Les Miserables
by Victor Hugo
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman
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"Reverend Mother?"

"Saint Didorus, Archbishop of Cappadocia, desired that this single
word might be inscribed on his tomb: Acarus, which signifies,
a worm of the earth; this was done. Is this true?"

"Yes, reverend Mother."

"The blessed Mezzocane, Abbot of Aquila, wished to be buried beneath
the gallows; this was done."

"That is true."

"Saint Terentius, Bishop of Port, where the mouth of the Tiber
empties into the sea, requested that on his tomb might be engraved
the sign which was placed on the graves of parricides, in the
hope that passers-by would spit on his tomb. This was done.
The dead must be obeyed."

"So be it."

"The body of Bernard Guidonis, born in France near Roche-Abeille, was,
as he had ordered, and in spite of the king of Castile, borne to
the church of the Dominicans in Limoges, although Bernard Guidonis
was Bishop of Tuy in Spain. Can the contrary be affirmed?"

"For that matter, no, reverend Mother."

"The fact is attested by Plantavit de la Fosse."

Several beads of the chaplet were told off, still in silence.
The prioress resumed:--

"Father Fauvent, Mother Crucifixion will be interred in the coffin
in which she has slept for the last twenty years."

"That is just."

"It is a continuation of her slumber."

"So I shall have to nail up that coffin?"

"Yes."

"And we are to reject the undertaker's coffin?"

"Precisely."

"I am at the orders of the very reverend community."

"The four Mother Precentors will assist you."

"In nailing up the coffin? I do not need them."

"No. In lowering the coffin."

"Where?"

"Into the vault."

"What vault?"

"Under the altar."

Fauchelevent started.

"The vault under the altar?"

"Under the altar."

"But--"

"You will have an iron bar."

"Yes, but--"

"You will raise the stone with the bar by means of the ring."

"But--"

"The dead must be obeyed. To be buried in the vault under the
altar of the chapel, not to go to profane earth; to remain there
in death where she prayed while living; such was the last wish
of Mother Crucifixion. She asked it of us; that is to say, commanded us."

"But it is forbidden."

"Forbidden by men, enjoined by God."

"What if it became known?"

"We have confidence in you."

"Oh! I am a stone in your walls."

"The chapter assembled. The vocal mothers, whom I have just
consulted again, and who are now deliberating, have decided
that Mother Crucifixion shall be buried, according to her wish,
in her own coffin, under our altar. Think, Father Fauvent, if she
were to work miracles here! What a glory of God for the community!
And miracles issue from tombs."

"But, reverend Mother, if the agent of the sanitary commission--"

"Saint Benoit II., in the matter of sepulture, resisted
Constantine Pogonatus."

"But the commissary of police--"

"Chonodemaire, one of the seven German kings who entered among
the Gauls under the Empire of Constantius, expressly recognized
the right of nuns to be buried in religion, that is to say,
beneath the altar."

"But the inspector from the Prefecture--"

"The world is nothing in the presence of the cross. Martin, the
eleventh general of the Carthusians, gave to his order this device:
Stat crux dum volvitur orbis."

"Amen," said Fauchelevent, who imperturbably extricated himself
in this manner from the dilemma, whenever he heard Latin.

Any audience suffices for a person who has held his peace too long.
On the day when the rhetorician Gymnastoras left his prison,
bearing in his body many dilemmas and numerous syllogisms which had
struck in, he halted in front of the first tree which he came to,
harangued it and made very great efforts to convince it. The prioress,
who was usually subjected to the barrier of silence, and whose
reservoir was overfull, rose and exclaimed with the loquacity of a dam
which has broken away:--

"I have on my right Benoit and on my left Bernard. Who was Bernard?
The first abbot of Clairvaux. Fontaines in Burgundy is a country
that is blest because it gave him birth. His father was named Tecelin,
and his mother Alethe. He began at Citeaux, to end in Clairvaux;
he was ordained abbot by the bishop of Chalon-sur-Saone, Guillaume
de Champeaux; he had seven hundred novices, and founded a hundred
and sixty monasteries; he overthrew Abeilard at the council
of Sens in 1140, and Pierre de Bruys and Henry his disciple,
and another sort of erring spirits who were called the Apostolics;
he confounded Arnauld de Brescia, darted lightning at the monk Raoul,
the murderer of the Jews, dominated the council of Reims in 1148,
caused the condemnation of Gilbert de Porea, Bishop of Poitiers,
caused the condemnation of Eon de l'Etoile, arranged the disputes
of princes, enlightened King Louis the Young, advised Pope Eugene III.,
regulated the Temple, preached the crusade, performed two hundred
and fifty miracles during his lifetime, and as many as thirty-nine
in one day. Who was Benoit? He was the patriarch of Mont-Cassin;
he was the second founder of the Saintete Claustrale, he was the Basil
of the West. His order has produced forty popes, two hundred cardinals,
fifty patriarchs, sixteen hundred archbishops, four thousand six
hundred bishops, four emperors, twelve empresses, forty-six kings,
forty-one queens, three thousand six hundred canonized saints,
and has been in existence for fourteen hundred years. On one side
Saint Bernard, on the other the agent of the sanitary department!
On one side Saint Benoit, on the other the inspector of public ways!
The state, the road commissioners, the public undertaker,
regulations, the administration, what do we know of all that?
There is not a chance passer-by who would not be indignant to see
how we are treated. We have not even the right to give our dust to
Jesus Christ! Your sanitary department is a revolutionary invention.
God subordinated to the commissary of police; such is the age.
Silence, Fauvent!"

Fauchelevent was but ill at ease under this shower bath.
The prioress continued:--

"No one doubts the right of the monastery to sepulture. Only fanatics
and those in error deny it. We live in times of terrible confusion.
We do not know that which it is necessary to know, and we know that
which we should ignore. We are ignorant and impious. In this age
there exist people who do not distinguish between the very great Saint
Bernard and the Saint Bernard denominated of the poor Catholics,
a certain good ecclesiastic who lived in the thirteenth century.
Others are so blasphemous as to compare the scaffold of Louis XVI.
to the cross of Jesus Christ. Louis XVI. was merely a king.
Let us beware of God! There is no longer just nor unjust.
The name of Voltaire is known, but not the name of Cesar de Bus.
Nevertheless, Cesar de Bus is a man of blessed memory, and Voltaire one
of unblessed memory. The last arch-bishop, the Cardinal de Perigord,
did not even know that Charles de Gondren succeeded to Berulle,
and Francois Bourgoin to Gondren, and Jean-Francois Senault
to Bourgoin, and Father Sainte-Marthe to Jean-Francois Senault.
The name of Father Coton is known, not because he was one of the three
who urged the foundation of the Oratorie, but because he furnished
Henri IV., the Huguenot king, with the material for an oath.
That which pleases people of the world in Saint Francois de Sales,
is that he cheated at play. And then, religion is attacked.
Why? Because there have been bad priests, because Sagittaire,
Bishop of Gap, was the brother of Salone, Bishop of Embrun,
and because both of them followed Mommol. What has that to do
with the question? Does that prevent Martin de Tours from being
a saint, and giving half of his cloak to a beggar? They persecute
the saints. They shut their eyes to the truth. Darkness is
the rule. The most ferocious beasts are beasts which are blind.
No one thinks of hell as a reality. Oh! how wicked people are!
By order of the king signifies to-day, by order of the revolution.
One no longer knows what is due to the living or to the dead. A holy
death is prohibited. Burial is a civil matter. This is horrible.
Saint Leo II. wrote two special letters, one to Pierre Notaire,
the other to the king of the Visigoths, for the purpose of combating
and rejecting, in questions touching the dead, the authority of the
exarch and the supremacy of the Emperor. Gauthier, Bishop of Chalons,
held his own in this matter against Otho, Duke of Burgundy.
The ancient magistracy agreed with him. In former times we had voices
in the chapter, even on matters of the day. The Abbot of Citeaux,
the general of the order, was councillor by right of birth to the
parliament of Burgundy. We do what we please with our dead.
Is not the body of Saint Benoit himself in France, in the abbey
of Fleury, called Saint Benoit-sur-Loire, although he died in Italy
at Mont-Cassin, on Saturday, the 21st of the month of March,
of the year 543? All this is incontestable. I abhor psalm-singers,
I hate priors, I execrate heretics, but I should detest yet more
any one who should maintain the contrary. One has only to read
Arnoul Wion, Gabriel Bucelin, Trithemus, Maurolics, and Dom Luc
d'Achery."

The prioress took breath, then turned to Fauchelevent.

"Is it settled, Father Fauvent?"

"It is settled, reverend Mother."

"We may depend on you?"

"I will obey."

"That is well."

"I am entirely devoted to the convent."

"That is understood. You will close the coffin. The sisters will
carry it to the chapel. The office for the dead will then be said.
Then we shall return to the cloister. Between eleven o'clock
and midnight, you will come with your iron bar. All will be done
in the most profound secrecy. There will be in the chapel only
the four Mother Precentors, Mother Ascension and yourself."

"And the sister at the post?"

"She will not turn round."

"But she will hear."

"She will not listen. Besides, what the cloister knows the world
learns not."

A pause ensued. The prioress went on:--

"You will remove your bell. It is not necessary that the sister
at the post should perceive your presence."

"Reverend Mother?"

"What, Father Fauvent?"

"Has the doctor for the dead paid his visit?"

"He will pay it at four o'clock to-day. The peal which orders
the doctor for the dead to be summoned has already been rung.
But you do not understand any of the peals?"

"I pay no attention to any but my own."

"That is well, Father Fauvent."

"Reverend Mother, a lever at least six feet long will be required."

"Where will you obtain it?"

"Where gratings are not lacking, iron bars are not lacking.
I have my heap of old iron at the bottom of the garden."

"About three-quarters of an hour before midnight; do not forget."

"Reverend Mother?"

"What?"

"If you were ever to have any other jobs of this sort, my brother
is the strong man for you. A perfect Turk!"

"You will do it as speedily as possible."

"I cannot work very fast. I am infirm; that is why I require
an assistant. I limp."

"To limp is no sin, and perhaps it is a blessing. The Emperor
Henry II., who combated Antipope Gregory and re-established Benoit
VIII., has two surnames, the Saint and the Lame."

"Two surtouts are a good thing," murmured Fauchelevent, who really
was a little hard of hearing.

"Now that I think of it, Father Fauvent, let us give a whole
hour to it. That is not too much. Be near the principal altar,
with your iron bar, at eleven o'clock. The office begins at midnight.
Everything must have been completed a good quarter of an hour
before that."

"I will do anything to prove my zeal towards the community.
These are my orders. I am to nail up the coffin. At eleven
o'clock exactly, I am to be in the chapel. The Mother Precentors
will be there. Mother Ascension will be there. Two men would
be better. However, never mind! I shall have my lever.
We will open the vault, we will lower the coffin, and we will close
the vault again. After which, there will be no trace of anything.
The government will have no suspicion. Thus all has been arranged,
reverend Mother?"

"No!"

"What else remains?"

"The empty coffin remains."

This produced a pause. Fauchelevent meditated. The prioress meditated.

"What is to be done with that coffin, Father Fauvent?"

"It will be given to the earth."

"Empty?"

Another silence. Fauchelevent made, with his left hand, that sort
of a gesture which dismisses a troublesome subject.

"Reverend Mother, I am the one who is to nail up the coffin in the
basement of the church, and no one can enter there but myself,
and I will cover the coffin with the pall."

"Yes, but the bearers, when they place it in the hearse and lower it
into the grave, will be sure to feel that there is nothing in it."

"Ah! the de--!" exclaimed Fauchelevent.

The prioress began to make the sign of the cross, and looked fixedly
at the gardener. The vil stuck fast in his throat.

He made haste to improvise an expedient to make her forget the oath.

"I will put earth in the coffin, reverend Mother. That will produce
the effect of a corpse."

"You are right. Earth, that is the same thing as man. So you
will manage the empty coffin?"

"I will make that my special business."

The prioress's face, up to that moment troubled and clouded,
grew serene once more. She made the sign of a superior dismissing
an inferior to him. Fauchelevent went towards the door. As he was
on the point of passing out, the prioress raised her voice gently:--

"I am pleased with you, Father Fauvent; bring your brother to me
to-morrow, after the burial, and tell him to fetch his daughter."

CHAPTER IV

IN WHICH JEAN VALJEAN HAS QUITE THE AIR OF HAVING READ AUSTIN
CASTILLEJO

The strides of a lame man are like the ogling glances of a one-eyed man;
they do not reach their goal very promptly. Moreover, Fauchelevent was
in a dilemma. He took nearly a quarter of an hour to return to his
cottage in the garden. Cosette had waked up. Jean Valjean had
placed her near the fire. At the moment when Fauchelevent entered,
Jean Valjean was pointing out to her the vintner's basket on the wall,
and saying to her, "Listen attentively to me, my little Cosette.
We must go away from this house, but we shall return to it, and we shall
be very happy here. The good man who lives here is going to carry you
off on his back in that. You will wait for me at a lady's house.
I shall come to fetch you. Obey, and say nothing, above all things,
unless you want Madame Thenardier to get you again!"

Cosette nodded gravely.

Jean Valjean turned round at the noise made by Fauchelevent opening
the door.

"Well?"

"Everything is arranged, and nothing is," said Fauchelevent.
"I have permission to bring you in; but before bringing you in you
must be got out. That's where the difficulty lies. It is easy
enough with the child."

"You will carry her out?"

"And she will hold her tongue?"

"I answer for that."

"But you, Father Madeleine?"

And, after a silence, fraught with anxiety, Fauchelevent exclaimed:--

"Why, get out as you came in!"

Jean Valjean, as in the first instance, contented himself
with saying, "Impossible."

Fauchelevent grumbled, more to himself than to Jean Valjean:--

"There is another thing which bothers me. I have said that I would
put earth in it. When I come to think it over, the earth instead
of the corpse will not seem like the real thing, it won't do,
it will get displaced, it will move about. The men will bear it.
You understand, Father Madeleine, the government will notice it."

Jean Valjean stared him straight in the eye and thought that he
was raving.

Fauchelevent went on:--

"How the de--uce are you going to get out? It must all be done
by to-morrow morning. It is to-morrow that I am to bring you in.
The prioress expects you."

Then he explained to Jean Valjean that this was his recompense for
a service which he, Fauchelevent, was to render to the community.
That it fell among his duties to take part in their burials, that he
nailed up the coffins and helped the grave-digger at the cemetery.
That the nun who had died that morning had requested to be buried
in the coffin which had served her for a bed, and interred in the vault
under the altar of the chapel. That the police regulations forbade this,
but that she was one of those dead to whom nothing is refused.
That the prioress and the vocal mothers intended to fulfil the wish
of the deceased. That it was so much the worse for the government.
That he, Fauchelevent, was to nail up the coffin in the cell,
raise the stone in the chapel, and lower the corpse into the vault.
And that, by way of thanks, the prioress was to admit his brother
to the house as a gardener, and his niece as a pupil. That his brother
was M. Madeleine, and that his niece was Cosette. That the prioress
had told him to bring his brother on the following evening, after the
counterfeit interment in the cemetery. But that he could not bring
M. Madeleine in from the outside if M. Madeleine was not outside.
That that was the first problem. And then, that there was another:
the empty coffin."

"What is that empty coffin?" asked Jean Valjean.

Fauchelevent replied:--

"The coffin of the administration."

"What coffin? What administration?"

"A nun dies. The municipal doctor comes and says, `A nun has died.'
The government sends a coffin. The next day it sends a hearse and
undertaker's men to get the coffin and carry it to the cemetery.
The undertaker's men will come and lift the coffin; there will be
nothing in it."

"Put something in it."

"A corpse? I have none."

"No."

"What then?"

"A living person."

"What person?"

"Me!" said Jean Valjean.

Fauchelevent, who was seated, sprang up as though a bomb had burst
under his chair.

"You!"

"Why not?"

Jean Valjean gave way to one of those rare smiles which lighted up
his face like a flash from heaven in the winter.

"You know, Fauchelevent, what you have said: `Mother Crucifixion
is dead.'  and I add: `and Father Madeleine is buried.'

"Ah! good, you can laugh, you are not speaking seriously."

"Very seriously, I must get out of this place."

"Certainly."

"l have told you to find a basket, and a cover for me also,"

"Well?"

"The basket will be of pine, and the cover a black cloth."

"In the first place, it will be a white cloth. Nuns are buried
in white."

"Let it be a white cloth, then."

"You are not like other men, Father Madeleine."

To behold such devices, which are nothing else than the savage and daring
inventions of the galleys, spring forth from the peaceable things
which surrounded him, and mingle with what he called the "petty course
of life in the convent," caused Fauchelevent as much amazement as a gull
fishing in the gutter of the Rue Saint-Denis would inspire in a passer-by.

Jean Valjean went on:--

"The problem is to get out of here without being seen. This offers
the means. But give me some information, in the first place.
How is it managed? Where is this coffin?"

"The empty one?"

"Yes."

"Down stairs, in what is called the dead-room. It stands
on two trestles, under the pall."

"How long is the coffin?"

"Six feet."

"What is this dead-room?"

"It is a chamber on the ground floor which has a grated window
opening on the garden, which is closed on the outside by a shutter,
and two doors; one leads into the convent, the other into the church."

"What church?"

"The church in the street, the church which any one can enter."

"Have you the keys to those two doors?"

"No; I have the key to the door which communicates with the convent;
the porter has the key to the door which communicates with the church."

"When does the porter open that door?"

"Only to allow the undertaker's men to enter, when they come
to get the coffin. When the coffin has been taken out, the door
is closed again."

"Who nails up the coffin?"

"I do."

"Who spreads the pall over it?"

"I do."

"Are you alone?"

"Not another man, except the police doctor, can enter the dead-room.
That is even written on the wall."

"Could you hide me in that room to-night when every one is asleep?"

"No. But I could hide you in a small, dark nook which opens
on the dead-room, where I keep my tools to use for burials,
and of which I have the key."

"At what time will the hearse come for the coffin to-morrow?"

"About three o'clock in the afternoon. The burial will take
place at the Vaugirard cemetery a little before nightfall.
It is not very near."

"I will remain concealed in your tool-closet all night and all
the morning. And how about food? I shall be hungry."

"I will bring you something."

"You can come and nail me up in the coffin at two o'clock."

Fauchelevent recoiled and cracked his finger-joints.

"But that is impossible!"

"Bah! Impossible to take a hammer and drive some nails in a plank?"

What seemed unprecedented to Fauchelevent was, we repeat,
a simple matter to Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean had been in worse
straits than this. Any man who has been a prisoner understands
how to contract himself to fit the diameter of the escape.
The prisoner is subject to flight as the sick man is subject
to a crisis which saves or kills him. An escape is a cure.
What does not a man undergo for the sake of a cure? To have
himself nailed up in a case and carried off like a bale of goods,
to live for a long time in a box, to find air where there is none,
to economize his breath for hours, to know how to stifle without dying--
this was one of Jean Valjean's gloomy talents.

Moreover, a coffin containing a living being,--that convict's expedient,--
is also an imperial expedient. If we are to credit the monk
Austin Castillejo, this was the means employed by Charles the Fifth,
desirous of seeing the Plombes for the last time after his abdication.

He had her brought into and carried out of the monastery
of Saint-Yuste in this manner.

Fauchelevent, who had recovered himself a little, exclaimed:--

"But how will you manage to breathe?"

"I will breathe."

"In that box! The mere thought of it suffocates me."

"You surely must have a gimlet, you will make a few holes here and there,
around my mouth, and you will nail the top plank on loosely."

"Good! And what if you should happen to cough or to sneeze?"

"A man who is making his escape does not cough or sneeze."

And Jean Valjean added:--

"Father Fauchelevent, we must come to a decision: I must either
be caught here, or accept this escape through the hearse."

Every one has noticed the taste which cats have for pausing
and lounging between the two leaves of a half-shut door. Who is
there who has not said to a cat, "Do come in!"  There are men who,
when an incident stands half-open before them, have the same tendency
to halt in indecision between two resolutions, at the risk of getting
crushed through the abrupt closing of the adventure by fate.
The over-prudent, cats as they are, and because they are cats,
sometimes incur more danger than the audacious. Fauchelevent was
of this hesitating nature. But Jean Valjean's coolness prevailed
over him in spite of himself. He grumbled:--

"Well, since there is no other means."

Jean Valjean resumed:--

"The only thing which troubles me is what will take place
at the cemetery."

"That is the very point that is not troublesome," exclaimed Fauchelevent.
"If you are sure of coming out of the coffin all right, I am sure
of getting you out of the grave. The grave-digger is a drunkard,
and a friend of mine. He is Father Mestienne. An old fellow
of the old school. The grave-digger puts the corpses in the grave,
and I put the grave-digger in my pocket. I will tell you
what will take place. They will arrive a little before dusk,
three-quarters of an hour before the gates of the cemetery are closed.
The hearse will drive directly up to the grave. I shall follow;
that is my business. I shall have a hammer, a chisel, and some
pincers in my pocket. The hearse halts, the undertaker's men knot
a rope around your coffin and lower you down. The priest says
the prayers, makes the sign of the cross, sprinkles the holy water,
and takes his departure. I am left alone with Father Mestienne.
He is my friend, I tell you. One of two things will happen,
he will either be sober, or he will not be sober. If he is not drunk,
I shall say to him: `Come and drink a bout while the Bon Coing
[the Good Quince] is open.'  I carry him off, I get him drunk,--
it does not take long to make Father Mestienne drunk, he always
has the beginning of it about him,--I lay him under the table,
I take his card, so that I can get into the cemetery again,
and I return without him. Then you have no longer any one but me
to deal with. If he is drunk, I shall say to him: `Be off;
I will do your work for you.'  Off he goes, and I drag you out of
the hole."

Jean Valjean held out his hand, and Fauchelevent precipitated
himself upon it with the touching effusion of a peasant.

"That is settled, Father Fauchelevent. All will go well."

"Provided nothing goes wrong," thought Fauchelevent. "In that case,
it would be terrible."

CHAPTER V

IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO BE DRUNK IN ORDER TO BE IMMORTAL

On the following day, as the sun was declining, the very rare
passers-by on the Boulevard du Maine pulled off their hats to an
old-fashioned hearse, ornamented with skulls, cross-bones, and tears.
This hearse contained a coffin covered with a white cloth over which
spread a large black cross, like a huge corpse with drooping arms.
A mourning-coach, in which could be seen a priest in his surplice,
and a choir boy in his red cap, followed. Two undertaker's men
in gray uniforms trimmed with black walked on the right and the left
of the hearse. Behind it came an old man in the garments of a laborer,
who limped along. The procession was going in the direction
of the Vaugirard cemetery.

The handle of a hammer, the blade of a cold chisel, and the antennae
of a pair of pincers were visible, protruding from the man's pocket.

The Vaugirard cemetery formed an exception among the cemeteries
of Paris. It had its peculiar usages, just as it had its carriage
entrance and its house door, which old people in the quarter,
who clung tenaciously to ancient words, still called the porte cavaliere
and the porte pietonne.[16] The Bernardines-Benedictines of the Rue
Petit-Picpus had obtained permission, as we have already stated,
to be buried there in a corner apart, and at night, the plot of land
having formerly belonged to their community. The grave-diggers being
thus bound to service in the evening in summer and at night in winter,
in this cemetery, they were subjected to a special discipline.
The gates of the Paris cemeteries closed, at that epoch, at sundown,
and this being a municipal regulation, the Vaugirard cemetery
was bound by it like the rest. The carriage gate and the house
door were two contiguous grated gates, adjoining a pavilion built
by the architect Perronet, and inhabited by the door-keeper of
the cemetery. These gates, therefore, swung inexorably on their
hinges at the instant when the sun disappeared behind the dome
of the Invalides. If any grave-digger were delayed after that
moment in the cemetery, there was but one way for him to get out--
his grave-digger's card furnished by the department of public funerals.
A sort of letter-box was constructed in the porter's window.
The grave-digger dropped his card into this box, the porter heard
it fall, pulled the rope, and the small door opened. If the man
had not his card, he mentioned his name, the porter, who was
sometimes in bed and asleep, rose, came out and identified the man,
and opened the gate with his key; the grave-digger stepped out,
but had to pay a fine of fifteen francs.

[16] Instead of porte cochere and porte batarde.

This cemetery, with its peculiarities outside the regulations,
embarrassed the symmetry of the administration. It was suppressed
a little later than 1830. The cemetery of Mont-Parnasse, called
the Eastern cemetery, succeeded to it, and inherited that famous
dram-shop next to the Vaugirard cemetery, which was surmounted
by a quince painted on a board, and which formed an angle, one side
on the drinkers' tables, and the other on the tombs, with this sign:
Au Bon Coing.

The Vaugirard cemetery was what may be called a faded cemetery.
It was falling into disuse. Dampness was invading it, the flowers
were deserting it. The bourgeois did not care much about being
buried in the Vaugirard; it hinted at poverty. Pere-Lachaise if
you please! to be buried in Pere-Lachaise is equivalent to having
furniture of mahogany. It is recognized as elegant. The Vaugirard
cemetery was a venerable enclosure, planted like an old-fashioned
French garden. Straight alleys, box, thuya-trees, holly,
ancient tombs beneath aged cypress-trees, and very tall grass.
In the evening it was tragic there. There were very lugubrious lines
about it.

The sun had not yet set when the hearse with the white pall and
the black cross entered the avenue of the Vaugirard cemetery.
The lame man who followed it was no other than Fauchelevent.

The interment of Mother Crucifixion in the vault under the altar,
the exit of Cosette, the introduction of Jean Valjean to the dead-room,--
all had been executed without difficulty, and there had been no hitch.

Let us remark in passing, that the burial of Mother Crucifixion
under the altar of the convent is a perfectly venial offence
in our sight. It is one of the faults which resemble a duty.
The nuns had committed it, not only without difficulty, but even
with the applause of their own consciences. In the cloister, what is
called the "government" is only an intermeddling with authority,
an interference which is always questionable. In the first place,
the rule; as for the code, we shall see. Make as many laws
as you please, men; but keep them for yourselves. The tribute
to Caesar is never anything but the remnants of the tribute to God.
A prince is nothing in the presence of a principle.

Fauchelevent limped along behind the hearse in a very contented
frame of mind. His twin plots, the one with the nuns, the one
for the convent, the other against it, the other with M. Madeleine,
had succeeded, to all appearance. Jean Valjean's composure
was one of those powerful tranquillities which are contagious.
Fauchelevent no longer felt doubtful as to his success.

What remained to be done was a mere nothing. Within the last
two years, he had made good Father Mestienne, a chubby-cheeked person,
drunk at least ten times. He played with Father Mestienne. He did
what he liked with him. He made him dance according to his whim.
Mestienne's head adjusted itself to the cap of Fauchelevent's will.
Fauchelevent's confidence was perfect.

At the moment when the convoy entered the avenue leading to the cemetery,
Fauchelevent glanced cheerfully at the hearse, and said half aloud,
as he rubbed his big hands:--

"Here's a fine farce!"

All at once the hearse halted; it had reached the gate. The permission
for interment must be exhibited. The undertaker's man addressed
himself to the porter of the cemetery. During this colloquy,
which always is productive of a delay of from one to two minutes,
some one, a stranger, came and placed himself behind the hearse,
beside Fauchelevent. He was a sort of laboring man, who wore a
waistcoat with large pockets and carried a mattock under his arm.

Fauchelevent surveyed this stranger.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

"The man replied:--

"The grave-digger."

If a man could survive the blow of a cannon-ball full in the breast,
he would make the same face that Fauchelevent made.

"The grave-digger?"

"Yes."

"You?"

"I."

"Father Mestienne is the grave-digger."

"He was."

"What! He was?"

"He is dead."

Fauchelevent had expected anything but this, that a grave-digger
could die. It is true, nevertheless, that grave-diggers do
die themselves. By dint of excavating graves for other people,
one hollows out one's own.

Fauchelevent stood there with his mouth wide open. He had hardly
the strength to stammer:--

"But it is not possible!"

"It is so."

"But," he persisted feebly, "Father Mestienne is the grave-digger."

"After Napoleon, Louis XVIII. After Mestienne, Gribier.
Peasant, my name is Gribier."

Fauchelevent, who was deadly pale, stared at this Gribier.

He was a tall, thin, livid, utterly funereal man. He had the air
of an unsuccessful doctor who had turned grave-digger.

Fauchelevent burst out laughing.

"Ah!" said he, "what queer things do happen! Father Mestienne
is dead, but long live little Father Lenoir! Do you know who little
Father Lenoir is? He is a jug of red wine. It is a jug of Surene,
morbigou! of real Paris Surene? Ah! So old Mestienne is dead!
I am sorry for it; he was a jolly fellow. But you are a jolly
fellow, too. Are you not, comrade? We'll go and have a drink
together presently."

The man replied:--

"I have been a student. I passed my fourth examination.
I never drink."

The hearse had set out again, and was rolling up the grand alley
of the cemetery.

Fauchelevent had slackened his pace. He limped more out of anxiety
than from infirmity.

The grave-digger walked on in front of him.

Fauchelevent passed the unexpected Gribier once more in review.

He was one of those men who, though very young, have the air of age,
and who, though slender, are extremely strong.

"Comrade!" cried Fauchelevent.

The man turned round.

"I am the convent grave-digger."

"My colleague," said the man.

Fauchelevent, who was illiterate but very sharp, understood that he
had to deal with a formidable species of man, with a fine talker.
He muttered:

"So Father Mestienne is dead."

The man replied:--

"Completely. The good God consulted his note-book which shows when
the time is up. It was Father Mestienne's turn. Father Mestienne died."

Fauchelevent repeated mechanically: "The good God--"

"The good God," said the man authoritatively. "According to
the philosophers, the Eternal Father; according to the Jacobins,
the Supreme Being."

"Shall we not make each other's acquaintance?" stammered Fauchelevent.

"It is made. You are a peasant, I am a Parisian."

"People do not know each other until they have drunk together.
He who empties his glass empties his heart. You must come and have
a drink with me. Such a thing cannot be refused."

"Business first."

Fauchelevent thought: "I am lost."

They were only a few turns of the wheel distant from the small
alley leading to the nuns' corner.

The grave-digger resumed:--

"Peasant, I have seven small children who must be fed. As they
must eat, I cannot drink."

And he added, with the satisfaction of a serious man who is turning
a phrase well:--

"Their hunger is the enemy of my thirst."

The hearse skirted a clump of cypress-trees, quitted the grand alley,
turned into a narrow one, entered the waste land, and plunged into
a thicket. This indicated the immediate proximity of the place
of sepulture. Fauchelevent slackened his pace, but he could not
detain the hearse. Fortunately, the soil, which was light and wet
with the winter rains, clogged the wheels and retarded its speed.

He approached the grave-digger.

"They have such a nice little Argenteuil wine," murmured Fauchelevent.

"Villager," retorted the man, "I ought not be a grave-digger. My
father was a porter at the Prytaneum [Town-Hall]. He destined me
for literature. But he had reverses. He had losses on 'change.
I was obliged to renounce the profession of author. But I am still
a public writer."

"So you are not a grave-digger, then?" returned Fauchelevent,
clutching at this branch, feeble as it was.

"The one does not hinder the other. I cumulate."

Fauchelevent did not understand this last word.

"Come have a drink," said he.

Here a remark becomes necessary. Fauchelevent, whatever his anguish,
offered a drink, but he did not explain himself on one point; who was
to pay? Generally, Fauchelevent offered and Father Mestienne paid.
An offer of a drink was the evident result of the novel situation
created by the new grave-digger, and it was necessary to make
this offer, but the old gardener left the proverbial quarter of an hour
named after Rabelais in the dark, and that not unintentionally.
As for himself, Fauchelevent did not wish to pay, troubled as he was.

The grave-digger went on with a superior smile:--

"One must eat. I have accepted Father Mestienne's reversion.
One gets to be a philosopher when one has nearly completed
his classes. To the labor of the hand I join the labor of the arm.
I have my scrivener's stall in the market of the Rue de Sevres.
You know? the Umbrella Market. All the cooks of the Red Cross apply
to me. I scribble their declarations of love to the raw soldiers.
In the morning I write love letters; in the evening I dig graves.
Such is life, rustic."

The hearse was still advancing. Fauchelevent, uneasy to the
last degree, was gazing about him on all sides. Great drops
of perspiration trickled down from his brow.

"But," continued the grave-digger, "a man cannot serve two mistresses.
I must choose between the pen and the mattock. The mattock is
ruining my hand."

The hearse halted.

The choir boy alighted from the mourning-coach, then the priest.

One of the small front wheels of the hearse had run up a little
on a pile of earth, beyond which an open grave was visible.

"What a farce this is!" repeated Fauchelevent in consternation.

CHAPTER VI

BETWEEN FOUR PLANKS

Who was in the coffin? The reader knows. Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean had arranged things so that he could exist there,
and he could almost breathe.

It is a strange thing to what a degree security of conscience
confers security of the rest. Every combination thought out
by Jean Valjean had been progressing, and progressing favorably,
since the preceding day. He, like Fauchelevent, counted on
Father Mestienne. He had no doubt as to the end. Never was
there a more critical situation, never more complete composure.

The four planks of the coffin breathe out a kind of terrible peace.
It seemed as though something of the repose of the dead entered into
Jean Valjean's tranquillity.

From the depths of that coffin he had been able to follow,
and he had followed, all the phases of the terrible drama which he
was playing with death.

Shortly after Fauchelevent had finished nailing on the upper plank,
Jean Valjean had felt himself carried out, then driven off. He knew,
from the diminution in the jolting, when they left the pavements
and reached the earth road. He had divined, from a dull noise,
that they were crossing the bridge of Austerlitz. At the first halt,
he had understood that they were entering the cemetery; at the
second halt, he said to himself:--

"Here is the grave."

Suddenly, he felt hands seize the coffin, then a harsh grating
against the planks; he explained it to himself as the rope which was
being fastened round the casket in order to lower it into the cavity.

Then he experienced a giddiness.

The undertaker's man and the grave-digger had probably allowed
the coffin to lose its balance, and had lowered the head before
the foot. He recovered himself fully when he felt himself
horizontal and motionless. He had just touched the bottom.

He had a certain sensation of cold.

A voice rose above him, glacial and solemn. He heard Latin words,
which he did not understand, pass over him, so slowly that he was
able to catch them one by one:--

"Qui dormiunt in terrae pulvere, evigilabunt; alii in vitam aeternam,
et alii in approbrium, ut videant semper."

A child's voice said:--

"De profundis."

The grave voice began again:--

"Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine."

The child's voice responded:--

"Et lux perpetua luceat ei."

He heard something like the gentle patter of several drops of rain
on the plank which covered him. It was probably the holy water.

He thought: "This will be over soon now. Patience for a
little while longer. The priest will take his departure.
Fauchelevent will take Mestienne off to drink. I shall be left.
Then Fauchelevent will return alone, and I shall get out.
That will be the work of a good hour."

The grave voice resumed

"Requiescat in pace."

And the child's voice said:--

"Amen."

Jean Valjean strained his ears, and heard something
like retreating footsteps.

"There, they are going now," thought he. "I am alone."

All at once, he heard over his head a sound which seemed to him
to be a clap of thunder.

It was a shovelful of earth falling on the coffin.

A second shovelful fell.

One of the holes through which he breathed had just been stopped up.

A third shovelful of earth fell.

Then a fourth.

There are things which are too strong for the strongest man.
Jean Valjean lost consciousness.

CHAPTER VII

IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND THE ORIGIN OF THE SAYING: DON'T LOSE THE
CARD

This is what had taken place above the coffin in which lay Jean Valjean.

When the hearse had driven off, when the priest and the choir
boy had entered the carriage again and taken their departure,
Fauchelevent, who had not taken his eyes from the grave-digger,
saw the latter bend over and grasp his shovel, which was sticking
upright in the heap of dirt.

Then Fauchelevent took a supreme resolve.

He placed himself between the grave and the grave-digger, crossed
his arms and said:--

"I am the one to pay!"

The grave-digger stared at him in amazement, and replied:--

"What's that, peasant?"

Fauchelevent repeated:--

"I am the one who pays!"

"What?"

"For the wine."

"What wine?"

"That Argenteuil wine."

"Where is the Argenteuil?"

"At the Bon Coing."

"Go to the devil!" said the grave-digger.

And he flung a shovelful of earth on the coffin.

The coffin gave back a hollow sound. Fauchelevent felt himself
stagger and on the point of falling headlong into the grave himself.
He shouted in a voice in which the strangling sound of the death
rattle began to mingle:--

"Comrade! Before the Bon Coing is shut!"

The grave-digger took some more earth on his shovel.
Fauchelevent continued.

"I will pay."

And he seized the man's arm.

"Listen to me, comrade. I am the convent grave-digger, I have come
to help you. It is a business which can be performed at night.
Let us begin, then, by going for a drink."

And as he spoke, and clung to this desperate insistence,
this melancholy reflection occurred to him: "And if he drinks,
will he get drunk?"

"Provincial," said the man, "if you positively insist upon it,
I consent. We will drink. After work, never before."

And he flourished his shovel briskly. Fauchelevent held him back.

"It is Argenteuil wine, at six."

"Oh, come," said the grave-digger, "you are a bell-ringer. Ding dong,
ding dong, that's all you know how to say. Go hang yourself."

And he threw in a second shovelful.

Fauchelevent had reached a point where he no longer knew what he
was saying.

"Come along and drink," he cried, "since it is I who pays the bill."

"When we have put the child to bed," said the grave-digger.

He flung in a third shovelful.

Then he thrust his shovel into the earth and added:--

"It's cold to-night, you see, and the corpse would shriek out
after us if we were to plant her there without a coverlet."

At that moment, as he loaded his shovel, the grave-digger bent over,
and the pocket of his waistcoat gaped. Fauchelevent's wild gaze
fell mechanically into that pocket, and there it stopped.

The sun was not yet hidden behind the horizon; there was still light
enough to enable him to distinguish something white at the bottom
of that yawning pocket.

The sum total of lightning that the eye of a Picard peasant can contain,
traversed Fauchelevent's pupils. An idea had just occurred to him.

He thrust his hand into the pocket from behind, without the grave-digger,
who was wholly absorbed in his shovelful of earth, observing it,
and pulled out the white object which lay at the bottom of it.

The man sent a fourth shovelful tumbling into the grave.

Just as he turned round to get the fifth, Fauchelevent looked
calmly at him and said:--

"By the way, you new man, have you your card?"

The grave-digger paused.

"What card?"

"The sun is on the point of setting."

"That's good, it is going to put on its nightcap."

"The gate of the cemetery will close immediately."

"Well, what then?"

"Have you your card?"

"Ah! my card?" said the grave-digger.

And he fumbled in his pocket.

Having searched one pocket, he proceeded to search the other.
He passed on to his fobs, explored the first, returned to the second.

"Why, no," said he, "I have not my card. I must have forgotten it."

"Fifteen francs fine," said Fauchelevent.

The grave-digger turned green. Green is the pallor of livid people.

"Ah! Jesus-mon-Dieu-bancroche-a-bas-la-lune!"[17] he exclaimed.
"Fifteen francs fine!"

[17] Jesus-my-God-bandy-leg--down with the moon!

"Three pieces of a hundred sous," said Fauchelevent.

The grave-digger dropped his shovel.

Fauchelevent's turn had come.

"Ah, come now, conscript," said Fauchelevent, "none of this despair.
There is no question of committing suicide and benefiting the grave.
Fifteen francs is fifteen francs, and besides, you may not be able
to pay it. I am an old hand, you are a new one. I know all the
ropes and the devices. I will give you some friendly advice.
One thing is clear, the sun is on the point of setting, it is touching
the dome now, the cemetery will be closed in five minutes more."

"That is true," replied the man.

"Five minutes more and you will not have time to fill the grave,
it is as hollow as the devil, this grave, and to reach the gate
in season to pass it before it is shut."

"That is true."

"In that case, a fine of fifteen francs."

"Fifteen francs."

"But you have time. Where do you live?"

"A couple of steps from the barrier, a quarter of an hour from here.
No. 87 Rue de Vaugirard."

"You have just time to get out by taking to your heels at your
best speed."

"That is exactly so."

"Once outside the gate, you gallop home, you get your card,
you return, the cemetery porter admits you. As you have your card,
there will be nothing to pay. And you will bury your corpse.
I'll watch it for you in the meantime, so that it shall not
run away."

"I am indebted to you for my life, peasant."

"Decamp!" said Fauchelevent.

The grave-digger, overwhelmed with gratitude, shook his hand and set
off on a run.

When the man had disappeared in the thicket, Fauchelevent listened
until he heard his footsteps die away in the distance, then he
leaned over the grave, and said in a low tone:--

"Father Madeleine!"

There was no reply.

Fauchelevent was seized with a shudder. He tumbled rather than
climbed into the grave, flung himself on the head of the coffin
and cried:--

"Are you there?"

Silence in the coffin.

Fauchelevent, hardly able to draw his breath for trembling,
seized his cold chisel and his hammer, and pried up the coffin lid.

Jean Valjean's face appeared in the twilight; it was pale and his
eyes were closed.

Fauchelevent's hair rose upright on his head, he sprang to his feet,
then fell back against the side of the grave, ready to swoon on
the coffin. He stared at Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean lay there pallid and motionless.

Fauchelevent murmured in a voice as faint as a sigh:--

"He is dead!"

And, drawing himself up, and folding his arms with such violence
that his clenched fists came in contact with his shoulders,
he cried:--

"And this is the way I save his life!"

Then the poor man fell to sobbing. He soliloquized the while,
for it is an error to suppose that the soliloquy is unnatural.
Powerful emotion often talks aloud.

"It is Father Mestienne's fault. Why did that fool die? What need
was there for him to give up the ghost at the very moment when no
one was expecting it? It is he who has killed M. Madeleine.
Father Madeleine! He is in the coffin. It is quite handy.
All is over. Now, is there any sense in these things?
Ah! my God! he is dead! Well! and his little girl, what am
I to do with her? What will the fruit-seller say? The idea
of its being possible for a man like that to die like this!
When I think how he put himself under that cart! Father Madeleine!
Father Madeleine! Pardine! He was suffocated, I said so.
He wouldn't believe me. Well! Here's a pretty trick to play!
He is dead, that good man, the very best man out of all the good
God's good folks! And his little girl! Ah! In the first place,
I won't go back there myself. I shall stay here. After having
done such a thing as that! What's the use of being two old men,
if we are two old fools! But, in the first place, how did he
manage to enter the convent? That was the beginning of it all.
One should not do such things. Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine!
Father Madeleine! Madeleine! Monsieur Madeleine! Monsieur le Maire!
He does not hear me. Now get out of this scrape if you can!"

And he tore his hair.

A grating sound became audible through the trees in the distance.
It was the cemetery gate closing.

Fauchelevent bent over Jean Valjean, and all at once he bounded
back and recoiled so far as the limits of a grave permit.

Jean Valjean's eyes were open and gazing at him.

To see a corpse is alarming, to behold a resurrection is almost as much
so. Fauchelevent became like stone, pale, haggard, overwhelmed by all
these excesses of emotion, not knowing whether he had to do with a living
man or a dead one, and staring at Jean Valjean, who was gazing at him.

"I fell asleep," said Jean Valjean.

And he raised himself to a sitting posture.

Fauchelevent fell on his knees.

"Just, good Virgin! How you frightened me!"

Then he sprang to his feet and cried:--

"Thanks, Father Madeleine!"

Jean Valjean had merely fainted. The fresh air had revived him.

Joy is the ebb of terror. Fauchelevent found almost as much
difficulty in recovering himself as Jean Valjean had.

"So you are not dead! Oh! How wise you are! I called you
so much that you came back. When I saw your eyes shut, I said:
`Good! there he is, stifled,' I should have gone raving mad,
mad enough for a strait jacket. They would have put me in Bicetre.
What do you suppose I should have done if you had been dead?
And your little girl? There's that fruit-seller,--she would never
have understood it! The child is thrust into your arms, and then--
the grandfather is dead! What a story! good saints of paradise,
what a tale! Ah! you are alive, that's the best of it!"

"I am cold," said Jean Valjean.

This remark recalled Fauchelevent thoroughly to reality,
and there was pressing need of it. The souls of these two men were
troubled even when they had recovered themselves, although they
did not realize it, and there was about them something uncanny,
which was the sinister bewilderment inspired by the place.

"Let us get out of here quickly," exclaimed Fauchelevent.

He fumbled in his pocket, and pulled out a gourd with which he
had provided himself.

"But first, take a drop," said he.

The flask finished what the fresh air had begun, Jean Valjean swallowed
a mouthful of brandy, and regained full possession of his faculties.

He got out of the coffin, and helped Fauchelevent to nail
on the lid again.

Three minutes later they were out of the grave.

Moreover, Fauchelevent was perfectly composed. He took his time.
The cemetery was closed. The arrival of the grave-digger Gribier
was not to be apprehended. That "conscript" was at home busily
engaged in looking for his card, and at some difficulty in finding
it in his lodgings, since it was in Fauchelevent's pocket.
Without a card, he could not get back into the cemetery.

Fauchelevent took the shovel, and Jean Valjean the pick-axe,
and together they buried the empty coffin.

When the grave was full, Fauchelevent said to Jean Valjean:--

"Let us go. I will keep the shovel; do you carry off the mattock."

Night was falling.

Jean Valjean experienced rome difficulty in moving and in walking.
He had stiffened himself in that coffin, and had become a little
like a corpse. The rigidity of death had seized upon him between
those four planks. He had, in a manner, to thaw out, from the tomb.

"You are benumbed," said Fauchelevent. "It is a pity that I have
a game leg, for otherwise we might step out briskly."

"Bah!" replied Jean Valjean, "four paces will put life into my legs
once more."

They set off by the alleys through which the hearse had passed.
On arriving before the closed gate and the porter's pavilion Fauchelevent,
who held the grave-digger's card in his hand, dropped it into the box,
the porter pulled the rope, the gate opened, and they went out.

"How well everything is going!" said Fauchelevent; "what a capital
idea that was of yours, Father Madeleine!"

They passed the Vaugirard barrier in the simplest manner in the world.
In the neighborhood of the cemetery, a shovel and pick are equal
to two passports.

The Rue Vaugirard was deserted.

"Father Madeleine," said Fauchelevent as they went along,
and raising his eyes to the houses, "Your eyes are better than mine.
Show me No. 87."

"Here it is," said Jean Valjean.

"There is no one in the street," said Fauchelevent. "Give me
your mattock and wait a couple of minutes for me."

Fauchelevent entered No. 87, ascended to the very top, guided by
the instinct which always leads the poor man to the garret,
and knocked in the dark, at the door of an attic.

A voice replied: "Come in."

It was Gribier's voice.

Fauchelevent opened the door. The grave-digger's dwelling was,
like all such wretched habitations, an unfurnished and encumbered garret.
A packing-case--a coffin, perhaps--took the place of a commode,
a butter-pot served for a drinking-fountain, a straw mattress served
for a bed, the floor served instead of tables and chairs. In a corner,
on a tattered fragment which had been a piece of an old carpet, a thin
woman and a number of children were piled in a heap. The whole of this
poverty-stricken interior bore traces of having been overturned.
One would have said that there had been an earthquake "for one."
The covers were displaced, the rags scattered about, the jug broken,
the mother had been crying, the children had probably been beaten;
traces of a vigorous and ill-tempered search. It was plain
that the grave-digger had made a desperate search for his card,
and had made everybody in the garret, from the jug to his wife,
responsible for its loss. He wore an air of desperation.

But Fauchelevent was in too great a hurry to terminate this adventure
to take any notice of this sad side of his success.

He entered and said:--

"I have brought you back your shovel and pick."

Gribier gazed at him in stupefaction.

"Is it you, peasant?"

"And to-morrow morning you will find your card with the porter
of the cemetery."

And he laid the shovel and mattock on the floor.

"What is the meaning of this?" demanded Gribier.

"The meaning of it is, that you dropped your card out of your pocket,
that I found it on the ground after you were gone, that I have buried
the corpse, that I have filled the grave, that I have done your work,
that the porter will return your card to you, and that you will
not have to pay fifteen francs. There you have it, conscript."

"Thanks, villager!" exclaimed Gribier, radiant. "The next time I
will pay for the drinks."

CHAPTER VIII

A SUCCESSFUL INTERROGATORY

An hour later, in the darkness of night, two men and a child
presented themselves at No. 62 Rue Petit-Picpus. The elder
of the men lifted the knocker and rapped.

They were Fauchelevent, Jean Valjean, and Cosette.

The two old men had gone to fetch Cosette from the fruiterer's
in the Rue du Chemin-Vert, where Fauchelevent had deposited
her on the preceding day. Cosette had passed these twenty-four
hours trembling silently and understanding nothing. She trembled
to such a degree that she wept. She had neither eaten nor slept.
The worthy fruit-seller had plied her with a hundred questions,
without obtaining any other reply than a melancholy and unvarying gaze.
Cosette had betrayed nothing of what she had seen and heard during the
last two days. She divined that they were passing through a crisis.
She was deeply conscious that it was necessary to "be good."
Who has not experienced the sovereign power of those two words,
pronounced with a certain accent in the ear of a terrified little being:
Say nothing! Fear is mute. Moreover, no one guards a secret like
a child.

But when, at the expiration of these lugubrious twenty-four hours,
she beheld Jean Valjean again, she gave vent to such a cry of joy,
that any thoughtful person who had chanced to hear that cry,
would have guessed that it issued from an abyss.

Fauchelevent belonged to the convent and knew the pass-words. All
the doors opened.

Thus was solved the double and alarming problem of how to get
out and how to get in.

The porter, who had received his instructions, opened the little
servant's door which connected the courtyard with the garden,
and which could still be seen from the street twenty years ago,
in the wall at the bottom of the court, which faced the carriage entrance.

The porter admitted all three of them through this door, and from
that point they reached the inner, reserved parlor where Fauchelevent,
on the preceding day, had received his orders from the prioress.

The prioress, rosary in hand, was waiting for them. A vocal mother,
with her veil lowered, stood beside her.

A discreet candle lighted, one might almost say, made a show
of lighting the parlor.

The prioress passed Jean Valjean in review. There is nothing
which examines like a downcast eye.

Then she questioned him:--

"You are the brother?"

"Yes, reverend Mother," replied Fauchelevent.

"What is your name?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Ultime Fauchelevent."

He really had had a brother named Ultime, who was dead.

"Where do you come from?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"From Picquigny, near Amiens."

"What is your age?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Fifty."

"What is your profession?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Gardener."

"Are you a good Christian?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Every one is in the family."

"Is this your little girl?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Yes, reverend Mother."

"You are her father?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Her grandfather."

The vocal mother said to the prioress in a low voice

"He answers well."

Jean Valjean had not uttered a single word.

The prioress looked attentively at Cosette, and said half aloud
to the vocal mother:--

"She will grow up ugly."

The two mothers consulted for a few moments in very low tones in
the corner of the parlor, then the prioress turned round and said:--

"Father Fauvent, you will get another knee-cap with a bell.
Two will be required now."

On the following day, therefore, two bells were audible in the garden,
and the nuns could not resist the temptation to raise the corner
of their veils. At the extreme end of the garden, under the trees,
two men, Fauvent and another man, were visible as they dug side
by side. An enormous event. Their silence was broken to the extent
of saying to each other: "He is an assistant gardener."

The vocal mothers added: "He is a brother of Father Fauvent."

Jean Valjean was, in fact, regularly installed; he had his belled
knee-cap; henceforth he was official. His name was Ultime Fauchelevent.

The most powerful determining cause of his admission had been
the prioress's observation upon Cosette: "She will grow up ugly."

The prioress, that pronounced prognosticator, immediately took a fancy
to Cosette and gave her a place in the school as a charity pupil.

There is nothing that is not strictly logical about this.

It is in vain that mirrors are banished from the convent, women are
conscious of their faces; now, girls who are conscious of their
beauty do not easily become nuns; the vocation being voluntary
in inverse proportion to their good looks, more is to be hoped from
the ugly than from the pretty. Hence a lively taste for plain girls.

The whole of this adventure increased the importance of good,
old Fauchelevent; he won a triple success; in the eyes of Jean Valjean,
whom he had saved and sheltered; in those of grave-digger Gribier,
who said to himself: "He spared me that fine"; with the convent,
which, being enabled, thanks to him, to retain the coffin of Mother
Crucifixion under the altar, eluded Caesar and satisfied God.
There was a coffin containing a body in the Petit-Picpus, and a coffin
without a body in the Vaugirard cemetery, public order had no doubt
been deeply disturbed thereby, but no one was aware of it.

As for the convent, its gratitude to Fauchelevent was very great.
Fauchelevent became the best of servitors and the most precious
of gardeners. Upon the occasion of the archbishop's next visit,
the prioress recounted the affair to his Grace, making something
of a confession at the same time, and yet boasting of her deed.
On leaving the convent, the archbishop mentioned it with approval,
and in a whisper to M. de Latil, Monsieur's confessor,
afterwards Archbishop of Reims and Cardinal. This admiration
for Fauchelevent became widespread, for it made its way to Rome.
We have seen a note addressed by the then reigning Pope, Leo XII.,
to one of his relatives, a Monsignor in the Nuncio's establishment
in Paris, and bearing, like himself, the name of Della Genga;
it contained these lines: "It appears that there is in a convent in
Paris an excellent gardener, who is also a holy man, named Fauvent."
Nothing of this triumph reached Fauchelevent in his hut;
he went on grafting, weeding, and covering up his melon beds,
without in the least suspecting his excellences and his sanctity.
Neither did he suspect his glory, any more than a Durham or Surrey
bull whose portrait is published in the London Illustrated News,
with this inscription: "Bull which carried off the prize at the
Cattle Show."

CHAPTER IX

CLOISTERED

Cosette continued to hold her tongue in the convent.

It was quite natural that Cosette should think herself Jean Valjean's
daughter. Moreover, as she knew nothing, she could say nothing,
and then, she would not have said anything in any case. As we have
just observed, nothing trains children to silence like unhappiness.
Cosette had suffered so much, that she feared everything,
even to speak or to breathe. A single word had so often brought
down an avalanche upon her. She had hardly begun to regain her
confidence since she had been with Jean Valjean. She speedily
became accustomed to the convent. Only she regretted Catherine,
but she dared not say so. Once, however, she did say to Jean Valjean:
"Father, if I had known, I would have brought her away with me."

Cosette had been obliged, on becoming a scholar in the convent,
to don the garb of the pupils of the house. Jean Valjean succeeded
in getting them to restore to him the garments which she laid aside.
This was the same mourning suit which he had made her put on when she
had quitted the Thenardiers' inn. It was not very threadbare even now.
Jean Valjean locked up these garments, plus the stockings and the shoes,
with a quantity of camphor and all the aromatics in which convents
abound, in a little valise which he found means of procuring.
He set this valise on a chair near his bed, and he always carried
the key about his person. "Father," Cosette asked him one day,
"what is there in that box which smells so good?"

Father Fauchelevent received other recompense for his good action,
in addition to the glory which we just mentioned, and of which he
knew nothing; in the first place it made him happy; next, he had
much less work, since it was shared. Lastly, as he was very fond
of snuff, he found the presence of M. Madeleine an advantage,
in that he used three times as much as he had done previously,
and that in an infinitely more luxurious manner, seeing that
M. Madeleine paid for it.

The nuns did not adopt the name of Ultime; they called Jean Valjean
the other Fauvent.

If these holy women had possessed anything of Javert's glance,
they would eventually have noticed that when there was any errand
to be done outside in the behalf of the garden, it was always the
elder Fauchelevent, the old, the infirm, the lame man, who went,
and never the other; but whether it is that eyes constantly fixed
on God know not how to spy, or whether they were, by preference,
occupied in keeping watch on each other, they paid no heed to this.

Moreover, it was well for Jean Valjean that he kept close and did
not stir out. Javert watched the quarter for more than a month.

This convent was for Jean Valjean like an island surrounded
by gulfs. Henceforth, those four walls constituted his world.
He saw enough of the sky there to enable him to preserve his serenity,
and Cosette enough to remain happy.

A very sweet life began for him.

He inhabited the old hut at the end of the garden, in company
with Fauchelevent. This hovel, built of old rubbish, which was still
in existence in 1845, was composed, as the reader already knows,
of three chambers, all of which were utterly bare and had nothing
beyond the walls. The principal one had been given up, by force,
for Jean Valjean had opposed it in vain, to M. Madeleine,
by Father Fauchelevent. The walls of this chamber had for ornament,
in addition to the two nails whereon to hang the knee-cap and
the basket, a Royalist bank-note of '93, applied to the wall over
the chimney-piece, and of which the following is an exact facsimile:--

{GRAPHIC HERE}

This specimen of Vendean paper money had been nailed to the wall
by the preceding gardener, an old Chouan, who had died in the convent,
and whose place Fauchelevent had taken.

Jean Valjean worked in the garden every day and made himself very useful.
He had formerly been a pruner of trees, and he gladly found himself
a gardener once more. It will be remembered that he knew all sorts
of secrets and receipts for agriculture. He turned these to advantage.
Almost all the trees in the orchard were ungrafted, and wild.
He budded them and made them produce excellent fruit.

Cosette had permission to pass an hour with him every day.
As the sisters were melancholy and he was kind, the child made
comparisons and adored him. At the appointed hour she flew to the hut.
When she entered the lowly cabin, she filled it with paradise.
Jean Valjean blossomed out and felt his happiness increase
with the happiness which he afforded Cosette. The joy which we
inspire has this charming property, that, far from growing meagre,
like all reflections, it returns to us more radiant than ever.
At recreation hours, Jean Valjean watched her running and playing
in the distance, and he distinguished her laugh from that of
the rest.

For Cosette laughed now.

Cosette's face had even undergone a change, to a certain extent.
The gloom had disappeared from it. A smile is the same as sunshine;
it banishes winter from the human countenance.

Recreation over, when Cosette went into the house again,
Jean Valjean gazed at the windows of her class-room,
and at night he rose to look at the windows of her dormitory.

God has his own ways, moreover; the convent contributed, like Cosette,
to uphold and complete the Bishop's work in Jean Valjean. It is
certain that virtue adjoins pride on one side. A bridge built by the
devil exists there. Jean Valjean had been, unconsciously, perhaps,
tolerably near that side and that bridge, when Providence cast his
lot in the convent of the Petit-Picpus; so long as he had compared
himself only to the Bishop, he had regarded himself as unworthy
and had remained humble; but for some time past he had been comparing
himself to men in general, and pride was beginning to spring up.
Who knows? He might have ended by returning very gradually to hatred.

The convent stopped him on that downward path.

This was the second place of captivity which he had seen.
In his youth, in what had been for him the beginning of his life,
and later on, quite recently again, he had beheld another,--
a frightful place, a terrible place, whose severities had always
appeared to him the iniquity of justice, and the crime of the law.
Now, after the galleys, he saw the cloister; and when he meditated
how he had formed a part of the galleys, and that he now, so to speak,
was a spectator of the cloister, he confronted the two in his own
mind with anxiety.

Sometimes he crossed his arms and leaned on his hoe, and slowly
descended the endless spirals of revery.

He recalled his former companions: how wretched they were;
they rose at dawn, and toiled until night; hardly were they permitted
to sleep; they lay on camp beds, where nothing was tolerated but
mattresses two inches thick, in rooms which were heated only in the
very harshest months of the year; they were clothed in frightful
red blouses; they were allowed, as a great favor, linen trousers
in the hottest weather, and a woollen carter's blouse on their
backs when it was very cold; they drank no wine, and ate no meat,
except when they went on "fatigue duty."  They lived nameless,
designated only by numbers, and converted, after a manner,
into ciphers themselves, with downcast eyes, with lowered voices,
with shorn heads, beneath the cudgel and in disgrace.

Then his mind reverted to the beings whom he had under his eyes.

These beings also lived with shorn heads, with downcast eyes,
with lowered voices, not in disgrace, but amid the scoffs of the world,
not with their backs bruised with the cudgel, but with their shoulders
lacerated with their discipline. Their names, also, had vanished from
among men; they no longer existed except under austere appellations.
They never ate meat and they never drank wine; they often remained
until evening without food; they were attired, not in a red blouse,
but in a black shroud, of woollen, which was heavy in summer and thin
in winter, without the power to add or subtract anything from it;
without having even, according to the season, the resource of the
linen garment or the woollen cloak; and for six months in the year
they wore serge chemises which gave them fever. They dwelt, not in
rooms warmed only during rigorous cold, but in cells where no fire
was ever lighted; they slept, not on mattresses two inches thick,
but on straw. And finally, they were not even allowed their sleep;
every night, after a day of toil, they were obliged, in the weariness
of their first slumber, at the moment when they were falling sound
asleep and beginning to get warm, to rouse themselves, to rise and
to go and pray in an ice-cold and gloomy chapel, with their knees
on the stones.

On certain days each of these beings in turn had to remain for twelve
successive hours in a kneeling posture, or prostrate, with face
upon the pavement, and arms outstretched in the form of a cross.

The others were men; these were women.

What had those men done? They had stolen, violated,
pillaged, murdered, assassinated. They were bandits,
counterfeiters, poisoners, incendiaries, murderers,
parricides. What had these women done? They had done nothing whatever.

On the one hand, highway robbery, fraud, deceit, violence,
sensuality, homicide, all sorts of sacrilege, every variety
of crime; on the other, one thing only, innocence.

Perfect innocence, almost caught up into heaven in a mysterious
assumption, attached to the earth by virtue, already possessing
something of heaven through holiness.

On the one hand, confidences over crimes, which are exchanged
in whispers; on the other, the confession of faults made aloud.
And what crimes! And what faults!

On the one hand, miasms; on the other, an ineffable perfume.
On the one hand, a moral pest, guarded from sight, penned up under the
range of cannon, and literally devouring its plague-stricken victims;
on the other, the chaste flame of all souls on the same hearth.
There, darkness; here, the shadow; but a shadow filled with gleams
of light, and of gleams full of radiance.

Two strongholds of slavery; but in the first, deliverance possible,
a legal limit always in sight, and then, escape. In the second,
perpetuity; the sole hope, at the distant extremity of the future,
that faint light of liberty which men call death.

In the first, men are bound only with chains; in the other,
chained by faith.

What flowed from the first? An immense curse, the gnashing of teeth,
hatred, desperate viciousness, a cry of rage against human society,
a sarcasm against heaven.

What results flowed from the second? Blessings and love.

And in these two places, so similar yet so unlike, these two species of
beings who were so very unlike, were undergoing the same work, expiation.

Jean Valjean understood thoroughly the expiation of the former;
that personal expiation, the expiation for one's self. But he
did not understand that of these last, that of creatures without
reproach and without stain, and he trembled as he asked himself:
The expiation of what? What expiation?

A voice within his conscience replied: "The most divine
of human generosities, the expiation for others."

Here all personal theory is withheld; we are only the narrator;
we place ourselves at Jean Valjean's point of view, and we translate
his impressions.

Before his eyes he had the sublime summit of abnegation,
the highest possible pitch of virtue; the innocence which
pardons men their faults, and which expiates in their stead;
servitude submitted to, torture accepted, punishment claimed
by souls which have not sinned, for the sake of sparing it
to souls which have fallen; the love of humanity swallowed up
in the love of God, but even there preserving its distinct and
mediatorial character; sweet and feeble beings possessing the misery
of those who are punished and the smile of those who are recompensed.

And he remembered that he had dared to murmur!

Often, in the middle of the night, he rose to listen to the grateful
song of those innocent creatures weighed down with severities,
and the blood ran cold in his veins at the thought that those who were
justly chastised raised their voices heavenward only in blasphemy,
and that he, wretch that he was, had shaken his fist at God.

There was one striking thing which caused him to meditate deeply,
like a warning whisper from Providence itself: the scaling of that wall,
the passing of those barriers, the adventure accepted even at the risk
of death, the painful and difficult ascent, all those efforts even,
which he had made to escape from that other place of expiation,
he had made in order to gain entrance into this one. Was this
a symbol of his destiny? This house was a prison likewise and bore
a melancholy resemblance to that other one whence he had fled,
and yet he had never conceived an idea of anything similar.

Again he beheld gratings, bolts, iron bars--to guard whom? Angels.

These lofty walls which he had seen around tigers, he now beheld
once more around lambs.

This was a place of expiation, and not of punishment; and yet,
it was still more austere, more gloomy, and more pitiless than
the other.

These virgins were even more heavily burdened than the convicts.
A cold, harsh wind, that wind which had chilled his youth,
traversed the barred and padlocked grating of the vultures; a still
harsher and more biting breeze blew in the cage of these doves.

Why?

When he thought on these things, all that was within him was lost
in amazement before this mystery of sublimity.

In these meditations, his pride vanished. He scrutinized his own
heart in all manner of ways; he felt his pettiness, and many a time
he wept. All that had entered into his life for the last six
months had led him back towards the Bishop's holy injunctions;
Cosette through love, the convent through humility.

Sometimes at eventide, in the twilight, at an hour when the garden
was deserted, he could be seen on his knees in the middle of the walk
which skirted the chapel, in front of the window through which he had
gazed on the night of his arrival, and turned towards the spot where,
as he knew, the sister was making reparation, prostrated in prayer.
Thus he prayed as he knelt before the sister.

It seemed as though he dared not kneel directly before God.

Everything that surrounded him, that peaceful garden, those fragrant
flowers, those children who uttered joyous cries, those grave
and simple women, that silent cloister, slowly permeated him,
and little by little, his soul became compounded of silence
like the cloister, of perfume like the flowers, of simplicity
like the women, of joy like the children. And then he reflected
that these had been two houses of God which had received him
in succession at two critical moments in his life: the first,
when all doors were closed and when human society rejected him;
the second, at a moment when human society had again set out in
pursuit of him, and when the galleys were again yawning; and that,
had it not been for the first, he should have relapsed into crime,
and had it not been for the second, into torment.

His whole heart melted in gratitude, and he loved more and more.

Many years passed in this manner; Cosette was growing up.

[The end of Volume II. "Cosette"]

VOLUME III

MARIUS.

BOOK FIRST.--PARIS STUDIED IN ITS ATOM

CHAPTER I

PARVULUS

Paris has a child, and the forest has a bird; the bird is called
the sparrow; the child is called the gamin.

Couple these two ideas which contain, the one all the furnace, the other
all the dawn; strike these two sparks together, Paris, childhood;
there leaps out from them a little being. Homuncio, Plautus would say.

This little being is joyous. He has not food every day, and he
goes to the play every evening, if he sees good. He has no
shirt on his body, no shoes on his feet, no roof over his head;
he is like the flies of heaven, who have none of these things.
He is from seven to thirteen years of age, he lives in bands,
roams the streets, lodges in the open air, wears an old pair
of trousers of his father's, which descend below his heels,
an old hat of some other father, which descends below his ears,
a single suspender of yellow listing; he runs, lies in wait,
rummages about, wastes time, blackens pipes, swears like a convict,
haunts the wine-shop, knows thieves, calls gay women thou,
talks slang, sings obscene songs, and has no evil in his heart.
This is because he has in his heart a pearl, innocence; and pearls
are not to be dissolved in mud. So long as man is in his childhood,
God wills that he shall be innocent.

If one were to ask that enormous city: "What is this?" she would reply:
"It is my little one."

CHAPTER II

SOME OF HIS PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS

The gamin--the street Arab--of Paris is the dwarf of the giant.

Let us not exaggerate, this cherub of the gutter sometimes has
a shirt, but, in that case, he owns but one; he sometimes has shoes,
but then they have no soles; he sometimes has a lodging, and he
loves it, for he finds his mother there; but he prefers the street,
because there he finds liberty. He has his own games, his own bits
of mischief, whose foundation consists of hatred for the bourgeois;
his peculiar metaphors: to be dead is to eat dandelions by the root;
his own occupations, calling hackney-coaches, letting down
carriage-steps, establishing means of transit between the two
sides of a street in heavy rains, which he calls making the bridge
of arts, crying discourses pronounced by the authorities in favor
of the French people, cleaning out the cracks in the pavement;
he has his own coinage, which is composed of all the little
morsels of worked copper which are found on the public streets.
This curious money, which receives the name of loques--rags--has an
invariable and well-regulated currency in this little Bohemia
of children.

Lastly, he has his own fauna, which he observes attentively
in the corners; the lady-bird, the death's-head plant-louse,
the daddy-long-legs, "the devil," a black insect, which menaces
by twisting about its tail armed with two horns. He has his
fabulous monster, which has scales under its belly, but is not
a lizard, which has pustules on its back, but is not a toad,
which inhabits the nooks of old lime-kilns and wells that have run dry,
which is black, hairy, sticky, which crawls sometimes slowly,
sometimes rapidly, which has no cry, but which has a look,
and is so terrible that no one has ever beheld it; he calls this
monster "the deaf thing."  The search for these "deaf things"
among the stones is a joy of formidable nature. Another pleasure
consists in suddenly prying up a paving-stone, and taking a look
at the wood-lice. Each region of Paris is celebrated for the
interesting treasures which are to be found there. There are
ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the Ursulines, there are millepeds
in the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in the ditches of the Champs-de-Mars.

As far as sayings are concerned, this child has as many of them
as Talleyrand. He is no less cynical, but he is more honest.
He is endowed with a certain indescribable, unexpected joviality;
he upsets the composure of the shopkeeper with his wild laughter.
He ranges boldly from high comedy to farce.

A funeral passes by. Among those who accompany the dead there
is a doctor. "Hey there!" shouts some street Arab, "how long has
it been customary for doctors to carry home their own work?"

Another is in a crowd. A grave man, adorned with spectacles
and trinkets, turns round indignantly: "You good-for-nothing,
you have seized my wife's waist!"--"I, sir? Search me!"

CHAPTER III

HE IS AGREEABLE

In the evening, thanks to a few sous, which he always finds means
to procure, the homuncio enters a theatre. On crossing that
magic threshold, he becomes transfigured; he was the street Arab,
he becomes the titi.[18] Theatres are a sort of ship turned upside
down with the keel in the air. It is in that keel that the titi
huddle together. The titi is to the gamin what the moth is
to the larva; the same being endowed with wings and soaring.
It suffices for him to be there, with his radiance of happiness,
with his power of enthusiasm and joy, with his hand-clapping,
which resembles a clapping of wings, to confer on that narrow, dark,
fetid, sordid, unhealthy, hideous, abominable keel, the name of Paradise.

[18] Chicken: slang allusion to the noise made in calling poultry.

Bestow on an individual the useless and deprive him of the necessary,
and you have the gamin.

The gamin is not devoid of literary intuition. His tendency,
and we say it with the proper amount of regret, would not constitute
classic taste. He is not very academic by nature. Thus, to give
an example, the popularity of Mademoiselle Mars among that little
audience of stormy children was seasoned with a touch of irony.
The gamin called her Mademoiselle Muche--"hide yourself."

This being bawls and scoffs and ridicules and fights, has rags
like a baby and tatters like a philosopher, fishes in the sewer,
hunts in the cesspool, extracts mirth from foulness, whips up the
squares with his wit, grins and bites, whistles and sings, shouts,
and shrieks, tempers Alleluia with Matantur-lurette, chants every rhythm
from the De Profundis to the Jack-pudding, finds without seeking,
knows what he is ignorant of, is a Spartan to the point of thieving,
is mad to wisdom, is lyrical to filth, would crouch down on Olympus,
wallows in the dunghill and emerges from it covered with stars.
The gamin of Paris is Rabelais in this youth.

He is not content with his trousers unless they have a watch-pocket.

He is not easily astonished, he is still less easily terrified,
he makes songs on superstitions, he takes the wind out of exaggerations,
he twits mysteries, he thrusts out his tongue at ghosts, he takes
the poetry out of stilted things, he introduces caricature into
epic extravaganzas. It is not that he is prosaic; far from that;
but he replaces the solemn vision by the farcical phantasmagoria.
If Adamastor were to appear to him, the street Arab would say:
"Hi there! The bugaboo!"

CHAPTER IV

HE MAY BE OF USE

Paris begins with the lounger and ends with the street Arab,
two beings of which no other city is capable; the passive acceptance,
which contents itself with gazing, and the inexhaustible initiative;
Prudhomme and Fouillou. Paris alone has this in its natural history.
The whole of the monarchy is contained in the lounger; the whole of
anarchy in the gamin.

This pale child of the Parisian faubourgs lives and develops,
makes connections, "grows supple" in suffering, in the presence
of social realities and of human things, a thoughtful witness.
He thinks himself heedless; and he is not. He looks and is on
the verge of laughter; he is on the verge of something else also.
Whoever you may be, if your name is Prejudice, Abuse, Ignorance,
Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice, Fanaticism, Tyranny,
beware of the gaping gamin.

The little fellow will grow up.

Of what clay is he made? Of the first mud that comes to hand.
A handful of dirt, a breath, and behold Adam. It suffices for a
God to pass by. A God has always passed over the street Arab.
Fortune labors at this tiny being. By the word "fortune" we
mean chance, to some extent. That pigmy kneaded out of common
earth, ignorant, unlettered, giddy, vulgar, low. Will that become
an Ionian or a Boeotian? Wait, currit rota, the Spirit of Paris,
that demon which creates the children of chance and the men of destiny,
reversing the process of the Latin potter, makes of a jug an amphora.

CHAPTER V

HIS FRONTIERS

The gamin loves the city, he also loves solitude, since he
has something of the sage in him. Urbis amator, like Fuscus;
ruris amator, like Flaccus.

To roam thoughtfully about, that is to say, to lounge, is a fine
employment of time in the eyes of the philosopher; particularly in
that rather illegitimate species of campaign, which is tolerably
ugly but odd and composed of two natures, which surrounds certain
great cities, notably Paris. To study the suburbs is to study
the amphibious animal. End of the trees, beginning of the roofs;
end of the grass, beginning of the pavements; end of the furrows,
beginning of the shops, end of the wheel-ruts, beginning of
the passions; end of the divine murmur, beginning of the human uproar;
hence an extraordinary interest.

Hence, in these not very attractive places, indelibly stamped by
the passing stroller with the epithet: melancholy, the apparently
objectless promenades of the dreamer.

He who writes these lines has long been a prowler about the barriers
of Paris, and it is for him a source of profound souvenirs.
That close-shaven turf, those pebbly paths, that chalk, those pools,
those harsh monotonies of waste and fallow lands, the plants
of early market-garden suddenly springing into sight in a bottom,
that mixture of the savage and the citizen, those vast desert nooks
where the garrison drums practise noisily, and produce a sort of
lisping of battle, those hermits by day and cut-throats by night,
that clumsy mill which turns in the wind, the hoisting-wheels
of the quarries, the tea-gardens at the corners of the cemeteries;
the mysterious charm of great, sombre walls squarely intersecting
immense, vague stretches of land inundated with sunshine and full
of butterflies,--all this attracted him.

There is hardly any one on earth who is not acquainted with those
singular spots, the Glaciere, the Cunette, the hideous wall of Grenelle
all speckled with balls, Mont-Parnasse, the Fosse-aux-Loups, Aubiers on
the bank of the Marne, Mont-Souris, the Tombe-Issoire, the Pierre-Plate
de Chatillon, where there is an old, exhausted quarry which no longer
serves any purpose except to raise mushrooms, and which is closed,
on a level with the ground, by a trap-door of rotten planks.
The campagna of Rome is one idea, the banlieue of Paris is another;
to behold nothing but fields, houses, or trees in what a stretch of
country offers us, is to remain on the surface; all aspects of things
are thoughts of God. The spot where a plain effects its junction
with a city is always stamped with a certain piercing melancholy.
Nature and humanity both appeal to you at the same time there.
Local originalities there make their appearance.

Any one who, like ourselves, has wandered about in these solitudes
contiguous to our faubourgs, which may be designated as the limbos
of Paris, has seen here and there, in the most desert spot, at the
most unexpected moment, behind a meagre hedge, or in the corner
of a lugubrious wall, children grouped tumultuously, fetid, muddy,
dusty, ragged, dishevelled, playing hide-and-seek, and crowned with
corn-flowers. All of them are little ones who have made their escape
from poor families. The outer boulevard is their breathing space;
the suburbs belong to them. There they are eternally playing truant.
There they innocently sing their repertory of dirty songs.
There they are, or rather, there they exist, far from every eye,
in the sweet light of May or June, kneeling round a hole in the ground,
snapping marbles with their thumbs, quarrelling over half-farthings,
irresponsible, volatile, free and happy; and, no sooner do they
catch sight of you than they recollect that they have an industry,
and that they must earn their living, and they offer to sell you an
old woollen stocking filled with cockchafers, or a bunch of lilacs.
These encounters with strange children are one of the charming
and at the same time poignant graces of the environs of Paris.

Sometimes there are little girls among the throng of boys,--
are they their sisters?--who are almost young maidens, thin, feverish,
with sunburnt hands, covered with freckles, crowned with poppies
and ears of rye, gay, haggard, barefooted. They can be seen devouring
cherries among the wheat. In the evening they can be heard laughing.
These groups, warmly illuminated by the full glow of midday,
or indistinctly seen in the twilight, occupy the thoughtful
man for a very long time, and these visions mingle with his dreams.

Paris, centre, banlieue, circumference; this constitutes all
the earth to those children. They never venture beyond this.
They can no more escape from the Parisian atmosphere than fish
can escape from the water. For them, nothing exists two leagues
beyond the barriers: Ivry, Gentilly, Arcueil, Belleville,
Aubervilliers, Menilmontant, Choisy-le-Roi, Billancourt, Mendon,
Issy, Vanvre, Sevres, Puteaux, Neuilly, Gennevilliers, Colombes,
Romainville, Chatou, Asnieres, Bougival, Nanterre, Enghien,
Noisy-le-Sec, Nogent, Gournay, Drancy, Gonesse; the universe ends there.

CHAPTER VI

A BIT OF HISTORY

At the epoch, nearly contemporary by the way, when the action
of this book takes place, there was not, as there is to-day,
a policeman at the corner of every street (a benefit which there
is no time to discuss here); stray children abounded in Paris.
The statistics give an average of two hundred and sixty homeless
children picked up annually at that period, by the police patrols,
in unenclosed lands, in houses in process of construction,
and under the arches of the bridges. One of these nests, which has
become famous, produced "the swallows of the bridge of Arcola."
This is, moreover, the most disastrous of social symptoms.
All crimes of the man begin in the vagabondage of the child.

Let us make an exception in favor of Paris, nevertheless. In a
relative measure, and in spite of the souvenir which we have
just recalled, the exception is just. While in any other great city
the vagabond child is a lost man, while nearly everywhere the child
left to itself is, in some sort, sacrificed and abandoned to a kind
of fatal immersion in the public vices which devour in him honesty
and conscience, the street boy of Paris, we insist on this point,
however defaced and injured on the surface, is almost intact on
the interior. It is a magnificent thing to put on record, and one
which shines forth in the splendid probity of our popular revolutions,
that a certain incorruptibility results from the idea which exists
in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water of the ocean.
To breathe Paris preserves the soul.

What we have just said takes away nothing of the anguish of heart
which one experiences every time that one meets one of these children
around whom one fancies that he beholds floating the threads
of a broken family. In the civilization of the present day,
incomplete as it still is, it is not a very abnormal thing
to behold these fractured families pouring themselves out into
the darkness, not knowing clearly what has become of their children,
and allowing their own entrails to fall on the public highway.
Hence these obscure destinies. This is called, for this sad thing
has given rise to an expression, "to be cast on the pavements of Paris."

Let it be said by the way, that this abandonment of children
was not discouraged by the ancient monarchy. A little of Egypt
and Bohemia in the lower regions suited the upper spheres,
and compassed the aims of the powerful. The hatred of instruction
for the children of the people was a dogma. What is the use
of "half-lights"? Such was the countersign. Now, the erring
child is the corollary of the ignorant child.

Besides this, the monarchy sometimes was in need of children,
and in that case it skimmed the streets.

Under Louis XIV., not to go any further back, the king rightly desired
to create a fleet. The idea was a good one. But let us consider
the means. There can be no fleet, if, beside the sailing ship,
that plaything of the winds, and for the purpose of towing it,
in case of necessity, there is not the vessel which goes where
it pleases, either by means of oars or of steam; the galleys were
then to the marine what steamers are to-day. Therefore, galleys
were necessary; but the galley is moved only by the galley-slave;
hence, galley-slaves were required. Colbert had the commissioners
of provinces and the parliaments make as many convicts as possible.
The magistracy showed a great deal of complaisance in the matter.
A man kept his hat on in the presence of a procession--it was
a Huguenot attitude; he was sent to the galleys. A child was
encountered in the streets; provided that he was fifteen years of age
and did not know where he was to sleep, he was sent to the galleys.
Grand reign; grand century.

Under Louis XV. children disappeared in Paris; the police
carried them off, for what mysterious purpose no one knew.
People whispered with terror monstrous conjectures as to the king's
baths of purple. Barbier speaks ingenuously of these things.
It sometimes happened that the exempts of the guard, when they
ran short of children, took those who had fathers. The fathers,
in despair, attacked the exempts. In that case, the parliament
intervened and had some one hung. Who? The exempts? No, the fathers.

CHAPTER VII

THE GAMIN SHOULD HAVE HIS PLACE IN THE CLASSIFICATIONS OF INDIA

The body of street Arabs in Paris almost constitutes a caste.
One might almost say: Not every one who wishes to belong to it can
do so.

This word gamin was printed for the first time, and reached popular
speech through the literary tongue, in 1834. It is in a little
work entitled Claude Gueux that this word made its appearance.
The horror was lively. The word passed into circulation.

The elements which constitute the consideration of the gamins
for each other are very various. We have known and associated
with one who was greatly respected and vastly admired because he
had seen a man fall from the top of the tower of Notre-Dame;
another, because he had succeeded in making his way into the rear
courtyard where the statues of the dome of the Invalides had been
temporarily deposited, and had "prigged" some lead from them; a third,
because he had seen a diligence tip over; still another, because he
"knew" a soldier who came near putting out the eye of a citizen.

This explains that famous exclamation of a Parisian gamin,
a profound epiphonema, which the vulgar herd laughs at without
comprehending,--Dieu de Dieu! What ill-luck I do have! to think
that I have never yet seen anybody tumble from a fifth-story window!
(I have pronounced I'ave and fifth pronounced fift'.)

Surely, this saying of a peasant is a fine one: "Father So-and-So,
your wife has died of her malady; why did you not send for the doctor?"
"What would you have, sir, we poor folks die of ourselves."
But if the peasant's whole passivity lies in this saying, the whole
of the free-thinking anarchy of the brat of the faubourgs is, assuredly,
contained in this other saying. A man condemned to death is listening
to his confessor in the tumbrel. The child of Paris exclaims:
"He is talking to his black cap! Oh, the sneak!"

A certain audacity on matters of religion sets off the gamin.
To be strong-minded is an important item.

To be present at executions constitutes a duty. He shows himself at
the guillotine, and he laughs. He calls it by all sorts of pet names:
The End of the Soup, The Growler, The Mother in the Blue (the
sky), The Last Mouthful, etc., etc. In order not to lose anything
of the affair, he scales the walls, he hoists himself to balconies,
he ascends trees, he suspends himself to gratings, he clings fast
to chimneys. The gamin is born a tiler as he is born a mariner.
A roof inspires him with no more fear than a mast. There is no
festival which comes up to an execution on the Place de Greve.
Samson and the Abbe Montes are the truly popular names. They hoot
at the victim in order to encourage him. They sometimes admire him.
Lacenaire, when a gamin, on seeing the hideous Dautin die bravely,
uttered these words which contain a future: "I was jealous of him."
In the brotherhood of gamins Voltaire is not known, but Papavoine is.
"Politicians" are confused with assassins in the same legend.
They have a tradition as to everybody's last garment. It is
known that Tolleron had a fireman's cap, Avril an otter cap,
Losvel a round hat, that old Delaporte was bald and bare-headed,
that Castaing was all ruddy and very handsome, that Bories had
a romantic small beard, that Jean Martin kept on his suspenders,
that Lecouffe and his mother quarrelled. "Don't reproach each other
for your basket," shouted a gamin to them. Another, in order to get
a look at Debacker as he passed, and being too small in the crowd,
caught sight of the lantern on the quay and climbed it. A gendarme
stationed opposite frowned. "Let me climb up, m'sieu le gendarme,"
said the gamin. And, to soften the heart of the authorities he added:
"I will not fall."  "I don't care if you do," retorted the gendarme.

In the brotherhood of gamins, a memorable accident counts for a
great deal. One reaches the height of consideration if one chances
to cut one's self very deeply, "to the very bone."

The fist is no mediocre element of respect. One of the things
that the gamin is fondest of saying is: "I am fine and strong,
come now!"  To be left-handed renders you very enviable. A squint
is highly esteemed.

CHAPTER VIII

IN WHICH THE READER WILL FIND A CHARMING SAYING OF THE LAST KING

In summer, he metamorphoses himself into a frog; and in the evening,
when night is falling, in front of the bridges of Austerlitz and Jena,
from the tops of coal wagons, and the washerwomen's boats, he hurls
himself headlong into the Seine, and into all possible infractions
of the laws of modesty and of the police. Nevertheless the
police keep an eye on him, and the result is a highly dramatic
situation which once gave rise to a fraternal and memorable cry;
that cry which was celebrated about 1830, is a strategic warning
from gamin to gamin; it scans like a verse from Homer, with a
notation as inexpressible as the eleusiac chant of the Panathenaea,
and in it one encounters again the ancient Evohe. Here it is:
"Ohe, Titi, oheee! Here comes the bobby, here comes the p'lice,
pick up your duds and be off, through the sewer with you!"

Sometimes this gnat--that is what he calls himself--knows how to read;
sometimes he knows how to write; he always knows how to daub.
He does not hesitate to acquire, by no one knows what mysterious
mutual instruction, all the talents which can be of use to the public;
from 1815 to 1830, he imitated the cry of the turkey; from 1830
to 1848, he scrawled pears on the walls. One summer evening,
when Louis Philippe was returning home on foot, he saw a little fellow,
no higher than his knee, perspiring and climbing up to draw a gigantic
pear in charcoal on one of the pillars of the gate of Neuilly;
the King, with that good-nature which came to him from Henry IV.,
helped the gamin, finished the pear, and gave the child a louis,
saying: "The pear is on that also."[19] The gamin loves uproar.
A certain state of violence pleases him. He execrates "the cures."
One day, in the Rue de l'Universite, one of these scamps was putting
his thumb to his nose at the carriage gate of No. 69. "Why are you
doing that at the gate?" a passer-by asked. The boy replied:
"There is a cure there."  It was there, in fact, that the Papal
Nuncio lived.

[19] Louis XVIII. is represented in comic pictures of that day
as having a pear-shaped head.

Nevertheless, whatever may be the Voltairianism of the small gamin,
if the occasion to become a chorister presents itself, it is
quite possible that he will accept, and in that case he serves
the mass civilly. There are two things to which he plays Tantalus,
and which he always desires without ever attaining them:
to overthrow the government, and to get his trousers sewed up again.

The gamin in his perfect state possesses all the policemen of Paris,
and can always put the name to the face of any one which he chances
to meet. He can tell them off on the tips of his fingers.
He studies their habits, and he has special notes on each one
of them. He reads the souls of the police like an open book.
He will tell you fluently and without flinching: "Such an one
is a traitor; such another is very malicious; such another
is great; such another is ridiculous."  (All these words:
traitor, malicious, great, ridiculous, have a particular meaning
in his mouth.) That one imagines that he owns the Pont-Neuf, and he
prevents people from walking on the cornice outside the parapet;
that other has a mania for pulling person's ears; etc., etc.

CHAPTER IX

THE OLD SOUL OF GAUL

There was something of that boy in Poquelin, the son of the fish-market;
Beaumarchais had something of it. Gaminerie is a shade of the
Gallic spirit. Mingled with good sense, it sometimes adds force
to the latter, as alcohol does to wine. Sometimes it is a defect.
Homer repeats himself eternally, granted; one may say that
Voltaire plays the gamin. Camille Desmoulins was a native
of the faubourgs. Championnet, who treated miracles brutally,
rose from the pavements of Paris; he had, when a small lad,
inundated the porticos of Saint-Jean de Beauvais, and of Saint-Etienne
du Mont; he had addressed the shrine of Sainte-Genevieve
familiarly to give orders to the phial of Saint Januarius.

The gamin of Paris is respectful, ironical, and insolent. He has
villainous teeth, because he is badly fed and his stomach suffers,
and handsome eyes because he has wit. If Jehovah himself were present,
he would go hopping up the steps of paradise on one foot.
He is strong on boxing. All beliefs are possible to him.
He plays in the gutter, and straightens himself up with a revolt;
his effrontery persists even in the presence of grape-shot; he was
a scapegrace, he is a hero; like the little Theban, he shakes the skin
from the lion; Barra the drummer-boy was a gamin of Paris; he Shouts:
"Forward!" as the horse of Scripture says "Vah!" and in a moment he
has passed from the small brat to the giant.

This child of the puddle is also the child of the ideal.
Measure that spread of wings which reaches from Moliere to Barra.

To sum up the whole, and in one word, the gamin is a being
who amuses himself, because he is unhappy.

CHAPTER X

ECCE PARIS, ECCE HOMO

To sum it all up once more, the Paris gamin of to-day, like
the graeculus of Rome in days gone by, is the infant populace
with the wrinkle of the old world on his brow.

The gamin is a grace to the nation, and at the same time a disease;
a disease which must be cured, how? By light.

Light renders healthy.

Light kindles.

All generous social irradiations spring from science, letters, arts,
education. Make men, make men. Give them light that they may warm you.
Sooner or later the splendid question of universal education will
present itself with the irresistible authority of the absolute truth;
and then, those who govern under the superintendence of the French
idea will have to make this choice; the children of France or the
gamins of Paris; flames in the light or will-o'-the-wisps in the gloom.

The gamin expresses Paris, and Paris expresses the world.

For Paris is a total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race.
The whole of this prodigious city is a foreshortening of dead manners
and living manners. He who sees Paris thinks he sees the bottom of all
history with heaven and constellations in the intervals. Paris has
a capital, the Town-Hall, a Parthenon, Notre-Dame, a Mount Aventine,
the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, an Asinarium, the Sorbonne, a Pantheon,
the Pantheon, a Via Sacra, the Boulevard des Italiens, a temple
of the winds, opinion; and it replaces the Gemoniae by ridicule.
Its majo is called "faraud," its Transteverin is the man of the faubourgs,
its hammal is the market-porter, its lazzarone is the pegre, its cockney
is the native of Ghent. Everything that exists elsewhere exists
at Paris. The fishwoman of Dumarsais can retort on the herb-seller
of Euripides, the discobols Vejanus lives again in the Forioso,
the tight-rope dancer. Therapontigonus Miles could walk arm in arm
with Vadeboncoeur the grenadier, Damasippus the second-hand dealer
would be happy among bric-a-brac merchants, Vincennes could grasp
Socrates in its fist as just as Agora could imprison Diderot,
Grimod de la Reyniere discovered larded roast beef, as Curtillus
invented roast hedgehog, we see the trapeze which figures in Plautus
reappear under the vault of the Arc of l'Etoile, the sword-eater of
Poecilus encountered by Apuleius is a sword-swallower on the PontNeuf,
the nephew of Rameau and Curculio the parasite make a pair,
Ergasilus could get himself presented to Cambaceres by d'Aigrefeuille;
the four dandies of Rome: Alcesimarchus, Phoedromus, Diabolus,
and Argyrippus, descend from Courtille in Labatut's posting-chaise;
Aulus Gellius would halt no longer in front of Congrio than would
Charles Nodier in front of Punchinello; Marto is not a tigress,
but Pardalisca was not a dragon; Pantolabus the wag jeers in the Cafe
Anglais at Nomentanus the fast liver, Hermogenus is a tenor in the
Champs-Elysees, and round him, Thracius the beggar, clad like Bobeche,
takes up a collection; the bore who stops you by the button of your
coat in the Tuileries makes you repeat after a lapse of two thousand
years Thesprion's apostrophe: Quis properantem me prehendit pallio?
The wine on Surene is a parody of the wine of Alba, the red border
of Desaugiers forms a balance to the great cutting of Balatro,
Pere Lachaise exhales beneath nocturnal rains same gleams as
the Esquiliae, and the grave of the poor bought for five years,
is certainly the equivalent of the slave's hived coffin.

Seek something that Paris has not. The vat of Trophonius
contains nothing that is not in Mesmer's tub; Ergaphilas lives
again in Cagliostro; the Brahmin Vasaphanta become incarnate
in the Comte de Saint-Germain; the cemetery of Saint-Medard
works quite as good miracles as the Mosque of Oumoumie at Damascus.

Paris has an AEsop-Mayeux, and a Canidia, Mademoiselle Lenormand.
It is terrified, like Delphos at the fulgurating realities of
the vision; it makes tables turn as Dodona did tripods. It places
the grisette on the throne, as Rome placed the courtesan there;
and, taking it altogether, if Louis XV. is worse than Claudian,
Madame Dubarry is better than Messalina. Paris combines in an
unprecedented type, which has existed and which we have elbowed,
Grecian nudity, the Hebraic ulcer, and the Gascon pun.
It mingles Diogenes, Job, and Jack-pudding, dresses up a spectre
in old numbers of the Constitutional, and makes Chodruc Duclos.

Although Plutarch says: the tyrant never grows old, Rome, under Sylla
as under Domitian, resigned itself and willingly put water in
its wine. The Tiber was a Lethe, if the rather doctrinary eulogium
made of it by Varus Vibiscus is to be credited: Contra Gracchos
Tiberim habemus, Bibere Tiberim, id est seditionem oblivisci.
Paris drinks a million litres of water a day, but that does not prevent
it from occasionally beating the general alarm and ringing the tocsin.

With that exception, Paris is amiable. It accepts everything royally;
it is not too particular about its Venus; its Callipyge is Hottentot;
provided that it is made to laugh, it condones; ugliness cheers it,
deformity provokes it to laughter, vice diverts it; be eccentric
and you may be an eccentric; even hypocrisy, that supreme cynicism,
does not disgust it; it is so literary that it does not hold
its nose before Basile, and is no more scandalized by the prayer
of Tartuffe than Horace was repelled by the "hiccup" of Priapus.
No trait of the universal face is lacking in the profile of Paris.
The bal Mabile is not the polymnia dance of the Janiculum,
but the dealer in ladies' wearing apparel there devours the lorette
with her eyes, exactly as the procuress Staphyla lay in wait for
the virgin Planesium. The Barriere du Combat is not the Coliseum,
but people are as ferocious there as though Caesar were looking on.
The Syrian hostess has more grace than Mother Saguet, but, if Virgil
haunted the Roman wine-shop, David d'Angers, Balzac and Charlet
have sat at the tables of Parisian taverns. Paris reigns.
Geniuses flash forth there, the red tails prosper there.
Adonai passes on his chariot with its twelve wheels of thunder
and lightning; Silenus makes his entry there on his ass. For Silenus
read Ramponneau.

Paris is the synonym of Cosmos, Paris is Athens, Sybaris, Jerusalem,
Pantin. All civilizations are there in an abridged form, all barbarisms
also. Paris would greatly regret it if it had not a guillotine.

A little of the Place de Greve is a good thing. What would all that
eternal festival be without this seasoning? Our laws are wisely
provided, and thanks to them, this blade drips on this Shrove Tuesday.

CHAPTER XI

TO SCOFF, TO REIGN

There is no limit to Paris. No city has had that domination
which sometimes derides those whom it subjugates. To please you,
O Athenians! exclaimed Alexander. Paris makes more than the law,
it makes the fashion; Paris sets more than the fashion, it sets
the routine. Paris may be stupid, if it sees fit; it sometimes
allows itself this luxury; then the universe is stupid in company
with it; then Paris awakes, rubs its eyes, says: "How stupid
I am!" and bursts out laughing in the face of the human race.
What a marvel is such a city! it is a strange thing that this
grandioseness and this burlesque should be amicable neighbors,
that all this majesty should not be thrown into disorder by all
this parody, and that the same mouth can to-day blow into the trump
of the Judgment Day, and to-morrow into the reed-flute! Paris has
a sovereign joviality. Its gayety is of the thunder and its farce
holds a sceptre.

Its tempest sometimes proceeds from a grimace. Its explosions,
its days, its masterpieces, its prodigies, its epics, go forth to the
bounds of the universe, and so also do its cock-and-bull stories.
Its laugh is the mouth of a volcano which spatters the whole earth.
Its jests are sparks. It imposes its caricatures as well as its
ideal on people; the highest monuments of human civilization accept
its ironies and lend their eternity to its mischievous pranks.
It is superb; it has a prodigious 14th of July, which delivers
the globe; it forces all nations to take the oath of tennis;
its night of the 4th of August dissolves in three hours a thousand
years of feudalism; it makes of its logic the muscle of unanimous will;
it multiplies itself under all sorts of forms of the sublime;
it fills with its light Washington, Kosciusko, Bolivar, Bozzaris,
Riego, Bem, Manin, Lopez, John Brown, Garibaldi; it is everywhere
where the future is being lighted up, at Boston in 1779,
at the Isle de Leon in 1820, at Pesth in 1848, at Palermo in 1860,
it whispers the mighty countersign: Liberty, in the ear of the
American abolitionists grouped about the boat at Harper's Ferry,
and in the ear of the patriots of Ancona assembled in the shadow,
to the Archi before the Gozzi inn on the seashore; it creates Canaris;
it creates Quiroga; it creates Pisacane; it irradiates the great
on earth; it was while proceeding whither its breath urge them,
that Byron perished at Missolonghi, and that Mazet died at Barcelona;
it is the tribune under the feet of Mirabeau, and a crater under the
feet of Robespierre; its books, its theatre, its art, its science,
its literature, its philosophy, are the manuals of the human race;
it has Pascal, Regnier, Corneille, Descartes, Jean-Jacques: Voltaire
for all moments, Moliere for all centuries; it makes its language to
be talked by the universal mouth, and that language becomes the word;
it constructs in all minds the idea of progress, the liberating dogmas
which it forges are for the generations trusty friends, and it is
with the soul of its thinkers and its poets that all heroes of all
nations have been made since 1789; this does not prevent vagabondism,
and that enormous genius which is called Paris, while transfiguring
the world by its light, sketches in charcoal Bouginier's nose on
the wall of the temple of Theseus and writes Credeville the thief on
the Pyramids.

Paris is always showing its teeth; when it is not scolding it
is laughing.

Such is Paris. The smoke of its roofs forms the ideas of the universe.
A heap of mud and stone, if you will, but, above all, a moral being.
It is more than great, it is immense. Why? Because it is daring.

To dare; that is the price of progress.

All sublime conquests are, more or less, the prizes of daring.
In order that the Revolution should take place, it does not suffice
that Montesquieu should foresee it, that Diderot should preach it,
that Beaumarchais should announce it, that Condorcet should calculate it,
that Arouet should prepare it, that Rousseau should premeditate it;
it is necessary that Danton should dare it.

The cry: Audacity! is a Fiat lux. It is necessary, for the sake
of the forward march of the human race, that there should be proud
lessons of courage permanently on the heights. Daring deeds
dazzle history and are one of man's great sources of light.
The dawn dares when it rises. To attempt, to brave, to persist,
to persevere, to be faithful to one's self, to grasp fate bodily,
to astound catastrophe by the small amount of fear that it occasions us,
now to affront unjust power, again to insult drunken victory,
to hold one's position, to stand one's ground; that is the example
which nations need, that is the light which electrifies them.
The same formidable lightning proceeds from the torch of Prometheus to
Cambronne's short pipe.

CHAPTER XII

THE FUTURE LATENT IN THE PEOPLE

As for the Parisian populace, even when a man grown, it is always
the street Arab; to paint the child is to paint the city; and it is
for that reason that we have studied this eagle in this arrant sparrow.
It is in the faubourgs, above all, we maintain, that the Parisian
race appears; there is the pure blood; there is the true physiognomy;
there this people toils and suffers, and suffering and toil are the two
faces of man. There exist there immense numbers of unknown beings,
among whom swarm types of the strangest, from the porter of la
Rapee to the knacker of Montfaucon. Fex urbis, exclaims Cicero;
mob, adds Burke, indignantly; rabble, multitude, populace. These are
words and quickly uttered. But so be it. What does it matter?
What is it to me if they do go barefoot! They do not know how to read;
so much the worse. Would you abandon them for that? Would you
turn their distress into a malediction? Cannot the light penetrate
these masses? Let us return to that cry: Light! and let us obstinately
persist therein! Light! Light! Who knows whether these opacities
will not become transparent? Are not revolutions transfigurations?
Come, philosophers, teach, enlighten, light up, think aloud,
speak aloud, hasten joyously to the great sun, fraternize with the
public place, announce the good news, spend your alphabets lavishly,
proclaim rights, sing the Marseillaises, sow enthusiasms,
tear green boughs from the oaks. Make a whirlwind of the idea.
This crowd may be rendered sublime. Let us learn how to make use
of that vast conflagration of principles and virtues, which sparkles,
bursts forth and quivers at certain hours. These bare feet,
these bare arms, these rags, these ignorances, these abjectnesses,
these darknesses, may be employed in the conquest of the ideal.
Gaze past the people, and you will perceive truth. Let that vile
sand which you trample under foot be cast into the furnace, let it
melt and seethe there, it will become a splendid crystal, and it
is thanks to it that Galileo and Newton will discover stars.

CHAPTER XIII

LITTLE GAVROCHE

Eight or nine years after the events narrated in the second part
of this story, people noticed on the Boulevard du Temple, and in the
regions of the Chateau-d'Eau, a little boy eleven or twelve years
of age, who would have realized with tolerable accuracy that ideal
of the gamin sketched out above, if, with the laugh of his age
on his lips, he had not had a heart absolutely sombre and empty.
This child was well muffled up in a pair of man's trousers, but he
did not get them from his father, and a woman's chemise, but he
did not get it from his mother. Some people or other had clothed
him in rags out of charity. Still, he had a father and a mother.
But his father did not think of him, and his mother did not love him.

He was one of those children most deserving of pity, among all,
one of those who have father and mother, and who are orphans nevertheless.

This child never felt so well as when he was in the street.
The pavements were less hard to him than his mother's heart.

His parents had despatched him into life with a kick.

He simply took flight.

He was a boisterous, pallid, nimble, wide-awake, jeering, lad, with a
vivacious but sickly air. He went and came, sang, played at hopscotch,
scraped the gutters, stole a little, but, like cats and sparrows,
gayly laughed when he was called a rogue, and got angry when
called a thief. He had no shelter, no bread, no fire, no love;
but he was merry because he was free.

When these poor creatures grow to be men, the millstones of the social
order meet them and crush them, but so long as they are children,
they escape because of their smallness. The tiniest hole saves them.

Nevertheless, abandoned as this child was, it sometimes happened,
every two or three months, that he said, "Come, I'll go and see mamma!"
Then he quitted the boulevard, the Cirque, the Porte Saint-Martin,
descended to the quays, crossed the bridges, reached the suburbs,
arrived at the Salpetriere, and came to a halt, where? Precisely at
that double number 50-52 with which the reader is acquainted--
at the Gorbeau hovel.

At that epoch, the hovel 50-52 generally deserted and eternally
decorated with the placard: "Chambers to let," chanced to be,
a rare thing, inhabited by numerous individuals who, however, as is
always the case in Paris, had no connection with each other.
All belonged to that indigent class which begins to separate
from the lowest of petty bourgeoisie in straitened circumstances,
and which extends from misery to misery into the lowest depths
of society down to those two beings in whom all the material
things of civilization end, the sewer-man who sweeps up the mud,
and the ragpicker who collects scraps.

The "principal lodger" of Jean Valjean's day was dead and had been
replaced by another exactly like her. I know not what philosopher
has said: "Old women are never lacking."

This new old woman was named Madame Bourgon, and had nothing
remarkable about her life except a dynasty of three paroquets,
who had reigned in succession over her soul.

The most miserable of those who inhabited the hovel were a family
of four persons, consisting of father, mother, and two daughters,
already well grown, all four of whom were lodged in the same attic,
one of the cells which we have already mentioned.

At first sight, this family presented no very special feature except
its extreme destitution; the father, when he hired the chamber,
had stated that his name was Jondrette. Some time after his moving in,
which had borne a singular resemblance to the entrance of nothing
at all, to borrow the memorable expression of the principal tenant,
this Jondrette had said to the woman, who, like her predecessor,
was at the same time portress and stair-sweeper: "Mother So-and-So,
if any one should chance to come and inquire for a Pole or an Italian,
or even a Spaniard, perchance, it is I."

This family was that of the merry barefoot boy. He arrived
there and found distress, and, what is still sadder, no smile;
a cold hearth and cold hearts. When he entered, he was asked:
"Whence come you?"  He replied: "From the street."  When he
went away, they asked him: "Whither are you going?"  He replied:
"Into the streets."  His mother said to him: "What did you come
here for?"

This child lived, in this absence of affection, like the pale
plants which spring up in cellars. It did not cause him suffering,
and he blamed no one. He did not know exactly how a father
and mother should be.

Nevertheless, his mother loved his sisters.

We have forgotten to mention, that on the Boulevard du Temple this
child was called Little Gavroche. Why was he called Little Gavroche?

Probably because his father's name was Jondrette.

It seems to be the instinct of certain wretched families to break
the thread.

The chamber which the Jondrettes inhabited in the Gorbeau hovel
was the last at the end of the corridor. The cell next to it
was occupied by a very poor young man who was called M. Marius.

Let us explain who this M. Marius was.

BOOK SECOND.--THE GREAT BOURGEOIS

CHAPTER I

NINETY YEARS AND THIRTY-TWO TEETH

In the Rue Boucherat, Rue de Normandie and the Rue de Saintonge
there still exist a few ancient inhabitants who have preserved
the memory of a worthy man named M. Gillenormand, and who mention
him with complaisance. This good man was old when they were young.
This silhouette has not yet entirely disappeared--for those who regard
with melancholy that vague swarm of shadows which is called the past--
from the labyrinth of streets in the vicinity of the Temple to which,
under Louis XIV., the names of all the provinces of France were
appended exactly as in our day, the streets of the new Tivoli quarter
have received the names of all the capitals of Europe; a progression,
by the way, in which progress is visible.

M.Gillenormand, who was as much alive as possible in 1831,
was one of those men who had become curiosities to be viewed,
simply because they have lived a long time, and who are strange
because they formerly resembled everybody, and now resemble nobody.
He was a peculiar old man, and in very truth, a man of another age,
the real, complete and rather haughty bourgeois of the eighteenth
century, who wore his good, old bourgeoisie with the air with which
marquises wear their marquisates. He was over ninety years of age,
his walk was erect, he talked loudly, saw clearly, drank neat,
ate, slept, and snored. He had all thirty-two of his teeth.
He only wore spectacles when he read. He was of an amorous disposition,
but declared that, for the last ten years, he had wholly and
decidedly renounced women. He could no longer please, he said;
he did not add: "I am too old," but: "I am too poor."  He said:
"If I were not ruined--Heee!"  All he had left, in fact, was an
income of about fifteen thousand francs. His dream was to come
into an inheritance and to have a hundred thousand livres income
for mistresses. He did not belong, as the reader will perceive,
to that puny variety of octogenaries who, like M. de Voltaire,
have been dying all their life; his was no longevity of a cracked pot;
this jovial old man had always had good health. He was superficial,
rapid, easily angered. He flew into a passion at everything,
generally quite contrary to all reason. When contradicted, he raised
his cane; he beat people as he had done in the great century.
He had a daughter over fifty years of age, and unmarried, whom he
chastised severely with his tongue, when in a rage, and whom he
would have liked to whip. She seemed to him to be eight years old.
He boxed his servants' ears soundly, and said: "Ah! carogne!"
One of his oaths was: "By the pantoufloche of the pantouflochade!"
He had singular freaks of tranquillity; he had himself shaved
every day by a barber who had been mad and who detested him,
being jealous of M. Gillenormand on account of his wife, a pretty
and coquettish barberess. M. Gillenormand admired his own discernment
in all things, and declared that he was extremely sagacious;
here is one of his sayings: "I have, in truth, some penetration;
I am able to say when a flea bites me, from what woman it came."

The words which he uttered the most frequently were: the sensible man,
and nature. He did not give to this last word the grand acceptation
which our epoch has accorded to it, but he made it enter,
after his own fashion, into his little chimney-corner satires:
"Nature," he said, "in order that civilization may have a little
of everything, gives it even specimens of its amusing barbarism.
Europe possesses specimens of Asia and Africa on a small scale.
The cat is a drawing-room tiger, the lizard is a pocket crocodile.
The dancers at the opera are pink female savages. They do not eat men,
they crunch them; or, magicians that they are, they transform them
into oysters and swallow them. The Caribbeans leave only the bones,
they leave only the shell. Such are our morals. We do not devour,
we gnaw; we do not exterminate, we claw."

CHAPTER II

LIKE MASTER, LIKE HOUSE

He lived in the Marais, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6.
He owned the house. This house has since been demolished and rebuilt,
and the number has probably been changed in those revolutions
of numeration which the streets of Paris undergo. He occupied
an ancient and vast apartment on the first floor, between street
and gardens, furnished to the very ceilings with great Gobelins
and Beauvais tapestries representing pastoral scenes; the subjects
of the ceilings and the panels were repeated in miniature on the
arm-chairs. He enveloped his bed in a vast, nine-leaved screen
of Coromandel lacquer. Long, full curtains hung from the windows,
and formed great, broken folds that were very magnificent.
The garden situated immediately under his windows was attached
to that one of them which formed the angle, by means of a staircase
twelve or fifteen steps long, which the old gentleman ascended and
descended with great agility. In addition to a library adjoining
his chamber, he had a boudoir of which he thought a great deal,
a gallant and elegant retreat, with magnificent hangings of straw,
with a pattern of flowers and fleurs-de-lys made on the galleys
of Louis XIV. and ordered of his convicts by M. de Vivonne for
his mistress. M. Gillenormand had inherited it from a grim maternal
great-aunt, who had died a centenarian. He had had two wives.
His manners were something between those of the courtier,
which he had never been, and the lawyer, which he might have been.
He was gay, and caressing when he had a mind. In his youth he
had been one of those men who are always deceived by their wives
and never by their mistresses, because they are, at the same time,
the most sullen of husbands and the most charming of lovers
in existence. He was a connoisseur of painting. He had in his chamber
a marvellous portrait of no one knows whom, painted by Jordaens,
executed with great dashes of the brush, with millions of details,
in a confused and hap-hazard manner. M. Gillenormand's attire
was not the habit of Louis XIV. nor yet that of Louis XVI.;
it was that of the Incroyables of the Directory. He had thought
himself young up to that period and had followed the fashions.
His coat was of light-weight cloth with voluminous revers, a long
swallow-tail and large steel buttons. With this he wore knee-breeches
and buckle shoes. He always thrust his hands into his fobs.
He said authoritatively: "The French Revolution is a heap
of blackguards."

CHAPTER III

LUC-ESPRIT

At the age of sixteen, one evening at the opera, he had had the
honor to be stared at through opera-glasses by two beauties at the
same time--ripe and celebrated beauties then, and sung by Voltaire,
the Camargo and the Salle. Caught between two fires, he had beaten
a heroic retreat towards a little dancer, a young girl named Nahenry,
who was sixteen like himself, obscure as a cat, and with whom he was
in love. He abounded in memories. He was accustomed to exclaim:
"How pretty she was--that Guimard-Guimardini-Guimardinette, the
last time I saw her at Longchamps, her hair curled in sustained
sentiments, with her come-and-see of turquoises, her gown of the
color of persons newly arrived, and her little agitation muff!"
He had worn in his young manhood a waistcoat of Nain-Londrin,
which he was fond of talking about effusively. "I was dressed
like a Turk of the Levant Levantin," said he. Madame de Boufflers,
having seen him by chance when he was twenty, had described him as "a
charming fool."  He was horrified by all the names which he saw
in politics and in power, regarding them as vulgar and bourgeois.
He read the journals, the newspapers, the gazettes as he said,
stifling outbursts of laughter the while. "Oh!" he said,
"what people these are! Corbiere! Humann! Casimir Perier!
There's a minister for you! I can imagine this in a journal:
`M. Gillenorman, minister!' that would be a farce. Well! They are so
stupid that it would pass"; he merrily called everything by its name,
whether decent or indecent, and did not restrain himself in the least
before ladies. He uttered coarse speeches, obscenities, and filth
with a certain tranquillity and lack of astonishment which was elegant.
It was in keeping with the unceremoniousness of his century.
It is to be noted that the age of periphrase in verse was the age
of crudities in prose. His god-father had predicted that he
would turn out a man of genius, and had bestowed on him these two
significant names: Luc-Esprit.

CHAPTER IV

A CENTENARIAN ASPIRANT

He had taken prizes in his boyhood at the College of Moulins, where he
was born, and he had been crowned by the hand of the Duc de Nivernais,
whom he called the Duc de Nevers. Neither the Convention, nor the
death of Louis XVI., nor the Napoleon, nor the return of the Bourbons,
nor anything else had been able to efface the memory of this crowning.
The Duc de Nevers was, in his eyes, the great figure of the century.
"What a charming grand seigneur," he said, "and what a fine air he
had with his blue ribbon!"

In the eyes of M. Gillenormand, Catherine the Second had made reparation
for the crime of the partition of Poland by purchasing, for three
thousand roubles, the secret of the elixir of gold, from Bestucheff.
He grew animated on this subject: "The elixir of gold," he exclaimed,
"the yellow dye of Bestucheff, General Lamotte's drops, in the
eighteenth century,--this was the great remedy for the catastrophes
of love, the panacea against Venus, at one louis the half-ounce phial.
Louis XV. sent two hundred phials of it to the Pope."  He would have
been greatly irritated and thrown off his balance, had any one told
him that the elixir of gold is nothing but the perchloride of iron.
M. Gillenormand adored the Bourbons, and had a horror of 1789;
he was forever narrating in what manner he had saved himself during
the Terror, and how he had been obliged to display a vast deal of
gayety and cleverness in order to escape having his head cut off.
If any young man ventured to pronounce an eulogium on the Republic
in his presence, he turned purple and grew so angry that he was on
the point of swooning. He sometimes alluded to his ninety years,
and said, "I hope that I shall not see ninety-three twice."
On these occasions, he hinted to people that he meant to live to be
a hundred.

CHAPTER V

BASQUE AND NICOLETTE

He had theories. Here is one of them: "When a man is passionately
fond of women, and when he has himself a wife for whom he cares
but little, who is homely, cross, legitimate, with plenty of rights,
perched on the code, and jealous at need, there is but one way
of extricating himself from the quandry and of procuring peace,
and that is to let his wife control the purse-strings. This
abdication sets him free. Then his wife busies herself,
grows passionately fond of handling coin, gets her fingers
covered with verdigris in the process, undertakes the education
of half-share tenants and the training of farmers, convokes lawyers,
presides over notaries, harangues scriveners, visits limbs of the law,
follows lawsuits, draws up leases, dictates contracts, feels herself
the sovereign, sells, buys, regulates, promises and compromises,
binds fast and annuls, yields, concedes and retrocedes, arranges,
disarranges, hoards, lavishes; she commits follies, a supreme
and personal delight, and that consoles her. While her husband
disdains her, she has the satisfaction of ruining her husband."
This theory M. Gillenormand had himself applied, and it had become
his history. His wife--the second one--had administered his fortune
in such a manner that, one fine day, when M. Gillenormand found
himself a widower, there remained to him just sufficient to live on,
by sinking nearly the whole of it in an annuity of fifteen
thousand francs, three-quarters of which would expire with him.
He had not hesitated on this point, not being anxious to leave
a property behind him. Besides, he had noticed that patrimonies are
subject to adventures, and, for instance, become national property;
he had been present at the avatars of consolidated three per cents,
and he had no great faith in the Great Book of the Public Debt.
"All that's the Rue Quincampois!" he said. His house in the Rue
Filles-du-Clavaire belonged to him, as we have already stated.
He had two servants, "a male and a female."  When a servant entered
his establishment, M. Gillenormand re-baptized him. He bestowed on
the men the name of their province: Nimois, Comtois, Poitevin, Picard.
His last valet was a big, foundered, short-winded fellow of fifty-five,
who was incapable of running twenty paces; but, as he had been born
at Bayonne, M. Gillenormand called him Basque. All the female
servants in his house were called Nicolette (even the Magnon,
of whom we shall hear more farther on). One day, a haughty cook,
a cordon bleu, of the lofty race of porters, presented herself.
"How much wages do you want a month?" asked M. Gillenormand.
"Thirty francs."  "What is your name?"  "Olympie."  "You shall
have fifty francs, and you shall be called Nicolette."

CHAPTER VI

IN WHICH MAGNON AND HER TWO CHILDREN ARE SEEN

With M. Gillenormand, sorrow was converted into wrath; he was furious
at being in despair. He had all sorts of prejudices and took
all sorts of liberties. One of the facts of which his exterior
relief and his internal satisfaction was composed, was, as we have
just hinted, that he had remained a brisk spark, and that he passed
energetically for such. This he called having "royal renown."
This royal renown sometimes drew down upon him singular windfalls.
One day, there was brought to him in a basket, as though it had
been a basket of oysters, a stout, newly born boy, who was yelling
like the deuce, and duly wrapped in swaddling-clothes, which a
servant-maid, dismissed six months previously, attributed to him.
M. Gillenormand had, at that time, fully completed his
eighty-fourth year. Indignation and uproar in the establishment.
And whom did that bold hussy think she could persuade to believe that?
What audacity! What an abominable calumny! M. Gillenormand himself
was not at all enraged. He gazed at the brat with the amiable smile
of a good man who is flattered by the calumny, and said in an aside:
"Well, what now? What's the matter? You are finely taken aback,
and really, you are excessively ignorant. M. le Duc d'Angouleme,
the bastard of his Majesty Charles IX., married a silly jade of fifteen
when he was eighty-five; M. Virginal, Marquis d'Alluye, brother
to the Cardinal de Sourdis, Archbishop of Bordeaux, had, at the age
of eighty-three, by the maid of Madame la Presidente Jacquin,
a son, a real child of love, who became a Chevalier of Malta
and a counsellor of state; one of the great men of this century,
the Abbe Tabaraud, is the son of a man of eighty-seven. There is
nothing out of the ordinary in these things. And then, the Bible!
Upon that I declare that this little gentleman is none of mine.
Let him be taken care of. It is not his fault."  This manner
of procedure was good-tempered. The woman, whose name was Magnon,
sent him another parcel in the following year. It was a boy again.
Thereupon, M. Gillenormand capitulated. He sent the two brats
back to their mother, promising to pay eighty francs a month
for their maintenance, on the condition that the said mother would
not do so any more. He added: "I insist upon it that the mother
shall treat them well. I shall go to see them from time to time."
And this he did. He had had a brother who was a priest, and who had
been rector of the Academy of Poitiers for three and thirty years,
and had died at seventy-nine. "I lost him young," said he.
This brother, of whom but little memory remains, was a peaceable
miser, who, being a priest, thought himself bound to bestow alms
on the poor whom he met, but he never gave them anything except
bad or demonetized sous, thereby discovering a means of going
to hell by way of paradise. As for M. Gillenormand the elder,
he never haggled over his alms-giving, but gave gladly and nobly.
He was kindly, abrupt, charitable, and if he had been rich,
his turn of mind would have been magnificent. He desired
that all which concerned him should be done in a grand manner,
even his rogueries. One day, having been cheated by a business
man in a matter of inheritance, in a gross and apparent manner,
he uttered this solemn exclamation: "That was indecently done!
I am really ashamed of this pilfering. Everything has degenerated
in this century, even the rascals. Morbleu! this is not the way
to rob a man of my standing. I am robbed as though in a forest,
but badly robbed. Silva, sint consule dignae!"  He had had two wives,
as we have already mentioned; by the first he had had a daughter,
who had remained unmarried, and by the second another daughter,
who had died at about the age of thirty, who had wedded, through love,
or chance, or otherwise, a soldier of fortune who had served
in the armies of the Republic and of the Empire, who had won
the cross at Austerlitz and had been made colonel at Waterloo.
"He is the disgrace of my family," said the old bourgeois.
He took an immense amount of snuff, and had a particularly graceful
manner of plucking at his lace ruffle with the back of one hand.
He believed very little in God.

CHAPTER VII

RULE: RECEIVE NO ONE EXCEPT IN THE EVENING

Such was M. Luc-Esprit Gillenormand, who had not lost his hair,--
which was gray rather than white,--and which was always dressed in
"dog's ears."  To sum up, he was venerable in spite of all this.

He had something of the eighteenth century about him; frivolous and great.

In 1814 and during the early years of the Restoration, M. Gillenormand,
who was still young,--he was only seventy-four,--lived in the
Faubourg Saint Germain, Rue Servandoni, near Saint-Sulpice.
He had only retired to the Marais when he quitted society,
long after attaining the age of eighty.

And, on abandoning society, he had immured himself in his habits.
The principal one, and that which was invariable, was to keep his
door absolutely closed during the day, and never to receive any one
whatever except in the evening. He dined at five o'clock, and after
that his door was open. That had been the fashion of his century,
and he would not swerve from it. "The day is vulgar," said he,
"and deserves only a closed shutter. Fashionable people only light up
their minds when the zenith lights up its stars."  And he barricaded
himself against every one, even had it been the king himself.
This was the antiquated elegance of his day.

CHAPTER VIII

TWO DO NOT MAKE A PAIR

We have just spoken of M. Gillenormand's two daughters. They had
come into the world ten years apart. In their youth they had
borne very little resemblance to each other, either in character
or countenance, and had also been as little like sisters to each
other as possible. The youngest had a charming soul, which turned
towards all that belongs to the light, was occupied with flowers,
with verses, with music, which fluttered away into glorious space,
enthusiastic, ethereal, and was wedded from her very youth, in ideal,
to a vague and heroic figure. The elder had also her chimera;
she espied in the azure some very wealthy purveyor, a contractor,
a splendidly stupid husband, a million made man, or even a prefect;
the receptions of the Prefecture, an usher in the antechamber
with a chain on his neck, official balls, the harangues of the
town-hall, to be "Madame la Prefete,"--all this had created
a whirlwind in her imagination. Thus the two sisters strayed,
each in her own dream, at the epoch when they were young girls.
Both had wings, the one like an angel, the other like a goose.

No ambition is ever fully realized, here below at least.
No paradise becomes terrestrial in our day. The younger wedded
the man of her dreams, but she died. The elder did not marry at all.

At the moment when she makes her entrance into this history which we
are relating, she was an antique virtue, an incombustible prude,
with one of the sharpest noses, and one of the most obtuse minds
that it is possible to see. A characteristic detail; outside of
her immediate family, no one had ever known her first name.
She was called Mademoiselle Gillenormand, the elder.

In the matter of cant, Mademoiselle Gillenormand could have given
points to a miss. Her modesty was carried to the other extreme
of blackness. She cherished a frightful memory of her life; one day,
a man had beheld her garter.

Age had only served to accentuate this pitiless modesty. Her guimpe
was never sufficiently opaque, and never ascended sufficiently high.
She multiplied clasps and pins where no one would have dreamed
of looking. The peculiarity of prudery is to place all the more
sentinels in proportion as the fortress is the less menaced.

Nevertheless, let him who can explain these antique mysteries
of innocence, she allowed an officer of the Lancers, her grand nephew,
named Theodule, to embrace her without displeasure.

In spite of this favored Lancer, the label: Prude, under which we have
classed her, suited her to absolute perfection. Mademoiselle Gillenormand
was a sort of twilight soul. Prudery is a demi-virtue and a demi-vice.

To prudery she added bigotry, a well-assorted lining. She belonged
to the society of the Virgin, wore a white veil on certain festivals,
mumbled special orisons, revered "the holy blood," venerated "the
sacred heart," remained for hours in contemplation before a
rococo-jesuit altar in a chapel which was inaccessible to the rank
and file of the faithful, and there allowed her soul to soar among
little clouds of marble, and through great rays of gilded wood.

She had a chapel friend, an ancient virgin like herself,
named Mademoiselle Vaubois, who was a positive blockhead,
and beside whom Mademoiselle Gillenormand had the pleasure of being
an eagle. Beyond the Agnus Dei and Ave Maria, Mademoiselle Vaubois
had no knowledge of anything except of the different ways of
making preserves. Mademoiselle Vaubois, perfect in her style,
was the ermine of stupidity without a single spot of intelligence.

Let us say it plainly, Mademoiselle Gillenormand had gained rather
than lost as she grew older. This is the case with passive natures.
She had never been malicious, which is relative kindness; and then,
years wear away the angles, and the softening which comes with time
had come to her. She was melancholy with an obscure sadness
of which she did not herself know the secret. There breathed
from her whole person the stupor of a life that was finished,
and which had never had a beginning.

She kept house for her father. M. Gillenormand had his daughter
near him, as we have seen that Monseigneur Bienvenu had his sister
with him. These households comprised of an old man and an old
spinster are not rare, and always have the touching aspect of two
weaknesses leaning on each other for support.

There was also in this house, between this elderly spinster
and this old man, a child, a little boy, who was always trembling
and mute in the presence of M. Gillenormand. M. Gillenormand
never addressed this child except in a severe voice, and sometimes,
with uplifted cane: "Here, sir! rascal, scoundrel, come here!--
Answer me, you scamp! Just let me see you, you good-for-nothing!"
etc., etc. He idolized him.

This was his grandson. We shall meet with this child again later on.

BOOK THIRD.--THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON

CHAPTER I

AN ANCIENT SALON

When M. Gillenormand lived in the Rue Servandoni, he had frequented
many very good and very aristocratic salons. Although a bourgeois,
M. Gillenormand was received in society. As he had a double
measure of wit, in the first place, that which was born with him,
and secondly, that which was attributed to him, he was even sought
out and made much of. He never went anywhere except on condition
of being the chief person there. There are people who will have
influence at any price, and who will have other people busy
themselves over them; when they cannot be oracles, they turn wags.
M. Gillenormand was not of this nature; his domination in the
Royalist salons which he frequented cost his self-respect nothing.
He was an oracle everywhere. It had happened to him to hold his own
against M. de Bonald, and even against M. Bengy-Puy-Vallee.

About 1817, he invariably passed two afternoons a week in a house in his
own neighborhood, in the Rue Ferou, with Madame la Baronne de T., a worthy
and respectable person, whose husband had been Ambassador of France
to Berlin under Louis XVI. Baron de T., who, during his lifetime,
had gone very passionately into ecstasies and magnetic visions,
had died bankrupt, during the emigration, leaving, as his entire
fortune, some very curious Memoirs about Mesmer and his tub, in ten
manuscript volumes, bound in red morocco and gilded on the edges.
Madame de T. had not published the memoirs, out of pride, and
maintained herself on a meagre income which had survived no one knew how.

Madame de T. lived far from the Court; "a very mixed society,"
as she said, in a noble isolation, proud and poor. A few friends
assembled twice a week about her widowed hearth, and these constituted
a purely Royalist salon. They sipped tea there, and uttered groans
or cries of horror at the century, the charter, the Bonapartists,
the prostitution of the blue ribbon, or the Jacobinism of Louis
XVIII., according as the wind veered towards elegy or dithyrambs;
and they spoke in low tones of the hopes which were presented
by Monsieur, afterwards Charles X.

The songs of the fishwomen, in which Napoleon was called Nicolas,
were received there with transports of joy. Duchesses, the most
delicate and charming women in the world, went into ecstasies over
couplets like the following, addressed to "the federates":--

               Refoncez dans vos culottes[20]
               Le bout d' chemis' qui vous pend.
               Qu'on n' dis' pas qu' les patriotes
               Ont arbore l' drapeau blanc?

[20] Tuck into your trousers the shirt-tail that is hanging out.
Let it not be said that patriots have hoisted the white flag.

There they amused themselves with puns which were considered terrible,
with innocent plays upon words which they supposed to be venomous,
with quatrains, with distiches even; thus, upon the Dessolles ministry,
a moderate cabinet, of which MM. Decazes and Deserre were members:--

          Pour raffermir le trone ebranle sur sa base,[21]
          Il faut changer de sol, et de serre et de case.

[21] In order to re-establish the shaken throne firmly on its base,
soil (Des solles), greenhouse and house (Decazes) must be changed.

Or they drew up a list of the chamber of peers, "an abominably
Jacobin chamber," and from this list they combined alliances of names,
in such a manner as to form, for example, phrases like the following:
Damas. Sabran. Gouvion-Saint-Cyr.--All this was done merrily.
In that society, they parodied the Revolution. They used I know
not what desires to give point to the same wrath in inverse sense.
They sang their little Ca ira:--

               Ah! ca ira ca ira ca ira!
               Les Bonapartistes a la lanterne!

Songs are like the guillotine; they chop away indifferently,
to-day this head, to-morrow that. It is only a variation.

In the Fualdes affair, which belongs to this epoch, 1816, they took
part for Bastide and Jausion, because Fualdes was "a Buonapartist."
They designated the liberals as friends and brothers; this constituted
the most deadly insult.

Like certain church towers, Madame de T.'s salon had two cocks.
One of them was M. Gillenormand, the other was Comte de Lamothe-Valois,
of whom it was whispered about, with a sort of respect: "Do you know?
That is the Lamothe of the affair of the necklace."  These singular
amnesties do occur in parties.

Let us add the following: in the bourgeoisie, honored situations
decay through too easy relations; one must beware whom one admits;
in the same way that there is a loss of caloric in the vicinity of those
who are cold, there is a diminution of consideration in the approach
of despised persons. The ancient society of the upper classes held
themselves above this law, as above every other. Marigny, the brother
of the Pompadour, had his entry with M. le Prince de Soubise.
In spite of? No, because. Du Barry, the god-father of the Vaubernier,
was very welcome at the house of M. le Marechal de Richelieu.
This society is Olympus. Mercury and the Prince de Guemenee are
at home there. A thief is admitted there, provided he be a god.

The Comte de Lamothe, who, in 1815, was an old man seventy-five
years of age, had nothing remarkable about him except his silent
and sententious air, his cold and angular face, his perfectly
polished manners, his coat buttoned up to his cravat, and his long legs
always crossed in long, flabby trousers of the hue of burnt sienna.
His face was the same color as his trousers.

This M. de Lamothe was "held in consideration" in this salon
on account of his "celebrity" and, strange to say, though true,
because of his name of Valois.

As for M. Gillenormand, his consideration was of absolutely
first-rate quality. He had, in spite of his levity, and without its
interfering in any way with his dignity, a certain manner about him
which was imposing, dignified, honest, and lofty, in a bourgeois fashion;
and his great age added to it. One is not a century with impunity.
The years finally produce around a head a venerable dishevelment.

In addition to this, he said things which had the genuine sparkle
of the old rock. Thus, when the King of Prussia, after having restored
Louis XVIII., came to pay the latter a visit under the name of the
Count de Ruppin, he was received by the descendant of Louis XIV.
somewhat as though he had been the Marquis de Brandebourg, and with
the most delicate impertinence. M. Gillenormand approved: "All kings
who are not the King of France," said he, "are provincial kings."
One day, the following question was put and the following answer
returned in his presence: "To what was the editor of the Courrier
Francais condemned?"  "To be suspended."  "Sus is superfluous,"
observed M. Gillenormand.[22] Remarks of this nature found a situation.

[22] Suspendu, suspended; pendu, hung.

At the Te Deum on the anniversary of the return of the Bourbons,
he said, on seeing M. de Talleyrand pass by: "There goes his
Excellency the Evil One."

M. Gillenormand was always accompanied by his daughter,
that tall mademoiselle, who was over forty and looked fifty,
and by a handsome little boy of seven years, white, rosy, fresh,
with happy and trusting eyes, who never appeared in that salon
without hearing voices murmur around him: "How handsome he is!
What a pity! Poor child!"  This child was the one of whom
we dropped a word a while ago. He was called "poor child,"
because he had for a father "a brigand of the Loire."

This brigand of the Loire was M. Gillenormand's son-in-law,
who has already been mentioned, and whom M. Gillenormand called
"the disgrace of his family."

CHAPTER II

ONE OF THE RED SPECTRES OF THAT EPOCH

Any one who had chanced to pass through the little town of Vernon
at this epoch, and who had happened to walk across that fine
monumental bridge, which will soon be succeeded, let us hope,
by some hideous iron cable bridge, might have observed, had he
dropped his eyes over the parapet, a man about fifty years of age
wearing a leather cap, and trousers and a waistcoat of coarse
gray cloth, to which something yellow which had been a red ribbon,
was sewn, shod with wooden sabots, tanned by the sun, his face
nearly black and his hair nearly white, a large scar on his forehead
which ran down upon his cheek, bowed, bent, prematurely aged,
who walked nearly every day, hoe and sickle in hand, in one of
those compartments surrounded by walls which abut on the bridge,
and border the left bank of the Seine like a chain of terraces,
charming enclosures full of flowers of which one could say, were they
much larger: "these are gardens," and were they a little smaller:
"these are bouquets."  All these enclosures abut upon the river
at one end, and on a house at the other. The man in the waistcoat
and the wooden shoes of whom we have just spoken, inhabited the
smallest of these enclosures and the most humble of these houses
about 1817. He lived there alone and solitary, silently and poorly,
with a woman who was neither young nor old, neither homely
nor pretty, neither a peasant nor a bourgeoise, who served him.
The plot of earth which he called his garden was celebrated in the
town for the beauty of the flowers which he cultivated there.
These flowers were his occupation.

By dint of labor, of perseverance, of attention, and of buckets
of water, he had succeeded in creating after the Creator, and he
had invented certain tulips and certain dahlias which seemed to have
been forgotten by nature. He was ingenious; he had forestalled
Soulange Bodin in the formation of little clumps of earth of
heath mould, for the cultivation of rare and precious shrubs from
America and China. He was in his alleys from the break of day,
in summer, planting, cutting, hoeing, watering, walking amid
his flowers with an air of kindness, sadness, and sweetness,
sometimes standing motionless and thoughtful for hours, listening to
the song of a bird in the trees, the babble of a child in a house,
or with his eyes fixed on a drop of dew at the tip of a spear of grass,
of which the sun made a carbuncle. His table was very plain,
and he drank more milk than wine. A child could make him give way,
and his servant scolded him. He was so timid that be seemed shy,
he rarely went out, and he saw no one but the poor people who
tapped at his pane and his cure, the Abbe Mabeuf, a good old man.
Nevertheless, if the inhabitants of the town, or strangers, or any
chance comers, curious to see his tulips, rang at his little cottage,
he opened his door with a smile. He was the "brigand of the Loire."

Any one who had, at the same time, read military memoirs, biographies,
the Moniteur, and the bulletins of the grand army, would have been
struck by a name which occurs there with tolerable frequency, the name
of Georges Pontmercy. When very young, this Georges Pontmercy had
been a soldier in Saintonge's regiment. The revolution broke out.
Saintonge's regiment formed a part of the army of the Rhine;
for the old regiments of the monarchy preserved their names
of provinces even after the fall of the monarchy, and were only
divided into brigades in 1794. Pontmercy fought at Spire, at Worms,
at Neustadt, at Turkheim, at Alzey, at Mayence, where he was one
of the two hundred who formed Houchard's rearguard. It was the
twelfth to hold its ground against the corps of the Prince of Hesse,
behind the old rampart of Andernach, and only rejoined the main body
of the army when the enemy's cannon had opened a breach from the cord
of the parapet to the foot of the glacis. He was under Kleber at
Marchiennes and at the battle of Mont-Palissel, where a ball from
a biscaien broke his arm. Then he passed to the frontier of Italy,
and was one of the thirty grenadiers who defended the Col de Tende
with Joubert. Joubert was appointed its adjutant-general, and
Pontmercy sub-lieutenant. Pontmercy was by Berthier's side in the
midst of the grape-shot of that day at Lodi which caused Bonaparte
to say: "Berthier has been cannoneer, cavalier, and grenadier."
He beheld his old general, Joubert, fall at Novi, at the moment when,
with uplifted sabre, he was shouting: "Forward!"  Having been embarked
with his company in the exigencies of the campaign, on board a pinnace
which was proceeding from Genoa to some obscure port on the coast,
he fell into a wasps'-nest of seven or eight English vessels.
The Genoese commander wanted to throw his cannon into the sea,
to hide the soldiers between decks, and to slip along in the dark
as a merchant vessel. Pontmercy had the colors hoisted to the peak,
and sailed proudly past under the guns of the British frigates.
Twenty leagues further on, his audacity having increased, he attacked
with his pinnace, and captured a large English transport which was
carrying troops to Sicily, and which was so loaded down with men
and horses that the vessel was sunk to the level of the sea.
In 1805 he was in that Malher division which took Gunzberg from
the Archduke Ferdinand. At Weltingen he received into his arms,
beneath a storm of bullets, Colonel Maupetit, mortally wounded at
the head of the 9th Dragoons. He distinguished himself at Austerlitz
in that admirable march in echelons effected under the enemy's fire.
When the cavalry of the Imperial Russian Guard crushed a battalion
of the 4th of the line, Pontmercy was one of those who took their
revenge and overthrew the Guard. The Emperor gave him the cross.
Pontmercy saw Wurmser at Mantua, Melas, and Alexandria, Mack at Ulm,
made prisoners in succession. He formed a part of the eighth corps
of the grand army which Mortier commanded, and which captured Hamburg.
Then he was transferred to the 55th of the line, which was the old
regiment of Flanders. At Eylau he was in the cemetery where,
for the space of two hours, the heroic Captain Louis Hugo,
the uncle of the author of this book, sustained alone with his
company of eighty-three men every effort of the hostile army.
Pontmercy was one of the three who emerged alive from that cemetery.
He was at Friedland. Then he saw Moscow. Then La Beresina, then Lutzen,
Bautzen, Dresden, Wachau, Leipzig, and the defiles of Gelenhausen;
then Montmirail, Chateau-Thierry, Craon, the banks of the Marne,
the banks of the Aisne, and the redoubtable position of Laon.
At Arnay-Le-Duc, being then a captain, he put ten Cossacks to the sword,
and saved, not his general, but his corporal. He was well slashed
up on this occasion, and twenty-seven splinters were extracted from
his left arm alone. Eight days before the capitulation of Paris
he had just exchanged with a comrade and entered the cavalry.
He had what was called under the old regime, the double hand,
that is to say, an equal aptitude for handling the sabre or the musket
as a soldier, or a squadron or a battalion as an officer. It is
from this aptitude, perfected by a military education, which certain
special branches of the service arise, the dragoons, for example,
who are both cavalry-men and infantry at one and the same time.
He accompanied Napoleon to the Island of Elba. At Waterloo, he was
chief of a squadron of cuirassiers, in Dubois' brigade. It was he
who captured the standard of the Lunenburg battalion. He came and
cast the flag at the Emperor's feet. He was covered with blood.
While tearing down the banner he had received a sword-cut across
his face. The Emperor, greatly pleased, shouted to him: "You are
a colonel, you are a baron, you are an officer of the Legion of Honor!"
Pontmercy replied: "Sire, I thank you for my widow."  An hour later,
he fell in the ravine of Ohain. Now, who was this Georges Pontmercy?
He was this same "brigand of the Loire."

We have already seen something of his history. After Waterloo,
Pontmercy, who had been pulled out of the hollow road of Ohain,
as it will be remembered, had succeeded in joining the army,
and had dragged himself from ambulance to ambulance as far
as the cantonments of the Loire.

The Restoration had placed him on half-pay, then had sent him
into residence, that is to say, under surveillance, at Vernon.
King Louis XVIII., regarding all that which had taken place
during the Hundred Days as not having occurred at all, did not
recognize his quality as an officer of the Legion of Honor,
nor his grade of colonel, nor his title of baron. He, on his side,
neglected no occasion of signing himself "Colonel Baron Pontmercy."
He had only an old blue coat, and he never went out without
fastening to it his rosette as an officer of the Legion of Honor.
The Attorney for the Crown had him warned that the authorities
would prosecute him for "illegal" wearing of this decoration.
When this notice was conveyed to him through an officious intermediary,
Pontmercy retorted with a bitter smile: "I do not know whether I
no longer understand French, or whether you no longer speak it;
but the fact is that I do not understand."  Then he went out for eight
successive days with his rosette. They dared not interfere with him.
Two or three times the Minister of War and the general in command
of the department wrote to him with the following address:
A Monsieur le Commandant Pontmercy."  He sent back the letters
with the seals unbroken. At the same moment, Napoleon at Saint
Helena was treating in the same fashion the missives of Sir Hudson
Lowe addressed to General Bonaparte. Pontmercy had ended, may we
be pardoned the expression, by having in his mouth the same saliva as
his Emperor.

In the same way, there were at Rome Carthaginian prisoners who refused
to salute Flaminius, and who had a little of Hannibal's spirit.

One day he encountered the district-attorney in one of the streets
of Vernon, stepped up to him, and said: "Mr. Crown Attorney,
am I permitted to wear my scar?"

He had nothing save his meagre half-pay as chief of squadron.
He had hired the smallest house which he could find at Vernon.
He lived there alone, we have just seen how. Under the Empire,
between two wars, he had found time to marry Mademoiselle Gillenormand.
The old bourgeois, thoroughly indignant at bottom, had given his consent
with a sigh, saying: "The greatest families are forced into it."
In 1815, Madame Pontmercy, an admirable woman in every sense,
by the way, lofty in sentiment and rare, and worthy of her husband,
died, leaving a child. This child had been the colonel's joy
in his solitude; but the grandfather had imperatively claimed
his grandson, declaring that if the child were not given to him he would
disinherit him. The father had yielded in the little one's interest,
and had transferred his love to flowers.

Moreover, he had renounced everything, and neither stirred up mischief
nor conspired. He shared his thoughts between the innocent things
which he was then doing and the great things which he had done.
He passed his time in expecting a pink or in recalling Austerlitz.

M. Gillenormand kept up no relations with his son-in-law. The
colonel was "a bandit" to him. M. Gillenormand never mentioned
the colonel, except when he occasionally made mocking allusions
to "his Baronship."  It had been expressly agreed that Pontmercy
should never attempt to see his son nor to speak to him, under penalty
of having the latter handed over to him disowned and disinherited.
For the Gillenormands, Pontmercy was a man afflicted with the plague.
They intended to bring up the child in their own way. Perhaps the
colonel was wrong to accept these conditions, but he submitted to them,
thinking that he was doing right and sacrificing no one but himself.

The inheritance of Father Gillenormand did not amount to much; but the
inheritance of Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder was considerable.
This aunt, who had remained unmarried, was very rich on the
maternal side, and her sister's son was her natural heir. The boy,
whose name was Marius, knew that he had a father, but nothing more.
No one opened his mouth to him about it. Nevertheless, in the society
into which his grandfather took him, whispers, innuendoes, and winks,
had eventually enlightened the little boy's mind; he had finally
understood something of the case, and as he naturally took in the
ideas and opinions which were, so to speak, the air he breathed,
by a sort of infiltration and slow penetration, he gradually came
to think of his father only with shame and with a pain at his heart.

While he was growing up in this fashion, the colonel slipped away
every two or three months, came to Paris on the sly, like a criminal
breaking his ban, and went and posted himself at Saint-Sulpice,
at the hour when Aunt Gillenormand led Marius to the mass.
There, trembling lest the aunt should turn round, concealed behind
a pillar, motionless, not daring to breathe, he gazed at his child.
The scarred veteran was afraid of that old spinster.

From this had arisen his connection with the cure of Vernon,
M. l'Abbe Mabeuf.

That worthy priest was the brother of a warden of Saint-Sulpice,
who had often observed this man gazing at his child, and the scar on
his cheek, and the large tears in his eyes. That man, who had so manly
an air, yet who was weeping like a woman, had struck the warden.
That face had clung to his mind. One day, having gone to Vernon to
see his brother, he had encountered Colonel Pontmercy on the bridge,
and had recognized the man of Saint-Sulpice. The warden had mentioned
the circumstance to the cure, and both had paid the colonel a visit,
on some pretext or other. This visit led to others. The colonel,
who had been extremely reserved at first, ended by opening his heart,
and the cure and the warden finally came to know the whole history,
and how Pontmercy was sacrificing his happiness to his child's future.
This caused the cure to regard him with veneration and tenderness,
and the colonel, on his side, became fond of the cure. And moreover,
when both are sincere and good, no men so penetrate each other,
and so amalgamate with each other, as an old priest and an old soldier.
At bottom, the man is the same. The one has devoted his life to his
country here below, the other to his country on high; that is the
only difference.

Twice a year, on the first of January and on St. George's day,
Marius wrote duty letters to his father, which were dictated by his aunt,
and which one would have pronounced to be copied from some formula;
this was all that M. Gillenormand tolerated; and the father answered
them with very tender letters which the grandfather thrust into his
pocket unread.

CHAPTER III

REQUIESCANT

Madame de T.'s salon was all that Marius Pontmercy knew of the world.
It was the only opening through which he could get a glimpse
of life. This opening was sombre, and more cold than warmth,
more night than day, came to him through this skylight. This child,
who had been all joy and light on entering this strange world,
soon became melancholy, and, what is still more contrary to his age,
grave. Surrounded by all those singular and imposing personages,
he gazed about him with serious amazement. Everything conspired
to increase this astonishment in him. There were in Madame de T.'s
salon some very noble ladies named Mathan, Noe, Levis,--which was
pronounced Levi,--Cambis, pronounced Cambyse. These antique visages
and these Biblical names mingled in the child's mind with the Old
Testament which he was learning by heart, and when they were
all there, seated in a circle around a dying fire, sparely lighted
by a lamp shaded with green, with their severe profiles, their gray
or white hair, their long gowns of another age, whose lugubrious
colors could not be distinguished, dropping, at rare intervals,
words which were both majestic and severe, little Marius stared
at them with frightened eyes, in the conviction that he beheld
not women, but patriarchs and magi, not real beings, but phantoms.

With these phantoms, priests were sometimes mingled, frequenters of this
ancient salon, and some gentlemen; the Marquis de Sass****, private
secretary to Madame de Berry, the Vicomte de Val***, who published,
under the pseudonyme of Charles-Antoine, monorhymed odes, the Prince
de Beauff*******, who, though very young, had a gray head and a pretty
and witty wife, whose very low-necked toilettes of scarlet velvet with
gold torsades alarmed these shadows, the Marquis de C*****d'E******,
the man in all France who best understood "proportioned politeness,"
the Comte d'Am*****, the kindly man with the amiable chin, and the
Chevalier de Port-de-Guy, a pillar of the library of the Louvre,
called the King's cabinet, M. de Port-de-Guy, bald, and rather aged
than old, was wont to relate that in 1793, at the age of sixteen,
he had been put in the galleys as refractory and chained with an
octogenarian, the Bishop of Mirepoix, also refractory, but as a priest,
while he was so in the capacity of a soldier. This was at Toulon.
Their business was to go at night and gather up on the scaffold
the heads and bodies of the persons who had been guillotined during
the day; they bore away on their backs these dripping corpses,
and their red galley-slave blouses had a clot of blood at the back
of the neck, which was dry in the morning and wet at night.
These tragic tales abounded in Madame de T.'s salon, and by dint
of cursing Marat, they applauded Trestaillon. Some deputies
of the undiscoverable variety played their whist there; M. Thibord
du Chalard, M. Lemarchant de Gomicourt, and the celebrated scoffer
of the right, M. Cornet-Dincourt. The bailiff de Ferrette, with his
short breeches and his thin legs, sometimes traversed this salon
on his way to M. de Talleyrand. He had been M. le Comte d'Artois'
companion in pleasures and unlike Aristotle crouching under Campaspe,
he had made the Guimard crawl on all fours, and in that way he
had exhibited to the ages a philosopher avenged by a bailiff.
As for the priests, there was the Abbe Halma, the same to whom
M. Larose, his collaborator on la Foudre, said: "Bah! Who is
there who is not fifty years old? a few greenhorns perhaps?"
The Abbe Letourneur, preacher to the King, the Abbe Frayssinous,
who was not, as yet, either count, or bishop, or minister, or peer,
and who wore an old cassock whose buttons were missing, and the Abbe
Keravenant, Cure of Saint-Germain-des-Pres; also the Pope's Nuncio,
then Monsignor Macchi, Archbishop of Nisibi, later on Cardinal,
remarkable for his long, pensive nose, and another Monsignor,
entitled thus: Abbate Palmieri, domestic prelate, one of the seven
participant prothonotaries of the Holy See, Canon of the illustrious
Liberian basilica, Advocate of the saints, Postulatore dei Santi,
which refers to matters of canonization, and signifies very nearly:
Master of Requests of the section of Paradise. Lastly, two cardinals,
M. de la Luzerne, and M. de Cl****** T*******. The Cardinal of Luzerne
was a writer and was destined to have, a few years later, the honor
of signing in the Conservateur articles side by side with Chateaubriand;
M. de Cl****** T******* was Archbishop of Toul****, and often made
trips to Paris, to his nephew, the Marquis de T*******, who was
Minister of Marine and War. The Cardinal of Cl****** T*******
was a merry little man, who displayed his red stockings beneath his
tucked-up cassock; his specialty was a hatred of the Encyclopaedia,
and his desperate play at billiards, and persons who, at that epoch,
passed through the Rue M***** on summer evenings, where the hotel
de Cl****** T******* then stood, halted to listen to the shock
of the balls and the piercing voice of the Cardinal shouting to
his conclavist, Monseigneur Cotiret, Bishop in partibus of Caryste:
"Mark, Abbe, I make a cannon."  The Cardinal de Cl****** T*******
had been brought to Madame de T.'s by his most intimate friend,
M. de Roquelaure, former Bishop of Senlis, and one of the Forty.
M. de Roquelaure was notable for his lofty figure and his assiduity
at the Academy; through the glass door of the neighboring hall
of the library where the French Academy then held its meetings,
the curious could, on every Tuesday, contemplate the Ex-Bishop
of Senlis, usually standing erect, freshly powdered, in violet hose,
with his back turned to the door, apparently for the purpose of
allowing a better view of his little collar. All these ecclesiastics,
though for the most part as much courtiers as churchmen, added to the
gravity of the T. salon, whose seigniorial aspect was accentuated
by five peers of France, the Marquis de Vib****, the Marquis de
Tal***, the Marquis de Herb*******, the Vicomte Damb***, and the Duc
de Val********. This Duc de Val********, although Prince de Mon***,
that is to say a reigning prince abroad, had so high an idea of France
and its peerage, that he viewed everything through their medium.
It was he who said: "The Cardinals are the peers of France of Rome;
the lords are the peers of France of England."  Moreover, as it is
indispensable that the Revolution should be everywhere in this century,
this feudal salon was, as we have said, dominated by a bourgeois.
M. Gillenormand reigned there.

There lay the essence and quintessence of the Parisian white society.
There reputations, even Royalist reputations, were held in quarantine.
There is always a trace of anarchy in renown. Chateaubriand, had he
entered there, would have produced the effect of Pere Duchene. Some of
the scoffed-at did, nevertheless, penetrate thither on sufferance.
Comte Beug*** was received there, subject to correction.

The "noble" salons of the present day no longer resemble those salons.
The Faubourg Saint-Germain reeks of the fagot even now. The Royalists
of to-day are demagogues, let us record it to their credit.

At Madame de T.'s the society was superior, taste was exquisite
and haughty, under the cover of a great show of politeness.
Manners there admitted of all sorts of involuntary refinements
which were the old regime itself, buried but still alive. Some of
these habits, especially in the matter of language, seem eccentric.
Persons but superficially acquainted with them would have taken
for provincial that which was only antique. A woman was called
Madame la Generale. Madame la Colonelle was not entirely disused.
The charming Madame de Leon, in memory, no doubt, of the Duchesses
de Longueville and de Chevreuse, preferred this appellation to her
title of Princesse. The Marquise de Crequy was also called Madame
la Colonelle.

It was this little high society which invented at the Tuileries
the refinement of speaking to the King in private as the King,
in the third person, and never as Your Majesty, the designation
of Your Majesty having been "soiled by the usurper."

Men and deeds were brought to judgment there. They jeered at the age,
which released them from the necessity of understanding it.
They abetted each other in amazement. They communicated
to each other that modicum of light which they possessed.
Methuselah bestowed information on Epimenides. The deaf man made
the blind man acquainted with the course of things. They declared
that the time which had elasped since Coblentz had not existed.
In the same manner that Louis XVIII. was by the grace of God,
in the five and twentieth year of his reign, the emigrants were,
by rights, in the five and twentieth year of their adolescence.

All was harmonious; nothing was too much alive; speech hardly
amounted to a breath; the newspapers, agreeing with the salons,
seemed a papyrus. There were some young people, but they were
rather dead. The liveries in the antechamber were antiquated.
These utterly obsolete personages were served by domestics of the
same stamp.

They all had the air of having lived a long time ago, and of obstinately
resisting the sepulchre. Nearly the whole dictionary consisted
of Conserver, Conservation, Conservateur; to be in good odor,--
that was the point. There are, in fact, aromatics in the opinions
of these venerable groups, and their ideas smelled of it.
It was a mummified society. The masters were embalmed, the servants
were stuffed with straw.

A worthy old marquise, an emigree and ruined, who had
but a solitary maid, continued to say: "My people."

What did they do in Madame de T.'s salon? They were ultra.

To be ultra; this word, although what it represents may not
have disappeared, has no longer any meaning at the present day.
Let us explain it.

To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the sceptre in the name
of the throne, and the mitre in the name of the attar; it is to ill-treat
the thing which one is dragging, it is to kick over the traces;
it is to cavil at the fagot on the score of the amount of cooking
received by heretics; it is to reproach the idol with its small
amount of idolatry; it is to insult through excess of respect;
it is to discover that the Pope is not sufficiently papish,
that the King is not sufficiently royal, and that the night
has too much light; it is to be discontented with alabaster,
with snow, with the swan and the lily in the name of whiteness;
it is to be a partisan of things to the point of becoming their enemy;
it is to be so strongly for, as to be against.

The ultra spirit especially characterizes the first phase
of the Restoration.

Nothing in history resembles that quarter of an hour which begins in 1814
and terminates about 1820, with the advent of M. de Villele, the practical
man of the Right. These six years were an extraordinary moment;
at one and the same time brilliant and gloomy, smiling and sombre,
illuminated as by the radiance of dawn and entirely covered, at the
same time, with the shadows of the great catastrophes which still filled
the horizon and were slowly sinking into the past. There existed
in that light and that shadow, a complete little new and old world,
comic and sad, juvenile and senile, which was rubbing its eyes;
nothing resembles an awakening like a return; a group which regarded
France with ill-temper, and which France regarded with irony;
good old owls of marquises by the streetful, who had returned,
and of ghosts, the "former" subjects of amazement at everything,
brave and noble gentlemen who smiled at being in France but wept also,
delighted to behold their country once more, in despair at not finding
their monarchy; the nobility of the Crusades treating the nobility
of the Empire, that is to say, the nobility of the sword, with scorn;
historic races who had lost the sense of history; the sons of the
companions of Charlemagne disdaining the companions of Napoleon.
The swords, as we have just remarked, returned the insult; the sword
of Fontenoy was laughable and nothing but a scrap of rusty iron;
the sword of Marengo was odious and was only a sabre. Former days
did not recognize Yesterday. People no longer had the feeling for
what was grand. There was some one who called Bonaparte Scapin.
This Society no longer exists. Nothing of it, we repeat,
exists to-day. When we select from it some one figure at random,
and attempt to make it live again in thought, it seems as strange
to us as the world before the Deluge. It is because it, too, as a
matter of fact, has been engulfed in a deluge. It has disappeared
beneath two Revolutions. What billows are ideas! How quickly
they cover all that it is their mission to destroy and to bury,
and how promptly they create frightful gulfs!

Such was the physiognomy of the salons of those distant and candid
times when M. Martainville had more wit than Voltaire.

These salons had a literature and politics of their own.
They believed in Fievee. M. Agier laid down the law in them.
They commentated M. Colnet, the old bookseller and publicist of the
Quay Malaquais. Napoleon was to them thoroughly the Corsican Ogre.
Later on the introduction into history of M. le Marquis de Bonaparte,
Lieutenant-General of the King's armies, was a concession to the spirit
of the age.

These salons did not long preserve their purity. Beginning with 1818,
doctrinarians began to spring up in them, a disturbing shade.
Their way was to be Royalists and to excuse themselves for being so.
Where the ultras were very proud, the doctrinarians were rather ashamed.
They had wit; they had silence; their political dogma was
suitably impregnated with arrogance; they should have succeeded.
They indulged, and usefully too, in excesses in the matter of white
neckties and tightly buttoned coats. The mistake or the misfortune
of the doctrinarian party was to create aged youth. They assumed
the poses of wise men. They dreamed of engrafting a temperate
power on the absolute and excessive principle. They opposed,
and sometimes with rare intelligence, conservative liberalism
to the liberalism which demolishes. They were heard to say:
"Thanks for Royalism! It has rendered more than one service. It has
brought back tradition, worship, religion, respect. It is faithful,
brave, chivalric, loving, devoted. It has mingled, though with regret,
the secular grandeurs of the monarchy with the new grandeurs
of the nation. Its mistake is not to understand the Revolution,
the Empire, glory, liberty, young ideas, young generations,
the age. But this mistake which it makes with regard to us,--
have we not sometimes been guilty of it towards them? The Revolution,
whose heirs we are, ought to be intelligent on all points.
To attack Royalism is a misconstruction of liberalism. What an error!
And what blindness! Revolutionary France is wanting in respect
towards historic France, that is to say, towards its mother,
that is to say, towards itself. After the 5th of September,
the nobility of the monarchy is treated as the nobility of the Empire
was treated after the 5th of July. They were unjust to the eagle,
we are unjust to the fleur-de-lys. It seems that we must always
have something to proscribe! Does it serve any purpose to ungild
the crown of Louis XIV., to scrape the coat of arms of Henry IV.? We
scoff at M. de Vaublanc for erasing the N's from the bridge of Jena!
What was it that he did? What are we doing? Bouvines belongs to us
as well as Marengo. The fleurs-de-lys are ours as well as the N's.
That is our patrimony. To what purpose shall we diminish it?
We must not deny our country in the past any more than in the present.
Why not accept the whole of history? Why not love the whole
of France?

It is thus that doctrinarians criticised and protected Royalism,
which was displeased at criticism and furious at protection.

The ultras marked the first epoch of Royalism,
congregation characterized the second.
Skill follows ardor. Let us confine ourselves here to this sketch.

In the course of this narrative, the author of this book has
encountered in his path this curious moment of contemporary history;
he has been forced to cast a passing glance upon it, and to trace
once more some of the singular features of this society which is
unknown to-day. But he does it rapidly and without any bitter
or derisive idea. Souvenirs both respectful and affectionate,
for they touch his mother, attach him to this past. Moreover,
let us remark, this same petty world had a grandeur of its own.
One may smile at it, but one can neither despise nor hate it.
It was the France of former days.

Marius Pontmercy pursued some studies, as all children do. When he
emerged from the hands of Aunt Gillenormand, his grandfather confided
him to a worthy professor of the most purely classic innocence.
This young soul which was expanding passed from a prude to a
vulgar pedant.

Marius went through his years of college, then he entered the
law school. He was a Royalist, fanatical and severe. He did
not love his grandfather much, as the latter's gayety and cynicism
repelled him, and his feelings towards his father were gloomy.

He was, on the whole, a cold and ardent, noble, generous, proud,
religious, enthusiastic lad; dignified to harshness, pure to shyness.

CHAPTER IV

END OF THE BRIGAND

The conclusion of Marius' classical studies coincided with
M. Gillenormand's departure from society. The old man bade
farewell to the Faubourg Saint-Germain and to Madame de T.'s salon,
and established himself in the Mardis, in his house of the Rue
des Filles-du-Calvaire. There he had for servants, in addition to
the porter, that chambermaid, Nicolette, who had succeeded to Magnon,
and that short-breathed and pursy Basque, who have been mentioned above.

In 1827, Marius had just attained his seventeenth year. One evening,
on his return home, he saw his grandfather holding a letter in his hand.

"Marius," said M. Gillenormand, "you will set out for Vernon to-morrow."

"Why?" said Marius.

"To see your father."

Marius was seized with a trembling fit. He had thought of everything
except this--that he should one day be called upon to see his father.
Nothing could be more unexpected, more surprising, and, let us
admit it, more disagreeable to him. It was forcing estrangement into
reconciliation. It was not an affliction, but it was an unpleasant duty.

Marius, in addition to his motives of political antipathy,
was convinced that his father, the slasher, as M. Gillenormand
called him on his amiable days, did not love him; this was evident,
since he had abandoned him to others. Feeling that he was not beloved,
he did not love. "Nothing is more simple," he said to himself.

He was so astounded that he did not question M. Gillenormand.
The grandfather resumed:--

"It appears that he is ill. He demands your presence."

And after a pause, he added:--

"Set out to-morrow morning. I think there is a coach which leaves the
Cour des Fontaines at six o'clock, and which arrives in the evening.
Take it. He says that here is haste."

Then he crushed the letter in his hand and thrust it into his pocket.
Marius might have set out that very evening and have been with his
father on the following morning. A diligence from the Rue du
Bouloi took the trip to Rouen by night at that date, and passed
through Vernon. Neither Marius nor M.Gillenormand thought of making
inquiries about it.

The next day, at twilight, Marius reached Vernon. People were
just beginning to light their candles. He asked the first person
whom be met for "M. Pontmercy's house."  For in his own mind,
he agreed with the Restoration, and like it, did not recognize
his father's claim to the title of either colonel or baron.

The house was pointed out to him. He rang; a woman with a little
lamp in her hand opened the door.

"M. Pontmercy?" said Marius.

The woman remained motionless.

"Is this his house?" demanded Marius.

The woman nodded affirmatively.

"Can I speak with him?"

The woman shook her head.

"But I am his son!" persisted Marius. "He is expecting me."

"He no longer expects you," said the woman.

Then he perceived that she was weeping.

She pointed to the door of a room on the ground-floor; he entered.

In that room, which was lighted by a tallow candle standing
on the chimney-piece, there were three men, one standing erect,
another kneeling, and one lying at full length, on the floor
in his shirt. The one on the floor was the colonel.

The other two were the doctor, and the priest, who was engaged
in prayer.

The colonel had been attacked by brain fever three days previously.
As he had a foreboding of evil at the very beginning of his illness,
he had written to M. Gillenormand to demand his son. The malady
had grown worse. On the very evening of Marius' arrival at Vernon,
the colonel had had an attack of delirium; he had risen from his bed,
in spite of the servant's efforts to prevent him, crying: "My son
is not coming! I shall go to meet him!"  Then he ran out of his
room and fell prostrate on the floor of the antechamber. He had
just expired.

The doctor had been summoned, and the cure. The doctor had arrived
too late. The son had also arrived too late.

By the dim light of the candle, a large tear could be distinguished
on the pale and prostrate colonel's cheek, where it had trickled
from his dead eye. The eye was extinguished, but the tear was
not yet dry. That tear was his son's delay.

Marius gazed upon that man whom he beheld for the first time,
on that venerable and manly face, on those open eyes which saw not,
on those white locks, those robust limbs, on which, here and there,
brown lines, marking sword-thrusts, and a sort of red stars,
which indicated bullet-holes, were visible. He contemplated that
gigantic sear which stamped heroism on that countenance upon which God
had imprinted goodness. He reflected that this man was his father,
and that this man was dead, and a chill ran over him.

The sorrow which he felt was the sorrow which he would have felt
in the presence of any other man whom he had chanced to behold
stretched out in death.

Anguish, poignant anguish, was in that chamber. The servant-woman was
lamenting in a corner, the cure was praying, and his sobs were audible,
the doctor was wiping his eyes; the corpse itself was weeping.

The doctor, the priest, and the woman gazed at Marius in the
midst of their affliction without uttering a word; he was the
stranger there. Marius, who was far too little affected, felt ashamed
and embarrassed at his own attitude; he held his hat in his hand;
and he dropped it on the floor, in order to produce the impression
that grief had deprived him of the strength to hold it.

At the same time, he experienced remorse, and he despised himself
for behaving in this manner. But was it his fault? He did not
love his father? Why should he!

The colonel had left nothing. The sale of big furniture barely
paid the expenses of his burial.

The servant found a scrap of paper, which she handed to Marius.
It contained the following, in the colonel's handwriting:--

"For my son.--The Emperor made me a Baron on the battle-field
of Waterloo. Since the Restoration disputes my right to this title
which I purchased with my blood, my son shall take it and bear it.
That he will be worthy of it is a matter of course."  Below, the colonel
had added: "At that same battle of Waterloo, a sergeant saved my life.
The man's name was Thenardier. I think that he has recently been
keeping a little inn, in a village in the neighborhood of Paris,
at Chelles or Montfermeil. If my son meets him, he will do all
the good he can to Thenardier."

Marius took this paper and preserved it, not out of duty
to his father, but because of that vague respect for death
which is always imperious in the heart of man.

Nothing remained of the colonel. M. Gillenormand had his sword
and uniform sold to an old-clothes dealer. The neighbors devastated
the garden and pillaged the rare flowers. The other plants turned
to nettles and weeds, and died.

Marius remained only forty-eight hours at Vernon. After the interment
he returned to Paris, and applied himself again to his law studies,
with no more thought of his father than if the latter had never lived.
In two days the colonel was buried, and in three forgotten.

Marius wore crape on his hat. That was all.

CHAPTER V

THE UTILITY OF GOING TO MASS, IN ORDER TO BECOME A REVOLUTIONIST

Marius had preserved the religious habits of his childhood.
One Sunday, when he went to hear mass at Saint-Sulpice, at that same
chapel of the Virgin whither his aunt had led him when a small lad,
he placed himself behind a pillar, being more absent-minded and
thoughtful than usual on that occasion, and knelt down, without paying
any special heed, upon a chair of Utrecht velvet, on the back of
which was inscribed this name: Monsieur Mabeuf, warden. Mass had
hardly begun when an old man presented himself and said to Marius:--

"This is my place, sir."

Marius stepped aside promptly, and the old man took possession
of his chair.

The mass concluded, Marius still stood thoughtfully a few paces distant;
the old man approached him again and said:--

"I beg your pardon, sir, for having disturbed you a while ago,
and for again disturbing you at this moment; you must have thought
me intrusive, and I will explain myself."

"There is no need of that, Sir," said Marius.

"Yes!" went on the old man, "I do not wish you to have a bad
opinion of me. You see, I am attached to this place. It seems
to me that the mass is better from here. Why? I will tell you.
It is from this place, that I have watched a poor, brave father
come regularly, every two or three months, for the last ten years,
since he had no other opportunity and no other way of seeing
his child, because he was prevented by family arrangements.
He came at the hour when he knew that his son would be brought
to mass. The little one never suspected that his father was there.
Perhaps he did not even know that he had a father, poor innocent!
The father kept behind a pillar, so that he might not be seen.
He gazed at his child and he wept. He adored that little fellow,
poor man! I could see that. This spot has become sanctified in
my sight, and I have contracted a habit of coming hither to listen
to the mass. I prefer it to the stall to which I have a right,
in my capacity of warden. I knew that unhappy gentleman a little, too.
He had a father-in-law, a wealthy aunt, relatives, I don't know
exactly what all, who threatened to disinherit the child if he,
the father, saw him. He sacrificed himself in order that his son
might be rich and happy some day. He was separated from him
because of political opinions. Certainly, I approve of political
opinions, but there are people who do not know where to stop.
Mon Dieu! a man is not a monster because he was at Waterloo;
a father is not separated from his child for such a reason as that.
He was one of Bonaparte's colonels. He is dead, I believe. He lived
at Vernon, where I have a brother who is a cure, and his name was
something like Pontmarie or Montpercy. He had a fine sword-cut, on
my honor."

"Pontmercy," suggested Marius, turning pale.

"Precisely, Pontmercy. Did you know him?"

"Sir," said Marius, "he was my father."

The old warden clasped his hands and exclaimed:--

"Ah! you are the child! Yes, that's true, he must be a man by
this time. Well! poor child, you may say that you had a father
who loved you dearly!"

Marius offered his arm to the old man and conducted him to his lodgings.

On the following day, he said to M. Gillenormand:--

"I have arranged a hunting-party with some friends. Will you
permit me to be absent for three days?"

"Four!" replied his grandfather. "Go and amuse yourself."

And he said to his daughter in a low tone, and with a wink,
"Some love affair!"

CHAPTER VI

THE CONSEQUENCES OF HAVING MET A WARDEN

Where it was that Marius went will be disclosed a little further on.

Marius was absent for three days, then he returned to Paris,
went straight to the library of the law-school and asked for the
files of the Moniteur.

He read the Moniteur, he read all the histories of the Republic
and the Empire, the Memorial de Sainte-Helene, all the memoirs,
all the newspapers, the bulletins, the proclamations; he devoured
everything. The first time that he came across his father's name
in the bulletins of the grand army, he had a fever for a week.
He went to see the generals under whom Georges Pontmercy had served,
among others, Comte H. Church-warden Mabeuf, whom he went to see again,
told him about the life at Vernon, the colonel's retreat, his flowers,
his solitude. Marius came to a full knowledge of that rare, sweet,
and sublime man, that species of lion-lamb who had been his father.

In the meanwhile, occupied as he was with this study which absorbed
all his moments as well as his thoughts, he hardly saw the Gillenormands
at all. He made his appearance at meals; then they searched for him,
and he was not to be found. Father Gillenormand smiled. "Bah! bah!
He is just of the age for the girls!"  Sometimes the old man added:
"The deuce! I thought it was only an affair of gallantry, It seems
that it is an affair of passion!"

It was a passion, in fact. Marius was on the high road to adoring
his father.

At the same time, his ideas underwent an extraordinary change.
The phases of this change were numerous and successive. As this is
the history of many minds of our day, we think it will prove useful
to follow these phases step by step and to indicate them all.

That history upon which he had just cast his eyes appalled him.

The first effect was to dazzle him.

Up to that time, the Republic, the Empire, had been to him only
monstrous words. The Republic, a guillotine in the twilight;
the Empire, a sword in the night. He had just taken a look at it,
and where he had expected to find only a chaos of shadows, he had beheld,
with a sort of unprecedented surprise, mingled with fear and joy,
stars sparkling, Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre,
Camille, Desmoulins, Danton, and a sun arise, Napoleon. He did not
know where he stood. He recoiled, blinded by the brilliant lights.
Little by little, when his astonishment had passed off,
he grew accustomed to this radiance, he contemplated these deeds
without dizziness, he examined these personages without terror;
the Revolution and the Empire presented themselves luminously,
in perspective, before his mind's eye; he beheld each of these
groups of events and of men summed up in two tremendous facts:
the Republic in the sovereignty of civil right restored to the masses,
the Empire in the sovereignty of the French idea imposed on Europe;
he beheld the grand figure of the people emerge from the Revolution,
and the grand figure of France spring forth from the Empire.
He asserted in his conscience, that all this had been good.
What his dazzled state neglected in this, his first far too
synthetic estimation, we do not think it necessary to point out here.
It is the state of a mind on the march that we are recording.
Progress is not accomplished in one stage. That stated, once for all,
in connection with what precedes as well as with what is to follow,
we continue.

He then perceived that, up to that moment, he had comprehended his
country no more than he had comprehended his father. He had not
known either the one or the other, and a sort of voluntary night
had obscured his eyes. Now he saw, and on the one hand he admired,
while on the other he adored.

He was filled with regret and remorse, and he reflected in despair
that all he had in his soul could now be said only to the tomb.
Oh! if his father had still been in existence, if he had still
had him, if God, in his compassion and his goodness, had permitted
his father to be still among the living, how he would have run,
how he would have precipitated himself, how he would have cried
to his father: "Father! Here I am! It is I! I have the same heart
as thou! I am thy son!"  How he would have embraced that white head,
bathed his hair in tears, gazed upon his scar, pressed his hands,
adored his garment, kissed his feet! Oh! Why had his father died
so early, before his time, before the justice, the love of his
son had come to him? Marius had a continual sob in his heart,
which said to him every moment: "Alas!"  At the same time,
he became more truly serious, more truly grave, more sure of his
thought and his faith. At each instant, gleams of the true came
to complete his reason. An inward growth seemed to be in progress
within him. He was conscious of a sort of natural enlargement,
which gave him two things that were new to him--his father and
his country.

As everything opens when one has a key, so he explained to himself
that which he had hated, he penetrated that which he had abhorred;
henceforth he plainly perceived the providential, divine and human
sense of the great things which he had been taught to detest,
and of the great men whom he had been instructed to curse. When he
reflected on his former opinions, which were but those of yesterday,
and which, nevertheless, seemed to him already so very ancient,
he grew indignant, yet he smiled.

From the rehabilitation of his father, he naturally passed
to the rehabilitation of Napoleon.

But the latter, we will confess, was not effected without labor.

From his infancy, he had been imbued with the judgments of the party
of 1814, on Bonaparte. Now, all the prejudices of the Restoration,
all its interests, all its instincts tended to disfigure Napoleon.
It execrated him even more than it did Robespierre. It had very
cleverly turned to sufficiently good account the fatigue of the nation,
and the hatred of mothers. Bonaparte had become an almost
fabulous monster, and in order to paint him to the imagination
of the people, which, as we lately pointed out, resembles the
imagination of children, the party of 1814 made him appear under
all sorts of terrifying masks in succession, from that which is
terrible though it remains grandiose to that which is terrible and
becomes grotesque, from Tiberius to the bugaboo. Thus, in speaking
of Bonaparte, one was free to sob or to puff up with laughter,
provided that hatred lay at the bottom. Marius had never entertained--
about that man, as he was called--any other ideas in his mind.
They had combined with the tenacity which existed in his nature.
There was in him a headstrong little man who hated Napoleon.

On reading history, on studying him, especially in the documents
and materials for history, the veil which concealed Napoleon
from the eyes of Marius was gradually rent. He caught a glimpse
of something immense, and he suspected that he had been deceived up
to that moment, on the score of Bonaparte as about all the rest;
each day he saw more distinctly; and he set about mounting, slowly,
step by step, almost regretfully in the beginning, then with
intoxication and as though attracted by an irresistible fascination,
first the sombre steps, then the vaguely illuminated steps,
at last the luminous and splendid steps of enthusiasm.

One night, he was alone in his little chamber near the roof.
His candle was burning; he was reading, with his elbows resting on
his table close to the open window. All sorts of reveries reached
him from space, and mingled with his thoughts. What a spectacle is
the night! One hears dull sounds, without knowing whence they proceed;
one beholds Jupiter, which is twelve hundred times larger than the earth,
glowing like a firebrand, the azure is black, the stars shine;
it is formidable.

He was perusing the bulletins of the grand army, those heroic
strophes penned on the field of battle; there, at intervals,
he beheld his father's name, always the name of the Emperor;
the whole of that great Empire presented itself to him; he felt
a flood swelling and rising within him; it seemed to him at moments
that his father passed close to him like a breath, and whispered
in his ear; he gradually got into a singular state; he thought that he
heard drums, cannon, trumpets, the measured tread of battalions,
the dull and distant gallop of the cavalry; from time to time,
his eyes were raised heavenward, and gazed upon the colossal
constellations as they gleamed in the measureless depths of space,
then they fell upon his book once more, and there they beheld other
colossal things moving confusedly. His heart contracted within him.
He was in a transport, trembling, panting. All at once, without
himself knowing what was in him, and what impulse he was obeying,
he sprang to his feet, stretched both arms out of the window,
gazed intently into the gloom, the silence, the infinite darkness,
the eternal immensity, and exclaimed: "Long live the Emperor!"

From that moment forth, all was over; the Ogre of Corsica,--
the usurper,--the tyrant,--the monster who was the lover of his
own sisters,--the actor who took lessons of Talma,--the poisoner
of Jaffa,--the tiger,--Buonaparte,--all this vanished, and gave
place in his mind to a vague and brilliant radiance in which shone,
at an inaccessible height, the pale marble phantom of Caesar.
The Emperor had been for his father only the well-beloved captain whom
one admires, for whom one sacrifices one's self; he was something more
to Marius. He was the predestined constructor of the French group,
succeeding the Roman group in the domination of the universe.
He was a prodigious architect, of a destruction, the continuer
of Charlemagne, of Louis XI., of Henry IV., of Richelieu, of Louis
XIV., and of the Committee of Public Safety, having his spots,
no doubt, his faults, his crimes even, being a man, that is to say;
but august in his faults, brilliant in his spots, powerful in
his crime.

He was the predestined man, who had forced all nations to say:
"The great nation!"  He was better than that, he was the very
incarnation of France, conquering Europe by the sword which
he grasped, and the world by the light which he shed. Marius saw
in Bonaparte the dazzling spectre which will always rise upon
the frontier, and which will guard the future. Despot but dictator;
a despot resulting from a republic and summing up a revolution.
Napoleon became for him the man-people as Jesus Christ is the man-God.

It will be perceived, that like all new converts to a religion,
his conversion intoxicated him, he hurled himself headlong into
adhesion and he went too far. His nature was so constructed;
once on the downward slope, it was almost impossible for him
to put on the drag. Fanaticism for the sword took possession
of him, and complicated in his mind his enthusiasm for the idea.
He did not perceive that, along with genius, and pell-mell, he
was admitting force, that is to say, that he was installing in two
compartments of his idolatry, on the one hand that which is divine,
on the other that which is brutal. In many respects, he had set
about deceiving himself otherwise. He admitted everything.
There is a way of encountering error while on one's way to the truth.
He had a violent sort of good faith which took everything in the lump.
In the new path which he had entered on, in judging the mistakes
of the old regime, as in measuring the glory of Napoleon, he neglected
the attenuating circumstances.

At all events, a tremendous step had been taken. Where he had formerly
beheld the fall of the monarchy, he now saw the advent of France.
His orientation had changed. What had been his East became the West.
He had turned squarely round.

All these revolutions were accomplished within him, without his
family obtaining an inkling of the case.

When, during this mysterious labor, he had entirely shed his old Bourbon
and ultra skin, when he had cast off the aristocrat, the Jacobite
and the Royalist, when he had become thoroughly a revolutionist,
profoundly democratic and republican, he went to an engraver on the
Quai des Orfevres and ordered a hundred cards bearing this name:
Le Baron Marius Pontmercy.

This was only the strictly logical consequence of the change which
had taken place in him, a change in which everything gravitated
round his father.

Only, as he did not know any one and could not sow his cards
with any porter, he put them in his pocket.

By another natural consequence, in proportion as he drew nearer
to his father, to the latter's memory, and to the things for which
the colonel had fought five and twenty years before, he receded
from his grandfather. We have long ago said, that M. Gillenormand's
temper did not please him. There already existed between them all
the dissonances of the grave young man and the frivolous old man.
The gayety of Geronte shocks and exasperates the melancholy
of Werther. So long as the same political opinions and the same
ideas had been common to them both, Marius had met M. Gillenormand
there as on a bridge. When the bridge fell, an abyss was formed.
And then, over and above all, Marius experienced unutterable
impulses to revolt, when he reflected that it was M. Gillenormand
who had, from stupid motives, torn him ruthlessly from the colonel,
thus depriving the father of the child, and the child of the father.

By dint of pity for his father, Marius had nearly arrived at aversion
for his grandfather.

Nothing of this sort, however, was betrayed on the exterior,
as we have already said. Only he grew colder and colder;
laconic at meals, and rare in the house. When his aunt scolded him
for it, he was very gentle and alleged his studies, his lectures,
the examinations, etc., as a pretext. His grandfather never departed
from his infallible diagnosis: "In love! I know all about it."

From time to time Marius absented himself.

"Where is it that he goes off like this?" said his aunt.

On one of these trips, which were always very brief,
he went to Montfermeil, in order to obey the injunction
which his father had left him, and he sought the old sergeant
to Waterloo, the inn-keeper Thenardier. Thenardier had failed,
the inn was closed, and no one knew what had become of him.
Marius was away from the house for four days on this quest.

"He is getting decidedly wild," said his grandfather.

They thought they had noticed that he wore something on his breast,
under his shirt, which was attached to his neck by a black ribbon.

CHAPTER VII

SOME PETTICOAT

We have mentioned a lancer.

He was a great-grand-nephew of M. Gillenormand, on the paternal side,
who led a garrison life, outside the family and far from the
domestic hearth. Lieutenant Theodule Gillenormand fulfilled all
the conditions required to make what is called a fine officer.
He had "a lady's waist," a victorious manner of trailing his
sword and of twirling his mustache in a hook. He visited Paris
very rarely, and so rarely that Marius had never seen him.
The cousins knew each other only by name. We think we have
said that Theodule was the favorite of Aunt Gillenormand,
who preferred him because she did not see him. Not seeing
people permits one to attribute to them all possible perfections.

One morning, Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder returned to her
apartment as much disturbed as her placidity was capable of allowing.
Marius had just asked his grandfather's permission to take a
little trip, adding that he meant to set out that very evening.
"Go!" had been his grandfather's reply, and M. Gillenormand
had added in an aside, as he raised his eyebrows to the top
of his forehead: "Here he is passing the night out again."
Mademoiselle Gillenormand had ascended to her chamber greatly puzzled,
and on the staircase had dropped this exclamation: "This is
too much!"--and this interrogation: "But where is it that he goes?"
She espied some adventure of the heart, more or less illicit,
a woman in the shadow, a rendezvous, a mystery, and she would
not have been sorry to thrust her spectacles into the affair.
Tasting a mystery resembles getting the first flavor of a scandal;
sainted souls do not detest this. There is some curiosity about
scandal in the secret compartments of bigotry.

So she was the prey of a vague appetite for learning a history.

In order to get rid of this curiosity which agitated her
a little beyond her wont, she took refuge in her talents,
and set about scalloping, with one layer of cotton after another,
one of those embroideries of the Empire and the Restoration,
in which there are numerous cart-wheels. The work was clumsy,
the worker cross. She had been seated at this for several hours
when the door opened. Mademoiselle Gillenormand raised her nose.
Lieutenant Theodule stood before her, making the regulation salute.
She uttered a cry of delight. One may be old, one may be a prude,
one may be pious, one may be an aunt, but it is always agreeable
to see a lancer enter one's chamber.

"You here, Theodule!" she exclaimed.

"On my way through town, aunt."

"Embrace me."

"Here goes!" said Theodule.

And he kissed her. Aunt Gillenormand went to her writing-desk
and opened it.

"You will remain with us a week at least?"

"I leave this very evening, aunt."

"It is not possible!"

"Mathematically!"

"Remain, my little Theodule, I beseech you."

"My heart says `yes,' but my orders say `no.' The matter is simple.
They are changing our garrison; we have been at Melun, we are being
transferred to Gaillon. It is necessary to pass through Paris
in order to get from the old post to the new one. I said: `I am
going to see my aunt.'"

"Here is something for your trouble."

And she put ten louis into his hand.

"For my pleasure, you mean to say, my dear aunt."

Theodule kissed her again, and she experienced the joy of having some
of the skin scratched from her neck by the braidings on his uniform.

"Are you making the journey on horseback, with your regiment?"
she asked him.

"No, aunt. I wanted to see you. I have special permission.
My servant is taking my horse; I am travelling by diligence.
And, by the way, I want to ask you something."

"What is it?"

"Is my cousin Marius Pontmercy travelling so, too?"

"How do you know that?" said his aunt, suddenly pricked to the quick
with a lively curiosity.

"On my arrival, I went to the diligence to engage my seat in the coupe."

"Well?"

"A traveller had already come to engage a seat in the imperial.
I saw his name on the card."

"What name?"

"Marius Pontmercy."

"The wicked fellow!" exclaimed his aunt. "Ah! your cousin is not
a steady lad like yourself. To think that he is to pass the night
in a diligence!"

"Just as I am going to do."

"But you--it is your duty; in his case, it is wildness."

"Bosh!" said Theodule.

Here an event occurred to Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder,--
an idea struck her. If she had been a man, she would have slapped
her brow. She apostrophized Theodule:--

"Are you aware whether your cousin knows you?"

"No. I have seen him; but he has never deigned to notice me."

"So you are going to travel together?"

"He in the imperial, I in the coupe."

"Where does this diligence run?"

"To Andelys."

"Then that is where Marius is going?"

"Unless, like myself, he should stop on the way. I get down at Vernon,
in order to take the branch coach for Gaillon. I know nothing
of Marius' plan of travel."

"Marius! what an ugly name! what possessed them to name him Marius?
While you, at least, are called Theodule."

"I would rather be called Alfred," said the officer.

"Listen, Theodule."

"I am listening, aunt."

"Pay attention."

"I am paying attention."

"You understand?"

"Yes."

"Well, Marius absents himself!"

"Eh! eh!"

"He travels."

"Ah! ah!"

"He spends the night out."

"Oh! oh!"

"We should like to know what there is behind all this."

Theodule replied with the composure of a man of bronze:--

"Some petticoat or other."

And with that inward laugh which denotes certainty, he added:--

"A lass."

"That is evident," exclaimed his aunt, who thought she heard
M. Gillenormand speaking, and who felt her conviction become
irresistible at that word fillette, accentuated in almost the
very same fashion by the granduncle and the grandnephew. She resumed:--

"Do us a favor. Follow Marius a little. He does not know you,
it will be easy. Since a lass there is, try to get a sight of her.
You must write us the tale. It will amuse his grandfather."

Theodule had no excessive taste for this sort of spying; but he
was much touched by the ten louis, and he thought he saw a chance
for a possible sequel. He accepted the commission and said:
"As you please, aunt."

And he added in an aside, to himself: "Here I am a duenna."

Mademoiselle Gillenormand embraced him.

"You are not the man to play such pranks, Theodule. You obey discipline,
you are the slave of orders, you are a man of scruples and duty,
and you would not quit your family to go and see a creature."

The lancer made the pleased grimace of Cartouche when praised
for his probity.

Marius, on the evening following this dialogue, mounted the diligence
without suspecting that he was watched. As for the watcher,
the first thing he did was to fall asleep. His slumber was complete
and conscientious. Argus snored all night long.

At daybreak, the conductor of the diligence shouted: "Vernon! relay
of Vernon! Travellers for Vernon!"  And Lieutenant Theodule woke.

"Good," he growled, still half asleep, "this is where I get out."

Then, as his memory cleared by degrees, the effect of waking,
he recalled his aunt, the ten louis, and the account which he
had undertaken to render of the deeds and proceedings of Marius.
This set him to laughing.

"Perhaps he is no longer in the coach," he thought, as he rebuttoned
the waistcoat of his undress uniform. "He may have stopped at Poissy;
he may have stopped at Triel; if he did not get out at Meulan,
he may have got out at Mantes, unless he got out at Rolleboise,
or if he did not go on as far as Pacy, with the choice of turning
to the left at Evreus, or to the right at Laroche-Guyon. Run
after him, aunty. What the devil am I to write to that good
old soul?"

At that moment a pair of black trousers descending from the imperial,
made its appearance at the window of the coupe.

"Can that be Marius?" said the lieutenant.

It was Marius.

A little peasant girl, all entangled with the horses and the postilions
at the end of the vehicle, was offering flowers to the travellers.
"Give your ladies flowers!" she cried.

Marius approached her and purchased the finest flowers in her
flat basket.

"Come now," said Theodule, leaping down from the coupe, "this piques
my curiosity. Who the deuce is he going to carry those flowers to?
She must be a splendidly handsome woman for so fine a bouquet.
I want to see her."

And no longer in pursuance of orders, but from personal curiosity,
like dogs who hunt on their own account, he set out to follow Marius.

Marius paid no attention to Theodule. Elegant women descended
from the diligence; he did not glance at them. He seemed to see
nothing around him.

"He is pretty deeply in love!" thought Theodule.

Marius directed his steps towards the church.

"Capital," said Theodule to himself. "Rendezvous seasoned with a
bit of mass are the best sort. Nothing is so exquisite as an ogle
which passes over the good God's head."

On arriving at the church, Marius did not enter it, but skirted
the apse. He disappeared behind one of the angles of the apse.

"The rendezvous is appointed outside," said Theodule. "Let's have
a look at the lass."

And he advanced on the tips of his boots towards the corner
which Marius had turned.

On arriving there, he halted in amazement.

Marius, with his forehead clasped in his hands, was kneeling upon
the grass on a grave. He had strewn his bouquet there. At the
extremity of the grave, on a little swelling which marked the head,
there stood a cross of black wood with this name in white letters:
COLONEL BARON PONTMERCY. Marius' sobs were audible.

The "lass" was a grave.

CHAPTER VIII

MARBLE AGAINST GRANITE

It was hither that Marius had come on the first occasion of his
absenting himself from Paris. It was hither that he had come
every time that M. Gillenormand had said: "He is sleeping out."

Lieutenant Theodule was absolutely put out of countenance by this
unexpected encounter with a sepulchre; he experienced a singular
and disagreeable sensation which he was incapable of analyzing,
and which was composed of respect for the tomb, mingled with respect
for the colonel. He retreated, leaving Marius alone in the cemetery,
and there was discipline in this retreat. Death appeared to him
with large epaulets, and he almost made the military salute to him.
Not knowing what to write to his aunt, he decided not to write at all;
and it is probable that nothing would have resulted from the discovery
made by Theodule as to the love affairs of Marius, if, by one
of those mysterious arrangements which are so frequent in chance,
the scene at Vernon had not had an almost immediate counter-shock
at Paris.

Marius returned from Vernon on the third day, in the middle of
the morning, descended at his grandfather's door, and, wearied by the two
nights spent in the diligence, and feeling the need of repairing his
loss of sleep by an hour at the swimming-school, he mounted rapidly to
his chamber, took merely time enough to throw off his travelling-coat, and
the black ribbon which he wore round his neck, and went off to the bath.

M.Gillenormand, who had risen betimes like all old men in good health,
had heard his entrance, and had made haste to climb, as quickly as his
old legs permitted, the stairs to the upper story where Marius lived,
in order to embrace him, and to question him while so doing,
and to find out where he had been.

But the youth had taken less time to descend than the old man
had to ascend, and when Father Gillenormand entered the attic,
Marius was no longer there.

The bed had not been disturbed, and on the bed lay, outspread,
but not defiantly the great-coat and the black ribbon.

"I like this better," said M. Gillenormand.

And a moment later, he made his entrance into the salon,
where Mademoiselle Gillenormand was already seated,
busily embroidering her cart-wheels.

The entrance was a triumphant one.

M. Gillenormand held in one hand the great-coat, and in the other
the neck-ribbon, and exclaimed:--

"Victory! We are about to penetrate the mystery! We are going
to learn the most minute details; we are going to lay our finger on
the debaucheries of our sly friend! Here we have the romance itself.
I have the portrait!"

In fact, a case of black shagreen, resembling a medallion portrait,
was suspended from the ribbon.

The old man took this case and gazed at it for some time without
opening it, with that air of enjoyment, rapture, and wrath,
with which a poor hungry fellow beholds an admirable dinner
which is not for him, pass under his very nose.

"For this evidently is a portrait. I know all about such things.
That is worn tenderly on the heart. How stupid they are!
Some abominable fright that will make us shudder, probably! Young men
have such bad taste nowadays!"

"Let us see, father," said the old spinster.

The case opened by the pressure of a spring. They found in it
nothing but a carefully folded paper.

"From the same to the same," said M. Gillenormand, bursting
with laughter. "I know what it is. A billet-doux."

"Ah! let us read it!" said the aunt.

And she put on her spectacles. They unfolded the paper and read
as follows:--

"For my son.--The Emperor made me a Baron on the battlefield
of Waterloo. Since the Restoration disputes my right to this title
which I purchased with my blood, my son shall take it and bear it.
That he will be worthy of it is a matter of course."

The feelings of father and daughter cannot be described. They felt
chilled as by the breath of a death's-head. They did not exchange
a word.

Only, M. Gillenormand said in a low voice and as though speaking
to himself:--

"It is the slasher's handwriting."

The aunt examined the paper, turned it about in all directions,
then put it back in its case.

At the same moment a little oblong packet, enveloped in blue paper,
fell from one of the pockets of the great-coat. Mademoiselle
Gillenormand picked it up and unfolded the blue paper.

It contained Marius' hundred cards. She handed one of them
to M. Gillenormand, who read: Le Baron Marius Pontmercy.

The old man rang the bell. Nicolette came. M. Gillenormand took
the ribbon, the case, and the coat, flung them all on the floor
in the middle of the room, and said:--

"Carry those duds away."

A full hour passed in the most profound silence. The old man and the
old spinster had seated themselves with their backs to each other,
and were thinking, each on his own account, the same things,
in all probability.

At the expiration of this hour, Aunt Gillenormand said:--"A pretty
state of things!"

A few moments later, Marius made his appearance. He entered.
Even before he had crossed the threshold, he saw his grandfather
holding one of his own cards in his hand, and on catching sight
of him, the latter exclaimed with his air of bourgeois and grinning
superiority which was something crushing:--

"Well! well! well! well! well! so you are a baron now. I present
you my compliments. What is the meaning of this?"

Marius reddened slightly and replied:--

"It means that I am the son of my father."

M. Gillenormand ceased to laugh, and said harshly:--

"I am your father."

"My father," retorted Marius, with downcast eyes and a severe air,
"was a humble and heroic man, who served the Republic and France
gloriously, who was great in the greatest history that men have
ever made, who lived in the bivouac for a quarter of a century,
beneath grape-shot and bullets, in snow and mud by day, beneath rain
at night, who captured two flags, who received twenty wounds, who died
forgotten and abandoned, and who never committed but one mistake,
which was to love too fondly two ingrates, his country and myself."

This was more than M. Gillenormand could bear to hear. At the
word republic, he rose, or, to speak more correctly, he sprang
to his feet. Every word that Marius had just uttered produced on
the visage of the old Royalist the effect of the puffs of air from
a forge upon a blazing brand. From a dull hue he had turned red,
from red, purple, and from purple, flame-colored.

"Marius!" he cried. "Abominable child! I do not know what your
father was! I do not wish to know! I know nothing about that,
and I do not know him! But what I do know is, that there
never was anything but scoundrels among those men! They were
all rascals, assassins, red-caps, thieves! I say all! I say all!
I know not one! I say all! Do you hear me, Marius! See here,
you are no more a baron than my slipper is! They were all bandits
in the service of Robespierre! All who served B-u-o-naparte
were brigands! They were all traitors who betrayed, betrayed,
betrayed their legitimate king! All cowards who fled before the
Prussians and the English at Waterloo! That is what I do know!
Whether Monsieur your father comes in that category, I do not know!
I am sorry for it, so much the worse, your humble servant!"

In his turn, it was Marius who was the firebrand and M. Gillenormand
who was the bellows. Marius quivered in every limb, he did
not know what would happen next, his brain was on fire. He was
the priest who beholds all his sacred wafers cast to the winds,
the fakir who beholds a passer-by spit upon his idol. It could
not be that such things had been uttered in his presence.
What was he to do? His father had just been trampled under foot
and stamped upon in his presence, but by whom? By his grandfather.
How was he to avenge the one without outraging the other?
It was impossible for him to insult his grandfather and it
was equally impossible for him to leave his father unavenged.
On the one hand was a sacred grave, on the other hoary locks.

He stood there for several moments, staggering as though intoxicated,
with all this whirlwind dashing through his head; then he raised
his eyes, gazed fixedly at his grandfather, and cried in a voice
of thunder:--

"Down with the Bourbons, and that great hog of a Louis XVIII.!"

Louis XVIII. had been dead for four years; but it was all the same
to him.

The old man, who had been crimson, turned whiter than his hair.
He wheeled round towards a bust of M. le Duc de Berry, which stood
on the chimney-piece, and made a profound bow, with a sort of
peculiar majesty. Then he paced twice, slowly and in silence,
from the fireplace to the window and from the window to the fireplace,
traversing the whole length of the room, and making the polished
floor creak as though he had been a stone statue walking.

On his second turn, he bent over his daughter, who was watching this
encounter with the stupefied air of an antiquated lamb, and said to
her with a smile that was almost calm: "A baron like this gentleman,
and a bourgeois like myself cannot remain under the same roof."

And drawing himself up, all at once, pallid, trembling, terrible,
with his brow rendered more lofty by the terrible radiance of wrath,
he extended his arm towards Marius and shouted to him:--

"Be off!"

Marius left the house.

On the following day, M. Gillenormand said to his daughter:

"You will send sixty pistoles every six months to that blood-drinker,
and you will never mention his name to me."

Having an immense reserve fund of wrath to get rid of, and not
knowing what to do with it, he continued to address his daughter
as you instead of thou for the next three months.

Marius, on his side, had gone forth in indignation. There was one
circumstance which, it must be admitted, aggravated his exasperation.
There are always petty fatalities of the sort which complicate
domestic dramas. They augment the grievances in such cases,
although, in reality, the wrongs are not increased by them.
While carrying Marius' "duds" precipitately to his chamber, at his
grandfather's command, Nicolette had, inadvertently, let fall,
probably, on the attic staircase, which was dark, that medallion
of black shagreen which contained the paper penned by the colonel.
Neither paper nor case could afterwards be found. Marius was
convinced that "Monsieur Gillenormand"--from that day forth he
never alluded to him otherwise--had flung "his father's testament"
in the fire. He knew by heart the few lines which the colonel
had written, and, consequently, nothing was lost. But the paper,
the writing, that sacred relic,--all that was his very heart.
What had been done with it?

Marius had taken his departure without saying whither he was going,
and without knowing where, with thirty francs, his watch, and a few
clothes in a hand-bag. He had entered a hackney-coach, had engaged
it by the hour, and had directed his course at hap-hazard towards
the Latin quarter.

What was to become of Marius?

BOOK FOURTH.--THE FRIENDS OF THE A B C

CHAPTER I

A GROUP WHICH BARELY MISSED BECOMING HISTORIC

At that epoch, which was, to all appearances indifferent, a certain
revolutionary quiver was vaguely current. Breaths which had started
forth from the depths of '89 and '93 were in the air. Youth was
on the point, may the reader pardon us the word, of moulting.
People were undergoing a transformation, almost without being
conscious of it, through the movement of the age. The needle
which moves round the compass also moves in souls. Each person
was taking that step in advance which he was bound to take.
The Royalists were becoming liberals, liberals were turning democrats.
It was a flood tide complicated with a thousand ebb movements;
the peculiarity of ebbs is to create intermixtures; hence the combination
of very singular ideas; people adored both Napoleon and liberty.
We are making history here. These were the mirages of that period.
Opinions traverse phases. Voltairian royalism, a quaint variety,
had a no less singular sequel, Bonapartist liberalism.

Other groups of minds were more serious. In that direction,
they sounded principles, they attached themselves to the right.
They grew enthusiastic for the absolute, they caught glimpses of
infinite realizations; the absolute, by its very rigidity, urges spirits
towards the sky and causes them to float in illimitable space.
There is nothing like dogma for bringing forth dreams. And there
is nothing like dreams for engendering the future. Utopia to-day,
flesh and blood to-morrow.

These advanced opinions had a double foundation. A beginning
of mystery menaced "the established order of things," which was
suspicious and underhand. A sign which was revolutionary
to the highest degree. The second thoughts of power meet the
second thoughts of the populace in the mine. The incubation
of insurrections gives the retort to the premeditation of coups d'etat.

There did not, as yet, exist in France any of those vast underlying
organizations, like the German tugendbund and Italian Carbonarism;
but here and there there were dark underminings, which were in process
of throwing off shoots. The Cougourde was being outlined at Aix;
there existed at Paris, among other affiliations of that nature,
the society of the Friends of the A B C.

What were these Friends of the A B C? A society which had for its object
apparently the education of children, in reality the elevation of man.

They declared themselves the Friends of the A B C,--the Abaisse,--
the debased,--that is to say, the people. They wished to elevate
the people. It was a pun which we should do wrong to smile at.
Puns are sometimes serious factors in politics; witness the Castratus
ad castra, which made a general of the army of Narses; witness:
Barbari et Barberini; witness: Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram,
etc., etc.

The Friends of the A B C were not numerous, it was a secret society
in the state of embryo, we might almost say a coterie, if coteries
ended in heroes. They assembled in Paris in two localities,
near the fish-market, in a wine-shop called Corinthe, of which more
will be heard later on, and near the Pantheon in a little cafe
in the Rue Saint-Michel called the Cafe Musain, now torn down;
the first of these meeting-places was close to the workingman,
the second to the students.

The assemblies of the Friends of the A B C were usually held
in a back room of the Cafe Musain.

This hall, which was tolerably remote from the cafe, with which it
was connected by an extremely long corridor, had two windows and an
exit with a private stairway on the little Rue des Gres. There they
smoked and drank, and gambled and laughed. There they conversed
in very loud tones about everything, and in whispers of other things.
An old map of France under the Republic was nailed to the wall,--
a sign quite sufficient to excite the suspicion of a police agent.

The greater part of the Friends of the A B C were students,
who were on cordial terms with the working classes. Here are
the names of the principal ones. They belong, in a certain
measure, to history: Enjolras, Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire,
Feuilly, Courfeyrac, Bahorel, Lesgle or Laigle, Joly, Grantaire.

These young men formed a sort of family, through the bond
of friendship. All, with the exception of Laigle, were from the South.

This was a remarkable group. It vanished in the invisible depths
which lie behind us. At the point of this drama which we have
now reached, it will not perhaps be superfluous to throw a ray
of light upon these youthful heads, before the reader beholds
them plunging into the shadow of a tragic adventure.

Enjolras, whose name we have mentioned first of all,--the reader
shall see why later on,--was an only son and wealthy.

Enjolras was a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible.
He was angelically handsome. He was a savage Antinous. One would
have said, to see the pensive thoughtfulness of his glance, that he
had already, in some previous state of existence, traversed the
revolutionary apocalypse. He possessed the tradition of it as though
he had been a witness. He was acquainted with all the minute details
of the great affair. A pontifical and warlike nature, a singular
thing in a youth. He was an officiating priest and a man of war;
from the immediate point of view, a soldier of the democracy;
above the contemporary movement, the priest of the ideal. His eyes
were deep, his lids a little red, his lower lip was thick and easily
became disdainful, his brow was lofty. A great deal of brow in a face
is like a great deal of horizon in a view. Like certain young men
at the beginning of this century and the end of the last, who became
illustrious at an early age, he was endowed with excessive youth,
and was as rosy as a young girl, although subject to hours of pallor.
Already a man, he still seemed a child. His two and twenty years
appeared to be but seventeen; he was serious, it did not seem
as though he were aware there was on earth a thing called woman.
He had but one passion--the right; but one thought--to overthrow
the obstacle. On Mount Aventine, he would have been Gracchus;
in the Convention, he would have been Saint-Just. He hardly saw
the roses, he ignored spring, he did not hear the carolling
of the birds; the bare throat of Evadne would have moved him no
more than it would have moved Aristogeiton; he, like Harmodius,
thought flowers good for nothing except to conceal the sword.
He was severe in his enjoyments. He chastely dropped his eyes
before everything which was not the Republic. He was the marble
lover of liberty. His speech was harshly inspired, and had the
thrill of a hymn. He was subject to unexpected outbursts of soul.
Woe to the love-affair which should have risked itself beside him!
If any grisette of the Place Cambrai or the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais,
seeing that face of a youth escaped from college, that page's mien,
those long, golden lashes, those blue eyes, that hair billowing in
the wind, those rosy cheeks, those fresh lips, those exquisite teeth,
had conceived an appetite for that complete aurora, and had tried
her beauty on Enjolras, an astounding and terrible glance would
have promptly shown her the abyss, and would have taught her not
to confound the mighty cherub of Ezekiel with the gallant Cherubino
of Beaumarchais.

By the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of the Revolution,
Combeferre represented its philosophy. Between the logic of the
Revolution and its philosophy there exists this difference--that its
logic may end in war, whereas its philosophy can end only in peace.
Combeferre complemented and rectified Enjolras. He was less lofty,
but broader. He desired to pour into all minds the extensive
principles of general ideas: he said: "Revolution, but civilization";
and around the mountain peak he opened out a vast view of the blue sky.
The Revolution was more adapted for breathing with Combeferre than
with Enjolras. Enjolras expressed its divine right, and Combeferre
its natural right. The first attached himself to Robespierre;
the second confined himself to Condorcet. Combeferre lived
the life of all the rest of the world more than did Enjolras.
If it had been granted to these two young men to attain to history,
the one would have been the just, the other the wise man.
Enjolras was the more virile, Combeferre the more humane. Homo and vir,
that was the exact effect of their different shades. Combeferre was
as gentle as Enjolras was severe, through natural whiteness.
He loved the word citizen, but he preferred the word man. He would
gladly have said: Hombre, like the Spanish. He read everything,
went to the theatres, attended the courses of public lecturers,
learned the polarization of light from Arago, grew enthusiastic
over a lesson in which Geoffrey Sainte-Hilaire explained the
double function of the external carotid artery, and the internal,
the one which makes the face, and the one which makes the brain;
he kept up with what was going on, followed science step by step,
compared Saint-Simon with Fourier, deciphered hieroglyphics,
broke the pebble which he found and reasoned on geology,
drew from memory a silkworm moth, pointed out the faulty French
in the Dictionary of the Academy, studied Puysegur and Deleuze,
affirmed nothing, not even miracles; denied nothing, not even ghosts;
turned over the files of the Moniteur, reflected. He declared
that the future lies in the hand of the schoolmaster, and busied
himself with educational questions. He desired that society
should labor without relaxation at the elevation of the moral
and intellectual level, at coining science, at putting ideas
into circulation, at increasing the mind in youthful persons,
and he feared lest the present poverty of method, the paltriness
from a literary point of view confined to two or three centuries
called classic, the tyrannical dogmatism of official pedants,
scholastic prejudices and routines should end by converting our
colleges into artificial oyster beds. He was learned, a purist,
exact, a graduate of the Polytechnic, a close student, and at the
same time, thoughtful "even to chimaeras," so his friends said.
He believed in all dreams, railroads, the suppression of suffering
in chirurgical operations, the fixing of images in the dark chamber,
the electric telegraph, the steering of balloons. Moreover, he was
not much alarmed by the citadels erected against the human mind
in every direction, by superstition, despotism, and prejudice.
He was one of those who think that science will eventually turn
the position. Enjolras was a chief, Combeferre was a guide.
One would have liked to fight under the one and to march behind
the other. It is not that Combeferre was not capable of fighting,
he did not refuse a hand-to-hand combat with the obstacle,
and to attack it by main force and explosively; but it suited
him better to bring the human race into accord with its destiny
gradually, by means of education, the inculcation of axioms,
the promulgation of positive laws; and, between two lights,
his preference was rather for illumination than for conflagration.
A conflagration can create an aurora, no doubt, but why not await
the dawn? A volcano illuminates, but daybreak furnishes a still
better illumination. Possibly, Combeferre preferred the whiteness
of the beautiful to the blaze of the sublime. A light troubled
by smoke, progress purchased at the expense of violence, only half
satisfied this tender and serious spirit. The headlong precipitation
of a people into the truth, a '93, terrified him; nevertheless,
stagnation was still more repulsive to him, in it he detected
putrefaction and death; on the whole, he preferred scum to miasma,
and he preferred the torrent to the cesspool, and the falls of Niagara
to the lake of Montfaucon. In short, he desired neither halt
nor haste. While his tumultuous friends, captivated by the absolute,
adored and invoked splendid revolutionary adventures, Combeferre was
inclined to let progress, good progress, take its own course;
he may have been cold, but he was pure; methodical, but irreproachable;
phlegmatic, but imperturbable. Combeferre would have knelt and
clasped his hands to enable the future to arrive in all its candor,
and that nothing might disturb the immense and virtuous evolution
of the races. The good must be innocent, he repeated incessantly.
And in fact, if the grandeur of the Revolution consists in keeping
the dazzling ideal fixedly in view, and of soaring thither athwart
the lightnings, with fire and blood in its talons, the beauty of
progress lies in being spotless; and there exists between Washington,
who represents the one, and Danton, who incarnates the other,
that difference which separates the swan from the angel with the wings
of an eagle.

Jean Prouvaire was a still softer shade than Combeferre. His name
was Jehan, owing to that petty momentary freak which mingled
with the powerful and profound movement whence sprang the very
essential study of the Middle Ages. Jean Prouvaire was in love;
he cultivated a pot of flowers, played on the flute, made verses,
loved the people, pitied woman, wept over the child, confounded God
and the future in the same confidence, and blamed the Revolution
for having caused the fall of a royal head, that of Andre Chenier.
His voice was ordinarily delicate, but suddenly grew manly.
He was learned even to erudition, and almost an Orientalist.
Above all, he was good; and, a very simple thing to those who know
how nearly goodness borders on grandeur, in the matter of poetry,
he preferred the immense. He knew Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew;
and these served him only for the perusal of four poets:
Dante, Juvenal, AEschylus, and Isaiah. In French, he preferred
Corneille to Racine, and Agrippa d'Aubigne to Corneille.
He loved to saunter through fields of wild oats and corn-flowers,
and busied himself with clouds nearly as much as with events.
His mind had two attitudes, one on the side towards man, the other
on that towards God; he studied or he contemplated. All day long,
he buried himself in social questions, salary, capital, credit,
marriage, religion, liberty of thought, education, penal servitude,
poverty, association, property, production and sharing, the enigma
of this lower world which covers the human ant-hill with darkness;
and at night, he gazed upon the planets, those enormous beings.
Like Enjolras, he was wealthy and an only son. He spoke softly,
bowed his head, lowered his eyes, smiled with embarrassment,
dressed badly, had an awkward air, blushed at a mere nothing,
and was very timid. Yet he was intrepid.

Feuilly was a workingman, a fan-maker, orphaned both of father
and mother, who earned with difficulty three francs a day, and had
but one thought, to deliver the world. He had one other preoccupation,
to educate himself; he called this also, delivering himself.
He had taught himself to read and write; everything that he knew,
he had learned by himself. Feuilly had a generous heart. The range
of his embrace was immense. This orphan had adopted the peoples.
As his mother had failed him, he meditated on his country.
He brooded with the profound divination of the man of the people,
over what we now call the idea of the nationality, had learned history
with the express object of raging with full knowledge of the case.
In this club of young Utopians, occupied chiefly with France,
he represented the outside world. He had for his specialty Greece,
Poland, Hungary, Roumania, Italy. He uttered these names incessantly,
appropriately and inappropriately, with the tenacity of right.
The violations of Turkey on Greece and Thessaly, of Russia
on Warsaw, of Austria on Venice, enraged him. Above all things,
the great violence of 1772 aroused him. There is no more
sovereign eloquence than the true in indignation; he was eloquent
with that eloquence. He was inexhaustible on that infamous date
of 1772, on the subject of that noble and valiant race suppressed
by treason, and that three-sided crime, on that monstrous ambush,
the prototype and pattern of all those horrible suppressions
of states, which, since that time, have struck many a noble nation,
and have annulled their certificate of birth, so to speak.
All contemporary social crimes have their origin in the partition
of Poland. The partition of Poland is a theorem of which all present
political outrages are the corollaries. There has not been a despot,
nor a traitor for nearly a century back, who has not signed, approved,
counter-signed, and copied, ne variatur, the partition of Poland.
When the record of modern treasons was examined, that was the first
thing which made its appearance. The congress of Vienna consulted
that crime before consummating its own. 1772 sounded the onset;
1815 was the death of the game. Such was Feuilly's habitual text.
This poor workingman had constituted himself the tutor of Justice,
and she recompensed him by rendering him great. The fact is,
that there is eternity in right. Warsaw can no more be Tartar
than Venice can be Teuton. Kings lose their pains and their honor
in the attempt to make them so. Sooner or later, the submerged part
floats to the surface and reappears. Greece becomes Greece again,
Italy is once more Italy. The protest of right against the deed
persists forever. The theft of a nation cannot be allowed
by prescription. These lofty deeds of rascality have no future.
A nation cannot have its mark extracted like a pocket handkerchief.

Courfeyrac had a father who was called M. de Courfeyrac. One of
the false ideas of the bourgeoisie under the Restoration as regards
aristocracy and the nobility was to believe in the particle.
The particle, as every one knows, possesses no significance.
But the bourgeois of the epoch of la Minerve estimated so highly
that poor de, that they thought themselves bound to abdicate it.
M. de Chauvelin had himself called M. Chauvelin; M. de Caumartin,
M. Caumartin; M. de Constant de Robecque, Benjamin Constant;
M. de Lafayette, M. Lafayette. Courfeyrac had not wished to remain
behind the rest, and called himself plain Courfeyrac.

We might almost, so far as Courfeyrac is concerned, stop here,
and confine ourselves to saying with regard to what remains:
"For Courfeyrac, see Tholomyes."

Courfeyrac had, in fact, that animation of youth which may be
called the beaute du diable of the mind. Later on, this disappears
like the playfulness of the kitten, and all this grace ends,
with the bourgeois, on two legs, and with the tomcat, on four paws.

This sort of wit is transmitted from generation to generation
of the successive levies of youth who traverse the schools,
who pass it from hand to hand, quasi cursores, and is almost
always exactly the same; so that, as we have just pointed out,
any one who had listened to Courfeyrac in 1828 would have thought he
heard Tholomyes in 1817. Only, Courfeyrac was an honorable fellow.
Beneath the apparent similarities of the exterior mind, the difference
between him and Tholomyes was very great. The latent man which
existed in the two was totally different in the first from what it
was in the second. There was in Tholomyes a district attorney,
and in Courfeyrac a paladin.

Enjolras was the chief, Combeferre was the guide, Courfeyrac was
the centre. The others gave more light, he shed more warmth;
the truth is, that he possessed all the qualities of a centre,
roundness and radiance.

Bahorel had figured in the bloody tumult of June, 1822, on the
occasion of the burial of young Lallemand.

Bahorel was a good-natured mortal, who kept bad company, brave,
a spendthrift, prodigal, and to the verge of generosity, talkative,
and at times eloquent, bold to the verge of effrontery; the best
fellow possible; he had daring waistcoats, and scarlet opinions;
a wholesale blusterer, that is to say, loving nothing so much as
a quarrel, unless it were an uprising; and nothing so much as an uprising,
unless it were a revolution; always ready to smash a window-pane,
then to tear up the pavement, then to demolish a government,
just to see the effect of it; a student in his eleventh year.
He had nosed about the law, but did not practise it. He had taken
for his device: "Never a lawyer," and for his armorial bearings
a nightstand in which was visible a square cap. Every time that
he passed the law-school, which rarely happened, he buttoned up
his frock-coat,--the paletot had not yet been invented,--and took
hygienic precautions. Of the school porter he said: "What a fine
old man!" and of the dean, M. Delvincourt: "What a monument!"
In his lectures he espied subjects for ballads, and in his professors
occasions for caricature. He wasted a tolerably large allowance,
something like three thousand francs a year, in doing nothing.

He had peasant parents whom he had contrived to imbue with respect
for their son.

He said of them: "They are peasants and not bourgeois; that is
the reason they are intelligent."

Bahorel, a man of caprice, was scattered over numerous cafes;
the others had habits, he had none. He sauntered. To stray is human.
To saunter is Parisian. In reality, he had a penetrating mind and
was more of a thinker than appeared to view.

He served as a connecting link between the Friends of the A B C
and other still unorganized groups, which were destined to take
form later on.

In this conclave of young heads, there was one bald member.

The Marquis d'Avaray, whom Louis XVIII. made a duke for having
assisted him to enter a hackney-coach on the day when he emigrated,
was wont to relate, that in 1814, on his return to France, as the
King was disembarking at Calais, a man handed him a petition.

"What is your request?" said the King.

"Sire, a post-office."

"What is your name?"

"L'Aigle."

The King frowned, glanced at the signature of the petition and beheld
the name written thus: LESGLE. This non-Bonoparte orthography
touched the King and he began to smile. "Sire," resumed the man
with the petition, "I had for ancestor a keeper of the hounds
surnamed Lesgueules. This surname furnished my name. I am
called Lesgueules, by contraction Lesgle, and by corruption l'Aigle."
This caused the King to smile broadly. Later on he gave the man
the posting office of Meaux, either intentionally or accidentally.

The bald member of the group was the son of this Lesgle, or Legle,
and he signed himself, Legle [de Meaux]. As an abbreviation,
his companions called him Bossuet.

Bossuet was a gay but unlucky fellow. His specialty was not to
succeed in anything. As an offset, he laughed at everything.
At five and twenty he was bald. His father had ended by owning
a house and a field; but he, the son, had made haste to lose
that house and field in a bad speculation. He had nothing left.
He possessed knowledge and wit, but all he did miscarried.
Everything failed him and everybody deceived him; what he was building
tumbled down on top of him. If he were splitting wood, he cut off
a finger. If he had a mistress, he speedily discovered that he
had a friend also. Some misfortune happened to him every moment,
hence his joviality. He said: "I live under falling tiles."
He was not easily astonished, because, for him, an accident was
what he had foreseen, he took his bad luck serenely, and smiled at
the teasing of fate, like a person who is listening to pleasantries.
He was poor, but his fund of good humor was inexhaustible.
He soon reached his last sou, never his last burst of laughter.
When adversity entered his doors, he saluted this old acquaintance
cordially, he tapped all catastrophes on the stomach; he was
familiar with fatality to the point of calling it by its nickname:
"Good day, Guignon," he said to it.

These persecutions of fate had rendered him inventive. He was full
of resources. He had no money, but he found means, when it seemed
good to him, to indulge in "unbridled extravagance."  One night,
he went so far as to eat a "hundred francs" in a supper with a wench,
which inspired him to make this memorable remark in the midst of
the orgy: "Pull off my boots, you five-louis jade."

Bossuet was slowly directing his steps towards the profession
of a lawyer; he was pursuing his law studies after the manner
of Bahorel. Bossuet had not much domicile, sometimes none at all.
He lodged now with one, now with another, most often with Joly.
Joly was studying medicine. He was two years younger than Bossuet.

Joly was the "malade imaginaire" junior. What he had won in medicine
was to be more of an invalid than a doctor. At three and twenty he
thought himself a valetudinarian, and passed his life in inspecting
his tongue in the mirror. He affirmed that man becomes magnetic
like a needle, and in his chamber he placed his bed with its head
to the south, and the foot to the north, so that, at night,
the circulation of his blood might not be interfered with by the
great electric current of the globe. During thunder storms,
he felt his pulse. Otherwise, he was the gayest of them all.
All these young, maniacal, puny, merry incoherences lived in
harmony together, and the result was an eccentric and agreeable
being whom his comrades, who were prodigal of winged consonants,
called Jolllly . "You may fly away on the four L's," Jean Prouvaire
said to him.[23]

[23] L'Aile, wing.

Joly had a trick of touching his nose with the tip of his cane,
which is an indication of a sagacious mind.

All these young men who differed so greatly, and who, on the whole,
can only be discussed seriously, held the same religion: Progress.

All were the direct sons of the French Revolution. The most giddy of
them became solemn when they pronounced that date: '89. Their fathers
in the flesh had been, either royalists, doctrinaires, it matters
not what; this confusion anterior to themselves, who were young,
did not concern them at all; the pure blood of principle ran in
their veins. They attached themselves, without intermediate shades,
to incorruptible right and absolute duty.

Affiliated and initiated, they sketched out the ideal underground.

Among all these glowing hearts and thoroughly convinced minds,
there was one sceptic. How came he there? By juxtaposition.
This sceptic's name was Grantaire, and he was in the habit of
signing himself with this rebus: R. Grantaire was a man who took
good care not to believe in anything. Moreover, he was one of the
students who had learned the most during their course at Paris;
he knew that the best coffee was to be had at the Cafe Lemblin,
and the best billiards at the Cafe Voltaire, that good cakes and
lasses were to be found at the Ermitage, on the Boulevard du Maine,
spatchcocked chickens at Mother Sauget's, excellent matelotes
at the Barriere de la Cunette, and a certain thin white wine at
the Barriere du Com pat. He knew the best place for everything;
in addition, boxing and foot-fencing and some dances; and he was a
thorough single-stick player. He was a tremendous drinker to boot.
He was inordinately homely: the prettiest boot-stitcher of that day,
Irma Boissy, enraged with his homeliness, pronounced sentence on him
as follows: "Grantaire is impossible"; but Grantaire's fatuity was
not to be disconcerted. He stared tenderly and fixedly at all women,
with the air of saying to them all: "If I only chose!" and of trying
to make his comrades believe that he was in general demand.

All those words: rights of the people, rights of man,
the social contract, the French Revolution, the Republic,
democracy, humanity, civilization, religion, progress, came very near
to signifying nothing whatever to Grantaire. He smiled at them.
Scepticism, that caries of the intelligence, had not left him
a single whole idea. He lived with irony. This was his axiom:
"There is but one certainty, my full glass."  He sneered at all devotion
in all parties, the father as well as the brother, Robespierre junior
as well as Loizerolles. "They are greatly in advance to be dead,"
he exclaimed. He said of the crucifix: "There is a gibbet which has
been a success."  A rover, a gambler, a libertine, often drunk,
he displeased these young dreamers by humming incessantly:
"J'aimons les filles, et j'aimons le bon vin."  Air: Vive Henri IV.

However, this sceptic had one fanaticism. This fanaticism was
neither a dogma, nor an idea, nor an art, nor a science; it was
a man: Enjolras. Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras.
To whom did this anarchical scoffer unite himself in this phalanx
of absolute minds? To the most absolute. In what manner had
Enjolras subjugated him? By his ideas? No. By his character.
A phenomenon which is often observable. A sceptic who adheres to a
believer is as simple as the law of complementary colors. That which
we lack attracts us. No one loves the light like the blind man.
The dwarf adores the drum-major. The toad always has his eyes
fixed on heaven. Why? In order to watch the bird in its flight.
Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith soar in Enjolras.
He had need of Enjolras. That chaste, healthy, firm, upright, hard,
candid nature charmed him, without his being clearly aware of it,
and without the idea of explaining it to himself having occurred
to him. He admired his opposite by instinct. His soft, yielding,
dislocated, sickly, shapeless ideas attached themselves to Enjolras
as to a spinal column. His moral backbone leaned on that firmness.
Grantaire in the presence of Enjolras became some one once more.
He was, himself, moreover, composed of two elements, which were,
to all appearance, incompatible. He was ironical and cordial.
His indifference loved. His mind could get along without belief,
but his heart could not get along without friendship.
A profound contradiction; for an affection is a conviction.
His nature was thus constituted. There are men who seem to be born
to be the reverse, the obverse, the wrong side. They are Pollux,
Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Ephestion, Pechmeja. They only exist
on condition that they are backed up with another man; their name
is a sequel, and is only written preceded by the conjunction and;
and their existence is not their own; it is the other side of an
existence which is not theirs. Grantaire was one of these men.
He was the obverse of Enjolras.

One might almost say that affinities begin with the letters of
the alphabet. In the series O and P are inseparable. You can,
at will, pronounce O and P or Orestes and Pylades.

Grantaire, Enjolras' true satellite, inhabited this circle of
young men; he lived there, he took no pleasure anywhere but there;
he followed them everywhere. His joy was to see these forms go
and come through the fumes of wine. They tolerated him on account
of his good humor.

Enjolras, the believer, disdained this sceptic; and, a sober
man himself, scorned this drunkard. He accorded him a little
lofty pity. Grantaire was an unaccepted Pylades. Always harshly
treated by Enjolras, roughly repulsed, rejected yet ever returning
to the charge, he said of Enjolras: "What fine marble!"

CHAPTER II

BLONDEAU'S FUNERAL ORATION BY BOSSUET

On a certain afternoon, which had, as will be seen hereafter,
some coincidence with the events heretofore related, Laigle de Meaux
was to be seen leaning in a sensual manner against the doorpost
of the Cafe Musain. He had the air of a caryatid on a vacation;
he carried nothing but his revery, however. He was staring at the
Place Saint-Michel. To lean one's back against a thing is equivalent
to lying down while standing erect, which attitude is not hated
by thinkers. Laigle de Meaux was pondering without melancholy,
over a little misadventure which had befallen him two days previously
at the law-school, and which had modified his personal plans
for the future, plans which were rather indistinct in any case.

Revery does not prevent a cab from passing by, nor the dreamer
from taking note of that cab. Laigle de Meaux, whose eyes
were straying about in a sort of diffuse lounging, perceived,
athwart his somnambulism, a two-wheeled vehicle proceeding
through the place, at a foot pace and apparently in indecision.
For whom was this cabriolet? Why was it driving at a walk?
Laigle took a survey. In it, beside the coachman, sat a young man,
and in front of the young man lay a rather bulky hand-bag. The
bag displayed to passers-by the following name inscribed in large
black letters on a card which was sewn to the stuff: MARIUS PONTMERCY.

This name caused Laigle to change his attitude. He drew himself
up and hurled this apostrophe at the young man in the cabriolet:--

"Monsieur Marius Pontmercy!"

The cabriolet thus addressed came to a halt.

The young man, who also seemed deeply buried in thought, raised his eyes:--

"Hey?" said he.

"You are M. Marius Pontmercy?"

"Certainly."

"I was looking for you," resumed Laigle de Meaux.

"How so?" demanded Marius; for it was he: in fact, he had just
quitted his grandfather's, and had before him a face which he
now beheld for the first time. "I do not know you."

"Neither do I know you," responded Laigle.

Marius thought he had encountered a wag, the beginning of a mystification
in the open street. He was not in a very good humor at the moment.
He frowned. Laigle de Meaux went on imperturbably:--

"You were not at the school day before yesterday."

"That is possible."

"That is certain."

"You are a student?" demanded Marius.

"Yes, sir. Like yourself. Day before yesterday, I entered the school,
by chance. You know, one does have such freaks sometimes.
The professor was just calling the roll. You are not unaware that
they are very ridiculous on such occasions. At the third call,
unanswered, your name is erased from the list. Sixty francs in the gulf."

Marius began to listen.

"It was Blondeau who was making the call. You know Blondeau, he has
a very pointed and very malicious nose, and he delights to scent out
the absent. He slyly began with the letter P. I was not listening,
not being compromised by that letter. The call was not going badly.
No erasures; the universe was present. Blondeau was grieved.
I said to myself: `Blondeau, my love, you will not get the very
smallest sort of an execution to-day.' All at once Blondeau calls,
`Marius Pontmercy!'  No one answers. Blondeau, filled with hope,
repeats more loudly: `Marius Pontmercy!'  And he takes his pen.
Monsieur, I have bowels of compassion. I said to myself hastily:
`Here's a brave fellow who is going to get scratched out. Attention.
Here is a veritable mortal who is not exact. He's not a good student.
Here is none of your heavy-sides, a student who studies,
a greenhorn pedant, strong on letters, theology, science, and sapience,
one of those dull wits cut by the square; a pin by profession.
He is an honorable idler who lounges, who practises country jaunts,
who cultivates the grisette, who pays court to the fair sex,
who is at this very moment, perhaps, with my mistress. Let us
save him. Death to Blondeau!'  At that moment, Blondeau dipped
his pen in, all black with erasures in the ink, cast his yellow
eyes round the audience room, and repeated for the third time:
`Marius Pontmercy!'  I replied: `Present!' This is why you were not
crossed off."

"Monsieur!--" said Marius.

"And why I was," added Laigle de Meaux.

"I do not understand you," said Marius.

Laigle resumed:--

"Nothing is more simple. I was close to the desk to reply, and close
to the door for the purpose of flight. The professor gazed at me
with a certain intensity. All of a sudden, Blondeau, who must
be the malicious nose alluded to by Boileau, skipped to the letter
L. L is my letter. I am from Meaux, and my name is Lesgle."

"L'Aigle!" interrupted Marius, "what fine name!"

"Monsieur, Blondeau came to this fine name, and called:
`Laigle!' I reply: `Present!' Then Blondeau gazes at me, with the
gentleness of a tiger, and says to me: `lf you are Pontmercy,
you are not Laigle.'  A phrase which has a disobliging air for you,
but which was lugubrious only for me. That said, he crossed me off."

Marius exclaimed:--

"I am mortified, sir--"

"First of all," interposed Laigle, "I demand permission to embalm
Blondeau in a few phrases of deeply felt eulogium. I will assume
that he is dead. There will be no great change required in
his gauntness, in his pallor, in his coldness, and in his smell.
And I say: `Erudimini qui judicatis terram. Here lies Blondeau,
Blondeau the Nose, Blondeau Nasica, the ox of discipline,
bos disciplinae, the bloodhound of the password, the angel of the
roll-call, who was upright, square exact, rigid, honest, and hideous.
God crossed him off as he crossed me off.'"

Marius resumed:--

"I am very sorry--"

"Young man," said Laigle de Meaux, "let this serve you as a lesson.
In future, be exact."

"I really beg you a thousand pardons."

"Do not expose your neighbor to the danger of having his name
erased again."

"I am extremely sorry--"

Laigle burst out laughing.

"And I am delighted. I was on the brink of becoming a lawyer.
This erasure saves me. I renounce the triumphs of the bar.
I shall not defend the widow, and I shall not attack the orphan.
No more toga, no more stage. Here is my erasure all ready for me.
It is to you that I am indebted for it, Monsieur Pontmercy.
I intend to pay a solemn call of thanks upon you. Where do you
live?"

"In this cab," said Marius.

"A sign of opulence," retorted Laigle calmly. "I congratulate you.
You have there a rent of nine thousand francs per annum."

At that moment, Courfeyrac emerged from the cafe.

Marius smiled sadly.

"I have paid this rent for the last two hours, and I aspire
to get rid of it; but there is a sort of history attached to it,
and I don't know where to go."

"Come to my place, sir," said Courfeyrac.

"I have the priority," observed Laigle, "but I have no home."

"Hold your tongue, Bossuet," said Courfeyrac.

"Bossuet," said Marius, "but I thought that your name was Laigle."

"De Meaux," replied Laigle; "by metaphor, Bossuet."

Courfeyrac entered the cab.

"Coachman," said he, "hotel de la Porte-Saint-Jacques."

And that very evening, Marius found himself installed in a chamber
of the hotel de la Porte-Saint-Jacques side by side with Courfeyrac.

CHAPTER III

MARIUS' ASTONISHMENTS

In a few days, Marius had become Courfeyrac's friend. Youth is
the season for prompt welding and the rapid healing of scars.
Marius breathed freely in Courfeyrac's society, a decidedly new
thing for him. Courfeyrac put no questions to him. He did not
even think of such a thing. At that age, faces disclose everything
on the spot. Words are superfluous. There are young men of whom
it can be said that their countenances chatter. One looks at them
and one knows them.

One morning, however, Courfeyrac abruptly addressed this interrogation
to him:--

"By the way, have you any political opinions?"

"The idea!" said Marius, almost affronted by the question.

"What are you?"

"A democrat-Bonapartist."

"The gray hue of a reassured rat," said Courfeyrac.

On the following day, Courfeyrac introduced Marius at the Cafe Musain.
Then he whispered in his ear, with a smile: "I must give you your
entry to the revolution."  And he led him to the hall of the Friends
of the A B C. He presented him to the other comrades, saying this
simple word which Marius did not understand: "A pupil."

Marius had fallen into a wasps'-nest of wits. However, although he
was silent and grave, he was, none the less, both winged and armed.

Marius, up to that time solitary and inclined to soliloquy,
and to asides, both by habit and by taste, was a little fluttered
by this covey of young men around him. All these various
initiatives solicited his attention at once, and pulled him about.
The tumultuous movements of these minds at liberty and at work
set his ideas in a whirl. Sometimes, in his trouble, they fled
so far from him, that he had difficulty in recovering them.
He heard them talk of philosophy, of literature, of art, of history,
of religion, in unexpected fashion. He caught glimpses of
strange aspects; and, as he did not place them in proper perspective,
he was not altogether sure that it was not chaos that he grasped.
On abandoning his grandfather's opinions for the opinions of his father,
he had supposed himself fixed; he now suspected, with uneasiness,
and without daring to avow it to himself, that he was not.
The angle at which he saw everything began to be displaced anew.
A certain oscillation set all the horizons of his brains in motion.
An odd internal upsetting. He almost suffered from it.

It seemed as though there were no "consecrated things"
for those young men. Marius heard singular propositions
on every sort of subject, which embarrassed his still timid mind.

A theatre poster presented itself, adorned with the title of a tragedy
from the ancient repertory called classic: "Down with tragedy dear
to the bourgeois!" cried Bahorel. And Marius heard Combeferre reply:--

"You are wrong, Bahorel. The bourgeoisie loves tragedy,
and the bourgeoisie must be left at peace on that score.
Bewigged tragedy has a reason for its existence, and I am not one
of those who, by order of AEschylus, contest its right to existence.
There are rough outlines in nature; there are, in creation,
ready-made parodies; a beak which is not a beak, wings which are
not wings, gills which are not gills, paws which are not paws,
a cry of pain which arouses a desire to laugh, there is the duck.
Now, since poultry exists by the side of the bird, I do not see
why classic tragedy should not exist in the face of antique tragedy."

Or chance decreed that Marius should traverse Rue Jean-Jacques
Rousseau between Enjolras and Courfeyrac.

Courfeyrac took his arm:--

"Pay attention. This is the Rue Platriere, now called Rue
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on account of a singular household which lived
in it sixty years ago. This consisted of Jean-Jacques and Therese.
From time to time, little beings were born there. Therese gave
birth to them, Jean-Jacques represented them as foundlings."

And Enjolras addressed Courfeyrac roughly:--

"Silence in the presence of Jean-Jacques! I admire that man.
He denied his own children, that may be; but he adopted the people."

Not one of these young men articulated the word: The Emperor.
Jean Prouvaire alone sometimes said Napoleon; all the others
said "Bonaparte."  Enjolras pronounced it "Buonaparte."

Marius was vaguely surprised. Initium sapientiae.

CHAPTER IV

THE BACK ROOM OF THE CAFE MUSAIN

One of the conversations among the young men, at which Marius was
present and in which he sometimes joined, was a veritable shock
to his mind.

This took place in the back room of the Cafe Musain. Nearly all
the Friends of the A B C had convened that evening. The argand
lamp was solemnly lighted. They talked of one thing and another,
without passion and with noise. With the exception of Enjolras
and Marius, who held their peace, all were haranguing rather at
hap-hazard. Conversations between comrades sometimes are subject
to these peaceable tumults. It was a game and an uproar as much
as a conversation. They tossed words to each other and caught
them up in turn. They were chattering in all quarters.

No woman was admitted to this back room, except Louison,
the dish-washer of the cafe, who passed through it from time to time,
to go to her washing in the "lavatory."

Grantaire, thoroughly drunk, was deafening the corner of which he
had taken possession, reasoning and contradicting at the top
of his lungs, and shouting:--

"I am thirsty. Mortals, I am dreaming: that the tun of Heidelberg
has an attack of apoplexy, and that I am one of the dozen leeches
which will be applied to it. I want a drink. I desire to forget life.
Life is a hideous invention of I know not whom. It lasts no time
at all, and is worth nothing. One breaks one's neck in living.
Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.
Happiness is an antique reliquary painted on one side only.
Ecclesiastes says: `All is vanity.'  I agree with that good man,
who never existed, perhaps. Zero not wishing to go stark naked,
clothed himself in vanity. O vanity! The patching up of everything
with big words! a kitchen is a laboratory, a dancer is a professor,
an acrobat is a gymnast, a boxer is a pugilist, an apothecary
is a chemist, a wigmaker is an artist, a hodman is an architect,
a jockey is a sportsman, a wood-louse is a pterigybranche. Vanity has
a right and a wrong side; the right side is stupid, it is the negro
with his glass beads; the wrong side is foolish, it is the philosopher
with his rags. I weep over the one and I laugh over the other.
What are called honors and dignities, and even dignity and honor,
are generally of pinchbeck. Kings make playthings of human pride.
Caligula made a horse a consul; Charles II. made a knight of
a sirloin. Wrap yourself up now, then, between Consul Incitatus
and Baronet Roastbeef. As for the intrinsic value of people,
it is no longer respectable in the least. Listen to the panegyric
which neighbor makes of neighbor. White on white is ferocious;
if the lily could speak, what a setting down it would give the dove!
A bigoted woman prating of a devout woman is more venomous
than the asp and the cobra. It is a shame that I am ignorant,
otherwise I would quote to you a mass of things; but I know nothing.
For instance, I have always been witty; when I was a pupil of Gros,
instead of daubing wretched little pictures, I passed my time
in pilfering apples; rapin[24] is the masculine of rapine. So much
for myself; as for the rest of you, you are worth no more than I am.
I scoff at your perfections, excellencies, and qualities.
Every good quality tends towards a defect; economy borders on avarice,
the generous man is next door to the prodigal, the brave man rubs
elbows with the braggart; he who says very pious says a trifle bigoted;
there are just as many vices in virtue as there are holes
in Diogenes' cloak. Whom do you admire, the slain or the slayer,
Caesar or Brutus? Generally men are in favor of the slayer.
Long live Brutus, he has slain! There lies the virtue. Virtue, granted,
but madness also. There are queer spots on those great men.
The Brutus who killed Caesar was in love with the statue of a little boy.
This statue was from the hand of the Greek sculptor Strongylion,
who also carved that figure of an Amazon known as the Beautiful Leg,
Eucnemos, which Nero carried with him in his travels. This Strongylion
left but two statues which placed Nero and Brutus in accord.
Brutus was in love with the one, Nero with the other. All history
is nothing but wearisome repetition. One century is the plagiarist
of the other. The battle of Marengo copies the battle of Pydna;
the Tolbiac of Clovis and the Austerlitz of Napoleon are as like each
other as two drops of water. I don't attach much importance to victory.
Nothing is so stupid as to conquer; true glory lies in convincing.
But try to prove something! If you are content with success,
what mediocrity, and with conquering, what wretchedness! Alas, vanity
and cowardice everywhere. Everything obeys success, even grammar.
Si volet usus, says Horace. Therefore I disdain the human race.
Shall we descend to the party at all? Do you wish me to begin admiring
the peoples? What people, if you please? Shall it be Greece?
The Athenians, those Parisians of days gone by, slew Phocion,
as we might say Coligny, and fawned upon tyrants to such an extent
that Anacephorus said of Pisistratus: "His urine attracts the bees."
The most prominent man in Greece for fifty years was that grammarian
Philetas, who was so small and so thin that he was obliged to load
his shoes with lead in order not to be blown away by the wind.
There stood on the great square in Corinth a statue carved by Silanion
and catalogued by Pliny; this statue represented Episthates.
What did Episthates do? He invented a trip. That sums up Greece
and glory. Let us pass on to others. Shall I admire England?
Shall I admire France? France? Why? Because of Paris? I have just
told you my opinion of Athens. England? Why? Because of London?
I hate Carthage. And then, London, the metropolis of luxury,
is the headquarters of wretchedness. There are a hundred deaths a year
of hunger in the parish of Charing-Cross alone. Such is Albion.
I add, as the climax, that I have seen an Englishwoman dancing
in a wreath of roses and blue spectacles. A fig then for England!
If I do not admire John Bull, shall I admire Brother Jonathan?
I have but little taste for that slave-holding brother. Take away
Time is money, what remains of England? Take away Cotton is king,
what remains of America? Germany is the lymph, Italy is the bile.
Shall we go into ecstasies over Russia? Voltaire admired it. He also
admired China. I admit that Russia has its beauties, among others,
a stout despotism; but I pity the despots. Their health is delicate.
A decapitated Alexis, a poignarded Peter, a strangled Paul,
another Paul crushed flat with kicks, divers Ivans strangled,
with their throats cut, numerous Nicholases and Basils poisoned,
all this indicates that the palace of the Emperors of Russia is
in a condition of flagrant insalubrity. All civilized peoples
offer this detail to the admiration of the thinker; war; now, war,
civilized war, exhausts and sums up all the forms of ruffianism,
from the brigandage of the Trabuceros in the gorges of Mont Jaxa
to the marauding of the Comanche Indians in the Doubtful Pass.
`Bah!' you will say to me, `but Europe is certainly better than Asia?'
I admit that Asia is a farce; but I do not precisely see what you
find to laugh at in the Grand Lama, you peoples of the west,
who have mingled with your fashions and your elegances all the
complicated filth of majesty, from the dirty chemise of Queen Isabella
to the chamber-chair of the Dauphin. Gentlemen of the human race,
I tell you, not a bit of it! It is at Brussels that the most
beer is consumed, at Stockholm the most brandy, at Madrid the
most chocolate, at Amsterdam the most gin, at London the most wine,
at Constantinople the most coffee, at Paris the most absinthe;
there are all the useful notions. Paris carries the day, in short.
In Paris, even the rag-pickers are sybarites; Diogenes would have loved
to be a rag-picker of the Place Maubert better than to be a philosopher
at the Piraeus. Learn this in addition; the wineshops of the ragpickers
are called bibines; the most celebrated are the Saucepan and The
Slaughter-House. Hence, tea-gardens, goguettes, caboulots, bouibuis,
mastroquets, bastringues, manezingues, bibines of the rag-pickers,
caravanseries of the caliphs, I certify to you, I am a voluptuary,
I eat at Richard's at forty sous a head, I must have Persian carpets
to roll naked Cleopatra in! Where is Cleopatra? Ah! So it
is you, Louison. Good day."

[24] The slang term for a painter's assistant.

Thus did Grantaire, more than intoxicated, launch into speech,
catching at the dish-washer in her passage, from his corner in the
back room of the Cafe Musain.

Bossuet, extending his hand towards him, tried to impose silence
on him, and Grantaire began again worse than ever:--

"Aigle de Meaux, down with your paws. You produce on me no effect
with your gesture of Hippocrates refusing Artaxerxes' bric-a-brac. I
excuse you from the task of soothing me. Moreover, I am sad.
What do you wish me to say to you? Man is evil, man is deformed;
the butterfly is a success, man is a failure. God made a mistake
with that animal. A crowd offers a choice of ugliness.
The first comer is a wretch, Femme--woman--rhymes with infame,--
infamous. Yes, I have the spleen, complicated with melancholy,
with homesickness, plus hypochondria, and I am vexed and I rage,
and I yawn, and I am bored, and I am tired to death, and I am stupid!
Let God go to the devil!"

"Silence then, capital R!" resumed Bossuet, who was discussing a
point of law behind the scenes, and who was plunged more than waist
high in a phrase of judicial slang, of which this is the conclusion:--

"--And as for me, although I am hardly a legist, and at the most,
an amateur attorney, I maintain this: that, in accordance with
the terms of the customs of Normandy, at Saint-Michel, and for
each year, an equivalent must be paid to the profit of the lord
of the manor, saving the rights of others, and by all and several,
the proprietors as well as those seized with inheritance, and that,
for all emphyteuses, leases, freeholds, contracts of domain, mortgages--"

"Echo, plaintive nymph," hummed Grantaire.

Near Grantaire, an almost silent table, a sheet of paper, an inkstand
and a pen between two glasses of brandy, announced that a vaudeville
was being sketched out.

This great affair was being discussed in a low voice, and the two
heads at work touched each other: "Let us begin by finding names.
When one has the names, one finds the subject."

"That is true. Dictate. I will write."

"Monsieur Dorimon."

"An independent gentleman?"

"Of course."

"His daughter, Celestine."

"--tine. What next?"

"Colonel Sainval."

"Sainval is stale. I should say Valsin."

Beside the vaudeville aspirants, another group, which was also
taking advantage of the uproar to talk low, was discussing a duel.
An old fellow of thirty was counselling a young one of eighteen,
and explaining to him what sort of an adversary he had to deal with.

"The deuce! Look out for yourself. He is a fine swordsman. His play
is neat. He has the attack, no wasted feints, wrist, dash, lightning,
a just parade, mathematical parries, bigre! and he is left-handed."

In the angle opposite Grantaire, Joly and Bahorel were playing dominoes,
and talking of love.

"You are in luck, that you are," Joly was saying. "You have
a mistress who is always laughing."

"That is a fault of hers," returned Bahorel. "One's mistress
does wrong to laugh. That encourages one to deceive her. To see
her gay removes your remorse; if you see her sad, your conscience
pricks you."

"Ingrate! a woman who laughs is such a good thing! And you
never quarrel!"

"That is because of the treaty which we have made. On forming
our little Holy Alliance we assigned ourselves each our frontier,
which we never cross. What is situated on the side of winter belongs
to Vaud, on the side of the wind to Gex. Hence the peace."

"Peace is happiness digesting."

"And you, Jolllly, where do you stand in your entanglement with Mamselle--
you know whom I mean?"

"She sulks at me with cruel patience."

"Yet you are a lover to soften the heart with gauntness."

"Alas!"

"In your place, I would let her alone."

"That is easy enough to say."

"And to do. Is not her name Musichetta?"

"Yes. Ah! my poor Bahorel, she is a superb girl, very literary,
with tiny feet, little hands, she dresses well, and is white and dimpled,
with the eyes of a fortune-teller. I am wild over her."

"My dear fellow, then in order to please her, you must be elegant,
and produce effects with your knees. Buy a good pair of trousers
of double-milled cloth at Staub's. That will assist."

"At what price?" shouted Grantaire.

The third corner was delivered up to a poetical discussion.
Pagan mythology was giving battle to Christian mythology.
The question was about Olympus, whose part was taken by Jean Prouvaire,
out of pure romanticism.

Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth,
a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once
both laughing and lyric.

"Let us not insult the gods," said he. "The gods may not have
taken their departure. Jupiter does not impress me as dead.
The gods are dreams, you say. Well, even in nature, such as it
is to-day, after the flight of these dreams, we still find all the
grand old pagan myths. Such and such a mountain with the profile
of a citadel, like the Vignemale, for example, is still to me
the headdress of Cybele; it has not been proved to me that Pan does
not come at night to breathe into the hollow trunks of the willows,
stopping up the holes in turn with his fingers, and I have always
believed that Io had something to do with the cascade of Pissevache."

In the last corner, they were talking politics. The Charter which had
been granted was getting roughly handled. Combeferre was upholding
it weakly. Courfeyrac was energetically making a breach in it.
On the table lay an unfortunate copy of the famous Touquet Charter.
Courfeyrac had seized it, and was brandishing it, mingling with his
arguments the rattling of this sheet of paper.

"In the first place, I won't have any kings; if it were only
from an economical point of view, I don't want any; a king is
a parasite. One does not have kings gratis. Listen to this:
the dearness of kings. At the death of Francois I., the national
debt of France amounted to an income of thirty thousand livres;
at the death of Louis XIV. it was two milliards, six hundred millions,
at twenty-eight livres the mark, which was equivalent in 1760,
according to Desmarets, to four milliards, five hundred millions,
which would to-day be equivalent to twelve milliards. In the
second place, and no offence to Combeferre, a charter granted
is but a poor expedient of civilization. To save the transition,
to soften the passage, to deaden the shock, to cause the nation
to pass insensibly from the monarchy to democracy by the practice
of constitutional fictions,--what detestable reasons all those are!
No! no! let us never enlighten the people with false daylight.
Principles dwindle and pale in your constitutional cellar.
No illegitimacy, no compromise, no grant from the king to the people.
In all such grants there is an Article 14. By the side of the hand
which gives there is the claw which snatches back. I refuse your
charter point-blank. A charter is a mask; the lie lurks beneath it.
A people which accepts a charter abdicates. The law is only the law
when entire. No! no charter!"

It was winter; a couple of fagots were crackling in the fireplace.
This was tempting, and Courfeyrac could not resist. He crumpled
the poor Touquet Charter in his fist, and flung it in the fire.
The paper flashed up. Combeferre watched the masterpiece of Louis XVIII.
burn philosophically, and contented himself with saying:--

"The charter metamorphosed into flame."

And sarcasms, sallies, jests, that French thing which is called entrain,
and that English thing which is called humor, good and bad taste,
good and bad reasons, all the wild pyrotechnics of dialogue,
mounting together and crossing from all points of the room,
produced a sort of merry bombardment over their heads.

CHAPTER V

ENLARGEMENT OF HORIZON

The shocks of youthful minds among themselves have this admirable
property, that one can never foresee the spark, nor divine the
lightning flash. What will dart out presently? No one knows.
The burst of laughter starts from a tender feeling.

At the moment of jest, the serious makes its entry. Impulses depend on
the first chance word. The spirit of each is sovereign, jest suffices
to open the field to the unexpected. These are conversations
with abrupt turns, in which the perspective changes suddenly.
Chance is the stage-manager of such conversations.

A severe thought, starting oddly from a clash of words, suddenly
traversed the conflict of quips in which Grantaire, Bahorel,
Prouvaire, Bossuet, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac were confusedly fencing.

How does a phrase crop up in a dialogue? Whence comes it that it
suddenly impresses itself on the attention of those who hear it?
We have just said, that no one knows anything about it. In the
midst of the uproar, Bossuet all at once terminated some apostrophe
to Combeferre, with this date:--

"June 18th, 1815, Waterloo."

At this name of Waterloo, Marius, who was leaning his elbows on a table,
beside a glass of water, removed his wrist from beneath his chin,
and began to gaze fixedly at the audience.

"Pardieu!" exclaimed Courfeyrac ("Parbleu" was falling into disuse
at this period), "that number 18 is strange and strikes me. It is
Bonaparte's fatal number. Place Louis in front and Brumaire behind,
you have the whole destiny of the man, with this significant peculiarity,
that the end treads close on the heels of the commencement."

Enjolras, who had remained mute up to that point, broke the silence
and addressed this remark to Combeferre:--

"You mean to say, the crime and the expiation."

This word crime overpassed the measure of what Marius, who was
already greatly agitated by the abrupt evocation of Waterloo,
could accept.

He rose, walked slowly to the map of France spread out on the wall,
and at whose base an island was visible in a separate compartment,
laid his finger on this compartment and said:--

"Corsica, a little island which has rendered France very great."

This was like a breath of icy air. All ceased talking. They felt
that something was on the point of occurring.

Bahorel, replying to Bossuet, was just assuming an attitude
of the torso to which he was addicted. He gave it up to listen.

Enjolras, whose blue eye was not fixed on any one, and who seemed
to be gazing at space, replied, without glancing at Marius:--

"France needs no Corsica to be great. France is great because she
is France. Quia nomina leo."

Marius felt no desire to retreat; he turned towards Enjolras,
and his voice burst forth with a vibration which came from a quiver
of his very being:--

"God forbid that I should diminish France! But amalgamating Napoleon
with her is not diminishing her. Come! let us argue the question.
I am a new comer among you, but I will confess that you amaze me.
Where do we stand? Who are we? Who are you? Who am I? Let us come
to an explanation about the Emperor. I hear you say Buonaparte,
accenting the u like the Royalists. I warn you that my grandfather
does better still; he says Buonaparte'. I thought you were
young men. Where, then, is your enthusiasm? And what are you doing
with it? Whom do you admire, if you do not admire the Emperor?
And what more do you want? If you will have none of that great man,
what great men would you like? He had everything. He was complete.
He had in his brain the sum of human faculties. He made codes
like Justinian, he dictated like Caesar, his conversation was mingled
with the lightning-flash of Pascal, with the thunderclap of Tacitus,
he made history and he wrote it, his bulletins are Iliads, he combined
the cipher of Newton with the metaphor of Mahomet, he left behind
him in the East words as great as the pyramids, at Tilsit he taught
Emperors majesty, at the Academy of Sciences he replied to Laplace,
in the Council of State be held his own against Merlin, he gave a soul
to the geometry of the first, and to the chicanery of the last,
he was a legist with the attorneys and sidereal with the astronomers;
like Cromwell blowing out one of two candles, he went to the Temple
to bargain for a curtain tassel; he saw everything; he knew everything;
which did not prevent him from laughing good-naturedly beside the
cradle of his little child; and all at once, frightened Europe lent
an ear, armies put themselves in motion, parks of artillery rumbled,
pontoons stretched over the rivers, clouds of cavalry galloped in
the storm, cries, trumpets, a trembling of thrones in every direction,
the frontiers of kingdoms oscillated on the map, the sound of
a superhuman sword was heard, as it was drawn from its sheath;
they beheld him, him, rise erect on the horizon with a blazing brand
in his hand, and a glow in his eyes, unfolding amid the thunder,
his two wings, the grand army and the old guard, and he was the archangel
of war!"

All held their peace, and Enjolras bowed his head. Silence always
produces somewhat the effect of acquiescence, of the enemy being
driven to the wall. Marius continued with increased enthusiasm,
and almost without pausing for breath:--

"Let us be just, my friends! What a splendid destiny for a nation
to be the Empire of such an Emperor, when that nation is France
and when it adds its own genius to the genius of that man! To appear
and to reign, to march and to triumph, to have for halting-places
all capitals, to take his grenadiers and to make kings of them,
to decree the falls of dynasties, and to transfigure Europe at
the pace of a charge; to make you feel that when you threaten
you lay your hand on the hilt of the sword of God; to follow
in a single man, Hannibal, Caesar, Charlemagne; to be the people
of some one who mingles with your dawns the startling announcement
of a battle won, to have the cannon of the Invalides to rouse you
in the morning, to hurl into abysses of light prodigious words
which flame forever, Marengo, Arcola, Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram!
To cause constellations of victories to flash forth at each instant
from the zenith of the centuries, to make the French Empire a pendant
to the Roman Empire, to be the great nation and to give birth to
the grand army, to make its legions fly forth over all the earth,
as a mountain sends out its eagles on all sides to conquer,
to dominate, to strike with lightning, to be in Europe a sort
of nation gilded through glory, to sound athwart the centuries
a trumpet-blast of Titans, to conquer the world twice, by conquest
and by dazzling, that is sublime; and what greater thing is there?"

"To be free," said Combeferre.

Marius lowered his head in his turn; that cold and simple
word had traversed his epic effusion like a blade of steel,
and he felt it vanishing within him. When he raised his eyes,
Combeferre was no longer there. Probably satisfied with his reply
to the apotheosis, he had just taken his departure, and all,
with the exception of Enjolras, had followed him. The room had
been emptied. Enjolras, left alone with Marius, was gazing gravely
at him. Marius, however, having rallied his ideas to some extent,
did not consider himself beaten; there lingered in him a trace
of inward fermentation which was on the point, no doubt,
of translating itself into syllogisms arrayed against Enjolras,
when all of a sudden, they heard some one singing on the stairs
as he went. It was Combeferre, and this is what he was singing:--

               "Si Cesar m'avait donne[25]
                 La gloire et la guerre,
               Et qu'il me fallait quitter
                 L'amour de ma mere,
               Je dirais au grand Cesar:
                 Reprends ton sceptre et ton char,
               J'aime mieux ma mere, o gue!
                 J'aime mieux ma mere!"

[25] If Cesar had given me glory and war, and I were obliged
to quit my mother's love, I would say to great Caesar, "Take back
thy sceptre and thy chariot; I prefer the love of my mother."

The wild and tender accents with which Combeferre sang communicated
to this couplet a sort of strange grandeur. Marius, thoughtfully,
and with his eyes diked on the ceiling, repeated almost mechanically:
"My mother?--"

At that moment, he felt Enjolras' hand on his shoulder.

"Citizen," said Enjolras to him, "my mother is the Republic."

CHAPTER VI

RES ANGUSTA

That evening left Marius profoundly shaken, and with a melancholy
shadow in his soul. He felt what the earth may possibly feel,
at the moment when it is torn open with the iron, in order
that grain may be deposited within it; it feels only the wound;
the quiver of the germ and the joy of the fruit only arrive later.

Marius was gloomy. He had but just acquired a faith; must he then
reject it already? He affirmed to himself that he would not.
He declared to himself that he would not doubt, and he began
to doubt in spite of himself. To stand between two religions,
from one of which you have not as yet emerged, and another into
which you have not yet entered, is intolerable; and twilight is
pleasing only to bat-like souls. Marius was clear-eyed, and he
required the true light. The half-lights of doubt pained him.
Whatever may have been his desire to remain where he was, he could not
halt there, he was irresistibly constrained to continue, to advance,
to examine, to think, to march further. Whither would this lead him?
He feared, after having taken so many steps which had brought him
nearer to his father, to now take a step which should estrange
him from that father. His discomfort was augmented by all the
reflections which occurred to him. An escarpment rose around him.
He was in accord neither with his grandfather nor with his friends;
daring in the eyes of the one, he was behind the times in the eyes
of the others, and he recognized the fact that he was doubly isolated,
on the side of age and on the side of youth. He ceased to go to the
Cafe Musain.

In the troubled state of his conscience, he no longer thought
of certain serious sides of existence. The realities of life do
not allow themselves to be forgotten. They soon elbowed him abruptly.

One morning, the proprietor of the hotel entered Marius' room and
said to him:--

"Monsieur Courfeyrac answered for you."

"Yes."

"But I must have my money."

"Request Courfeyrac to come and talk with me," said Marius.

Courfeyrac having made his appearance, the host left them.
Marius then told him what it had not before occurred to him to relate,
that he was the same as alone in the world, and had no relatives.

"What is to become of you?" said Courfeyrac.

"I do not know in the least," replied Marius.

"What are you going to do?"

"I do not know."

"Have you any money?"

"Fifteen francs."

"Do you want me to lend you some?"

"Never."

"Have you clothes?"

"Here is what I have."

"Have you trinkets?"

"A watch."

"Silver?"

"Gold; here it is."

"I know a clothes-dealer who will take your frock-coat and a pair
of trousers."

"That is good."

"You will then have only a pair of trousers, a waistcoat, a hat
and a coat."

"And my boots."

"What! you will not go barefoot? What opulence!"

"That will be enough."

"I know a watchmaker who will buy your watch."

"That is good."

"No; it is not good. What will you do after that?"

"Whatever is necessary. Anything honest, that is to say."

"Do you know English?"

"No."

"Do you know German?"

"No."

"So much the worse."

"Why?"

"Because one of my friends, a publisher, is getting up a sort
of an encyclopaedia, for which you might have translated English
or German articles. It is badly paid work, but one can live by it."

"I will learn English and German."

"And in the meanwhile?"

"In the meanwhile I will live on my clothes and my watch."

The clothes-dealer was sent for. He paid twenty francs for the
cast-off garments. They went to the watchmaker's. He bought
the watch for forty-five francs.

"That is not bad," said Marius to Courfeyrac, on their return
to the hotel, "with my fifteen francs, that makes eighty."

"And the hotel bill?" observed Courfeyrac.

"Hello, I had forgotten that," said Marius.

The landlord presented his bill, which had to be paid on the spot.
It amounted to seventy francs.

"I have ten francs left," said Marius.

"The deuce," exclaimed Courfeyrac, "you will eat up five francs
while you are learning English, and five while learning German.
That will be swallowing a tongue very fast, or a hundred sous
very slowly."

In the meantime Aunt Gillenormand, a rather good-hearted person
at bottom in difficulties, had finally hunted up Marius' abode.

One morning, on his return from the law-school, Marius found
a letter from his aunt, and the sixty pistoles, that is to say,
six hundred francs in gold, in a sealed box.

Marius sent back the thirty louis to his aunt, with a respectful letter,
in which he stated that he had sufficient means of subsistence
and that he should be able thenceforth to supply all his needs.
At that moment, he had three francs left.

His aunt did not inform his grandfather of this refusal for fear
of exasperating him. Besides, had he not said: "Let me never hear
the name of that blood-drinker again!"

Marius left the hotel de la Porte Saint-Jacques, as he did not wish
to run in debt there.

BOOK FIFTH.--THE EXCELLENCE OF MISFORTUNE

CHAPTER I

MARIUS INDIGENT

Life became hard for Marius. It was nothing to eat his clothes
and his watch. He ate of that terrible, inexpressible thing that is
called de la vache enrage; that is to say, he endured great hardships
and privations. A terrible thing it is, containing days without bread,
nights without sleep, evenings without a candle, a hearth without a fire,
weeks without work, a future without hope, a coat out at the elbows,
an old hat which evokes the laughter of young girls, a door which
one finds locked on one at night because one's rent is not paid,
the insolence of the porter and the cook-shop man, the sneers
of neighbors, humiliations, dignity trampled on, work of whatever
nature accepted, disgusts, bitterness, despondency. Marius learned
how all this is eaten, and how such are often the only things
which one has to devour. At that moment of his existence when a man
needs his pride, because he needs love, he felt that he was jeered
at because he was badly dressed, and ridiculous because he was poor.
At the age when youth swells the heart with imperial pride,
he dropped his eyes more than once on his dilapidated boots, and he
knew the unjust shame and the poignant blushes of wretchedness.
Admirable and terrible trial from which the feeble emerge base,
from which the strong emerge sublime. A crucible into which destiny
casts a man, whenever it desires a scoundrel or a demi-god.

For many great deeds are performed in petty combats. There are
instances of bravery ignored and obstinate, which defend themselves
step by step in that fatal onslaught of necessities and turpitudes.
Noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye beholds, which are
requited with no renown, which are saluted with no trumpet blast.
Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are the
fields of battle which have their heroes; obscure heroes,
who are, sometimes, grander than the heroes who win renown.

Firm and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always
a step-mother, is sometimes a mother; destitution gives birth
to might of soul and spirit; distress is the nurse of pride;
unhappiness is a good milk for the magnanimous.

There came a moment in Marius' life, when he swept his own landing,
when he bought his sou's worth of Brie cheese at the fruiterer's,
when he waited until twilight had fallen to slip into the baker's
and purchase a loaf, which he carried off furtively to his attic
as though he had stolen it. Sometimes there could be seen gliding
into the butcher's shop on the corner, in the midst of the bantering
cooks who elbowed him, an awkward young man, carrying big books
under his arm, who had a timid yet angry air, who, on entering,
removed his hat from a brow whereon stood drops of perspiration,
made a profound bow to the butcher's astonished wife, asked for
a mutton cutlet, paid six or seven sous for it, wrapped it up in
a paper, put it under his arm, between two books, and went away.
It was Marius. On this cutlet, which he cooked for himself, he lived
for three days.

On the first day he ate the meat, on the second he ate the fat,
on the third he gnawed the bone. Aunt Gillenormand made
repeated attempts, and sent him the sixty pistoles several times.
Marius returned them on every occasion, saying that he needed nothing.

He was still in mourning for his father when the revolution which we
have just described was effected within him. From that time forth,
he had not put off his black garments. But his garments were
quitting him. The day came when he had no longer a coat.
The trousers would go next. What was to be done? Courfeyrac, to whom
he had, on his side, done some good turns, gave him an old coat.
For thirty sous, Marius got it turned by some porter or other,
and it was a new coat. But this coat was green. Then Marius
ceased to go out until after nightfall. This made his coat black.
As he wished always to appear in mourning, he clothed himself with
the night.

In spite of all this, he got admitted to practice as a lawyer.
He was supposed to live in Courfeyrac's room, which was decent,
and where a certain number of law-books backed up and completed
by several dilapidated volumes of romance, passed as the library
required by the regulations. He had his letters addressed to
Courfeyrac's quarters.

When Marius became a lawyer, he informed his grandfather of the fact
in a letter which was cold but full of submission and respect.
M. Gillenormand trembled as he took the letter, read it, tore it
in four pieces, and threw it into the waste-basket. Two or three
days later, Mademoiselle Gillenormand heard her father, who was alone
in his room, talking aloud to himself. He always did this whenever
he was greatly agitated. She listened, and the old man was saying:
"If you were not a fool, you would know that one cannot be a baron
and a lawyer at the same time."

CHAPTER II

MARIUS POOR

It is the same with wretchedness as with everything else. It ends
by becoming bearable. It finally assumes a form, and adjusts itself.
One vegetates, that is to say, one develops in a certain meagre fashion,
which is, however, sufficient for life. This is the mode in which
the existence of Marius Pontmercy was arranged:

He had passed the worst straits; the narrow pass was opening out a little
in front of him. By dint of toil, perseverance, courage, and will,
he had managed to draw from his work about seven hundred francs a year.
He had learned German and English; thanks to Courfeyrac, who had put
him in communication with his friend the publisher, Marius filled the
modest post of utility man in the literature of the publishing house.
He drew up prospectuses, translated newspapers, annotated editions,
compiled biographies, etc.; net product, year in and year out,
seven hundred francs. He lived on it. How? Not so badly.
We will explain.

Marius occupied in the Gorbeau house, for an annual sum of thirty francs,
a den minus a fireplace, called a cabinet, which contained only the
most indispensable articles of furniture. This furniture belonged
to him. He gave three francs a month to the old principal tenant
to come and sweep his hole, and to bring him a little hot water
every morning, a fresh egg, and a penny roll. He breakfasted on this
egg and roll. His breakfast varied in cost from two to four sous,
according as eggs were dear or cheap. At six o'clock in the
evening he descended the Rue Saint-Jacques to dine at Rousseau's,
opposite Basset's, the stamp-dealer's, on the corner of the Rue
des Mathurins. He ate no soup. He took a six-sou plate of meat,
a half-portion of vegetables for three sous, and a three-sou dessert.
For three sous he got as much bread as he wished. As for wine,
he drank water. When he paid at the desk where Madam Rousseau,
at that period still plump and rosy majestically presided,
he gave a sou to the waiter, and Madam Rousseau gave him a smile.
Then he went away. For sixteen sous he had a smile and a dinner.

This Restaurant Rousseau, where so few bottles and so many water
carafes were emptied, was a calming potion rather than a restaurant.
It no longer exists. The proprietor had a fine nickname: he was
called Rousseau the Aquatic.

Thus, breakfast four sous, dinner sixteen sous; his food cost
him twenty sous a day; which made three hundred and sixty-five
francs a year. Add the thirty francs for rent, and the thirty-six
francs to the old woman, plus a few trifling expenses; for four
hundred and fifty francs, Marius was fed, lodged, and waited on.
His clothing cost him a hundred francs, his linen fifty francs,
his washing fifty francs; the whole did not exceed six hundred and
fifty francs. He was rich. He sometimes lent ten francs to a friend.
Courfeyrac had once been able to borrow sixty francs of him.
As far as fire was concerned, as Marius had no fireplace, he had
"simplified matters."

Marius always had two complete suits of clothes, the one old,
"for every day"; the other, brand new for special occasions.
Both were black. He had but three shirts, one on his person,
the second in the commode, and the third in the washerwoman's hands.
He renewed them as they wore out. They were always ragged, which caused
him to button his coat to the chin.

It had required years for Marius to attain to this flourishing condition.
Hard years; difficult, some of them, to traverse, others to climb.
Marius had not failed for a single day. He had endured everything in
the way of destitution; he had done everything except contract debts.
He did himself the justice to say that he had never owed any one a sou.
A debt was, to him, the beginning of slavery. He even said to himself,
that a creditor is worse than a master; for the master possesses only
your person, a creditor possesses your dignity and can administer
to it a box on the ear. Rather than borrow, he went without food.
He had passed many a day fasting. Feeling that all extremes meet,
and that, if one is not on one's guard, lowered fortunes may lead
to baseness of soul, he kept a jealous watch on his pride.
Such and such a formality or action, which, in any other situation
would have appeared merely a deference to him, now seemed insipidity,
and he nerved himself against it. His face wore a sort of severe flush.
He was timid even to rudeness.

During all these trials he had felt himself encouraged and even uplifted,
at times, by a secret force that he possessed within himself.
The soul aids the body, and at certain moments, raises it.
It is the only bird which bears up its own cage.

Besides his father's name, another name was graven in Marius' heart,
the name of Thenardier. Marius, with his grave and enthusiastic nature,
surrounded with a sort of aureole the man to whom, in his thoughts,
he owed his father's life,--that intrepid sergeant who had saved
the colonel amid the bullets and the cannon-balls of Waterloo.
He never separated the memory of this man from the memory of his father,
and he associated them in his veneration. It was a sort of worship
in two steps, with the grand altar for the colonel and the lesser
one for Thenardier. What redoubled the tenderness of his gratitude
towards Thenardier, was the idea of the distress into which he knew
that Thenardier had fallen, and which had engulfed the latter.
Marius had learned at Montfermeil of the ruin and bankruptcy of the
unfortunate inn-keeper. Since that time, he had made unheard-of efforts
to find traces of him and to reach him in that dark abyss of misery in
which Thenardier had disappeared. Marius had beaten the whole country;
he had gone to Chelles, to Bondy, to Gourney, to Nogent, to Lagny.
He had persisted for three years, expending in these explorations
the little money which he had laid by. No one had been able to give
him any news of Thenardier: he was supposed to have gone abroad.
His creditors had also sought him, with less love than Marius,
but with as much assiduity, and had not been able to lay their hands
on him. Marius blamed himself, and was almost angry with himself
for his lack of success in his researches. It was the only debt left
him by the colonel, and Marius made it a matter of honor to pay it.
"What," he thought, "when my father lay dying on the field of battle,
did Thenardier contrive to find him amid the smoke and the grape-shot,
and bear him off on his shoulders, and yet he owed him nothing,
and I, who owe so much to Thenardier, cannot join him in this
shadow where he is lying in the pangs of death, and in my turn
bring him back from death to life! Oh! I will find him!"
To find Thenardier, in fact, Marius would have given one of his arms,
to rescue him from his misery, he would have sacrificed all his blood.
To see Thenardier, to render Thenardier some service, to say to him:
"You do not know me; well, I do know you! Here I am. Dispose of me!"
This was Marius' sweetest and most magnificent dream.

CHAPTER III

MARIUS GROWN UP

At this epoch, Marius was twenty years of age. It was three years
since he had left his grandfather. Both parties had remained
on the same terms, without attempting to approach each other,
and without seeking to see each other. Besides, what was the use
of seeing each other? Marius was the brass vase, while Father
Gillenormand was the iron pot.

We admit that Marius was mistaken as to his grandfather's heart.
He had imagined that M. Gillenormand had never loved him,
and that that crusty, harsh, and smiling old fellow who cursed,
shouted, and stormed and brandished his cane, cherished for him,
at the most, only that affection, which is at once slight
and severe, of the dotards of comedy. Marius was in error.
There are fathers who do not love their children; there exists
no grandfather who does not adore his grandson. At bottom,
as we have said, M. Gillenormand idolized Marius. He idolized him
after his own fashion, with an accompaniment of snappishness and
boxes on the ear; but, this child once gone, he felt a black void
in his heart; he would allow no one to mention the child to him,
and all the while secretly regretted that he was so well obeyed.
At first, he hoped that this Buonapartist, this Jacobin, this terrorist,
this Septembrist, would return. But the weeks passed by, years passed;
to M. Gillenormand's great despair, the "blood-drinker" did
not make his appearance. "I could not do otherwise than turn
him out," said the grandfather to himself, and he asked himself:
"If the thing were to do over again, would I do it?"  His pride
instantly answered "yes," but his aged head, which he shook
in silence, replied sadly "no."  He had his hours of depression.
He missed Marius. Old men need affection as they need the sun.
It is warmth. Strong as his nature was, the absence of Marius
had wrought some change in him. Nothing in the world could have
induced him to take a step towards "that rogue"; but he suffered.
He never inquired about him, but he thought of him incessantly.
He lived in the Marais in a more and more retired manner;
he was still merry and violent as of old, but his merriment
had a convulsive harshness, and his violences always terminated
in a sort of gentle and gloomy dejection. He sometimes said:
"Oh! if he only would return, what a good box on the ear I would
give him!"

As for his aunt, she thought too little to love much; Marius was
no longer for her much more than a vague black form; and she
eventually came to occupy herself with him much less than with the
cat or the paroquet which she probably had. What augmented Father
Gillenormand's secret suffering was, that he locked it all up
within his breast, and did not allow its existence to be divined.
His sorrow was like those recently invented furnaces which consume
their own smoke. It sometimes happened that officious busybodies spoke
to him of Marius, and asked him: "What is your grandson doing?"
"What has become of him?"  The old bourgeois replied with a sigh,
that he was a sad case, and giving a fillip to his cuff, if he
wished to appear gay: "Monsieur le Baron de Pontmercy is practising
pettifogging in some corner or other."

While the old man regretted, Marius applauded himself.
As is the case with all good-hearted people, misfortune had
eradicated his bitterness. He only thought of M. Gillenormand
in an amiable light, but he had set his mind on not receiving
anything more from the man who had been unkind to his father.
This was the mitigated translation of his first indignation.
Moreover, he was happy at having suffered, and at suffering still.
It was for his father's sake. The hardness of his life satisfied
and pleased him. He said to himself with a sort of joy that--
it was certainly the least he could do; that it was an expiation;--
that, had it not been for that, he would have been punished in some
other way and later on for his impious indifference towards his father,
and such a father! that it would not have been just that his father
should have all the suffering, and he none of it; and that, in any case,
what were his toils and his destitution compared with the colonel's
heroic life? that, in short, the only way for him to approach his
father and resemble him, was to be brave in the face of indigence,
as the other had been valiant before the enemy; and that that was,
no doubt, what the colonel had meant to imply by the words:
"He will be worthy of it."  Words which Marius continued to wear,
not on his breast, since the colonel's writing had disappeared,
but in his heart.

And then, on the day when his grandfather had turned him out of doors,
he had been only a child, now he was a man. He felt it. Misery,
we repeat, had been good for him. Poverty in youth, when it succeeds,
has this magnificent property about it, that it turns the whole
will towards effort, and the whole soul towards aspiration.
Poverty instantly lays material life bare and renders it hideous;
hence inexpressible bounds towards the ideal life. The wealthy young
man has a hundred coarse and brilliant distractions, horse races,
hunting, dogs, tobacco, gaming, good repasts, and all the rest of it;
occupations for the baser side of the soul, at the expense of the
loftier and more delicate sides. The poor young man wins his bread
with difficulty; he eats; when he has eaten, he has nothing more
but meditation. He goes to the spectacles which God furnishes gratis;
he gazes at the sky, space, the stars, flowers, children, the humanity
among which he is suffering, the creation amid which he beams.
He gazes so much on humanity that he perceives its soul, he gazes
upon creation to such an extent that he beholds God. He dreams,
he feels himself great; he dreams on, and feels himself tender.
From the egotism of the man who suffers he passes to the
compassion of the man who meditates. An admirable sentiment
breaks forth in him, forgetfulness of self and pity for all.
As he thinks of the innumerable enjoyments which nature offers,
gives, and lavishes to souls which stand open, and refuses to souls
that are closed, he comes to pity, he the millionnaire of the mind,
the millionnaire of money. All hatred departs from his heart,
in proportion as light penetrates his spirit. And is he unhappy?
No. The misery of a young man is never miserable. The first young
lad who comes to hand, however poor he may be, with his strength,
his health, his rapid walk, his brilliant eyes, his warmly
circulating blood, his black hair, his red lips, his white teeth,
his pure breath, will always arouse the envy of an aged emperor.
And then, every morning, he sets himself afresh to the task of
earning his bread; and while his hands earn his bread, his dorsal
column gains pride, his brain gathers ideas. His task finished,
he returns to ineffable ecstasies, to contemplation, to joys;
he beholds his feet set in afflictions, in obstacles, on the pavement,
in the nettles, sometimes in the mire; his head in the light. He is
firm serene, gentle, peaceful, attentive, serious, content with little,
kindly; and he thanks God for having bestowed on him those two forms
of riches which many a rich man lacks: work, which makes him free;
and thought, which makes him dignified.

This is what had happened with Marius. To tell the truth, he inclined
a little too much to the side of contemplation. From the day when he
had succeeded in earning his living with some approach to certainty,
he had stopped, thinking it good to be poor, and retrenching time
from his work to give to thought; that is to say, he sometimes passed
entire days in meditation, absorbed, engulfed, like a visionary,
in the mute voluptuousness of ecstasy and inward radiance.
He had thus propounded the problem of his life: to toil as little
as possible at material labor, in order to toil as much as possible
at the labor which is impalpable; in other words, to bestow a few hours
on real life, and to cast the rest to the infinite. As he believed
that he lacked nothing, he did not perceive that contemplation,
thus understood, ends by becoming one of the forms of idleness;
that he was contenting himself with conquering the first necessities
of life, and that he was resting from his labors too soon.

It was evident that, for this energetic and enthusiastic nature,
this could only be a transitory state, and that, at the first shock
against the inevitable complications of destiny, Marius would awaken.

In the meantime, although he was a lawyer, and whatever Father
Gillenormand thought about the matter, he was not practising, he was
not even pettifogging. Meditation had turned him aside from pleading.
To haunt attorneys, to follow the court, to hunt up cases--
what a bore! Why should he do it? He saw no reason for changing
the manner of gaining his livelihood! The obscure and ill-paid
publishing establishment had come to mean for him a sure source
of work which did not involve too much labor, as we have explained,
and which sufficed for his wants.

One of the publishers for whom he worked, M. Magimel, I think,
offered to take him into his own house, to lodge him well, to furnish
him with regular occupation, and to give him fifteen hundred francs
a year. To be well lodged! Fifteen hundred francs! No doubt.
But renounce his liberty! Be on fixed wages! A sort of hired
man of letters! According to Marius' opinion, if he accepted,
his position would become both better and worse at the same time,
he acquired comfort, and lost his dignity; it was a fine and complete
unhappiness converted into a repulsive and ridiculous state of torture:
something like the case of a blind man who should recover the sight
of one eye. He refused.

Marius dwelt in solitude. Owing to his taste for remaining outside
of everything, and through having been too much alarmed, he had
not entered decidedly into the group presided over by Enjolras.
They had remained good friends; they were ready to assist each
other on occasion in every possible way; but nothing more.
Marius had two friends: one young, Courfeyrac; and one old,
M. Mabeuf. He inclined more to the old man. In the first place,
he owed to him the revolution which had taken place within him;
to him he was indebted for having known and loved his father.
"He operated on me for a cataract," he said.

The churchwarden had certainly played a decisive part.

It was not, however, that M. Mabeuf had been anything but the calm
and impassive agent of Providence in this connection. He had
enlightened Marius by chance and without being aware of the fact,
as does a candle which some one brings; he had been the candle
and not the some one.

As for Marius' inward political revolution, M. Mabeuf was totally
incapable of comprehending it, of willing or of directing it.

As we shall see M. Mabeuf again, later on, a few words will not
be superfluous.

CHAPTER IV

M. MABEUF

On the day when M. Mabeuf said to Marius: "Certainly I approve
of political opinions," he expressed the real state of his mind.
All political opinions were matters of indifference to him, and he
approved them all, without distinction, provided they left him
in peace, as the Greeks called the Furies "the beautiful, the good,
the charming," the Eumenides. M. Mabeuf's political opinion consisted
in a passionate love for plants, and, above all, for books.
Like all the rest of the world, he possessed the termination in ist,
without which no one could exist at that time, but he was neither
a Royalist, a Bonapartist, a Chartist, an Orleanist, nor an Anarchist;
he was a bouquinist, a collector of old books. He did not understand
how men could busy themselves with hating each other because of silly
stuff like the charter, democracy, legitimacy, monarchy, the republic,
etc., when there were in the world all sorts of mosses, grasses,
and shrubs which they might be looking at, and heaps of folios,
and even of 32mos, which they might turn over. He took good care
not to become useless; having books did not prevent his reading,
being a botanist did not prevent his being a gardener. When he
made Pontmercy's acquaintance, this sympathy had existed between
the colonel and himself--that what the colonel did for flowers,
he did for fruits. M. Mabeuf had succeeded in producing seedling
pears as savory as the pears of St. Germain; it is from one
of his combinations, apparently, that the October Mirabelle,
now celebrated and no less perfumed than the summer Mirabelle,
owes its origin. He went to mass rather from gentleness than
from piety, and because, as he loved the faces of men, but hated
their noise, he found them assembled and silent only in church.
Feeling that he must be something in the State, he had chosen the
career of warden. However, he had never succeeded in loving any
woman as much as a tulip bulb, nor any man as much as an Elzevir.
He had long passed sixty, when, one day, some one asked him:
"Have you never been married?"  "I have forgotten," said he.
When it sometimes happened to him--and to whom does it not happen?--
to say: "Oh! if I were only rich!" it was not when ogling a
pretty girl, as was the case with Father Gillenormand, but when
contemplating an old book. He lived alone with an old housekeeper.
He was somewhat gouty, and when he was asleep, his aged fingers,
stiffened with rheumatism, lay crooked up in the folds of his sheets.
He had composed and published a Flora of the Environs of Cauteretz,
with colored plates, a work which enjoyed a tolerable measure of esteem
and which sold well. People rang his bell, in the Rue Mesieres,
two or three times a day, to ask for it. He drew as much as two
thousand francs a year from it; this constituted nearly the whole of
his fortune. Although poor, he had had the talent to form for himself,
by dint of patience, privations, and time, a precious collection
of rare copies of every sort. He never went out without a book
under his arm, and he often returned with two. The sole decoration
of the four rooms on the ground floor, which composed his lodgings,
consisted of framed herbariums, and engravings of the old masters.
The sight of a sword or a gun chilled his blood. He had never
approached a cannon in his life, even at the Invalides. He had
a passable stomach, a brother who was a cure, perfectly white hair,
no teeth, either in his mouth or his mind, a trembling in every limb,
a Picard accent, an infantile laugh, the air of an old sheep, and he
was easily frightened. Add to this, that he had no other friendship,
no other acquaintance among the living, than an old bookseller of the
Porte-Saint-Jacques, named Royal. His dream was to naturalize indigo
in France.

His servant was also a sort of innocent. The poor good old woman
was a spinster. Sultan, her cat, which might have mewed Allegri's
miserere in the Sixtine Chapel, had filled her heart and sufficed
for the quantity of passion which existed in her. None of her dreams
had ever proceeded as far as man. She had never been able to get
further than her cat. Like him, she had a mustache. Her glory
consisted in her caps, which were always white. She passed her time,
on Sundays, after mass, in counting over the linen in her chest,
and in spreading out on her bed the dresses in the piece which she
bought and never had made up. She knew how to read. M. Mabeuf
had nicknamed her Mother Plutarque.

M. Mabeuf had taken a fancy to Marius, because Marius, being young
and gentle, warmed his age without startling his timidity.
Youth combined with gentleness produces on old people the effect of
the sun without wind. When Marius was saturated with military glory,
with gunpowder, with marches and countermarches, and with all
those prodigious battles in which his father had given and received
such tremendous blows of the sword, he went to see M. Mabeuf,
and M. Mabeuf talked to him of his hero from the point of view
of flowers.

His brother the cure died about 1830, and almost immediately, as when
the night is drawing on, the whole horizon grew dark for M. Mabeuf.
A notary's failure deprived him of the sum of ten thousand francs,
which was all that he possessed in his brother's right and his own.
The Revolution of July brought a crisis to publishing. In a period
of embarrassment, the first thing which does not sell is a Flora.
The Flora of the Environs of Cauteretz stopped short. Weeks passed
by without a single purchaser. Sometimes M. Mabeuf started at
the sound of the bell. "Monsieur," said Mother Plutarque sadly,
"it is the water-carrier." In short, one day, M. Mabeuf quitted
the Rue Mesieres, abdicated the functions of warden, gave up
Saint-Sulpice, sold not a part of his books, but of his prints,--
that to which he was the least attached,--and installed himself in
a little house on the Rue Montparnasse, where, however, he remained
but one quarter for two reasons: in the first place, the ground
floor and the garden cost three hundred francs, and he dared not
spend more than two hundred francs on his rent; in the second,
being near Faton's shooting-gallery, he could hear the pistol-shots;
which was intolerable to him.

He carried off his Flora, his copper-plates, his herbariums,
his portfolios, and his books, and established himself near
the Salpetriere, in a sort of thatched cottage of the village
of Austerlitz, where, for fifty crowns a year, he got three rooms
and a garden enclosed by a hedge, and containing a well. He took
advantage of this removal to sell off nearly all his furniture.
On the day of his entrance into his new quarters, he was very gay,
and drove the nails on which his engravings and herbariums were
to hang, with his own hands, dug in his garden the rest of the day,
and at night, perceiving that Mother Plutarque had a melancholy air,
and was very thoughtful, he tapped her on the shoulder and said
to her with a smile: "We have the indigo!"

Only two visitors, the bookseller of the Porte-Saint-Jacques and Marius,
were admitted to view the thatched cottage at Austerlitz, a brawling
name which was, to tell the truth, extremely disagreeable to him.

However, as we have just pointed out, brains which are absorbed
in some bit of wisdom, or folly, or, as it often happens, in both
at once, are but slowly accessible to the things of actual life.
Their own destiny is a far-off thing to them. There results from such
concentration a passivity, which, if it were the outcome of reasoning,
would resemble philosophy. One declines, descends, trickles away,
even crumbles away, and yet is hardly conscious of it one's self.
It always ends, it is true, in an awakening, but the awakening is tardy.
In the meantime, it seems as though we held ourselves neutral in the
game which is going on between our happiness and our unhappiness.
We are the stake, and we look on at the game with indifference.

It is thus that, athwart the cloud which formed about him, when all
his hopes were extinguished one after the other, M. Mabeuf remained
rather puerilely, but profoundly serene. His habits of mind had
the regular swing of a pendulum. Once mounted on an illusion,
he went for a very long time, even after the illusion had disappeared.
A clock does not stop short at the precise moment when the key
is lost.

M. Mabeuf had his innocent pleasures. These pleasures were inexpensive
and unexpected; the merest chance furnished them. One day,
Mother Plutarque was reading a romance in one corner of the room.
She was reading aloud, finding that she understood better thus.
To read aloud is to assure one's self of what one is reading.
There are people who read very loud, and who have the appearance of
giving themselves their word of honor as to what they are perusing.

It was with this sort of energy that Mother Plutarque was reading
the romance which she had in hand. M. Mabeuf heard her without
listening to her.

In the course of her reading, Mother Plutarque came to this phrase.
It was a question of an officer of dragoons and a beauty:--

"--The beauty pouted, and the dragoon--"

Here she interrupted herself to wipe her glasses.

"Bouddha and the Dragon," struck in M. Mabeuf in a low voice.
"Yes, it is true that there was a dragon, which, from the depths of
its cave, spouted flame through his maw and set the heavens on fire.
Many stars had already been consumed by this monster, which, besides,
had the claws of a tiger. Bouddha went into its den and succeeded
in converting the dragon. That is a good book that you are reading,
Mother Plutarque. There is no more beautiful legend in existence."

And M. Mabeuf fell into a delicious revery.

CHAPTER V

POVERTY A GOOD NEIGHBOR FOR MISERY

Marius liked this candid old man who saw himself gradually falling
into the clutches of indigence, and who came to feel astonishment,
little by little, without, however, being made melancholy by it.
Marius met Courfeyrac and sought out M. Mabeuf. Very rarely, however;
twice a month at most.

Marius' pleasure consisted in taking long walks alone on the outer
boulevards, or in the Champs-de-Mars, or in the least frequented alleys
of the Luxembourg. He often spent half a day in gazing at a market
garden, the beds of lettuce, the chickens on the dung-heap, the horse
turning the water-wheel. The passers-by stared at him in surprise,
and some of them thought his attire suspicious and his mien sinister.
He was only a poor young man dreaming in an objectless way.

It was during one of his strolls that he had hit upon the Gorbeau
house, and, tempted by its isolation and its cheapness, had taken
up his abode there. He was known there only under the name of M. Marius.

Some of his father's old generals or old comrades had invited him
to go and see them, when they learned about him. Marius had not
refused their invitations. They afforded opportunities of talking
about his father. Thus he went from time to time, to Comte Pajol,
to General Bellavesne, to General Fririon, to the Invalides.
There was music and dancing there. On such evenings, Marius put
on his new coat. But he never went to these evening parties or
balls except on days when it was freezing cold, because he could
not afford a carriage, and he did not wish to arrive with boots
otherwise than like mirrors.

He said sometimes, but without bitterness: "Men are so made that in
a drawing-room you may be soiled everywhere except on your shoes.
In order to insure a good reception there, only one irreproachable
thing is asked of you; your conscience? No, your boots."

All passions except those of the heart are dissipated by revery.
Marius' political fevers vanished thus. The Revolution of 1830
assisted in the process, by satisfying and calming him.
He remained the same, setting aside his fits of wrath.
He still held the same opinions. Only, they had been tempered.
To speak accurately, he had no longer any opinions, he had sympathies.
To what party did he belong? To the party of humanity. Out of
humanity he chose France; out of the Nation he chose the people;
out of the people he chose the woman. It was to that point above all,
that his pity was directed. Now he preferred an idea to a deed,
a poet to a hero, and he admired a book like Job more than an event
like Marengo. And then, when, after a day spent in meditation,
he returned in the evening through the boulevards, and caught
a glimpse through the branches of the trees of the fathomless
space beyond, the nameless gleams, the abyss, the shadow, the mystery,
all that which is only human seemed very pretty indeed to him.

He thought that he had, and he really had, in fact, arrived at
the truth of life and of human philosophy, and he had ended
by gazing at nothing but heaven, the only thing which Truth
can perceive from the bottom of her well.

This did not prevent him from multiplying his plans, his combinations,
his scaffoldings, his projects for the future. In this state
of revery, an eye which could have cast a glance into Marius'
interior would have been dazzled with the purity of that soul.
In fact, had it been given to our eyes of the flesh to gaze into
the consciences of others, we should be able to judge a man much
more surely according to what he dreams, than according to what
he thinks. There is will in thought, there is none in dreams.
Revery, which is utterly spontaneous, takes and keeps, even in the
gigantic and the ideal, the form of our spirit. Nothing proceeds
more directly and more sincerely from the very depth of our soul,
than our unpremeditated and boundless aspirations towards the splendors
of destiny. In these aspirations, much more than in deliberate,
rational coordinated ideas, is the real character of a man to
be found. Our chimeras are the things which the most resemble us.
Each one of us dreams of the unknown and the impossible in accordance
with his nature.

Towards the middle of this year 1831, the old woman who waited on
Marius told him that his neighbors, the wretched Jondrette family,
had been turned out of doors. Marius, who passed nearly the whole
of his days out of the house, hardly knew that he had any neighbors.

"Why are they turned out?" he asked.

"Because they do not pay their rent; they owe for two quarters."

"How much is it?"

"Twenty francs," said the old woman.

Marius had thirty francs saved up in a drawer.

"Here," he said to the old woman, "take these twenty-five francs.
Pay for the poor people and give them five francs, and do not tell
them that it was I."

CHAPTER VI

THE SUBSTITUTE

It chanced that the regiment to which Lieutenant Theodule belonged
came to perform garrison duty in Paris. This inspired Aunt
Gillenormand with a second idea. She had, on the first occasion,
hit upon the plan of having Marius spied upon by Theodule; now she
plotted to have Theodule take Marius' place.

At all events and in case the grandfather should feel the vague need
of a young face in the house,--these rays of dawn are sometimes
sweet to ruin,--it was expedient to find another Marius. "Take it
as a simple erratum," she thought, "such as one sees in books.
For Marius, read Theodule."

A grandnephew is almost the same as a grandson; in default
of a lawyer one takes a lancer.

One morning, when M. Gillenormand was about to read something
in the Quotidienne, his daughter entered and said to him in her
sweetest voice; for the question concerned her favorite:--

"Father, Theodule is coming to present his respects to you this morning."

"Who's Theodule?"

"Your grandnephew."

"Ah!" said the grandfather.

Then he went back to his reading, thought no more of his grandnephew,
who was merely some Theodule or other, and soon flew into a rage,
which almost always happened when he read. The "sheet" which he held,
although Royalist, of course, announced for the following day,
without any softening phrases, one of these little events which were
of daily occurrence at that date in Paris: "That the students
of the schools of law and medicine were to assemble on the Place
du Pantheon, at midday,--to deliberate."  The discussion concerned one
of the questions of the moment, the artillery of the National Guard,
and a conflict between the Minister of War and "the citizen's militia,"
on the subject of the cannon parked in the courtyard of the Louvre.
The students were to "deliberate" over this. It did not take much
more than this to swell M. Gillenormand's rage.

He thought of Marius, who was a student, and who would probably go
with the rest, to "deliberate, at midday, on the Place du Pantheon."

As he was indulging in this painful dream, Lieutenant Theodule
entered clad in plain clothes as a bourgeois, which was clever
of him, and was discreetly introduced by Mademoiselle Gillenormand.
The lancer had reasoned as follows: "The old druid has not sunk
all his money in a life pension. It is well to disguise one's self
as a civilian from time to time."

Mademoiselle Gillenormand said aloud to her father:--

"Theodule, your grandnephew."

And in a low voice to the lieutenant:--

"Approve of everything."

And she withdrew.

The lieutenant, who was but little accustomed to such venerable
encounters, stammered with some timidity: "Good day, uncle,"--
and made a salute composed of the involuntary and mechanical
outline of the military salute finished off as a bourgeois salute.

"Ah! so it's you; that is well, sit down," said the old gentleman.

That said, he totally forgot the lancer.

Theodule seated himself, and M. Gillenormand rose.

M. Gillenormand began to pace back and forth, his hands in his pockets,
talking aloud, and twitching, with his irritated old fingers,
at the two watches which he wore in his two fobs.

"That pack of brats! they convene on the Place du Pantheon!
by my life! urchins who were with their nurses but yesterday!
If one were to squeeze their noses, milk would burst out.
And they deliberate to-morrow, at midday. What are we coming to?
What are we coming to? It is clear that we are making for the abyss.
That is what the descamisados have brought us to! To deliberate
on the citizen artillery! To go and jabber in the open air over the
jibes of the National Guard! And with whom are they to meet there?
Just see whither Jacobinism leads. I will bet anything you like,
a million against a counter, that there will be no one there but
returned convicts and released galley-slaves. The Republicans and
the galley-slaves,--they form but one nose and one handkerchief.
Carnot used to say: `Where would you have me go, traitor?'
Fouche replied: `Wherever you please, imbecile!'  That's what the
Republicans are like."

"That is true," said Theodule.

M. Gillenormand half turned his head, saw Theodule, and went on:--

"When one reflects that that scoundrel was so vile as to turn carbonaro!
Why did you leave my house? To go and become a Republican! Pssst!
In the first place, the people want none of your republic, they have
common sense, they know well that there always have been kings,
and that there always will be; they know well that the people are
only the people, after all, they make sport of it, of your republic--
do you understand, idiot? Is it not a horrible caprice? To fall
in love with Pere Duchesne, to make sheep's-eyes at the guillotine,
to sing romances, and play on the guitar under the balcony
of '93--it's enough to make one spit on all these young fellows,
such fools are they! They are all alike. Not one escapes.
It suffices for them to breathe the air which blows through the
street to lose their senses. The nineteenth century is poison.
The first scamp that happens along lets his beard grow like a goat's,
thinks himself a real scoundrel, and abandons his old relatives.
He's a Republican, he's a romantic. What does that mean, romantic?
Do me the favor to tell me what it is. All possible follies.
A year ago, they ran to Hernani. Now, I just ask you, Hernani!
antitheses! abominations which are not even written in French!
And then, they have cannons in the courtyard of the Louvre.
Such are the rascalities of this age!"

"You are right, uncle," said Theodule.

M. Gillenormand resumed:--

"Cannons in the courtyard of the Museum! For what purpose?
Do you want to fire grape-shot at the Apollo Belvedere? What have
those cartridges to do with the Venus de Medici? Oh! the young men
of the present day are all blackguards! What a pretty creature is their
Benjamin Constant! And those who are not rascals are simpletons!
They do all they can to make themselves ugly, they are badly dressed,
they are afraid of women, in the presence of petticoats they have a
mendicant air which sets the girls into fits of laughter; on my word
of honor, one would say the poor creatures were ashamed of love.
They are deformed, and they complete themselves by being stupid;
they repeat the puns of Tiercelin and Potier, they have sack coats,
stablemen's waistcoats, shirts of coarse linen, trousers of coarse cloth,
boots of coarse leather, and their rigmarole resembles their plumage.
One might make use of their jargon to put new soles on their old shoes.
And all this awkward batch of brats has political opinions,
if you please. Political opinions should be strictly forbidden.
They fabricate systems, they recast society, they demolish the monarchy,
they fling all laws to the earth, they put the attic in the cellar's
place and my porter in the place of the King, they turn Europe
topsy-turvy, they reconstruct the world, and all their love
affairs consist in staring slily at the ankles of the laundresses
as these women climb into their carts. Ah! Marius! Ah! you
blackguard! to go and vociferate on the public place! to discuss,
to debate, to take measures! They call that measures, just God!
Disorder humbles itself and becomes silly. I have seen chaos,
I now see a mess. Students deliberating on the National Guard,--
such a thing could not be seen among the Ogibewas nor the Cadodaches!
Savages who go naked, with their noddles dressed like a shuttlecock,
with a club in their paws, are less of brutes than those bachelors
of arts! The four-penny monkeys! And they set up for judges!
Those creatures deliberate and ratiocinate! The end of the world
is come! This is plainly the end of this miserable terraqueous globe!
A final hiccough was required, and France has emitted it.
Deliberate, my rascals! Such things will happen so long as they
go and read the newspapers under the arcades of the Odeon.
That costs them a sou, and their good sense, and their intelligence,
and their heart and their soul, and their wits. They emerge thence,
and decamp from their families. All newspapers are pests; all, even the
Drapeau Blanc! At bottom, Martainville was a Jacobin. Ah! just
Heaven! you may boast of having driven your grandfather to despair,
that you may!"

"That is evident," said Theodule.

And profiting by the fact that M. Gillenormand was taking breath,
the lancer added in a magisterial manner:--

"There should be no other newspaper than the Moniteur, and no
other book than the Annuaire Militaire."

M. Gillenormand continued:--

"It is like their Sieyes! A regicide ending in a senator;
for that is the way they always end. They give themselves a scar
with the address of thou as citizens, in order to get themselves
called, eventually, Monsieur le Comte. Monsieur le Comte as big
as my arm, assassins of September. The philosopher Sieyes!
I will do myself the justice to say, that I have never had any better
opinion of the philosophies of all those philosophers, than of the
spectacles of the grimacer of Tivoli! One day I saw the Senators
cross the Quai Malplaquet in mantles of violet velvet sown with bees,
with hats a la Henri IV. They were hideous. One would have pronounced
them monkeys from the tiger's court. Citizens, I declare to you,
that your progress is madness, that your humanity is a dream,
that your revolution is a crime, that your republic is a monster,
that your young and virgin France comes from the brothel, and I
maintain it against all, whoever you may be, whether journalists,
economists, legists, or even were you better judges of liberty,
of equality, and fraternity than the knife of the guillotine!
And that I announce to you, my flne fellows!"

"Parbleu!" cried the lieutenant, "that is wonderfully true."

M. Gillenormand paused in a gesture which he had begun, wheeled round,
stared Lancer Theodule intently in the eyes, and said to him:--

"You are a fool."

BOOK SIXTH.--THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO STARS

CHAPTER I

THE SOBRIQUET: MODE OF FORMATION OF FAMILY NAMES

Marius was, at this epoch, a handsome young man, of medium stature,
with thick and intensely black hair, a lofty and intelligent brow,
well-opened and passionate nostrils, an air of calmness and sincerity,
and with something indescribably proud, thoughtful, and innocent
over his whole countenance. His profile, all of whose lines
were rounded, without thereby losing their firmness, had a certain
Germanic sweetness, which has made its way into the French physiognomy
by way of Alsace and Lorraine, and that complete absence of angles
which rendered the Sicambres so easily recognizable among the Romans,
and which distinguishes the leonine from the aquiline race.
He was at that period of life when the mind of men who think
is composed, in nearly equal parts, of depth and ingenuousness.
A grave situation being given, he had all that is required to
be stupid: one more turn of the key, and he might be sublime.
His manners were reserved, cold, polished, not very genial.
As his mouth was charming, his lips the reddest, and his teeth the
whitest in the world, his smile corrected the severity of his face,
as a whole. At certain moments, that pure brow and that voluptuous
smile presented a singular contrast. His eyes were small, but his
glance was large.

At the period of his most abject misery, he had observed that
young girls turned round when he passed by, and he fled or hid,
with death in his soul. He thought that they were staring at him
because of his old clothes, and that they were laughing at them;
the fact is, that they stared at him because of his grace, and that
they dreamed of him.

This mute misunderstanding between him and the pretty passers-by
had made him shy. He chose none of them for the excellent reason
that he fled from all of them. He lived thus indefinitely,--
stupidly, as Courfeyrac said.

Courfeyrac also said to him: "Do not aspire to be venerable"
[they called each other thou; it is the tendency of youthful
friendships to slip into this mode of address]. "Let me give you
a piece of advice, my dear fellow. Don't read so many books,
and look a little more at the lasses. The jades have some good
points about them, O Marius! By dint of fleeing and blushing,
you will become brutalized."

On other occasions, Courfeyrac encountered him and said:--"Good morning,
Monsieur l'Abbe!"

When Courfeyrac had addressed to him some remark of this nature,
Marius avoided women, both young and old, more than ever for a week
to come, and he avoided Courfeyrac to boot.

Nevertheless, there existed in all the immensity of creation, two women
whom Marius did not flee, and to whom he paid no attention whatever.
In truth, he would have been very much amazed if he had been informed
that they were women. One was the bearded old woman who swept
out his chamber, and caused Courfeyrac to say: "Seeing that his
servant woman wears his beard, Marius does not wear his own beard."
The other was a sort of little girl whom he saw very often,
and whom he never looked at.

For more than a year, Marius had noticed in one of the walks of
the Luxembourg, the one which skirts the parapet of the Pepiniere,
a man and a very young girl, who were almost always seated side
by side on the same bench, at the most solitary end of the alley,
on the Rue de l'Ouest side. Every time that that chance which
meddles with the strolls of persons whose gaze is turned inwards,
led Marius to that walk,--and it was nearly every day,--he found
this couple there. The man appeared to be about sixty years of age;
he seemed sad and serious; his whole person presented the robust
and weary aspect peculiar to military men who have retired from
the service. If he had worn a decoration, Marius would have said:
"He is an ex-officer." He had a kindly but unapproachable air,
and he never let his glance linger on the eyes of any one.
He wore blue trousers, a blue frock coat and a broad-brimmed hat,
which always appeared to be new, a black cravat, a quaker shirt,
that is to say, it was dazzlingly white, but of coarse linen. A grisette
who passed near him one day, said: "Here's a very tidy widower."
His hair was very white.

The first time that the young girl who accompanied him came and
seated herself on the bench which they seemed to have adopted,
she was a sort of child thirteen or fourteen years of age, so thin
as to be almost homely, awkward, insignificant, and with a possible
promise of handsome eyes. Only, they were always raised with a sort
of displeasing assurance. Her dress was both aged and childish,
like the dress of the scholars in a convent; it consisted of a
badly cut gown of black merino. They had the air of being father
and daughter.

Marius scanned this old man, who was not yet aged, and this little girl,
who was not yet a person, for a few days, and thereafter paid no
attention to them. They, on their side, did not appear even to see him.
They conversed together with a peaceful and indifferent air. The girl
chattered incessantly and merrily. The old man talked but little, and,
at times, he fixed on her eyes overflowing with an ineffable paternity.

Marius had acquired the mechanical habit of strolling in that walk.
He invariably found them there.

This is the way things went:--

Marius liked to arrive by the end of the alley which was furthest
from their bench; he walked the whole length of the alley, passed in
front of them, then returned to the extremity whence he had come,
and began again. This he did five or six times in the course
of his promenade, and the promenade was taken five or six times
a week, without its having occurred to him or to these people
to exchange a greeting. That personage, and that young girl,
although they appeared,--and perhaps because they appeared,--
to shun all glances, had, naturally, caused some attention on the
part of the five or six students who strolled along the Pepiniere
from time to time; the studious after their lectures, the others
after their game of billiards. Courfeyrac, who was among the last,
had observed them several times, but, finding the girl homely,
he had speedily and carefully kept out of the way. He had fled,
discharging at them a sobriquet, like a Parthian dart.
Impressed solely with the child's gown and the old man's hair,
he had dubbed the daughter Mademoiselle Lanoire, and the father,
Monsieur Leblanc, so that as no one knew them under any other title,
this nickname became a law in the default of any other name.
The students said: "Ah! Monsieur Leblanc is on his bench."
And Marius, like the rest, had found it convenient to call this
unknown gentleman Monsieur Leblanc.

We shall follow their example, and we shall say M. Leblanc,
in order to facilitate this tale.

So Marius saw them nearly every day, at the same hour, during the
first year. He found the man to his taste, but the girl insipid.

CHAPTER II

LUX FACTA EST

During the second year, precisely at the point in this history
which the reader has now reached, it chanced that this habit of
the Luxembourg was interrupted, without Marius himself being quite
aware why, and nearly six months elapsed, during which he did not set
foot in the alley. One day, at last, he returned thither once more;
it was a serene summer morning, and Marius was in joyous mood,
as one is when the weather is fine. It seemed to him that he had
in his heart all the songs of the birds that he was listening to,
and all the bits of blue sky of which he caught glimpses through
the leaves of the trees.

He went straight to "his alley," and when he reached the end of it
he perceived, still on the same bench, that well-known couple.
Only, when he approached, it certainly was the same man; but it seemed
to him that it was no longer the same girl. The person whom he now
beheld was a tall and beautiful creature, possessed of all the most
charming lines of a woman at the precise moment when they are still
combined with all the most ingenuous graces of the child; a pure
and fugitive moment, which can be expressed only by these two words,--
"fifteen years."  She had wonderful brown hair, shaded with threads
of gold, a brow that seemed made of marble, cheeks that seemed made
of rose-leaf, a pale flush, an agitated whiteness, an exquisite mouth,
whence smiles darted like sunbeams, and words like music, a head
such as Raphael would have given to Mary, set upon a neck that Jean
Goujon would have attributed to a Venus. And, in order that nothing
might be lacking to this bewitching face, her nose was not handsome--
it was pretty; neither straight nor curved, neither Italian nor Greek;
it was the Parisian nose, that is to say, spiritual, delicate,
irregular, pure,--which drives painters to despair, and charms poets.

When Marius passed near her, he could not see her eyes, which were
constantly lowered. He saw only her long chestnut lashes,
permeated with shadow and modesty.