Some time after the events which we have just recorded, Sieur
Boulatruelle experienced a lively emotion.
Sieur Boulatruelle was that road-mender of Montfermeil whom the reader
has already seen in the gloomy parts of this book.
Boulatruelle, as the reader may, perchance, recall, was a man who was
occupied with divers and troublesome matters. He broke stones and
damaged travellers on the highway.
Road-mender and thief as he was, he cherished one dream; he believed in
the treasures buried in the forest of Montfermeil. He hoped some day to
find the money in the earth at the foot of a tree; in the meanwhile, he
lived to search the pockets of passers-by.
Nevertheless, for an instant, he was prudent. He had just escaped
neatly. He had been, as the reader is aware, picked up in Jondrette’s
garret in company with the other ruffians. Utility of a vice: his
drunkenness had been his salvation. The authorities had never been able
to make out whether he had been there in the quality of a robber or a
man who had been robbed. An order of _nolle prosequi_, founded on his
well authenticated state of intoxication on the evening of the ambush,
had set him at liberty. He had taken to his heels. He had returned to
his road from Gagny to Lagny, to make, under administrative
supervision, broken stone for the good of the state, with downcast
mien, in a very pensive mood, his ardor for theft somewhat cooled; but
he was addicted nonetheless tenderly to the wine which had recently
saved him.
As for the lively emotion which he had experienced a short time after
his return to his road-mender’s turf-thatched cot, here it is:
One morning, Boulatruelle, while on his way as was his wont, to his
work, and possibly also to his ambush, a little before daybreak caught
sight, through the branches of the trees, of a man, whose back alone he
saw, but the shape of whose shoulders, as it seemed to him at that
distance and in the early dusk, was not entirely unfamiliar to him.
Boulatruelle, although intoxicated, had a correct and lucid memory, a
defensive arm that is indispensable to any one who is at all in
conflict with legal order.
“Where the deuce have I seen something like that man yonder?” he said
to himself. But he could make himself no answer, except that the man
resembled some one of whom his memory preserved a confused trace.
However, apart from the identity which he could not manage to catch,
Boulatruelle put things together and made calculations. This man did
not belong in the country-side. He had just arrived there. On foot,
evidently. No public conveyance passes through Montfermeil at that
hour. He had walked all night. Whence came he? Not from a very great
distance; for he had neither haversack, nor bundle. From Paris, no
doubt. Why was he in these woods? why was he there at such an hour?
what had he come there for?
Boulatruelle thought of the treasure. By dint of ransacking his memory,
he recalled in a vague way that he had already, many years before, had
a similar alarm in connection with a man who produced on him the effect
that he might well be this very individual.
“By the deuce,” said Boulatruelle, “I’ll find him again. I’ll discover
the parish of that parishioner. This prowler of Patron-Minette has a
reason, and I’ll know it. People can’t have secrets in my forest if I
don’t have a finger in the pie.”
He took his pick-axe which was very sharply pointed.
“There now,” he grumbled, “is something that will search the earth and
a man.”
And, as one knots one thread to another thread, he took up the line of
march at his best pace in the direction which the man must follow, and
set out across the thickets.
When he had compassed a hundred strides, the day, which was already
beginning to break, came to his assistance. Footprints stamped in the
sand, weeds trodden down here and there, heather crushed, young
branches in the brushwood bent and in the act of straightening
themselves up again with the graceful deliberation of the arms of a
pretty woman who stretches herself when she wakes, pointed out to him a
sort of track. He followed it, then lost it. Time was flying. He
plunged deeper into the woods and came to a sort of eminence. An early
huntsman who was passing in the distance along a path, whistling the
air of Guillery, suggested to him the idea of climbing a tree. Old as
he was, he was agile. There stood close at hand a beech-tree of great
size, worthy of Tityrus and of Boulatruelle. Boulatruelle ascended the
beech as high as he was able.
The idea was a good one. On scrutinizing the solitary waste on the side
where the forest is thoroughly entangled and wild, Boulatruelle
suddenly caught sight of his man.
Hardly had he got his eye upon him when he lost sight of him.
The man entered, or rather, glided into, an open glade, at a
considerable distance, masked by large trees, but with which
Boulatruelle was perfectly familiar, on account of having noticed, near
a large pile of porous stones, an ailing chestnut-tree bandaged with a
sheet of zinc nailed directly upon the bark. This glade was the one
which was formerly called the Blaru-bottom. The heap of stones,
destined for no one knows what employment, which was visible there
thirty years ago, is doubtless still there. Nothing equals a heap of
stones in longevity, unless it is a board fence. They are temporary
expedients. What a reason for lasting!
Boulatruelle, with the rapidity of joy, dropped rather than descended
from the tree. The lair was unearthed, the question now was to seize
the beast. That famous treasure of his dreams was probably there.
It was no small matter to reach that glade. By the beaten paths, which
indulge in a thousand teasing zigzags, it required a good quarter of an
hour. In a bee-line, through the underbrush, which is peculiarly dense,
very thorny, and very aggressive in that locality, a full half hour was
necessary. Boulatruelle committed the error of not comprehending this.
He believed in the straight line; a respectable optical illusion which
ruins many a man. The thicket, bristling as it was, struck him as the
best road.
“Let’s take to the wolves’ Rue de Rivoli,” said he.
Boulatruelle, accustomed to taking crooked courses, was on this
occasion guilty of the fault of going straight.
He flung himself resolutely into the tangle of undergrowth.
He had to deal with holly bushes, nettles, hawthorns, eglantines,
thistles, and very irascible brambles. He was much lacerated.
At the bottom of the ravine he found water which he was obliged to
traverse.
At last he reached the Blaru-bottom, after the lapse of forty minutes,
sweating, soaked, breathless, scratched, and ferocious.
There was no one in the glade. Boulatruelle rushed to the heap of
stones. It was in its place. It had not been carried off.
As for the man, he had vanished in the forest. He had made his escape.
Where? in what direction? into what thicket? Impossible to guess.
And, heartrending to say, there, behind the pile of stones, in front of
the tree with the sheet of zinc, was freshly turned earth, a pick-axe,
abandoned or forgotten, and a hole.
The hole was empty.
“Thief!” shrieked Boulatruelle, shaking his fist at the horizon.
CHAPTER II—MARIUS, EMERGING FROM CIVIL WAR, MAKES READY FOR DOMESTIC
WAR
For a long time, Marius was neither dead nor alive. For many weeks he
lay in a fever accompanied by delirium, and by tolerably grave cerebral
symptoms, caused more by the shocks of the wounds on the head than by
the wounds themselves.
He repeated Cosette’s name for whole nights in the melancholy loquacity
of fever, and with the sombre obstinacy of agony. The extent of some of
the lesions presented a serious danger, the suppuration of large wounds
being always liable to become re-absorbed, and consequently, to kill
the sick man, under certain atmospheric conditions; at every change of
weather, at the slightest storm, the physician was uneasy.
“Above all things,” he repeated, “let the wounded man be subjected to
no emotion.” The dressing of the wounds was complicated and difficult,
the fixation of apparatus and bandages by cerecloths not having been
invented as yet, at that epoch. Nicolette used up a sheet “as big as
the ceiling,” as she put it, for lint. It was not without difficulty
that the chloruretted lotions and the nitrate of silver overcame the
gangrene. As long as there was any danger, M. Gillenormand, seated in
despair at his grandson’s pillow, was, like Marius, neither alive nor
dead.
Every day, sometimes twice a day, a very well dressed gentleman with
white hair,—such was the description given by the porter,—came to
inquire about the wounded man, and left a large package of lint for the
dressings.
Finally, on the 7th of September, four months to a day, after the
sorrowful night when he had been brought back to his grandfather in a
dying condition, the doctor declared that he would answer for Marius.
Convalescence began. But Marius was forced to remain for two months
more stretched out on a long chair, on account of the results called up
by the fracture of his collar-bone. There always is a last wound like
that which will not close, and which prolongs the dressings
indefinitely, to the great annoyance of the sick person.
However, this long illness and this long convalescence saved him from
all pursuit. In France, there is no wrath, not even of a public
character, which six months will not extinguish. Revolts, in the
present state of society, are so much the fault of every one, that they
are followed by a certain necessity of shutting the eyes.
Let us add, that the inexcusable Gisquet order, which enjoined doctors
to lodge information against the wounded, having outraged public
opinion, and not opinion alone, but the King first of all, the wounded
were covered and protected by this indignation; and, with the exception
of those who had been made prisoners in the very act of combat, the
councils of war did not dare to trouble any one. So Marius was left in
peace.
M. Gillenormand first passed through all manner of anguish, and then
through every form of ecstasy. It was found difficult to prevent his
passing every night beside the wounded man; he had his big armchair
carried to Marius’ bedside; he required his daughter to take the finest
linen in the house for compresses and bandages. Mademoiselle
Gillenormand, like a sage and elderly person, contrived to spare the
fine linen, while allowing the grandfather to think that he was obeyed.
M. Gillenormand would not permit any one to explain to him, that for
the preparation of lint batiste is not nearly so good as coarse linen,
nor new linen as old linen. He was present at all the dressings of the
wounds from which Mademoiselle Gillenormand modestly absented herself.
When the dead flesh was cut away with scissors, he said: “Aïe! aïe!”
Nothing was more touching than to see him with his gentle, senile
palsy, offer the wounded man a cup of his cooling-draught. He
overwhelmed the doctor with questions. He did not observe that he asked
the same ones over and over again.
On the day when the doctor announced to him that Marius was out of
danger, the good man was in a delirium. He made his porter a present of
three louis. That evening, on his return to his own chamber, he danced
a gavotte, using his thumb and forefinger as castanets, and he sang the
following song:
“Jeanne est née à Fougère “Amour, tu vis en elle;
Vrai nid d’une bergère; Car c’est dans sa prunelle
J’adore son jupon, Que tu mets ton carquois.
Fripon. Narquois!
“Moi, je la chante, et j’aime,
Plus que Diane même,
Jeanne et ses durs tetons
Bretons.”61
Then he knelt upon a chair, and Basque, who was watching him through
the half-open door, made sure that he was praying.
Up to that time, he had not believed in God.
At each succeeding phase of improvement, which became more and more
pronounced, the grandfather raved. He executed a multitude of
mechanical actions full of joy; he ascended and descended the stairs,
without knowing why. A pretty female neighbor was amazed one morning at
receiving a big bouquet; it was M. Gillenormand who had sent it to her.
The husband made a jealous scene. M. Gillenormand tried to draw
Nicolette upon his knees. He called Marius, “M. le Baron.” He shouted:
“Long live the Republic!”
Every moment, he kept asking the doctor: “Is he no longer in danger?”
He gazed upon Marius with the eyes of a grandmother. He brooded over
him while he ate. He no longer knew himself, he no longer rendered
himself an account of himself. Marius was the master of the house,
there was abdication in his joy, he was the grandson of his grandson.
In the state of joy in which he then was, he was the most venerable of
children. In his fear lest he might fatigue or annoy the convalescent,
he stepped behind him to smile. He was content, joyous, delighted,
charming, young. His white locks added a gentle majesty to the gay
radiance of his visage. When grace is mingled with wrinkles, it is
adorable. There is an indescribable aurora in beaming old age.
As for Marius, as he allowed them to dress his wounds and care for him,
he had but one fixed idea: Cosette.
After the fever and delirium had left him, he did not again pronounce
her name, and it might have been supposed that he no longer thought of
her. He held his peace, precisely because his soul was there.
He did not know what had become of Cosette; the whole affair of the Rue
de la Chanvrerie was like a cloud in his memory; shadows that were
almost indistinct, floated through his mind, Éponine, Gavroche, Mabeuf,
the Thénardiers, all his friends gloomily intermingled with the smoke
of the barricade; the strange passage of M. Fauchelevent through that
adventure produced on him the effect of a puzzle in a tempest; he
understood nothing connected with his own life, he did not know how nor
by whom he had been saved, and no one of those around him knew this;
all that they had been able to tell him was, that he had been brought
home at night in a hackney-coach, to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire;
past, present, future were nothing more to him than the mist of a vague
idea; but in that fog there was one immovable point, one clear and
precise outline, something made of granite, a resolution, a will; to
find Cosette once more. For him, the idea of life was not distinct from
the idea of Cosette. He had decreed in his heart that he would not
accept the one without the other, and he was immovably resolved to
exact of any person whatever, who should desire to force him to
live,—from his grandfather, from fate, from hell,—the restitution of
his vanished Eden.
He did not conceal from himself the fact that obstacles existed.
Let us here emphasize one detail, he was not won over and was but
little softened by all the solicitude and tenderness of his
grandfather. In the first place, he was not in the secret; then, in his
reveries of an invalid, which were still feverish, possibly, he
distrusted this tenderness as a strange and novel thing, which had for
its object his conquest. He remained cold. The grandfather absolutely
wasted his poor old smile. Marius said to himself that it was all right
so long as he, Marius, did not speak, and let things take their course;
but that when it became a question of Cosette, he would find another
face, and that his grandfather’s true attitude would be unmasked. Then
there would be an unpleasant scene; a recrudescence of family
questions, a confrontation of positions, every sort of sarcasm and all
manner of objections at one and the same time, Fauchelevent,
Coupelevent, fortune, poverty, a stone about his neck, the future.
Violent resistance; conclusion: a refusal. Marius stiffened himself in
advance.
And then, in proportion as he regained life, the old ulcers of his
memory opened once more, he reflected again on the past, Colonel
Pontmercy placed himself once more between M. Gillenormand and him,
Marius, he told himself that he had no true kindness to expect from a
person who had been so unjust and so hard to his father. And with
health, there returned to him a sort of harshness towards his
grandfather. The old man was gently pained by this. M. Gillenormand,
without however allowing it to appear, observed that Marius, ever since
the latter had been brought back to him and had regained consciousness,
had not once called him father. It is true that he did not say
“monsieur” to him; but he contrived not to say either the one or the
other, by means of a certain way of turning his phrases. Obviously, a
crisis was approaching.
As almost always happens in such cases, Marius skirmished before giving
battle, by way of proving himself. This is called “feeling the ground.”
One morning it came to pass that M. Gillenormand spoke slightingly of
the Convention, apropos of a newspaper which had fallen into his hands,
and gave vent to a Royalist harangue on Danton, Saint-Juste and
Robespierre.—“The men of ’93 were giants,” said Marius with severity.
The old man held his peace, and uttered not a sound during the
remainder of that day.
Marius, who had always present to his mind the inflexible grandfather
of his early years, interpreted this silence as a profound
concentration of wrath, augured from it a hot conflict, and augmented
his preparations for the fray in the inmost recesses of his mind.
He decided that, in case of a refusal, he would tear off his bandages,
dislocate his collar-bone, that he would lay bare all the wounds which
he had left, and would reject all food. His wounds were his munitions
of war. He would have Cosette or die.
He awaited the propitious moment with the crafty patience of the sick.
That moment arrived.
CHAPTER III—MARIUS ATTACKED
One day, M. Gillenormand, while his daughter was putting in order the
phials and cups on the marble of the commode, bent over Marius and said
to him in his tenderest accents: “Look here, my little Marius, if I
were in your place, I would eat meat now in preference to fish. A fried
sole is excellent to begin a convalescence with, but a good cutlet is
needed to put a sick man on his feet.”
Marius, who had almost entirely recovered his strength, collected the
whole of it, drew himself up into a sitting posture, laid his two
clenched fists on the sheets of his bed, looked his grandfather in the
face, assumed a terrible air, and said:
“This leads me to say something to you.”
“What is it?”
“That I wish to marry.”
“Agreed,” said his grandfather.—And he burst out laughing.
“How agreed?”
“Yes, agreed. You shall have your little girl.”
Marius, stunned and overwhelmed with the dazzling shock, trembled in
every limb.
M. Gillenormand went on:
“Yes, you shall have her, that pretty little girl of yours. She comes
every day in the shape of an old gentleman to inquire after you. Ever
since you were wounded, she has passed her time in weeping and making
lint. I have made inquiries. She lives in the Rue de l’Homme Armé, No.
7. Ah! There we have it! Ah! so you want her! Well, you shall have her.
You’re caught. You had arranged your little plot, you had said to
yourself:—‘I’m going to signify this squarely to my grandfather, to
that mummy of the Regency and of the Directory, to that ancient beau,
to that Dorante turned Géronte; he has indulged in his frivolities
also, that he has, and he has had his love affairs, and his grisettes
and his Cosettes; he has made his rustle, he has had his wings, he has
eaten of the bread of spring; he certainly must remember it.’ Ah! you
take the cockchafer by the horns. That’s good. I offer you a cutlet and
you answer me: ‘By the way, I want to marry.’ There’s a transition for
you! Ah! you reckoned on a bickering! You do not know that I am an old
coward. What do you say to that? You are vexed? You did not expect to
find your grandfather still more foolish than yourself, you are wasting
the discourse which you meant to bestow upon me, Mr. Lawyer, and that’s
vexatious. Well, so much the worse, rage away. I’ll do whatever you
wish, and that cuts you short, imbecile! Listen. I have made my
inquiries, I’m cunning too; she is charming, she is discreet, it is not
true about the lancer, she has made heaps of lint, she’s a jewel, she
adores you, if you had died, there would have been three of us, her
coffin would have accompanied mine. I have had an idea, ever since you
have been better, of simply planting her at your bedside, but it is
only in romances that young girls are brought to the bedsides of
handsome young wounded men who interest them. It is not done. What
would your aunt have said to it? You were nude three quarters of the
time, my good fellow. Ask Nicolette, who has not left you for a moment,
if there was any possibility of having a woman here. And then, what
would the doctor have said? A pretty girl does not cure a man of fever.
In short, it’s all right, let us say no more about it, all’s said,
all’s done, it’s all settled, take her. Such is my ferocity. You see, I
perceived that you did not love me. I said to myself: ‘Here now, I have
my little Cosette right under my hand, I’m going to give her to him, he
will be obliged to love me a little then, or he must tell the reason
why.’ Ah! so you thought that the old man was going to storm, to put on
a big voice, to shout no, and to lift his cane at all that aurora. Not
a bit of it. Cosette, so be it; love, so be it; I ask nothing better.
Pray take the trouble of getting married, sir. Be happy, my
well-beloved child.”
That said, the old man burst forth into sobs.
And he seized Marius’ head, and pressed it with both arms against his
breast, and both fell to weeping. This is one of the forms of supreme
happiness.
“Father!” cried Marius.
“Ah, so you love me!” said the old man.
An ineffable moment ensued. They were choking and could not speak.
At length the old man stammered:
“Come! his mouth is unstopped at last. He has said: ‘Father’ to me.”
Marius disengaged his head from his grandfather’s arms, and said
gently:
“But, father, now that I am quite well, it seems to me that I might see
her.”
“Agreed again, you shall see her to-morrow.”
“Father!”
“What?”
“Why not to-day?”
“Well, to-day then. Let it be to-day. You have called me ‘father’ three
times, and it is worth it. I will attend to it. She shall be brought
hither. Agreed, I tell you. It has already been put into verse. This is
the ending of the elegy of the ‘Jeune Malade’ by André Chénier, by
André Chénier whose throat was cut by the ras . . . by the giants of
’93.”
M. Gillenormand fancied that he detected a faint frown on the part of
Marius, who, in truth, as we must admit, was no longer listening to
him, and who was thinking far more of Cosette than of 1793.
The grandfather, trembling at having so inopportunely introduced André
Chénier, resumed precipitately:
“Cut his throat is not the word. The fact is that the great
revolutionary geniuses, who were not malicious, that is incontestable,
who were heroes, pardi! found that André Chénier embarrassed them
somewhat, and they had him guillot . . . that is to say, those great
men on the 7th of Thermidor, besought André Chénier, in the interests
of public safety, to be so good as to go....”
M. Gillenormand, clutched by the throat by his own phrase, could not
proceed. Being able neither to finish it nor to retract it, while his
daughter arranged the pillow behind Marius, who was overwhelmed with so
many emotions, the old man rushed headlong, with as much rapidity as
his age permitted, from the bed-chamber, shut the door behind him, and,
purple, choking and foaming at the mouth, his eyes starting from his
head, he found himself nose to nose with honest Basque, who was
blacking boots in the anteroom. He seized Basque by the collar, and
shouted full in his face in fury:—“By the hundred thousand Javottes of
the devil, those ruffians did assassinate him!”
“Who, sir?”
“André Chénier!”
“Yes, sir,” said Basque in alarm.
CHAPTER IV—MADEMOISELLE GILLENORMAND ENDS BY NO LONGER THINKING IT A
BAD THING THAT M. FAUCHELEVENT SHOULD HAVE ENTERED WITH SOMETHING UNDER
HIS ARM
Cosette and Marius beheld each other once more.
What that interview was like we decline to say. There are things which
one must not attempt to depict; the sun is one of them.
The entire family, including Basque and Nicolette, were assembled in
Marius’ chamber at the moment when Cosette entered it.
Precisely at that moment, the grandfather was on the point of blowing
his nose; he stopped short, holding his nose in his handkerchief, and
gazing over it at Cosette.
She appeared on the threshold; it seemed to him that she was surrounded
by a glory.
“Adorable!” he exclaimed.
Then he blew his nose noisily.
Cosette was intoxicated, delighted, frightened, in heaven. She was as
thoroughly alarmed as any one can be by happiness. She stammered all
pale, yet flushed, she wanted to fling herself into Marius’ arms, and
dared not. Ashamed of loving in the presence of all these people.
People are pitiless towards happy lovers; they remain when the latter
most desire to be left alone. Lovers have no need of any people
whatever.
With Cosette, and behind her, there had entered a man with white hair
who was grave yet smiling, though with a vague and heartrending smile.
It was “Monsieur Fauchelevent”; it was Jean Valjean.
He was very well dressed, as the porter had said, entirely in black, in
perfectly new garments, and with a white cravat.
The porter was a thousand leagues from recognizing in this correct
bourgeois, in this probable notary, the fear-inspiring bearer of the
corpse, who had sprung up at his door on the night of the 7th of June,
tattered, muddy, hideous, haggard, his face masked in blood and mire,
supporting in his arms the fainting Marius; still, his porter’s scent
was aroused. When M. Fauchelevent arrived with Cosette, the porter had
not been able to refrain from communicating to his wife this aside: “I
don’t know why it is, but I can’t help fancying that I’ve seen that
face before.”
M. Fauchelevent in Marius’ chamber, remained apart near the door. He
had under his arm, a package which bore considerable resemblance to an
octavo volume enveloped in paper. The enveloping paper was of a
greenish hue, and appeared to be mouldy.
“Does the gentleman always have books like that under his arm?”
Mademoiselle Gillenormand, who did not like books, demanded in a low
tone of Nicolette.
“Well,” retorted M. Gillenormand, who had overheard her, in the same
tone, “he’s a learned man. What then? Is that his fault? Monsieur
Boulard, one of my acquaintances, never walked out without a book under
his arm either, and he always had some old volume hugged to his heart
like that.”
And, with a bow, he said aloud:
“Monsieur Tranchelevent....”
Father Gillenormand did not do it intentionally, but inattention to
proper names was an aristocratic habit of his.
“Monsieur Tranchelevent, I have the honor of asking you, on behalf of
my grandson, Baron Marius Pontmercy, for the hand of Mademoiselle.”
Monsieur Tranchelevent bowed.
“That’s settled,” said the grandfather.
And, turning to Marius and Cosette, with both arms extended in
blessing, he cried:
“Permission to adore each other!”
They did not require him to repeat it twice. So much the worse! the
chirping began. They talked low. Marius, resting on his elbow on his
reclining chair, Cosette standing beside him. “Oh, heavens!” murmured
Cosette, “I see you once again! it is thou! it is you! The idea of
going and fighting like that! But why? It is horrible. I have been dead
for four months. Oh! how wicked it was of you to go to that battle!
What had I done to you? I pardon you, but you will never do it again. A
little while ago, when they came to tell us to come to you, I still
thought that I was about to die, but it was from joy. I was so sad! I
have not taken the time to dress myself, I must frighten people with my
looks! What will your relatives say to see me in a crumpled collar? Do
speak! You let me do all the talking. We are still in the Rue de
l’Homme Armé. It seems that your shoulder was terrible. They told me
that you could put your fist in it. And then, it seems that they cut
your flesh with the scissors. That is frightful. I have cried till I
have no eyes left. It is queer that a person can suffer like that. Your
grandfather has a very kindly air. Don’t disturb yourself, don’t rise
on your elbow, you will injure yourself. Oh! how happy I am! So our
unhappiness is over! I am quite foolish. I had things to say to you,
and I no longer know in the least what they were. Do you still love me?
We live in the Rue de l’Homme Armé. There is no garden. I made lint all
the time; stay, sir, look, it is your fault, I have a callous on my
fingers.”
“Angel!” said Marius.
_Angel_ is the only word in the language which cannot be worn out. No
other word could resist the merciless use which lovers make of it.
Then as there were spectators, they paused and said not a word more,
contenting themselves with softly touching each other’s hands.
M. Gillenormand turned towards those who were in the room and cried:
“Talk loud, the rest of you. Make a noise, you people behind the
scenes. Come, a little uproar, the deuce! so that the children can
chatter at their ease.”
And, approaching Marius and Cosette, he said to them in a very low
voice:
“Call each other _thou_. Don’t stand on ceremony.”
Aunt Gillenormand looked on in amazement at this irruption of light in
her elderly household. There was nothing aggressive about this
amazement; it was not the least in the world like the scandalized and
envious glance of an owl at two turtledoves, it was the stupid eye of a
poor innocent seven and fifty years of age; it was a life which had
been a failure gazing at that triumph, love.
“Mademoiselle Gillenormand senior,” said her father to her, “I told you
that this is what would happen to you.”
He remained silent for a moment, and then added:
“Look at the happiness of others.”
Then he turned to Cosette.
“How pretty she is! how pretty she is! She’s a Greuze. So you are going
to have that all to yourself, you scamp! Ah! my rogue, you are getting
off nicely with me, you are happy; if I were not fifteen years too old,
we would fight with swords to see which of us should have her. Come
now! I am in love with you, mademoiselle. It’s perfectly simple. It is
your right. You are in the right. Ah! what a sweet, charming little
wedding this will make! Our parish is Saint-Denis du Saint Sacrament,
but I will get a dispensation so that you can be married at Saint-Paul.
The church is better. It was built by the Jesuits. It is more
coquettish. It is opposite the fountain of Cardinal de Birague. The
masterpiece of Jesuit architecture is at Namur. It is called
Saint-Loup. You must go there after you are married. It is worth the
journey. Mademoiselle, I am quite of your mind, I think girls ought to
marry; that is what they are made for. There is a certain
Sainte-Catherine whom I should always like to see uncoiffed.62 It’s a
fine thing to remain a spinster, but it is chilly. The Bible says:
Multiply. In order to save the people, Jeanne d’Arc is needed; but in
order to make people, what is needed is Mother Goose. So, marry, my
beauties. I really do not see the use in remaining a spinster! I know
that they have their chapel apart in the church, and that they fall
back on the Society of the Virgin; but, sapristi, a handsome husband, a
fine fellow, and at the expiration of a year, a big, blond brat who
nurses lustily, and who has fine rolls of fat on his thighs, and who
musses up your breast in handfuls with his little rosy paws, laughing
the while like the dawn,—that’s better than holding a candle at
vespers, and chanting _Turris Eburnea!_”
The grandfather executed a pirouette on his eighty-year-old heels, and
began to talk again like a spring that has broken loose once more:
“Ainsi, bornant les cours de tes rêvasseries,
Alcippe, il est donc vrai, dans peu tu te maries.”63
“By the way!”
“What is it, father?”
“Have not you an intimate friend?”
“Yes, Courfeyrac.”
“What has become of him?”
“He is dead.”
“That is good.”
He seated himself near them, made Cosette sit down, and took their four
hands in his aged and wrinkled hands:
“She is exquisite, this darling. She’s a masterpiece, this Cosette! She
is a very little girl and a very great lady. She will only be a
Baroness, which is a come down for her; she was born a Marquise. What
eyelashes she has! Get it well fixed in your noddles, my children, that
you are in the true road. Love each other. Be foolish about it. Love is
the folly of men and the wit of God. Adore each other. Only,” he added,
suddenly becoming gloomy, “what a misfortune! It has just occurred to
me! More than half of what I possess is swallowed up in an annuity; so
long as I live, it will not matter, but after my death, a score of
years hence, ah! my poor children, you will not have a sou! Your
beautiful white hands, Madame la Baronne, will do the devil the honor
of pulling him by the tail.”64
At this point they heard a grave and tranquil voice say:
“Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent possesses six hundred thousand
francs.”
It was the voice of Jean Valjean.
So far he had not uttered a single word, no one seemed to be aware that
he was there, and he had remained standing erect and motionless, behind
all these happy people.
“What has Mademoiselle Euphrasie to do with the question?” inquired the
startled grandfather.
“I am she,” replied Cosette.
“Six hundred thousand francs?” resumed M. Gillenormand.
“Minus fourteen or fifteen thousand francs, possibly,” said Jean
Valjean.
And he laid on the table the package which Mademoiselle Gillenormand
had mistaken for a book.
Jean Valjean himself opened the package; it was a bundle of bank-notes.
They were turned over and counted. There were five hundred notes for a
thousand francs each, and one hundred and sixty-eight of five hundred.
In all, five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs.
“This is a fine book,” said M. Gillenormand.
“Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!” murmured the aunt.
“This arranges things well, does it not, Mademoiselle Gillenormand
senior?” said the grandfather. “That devil of a Marius has ferreted out
the nest of a millionaire grisette in his tree of dreams! Just trust to
the love affairs of young folks now, will you! Students find
studentesses with six hundred thousand francs. Cherubino works better
than Rothschild.”
“Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!” repeated Mademoiselle
Gillenormand, in a low tone. “Five hundred and eighty-four! one might
as well say six hundred thousand!”
As for Marius and Cosette, they were gazing at each other while this
was going on; they hardly heeded this detail.
CHAPTER V—DEPOSIT YOUR MONEY IN A FOREST RATHER THAN WITH A NOTARY
The reader has, no doubt, understood, without necessitating a lengthy
explanation, that Jean Valjean, after the Champmathieu affair, had been
able, thanks to his first escape of a few days’ duration, to come to
Paris and to withdraw in season, from the hands of Laffitte, the sum
earned by him, under the name of Monsieur Madeleine, at
Montreuil-sur-Mer; and that fearing that he might be recaptured,—which
eventually happened—he had buried and hidden that sum in the forest of
Montfermeil, in the locality known as the Blaru-bottom. The sum, six
hundred and thirty thousand francs, all in bank-bills, was not very
bulky, and was contained in a box; only, in order to preserve the box
from dampness, he had placed it in a coffer filled with chestnut
shavings. In the same coffer he had placed his other treasures, the
Bishop’s candlesticks. It will be remembered that he had carried off
the candlesticks when he made his escape from Montreuil-sur-Mer. The
man seen one evening for the first time by Boulatruelle, was Jean
Valjean. Later on, every time that Jean Valjean needed money, he went
to get it in the Blaru-bottom. Hence the absences which we have
mentioned. He had a pickaxe somewhere in the heather, in a hiding-place
known to himself alone. When he beheld Marius convalescent, feeling
that the hour was at hand, when that money might prove of service, he
had gone to get it; it was he again, whom Boulatruelle had seen in the
woods, but on this occasion, in the morning instead of in the evening.
Boulatreulle inherited his pickaxe.
The actual sum was five hundred and eighty-four thousand, five hundred
francs. Jean Valjean withdrew the five hundred francs for himself.—“We
shall see hereafter,” he thought.
The difference between that sum and the six hundred and thirty thousand
francs withdrawn from Laffitte represented his expenditure in ten
years, from 1823 to 1833. The five years of his stay in the convent had
cost only five thousand francs.
Jean Valjean set the two candlesticks on the chimney-piece, where they
glittered to the great admiration of Toussaint.
Moreover, Jean Valjean knew that he was delivered from Javert. The
story had been told in his presence, and he had verified the fact in
the _Moniteur_, how a police inspector named Javert had been found
drowned under a boat belonging to some laundresses, between the Pont au
Change and the Pont-Neuf, and that a writing left by this man,
otherwise irreproachable and highly esteemed by his superiors, pointed
to a fit of mental aberration and a suicide.—“In fact,” thought Jean
Valjean, “since he left me at liberty, once having got me in his power,
he must have been already mad.”
CHAPTER VI—THE TWO OLD MEN DO EVERYTHING, EACH ONE AFTER HIS OWN
FASHION, TO RENDER COSETTE HAPPY
Everything was made ready for the wedding. The doctor, on being
consulted, declared that it might take place in February. It was then
December. A few ravishing weeks of perfect happiness passed.
The grandfather was not the least happy of them all. He remained for a
quarter of an hour at a time gazing at Cosette.
“The wonderful, beautiful girl!” he exclaimed. “And she has so sweet
and good an air! she is, without exception, the most charming girl that
I have ever seen in my life. Later on, she’ll have virtues with an odor
of violets. How graceful! one cannot live otherwise than nobly with
such a creature. Marius, my boy, you are a Baron, you are rich, don’t
go to pettifogging, I beg of you.”
Cosette and Marius had passed abruptly from the sepulchre to paradise.
The transition had not been softened, and they would have been stunned,
had they not been dazzled by it.
“Do you understand anything about it?” said Marius to Cosette.
“No,” replied Cosette, “but it seems to me that the good God is caring
for us.”
Jean Valjean did everything, smoothed away every difficulty, arranged
everything, made everything easy. He hastened towards Cosette’s
happiness with as much ardor, and, apparently with as much joy, as
Cosette herself.
As he had been a mayor, he understood how to solve that delicate
problem, with the secret of which he alone was acquainted, Cosette’s
civil status. If he were to announce her origin bluntly, it might
prevent the marriage, who knows? He extricated Cosette from all
difficulties. He concocted for her a family of dead people, a sure
means of not encountering any objections. Cosette was the only scion of
an extinct family; Cosette was not his own daughter, but the daughter
of the other Fauchelevent. Two brothers Fauchelevent had been gardeners
to the convent of the Petit-Picpus. Inquiry was made at that convent;
the very best information and the most respectable references abounded;
the good nuns, not very apt and but little inclined to fathom questions
of paternity, and not attaching any importance to the matter, had never
understood exactly of which of the two Fauchelevents Cosette was the
daughter. They said what was wanted and they said it with zeal. An
_acte de notoriété_ was drawn up. Cosette became in the eyes of the
law, Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent. She was declared an orphan,
both father and mother being dead. Jean Valjean so arranged it that he
was appointed, under the name of Fauchelevent, as Cosette’s guardian,
with M. Gillenormand as supervising guardian over him.
As for the five hundred and eighty thousand francs, they constituted a
legacy bequeathed to Cosette by a dead person, who desired to remain
unknown. The original legacy had consisted of five hundred and
ninety-four thousand francs; but ten thousand francs had been expended
on the education of Mademoiselle Euphrasie, five thousand francs of
that amount having been paid to the convent. This legacy, deposited in
the hands of a third party, was to be turned over to Cosette at her
majority, or at the date of her marriage. This, taken as a whole, was
very acceptable, as the reader will perceive, especially when the sum
due was half a million. There were some peculiarities here and there,
it is true, but they were not noticed; one of the interested parties
had his eyes blindfolded by love, the others by the six hundred
thousand francs.
Cosette learned that she was not the daughter of that old man whom she
had so long called father. He was merely a kinsman; another
Fauchelevent was her real father. At any other time this would have
broken her heart. But at the ineffable moment which she was then
passing through, it cast but a slight shadow, a faint cloud, and she
was so full of joy that the cloud did not last long. She had Marius.
The young man arrived, the old man was effaced; such is life.
And then, Cosette had, for long years, been habituated to seeing
enigmas around her; every being who has had a mysterious childhood is
always prepared for certain renunciations.
Nevertheless, she continued to call Jean Valjean: Father.
Cosette, happy as the angels, was enthusiastic over Father
Gillenormand. It is true that he overwhelmed her with gallant
compliments and presents. While Jean Valjean was building up for
Cosette a normal situation in society and an unassailable status, M.
Gillenormand was superintending the basket of wedding gifts. Nothing so
amused him as being magnificent. He had given to Cosette a robe of
Binche guipure which had descended to him from his own grandmother.
“These fashions come up again,” said he, “ancient things are the rage,
and the young women of my old age dress like the old women of my
childhood.”
He rifled his respectable chests of drawers in Coromandel lacquer, with
swelling fronts, which had not been opened for years.—“Let us hear the
confession of these dowagers,” he said, “let us see what they have in
their paunches.” He noisily violated the pot-bellied drawers of all his
wives, of all his mistresses and of all his grandmothers. Pekins,
damasks, lampas, painted moires, robes of shot gros de Tours, India
kerchiefs embroidered in gold that could be washed, dauphines without a
right or wrong side, in the piece, Genoa and Alençon point lace,
parures in antique goldsmith’s work, ivory bon-bon boxes ornamented
with microscopic battles, gewgaws and ribbons—he lavished everything on
Cosette. Cosette, amazed, desperately in love with Marius, and wild
with gratitude towards M. Gillenormand, dreamed of a happiness without
limit clothed in satin and velvet. Her wedding basket seemed to her to
be upheld by seraphim. Her soul flew out into the azure depths, with
wings of Mechlin lace.
The intoxication of the lovers was only equalled, as we have already
said, by the ecstasy of the grandfather. A sort of flourish of trumpets
went on in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.
Every morning, a fresh offering of bric-à-brac from the grandfather to
Cosette. All possible knickknacks glittered around her.
One day Marius, who was fond of talking gravely in the midst of his
bliss, said, apropos of I know not what incident:
“The men of the revolution are so great, that they have the prestige of
the ages, like Cato and like Phocion, and each one of them seems to me
an antique memory.”
“Moire antique!” exclaimed the old gentleman. “Thanks, Marius. That is
precisely the idea of which I was in search.”
And on the following day, a magnificent dress of tea-rose colored moire
antique was added to Cosette’s wedding presents.
From these fripperies, the grandfather extracted a bit of wisdom.
“Love is all very well; but there must be something else to go with it.
The useless must be mingled with happiness. Happiness is only the
necessary. Season that enormously with the superfluous for me. A palace
and her heart. Her heart and the Louvre. Her heart and the grand
waterworks of Versailles. Give me my shepherdess and try to make her a
duchess. Fetch me Phyllis crowned with corn-flowers, and add a hundred
thousand francs income. Open for me a bucolic perspective as far as you
can see, beneath a marble colonnade. I consent to the bucolic and also
to the fairy spectacle of marble and gold. Dry happiness resembles dry
bread. One eats, but one does not dine. I want the superfluous, the
useless, the extravagant, excess, that which serves no purpose. I
remember to have seen, in the Cathedral of Strasburg, a clock, as tall
as a three-story house which marked the hours, which had the kindness
to indicate the hour, but which had not the air of being made for that;
and which, after having struck midday, or midnight,—midday, the hour of
the sun, or midnight, the hour of love,—or any other hour that you
like, gave you the moon and the stars, the earth and the sea, birds and
fishes, Phœbus and Phœbe, and a host of things which emerged from a
niche, and the twelve apostles, and the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and
Éponine, and Sabinus, and a throng of little gilded goodmen, who played
on the trumpet to boot. Without reckoning delicious chimes which it
sprinkled through the air, on every occasion, without any one’s knowing
why. Is a petty bald clock-face which merely tells the hour equal to
that? For my part, I am of the opinion of the big clock of Strasburg,
and I prefer it to the cuckoo clock from the Black Forest.”
M. Gillenormand talked nonsense in connection with the wedding, and all
the fripperies of the eighteenth century passed pell-mell through his
dithyrambs.
“You are ignorant of the art of festivals. You do not know how to
organize a day of enjoyment in this age,” he exclaimed. “Your
nineteenth century is weak. It lacks excess. It ignores the rich, it
ignores the noble. In everything it is clean-shaven. Your third estate
is insipid, colorless, odorless, and shapeless. The dreams of your
bourgeois who set up, as they express it: a pretty boudoir freshly
decorated, violet, ebony and calico. Make way! Make way! the Sieur
Curmudgeon is marrying Mademoiselle Clutch-penny. Sumptuousness and
splendor. A louis d’or has been stuck to a candle. There’s the epoch
for you. My demand is that I may flee from it beyond the Sarmatians.
Ah! in 1787, I predict that all was lost, from the day when I beheld
the Duc de Rohan, Prince de Léon, Duc de Chabot, Duc de Montbazon,
Marquis de Soubise, Vicomte de Thouars, peer of France, go to
Longchamps in a tapecu! That has borne its fruits. In this century, men
attend to business, they gamble on ’Change, they win money, they are
stingy. People take care of their surfaces and varnish them; every one
is dressed as though just out of a bandbox, washed, soaped, scraped,
shaved, combed, waked, smoothed, rubbed, brushed, cleaned on the
outside, irreproachable, polished as a pebble, discreet, neat, and at
the same time, death of my life, in the depths of their consciences
they have dung-heaps and cesspools that are enough to make a cow-herd
who blows his nose in his fingers, recoil. I grant to this age the
device: ‘Dirty Cleanliness.’ Don’t be vexed, Marius, give me permission
to speak; I say no evil of the people as you see, I am always harping
on your people, but do look favorably on my dealing a bit of a slap to
the bourgeoisie. I belong to it. He who loves well lashes well.
Thereupon, I say plainly, that nowadays people marry, but that they no
longer know how to marry. Ah! it is true, I regret the grace of the
ancient manners. I regret everything about them, their elegance, their
chivalry, those courteous and delicate ways, that joyous luxury which
every one possessed, music forming part of the wedding, a symphony
above stairs, a beating of drums below stairs, the dances, the joyous
faces round the table, the fine-spun gallant compliments, the songs,
the fireworks, the frank laughter, the devil’s own row, the huge knots
of ribbon. I regret the bride’s garter. The bride’s garter is cousin to
the girdle of Venus. On what does the war of Troy turn? On Helen’s
garter, parbleu! Why did they fight, why did Diomed the divine break
over the head of Meriones that great brazen helmet of ten points? why
did Achilles and Hector hew each other up with vast blows of their
lances? Because Helen allowed Paris to take her garter. With Cosette’s
garter, Homer would construct the _Iliad_. He would put in his poem, a
loquacious old fellow, like me, and he would call him Nestor. My
friends, in bygone days, in those amiable days of yore, people married
wisely; they had a good contract, and then they had a good carouse. As
soon as Cujas had taken his departure, Gamacho entered. But, in sooth!
the stomach is an agreeable beast which demands its due, and which
wants to have its wedding also. People supped well, and had at table a
beautiful neighbor without a guimpe so that her throat was only
moderately concealed. Oh! the large laughing mouths, and how gay we
were in those days! youth was a bouquet; every young man terminated in
a branch of lilacs or a tuft of roses; whether he was a shepherd or a
warrior; and if, by chance, one was a captain of dragoons, one found
means to call oneself Florian. People thought much of looking well.
They embroidered and tinted themselves. A bourgeois had the air of a
flower, a Marquis had the air of a precious stone. People had no straps
to their boots, they had no boots. They were spruce, shining, waved,
lustrous, fluttering, dainty, coquettish, which did not at all prevent
their wearing swords by their sides. The humming-bird has beak and
claws. That was the day of the _Galland Indies_. One of the sides of
that century was delicate, the other was magnificent; and by the green
cabbages! people amused themselves. To-day, people are serious. The
bourgeois is avaricious, the bourgeoise is a prude; your century is
unfortunate. People would drive away the Graces as being too low in the
neck. Alas! beauty is concealed as though it were ugliness. Since the
revolution, everything, including the ballet-dancers, has had its
trousers; a mountebank dancer must be grave; your rigadoons are
doctrinarian. It is necessary to be majestic. People would be greatly
annoyed if they did not carry their chins in their cravats. The ideal
of an urchin of twenty when he marries, is to resemble M.
Royer-Collard. And do you know what one arrives at with that majesty?
at being petty. Learn this: joy is not only joyous; it is great. But be
in love gayly then, what the deuce! marry, when you marry, with fever
and giddiness, and tumult, and the uproar of happiness! Be grave in
church, well and good. But, as soon as the mass is finished, sarpejou!
you must make a dream whirl around the bride. A marriage should be
royal and chimerical; it should promenade its ceremony from the
cathedral of Rheims to the pagoda of Chanteloup. I have a horror of a
paltry wedding. Ventregoulette! be in Olympus for that one day, at
least. Be one of the gods. Ah! people might be sylphs. Games and
Laughter, argiraspides; they are stupids. My friends, every recently
made bridegroom ought to be Prince Aldobrandini. Profit by that unique
minute in life to soar away to the empyrean with the swans and the
eagles, even if you do have to fall back on the morrow into the
bourgeoisie of the frogs. Don’t economize on the nuptials, do not prune
them of their splendors; don’t scrimp on the day when you beam. The
wedding is not the housekeeping. Oh! if I were to carry out my fancy,
it would be gallant, violins would be heard under the trees. Here is my
programme: sky-blue and silver. I would mingle with the festival the
rural divinities, I would convoke the Dryads and the Nereids. The
nuptials of Amphitrite, a rosy cloud, nymphs with well dressed locks
and entirely naked, an Academician offering quatrains to the goddess, a
chariot drawn by marine monsters.
“Triton trottait devant, et tirait de sa conque
Des sons si ravissants qu’il ravissait quiconque!”65
—there’s a festive programme, there’s a good one, or else I know
nothing of such matters, deuce take it!”
While the grandfather, in full lyrical effusion, was listening to
himself, Cosette and Marius grew intoxicated as they gazed freely at
each other.
Aunt Gillenormand surveyed all this with her imperturbable placidity.
Within the last five or six months she had experienced a certain amount
of emotions. Marius returned, Marius brought back bleeding, Marius
brought back from a barricade, Marius dead, then living, Marius
reconciled, Marius betrothed, Marius wedding a poor girl, Marius
wedding a millionairess. The six hundred thousand francs had been her
last surprise. Then, her indifference of a girl taking her first
communion returned to her. She went regularly to service, told her
beads, read her euchology, mumbled _Aves_ in one corner of the house,
while _I love you_ was being whispered in the other, and she beheld
Marius and Cosette in a vague way, like two shadows. The shadow was
herself.
There is a certain state of inert asceticism in which the soul,
neutralized by torpor, a stranger to that which may be designated as
the business of living, receives no impressions, either human, or
pleasant or painful, with the exception of earthquakes and
catastrophes. This devotion, as Father Gillenormand said to his
daughter, corresponds to a cold in the head. You smell nothing of life.
Neither any bad, nor any good odor.
Moreover, the six hundred thousand francs had settled the elderly
spinster’s indecision. Her father had acquired the habit of taking her
so little into account, that he had not consulted her in the matter of
consent to Marius’ marriage. He had acted impetuously, according to his
wont, having, a despot-turned slave, but a single thought,—to satisfy
Marius. As for the aunt,—it had not even occurred to him that the aunt
existed, and that she could have an opinion of her own, and, sheep as
she was, this had vexed her. Somewhat resentful in her inmost soul, but
impassible externally, she had said to herself: “My father has settled
the question of the marriage without reference to me; I shall settle
the question of the inheritance without consulting him.” She was rich,
in fact, and her father was not. She had reserved her decision on this
point. It is probable that, had the match been a poor one, she would
have left him poor. “So much the worse for my nephew! he is wedding a
beggar, let him be a beggar himself!” But Cosette’s half-million
pleased the aunt, and altered her inward situation so far as this pair
of lovers were concerned. One owes some consideration to six hundred
thousand francs, and it was evident that she could not do otherwise
than leave her fortune to these young people, since they did not need
it.
It was arranged that the couple should live with the grandfather—M.
Gillenormand insisted on resigning to them his chamber, the finest in
the house. “That will make me young again,” he said. “It’s an old plan
of mine. I have always entertained the idea of having a wedding in my
chamber.”
He furnished this chamber with a multitude of elegant trifles. He had
the ceiling and walls hung with an extraordinary stuff, which he had by
him in the piece, and which he believed to have emanated from Utrecht
with a buttercup-colored satin ground, covered with velvet auricula
blossoms.—“It was with that stuff,” said he, “that the bed of the
Duchesse d’Anville at la Roche-Guyon was draped.”—On the chimney-piece,
he set a little figure in Saxe porcelain, carrying a muff against her
nude stomach.
M. Gillenormand’s library became the lawyer’s study, which Marius
needed; a study, it will be remembered, being required by the council
of the order.
CHAPTER VII—THE EFFECTS OF DREAMS MINGLED WITH HAPPINESS
The lovers saw each other every day. Cosette came with M.
Fauchelevent.—“This is reversing things,” said Mademoiselle
Gillenormand, “to have the bride come to the house to do the courting
like this.” But Marius’ convalescence had caused the habit to become
established, and the armchairs of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire,
better adapted to interviews than the straw chairs of the Rue de
l’Homme Armé, had rooted it. Marius and M. Fauchelevent saw each other,
but did not address each other. It seemed as though this had been
agreed upon. Every girl needs a chaperon. Cosette could not have come
without M. Fauchelevent. In Marius’ eyes, M. Fauchelevent was the
condition attached to Cosette. He accepted it. By dint of discussing
political matters, vaguely and without precision, from the point of
view of the general amelioration of the fate of all men, they came to
say a little more than “yes” and “no.” Once, on the subject of
education, which Marius wished to have free and obligatory, multiplied
under all forms lavished on every one, like the air and the sun in a
word, respirable for the entire population, they were in unison, and
they almost conversed. M. Fauchelevent talked well, and even with a
certain loftiness of language—still he lacked something indescribable.
M. Fauchelevent possessed something less and also something more, than
a man of the world.
Marius, inwardly, and in the depths of his thought, surrounded with all
sorts of mute questions this M. Fauchelevent, who was to him simply
benevolent and cold. There were moments when doubts as to his own
recollections occurred to him. There was a void in his memory, a black
spot, an abyss excavated by four months of agony.—Many things had been
lost therein. He had come to the point of asking himself whether it
were really a fact that he had seen M. Fauchelevent, so serious and so
calm a man, in the barricade.
This was not, however, the only stupor which the apparitions and the
disappearances of the past had left in his mind. It must not be
supposed that he was delivered from all those obsessions of the memory
which force us, even when happy, even when satisfied, to glance sadly
behind us. The head which does not turn backwards towards horizons that
have vanished contains neither thought nor love. At times, Marius
clasped his face between his hands, and the vague and tumultuous past
traversed the twilight which reigned in his brain. Again he beheld
Mabeuf fall, he heard Gavroche singing amid the grape-shot, he felt
beneath his lips the cold brow of Éponine; Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean
Prouvaire, Combeferre, Bossuet, Grantaire, all his friends rose erect
before him, then dispersed into thin air. Were all those dear,
sorrowful, valiant, charming or tragic beings merely dreams? had they
actually existed? The revolt had enveloped everything in its smoke.
These great fevers create great dreams. He questioned himself; he felt
himself; all these vanished realities made him dizzy. Where were they
all then? was it really true that all were dead? A fall into the
shadows had carried off all except himself. It all seemed to him to
have disappeared as though behind the curtain of a theatre. There are
curtains like this which drop in life. God passes on to the following
act.
And he himself—was he actually the same man? He, the poor man, was
rich; he, the abandoned, had a family; he, the despairing, was to marry
Cosette. It seemed to him that he had traversed a tomb, and that he had
entered into it black and had emerged from it white, and in that tomb
the others had remained. At certain moments, all these beings of the
past, returned and present, formed a circle around him, and
overshadowed him; then he thought of Cosette, and recovered his
serenity; but nothing less than this felicity could have sufficed to
efface that catastrophe.
M. Fauchelevent almost occupied a place among these vanished beings.
Marius hesitated to believe that the Fauchelevent of the barricade was
the same as this Fauchelevent in flesh and blood, sitting so gravely
beside Cosette. The first was, probably, one of those nightmares
occasioned and brought back by his hours of delirium. However, the
natures of both men were rigid, no question from Marius to M.
Fauchelevent was possible. Such an idea had not even occurred to him.
We have already indicated this characteristic detail.
Two men who have a secret in common, and who, by a sort of tacit
agreement, exchange not a word on the subject, are less rare than is
commonly supposed.
Once only, did Marius make the attempt. He introduced into the
conversation the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and, turning to M. Fauchelevent,
he said to him:
“Of course, you are acquainted with that street?”
“What street?”
“The Rue de la Chanvrerie.”
“I have no idea of the name of that street,” replied M. Fauchelevent,
in the most natural manner in the world.
The response which bore upon the name of the street and not upon the
street itself, appeared to Marius to be more conclusive than it really
was.
“Decidedly,” thought he, “I have been dreaming. I have been subject to
a hallucination. It was some one who resembled him. M. Fauchelevent was
not there.”’
CHAPTER VIII—TWO MEN IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND
Marius’ enchantment, great as it was, could not efface from his mind
other pre-occupations.
While the wedding was in preparation, and while awaiting the date fixed
upon, he caused difficult and scrupulous retrospective researches to be
made.
He owed gratitude in various quarters; he owed it on his father’s
account, he owed it on his own.
There was Thénardier; there was the unknown man who had brought him,
Marius, back to M. Gillenormand.
Marius endeavored to find these two men, not intending to marry, to be
happy, and to forget them, and fearing that, were these debts of
gratitude not discharged, they would leave a shadow on his life, which
promised so brightly for the future.
It was impossible for him to leave all these arrears of suffering
behind him, and he wished, before entering joyously into the future, to
obtain a quittance from the past.
That Thénardier was a villain detracted nothing from the fact that he
had saved Colonel Pontmercy. Thénardier was a ruffian in the eyes of
all the world except Marius.
And Marius, ignorant of the real scene in the battle field of Waterloo,
was not aware of the peculiar detail, that his father, so far as
Thénardier was concerned was in the strange position of being indebted
to the latter for his life, without being indebted to him for any
gratitude.
None of the various agents whom Marius employed succeeded in
discovering any trace of Thénardier. Obliteration appeared to be
complete in that quarter. Madame Thénardier had died in prison pending
the trial. Thénardier and his daughter Azelma, the only two remaining
of that lamentable group, had plunged back into the gloom. The gulf of
the social unknown had silently closed above those beings. On the
surface there was not visible so much as that quiver, that trembling,
those obscure concentric circles which announce that something has
fallen in, and that the plummet may be dropped.
Madame Thénardier being dead, Boulatruelle being eliminated from the
case, Claquesous having disappeared, the principal persons accused
having escaped from prison, the trial connected with the ambush in the
Gorbeau house had come to nothing.
That affair had remained rather obscure. The bench of Assizes had been
obliged to content themselves with two subordinates. Panchaud, alias
Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, and Demi-Liard, alias Deux-Milliards,
who had been inconsistently condemned, after a hearing of both sides of
the case, to ten years in the galleys. Hard labor for life had been the
sentence pronounced against the escaped and contumacious accomplices.
Thénardier, the head and leader, had been, through contumacy, likewise
condemned to death.
This sentence was the only information remaining about Thénardier,
casting upon that buried name its sinister light like a candle beside a
bier.
Moreover, by thrusting Thénardier back into the very remotest depths,
through a fear of being re-captured, this sentence added to the density
of the shadows which enveloped this man.
As for the other person, as for the unknown man who had saved Marius,
the researches were at first to some extent successful, then came to an
abrupt conclusion. They succeeded in finding the carriage which had
brought Marius to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire on the evening of the
6th of June.
The coachman declared that, on the 6th of June, in obedience to the
commands of a police-agent, he had stood from three o’clock in the
afternoon until nightfall on the Quai des Champs-Élysées, above the
outlet of the Grand Sewer; that, towards nine o’clock in the evening,
the grating of the sewer, which abuts on the bank of the river, had
opened; that a man had emerged therefrom, bearing on his shoulders
another man, who seemed to be dead; that the agent, who was on the
watch at that point, had arrested the living man and had seized the
dead man; that, at the order of the police-agent, he, the coachman, had
taken “all those folks” into his carriage; that they had first driven
to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; that they had there deposited the
dead man; that the dead man was Monsieur Marius, and that he, the
coachman, recognized him perfectly, although he was alive “this time”;
that afterwards, they had entered the vehicle again, that he had
whipped up his horses; a few paces from the gate of the Archives, they
had called to him to halt; that there, in the street, they had paid him
and left him, and that the police-agent had led the other man away;
that he knew nothing more; that the night had been very dark.
Marius, as we have said, recalled nothing. He only remembered that he
had been seized from behind by an energetic hand at the moment when he
was falling backwards into the barricade; then, everything vanished so
far as he was concerned.
He had only regained consciousness at M. Gillenormand’s.
He was lost in conjectures.
He could not doubt his own identity. Still, how had it come to pass
that, having fallen in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, he had been picked up
by the police-agent on the banks of the Seine, near the Pont des
Invalides?
Some one had carried him from the Quartier des Halles to the
Champs-Élysées. And how? Through the sewer. Unheard-of devotion!
Some one? Who?
This was the man for whom Marius was searching.
Of this man, who was his savior, nothing; not a trace; not the faintest
indication.
Marius, although forced to preserve great reserve, in that direction,
pushed his inquiries as far as the prefecture of police. There, no more
than elsewhere, did the information obtained lead to any enlightenment.
The prefecture knew less about the matter than did the
hackney-coachman. They had no knowledge of any arrest having been made
on the 6th of June at the mouth of the Grand Sewer.
No report of any agent had been received there upon this matter, which
was regarded at the prefecture as a fable. The invention of this fable
was attributed to the coachman.
A coachman who wants a gratuity is capable of anything, even of
imagination. The fact was assured, nevertheless, and Marius could not
doubt it, unless he doubted his own identity, as we have just said.
Everything about this singular enigma was inexplicable.
What had become of that man, that mysterious man, whom the coachman had
seen emerge from the grating of the Grand Sewer bearing upon his back
the unconscious Marius, and whom the police-agent on the watch had
arrested in the very act of rescuing an insurgent? What had become of
the agent himself?
Why had this agent preserved silence? Had the man succeeded in making
his escape? Had he bribed the agent? Why did this man give no sign of
life to Marius, who owed everything to him? His disinterestedness was
no less tremendous than his devotion. Why had not that man appeared
again? Perhaps he was above compensation, but no one is above
gratitude. Was he dead? Who was the man? What sort of a face had he? No
one could tell him this.
The coachman answered: “The night was very dark.” Basque and Nicolette,
all in a flutter, had looked only at their young master all covered
with blood.
The porter, whose candle had lighted the tragic arrival of Marius, had
been the only one to take note of the man in question, and this is the
description that he gave:
“That man was terrible.”
Marius had the blood-stained clothing which he had worn when he had
been brought back to his grandfather preserved, in the hope that it
would prove of service in his researches.
On examining the coat, it was found that one skirt had been torn in a
singular way. A piece was missing.
One evening, Marius was speaking in the presence of Cosette and Jean
Valjean of the whole of that singular adventure, of the innumerable
inquiries which he had made, and of the fruitlessness of his efforts.
The cold countenance of “Monsieur Fauchelevent” angered him.
He exclaimed, with a vivacity which had something of wrath in it:
“Yes, that man, whoever he may have been, was sublime. Do you know what
he did, sir? He intervened like an archangel. He must have flung
himself into the midst of the battle, have stolen me away, have opened
the sewer, have dragged me into it and have carried me through it! He
must have traversed more than a league and a half in those frightful
subterranean galleries, bent over, weighed down, in the dark, in the
cesspool,—more than a league and a half, sir, with a corpse upon his
back! And with what object? With the sole object of saving the corpse.
And that corpse I was. He said to himself: ‘There may still be a
glimpse of life there, perchance; I will risk my own existence for that
miserable spark!’ And his existence he risked not once but twenty
times! And every step was a danger. The proof of it is, that on
emerging from the sewer, he was arrested. Do you know, sir, that that
man did all this? And he had no recompense to expect. What was I? An
insurgent. What was I? One of the conquered. Oh! if Cosette’s six
hundred thousand francs were mine….”
“They are yours,” interrupted Jean Valjean.
“Well,” resumed Marius, “I would give them all to find that man once
more.”
Jean Valjean remained silent.
BOOK SIXTH—THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT
CHAPTER I—THE 16TH OF FEBRUARY, 1833
The night of the 16th to the 17th of February, 1833, was a blessed
night. Above its shadows heaven stood open. It was the wedding night of
Marius and Cosette.
The day had been adorable.
It had not been the grand festival dreamed by the grandfather, a fairy
spectacle, with a confusion of cherubim and Cupids over the heads of
the bridal pair, a marriage worthy to form the subject of a painting to
be placed over a door; but it had been sweet and smiling.
The manner of marriage in 1833 was not the same as it is to-day. France
had not yet borrowed from England that supreme delicacy of carrying off
one’s wife, of fleeing, on coming out of church, of hiding oneself with
shame from one’s happiness, and of combining the ways of a bankrupt
with the delights of the Song of Songs. People had not yet grasped to
the full the chastity, exquisiteness, and decency of jolting their
paradise in a posting-chaise, of breaking up their mystery with
clic-clacs, of taking for a nuptial bed the bed of an inn, and of
leaving behind them, in a commonplace chamber, at so much a night, the
most sacred of the souvenirs of life mingled pell-mell with the
tête-à-tête of the conductor of the diligence and the maid-servant of
the inn.
In this second half of the nineteenth century in which we are now
living, the mayor and his scarf, the priest and his chasuble, the law
and God no longer suffice; they must be eked out by the Postilion de
Lonjumeau; a blue waistcoat turned up with red, and with bell buttons,
a plaque like a vantbrace, knee-breeches of green leather, oaths to the
Norman horses with their tails knotted up, false galloons, varnished
hat, long powdered locks, an enormous whip and tall boots. France does
not yet carry elegance to the length of doing like the English
nobility, and raining down on the post-chaise of the bridal pair a hail
storm of slippers trodden down at heel and of worn-out shoes, in memory
of Churchill, afterwards Marlborough, or Malbrouck, who was assailed on
his wedding-day by the wrath of an aunt which brought him good luck.
Old shoes and slippers do not, as yet, form a part of our nuptial
celebrations; but patience, as good taste continues to spread, we shall
come to that.
In 1833, a hundred years ago, marriage was not conducted at a full
trot.
Strange to say, at that epoch, people still imagined that a wedding was
a private and social festival, that a patriarchal banquet does not
spoil a domestic solemnity, that gayety, even in excess, provided it be
honest, and decent, does happiness no harm, and that, in short, it is a
good and a venerable thing that the fusion of these two destinies
whence a family is destined to spring, should begin at home, and that
the household should thenceforth have its nuptial chamber as its
witness.
And people were so immodest as to marry in their own homes.
The marriage took place, therefore, in accordance with this now
superannuated fashion, at M. Gillenormand’s house.
Natural and commonplace as this matter of marrying is, the banns to
publish, the papers to be drawn up, the mayoralty, and the church
produce some complication. They could not get ready before the 16th of
February.
Now, we note this detail, for the pure satisfaction of being exact, it
chanced that the 16th fell on Shrove Tuesday. Hesitations, scruples,
particularly on the part of Aunt Gillenormand.
“Shrove Tuesday!” exclaimed the grandfather, “so much the better. There
is a proverb:
“‘Mariage un Mardi gras
N’aura point enfants ingrats.’66
Let us proceed. Here goes for the 16th! Do you want to delay, Marius?”
“No, certainly not!” replied the lover.
“Let us marry, then,” cried the grandfather.
Accordingly, the marriage took place on the 16th, notwithstanding the
public merrymaking. It rained that day, but there is always in the sky
a tiny scrap of blue at the service of happiness, which lovers see,
even when the rest of creation is under an umbrella.
On the preceding evening, Jean Valjean handed to Marius, in the
presence of M. Gillenormand, the five hundred and eighty-four thousand
francs.
As the marriage was taking place under the régime of community of
property, the papers had been simple.
Henceforth, Toussaint was of no use to Jean Valjean; Cosette inherited
her and promoted her to the rank of lady’s maid.
As for Jean Valjean, a beautiful chamber in the Gillenormand house had
been furnished expressly for him, and Cosette had said to him in such
an irresistible manner: “Father, I entreat you,” that she had almost
persuaded him to promise that he would come and occupy it.
A few days before that fixed on for the marriage, an accident happened
to Jean Valjean; he crushed the thumb of his right hand. This was not a
serious matter; and he had not allowed any one to trouble himself about
it, nor to dress it, nor even to see his hurt, not even Cosette.
Nevertheless, this had forced him to swathe his hand in a linen
bandage, and to carry his arm in a sling, and had prevented his
signing. M. Gillenormand, in his capacity of Cosette’s
supervising-guardian, had supplied his place.
We will not conduct the reader either to the mayor’s office or to the
church. One does not follow a pair of lovers to that extent, and one is
accustomed to turn one’s back on the drama as soon as it puts a wedding
nosegay in its buttonhole. We will confine ourselves to noting an
incident which, though unnoticed by the wedding party, marked the
transit from the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire to the church of
Saint-Paul.
At that epoch, the northern extremity of the Rue Saint-Louis was in
process of repaving. It was barred off, beginning with the Rue du
Parc-Royal. It was impossible for the wedding carriages to go directly
to Saint-Paul. They were obliged to alter their course, and the
simplest way was to turn through the boulevard. One of the invited
guests observed that it was Shrove Tuesday, and that there would be a
jam of vehicles.—“Why?” asked M. Gillenormand—“Because of the
maskers.”—“Capital,” said the grandfather, “let us go that way. These
young folks are on the way to be married; they are about to enter the
serious part of life. This will prepare them for seeing a bit of the
masquerade.”
They went by way of the boulevard. The first wedding coach held Cosette
and Aunt Gillenormand, M. Gillenormand and Jean Valjean. Marius, still
separated from his betrothed according to usage, did not come until the
second. The nuptial train, on emerging from the Rue des
Filles-du-Calvaire, became entangled in a long procession of vehicles
which formed an endless chain from the Madeleine to the Bastille, and
from the Bastille to the Madeleine. Maskers abounded on the boulevard.
In spite of the fact that it was raining at intervals, Merry-Andrew,
Pantaloon and Clown persisted. In the good humor of that winter of
1833, Paris had disguised itself as Venice. Such Shrove Tuesdays are no
longer to be seen nowadays. Everything which exists being a scattered
Carnival, there is no longer any Carnival.
The sidewalks were overflowing with pedestrians and the windows with
curious spectators. The terraces which crown the peristyles of the
theatres were bordered with spectators. Besides the maskers, they
stared at that procession—peculiar to Shrove Tuesday as to
Longchamps,—of vehicles of every description, citadines, tapissières,
carioles, cabriolets marching in order, rigorously riveted to each
other by the police regulations, and locked into rails, as it were. Any
one in these vehicles is at once a spectator and a spectacle. Police
sergeants maintained, on the sides of the boulevard, these two
interminable parallel files, moving in contrary directions, and saw to
it that nothing interfered with that double current, those two brooks
of carriages, flowing, the one downstream, the other upstream, the one
towards the Chaussée d’Antin, the other towards the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine. The carriages of the peers of France and of the
Ambassadors, emblazoned with coats of arms, held the middle of the way,
going and coming freely. Certain joyous and magnificent trains, notably
that of the Bœuf Gras, had the same privilege. In this gayety of Paris,
England cracked her whip; Lord Seymour’s post-chaise, harassed by a
nickname from the populace, passed with great noise.
In the double file, along which the municipal guards galloped like
sheep-dogs, honest family coaches, loaded down with great-aunts and
grandmothers, displayed at their doors fresh groups of children in
disguise, Clowns of seven years of age, Columbines of six, ravishing
little creatures, who felt that they formed an official part of the
public mirth, who were imbued with the dignity of their harlequinade,
and who possessed the gravity of functionaries.
From time to time, a hitch arose somewhere in the procession of
vehicles; one or other of the two lateral files halted until the knot
was disentangled; one carriage delayed sufficed to paralyze the whole
line. Then they set out again on the march.
The wedding carriages were in the file proceeding towards the Bastille,
and skirting the right side of the Boulevard. At the top of the
Pont-aux-Choux, there was a stoppage. Nearly at the same moment, the
other file, which was proceeding towards the Madeleine, halted also. At
that point of the file there was a carriage-load of maskers.
These carriages, or to speak more correctly, these wagon-loads of
maskers are very familiar to Parisians. If they were missing on a
Shrove Tuesday, or at the Mid-Lent, it would be taken in bad part, and
people would say: “There’s something behind that. Probably the ministry
is about to undergo a change.” A pile of Cassandras, Harlequins and
Columbines, jolted along high above the passers-by, all possible
grotesquenesses, from the Turk to the savage, Hercules supporting
Marquises, fishwives who would have made Rabelais stop up his ears just
as the Mænads made Aristophanes drop his eyes, tow wigs, pink tights,
dandified hats, spectacles of a grimacer, three-cornered hats of Janot
tormented with a butterfly, shouts directed at pedestrians, fists on
hips, bold attitudes, bare shoulders, immodesty unchained; a chaos of
shamelessness driven by a coachman crowned with flowers; this is what
that institution was like.
Greece stood in need of the chariot of Thespis, France stands in need
of the hackney-coach of Vadé.
Everything can be parodied, even parody. The Saturnalia, that grimace
of antique beauty, ends, through exaggeration after exaggeration, in
Shrove Tuesday; and the Bacchanal, formerly crowned with sprays of vine
leaves and grapes, inundated with sunshine, displaying her marble
breast in a divine semi-nudity, having at the present day lost her
shape under the soaked rags of the North, has finally come to be called
the Jack-pudding.
The tradition of carriage-loads of maskers runs back to the most
ancient days of the monarchy. The accounts of Louis XI. allot to the
bailiff of the palace “twenty sous, Tournois, for three coaches of
mascarades in the crossroads.” In our day, these noisy heaps of
creatures are accustomed to have themselves driven in some ancient
cuckoo carriage, whose imperial they load down, or they overwhelm a
hired landau, with its top thrown back, with their tumultuous groups.
Twenty of them ride in a carriage intended for six. They cling to the
seats, to the rumble, on the cheeks of the hood, on the shafts. They
even bestride the carriage lamps. They stand, sit, lie, with their
knees drawn up in a knot, and their legs hanging. The women sit on the
men’s laps. Far away, above the throng of heads, their wild pyramid is
visible. These carriage-loads form mountains of mirth in the midst of
the rout. Collé, Panard and Piron flow from it, enriched with slang.
This carriage which has become colossal through its freight, has an air
of conquest. Uproar reigns in front, tumult behind. People vociferate,
shout, howl, there they break forth and writhe with enjoyment; gayety
roars; sarcasm flames forth, joviality is flaunted like a red flag; two
jades there drag farce blossomed forth into an apotheosis; it is the
triumphal car of laughter.
A laughter that is too cynical to be frank. In truth, this laughter is
suspicious. This laughter has a mission. It is charged with proving the
Carnival to the Parisians.
These fishwife vehicles, in which one feels one knows not what shadows,
set the philosopher to thinking. There is government therein. There one
lays one’s finger on a mysterious affinity between public men and
public women.
It certainly is sad that turpitude heaped up should give a sum total of
gayety, that by piling ignominy upon opprobrium the people should be
enticed, that the system of spying, and serving as caryatids to
prostitution should amuse the rabble when it confronts them, that the
crowd loves to behold that monstrous living pile of tinsel rags, half
dung, half light, roll by on four wheels howling and laughing, that
they should clap their hands at this glory composed of all shames, that
there would be no festival for the populace, did not the police
promenade in their midst these sorts of twenty-headed hydras of joy.
But what can be done about it? These be-ribboned and be-flowered
tumbrils of mire are insulted and pardoned by the laughter of the
public. The laughter of all is the accomplice of universal degradation.
Certain unhealthy festivals disaggregate the people and convert them
into the populace. And populaces, like tyrants, require buffoons. The
King has Roquelaure, the populace has the Merry-Andrew. Paris is a
great, mad city on every occasion that it is a great sublime city.
There the Carnival forms part of politics. Paris,—let us confess
it—willingly allows infamy to furnish it with comedy. She only demands
of her masters—when she has masters—one thing: “Paint me the mud.” Rome
was of the same mind. She loved Nero. Nero was a titanic lighterman.
Chance ordained, as we have just said, that one of these shapeless
clusters of masked men and women, dragged about on a vast calash,
should halt on the left of the boulevard, while the wedding train
halted on the right. The carriage-load of masks caught sight of the
wedding carriage containing the bridal party opposite them on the other
side of the boulevard.
“Hullo!” said a masker, “here’s a wedding.”
“A sham wedding,” retorted another. “We are the genuine article.”
And, being too far off to accost the wedding party, and fearing also,
the rebuke of the police, the two maskers turned their eyes elsewhere.
At the end of another minute, the carriage-load of maskers had their
hands full, the multitude set to yelling, which is the crowd’s caress
to masquerades; and the two maskers who had just spoken had to face the
throng with their comrades, and did not find the entire repertory of
projectiles of the fishmarkets too extensive to retort to the enormous
verbal attacks of the populace. A frightful exchange of metaphors took
place between the maskers and the crowd.
In the meanwhile, two other maskers in the same carriage, a Spaniard
with an enormous nose, an elderly air, and huge black moustache, and a
gaunt fishwife, who was quite a young girl, masked with a _loup_,67 had
also noticed the wedding, and while their companions and the passers-by
were exchanging insults, they had held a dialogue in a low voice.
Their aside was covered by the tumult and was lost in it. The gusts of
rain had drenched the front of the vehicle, which was wide open; the
breezes of February are not warm; as the fishwife, clad in a low-necked
gown, replied to the Spaniard, she shivered, laughed and coughed.
Here is their dialogue:
“Say, now.”
“What, daddy?”
“Do you see that old cove?”
“What old cove?”
“Yonder, in the first wedding-cart, on our side.”