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– Le cheminement intérieur de Jean Valjean, entre devoir, sacrifice et espoir.
– Les destins croisés de Cosette, Marius et des autres protagonistes.
– Une réflexion profonde sur la justice, l’amour, la foi et la liberté.
– Le contexte historique bouleversé par les luttes sociales et politiques de la France du XIXᵉ siècle.
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Parce que Victor Hugo y mêle habilement drame, poésie et humanisme, offrant une conclusion inoubliable à l’une des plus grandes histoires jamais écrites.
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– Ceux qui souhaitent redécouvrir Les Misérables dans leur intégralité.
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In this fifth and final volume of “Les Misérables,” Victor Hugo leads us toward the moving conclusion of this human epic. Jean Valjean, aged and scarred by trials, sees his destiny unfold around Cosette, now married to Marius. Long-kept secrets threaten to burst forth, while the shadows of the past return to haunt the protagonists. Between sacrifice, redemption , and revealed truth, this story explores the final struggles of a man who has spent his life seeking redemption. Prepare to discover the moving end of this timeless story. Chapter 1. The Charybdis of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Scylla of the Faubourg du Temple. The two most memorable barricades that the observer of social illnesses can mention do not belong to the period in which the action of this book is set. These two barricades, both symbols , in two different aspects, of a formidable situation, emerged from the ground during the fatal insurrection of June 1848, the greatest street war that history has seen. It sometimes happens that, even against principles, even against liberty , equality and fraternity, even against universal suffrage, even against the government of all by all, from the depths of its anxieties, its discouragements, its destitutions, its fevers, its distresses, its miasmas, its ignorances, its darkness, this great despair, the rabble, protests, and the populace gives battle to the people. The beggars attack the common law; the ochlocracy rises up against the demos. These are lugubrious days; for there is always a certain amount of law even in this madness, there is suicide in this duel; and these words, which are intended to be insults, beggar, rabble, ochlocracy, populace, alas! rather acknowledge the fault of those who reign than the fault of those who suffer; rather the fault of the privileged than the fault of the disinherited. As for us, we never pronounce these words without pain and without respect, for, when philosophy probes the facts to which they correspond, it often finds many greatnesses alongside the miseries. Athens was an ochlocracy; the beggars made Holland; the populace more than once saved Rome; and the rabble followed Jesus Christ. There is no thinker who has not sometimes contemplated the magnificences of below. It was of this rabble that Saint Jerome doubtless had in mind, and of all these poor people, and of all these vagabonds, and of all these wretches from whom the apostles and martyrs sprang, when he said these mysterious words: _Fex urbis, lex orbis._ The exasperations of this suffering and bleeding crowd, its violence against the principles which are its life, its acts of violence against the law, are popular coups d’état, and must be repressed. The honest man devotes himself to it, and, out of love for this crowd, he fights it. But how excusable he feels it while standing up to it! How he venerates it while resisting it! This is one of those rare moments when, in doing what one must do, one feels something disconcerting and which almost advises against going further; one persists, one must; but a satisfied conscience is sad, and the fulfillment of duty is complicated by a pang of heart. June 1848 was, let us hasten to say, a fact apart, and almost impossible to classify in the philosophy of history. All the words we have just spoken must be set aside when it comes to this extraordinary riot where one felt the holy anxiety of labor demanding its rights. It had to be fought, and it was the duty, because it attacked the Republic. But, at bottom, what was June 1848? A revolt of the people against itself. Where the subject is not lost sight of, there is no digression; let us therefore be allowed to stop the reader’s attention for a moment on the two absolutely unique barricades of which we have just spoken and which characterized this insurrection. One blocked the entrance to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; the other defended the approach to the Faubourg du Temple; those before whom these two terrifying masterpieces of the Civil War stood, under the brilliant blue June sky, will never forget them. The Saint-Antoine barricade was monstrous; it was three stories high and seven hundred feet wide. It barred from one corner to the other the vast mouth of the Faubourg, that is to say, three streets; ravined, jagged, indented, chopped, crenellated with an immense rent, buttressed by mounds which were themselves bastions, pushing up capes here and there, powerfully leaning against the two great promontories of houses in the Faubourg, it rose like a cyclopean levee at the bottom of the formidable square which saw the 14th of July. Nineteen barricades were stacked in tiers in the depths of the streets behind this mother barricade. Just by looking at it, one could feel in the suburb the immense, agonizing suffering that had arrived at that extreme moment when distress wants to become a catastrophe. What was this barricade made of? From the collapse of three six-story houses, demolished on purpose, some said. From the prodigy of all anger, said others. It had the lamentable aspect of all the constructions of hatred: ruin. One could say: who built this? One could also say: who destroyed this? It was the improvisation of the boiling. Look! This door! This gate! This awning! This doorframe! This broken stove! This cracked pot! Give it all! Throw it all away! Push, roll, dig, dismantle, upset, collapse everything! It was the collaboration of the paving stone, the rubble, the beam, the iron bar, the rag, the broken tile, the stripped chair, the cabbage stalk, the rag, the tatters, and the curse. It was big and it was small. It was the abyss parodied on the spot by the hubbub. The mass close to the atom; the torn-off section of wall and the broken bowl; a menacing fraternization of all the debris; Sisyphus had thrown his rock there and Job his shard. In short, terrible. It was the acropolis of the barefoot. Overturned carts were making havoc on the embankment; an immense cart was spread across it, its axle towards the sky, and seemed a scar on this tumultuous façade, an omnibus, gaily hoisted by force of arms to the very summit of the heap, as if the architects of this savagery had wanted to add childishness to terror, offered its unharnessed pole to who knows what horses of the air. This gigantic heap, alluvium of the riot, represented to the mind an Ossa on Pelion of all the revolutions; 93 on 89, the 9th of Thermidor on the 10th of August, the 18th of Brumaire on the 21st of January, Vendémiaire on Prairial, 1848 on 1830. The place was worth the trouble, and this barricade was worthy of appearing on the very spot where the Bastille had disappeared. If the ocean made dikes, it is thus that it would build them. The fury of the flood was imprinted on this misshapen congestion. What flood? The crowd. One thought one saw a petrified din. One thought one heard buzzing, above this barricade, as if they had been there on their hive, the enormous dark bees of violent progress. Was it a thicket? Was it a bacchanal? Was it a fortress? Vertigo seemed to have built it with the strokes of its wings. There was a cesspool in this redoubt and something Olympian in this jumble. There one could see, in a jumble full of despair, roof rafters, pieces of attic rooms with their wallpaper, window frames with all their panes stuck in the rubble, waiting for the cannon, unsealed chimneys, cupboards, tables, benches, a howling upside down, and a thousand indigent things, the very refuse of the beggar, which contain at once fury and nothingness. One would have said that it was the rags of a people, rags of wood, iron, bronze, stone, and that the Faubourg Saint-Antoine had pushed it there to its door with a colossal blow of broom, making his misery his barricade. Blocks like logs, dislocated chains, battened frames in the form of gallows, horizontal wheels emerging from the rubble, amalgamated into this edifice of anarchy the somber figure of the old tortures suffered by the people. The Saint-Antoine barricade made a weapon of everything; everything that civil war can throw at the head of society came out of it; it was not combat, it was paroxysm; the carbines which defended this redoubt, among which there were some blunderbusses, sent crumbs of earthenware, knucklebones, coat buttons, even bedside table castors, dangerous projectiles because of the copper. This barricade was frenzied; it threw into the clouds an inexpressible clamour; At certain moments, provoking the army, it was covered with crowds and storms, a throng of flaming heads crowned it; a swarm filled it; it had a thorny crest of rifles, sabers, sticks, axes, pikes and bayonets; a vast red flag flapped in the wind; one could hear the cries of command, the songs of attack, the rolling of drums, the sobs of women, and the dark burst of laughter of the starving. It was immense and alive; and, as from the back of an electric beast, a crackling of lightning issued from it. The spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this summit where rumbled this voice of the people which resembled the voice of God; a strange majesty emanated from this titanic basket of rubble. It was a heap of garbage and it was Sinai. As we said above, she attacked in the name of the Revolution, what? The Revolution. It, this barricade, chance, disorder, dismay, misunderstanding, the unknown, it had before it the Constituent Assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage , the nation, the Republic; and it was the Carmagnole defying the Marseillaise. A senseless challenge, but a heroic one, for this old suburb is a hero. The suburb and its redoubt lent each other a hand. The suburb supported the redoubt, the redoubt backed up against the suburb. The vast barricade spread out like a cliff where the strategy of the African generals was shattered . Its caverns, its excrescences, its warts, its humps, grimaced, so to speak, and sneered beneath the smoke.
The grapeshot vanished into the formless; the shells sank into it, engulfed themselves, plunged into it; the cannonballs only succeeded in making holes; what was the point of cannonading chaos? And the regiments, accustomed to the fiercest visions of war, looked with a worried eye at this kind of redoubt, a wild beast, by the bristling boar, and by the enormity of the mountain. A quarter of a league away, from the corner of Rue du Temple which opens onto the boulevard near the Château-d’Eau, if one were to boldly thrust one’s head beyond the point formed by the front of the Dallemagne store, one could see in the distance, beyond the canal, in the street which climbs the Belleville ramps, at the highest point of the climb, a strange wall reaching to the second floor of the facades, a sort of link from the houses on the right to the houses on the left, as if the street had folded back its highest wall of its own accord to close abruptly. This wall was built with paving stones. It was straight, correct, cold, perpendicular, leveled at right angles, drawn with a line, aligned with a plumb line. The cement was undoubtedly lacking, but as with certain Roman walls, without disturbing its rigid architecture. At its height one could guess its depth. The entablature was mathematically parallel to the base. From space to space, on its gray surface, one could distinguish almost invisible loopholes that resembled black threads . These loopholes were separated from each other by equal intervals. The street was deserted as far as the eye could see. All the windows and all the doors were closed. In the background stood this barrier which made the street a dead end; a motionless and quiet wall; no one could be seen there, nothing could be heard; not a cry, not a noise, not a breath. A sepulchre. The dazzling June sun flooded this terrible thing with light. It was the barricade of the Faubourg du Temple. As soon as one arrived on the ground and saw it, it was impossible, even for the boldest, not to become pensive before this mysterious apparition. It was adjusted, fitted together, imbricated, rectilinear, symmetrical, and funereal. There was science and darkness there. One felt that the leader of this barricade was a geometer or a ghost. One looked at it and spoke quietly. From time to time, if someone, soldier, officer, or representative of the people, ventured to cross the lonely roadway, a high-pitched, faint whistle would be heard, and the passer-by would fall wounded or dead, or, if he escaped, a bullet would be seen to sink into some closed shutter, into a gap in the rubble, into the plaster of a wall. Sometimes a Biscayan. For the men on the barricade had made two small cannons from two sections of cast-iron gas pipes, plugged at one end with tow and stove-clay. No unnecessary expenditure of powder. Almost every shot landed. There were a few corpses here and there, and pools of blood on the paving stones. I remember a white butterfly that came and went in the street. Summer does not give up. In the surrounding area, the underside of the carriage doors was cluttered with wounded men. One felt one was being targeted by someone one could not see, and one understood that the entire length of the street was aimed at. Massed behind the kind of hump made at the entrance to the Faubourg du Temple by the curved canal bridge, the soldiers of the attacking column observed, grave and collected, this gloomy redoubt, this immobility, this impassivity, from which death issued. Some crawled flat on their stomachs to the top of the curve of the bridge, taking care that their shakos did not slip through. The valiant Colonel Monteynard admired this barricade with a shudder. “How well it is built!” he said to a representative. “Not one paving stone overhangs the other. It is porcelain.” At that moment a bullet shattered the cross on his chest, and he fell. “The cowards!” they said. “Let them show themselves! Let them be seen!” They dare not! They hide! The barricade of the Temple suburb, defended by eighty men, attacked by ten thousand, held out for three days. On the fourth, they did as at Zaatcha and Constantine, they broke through the houses, they came over the roofs, the barricade was taken. Not one of the eighty cowards thought of fleeing; all were killed there, except the leader, Barthélemy, of whom we will speak presently. The Saint-Antoine barricade was the tumult of thunder; the Temple barricade was silence. There was between these two redoubts the difference between the formidable and the sinister. One seemed like a mouth; the other a mask. Admitting that the gigantic and tenebrous insurrection of June was composed of anger and enigma, one felt in the first barricade the dragon and behind the second the sphinx. These two fortresses had been built by two men named, one Cournet, the other Barthélemy. Cournet had made the Saint-Antoine barricade; Barthélemy the Temple barricade. Each of them was the image of the one who had built it. Cournet was a man of tall stature; he had broad shoulders, a red face, a crushing fist, a bold heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible eye. Intrepid, energetic, irascible, stormy; the most cordial of men, the most formidable of fighters. War, struggle, the melee, were his breathing air and put him in a good mood. He had been a naval officer, and, from his gestures and his voice, one guessed that he came from the ocean and came from the storm; he continued the hurricane in the battle. Except for genius, there was in Cournet something of Danton, just as, apart from the divinity, there was in Danton something of Hercules. Barthélemy, thin, puny, pale, taciturn, was a kind of tragic boy who, slapped by a policeman, watched for him, waited for him, and killed him, and, at seventeen, was put in the galleys. He got out and made this barricade. Later, fatally, in London, both outlaws, Barthélemy killed Cournet. It was a funereal duel. Some time later, caught in the cogs of one of those mysterious adventures where passion is mixed, catastrophes where French justice sees extenuating circumstances and English justice sees only death, Barthélemy was hanged. The dark social construction is so made that, thanks to material destitution, thanks to moral obscurity, this unfortunate being who contained an intelligence, firm for sure, great perhaps, began in the galleys in France and ended in the gallows in England. Barthélemy, on occasion, flew only one flag; the black flag. Chapter 2. What to do in the abyss unless one speaks? Sixteen years count in the subterranean education of the riot, and June 1848 knew more than June 1832. Also the barricade of the rue de la Chanvrerie was only a sketch and an embryo, compared to the two colossus barricades that we have just sketched; but, for the time, it was formidable. The insurgents, under the eye of Enjolras, for Marius no longer looked at anything, had taken advantage of the night. The barricade had not only been repaired, but increased. It had been raised two feet. Iron bars driven into the paving stones resembled spears at a standstill. All sorts of rubble added and brought in from all sides complicated the tangle outside. The redoubt had been skillfully rebuilt as a wall on the inside and brushwood on the outside. The cobblestone staircase had been restored, allowing one to climb it like a citadel wall. The barricade had been cleaned, the lower room cleared of clutter, the kitchen used as an ambulance, the dressing of the wounded had been completed, the powder scattered on the ground and on the tables had been collected, bullets had been melted down, cartridges had been made, lint had been peeled off, fallen weapons had been distributed, the interior of the redoubt had been cleaned, the debris had been collected, and the corpses had been carried out. The dead had been placed in piles in the Mondétour alley, which was still under their control. The paving had been red for a long time in this place. Among the dead were four National Guardsmen from the suburbs. Enjolras had their uniforms put aside. Enjolras had advised two hours of sleep. Enjolras’s advice was an order. Yet, only three or four took advantage of it. Feuilly used those two hours to carve this inscription on the wall facing the cabaret: LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE! These three words, dug into the rubble with a nail, could still be read on this wall in 1848. The three women had taken advantage of the night’s respite to disappear for good; which made the insurgents breathe more easily. They had found a way to take refuge in a nearby house. Most of the wounded could and would still fight. There
were, on a litter of mattresses and bales of straw, in the kitchen that had become the ambulance, five seriously injured men, including two municipal guards. The municipal guards were the first to be bandaged. There remained in the lower room only Mabeuf under his black cloth and Javert tied to the post. “This is the room of the dead,” said Enjolras. Inside this room, barely lit by a candle, at the very back, the mortuary table being behind the post like a horizontal bar, a sort of large vague cross resulted from Javert standing and Mabeuf lying down. The pole of the omnibus, although truncated by the shooting, was still standing enough for a flag to be hung on it. Enjolras, who had that quality of a leader, of always doing what he said, attached to this pole the holey and bloody garment of the dead old man. No meal was possible anymore. There was neither bread nor meat. The fifty men at the barricade, in the sixteen hours they had been there, had quickly exhausted the meager provisions of the tavern. At a given moment, any barricade that holds inevitably becomes the raft of the Medusa. We had to resign ourselves to hunger. It was the early hours of that Spartan day of June 6 when, in the Saint-Merry barricade, Jeanne, surrounded by insurgents who were asking for bread, to all these fighters shouting: To eat! replied: Why? It is three o’clock. At four o’clock we will be dead. As we could no longer eat, Enjolras forbade drinking. He banned wine and rationed brandy. About fifteen full bottles had been found in the cellar, hermetically sealed. Enjolras and Combeferre examined them. Combeferre, coming up, said: “It’s from the old stock of Father Hucheloup, who started out as a grocer.” “It must be real wine,” Bossuet observed. “It’s lucky Grantaire is asleep. If he were up, we ‘d have trouble saving those bottles.” Enjolras, despite the murmurs, vetoed the fifteen bottles, and so that no one would touch them and they would be considered sacred, he had them placed under the table where Father Mabeuf lay. Around two o’clock in the morning, they counted themselves. There were still thirty-seven of them. Day was beginning to break. The torch had just been extinguished, having been replaced in its cobblestone cell. The interior of the barricade, that sort of little courtyard overlooking the street, was drowned in darkness and , through the vague twilight horror, resembled the deck of a disabled ship. The combatants, coming and going, moved there like black shapes. Above this frightening nest of shadow, the floors of the silent houses were outlined lividly; at the very top the chimneys were turning pale. The sky had that charming, indecisive shade which is perhaps white and perhaps blue. Birds flew over it with cries of happiness. The tall house which formed the back of the barricade, being turned towards the east, had a pink reflection on its roof. At the skylight of the third floor, the morning wind stirred the gray hair on the dead man’s head. “I am delighted that the torch has been extinguished,” Courfeyrac was saying to Feuilly. “That torch, frightened in the wind, bored me. It seemed to be afraid. The light of torches resembles the wisdom of cowards; it illuminates poorly, because it trembles. Dawn awakens minds like birds; everyone was talking. Joly, seeing a cat prowling along a gutter, extracted philosophy from it. “What is a cat?” he cried. “It’s a corrective. The good Lord, having made a mouse, said: ‘Look, I’ve done something stupid.’ And he made a cat. The cat is the mouse’s correction. The mouse, plus the cat, is the revised and corrected proof of creation. ” Combeferre, surrounded by students and workers, spoke of the dead, of Jean Prouvaire, Bahorel, Mabeuf, and even Cabuc, and of the severe sadness of Enjolras. He said: “Harmodius and Aristogiton, Brutus, Chéréas, Stephanus, Cromwell, Charlotte Corday, Sand, all had, after the event, their moment of anguish.” Our heart is so trembling and human life is such a mystery that, even in a civic murder, even in a liberating murder, if there is one, the remorse of having struck a man exceeds the joy of having served the human race. And, these are the twists and turns of the words exchanged, a minute later, by a transition from the verses of Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre compared the translators of the Georgics, Raux to Cournand, Cournand to Delille, indicating the few passages translated by Malfilâtre, particularly the prodigies of Caesar’s death; and with this word, Caesar, the conversation returned to Brutus. “Caesar,” said Combeferre, “has fallen justly. Cicero was severe for Caesar, and he was right. This severity is not a diatribe. When Zoilus insults Homer, when Maevius insults Virgil, when Visé insults Molière, when Pope insults Shakespeare, when Fréron insults Voltaire, it is an old law of envy and hatred that is executed; geniuses attract insult, great men are always more or less barked at. But Zoilus and Cicero are two. Cicero is a justice by thought just as Brutus is a justice by the sword. I blame, for my part, this last justice, the sword; but antiquity admitted it. Caesar, violator of the Rubicon, conferring, as coming from him, the dignities that came from the people, not rising at the entrance of the senate, did, as Eutropius says, the things of a king and almost of a tyrant, _regia ac pene tyrannica_. He was a great man; so much the worse, or so much the better; the lesson is higher. His twenty-three wounds affect me less than the spit on the forehead of Jesus Christ. Caesar is stabbed by the senators; Christ is slapped by the servants. In more outrage, one feels the god. Bossuet, dominating the talkers from the top of a pile of paving stones, cried out, carbine in hand: –O Cydathenæum, O Myrrhinus, O Probalinthe, O graces of the AEantis! Oh! who will make me pronounce the verses of Homer like a Greek of Laurium or Edapteon! Chapter 3. Enlightenment and Darkening. Enjolras had gone to reconnoiter. He had left by the Mondétour alley, winding along the houses. The insurgents, let us say, were full of hope. The way in which they had repelled the night attack almost made them disdain in advance the attack at daybreak. They awaited it and smiled at it. They doubted their success no more than their cause. Besides, help was obviously going to come to them. They counted on it. With that facility for triumphant prophecy which is one of the strengths of the fighting Frenchman, they divided the day that was about to open into three certain phases: at six o’clock in the morning, a regiment, “which had been worked on,” would turn; at noon, the insurrection of all Paris; at sunset , the revolution. The tocsin of Saint-Merry could be heard, which had not been silent for a minute since the day before; proof that the other barricade, the great one, that of Joan, still held. All these hopes were exchanged from one group to another in a sort of gay and formidable whisper which resembled the warlike buzzing of a beehive. Enjolras reappeared. He was returning from his somber eagle-like stroll in the darkness outside. He listened for a moment to all this joy with his arms crossed, a hand over his mouth. Then, fresh and rosy in the growing whiteness of the morning, he said: “The entire army of Paris is giving. A third of this army weighs on the barricade where you are. Also, the National Guard. I distinguished the shakos of the Fifth Line and the guidons of the Sixth Legion. You will be attacked in an hour. As for the people, they seethed yesterday, but this morning they do not move. Nothing to expect, nothing to hope for. Not a suburb or a regiment. You are abandoned.” These words fell on the buzzing of the groups, and had the same effect on a swarm as the first drop of a storm does on a swarm. All remained silent. There was a moment of inexpressible anguish in which one would have heard death flying. This moment was short. A voice, from the darkest depths of the groups, shouted to Enjolras: “So be it. Let us raise the barricade twenty feet high, and let us all remain there. Citizens, let us protect the corpses. Let us show that, if the people abandon the Republicans, the Republicans do not abandon the people. ” This word freed everyone’s thoughts from the painful cloud of individual anxieties . An enthusiastic acclamation greeted him. The name of the man who spoke thus was never known; he was some ignored porter, an unknown, a forgotten man, a heroic passerby, this great anonymous person always mixed up in human crises and social geneses who, at a given moment, says the decisive word in a supreme way, and who vanishes into the darkness after having represented for a minute, in the light of a flash, the people and God. This inexorable resolution was so much in the air of June 6, 1832 that, almost at the same time, in the barricade of Saint-Merry, the insurgents pushed this clamor which has remained historical and recorded at the trial: Let them come to our aid or not, what does it matter! Let us be killed here to the last man. As we see, the two barricades, although materially isolated, communicated. Chapter 4. Five less, one more. After the ordinary man, who decreed “the protest of the corpses,” had spoken and given the formula of the common soul, from all mouths came a strangely satisfied and terrible cry, funereal in meaning and triumphant in tone: “Long live death! Let us all stay here.” “Why all?” said Enjolras. “All! all! ” Enjolras continued: “The position is good, the barricade is beautiful. Thirty men are enough. Why sacrifice forty? ” They replied: “Because not one will want to leave. ” “Citizens,” cried Enjolras, and there was an almost irritated vibration in his voice, “the Republic is not rich enough in men to make useless expenditures. Glory is a waste. If, for a few, the duty is to leave, that duty must be done like any other.” Enjolras, the principled man, had over his coreligionists that sort of omnipotence which emerges from the absolute. However, whatever this omnipotence, there were murmurs. A leader to the tips of his nails, Enjolras, seeing that there were murmurs, insisted. He continued haughtily: “Let those who fear being reduced to thirty say so.” The murmurs redoubled. “Besides,” observed a voice in a group, “leaving is easy to say. The barricade is surrounded. ” “Not on the side of the market halls,” said Enjolras. “Rue Mondétour is free, and by Rue des Prêcheurs we can reach the Marché des Innocents. ” “And there,” continued another voice from the group, “we will be caught. We will fall into some grand guard of the line or the suburbs. They will see a man pass by in a smock and cap. Where do you come from? Are you not from the barricade?” And they’re looking at your hands. You smell of gunpowder. Shot. Enjolras, without replying, touched Combeferre’s shoulder, and the two of them entered the lower room. They came out a moment later. Enjolras held in his two outstretched hands the four uniforms he had had reserved. Combeferre followed him carrying the buffalo suits and shakos. “With this uniform,” said Enjolras, “one can mingle with the ranks and escape . Here’s enough for four. ” And he threw the four uniforms onto the uneven ground. There was no stirring in the stoic audience. Combeferre spoke. “Come,” he said, “we must have a little pity. Do you know what this is about? It’s about women. Let’s see. Are there women, yes or no? Are there children, yes or no?” Are there, yes or no, mothers who push cradles with their feet and who have heaps of little ones around them? Let the one of you who has never seen a wet nurse raise your hand. Ah! you want to be killed, I want it too, I who speak to you, but I do not want to feel the ghosts of women twisting their arms around me. Die, fine, but do not kill. Suicides like the one that is going to be accomplished here are sublime, but suicide is narrow, and does not want extension; and as soon as it touches those close to you, suicide is called murder. Think of the little blond heads, and think of the white hair. Listen, just now , Enjolras, he has just told me, saw at the corner of the rue du Cygne a lit casement, a candle in a poor window, at the fifth, and on the windowpane the wobbly shadow of an old woman’s head that looked as if she had spent the night waiting. Perhaps it’s the mother of one of you. Well, let him go, that one, and hurry up and tell his mother: Mother, here I am! Let him rest easy, we’ll get the job done here all the same. When you support your loved ones with your work, you no longer have the right to sacrifice yourself. That’s deserting the family. And those who have daughters, and those who have sisters! Do you think about it? You get killed, there you are dead, that’s good, and tomorrow? Young girls who have no bread, that’s terrible. The man begs, the woman sells. Ah! These charming beings, so graceful and so sweet, who have flower caps, who sing, who chatter, who fill the house with chastity, who are like a living perfume, who prove the existence of angels in heaven by the purity of virgins on earth, this Jeanne, this Lise, this Mimi, these adorable and honest creatures who are your blessing and your pride, ah my God, they are going to be hungry! What do you want me to tell you? There is a market for human flesh, and it is not with your shadowy hands, quivering around them, that you will prevent them from entering! Think of the street, think of the pavement covered with passersby, think of the shops in front of which women come and go, low-cut and in the mud. These women too were pure. Think of your sisters, those who have them. Poverty, prostitution, policemen, Saint-Lazare, that’s where these delicate, beautiful girls will fall, these fragile marvels of modesty, kindness, and beauty, fresher than the lilacs of May. Ah! You’ve been killed! Ah! You’re no longer here! That’s good; you wanted to remove the people from royalty, you give your daughters to the police. Friends, be careful, have compassion. Women, unfortunate women, we don’t usually think about them much. We rely on the fact that women haven’t received the education of men, we prevent them from reading, we prevent them from thinking, we prevent them from being involved in politics; will you prevent them from going to the morgue tonight and recognizing your corpses? Come now, those who have families must be good children and shake our hands and go away, and leave us to deal with this matter here on our own. I know very well that it takes courage to leave , it is difficult; but the more difficult it is, the more meritorious it is. They say: I have a gun, I am at the barricade, too bad, I’ll stay there. Too bad, it’s soon over. My friends, there is a tomorrow, you will not be there tomorrow, but your families will be. And what suffering! Look, a pretty, healthy child with cheeks like an apple, who babbles, who chatters, who jabbers, who laughs, who feels fresh under the kiss, do you know what becomes of it when it is abandoned? I saw one, very small, as tall as that. His father was dead. Some poor people had taken him in out of charity, but they had no bread for themselves. The child was always hungry. It was winter. He didn’t cry . We saw him go near the stove where there was never a fire and whose pipe, you know, was covered with yellow earth. The child would detach a little of this earth with his little fingers and eat it. His breathing was hoarse, his face was livid, his legs were weak, his belly was swollen. He said nothing. We spoke to him, he didn’t answer. He died. He was taken to die at the Necker hospice, where I saw him. I was an intern at that hospice. Now, if there are any fathers among you, fathers who have the joy of walking on Sundays holding in their good, sturdy hand the little hand of their child, let each of these fathers imagine that this child is his own. This poor kid, I remember him, I seem to see him, when he was naked on the anatomy table, his ribs protruded under his skin like the pits under the grass of a cemetery. They found a kind of mud in his stomach. He had ash in his teeth. Come on, let us feel our consciences and take counsel with our hearts. Statistics show that the mortality rate of abandoned children is fifty-five percent. I repeat, it concerns women, it concerns mothers, it concerns young girls, it concerns brats. Are we talking about you? We know very well what you are; we know very well that you are all brave, by Jove! We know very well that you all have in your souls the joy and the glory of giving your lives for the great cause; we know very well that you feel chosen to die usefully and magnificently, and that each of you holds on to your share of the triumph. Good . But you are not alone in this world. There are other beings of whom we must think. We must not be selfish. All bowed their heads with a somber expression. Strange contradictions of the human heart at its most sublime moments! Combeferre, who spoke thus, was not an orphan. He remembered the mothers of others, and he forgot his own. He was going to be killed. He was “selfish.” Marius, fasting, feverish, successively overcome by all hopes, stranded in pain, the darkest of shipwrecks, saturated with violent emotions, and feeling the end approaching, had sunk deeper and deeper into that visionary stupor which always precedes the fatal hour voluntarily accepted. A physiologist could have studied in him the growing symptoms of that feverish absorption known and classified by science, and which is to suffering what voluptuousness is to pleasure. Despair also has its ecstasy. Marius was there. He witnessed everything as if from outside; As we have said, the things that were happening before him seemed distant; he could distinguish the whole, but did not perceive the details. He saw the comings and goings through a blaze. He heard the voices speaking as if from the depths of an abyss. Yet this moved him. There was in this scene a point that pierced through to him, and which woke him up. He had only one idea left, to die, and he did not want to be distracted from it; but he reflected, in his funereal somnambulism, that in losing oneself, it is not forbidden to save someone. He raised his voice: “Enjolras and Combeferre are right,” he said; “no useless sacrifice. I join them, and we must hurry. Combeferre has told you the decisive things. There are some among you who have families, mothers, sisters, wives, children.” Let them leave the ranks. No one moved. “Married men and breadwinners out of the ranks!” repeated Marius. His authority was great. Enjolras was indeed the leader of the barricade, but Marius was its savior. “I order it!” shouted Enjolras. “I beg you,” said Marius. Then, stirred by Combeferre’s words, shaken by Enjolras’s order , moved by Marius’s prayer, these heroic men began to denounce one another. “It’s true,” said a young man to a grown man. “You are the father of a family. Go away.” “It’s rather you,” replied the man, “you have your two sisters that you are supporting.” And an unheard-of struggle broke out. It was a contest to see who would not allow themselves to be thrown out of the grave. “Let’s hurry,” said Courfeyrac, “in a quarter of an hour it will be too late. ” “Citizens,” continued Enjolras, “this is the Republic, and universal suffrage reigns. Designate yourselves those who must leave.” They obeyed. At the end of a few minutes, five were unanimously designated, and came out of the ranks. “There are five of them!” cried Marius. ” There were only four in uniform. ” “Well,” replied the five, “one must remain.” And it was a question of who would stay, and who would find reasons for the others not to stay. The generous quarrel began again. “You, you have a wife who loves you.” “You, you have your old mother.” “You, You no longer have either father or mother, what will become of your three little brothers? You are the father of five children. You have the right to live, you are seventeen, it is too soon. These great revolutionary barricades were rendezvous of heroism. The improbable was simple there. These men did not surprise one another. “Do it quickly,” Courfeyrac repeated. Groups shouted to Marius: “Designate, you, the one who must remain. ” “Yes,” said the five, “choose. We will obey you. ” Marius no longer believed in any possible emotion. However, at this idea, choosing a man for death, all his blood flowed back to his heart. He would have turned pale, if he could have turned pale again. He advanced towards the five who were smiling at him, and each one, their eyes full of that great flame which one sees at the bottom of the story about Thermopylae, shouted to him: “Me! Me! Me! ” And Marius, stupidly, counted them; there were still five of them! Then his gaze fell upon the four uniforms. At that instant, a fifth uniform fell, as if from the sky, upon the other four. The fifth man was saved. Marius raised his eyes and recognized M. Fauchelevent. Jean Valjean had just entered the barricade. Whether by information, instinct, or chance, he was arriving by the Alley Mondétour. Thanks to his National Guard uniform, he had passed easily. The patrol boat placed by the insurgents in the Rue Mondétour had no business giving the alarm signal for a lone National Guard. It had allowed him to enter the street, saying to itself: it was probably a reinforcement, or at worst a prisoner. The moment was too serious for the sentry to be distracted from his duty and his observation post. At the moment Jean Valjean entered the redoubt, no one had noticed him, all eyes being fixed on the five chosen ones and the four uniforms. Jean Valjean, for his part, had seen and heard, and silently stripped himself of his coat and thrown it on the pile of others. The emotion was indescribable. “Who is this man?” asked Bossuet. “He is,” replied Combeferre, “a man who saves others. ” Marius added in a grave voice: “I know him. This guarantee was enough for all.” Enjolras turned to Jean Valjean. “Citizen, be welcome.” And he added: “You know that we are going to die.” Jean Valjean, without replying, helped the insurgent he was saving to put on his uniform. Chapter 5. What a horizon one sees from the top of the barricade. The situation of all, in this fatal hour and in this inexorable place, had as its result and its summit the supreme melancholy of Enjolras. Enjolras had in him the fullness of the revolution; he was incomplete , however, as much as the absolute can be; he had too much of Saint-Just, and not enough of Anacharsis Cloots; however, his mind, in the society of the Friends of the ABC, had ended up undergoing a certain magnetism of the ideas of Combeferre; for some time, he had gradually emerged from the narrow form of dogma and allowed himself to be carried away by the broadenings of progress, and he had come to accept, as a definitive and magnificent evolution, the transformation of the great French republic into an immense human republic. As for the immediate means, given a violent situation, he wanted them to be violent; in this, he did not vary ; and he had remained from that epic and formidable school summed up in this word: Ninety-three. Enjolras was standing on the cobblestone staircase, one of his elbows on the barrel of his rifle. He was thinking; he was shuddering, as if at the passing of breath; the places where death is have these tripod effects. From his eyes, full of the inner gaze, came forth a kind of stifled fire. Suddenly, he raised his head, his blond hair fell back like that of the angel on the dark quadriga made of stars, it was like a frightened lion’s mane in a blazing halo, and Enjolras cried out: “Citizens, do you imagine the future? The streets of cities flooded with lights, green branches on thresholds, sister nations, just men, old men blessing children, the past loving the present, thinkers in full liberty, believers in full equality, heaven for religion, God direct priest, human conscience become the altar, no more hatred, the fraternity of the workshop and the school, notoriety for penalty and reward, work for all, law for all, peace for all, no more bloodshed, no more wars, happy mothers! Taming matter is the first step; realizing the ideal is the second. Reflect on what progress has already done. Long ago, the first human races saw with terror pass before their eyes the hydra that breathed on the waters, the dragon that vomited fire, the griffin that was the monster of the air and that flew with the wings of an eagle and the claws of a tiger; frightening beasts that were above man. Man, however, has set his traps, the sacred traps of intelligence, and he has ended up trapping the monsters in them.
We have tamed the hydra, and it is called the steamer; we have tamed the dragon, and it is called the locomotive; we are on the point of taming the griffin, we already have it, and it is called the balloon.
The day when this Promethean work is completed and when man has definitively harnessed to his will the triple ancient Chimera, the hydra, the dragon and the griffin, he will be master of water, fire and air, and he will be for the rest of animated creation what the ancient gods were once for him. Courage, and forward! Citizens, where are we going? To science made government, to the force of things becoming the only public force, to natural law having its sanction and its penalty in itself and promulgating itself by evidence, to a dawning of truth corresponding to the dawning of day. We are going to the union of peoples; we are going to the unity of man. No more fictions; no more parasites. Reality governed by truth, that is the goal. Civilization will hold its foundations at the summit of Europe, and later at the center of the continents, in a great parliament of intelligence. Something similar has already been seen. The amphictyons had two sessions per year, one at Delphi, place of the gods, the other at Thermopylae, place of heroes. Europe will have its amphictyons; the globe will have its amphictyons. France carries this sublime future in its womb. This is the gestation of the nineteenth century. What Greece had sketched is worthy of being completed by France. Listen to me, you Feuilly, valiant worker, man of the people, man of the people. I venerate you. Yes, you see the future times clearly, yes, you are right. You had neither father nor mother, Feuilly; you adopted humanity as your mother and law as your father. You will die here, that is to say, triumph. Citizens, whatever happens today, by our defeat as well as by our victory, it is a revolution that we are going to make. Just as fires illuminate the whole city, revolutions illuminate the whole human race. And what revolution will we make? I have just said it, the revolution of Truth. From the political point of view, there is only one principle—the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of me over me is called Liberty. Where two or more of these sovereignties associate, the State begins. But in this association there is no abdication. Each sovereignty concedes a certain quantity of itself to form the common law. This quantity is the same for all. This identity of concession that each makes to all is called Equality. The common law is nothing other than the protection of all radiating upon the right of each. This protection of all over each is called Fraternity. The point of intersection of all these sovereignties that come together is called Society. This intersection being a junction, this point is a node. Hence what we call the social bond. Some say social contract, which is the same thing, the word contract being etymologically formed with the idea of bond. Let us agree on equality; for, if liberty is the summit, equality is the base. Equality, citizens, is not all vegetation level, a society of tall blades of grass and small oaks; a neighborhood of jealousies castrating each other; it is, civilly, all aptitudes having the same openness; politically, all votes having the same weight; religiously, all consciences having the same right. Equality has an organ: free and compulsory education. The right to the alphabet, that is where we must begin. Primary school imposed on all, secondary school offered to all, that is the law. From the identical school comes the equal society. Yes, education! Light! Light! Everything comes from light and everything returns to it. Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Then nothing will be like the old story; we will no longer have to fear, as today, a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, an armed rivalry of nations, an interruption of civilization dependent on a marriage of kings, a birth in hereditary tyrannies, a partition of peoples by congress, a dismemberment by collapse of dynasties, a combat of two religions meeting head-on, like two goats of the shadow, on the bridge of infinity; we will no longer have to fear famine, exploitation, prostitution through distress, misery through unemployment, and the scaffold, and the sword, and battles, and all the brigandage of chance in the forest of events. One could almost say: there will be no more events. We will be happy. Humankind will fulfill its law as the terrestrial globe fulfills its own; harmony will be reestablished between the soul and the star. The soul will gravitate around the truth as the star around the light. Friends, the hour in which we are and in which I speak to you is a dark hour; but these are the terrible purchases of the future. A revolution is a toll. Oh! humankind will be delivered, raised up and consoled! We affirm it to it on this barricade. From where will the cry of love be raised, if not from the height of sacrifice? O my brothers, this is the place where those who think and those who suffer meet; This barricade is not made of paving stones, beams, or iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas and a heap of pain. Misery meets the ideal there. Day embraces night there and says to it: I will die with you and you will be reborn with me. From the embrace of all desolations springs faith. Sufferings bring here their agony, and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality will mingle and compose our death. Brothers, whoever dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we enter a tomb completely permeated by dawn. Enjolras stopped rather than fell silent; his lips moved silently as if he continued to speak to himself, which made them look at him attentively, trying to hear him again . There was no applause; but they whispered for a long time. Speech being breath, the quivering of intelligences resembles the quivering of leaves. Chapter 6. Marius haggard, Javert laconic. Let us say what was going on in Marius’s thoughts. Let us remember the state of his soul. As we have just recalled, everything was nothing more to him than a vision. His appreciation was troubled. Marius, let us insist, was under the shadow of the great dark wings open over the dying. He felt himself entering the tomb, it seemed to him that he was already on the other side of the wall, and he saw more the faces of the living than with the eyes of a dead man. How was M. Fauchelevent there? Why was he there? What was he doing there? Marius did not ask himself all these questions. Besides, our despair having this peculiarity that it envelops others as well as ourselves, it seemed logical to him that everyone should come to die. Only he thought of Cosette with a pang of heart. Besides, M. Fauchevelent did not speak to him, did not look at him, and did not even seem to hear when Marius raised his voice to say: I know him. As for Marius, this attitude of M. Fauchelevent relieved him, and if one could use such a word for such impressions, we would say, pleased him. He had always felt an absolute impossibility of speaking to this enigmatic man who was at once equivocal and imposing for him. It was also a very long time since he had seen him; which, for Marius’s timid and reserved nature, increased the impossibility even more. The five designated men left the barricade by the Mondétour alley; they looked exactly like national guards. One of them left weeping. Before leaving, they embraced those who remained. When the five men sent back to life had left, Enjolras thought of the man condemned to death. He entered the lower room. Javert, tied to the pillar, was thinking. “Do you need anything?” Enjolras asked him. Javert replied: “When will you kill me? ” “Wait. We need all our cartridges right now. ” “Then give me a drink,” said Javert. Enjolras himself offered him a glass of water, and, as Javert was garroted, he helped him to drink. “Is that all?” continued Enjolras. “I’m uncomfortable at this post,” replied Javert. “You’re not being kind to have let me spend the night here. Tie me up as you please, but you can lay me on any table like the other. ” And with a nod of his head he indicated the corpse of M. Mabeuf. There was, as you will remember, at the back of the room a large, long table on which bullets had been melted and cartridges made. All the cartridges being made and all the powder used, this table was free. On Enjolras’s orders, four insurgents untied Javert from the post. While he was being untied, a fifth held a bayonet against his chest. His hands were left tied behind his back, a thin, strong whipping rope was placed around his feet, which enabled him to take fifteen-inch steps like those about to go up to the scaffold, and he was marched to the table at the back of the room where he was stretched out, tightly bound around the middle of his body. For greater safety, by means of a rope fixed to his neck, they added to the system of ligatures which made all escape impossible a kind of bond, called in prisons a martingale, which starts at the nape of the neck, branches off at the stomach, and joins the hands after passing between the legs. While Javert was being garroted, a man on the threshold of the door was watching him with singular attention. The shadow cast by this man made Javert turn his head. He raised his eyes and recognized Jean Valjean. He did not even flinch, proudly lowered his eyelid, and merely said : It is quite simple. Chapter 7. The situation worsens. Day was growing rapidly. But not a window opened, not a door ajar; it was dawn, not awakening. The end of the Rue de la Chanvrerie opposite the barricade had been evacuated by the troops, as we have said; it seemed free and opened to passersby with a sinister tranquility. The Rue Saint-Denis was as silent as the Avenue of the Sphinxes in Thebes. Not a living being in the crossroads, which were whitened by a reflection of the sun. Nothing is so gloomy as the brightness of deserted streets. Nothing could be seen, but one could hear it. A mysterious movement was taking place at a certain distance. It was evident that the critical moment was approaching. As the previous evening, the vedettes fell back; but this time all of them. The barricade was stronger than during the first attack. Since the departure of the five, it had been raised again. On the advice of the vedette who had observed the region of the market halls, Enjolras, fearing a surprise from behind, made a serious decision. He had the small passage of the Mondétour alley, which had remained free until then, barricaded. For this purpose, a few more lengths of houses were unpaved . In this way, the barricade, walled up along three streets, in front on the Rue de la Chanvrerie, on the left on the Rue du Cygne and de la Petite-Truanderie, on the right on the Rue Mondétour, was truly almost impregnable; it is true that one was fatally trapped there. It had three fronts, but no longer had any exit. “A fortress, but a mousetrap,” said Courfeyrac, laughing. Enjolras had about thirty paving stones piled up near the door of the cabaret , “torn out of excess,” said Bossuet. The silence was now so profound on the side from which the attack was to come that Enjolras made everyone return to their combat posts. A ration of brandy was distributed to all. Nothing is more curious than a barricade preparing for an assault. Everyone chooses their place as if at a theater. They lean against each other, they elbow their elbows, they shoulder each other. There are some who make stalls with paving stones. There is a corner of the wall that is in the way, they move away from it; there is a redan that can protect, they take shelter there. Left-handed people are precious; they take the places that are uncomfortable for others. Many arrange to fight sitting down. One wants to be comfortable to kill and comfortable to die. In the disastrous war of June 1848, an insurgent who had a formidable shot and was fighting from the top of a roof terrace had a Voltaire armchair brought to him; a shot from a grapeshot found him there. As soon as the leader ordered the general alert, all disorderly movements ceased; no more tugging from one to the other; no more cliques; no more asides; no more separate gangs; everything that is in people’s minds converges and changes into waiting for the assailant. A barricade before danger, chaos; in danger, discipline. Peril creates order. As soon as Enjolras took his double-barreled rifle and placed himself in a kind of niche he had reserved for himself, everyone fell silent. A crackling of small dry noises sounded confusedly along the cobblestone wall . It was the rifles that were being armed. Besides, the attitudes were prouder and more confident than ever; the excess of sacrifice is a strengthening; they no longer had hope, but they had despair. Despair, the last weapon, which sometimes gives victory; Virgil said so. Supreme resources come from extreme resolutions. Embarking on death is sometimes the means of escaping shipwreck; and the lid of the coffin becomes a lifeline. As the previous evening, all attention was turned, and one might almost say leaned, on the end of the street, now lit and visible. The wait was not long. The stirring began distinctly again in the direction of Saint-Leu, but it did not resemble the movement of the first attack. A rattle of chains, the disturbing jolt of a sledgehammer, a clang of brass jumping on the pavement, a sort of solemn crash, announced that a sinister scrap was approaching. There was a shudder in the bowels of these old peaceful streets, pierced and built for the fruitful circulation of interests and ideas, and which are not made for the monstrous rolling of the wheels of war. The fixity of the eyes of all the combatants at the end of the street became fierce. A piece of cannon appeared. The artillerymen pushed the piece; it was in its recess of firing; the fore-carriage had been detached; two supported the carriage, four were at the wheels, others followed with the caisson. The lit fuse could be seen. “Fire!” shouted Enjolras. The whole barricade fired, the detonation was frightful; an avalanche of smoke covered and erased the gun and the men; after a few seconds the cloud dissipated, and the gun and the men reappeared; the gun crews finished rolling it in front of the barricade slowly, correctly, and without haste. Not one was hit. Then the gun commander, pressing on the breech to raise the shot, began to aim the gun with the gravity of an astronomer aiming a telescope. “Bravo, gunners!” shouted Bossuet. And the whole barricade clapped their hands. A moment later, squarely placed in the middle of the street, astride the stream, the gun was in battery. A formidable mouth was open on the barricade. “Come on, gaie!” said Courfeyrac. “Here comes the brute. After the flick, the punch. The army extends its big paw towards us. The barricade is going to be seriously shaken. The fusillade feels, the cannon takes. “It’s a piece of eight, new model, in bronze,” added Combeferre. “These pieces, if you exceed the proportion of ten parts of tin to one hundred copper, are liable to burst. The excess of tin makes them too soft. It then happens that they have cellars and chambers in the light. To obviate this danger and be able to force the charge, it would perhaps be necessary to return to the fourteenth- century process, hooping, and to encircle the outside of the piece with a series of seamless steel rings, from the breech to the trunnion. In the meantime, the defect is remedied as best we can; we can recognize where the holes and caves are in the light of a cannon by means of the cat. But there is a better way, it is Gribeauval’s mobile star. –In the sixteenth century, observed Bossuet, the cannons were rifled. –Yes, replied Combeferre, this increases the ballistic power, but reduces the accuracy of the shot. Moreover, in short-range shooting, the trajectory does not have all the desirable stiffness, the parabola is exaggerated, the path of the projectile is no longer straight enough for it to be able to strike all the intermediate objects, a necessity of combat, however, the importance of which increases with the proximity of the enemy and the haste of the shot. This lack of tension of the curve of the projectile in the rifled cannons of the sixteenth century was due to the weakness of the charge; the weak charges, for this type of machine, are imposed by ballistic necessities, such as, for example, the preservation of the carriages. In short, the cannon, that despot, cannot do everything it wants; strength is a great weakness. A cannonball travels only 600 leagues per hour; light travels 70,000 leagues per second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon. “Reload the weapons,” said Enjolras. “How would the revetment of the barricade behave under the cannonball? Would the shot breach it? That was the question. While the insurgents were reloading their rifles, the artillerymen were loading the cannon. Anxiety was profound in the redoubt. The shot rang out, the detonation exploded. “Present!” cried a joyful voice. And at the same time as the cannonball hit the barricade, Gavroche fell into it. He was coming from the direction of the Rue du Cygne and had nimbly climbed over the secondary barricade which faced the maze of the Petite-Truanderie. Gavroche made more of an impression on the barricade than the cannonball. The cannonball had gotten lost in the jumble of rubble. At most, it had broken a wheel of the omnibus and finished off the old Anceau cart. Seeing this, the barricade began to laugh. “Go on,” Bossuet shouted to the gunners. Chapter 8. The gunners are being taken seriously. Gavroche was surrounded. But he had no time to say anything. Marius, shivering, took him aside . “What are you doing here?” “Here!” said the child. “And you?” And he looked fixedly at Marius with his epic effrontery. His two eyes widened with the proud clarity that was within. It was with a stern accent that Marius continued: “Who told you to come back? Did you at least deliver my letter to his address?” Gavroche was not without some remorse about this letter. In his haste to return to the barricade, he had gotten rid of it rather than delivered it. He was forced to admit to himself that he had entrusted it a little lightly to this stranger whose face he had not even been able to distinguish. It is true that this man was bareheaded, but that was not enough. In short, he was making little internal remonstrances on this subject and he feared Marius’s reproaches. To get out of the difficulty, he took the simplest course of action; he lied abominably. “Citizen, I gave the letter to the porter. The lady was asleep. She will have the letter when she wakes up. ” Marius, in sending this letter, had two aims: to say goodbye to Cosette and to save Gavroche. He had to be content with half of what he wanted. The sending of his letter, and the presence of M. Fauchelevent in the barricade, this connection presented itself to his mind. He pointed out M. Fauchelevent to Gavroche : “Do you know this man? ” “No,” said Gavroche. Gavroche, in fact, as we have just recalled, had only seen Jean Valjean at night. The troubled and morbid conjectures that had begun to form in Marius’s mind dissipated. Did he know M. Fauchelevent’s opinions? M. Fauchelevent was perhaps a republican. Hence his simple presence in this fight. Meanwhile, Gavroche was already at the other end of the barricade, shouting: “My rifle!” Courfeyrac made him give it back. Gavroche warned “the comrades,” as he called them, that the barricade was blocked. He had had great difficulty arriving. A battalion of the line, whose fasces were in the Petite-Truanderie, was observing the side of the Rue du Cygne; on the opposite side, the municipal guard occupied the Rue des Prêcheurs. Opposite, they had the bulk of the army. Having given this information, Gavroche added: “I authorize you to throw an unworthy charge at them.” Meanwhile, Enjolras, at his crenel, his ear pricked, was spying. The attackers, doubtless dissatisfied with the cannonball, had not repeated it. A company of regular infantry had come to occupy the end of the street, behind the gun. The soldiers were digging up the pavement and building a small, low wall with the paving stones, a sort of breastwork that was hardly more than eighteen inches high and which faced the barricade. At the left corner of this breastwork, the head of a battalion from the suburbs could be seen, massed on Rue Saint-Denis. Enjolras, on the lookout, thought he could distinguish the peculiar noise made when the canisters of grapeshot are removed from the caissons, and he saw the gun commander change the aim and tilt the muzzle slightly to the left. Then the gunners began to load the gun. The gun commander himself seized the shot-firer and brought him closer to the light. “Lower your head, rally the wall!” shouted Enjolras, and all on their knees along the barricade! The insurgents, scattered in front of the tavern and who had left their combat posts on Gavroche’s arrival, rushed pell-mell towards the barricade; but before Enjolras’s order was carried out, the discharge was made with the frightening rattle of a grapeshot. It was indeed one. The charge had been directed at the cut in the redoubt, had ricocheted off the wall, and this terrible ricochet had left two dead and three wounded. If this continued, the barricade was no longer tenable. The grapeshot entered. There was a murmur of consternation. “Let’s always prevent the second shot,” said Enjolras. And, lowering his rifle, he aimed the gun commander who, at that moment, leaning over the breech of the cannon, was correcting and definitively fixing the aim. This gun commander was a handsome gunnery sergeant, very young, blond, with a very gentle face, with the intelligent air proper to this predestined and formidable weapon which, by dint of perfecting itself in horror, must end up killing war. Combeferre, standing near Enjolras, was considering this young man. “What a pity!” said Combeferre. “What a hideous thing these butcheries are! Come on, when there are no more kings, there will be no more war. Enjolras, you aim at this sergeant, you don’t look at him.” Imagine that he is a charming young man, he is intrepid, you can see that he thinks, they are very educated, these young men of the artillery; he has a father, a mother, a family, he probably loves, he is at most twenty-five years old, he could be your brother. “He is,” said Enjolras. “Yes,” continued Combeferre, “and mine too. Well, let’s not kill him.” ” Leave me. It takes what it takes.” And a tear slowly rolled down Enjolras’s marble cheek. At the same time he pulled the trigger of his rifle. The flash flashed. The artilleryman turned twice, his arms outstretched in front of him and his head raised as if to suck in air, then threw himself back on his side on the gun and remained there without movement. You could see his back from the center of it , from the straight line of which a stream of blood flowed. The bullet had pierced his chest from one end to the other. He was dead. It was necessary to carry it away and replace it. It was indeed a few minutes gained. Chapter 9. Use of this old poaching talent and this infallible shot which influenced the condemnation 1796 Opinions were crossing in the barricade. The firing of the gun was about to begin again. It would not take a quarter of an hour with this grapeshot. It was absolutely necessary to cushion the blows. Enjolras gave this order: “We must put a mattress there.” “We don’t have one,” said Combeferre, “the wounded are on it. ” Jean Valjean, sitting apart on a boundary stone at the corner of the tavern, his rifle between his legs, had until this moment taken no part in what was happening. He seemed not to hear the combatants saying around him: “There is a rifle that does nothing.” At the order given by Enjolras, he rose. It will be remembered that upon the arrival of the assembly in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, an old woman, anticipating the bullets, had placed her mattress in front of her window. This window, an attic window, was on the roof of a six-story house situated a little outside the barricade. The mattress, placed across, supported at the bottom by two clothes-drying poles, was supported at the top by two ropes which, from a distance, looked like two strings and which were attached to nails driven into the doorframes of the attic. These two ropes could be seen distinctly against the sky like hair. “Can anyone lend me a double-barreled rifle?” said Jean Valjean. Enjolras, who had just reloaded his, held it out to him. Jean Valjean adjusted the attic window and fired. One of the two ropes of the mattress was cut. The mattress was now hanging by only a thread. Jean Valjean fired the second shot. The second rope whipped the attic window . The mattress slid between the two poles and fell into the street . The barricade applauded. All the voices cried out: “Here’s a mattress. ” “Yes,” said Combeferre, “but who will go and get it?” The mattress had indeed fallen outside the barricade, between the besieged and the besiegers. Now, the death of the gunnery sergeant having exasperated the troops, the soldiers, for some moments, had been lying flat on their stomachs behind the line of paving stones they had erected, and, to compensate for the enforced silence of the room, which was silent while waiting for its service to be reorganized, they had opened fire against the barricade. The insurgents did not respond to this musketry, to save ammunition. The fusillade broke at the barricade; but the street, which it filled with bullets, was terrible. Jean Valjean came out of the gap, entered the street, crossed the storm of bullets, went to the mattress, picked it up, loaded it on his back, and returned to the barricade. He himself put the mattress in the gap. He fixed it against the wall so that the artillerymen would not see it. This done, they waited for the grapeshot. It did not take long. The cannon vomited out its packet of buckshot with a roar. But there was no ricochet. The grapeshot misfired on the mattress. The intended effect was obtained. The barricade was preserved. “Citizen,” said Enjolras to Jean Valjean, “the Republic thanks you.” Bossuet admired and laughed. He exclaimed: “It is immoral that a mattress should have so much power. Triumph of that which bends over that which strikes down. But it doesn’t matter, glory to the mattress which cancels out a cannon! ” Chapter 10. Dawn. At that moment, Cosette was waking. Her room was narrow, clean, discreet, with a long easterly window overlooking the backyard of the house. Cosette knew nothing of what was happening in Paris. She hadn’t been there the day before, and she had already returned to her room when Toussaint had said: “It seems there’s a train.” Cosette had slept for a few hours, but well. She had had sweet dreams, which perhaps had something to do with the fact that her little bed was very white. Someone who was Marius had appeared to her in the light. She awoke with sunlight in her eyes, which at first seemed to her like a continuation of the dream. Her first thought emerging from this dream was a cheerful one. Cosette felt completely reassured. She was going through, like Jean Valjean a few hours before, that reaction of the soul which absolutely does not want misfortune. She began to hope with all her might without knowing why. Then a pang came over her. It was three days since she had seen Marius. But she told herself that he must have received her letter, that he knew where she was, and that he had so much wit, and that he would find a way to reach her. And that certainly today, and perhaps this very morning. It was broad daylight, but the ray of light was very horizontal, she thought that it was very early; that she must get up, however, to receive Marius. She felt that she could not live without Marius, and that consequently that was enough, and that Marius would come. No objection was admissible. All this was certain. It was already monstrous enough to have suffered three days. Marius absent for three days, that was horrible to God. Now, this cruel teasing from above was a trial endured. Marius was going to arrive, and would bring good news. Such is youth; it quickly wipes its eyes; it finds pain useless and does not accept it. Youth is the smile of the future before a stranger who is itself. It is natural for it to be happy. It seems that its breathing is filled with hope. Besides, Cosette could not manage to remember what Marius had told her about this absence which was to last only one day, and what explanation he had given her for it. Everyone has noticed with what skill a coin dropped on the ground runs to hide, and what art it has of making itself untraceable. There are thoughts that play the same trick on us; they nestle in a corner of our brain; it’s over; they’re lost; it’s impossible to recall them. Cosette was somewhat annoyed by the small, useless effort her memory was making. She told herself that it was very wrong of her and quite guilty of having forgotten words spoken by Marius. She got out of bed and performed the two ablutions of soul and body, her prayer and her toilet. One can, at a pinch, introduce the reader into a bridal chamber, not into a virginal chamber. Verse would hardly dare, prose should not. It is the interior of a flower still closed, it is a whiteness in the shadow, it is the intimate cell of a closed lily which must not be looked at by man until it has been looked at by the sun. The woman in bud is sacred. This innocent bed that uncovers itself, this adorable semi-nudity that is afraid of itself, this white foot that takes refuge in a slipper, this throat that veils itself before a mirror as if this mirror were an eye, this shirt that hurries to ride up and hide the shoulder for a piece of furniture that creaks or for a passing car, these knotted cords, these hooked clasps, these pulled laces, these tremors, these little shivers of cold and modesty, this exquisite fright of all movements, this almost winged anxiety where nothing is to be feared, the successive phases of the garment as charming as the clouds of dawn, it is not fitting that all this be recounted, and it is already too much to indicate it. The eye of man must be even more religious before the rising of a young girl than before the rising of a star. The possibility of attaining must turn into an increase of respect. The peach down, the plum’s ash, the radiant crystal of the snow, the butterfly’s wing powdered with feathers, are coarse things compared to this chastity that does not even know that it is chaste. The young girl is only a glimmer of dream and is not yet a statue. Her alcove is hidden in the dark part of the ideal. The indiscreet touch of the gaze brutalizes this vague half-light. Here, to contemplate is to profane. We will therefore show nothing of all this sweet little commotion of Cosette’s awakening. An oriental tale says that the rose was made white by God, but that Adam, having looked at it at the moment when it opened, was ashamed and turned pink. We are among those who feel forbidden before young girls and flowers, finding them venerable. Cosette dressed quickly, combed her hair, and fixed her hair, which was very simple in those days when women did not puff out their curls and headbands with cushions and barrels, and did not put crinolines in their hair. Then she opened the window and looked all around her, hoping to see some of the street, a corner of a house, a corner of the pavement, and to be able to watch for Marius there. But nothing could be seen from outside. The backyard was surrounded by fairly high walls, and had only a few gardens as an escape. Cosette declared these gardens hideous; for the first time in her life she found ugly flowers. The smallest bit of stream at the crossroads would have been much better for her. She decided to look at the sky, as if she thought that Marius might also come from there. Suddenly, she burst into tears. Not that it was mobility of soul; But hopes cut off by despondency, that was her situation. She felt confusedly something horrible. Things pass in the air, in fact. She told herself that she was sure of nothing, that to lose sight of herself was to lose herself; and the idea that Marius might well return to her from heaven appeared to her, no longer charming, but lugubrious. Then, such are these clouds, calm returned to her, and hope, and a sort of unconscious smile, but trusting in God. Everyone was still asleep in the house. A provincial silence reigned. No shutter was closed. The porter’s lodge was closed. Toussaint had not risen, and Cosette naturally thought that her father was asleep. She must have suffered greatly, and she did suffer well again, for she told herself that her father had been wicked; but she was counting on Marius. The eclipse of such a light was decidedly impossible. She prayed. At times she heard at a certain distance a kind of dull trembling, and she said: It is strange that the carriage doors are opened and closed so early . It was the cannon shots beating against the barricade. There was, a few feet below Cosette’s window, in the old, black cornice of the wall, a nest of swifts; the corbel of this nest projected a little beyond the cornice so that from above one could see the inside of this little paradise. The mother was there, opening her wings like a fan over her brood; the father fluttered, went away, then returned, bringing food and kisses in his beak. The rising day gilded this happy thing, the great law Multiply was there, smiling and august, and this sweet mystery blossomed in the glory of the morning. Cosette, her hair in the sun, her soul in chimeras, illuminated by love within and by the dawn without, leaned forward as if mechanically, and, almost without daring to admit to herself that she was thinking at the same time of Marius, began to look at these birds, this family, this male and this female, this mother and these young, with the profound trouble that a nest gives to a virgin. Chapter 11. The shot that misses nothing and kills no one. The fire of the assailants continued. Musketeering and grapeshot alternated, without much damage, in truth. Only the top of the facade of Corinth suffered; the window of the first floor and the attic windows of the roof, riddled with buckshot and biscayen, were slowly deforming. The fighters who had positioned themselves there had to withdraw. Besides, this is a tactic for attacking barricades: to fire for a long time, in order to exhaust the insurgents’ ammunition, if they make the mistake of replying. When one realizes, as their fire slows, that they have neither bullets nor powder left, one launches the assault. Enjolras had not fallen into this trap; the barricade did not respond. At each firing of the platoon, Gavroche puffed out his cheek with his tongue, a sign of high disdain. “All right,” he said, “tear up some canvas. We need lint.
” Courfeyrac called out the grapeshot for its lack of effect and said to the cannon: “You’re becoming diffuse, my good man. In battle, one gets intrigued like at a ball.” It is probable that this silence of the redoubt was beginning to disturb the besiegers and to make them fear some unexpected incident, and that they felt the need to see clearly through this pile of paving stones and to know what was happening behind this impassive wall which received the blows without responding. The insurgents suddenly perceived a helmet shining in the sun on a neighboring roof. A fireman was leaning against a high chimney and seemed there as a sentinel. His gaze plunged straight into the barricade. “There is a troublesome overseer,” said Enjolras. Jean Valjean had returned Enjolras’s carbine, but he had his rifle. Without saying a word, he aimed at the fireman, and, a second later, the helmet, struck by a bullet, fell noisily into the street. The terrified soldier hastened to disappear. A second observer took his place. This one was an officer. Jean
Valjean, who had reloaded his rifle, aimed at the newcomer, and sent the officer’s helmet to join the soldier’s helmet. The officer did not insist, and withdrew very quickly. This time the advice was understood. No one reappeared on the roof; and they gave up spying on the barricade. “Why did you not kill the man?” Bossuet asked Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean did not reply. Chapter 12. Disorder in favor of order. Bossuet whispered in Combeferre’s ear: “He didn’t answer my question. ” “He’s a man who does kindness with a rifle,” said Combeferre. “Those who have some memory of that already distant era know that the suburban National Guard was valiant against insurrections. It was particularly fierce and intrepid during the June days of 1832. A good innkeeper from Pantin, Les Vertus, or La Cunette, whose riot brought the “establishment” to a standstill, became a leonine when he saw his dance hall deserted, and got himself killed to save the order represented by the guinguette. In those times, both bourgeois and heroic, in the presence of ideas that had their knights, interests had their paladins. The prosaic nature of the motive took nothing away from the bravery of the movement. The decrease of a pile of crowns made bankers sing the Marseillaise. People shed their blood lyrically for the counter; and the shop, that immense diminutive of the fatherland, was defended with Lacedaemonian enthusiasm . At bottom, let us say, there was nothing in all this that was not very serious. It was the social elements that were entering into struggle, awaiting the day when they would find equilibrium. Another sign of this time was anarchy mixed with governmentalism (a barbaric name for the correct party). People were for order with indiscipline. The drum beat unexpectedly, on the command of such and such a colonel of the National Guard, reminders of caprice; such and such a captain went into action by inspiration; such and such a National Guard fought “by idea,” and on his own account. In moments of crisis, in “days,” people took advice less from their leaders than from their instincts. There were in the army of order real guerrillas, some of the sword like Fannicot, others of the pen like Henri Fonfrède. Civilization, unfortunately represented at that time more by an aggregation of interests than by a group of principles, was or believed itself to be in danger; it raised the cry of alarm; each, making himself the center, defended it, rescued it and protected it, at its head; and the first comer took it upon himself to save society. Zeal sometimes went as far as extermination. A platoon of national guards constituted itself, on its own authority, a council of war, and judged and executed a prisoner insurgent in five minutes. It was an improvisation of this sort that had killed Jean Prouvaire. A ferocious law of Lynch, which no party has the right to reproach the others for, because it is applied by the republic in America as by the monarchy in Europe . This law of Lynch was complicated by misunderstandings. One day during a riot, a young poet named Paul-Aimé Garnier was pursued along the Place Royale with bayonets fixed to his waist, and only escaped by taking refuge under the carriage entrance of number 6. They shouted: “Here’s another one of those Saint-Simonians!” and they wanted to kill him. Now, he had under his arm a volume of the memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon. A National Guardsman had read the word Saint-Simon on the book and shouted: “Death to you!” On June 6, 1832, a company of National Guardsmen from the suburbs, commanded by Captain Fannicot, mentioned above, had themselves, out of whim and good pleasure, decimated on Rue de la Chanvrerie. The fact, as singular as it may be, was noted by the judicial investigation opened following the insurrection of 1832. Captain Fannicot, an impatient and bold bourgeois, a sort of condottiere of order, of those we have just characterized, a fanatic and rebellious governmentalist, could not resist the attraction of firing before the hour and the ambition of taking the barricade alone, that is to say with his company. Exasperated by the successive appearance of the red flag and the old coat which he took for the black flag, he blamed aloud the generals and the corps commanders, who were holding council, did not judge that the moment of the decisive assault had come, and left, according to a famous expression of one of them, “the insurrection to stew in its juice.” As for him, he found the barricade ripe, and, as what is ripe must fall, he tried. He commanded men as resolute as himself, “madmen,” said one witness. His company, the very one that had shot the poet Jean Prouvaire, was the first of the battalion posted at the corner of the street. When it was least expected, the captain launched his men against the barricade. This movement, executed with more good will than strategy, cost Fannicot’s company dearly. Before it had reached two-thirds of the street, a general discharge from the barricade greeted it. Four of the most daring, who were running in front, were struck down at point-blank range at the very foot of the redoubt, and this courageous mob of national guards, very brave people, but who lacked military tenacity, had to retreat, after some hesitation, leaving fifteen corpses on the pavement. The moment of hesitation gave the insurgents time to reload their weapons, and a second, very deadly discharge hit the company before it could return to the corner of the street, its shelter. For a moment, it was caught between two grapeshots, and it received the volley from the gun in battery which, having no order, had not ceased its fire. The intrepid and imprudent Fannicot was one of the dead from this grapeshot. He was killed by the cannon, that is to say, by the order. This attack, more furious than serious, irritated Enjolras. “The imbeciles!” he said. “They have their men killed, and they use up our ammunition, for nothing. ” Enjolras spoke like the true riot general that he was. Insurrection and repression do not fight on equal terms. The insurrection, quickly exhausted, has only so many shots to fire and so many combatants to expend. An emptied cartridge pouch, a man killed, are not replaced. Repression, having the army, does not count the men, and, having Vincennes, does not count the shots. Repression has as many regiments as the barricade has men, and as many arsenals as the barricade has cartridge pouches. Thus these are struggles of one against a hundred, which always end with the crushing of the barricades; unless the revolution, suddenly arising, comes to throw its flaming archangel’s sword into the balance. This happens. Then everything rises, the paving stones begin to boil, the popular redoubts swarm, Paris trembles supremely, the _quid divinum_ is cleared, an August 10 is in the air, a July 29 is in the air, a prodigious light appears, the gaping maw of force retreats, and the army, this lion, sees before it, standing and tranquil, this prophet, France. Chapter 13. Passing Glimmers. In the chaos of feelings and passions that defend a barricade, there is everything; there is bravery, youth, a point of honor, enthusiasm, ideals, conviction, the gambler’s determination, and above all, intermittencies of hope. One of these intermittencies, one of these vague tremors of hope suddenly crossed, at the most unexpected moment, the barricade of the Chanvrerie. “Listen,” Enjolras suddenly cried, still on the lookout, “it seems to me that Paris is waking up. It is certain that, on the morning of June 6, the insurrection had, for an hour or two, a certain recrudescence. The obstinacy of the tocsin of Saint-Merry revived some inclinations. Rue du Poirier, rue des Gravilliers, barricades were outlined. In front of the Porte Saint-Martin, a young man, armed with a carbine, attacked a squadron of cavalry alone. In the open, in the middle of the boulevard, he knelt on the ground, shouldered his weapon, fired, killed the squadron leader, and turned around saying: “Here’s another one who won’t hurt us again.” He was sabered. Rue Saint-Denis, a woman fired at the municipal guard from behind a lowered blind. One could see the leaves of jealousy. A fourteen-year-old child was arrested on Rue de la Cossonnerie with his pockets full of cartridges. Several posts were attacked. At the entrance to Rue Bertin-Poirée, a very lively and completely unexpected fusillade greeted a regiment of cuirassiers, led by General Cavaignac de Baragne. On Rue Planche-Mibray, old shards of crockery and household utensils were thrown from the rooftops onto the troops ; a bad sign; and when this fact was reported to Marshal Soult, Napoleon’s old lieutenant became dreamy, remembering Suchet’s words in Saragossa: _We are lost when old women empty their chamber pots over our heads_. These general symptoms which manifested themselves at the moment when the riot was believed to be localized, this fever of anger which was regaining the upper hand, these sparks which flew here and there above these deep masses of combustible which are called the suburbs of Paris, all this together worried the military leaders. They hastened to extinguish these beginnings of fire. They delayed, until these sparks were smothered, the attack on the barricades of Maubuée, of the Chanvrerie and of Saint-Merry, in order to have only them to deal with, and to be able to finish everything at once. Columns were launched into the fermenting streets, sweeping the large ones, probing the small ones, to the right, to the left, sometimes cautiously and slowly, sometimes at full speed. The troops broke down the doors of the houses from which they had fired; at the same time, cavalry maneuvers dispersed the groups from the boulevards. This repression was not without rumour and without that tumultuous din characteristic of the clashes of army and people. This was what Enjolras, in the intervals between the cannonade and the musketry, grasped. Moreover, he had seen at the end of the street wounded men passing on stretchers, and he said to Courfeyrac: “Those wounded men do not come from our country. ” Hope lasted but a short time; the glimmer of hope quickly faded. In less than half an hour, what was in the air vanished, it was like a flash without thunder, and the insurgents felt fall upon them that kind of leaden pall which the indifference of the people casts over the abandoned stubborn. The general movement which seemed to have been vaguely outlined had been aborted; and the attention of the Minister of War and the strategy of the generals could now concentrate on the three or four barricades still standing. The sun was rising over the horizon. An insurgent called out to Enjolras: “We’re hungry here. Are we really going to die like this without eating?”
Enjolras, still leaning on his battlement, without taking his eyes off the end of the street, nodded affirmatively. Chapter 14. Where we will read the name of Enjolras’s mistress. Courfeyrac, sitting on a paving stone next to Enjolras, continued to insult the cannon, and each time that dark cloud of projectiles called grapeshot passed by with its monstrous noise, he greeted it with a burst of irony. “You’re shouting yourself hoarse, my poor old brute, you make me sad, you ‘re wasting your din. That’s not thunder. It’s coughing.” And people laughed around him. Courfeyrac and Bossuet, whose valiant good humor increased with the peril, replaced, like Madame Scarron, food with jokes, and, since wine was lacking, poured gaiety for all. “I admire Enjolras,” said Bossuet. “His impassive temerity amazes me. He lives alone, which perhaps makes him a little sad; Enjolras complains of his grandeur which binds him to widowhood. We all have more or less mistresses who drive us mad, that is to say, brave. When one is in love like a tiger, it is the least one can do to fight like a lion. It is a way of avenging ourselves for the traits that our ladies do to us. Roland gets himself killed for to make Angélique angry. All our heroism comes from our women. A man without a woman is a pistol without a hammer; it is the woman who makes the man go. Well, Enjolras has no wife. He is not in love, and he finds a way to be intrepid. It is an unheard-of thing that one can be as cold as ice and bold as fire. Enjolras did not appear to be listening, but someone who had been near him would have heard him murmur in a low voice: _Patria_. Bossuet was still laughing when Courfeyrac cried out: “Something new!” And, adopting the voice of an usher announcing, he added: “My name is Piece of Eight.” Indeed, a new character had just entered the scene. It was a second cannon. The artillerymen quickly carried out the maneuver by force, and placed this second piece in battery near the first. This outlined the outcome. A few moments later, the two guns, quickly served, fired head- on against the redoubt; the platoon fire from the line and the suburbs supported the artillery. Another cannonade could be heard some distance away. At the same time as two guns were attacking the redoubt on the Rue de la Chanvrerie, two other cannons, one aimed at the Rue Saint-Denis, the other at the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, were riddling the Saint-Merry barricade. The four cannons echoed each other lugubriously. The barking of the dark dogs of war answered each other. Of the two guns now battering the barricade on the Rue de la Chanvrerie, one fired grapeshot, the other cannonballs. The cannonball was aimed a little high and the shot was calculated so that the cannonball struck the extreme edge of the upper ridge of the barricade, clipped it, and crumbled the paving stones onto the insurgents into shrapnel. This firing method was intended to push the combatants away from the top of the redoubt and force them to huddle inside; that is to say, it announced the assault. Once the combatants had been driven from the top of the barricade by the cannonball and from the windows of the tavern by the shrapnel, the attacking columns could venture into the street without being targeted, perhaps even without being seen, suddenly scale the redoubt, as they had done the previous evening, and, who knows? take it by surprise. “We must absolutely lessen the discomfort of these guns,” said Enjolras, and he shouted: “Fire on the gunners!” All were ready. The barricade, which had been silent for so long, fired wildly, seven or eight discharges followed one another with a sort of rage and joy, the street filled with blinding smoke, and, at the end of a few minutes, through this mist streaked with flame, two-thirds of the others could be dimly distinguished lying beneath the wheels of the cannons. Those who had remained standing continued to serve the guns with severe tranquility; but the fire was slowing down. “That’s good,” said Bossuet to Enjolras. “Success.” Enjolras nodded and replied: “Another quarter of an hour of this success, and there won’t be ten cartridges left in the barricade.” It seems that Gavroche heard this word. Chapter 15. Gavroche Outside. Courfeyrac suddenly saw someone at the foot of the barricade, outside, in the street, under the bullets. Gavroche had taken a bottle basket from the tavern, had gone out through the gap, and was peacefully emptying into his basket the cartridge pouches of the National Guardsmen killed on the embankment of the redoubt.
“What are you doing here?” said Courfeyrac. Gavroche raised his nose: “Citizen, I am filling my basket. ” “Don’t you see the grapeshot?” Gavroche replied: “Well, it’s raining. What about?” Courfeyrac shouted: “Come in! ” “Soon,” said Gavroche. And with a bound, he plunged into the street. It will be remembered that the Fannicot company, in retreating, had left behind a trail of corpses. About twenty dead men lay here and there along the entire length of the street on the pavement. About twenty cartridge pouches for Gavroche. A supply of cartridges for the barricade. The smoke hung in the street like a fog. Anyone who has seen a cloud fall into a mountain gorge between two sheer escarpments can imagine this smoke constricted and as if thickened by two dark lines of tall houses. It rose slowly and was constantly renewed; hence a gradual darkening that paled even the broad daylight. From one end of the street to the other, although very short, the combatants could hardly be seen. This darkening, probably intended and calculated by the leaders who were to direct the assault on the barricade, was useful to Gavroche. Under the folds of this veil of smoke, and thanks to his small size, he was able to advance quite far into the street without being seen. He plundered the first seven or eight cartridge boxes without much danger. He crawled on his stomach, galloped on all fours, took his basket in his teeth, twisted, slid, undulated, snaked from one dead man to another, and emptied the cartridge box or cartridge belt like a monkey opening a nut. From the barricade, to which he was still quite close, no one dared to shout to him to come back, for fear of drawing attention to himself. On a corpse, which was a corporal, he found a powder flask. “For thirst,” he said, putting it in his pocket. By dint of going forward , he reached the point where the fog of the shooting became transparent. So much so that the riflemen of the line, drawn up and lying in wait behind their pile of paving stones, and the riflemen of the suburbs massed at the corner of the street, suddenly saw something stirring in the smoke. Just as Gavroche was removing the cartridges from a sergeant lying near a boundary stone, a bullet struck the corpse. “Blimey!” Gavroche said. “Now they’re killing my dead.” A second bullet made the paving stone beside him sparkle. A third upset his basket. Gavroche looked and saw that it was coming from the suburbs. He stood up straight, his hair blowing in the wind, his hands on his hips, his eyes fixed on the National Guardsmen who were firing, and he sang: “We’re ugly at Nanterre, It’s Voltaire’s fault, And stupid at Palaiseau, It’s Rousseau’s fault.” Then he picked up his basket, put back into it, without losing a single one, the cartridges that had fallen out, and, advancing towards the shooting, went to strip another cartridge pouch. There a fourth bullet missed him again. Gavroche sang: I am not a notary, It’s Voltaire’s fault, I am a little bird, It’s Rousseau’s fault. A fifth bullet only succeeded in drawing from him a third verse: Joy is my character, It’s Voltaire’s fault, Misery is my trousseau, It’s Rousseau’s fault. It went on like this for some time. The spectacle was both dreadful and charming. Gavroche, shot, teased the shooting. He seemed to be having a great deal of fun. He was the sparrow pecking at the hunters. He responded to each discharge with a verse. They constantly aimed at him, they always missed. The National Guards and the soldiers laughed as they aimed at him. He lay down, then stood up again, withdrew into a corner of the doorway, then sprang up, disappeared, reappeared, ran away, came back, responded to the grapeshot with a snub, and yet plundered the cartridges, emptied the cartridge pouches and filled his basket. The insurgents, panting with anxiety, followed him with their eyes. The barricade trembled; he sang. He was not a child, he was not a man; he was a strange fairy boy. He was like the invulnerable dwarf of the melee. The bullets ran after him, he was more nimble than they. He played on I don’t know what terrifying game of hide-and-seek with death; each time the ghost’s sneered face approached, the boy flicked it . One bullet, however, better aimed or more treacherous than the others, finally hit the will-o’-the-wisp child. Gavroche was seen to stagger, then he collapsed. The whole barricade gave a cry; but there was something of Antaeus in this pygmy; for the boy to touch the pavement is like for the giant to touch the earth; Gavroche had fallen only to get up again; he remained seated, a long trickle of blood streaked his face, he raised his two arms in the air, looked in the direction from which the shot had come, and began to sing. I fell to the ground, It’s Voltaire’s fault, My nose in the gutter, It’s… He didn’t finish. A second bullet from the same shooter stopped him short. This time he fell face down on the pavement and did not move again. This little great soul had just flown away. Chapter 16. How from brother one becomes father. At that very moment in the Luxembourg Gardens—for the gaze of the drama must be present everywhere—there were two children holding hands. One might have been seven years old, the other five. The rain having wet them, they were walking along the paths on the sunny side; the elder led the younger one; they were in rags and pale; they had the air of wild birds. The younger one said: I am very hungry. The elder, already a little protective, led his brother with his left hand and had a wand in his right. They were alone in the garden. The garden was deserted, the gates were closed as a police measure because of the insurrection. The troops who had bivouacked there had left for the needs of the battle. How did these children get there? Perhaps they had escaped from some half-open guardhouse; perhaps in the surrounding area, at the Barrière d’Enfer, or on the esplanade of the Observatory, or in the neighboring crossroads dominated by the pediment where one reads: _invenerunt parvulum pannis involutum,_ there was some hut of acrobats from which they had fled; perhaps, the previous evening, they had deceived the eye of the inspectors of the garden at the hour of closing, and had spent the night in one of those sentry boxes where one reads the newspapers? The fact is that they were wandering and they seemed free. To be wandering and to seem free is to be lost. These poor little ones were lost indeed . These two children were the very ones over whom Gavroche had been in sorrow, and whom the reader remembers. Children of the Thénardiers, rented from Magnon, assigned to M. Gillenormand, and now leaves fallen from all these rootless branches, and rolled on the earth by the wind. Their clothes, clean in Magnon’s time and which served as a leaflet for M. Gillenormand, had become rags. These beings now belonged to the statistic of ” Abandoned Children” that the police note, pick up, misplace and find on the streets of Paris. It took the disturbance of such a day for these little wretches to be in this garden. If the guards had noticed them, they would have chased these rags away. Little poor people do not enter public gardens: yet one should remember that, as children, they have the right to flowers. These were there, thanks to the closed gates. They were in violation. They had slipped into the garden, and there they had stayed. The closed gates do not give the inspectors a day off; surveillance is supposed to continue, but it softens and rests; and the inspectors, also moved by public anxiety and more occupied with the outside than with the inside, no longer looked at the garden, and had not seen the two delinquents. It had rained the day before, and even a little in the morning. But in June the showers don’t count. One hardly notices, an hour after a storm, that this beautiful blond day has wept. The earth in summer dries as quickly as a child’s cheek. At this moment of the solstice, the light of high noon is, so to speak, poignant. It takes everything. It applies itself and superimposes itself on the earth with a sort of suction. One would say that the sun is thirsty. A downpour is a glass of water; a rain is immediately drunk. In the morning everything streamed, in the afternoon everything is powdery. Nothing is as admirable as greenery washed clean by the rain and wiped by the ray; it is warm freshness. Gardens and meadows, having water in their roots and sun in their flowers, become incense burners and smoke with all their perfumes at once. Everything laughs, sings and offers itself. One feels gently intoxicated. Spring is a temporary paradise; the sun helps man to be patient. There are beings who ask for nothing more; living beings who, having the azure of the sky, say: that is enough! Dreamers absorbed in the prodigy, drawing from the idolatry of nature the indifference of good and evil, contemplators of the cosmos radiantly distracted from man, who do not understand that one is concerned with the hunger of some, the thirst of those, the nudity of the poor in winter, the lymphatic curvature of a small spine, the pallet, the attic, the dungeon, and the rags of shivering young girls, when one can dream under the trees; peaceful and terrible spirits, pitilessly satisfied. Strangely enough, the infinite is enough for them. This great need of man, the finite, which admits embrace, they ignore. The finite, which admits progress, this sublime work, they do not think about it. The indefinite, which is born from the human and divine combination of the infinite and the finite, escapes them. Provided they are face to face with immensity, they smile. Never joy, always ecstasy. To be lost, that is their life. The history of humanity for them is only a fragmentary plan; Everything is not there; the true Everything remains outside; what is the use of worrying about this detail, man? Man suffers, it is possible; but look at Aldebaran rising! The mother has no more milk, the newborn is dying, I know nothing about it, but consider this marvelous rosette made by a slice of the sapwood of the fir examined under a microscope! Compare the most beautiful Malines to that! These thinkers forget to love. The zodiac succeeds with them to the point of preventing them from seeing the crying child. God eclipses their souls. This is a family of spirits, both small and great. Horace was one of them, Goethe was one, La Fontaine perhaps; magnificent egotists of the infinite, tranquil spectators of pain, who do not see Nero if the weather is fine, from whom the sun hides the stake, who would watch the guillotine while seeking an effect of light, who hear neither the cry, nor the sob, nor the death rattle, nor the tocsin, for whom all is well since there is the month of May, who, as long as there are clouds of purple and gold above their heads, declare themselves content, and who are determined to be happy until the radiance of the stars and the song of the birds are exhausted. They are radiant tenebrous. They do not suspect that they are to be pitied. Certainly, they are. He who does not cry does not see. We must admire and pity them, as we would pity and admire a being who is both night and day, who has no eyes under his eyebrows and who has a star in the middle of his forehead. The indifference of these thinkers is, according to some, a superior philosophy. So be it; but in this superiority there is infirmity. One can be immortal and lame; witness Vulcan. One can be more than man and less than man. The immense incompleteness is in nature. Who knows if the sun is not blind? But then, what! Who can we trust? Solem quis dicere falsum audeat? So even certain geniuses, certain Most High humans, star-men, could be mistaken? What is up there, at the summit, at the peak, at the zenith, what sends so much light down to earth, would see little, see badly, not see at all? Isn’t that despairing? No. But what is there above the sun? The god. On June 6, 1832, around eleven o’clock in the morning, the Luxembourg, solitary and depopulated, was charming. The quincunxes and flowerbeds were bathed in the light of balsams and dazzling lights. The branches, wild in the midday light, seemed to be trying to embrace each other. In the sycamores there was a din of warblers, the sparrows triumphed, the woodpeckers climbed along the chestnut trees, giving little pecks in the holes in the bark. The flowerbeds accepted the legitimate royalty of the lilies; the most august of perfumes is that which comes from whiteness. One breathed the peppery scent of carnations. Marie de Medici’s old crows were in love in the tall trees. The sun gilded, reddened, and lit the tulips, which are nothing other than all the varieties of the flame, made flowers. All around the banks of tulips swirled the bees, sparks of these flame flowers. All was grace and gaiety, even the approaching rain; this recurrence, from which the lilies of the valley and the honeysuckles were to profit, was nothing to worry about; the swallows made the charming threat of flying low. Whoever was there yearned for happiness; life smelled good; all this nature exhaled candor, help, assistance, paternity, caress, dawn. The thoughts that fell from the sky were soft like a child’s little hand being kissed. The statues under the trees, naked and white, had robes of shadow pierced with light; these goddesses were all ragged with sun; rays hung from them on all sides. Around the large basin, the earth was already dried to the point of being almost burnt. There was enough wind to raise here and there little riots of dust. A few yellow leaves, left over from last autumn, chased each other joyfully, and seemed to be childish. The abundance of light had something reassuring about it. Life, sap, heat, scents, overflowed; one felt beneath creation the enormity of the source; in all these breaths filled with love, in this coming and going of reverberations and reflections, in this prodigious expenditure of rays, in this indefinite pouring of fluid gold, one felt the prodigality of the inexhaustible; and, behind this splendor as behind a curtain of flame, one glimpsed God, this millionaire of stars. Thanks to the sand, there was not a stain of mud; thanks to the rain, there was not a grain of ash. The bouquets had just been washed; all the velvets, all the satins, all the varnishes, all the golds, which come from the earth in the form of flowers, were irreproachable. This magnificence was clean. The great silence of happy nature filled the garden. Celestial silence compatible with a thousand musics, cooing of nests, buzzing of swarms, palpitations of the wind. All the harmony of the season was accomplished in a graceful ensemble; The entrances and exits of spring took place in the desired order; the lilacs were ending, the jasmines were beginning; some flowers were late, some insects were early; the vanguard of the red butterflies of June was fraternizing with the rearguard of the white butterflies of May. The plane trees were getting a new skin. The breeze was carving ripples into the magnificent enormity of the chestnut trees. It was splendid. A veteran from the neighboring barracks who was looking through the gate was saying: Here is spring bearing arms and in full dress. All of nature was having lunch; creation was at table; it was time; The great blue tablecloth was placed in the sky and the great green tablecloth on the earth; the sun shone every day. God served the universal meal. Each being had its pasture or its food. The wood-pigeon found hempseed, the chaffinch found millet, the goldfinch found chickweed, the robin found worms, the bee found flowers, the fly found infusoria, the greenfinch found flies. They did eat a little of each other, which is the mystery of evil mixed with good; but not a single animal had an empty stomach. The two abandoned little ones had reached the large pool, and, a little troubled by all this light, they tried to hide, the instinct of the poor and the weak before magnificence, even impersonal; and they remained behind the swans’ stall. Here and there, at intervals, when the wind blew, one could hear confused cries, a commotion, a kind of tumultuous rattle that was gunfire, and dull rapping that was cannon fire. There was smoke above the roofs near the market halls. A bell, which seemed to be calling, rang in the distance. These children did not seem to notice these noises. The little one repeated from time to time in a low voice: I’m hungry. Almost at the same time as the two children, another couple approached the large pool. It was a man of fifty who was leading a boy of six by the hand. No doubt the father with his son. The six-year-old boy was holding a large brioche. At that time, some of the riverside houses, on Rue Madame and Rue d’Enfer, had a key to the Luxembourg that the tenants enjoyed when the gates were closed, a tolerance that has since been abolished. This father and son were probably coming out of one of those houses. The two poor little ones watched this “gentleman” approach and hid a little more. This one was a bourgeois. Perhaps the same one that Marius, through his fever of love, had heard one day, near this same large pool, advising his son to “avoid excesses.” He had an affable and haughty air, and a mouth that, never closing, was always smiling. This mechanical smile, produced by too much jaw and too little skin, shows the teeth rather than the soul. The child, with his bitten brioche that he did not finish, seemed stuffed. The child was dressed as a National Guardsman because of the riot, and the father had remained dressed as a bourgeois because of prudence. The father and son had stopped near the pool where the two swans were frolicking. This bourgeois seemed to have a special admiration for swans . He resembled them in that he walked as swans swam for the moment, which is their chief talent, and they were superb. If the two poor little ones had listened and had been old enough to understand, they could have gathered the words of a serious man. The father said to the son: “The wise man lives content with little. Look at me, my son. I do not like ostentation . I am never seen in clothes bedecked with gold and precious stones; I leave that false splendor to ill-organized souls.” Here the deep cries that came from the direction of the market burst forth with a redoubling of bells and rumor. “What is this?” asked the child. The father replied: “It’s Saturnalia.” Suddenly, he saw the two little ragged ones, motionless behind the swans’ little green house. “This is the beginning,” he said. And after a silence he added: “Anarchy enters this garden.” Meanwhile, the son bit into the cake, spat it out, and suddenly began to cry. “Why are you crying?” asked the father. “I’m not hungry anymore,” said the child. The father’s smile widened. “You don’t need to be hungry to eat a cake. ” “My cake bores me. It’s stale. ” “Don’t you want any more?” “No.” The father showed him the swans. “Throw it to those web-footed birds. ” The child hesitated. “No one wants his cake anymore; that’s no reason to give it away. ” The father continued: “Be human. We must have pity on animals.” And, taking the cake from his son, he threw it into the pool. The cake fell quite close to the edge. The swans were far away, in the center of the pool, and busy with some prey. They had seen neither the bourgeois nor the cake. The bourgeois, feeling that the cake was in danger of being lost, and upset by this useless shipwreck, gave himself over to a telegraphic agitation which finally attracted the attention of the swans. They saw something floating, tacked like the ships they are, and slowly headed towards the cake, with the beatific majesty befitting white beasts. “Swans understand signs,” said the bourgeois, happy to have wit. At that moment the distant tumult of the city suddenly swelled again . This time it was sinister. There are gusts of wind that speak more distinctly than others. The one blowing at that moment clearly brought drum rolls, shouts, firing squads, and the mournful replies of the tocsin and the cannon. This coincided with a black cloud that suddenly hid the sun. The swans had not yet reached the brioche. “Let’s go back,” said the father, “they’re attacking the Tuileries.” He seized his son’s hand again . Then he continued: “From the Tuileries to the Luxembourg, there is only the distance that separates royalty from the peerage; it’s not far. The gunshots will rain down. ” He looked at the cloud. “And perhaps the rain itself will rain; the sky is involved; the younger branch is doomed. Let’s go home quickly. ” “I would like to see the swans eat the cake,” said the child. The father replied: “That would be imprudent.” And he took his little bourgeois with him. The son, missing the swans, turned his head toward the pool until a bend in the quincunxes hid it from him. Meanwhile, at the same time as the swans, the two little wanderers had approached the cake. It was floating on the water. The smaller one looked at the cake, the larger one looked at the bourgeois who was leaving.
The father and son entered the labyrinth of paths that leads to the grand staircase in the clump of trees on the side of the Rue Madame. As soon as they were no longer in sight, the elder lay down quickly on his stomach on the rounded edge of the basin, and, clinging to it with his left hand, leaning over the water, almost ready to fall in, extended his wand with his right hand towards the cake. The swans, seeing the enemy, hastened, and in haste made a breast effect useful to the little fisherman; the water in front of the swans flowed back, and one of these soft concentric undulations gently pushed the cake towards the child’s wand. As the swans arrived, the wand touched the cake. The child gave a sharp blow, brought back the brioche, frightened the swans, seized the cake, and stood up. The cake was wet; but they were hungry and thirsty. The elder made two pieces of the brioche, one large and one small, took the small one for himself, gave the large one to his little brother, and said to him: “Stick this in the gun. ” Chapter 17. _Mortuus pater filium moriturum expectat_. Marius had rushed out of the barricade. Combeferre had followed him. But it was too late. Gavroche was dead. Combeferre brought back the basket of cartridges. Marius brought back the child. Alas! he thought, what the father had done for his father, he was giving back to the son; only Thénardier had brought back his father alive; he was bringing back the dead child. When Marius returned to the redoubt with Gavroche in his arms, he , like the child, had his face bathed in blood. The moment he bent down to pick up Gavroche, a bullet struck him. had grazed the skull; he hadn’t noticed. Courfeyrac undid his cravat and bandaged Marius’s forehead with it. Gavroche was placed on the same table as Mabeuf, and the black shawl was spread over both bodies. There was enough for the old man and the child. Combeferre distributed the cartridges from the basket he had brought back. This gave each man fifteen shots to fire. Jean Valjean was still in the same place, motionless on his boundary stone. When Combeferre presented him with his fifteen cartridges, he shook his head. “There’s a rare eccentric,” Combeferre said quietly to Enjolras. “He finds a way not to fight in this barricade. ” “Which doesn’t stop him from defending it,” replied Enjolras. “Heroism has its eccentrics,” continued Combeferre. And Courfeyrac, who had heard, added: “He’s a different kind of man than Father Mabeuf. It should be noted that the fire beating against the barricade barely disturbed its interior. Those who have never experienced the whirlwind of this kind of warfare can have no idea of the singular moments of tranquility mingled with these convulsions. People come and go, they talk, they joke, they stroll. Someone we know heard a combatant say to him in the midst of the grapeshot: “We are here like at a bachelor’s luncheon.” The redoubt on the Rue de la Chanvrerie, we repeat, seemed very calm inside. All the twists and turns and all the phases had been or were about to be exhausted. The position, from critical, had become threatening, and, from threatening, was probably going to become desperate. As the situation darkened, the heroic glow increasingly crimsoned the barricade. Enjolras, grave, dominated her, in the attitude of a young Spartan devoting his naked sword to the dark genius Epidotas. Combeferre, his apron over his stomach, dressed the wounded; Bossuet and Feuilly made cartridges with the powder flask plucked by Gavroche from the dead corporal, and Bossuet said to Feuilly: _We will soon take the diligence for another planet_; Courfeyrac, on the few cobblestones he had reserved for himself near Enjolras, arranged and put in order a whole arsenal, his sword-cane, his rifle, two saddle pistols and a knuckle-pistol, with the care of a young girl putting in order a small Dunkirk. Jean Valjean, mute, looked at the wall opposite him. A workman was securing a large straw hat from Mother Hucheloup on his head with a string , _for fear of sunburn_ , he said. The young people of La Cougourde d’Aix chatted happily among themselves, as if eager to speak patois one last time. Joly, who had taken down Widow Hucheloup’s mirror, was examining his tongue in it. Some fighters, having discovered some crusts of bread, almost moldy, in a drawer, were eating them greedily. Marius was worried about what his father would say to him. Chapter 18. The Vulture Becomes Prey. Let us emphasize a psychological fact specific to barricades. Nothing that characterizes this surprising street war must be omitted. Whatever this strange inner tranquility of which we have just spoken, the barricade, for those within it, remains nonetheless a vision. There is something apocalyptic in civil war, all the mists of the unknown mingle with these fierce blazes, revolutions are sphinxes, and anyone who has crossed a barricade believes he has crossed a dream. What one feels in these places, as we have indicated with regard to Marius, and we will see the consequences, is more and less than life. Coming out of a barricade, one no longer knows what one saw there. One was terrible, one does not know. One was surrounded by fighting ideas that had human faces; one had one’s head in the light of the future. There were corpses lying there and ghosts standing there. The hours were colossal and seemed like hours of eternity. One lived in death. Shadows passed. What was it? We saw hands where there was blood; it was a terrible deafening, it was also a dreadful silence; there were open mouths screaming, and other open mouths falling silent; we were in smoke, in night perhaps. We think we have touched the sinister oozing of unknown depths; we look at something red that we have in our nails. We no longer remember. Let us return to the rue de la Chanvrerie. Suddenly, between two discharges, we heard the distant sound of an hour striking. “It’s noon,” said Combeferre. The twelve strokes had not sounded when Enjolras stood up and threw out from the top of the barricade this thunderous clamour: “Bring up paving stones into the house. Line the windowsills and the attic with them.” Half the men with rifles, the other half with paving stones. Not a minute to lose. A platoon of firefighters, axes on their shoulders, had just appeared in battle formation at the end of the street. This could only be the head of a column; and of which column? Of the attacking column, obviously; the firefighters charged with demolishing the barricade must always precede the soldiers charged with scaling it. We were obviously approaching the moment that M. de Clermont-Tonnerre, in 1822, called “the coup de collier.” Enjolras’s order was executed with the proper haste proper to ships and barricades, the only two places of combat from which escape is impossible. In less than a minute, two-thirds of the paving stones that Enjolras had piled up at the Corinth Gate were brought up to the first floor and the attic, and before a second minute had elapsed, these paving stones, artfully placed one on top of the other, walled up to half the height of the window on the first floor and the dormer windows of the attic. A few intervals, carefully arranged by Feuilly, the principal builder, could allow the passage of rifle barrels. This arming of the windows could be done all the more easily since the grapeshot had ceased. The two guns were now firing cannonballs at the center of the barrage in order to make a hole, and, if possible, a breach, for the assault.
When the paving stones, intended for the ultimate defense, were in place, Enjolras had the bottles he had placed under the table where Mabeuf was carried to the first floor. “Who will drink that?” Bossuet asked him. “Them,” replied Enjolras. Then the lower window was barricaded, and the iron crosspieces that served to bar the inside of the inn at night were kept ready. The fortress was complete. The barricade was the rampart, the inn was the keep. With the remaining paving stones, the gap was filled. As the defenders of a barricade are always obliged to conserve ammunition, and the besiegers know this, the besiegers combine their arrangements with a sort of irritating leisure, expose themselves to fire before the hour, but in appearance more than in reality, and take their ease. Preparations for attack are always made with a certain methodical slowness; after which, lightning. This slowness allowed Enjolras to review and perfect everything. He felt that since such men were going to die, their death must be a masterpiece. He said to Marius: “We are the two leaders.” I’m going to give the last orders inside. You stay outside and observe. Marius posted himself to observe on the crest of the barricade. Enjolras had the kitchen door nailed shut, which, as you will remember, was the ambulance. “No splashing on the wounded,” he said. He gave his last instructions in the lower room in a brief but profoundly calm voice; Feuilly listened and answered on behalf of everyone. “On the first floor, have axes ready to cut down the staircase. The do we have? “Yes,” said Feuilly. “How many? ” “Two axes and a maul. ” “That’s good. We are twenty-six combatants standing. How many rifles are there ? ” “Thirty-four. ” “Eight too many. Keep these rifles loaded like the others, and at hand . Sabers and pistols in your belts. Twenty men at the barricade. Six ambushed in the attic and at the first-floor window to fire on the assailants through the loopholes in the paving stones. Let not a single useless worker remain here. Presently, when the drum beats the charge, let the twenty below rush to the barricade. The first to arrive will be in the best position.” These arrangements made, he turned to Javert and said to him: “I haven’t forgotten you.” And, placing a pistol on the table, he added: “The last one who leaves here will break this spy’s head. ” “Here?” asked a voice. “No, let’s not mix this corpse with ours. We can climb over the little barricade on Mondétour Lane. It is only four feet high. The man is well garroted. We will take him there, and execute him.” Someone, at that moment, was more impassive than Enjolras; it was Javert. Here Jean Valjean appeared. He was mingled with the group of insurgents. He left it, and said to Enjolras: “You are the commander? ” “Yes. ” “You thanked me just now. ” “In the name of the Republic. The barricade has two saviors: Marius Pontmercy and you. ” “Do you think I deserve a reward? ” “Certainly. ” “Well, I ask for one.” “Which one?” “Blow out that man’s brains myself.” Javert raised his head, saw Jean Valjean, made an imperceptible movement, and said: “That’s right.” As for Enjolras, he had begun to reload his rifle; he looked around him: “No complaints?” And he turned to Jean Valjean: “Take the spy.” Jean Valjean, in fact, took possession of Javert by sitting down at the end of the table. He seized the pistol, and a faint click announced that he had just cocked it. Almost at the same instant, a blast of bugles was heard. “Alert!” cried Marius from the top of the barricade. Javert began to laugh with that soundless laugh of his, and, looking fixedly at the insurgents, said to them: “You are hardly in better health than I am. ” “All out!” cried Enjolras. The insurgents rushed forward in a tumult, and, as they left, received in the back, if we may excuse the expression, this word from Javert: “See you later!” Chapter 19. Jean Valjean Takes His Revenge. When Jean Valjean was alone with Javert, he undid the rope which bound the prisoner by the middle of his body, the knot of which was under the table. After which, he made a sign to him to rise. Javert obeyed, with that indefinable smile which condenses the supremacy of chained authority. Jean Valjean took Javert by the martingale as one would take a beast of burden by the breastplate, and, dragging him after him, left the tavern, slowly, for Javert, hobbled at the legs, could only take very small steps. Jean Valjean had his pistol in his hand. They thus crossed the inner trapeze of the barricade. The insurgents, all in the imminent attack, turned their backs. Marius, alone, placed aside at the left end of the barrier, saw them pass. This group of the patient and the executioner was lit by the sepulchral light that he had in his soul. Jean Valjean made Javert, garroted, with some difficulty, but without letting go of him for a single instant, scale the small entrenchment of the Mondétour alley. When they had climbed over this barrier, they found themselves alone together in the alley. No one saw them any more. The bend of the houses hid them from the insurgents. The corpses removed from the barricade made a terrible heap a few steps away. In the pile of dead bodies one could distinguish a livid face, loose hair , a pierced hand, and a half-naked woman’s breast. It was Éponine. Javert looked obliquely at this dead woman, and, profoundly calm, said in a low voice: “It seems to me that I know that girl.” Then he turned to Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean put the pistol under his arm, and fixed on Javert a look that needed no words to say: “Javert, it is I.” Javert replied: “Take your revenge.” Jean Valjean drew a knife from his pocket and opened it. “A shiv!” cried Javert. ” You are right. That suits you better.” Jean Valjean cut the martingale that Javert had around his neck, then he cut the ropes that he had around his wrists, then bending down, he cut the string that he had around his feet and, standing up, he said to him: “You are free.” Javert was not easy to astonish. However, master as he was of himself, he could not escape a commotion. He remained gaping and motionless. Jean Valjean continued: “I do not believe I am leaving here. Yet, if, by chance, I do leave, I live, under the name of Fauchelevent, at number seven Rue de l’Homme-Armé .” Javert gave a frown that half-opened a corner of his mouth, and he murmured between his teeth: “Take care. ” “Go,” said Jean Valjean. Javert continued: “You said Fauchelevent, Rue de l’Homme-Armé?” –Number seven. Javert repeated in a low voice: –Number seven. He buttoned up his frock coat, restored some military stiffness between his shoulders, turned around, crossed his arms, supporting his chin in one of his hands, and began to walk in the direction of the market. Jean Valjean followed him with his eyes. After a few steps, Javert turned around and shouted to Jean Valjean: –You are boring me. Kill me instead. Javert did not himself notice that he was no longer addressing Jean Valjean in the familiar form: –Go away, said Jean Valjean. Javert walked away slowly. A moment later, he turned the corner of the Rue des Prêcheurs. When Javert had disappeared, Jean Valjean discharged the pistol into the air. Then he reentered the barricade and said: –It is done. However, this is what had happened: Marius, more preoccupied with the outside than with the inside, had not until then looked attentively at the spy bound in the dark depths of the lower room. When he saw him in broad daylight, climbing over the barricade to go and die, he recognized him. A sudden memory entered his mind. He remembered the inspector of the Rue de Pontoise, and the two pistols he had given him and which he, Marius, had used in that very barricade; and not only did he remember the face, but he remembered the name. This memory, however, was hazy and troubled like all his ideas. It was not an affirmation that he made to himself, it was a question that he asked himself: “Isn’t this the police inspector who told me his name was Javert? Perhaps there was still time to intervene for this man? But first he had to know if it was indeed this Javert.” Marius called out to Enjolras, who had just positioned himself at the other end of the barricade. “Enjolras? ” “What? ” “What’s that man’s name? ” “Who? ” “The police officer. Do you know his name? ” “No doubt. He told us. ” “What’s his name?” “Javert.” Marius stood up. At that moment, the pistol shot was heard. Jean Valjean reappeared and shouted, “It’s done.” A dark chill passed through Marius’s heart. Chapter 20. The Dead Are Right and the Living Are Not Wrong. The agony of the barricade was about to begin. Everything contributed to the tragic majesty of this supreme moment; a thousand mysterious crash in the air, the breath of the armed masses set in motion in streets that could not be seen, the intermittent gallop of the cavalry, the heavy shaking of the artillery on the march, the firing of platoons and cannonades crossing in the maze of Paris, the smoke of battle rising all golden above the roofs, one knows not what distant cries vaguely terrible, flashes of menace everywhere, the tocsin of Saint-Merry which now had the accent of a sob, the mildness of the season, the splendor of the sky full of sun and clouds, the beauty of the day and the terrible silence of the houses. For, since the day before, the two rows of houses on the Rue de la Chanvrerie had become two walls; fierce walls. Doors closed, windows closed, shutters closed. In those times, so different from our own, when the time had come when the people wanted to put an end to a situation that had lasted too long, to a granted charter or to a legal country, when universal anger was diffused in the atmosphere, when the city consented to the uprising of its cobblestones, when the insurrection made the bourgeoisie smile by whispering its slogan in its ear, then the inhabitant, penetrated by riot, so to speak, was the auxiliary of the fighter, and the house fraternized with the improvised fortress that leaned on it. When the situation was not ripe, when the insurrection was decidedly not consented to, when the mass disavowed the movement, it was the end of the fighters, the city turned into a desert around the revolt, souls froze, asylums were walled up, and the street was paraded to help the army take the barricade. You can’t make a people march by surprise faster than they want. Woe to anyone who tries to force their hand! A people won’t let themselves be pushed around. So they abandon the insurrection to themselves. The insurgents become plague victims. A house is a cliff, a door is a refusal, a facade is a wall. This wall sees, hears, and doesn’t want to. It could open slightly and save you. No. This wall is a judge. It looks at you and condemns you. What a dark thing these closed houses are! They seem dead, they are alive. Life, which is suspended there, persists. No one has left for twenty-four hours, but no one is missing. Inside this rock, people come and go, they lie down, they get up; they are there with their families; they drink and eat there; they are afraid, a terrible thing! Fear excuses this formidable inhospitality; she mixes with it dismay, an extenuating circumstance. Sometimes even, and this has been seen, fear becomes passion; terror can change into fury, as prudence into rage; hence this so profound word: _The enraged of moderates_. There are blazes of supreme terror from which anger issues, like a lugubrious smoke.–What do these people want? They are never satisfied. They compromise peaceful men. As if we did not have enough revolutions as it is! What did they come to do here? Let them get away with it. So much the worse for them. It is their fault. They only get what they deserve. It does not concern us. Here is our poor street riddled with bullets. It is a heap of scoundrels. Above all, do not open the door.–And the house takes on the appearance of a tomb. The insurgent before this door is dying; he sees the grapeshot and the naked sabers coming; if he shouts, he knows that he is being listened to, but that no one will come; there are walls there that could protect him, there are men there who could save him, and these walls have ears of flesh, and these men have entrails of stone. Who to blame? No one, and everyone. The incomplete times in which we live. It is always at its own risk and peril that utopia transforms itself into insurrection, and turns from philosophical protest into armed protest, and from Minerva Pallas. The utopia that grows impatient and becomes a riot knows what awaits her; almost always it arrives too soon. Then she resigns herself, and stoically accepts, instead of triumph, catastrophe. She serves, without complaint, and even exonerating them, those who deny her, and her magnanimity is to consent to abandonment. She is indomitable against the obstacle and gentle towards ingratitude. Is it ingratitude, moreover? Yes, from the point of view of the human race. No, from the point of view of the individual. Progress is the way of man. The general life of the human race is called Progress; the collective step of the human race is called Progress. Progress marches on; it makes the great human and earthly journey towards the celestial and the divine; it has its halts where it rallies the belated flock ; it has its stations where it meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenly revealing its horizon; it has its nights where it sleeps; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the shadow on the human soul and to feel in the darkness, without being able to awaken it, the sleeping progress. –God is perhaps dead, said one day to the one who writes these lines Gérard de Nerval, confusing progress with God, and taking the interruption of movement for the death of Being. He who despairs is wrong. Progress infallibly awakens, and, in short, one could say that it has marched even asleep, for it has grown. When we see it standing again, we find it higher. To be always peaceful, that does not depend on progress any more than on the river; do not raise a dam, do not throw a rock into it; the obstacle makes the water foam and humanity boil. Hence troubles; but after these troubles, we recognize that there is progress made. Until order, which is nothing other than universal peace, is established, until harmony and unity reign, progress will have revolutions as its stages. What then is Progress? We have just said it. The permanent life of peoples. Now, it sometimes happens that the momentary life of individuals resists the eternal life of the human race. Let us admit it without bitterness, the individual has his distinct interest, and can without forfeiture stipulate for this interest and defend it; the present has its excusable amount of egoism; momentary life has its right, and is not obliged to sacrifice itself constantly to the future. The generation which currently has its turn on earth is not forced to shorten it for the generations, its equals after all, which will have their turn later. –I exist, murmurs this someone who calls himself All. I am young and I am in love, I am old and I want to rest, I am a father, I work, I prosper, I do good business, I have houses to rent, I have money from the State, I am happy, I have a wife and children, I love all that, I want to live, leave me alone .–From there, at certain times, a deep cold falls on the magnanimous vanguards of the human race. Utopia, moreover, let us agree, leaves its radiant sphere by making war. It, the truth of tomorrow, borrows its method, the battle, from the lie of yesterday. It, the future, acts like the past. It, the pure idea, becomes an act of deed. It complicates its heroism with a violence for which it is right that it responds; violence of occasion and expediency, contrary to principles, and for which it is fatally punished. Utopia insurrection fights, the old military code in hand; it shoots spies, it executes traitors, it eliminates living beings and throws them into the unknown darkness. It uses death, a serious thing. It seems that utopia no longer has faith in radiance, its irresistible and incorruptible force. It strikes with the sword. Now, no sword is simple. Every sword has two edges; he who wounds with one wounds the other. This reservation made, and made with all severity, it is impossible for us not to admire, whether they succeed or not, the glorious fighters of the future, the confessors of utopia. Even when they fail, they are venerable, and it is perhaps in failure that they have more majesty. Victory, when it is according to progress, deserves the applause of the people; but a heroic defeat deserves their tenderness. One is magnificent, the other is sublime. For us, who prefer martyrdom to success, John Brown is greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi. Someone must be for the vanquished. We are unfair to these great testers of the future when they fail. We accuse revolutionaries of sowing fear. Every barricade seems an attack. We incriminate their theories, we suspect their goal, we fear their ulterior motive, we denounce their conscience. They are accused of raising, constructing, and piling up against the prevailing social reality a heap of misery, pain, iniquity, grievances, and despair, and of tearing blocks of darkness from the depths to embattle and fight against them. They are shouted at them: You are unpaving hell! They could respond: That is why our barricade is made of good intentions. The best, certainly, is the peaceful solution. In short, let us agree, when we see the paving stone, we think of the bear, and it is good will that worries society. But it is up to society to save itself; it is to its own good will that we appeal. No violent remedy is necessary. Study the evil amicably, note it, then cure it. This is what we invite it to do. Be that as it may, even fallen, especially fallen, they are august, these men who, at all points of the universe, their eyes fixed on France, fight for the great work with the inflexible logic of the ideal; they give their lives as a pure gift for progress; they accomplish the will of providence; they perform a religious act. At the appointed hour, with as much selflessness as an actor who arrives at his cue, obeying the divine script, they enter the tomb. And this hopeless combat, and this stoic disappearance, they accept it to bring to its splendid and supreme universal consequences the magnificent human movement irresistibly begun on July 14, 1789. These soldiers are priests. The French Revolution is a gesture of God. Moreover, there are, and it is appropriate to add this distinction to the distinctions already indicated in another chapter, there are accepted insurrections which are called revolutions; There are rejected revolutions that are called riots. An insurrection that breaks out is an idea that passes its examination before the people. If the people drop their black ball, the idea is dried fruit, the insurrection is a scuffle. Going to war at every summons and each time that utopia desires it is not the work of the people. Nations do not always and at all times have the temperament of heroes and martyrs. They are positive. A priori, insurrection is repugnant to them; firstly, because it often results in a catastrophe, secondly, because it always has an abstraction as its starting point. For, and this is beautiful, it is always for the ideal, and for the ideal alone, that those who devote themselves devote themselves. An insurrection is an enthusiasm. Enthusiasm can become angry; hence the taking up of arms. But any insurrection that aims at a government or a regime aims higher. Thus, for example, let us insist, what the leaders of the 1832 insurrection were fighting against, and in particular the young enthusiasts of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, was not precisely Louis-Philippe. Most of them, talking openly, did justice to the qualities of this king who was a cross between the monarchy and the revolution; none of them hated him. But they attacked the branch cadet branch of divine right in Louis-Philippe as they had attacked the elder branch in Charles X; and what they wanted to overthrow by overthrowing royalty in France, as we have explained, was the usurpation of man over man and of privilege over right in the entire universe. Paris without a king has as its counter-effect the world without despots. They reasoned in this way. Their goal was distant no doubt, vague perhaps, and recoiling from the effort; but great. That is how it is. And one sacrifices oneself for these visions, which, for the sacrificed, are almost always illusions, but illusions in which, in short, all human certainty is mixed. The insurgent poeticizes and gilds the insurrection. One throws oneself into these tragic things, getting drunk on what one is going to do. Who knows? one might succeed. One is the few; one has a whole army against oneself; but we defend the right, the natural law, the sovereignty of each person over himself, which has no possible abdication, justice, truth, and if necessary we will die like the three hundred Spartans. We do not think of Don Quixote, but of Leonidas. And we go forward, and, once engaged, we do not retreat , and we rush headlong, having as our hope an unheard-of victory, the revolution completed, progress set free, the enlargement of the human race, universal deliverance; and to make matters worse, Thermopylae. These feats of arms for progress often fail, and we have just explained why. The crowd is resistant to the training of paladins. These heavy masses, the multitudes, fragile because of their very weight, fear adventures; and there is adventure in the ideal. Besides, let us not forget, interests are there, little friends of the ideal and the sentimental. Sometimes the stomach paralyzes the heart. The greatness and beauty of France is that it takes less belly than other peoples; it ties the rope around its loins more easily. It is the first to wake up, the last to sleep. It goes forward. It is a seeker. This is due to the fact that it is an artist. The ideal is nothing other than the culminating point of logic, just as beauty is nothing other than the summit of truth. Artistic peoples are also consistent peoples. To love beauty is to see the light. This is what made the torch of Europe, that is to say of civilization, first carried by Greece, which passed it to Italy, which passed it to France. Divine enlightening peoples! _Vitaï lampada tradunt_. An admirable thing, the poetry of a people is the element of its progress. The quantity of civilization is measured by the quantity of imagination. Only a civilizing people must remain a male people. Corinth, yes; Sybaris, no. Whoever becomes effeminate degenerates. One must be neither dilettante nor virtuoso; but one must be an artist. In matters of civilization, one must not refine, but one must sublimate. On this condition, one gives to the human race the pattern of the ideal. The modern ideal has its type in art, and its means in science. It is through science that one will realize this august vision of the poets: the social beautiful. One will remake Eden by A + B. At the point where civilization has reached, the exact is a necessary element of the splendid, and the artistic sentiment is not only served, but completed by the scientific organ; the dream must calculate. Art, which is the conqueror, must have as its fulcrum science, which is the walker. The solidity of the mount matters. The modern spirit is the genius of Greece having as its vehicle the genius of India; Alexander on the elephant. Races petrified in dogma or demoralized by lucre are unfit for the conduct of civilization. Genuflection before the idol or before the shield atrophies the muscle that walks and the will that goes. Hieratic or commercial absorption diminishes the radiance of a people, lowers its horizon by lowering its level, and removes from it that intelligence, both human and divine, of the universal goal, which makes missionary nations. Babylon has no ideal; Carthage has no ideal. Athens and Rome have and keep, even through all the nocturnal thickness of the centuries, halos of civilization. France is of the same quality of people as Greece and Italy. It is Athenian in the beautiful and Roman in the great. Moreover, it is good. It gives of itself. It is more often than other peoples in a mood for devotion and sacrifice. Only, this mood takes it and leaves it. And that is the great danger for those who run when it only wants to walk, or who walk when it wants to stop. France has its relapses of materialism, and, at certain moments, the ideas which obstruct this sublime brain no longer have anything that recalls French grandeur and are of the dimension of a Missouri and a South Carolina. What can be done? The giant plays the dwarf; immense France has its fantasies of smallness. That’s all. Nothing to say about that. Peoples, like stars, have the right to eclipse. And all is well, provided that the light returns and that the eclipse does not degenerate into night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of light is identical to the persistence of the self. Let us note these facts calmly. Death on the barricade, or the grave in exile, is an acceptable snack for devotion. The true name of devotion is selflessness. Let the abandoned allow themselves to be abandoned, let the exiled allow themselves to be exiled, and let us confine ourselves to begging the great peoples not to retreat too far when they retreat. We must not, under the pretext of a return to reason, go too far in the descent. Matter exists, the minute exists, interests exist, the belly exists; But the belly must not be the only wisdom. Momentary life has its right, we admit, but permanent life has its. Alas! to have risen does not prevent one from falling. We see this in history more often than we would like. A nation is illustrious; it tastes the ideal, then it bites into the mire, and it finds it good; and if we ask it why it abandons Socrates for Falstaff, it replies: It is because I love statesmen. One more word before entering the fray. A battle like the one we are recounting at this moment is nothing other than a convulsion towards the ideal. Progress hindered is morbid, and it has these tragic epilepsies. This disease of progress, civil war , we have had to encounter on our way. This is one of the fatal phases, both act and interlude, of this drama whose pivot is a social damned, and whose true title is: Progress. Progress! This cry that we often utter is our whole thought; and, at the point of this drama where we are, the idea that it contains having still more than one test to undergo, it is perhaps permissible for us, if not to lift the veil, at least to let its light shine clearly through. The book that the reader has before his eyes at this moment is, from one end to the other, in its entirety and in its details, whatever the intermittencies, the exceptions or the failings, the march from evil to good, from the unjust to the just, from the false to the true, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from rottenness to life, from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God. Starting point: matter, ending point: the soul. The hydra at the beginning, the angel at the end. Chapter 21. The Heroes. Suddenly the drum beat the charge. The attack was a hurricane. The day before, in the darkness, the barricade had been approached silently as if by a boa constrictor. Now, in broad daylight, in this wide street, surprise was decidedly impossible, the The lively force had unmasked itself, the cannon had begun to roar, the army rushed upon the barricade. Fury was now skill. A powerful column of line infantry, cut at equal intervals by the National Guard and the Municipal Guard on foot, and supported by deep masses that could be heard without being seen, emerged into the street at a run, drums beating, bugles sounding, bayonets crossed, sappers at the head, and, imperturbable under the projectiles, arrived straight upon the barricade with the weight of a bronze beam on a wall. The wall held firm. The insurgents fired impetuously. The scaled barricade had a mane of lightning. The assault was so frenzied that it was for a moment flooded with assailants; but it shook off the soldiers as a lion shakes off dogs, and it covered itself with besiegers only like a cliff with foam, to reappear the next moment, steep, black, and formidable. The column, forced to fall back, remained massed in the street, exposed, but terrible, and responded to the redoubt with frightening musketry. Anyone who has seen a fireworks display remembers this sheaf made of a crossing of thunderbolts that is called the bouquet. Let us imagine this bouquet, no longer vertical, but horizontal, carrying a ball, a buckshot, or a biscay at the point of each of its jets of fire, and scattering death in its clusters of thunder. The barricade was there below. On both sides, equal resolution. The bravery there was almost barbaric and was complicated by a sort of heroic ferocity that began with the sacrifice of oneself. It was the time when a National Guardsman fought like a Zouave. The troops wanted to end it all; the insurrection wanted to fight. The acceptance of agony in the prime of youth and health turned intrepidity into a frenzy. Everyone in this melee had the magnificence of the supreme hour. The street was strewn with corpses. The barricade had Enjolras at one end and Marius at the other. Enjolras, who carried the entire barricade in his head, reserved himself and sheltered himself; three soldiers fell one after the other under his battlement without even having seen him; Marius fought in the open. He made himself a target. He emerged from the top of the redoubt more than half-length. There is no more violent prodigal than a miser who takes the bit between his teeth; there is no man more terrifying in action than a dreamer. Marius was formidable and pensive. He was in the battle as if in a dream. He was like a ghost firing a gun. The cartridges of the besieged were running out; their sarcasm was not. In this whirlwind of the sepulchre where they were, they were laughing. Courfeyrac was bareheaded. “What have you done with your hat?” Bossuet asked him. Courfeyrac replied: “They ended up carrying it off with cannon fire. Or else they were saying haughty things. ” “Do you understand,” Feuilly cried bitterly, “these men—(and he cited names, well-known names, even famous, some from the old army)—who had promised to join us and sworn to help us, and who had pledged themselves to do so with honor, and who are our generals, and who abandon us! And Combeferre merely replied with a grave smile: “There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the stars, from a great distance.” The interior of the barricade was so strewn with torn cartridges that one would have said it had snowed there. The assailants had the numbers; the insurgents had the position. They were at the top of a wall, and they were striking down at point-blank range the soldiers stumbling among the dead and wounded and entangled in the escarpment. This barricade, constructed as it was and admirably buttressed, was truly one of those situations where a A handful of men holds a legion in check. However, still recruited and growing under the hail of bullets, the attacking column was inexorably approaching, and now, little by little, step by step, but with certainty, the advance was tightening the barricade like a screw tightens the wine press. The assaults followed one another. The horror grew. Then broke out, on this pile of paving stones, in this rue de la Chanvrerie, a struggle worthy of a wall of Troy. These gaunt, ragged, exhausted men, who had not eaten for twenty-four hours, who had not slept, who had only a few shots left to fire, who felt their pockets empty of cartridges, almost all wounded, their heads or arms bandaged with rusty and blackish cloth, with holes in their clothes from which blood flowed, barely armed with bad rifles and old chipped sabers, became Titans. The barricade was approached ten times, assaulted, scaled, and never taken. To get an idea of this struggle, one should imagine the fire set to a heap of terrible courage, and look at the conflagration. It was not a combat, it was the interior of a furnace; the mouths breathed flames; the faces were extraordinary, the human form seemed impossible, the combatants blazed, and it was formidable to see these salamanders of the melee coming and going in this red smoke. We refuse to paint the successive and simultaneous scenes of this grandiose slaughter. The epic alone has the right to fill twelve thousand verses with a battle. It was like that hell of Brahmanism, the most formidable of the seventeen abysses, which the Veda calls the Forest of Swords. They fought hand to hand, foot to foot, with pistols, with sabers, with fists, from afar, from near, from above, from below, from everywhere, from the roofs of the house, from the windows of the tavern, from the cellar vents where some had slipped. They were one against sixty. The facade of Corinth, half demolished, was hideous. The window, tattooed with grapeshot, had lost its panes and frame, and was nothing more than a shapeless hole, tumultuously blocked with paving stones. Bossuet was killed; Feuilly was killed; Courfeyrac was killed; Joly was killed; Combeferre, pierced by three bayonet blows in the chest as he was lifting a wounded soldier, only had time to look at the sky, and expired. Marius, always fighting, was so riddled with wounds, particularly to the head, that his face disappeared in the blood and one would have said that his face was covered with a red handkerchief. Enjolras alone was not injured. When he no longer had a weapon, he stretched out his hand to the right or left and an insurgent would put some blade in his hand. He had only a stub of four swords left; one more than François I at Marignan. Homer says: “Diomedes slaughters Axyles, son of Teuthranis, who lived in happy Arisba; Euryalus, son of Mecistaeus, exterminates Dresus, and Opheltius, Aesepus, and that Pedasus whom the naiad Abarbarea conceived by the blameless Bucolion; Odysseus overthrows Pidytus of Percosa; Antilochus, Ablerus; Polypaetes, Astyalus; Polydamas, Otos of Cyllene, and Teucer, Aretaon. Meganthios dies under the pike blows of Euripyles. Agamemnon, king of heroes, overthrows Elatos, born in the steep city bathed by the sonorous river Satnois.” In our old poems of gestures, Esplandian attacks with a sharp spear of fire the giant marquis Swantiborus, who defends himself by stoning the knight with towers that he uproots. Our ancient mural frescoes show us the two dukes of Brittany and Bourbon, armed, bearing coats of arms and stamped in war, on horseback, and approaching each other, battle axes in hand, masked in iron, booted in iron, gloved in iron, one caparisoned in ermine, the other draped in azure; Brittany with her lion between the two horns of her crown, Bourbon helmeted with a monstrous fleur-de-lis visor. But to be superb, it is not necessary to wear, like Yvon, the ducal morion, to have in one’s hand, like Esplandian, a living flame, or, like Phylès, father of Polydamas, to have brought back from Ephyre a good armor, a present from the king of men Euphetes; it is enough to give one’s life for a conviction or for a loyalty. This little naive soldier, yesterday a peasant from Beauce or Limousin, who prowls, straight razor at his side, around the nurses in the Luxembourg, this young pale student bent over a piece of anatomy or a book, a blond adolescent who trims his beard with scissors, take them both, breathe into them a breath of duty, put them face to face with each other in the Boucherat crossroads or in the Planche-Mibray cul-de-sac, and let one fight for his flag, and let the other fight for his ideal, and let them both imagine themselves fighting for the fatherland; the struggle will be colossal; and the shadow that this little scamp and this carabin will cast in the great epic field where humanity struggles will equal the shadow cast by Megaryon, king of Lycia full of tigers, clasping hand to hand the immense Ajax, equal to the gods. Chapter 22. Foot to foot. When there were no more living leaders but Enjolras and Marius at the two ends of the barricade, the center, which had been supported for so long by Courfeyrac, Joly, Bossuet, Feuilly and Combeferre, gave way. The cannon, without making a practicable breach, had rather widely cut the middle of the redoubt; there, the top of the wall had disappeared under the cannonball, and had collapsed; and the debris, which had fallen, sometimes inside, sometimes outside, had ended up, piling up, by making, on both sides of the dam, two kinds of embankments, one inside, the other outside. The outer embankment offered an inclined plane for boarding . A final assault was attempted there and this assault succeeded. The mass bristling with bayonets and launched at a gymnastic pace arrived irresistible, and the thick battle front of the attacking column appeared in the smoke at the top of the escarpment. This time it was over. The group of insurgents who defended the center retreated pell-mell. Then the dark love of life awoke in some of them. Aimed at by this forest of rifles, several no longer wanted to die. It is a moment when the instinct of self-preservation howls and when the beast reappears in man. They were cornered at the tall, six-story house that formed the back of the redoubt. This house could be their salvation. This house was barricaded and as if walled up from top to bottom. Before the regular troops were inside the redoubt, a door had time to open and close, a flash of lightning was enough for that, and the door of this house, suddenly half-open and immediately closed, was life for these desperate souls. Behind this house were the streets, the possible escape, space. They began to beat on this door with rifle butts and kicks, calling out, shouting, pleading, clasping their hands. No one opened it. From the third-story skylight, the dead head watched them. But Enjolras and Marius, and seven or eight rallied around them, had rushed forward and protected them. Enjolras had shouted to the soldiers: Don’t advance ! And when an officer didn’t obey, Enjolras had killed the officer. He was now in the small inner courtyard of the redoubt, leaning against Corinth’s house, sword in one hand, carbine in the other, holding open the door of the tavern, which he barred from the attackers. He shouted to the desperate: “There is only one door open. This one.” And, covering them with his body, facing a battalion alone, he made them pass behind him. All rushed towards it. Enjolras, executing with his carbine, which he now used as a cane, what the batonists call the covered rose, brought down the bayonets around of him and in front of him, and entered last; and there was a horrible moment, the soldiers wanting to enter, the insurgents wanting to close. The door was closed with such violence that as it fitted back into its frame, it revealed, cut and stuck to its jamb, the five fingers of a soldier who had clung to it. Marius had remained outside. A shot had just broken his collarbone; he felt that he was fainting and falling. At that moment, his eyes already closed, he had the shock of a vigorous hand seizing him, and his fainting, in which he lost himself, barely left him time for this thought mingled with the supreme memory of Cosette: “I am taken prisoner. I will be shot.” Enjolras, not seeing Marius among the refugees from the cabaret, had the same idea. But they were at that moment when everyone only has time to think about their own death. Enjolras secured the bar of the door, and bolted it, and double-locked the lock and padlock, while they were furiously beating on it outside, the soldiers with rifle butts, the sappers with axes. The assailants had gathered at this door. Now the siege of the tavern was beginning. The soldiers, let us say, were full of anger. The death of the artillery sergeant had irritated them, and then, more fatally, during the few hours preceding the attack, it had been said among them that the insurgents were mutilating the prisoners, and that there was the headless corpse of a soldier in the tavern. This kind of fatal rumor is the usual accompaniment of civil wars, and it was a false rumor of this kind that later caused the catastrophe of the Rue Transnonain. When the door was barricaded, Enjolras said to the others: “Let’s sell ourselves dearly.” Then he approached the table where Mabeuf and Gavroche were lying. Under the black cloth, two straight, rigid forms could be seen, one large, the other small, and the two faces were vaguely outlined under the cold folds of the shroud. A hand emerged from under the shroud and hung towards the ground. It was the old man’s. Enjolras bent down and kissed this venerable hand, just as the day before he had kissed the forehead. These were the only two kisses he had given in his life. Let’s cut to the chase. The barricade had fought like a gate of Thebes, the tavern fought like a house in Saragossa. Such resistance is gruff. No quarter. No possible parliamentarian. One wants to die as long as one kills. When Suchet said: “Capitulate,” Palafox replied: “After the war with cannons, the war with knives. ” Nothing was missing from the storming of the Hucheloup cabaret; neither the paving stones raining from the window and the roof onto the besiegers and exasperating the soldiers with horrible crushing, nor the shots from the cellars and attics, nor the fury of the attack, nor the rage of the defense, nor finally, when the door gave way, the frenzied madness of extermination. The assailants, rushing into the cabaret, their feet entangled in the panels of the door, which had been broken down and thrown to the ground, did not find a single combatant there. The spiral staircase, cut down with axes, lay in the middle of the lower room, a few wounded were dying, all who were not killed were on the first floor, and there, through the hole in the ceiling, which had been the entrance to the staircase, a terrifying fire broke out. They were the last cartridges. When they were burned, when these fearsome dying men had neither powder nor bullets left, each took in his hand two of those bottles reserved by Enjolras and of which we have spoken, and they stood up to the climb with these frighteningly fragile clubs. They were bottles of aquaforte. We say these dark things of carnage as they are. The besieged, alas, makes weapons of everything. Greek fire did not dishonor Archimedes; boiling pitch did not dishonor Bayard. All war is terror, and there is no has nothing to choose from. The musketry of the besiegers, though hampered and from bottom to top, was murderous. The edge of the hole in the ceiling was soon surrounded by dead heads from which streamed long red and smoking threads. The din was inexpressible; a trapped and burning smoke almost made night over this fight. Words fail to express the horror that had reached this level. There were no longer any men in this now infernal struggle. It was no longer giants against colossi. It resembled Milton and Dante more than Homer. Demons attacked, specters resisted. It was monstrous heroism. Chapter 23. Orestes fasting and Pylades drunk. Finally, using the skeleton of the staircase as a support, climbing the walls, clinging to the ceiling, tearing to pieces, at the very edge of the trapdoor, the last of the besiegers, soldiers, national guards, municipal guards, pell-mell, most of them disfigured by facial wounds in this formidable ascent, blinded by blood, furious, turned savage, burst into the room on the first floor. There was only one left standing, Enjolras. Without cartridges, without a sword, he had nothing left in his hand but the barrel of his rifle, the butt of which he had broken over the heads of those who entered. He had put the billiard table between the assailants and himself; he had retreated to the corner of the room, and there, with a proud look , his head held high, this piece of weapon in his hand, he was still sufficiently disturbing for a vacuum to have formed around him. A cry arose: “It’s the chief. He’s the one who killed the gunner. Since he put himself there, he’s fine there. Let him stay there. Let’s shoot him on the spot. ” “Shoot me,” said Enjolras. And, throwing down the stub of his rifle and crossing his arms, he presented his chest. The audacity to die well always moves men. As soon as Enjolras crossed his arms, accepting the end, the muffled struggle in the room ceased, and this chaos suddenly subsided into a sort of sepulchral solemnity. It seemed that the menacing majesty of the unarmed and motionless Enjolras weighed on this tumult, and that, simply by the authority of his calm gaze, this young man, who alone was not wounded, superb, bloody, charming, indifferent as one invulnerable, forced this sinister mob to kill him with respect. His beauty, at that moment increased by his pride, was a resplendent, and, as if he could no more be tired than wounded, after the frightening twenty-four hours which had just passed , he was rosy and rosy. It was perhaps of him that the witness was speaking who said later before the court-martial: “There was an insurgent whom I heard called Apollo.” A National Guardsman who was aiming at Enjolras lowered his weapon, saying: “It seems to me that I am going to shoot a flower.” Twelve men formed a platoon at the corner opposite Enjolras and silently readied their rifles. Then a sergeant shouted: “Play.” An officer intervened. “Wait.” And addressing Enjolras: “Do you want your eyes blindfolded? ” “No. ” “Was it really you who killed the artillery sergeant? ” “Yes.” Grantaire had woken up a few moments ago. Grantaire, it will be remembered, had been asleep since the day before in the upper room of the cabaret, sitting on a chair, slumped over a table. He was realizing, with all his energy, the old metaphor: dead drunk. The hideous absinthe-stout-alcohol potion had thrown him into a lethargy. His table being small and unfit for the barricade, it had been left to him. He was still in the same posture, his chest bent on the table, his head resting flat on his arms, surrounded by glasses, tankards, and bottles. He slept that crushing sleep of the torpid bear and the sated leech. Nothing had done anything, neither the fusillade, nor the cannonballs, nor the grapeshot that penetrated through the window into the room where he was, nor the prodigious din of the assault. Only, he sometimes responded to the cannon with a snore. He seemed to be waiting there for a bullet to spare him the trouble of waking up. Several corpses lay around him; and, at first glance, nothing distinguished him from these deep sleepers of death. Noise does not wake a drunkard, silence does. This singularity has been observed more than once. The collapse of everything around him increased Grantaire’s annihilation; the collapse rocked him. The kind of halt made by the tumult in front of Enjolras was a jolt to this heavy sleep. It is the effect of a galloping carriage that stops short. The sleepy ones wake up there. Grantaire jumped up , stretched out his arms, rubbed his eyes, looked, yawned, and understood. Drunkenness that ends is like a curtain being torn. One sees, in a single block and at a glance, everything that it was hiding. Everything suddenly presents itself to the memory; and the drunkard who knows nothing of what has happened in the last twenty-four hours has hardly finished opening his eyelids when he is aware of the facts. Ideas return to him with sudden lucidity; the fading of drunkenness, a sort of fog that blinded the brain, dissipates, and gives way to the clear and distinct obsession with reality. Relegated as he was to his corner and as if sheltered behind the billiard table, the soldiers, their eyes fixed on Enjolras, had not even noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat the order: Aim! when suddenly they heard a loud voice cry beside them: “Long live the Republic! I’m in it.” Grantaire stood up. The immense glow of all the fighting he had missed, and of which he had not been, appeared in the dazzling eyes of the transfigured drunkard. He repeated: “Long live the Republic!” crossed the room with a firm step, and went to stand in front of the rifles standing near Enjolras. “Make two at once,” he said. And, turning gently to Enjolras, he said to him: “Will you allow me?” Enjolras shook his hand, smiling. This smile was not over when the detonation burst forth. Enjolras, pierced by eight shots, remained leaning against the wall as if the bullets had nailed him there. Only he bent his head. Grantaire, thunderstruck, fell at his feet. A few moments later, the soldiers dislodged the last insurgents who had taken refuge at the top of the house. They fired through a wooden trellis in the attic. There was fighting in the rafters. Bodies were thrown out of the windows, some of them alive. Two voltigeurs, who were trying to raise the shattered omnibus, were killed by two rifle shots fired from the attic. A man in a smock was thrown from it, a bayonet thrust in the stomach, and lay groaning on the ground. A soldier and an insurgent slid together on the tiled slope of the roof, refused to let go, and fell, holding each other in a ferocious embrace. A similar struggle in the cellar. Shouts, gunshots, fierce stamping. Then silence. The barricade was taken. The soldiers began searching the surrounding houses and pursuing the fugitives. Chapter 24. Prisoner. Marius was indeed a prisoner. Prisoner of Jean Valjean. The hand that had clasped him from behind as he fell, and whose shock he had felt when he lost consciousness, was Jean Valjean’s. Jean Valjean had taken no other action in combat than to expose himself to it. Without him, in this supreme phase of his agony, no one would have thought of the wounded. Thanks to him, everywhere present in the carnage like a providence, those who fell were raised, carried into the lower room, and bandaged. In the intervals, he repaired the barricade. But nothing that could resemble a blow, an attack, or even a personal defense, came from his hands. He remained silent and helped. Besides, he had barely a few scratches. The bullets had not wanted him. If suicide was part of what he had dreamed of when he came to this sepulchre, in that direction he had not succeeded. But we doubt that he had thought of suicide, an irreligious act. Jean Valjean, in the thick cloud of combat, did not seem to see Marius; the fact is that he did not take his eyes off him. When a shot knocked Marius down, Jean Valjean sprang with the agility of a tiger, fell upon him as upon prey, and carried him off. The whirlwind of the attack was at that moment so violently concentrated on Enjolras and on the door of the tavern that no one saw Jean Valjean, supporting the fainting Marius in his arms, cross the unpaved area of the barricade and disappear behind the corner of the house at Corinth. We remember this corner which formed a sort of cape in the street; it protected from bullets and grapeshot, and from glances too, a few square feet of ground. Thus there is sometimes in fires a room which does not burn, and in the most furious seas, on this side of a promontory or at the bottom of a dead end of reefs, a little quiet corner. It was in this sort of fold of the inner trapezium of the barricade that Éponine had lain in agony. There Jean Valjean stopped, he let Marius slide to the ground, leaned against the wall and cast his eyes around him. The situation was frightful. For the moment, for two or three minutes perhaps, this section of wall was a shelter; but how could he escape from this massacre? He remembered the anguish in which he had found himself on Rue Polonceau, eight years before, and how he had managed to escape; it had been difficult then, today it was impossible. He had before him that implacable and deaf six-story house which seemed inhabited only by the dead man leaning out of his window; he had on his right the rather low barricade which closed off the Petite-Truanderie; to climb over this obstacle seemed easy, but above the crest of the barrier one could see a row of bayonet points. It was the regular troops, posted beyond this barricade, and on the lookout. It was obvious that to cross the barricade was to invite a firing squad, and that any head which ventured to exceed the top of the cobblestone wall would serve as a target for sixty rifle shots. He had the field of combat on his left. Death was behind the angle of the wall. What was to be done? A single bird could have escaped from there. And it was necessary to decide at once, to find an expedient, to take a stand. The fighting was going on a few paces from him; fortunately, all were bent on a single point, on the door of the tavern; but if a soldier, a single one, had the idea of turning the house, or attacking it in flank, all was over. Jean Valjean looked at the house opposite him, he looked at the barricade beside him, then he looked at the ground, with the violence of supreme extremity, distraught, and as if he wanted to make a hole in it with his eyes. By dint of looking, one knows not what vaguely perceptible in such agony took shape and took form at his feet, as if it were a power of the gaze to bring forth the thing requested. He perceived a few steps from him, at the bottom of the little dam so pitilessly guarded and watched from the outside, under a collapse of paving stones which partly hid it, an iron grating laid flat and level with the ground. This grating, made of strong transverse bars, was about two feet square. The frame of paving stones which held it in place had been torn off, and it was as if unsealed. Through the bars a dark opening could be glimpsed, something like the flue of a chimney or the cylinder of a cistern. Jean Valjean rushed forward. His old science of escapes rose to his brain like a clarity. To push aside the paving stones, to lift the gate, to load Marius, inert as a dead body, onto his shoulders, to descend, with this burden on his loins, using his elbows and knees, into this sort of fortunately shallow well, to let fall above his head the heavy iron trapdoor upon which the shaken paving stones crumbled again, to set foot on a paved surface three meters below the ground, this was executed as one does in delirium, with the strength of a giant and the swiftness of an eagle; it lasted scarcely a few minutes. Jean Valjean found himself, with Marius still unconscious, in a sort of long subterranean corridor. There, profound peace, absolute silence, night. The impression he had formerly experienced on falling from the street into the convent returned to him. Only, what he carried away today was no longer Cosette; it was Marius. It was barely now that he heard above him, like a vague murmur, the formidable tumult of the cabaret being stormed. Book Two–The Intestine of Leviathan Chapter 25. The Earth Impoverished by the Sea. Paris throws twenty-five million into the water every year. And this without metaphor. How, and in what way? Day and night. For what purpose? Without any purpose. With what thought? Without thinking. Why do it? For nothing. By means of what organ? By means of its intestine. What is its intestine? It is its sewer. Twenty-five million is the most moderate of the approximate figures given by the estimates of special science. Science, after having groped for a long time, knows today that the most fertilizing and the most effective of fertilizers is human fertilizer. The Chinese, let us say it to our shame, knew it before us. Not a Chinese peasant , Eckeberg says, goes to town without bringing back, at both ends of his bamboo, two buckets full of what we call filth. Thanks to human fertilizer, the earth in China is still as young as in the time of Abraham. Chinese wheat yields up to 120 times its seed. There is no guano comparable in fertility to the detritus of a capital. A great city is the most powerful of stercoraria. To employ the city to manure the plain would be a certain success. If our gold is manure, on the other hand, our manure is gold. What do we do with this gold manure? We sweep it into the abyss. At great expense, convoys of ships are sent to the South Pole to collect the droppings of petrels and penguins, and the incalculable element of opulence that is at hand is sent to the sea. All the human and animal manure that the world loses, if returned to the earth instead of being thrown into the water, would be enough to feed the world. Do you know what these piles of garbage at the corner of the terminals, these carts of mud jolted through the streets at night, these horrible barrels in the road, these fetid flows of subterranean mud that the pavement hides from you ? It is meadow in bloom, it is green grass, it is wild thyme and thyme and sage, it is game, it is cattle, it is the satisfied lowing of great oxen in the evening, it is fragrant hay , it is golden wheat, it is bread on your table, it is warm blood in your veins, it is health, it is joy, it is life . This is what this mysterious creation wants, which is transformation on earth and transfiguration in heaven. Return this to the great crucible; your abundance will come out. The nutrition of the plains is the food of men. You are masters of losing this wealth, and of finding me ridiculous into the bargain. This will be the masterpiece of your ignorance. Statistics have calculated that France alone makes a payment of half a billion to the Atlantic every year through the mouths of its rivers . Note this: with these five hundred million we would pay the quarter of the budget expenditures. The skill of man is such that he prefers to throw these five hundred million down the drain. It is the very substance of the people that is carried away, here drop by drop, there in floods, by the miserable vomit of our sewers into the rivers and the gigantic vomit of our rivers into the ocean. Each hiccup of our cesspools costs us a thousand francs. This has two results: impoverished land and stinking water. Hunger emerging from the furrow and disease emerging from the river. It is well known, for example, that at this time the Thames is poisoning London. As for Paris, in recent times it has been necessary to transport most of the sewer outlets downstream below the last bridge. A double tubular apparatus, equipped with valves and flushing sluices, suction and discharge, an elementary drainage system, simple as the human lung, and which is already in full operation in several English municipalities, would be enough to bring pure water from the fields into our cities and to return the rich water from the cities to our fields, and this easy back and forth, the simplest in the world, would retain in our country the five hundred million thrown out. We think of something else. The current process does harm while wanting to do good. The intention is good, the result is sad. We believe we are purging the city, we are wasting the population. A sewer is a misunderstanding. When everywhere drainage, with its double function, restoring what it takes, has replaced the sewer, a simple impoverishing wash, then, this being combined with the data of a new social economy, the product of the earth will be increased tenfold, and the problem of poverty will be singularly attenuated. Add the suppression of parasitism, it will be resolved. In the meantime, public wealth goes down the river, and the sinking takes place. Sinking is the word. Europe is ruining itself in this way through exhaustion. As for France, we have just given its figure. Now, Paris containing a twenty-fifth of the total French population, and Parisian guano being the richest of all, we remain below the truth in estimating at twenty-five million the share of Paris’s loss in the half-billion that France refuses annually. These twenty-five million, used in assistance and enjoyment, would double the splendor of Paris. The city spends them on cesspools. So that one can say that the great prodigality of Paris, its marvelous festival, its Folie-Beaujon, its orgy, its flowing of gold by the handful, its pomp, its luxury, its magnificence, is its sewer. This is how, in the blindness of a bad political economy , the well-being of all is drowned and allowed to go to waste and be lost in the abysses. There should be nets of Saint-Cloud for the public fortune. Economically, the fact can be summed up thus: Paris, a leaky basket. Paris, this model city, this patron saint of well-made capitals of which each people strives to have a copy, this metropolis of the ideal, this august homeland of initiative, impulse and experimentation, this center and place of minds, this nation-city, this hive of the future, this marvelous composite of Babylon and Corinth, would, from the point of view we have just mentioned, make a peasant from Fo-Kian shrug his shoulders. Imitate Paris, you will ruin yourself. Moreover, particularly in this immemorial and senseless waste, Paris itself imitates. These surprising ineptitudes are not new; This is not youthful stupidity. The ancients acted like the moderns. “The cesspools of Rome,” says Liebig, “absorbed all the well-being of the Roman peasant.” When the Roman countryside was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome exhausted Italy, and when it had put Italy in its cesspool, it poured Sicily into it, then Sardinia, then Africa. The sewer of Rome swallowed up the world. This cesspool offered its engulfment to the city and to the universe. Urbi et orbi. Eternal city, unfathomable sewer. For these things as for others, Rome sets the example. This example, Paris follows, with all the stupidity proper to cities of spirit.
For the needs of the operation we have just explained, Paris has beneath it another Paris; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its crossroads, its squares, its dead ends, its arteries, and its circulation, which is mud, with the human form missing. For one must not flatter anything, not even a great people; where there is everything, there is ignominy alongside sublimity; and, if Paris contains Athens, the city of light, Tyre, the city of power, Sparta, the city of virtue, Nineveh, the city of wonders, it also contains Lutetia, the city of mud. Besides, the stamp of its power is there too, and the titanic bilge of Paris realizes, among the monuments, that strange ideal realized in humanity by a few men such as Machiavelli, Bacon and Mirabeau, the abject grandiose. The subsoil of Paris, if the eye could penetrate its surface, would present the aspect of a colossal madrepore. A sponge has hardly more sluices and corridors than the mound of earth six leagues in circumference on which the ancient great city rests. Without speaking of the catacombs, which are a cellar apart, without speaking of the inextricable latticework of gas conduits, without counting the vast tubular system of the distribution of living water which ends at the fountains, the sewers alone form under the two banks a prodigious dark network; a labyrinth which has its slope as its thread. There appears, in the humid mist, the rat, which seems the product of the childbirth of Paris. Chapter 26. The Ancient History of the Sewer. Imagine Paris removed like a lid; the underground network of sewers, seen from a bird’s eye view, will draw on both banks a kind of large branch grafted to the river. On the right bank, the belt sewer will be the trunk of this branch, the secondary conduits will be the branches, and the dead ends will be the offshoots. This figure is only rough and half-exact, the right angle, which is the usual angle for this kind of underground ramifications, being very rare in vegetation. We will form a more realistic image of this strange geometric plan by supposing that we see flat against a background of darkness some bizarre oriental alphabet scrambled like a jumble, and whose misshapen letters would be welded to each other, in an apparent jumble and as if at random, sometimes by their angles, sometimes by their extremities. The bilges and sewers played a great role in the Middle Ages, in the Late Empire and in this old Orient. The plague was born there, despots died there. The multitudes looked almost with religious fear at these beds of rot, monstrous cradles of Death. The vermin pit of Benares is no less dizzying than the lion’s den of Babylon. Tiglath-Pileser, according to the rabbinical books, swore by the bilges of Nineveh. It was from the sewer of Munster that John of Leiden brought forth his false moon, and it was from the cesspool-well of Kekhseb that his oriental Menechmus, Mokanna, the veiled prophet of Khorasan, brought forth his false sun. The history of men is reflected in the history of cesspools. The gallows told of Rome. The sewer of Paris was a formidable old thing. It has been a sepulchre, it has been an asylum. Crime, intelligence, social protest, freedom of conscience, thought, theft, everything that human laws pursue or have pursued, has hidden in this hole; the Maillotins in the fourteenth century, the tire-laine in the fifteenth, the Huguenots in the sixteenth, the illuminati of Morin in the seventeenth, the chauffeurs in the eighteenth. A hundred years ago, the nocturnal stab came out of it, the thief in danger slipped into it; the wood had the cavern, Paris had the sewer. The roguery, this Gallic picareria, accepted the sewer as a branch of the Cour des Miracles, and in the evening, mocking and ferocious, returned under the Maubuée vomitorium as if into an alcove. It was quite simple that those whose daily workplace was the cul-de-sac Vide-Gousset or the rue Coupe-Gorge had for their nightly abode the cul-de-sac du Chemin-Vert or the blazing Hurepoix. Hence a swarm of memories. All sorts of ghosts haunt these long solitary corridors; everywhere putridity and miasma; here and there a basement window where Villon inside talks with Rabelais outside. The sewer, in old Paris, is the meeting place of all exhaustion and all trials. Political economy sees it as detritus, social philosophy sees it as residue. The sewer is the city’s conscience. Everything converges there, and confronts each other. In this livid place, there is darkness, but there are no more secrets. Everything has its true form, or at least its definitive form. The pile of garbage has this going for it: it is not a liar. Naiveté has taken refuge there. Basile’s mask is there, but we see the cardboard, and the strings, and the inside as well as the outside, and it is accentuated by an honest mud. Scapin’s false nose is next to it. All the filth of civilization, once out of service, falls into this pit of truth where the immense social shift ends. They are swallowed up there, but they spread out there. This jumble is a confession. There, no more false appearance, no possible plastering, the filth takes off its shirt, absolute denudation, rout of illusions and mirages, nothing more than what is, making the sinister figure of what ends. Reality and disappearance. There, a bottle bottom confesses drunkenness, a basket handle tells of domesticity; there, the apple core that had literary opinions becomes the apple core again; the effigy of the big penny turns verdigris, the spit of Caiaphas meets the vomit of Falstaff, the gold louis that comes out of the gambling den hits the nail where the end of the suicide rope hangs, a livid fetus rolls wrapped in sequins that danced last Shrove Tuesday at the Opera, a toque that judged men wallows near a rottenness that was Margoton’s skirt; it is more than fraternity , it is tutoiement. Everything that was made up is smeared. The last veil is torn away. A sewer is a cynic. It says everything. This sincerity of filth pleases us, and rests the soul. When one has spent one’s time on earth enduring the spectacle of the grand airs assumed by reason of state, oaths, political wisdom, human justice, professional probity, situational austerity, incorruptible robes, it is a relief to enter a sewer and see the filth that suits it. It teaches at the same time. As we said earlier, history passes through the sewer. The Saint-Bartholomews filter there drop by drop between the paving stones. The great public assassinations, the political and religious butcheries, cross this underground of civilization and push their corpses there. To the dreamer’s eye, all the historical murderers are there, in the hideous gloom, on their knees, with a piece of their shroud for an apron, lugubriously mopping their work. Louis XI is there with Tristan, François I is there with Duprat, Charles IX is there with his mother, Richelieu is there with Louis XIII, Louvois is there, Letellier is there, Hébert and Maillard are there, scraping the stones and trying to erase the trace of their actions. One hears under these vaults the broom of these specters. One breathes there the enormous fetidity of social catastrophes. One sees in corners reddish shimmers. There flows a terrible water where bloody hands have been washed. The social observer must enter these shadows. They are part of his laboratory. Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything wants to flee it, but nothing escapes it. Procrastination is useless. What side of oneself does one show by procrastinating? the shameful side. Philosophy pursues with its gaze, probes evil, and does not allow it to escape into nothingness. In the erasure of things that disappear, in the diminishing of things that vanish, it recognizes everything. It reconstructs the purple from the rag and the woman from the rag. With the cesspool it remakes the city; with the mud it remakes morals. From the shard it concludes the amphora, or the jug. It recognizes by a fingernail print on a parchment the difference that separates the Jewry of the Judengasse from the Jewry of the Ghetto. She
finds in what remains what has been, the good, the bad, the false, the true, the bloodstain of the palace, the ink blot of the cave, the drop of tallow from the brothel, the trials undergone, the welcome temptations , the vomited orgies, the fold that characters made in lowering themselves, the trace of prostitution in the souls that their coarseness made them capable of, and on the jackets of the porters of Rome the mark of Messalina’s elbow. Chapter 27. Bruneseau. The sewer of Paris, in the Middle Ages, was legendary. In the sixteenth century Henry II attempted a sounding that failed. Not a hundred years ago, the cesspool, Mercier attests, was abandoned to itself and became what it could. Such was that old Paris, given over to quarrels, indecisions and fumbling. It was for a long time rather stupid. Later, 89 showed how the spirit comes to cities. But, in the good old days, the capital had little sense; it knew neither morally nor materially how to manage its affairs, and how to sweep away garbage no better than abuses. Everything was an obstacle, everything was questionable. The sewer, for example, was resistant to any itinerary. One could no more find one’s way in the streets than one could understand oneself in the city; above the unintelligible, below the inextricable; beneath the confusion of languages there was the confusion of cellars; Daedalus doubled Babel. Sometimes, the sewer of Paris would overflow, as if this unknown Nile were suddenly seized with anger. There were, infamously, sewer floods. At times, this stomach of civilization digested badly, the cesspool flowed back into the throat of the city, and Paris had the aftertaste of its own filth. These resemblances of the sewer with remorse had their good points; they were warnings; very badly taken, moreover; the city was indignant that its mud had so much audacity, and would not allow the filth to return. Chase it away better. The flood of 1802 is one of the current memories of Parisians of eighty years. The mud spread in a cross on the Place des Victoires, where the statue of Louis XIV is; it entered Rue Saint-Honoré by the two sewer mouths of the Champs-Élysées, Rue Saint-Florentin by the Saint-Florentin sewer, Rue Pierre-à-Poisson by the Sonnerie sewer, Rue Popincourt by the Chemin-Vert sewer, Rue de la Roquette by the sewer of the Rue de Lappe; it covered the gutter of the Rue des Champs-Élysées to a height of thirty-five centimeters; and, to the south, by the vomitory of the Seine performing its function in the opposite direction, it entered rue Mazarine, rue de l’Échaudé, and rue des Marais, where it stopped at a length of one hundred and nine meters, precisely a few steps from the house where Racine had lived, respecting, in the seventeenth century, the poet more than the king. It reached its maximum depth on rue Saint-Pierre where it rose three feet above the flagstones of the gargoyle, and its maximum extent on rue Saint-Sabin where it spread over a length of two hundred and thirty-eight meters. At the beginning of this century, the sewer of Paris was still a mysterious place . Mud can never be well known; but here the bad reputation went as far as terror. Paris knew confusedly that it had under him a terrible cellar. It was spoken of as that monstrous dunghill in Thebes where fifteen-foot-long centipedes swarmed and which could have served as a bathtub for Behemoth. The sewer workers’ heavy boots never ventured beyond certain known points. It was still very close to the time when the garbage collectors’ carts, from the top of which Sainte-Foix fraternized with the Marquis de Créqui, simply emptied themselves into the sewer. As for cleaning, this function was entrusted to the downpours, which clogged more than they swept away. Rome still left some poetry to its cesspool and called it Gemonies; Paris insulted its own and called it the Bug Hole . Science and superstition were in agreement in their horror. The Bug Hole was no less repugnant to hygiene than to legend. The Gruff Monk had hatched under the fetid vault of the Mouffetard sewer; The corpses of the Marmousets had been thrown into the sewer of the Barillerie; Fagon had attributed the dreaded malignant fever of 1685 to the great hiatus of the Marais sewer, which remained gaping until 1833 on rue Saint-Louis, almost opposite the sign of the Messager galant. The manhole in rue de la Mortellerie was famous for the plagues that emerged from it; with its spiked iron grating that simulated a row of teeth, it was in this fatal street like a dragon’s mouth breathing hell upon men. Popular imagination seasoned the dark Parisian sink with some hideous mixture of infinity. The sewer was bottomless. The sewer was barathrum. The idea of exploring these leprous regions did not even occur to the police. To tempt this unknown, to throw the probe into this shadow, to go on a discovery in this abyss, who would have dared? It was terrifying. Someone did come forward , however. The cesspool had its Christopher Columbus. One day in 1805, in one of those rare appearances the Emperor made in Paris, the Minister of the Interior, some Decrès or Crétet , came to the master’s early morning. In the Carrousel, one could hear the dragging of sabres by all those extraordinary soldiers of the great Republic and the great Empire; there was a crowd of heroes at Napoleon’s door; men of the Rhine, the Scheldt, the Adige, and the Nile; companions of Joubert, Desaix, Marceau, Hoche, and Kléber; balloonists from Fleurus, grenadiers from Mayence, pontooners from Genoa, hussars whom the Pyramids had watched, artillerymen who had been splashed by Junot’s cannonball, cuirassiers who had stormed the fleet at anchor in the Zuyderzee; Some had followed Bonaparte over the bridge at Lodi, others had accompanied Murat into the trench at Mantua, others had preceded Lannes in the sunken road at Montebello. The whole army of that time was there, in the courtyard of the Tuileries, represented by a squad or a platoon, and guarding Napoleon at rest; and it was the splendid period when the great army had Marengo behind it and Austerlitz before it. “Sire,” said the Minister of the Interior to Napoleon, “yesterday I saw the most intrepid man in your empire.” “What is this man?” said the Emperor abruptly, “and what has he done?” “He wants to do one thing, Sire.” “What is it?” “Visit the sewers of Paris.” This man existed and his name was Bruneseau. Chapter 28. Details unknown. The visit took place. It was a formidable campaign; a night battle against the plague and asphyxiation. It was at the same time a voyage of discovery. One of the survivors of this exploration, an intelligent worker, very young at the time, was still recounting a few years ago the curious details that Bruneseau felt he had to omit in his report to the police prefect, as unworthy of the administrative style. Disinfectant procedures were at that time very rudimentary. Hardly
had Bruneseau crossed the first joints of the network underground, that eight out of twenty workers refused to go further . The operation was complicated; the visit entailed cleaning; it was therefore necessary to clean, and at the same time to survey: note the water inlets, count the grates and the mouths, detail the connections, indicate the currents at the dividing points, recognize the respective districts of the various basins, sound the small sewers grafted onto the main sewer, measure the height under key of each corridor, and the width, both at the base of the vaults and at the level of the invert, finally determine the ordinates of the leveling at the right of each water inlet, either of the invert of the sewer, or of the ground of the street. It was difficult to advance. It was not rare for the descent ladders to plunge into three feet of mud. The lanterns were dying in the miasma. From time to time a sewer worker was carried away unconscious. In certain places, a precipice. The ground had collapsed, the paving had crumbled, the sewer had become a cesspool; the solid was no longer to be found; a man suddenly disappeared; it was with great difficulty that he was removed. On the advice of Fourcroy, large cages filled with tow soaked in resin were lit at intervals, in sufficiently drained areas. The wall, in places, was covered with deformed fungi, and they looked like tumors; the stone itself seemed diseased in this stifling environment. Bruneseau, in his exploration, proceeded from upstream to downstream. At the point where the two water pipes of the Grand-Hurleur divide, he deciphered the date 1550 on a projecting stone; this stone indicated the limit where Philibert Delorme, commissioned by Henri II to inspect the underground roads of Paris, had stopped . This stone was the mark of the sixteenth century on the sewer. Bruneseau found the labor of the seventeenth in the Ponceau conduit and in the conduit of the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, vaulted between 1600 and 1650, and the labor of the eighteenth in the western section of the collector canal, encased and vaulted in 1740. These two vaults, especially the oldest one, that of 1740, were more cracked and more decrepit than the masonry of the belt sewer, which dated from 1412, the time when the running water stream of Ménilmontant was elevated to the dignity of great sewer of Paris, a promotion analogous to that of a peasant who would become first valet of the king’s chamber; something like Gros-Jean transformed into Lebel. It was believed that here and there, notably under the Palais de Justice, it was possible to recognize the cells of old dungeons made in the sewer itself. _In pace_ hideous. An iron collar hung in one of these cells. They were all walled up. Some finds were bizarre; among others, the skeleton of an orangutan that disappeared from the Jardin des Plantes in 1800, a disappearance probably connected with the famous and incontestable appearance of the devil on Rue des Bernardins in the last year of the eighteenth century. The poor devil had ended up drowning in the sewer. Under the long arched corridor that leads to the Arche-Marion, a perfectly preserved rag-picker’s basket was the admiration of connoisseurs. Everywhere, the mud, which the sewer workers had come to handle intrepidly, abounded in precious objects, gold and silver jewelry, precious stones, coins. A giant who had filtered this cesspool would have had in his sieve the riches of centuries. At the point where the two branches of Rue du Temple and Rue Sainte-Avoye divide, a singular copper Huguenot medal was picked up , bearing on one side a pig wearing a cardinal’s hat and on the other a wolf with a tiara on its head. The most surprising encounter was at the entrance to the Grand Égout. This entrance had once been closed by a gate of which only the hinges remained . From one of these hinges hung a sort of shapeless and soiled rag which, no doubt stopped there in passing, floated there in the shadows and was finishing tearing itself to pieces. Bruneseau brought his lantern close and examined this scrap. It was very fine cambric, and one could make out in one of the corners, less worn than the rest, a heraldic crown embroidered above these seven letters: LAVBESP. The crown was a marquis’ crown and the seven letters meant _Laubespine_. It was recognized that what was before one’s eyes was a piece of Marat’s shroud. Marat, in his youth, had had love affairs. This was when he was part of the household of the Count of Artois as stable doctor. From these historically recorded loves with a great lady, this bed sheet remained to him. Wreck or souvenir. At his death, as it was the only slightly fine linen he had at home, he was buried in it. Old women had swaddled the tragic Friend of the People for the tomb in this swaddling cloth in which there had been voluptuousness. Bruneseau moved on. This rag was left where it was; it was not finished. Was it contempt or respect? Marat deserved both. And then, destiny was sufficiently imprinted on it that one hesitated to touch it. Besides, one must leave the things of the sepulchre the place they choose. In short, the relic was strange. A marquise had slept there; Marat had rotted there; it had crossed the Pantheon to end up with the sewer rats. This alcove rag, whose every fold Watteau would once have joyfully traced, had ended up being worthy of Dante’s fixed gaze. The complete inspection of the subterranean worldly road system of Paris lasted seven years, from 1805 to 1812. While making his way, Bruneseau designated, directed, and completed considerable works; In 1808, he lowered the foundation of the Ponceau, and, creating new lines everywhere, he pushed the sewer, in 1809, under the rue Saint-Denis as far as the fountain of the Innocents; in 1810, under the rue Froidmanteau and under the Salpêtrière, in 1811, under the rue Neuve-des-Petits-Pères, under the rue du Mail, under the rue de l’Écharpe, under the place Royale, in 1812, under the rue de la Paix and under the Chaussée d’Antin. At the same time, he had the entire network disinfected and cleaned. From the second year, Bruneseau had joined his son-in-law Nargaud. Thus, at the beginning of this century, the old company cleaned its double bottom and cleaned its sewer. That was always something that was cleaned. Tortuous, crevassed, unpaved, cracked, cut by quagmires, jolted by strange bends, rising and falling without logic, fetid, wild, fierce, submerged in darkness, with scars on its flagstones and gashes on its walls, dreadful, such was, seen in retrospect, the ancient sewer of Paris. Branches in all directions, crossings of trenches, connections, crow’s feet, stars like in sapes, caecums, dead ends, saltpeter vaults, foul cesspools, scaly oozing on the walls, drops falling from the ceilings, darkness; nothing equaled the horror of this old crypt outlet, digestive apparatus of Babylon, lair, pit, chasm pierced by streets, titanic molehill where the mind thinks it sees prowling through the shadows, in filth that was splendor, this enormous blind mole, the past. This, we repeat, was the sewer of old. Chapter 29. Current Progress. Today the sewer is clean, cold, straight, correct. It almost realizes the ideal of what is understood in England by the word “respectable.” It is proper and grayish; drawn to a line; one could almost say spick and span. It resembles a supplier turned State Councilor. One can almost see clearly. The filth behaves decently there. At first glance, one would readily take it for one of those underground corridors so common in the past and so useful for the escapes of monarchs and princes, in those good old days “when the people loved their kings.” The current sewer is a beautiful sewer; pure style reigns there; the classic rectilinear Alexandrine which, expelled from poetry, seems to have taking refuge in the architecture, seems mingled with all the stones of this long, dark, whitish vault; each drain is an arcade; the Rue de Rivoli is a school even in the cesspool. Besides, if the geometric line is somewhere in its place, it is certainly in the stercorary trench of a large city. There, everything must be subordinated to the shortest route. The sewer has today taken on a certain official aspect. Even the police reports to which it is sometimes subject no longer lack respect. The words that characterize it in administrative language are raised and dignified. What was called a gut, is called a gallery; what was called a hole, is called a lookout. Villon would no longer recognize his ancient snack home. This network of cellars still has its immemorial population of rodents, more teeming than ever; From time to time, a rat, an old mustache, risks its head at the sewer window and examines the Parisians; but this vermin itself tames itself, satisfied as it is with its subterranean palace. The cesspool no longer has anything of its primitive ferocity. The rain, which soiled the sewer of the past, washes the sewer of today. Do not trust it too much, however. The miasmas still inhabit it. It is more hypocritical than irreproachable. The police headquarters and the sanitation commission have done their best. Despite all the sanitation procedures, it exhales a vague suspicious odor, like Tartuffe after confession. Let us agree that, all things considered, sweeping is a tribute that the sewer pays to civilization, and since, from this point of view, Tartuffe’s conscience is an improvement on the Augean stable, it is certain that the sewer of Paris has improved. It is more than progress; it is a transmutation. Between the old sewer and the current sewer, there is a revolution. Who made this revolution? The man everyone forgets and whom we have named, Bruneseau. Chapter 30. Future Progress. The digging of the Paris sewer was no small task. The last ten centuries have worked on it without being able to finish it, any more than they have been able to finish Paris. The sewer, in fact, receives all the repercussions of the growth of Paris. It is, in the earth, a sort of dark polyp with a thousand antennae that grows beneath it at the same time as the city above it. Each time the city digs a street, the sewer stretches out an arm. The old monarchy had built only twenty-three thousand three hundred meters of sewers; This is where Paris was on January 1, 1806. From this time, which we will discuss again shortly , the work has been usefully and energetically resumed and continued; Napoleon built, these figures are curious, 4,804 meters; Louis XVIII, 5,709; Charles X, 10,836 ; Louis-Philippe, 89,200 ; the Republic of 1848, 23,381; the current regime, 70,500; in all, at this moment, 226,611 meters, 600 leagues of sewer; enormous entrails of Paris. An obscure branch, always in progress; an unknown and immense construction . As we see, the subterranean labyrinth of Paris is today more than ten times what it was at the beginning of the century. It is difficult to imagine all the perseverance and effort it took to bring this cesspool to the point of relative perfection where it is now. It was with great difficulty that the old monarchical provostship and, in the last ten years of the eighteenth century, the revolutionary mayor’s office had managed to dig the five leagues of sewers that existed before 1806. All kinds of obstacles hindered this operation, some specific to the nature of the soil, others inherent in the very prejudices of the working population of Paris. Paris is built on a deposit strangely rebellious to the pickaxe, the hoe, the probe, human handling. Nothing is more difficult to pierce and penetrate than this geological formation on which is superimposed the marvelous historical formation called Paris; as soon as, in any form, work begins and ventures into this sheet of alluvium, underground resistance abounds. These are liquid clays, live springs, hard rocks, those soft and deep muds that special science calls mustards. The pick advances laboriously in limestone blades alternating with very thin threads of clay and schistose layers with layers encrusted with oyster shells contemporary with the pre-Adamite oceans. Sometimes a stream suddenly bursts through a vault begun and floods the workers; or it is a flow of marl which appears and rushes with the fury of a cataract, shattering like glass the largest supporting beams. Very recently, at La Villette, when it was necessary, without interrupting navigation and without emptying the canal, to pass the collector sewer under the Saint-Martin canal, a crack appeared in the basin of the canal, the water suddenly abounded in the underground construction site, beyond all the power of the drainage pumps; it was necessary to have a diver search for the crack which was in the neck of the large basin, and it was not blocked without difficulty. Elsewhere, near the Seine, and even quite far from the river, as for example at Belleville, Grande-Rue and passage Lumière, one encounters bottomless sands where one gets bogged down and where a man can melt before his eyes. Add the asphyxiation by miasmas, the burial by landslides, the sudden collapses. Add the typhus, which the workers slowly become impregnated with. Nowadays, after having dug the Clichy gallery, with a bench to receive a water main from the Ourcq, work carried out in a trench, ten meters deep; after having, through the landslides, with the help of excavations, often putrid, and bracing, vaulted the Bièvre from the Boulevard de l’Hôpital to the Seine; after having, to deliver Paris from the torrential waters of Montmartre and to give flow to this nine-hectare river pool which was stagnating near the Barrière des Martyrs; after having, we say, built the sewer line from the Barrière Blanche to the Chemin d’Aubervilliers, in four months, day and night, to a depth of eleven meters; after having, something that had not yet been seen, executed underground a sewer on rue Barre-du-Bec, without a trench, six meters below the ground, the conductor Monnot died. After having vaulted three thousand meters of sewers at all points of the city, from rue Traversière-Saint-Antoine to rue de Lourcine, after having, by the connection of the Arbalète, relieved the Censier-Mouffetard intersection of rainwater floods , after having built the Saint-Georges sewer on rockfill and concrete in fluid sands, after having directed the formidable lowering of the invert of the Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth connection, the engineer Duleau died. There is no bulletin for these acts of bravery, more useful however than the stupid slaughter of the battlefields . The sewers of Paris, in 1832, were far from being what they are today. Bruneseau had set the ball rolling, but it took cholera to determine the vast reconstruction that has since taken place. It is surprising to say, for example, that in 1821, part of the ring sewer , called the Grand Canal, as in Venice, was still languishing in the open air on Rue des Gourdes. It was only in 1823 that the city of Paris found in its pocket the two hundred and sixty-six thousand eighty francs and six centimes necessary to cover this turpitude. The three absorption wells of Combat, Cunette and Saint-Mandé, with their drains, their devices, their sumps and their connections depuratories, date only from 1836. The intestinal road network of Paris has been completely rebuilt and, as we have said, more than tenfold in the last quarter of a century. Thirty years ago, at the time of the insurrection of June 5 and 6, it was still, in many places, almost the old sewer. A very large number of streets, today curved, were then split causeways . One very often saw, at the point of decline where the slopes of a street or a crossroads ended, large square gates with large bars whose iron gleamed worn by the footsteps of the crowd, dangerous and slippery for carriages and causing horses to collapse. The official language of bridges and roads gave these points of decline and these gates the expressive name of _cassis_. In 1832, in a multitude of streets, rue de l’Étoile, rue Saint-Louis, rue du Temple, rue Vieille-du-Temple, rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, rue Folie-Méricourt, quai aux Fleurs, rue du Petit-Musc, rue de Normandie, rue Pont-aux-Biches, rue des Marais, faubourg Saint-Martin, rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, faubourg Montmartre, rue Grange-Batelière, on the Champs-Élysées, rue Jacob, rue de Tournon, the old Gothic cesspool still cynically showed its jaws. They were enormous hiatuses of stone with dodgers, sometimes surrounded by boundary stones, with monumental effrontery. Paris, in 1806, was still almost at the number of sewers recorded in May 1663: five thousand three hundred and twenty-eight fathoms. After Bruneseau, on January 1, 1832, there were forty thousand three hundred meters. From 1806 to 1831, an average of seven hundred and fifty meters had been built annually; since then, eight and even ten thousand meters of galleries have been built every year , in masonry of small materials with a hydraulic lime bath on a concrete foundation. At two hundred francs per meter, the sixty leagues of sewers in present-day Paris represent forty-eight million. In addition to the economic progress that we indicated at the beginning, serious problems of public hygiene are linked to this immense question: the sewer of Paris. Paris is between two layers, a layer of water and a layer of air. The layer of water, lying at a fairly great underground depth, but already tested by two boreholes, is provided by the layer of green sandstone located between the chalk and the Jurassic limestone; this layer can be represented by a disk with a radius of twenty-five leagues; a multitude of rivers and streams ooze there; we drink the Seine, the Marne, the Yonne, the Oise, the Aisne, the Cher, the Vienne and the Loire in a glass of water from the Grenelle well. The water table is healthy, it comes from the sky first, then from the earth; the air table is unhealthy, it comes from the sewer. All the miasmas of the cesspool mix with the breathing of the city; hence this bad breath. The air taken above a dunghill, this has been scientifically established, is purer than the air taken above Paris. In a given time, with the help of progress, the mechanisms being perfected, and clarity being established, we will use the water table to purify the air table. That is to say, to wash the sewer. We know that by washing the sewer, we mean returning the filth to the earth; return of manure to the soil and fertilizer to the fields. There will be, by this simple fact, for the entire social community, a reduction in misery and an increase in health. At the present time, the radiation of the diseases of Paris extends fifty leagues around the Louvre, taken as the hub of this pestilential road. One could say that, for ten centuries, the cesspool has been the disease of Paris. The sewer is the vice that the city has in its blood. Popular instinct has never been mistaken. The profession of sewer worker was once almost as perilous, and almost as repugnant to the people, as the profession of knacker, so long stricken with horror and abandoned to the executioner. It took a high salary to persuade a mason to disappear in this fetid sap; the well-digger’s ladder hesitated to plunge into it; it was said proverbially: _to descend into the sewer is to enter the pit_; and all sorts of hideous legends, as we have said, covered this colossal sink with terror; a dreaded bilge which bears the traces of the revolutions of the globe as well as the revolutions of men, and where one finds vestiges of all the cataclysms from the shell of the flood to the rag of Marat. Book Three–The Mud, but the Soul Chapter 31. The cesspool and its surprises. It was in the sewer of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself. Another resemblance of Paris with the sea. As in the ocean, the diver can disappear there. The transition was unheard of. In the very middle of the city, Jean Valjean had left the city; and, in the twinkling of an eye, the time it took to lift a lid and close it, he had passed from broad daylight to complete darkness, from noon to midnight, from crash to silence, from the whirlwind of thunder to the stagnation of the tomb, and, by a twist of fate even more prodigious than that of the Rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the most absolute security. A sudden fall into a cellar; disappearance into the oubliette of Paris; leaving this street where death was everywhere for this kind of sepulchre where there was life; it was a strange moment. He remained for a few seconds as if stunned; listening, stupefied. The pitfall of salvation had suddenly opened beneath him. Celestial goodness had, as it were, taken him by treachery. Adorable ambushes of providence! Only the wounded man did not move, and Jean Valjean did not know whether what he was carrying into this pit was a living man or a dead man. His first sensation was blindness. Suddenly he saw nothing. It also seemed to him that in a minute he had become deaf. He no longer heard anything. The frenzied storm of murder that was unleashed a few feet above him reached him, as we have said , thanks to the thickness of earth that separated him from it, only muted and indistinct, and like a murmur in a depth. He felt that it was solid beneath his feet; that was all; but that was enough. He stretched out one arm, then the other, and touched the wall on both sides, and recognized that the corridor was narrow; he slipped, and recognized that the flagstone was wet. He put one foot forward cautiously, fearing a hole, a sump, some chasm; he noted that the paving continued. A puff of fetidity warned him of where he was. After a few moments, he was no longer blind. A little light fell from the basement window through which he had slipped, and his gaze had become accustomed to this cellar. He began to distinguish something. The corridor in which he had hidden himself—no other word expresses the situation better—was walled up behind him. It was one of those dead ends which the special language calls branches. Before him was another wall, a wall of night.
The light from the basement window expired ten or twelve paces from the point where Jean Valjean was, and barely made a wan whiteness over a few meters of the damp wall of the sewer. Beyond it, the opacity was massive; to penetrate it seemed horrible, and the entrance seemed like an engulfment. One could, however, plunge into this wall of mist, and it was necessary. It was even necessary to hasten. Jean Valjean thought that this grating, seen by him under the paving stones, could have been seen by the soldiers, and that everything depended on this chance. They too could go down into this well and search it. There was not a minute to lose. He had placed Marius on the ground, he picked him up—this is still the true word—took him back on his shoulders and set off. He entered resolutely into this darkness. The reality was that they were less safe than Jean Valjean believed . Perils of another kind and no less great perhaps awaited them. After the dazzling whirlwind of combat, the cavern of miasmas and traps; after chaos, the cesspool. Jean Valjean had fallen from one circle of hell into another. When he had taken fifty steps, he had to stop. A question presented itself. The corridor ended at another passageway which he encountered transversely. There were two paths open to him. Which one to take? Should he turn left or right? How to find his way in this black labyrinth? This labyrinth, as we have noted, has a thread; it is its slope. To follow the slope is to go to the river. Jean Valjean understood this at once. He told himself that he was probably in the sewer of Les Halles; that, if he chose the left and followed the slope, he would arrive within a quarter of an hour at some mouth of the Seine between the Pont-au-Change and the Pont-Neuf, that is to say, at an apparition in broad daylight at the most populated point in Paris. Perhaps he would end up at some crossroads blaze. The passers-by were stunned to see two bloody men emerge from the earth beneath their feet. The police arrived, the neighboring guardhouse took up arms. They would be seized before they got out. It was better to plunge into the maze, trust in this darkness, and leave the issue to providence. He went back up the slope and turned right. When he had turned the corner of the gallery, the distant glow of the air vent disappeared, the curtain of darkness fell back on him, and he became blind again. He advanced nonetheless, and as quickly as he could. Marius’s two arms were passed around his neck and his feet hung behind him. He held both arms with one hand and felt the wall with the other. Marius’s cheek touched his own and clung to it, being bloody. He felt a warm stream flowing over him and penetrating under his clothes, which came from Marius. However, a damp heat in his ear, which the wounded man’s mouth touched, indicated breathing , and consequently life. The corridor in which Jean Valjean was now traveling was less narrow than the first. Jean Valjean walked along it with some difficulty. The rains of the day before had not yet passed and made a small torrent in the center of the raft, and he was forced to press himself against the wall to avoid having his feet in the water. He walked thus darkly. He resembled the creatures of the night groping in the invisible and subterraneanly lost in the veins of shadow. Yet, little by little, whether distant vents sent a little floating light into this opaque mist, or his eyes were accustomed to the darkness, some vague vision returned to him, and he began to become confusedly aware, sometimes of the wall he was touching, sometimes of the vault under which he was passing. The pupil dilates in the night and ends up finding day there, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and ends up finding God there. Finding one’s way was difficult. The layout of the sewers echoes, so to speak, the layout of the streets superimposed on it. There were 2,200 streets in the Paris of that time. Imagine, beneath them, that forest of dark branches which is called the sewer. The system of sewers existing at that time, placed end to end, would have given a length of eleven leagues. We have said above that the current network, thanks to the special activity of the last thirty years, is no less than sixty leagues long. Jean Valjean began by making a mistake. He thought he was under the Rue Saint-Denis, and it was unfortunate that he was not. There is under the Rue Saint-Denis an old stone sewer dating from the time of Louis XIII and which goes straight to the collecting sewer called the Grand Égout, with a single bend, to the right, at the level of the old Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the Sewer Saint-Martin, whose four arms intersect in a cross. But the conduit of the Petite-Truanderie, whose entrance was near the Corinthe cabaret, never communicated with the underground passage of the rue Saint-Denis; it ends at the Montmartre sewer and it is there that Jean Valjean was engaged. There, opportunities for getting lost abounded. The Montmartre sewer is one of the most labyrinthine of the old network. Fortunately, Jean Valjean had left behind him the sewer of Les Halles, whose geometric plan represents a crowd of tangled topgallant masts; but he had before him more than one embarrassing encounter and more than one street corner—for they are streets—offering themselves in the darkness like a question mark: first, on his left, the vast Plâtrière sewer, a kind of Chinese puzzle, pushing and confusing its chaos of Ts and Zs under the Post Office and under the rotunda of the corn exchange as far as the Seine where it ends in a Y; second, on his right, the curved corridor of the Rue du Cadran with its three teeth which are as many dead ends; thirdly, on his left, the branch of the Mail, complicated, almost at the entrance, by a kind of fork, and going from zigzag to zigzag to end in the great crypt outlet of the Louvre , cut off and branched in all directions; finally, on the right, the dead-end corridor of the Rue des Jeûneurs, without counting small recesses here and there, before arriving at the ring sewer, which alone could lead him to some exit far enough away to be sure. If Jean Valjean had had any notion of all that we indicate here, he would have quickly perceived, simply by feeling the wall, that he was not in the subterranean gallery of the Rue Saint-Denis. Instead of the old cut stone, instead of the ancient architecture, haughty and regal even in the sewer, with its foundation and running courses of granite and lime mortar, which cost eight hundred pounds a fathom, he would have felt under his hand the contemporary cheapness, the economical expedient, the millstone with a bath of hydraulic mortar on a layer of concrete which costs two hundred francs a meter, the bourgeois masonry called “small materials”; but he knew nothing of all that. He walked ahead, anxiously, but calmly, seeing nothing, knowing nothing, plunged into chance, that is to say, swallowed up in providence. By degrees, let us say, some horror was overcoming him. The shadow which enveloped him entered his mind. He was walking in an enigma. This aqueduct of the cesspool is formidable; it crisscrosses dizzyingly. It is a gloomy thing to be caught in this Paris of darkness. Jean Valjean was obliged to find and almost to invent his route without seeing it. In this unknown, each step he risked could be his last. How would he get out of there? Would he find an exit? Would he find it in time? Would this colossal subterranean sponge with its stone cells allow itself to be penetrated and pierced? Would one encounter some unexpected knot of darkness there? Would one arrive at the inextricable and the impassable? Would Marius die there of hemorrhage, and he of hunger? Would they both end up lost there, and become two skeletons in a corner of this night? He did not know. He wondered all this and could not answer himself. The intestine of Paris is a precipice. Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster. He was suddenly surprised. At the most unexpected moment, and without having stopped walking in a straight line, he noticed that he was no longer climbing; the water of the stream was beating against his heels instead of coming to his tiptoes. The sewer was now descending. Why? Was he then going to suddenly arrive at the Seine? This danger was great, but the danger of going back was even greater. He continued to advance. It was not towards the Seine that he was going. The hump that the ground of Paris makes on the right bank empties one of its slopes into the Seine and the other into the Grand Égout. The crest of this hump, which determines the division of the waters, draws a very capricious line. The highest point, which is the place where the flows divide, is, in the sewer Sainte-Avoye, beyond the Rue Michel-le-Comte, in the Louvre sewer, near the boulevards, and in the Montmartre sewer, near Les Halles. It was at this culminating point that Jean Valjean had arrived. He was heading towards the ring sewer; he was on the right path. But he knew nothing about it.
Each time he came across a fork, he felt its angles, and if he found the opening that presented itself narrower than the corridor where he was, he did not enter and continued on his way, judging rightly that any narrower way must end in a dead end and could only take him further from the goal, that is to say, from the exit. He thus avoided the fourfold trap that was set for him in the darkness by the four mazes we have just enumerated. At a certain moment he recognized that he was emerging from beneath the Paris petrified by the riot, where the barricades had cut off traffic , and that he was re-entering the living, normal Paris. He suddenly heard above his head a sound like lightning, distant but continuous. It was the rumble of carriages. He had been walking for about half an hour, at least according to his own calculations, and had not yet thought of resting; only he had changed the hand that was supporting Marius. The darkness was deeper than ever, but this depth reassured him. Suddenly he saw his shadow before him. It stood out against a faint, almost indistinct redness that vaguely crimsoned the raft at his feet and the vault over his head, and that slid to his right and left over the two slimy walls of the corridor. Stupefied, he turned around. Behind him, in the part of the corridor he had just passed, at a distance that seemed immense to him, blazed, streaking the dark depths, a sort of horrible star that seemed to be looking at him. It was the dark star of the police rising in the sewer. Behind this star moved confusedly eight or ten black shapes, straight, indistinct, terrible. Chapter 32. Explanation. During the day of June 6, a sweep of the sewers had been ordered. It was feared that they might be taken as a refuge by the vanquished, and Prefect Gisquet had to search the hidden Paris while General Bugeaud swept the public Paris; a double connected operation which required a double strategy of the public force represented above by the army and below by the police. Three squads of policemen and sewermen explored the underground streets of Paris, the first on the right bank, the second on the left bank, and the third in the Cité. The officers were armed with carbines, crowbars, swords, and daggers. What was at that moment directed at Jean Valjean was the lantern of the patrol on the right bank. This patrol had just visited the curved gallery and the three dead ends which are under the Rue du Cadran. While it was carrying its lantern along the bottom of these dead ends, Jean Valjean had encountered on his way the entrance to the gallery, had recognized it as narrower than the main corridor, and had not entered it. He had passed beyond it. The policemen , on leaving the Galerie du Cadran, had thought they had heard the sound of footsteps in the direction of the ring sewer. They were, in fact, the footsteps of Jean Valjean. The sergeant in charge of the patrol had raised his lantern, and the squad had begun to look into the fog in the direction from which the noise had come. It was an inexpressible moment for Jean Valjean. Fortunately, if he saw the lantern clearly, the lantern saw him poorly. It was the light and he was the shadow. He was very far away, and mingled with the darkness of the place. He hunched himself against the wall and stopped. Besides, he was not aware of what was moving there behind him. Insomnia, lack of food, emotions, had made him , too, pass into a visionary state. He saw a blaze, and around this blaze, larvae. What was it? He didn’t understand . Jean Valjean having stopped, the noise had ceased. The men of the patrol listened and heard nothing, they looked and saw nothing. They consulted together. There was at that time at this point of the Montmartre sewer a kind of crossroads called a service crossroads, which has since been removed because of the small interior lake formed there by the torrent of rainwater, which became engorged in heavy storms . The patrol was able to huddle in this crossroads. Jean Valjean saw these larvae form a sort of circle. These mastiff heads came closer and whispered. The result of this advice given by the watchdogs was that they had been mistaken, that there had been no noise, that there was no one there, that it was useless to go into the ring sewer, that it would be a waste of time, but that they had to hurry towards Saint-Merry, that if there was something to do and some “bousingot” to track down, it was in that district. From time to time the parties give new soles to their old insults. In 1832, the word _bousingot_ acted as an interim between the word _jacobin_ which was worn out, and the word _démagogue_ then almost unused and which has since done such excellent service. The sergeant gave the order to turn left towards the slope of the Seine. If they had had the idea of dividing into two squads and going in both directions, Jean Valjean would have been seized. It hung on that thread. It is probable that the instructions from the prefecture, foreseeing a case of combat and the insurgents in numbers, forbade the patrol to break up. The patrol resumed its march, leaving Jean Valjean behind. Of all this movement, Jean Valjean perceived nothing, except the eclipse of the lantern, which suddenly turned. Before leaving, the sergeant, for the sake of the police’s conscience, discharged his carbine from the side they were abandoning, in Jean Valjean’s direction. The detonation rolled from echo to echo in the crypt like the rumbling of this titanic passage. A piece of plaster falling into the brook and making the water ripple a few paces from Jean Valjean warned him that the ball had struck the vault above his head. Slow, measured footsteps echoed for some time on the raft, more and more deadened by the gradual increase in distance; the group of black forms sank down; a light swayed and floated, making a reddish arch in the vault which diminished, then disappeared; the silence became profound again, the darkness became complete again, blindness and deafness took possession of the gloom; and Jean Valjean, not yet daring to stir, remained for a long time leaning against the wall, his ears strained, his pupils dilated, watching the vanishing of this patrol of phantoms. Chapter 33. The Man Spun Away. It must be given to the police of that time this justice that, even in the most serious public circumstances, they imperturbably fulfilled their duty of highway maintenance and surveillance. A riot was not, in their eyes, a pretext for giving criminals free rein and for neglecting society on the grounds that the government was in danger. The ordinary service was carried out correctly through the extraordinary service, and was not disturbed by it. In the midst of an incalculable political event that had begun, under the pressure of a possible revolution, without being distracted by the insurrection and the barricade, an officer “tailed” a thief. It was precisely something similar that happened on the afternoon of June 6th on the banks of the Seine, on the right bank, a little beyond the Pont des Invalides. There is no longer a bank there today. The appearance of the place has changed. On this bank, two men separated by a certain distance seemed to be observing each other, one avoiding the other. The one who went ahead was trying to move away, the one coming from behind was trying to get closer. It was like a game of chess being played from afar and silently. Neither seemed to be in a hurry, and they both walked slowly, as if each of them were afraid of making their partner overtake them by being too hasty. It was like an appetite following its prey, without seeming to do so on purpose. The prey was sly and kept on its guard. The desired proportions between the hunted marten and the tracking mastiff were observed. The one trying to escape had a small neck and a puny appearance; the one trying to grab hold of it, a tall fellow , was rough-looking and must have been a tough encounter. The first, feeling himself the weakest, avoided the second; but he avoided it in a profoundly furious manner; Anyone who could have observed him would have seen in his eyes the dark hostility of flight, and all the menace that there is in fear. The bank was solitary; there were no passers-by; not even a boatman or a stevedore in the barges moored here and there. These two men could only be easily seen from the quay opposite, and to anyone who had examined them from that distance, the man who went in front would have appeared as a bristling, ragged, and oblique being, anxious and shivering under a ragged blouse, and the other as a classic and official person, wearing the frock coat of authority buttoned up to the chin. The reader would perhaps recognize these two men if he saw them more closely. What was the aim of the latter? Probably to be able to clothe the former more warmly. When a man dressed by the state pursues a man in rags, it is in order to make him also a man dressed by the state. Only the color is the whole question. To be dressed in blue is glorious; to be dressed in red is unpleasant. There is a purple from below. It is probably some unpleasantness and some purple of this kind that the first wanted to avoid. If the other let him walk in front and did not yet seize him, it was, according to all appearances, in the hope of seeing him end up at some significant rendezvous and some group of good catches. This delicate operation is called “tailing.” What makes this conjecture entirely probable is that the buttoned-up man, seeing from the bank on the quay a cab passing empty , signaled to the coachman; the coachman understood, evidently recognized who he was dealing with, turned his horse and began to follow the two men at walking pace from the top of the quay. This was not noticed by the shifty and torn character who was going ahead. The cab was rolling along the trees of the Champs-Élysées. The bust of the coachman could be seen passing over the parapet, his whip in his hand. One of the secret police instructions to the officers contains this article:–“Always have a spare carriage within reach, in case of emergency.” While each maneuvering on their own with impeccable strategy, these two men were approaching a ramp on the quay leading down to the bank which then allowed the cab drivers arriving from Passy to come to the river to water their horses. This ramp has since been removed, for the sake of symmetry; the horses are dying of thirst, but the eye is flattered. It was likely that the man in the smock was going to climb this ramp in order to try to escape into the Champs-Élysées, a place adorned with trees, but on the other hand heavily crossed by police officers, and where the other would easily find help. This point on the quay is not far from the house brought from Moret to Paris in 1824 by Colonel Brack, and called the house of François I. A guardhouse is there very close by. To the great surprise of his observer, the hunted man did not take the ramp of the watering place. He continued to advance on the bank along the quay. His position was becoming visibly critical. Short of throwing himself into the Seine, what was he going to do? There was no way back onto the quay; no more handrail and no stairs; and they were very close to the spot, marked by the bend in the Seine towards the Pont d’Iéna, where the bank, narrowing more and more, ended in a thin tongue and disappeared under the water. There, he would inevitably find himself blocked between the sheer wall to his right, the river to the left and opposite, and the authority at his heels. It is true that this end of the bank was hidden from view by a pile of rubble six to seven feet high, the product of some unknown demolition. But did this man hope to usefully hide behind this pile of rubble that he only had to turn? The expedient would have been childish. He certainly wasn’t thinking of it. The innocence of the thieves does not extend that far. The pile of rubble formed a sort of eminence at the water’s edge, extending as a promontory to the quay wall. The man being followed reached this small hill and rounded it, so that he was no longer seen by the other. The latter, not seeing, was not seen; he took advantage of this to abandon all concealment and to walk very quickly. In a few moments he was at the pile of rubble and turned it. There, he stopped, stupefied. The man he was chasing was no longer there. Total eclipse of the man in the blouse. The bank was only about thirty paces long from the pile of rubble , then it plunged beneath the water which came beating against the quay wall. The fugitive could not have thrown himself into the Seine or climbed the quay without being seen by the one who was following him. What had become of him? The man in the buttoned frock coat walked to the end of the bank and stood there pensively for a moment, his fists clenched and his eyes searching. Suddenly he struck his forehead. He had just noticed, at the point where the land ended and the water began, a wide, low, arched iron gate, fitted with a thick lock and three massive hinges. This gate, a sort of door pierced at the bottom of the quay, opened onto the river as much as onto the bank. A blackish stream flowed beneath it. This stream flowed into the Seine. Beyond its heavy, rusty bars, a sort of dark, vaulted corridor could be seen. The man crossed his arms and looked at the gate reproachfully. This look not being enough, he tried to push it; he shook it, it resisted firmly. It was probable that it had just been opened, although no noise had been heard, a singular thing for such a rusty gate; but it was certain that it had been closed again. This indicated that the one before whom this door had just turned had not a hook, but a key. This evidence immediately burst upon the mind of the man who was trying to shake the gate and drew from him this indignant epiphoneme: “That’s strong! A key to the government!” Then, calming down immediately, he expressed a whole world of inner ideas in this burst of monosyllables accented almost ironically: “Well! well! well! well!” That said, hoping for something or other, either to see the man come out again, or to see others come in, he posted himself on the lookout behind the pile of rubble, with the patient rage of a pointer. For its part, the cab, which was adjusting its pace, had halted above him near the parapet. The coachman, anticipating a long stop, put his horses’ muzzles in the bag of damp oats at the bottom, so well known to Parisians, to whom governments, incidentally, sometimes put them. The rare passers-by on the Pont d’Iéna, before moving away, turned their heads to look for a moment at these two motionless details of the landscape, the man on the bank, the cab on the quay. Chapter 34. He too carries his cross. Jean Valjean had resumed his walk and had not stopped. This walk was becoming more and more laborious. The level of these vaults varies; the average height is about five feet six inches, and was calculated for the height of a man; Jean Valjean was forced to bend down so as not to strike Marius against the vault; he had to bend down at every moment, then straighten up, constantly feel the wall. The dampness of the stones and the viscosity of the foundation made them poor points of support, either for the hand or the foot. He stumbled in the hideous dunghill of the city. The intermittent reflections of the basement windows appeared only at very long intervals, and so pale that the full sun seemed like moonlight; all the rest was fog, miasma, opacity, blackness. Jean Valjean was hungry and thirsty; thirst above all; and it is there, like the sea, a place full of water where one cannot drink. His strength, which was prodigious, as we know, and very little diminished by age, thanks to his chaste and sober life, was nevertheless beginning to fail. Fatigue came to him, and his diminishing strength increased the weight of the burden. Marius, perhaps dead, weighed as inert bodies weigh. Jean Valjean supported him in such a way that his chest was not hampered and his breathing could always pass as easily as possible. He felt the rapid gliding of rats between his legs. One of them was so frightened that it bit him. From time to time a breath of fresh air came to him through the flaps of the sewer mouths, which revived him. It might have been three o’clock in the afternoon when he arrived at the ring sewer. He was at first astonished by this sudden widening. He suddenly found himself in a gallery whose two walls his outstretched hands could not reach, and under a vault that his head did not touch. The Grand Sewer is, in fact, eight feet wide by seven feet high. At the point where the Montmartre sewer joins the Grand Sewer, two other subterranean galleries, that of the Rue de Provence and that of the Abattoir, come to form a crossroads. Between these four routes, a less sagacious person would have been undecided. Jean Valjean took the widest, that is to say, the belt sewer. But here the question returned: go down, or go up? He thought that the situation was pressing, and that he must, at all risks, reach the Seine now. In other words, go down. He turned left. It was a good thing he did. For it would be a mistake to believe that the belt sewer has two outlets, one towards Bercy, the other towards Passy, and that it is, as its name indicates, the underground belt of Paris on the right bank. The Grand Égout, which is, it must be remembered, nothing other than the old Ménilmontant stream, ends, if we go back up it, at a dead end, that is to say at its old starting point, which was its source, at the foot of the Ménilmontant hill. It has no direct communication with the branch which collects the waters of Paris from the Popincourt district, and which flows into the Seine by the Amelot sewer above the old Louviers island. This branch, which completes the collector sewer, is separated from it, under the rue Ménilmontant itself, by a massif which marks the point of division of the waters upstream and downstream. If Jean Valjean had gone up the gallery, he would have arrived, after a thousand efforts, exhausted with fatigue, expiring in the darkness, at a wall. He was lost. At a pinch, by retracing his steps a little, by entering the corridor of the Filles-du-Calvaire, on condition of not hesitating at the underground goose foot of the Boucherat crossroads, by taking the Saint-Louis corridor, then, on the left, the Saint-Gilles passage, then by turning to the right and avoiding the Saint-Sébastien gallery, he could have reached the Amelot sewer, and from there, provided he did not stray into the kind of F which is under the Bastille, reach the exit on the Seine near the Arsenal. But, for that, it would have been necessary to know thoroughly, and in all its ramifications and in all its openings, the enormous madrepore of the sewer. Now, we must insist, he knew nothing of this frightening roadway where he was walking; and, if one had asked him what he was in, he would have answered: in the night. His instinct served him well. To go down was indeed the possible salvation. He left to his right the two corridors which branch off in the shape of a claw under the rue Laffitte and the rue Saint-Georges and the long forked corridor of the Chaussée d’Antin. A little beyond a tributary which was probably the branch of the Madeleine, he stopped. He was very tired. A rather large air vent, probably the view of the rue d’Anjou, gave off an almost bright light. Jean Valjean, with the gentleness of movement that a brother would have for his wounded brother, laid Marius on the sewer bench. Marius’s bleeding face appeared under the white light of the air-hole as if from the bottom of a tomb. His eyes were closed, his hair pressed to his temples like brushes dried in red paint, his hands hung dead and hanging, his limbs cold, and coagulated blood at the corners of his lips. A clot of blood had collected in the knot of his cravat; the shirt was digging into the wounds, the cloth of his coat rubbed the gaping cuts of raw flesh. Jean Valjean, pushing the garments aside with his fingertips, laid his hand on his breast; his heart was still beating. Jean Valjean tore off his shirt, bandaged the wounds as best he could, and stopped the flowing blood; then, bending over Marius in the half-light, still unconscious and almost breathless, he looked at him with inexpressible hatred. While rearranging Marius’s clothes, he found two things in his pockets: the bread that had been forgotten there since the day before, and Marius’s wallet. He ate the bread and opened the wallet. On the first page, he found the four lines written by Marius. They will be remembered: “My name is Marius Pontmercy. Take my body to my grandfather, Mr. Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the Marais. ” Jean Valjean read these four lines by the light of the air vent, and remained for a moment as if absorbed in himself, repeating in a low voice: Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, Mr. Gillenormand. He replaced the wallet in Marius’s pocket. He had eaten, his strength had returned; he took Marius back onto his back, carefully rested his head on his right shoulder, and began to descend the sewer again. The Great Sewer, directed along the thalweg of the valley of Ménilmontant, is nearly two leagues long. It is paved over a notable part of its course. Jean Valjean did not have this torch, named after the streets of Paris, with which we illuminate for the reader the subterranean journey of Jean Valjean. Nothing told him what part of the city he was crossing, nor what route he had taken. Only the increasing pallor of the pools of light which he encountered from time to time indicated to him that the sun was withdrawing from the pavement and that the day would soon decline; and the rumbling of the carriages above his head, having become continuous and intermittent, then having almost ceased, he concluded that he was no longer beneath central Paris and that he was approaching some solitary region, near the outer boulevards or the outer quays. Where there are fewer houses and fewer streets, the sewer has fewer basement windows. The darkness thickened around Jean Valjean. He continued to advance nonetheless , groping in the shadows. This shadow suddenly became terrible. Chapter 35. For the sand as for the woman there is a finesse that is perfidious. He felt that he was entering the water, and that he had under his feet, no longer pavement, but mud. It sometimes happens, on certain coasts of Brittany or Scotland, that a A man, a traveler or a fisherman, walking at low tide on the beach far from the shore, suddenly realizes that for several minutes he has been walking with some difficulty. The beach is under his feet like pitch; the sole sticks to it; it is no longer sand, it is glue. The beach is perfectly dry, but with every step he takes, as soon as he lifts his foot, the imprint he leaves fills with water. The eye, moreover , has noticed no change; the immense beach is smooth and calm, all the sand has the same appearance, nothing distinguishes the ground which is solid from the ground which is no longer; the small joyful cloud of sea aphids continues to jump tumultuously on the feet of the passer-by. The man follows his route, goes ahead, presses towards the land, tries to get closer to the coast. He is not worried. Worried about what? Only he feels something as if the heaviness of his feet increases with each step he takes. Suddenly, he sinks. He sinks two or three inches. He is definitely not on the right path; he stops to get his bearings. Suddenly he looks at his feet. His feet have disappeared. The sand covers them. He pulls his feet out of the sand, he wants to retrace his steps, he goes back; he sinks deeper . The sand reaches his ankle, he pulls it out and throws himself to the left, the sand reaches mid-leg, he throws himself to the right, the sand reaches his hocks. Then he recognizes with indescribable terror that he is caught in shifting shore, and that he has beneath him the dreadful environment where man can no more walk than a fish can swim. He throws off his burden if he has one, he lightens himself like a ship in distress; It’s already too late, the sand is above his knees. He calls, he waves his hat or his handkerchief, the sand is getting closer and closer to him; if the beach is deserted, if the land is too far away, if the sandbank is too disreputable, if there are no heroes nearby , it’s over, he is condemned to sink. He is condemned to this dreadful burial, long, infallible, implacable, impossible to delay or hasten, which lasts for hours, which never ends, which takes you standing, free and in full health, which pulls you by the feet, which, with each effort you attempt, with each cry you utter, drags you a little lower, which seems to punish you for your resistance by a redoubled grip, which slowly makes man return to the earth while leaving him all the time to look at the horizon, the trees, the green countryside, the smoke of the villages in the plain, the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds which fly and which sing, the sun, the sky. Sinking is the sepulchre which becomes a tide and which rises from the depths of the earth towards a living being. Each minute is an inexorable burying. The wretch tries to sit up, to lie down, to crawl; every movement he makes buries him; he straightens up, he sinks; he feels himself being swallowed up; he howls, implores, cries to the clouds, twists his arms, despairs. There he is in the sand up to his belly; the sand reaches his chest; he is no more than a bust. He raises his hands, utters furious moans, clenches his nails on the shore, wants to hold on to this ash, leans on his elbows to tear himself away from this soft sheath, sobs frantically; the sand rises. The sand reaches his shoulders, the sand reaches his neck; only his face is visible now. His mouth cries out, the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still look, the sand closes them; night. Then his forehead decreases, a little hair quivers above the sand; a hand comes out, pierces the surface of the shore, stirs and agitates, and disappears. Sinister obliteration of a man. Sometimes the rider gets stuck with the horse; sometimes the carter gets stuck with the cart; everything sinks beneath the shore. It is shipwreck elsewhere than in the water. It is the earth drowning the man. Earth, penetrated by ocean, becomes a trap. It presents itself as a plain and opens like a wave. The abyss has its betrayals. This funereal adventure, always possible on this or that beach of the sea, was also possible, thirty years ago, in the sewer of Paris. Before the major works begun in 1833, the underground road system of Paris was subject to sudden collapses. Water infiltrated into certain underlying grounds, which were particularly friable; the raft, whether it was made of paving stones, as in the old sewers, or of hydraulic lime on concrete, as in the new galleries, no longer having a point of support, bent. A bend in a floor of this kind is a crack; a crack is a collapse. The raft collapsed over a certain length. This crevasse, the hiatus of a mud pit, was called in the special language _fontis_. What is a fontis? It is the shifting sand of the seashore suddenly encountered underground; it is the shore of Mont Saint-Michel in a sewer. The soil, soaked, is as if molten; all its molecules are suspended in a soft medium; it is not earth and it is not water. Sometimes very great depth. Nothing more fearful than such an encounter. If water dominates, death is swift, there is engulfment; if earth dominates, death is slow, there is sinking. Can one imagine such a death? If sinking is frightful on a seashore, what is it in the cesspool? Instead of the open air, the full light, the broad daylight, this clear horizon, these vast noises, these free clouds from which life rains, these boats glimpsed in the distance, this hope in all its forms, the probable passers-by, the possible help until the last minute, instead of all that, deafness, blindness, a black vault, a tomb already made, death in the mire under a lid! Slow suffocation by filth, a stone box where asphyxiation opens its claw in the mire and takes you by the throat; fetidity mixed with the death rattle; mud instead of the beach, hydrogen sulfide instead of the hurricane, filth instead of the ocean! And calling, and gnashing of teeth, and writhing, and struggling, and dying, with this enormous city that knows nothing of it, and which one has above one’s head! The inexpressible horror of dying like this! Death sometimes redeems its atrocity with a certain terrible dignity. On the pyre, in shipwreck, one can be great; in the flames as in the foam, a superb attitude is possible; one is transfigured by being lost in them. But not here. Death is filthy. It is humiliating to expire. The supreme floating visions are abject. Mud is synonymous with shame. It is small, ugly, infamous. To die in a ton of malvoisie, like Clarence, fine; in the mudman’s pit, like d’Escoubleau, is horrible. To struggle in there is hideous; at the same time as one is dying, one is floundering. There is enough darkness for it to be hell, and enough mire for it to be nothing but the quagmire, and the dying person does not know whether he will become a ghost or a toad. Everywhere else the sepulchre is sinister; here it is deformed. The depth of the sinkholes varied, and their length, and their density, due to the more or less poor quality of the subsoil. Sometimes a sinkhole was three or four feet deep, sometimes eight or ten; sometimes the bottom could not be found. The mud was almost solid here, almost liquid there. In the sinkhole Lunière, a man would have taken a day to disappear, while he would have been devoured in five minutes by the quagmire Phélippeaux. The mud carries more or less according to its more or less density. A child escapes where a man is lost. The first law of salvation is to strip oneself of all kinds of cargo. Throwing away one’s bag of tools, or one’s basket or one’s trough, that was the beginning of every sewer worker who felt the ground give way beneath him. The sinkholes had various causes: friability of the soil; some landslide at a depth beyond human reach; the violent summer downpours; the incessant winter downpour; the long, fine rains. Sometimes the weight of the surrounding houses on marly or sandy ground forced the vaults of the underground galleries and made them buckle, or it happened that the foundation slab burst and split under this crushing pressure. The settlement of the Pantheon obliterated in this way, a century ago, part of the cellars of the Sainte-Geneviève mountain. When a sewer collapsed under the pressure of the houses, the disorder, on certain occasions, was expressed above in the street by a kind of saw-tooth gaps between the paving stones; this tear developed in a serpentine line along the entire length of the cracked vault, and then, the damage being visible, the remedy could be prompt. It also often happened that the internal devastation was not revealed by any external scar. And in that case, woe betide the sewer workers. Entering the broken sewer without precaution, they could get lost. The old registers mention a few well-diggers buried in this way in the sinkholes. They give several names; among others, that of the sewer worker who got stuck in a collapse under the blazing sun on Rue Carême-Prenant, a man named Blaise Poutrain; this Blaise Poutrain was the brother of Nicolas Poutrain who was the last gravedigger of the cemetery known as the Charnier des Innocents in 1785, the time when this cemetery died. There was also that young and charming Viscount d’Escoubleau of whom we have just spoken, one of the heroes of the siege of Lérida where the assault was given in silk stockings, violins at the head. D’Escoubleau, surprised one night at his cousin’s, the Duchess of Sourdis, drowned in a quagmire in the Beautreillis sewer where he had taken refuge to escape the Duke. Madame de Sourdis, when she was told of this death, asked for her flask, and forgot to cry from breathing salts. In such cases, there is no love that lasts; the cesspool extinguishes it. Hero refuses to wash Leander’s corpse. Thisbe holds her nose in front of Pyramus and says: Ugh! Chapter 36. The sinkhole. Jean Valjean found himself in the presence of a sinkhole. This type of collapse was then common in the subsoil of the Champs-Élysées, difficult to handle for hydraulic works and not very conservative for underground constructions because of its excessive fluidity. This fluidity goes beyond the inconsistency of the sands of the Saint-Georges district itself, which could only be overcome by riprap on concrete, and the gas-infected clay layers of the Martyrs district, so liquid that the passage could only be made under the Martyrs gallery by means of a cast iron pipe. When in 1836 the old stone sewer where we see Jean Valjean at this moment engaged was demolished under the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in order to rebuild it, the shifting sand, which is the subsoil of the Champs-Élysées as far as the Seine, was an obstacle to the point that the operation lasted nearly six months, to the great outcry of the residents, especially those with hotels and carriages. The work was more than difficult; it was dangerous. It is true that there were four and a half months of rain and three floods of the Seine. The sinkhole that Jean Valjean encountered was caused by the previous day’s downpour. A sagging of the pavement, poorly supported by the underlying sand, had produced a backflow of rainwater. Once the infiltration had taken place, the collapse had followed. The raft, dislocated, had sunk into the mud. For how long? Impossible to say. The darkness was thicker there than anywhere else. It was a mud hole in a night cavern. Jean Valjean felt the pavement give way beneath him. He entered this mire. There was water on the surface, mud at the bottom. He had to get through. Retracing his steps was impossible. Marius was expiring, and Jean Valjean exhausted. Where else to go? Jean Valjean advanced. Besides, the quagmire seemed shallow at first. But as he advanced, his feet sank. He soon had mud up to his mid-thighs and water higher than his knees. He walked, lifting Marius with both arms as much as he could above the water. The mud now reached his hamstrings and the water to his waist. He could no longer retreat. He was sinking deeper and deeper. This mud, dense enough for the weight of a man, could obviously not support two. Marius and Jean Valjean would have had a chance of getting out of it, alone. Jean Valjean continued to advance, supporting this dying man, who was perhaps a corpse. The water came up to his armpits; he felt himself sinking; He could hardly move in the depth of mud in which he was. The density, which was the support, was also the obstacle. He still lifted Marius, and, with an unheard-of expenditure of strength, he advanced; but he was sinking. He had only his head above water, and his two arms raising Marius. There is, in the old paintings of the flood, a mother who does this with her child. He sank further, he threw his face back to escape the water and be able to breathe; whoever had seen him in that darkness would have thought he saw a mask floating on shadow; he vaguely perceived above him the hanging head and the livid face of Marius; he made a desperate effort , and threw his foot forward; his foot struck something solid. A point of support. It was time. He rose and twisted and took root with a sort of fury on this support. It had the effect on him of the first step of a staircase leading back to life. This support, encountered in the mud at the supreme moment, was the beginning of the other side of the raft, which had bent without breaking and had curved under the water like a plank and in a single piece. Well-constructed pavings form vaults and have such firmness. This fragment of raft, partly submerged, but solid, was a veritable ramp, and, once on this ramp, one was saved. Jean Valjean climbed this inclined plane and arrived on the other side of the quagmire. As he came out of the water, he struck against a stone and fell on his knees. He found that it was just, and remained there for some time, his soul lost in some unknown word to God. He straightened up, shivering, frozen, foul, bent under this dying man he was dragging, all dripping with mud, his soul filled with a strange clarity. Chapter 37. Sometimes one fails where one thinks one has landed. He set off again once more. Besides, if he had not lost his life in the sinkhole, he seemed to have lost his strength there. This supreme effort had exhausted him. His weariness was now such that every three or four steps, he was obliged to catch his breath, and leaned against the wall. Once, he had to sit down on the bench to change Marius’s position, and he thought he would remain there. But if his vigor was gone, his energy was not. He got up. He walked desperately, almost quickly, took a hundred steps like this, without raising his head, almost without breathing, and suddenly bumped into the wall. He had reached a bend in the sewer, and, as he arrived with his head bowed at the turning, he had encountered the wall. He raised his eyes, and at the end of the underground passage, there, in front of him, far, very far away, he saw a light. This time, it was not the terrible light; it was the good, white light. It was day. Jean Valjean saw the exit. A damned soul who, from the midst of the furnace, should suddenly perceive the exit from Gehenna, would experience what Jean Valjean experienced. It would fly desperately with the stumps of its burnt wings towards the radiant door. Jean Valjean no longer felt fatigue, he no longer felt the Marius’s weight, he regained his steel hamstrings, he ran more than he walked. As he approached, the exit became more and more distinctly visible. It was a curved arch, less high than the vault, which narrowed gradually, and less wide than the gallery, which narrowed at the same time as the vault lowered. The tunnel ended in the interior of a funnel; a vicious narrowing, imitated from the wickets of penal institutions, logical in a prison, illogical in a sewer, and which has since been corrected. Jean Valjean arrived at the exit. There he stopped. It was indeed the exit, but one could not get out. The arch was closed with a strong grille, and the grille, which, to all appearances, rarely turned on its rusty hinges, was secured to its stone jamb by a thick lock which, red with rust, looked like an enormous brick. The keyhole could be seen, and the sturdy bolt deeply set in the iron strike. The lock was obviously double-locked. It was one of those bastille locks that old Paris readily gave away. Beyond the gate, the open air, the river, the day, the very narrow bank, but sufficient for getting away, the distant quays, Paris, that abyss where one escapes so easily, the broad horizon, freedom. On the right, downstream, one could make out the Pont d’Iéna, and on the left, upstream, the Pont des Invalides; the place would have been propitious for waiting out the night and escaping. It was one of the most solitary spots in Paris; the bank facing the Gros-Caillou. Flies came in and out through the bars of the gate. It might have been eight thirty in the evening. The day was fading. Jean Valjean placed Marius along the wall on the dry part of the raft, then walked to the gate and clenched his two fists on the bars; the shaking was frantic, the jolt nil. The gate did not budge. Jean Valjean seized the bars one after the other, hoping to be able to tear off the weakest one and use it as a lever to lift the door or break the lock. Not a bar moved. A tiger’s teeth are no more solid in their sockets. No lever; no possible weight. The obstacle was invincible. No means of opening the door. Was it then necessary to end there? What was to be done? What would become of him? Regress; recommence the frightening journey he had already traveled; he did not have the strength. Besides, how could he cross again this quagmire from which he had only escaped by a miracle? And after the quagmire, was there not that police patrol which, certainly, one would not escape twice? And then, where to go? Which direction to take? To follow the slope was not to reach the goal. Even if one arrived at another exit, one would find it blocked by a plug or a grating. All the exits were undoubtedly closed in this way. Chance had unsealed the grating by which one had entered, but evidently all the other mouths of the sewer were closed. One had only succeeded in escaping into a prison. It was over. All that Jean Valjean had done was useless. Exhaustion ended in abortion. They were both caught in the dark and immense web of death, and Jean Valjean felt the dreadful spider running over these black threads quivering in the darkness. He turned his back to the gate and fell onto the pavement, more knocked down than sitting, near Marius, still motionless, and his head sank between his knees. No way out. It was the last drop of anguish. Who was he thinking of in this profound despondency? Neither himself nor Marius. He was thinking of Cosette. Chapter 38. The Torn Tail of the Coat. In the midst of this annihilation, a hand was placed on his shoulder, and a voice that spoke softly said to him: “Leave together. Someone in this shadow? Nothing resembles a dream like the despair. Jean Valjean thought he was dreaming. He hadn’t heard any footsteps. Was it possible? He looked up. A man was before him. This man was dressed in a blouse; his feet were bare; he held his shoes in his left hand; he had evidently taken them off in order to reach Jean Valjean without anyone hearing him walk. Jean Valjean didn’t hesitate for a moment. However unexpected the encounter was, this man was known to him. This man was Thénardier. Although awakened, so to speak, with a start, Jean Valjean, accustomed to alarms and hardened to unexpected blows that must be quickly parried, immediately regained possession of all his presence of mind. Besides, the situation could not worsen; a certain degree of distress is no longer capable of a crescendo, and Thénardier himself could not add darkness to this night. There was a moment of waiting. Thénardier, raising his right hand to the height of his forehead, made a lampshade of it, then he drew his eyebrows together while blinking, which , with a slight pursedness of the mouth, characterizes the sagacious attention of a man who seeks to recognize another. He did not succeed . Jean Valjean, as has just been said, had his back to the day, and was moreover so disfigured, so muddy and so bloody that at midday he would have been unrecognizable. On the contrary, illuminated from the front by the light from the grating, a cellar brightness, it is true, livid, but precise in its lividity, Thénardier, as the energetic banal metaphor says, immediately leaped out at Jean Valjean. This inequality of conditions was enough to assure some advantage to Jean Valjean in this mysterious duel which was about to take place between the two situations and the two men. The meeting took place between the veiled Jean Valjean and the unmasked Thénardier. Jean Valjean immediately noticed that Thénardier did not recognize him .
They considered each other for a moment in the half-light, as if taking measure. Thénardier was the first to break the silence. “How are you going to get out?” Jean Valjean did not reply. Thénardier continued: “Impossible to pick the lock. Yet you must leave here. ” “That’s true,” said Jean Valjean. “Well, let’s go together. ” “What do you mean? ” “You killed the man; that’s good. I have the key.” Thénardier pointed at Marius. He continued: “I don’t know you, but I want to help you. You must be a friend.” Jean Valjean began to understand. Thénardier took him for an assassin. Thénardier continued: “Listen, comrade. You didn’t kill that man without looking at what he had in his pockets. Give me my half. I’ll open the door for you. And, half-pulling a large key from under his torn blouse, he added: “Do you want to see how the key to the fields is made? There you go. ” Jean Valjean “remained stupid,” the word is from old Corneille, to the point of doubting that what he saw was real. It was Providence appearing horrible, and the good angel coming out of the earth in the form of Thénardier. Thénardier thrust his fist into a large pocket hidden under his blouse, pulled out a rope, and handed it to Jean Valjean. “Here,” he said, “I’ll give you the rope into the bargain. ” “Why use a rope? ” “You must also have a stone, but you’ll find one outside. There’s a pile of rubble there. ” “Why use a stone?” “Fool, since you’re going to throw the panther into the river, you need a stone and a rope, otherwise it would float on the water.” Jean Valjean took the rope. There is no one who does not have these mechanical acceptances. Thénardier snapped his fingers as if at the arrival of a sudden idea: “Ah, comrade, how did you manage to pull yourself out of the quagmire over there ? I didn’t dare risk it. Ugh! You don’t smell good.” After a pause, he added: “I’m asking you questions, but you’re right not to answer them. It’s a learning curve for the damned quarter of an hour with the examining magistrate. And besides, by not speaking at all, there’s no risk of speaking too loudly. It doesn’t matter, because I can’t see your face and because I don’t know your name, you’d be wrong to think that I don’t know who you are and what you want. Known. You’ve broken this gentleman a bit; now you want to squeeze him somewhere. You need the river, the big cover-up. I’ll get you out of this strait. Helping a good fellow in trouble, that’s fine with me.” While approving of Jean Valjean’s silence, he was visibly trying to make him talk. He pushed his shoulder, so as to try to see him in profile, and cried out, without leaving the medium in which he maintained his voice: “About the quagmire, you’re a proud animal.” Why didn’t you throw the man in? Jean Valjean remained silent. Thénardier continued, raising the rag that served as a tie to his Adam’s apple, a gesture that completes the capable air of a serious man: “In fact, perhaps you acted wisely. The workmen tomorrow, when they came to plug the hole, would have certainly found the Pantinois forgotten there, and they could have, thread by thread, bit by bit, caught your trace and reached you. Someone went through the sewer. Who? Where did he come out? Were they seen to leave? The police are full of wit. The sewer is treacherous, and denounces you. Such a find is a rarity; it calls for attention; few people use the sewer for their business, while the river belongs to everyone. The river is the real pit.” After a month, they fished the man out of the Saint-Cloud nets. Well, what does it matter? He’s a carcass, right? Who killed this man? Paris. And justice doesn’t even investigate. You did well. The more talkative Thénardier was, the more mute Jean Valjean was. Thénardier shook his shoulder again. “Now, let’s settle the matter. Let’s divide it up. You’ve seen my key, show me your money.” Thénardier was haggard, wild, shifty, a little threatening, yet friendly. There was one strange thing; Thénardier’s manner was not simple; he didn’t seem entirely at ease; while not affecting an air of mystery, he spoke low; from time to time, he put his finger to his mouth and murmured: “Shh!” It was difficult to guess why. There was no one there but the two of them. Jean Valjean thought that other bandits were perhaps hidden in some nook, not far away, and that Thénardier did not care to share with them. Thénardier continued: “Let us finish. How much did the panther have in his pockets?” Jean Valjean searched himself. It was, as you will remember, his habit to always carry money with him. The dark life of expedients to which he was condemned made it a law. This time, however, he was taken unawares. While putting on his National Guard uniform the previous evening, he had forgotten, gloomily absorbed as he was, to take his wallet with him. He had only a few coins in the pocket of his waistcoat. It amounted to about thirty francs. He turned out his pocket, soaked with mud, and spread out on the bench of the raft a gold louis, two five-franc pieces, and five or six gros sous. Thénardier jutted out his lower lip with a significant twist of his neck. “You killed him cheaply,” he said. He began to feel, with all familiarity, the pockets of Jean Valjean and Marius. Jean Valjean, concerned above all with turning his back on the light, let him do it. While handling Marius’s coat, Thénardier, with the dexterity of a conjurer, found a way to tear off, without Jean Valjean noticing, a scrap which he hid under his blouse, probably thinking that this piece of material might be of use to him. later to recognize the murdered man and the murderer. He found nothing more than the thirty francs. “That’s true,” he said, one carrying the other, “you don’t have more than that.” And , forgetting his note: “share for two,” he took everything. He hesitated a little before the big coins. On reflection, he took them too, grumbling: “No matter! It’s gouging people too cheaply. ” That done, he took the key from under his blouse again. “Now, my friend, you must leave. It’s like a fair here, you pay on leaving. You’ve paid, get out.” And he began to laugh. Did he, in giving a stranger the help of this key and making someone other than himself leave through this door, have the pure and disinterested intention of saving a murderer? That is something that one may doubt. Thénardier helped Jean Valjean to replace Marius on his shoulders, then he went to the gate on tiptoe, beckoning Jean Valjean to follow him, he looked outside, placed his finger on his mouth, and remained for a few seconds as if in suspense; the inspection completed, he put the key in the lock. The bolt slid and the door turned. There was neither creaking nor grinding. It was done very gently. It was evident that this gate and these hinges, carefully oiled , opened more often than one would have thought. This softness was sinister; one felt in it the furtive comings and goings, the silent entrances and exits of nocturnal men, and the wolfish treads of crime. The sewer was evidently in complicity with some mysterious gang. This taciturn gate was a receiver. Thénardier half-opened the door, barely allowed Jean Valjean to pass, closed the gate, turned the key twice in the lock, and plunged back into the darkness, making no more noise than a breath. He seemed to walk with the velvet paws of a tiger. A moment later, this hideous providence had returned to the invisible. Jean Valjean found himself outside. Chapter 39. Marius appears to one who knows what he is doing to be dead. He let Marius slide onto the bank. They were outside! The miasmas, the darkness, the horror, were behind him. The healthy air , pure, living, joyful, freely breathable, flooded him. Everywhere around him was silence, but the charming silence of the sun setting in full azure. Twilight had fallen; night was coming, the great liberator, the friend of all those who need a cloak of shadow to escape from anguish. The sky presented itself on all sides like an enormous calm. The river reached his feet with the sound of a kiss. One could hear the aerial dialogue of the nests saying goodnight to each other in the elms of the Champs-Élysées. A few stars, faintly piercing the pale blue of the zenith and visible only to reverie, made small, imperceptible resplendences in the immensity. Evening spread over Jean Valjean’s head all the sweetness of infinity. It was the indecisive and exquisite hour which says neither yes nor no. There was already enough night for one to be lost in it at some distance, and still enough day for one to be able to recognize oneself at close range. Jean Valjean was for a few seconds irresistibly overcome by all this august and caressing serenity; there are such minutes of forgetfulness; suffering ceases to harass the wretch; everything fades away in thought; peace covers the dreamer like night; and beneath the radiant twilight, and in imitation of the sky which illuminates itself, the soul becomes starry. Jean Valjean could not help contemplating this vast, clear shadow which he had above him; pensive, he took in the majestic silence of the eternal sky a bath of ecstasy and prayer. Then, quickly, as if the feeling of a duty returned to him, he bent towards Marius, and, drawing water in the hollow of his hand, he poured it to him gently threw a few drops on his face. Marius’s eyelids did not lift; however, his half-open mouth breathed. Jean Valjean was about to plunge his hand back into the river, when suddenly he felt a kind of discomfort, like when someone is behind you without seeing them. We have already mentioned elsewhere this impression, which everyone knows. He turned around. As before, someone was indeed behind him. A tall man, wrapped in a long frock coat, his arms crossed, and carrying in his right fist a puzzle whose lead knob could be seen, was standing a few paces behind Jean Valjean, who was crouching over Marius. It was, with the help of the shadows, a sort of apparition. A simple man would have been afraid of it because of the twilight, and a thoughtful man because of the puzzle. Jean Valjean recognized Javert. The reader has no doubt guessed that Thénardier’s tracker was none other than Javert. Javert, after his unexpected exit from the barricade, had gone to the police headquarters, given a verbal account to the prefect in person, in a short audience, and then immediately resumed his duties, which involved, one recalls the note seized from him, a certain surveillance of the embankment of the right bank at the Champs-Élysées, which for some time had been attracting the attention of the police. There, he had seen Thénardier and followed him. We know the rest. We also understand that this gate, so obligingly opened before Jean Valjean, was a clever move on Thénardier’s part. Thénardier always smelled Javert there; the man under surveillance has a flair that does not deceive him; it was necessary to throw a bone to this bloodhound. An assassin, what a windfall! It was the share of the fire, which must never be refused. Thénardier, by putting Jean Valjean out in his place, gave the police a prey, made them lose their trail, made himself forgotten in a bigger adventure, rewarded Javert for his wait, which always flatters a spy, gained thirty francs, and counted, for his part, on escaping with the help of this diversion. Jean Valjean had gone from one reef to the other. These two encounters one after the other, to fall from Thénardier to Javert, was harsh. Javert did not recognize Jean Valjean who, as we have said, no longer resembled himself. He did not uncross his arms, steadied his puzzle in his fist with an imperceptible movement, and said in a brief and calm voice: “Who are you?” “Me.” “Who, you? ” “Jean Valjean.” Javert put the puzzle between his teeth, bent his hamstrings, inclined his torso, placed his two powerful hands on Jean Valjean’s shoulders, which fitted together as in two vices, examined him, and recognized him. Their faces almost touched. Javert’s gaze was terrible. Jean Valjean remained inert under Javert’s grasp like a lion consenting to the claws of a lynx. “Inspector Javert,” he said, “you have me. Besides, since this morning I have considered myself your prisoner. I did not give you my address to try to escape. Take me. Only grant me one thing.” Javert seemed not to hear. He pressed his fixed eyes against Jean Valjean. His furrowed chin pushed his lips towards his nose, a sign of wild reverie. At last he let go of Jean Valjean, stood up straight , took up the puzzle again in his hand, and, as if in a dream, murmured rather than uttered this question: “What are you doing here? And who is this man?” He continued to no longer address Jean Valjean in the familiar form. Jean Valjean replied, and the sound of his voice seemed to awaken Javert: “It is precisely of him that I wanted to speak to you. Dispose of me as you please; but first help me to bring him home. I ask nothing more of you.” Javert’s face contracted as it always did that they seemed to believe him capable of a concession. However, he did not say no. He bent down again, took a handkerchief from his pocket, dipped it in water, and wiped Marius’s bleeding forehead. “This man was at the barricade,” he said in a low voice, as if speaking to himself. “It is the one they called Marius. A spy of the first quality, who had observed everything, listened to everything, heard everything, and taken in everything, believing he was dying; who spied even in his agony, and who, leaning on the first step of the sepulchre, had taken notes. He seized Marius’s hand, feeling for his pulse. “He is wounded,” said Jean Valjean. “He is dead,” said Javert. Jean Valjean replied: “No. Not yet. ” “So you brought him here from the barricade?” observed Javert. His preoccupation must have been profound for him not to dwell on this disturbing rescue through the sewer, and for him not even to notice Jean Valjean’s silence after his question. Jean Valjean, for his part, seemed to have a single thought. He continued: “He lives in the Marais, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, with his grandfather….–I no longer know the name.” Jean Valjean rummaged in Marius’s coat, took out the pocketbook, opened it at the page Marius had penciled, and handed it to Javert. There was still enough floating light in the air for one to be able to read. Javert, moreover, had in his eye the feline phosphorescence of night birds. He deciphered the few lines written by Marius, and grumbled: “Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, number 6.” Then he shouted: “Coachman!” We remember the cab that was waiting, just in case. Javert kept Marius’s wallet. A moment later, the carriage, having descended by the ramp from the drinking trough, was on the bank, Marius was placed on the back seat, and Javert sat down near Jean Valjean on the front seat. The door closed, the cab moved off quickly, going up the quays in the direction of the Bastille. They left the quays and entered the streets. The coachman, a black silhouette on his seat, was whipping his thin horses. Icy silence in the cab. Marius, motionless, his torso leaning against the corner of the back, his head bent on his chest, his arms hanging down, his legs stiff, seemed to be waiting for nothing but a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed made of shadow, and Javert of stone; and in this carriage full of night, whose interior, each time it passed a street lamp, appeared lividly pale as if by an intermittent flash, chance brought together and seemed to bring into dismal confrontation the three tragic immobilities, the corpse, the spectre, the statue. Chapter 40. Return of the prodigal son of his life. At each bump in the pavement, a drop of blood fell from Marius’s hair. It was late night when the cab arrived at number 6, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. Javert dismounted first, noted at a glance the number above the carriage entrance, and, raising the heavy hammer of beaten iron, decorated in the old fashion with a goat and a satyr confronting each other, struck a violent blow. The door opened ajar, and Javert pushed it open. The porter appeared half-yawning, vaguely awake, a candle in his hand. Everyone in the house was asleep. People go to bed early in the Marais; especially on days of riot. This good old neighborhood, frightened by the revolution, takes refuge in sleep, just as children, when they hear Bogey coming, quickly hide their heads under their blankets. Meanwhile, Jean Valjean and the coachman were pulling Marius from the cab, Jean Valjean supporting him under the armpits and the coachman under the hamstrings. While carrying Marius in this way, Jean Valjean slipped his hand under the clothes, which were widely torn, felt his chest, and made sure that the heart was still beating. It was even beating a little less weakly, as if the movement of the carriage had brought about a certain revival of life. Javert called out to the porter in the tone appropriate to government in the presence of the porter of a rebel. “Someone named Gillenormand? ” “It’s here. What do you want from him? ” “His son is being brought to him. ” “His son?” said the porter, dazed. “He is dead.” Jean Valjean, who was coming, ragged and soiled, behind Javert, and whom the porter was looking at with some horror, nodded to him no.
The porter seemed to understand neither Javert’s words nor Jean Valjean’s sign. Javert continued: “He went to the barricade, and there he is. ” “To the barricade!” cried the porter. “He has been killed. Go and wake the father.” The porter did not move. “Go on!” continued Javert. And he added: “Tomorrow there will be a funeral here.” For Javert, the usual incidents of the public highway were categorically classified, which is the beginning of foresight and surveillance , and each eventuality had its compartment; the possible facts were, as it were, in drawers from which they emerged, according to the occasion, in varying quantities; there was, in the street, noise, riot, carnival, funeral. The porter confined himself to waking Basque. Basque woke Nicolette; Nicolette woke Aunt Gillenormand. As for the grandfather, he was left to sleep, thinking that he would always know the thing soon enough. Marius was taken up to the first floor, without anyone, moreover, noticing in the other parts of the house, and he was placed on an old sofa in M. Gillenormand’s antechamber; and, while Basque went to fetch a doctor and Nicolette opened the linen cupboards, Jean Valjean felt Javert touch his shoulder. He understood, and went back downstairs, with Javert’s footsteps following him. The porter watched them leave as he had watched them arrive, with a terrified drowsiness. They climbed back into the cab, and the coachman sat on his seat. “Inspector Javert,” said Jean Valjean, “grant me one more thing. ” “What is it?” asked Javert roughly. “Let me go home for a moment. Then you can do with me what you like. ” Javert remained silent for a few moments, his chin tucked into the collar of his frock coat, then he lowered the front window. “Coachman,” he said, “Rue de l’Homme-Armé, number 7.” Chapter 41. Absolute shock. They did not open their mouths during the whole journey. What did Jean Valjean want? To finish what he had begun; to warn Cosette, to tell her where Marius was, perhaps to give her some other useful information, to take, if he could, certain final measures. As for him, as far as what concerned him personally was concerned, it was finished; he was seized by Javert and could not resist him; another than he, in such a situation, might perhaps have vaguely thought of the rope that Thénardier had given him and of the bars of the first dungeon he would enter; but, since the bishop, there was in Jean Valjean before any attempt, even against himself, let us insist, a profound religious hesitation. Suicide, that mysterious assault on the unknown, which can contain to a certain extent the death of the soul, was impossible for Jean Valjean. At the entrance to the Rue de l’Homme-Armé, the cab stopped, this street being too narrow for carriages to enter. Javert and Jean Valjean got out. The coachman humbly informed “Monsieur Inspector” that the Utrecht velvet of his carriage was stained with the blood of the murdered man and the mud of the assassin. This was what he had understood. He added that compensation was due to him. At the same time, pulling From his pocket, he asked the inspector to be kind enough to write on it “a little bit of certification.” Javert pushed back the book the coachman held out to him and said: “How much do you need, including your station and the fare?” “It was seven and a quarter hours ago,” replied the coachman, “and my velvet was brand new. Eighty francs, inspector.” Javert took four napoleons from his pocket and dismissed the cab. Jean Valjean thought that Javert’s intention was to take him on foot to the White Coats station or the Archives station, which are nearby . They entered the street. It was, as usual, deserted. Javert followed Jean Valjean. They arrived at number 7. Jean Valjean knocked. The door opened. “That’s good,” said Javert. “Get in.” He added with a strange expression, and as if he were making an effort to speak in this way: “I’ll wait for you here. ” Jean Valjean looked at Javert. This way of doing things was not typical of Javert. However, that Javert now had in him a sort of haughty confidence, the confidence of the cat that grants the mouse a liberty the length of its claw, resolved as Jean Valjean was to give himself up and have an end of it, could not have surprised him much. He pushed open the door, entered the house, shouted to the porter, who was lying down and had pulled the cord of his bed: “It’s me!” and mounted the stairs. Having reached the first floor, he paused. All painful paths have stations. The window on the landing, which was a sash window, was open. As in many old houses, the staircase was lighted and had a view of the street. The street lamp , situated precisely opposite, threw some light on the steps, which saved the lighting. Jean Valjean, either to breathe or mechanically, put his head to this window. He leaned out over the street. It is short and the street lamp lit it up from one end to the other. Jean Valjean was dazzled with stupor; there was no one there. Javert had gone. Chapter 42. The Grandfather. Basque and the porter had carried Marius, still lying motionless on the sofa where he had been placed on arrival, into the drawing-room. The doctor, who had been sent for, had rushed in. Aunt Gillenormand had risen. Aunt Gillenormand paced back and forth, terrified, clasping her hands, and incapable of doing anything but saying: “Is it possible?” She added at times: “Everything will be drenched in blood!” When the first horror had passed, a certain philosophy of the situation dawned on her mind and expressed itself in this exclamation: “It must end like this!” She did not go so far as to say: _I told you so !_ which is customary on occasions of this kind. On the doctor’s orders, a bedstead had been set up near the couch. The doctor examined Marius and, after having ascertained that the pulse persisted, that the wounded man had no penetrating wound in his chest, and that the blood from the corners of his lips came from the nasal passages, he had him lie flat on the bed, without a pillow, his head on the same level as his body, and even a little lower, his torso bare, in order to facilitate breathing. Mademoiselle Gillenormand, seeing that Marius was being undressed, withdrew. She began to say her rosary in her room. His torso was not affected by any internal injury; a bullet, cushioned by the wallet, had deflected and circled his ribs with a hideous tear, but without depth, and consequently without danger. The long underground march had completed the dislocation of the broken collarbone, and there was serious disorder there. The arms were sabered. No scar disfigured the face; the head, however, was as if covered with hatching; what would become of these head wounds? Did they stop at the scalp? Did they cut into the skull? One could not could still say it. A serious symptom is that they had caused fainting, and one does not always wake up from these fainting spells. The hemorrhage, moreover, had exhausted the wounded man. From the waist down, the lower part of the body had been protected by the barricade. Basque and Nicolette tore up cloths and prepared bandages; Nicolette sewed them, Basque rolled them. Since lint was lacking, the doctor had temporarily stopped the bleeding from the wounds with wads of cotton wool. Beside the bed, three candles burned on a table where the surgical kit was spread out. The doctor washed Marius’s face and hair with cold water. A full bucket was red in an instant. The porter, candle in hand, lit the light. The doctor seemed to be thinking sadly. From time to time, he nodded negatively, as if answering some question he was asking himself inwardly. A bad sign for the patient, these mysterious dialogues of the doctor with himself. At the moment when the doctor wiped the face and lightly touched the still closed eyelids with his finger, a door opened at the back of the living room, and a long pale figure appeared. It was the grandfather. The riot, for two days, had greatly agitated, indignant, and preoccupied Mr. Gillenormand. He had not been able to sleep the previous night, and he had had a fever all day. In the evening, he had gone to bed very early, recommending that everything in the house be locked, and, from fatigue, he had dozed off. Old people have delicate sleeps; Mr. Gillenormand’s room was adjacent to the living room, and, whatever precautions had been taken, the noise had awakened him. Surprised by the crack of light he saw at his door, he had gotten out of bed and groped his way over. He was on the threshold, one hand on the latch of the half-open door, his head slightly bent forward and wobbly, his body wrapped tightly in a white dressing gown, straight and without wrinkles like a shroud, astonished; and he looked like a ghost looking into a tomb. He saw the bed, and on the mattress this bleeding young man, white as wax, his eyes closed, his mouth open, his lips pale, naked to the waist, cut all over with crimson wounds, motionless, brightly lit. The grandfather felt from head to toe all the shudder that ossified limbs can have, his eyes, whose corneas were yellow from great age, were veiled with a sort of glassy shimmer, his whole face took on in an instant the earthy angles of a skeleton’s head, his arms hung loose as if a spring had broken in them, and his stupor was expressed by the spreading of the fingers of his two old, trembling hands, his knees angled forward, revealing through the opening of his dressing gown his poor bare legs bristling with white hair, and he murmured: “Marius! ” “Sir,” said Basque, “they have just brought in the gentleman. He went to the barricade, and…. ” “He is dead!” cried the old man in a terrible voice. “Ah! the brigand!” Then a sort of sepulchral transfiguration raised this centenarian upright as a young man. “Sir,” he said, “you are the doctor.” Start by telling me one thing. He’s dead, isn’t he? The doctor, overcome with anxiety, remained silent. M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with a burst of terrifying laughter. “He’s dead! He’s dead! He got himself killed at the barricades! Out of hatred for me! He did that to me! Ah! Blood drinker! That’s how he comes back to me! Misery of my life, he’s dead!” He went to the window, opened it wide as if he were suffocating, and, standing in front of the shadow, he began to speak in the street to the night: “Pierced, sabered, throat slit, exterminated, torn to pieces, cut into pieces! Do you see that, the beggar! He knew very well that I was waiting for him, and that I had his room arranged, and that I had put his portrait at the head of my bed from when he was a little child! He knew very well that he only had to come back, and that for years I had been calling him back, and that I stayed in the evenings by my fireside with my hands on my knees not knowing what to do, and that I was an idiot for it! You knew that very well, that you only had to come back, and say: It’s me, and that you would be the master of the house, and that I would obey you, and that you would do whatever you wanted with your old fool of a grandfather! You knew that very well, and you said: No, he’s a royalist, I won’t go! And you went to the barricades, and you got yourself killed out of spite! to avenge what I had told you about Monsieur the Duke of Berry! That’s what is infamous! Go to bed and sleep peacefully! He’s dead. Here’s my alarm clock. The doctor, who was beginning to be worried on both sides, left Marius for a moment and went to M. Gillenormand, and took his arm. The grandfather turned, looked at him with eyes that seemed enlarged and bloody, and said calmly: “Sir, I thank you. I am calm, I am a man, I saw the death of Louis XVI, I know how to carry events. There is one thing that is terrible, it is to think that it is your newspapers that do all the harm. You will have scribblers, talkers, lawyers, orators, platforms, discussions, progress, enlightenment, human rights, freedom of the press, and this is how your children will be brought back to your homes! Ah! Marius! it’s abominable! Killed ! Dead before me! A barricade! Ah! the bandit! Doctor, you live in the neighborhood, I believe?” Oh! I know you well. I can see your cabriolet going by from my window. I’ll tell you. You’d be wrong to think I’m angry. You don’t get angry at a dead person. That would be stupid. He’s a child I raised. I was already old, when he was still very small. He played in the Tuileries with his little shovel and his little chair, and so that the inspectors wouldn’t scold him, I would fill in the holes he made in the earth with his shovel with my cane. One day he shouted: “Down with Louis XVIII!” and went away. It’s not my fault. He was all pink and blond. His mother is dead. Have you noticed that all little children are blond? What’s the reason for that? He’s the son of one of those brigands from the Loire, but children are innocent of their fathers’ crimes. I remember him when he was this tall. He couldn’t pronounce the _d_s. He had such a soft and obscure way of speaking that you would have thought he was a bird. I remember that once, in front of the Farnese Hercules, we formed a circle to marvel and admire him, he was so beautiful, that child! He was a face like those in paintings. I gave him my deep voice, I scared him with my cane, but he knew perfectly well that it was a joke. In the morning, when he came into my room, I grumbled, but it had the effect of sunshine on me. You can’t defend yourself against those kids. They take you, they hold you, they never let go. The truth is that there was no love like that child. Now, what do you say about your Lafayettes, your Benjamin Constants, and your Tirecuir de Corcelles, who kill me! It can’t go down like that. He approached Marius, still livid and motionless, to whom the doctor had returned, and he began to wring his arms again. The old man’s white lips moved, as if mechanically, and let out, like breaths in a death rattle, almost indistinct words that could hardly be heard:–Ah! heartless! Ah! club member! Ah! scoundrel! Ah! September-breaker!–Low-voiced reproaches of a dying man to a corpse. Little by little, as inner eruptions must always come to light, the sequence of words returned, but the grandfather seemed no longer have the strength to pronounce them; his voice was so dull and extinguished that it seemed to come from the other side of an abyss: “It’s all the same to me, I’m going to die too. And to think that there isn’t a scamp in Paris who wouldn’t have been happy to make this wretch happy! A scoundrel who, instead of having fun and enjoying life, went to fight and got himself machine-gunned like a brute! And for whom, why? For the Republic! Instead of going dancing at the Chaumière, as is the duty of young people! It’s really worth being twenty . The Republic, what a beautiful damned foolishness! Poor mothers, go and make some pretty boys! Come on, he’s dead. That’ll make two burials under the carriage entrance. So you got yourself arranged like that for General Lamarque’s beautiful eyes!” What did General Lamarque do to you? A swordsman! A chatterer! Getting himself killed for a dead man! Isn’t that enough to drive you mad? Understand that! At twenty years old! And without turning your head to see if he left anything behind! Now here are the poor old fellows who are forced to die all alone. Die in your corner, owl! Well, by the way, so much the better, that’s what I was hoping for, it’ll kill me straight away. I’m too old, I’m a hundred years old, a hundred thousand years old, I’ve had the right to be dead a long time ago. This time, it’s done. So it’s over, what a joy! What’s the point of making him breathe ammonia and all that pile of drugs? You’re wasting your time, you stupid doctor! Come on, he’s dead, really dead. I know about that, I who am dead too. He didn’t do it by halves. Yes, this time is infamous, infamous, infamous, and that is what I think of you, of your ideas, of your systems, of your masters, of your oracles, of your doctors, of your rascals of writers, of your beggars of philosophers , and of all the revolutions which for sixty years have been frightening the flocks of crows of the Tuileries! And since you were pitiless in having yourself killed like that, I will not even be saddened by your death, do you hear, assassin! At this moment, Marius slowly opened his eyelids, and his gaze, still veiled by lethargic astonishment, rested on M. Gillenormand. “Marius!” cried the old man. “Marius! My little Marius! My child! My beloved son! You open your eyes, you look at me, you are alive, thank you!” And he fell down in a swoon. Book Four–Javert Derailed Chapter 43. Javert Derailed. Javert had moved slowly away from the Rue de l’Homme-Armé. He walked with his head bowed, for the first time in his life, and, for the first time in his life also, with his hands behind his back. Until that day, Javert had assumed, in Napoleon’s two attitudes , only the one expressing resolution, arms crossed on his chest, the one expressing uncertainty, hands behind his back, was unknown to him. Now, a change had taken place; his whole person, slow and somber, was imbued with anxiety. He plunged into the silent streets. However, he was following a direction. He cut by the shortest route towards the Seine, reached the Quai des Ormes, walked along the quay, passed La Grève, and stopped, some distance from the police station on the Place du Châtelet, at the corner of the Pont Notre-Dame. The Seine forms there, between the Pont Notre-Dame and the Pont au Change on the one hand, and on the other hand between the Quai de la Mégisserie and the Quai aux Fleurs, a sort of square lake crossed by a rapid. This point of the Seine is feared by boatmen. Nothing is more dangerous than this rapid, narrowed at that time and irritated by the piles of the bridge mill, now demolished. The two bridges, so close to each other, increase the danger; the water rushes tremendously under the arches. It rolls there in large terrible folds; it accumulates and piles up there; the flow strains the bridge piers as if to tear them away with large liquid ropes. Men who fall there do not reappear; the best swimmers drown there . Javert rested his two elbows on the parapet, his chin in his two hands, and, while his nails mechanically clenched the thickness of his whiskers, he reflected. Something new, a revolution, a catastrophe, had just taken place in the depths of his being; and there was something to examine. Javert was suffering terribly. For some hours Javert had ceased to be simple. He was troubled; this brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; there was a cloud in this crystal. Javert felt in his conscience the duty splitting in two, and he could not hide it from himself. When he had so unexpectedly met Jean Valjean on the banks of the Seine, there had been in him something of the wolf who seizes his prey and of the dog who finds his master. He saw before him two roads, both equally straight, but he saw two; and this terrified him, he who had never known anything in his life but a straight line. And, poignantly, these two roads were opposite. One of these two straight lines excluded the other. Which of the two was the true one? His situation was inexpressible. To owe his life to a criminal, to accept this debt and repay it, to be, in spite of himself, on the same level as a repeat offender, and to repay him one service with another; to be told: Go away, and to be told in turn: Be free; to sacrifice duty, this general obligation, to personal motives , and to feel in these personal motives something general too, and perhaps something higher; to betray society in order to remain faithful to his conscience; that all these absurdities should come true and come to pile up on himself, that was what terrified him. One thing had astonished him, that Jean Valjean had pardoned him, and one thing had petrified him, that he, Javert, had pardoned Jean Valjean. Where was he? He was searching for himself and no longer found himself. What was to be done now? To deliver Jean Valjean was wrong; to leave Jean Valjean free was wrong. In the first case, the man of authority fell lower than the man of the galleys; in the second, a convict climbed higher than the law and set foot upon it. In both cases, dishonor for him, Javert. In all the courses of action that could be taken, there was a fall. Destiny has certain extremes that plunge precipitously into the impossible, and beyond which life is nothing but a precipice. Javert was at one of these extremes. One of his anxieties was to be forced to think. The very violence of all these contradictory emotions compelled him to do so. Thought, something unusual for him, and singularly painful. There is always in thought a certain amount of inner rebellion; and he was irritated to have this within him. Thought, on any subject outside the narrow circle of his functions, would have been for him, in any case, useless and tiring ; but the thought of the day which had just passed was torture. It was necessary, however, to look into his conscience after such shocks, and to give himself an account of himself. What he had just done made him shudder. He, Javert, had seen fit to decide, against all the police regulations, against the whole social and judicial organization, against the entire code, on a release; that had suited him; he had substituted his own affairs for public affairs; was that not unspeakable? Every time he faced this nameless act he had committed, he trembled from head to toe. What could he do? Only one resource remained: to return hastily to the Rue de l’Homme-Armé and have Jean Valjean imprisoned. It was clear that this was what must be done. He could not. Something barred his path in that direction. Something? What? Is there anything in the world other than the courts, enforceable sentences, the police, and authority? Javert was overwhelmed. A sacred galley slave! A convict impregnable to justice! And all this because of Javert! That Javert and Jean Valjean, the man made to punish, the man made to submit, that these two men, who were both the object of the law, had come to the point of placing themselves both above the law, was it not frightening? What then! Such enormities would happen and no one would be punished! Jean Valjean, stronger than the entire social order, would be free, and he, Javert, would continue to eat the government’s bread! His reverie was gradually becoming terrible. He could have, through this reverie, reproached himself with some other remark about the insurgent reported in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; but he did not think of that. The lesser fault was lost in the greater. Besides, this insurgent was evidently a dead man, and, legally, death extinguishes pursuit. Jean Valjean, that was the weight he had on his mind. Jean Valjean disconcerted him. All the axioms which had been the points of support of his whole life crumbled before this man. Jean Valjean’s generosity towards him, Javert, overwhelmed him. Other facts, which he remembered and which he had formerly treated as lies and follies, now returned to him as realities. M. Madeleine reappeared behind Jean Valjean, and the two figures were superimposed so as to become only one, which was venerable. Javert felt that something horrible was penetrating his soul, admiration for a convict. Respect for a galley slave, is that possible? He shuddered at it, and could not escape it. He struggled in vain, but was reduced to confessing in his heart of hearts the sublimity of this wretch. It was odious. A benevolent malefactor, a compassionate, gentle, helpful, clement convict, returning good for evil, returning forgiveness for hatred, preferring pity to vengeance, preferring to lose himself rather than his enemy, saving the one who struck him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, closer to an angel than to a man! Javert was forced to admit to himself that this monster existed. It could not continue like this. Certainly, and we insist on this, he had not surrendered without resistance to this monster, to this infamous angel, to this hideous hero, by whom he was almost as indignant as he was stupefied. Twenty times, when he was in this carriage face to face with Jean Valjean, the legal title had roared within him. Twenty times he had been tempted to throw himself upon Jean Valjean, to seize him and devour him, that is to say, to arrest him. What could be simpler, in fact? To shout at the first post one passes: “Here is a criminal who has broken his ban!” To call the gendarmes and say to them: “This man is for you!” Then to go away, leave this damned man there, ignore the rest, and have nothing more to do with him. This man is forever the prisoner of the law; the law will do with him what it will. What could be more just? Javert had said all this to himself; he had wanted to go on, to act, to apprehend the man, and, then as now, he had been unable; and each time his hand had convulsively raised itself towards Jean Valjean’s collar , his hand, as if under an enormous weight, had fallen back, and he had heard in the depths of his thoughts a voice, a strange voice, which cried to him: “Good. Hand over your savior. Then have Pontius Pilate’s basin brought, and wash your claws.” Then his reflection fell upon himself, and beside Jean Valjean grown up, he saw himself, Javert, degraded. A convict was his benefactor! But also why had he allowed this man to let him live? He had, in this barricade, the right to be killed. He should have exercised this right. Call the other insurgents to his aid against Jean Valjean, to be shot by force was better. His supreme anguish was the disappearance of certainty. He felt uprooted. The code was no more than a stump in his hand. He was dealing with scruples of an unknown kind. A sentimental revelation was taking place within him, entirely distinct from legal affirmation , his only measure until then. To remain in the old honesty was no longer enough. A whole order of unexpected facts arose and subjugated him. A whole new world appeared to his soul, the benefit accepted and returned, devotion, mercy, indulgence, the violence done by pity to austerity, the respect of persons, no more definitive condemnation, no more damnation, the possibility of a tear in the eye of the law, one knows not what justice according to God going in the opposite direction of justice according to men. He perceived in the darkness the frightening rising of an unknown moral sun; he was horrified and dazzled by it. Owl forced to look at an eagle. He told himself that it was therefore true, that there were exceptions, that authority could be disconcerted, that the rule could remain short in the face of a fact, that not everything was contained in the text of the code, that the unforeseen had to be obeyed, that the virtue of a convict could set a trap for the virtue of a functionary, that the monstrous could be divine, that destiny had ambushes of this kind, and he reflected with despair that he himself had not been safe from a surprise. He was forced to recognize that goodness existed. This convict had been good. And he himself, unheard of, had just been good. So he was depraving himself. He found himself a coward. He horrified himself. The ideal for Javert was not to be human, to be great, to be sublime; It was to be irreproachable. Now, he had just failed. How had he arrived at this? How had all this happened? He could not have said it to himself. He took his head in his two hands, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not explain it to himself. He had certainly always intended to hand Jean Valjean over to the law, of which Jean Valjean was the captive, and of which he, Javert, was the slave. He had not admitted to himself for a single instant, while he held him, that he had the thought of letting him go. It was, as it were , without his knowledge that his hand had opened and released him. All sorts of enigmatic novelties were opening before his eyes. He asked himself questions, and he made himself answers, and his answers frightened him. He asked himself: This convict, this desperate man, whom I pursued to the point of persecution, and who had me under his thumb, and who could have taken revenge, and who owed it both for his resentment and for his safety, by leaving me alive, by pardoning me, what did he do? His duty. No. Something more. And I, by pardoning him in my turn, what did I do? My duty. No. Something more. Is there then something more than duty? Here he was terrified; his scales were falling apart; one of the scales fell into the abyss, the other went up into the sky; and Javert was no less terrified of the one who was above than of the one who was below. Without being in the least what one calls a Voltairean, or a philosopher, or an incredulous person, respectful on the contrary, by instinct, for the established church, he knew it only as an august fragment of the social whole; order was his dogma and was enough for him; since he had reached the age of man and functionary, he put almost all his religion into the police; being, and we use the words here without the slightest irony and in their most serious meaning, being, as we have said, a spy as one is a priest. He had a superior, M. Gisquet; he had hardly thought until that day of this other superior, God.
This new leader, God, he felt unexpectedly, and was troubled by it. He was disoriented by this unexpected presence; he did not know what to do with this superior, he who was not unaware that the subordinate is always bound to bow, that he must neither disobey, nor blame, nor argue, and that, with a superior who surprises him too much, the inferior has no other recourse than his resignation. But how to go about giving his resignation to God? Whatever the case, and this was always what he came back to, one fact for him dominated everything: he had just committed a dreadful offense. He had just closed his eyes to a repeat offender who had broken his ban. He had just released a galley slave. He had just robbed the law of a man who belonged to them. He had done that. He no longer understood himself. He wasn’t sure he was himself. The very reasons for his actions escaped him; they only made him dizzy. Until that moment, he had lived on the blind faith that engenders dark probity. This faith was leaving him, this probity was failing him. Everything he had believed was dissipating. Truths he didn’t want obsessed him inexorably. From now on, he had to be another man. He suffered the strange pains of a conscience suddenly stripped of its cataract. He saw what he was loath to see . He felt emptied, useless, dislocated from his past life, deposed, dissolved. Authority was dead within him. He no longer had any reason to exist. A terrible situation! To be moved. To be granite, and to doubt! To be the statue of punishment cast all in one piece in the mold of the law, and suddenly realize that one has under its bronze breast something absurd and disobedient that almost resembles a heart! To come to return good for good, although one has said until today that this good is evil! To be the watchdog, and lick! To be the ice, and melt! To be the pincers, and become a hand! To suddenly feel fingers opening! To let go, a terrible thing! Man the projectile no longer knowing his path, and retreating! To be obliged to admit this to oneself: infallibility is not infallible, there can be error in dogma, not everything is said when a code has spoken, society is not perfect, authority is complicated by vacillation, a crack in the immutable is possible, judges are men, the law can err, the courts can be mistaken! To see a crack in the immense blue window of the firmament! What was happening in Javert was the Fampoux of a rectilinear conscience, the throwing off track of a soul, the crushing of an honesty irresistibly launched in a straight line and breaking against God. Certainly, this was strange. That the driver of order, that the mechanic of authority, mounted on the blind iron horse with a rigid track, could be unseated by a flash of light! that the immutable, the direct, the correct, the geometric, the passive, the perfect, might bend! that there might be a road to Damascus for the locomotive! God, always within man, and refractory, he the true conscience, to the false, forbidding the spark to go out, ordering the ray to remember the sun, injunction to the soul to recognize the true absolute when it confronts the fictitious absolute, imperishable humanity, the infallible human heart, this splendid phenomenon, perhaps the most beautiful of our inner prodigies, did Javert understand it? Did Javert penetrate it? Did Javert realize it? Obviously not. But under the pressure of this incontestable incomprehensibility, he felt his skull half-open. He was less the transfigured than the victim of this prodigy. He suffered it, exasperated. He saw in all this only an immense difficulty of being. It seemed to him that now his breathing was forever embarrassed. To have the unknown over his head, he was not accustomed to that. Until now everything above him had been to his gaze a clear, simple, limpid surface; there was nothing unknown, nor obscure; nothing that was not defined, coordinated, linked, precise, exact, circumscribed, limited, closed; everything foreseen; authority was a flat thing; no fall into it, no vertigo before it. Javert had never seen the unknown except below. The irregular, the unexpected, the disorderly opening of chaos, the possible slide into a precipice, these were the things of the lower regions, of the rebels, the wicked, the wretched. Now Javert was falling back, and he was suddenly terrified by this unheard-of apparition: an abyss above. What then! they were dismantled from top to bottom! We were disconcerted, absolutely! What could we trust? What we were convinced of was crumbling! What! The chink in society’s armor could be found by a magnanimous wretch! What! An honest servant of the law could suddenly find himself caught between two crimes, the crime of letting a man escape, and the crime of arresting him! Not everything was certain in the instructions given by the state to the civil servant! There could be dead ends in duty! What then! All this was real! Was it true that a former bandit, bowed down under condemnations, could straighten up and end up being right? Was it credible? Were there then cases where the law had to withdraw before the transfigured crime, stammering excuses? Yes, that was it! And Javert saw it! And Javert touched it! And not only could he not deny it, but he took part in it. These were realities. It was abominable that real facts could reach such a deformity. If facts did their duty, they would be limited to being proofs of the law; facts are sent by God. Was anarchy now going to descend from above? Thus,–and in the magnification of anguish, and in the optical illusion of consternation, everything that could have restricted and corrected his impression was effaced, and society, and the human race, and the universe were henceforth summed up in his eyes in a simple and terrible outline,–thus the penalty, the res judicata, the force due to legislation, the decisions of the sovereign courts, the magistracy, the government, prevention and repression, official wisdom, legal infallibility, the principle of authority, all the dogmas on which political and civil security rest, sovereignty, justice, the logic flowing from the code, the social absolute, public truth , all this, rubble, heap, chaos; himself Javert, the watchman of order, incorruptibility in the service of the police, the providence-dog of society, vanquished and brought low; and over all this ruin a man standing, a green cap on his head and a halo on his forehead; that was the upheaval he had come to; that was the frightful vision he had in his soul. Was it bearable? No. A violent state, if ever there was one. There were only two ways out of it. One was to go resolutely to Jean Valjean, and return the man of the penal colony to the dungeon. The other…. Javert left the parapet, and, head held high this time, walked with a firm step towards the post indicated by a lantern at one of the corners of the Place du Châtelet. Arriving there, he saw through the window a police sergeant, and went in. Just by the way they push open the door of a guardhouse, the policemen recognize each other. Javert gave his name, showed his card to the sergeant, and sat down at the post table where a candle was burning. On the table was a quill, a lead inkwell, and paper in case of any reports and records of the night patrols . This table, always complemented by its straw chair, is a institution; it exists in all police stations; it is invariably adorned with a boxwood saucer full of sawdust and a cardboard grimace full of red sealing wafers, and it is the lowest level of official style. It is at this that the literature of the State begins. Javert took his pen and a sheet of paper and began to write. Here is what he wrote: SOME OBSERVATIONS FOR THE GOOD OF THE SERVICE. “First: I ask the prefect to take a look. “Second: prisoners arriving from the investigation take off their shoes and remain barefoot on the slab while they are searched. Many cough when they return to the prison. This results in infirmary expenses. “Third: the spinning mill is good, with relays of agents from distance to distance, but it would be necessary that, on important occasions, at least two agents do not lose sight of each other, since , if, for any reason, one agent becomes slack in the service, the other supervises and replaces him. “Fourth: it is not explained why the special regulations of the Madelonnettes prison forbid the prisoner from having a chair, even if he pays for it. “Fifth: at the Madelonnettes, there are only two bars in the canteen, which allows the canteen woman to let the prisoners touch her hand. “Sixth: the prisoners, called barkers, who call the other prisoners to the visiting room, are paid two sous by the prisoner to shout his name distinctly. This is theft. “Seventh: for a running thread, ten sous are deducted from the prisoner in the weavers’ workshop; This is an abuse by the contractor, since the canvas is no less good. “Eighth: It is unfortunate that visitors to the Force have to cross the children’s courtyard to get to the parlor of Sainte-Marie-l’Égyptienne. “Ninth: It is certain that every day we hear gendarmes recounting in the courtyard of the prefecture the interrogations of defendants by magistrates. A gendarme, who should be sacred, repeating what he heard in the office of the investigation, that is a serious disorder.
“Tenth: Madame Henry is an honest woman; her canteen is very clean; but it is bad for a woman to keep the wicket of the mousetrap of secrecy. This is not worthy of the Conciergerie of a great civilization.” Javert wrote these lines in his calmest and most correct handwriting, not omitting a comma, and firmly making the paper creak under his pen. Below the last line he signed: “Javert. “Inspector, 1st Class. “At the police station on the Place du Châtelet. “June 7, 1832, about one o’clock in the morning.” Javert dried the fresh ink on the paper, folded it like a letter, sealed it, wrote on the back: _Note for the Administration_, left it on the table, and left the station. The glass and grilled door fell back behind him. He crossed the Place du Châtelet diagonally again, regained the quay , and returned with automatic precision to the very point he had left a quarter of an hour before; he leaned on it, and found himself in the same attitude on the same slab of the parapet. It seemed as if he had not moved. The darkness was complete. It was the sepulchral moment which follows midnight. A ceiling of clouds hid the stars. The sky was nothing but a sinister thickness. The houses of the City no longer had a single light; no one passed by; all that could be seen of the streets and quays was deserted; Notre-Dame and the towers of the Palais de Justice seemed like outlines of the night. A street lamp reddened the edge of the quay. The silhouettes of the bridges were distorted in the mist, one behind the other. The rains had swollen the river. The place where Javert had leaned was, as we remember, precisely situated above the rapids of the Seine, perched on that formidable spiral of whirlpools which unravels and re-ravels like an endless screw .
Javert tilted his head and looked. Everything was black. Nothing could be seen . A foaming sound could be heard; but the river could not be seen. At times, in that dizzying depth, a light appeared and meandered vaguely, the water having this power, in the most complete night, to take the light from who knows where and to change it into a snake. The light vanished, and everything became indistinct again. The immensity seemed open there. What one had below oneself was not water, it was the abyss. The wall of the quay, abrupt, confused, mixed with the vapor, immediately hidden, gave the effect of an escarpment of infinity. Nothing could be seen, but one could feel the hostile coldness of the water and the insipid odor of the wet stones. A fierce breath rose from this abyss. The swelling of the river, guessed at rather than perceived, the tragic whisper of the tide, the lugubrious enormity of the arches of the bridge, the imaginable fall into this dark void, all this shadow was full of horror. Javert remained motionless for a few minutes, gazing at this opening of darkness; he considered the invisible with a fixity that resembled attention. The water rustled. Suddenly, he took off his hat and placed it on the edge of the quay. A moment later, a tall, black figure, which from a distance some belated passer-by might have taken for a ghost, appeared standing on the parapet, bent towards the Seine, then straightened up, and fell straight into the darkness; there was a dull lapping, and the shadow alone was in the secret of the convulsions of this obscure form disappeared beneath the water. Book Five–The Grandson and the Grandfather Chapter 44. Where we see again the tree with the zinc plaster. Some time after the events we have just recounted, Mr. Boulatruelle was deeply moved. Mr. Boulatruelle is the roadmender from Montfermeil whom we have already glimpsed in the darker parts of this book. Boulatruelle, we may remember, was a man occupied with various murky matters. He broke stones and damaged travelers on the highway. A navvy and a thief, he had a dream; he believed in the treasures buried in the forest of Montfermeil. He hoped one day to find money in the earth at the foot of a tree; in the meantime, he readily looked for it in the pockets of passersby. Nevertheless, for the moment, he was prudent. He had just had a narrow escape . He had been, as we know, picked up in the Jondrette garret with the other bandits. The usefulness of a vice: his drunkenness had saved him. It had never been clear whether he was there as a thief or as someone who had been robbed. A dismissal order, based on his clearly noted state of drunkenness on the evening of the ambush, had set him free. He had taken back the key to the woods. He had returned to his path from Gagny to Lagny to do, under administrative supervision, stonework for the state, with a low expression, very pensive, a little cold about the theft, which had almost lost him, but turning only with more tenderness to the wine, which had just saved him. As for the strong emotion he felt shortly after returning to the turf roof of his road-mender’s hut, here it is: One morning, Boulatruelle, going as usual to his work, and perhaps to his lookout, a little before daybreak, saw among the branches a man of whom he saw only the back, but whose neck, it seemed to him, through the distance and the twilight, was not entirely unknown to him. Boulatruelle, although a drunkard, had a good and lucid memory, an indispensable defensive weapon for anyone who is in the least in conflict with the legal order. “Where the devil have I seen anything like that man?” he asked himself. But he could not answer himself, except that it resembled someone whose trace he had vaguely in mind. Boulatruelle, moreover, apart from the identity that he could not manage to grasp, made connections and calculations. This man was not from the area. He was arriving there. On foot, obviously. No public transport passes through Montfermeil at such times. He had walked all night. Where had he come from? Not far away. For he had neither knapsack nor package. From Paris, no doubt. Why was he in this wood? Why was he there at such an hour? What was he doing there? Boulatruelle thought of the treasure. By dint of digging through his memory, he vaguely remembered having already had, several years before, a similar alert about a man who gave him the impression that he could very well be that man. While meditating, he had, under the very weight of his meditation, lowered his head, a natural thing, but not very clever. When he raised it, there was nothing there. The man had disappeared into the forest and the twilight. “By the devil,” said Boulatruelle, “I’ll find him. I’ll discover the parish of that parishioner. That wandering boss-minette has a why, I’ll know it. We don’t have any secrets in my woods without my involvement.” He took his pickaxe, which was very sharp. “There,” he grumbled, “is enough to dig the earth and a man.” And, as one attaches one thread to another, following as best he could the route the man must have followed, he set off through the thicket. When he had taken a hundred strides, the day, which was beginning to break, helped him. Footprints in the sand here and there, trampled grass, crushed heather, young branches bent in the undergrowth and straightening with graceful slowness like the arms of a pretty woman stretching upon waking, showed him a sort of trail. He followed it and then lost it. Time passed. He went deeper into the woods and reached a kind of eminence. An early morning hunter who was passing in the distance on a path whistling Guillery’s tune gave him the idea of climbing a tree. Although old, it was agile. There was a large beech tree there, worthy of Tityre and Boulatruelle. Boulatruelle climbed the beech tree as high as he could. The idea was a good one. Exploring the solitude on the side where the woods are completely tangled and wild, Boulatruelle suddenly saw the man. He had barely seen him when he lost sight of him. The man entered, or rather slipped into, a rather distant clearing, hidden by tall trees, but which Boulatruelle knew very well, having noticed there, near a large pile of millstones, a sick chestnut tree bandaged with a zinc plate nailed directly to the bark. This clearing is the one that was formerly called the Blaru fund. The pile of stones, intended for some unknown purpose, which was seen there thirty years ago, is undoubtedly still there. Nothing equals the longevity of a pile of stones, except that of a plank palisade. It is there temporarily. What a reason to last! Boulatruelle, with the rapidity of joy, let himself fall from the tree rather than climb down. The shelter was found, it was a matter of seizing the beast. This famous dreamed-of treasure was probably there. It was no small matter to reach this clearing. By the beaten paths, which make a thousand teasing zigzags, it took a good quarter of an hour. In a straight line, through the thicket, which is singularly thick, very thorny and very aggressive, it took a good half hour. This is what Boulatruelle was wrong not to understand. He believed in the straight line; a respectable optical illusion, but one which loses many men. The thicket, bristling as it was, seemed to him the right path. “Let’s take the Rue de Rivoli des Loupes,” he said. Boulatruelle, accustomed to going sideways, made the mistake this time. to go straight. He threw himself resolutely into the fray of the undergrowth. He had to deal with hollies, nettles, hawthorns, wild roses, thistles, and very irascible brambles. He was badly scratched. At the bottom of the ravine, he found water that he had to cross. He finally arrived at the Blaru clearing, after forty minutes, sweating, wet, out of breath, scratched, ferocious. No one in the clearing. Boulatruelle ran to the pile of stones. He was in his place. He hadn’t been taken away. As for the man, he had vanished into the forest. He had escaped. Where? Which way? Into which thicket? Impossible to guess. And, poignantly, behind the pile of stones, in front of the tree with the zinc plate, there was freshly turned earth, a forgotten or abandoned pickaxe, and a hole. This hole was empty. “Thief!” shouted Boulatruelle, shaking his fists at the horizon. Chapter 45. Marius, emerging from the civil war, prepares for domestic war. Marius was for a long time neither dead nor alive. For several weeks he had a fever accompanied by delirium, and rather serious cerebral symptoms caused more by the concussions of the head wounds than by the wounds themselves. He repeated Cosette’s name for entire nights in the lugubrious loquacity of fever and with the sombre obstinacy of agony. The width of certain lesions was a serious danger, the suppuration of large wounds being always capable of reabsorbing, and consequently killing the patient, under certain atmospheric influences; At every change in the weather, at the slightest storm, the doctor was worried. “Above all, that the wounded man should not be moved,” he repeated. The dressings were complicated and difficult, since the fixing of appliances and linens with adhesive tape had not yet been thought of at that time. Nicolette spent a bed sheet “as big as a ceiling,” she said, on lint. It was not without difficulty that chlorinated lotions and silver nitrate overcame the gangrene. As long as there was danger, M. Gillenormand, distraught at his grandson’s bedside, was like Marius; neither dead nor alive. Every day, and sometimes twice a day, a gentleman with white hair, very well dressed, such was the description given by the porter, came to inquire after the wounded man, and left a large bundle of lint for the dressings. Finally, on September 7, four months to the day after the painful night when he was reported dying at his grandfather’s house, the doctor declared that he would answer for him. Convalescence began. Marius, however, had to remain lying on a chaise longue for more than two months because of the injuries caused by the broken collarbone. There is always one last wound that won’t close and that drags out the bandages, much to the patient’s annoyance. Moreover, this long illness and this long convalescence saved him from prosecution. In France, there is no anger, even public anger, that six months does not extinguish. Riots, in the state society is in, are so much everyone’s fault that they are followed by a certain need to close one’s eyes. Let us add that the unspeakable Gisquet ordinance, which ordered doctors to denounce the wounded, having outraged public opinion, and not only public opinion, but the king first and foremost, the wounded were covered and protected by this indignation; and, with the exception of those who had been taken prisoner in the flagrant combat, the courts -martial did not dare to worry any of them. So Marius was left alone. M. Gillenormand went through all the anguish first, and then all the ecstasies. It was very difficult to prevent him from spending every night near the wounded man; he had his large armchair brought next to Marius’s bed; he demanded that his daughter take the finest linen in the house to make bandages. Mademoiselle Gillenormand, as a wise and elder person, found a way to spare the fine linen, while letting the grandfather believe that he was obeyed. M. Gillenormand did not allow anyone to explain to him that for making lint, cambric is no better than coarse linen, nor new linen than worn linen. He was present at all the dressings from which Mademoiselle Gillenormand modestly absented herself. When the dead flesh was cut with scissors, he would say: Ouch! Ouch! Nothing was more touching than seeing him hand the wounded man a cup of herbal tea with his gentle senile trembling. He overwhelmed the doctor with questions. He did not realize that he was always starting the same ones again. The day the doctor announced to him that Marius was out of danger, the good man was delirious. He gave three louis as a gratuity to his porter. In the evening, when he returned to his room, he danced a gavotte, making castanets with his thumb and forefinger, and he sang a song which follows: _Jeanne was born in Fougère,_ _True nest of a shepherdess;_ _I adore her petticoat_ _Fripon._ _Love, you come into her,_ _Because it is in her pupil_ _That you put your quiver,_ _Sneering!_ _I sing it, and I love_ _More than Diana herself_ _Jeanne and her hard nipples_ _Bretons._ Then he knelt on a chair, and Basque, who was watching him through the half-open door, thought he was sure that he was praying. Until then, he had hardly believed in God. At each new phase of the improvement, which was becoming more and more apparent, the grandfather became extravagant. He performed a lot of mechanical actions full of joy, he went up and down the stairs without knowing why. A neighbor, pretty, by the way, was quite astonished to receive a large bouquet one morning; it was M. Gillenormand who had sent it to her. The husband made a scene of jealousy. M. Gillenormand tried to take Nicolette on his knees. He called Marius Monsieur le Baron. He shouted: Long live the Republic! Every moment, he asked the doctor: Isn’t there any more danger? He looked at Marius with grandmother’s eyes. He coddled him while he ate. He no longer knew himself, he no longer counted himself, Marius was the master of the house, there was abdication in his joy, he was the grandson of his grandson. In this joy in which he was, he was the most venerable of children. For fear of tiring or bothering the convalescent, he would stand behind him to smile at him. He was content, joyful, delighted, charming, young. His white hair added a gentle majesty to the gay light on his face. When grace mingles with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is one knows not what dawn in blooming old age. As for Marius, while allowing himself to be bandaged and cared for, he had a fixed idea, Cosette. Since the fever and delirium had left him, he no longer pronounced this name, and one might have thought that he no longer thought about it. He was silent, precisely because his soul was there. He did not know what had become of Cosette; the whole affair of the Rue de la Chanvrerie was like a cloud in his memory; almost indistinct shadows floated in his mind, Éponine, Gavroche, Mabeuf, the Thénardiers, all his friends lugubriously mingled with the smoke of the barricade; the strange passage of M. Fauchelevent in this bloody adventure had the effect on him of an enigma in a storm; he understood nothing of his own life, he knew neither how nor by whom he had been saved, and no one around him knew; all that had been told him was that he had been brought back at night in a cab in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; past, present, future, all was now in him nothing but the fog of a vague idea, but there was in this mist an immobile point, a clear and precise lineament, something which was in granite, a resolution, a will: to find Cosette. For him, the idea of life was not distinct from the idea of Cosette, he had decreed in his heart that he would not accept one without the other, and he was unshakeably determined to demand from anyone who wanted to force him to live, from his grandfather, from fate, from hell, the restitution of his lost Eden. He did not hide the obstacles from himself. Let us emphasize here a detail: he was not won over and was little moved by all the solicitudes and all the tenderness of his grandfather. First of all, he was not in the secret of all of them; then, in his sick daydreams, still feverish perhaps, he distrusted these sweets as something strange and new whose purpose was to tame him. He remained cold to them. The grandfather was wasting his poor old smile. Marius told himself that it was all right as long as he, Marius, didn’t speak and let them do what they wanted; but that when it came to Cosette, he would find another face, and his grandfather’s true attitude would be unmasked. Then it would be tough; a resurgence of family questions, a confrontation of positions, all the sarcasm and all the objections at once, Fauchelevent, Coupelevent, fortune, poverty, misery, the stone around his neck, the future. Violent resistance; conclusion, refusal. Marius stiffened in advance. And then, as he came back to life, his old grievances reappeared, the old ulcers of his memory reopened, he reflected on the past, Colonel Pontmercy placed himself between M. Gillenormand and he, Marius, he told himself that he had no real kindness to hope for from someone who had been so unjust and so hard on his father. And with his health came back a sort of bitterness against his grandfather. The old man suffered gently from it. M. Gillenormand, without giving any evidence of it, noticed that Marius, since he had been brought home and had regained consciousness, had not once addressed him as my father. He did not say sir, that is true; but he found a way to say neither one nor the other, by a certain way of turning his phrases. A crisis was evidently approaching. As almost always happens in such cases, Marius, to test himself, skirmished before giving battle. This is called testing the waters. One morning it happened that M. Gillenormand, in connection with a newspaper which had fallen into his hands, spoke lightly of the Convention and let loose a royalist epiphoneme on Danton, Saint-Just, and Robespierre. “The men of ’93 were giants,” said Marius severely. The old man fell silent and did not breathe for the rest of the day. Marius, who always had in mind the inflexible grandfather of his early years, saw in this silence a profound concentration of anger, predicted a fierce struggle, and increased in the recesses of his thoughts his preparations for combat. He decided that in case of refusal he would tear off his braces, dislocate his clavicle, expose what wounds remained, and reject all food. His wounds were his ammunition. Have Cosette or die. He waited for the right moment with the sly patience of the sick. That moment arrived. Chapter 46. Marius Attacks. One day, M. Gillenormand, while his daughter was arranging the phials and cups on the marble chest of drawers, was leaning over Marius and said to him in his most tender tone: “You see, my little Marius, in your place I would now eat meat rather than fish. A fried sole is excellent to begin a convalescence, but to get the sick man on his feet, you need a good chop.” Marius, whose strength had almost completely returned, gathered them together, sat up, pressed his two clenched fists on the sheets of his bed, looked his grandfather in the face, assumed a terrible expression and said: “This brings me to tell you something. ” “What is it? ” “I want to get married. ” “Planned,” said the grandfather. And he burst out laughing. “What, planned? ” “Yes, planned. You’ll have your little girl. ” Marius, stupefied and overwhelmed by the dazzling light, trembled all over . M. Gillenormand continued: “Yes, you’ll have your beautiful, pretty little girl. She comes every day in the form of an old gentleman to ask how you are. Since you were wounded, she spends her time crying and making lint . I made inquiries. She lives at number seven, rue de l’Homme-Armé . Ah, here we are! Ah! You want her. Well, you’ll have her. It’s got you.” You had made your little plot, you had said to yourself: –I’m going to tell this grandfather, this mummy of the Regency and the Directory, this former beau, this Dorante who became Géronte; he had his frivolities too, and his love affairs, and his grisettes, and his Cosettes; he made his frou-frou, he had his wings, he ate spring bread; he’ll have to remember it. We’ll see. Battle. Ah! You take the cockchafer by the horns. That’s good. I offer you a chop, and you answer me: By the way, I want to get married. That’s what’s a transition! Ah! You were counting on a quarrel. You didn’t know I was an old coward. What do you say to that? You’re quarreling. Finding your grandfather even more stupid than you, you didn’t expect it, you’re losing the speech you were supposed to give me, Mr. Lawyer, it’s teasing. Well, too bad, rage. I’ll do what you want, it’ll cut it for you, you idiot! Listen. I’ve made some inquiries, I’m sneaky too; she’s charming, she’s wise, the lancer isn’t real, she’s made piles of lint, she’s a gem; she adores you. If you’d died, there would have been three of us; her beer would have accompanied mine. I had the idea, as soon as you were better, to simply plant her at your bedside, but it’s only in novels that they introduce young girls straight away near the bed of the pretty wounded men they’re interested in. It’s not done. What would your aunt have said? You were completely naked three-quarters of the time, my good man. Ask Nicolette, who hasn’t left your side for a minute, if there was any way a woman could have been there. And what would the doctor have said? A pretty girl doesn’t cure a fever. Anyway, that’s fine, let’s not talk about it anymore, it’s said, it’s done, it’s botched, take her. Such is my ferocity. You see, I saw that you didn’t love me, I said: What could I do to make that animal love me? I said: Look, I have my little Cosette at hand, I’m going to give her to him, he’ll have to love me a little then, or say why. Ah! You thought the old man was going to rant, raise his voice, shout no, and raise his cane at all this dawn. Not at all. Cosette, so be it. Love, so be it. I ask for nothing better. Sir, take the trouble to get married. Be happy, my beloved child. Having said this, the old man burst into tears. And he took Marius’s head and pressed it in his two arms against his old chest, and they both began to weep. This is one of the forms of supreme happiness. “My father!” cried Marius. “Ah! So you love me?” said the old man. There was an ineffable moment. They were suffocating and could not speak. Finally the old man stammered: “Come! Here he is. He said to me: My father.” Marius freed his head from his grandfather’s arms and said gently: “But, my father, now that I am well, it seems to me that I could see her. ” “Still expected, you will see her tomorrow. ” “My father!” “What? “Why not today? ” “Well, today. Fine for today.” You said “father” to me three times , that’s worth it. I’ll take care of it. We’ll bring it to you. Planned, you I said. This has already been put into verse. It is the denouement of the elegy of the _Young Sick Man_ by André Chénier, of André Chénier who was slaughtered by the scélér…–by the giants of 93. M. Gillenormand thought he saw a slight frown from Marius, who, in truth, we must say, was no longer listening to him, flown away as he was in ecstasy, and thinking much more of Cosette than of 1793. The grandfather, trembling at having introduced André Chénier so inappropriately, resumed hastily: –Slaughtered is not the word. The fact is that the great revolutionary geniuses, who were not wicked, that is incontestable, who were heroes, by Jove! found that André Chénier was a bit of a nuisance to them, and that they had him guillot….–That is to say, these great men, on the seventh of Thermidor, in the interest of public safety, asked André Chénier to be kind enough to go…. M.
Gillenormand, caught in the throat by his own sentence, could not continue; unable to finish it or retract it, while his daughter was arranging the pillow behind Marius, overwhelmed by so many emotions, the old man threw himself, with as much speed as his age allowed, out of the bedroom, pushed the door behind him, and, purple, strangling, foaming, his eyes bulging, found himself face to face with the honest Basque who was polishing boots in the antechamber. He seized Basque by the collar and shouted furiously in his face:–By the devil’s hundred thousand Javottes, those brigands have murdered him! “Who, sir? ” “André Chénier! ” “Yes, sir,” said Basque, terrified. Chapter 47. Mademoiselle Gillenormand finally no longer found it objectionable that M. Fauchelevent had entered with something under his arm . Cosette and Marius saw each other again. We will not say what the ordeal was. There are things that one should not attempt to paint; the sun is one of them. The whole family, including Basque and Nicolette, was gathered in Marius’s room at the moment Cosette entered. She appeared on the threshold; it seemed as if she were in a halo. Precisely at that moment, the grandfather was about to blow his nose; he stopped short, holding his nose in his handkerchief and looking over Cosette. “Adorable!” he cried. Then he blew his nose noisily. Cosette was intoxicated, ravished, frightened, in heaven. She was as frightened as one can be by happiness. She stammered, very pale, very red, wanting to throw herself into Marius’s arms, but not daring . Ashamed to love in front of all these people. One is pitiless toward happy lovers; one remains there when they most want to be alone. Yet they have no need of people at all. With Cosette and behind her, a man with white hair had entered, grave, smiling nevertheless, but with a vague and poignant smile. It was “Monsieur Fauchelevent”; it was Jean Valjean. He was _very well dressed_, as the porter had said, entirely dressed in black and new clothes and wearing a white cravat. The porter was a thousand miles from recognizing in this respectable bourgeois, in this probable notary, the frightening corpse-bearer who had appeared at his door on the night of June 7, ragged, muddy, hideous, haggard, his face masked with blood and mud, supporting the fainted Marius under his arms; yet his porter’s instinct was aroused. When M. Fauchelevent arrived with Cosette, the porter could not help confiding this aside to his wife: I don’t know why I always imagine I’ve seen that face before. M. Fauchelevent, in Marius’s room, remained as if apart near the door. He had under his arm a package rather like an octavo volume, wrapped in paper. The paper of the envelope was greenish and seemed moldy. “Does this gentleman always carry books like that under his arm?” Mademoiselle Gillenormand, who did not like books, asked Nicolette in a low voice . “Well,” replied M. Gillenormand, who had heard her, in the same tone, ” he is a scholar. Afterwards? Is it his fault? M. Boulard, whom I knew, never walked without a book either, and always had a book against his heart like that. And, bowing, he said aloud: “Monsieur Tranchelevent…” Father Gillenormand did not do it on purpose, but inattention to proper names was an aristocratic manner with him. “Monsieur Tranchelevent, I have the honor of asking you for my grandson, Baron Marius Pontmercy, for Mademoiselle’s hand in marriage.” “Monsieur Tranchelevent” bowed. “It is agreed,” said the grandfather. And, turning to Marius and Cosette, his arms outstretched and blessing, he cried: “Permission to adore you.” They didn’t need to be told twice. Too bad! The chirping began. They spoke to each other in low voices, Marius leaning on his chaise longue, Cosette standing near him. “Oh my God!” murmured Cosette, “I see you again. It’s you, it’s you! To have gone to fight like that! But why? It’s horrible. For four months, I was dead. Oh! how wicked of you to have been at that battle! What did I do to you? I forgive you, but you won’t do it again. Just now, when they came to tell us to come, I thought I was going to die again, but it was from joy. I was so sad! I didn’t take the time to dress; I must be frightening people.” What will your parents say to me when they see a crumpled collar? But speak up! You’ll let me talk to myself. We’re still on Rue de l’Homme-Armé. It seems that your shoulder was terrible. I was told you could put your fist in it. And then it seems that they cut the flesh with scissors. That’s what’s awful. I cried, I no longer have eyes. It’s funny that one can suffer like that. Your grandfather seems very kind! Don’t bother, don’t lean on your elbow, be careful, you’ll hurt yourself. Oh! How happy I am! So it’s all over, the misfortune! I’m so silly. I wanted to tell you things that I no longer know at all. Do you still love me? We live on Rue de l’Homme-Armé. There’s no garden. I’ve been making lint all the time; Look, sir, it’s your fault, I have a callus on my fingers. Angel! said Marius. Angel is the only word in the language that cannot wear out. No other word would resist the merciless use made of it by lovers. Then, as there were others present, they broke off and said no more, limiting themselves to gently touching each other’s hands. M. Gillenormand turned to everyone in the room and shouted:
Speak up, you others. Make some noise, all around. Come on, a little hubbub, for heaven’s sake! So these children can chat at their leisure.
And, approaching Marius and Cosette, he said to them in a low voice: Use the familiar form. Don’t be embarrassed. Aunt Gillenormand watched in amazement at this irruption of light into her old-fashioned interior. This stupor had nothing aggressive about it; it was not in the least the scandalized and envious look of a two-pigeon owl; it was the stupid eye of a poor innocent girl of fifty-seven; it was the wasted life looking at this triumph, love. “Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder,” her father was saying to her, “I told you this would happen to you.” He remained silent for a moment and added: “Look at the happiness of others. ” Then he turned to Cosette: “How pretty she is! How pretty she is! He’s a Greuze. You’re going to have this all to yourself, you rascal! Ah! you’ve had a lucky escape with me, you’re lucky, if I weren’t fifteen years too old, we would We would beat to the sword whoever had it. Look! I’m in love with you, mademoiselle. It’s quite simple. It’s your right. Ah! What a beautiful, pretty , charming little wedding that will be! Saint-Denis du Saint-Sacrement is our parish, but I’ll have a dispensation for you to get married at Saint-Paul. The church is better. It was built by the Jesuits. It’s more charming. It’s opposite Cardinal de Birague’s fountain. The masterpiece of Jesuit architecture is in Namur. It’s called Saint-Loup. You’ll have to go there when you’re married. It’s worth the trip. Mademoiselle, I’m completely on your side, I want girls to get married, that’s what it’s for. There’s a certain Saint Catherine whom I would always like to see with her hair disheveled. Staying a girl is beautiful, but it’s cold. The Bible says: Multiply. To save the people, you need Joan of Arc; but to make the people, you need Mother Gigogne. So, get married, you beauties. I really don’t see what’s the point of remaining a girl? I know very well that we have a separate chapel in the church and that we fall back on the brotherhood of the Virgin; but, by golly, a handsome husband, a good fellow, and, after a year, a big blond kid who suckles you vigorously, and who has nice folds of fat on his thighs, and who fondles your breast with handfuls in his little pink paws while laughing like the dawn, that’s still better than holding a candle at vespers and singing Turris eburnea! The grandfather did a pirouette on his ninety-year-old heels, and began to speak again, like a spring starting up again: “So, limiting the course of your daydreams, Alcippe, it is true, you are getting married soon. ” “By the way!” “What? My father? ” “Didn’t you have a close friend? ” “Yes, Courfeyrac. ” “What has become of him? ” “He is dead. ” “That is good.” He sat down near them, made Cosette sit down, and took their four hands in his old, wrinkled ones. “She is exquisite, that darling. She is a masterpiece, that Cosette! She is very little girl and very great lady. She will only be a baroness, that is an exception; she was born a marquise. Do you have eyelashes ? My children, make sure you know that you are right . Love one another. Be stupid about it. Love is the stupidity of men and the spirit of God. Adore yourselves. Only, he added, suddenly darkening , what a misfortune! Now I think of it! More than half of what I have is in a life annuity; as long as I live, it will still be all right, but after my death, in about twenty years from now, ah! my poor children, you will not have a penny! Your beautiful white hands, Madame la Baronne, will do the devil the honor of pulling him by the tail. Here a deep, calm voice was heard saying: “Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent has six hundred thousand francs. ” It was the voice of Jean Valjean. He had not yet uttered a word, no one even seemed to know he was there, and he stood motionless behind all these happy people. “What is Mademoiselle Euphrasie in question?” asked the terrified grandfather. “It’s me,” resumed Cosette. “Six hundred thousand francs!” replied Gillenormand. “Less fourteen or fifteen thousand francs perhaps,” said Jean Valjean. And he placed on the table the packet that Aunt Gillenormand had taken for a book. Jean Valjean opened the packet himself; it was a wad of banknotes . They leafed through them and counted them. There were five hundred thousand-franc notes and one hundred and sixty-eight five-hundred notes. In all, five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs. “That’s a good book,” said M. Gillenormand. “Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!” murmured the aunt. “That settles a lot of things, doesn’t it, Mademoiselle Gillenormand senior,” resumed the grandfather. “That devil Marius, he found you in the tree of dreams a millionaire grisette! Trust now the love affairs of young people! Students find students worth six hundred thousand francs. Cherubin works better than Rothschild. “Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!” repeated Mademoiselle Gillenormand in a low voice. “Five hundred and eighty-four! That’s as much as six hundred thousand, what!” As for Marius and Cosette, they looked at each other during this time; they hardly paid attention to this detail. Chapter 48. Deposit your money in such a forest rather than with such a notary. It has doubtless been understood, without it being necessary to explain it at length, that Jean Valjean, after the Champmathieu affair, had been able, thanks to his first escape of a few days, to come to Paris, and withdraw in time from Laffitte’s the sum he had earned, under the name of Monsieur Madeleine, at Montreuil-sur-Mer; and that, fearing recapture , which indeed happened to him shortly after, he had hidden and buried this sum in the forest of Montfermeil at a place called the Blaru fund. The sum, six hundred and thirty thousand francs, all in banknotes , was small and fit in a box; only, to protect the box from humidity, he had placed it in an oak casket full of chestnut shavings. In the same casket, he had put his other treasure, the bishop’s candlesticks. It will be remembered that he had taken these candlesticks with him when he escaped from Montreuil-sur-mer. The man seen for the first time one evening by Boulatruelle was Jean Valjean. Later, whenever Jean Valjean needed money, he came to look for it at the Blaru clearing. Hence the absences we have spoken of. He had a pickaxe somewhere in the heather, in a hiding place known only to himself. When he saw Marius convalescing, feeling that the time was approaching when this money might be useful, he had gone to fetch it; and it was still he whom Boulatruelle had seen in the woods, but this time in the morning and not in the evening. Boulatruelle inherited the pickaxe. The real sum was 584,500 francs. Jean Valjean withdrew the 500 francs for himself. “We will see later,” he thought. The difference between this sum and the 630,000 francs withdrawn from Laffitte’s represented the expenditure of ten years, from 1823 to 1833. The five years of stay in the convent had cost only 5,000 francs. Jean Valjean placed the two silver candlesticks on the mantelpiece where they shone resplendently to Toussaint’s great admiration. Besides, Jean Valjean knew he was freed from Javert. It had been told before him, and he had verified the fact in the _Moniteur_, which had published it, that a police inspector named Javert had been found drowned under a boat of laundresses between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf, and that a note left by this man, otherwise irreproachable and highly esteemed by his superiors, led one to believe that it had been a fit of mental alienation and a suicide. —In fact, thought Jean Valjean, since, having held me, he let me go free, it must be that he was already mad.
Chapter 49. The two old men do everything, each in their own way, to make Cosette happy . Everything was prepared for the wedding. The doctor consulted declared that it could take place in February. It was now December. A few delightful weeks of perfect happiness passed. The least happy person was not the grandfather. He remained for quarters of an hour in contemplation before Cosette. “The admirable pretty girl!” he cried. ” And she looks so sweet and so good! There’s no denying it, my dear, she’s the most charming girl I’ve ever seen in my life. Later on, she’ll have virtues with the scent of violets. It’s a blessing, really! One can only live nobly with such a creature. Marius, my boy, you’re a baron, you’re rich, don’t be a lawyer, I beg you. ” Cosette and Marius had passed abruptly from the sepulchre to paradise. The transition had been poorly managed, and they would have been stunned if they had not been dazzled. “Do you understand anything about that?” Marius would say to Cosette. “No,” Cosette would reply, “but it seems to me that the good Lord is watching us. ” Jean Valjean did everything, smoothed everything over, reconciled everything, made everything easy. He hastened toward Cosette’s happiness with as much eagerness, and, apparently, joy, as Cosette herself. As he had been mayor, he knew how to resolve a delicate problem, the secret of which he alone was privy to, Cosette’s civil status. To state the origin bluntly, who knows? That might have prevented the marriage. He freed Cosette from all difficulties. He arranged for her a family of dead people, a sure way of incurring no claims. Cosette was what remained of an extinct family. Cosette was not his daughter, but the daughter of another Fauchelevent. Two Fauchelevent brothers had been gardeners at the convent of Petit-Picpus. They went to this convent; the best information and the most respectable testimonies abounded; the good nuns, little able and little inclined to probe questions of paternity, and understanding no malice in it, had never really known which of the two Fauchelevents little Cosette was the daughter of. They said what was wanted, and said it with zeal. A certificate of notoriety was drawn up. Cosette became before the law Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent. She was declared an orphan of both father and mother. Jean Valjean arranged for himself to be designated, under the name of Fauchelevent, as Cosette’s guardian, with M. Gillenormand as his subrogated guardian. As for the five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs, it was a legacy made to Cosette by a deceased person who wished to remain unknown. The original legacy had been five hundred and ninety-four thousand francs; but ten thousand francs had been spent on the education of Mademoiselle Euphrasie, five thousand of which were paid to the convent itself. This legacy, placed in the hands of a third party, was to be given to Cosette when she came of age or at the time of her marriage. The whole thing was very acceptable, as can be seen, especially with an addition of more than half a million. There were indeed some oddities here and there, but they were not seen; one of the interested parties had his eyes blindfolded by love, the others by the six hundred thousand francs. Cosette learned that she was not the daughter of the old man she had so long called father. He was only a relative; another Fauchelevent was her real father. At any other time, this would have distressed her. But at the ineffable hour in which she found herself, it was only a little shadow, a darkening, and she was so happy that this cloud lasted a short time. She had Marius. The young man arrived, the good man faded away; life is like that. And then, Cosette had been accustomed for many years to seeing enigmas around her; every being who has had a mysterious childhood is always ready for certain renunciations. Yet she continued to say to Jean Valjean: Father. Cosette, in heaven, was enthusiastic about Father Gillenormand. It is true that he loaded her with madrigals and gifts. While Jean Valjean was constructing for Cosette a normal position in society and an unassailable possession of state, M. Gillenormand watched over the wedding basket. Nothing amused him more than being magnificent. He had given Cosette a guipure dress from Binche that came to her from his own grandmother. “These fashions are coming back,” he said, ” antique goods are all the rage, and young women of my old age dress like the old women of my childhood.” He was plundering her respectable chests of drawers of Coromandel lacquer with rounded bellies that had not been opened for years. “Let us confess these dowagers,” he said; “let us see what they have in their bellies.” He noisily raped bulging drawers full of the toilets of all his wives, all his mistresses, and all his grandmothers. Pekingese, damask, lampas, painted moire, flambéed Tours gros de Tours gowns, Indian handkerchiefs embroidered with a gold that can be washed, dauphines without reverses in pieces, Genoa and Alençon stitch, finery in old goldsmith’s work, ivory candy boxes decorated with microscopic battles, rags, ribbons, he lavished everything on Cosette. Cosette, amazed, mad with love for Marius and terrified with gratitude for M. Gillenormand, dreamed of boundless happiness dressed in satin and velvet. Her wedding basket appeared to her supported by the seraphim. Her soul flew into the azure with wings of Malines lace. The lovers’ intoxication was equaled, as we have said, only by the grandfather’s ecstasy. There was a sort of fanfare in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. Every morning, a new offering of bric-a-brac from the grandfather to Cosette. Every possible frills blossomed splendidly around her. One day Marius, who was happy to chat gravely through his happiness, said about some incident or other: “The men of the revolution are so great that they already have the prestige of centuries, like Cato and Phocion, and each of them seems like an ancient memory. ” “Ancient moire!” cried the old man. “Thank you, Marius. That is precisely the idea I was looking for.” And the next day a magnificent tea-colored antique moire dress was added to Cosette’s basket. The grandfather extracted wisdom from these rags. “Love is good; but it must be with that. Happiness requires the useless . Happiness is only the necessary. Season it with an enormous amount of superfluity. A palace and her heart. Her heart and the Louvre. Her heart and the fountains of Versailles. Give me my shepherdess, and make sure she becomes a duchess. Bring me Philis crowned with cornflowers and add a hundred thousand livres a year. Open me a bucolic as far as the eye can see under a marble colonnade. I consent to the bucolic and also to the fairyland of marble and gold. Dry happiness resembles dry bread. We eat, but we do not dine. I want the superfluous, the useless, the extravagant, the excess, that which serves no purpose. I remember seeing in the cathedral of Strasbourg a clock as tall as a three-story house that marked the hour, that had the goodness to mark the hour, but that didn’t seem made for that; and that, after striking noon or midnight, noon, the hour of the sun, midnight, the hour of love, or any other hour you please, gave you the moon and the stars, the earth and the sea, the birds and the fish, Phoebus and Phoebe, and a whole host of things coming out of a niche, and the twelve apostles, and the Emperor Charles V, and Éponine and Sabinus, and a bunch of little golden men playing the trumpet, to boot . Not to mention the delightful chimes that it scattered in the air at every opportunity without anyone knowing why. Is a nasty, bare dial that only tells the hours worth that? I agree with the big Strasbourg clock, and I prefer it to the Black Forest cuckoo. M. Gillenormand was especially unreasonable about weddings, and all the eighteenth-century overmantels were jumbled up in his dithyrambs . “You are ignorant of the art of celebrations. You don’t know how to make a day of joy in this time,” he cried. “Your nineteenth century is spineless. It lacks excess. It ignores the rich, it ignores the noble. In all things, it is close-cropped. Your third estate is insipid, colorless, odorless, and shapeless. Dreams of your bourgeois women who establish themselves, as they say: a pretty boudoir freshly decorated, rosewood and calico. Make way! Make way! Mr. Grigou marries Mademoiselle Grippesou. Sumptuousness and splendor! They stuck a gold louis to a candle. That’s the time. I ask me to flee beyond the Sarmatians. Ah! As early as 1787, I predicted that all was lost, the day I saw the Duke of Rohan, Prince of Léon, Duke of Chabot, Duke of Montbazon, Marquis of Soubise, Viscount of Thouars, Peer of France, go to Longchamp in a tapcul! It has borne fruit. In this century we do business, we play on the Stock Exchange, we make money, and we are stingy. We take care of and polish our surface; we are dressed to the nines, washed, soaped, raked, shaved, combed, waxed, smoothed, rubbed, brushed, cleaned on the outside, irreproachable, polished like a pebble, discreet, clean, and at the same time, virtue of my darling! we have deep down in our conscience manure and cesspools that would make a cowherd recoil while blowing her nose in her fingers. I grant this time this motto: Dirty Cleanliness. Marius, don’t get angry, give me permission to speak, I don’t speak ill of the people, you see, I’ve had enough of your people, but I think it’s good that I give the bourgeoisie a bit of a slap . I’m one of them. He who loves well, lashes out well. On that, I say it straight, today we get married, but we no longer know how to get married. Ah! it’s true, I miss the kindness of the old customs. I miss everything about it. That elegance, that chivalry, those courteous and cute manners, that joyful luxury that everyone had, the music being part of the wedding, symphony above, drumming below, the dances, the joyful faces seated at the table, the convoluted madrigals, the songs, the fireworks, the hearty laughter, the devil and his train, the big bows of ribbons. I miss the bride’s garter. The bride’s garter is a cousin of Venus’s girdle. What is the Trojan War about? By Jove, about Helen’s garter. Why do they fight, why does the divine Diomedes smash that great ten-pointed bronze helmet over Merionea’s head, why do Achilles and Hector poke each other with their pikes? Because Helen let Paris take her garter. With Cosette’s garter, Homer would write the Iliad. He would put in his poem an old chatterbox like me, and he would name him Nestor. My friends, in the past, in that amiable past, people married wisely; they made a good contract, and then a good feast. As soon as Cujas left, Gamache entered. But, lady! the stomach is a pleasant beast that demands its due, and wants its wedding too. We dined well, and at table we had a beautiful neighbor without a wimple who only moderately hid her throat! Oh! the wide laughing mouths, and how gay people were in those days! Youth was a bouquet; every young man ended with a branch of lilac or a tuft of roses; even if he were a warrior, he was a shepherd; and if, by chance, he was a captain of dragoons, he found a way to be called Florian. People wanted to be pretty. They embroidered themselves, they blushed. A bourgeois looked like a flower, a marquis looked like a jewel. They had no underfoot, they had no boots. They were dapper, shiny, moiré, russet, fluttering, cute, coquettish, which did not prevent them from having a sword at their side. The hummingbird has beak and claw. It was the time of the _Indies galantes_. One side of the century was delicate, the other was magnificent; and, by virtue-chou! we had fun. Today we are serious. The bourgeois is stingy, the bourgeoisie is prudish; your century is unfortunate. We would chase away the Graces as too low-cut. Alas! we hide beauty like ugliness. Since the revolution, everyone has trousers, even dancers; a ballad girl must be serious; your rigodons are doctrinaire. We must be majestic. We would be very sorry not to have our chin in our cravat. The ideal of a twenty-year-old urchin who is getting married is to look like Monsieur Royer-Collard. And do you know what one achieves with that majesty? To be small. Learn this: joy is not only joyful; it is great. But be in love gaily, for heaven’s sake! Get married, when you get married, with the fever and the dizziness and the uproar and the hubbub of happiness! Gravity in the church, fine. But, as soon as mass is over, sarpejeu! a dream should swirl around the bride. A marriage must be royal and chimerical; it must take its ceremony from the cathedral of Reims to the pagoda of Chanteloup. I have a horror of a cowardly wedding. Ventregoulette! Be in Olympus, at least for that day. Be gods. Ah! we could be sylphs, Jeux and Ris, argyraspides; we are scoundrels! My friends, every newlywed must be Prince Aldobrandini. Take advantage of this unique moment of life to fly into the empyrean with the swans and eagles, even if it means falling back the next day into the bourgeoisie of frogs. Don’t skimp on the wedding, don’t trim its splendors; don’t squander the day you shine. The wedding is not housekeeping. Oh! if I had my way, it would be gallant. One would hear violins in the trees. Here is my program: sky blue and silver. I would bring the rustic divinities into the party, I would summon the dryads and the nereids. The wedding of Amphitrite, a pink cloud, well-coiffed and completely naked nymphs, an academician offering quatrains to the goddess, a chariot drawn by sea monsters.
_Triton trotted ahead, and drew from his conch_ _Sounds so ravishing that he delighted anyone!_ –That’s a festive program, that’s one, or I don’t know anything about it, you paper bag! While the grandfather, in full lyrical effusion, listened to himself, Cosette and Marius became intoxicated by looking at each other freely. Aunt Gillenormand considered all this with her imperturbable placidity. For five or six months she had experienced a certain amount of emotion; Marius returned, Marius brought back bleeding, Marius brought back from a barricade, Marius dead, then alive, Marius reconciled, Marius engaged, Marius marrying a poor woman, Marius marrying a millionaire. The six hundred thousand francs had been her last surprise. Then her first-communicant indifference had returned. She went regularly to services, told her rosary, read her eucologia, whispered Aves in one corner of the house while I love yous were whispered in the other, and vaguely saw Marius and Cosette like two shadows. The shadow was her. There is a certain state of inert asceticism in which the soul, neutralized by numbness, foreign to what one might call the business of living, perceives, with the exception of earthquakes and catastrophes, none of the human impressions, neither pleasant impressions nor painful impressions. “That devotion,” Father Gillenormand said to his daughter, “corresponds to a head cold. You feel nothing of life. No bad smell, but no good one. ” Besides, the six hundred thousand francs had fixed the old maid’s indecision. Her father had gotten into the habit of counting so little on her that he hadn’t consulted her about consenting to Marius’s marriage. He had acted impulsively, as was his fashion, having, as a despot turned slave, only one thought: to satisfy Marius. As for the aunt, that the aunt existed, and that she could have an opinion, he hadn’t even thought of it, and, sheep-like as she was, this had offended her. Somewhat revolted in her heart of hearts, but outwardly impassive, she had said to herself: My father resolves the question of marriage without me; I will resolve the question of the inheritance without him. She was rich, in fact, and the father was not. She had therefore reserved her decision on that point. It is probable that if the marriage had been poor, she would have left him poor. So much the worse for my nephew! He marries a beggar, let him be a beggar. But Cosette’s half million pleased the aunt and changed her internal situation with regard to this pair of lovers. One owes consideration to six hundred thousand francs, and it was obvious that she could not do otherwise than leave her fortune to these young people, since they no longer needed it. It was arranged that the couple would live with the grandfather. M. Gillenormand absolutely wanted to give them his room, the most beautiful in the house.–_It will rejuvenate me_, he declared. _It is an old project. I had always had the idea of having the wedding in my room_. He furnished this room with a pile of old gallant trinkets. He had it ceilinged and draped with an extraordinary fabric that he had in a piece and that he believed to be from Utrecht, a buttercup satin ground with bear’s ear velvet flowers. – It was with this fabric, he said, that the bed of the Duchess of Anville at La Roche-Guyon was draped. – He placed on the mantelpiece a figurine of Saxony wearing a muff over its bare belly. M. Gillenormand’s library became the lawyer’s office that Marius needed; an office, it will be remembered, being required by the council of the order. Chapter 50. The effects of dream mixed with happiness. The lovers saw each other every day. Cosette came with M. Fauchelevent. “It’s the reverse of things,” said Mademoiselle Gillenormand, “that the bride-to-be should come to the house to be courted like that.” But Marius’s convalescence had made it a habit, and the armchairs in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, better for tête-à-têtes than the straw chairs in the Rue de l’Homme-Armé, had made it a habit. Marius and M. Fauchelevent saw each other, but did not speak. It seemed that this was agreed upon. Every girl needs a chaperone. Cosette could not have come without M. Fauchelevent. For Marius, M. Fauchelevent was Cosette’s condition. He accepted it. By bringing up, vaguely and without specifying, the subjects of politics, from the point of view of the general improvement of everyone’s lot, they managed to say a little more than yes or no. Once, on the subject of education, which Marius wanted free and compulsory, multiplied in all forms, provided to all like air and sunshine, in a word, breathable to the entire people, they were in unison and almost talked. Marius noticed on this occasion that M. Fauchelevent spoke well, and even with a certain elevation of language. Yet he lacked something I don’t know. M. Fauchelevent had something less than a man of the world, and something more. Marius, inwardly and in the depths of his thoughts, surrounded with all sorts of silent questions this M. Fauchelevent who was for him simply benevolent and cold. At times, doubts came to him about his own memories. There was a hole in his memory, in a black place, an abyss dug by four months of agony. Many things had been lost there. He was beginning to wonder if it was really true that he had seen M. Fauchelevent, such a serious and calm man, in the barricade. This was not, moreover, the only stupor that the appearances and disappearances of the past had left in his mind. It must not be believed that he was freed from all those obsessions of memory which force us, even when happy, even when satisfied, to look back melancholically. The head which does not turn towards faded horizons contains neither thought nor love. At times, Marius took his face in his hands and the tumultuous and vague past crossed the twilight which he had in his brain. He saw Mabeuf fall again, he heard Gavroche singing under the machine-gun fire, he felt the cold of Éponine’s forehead under his lips, Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre, Bossuet, Grantaire, all his friends, stood before him, then vanished. All these dear beings, sorrowful, valiant, charming or tragic, were they dreams? Had they really existed? The riot had everything rolled in its smoke. These great fevers have great dreams. He questioned himself; he felt himself; he was dizzy with all these vanished realities. Where were they all? Was it really true that everything was dead? A fall into darkness had swept everything away, except him. All that seemed to have disappeared as if behind a stage curtain. There are curtains that lower in life. God passes on to the next act. And he himself, was he really the same man? He, the poor man, was rich; he, the abandoned man, had a family; he, the desperate man, married Cosette. It seemed to him that he had crossed a tomb, and that he had entered black, and that he had come out white. And in this tomb, the others had remained. At certain moments, all these beings from the past, returned and present, formed a circle around him and darkened him; Then he thought of Cosette, and became serene again; but nothing less than this happiness was needed to erase this catastrophe. M. Fauchelevent had almost a place among these vanished beings. Marius hesitated to believe that the Fauchelevent of the barricade was the same as this Fauchelevent in the flesh, so gravely seated beside Cosette. The first was probably one of those nightmares brought on and carried away by his hours of delirium. Besides, their two natures being craggy, no question was possible from Marius to M. Fauchelevent. The idea would not even have occurred to him. We have already indicated this characteristic detail. Two men who have a common secret, and who, by a sort of tacit agreement , do not exchange a word on the subject, this is less rare than one thinks. Only once did Marius make an attempt. He brought up the Rue de la Chanvrerie in the conversation, and, turning to M. Fauchelevent, he said to him: “Do you know that street well?” “Which street? ” “The Rue de la Chanvrerie? ” “I have no idea of the name of that street,” replied M. Fauchelevent in the most natural tone in the world. The answer, which related to the name of the street, and not to the street itself, seemed to Marius more conclusive than it was. “Decidedly,” he thought, “I was dreaming. I had a hallucination. It was someone who looked like him. M. Fauchelevent was not there.” Chapter 51. Two Men Impossible to Find. The enchantment, however great it was, did not erase other preoccupations from Marius’s mind . While the marriage was being prepared and while waiting for the appointed time, he had difficult and scrupulous retrospective research carried out. He owed gratitude to several people; he owed it to his father, he owed it to himself. There was Thénardier; there was the stranger who had brought him, Marius, to M. Gillenormand’s. Marius was keen to find these two men, having no intention of marrying, being happy, and forgetting them, and fearing that these unpaid debts of duty would cast a shadow over his life, which was now so bright. It was impossible for him to leave all this outstanding debt behind him, and he wanted, before entering joyfully into the future, to have a receipt for the past. That Thénardier was a scoundrel did not detract from the fact that he had saved Colonel Pontmercy. Thénardier was a bandit to everyone except Marius. And Marius, ignorant of the true scene on the battlefield of Waterloo, did not know this peculiarity, that his father was in the strange position vis-à-vis Thénardier of owing him his life without owing him any gratitude. None of the various agents Marius employed managed to grasp Thénardier’s trail . The erasure seemed complete on that side. Thénardier had died in prison during the trial. Thénardier and his daughter Azelma, the only two who remained of this lamentable group, had plunged back into the shadows. The abyss of The social unknown had silently closed in on these beings. One no longer even saw on the surface that quivering, that trembling, those obscure concentric circles which announce that something has fallen there, and that one can probe into it. Thénardier being dead, Boulatruelle being exonerated, Claquesous having disappeared, the principal accused having escaped from prison, the trial of the ambush at the Gorbeau hovel had more or less been aborted. The affair had remained rather obscure. The bench of the assizes had had to be content with two subordinates, Panchaud, called Printanier, called Bigrenaille, and Demi-Liard, called Deux-Milliards, who had been sentenced contradictorily to ten years in the galleys. Hard labor for life had been pronounced against their escaped and contumacious accomplices. Thénardier, chief and leader, had been, also in absentia, sentenced to death. This condemnation was the only thing that remained about Thénardier, casting its sinister glow over the buried name, like a candle beside a coffin. Moreover, by forcing Thénardier back into the lowest depths through the fear of being recaptured, this condemnation added to the thickening darkness that covered this man. As for the other, as for the unknown man who had saved Marius, the searches at first had some results, then came to a halt. They succeeded in finding the cab that had brought Marius back to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire on the evening of June 6. The coachman declared that on June 6, according to the order of a police officer, he had “parked” from three o’clock in the afternoon until nightfall, on the Quai des Champs-Élysées, above the outlet of the Grand Égout; that, around nine o’clock in the evening, the gate of the sewer which leads to the river bank had opened; that a man had come out, carrying on his shoulders another man, who seemed to be dead; that the policeman, who was on observation at this point, had arrested the living man and seized the dead man; that, on the policeman’s orders, the driver had received “all those people” in his cab; that they had first gone to Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; that the dead man had been left there; that the dead man was Monsieur Marius, and that the driver recognized him well, although he was alive “this time”; that then they had got back into his carriage, that he had whipped his horses, that, a few steps from the door of the Archives, they had shouted at him to stop, that there, in the street, they had paid him and left him, and that the policeman had taken the other man away; that he knew nothing more; that the night was very dark. Marius, as we have said, remembered nothing. He remembered only being seized from behind by a forceful hand as he fell backward into the barricade; then everything faded away for him. He had only regained consciousness at M. Gillenormand’s. He was lost in conjecture. He could not doubt his own identity. Yet how was it that, having fallen in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, he had been picked up by the police officer on the bank of the Seine, near the Pont des Invalides? Someone had carried him from the Halles district to the Champs-Élysées. And how? Through the sewer. Unheard-of devotion! Someone? Who? It was this man that Marius was looking for. Of this man, who was his savior, nothing; no trace; not the slightest clue. Marius, although obliged to be very reserved in this regard, pushed his research as far as the police headquarters. There, no more than anywhere else, the information gathered led to no clarification. The headquarters knew less than the cab driver. There was no knowledge of any arrest made on June 6 at the gate of the Grand Égout; no report from an officer had been received on this incident, which, at the headquarters, was regarded as a fable. The invention of this fable was attributed to the coachman. A coachman who wants a tip is capable of everything, even of imagination. The fact, however, was certain, and Marius could not doubt it, unless he doubted his own identity, as we have just said. Everything in this strange enigma was inexplicable. This man, this mysterious man, whom the coachman had seen coming out of the grate of the Grand Égout carrying the fainted Marius on his back, and whom the police officer on the lookout had arrested in the act of rescuing an insurgent, what had become of him? What had become of the officer himself? Why had this officer remained silent? Had the man managed to escape? Had he corrupted the officer? Why had this man given no sign of life to Marius, who owed him everything? Selflessness was no less prodigious than devotion. Why had this man not reappeared? Perhaps he was above reward, but no one is above gratitude. Was he dead? What man was he? What was his appearance? No one could say. The coachman replied: The night was very dark. Basque and Nicolette, stunned, had only looked at their young master, covered in blood. The porter, whose candle had illuminated Marius’s tragic arrival, had alone noticed the man in question, and this is the description he gave of him: “This man was dreadful.” Hoping to use them for his research, Marius had the bloody clothes he had on his body preserved when he was brought back to his grandfather’s house. On examining the garment, it was noticed that one side was strangely torn. A piece was missing. One evening, Marius spoke, before Cosette and Jean Valjean, of this whole singular adventure, of the countless pieces of information he had gathered, and of the futility of his efforts. The cold face of “Monsieur Fauchelevent” made him impatient. He cried out with a vivacity that almost had the vibration of anger: “Yes, that man, whoever he was, was sublime. Do you know what he did, sir? He intervened like the archangel. He had to throw himself into the middle of the fight, steal me away, open the sewer, drag me there, carry me there! He had to travel more than a league and a half in dreadful underground galleries, bent, bent, in the darkness, in the cesspool, more than a league and a half, sir, with a corpse on his back! And for what purpose? For the sole purpose of saving that corpse. And that corpse was me. He said to himself: There is still perhaps a glimmer of life there; I am going to risk my very existence for that miserable spark!” And he didn’t risk his life once , but twenty! And every step was a danger. The proof is that as he came out of the sewer he was arrested. Do you know, sir, that this man did all this? And no reward to expect. What was I? An insurgent. What was I? A vanquished man. Oh! if Cosette’s six hundred thousand francs were mine… “They are yours,” interrupted Jean Valjean. “Well,” continued Marius, “I would give them to find this man!” Jean Valjean remained silent. Book Six–The White Night Chapter 52. February 16, 1833. The night of February 16-17, 1833, was a blessed night. It had the open sky above its shadow. It was the wedding night of Marius and Cosette. The day had been adorable. It had not been the blue party dreamed of by the grandfather, a fairyland with a confusion of cherubs and cupids above the heads of the bride and groom, a wedding worthy of a doorpost; but it had been sweet and cheerful. The fashion for marriage was not in 1833 what it is today. France had not yet borrowed from England that supreme delicacy of carrying off one’s wife, of running away as one leaves the church, of hiding with shame from one’s happiness, and of combining the allure of a bankrupt with the raptures of the song of songs. had not yet understood all that is chaste, exquisite and decent in jolting around his paradise in a post-chaise, in interspersing his mystery with sofa beds, in taking an inn bed for a nuptial bed, and in leaving behind, in the banal alcove at so much a night, the most sacred of memories of life jumbled up with the tête-à-tête of the stagecoach driver and the inn maid. In this second half of the nineteenth century in which we are, the mayor and his scarf, the priest and his chasuble, the law and God, are no longer enough; they must be supplemented by the postilion of Longjumeau; blue jacket with red turnbacks and bell buttons, armband badge, green leather breeches, oaths to the Norman horses with knotted tails, false braid, oilskin hat, thick powdered hair, enormous whip and strong boots. France has not yet taken elegance to the point of raining down, like the English nobility, a hail of worn-out slippers and old clogs on the bride and groom’s post carriage , in memory of Churchill, since Marlborough, or Malbrouck, assailed on his wedding day by an aunt’s anger that brought him luck. Clogs and slippers are not yet part of our wedding celebrations; but with patience, good taste continues to spread, we will get there. In 1833, a hundred years ago, marriage at full trot was not practiced. At that time, it was still believed, strangely enough, that a wedding was an intimate and social celebration, that a patriarchal banquet did not spoil a domestic solemnity, that gaiety, even if excessive, provided it was honest, did no harm to happiness, and that finally it was venerable and good that the fusion of these two destinies from which a family would emerge began in the home, and that the household henceforth had the bridal chamber as its witness. And people had the shamelessness to marry at home. The marriage therefore took place, following this now obsolete fashion, at M. Gillenormand’s. However natural and ordinary this business of getting married may be, the banns to be published, the acts to be drawn up, the town hall, the church, always had some complication. It was not possible to be ready before February 16. Now, we note this detail for the pure satisfaction of being exact, it happened that the 16th was Shrove Tuesday. Hesitations, scruples, particularly from Aunt Gillenormand. “A Shrove Tuesday!” cried the grandfather, “so much the better. There is a proverb: “A wedding on Shrove Tuesday will have no ungrateful children. ” Let’s pass on that. Go for the 16th! Do you want to delay, Marius? ” “No, certainly not!” replied the lover. “Let’s get married,” said the grandfather. The wedding took place on the 16th, notwithstanding the public gaiety. It was raining that day, but there is always a little patch of azure in the sky at the service of happiness, which lovers see, even when the rest of creation is under an umbrella. The day before, Jean Valjean had handed Marius, in the presence of M. Gillenormand, the five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs. The marriage being carried out under the regime of community property, the acts had been simple. Toussaint was henceforth useless to Jean Valjean; Cosette had inherited him and promoted her to the rank of chambermaid. As for Jean Valjean, there was in the Gillenormand house a beautiful room furnished expressly for him, and Cosette had said to him so irresistibly: “Father, I beg you,” that she had made him almost promise that he would come and live in it. A few days before the day fixed for the marriage, Jean Valjean had had an accident; he had slightly crushed the thumb of his right hand. It was not serious; and he had not allowed anyone to attend to it, or bandage it, or even see his injury, not even Cosette. This, however, had forced him to wrap his hand in a cloth, and to wear his arm in a sling, and had prevented him from signing anything. M. Gillenormand, as Cosette’s subrogated guardian, had replaced him. We will not take the reader to the town hall or to the church. One hardly follows two lovers that far, and one is accustomed to turning one’s back on the drama as soon as he puts a bridal bouquet in his buttonhole. We will limit ourselves to noting an incident which, moreover unnoticed by the wedding party, marked the route from the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire to the Church of Saint-Paul. At that time, the northern end of the Rue Saint-Louis was being repaved. It was blocked from the Rue du Parc-Royal. It was impossible for the wedding carriages to go directly to Saint-Paul. They had to change the route, and the simplest way was to turn around by the boulevard. One of the guests observed that it was Shrove Tuesday, and that there would be a traffic jam there. “Why?” asked M. Gillenormand. “Because of the masks.” “Excellent,” said the grandfather. ” Let’s go that way. These young people are getting married; They are about to enter into the seriousness of life. It will prepare them to see a little masquerade. They took the boulevard. The first of the wedding carriages contained Cosette and Aunt Gillenormand, M. Gillenormand and Jean Valjean. Marius, still separated from his fiancée, according to custom, came only in the second. The wedding procession, leaving the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, entered the long procession of carriages which formed the endless chain from the Madeleine to the Bastille and from the Bastille to the Madeleine. Masks abounded on the boulevard. Although it rained at intervals, Paillasse, Pantalon and Gille persisted. In the good humor of that winter of 1833, Paris had disguised itself as Venice. We no longer see those Shrove Tuesdays today. Everything that exists being a widespread carnival, there is no more carnival. The side streets were teeming with passersby and the windows with curious onlookers. The terraces crowning the peristyles of the theaters were lined with spectators. Besides the masks, people were watching this parade, typical of Shrove Tuesday as well as Longchamps, of vehicles of all kinds, city cars, upholsterers, carts, cabriolets, marching in order, rigorously riveted to each other by police regulations and as if fitted into rails. Anyone in one of these vehicles is both spectator and spectacle. Police officers maintained these two interminable parallel lines moving in a counter-movement along the sides of the boulevard , and watched, so that nothing impeded their double flow, these two streams of cars flowing, one downstream, the other upstream, one towards the Chaussée d’Antin, the other towards the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The armorial carriages of the peers of France and the ambassadors held the middle of the road, coming and going freely. Certain magnificent and joyous processions, notably the Fat Ox, had the same privilege. In this gaiety of Paris, England cracked its whip; Lord Seymour’s post-chaise, badgered with a popular nickname, passed with a great noise. In the double file, along which municipal guards galloped like sheepdogs, honest family berlingots, encumbered with great-aunts and grandmothers, displayed at their doors fresh groups of disguised children, seven-year-old Pierrots, six-year-old Pierrettes , ravishing little beings, feeling that they were officially part of the public rejoicing, imbued with the dignity of their harlequinade and possessing the gravity of officials. From time to time an embarrassment arose somewhere in the procession of vehicles; One or other of the two lateral lines would stop until the knot was untied; one blocked carriage was enough to paralyze the whole line. Then they would start moving again. The wedding carriages were in the line going towards the Bastille and running along the right side of the boulevard. At the height of the rue du Pont-aux-Choux, there was a pause. Almost at the same moment, on the other side, the other line going towards the Madeleine stopped. also. There was at that point in this line a car of masks. These cars, or, to put it better, these cartloads of masks are well known to Parisians. If they were missing on a Shrove Tuesday or a mid-Lent, one would hear malice, and one would say: _There is something down there. Probably the ministry will change_. A pile of Cassandras, Harlequins and Columbines, jolted above the passers-by, every possible grotesque from the Turk to the savage, Hercules supporting marquises, fishwives who would make Rabelais plug his ears just as maenads made Aristophanes lower his eyes, tow wigs, pink jerseys, swashbuckler hats , grim-caster glasses, Janot’s tricorn hats teased by a butterfly, shouts thrown at pedestrians, fists on hips, bold postures, bare shoulders, masked faces, unmuzzled immodesty; a chaos of effronteries led by a coachman wearing a flower headdress; that is what this institution is. Greece needed Thespis’s chariot, France needs Vadé’s cab. Everything can be parodied, even parody. Saturnalia, that grimace of ancient beauty, arrives, magnified by magnification, at Shrove Tuesday; and the bacchanalia, once crowned with vines, bathed in sunlight, displaying marble breasts in divine semi-nudity, today slumped beneath the wet rags of the north, has ended up being called the chie-en-lit. The tradition of masked carriages dates back to the earliest times of the monarchy. The accounts of Louis XI allocate to the bailiff of the palace “twenty sous tournois for three masquerade coaches at crossroads.” Nowadays , these noisy mounds of creatures are usually carted by some ancient cuckoo, whose imperial carriage they encumber, or overwhelm with their tumultuous group a control landau whose hoods are folded down. There are twenty of them in a carriage of six. There are some on the seat, on the folding seat, on the cheeks of the hoods, on the pole. They straddle up to the carriage’s lanterns. They are standing, lying down, sitting, hunches curled up, legs dangling. The women occupy the men’s knees. From afar, one can see their frenzied pyramid on the swarm of heads. These carriages make mountains of joy in the middle of the throng. Collé, Panard and Piron emerge from them, enriched with slang. From up there, the fishy catechism is spat upon the people. This cab, made disproportionate by its load, has an air of conquest. Brouhaha is in the front, Tohubohu is in the back. People vociferate, they vocalize, they howl, they burst out, they writhe with happiness; gaiety roars there, sarcasm blazes there, joviality spreads there like purple; two nags drag the farce blooming in apotheosis there; It is the chariot of the triumph of Laughter. Laughter too cynical to be frank. And indeed this laughter is suspect. This laughter has a mission. It is charged with proving the carnival to Parisians. These fishmongers’ carriages, where one senses who knows what darkness, make the philosopher think. There is government in there. One touches upon a mysterious affinity between public men and public women. That constructed turpitudes give a total of gaiety, that by layering ignominy on opprobrium one entices a people, that espionage serving as a caryatid for prostitution amuses the crowds by confronting them, that the crowd loves to see pass on the four wheels of a cab this monstrous living heap, tinsel and rags, half filth and half light, who barks and who sings, that one claps one’s hands to this glory made of all shames, that there is no celebration for the multitudes if the police do not parade among them these kinds of hydras of joy with twenty heads, certainly, this is sad. But what can be done? These cartloads of mire, ribboned and flowered, are insulted and amnestied by public laughter. The laughter of all is an accomplice in universal degradation. Certain unhealthy celebrations disintegrate the people and make them populace; and the populace, like tyrants, needs jesters. The king has Roquelaure, the people have Paillasse. Paris is the great mad city, whenever it is not the great sublime city. Carnival is part of politics there. Paris, let us admit it, willingly allows itself to be given comedy by infamy. It asks of its masters,—when it has masters,—only one thing: paint me with mud. Rome was of the same mood. She loved Nero. Nero was a titanic docker. Chance would have it, as we have just said, that one of these deformed clusters of masked women and men, carried in a vast carriage, stopped on the left of the boulevard while the wedding procession stopped on the right. From one side of the boulevard to the other, the carriage containing the masks saw opposite it the carriage containing the bride. “Look!” said one mask, “a wedding party. ” “A fake wedding party,” replied another. “We are the real one.” And, too far away to be able to call out to the wedding party, and fearing the hola from the police, the two masks looked elsewhere. The entire masked carriage had its work cut out for it after a moment; the multitude began to boo them, which is the caress of the crowd at masquerades; and the two masks who had just spoken had to face everyone with their comrades, and did not have enough of all the missiles in the repertoire of the market halls to respond to the enormous outbursts of the people. A frightening exchange of metaphors took place between the masks and the crowd . Meanwhile, two other masks from the same carriage, a Spaniard with an oversized nose, an old-fashioned look, and enormous black mustaches, and a thin, young fishwife, masked like a wolf, had also noticed the wedding, and while their companions and the passers-by insulted each other, they were having a conversation in low voices. Their aside was drowned out by the tumult and was lost in it. The gusts of rain had wet the wide-open carriage; the February wind is not warm; while answering the Spaniard, the fishwife, with her neckline uncovered, shivered, laughed, and coughed. Here is the dialogue: –Say. –What, daddy? –Do you see that old man? –What old man? –There, in the first caravan of the wedding party, on our side. –Whose arm is caught in a black tie? –Yes. –Well? –I’m sure I know him. –Ah! –I want my colombo stolen and have no use for my old age, said vousaille, tonorgue nor mézig, if I don’t dove that Pantinois there. –Today Paris is Pantin. –Can you see the bride, if you lean over? –No. –And the groom? –There’s no groom in that caravan over there. –Well! –Unless it’s the other old man. –Try to see the bride if you lean over well. –I can’t. –It doesn’t matter, that old man who has something on his paw, I’m sure of it, I know him. –And what good does it do you to know him? –We don’t know. Sometimes! –I don’t give a damn about old people, myself. –I know him. –Know him at your leisure. –How the hell is he at the wedding? –We’re happy here. –Where did this wedding come from? –Do I know? –Listen. –What? –You should do one thing. –What? –Get down from our caravan and tail that wedding. –Why? –To find out where it’s going, and what it is. Hurry down, run, my fairy, you who are young. –I can’t leave the car. –Why? –I’m hired. –Oh, damn it! –I owe my day as a fishwrecker to the prefecture. –That’s true. –If I leave the car, the first inspector who sees me will arrest me. You know that. –Yes, I know. –Today, I’m bought by Pharos. –It doesn’t matter. That old man bothers me. –Old men bother you. You’re not a young girl, though. –He’s in the first car. –Well? –In the bride’s caravan. –Afterwards? –So he’s the father. –What does that matter to me? –I’m telling you he’s the father. –There’s not only that father. –Listen. –What? –I can hardly go out without a mask. Here, I’m hidden, no one knows I’m here. But tomorrow, there are no more masks. It’s Ash Wednesday. I might fall. I have to go back to my hole. You’re free. –Not too much. –More than me, always. –Well, afterward? –You must try to find out where that wedding party went? –Where is it going? –Yes. –I know. –Where is she going then? –To the Cadran Bleu. –First of all, it’s not that way. –Well! To the Râpée. –Or somewhere else. –She’s free. Weddings are free. –That’s not all. I tell you, you must try to find out what this wedding is, who this old man is, and where this wedding is staying. –More often! That will be funny. It’s convenient to find, eight days later, a wedding that took place in Paris on Shrove Tuesday. A ticking one in a hayloft! Is that possible? –No matter, we’ll have to try. Do you hear, Azelma? The two lines resumed their movement on both sides of the boulevard in the opposite direction, and the carriage of the masks lost sight of the bride’s “caravan. ” Chapter 53. Jean Valjean still has his arm in a sling. To realize one’s dream. To whom is this given? There must be elections for that in heaven; we are all candidates without our knowledge; the angels vote. Cosette and Marius had been elected. Cosette, at the town hall and in the church, was radiant and touching. It was Toussaint, helped by Nicolette, who had dressed her. Cosette wore her Binche guipure dress over a skirt of white taffeta , a veil of point d’Angleterre, a necklace of fine pearls, a crown of orange blossoms; all this was white, and in this whiteness, she radiated. It was an exquisite candor expanding and transfiguring itself in the clarity. One would have said a virgin in the process of becoming a goddess. Marius’s beautiful hair was lustrous and perfumed; one could glimpse here and there, under the thickness of the curls, pale lines which were the scars of the barricade. The grandfather, superb, his head held high, amalgamating more than ever in his dress and manners all the elegance of Barras’s time, led Cosette. He replaced Jean Valjean who, because of his arm in a sling, could not give the bride his hand. Jean Valjean, in black, followed and smiled. “Monsieur Fauchelevent,” the grandfather said to him, “this is a fine day. I vote for the end of afflictions and sorrows! There must be no sadness anywhere henceforth. Pardieu! I decree joy! Evil has no right to exist. That there should be unhappy men, in truth, is shameful for the azure of the sky. Evil does not come from man who, at heart, is good. All human miseries have for their chief town and central government hell, in other words the devil’s Tuileries. Well, now I am speaking demagogic words! As for me, I no longer have any political opinion; that all men should be rich, that is to say, joyful, that is what I limit myself to. When, at the end of all the ceremonies, after having pronounced before the mayor and the priest all the possible yeses, after having signed in the registers at the municipality and at the sacristy, after having exchanged their rings, after having been on their knees elbow to elbow under the pan of white moiré in the smoke of the censer, they arrived holding hands, admired and envied by all, Marius in black, she in white, preceded by the Swiss man with colonel’s epaulettes striking the flagstones with his halberd, between two rows of amazed assistants, under the double-leafed portal of the church, ready to get back into the carriage and everything being over, Cosette still could not believe it. She looked at Marius, she looked at the crowd, she looked at the sky; it seemed that she was afraid of waking up. Her astonished and anxious air added something enchanting to it. To return, they got into the same carriage together, Marius near Cosette; M. Gillenormand and Jean Valjean faced them. Aunt Gillenormand had moved back a step and was in the second carriage. “My children,” said the grandfather, “here you are, Monsieur le Baron and Madame la Baroness, with thirty thousand livres a year.” And Cosette, leaning close to Marius, caressed his ear with this angelic whisper: “So it is true. My name is Marius. I am Madame Toi.” These two beings shone. They were at the irrevocable and untraceable moment, at the dazzling point of intersection of all youth and all joy. They fulfilled the verse of Jean Prouvaire; between them , they were not forty years old. It was marriage sublimated; these two children were two lilies. They did not see each other, they contemplated each other. Cosette saw Marius in glory; Marius saw Cosette on an altar. And on this altar and in this glory, the two apotheoses mingling, deep down, one knows not how, behind a cloud for Cosette, in a blaze for Marius, there was the ideal thing, the real thing, the rendezvous of the kiss and the dream, the nuptial pillow. All the torment they had suffered came back to them in intoxication. It seemed to them that the sorrows, the insomnia, the tears, the anguish, the terrors, the despairs, become caresses and rays, made the charming hour that was approaching even more charming; and that the sadnesses were so many servants who dressed the toilet of joy. To have suffered, how good it is! Their misfortune made a halo around their happiness. The long agony of their love ended in an ascension. It was in these two souls the same enchantment, shaded with voluptuousness in Marius and modesty in Cosette. They said to each other in a low voice: We will go back and see our little garden on the Rue Plumet. The folds of Cosette’s dress were on Marius. Such a day is an ineffable mixture of dream and certainty. One possesses and one supposes. One still has time before oneself to divine. It is an indescribable emotion that day to be at noon and to dream of midnight. The
delights of these two hearts overflowed onto the crowd and gave joy to the passers-by. People stopped on the Rue Saint-Antoine in front of Saint-Paul to see the orange blossoms trembling on Cosette’s head through the carriage window . Then they returned to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, to their home. Marius, side by side with Cosette, ascended, triumphant and radiant, the staircase where he had been dragged, dying. The poor, gathered before the door and sharing their purses, blessed them. There were flowers everywhere. The house was no less fragrant than the church; after the incense, the roses. They thought they heard voices singing in the infinite; they had God in their hearts; destiny appeared to them like a ceiling of stars; they saw above their heads a glimmer of the rising sun. Suddenly the clock struck. Marius looked at Cosette’s charming bare arm and the pink things that could be vaguely seen through the lace of her bodice, and Cosette, seeing Marius’s look, began to blush to the whites of her eyes. A good many old friends of the Gillenormand family had been invited; people crowded around Cosette. It was a question of who would call her Madame la Baronne. The officer Théodule Gillenormand, now a captain, had come from Chartres, where he was garrisoned, to attend the wedding of her cousin Pontmercy. Cosette did not recognize him. He, for his part, accustomed to being found handsome by women, remembered Cosette no more than anyone else. “How right I was not to believe that story about the lancer!” Father Gillenormand said to himself. Cosette had never been more tender with Jean Valjean. She was in unison with Father Gillenormand; while he was erecting joy into aphorisms and maxims, she exhaled love and kindness like a perfume. Happiness wants everyone happy. She found, when speaking to Jean Valjean, the inflections of voice from when she was a little girl. She caressed him with a smile. A banquet had been prepared in the dining room. A daylight is the necessary seasoning of great joy. Mist and darkness are not accepted by the happy. They do not consent to be black. Night, yes; darkness, no. If one has no sun, one must make one. The dining room was a furnace of gay things. In the center, above the white and dazzling table, a Venetian chandelier with flat blades, with all sorts of colored birds, blue, purple, red, green, perched among the candles; around the chandelier, girandoles, on the wall, triple and quintuple branched sconces; mirrors, crystals, glassware, crockery, porcelain, earthenware, pottery, goldsmiths’ work, silverware, everything sparkled and rejoiced. The gaps between the candelabras were filled with bouquets, so that where there was not a light, there was a flower. In the antechamber, three violins and a flute were quietly playing Haydn quartets. Jean Valjean sat on a chair in the drawing-room behind the door, the leaf of which folded back on him so as to almost hide him. A few moments before they sat down to eat, Cosette came, as if on a whim, to make a deep curtsey, spreading her bridal attire with both hands, and, with a tenderly mischievous look, she asked him: “Father, are you pleased? ” “Yes,” said Jean Valjean, “I am pleased. ” “Well, laugh then.” Jean Valjean began to laugh. A few moments later, Basque announced that dinner was served. The guests, preceded by M. Gillenormand giving Cosette his arm, entered the dining-room and spread out, in the proper order, around the table. Two large armchairs were placed there, to the right and left of the bride, the first for M. Gillenormand, the second for Jean Valjean. M. Gillenormand sat down. The other armchair remained empty. They looked around for “Monsieur Fauchelevent.” He was no longer there. M. Gillenormand called out to Basque. “Do you know where M. Fauchelevent is? ” “Monsieur,” replied Basque. “Precisely. M. Fauchelevent told me to tell Monsieur that he was suffering a little from his bad hand, and that he would not be able to dine with Monsieur le Baron and Madame la Baroness. That he begged for his pardon. That he would come tomorrow morning. He has just left. This empty armchair momentarily dampened the effusion of the wedding feast. But, M. Fauchelevent absent, M. Gillenormand was there, and the grandfather beamed for both of them. He affirmed that M. Fauchelevent was right to go to bed early if he was suffering, but that it was only a “bobo.” This statement sufficed. Besides, what is a dark corner in such a submersion of joy? Cosette and Marius were in one of those selfish and blessed moments when one has no other faculty than to perceive happiness. And then, M. Gillenormand had an idea: “By Jove, this armchair is empty. Come here, Marius. Your aunt, although she has a right to you, will allow you. This armchair is for you.” It is legal, and it is kind. Fortunatus near Fortunata.–Applause from the whole table. Marius took Jean Valjean’s place near Cosette; and things were arranged in such a way that Cosette, at first sad about Jean Valjean’s absence, ended by being pleased with it. From the moment Marius was the substitute, Cosette would not have regretted God. She placed her sweet little foot, shod in white satin, on Marius’s foot. The armchair occupied, M. Fauchelevent was erased; and nothing was missing. And, five minutes later, the whole table was laughing from one end to the other with all the verve of forgetfulness. At dessert, M. Gillenormand, standing, a glass of champagne in his hand, half full so that the trembling of his ninety-two years would not make it overflow, toasted the newlyweds. “You won’t escape two sermons,” he cried. “You had the priest’s in the morning, you’ll have the grandfather’s in the evening. Listen to me; I’ll give you some advice: adore each other. I’m not making a lot of giries, I’m going to the point, be happy. There are no wise men in creation other than lovebirds. Philosophers say: Moderate your joys. I say: Give them free rein, your joys. Be in love like devils. Be furious. Philosophers ramble on. I would like to make them put their philosophy back in the gargoyle. Can there be too many perfumes, too many open rosebuds, too many singing nightingales, too many green leaves, too much dawn in life? Can we love one another too much? Can we please one another too much?” Be careful, Estelle, you’re too pretty! Be careful, Némorin, you’re too handsome! What a clumsy lot! Can one be too enchanted, too cajoled, too charmed? Can one be too alive? Can one be too happy? Moderate your joys. Oh yeah! Down with the philosophers! Wisdom is jubilation. Rejoice, let us rejoice. Are we happy because we are good, or are we good because we are happy? Is Sancy called Sancy because it belonged to Harlay de Sancy, or because it weighs 106 carats? I don’t know; life is full of these problems; the important thing is to have Sancy, and happiness. Let us be happy without quarreling. Let us blindly obey the sun. What is the sun? It is love. Who says love, says woman. Ah! ah! there is an all-powerful power, it is woman. Ask that demagogue Marius if he is not the slave of that little tyrant Cosette. And of his own free will, the coward! Woman! There is no Robespierre who holds, woman reigns. I am no longer a royalist except for that royalty. What is Adam? It is the kingdom of Eve. No 89 for Eve. There was the royal scepter surmounted by a fleur-de-lis, there was the imperial scepter surmounted by a globe, there was the scepter of Charlemagne which was made of iron, there was the scepter of Louis the Great which was made of gold, the revolution twisted them between his thumb and forefinger, like two-farthing straws; It’s finished, it’s broken, it’s on the ground, there’s no more scepter; but make revolutions against this little embroidered handkerchief that smells of patchouli! I ‘d like to see you there. Try it. Why is it strong? Because it’s a rag. Ah! You’re the nineteenth century? Well, what about after that? We were the eighteenth, us! And we were as stupid as you. Do n’t imagine that you’ve changed much in the universe, because your gallant kit is called cholera morbus, and because your bourrée is called cachucha. At bottom, we’ll always have to love women. I defy you to get out of there. These devils are our angels.
Yes, love, woman, the kiss, it’s a circle from which I defy you to escape; and, as for me, I’d like to re-enter it. Which of you has seen rising in infinity, soothing everything below her, looking at the waves like a woman, the star Venus, the great coquette of the abyss, the Celimene of the ocean? The ocean, there’s a rude Alceste. Well, he may grumble, Venus appears, he must smile. This brute beast submits. We are all like that. Anger, storm, thunderbolts , foam up to the ceiling. A woman enters the scene, a star rises ; flat on his stomach! Marius was fighting six months ago; he’s getting married today. It’s well done. Yes, Marius, yes, Cosette, you are right. Exist boldly for each other, make love to each other, make us burst with rage at not being able to do the same, idolize each other. Take in your two beaks all the little bits of happiness there are on earth, and arrange yourselves in a nest for life. By Jove, to love, to be loved, the beautiful miracle when one is young! Don’t imagine that you invented that. I too have dreamed, I have mused, I have sighed; I too have had a moonlit soul. Love is a child of six thousand years. Love has the right to a long white beard. Methuselah is a child compared to Cupid. For sixty centuries, man and woman have gotten out of trouble by loving. The devil, who is cunning, began to hate man; man, who is cunninger, began to love woman. In this way, he has done himself more good than the devil has done him harm. This subtlety has been discovered in the earthly paradise. My friends, the invention is old, but it is brand new. Take advantage of it. Be Daphnis and Chloe while you wait to be Philemon and Baucis. Make sure that when you are with each other, you lack nothing, and that Cosette is the sun for Marius, and that Marius is the universe for Cosette. Cosette, may the good weather be your husband’s smile; Marius, may the rain be your wife’s tears. And may it never rain in your household. You have pinched the right number in the lottery, love in the sacrament; you have the jackpot, keep it well, lock it up, don’t waste it, adore each other, and don’t give a damn about the rest. Believe what I say. It is common sense. Common sense cannot lie. Be a religion for each other. Everyone has his own way of worshipping God. By Jove! The best way to worship God is to love your wife. I love you! That is my catechism. Whoever loves is orthodox. The oath of Henry IV places holiness between revelry and drunkenness. Ventre-saint-gris! I am not of the religion of that oath. Women are forgotten in it. This surprises me coming from the oath of Henry IV. My friends, long live women! I am old, they say; it is astonishing how young I feel myself becoming. I would like to go and listen to musettes in the woods. These children who manage to be beautiful and content, that intoxicates me. I would marry handsomely if anyone wanted to. It is impossible to imagine that God made us for anything other than this: to idolize, to coo, to adonize, to be a pigeon, to be a rooster, to peck at one’s loves from morning to night, to admire oneself in one’s little wife, to be proud, to be triumphant, to make a frill; that is the purpose of life. That, with all due respect, is what we thought, we others, in our time when we were young people. Ah! Virtue-bamboche! How many charming women there were, at that time, and faces, and young ladies! I wreaked havoc there. So love one another. If we did not love one another, I do not really see what use there would be in a spring; and, as for me, I would pray the good Lord to lock up all the beautiful things he shows us, and to take them back from us, and to put back in his box the flowers, the birds and the pretty girls. My children, receive the blessing of the old man. The evening was lively, gay, amiable. The sovereign good humor of the grandfather set the tone for the whole party, and everyone tuned in to this almost century-old cordiality. We danced a little, we laughed a lot; it was a good-natured wedding. One could have invited the good man Jadis. Besides, he was there in the person of Father Gillenormand. There was tumult, then silence. The bride and groom disappeared. A little after midnight the Gillenormand house became a temple. Here we stop. On the threshold of the wedding nights an angel stands, smiling, a finger on his mouth. The soul enters into contemplation before this sanctuary where the celebration of love takes place . There must be lights above these houses. The joy they contain must escape through the stones of the walls in clarity and vaguely scratch the darkness. It is impossible that this sacred and fatal festival does not send a celestial radiance to infinity. Love is the sublime crucible where the fusion of man and woman takes place; the one being, the triple being, the final being, the human trinity in itself. This birth of two souls in one must be an emotion for the shadow. The lover is a priest; the ravished virgin is terrified. Something of this joy goes to God. Where there is truly marriage, that is to say, where there is love, the ideal is involved. A nuptial bed makes a corner of dawn in the darkness. If it were given to the pupil of flesh to perceive the formidable and charming visions of the higher life, it is probable that one would see the forms of the night, the winged strangers, the blue passers-by of the invisible, leaning, a crowd of dark heads, around the luminous house, satisfied, blessing, showing each other the virgin bride, gently frightened, and having the reflection of human happiness on their divine faces. If, at this supreme hour, the spouses , dazzled by voluptuousness and who believe themselves alone, were to listen, they would hear in their room a rustling of confused wings. Perfect happiness implies the solidarity of angels. This small, dark alcove has the whole sky as its ceiling. When two mouths, made sacred by love, come together to create, it is impossible that above this ineffable kiss there should not be a thrill in the immense mystery of the stars. These are the true joys. No joy outside of these joys. Love, that is the only ecstasy. All the rest weeps. To love or to have loved, that is enough. Ask for nothing afterward. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life. To love is an accomplishment. Chapter 54. The Inseparable. What had become of Jean Valjean? Immediately after laughing, at Cosette’s kind command, no one paying any attention to him, Jean Valjean had risen and, unnoticed, had gone to the antechamber. It was the same room where, eight months before, he had entered, black with mud, blood, and powder, bringing the grandson back to his grandfather. The old wainscoting was garlanded with foliage and flowers; the musicians were seated on the sofa where Marius had been placed. Basque, in a black coat, short breeches, white stockings, and white gloves, was arranging wreaths of roses around each of the dishes that were about to be served. Jean Valjean had shown him his arm in a sling, asked him to explain his absence, and gone out. The windows of the dining room opened on the street. Jean Valjean remained for a few minutes standing motionless in the darkness beneath those radiant windows. He listened. The confused noise of the banquet reached him. He heard the grandfather’s loud and masterly speech, the violins, the clinking of plates and glasses, the peals of laughter, and in all this gay noise he distinguished the sweet, joyful voice of Cosette. He left the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire and returned to the Rue de l’Homme-Armé. To return, he took the Rue Saint-Louis, the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine and the Blancs-Manteaux; it was a little the longest , but it was the road by which, for three months, to avoid the congestion and the mud of the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, he was in the habit of coming every day from the Rue de l’Homme-Armé to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, with Cosette. This path which Cosette had passed excluded for him any other route. Jean Valjean returned home. He lit his candle and went upstairs. The apartment was empty. Toussaint herself was no longer there. Jean Valjean’s footsteps made more noise than usual in the rooms. All the wardrobes were open. He entered Cosette’s room. There were no sheets on the bed. The ticking pillow, without case or lace, was placed on the folded blankets at the foot of the mattresses whose fabric was visible and where no one was likely to sleep anymore. All the small feminine objects that Cosette cared for had been taken away; only the large pieces of furniture and the four walls remained. Toussaint’s bed was also bare . Only one bed was made and seemed to be waiting for someone; it was Jean Valjean’s. Jean Valjean looked at the walls, closed some wardrobe doors, and went back and forth from one room to another. Then he found himself in his own room, and he placed his candle on a table. He had freed his arm from the sash, and he used his right hand as if he did not suffer from it. He approached his bed, and his eyes rested, was it by chance? was it intentionally? on the inseparable, of which Cosette had been jealous, on the little trunk which never left him. On June 4, on arriving at the Rue de l’Homme-Armé, he had placed it on a small table near his bedside. He went to this small table with a sort of vivacity, took a key from his pocket, and opened the suitcase. He slowly took out the clothes in which, ten years before, Cosette had left Montfermeil; first the little black dress, then the black kerchief, then the good big children’s shoes that Cosette could almost still have worn, her feet were so small, then the thick fustian brassiere, then the knitted petticoat, then the apron with pockets, then the woolen stockings. These stockings, in which the shape of a little leg was still gracefully marked, were hardly longer than Jean Valjean’s hand. All of them were black. It was he who had brought these clothes for her to Montfermeil. As he took them from the valise, he laid them on the bed. He thought. He remembered. It was winter, a very cold December , she was shivering half-naked in rags, her poor little feet all red in her clogs. He, Jean Valjean, had made her take off these rags to put on this mourning dress. The mother must have been happy in her grave to see her daughter in mourning, and especially to see that she was dressed and warm. He thought of that forest of Montfermeil; they had crossed it together, Cosette and he; he thought of the weather, the leafless trees, the wood without birds, the sunless sky; it didn’t matter, it was charming. He arranged the little clothes on the bed, the kerchief near the petticoat, the stockings beside the shoes, the brassiere beside the dress, and he looked at them one after the other. She was no taller than that, she had her big doll in her arms, she had put her gold louis in the pocket of that apron, she was laughing, they were both walking holding hands, she had no one but him in the world. Then his venerable white head fell on the bed, that old stoic heart broke, his face sank, so to speak, into Cosette’s clothes, and if anyone had passed on the stairs at that moment, one would have heard frightful sobs. Chapter 55. _Immortale jecur_. The old formidable struggle, of which we have already seen several phases, began again. Jacob only wrestled with the angel for one night. Alas! how many times have we seen Jean Valjean seized body to body in the darkness by his conscience and struggling desperately against it! An incredible struggle! At times, it was the foot that slipped; at other times, it was the ground that collapsed. How many times had this conscience, driven by good, gripped him and overwhelmed him! How many times had the inexorable truth put its knee on his chest! How many times, overcome by the light, had he cried out for mercy! How many times had this implacable light, lit in him and on him by the bishop, dazzled him with force when he wished to be blinded! How many times had he straightened up in the fight, held to the rock, leaning against sophism, dragged in the dust, sometimes overturning his conscience beneath him, sometimes overturned by it! How many times, after an equivocation, after a treacherous and specious argument of selfishness, had he heard his irritated conscience cry in his ear: Trip! Wretch! How many times had his refractory thought rattled convulsively under the evidence of duty! Resistance to God. Funeral sweats. How many secret wounds, which he alone felt bleeding! How many scratches in his lamentable existence! How many times had he risen up bleeding, bruised, broken, enlightened, with despair in his heart, serenity in his soul? And, vanquished, he felt himself victorious. And, after having dislocated him, tormented him and broken him, his conscience, standing above him, formidable, luminous, tranquil, said to him: Now go in peace! But, at the end of such a dark struggle, what a lugubrious peace, alas! That night, however, Jean Valjean felt that he was fighting his last battle. A poignant question presented itself. Predestinations are not all straight, they do not develop in a rectilinear avenue before the predestined; they have dead ends, caeca, obscure turns, disquieting crossroads offering several paths. Jean Valjean was halting at that moment at the most perilous of these crossroads. He had arrived at the supreme crossing of good and evil. He had this dark intersection before his eyes. This time again, as had already happened to him in other painful adventures, two roads opened before him; one tempting, the other frightening. Which one to take? The one that frightened was advised by the mysterious pointing finger that we all perceive each time we fix our eyes on the shadow. Jean Valjean had, once again, the choice between the terrible bearing and the smiling ambush. Is this true then? The soul can heal; fate cannot. A dreadful thing! An incurable destiny! The question that presented itself was this: In what way was Jean Valjean going to behave with the happiness of Cosette and Marius? This happiness, it was he who had willed it, it was he who had made it; he himself had buried it in his entrails, and at this hour, in considering it, he could have the kind of satisfaction that an armorer would have who recognized his trademark on a knife, when he took it still smoking from his breast. Cosette had Marius, Marius possessed Cosette. They had everything, even wealth. And it was his work. But this happiness, now that it existed, now that it was there, what was he, Jean Valjean, going to do with it? Would he impose himself on this happiness? Would he treat it as if it were his own? Doubtless Cosette belonged to someone else; but would Jean Valjean retain from Cosette all that he could retain? Would he remain the sort of father, glimpsed, but respected, that he had been until then? Would he quietly introduce himself into Cosette’s house? Would he bring, without saying a word, his past to this future? Would he present himself there as having the right, and would he come and sit, veiled, at this luminous hearth? Would he take, smiling at them, the hands of these innocents in his two tragic hands? Would he place on the peaceful andirons of the Gillenormand salon, his feet dragging behind them the infamous shadow of the law? Would he enter into a participation of chances with Cosette and Marius? Would he thicken the darkness on his brow and the cloud in theirs? Would he put his catastrophe in third place with two felicities? Would he continue to be silent? In a word, would he be, next to these two happy beings, the sinister mute of destiny? One must be accustomed to fatality and its encounters to dare to raise one’s eyes when certain questions appear to us in their horrible nakedness. Good or evil are behind this severe question mark. What are you going to do? asked the Sphinx. Jean Valjean had this habit of trial. He looked fixedly at the Sphinx. He examined the pitiless problem from all sides. Cosette, this charming existence, was the raft of this shipwrecked man. What to do? Cling to it, or let go? If he clung to it, he would emerge from the disaster, he would rise again into the sun, he would let the bitter water flow from his clothes and his hair, he would be saved, he would live. Would he let go? Then, the abyss. Thus he held painful counsel with his thoughts. Or, to put it better, he would fight; he would rush, furious, within himself, sometimes against his will, sometimes against his conviction. It was a joy for Jean Valjean to have been able to weep. Perhaps it enlightened him. Yet the beginning was fierce. A storm, more furious than the one that had formerly driven him towards Arras, was unleashed within him. The past came back to him in comparison with the present; he compared and he sobbed. Once the floodgates of tears were opened, the desperate man writhed . He felt himself arrested. Alas! in this all-out fight between our egoism and our duty, when we retreat thus step by step before our immutable ideal, misguided, relentless, exasperated at yielding, disputing the ground, hoping for a possible escape, seeking a way out, what sudden and sinister resistance behind us is the foot of the wall! To feel the sacred shadow that stands in the way! The inexorable invisible, what an obsession! So with conscience one is never finished. Resign yourself to it, Brutus; resign yourself to it, Cato. It is bottomless, being God. We throw into this well the work of our whole life, we throw in our fortune, we throw in our wealth, we throw in our success, we throw in our freedom or our country, we throw in our well-being, we throw in our rest, we throw in our joy. Again! again! Empty the vase! tilt the urn! We must end by throwing in our heart. There is somewhere in the mist of the old hells a barrel like that. Is it not pardonable to refuse at last? Can the inexhaustible have a right? Are not endless chains beyond human strength? Who would blame Sisyphus and Jean Valjean for saying: enough is enough! The obedience of matter is limited by friction; is there not a limit to the obedience of the soul? If perpetual motion is impossible, is perpetual devotion required? The first step is nothing; it is the last that is difficult. What was the Champmathieu affair compared to Cosette’s marriage and what it entailed? What is this: entering the galleys, compared to this: entering nothingness? O first step to descend, how gloomy you are! O second step, how black you are! How can one not turn one’s head away this time? Martyrdom is a sublimation, a corrosive sublimation. It is a torture that consecrates. One may consent to it for the first hour; one sits on the red-hot iron throne, one places the red-hot iron crown on one’s brow, one accepts the red-hot iron globe, one takes the red-hot iron scepter, but one still has to clothe the mantle of flame, and is there not a moment when the miserable flesh revolts, and one abdicates the torture? Finally Jean Valjean entered into the calm of despondency. He weighed, he thought, he considered the alternatives of the mysterious balance of light and shadow. To impose his penal servitude on these two dazzling children, or to consummate his own irremediable engulfment. On the one hand, Cosette’s sacrifice, on the other, his own. What solution did he settle on? What determination did he make? What was, within himself, his definitive response to the incorruptible interrogation of fate? What door did he decide to open? Which side of his life did he decide to close and condemn? Among all these unfathomable precipices that surrounded him, what was his choice? Which extremity did he accept? To which of these abysses did he nod? His dizzying reverie lasted all night. He remained there until daybreak, in the same attitude, bent double on this bed, prostrate under the enormity of fate, crushed perhaps, alas! his fists clenched, his arms stretched out at right angles like a nail-stripped crucified man who has been thrown face down. He remained there for twelve hours, the twelve hours of a long winter night, frozen, without raising his head and without uttering a word. He was as motionless as a corpse, while his thoughts rolled on the ground and flew away, now like the hydra, now like the eagle. To see him thus motionless, one would have said he was dead; suddenly he would shudder convulsively and his mouth, glued to Cosette’s clothes, would kiss them; then one saw that he was alive. Who? One? since Jean Valjean was alone and there was no one there? The One who is in the darkness. Book Seven–The Last Sip from the Chalice Chapter 56. The Seventh Circle and the Eighth Heaven. The morning after a wedding is solitary. The contemplation of the happy is respected. And also a little of their delayed sleep. The hubbub of visits and congratulations only begins later. On the morning of February 17, it was a little after noon when Basque, napkin and feather duster under his arm, busy “cleaning his antechamber,” heard a light knock at the door. No one had rung the bell, which is discreet on such a day. Basque opened it and saw M. Fauchelevent. He showed him into the drawing room, still cluttered and upside down, and which looked like the battlefield of the previous evening’s joys. “Lady, sir,” Basque observed, “we woke up late. ” “Is your master up?” asked Jean Valjean. “How is the gentleman’s arm?” replied Basque. “Better. Is your master up?” “Which one?” the old or the new? “Monsieur Pontmercy.” “Monsieur le baron?” Basque said, straightening up. ” One is a baron above all for one’s servants. Something comes back to them ; they have what a philosopher would call the splash of the title, and it flatters them. Marius, to say it in passing, a militant republican, and he had proven it, was now a baron in spite of himself. A small revolution had taken place in the family over this title. It was now Monsieur Gillenormand who held to it and Marius who was distancing himself from it. But Colonel Pontmercy had written: “My son will bear my title.” Marius obeyed. And then Cosette, in whom womanhood was beginning to dawn, was delighted to be a baroness. ” “Monsieur le baron?” repeated Basque. “I’ll see. I’ll tell her that Monsieur Fauchelevent is here. ” “No. Don’t tell her it was me.” Tell him that someone wants to speak to him in private, and don’t give him a name. “Ah!” said Basque. “I want to surprise him. ” “Ah!” continued Basque, giving himself his second “ah!” as an explanation for the first. And he left. Jean Valjean remained alone. The drawing-room, as we have just said, was in complete disorder. It seemed that if one had listened closely, one could still hear the faint murmur of the wedding. There were all sorts of flowers on the floor, fallen from the garlands and headdresses. The candles burned to the stub added wax stalactites to the chandelier crystals. Not a single piece of furniture was out of place. In corners, three or four armchairs, close together and forming a circle, seemed to be carrying on a conversation. The whole was cheerful. There is still a certain grace in a dead party. It was happy. On these chairs in disarray, among these fading flowers, under these extinguished lights, one thought of joy. The sun succeeded the chandelier, and entered gaily into the drawing-room. A few minutes passed. Jean Valjean was motionless at the place where Basque had left him. He was very pale. His eyes were hollow and so sunk by insomnia under their sockets that they almost disappeared. His black coat had the tired folds of a garment that has spent the night. His elbows were whitened with that down left on the sheet by the friction of the linen. Jean Valjean looked at the window at his feet, traced on the parquet floor by the sun. A noise was made at the door, he raised his eyes. Marius entered, his head held high, his mouth laughing, some unknown light on his face, his brow radiant, his eye triumphant. He too had not slept. “It’s you, Father!” he cried, seeing Jean Valjean; “that imbecile Basque who had a mysterious air! But you come too early. It is still only half-past twelve. Cosette is asleep. ” This word “Father,” said to M. Fauchelevent by Marius, meant: Supreme happiness . There had always been, as we know, steepness, coldness, and constraint between them; ice to break or melt. Marius was so intoxicated that the escarpment was lowering, the ice was melting, and M. Fauchelevent was for him, as for Cosette, a father. He continued; the words overflowed from him, which is proper to these divine paroxysms of joy: “How glad I am to see you! If you only knew how much we missed you yesterday! Good morning, Father. How is your hand? Better, isn’t it?” And, satisfied with the good answer he gave himself, he continued: “We have spoken well of you both. Cosette loves you so much! You don’t forget that you have your room here. We don’t want the Rue de l’Homme-Armé any more. We don’t want it at all.” How could you have gone to live in a street like this, which is sick, which is grumpy, which is ugly, which has a gate at one end, where it is cold, where one cannot enter? You will come and settle here. And from today. Or you will have to deal with Cosette. She intends to lead us all by the nose, I warn you. You have seen your room, it is very close to ours; it overlooks the gardens; the lock has been fixed, the bed is made, it is all ready, you have only to arrive. Cosette has placed by your bed a large old shepherdess in Utrecht velvet, to whom she has said: stretch out your arms to her. Every spring, in the clump of acacias which is opposite your windows, a nightingale comes. You will have it in two months. You will have its nest on your left and ours on your right. At night he will sing, and by day Cosette will speak. Your room is at noon. Cosette will put away your books there, your voyage with Captain Cook, and the other, that of Vancouver, all your belongings. There is, I believe, a small suitcase that you are very fond of, I have arranged a corner of honor for it. You have won over my grandfather, you suit him. We will live together. Do you know whist? You will delight my grandfather if you know whist. It is you who will take Cosette for walks during my days in the palace, you will give her your arm, you know, like in the Luxembourg once upon a time. We are absolutely determined to be very happy. And you will be part of our happiness, do you hear, father? Oh, you are having lunch with us today? “Monsieur,” said Jean Valjean, “I have something to tell you. I am a former convict. The limit of perceptible high-pitched sounds can be just as easily exceeded for the mind as for the ear. These words: _I am a former convict_, coming from the mouth of M. Fauchelevent and entering the ear of Marius, went beyond the possible. Marius did not hear. It seemed to him that something had just been said to him; but he did not know what. He remained gaping. He then perceived that the man who spoke to him was frightening. Completely dazzled, he had not until that moment noticed this terrible pallor. Jean Valjean untied the black cravat which supported his right arm, undid the linen wrapped around his hand, exposed his thumb and showed it to Marius. “I have nothing in my hand,” he said. Marius looked at the thumb. “I have never had anything there,” resumed Jean Valjean. There was, in fact, no trace of injury. Jean Valjean continued: “It was fitting that I should be absent from your marriage. I made myself absent as much as I could. I assumed this injury so as not to make a forgery, so as not to introduce a nullity into the acts of marriage, so as to be excused from signing. ” Marius stammered: “What does that mean? ” “It means,” replied Jean Valjean, “that I have been in the galleys. ” “You are driving me mad!” cried Marius, terrified. “Monsieur Pontmercy,” said Jean Valjean, “I was in the galleys for nineteen years . For theft. Then I was condemned to life imprisonment. For theft. For a repeat offense. At this moment, I am in breach of my ban.” Marius had to recoil in vain from reality, refuse the fact, resist the evidence, but he had to surrender. He began to understand, and as always happens in such cases, he understood beyond that. He felt the shudder of a hideous interior flash; an idea, which made him shudder, crossed his mind. He glimpsed in the future, for himself, a deformed destiny. “Tell everything, tell everything!” he cried. “You are Cosette’s father!” And he took two steps backward with a movement of indescribable horror. Jean Valjean raised his head in such a majestic attitude that he seemed to grow to the ceiling. “It is necessary that you believe me here, sir; and, although our oath is not admissible in justice…” Here he fell silent, then, with a sort of sovereign and sepulchral authority, he added, articulating slowly and weighing the syllables: “You will believe me. Cosette’s father, me! Before God, no.” Baron Pontmercy, I am a peasant from Faverolles. I earned my living pruning trees. My name is not Fauchelevent, my name is Jean Valjean. I am nothing to Cosette. Rest assured. Marius stammered: “Who can prove it to me?” “Me. Since I say so.” Marius looked at this man. He was gloomy and tranquil. No lie could emerge from such calm. What is icy is sincere. One felt the truth in this grave-like coldness. “I believe you,” said Marius. Jean Valjean inclined his head as if to acknowledge it, and continued: “What am I to Cosette? A passerby. Ten years ago, I did not know she existed. I love her, it is true. A child whom one saw as a child, being oneself already old, one loves her. When one is old, one feels oneself a grandfather to all the little children. ” You can, it seems to me, suppose that I have something resembling a heart. She was an orphan. Without father or mother. She needed me. That is why I began to love her. Children are so weak that the first person who comes along, even a man like me, can be their protector. I have fulfilled this duty towards Cosette. I do not believe that one can really call so little a good action; but if it is a good action, well, write that I did it. Record this extenuating circumstance. Today Cosette leaves my life; our two paths separate. From now on I can do nothing more for her. She is Madame Pontmercy. Her providence has changed. And Cosette gains from the exchange. All is well. As for the six hundred thousand francs, you do not speak to me about it, but I anticipate your thought, it is a deposit. How did this deposit come into my hands? What does it matter? I return the deposit. Nothing more needs to be asked of me. I complete the restitution by giving my real name. This also concerns me. I want you to know who I am. And Jean Valjean looked Marius in the face. Everything Marius felt was tumultuous and incoherent. Certain gusts of wind of destiny make these waves in our soul. We have all had these moments of trouble in which everything disperses within us; we say the first things that come to mind, which are not always precisely those that should be said. There are sudden revelations that one cannot bear and that intoxicate like a fatal wine. Marius was stupefied by the new situation that appeared to him, to the point of speaking to this man almost as if he were angry with him for this confession. “But after all,” he cried, “why are you telling me all this? What compels you to do it? You could have kept the secret to yourself. You are neither denounced, nor pursued, nor hunted down? You have a reason for making such a revelation with a light heart. Finish. There is something else. What is your purpose in making this confession? For what reason? ” “For what reason?” replied Jean Valjean in a voice so low and so muffled that one would have said that it was to himself he was speaking more than to Marius. For what reason, in fact, does this convict come to say: I am a convict? Well, yes! the reason is strange. It’s out of honesty. Look, what’s unfortunate is a thread I have there in my heart that keeps me attached. It’s especially when you’re old that these threads are strong. All life around them is unraveling; they resist. If I could have pulled out this thread, broken it, untied the knot or cut it, gone far away, I would have been saved, I only had to leave; there are stagecoaches on Rue du Bouloy; you’re lucky, I’m leaving. I tried to break it, this thread, I pulled on it, it held firm, it didn’t break, I was tearing my heart out with it. So I said: I can’t live anywhere else but here. I have to stay. Well yes, but you’re right, I ‘m an idiot, why not just stay? You offer me a room in the house, Madame Pontmercy likes me, she said to this armchair: hold out your arms to it, your grandfather asks nothing better than to have me, I suit him, we will all live together, meals together, I will give my arm to Cosette…–to Madame Pontmercy, pardon, it is custom,–we will have only one roof, one table, one fire, the same chimney corner in winter, the same walk in summer, that is joy, that is happiness, that is all, that. We will live as a family. As a family! At this word, Jean Valjean became fierce. He crossed his arms, considered the floor at his feet as if he wanted to dig an abyss in it, and his voice was suddenly resounding: “As a family! No. I am not of any family, I. I am not of yours. I am not of that of men.” I’m one of the few houses where people are among themselves. There are families, but it’s not for me. I’m the unfortunate one; I’m outside. Did I have a father and a mother? I almost doubt it. The day I married this child, it was over, I saw her happy, and that she was with the man she loves, and that there was a good old man there, a couple of angels, all the joys in this house, and that it was good, and I said to myself: You, don’t come in. I could lie, it’s true, deceive you all, remain Monsieur Fauchelevent. As long as it was for her, I could lie; but now it would be for me, I must not. It was enough to keep quiet, it’s true, and everything continued. You ask me what forces me to speak? A funny thing, my conscience. Keeping quiet was, however, very easy. I spent the night trying to persuade myself; you confess to me, and what I have come to tell you is so extraordinary that you have the right to do so; well yes, I spent the night giving myself reasons, I gave myself very good reasons, I did what I could, go on. But there are two things in which I have not succeeded; neither in breaking the thread that holds me by the heart fixed, riveted and sealed here, nor in silencing someone who speaks to me quietly when I am alone. That is why I came to confess everything to you this morning. Everything, or almost everything. There is something useless to say that concerns only me; I keep it to myself. The essential, you know. So I took my mystery, and I brought it to you. And I ripped my secret open before your eyes. It was not an easy decision to make. All night I struggled. Ah! You think I didn’t tell myself that this was not the Champmathieu affair, that by hiding my name I was harming no one , that the name Fauchelevent had been given to me by Fauchelevent himself in recognition of a service rendered, and that I could very well keep it, and that I would be happy in this room you offered me, that I would not be in anyone’s way, that I would be in my own little corner, and that, while you had Cosette, I would have the idea of being in the same house as her. Everyone would have had their proportionate happiness. To continue to be Monsieur Fauchelevent, that would have settled everything. Yes, except my soul. There was joy all over me, the depths of my soul remained black. It is not enough to be happy, one must be content.
So I would have remained Monsieur Fauchelevent, so I would have hidden my true face, so, in the presence of your blossoming, I would have had an enigma, so, in the midst of your broad daylight, I would have had darkness; so, without warning, quite simply, I would have introduced the penal colony into your home, I would have sat at your table with the thought that, if you knew who I am, you would chase me away, I would have let myself be served by servants who, if they had known, would have said: How horrible! I would have touched you with my elbow which you have the right not to want, I would have cheated you of your handshakes! There would have been in your house a sharing of respect between venerable white hairs and withered white hairs; in your most intimate hours, when all hearts would have believed themselves open to the depths for one another, when the four of us would have been together, your grandfather, you two, and me, there would have been a stranger there! I would have been side by side with you in your existence, having for sole care never to disturb the lid of my terrible well. Thus, I, a dead man, would have imposed myself on you who are living. Her, I would have condemned to me for life. You, Cosette and I, we would have been three heads in the green cap! Do you not shudder? I am only the most overwhelmed of men, I would have been the most monstrous. And this crime, I would have committed it every day! And this lie, I would have done it every day! And this night face, I would have had it on my face every day! And my stigma, I would have given you your share of it every day! every day! To you my beloved, to you my children, to you my innocents! To be silent is nothing? To keep silence is simple? No, it is not simple. There is a silence that lies. And my lie, and my fraud, and my indignity, and my cowardice, and my treason, and my crime, I would have drunk it drop by drop, I would have spat it out, then drunk it again, I would have finished at midnight and started again at noon, and my good morning would have lied, and my good evening would have lied, and I would have slept on it, and I would have eaten it with my bread, and I would have looked Cosette in the face, and I would have answered the angel ‘s smile with the smile of the damned, and I would have been an abominable deceiver! Why do it? To be happy. To be happy, I! Have I the right to be happy? I am outside of life, sir. Jean Valjean stopped. Marius listened. Such chains of ideas and anxieties cannot be interrupted. Jean Valjean lowered his voice again , but it was no longer the dull voice, it was the sinister voice. “You ask why I speak? I am neither denounced, nor pursued, nor hunted, you say. Yes! I am denounced! Yes! I am pursued! Yes! I am hunted! By whom? By me.” It is I who bar my own way, and I drag myself, and I push myself, and I stop, and I comply, and when one holds oneself, one is well held. And, seizing his own coat in his hand and pulling it towards Marius: –Look at this fist here, he continued. Don’t you think it holds that collar so tightly as not to let go? Well! it’s really another wrist, conscience! If one wants to be happy, sir, one must never understand duty; for, as soon as one has understood it, it is implacable. One would say that it punishes you for understanding it; but no; it rewards you for it; for it puts you in a hell where one feels God beside oneself. One has no sooner torn one’s entrails than one is at peace with oneself. And, with poignant emphasis, he added: “Monsieur Pontmercy, this is not common sense, I am an honest man. It is by degrading myself in your eyes that I elevate myself in mine. This has already happened to me once, but it was less painful; it was nothing. Yes, an honest man. I would not be one if you had, through my fault, continued to esteem me; now that you despise me, I am. I have this fatality over me that, since I can never have anything but stolen respect, this respect humiliates me and overwhelms me internally, and that, for me to respect myself, I must be despised. So I straighten up. I am a galley slave who obeys his conscience. I know very well that this is not like him. But what do you want me to do about it? It is. I have made commitments to myself; I keep them. ” There are encounters that bind us, there are chances that draw us into duties. You see, Monsieur Pontmercy, things have happened to me in my life. Jean Valjean paused again, swallowing with an effort as if his words had a bitter aftertaste, and he continued: “When one has such horror upon oneself, one has no right to share it with others without their knowledge, one has no right to communicate one’s plague to them, one has no right to make them slide into one’s precipice without their noticing, one has no right to let one’s red coat trail over them, one has no right to surreptitiously encumber the happiness of others with one’s misery. To approach those who are healthy and touch them in the shadows with one’s invisible ulcer is hideous.” Fauchelevent may have lent me his name, but I have no right to use it; he may have given it to me, but I may not have taken it. A name is a me. You see, sir, I have thought a little, I have read a little, although I am a peasant; and I am aware of things. You see that I express myself properly. I have given myself an education. Well , yes, to subtract a name and put oneself under it is dishonest. Letters of the alphabet can be swindled like a purse or a watch. To be a false signature in flesh and blood, to be a false living key, to enter the homes of honest people by cheating their locks, never to look again, always to squint, to be infamous inside myself, no! no! no! no! It is better to suffer, to bleed, to cry, to tear the skin from the flesh with your nails, to spend the nights writhing in the anguish, gnawing at his stomach and his soul. That is why I have come to tell you all this. With a light heart, as you say. He breathed with difficulty, and uttered this last word: “To live, once upon a time, I stole a loaf of bread; today, to live, I do not want to steal a name. ” “To live!” interrupted Marius. “You do not need that name to live? ” “Ah! I understand myself,” replied Jean Valjean, raising and lowering his head slowly several times in succession. There was a silence. Both were silent, each lost in an abyss of thought. Marius had sat down near a table and was resting the corner of his mouth on one of his bent fingers. Jean Valjean paced back and forth. He stopped in front of a mirror and remained motionless. Then, as if responding to an internal reasoning, he said, looking at the mirror in which he could not see himself: “Now I am relieved!” He started walking again and went to the other end of the room. The moment he turned around, he saw that Marius was watching him walk. Then he said to him with an inexpressible accent: “I’m dragging my feet a little. Now you understand why.” Then he finished turning to Marius: “And now, sir, imagine this: I said nothing, I remained Monsieur Fauchelevent, I took my place in your house, I am one of you , I am in my room, I come to breakfast in the morning, in slippers, in the evenings we go to the theatre all three of us, I accompany Madame Pontmercy to the Tuileries and to the Place Royale, we are together, you think I am your equal; One fine day, I am here, you are there, we are talking, we are laughing, suddenly you hear a voice cry out this name: Jean Valjean! and there comes that dreadful hand, the police, out of the shadows and suddenly tears off my mask! He fell silent again; Marius had risen with a shudder. Jean Valjean continued: “What do you say?” Marius’s silence answered. Jean Valjean continued: “You see clearly that I am right not to be silent. Here, be happy, be in heaven, be the angel of an angel, be in the sun, and be content with it, and do not worry about the way in which a poor damned soul goes about opening his chest and doing his duty; you have a miserable man before you, sir.” Marius slowly crossed the drawing-room, and when he was near Jean Valjean, held out his hand to him. But Marius had to go and take this hand that did not present itself. Jean Valjean let him, and it seemed to Marius that he was clasping a hand of marble. “My grandfather has friends,” said Marius; “I will have your pardon. ” “It is useless,” replied Jean Valjean. “They think I am dead, that is enough. The dead are not subject to surveillance. They are supposed to rot quietly. Death is the same thing as pardon.” And, freeing his hand from which Marius held, he added with a sort of inexorable dignity: “Besides, to do my duty, that is the friend to whom I have recourse; and I have need of only one pardon, that of my conscience.” At that moment, at the other end of the room, the door opened gently, and in the gap Cosette’s head appeared. Only her sweet face could be seen; her hair was admirably disheveled, her eyelids still swollen with sleep. She made the movement of a bird poking its head out of its nest, looked first at her husband, then at Jean Valjean, and cried to them, laughing, as if one saw a smile at the bottom of a rose: “Let’s bet you’re talking politics! How stupid, instead of being with me! ” Jean Valjean started. “Cosette!” stammered Marius. And he stopped. They looked like two culprits. Cosette, radiant, continued to look at them both in turn . There were glimpses of paradise in her eyes. “I’ve caught you in the act,” said Cosette. “I just heard Through the door, my father Fauchelevent, who was saying: ” Conscience….–Doing one’s duty….–That’s politics. I don’t want that. We shouldn’t be talking politics the next day. It’s not right.
” “You’re mistaken, Cosette,” replied Marius. “We’re talking business. We ‘re talking about the best investment to find for your six hundred thousand francs… ” “That’s not all,” interrupted Cosette. “I’m coming. Do they want me here?” And, resolutely passing through the door, she entered the drawing-room. She was wearing a large white dressing-gown with a thousand pleats and long sleeves that, starting from her neck, fell to her feet. There are, in the golden skies of old Gothic paintings, charming bags that would fit an angel. She gazed at herself from head to toe in a large mirror, then cried out with an explosion of ineffable ecstasy: “Once upon a time, there was a king and a queen. Oh! how pleased I am! Having said this, she curtseyed to Marius and Jean Valjean. “There,” she said, “I’ll sit down near you in an armchair. We’ll have lunch in half an hour. You can say whatever you like. I know very well that men must talk. I’ll be very good.” Marius took her arm and said lovingly: “We’re talking business. ” “By the way,” replied Cosette, “I opened my window; a bunch of pierrots have just arrived in the garden. Birds, not masks. Today is Ash Wednesday; but not for birds. ” “I tell you we’re talking business. Go, my little Cosette, leave us a moment. We’re talking figures. It would bore you. ” “You put on a charming cravat this morning, Marius. You’re very coquettish, Monseigneur. No, it won’t bore me. ” “I assure you it will bore you.” “No.” Since it’s you. I won’t understand you, but I ‘ll listen to you. When you hear the voices you love, you don’t need to understand the words they say. Being there together is all I want. I’m staying with you, bah! –You are my beloved Cosette! Impossible. –Impossible! –Yes. –All right, Cosette continued. I would have told you the news. I would have told you that my grandfather is still asleep, that your aunt is at mass, that the chimney in my father Fauchelevent’s room is smoking, that Nicolette has sent for the chimney sweep, that Toussaint and Nicolette have already had an argument, that Nicolette is making fun of Toussaint’s stammer. Well, you won’t know anything! Ah! It’s impossible? I too, in my turn, you’ll see, sir, I’ll say: it’s impossible. Who will be caught? I beg you, my little Marius, leave me here with you two. “I swear we must be alone. ” “Well, am I anyone?” Jean Valjean did not utter a word. Cosette turned to him: “First of all, father, I want you to come and kiss me. What are you doing here, saying nothing instead of taking my side? Who gave me a father like that? You see I am very unhappy in my marriage. My husband beats me. Come, kiss me right away . ” Jean Valjean approached. Cosette turned to Marius. “You, I am grimacing at you.” Then she offered her forehead to Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean took a step toward her. Cosette drew back. “Father, you are pale. Does your arm hurt? ” “It is healed,” said Jean Valjean. “Did you sleep badly? ” “No. ” “Are you sad? ” “No.” “Kiss me. If you are well, if you sleep well, if you are happy, I will not scold you.” And again she offered him her forehead. Jean Valjean placed a kiss on that forehead, where there was a celestial reflection.
“Smile.” Jean Valjean obeyed. It was the smile of a ghost. “Now, defend me against my husband.” “Cosette!” said Marius. “Be angry, Father. Tell him I must stay. People can talk in front of me. You think I’m very stupid. What you say is really astonishing! Business, putting money in a bank, that’s a big deal. Men act mysterious for nothing. I want to stay. I’m very pretty this morning; look at me, Marius.” And with an adorable shrug of the shoulders and some exquisite pout, she looked at Marius. There was a flash of lightning between these two beings. It didn’t matter if anyone was there. “I love you!” said Marius. “I adore you!” said Cosette. And they fell irresistibly into each other’s arms. “Now,” continued Cosette, adjusting a fold of her dressing gown with a triumphant little pout, “I’m staying. ” “No,” replied Marius in a supplicating tone. We have something to finish. “Still, no?” Marius assumed a deep inflection in his voice: “I assure you, Cosette, that it’s impossible. ” “Ah! You’re putting on your man’s voice, sir. All right, we’re going. You, Father, you didn’t support me. My husband, my papa, you’re tyrants. I’m going to tell Grandfather. If you think I’m going to come back and make platitudes to you, you’re mistaken. I ‘m proud. I’m waiting for you now. You’ll see that it’s you who will be bored without me. I’m leaving, it’s well done.” And she went out. Two seconds later, the door opened again, her fresh, rosy head passed once more between the two leaves, and she shouted to them: “I’m very angry.” The door closed and darkness fell again. It was like a misguided ray of sunlight which, unawares, had suddenly pierced through the night. Marius made sure that the door was firmly closed. “Poor Cosette!” he murmured, “when she’s going to know…” At this word, Jean Valjean trembled all over. He fixed a wild eye on Marius. “Cosette! Oh yes, that’s true, you’re going to say that to Cosette. That’s right. Why, I hadn’t thought of that. One has strength for one thing, one has none for another. Sir, I conjure you, I beg you, sir, give me your most sacred word, don’t tell her. Isn’t it enough that you know it? I could have said it myself without being forced to; I would have told it to the world, to everyone, it wouldn’t have mattered to me. But she doesn’t know what it is, it would terrify her. A convict, what! One would be forced to explain it to her, to tell her: He’s a man who was in the galleys. One day she saw the chain pass by. Oh my God! He sank into an armchair and hid his face in his two hands. He couldn’t be heard, but from the shaking of his shoulders, one could see that he was crying. Silent tears, terrible tears. There is something stifling in the sob. A sort of convulsion seized him, he leaned back on the back of the armchair as if to breathe, letting his arms hang down and allowing Marius to see his face flooded with tears, and Marius heard him murmur so low that his voice seemed to be in a bottomless depth: “Oh, I wish I could die!” “Don’t worry,” said Marius, “I will keep your secret to myself.” And, perhaps less moved than he should have been, but obliged for the past hour to familiarize himself with a frightful surprise, seeing by degrees a convict superimpose himself before his eyes on M. Fauchelevent, gradually won over by this lugubrious reality, and led by the natural inclination of the situation to note the interval which had just been created between this man and him, Marius added: –It is impossible that I should not say a word to you about the deposit which you have so faithfully and so honestly handed over. This is an act of probity. It is just that a reward should be given to you. Fix the sum yourself, it will be counted to you. Do not be afraid to fix it very high. “I thank you, sir,” replied Jean Valjean gently. He remained thoughtful for a moment, mechanically passing the tip of his index finger over his thumbnail, then he raised his voice: “All is almost finished. I have one last thing left… ” “What is it?” Jean Valjean had a sort of supreme hesitation, and, voiceless, almost breathless, he stammered more than he said: “Now that you know, do you think, sir, you who are the master, that I must not see Cosette again? ” “I think it would be better,” replied Marius coldly. “I shall not see her again,” murmured Jean Valjean. And he went towards the door. He put his hand on the latch, the bolt gave way, the door half-opened, Jean Valjean opened it enough to be able to pass, remained motionless for a second, then closed the door and turned towards Marius. He was no longer pale, he was livid, there were no more tears in his eyes, but a sort of tragic flame. His voice had become strangely calm again. “Here, sir,” he said, “if you wish, I will come and see her. I assure you that I desire it very much. If I had not been anxious to see Cosette, I would not have made the confession I made, I would have left; but wishing to remain in the place where Cosette is and continue to see her , I had to honestly tell you everything. You follow my reasoning, do you not? That is something that is understandable. You see, it has been nine years since I have had her near me. We lived first in that hovel on the boulevard, then in the convent, then near the Luxembourg. It was there that you saw her for the first time. You remember her blue plush hat. We then went to the Invalides district where there was a gate and a garden. Rue Plumet. I lived in a small backyard where I could hear her piano. That was my life. We never left each other. It lasted nine years and months. I was like her father, and she was my child. I don’t know if you understand me, Monsieur Pontmercy, but to go away now, to not see her anymore, to not speak to her anymore, to have nothing left, that would be difficult. If you don’t think it’s bad, I will come from time to time to see Cosette. I wouldn’t come often. I wouldn’t stay long. You would say that I should be received in the small, low room. On the ground floor. I would go in by the back door, which is for the servants, but that might surprise people. It would be better, I think, if I went in by everyone’s door. Sir, really. I would like to see Cosette a little longer. As rarely as you please. Put yourself in my place, that’s all I have left. And then, you must be careful. If I stopped coming at all, it would have a bad effect, it would be considered strange. For example, what I can do is come in the evening, when it begins to get dark. “You will come every evening,” said Marius, “and Cosette will wait for you. ” “You are kind, sir,” said Jean Valjean. Marius bowed to Jean Valjean, happiness drove despair to the door, and the two men parted. Chapter 57. The Obscurities a Revelation Can Contain. Marius was overwhelmed. The kind of estrangement he had always felt for the man near whom he saw Cosette was now explained to him. There was in this personage an enigmatic something of which his instinct warned him. This enigma was the most hideous of shames, the galleys. This M. Fauchelevent was the convict Jean Valjean. To suddenly find such a secret in the midst of one’s happiness is like discovering a scorpion in a nest of turtledoves. Was the happiness of Marius and Cosette henceforth condemned to this proximity? Was this a fait accompli? Was the acceptance of this man part of the consummated marriage? Was there nothing more to be done? Had Marius also married the convict? Even though one may be crowned with light and joy, even though one may savor the great purple hour of life, the happy hour of love, such shocks would force even the archangel in his ecstasy, even the demigod in his glory, to shudder. As always happens in visual changes of this kind, Marius wondered if he had not something to reproach himself for? Had he lacked divination? Had he lacked prudence? Had he involuntarily become dizzy? A little, perhaps. Had he embarked, without sufficient precaution to illuminate the surroundings, on this adventure of love which had resulted in his marriage to Cosette? He observed—it is thus, by a series of successive observations of ourselves about ourselves, that life gradually amends us—he observed the chimerical and visionary side of his nature, a sort of interior cloud peculiar to many organizations, and which, in the paroxysms of passion and pain, expands, the temperature of the soul changing, and invades the whole man, to the point of making him nothing more than a consciousness bathed in a fog. We have more than once indicated this characteristic element of Marius’s individuality. He remembered that, in the intoxication of his love, rue Plumet, during those six or seven ecstatic weeks, he had not even spoken to Cosette of that enigmatic drama in the Gorbeau dive where the victim had adopted such a strange bias of silence during the struggle and of escape afterward. How was it that he had not spoken of it to Cosette? Yet it was so close and so dreadful! How was it that he had not even mentioned the Thénardiers to her, and particularly the day he had met Éponine? He had almost difficulty explaining to himself now his silence at that time. He realized it, however. He remembered his bewilderment, his intoxication with Cosette, love absorbing everything, that rapture of one by the other in the ideal, and perhaps also, like the imperceptible quantity of reason mingled with that violent and charming state of the soul, a vague and dull instinct to hide and abolish in his memory that dreadful adventure whose contact he feared, in which he would play no part, from which he shied away, and in which he could be neither narrator nor witness without being accuser. Besides, those few weeks had been a flash; there had been time for nothing but to love each other. Finally, all things considered, all turned over, all examined, when he had told Cosette about the Gorbeau ambush, when he had named the Thénardiers to her, whatever the consequences, even if he had discovered that Jean Valjean was a convict, would that have changed him, Marius? Would that have changed her, Cosette? Would he have backed away? Would he have adored her less? Would he have married her less? No. Would that have changed anything in what had been done? No. Nothing then to regret, nothing to reproach himself with. All was well. There is a god for those drunkards we call lovers. Blind, Marius had followed the road he would have chosen, clairvoyant. Love had blindfolded him, to lead him where? To paradise. But this paradise was henceforth complicated by an infernal proximity. Marius’s former estrangement from this man, from this Fauchelevent who had become Jean Valjean, was now mingled with horror. In this horror, let us say, there was some pity, and even a certain surprise. This thief, this recidivist thief, had returned a deposit. And what deposit? Six hundred thousand francs. He was alone in the secrecy of the deposit. He could keep it all, he had returned it all. Moreover, he had revealed his situation of his own accord. Nothing obliged him to do so. If anyone knew who he was, it was through him. There was in this confession more than the acceptance of humiliation, there was the acceptance of peril. For a condemned man, a mask is not a mask, it is a shelter. He had renounced this shelter. A false name is security; he had rejected this false name. He, a galley slave, could hide himself forever in an honest family; he had resisted this temptation. And for what reason? By scruples of conscience. He had explained it himself with the irresistible accent of reality. In short, whoever this Jean Valjean was, it was incontestably a conscience that was awakening. There was here some mysterious rehabilitation begun; and, to all appearances, for a long time already scruples had been master of this man. Such outbursts of justice and goodness are not proper to vulgar natures. Awakening of conscience is greatness of soul. Jean Valjean was sincere. This sincerity, visible, palpable, irrefutable, evident even by the pain it caused him, made information useless and gave authority to everything this man said. Here, for Marius, a strange inversion of situations. What came out of M. Fauchelevent? distrust. What emanated from Jean Valjean? Confidence. In the mysterious balance sheet of this Jean Valjean that the pensive Marius drew up, he noted the assets, he noted the liabilities, and he tried to arrive at a balance. But all this was like a storm. Marius, striving to form a clear idea of this man, and pursuing, so to speak, Jean Valjean to the depths of his thoughts, lost him and found him again in a fatal fog. The deposit honestly returned, the probity of the confession, that was good. It made like a clearing in the cloud, then the cloud became black again. However troubled Marius’s memories were, some shadow returned to him. What, decidedly, was this adventure in the Jondrette garret? Why, on the arrival of the police, had this man, instead of complaining, escaped? Here Marius found the answer. Because this man was a fugitive convict who had broken his ban. Another question: Why had this man come to the barricade? For now Marius distinctly saw this memory again, reappearing in these emotions like sympathetic ink in the fire. This man was in the barricade. He was not fighting there. What had he come to do there? Before this question a spectre rose up and gave the answer. Javert. Marius remembered perfectly at that hour the funereal vision of Jean Valjean dragging the garrotted Javert from the barricade, and he could still hear the dreadful pistol shot behind the corner of the little rue Mondétour . There was, in all likelihood, hatred between this spy and this galley slave. One hindered the other. Jean Valjean had gone to the barricade to take revenge. He had arrived late. He probably knew that Javert was a prisoner there. The Corsican vendetta has penetrated into certain slums and rules there; It is so simple that it does not astonish even souls half turned back to good; and these hearts are so made that a criminal, on the way to repentance, can be scrupulous about theft and not about revenge. Jean Valjean had killed Javert. At least, that seemed obvious. Last question at last; but to this one no answer. This question, Marius felt like a pincer. How was it that the existence of Jean Valjean had rubbed shoulders for so long with that of Cosette? What was this dark game of providence which had brought this child into contact with this man? Are there also chains for two forged up there, and does God delight in coupling the angel with the devil? Can a crime and an innocence then be roommates in the mysterious galley of misery? In this parade of condemned men that we call human destiny, two fronts can pass close to each other, one naive, the other formidable, one bathed in the divine whiteness of dawn, the other forever paled by the glimmer of an eternal lightning? Who could have determined this inexplicable pairing? In what way, as a result of what prodigy, could the community of life have been established between this celestial little one and this damned old man? Who could have to bind the lamb to the wolf, and, even more incomprehensibly, to bind the wolf to the lamb? For the wolf loved the lamb, for the fierce creature adored the weak creature, for, for nine years, the angel had had the monster as his support. Cosette’s childhood and adolescence, her coming into the light, her virginal growth towards life and light, had been sheltered by this deformed devotion. Here, the questions exfoliated, so to speak, into innumerable enigmas, the abysses opened at the bottom of the abysses, and Marius could no longer bend over Jean Valjean without vertigo. What then was this precipice of man? The old Genesis symbols are eternal; in human society, such as it exists, until the day when a greater clarity shall change it, there are forever two men, one superior, the other subterranean; he who is according to good is Abel; he who is according to evil is Cain. What was this tender Cain? What was this bandit religiously absorbed in the adoration of a virgin, watching over her, raising her, guarding her, dignifying her, and enveloping her, the impure one, in purity? What was this cesspool which had venerated this innocence to the point of not leaving it a stain? What was this Jean Valjean educating Cosette? What was this figure of darkness whose sole concern was to preserve the rising of a star from all shadow and cloud? Therein lay the secret of Jean Valjean; there also lay the secret of God. Before this double secret, Marius recoiled. One in some way reassured him of the other. God was in this adventure as visible as Jean Valjean. God has his instruments. He uses the tool he chooses. He is not responsible to man. Do we know how God goes about it ? Jean Valjean had worked on Cosette. He had made a little of this soul. That was incontestable. Well, afterward? The workman was horrible; but the work was admirable. God produces his miracles as he pleases. He had built this charming Cosette, and he had employed Jean Valjean. It had pleased him to choose this strange collaborator. What account have we to ask him? Is this the first time that manure has helped spring to make the rose? Marius gave himself these answers and declared to himself that they were good. On all the points we have just indicated, he had not dared to press Jean Valjean without admitting to himself that he did not dare. He adored Cosette, he possessed Cosette, Cosette was splendidly pure. That was enough for him. What clarification did he need? Cosette was a light. Does light need to be brightened? He had everything; what could he desire? Isn’t everything enough? Jean Valjean’s personal affairs were none of his business. Bending over the fatal shadow of this man, he clung to the wretch’s solemn declaration: “I am nothing to Cosette. Ten years ago, I did not know she existed.” Jean Valjean was a passer-by. He had said so himself. Well, he was passing by. Whoever he was, his role was finished. From now on, Marius was there to perform the functions of providence near Cosette. Cosette had come to find in the azure sky her equal, her lover, her husband, her celestial male. In flying away, Cosette, winged and transfigured, left behind her on the ground, empty and hideous, her chrysalis, Jean Valjean. In whatever circle of ideas Marius turned, he always returned to a certain horror of Jean Valjean. A sacred horror perhaps, for, as we have just indicated, he felt a quid divinum in this man. But, whatever one did, and whatever mitigation one sought, one always had to fall back on this: he was a convict; that is to say, the being who, in the social scale, does not even have a place, being below the lowest rung. After the lowest of men comes the convict. The convict is no longer, so to speak, the equal of the living. The law has stripped him of all the humanity it can take from a man. Marius, on penal matters, was still, although a democrat, at the inexorable system, and he had, on those whom the law strikes, all the ideas of the law. He had not yet accomplished, let us say, all the progress. He had not yet reached the point of distinguishing between what is written by man and what is written by God, between law and right. He had not examined and weighed the right that man takes to dispose of the irrevocable and the irreparable. He was not revolted by the word _retribution_. He found it simple that certain breaches of the written law were followed by eternal punishment, and he accepted, as a process of civilization, social damnation. He was still there, except to advance infallibly later, his nature being good, and at bottom all made of latent progress. In this milieu of ideas, Jean Valjean appeared to him deformed and repulsive. He was the outcast. He was the convict. This word was for him like a trumpet blast of judgment; and, after having considered Jean Valjean for a long time, his last gesture was to turn away his head. _Vade retro_. Marius, it must be recognized and even insisted upon, while questioning Jean Valjean to the point that Jean Valjean had said to him: _you confess me_, had not yet asked him two or three decisive questions. It was not that they had not presented themselves to his mind, but he had been afraid of them. The Jondrette garret? The barricade? Javert? Who knows where the revelations would have stopped? Jean Valjean did not seem like a man to back down, and who knows if Marius, after having pushed him, would not have wished to hold him back? In certain supreme circumstances, has it not happened to all of us, after having asked a question, to stop our ears so as not to hear the answer? It is especially when we love that we have such cowardice. It is not wise to question sinister situations excessively, especially when the indissoluble side of our own life is fatally mixed up in them. From Jean Valjean’s desperate explanations, some terrible light could have emerged, and who knows if this hideous clarity would not have bounced back to Cosette? Who knows if there would not have remained a sort of infernal glow on the brow of this angel? The splash of a flash is still lightning. Fate has such solidarities, where innocence itself is imbued with crime by the dark law of coloring reflections. The purest figures can forever retain the reverberation of a horrible neighborhood. Rightly or wrongly, Marius had been afraid . He already knew too much. He sought to stun himself rather than enlighten himself. Distraught, he carried Cosette in his arms, closing his eyes on Jean Valjean. This man was of the night, of the living and terrible night. How dare one seek its depths? It is a terror to question the shadow. Who knows what it will answer? The dawn might be blackened forever . In this state of mind, it was a poignant perplexity for Marius to think that this man would henceforth have any contact with Cosette. These formidable questions, from which he had shrunk, and from which an implacable and definitive decision might have emerged, he almost reproached himself now for not having asked them. He found himself too good, too gentle, let us say the word, too weak. This weakness had led him to an imprudent concession. He had allowed himself to be touched. He had been wrong. He should have purely and simply rejected Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean was the part of the fire, he should have done it, and rid his house of this man. He blamed himself, he blamed the abruptness of this whirlwind of emotions which had deafened, blinded, and swept him away. He was dissatisfied with himself. What to do now? Jean Valjean’s visits were deeply repugnant to him. What good was this man in his house? What was he to do? Here he was becoming dizzy, he did not want to dig, he did not want to go deeper; he did not want to sound out himself. He had promised, he had allowed himself to be drawn into promising; Jean Valjean had his promise; even to a convict, especially a convict, one must keep one’s word. However, his first duty was to Cosette. In short, a repulsion, which dominated everything, was stirring him up. Marius turned this whole collection of ideas confusedly in his mind, passing from one to another, and stirred by them all. Hence a profound disturbance. It was not easy for him to hide this disturbance from Cosette, but love is a talent, and Marius succeeded in doing so. Besides, he asked questions to Cosette, without any apparent purpose, as candid as a dove is white, and suspecting nothing; he spoke to her of his childhood and youth, and he became more and more convinced that everything good, paternal, and respectable that a man can be, this convict had been to Cosette. Everything that Marius had glimpsed and supposed was real. This sinister nettle had loved and protected this lily. Book Eight–The Twilight Decline Chapter 58. The Downstairs Room. The next day, at nightfall, Jean Valjean knocked at the carriage entrance of the Gillenormand house. It was Basque who received him. Basque was in the courtyard at the appointed time, and as if he had received orders. It sometimes happens that one says to a servant: You will watch for Monsieur So-and-so, when he arrives. Basque, without waiting for Jean Valjean to come to him, addressed him : “Monsieur le Baron has instructed me to ask Monsieur if he wishes to go up or remain below? ” “Remain below,” replied Jean Valjean. Basque, otherwise absolutely respectful, opened the door of the lower room and said: “I will inform Madame. ” The room into which Jean Valjean entered was a vaulted and damp ground floor, serving as a cellar on occasion, opening onto the street, tiled with red panes, and poorly lit by a window with iron bars. This room was not one of those harassed by the dust cover, the wolf’s head, and the broom. The dust was quiet there. The persecution of spiders was not organized there. Such a web, widely spread, very black, adorned with dead flies, was spinning on one of the panes of the window. The room, small and low, was furnished with a pile of empty bottles heaped in a corner. The wall, whitewashed with a yellow ochre wash, was peeling off in large patches. At the far end was a wooden fireplace painted black with a narrow shelf. A fire was lit there; which indicated that they had counted on Jean Valjean’s reply: _Stay downstairs_. Two armchairs were placed at the two corners of the fireplace. Between the armchairs was spread, by way of a carpet, an old bedside rug showing more rope than wool. The room was lit by the fire in the fireplace and the twilight from the window. Jean Valjean was tired. For several days he had neither eaten nor slept. He sank into one of the armchairs. Basque returned, placed a lighted candle on the mantelpiece, and withdrew. Jean Valjean, his head bent and his chin on his chest, saw neither Basque nor the candle. Suddenly, he stood up as if with a start. Cosette was behind him. He hadn’t seen her come in, but he had felt that she was coming in. He turned around. He contemplated her. She was adorably beautiful. But what he was looking at with that profound gaze was not beauty, it was the soul. “Ah well,” cried Cosette, “that’s an idea! Father, I knew you were singular, but I never would have expected that. Marius tells me that it is you who wants me to receive you here. ” “Yes, it is I. ” “I expected the answer. Hold on tight. I warn you that I I’m going to make a scene for you. Let’s start at the beginning. Father, kiss me. And she offered her cheek. Jean Valjean remained motionless. “You’re not moving. I can see it. A guilty attitude. But it does n’t matter, I forgive you. Jesus Christ said: Turn the other cheek. Here it is.” And she offered the other cheek. Jean Valjean did not move. It seemed as if his feet were nailed to the pavement. “This is getting serious,” said Cosette. “What have I done to you? I declare myself at odds. You owe me my reconciliation. You dine with us. ” “I have dined.
” “That’s not true. I’ll have Monsieur Gillenormand scold you. Grandfathers are made to scold fathers. Come on. Come up with me to the drawing-room. Right away.” “Impossible.” Cosette lost a little ground here. She stopped ordering and moved on to questions. “But why? And you choose the ugliest room in the house to see me. It’s horrible here. ” “You know…” Jean Valjean corrected himself. “You know, madame, I’m particular, I have my whims. ” Cosette clapped her little hands together. “Madame!… you know!… something new again! What does that mean ?” Jean Valjean fixed on her that heartbreaking smile to which he sometimes resorted. “You wanted to be madame. You are. ” “Not for yourself, father. ” “Don’t call me father anymore. ” “What? ” “Call me Monsieur Jean. Jean, if you like. ” “You are no longer a father? I am no longer Cosette? Monsieur Jean? What does that mean? But these are revolutions! What has happened? Look me in the face.” And you don’t want to stay with us! And you don’t want my room! What have I done to you? What have I done to you? So there has been something? “Nothing.” “Well then?” “Everything is as usual. ” “Why are you changing your name? ” “You have changed it, you.” He smiled again with that same smile and added: “Since you are Madame Pontmercy, I can very well be Monsieur Jean. ” “I don’t understand anything. It’s all stupid. I will ask my husband for permission to let you be Monsieur Jean. I hope he wo n’t agree. You are causing me great pain. One has whims, but one doesn’t cause grief to one’s little Cosette. It’s wrong. You have no right to be mean, you who are good.” He didn’t reply. She quickly took both his hands, and with an irresistible movement, raising them to her face, she pressed them against his neck under his chin, which is a profound gesture of tenderness. “Oh!” she said to him, “be good!” And she continued: “This is what I call being good: being kind, coming to live here, taking up our pleasant little walks again, there are birds here like in the Rue Plumet, living with us, leaving this hole in the Rue de l’Homme-Armé, not giving us riddles to guess, being like everyone else, dining with us, lunching with us, being my father.” He freed his hands. “You don’t need a father anymore, you have a husband.” Cosette lost her temper. “I don’t need a father anymore! Things like that that don’t make sense , you really don’t know what to say!” “If Toussaint were here,” Jean Valjean continued, like someone who is seeking authorities and who is attached to all branches, “she would be the first to admit that it is true that I have always had my own ways. There is nothing new. I have always loved my dark corner. ” “But it is cold here. One can’t see clearly. It is abominable, that, to want to be Monsieur Jean. I don’t want you to call me you. ” “Just now, on my way here,” replied Jean Valjean, “I saw a piece of furniture in the Rue Saint-Louis. At a cabinetmaker’s. If I were a pretty woman, I would give me that piece of furniture. A very fine dressing-table; the kind of thing you call it now. What you call rosewood, I think. It’s inlaid. A rather large mirror. There are drawers. It’s pretty. “Ooh! the ugly bear!” replied Cosette. And with supreme kindness, clenching her teeth and parting her lips, she breathed at Jean Valjean. It was a Grace copying a cat. “I’m furious,” she continued. “Since yesterday you’ve all been making me angry. I’m very upset. I don’t understand. You don’t defend me against Marius. Marius doesn’t support me against you. I’m all alone. I’m kindly arranging a room. If I could have put the good Lord there, I would have put him there. They leave me with my room. My tenant is bankrupting me. I order Nicolette a nice little dinner. They don’t want your dinner, madame.” And my father Fauchelevent wants me to call him Monsieur Jean, and to receive him in a horrible, ugly , moldy cellar where the walls are covered in beards, and where there are, instead of crystals, empty bottles, and instead of curtains, cobwebs ! You are singular, I agree, it is your style, but a truce is granted to people who are getting married. You should not have started being singular again so soon. You will be very happy in your abominable Rue de l’Homme-Armé. I was very desperate there! What have you got against me? You cause me great pain. Fie! And, suddenly serious, she looked fixedly at Jean Valjean, and added: “So you are angry with me because I am happy?” Naiveté, without knowing it, sometimes penetrates very deeply. This question, simple for Cosette, was profound for Jean Valjean. Cosette wanted to scratch; she tore. Jean Valjean turned pale. He remained a moment without replying, then, in an inexpressible tone and speaking to himself, he murmured: “Her happiness, that was the aim of my life. Now God can sign my exit. Cosette, you are happy; my time is up. ” “Ah! you called me _tu_!” cried Cosette. And she threw herself on his neck. Jean Valjean, distraught, clasped her to his breast wildly. It almost seemed to him that he was taking her back. “Thank you, father!” Cosette said to him. The training was about to become poignant for Jean Valjean. He gently withdrew from Cosette’s arms and took his hat. “Well?” said Cosette. Jean Valjean replied: “I am leaving you, madame, they are waiting for you.” And, from the threshold of the door, he added: “I called you tu.” Tell your husband that this will never happen to me again. Forgive me. Jean Valjean left, leaving Cosette stupefied by this enigmatic farewell. Chapter 59. Another Step Backward. The following day, at the same hour, Jean Valjean returned. Cosette did not ask him any questions, was no longer surprised, no longer cried out that she was cold, no longer spoke of the drawing-room; she avoided saying either father or Monsieur Jean. She let herself be addressed as you. She let herself be called madame. Only she had a certain diminution of joy. She would have been sad, if sadness had been possible for her. It is probable that she had had with Marius one of those conversations in which the beloved man says what he wants, explains nothing, and satisfies the beloved woman. The curiosity of lovers does not extend very far beyond their love. The lower room had been somewhat spruced up. Basque had removed the bottles, and Nicolette the spiders. All the following mornings brought Jean Valjean back at the same hour. He came every day, not having the strength to take Marius’s words anything but literally. Marius arranged things so as to be absent at the hours when Jean Valjean came. The house became accustomed to M. Fauchelevent’s new way of being. Toussaint helped. “Monsieur has always been like that,” she repeated. The grandfather issued this decree: “He is an eccentric.” And that was all. Besides, At ninety years old, there is no longer any possible connection; everything is juxtaposition; a newcomer is a nuisance. There is no more room, all the habits are set. M. Fauchelevent, M. Tranchelevent, Father Gillenormand asked nothing better than to be dispensed from “this gentleman.” He added: “Nothing is more common than these eccentrics. They do all sorts of oddities. No reason. The Marquis de Canaples was worse. He bought a palace to live in the attic. These are fantastic appearances that people have. No one glimpsed the sinister underside. Who would have been able to guess such a thing? There are marshes like these in India; the water seems extraordinary, inexplicable, shivering without there being any wind, agitated where it should be calm. We look at the surface of these causeless bubblings; we do not see the hydra that crawls along the bottom. Many men thus have a secret monster, an evil that they nourish, a dragon that gnaws at them, a despair that inhabits their night. Such a man resembles the others, comes and goes. We do not know that he has within him a frightful parasitic pain with a thousand teeth, which lives in this wretch, who dies from it. We do not know that this man is an abyss. He is stagnant, but deep. From time to time a disturbance that we understand nothing about occurs on his surface. A mysterious wrinkle creases, then vanishes, then reappears; a bubble of air rises and bursts. It is a small thing, it is terrible. It is the breathing of the unknown beast. Of certain strange habits, arriving at the hour when others are leaving, disappearing while others are spreading out, wearing on all occasions what one might call the wall-colored cloak, seeking the solitary alley, preferring the deserted street, not joining in conversations, avoiding crowds and festivals, appearing at one’s ease and living poorly, having, rich as one is, one’s key in one’s pocket and one’s candle at the porter’s, entering by the back door, ascending by the hidden staircase, all these insignificant singularities, wrinkles, air bubbles, fleeting folds on the surface, often come from a formidable foundation. Several weeks passed in this way. A new life gradually took possession of Cosette; the relationships created by marriage, visits, taking care of the house, pleasures, these great affairs. Cosette ‘s pleasures were not costly; they consisted of only one: being with Marius. Going out with him, staying with him, that was the great occupation of her life. It was for them a joy always brand new to go out arm in arm, in the face of the sun, in the open street, without hiding, in front of everyone, the two of them all alone. Cosette had a setback. Toussaint could not come to an agreement with Nicolette, the union of two old maids being impossible, and went away. The grandfather was well; Marius pleaded a few cases here and there; Aunt Gillenormand led peacefully near the new household that lateral life which was enough for her. Jean Valjean came every day. The form of address having disappeared, the vous, the madame, the monsieur Jean, all this made him different for Cosette. The care he himself had taken to detach her from him succeeded with her. She was more and more cheerful and less and less tender. Yet she still loved him well, and he felt it. One day she suddenly said to him: you were my father, you are no longer my father, you were my uncle, you are no longer my uncle, you were Monsieur Fauchelevent, you are Jean. Who are you then? I don’t like all this. If I didn’t know you were so good, I would be afraid of you. He always lived on the Rue de l’Homme-Armé, unable to bring himself to leave the neighborhood where Cosette lived. At first he only stayed with Cosette for a few minutes, then left. Little by little he got into the habit of making his visits shorter. It would have been said that he was taking advantage of the permission of the lengthening days; he arrived earlier and left later. One day Cosette missed saying to him: Father. A flash of joy lit up the dark old face of Jean Valjean. He corrected her: Say, Jean,—Ah! that’s true, she replied with a burst of laughter, Monsieur Jean.—That’s good, he said. And he turned away so that she would not see him wipe his eyes. Chapter 60. They remember the garden in the Rue Plumet. It was the last time. From that last glimmer onward, complete extinction set in. No more familiarity, no more good morning with a kiss, never again that word so profoundly sweet: my father! He was, at his own request and through his own complicity, successively driven from all his happiness; and he had this misery that after having lost Cosette entirely in one day, he had then had to lose her again in detail. The eye eventually grew accustomed to the days in the cellar. In short, having an apparition of Cosette every day was enough for him. His whole life was concentrated in that hour. He would sit near her, he would look at her in silence, or he would talk to her about the years gone by, about his childhood, the convent, his girlfriends of the time. One afternoon—it was one of the first days of April, already warm, still fresh, the time of the great gaiety of the sun, the gardens which surrounded the windows of Marius and Cosette had the emotion of awakening, the hawthorn was about to break forth, a jewel of wallflowers spread over the old walls, the pink snapdragons yawned in the cracks of the stones, there was in the grass a charming beginning of daisies and buttercups, the white butterflies of the year were beginning, the wind, that minstrel of the eternal wedding, was trying out in the trees the first notes of that great auroral symphony which the old poets called renewal—Marius said to Cosette:—We said that we would go and see again our garden in the Rue Plumet. Let us go. We must not be ungrateful. —And they flew away like two swallows towards spring. This garden on the Rue Plumet had the effect of dawn on them. They already had behind them something like the springtime of their love. The house on the Rue Plumet, being leased, still belonged to Cosette. They went to this garden and to this house. They met there, they forgot themselves there. In the evening, at the usual hour, Jean Valjean came to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. “Madame went out with Monsieur, and has not yet returned,” Basque told her. He sat down in silence and waited an hour. Cosette did not return. He bowed his head and went away. Cosette was so intoxicated by her walk in “their garden” and so joyful at having “lived a whole day in her past” that she spoke of nothing else the next day. She did not notice that she had not seen Jean Valjean. “How did you get there?” Jean Valjean asked her. “On foot. ” “And how did you get back? ” “In a cab.” For some time now, Jean Valjean had been noticing the narrow life the young couple led . He was bothered by it. Marius’s economy was severe, and the word for Jean Valjean had its absolute meaning. He ventured a question: “Why don’t you have a carriage of your own? A nice coupé would only cost you five hundred francs a month. You are rich. ” “I don’t know,” replied Cosette. “It’s like Toussaint,” resumed Jean Valjean. “She’s gone. You haven’t replaced her. Why? ” “Nicolette is enough. ” “But you would need a chambermaid. ” “Don’t I have Marius? ” “You ought to have a house of your own, your own servants, a carriage, a box at the theatre. There is nothing too good for you. Why not take advantage of the fact that you are rich? Wealth is added to happiness.” Cosette said nothing. Jean Valjean’s visits were not shortened. Far from it. When it is the heart that is slipping, one does not stop on the slope. When Jean Valjean wanted to prolong his visit and make people forget the hour, he praised Marius; he found him handsome, noble, courageous, witty, eloquent, good. Cosette would raise his voice. Jean Valjean would begin again. They never ran out. Marius, that word was inexhaustible; there were volumes in those six letters. In this way Jean Valjean managed to stay a long time. To see Cosette, to forget near her, that was so sweet to him! It was the dressing for his wound. It happened several times that Basque came to say twice: Monsieur Gillenormand sent me to remind Madame la Baronne that dinner is served. On those days, Jean Valjean returned home very thoughtful. Was there any truth in this comparison of the chrysalis that had presented itself to Marius’s mind? Was Jean Valjean in fact a chrysalis that persisted, and that came to pay visits to his butterfly? One day he stayed even longer than usual. The next day, he noticed that there was no fire in the fireplace. “Why! ” he thought. “No fire.” And he gave himself this explanation: “It’s quite simple. It is April. The cold has stopped. ” “Goodness! How cold it is here!” cried Cosette as she entered. “Why not,” said Jean Valjean. “So it was you who told Basque not to make a fire? ” “Yes. It is now May. ” “But they make fires until June. In this cellar, they need them all year round.” “I thought the fire was useless. ” “That’s one of your ideas!” Cosette continued. The next day, there was a fire. But the two armchairs were arranged at the other end of the room near the door. “What does that mean?” thought Jean Valjean. He went to get the armchairs and put them back in their usual place near the fireplace. The rekindled fire, however, encouraged him. He made the conversation last even longer than usual. As he rose to leave, Cosette said to him: “My husband said a funny thing to me yesterday.” “What thing? ” “He said to me: Cosette, we have thirty thousand livres a year. Twenty-seven that you have, three that my grandfather gives me.” I replied: ” That makes thirty.” He continued: “Would you have the courage to live on the three thousand?” I answered: “Yes, on nothing.” Provided it is with you. And then I asked: Why are you telling me this? He answered: To find out. Jean Valjean could not find a word. Cosette was probably waiting for some explanation from him; he listened to her in gloomy silence. He returned to the Rue de l’Homme-Armé; he was so deeply absorbed that he went to the wrong door, and instead of going home, he entered the neighboring house. It was only after he had climbed almost two floors that he realized his error and went back down. His mind was racked with conjectures. It was evident that Marius had doubts about the origin of these six hundred thousand francs, that he feared some unclean source, who knows? that he had perhaps even discovered that this money came from him, Jean Valjean, that he hesitated before this suspicious fortune, and was reluctant to take it as his own, preferring to remain poor, he and Cosette, than to be rich with a dubious wealth. Besides, vaguely, Jean Valjean began to feel rejected. The following day, on entering the lower room, he felt a kind of shock. The armchairs had disappeared. There was not even a chair. “Oh, come!” cried Cosette as she entered, “no armchairs! Where are the armchairs? ” “They are no longer there,” replied Jean Valjean. “That is strong!” Jean Valjean stammered: “I was the one who told Basque to take them down. ” “And the reason? ” “I’m only staying a few minutes today. ” “Staying a short time is no reason to stay standing. ” “I think Basque needed the armchairs for the drawing room. ” “Why? ” “You’re probably having company this evening. ” “We have no one.” Jean Valjean couldn’t say another word. Cosette shrugged her shoulders. “Have the armchairs removed! The other day you had the fire put out. How singular you are! ” “Goodbye,” murmured Jean Valjean. He didn’t say, “Goodbye, Cosette.” But he didn’t have the strength to say, ” Goodbye, madame.” He went out, overwhelmed. This time he had understood. The next day he didn’t come. Cosette didn’t notice until evening. “Well,” she said, “Monsieur Jean hasn’t come today.” She felt a slight pang in her heart, but she hardly noticed it, immediately distracted by a kiss from Marius. The next day, he did not come. Cosette paid no attention to it, spent her evening and slept through the night as usual, and only thought about it when she woke up. She was so happy! She quickly sent Nicolette to Monsieur Jean to find out if he was ill, and why he had not come the day before. Nicolette brought back Monsieur Jean’s reply. He was not ill. He was busy. He would come soon. As soon as he could. Besides, he was going on a little trip. Madame should remember that it was his habit to go on trips from time to time. They should not be worried. They should not think about him. Nicolette, on entering Monsieur Jean’s, had repeated to him her mistress’s own words. That madame sent to know “why Monsieur Jean had not come the day before.” It has been two days since I came, said Jean Valjean gently. But the observation slipped past Nicolette, who reported nothing to Cosette. Chapter 61. Attraction and Extinction. During the last months of spring and the first months of summer in 1833, the sparse passers-by in the Marais, the merchants in the shops, the idlers on the doorsteps, noticed an old man, neatly dressed in black, who, every day, around the same hour, at nightfall , left the Rue de l’Homme-Armé, towards the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, passed in front of the Blancs-Manteaux, reached the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine, and, having arrived at the Rue de l’Écharpe, turned left and entered the Rue Saint-Louis. There he walked with slow steps, his head stretched forward, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, his eye immutably fixed on a point always the same, which seemed to him starry, and which was none other than the corner of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. The closer he approached this street corner, the more his eye lit up; a sort of joy illuminated his pupils like an inner dawn; he had an air of fascination and tenderness, his lips made obscure movements, as if he were speaking to someone he could not see, he smiled vaguely, and he advanced as slowly as he could. One would have said that, while wishing to arrive, he was afraid of the moment when he would be very close. When there were only a few houses between him and this street which seemed to attract him, his pace slowed to the point that at times one could believe that he was no longer walking. The vacillation of his head and the fixity of his eyes made one think of the needle seeking the pole. However long it took to make the arrival last, he had to arrive; he reached the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; then he stopped, he trembled, he put his head with a sort of gloomy timidity beyond the corner of the last house, and he looked into this street, and there was in this tragic look something that resembled the dazzling of the impossible and the reverberation of a paradise closed. Then a tear, which had gradually gathered in the corner of his eyelids, had become large enough to fall, slid down his cheek, and sometimes stopped at his mouth. The old man felt its bitter taste. He remained like this for a few minutes as if he had been made of stone; then he returned by the same path and with the same step, and, as he moved away, his gaze faded. Little by little, this old man stopped going as far as the corner of Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; he stopped halfway down Rue Saint-Louis; sometimes a little further, sometimes a little closer. One day, he remained at the corner of Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine and looked at Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire from afar. Then he silently shook his head from right to left, as if refusing himself something, and turned back. Soon he didn’t even come as far as Rue Saint-Louis. He reached Rue Pavée, shook his brow, and turned back; then he didn’t go beyond Rue des Trois-Pavillons; then he didn’t go beyond Blancs-Manteaux. He was like a pendulum that was no longer wound up and whose oscillations were shortened until they stopped. Every day he left his house at the same time, he started the same journey, but he no longer finished it, and, perhaps without being aware of it, he was continually shortening it. His whole face expressed this single idea: What’s the use? His eyes were extinguished; no more radiance. His tears too had dried up; it no longer gathered in the corners of the eyelids; this pensive eye was dry. The old man’s head was always stretched forward; his chin moved at times; the folds of his thin neck were painful. Sometimes, when the weather was bad, he had an umbrella under his arm, which he did not open . The good women of the neighborhood said: He is innocent. The children followed him laughing. Book Nine–Supreme Shadow, Supreme Dawn Chapter 62. Pity for the unfortunate, but indulgence for the happy. It is a terrible thing to be happy! How content we are with it! How we find that enough! How, being in possession of the false goal of life, happiness, we forget the true goal, duty! Let us say it, however, it would be wrong to accuse Marius. Marius, as we have explained, before his marriage, had not asked any questions of M. Fauchelevent, and since then he had been afraid of asking any of Jean Valjean. He had regretted the promise into which he had allowed himself to be drawn. He had often told himself that he had been wrong to make this concession to despair. He had confined himself to gradually removing Jean Valjean from his house and erasing him as much as possible in Cosette’s mind . He had, as it were, always placed himself between Cosette and Jean Valjean, sure that in this way she would not perceive him and would not think of him. It was more than erasure, it was eclipse. Marius did what he judged necessary and just. He believed he had, for removing Jean Valjean, without harshness, but without weakness, serious reasons which we have already seen and others still which we will see later. Chance
having brought him into contact, in a lawsuit he had pleaded, with a former clerk of the Laffitte firm, he had obtained, without seeking it, mysterious information which he had not been able, in truth, to pursue, out of respect for the secret he had promised to keep, and out of consideration for the perilous situation of Jean Valjean. He believed, at that very moment, that he had a grave duty to accomplish, the restitution of the six hundred thousand francs to someone he was seeking as discreetly as possible. In the meantime, he abstained from touching this money. As for Cosette, she was not in on any of these secrets; but it would be hard to condemn her, too. There was an all-powerful magnetism between Marius and her, which made her to do, instinctively and almost mechanically, what Marius wished. She felt, on the side of “Monsieur Jean,” a will of Marius; she conformed to it. Her husband had had nothing to say to her; she was subjected to the vague, but clear, pressure of his tacit intentions, and obeyed blindly. Her obedience here consisted in not remembering what Marius forgot. She had no effort to make for that. Without her knowing why herself, and without there being any reason to accuse her, her soul had so become that of her husband, that what was covered with shadow in Marius’s thoughts was obscured in hers. Let us not go too far, however; as far as Jean Valjean was concerned, this forgetting and this effacement were only superficial. She was rather giddy than forgetful. At heart, she loved the man she had so long called her father. But she loved her husband even more. This was what had somewhat distorted the balance of her heart, which had tilted to one side. Sometimes Cosette spoke of Jean Valjean and was surprised. Then Marius calmed her: “He is absent, I believe. Didn’t he say he was going on a journey? It’s true,” thought Cosette. “He was in the habit of disappearing like this. But not for so long.” Two or three times she sent Nicolette to the Rue de l’Homme-Armé to inquire if Monsieur Jean had returned from his journey. Jean Valjean sent back a reply that he had not. Cosette asked no more, having only one need on earth, Marius. Let us also say that, for their part, Marius and Cosette had been absent. They had gone to Vernon. Marius had taken Cosette to her father’s tomb. Marius had little by little taken Cosette away from Jean Valjean. Cosette had let it happen. Besides, what is called far too harshly, in certain cases, the ingratitude of children, is not always as reprehensible a thing as one believes. It is the ingratitude of nature. Nature, as we have said elsewhere, “looks ahead.” Nature divides living beings into arrivals and departures. The departures are turned toward the shadow, the arrivals toward the light. From this comes a gap which, for the old, is fatal, and, for the young, involuntary. This gap, at first imperceptible, increases slowly like any separation of branches. The branches, without detaching themselves from the trunk, move away from it. It is not their fault. Youth goes where joy is, to festivals, to bright lights, to love. Old age goes to the end. We do not lose sight of each other, but there is no longer any embrace. Young people feel the chill of life; old people that of the grave. Let us not blame these poor children. Chapter 63. Last palpitations of the lamp without oil. Jean Valjean one day went down his stairs, took three steps into the street, sat down on a milestone, on the same milestone where Gavroche, on the night of June 5-6, had found him thinking; he remained there for a few minutes, then went back up. This was the last oscillation of the pendulum. The next day, he did not leave his house. The day after, he did not get out of bed. His porteress, who was preparing his meager meal, a few cabbages or a few potatoes with a little bacon, looked into the brown earthenware plate and exclaimed: “But you did not eat yesterday, poor dear man! ” “Yes, indeed,” replied Jean Valjean. “The plate is quite full. ” “Look at the water jug. It is empty.” “That proves that you drank; it doesn’t prove that you ate. ” “Well,” said Jean Valjean, “if I was only hungry for water? ” “That’s called thirst, and when you don’t eat at the same time, it ‘s called fever. ” “I’ll eat tomorrow. ” “Or at Trinity. Why not today? Do you say, ‘I ‘ll eat tomorrow!’ Leave me my whole dish without touching it! My ‘ viquelottes’ which were so good!” Jean Valjean took the old woman’s hand: “I promise to eat them,” he said to her in his kind voice. “I am not satisfied with you,” replied the porteress. Jean Valjean saw hardly any other human creature than this good woman. There are streets in Paris where no one passes and houses where no one comes. He was in one of these streets and in one of these houses. While he was still going out, he had bought from a coppersmith for a few sous a small copper crucifix which he had hung on a nail opposite his bed. That gallows is always a good sight. A week passed without Jean Valjean taking a step in his room. He still remained in bed. The porteress said to her husband: “The good man up there no longer gets up, he no longer eats, he will not go far. He has his troubles. They will never get it out of my head that his daughter is unhappily married. ” The porter replied with the accent of marital sovereignty: “If he is rich, let him have a doctor. If he is not rich, let him not have one. If he has no doctor, he will die. ” “And if he has one? ” “He will die,” said the porter. The porteress began to scrape with an old knife some grass that grew in what she called her pavement, and while she pulled the grass, she grumbled: “It’s a pity. An old man who is so clean! He is as white as a chicken. ” She saw at the end of the street a local doctor passing by; she took it upon herself to ask him to come up. “It’s on the second floor,” she said. “You will only have to go in.” As the good man no longer moves from his bed, the key is still in the door. The doctor saw Jean Valjean and spoke to him. When he came down again, the porter called out to him: “Well, doctor? ” “Your patient is very ill. ” “What’s the matter with him? ” “Everything and nothing. He is a man who, to all appearances, has lost someone dear to him. One dies of that. ” “What did he tell you? ” “He told me he was well. ” “Will you come back, doctor? ” “Yes,” replied the doctor. “But someone other than myself would have to come back.” Chapter 64. A Feather Is Heavy for One Who Lifted the Cart Fauchelevent. One evening Jean Valjean had difficulty raising himself on his elbow; he took his hand and could not find his pulse; his breathing was short and stopped at times; he recognized that he was weaker than he had ever been. Then, doubtless under the pressure of some supreme preoccupation, he made an effort, sat up, and dressed. He put on his old workman’s clothes. Since he no longer went out, he had returned to them, and he preferred them. He had to stop several times while dressing; just to get the sleeves of his jacket on, the sweat trickled down his brow. Since he had been alone, he had put his bed in the antechamber, so as to inhabit this deserted apartment as little as possible. He opened the suitcase and took out Cosette’s trousseau. He spread it on his bed . The bishop’s candlesticks were in their place on the mantelpiece. He took two wax candles from a drawer and put them in the candlesticks. Then, although it was still broad daylight, it was summer, he lit them. Thus one sometimes sees torches lit in broad daylight in rooms where there are dead people. Every step he took going from one piece of furniture to another exhausted him, and he was obliged to sit down. It was not ordinary fatigue which expends strength to renew it; it was the remainder of possible movements; It was exhausted life which drains away in overwhelming efforts which one will not repeat. One of the chairs into which he let himself fall was placed before the mirror, so fatal for him, so providential for Marius, where he had read on the blotting paper the reversed writing of Cosette. He saw himself in this mirror, and did not recognize himself. He was eighty years old; before Marius’s marriage, He would hardly have been fifty years old; this year had counted thirty. What he had on his forehead was no longer the wrinkle of age, it was the mysterious mark of death. One could feel there the digging of the pitiless nail. His cheeks sagged; the skin of his face had that color which would make one believe that there was already earth on it; the two corners of his mouth drooped like in that mask which the ancients sculpted on tombs; he looked into space with an air of reproach; one would have said he was one of those great tragic beings who have to complain about someone. He was in that situation, the last phase of despondency, where pain no longer flows; it is, so to speak, coagulated; there is on the soul like a clot of despair. Night had come. He laboriously dragged a table and the old armchair near the fireplace, and placed on the table a pen, ink , and paper. This done, he fainted. When he regained consciousness, he was thirsty. Unable to lift the water jug, he tilted it with difficulty towards his mouth and drank a mouthful. Then he turned towards the bed, and, still sitting, for he could not remain standing, he looked at the little black robe and all those dear objects. These contemplations lasted hours that seemed like minutes. Suddenly he had a shiver, he felt that the cold was coming on him; he leaned his elbows on the table lit by the bishop’s torches, and took up the pen. As neither the pen nor the ink had been used for a long time, the nib of the pen was curved, the ink was dry, he had to get up and put a few drops of water into the ink, which he could not do without stopping and sitting down two or three times, and he was forced to write with the back of the pen. He wiped his forehead from time to time. His hand trembled. He slowly wrote a few lines, which were as follows: “Cosette, I bless you. I will explain. Your husband was right to make me understand that I had to go; however, there is a little error in what he believed, but he was right. He is excellent. Always love him well when I am dead. Monsieur Pontmercy, always love my beloved child. Cosette, this paper will be found, this is what I want to tell you, you will see the figures, if I have the strength to remember them, listen carefully, this money is indeed yours. Here is the whole thing: White jet comes from Norway, black jet comes from England, black glass beads come from Germany. Jet is lighter, more precious, more expensive. Imitations can be made in France as well as in Germany. You need a small anvil, two inches square, and a spirit lamp to soften the wax. Wax used to be made with resin and lampblack and cost four francs a pound. I thought of making it with shellac and turpentine. It now costs only thirty sous, and it is much better. The buckles are made with violet glass, which is glued with this wax to a small black iron frame. The glass should be violet for iron jewelry and black for gold jewelry. Spain buys a lot of it. It is the land of jet…” Here he broke off, the pen fell from his fingers, he heaved one of those desperate sobs that rose at times from the depths of his being, the poor man took his head in his two hands, and thought. “Oh!” he cried within himself (lamentable cries, heard only by God), “it is over.” I will never see her again. It is a smile that has passed over me. I will enter the night without even seeing her again. Oh! for a minute, for an instant, to hear her voice, to touch her dress, to look at her, the angel! And then to die! It is nothing to die, what is dreadful is to die without seeing her. She would smile at me, she would say a word to me. Would that hurt anyone? No, it is over, never. Here I am all alone. My God! My God! I will never see her again. At that moment there was a knock at his door. Chapter 65. Bottle of Ink That Only Serves to Whiten. That same day, or, to put it better, that same evening, as Marius was leaving the table and had just retired to his study, having a file to study, Basque had given him a letter saying: The person who wrote the letter is in the antechamber. Cosette had taken the grandfather’s arm and was taking a walk in the garden. A letter can, like a man, have a bad appearance. Thick paper, coarse folds, just by looking at them, some missives are displeasing. The letter Basque had brought was of this kind. Marius took it. It smelled of tobacco. Nothing awakens a memory like an odor. Marius recognized this tobacco. He looked at the superscription: _To Monsieur, Monsieur Baron Pommerci. At his house_. The recognized tobacco made him recognize the writing. One might say that astonishment has flashes. Marius was as if illuminated by one of these flashes. Smell, that mysterious memory aid, had just brought a whole world back to life in him. This was indeed the paper, the way of folding, the pale tint of the ink, this was indeed the familiar writing; above all, this was the tobacco. The Jondrette garret appeared to him. Thus, a strange stroke of luck! One of the two leads he had sought so hard for, the one for which only recently he had made so much effort and which he believed to be lost forever, had just offered itself to him. He eagerly unsealed the letter and read: “Monsieur le Baron, “If the Supreme Being had given me the talents, I could have been Baron Thénard, a member of the institute (academy of sciences), but I am not. I only bear the same name as him, happy if this memory recommends me to the excellence of your kindness. The benefit with which you honor me will be reciprocal. I am in possession of a secret concerning an individual. This individual concerns you. I hold the secret at your disposal, desiring to have the honor of being humble to you. I will give you the simple means of driving from your honorable family this individual who has no right to it, Madame la Baronne being of high birth. The sanctuary of virtue could no longer cohabit with crime without abdicating. “I await in the antechamber the orders of Monsieur le Baron. ” “With respect.” The letter was signed “Thénard.” This signature was not false. It was only a little abbreviated. Besides, the nonsense and the spelling completed the revelation. The certificate of origin was complete. No doubt was possible. Marius’s emotion was profound. After the movement of surprise, he had a movement of happiness. Let him now find the other man he was looking for, the one who had saved Marius, and he would have nothing more to wish for. He opened a drawer of his desk, took out a few banknotes , put them in his pocket, closed the desk, and rang. Basque opened the door a crack. “Show me in,” said Marius. Basque announced: “Monsieur Thénard. ” A man entered. Another surprise for Marius. The man who entered was a complete stranger to him. This man, old, moreover, had a big nose, his chin tucked into his tie, green glasses with double shades of green taffeta over his eyes, his hair smoothed and flattened on his forehead, close to the eyebrows like the wigs of English high-life coachmen. His hair was gray. He was dressed in black from head to toe, a very threadbare black, but clean; a bunch of trinkets, sticking out of his pocket, suggested a watch. In his hand he held an old hat. He walked stooped, and the curve of his back increased with the depth of his bow. What was striking at first sight was that the clothing of this person, too loose, although carefully buttoned, did not seem made for him. Here a short digression is necessary. There was in Paris, at that time, in an old, one-eyed lodging, rue Beautreillis, near the Arsenal, an ingenious Jew whose profession was to change a scoundrel into an honest man. Not for too long, which might have been inconvenient for the scoundrel. The change was made on sight, for a day or two, at the rate of thirty sous a day, by means of a costume resembling as closely as possible the honesty of everyone else. This costume hirer was called _the Changer_; the Parisian rogues had given him this name, and knew of no other. He had a fairly complete wardrobe. The rags with which he dressed people were almost possible. He had specialties and categories; from each nail in his shop hung, worn and crumpled, a social condition; here the magistrate’s habit, there the priest’s habit, there the banker’s habit, in a corner the retired soldier’s habit, elsewhere the man of letters’ habit, further on the statesman’s habit. This being was the costume designer of the immense drama that roguery plays in Paris. His den was the backstage from which theft came out and swindle came in. A ragged rogue arrived at this cloakroom, deposited thirty sous, and chose, according to the role he wanted to play that day, the suit that suited him, and, on coming back down the stairs, the rogue was someone. The next day the rags were faithfully returned, and the Moneychanger, who entrusted everything to the thieves, was never robbed. These clothes had one drawback, they “didn’t fit”; Not being made for those who wore them, they were clingy for this one, loose for that one, and fitted no one. Any rogue who exceeded the human average in smallness or height, was ill at ease in the Money Changer’s costumes. One must be neither too fat nor too thin. The Money Changer had only provided for ordinary men. He had taken the measure of the species in the person of the first beggar who came along, who is neither fat, nor thin, nor tall, nor short. Hence the sometimes difficult adaptations from which the Money Changer’s practices managed as best they could. So much the worse for exceptions! The statesman’s suit, for example, black from top to bottom, and consequently suitable, would have been too loose for Pitt and too narrow for Castelcicala. The statesman’s garment was designated as follows in the Money Changer’s catalogue: we copy: “A black cloth coat, black wool trousers, a silk waistcoat, boots and linen.” There was in the margin: _Former Ambassador_, and a note which we also transcribe: “In a separate box, a neatly curled wig, green spectacles, trinkets, and two small quill pens an inch long wrapped in cotton.” All this belonged to the statesman, former ambassador. This whole costume was, if one can put it that way, worn; the seams were whitening, a vague buttonhole was half-open at one of the elbows; moreover, a button was missing from the coat on the chest; but this is only a detail; the hand of the statesman, which must always be in the coat and on the heart, had the function of hiding the missing button. If Marius had been familiar with the occult institutions of Paris, he would have immediately recognized, on the back of the visitor whom Basque had just introduced, the statesman’s garb borrowed from The Moneychanger’s “Unhook Me This.” Marius’s disappointment, on seeing a man enter other than the one he expected, turned into disgrace for the newcomer. He examined him from head to toe, while the personage bowed immoderately, and asked him curtly: “What do you want? ” The man replied with an amiable grin, the caressing smile of a crocodile of which would give some idea: “It seems impossible to me that I have not already had the honor of seeing Monsieur le Baron in society. I believe I met him in particular, a few years ago, at the home of Princess Bagration and in the salons of his lordship, Viscount Dambray, peer of France. It is always a good tactic in roguery to appear to recognize someone you do not know. Marius was attentive to the man’s speech. He watched the accent and the gesture, but his disappointment grew; it was a nasal pronunciation, completely different from the harsh, dry sound he had expected. He was completely disconcerted. “I don’t know,” he said, “neither Madame Bagration nor Monsieur Dambray. I have never in my life set foot in either of them.” The reply was gruff. The personage, gracious all the same, insisted. “Then it will be at Chateaubriand’s that I will have seen, monsieur! I know Chateaubriand very well. He is very affable.” He sometimes said to me: Thénard, my friend… won’t you have a drink with me? Marius’s brow became more and more severe: “I have never had the honor of being received at Monsieur de Chateaubriand’s. Let’s be brief. What do you want? ” The man, faced with the harsher voice, bowed more quietly. “Baron, deign to listen to me. There is in America, in a country near Panama, a village called La Joya. This village consists of a single house. A large, three-story square house made of sun-baked bricks, each side of the square five hundred feet long, each story set back twelve feet from the lower story so as to leave in front of it a terrace that runs around the building, in the center an interior courtyard where the provisions and ammunition are, no windows, loopholes, no doors, ladders, ladders to go up from the ground to the first terrace, and from the first to the second, and from the second to the third, ladders to go down into the interior courtyard, no doors to the bedrooms, trapdoors, no stairs to the bedrooms, ladders; in the evening the trapdoors are closed, the ladders are removed, blunderbusses and rifles are pointed at the loopholes; no way in; a house by day, a citadel by night, eight hundred inhabitants, that is this village. Why so many precautions? It is because this country is dangerous; it is full of cannibals. So why do people go there? It is because this country is marvelous; gold is found there. “What are you getting at?” interrupted Marius, who was passing from disappointment to impatience. “To this, Monsieur le Baron. I am a tired former diplomat. The old civilization has got on my nerves. I want to try some savages. ” “And then? ” “Monsieur le Baron, selfishness is the law of the world. The proletarian peasant woman who works by the day turns around when the stagecoach passes, the peasant woman who is a landowner and works in her field does not turn around . The poor man’s dog barks at the rich man, the rich man’s dog barks at the poor man. Every man for himself. Interest, that is the goal of men. Gold, that is the magnet. ” “And then? Conclude. ” “I would like to go and settle at La Joya. There are three of us. I have my wife and my young lady; a daughter who is very beautiful. The journey is long and expensive. I must have a little money. ” “What does that have to do with me?” asked Marius. The stranger craned his neck out of his cravat, a gesture typical of a vulture, and replied with a redoubled smile: “Didn’t Monsieur le Baron read my letter?” That was more or less true. The fact is that the contents of the epistle had slipped past Marius. He had seen the writing more than he had read the letter. He barely remembered it. For a moment now, a new awakening had just been given to him. He had noticed this detail: my wife and my young lady. He fixed a penetrating eye on the stranger. An examining magistrate could not have looked more closely. He was almost watching him. He limited himself to answering him: “Be more precise.” The stranger inserted his two hands into his two pockets, raised his head without straightening his spine, but scrutinizing Marius from his side with the green gaze of his glasses. “Very well, Monsieur Baron. I’ll be more precise. I have a secret to sell you. ” “A secret? ” “A secret. ” “That concerns me? ” “A little. ” “What is this secret?” Marius examined the man more and more, while listening to him. “I’ll start for free,” said the stranger. “You’ll see that I’m interesting. ” “Speak.” “Monsieur Baron, you have a thief and a murderer in your house. ” Marius started. “In my house? No,” he said. The stranger, imperturbable, brushed his hat with his elbow and continued: “Murderer and thief.” Note, Baron, that I am not speaking here of old, backward, obsolete facts, which can be erased by prescription before the law and by repentance before God. I am speaking of recent facts, current facts, facts still unknown to justice at this hour. I continue. This man has slipped into your confidence, and almost into your family, under a false name. I will tell you his real name. And tell you for nothing. “I am listening.” “His name is Jean Valjean.” “I know it.” “I will tell you, also for nothing, who he is. ” “Tell me.” “He is a former convict. ” “I know it. ” “You have known it since I had the honor of telling you. ” “No. I knew it before.” Marius’s cold tone, this double reply, “I know it,” his laconicism, resistant to dialogue, stirred in the stranger some dull anger. He furtively shot Marius a furious look, which was immediately extinguished. However quick it was, this look was one of those you recognize when you have seen them once; it did not escape Marius. Certain blazes can only come from certain souls; the pupil, that air vent of thought, is ablaze with them; spectacles hide nothing; put a window in hell. The stranger continued, smiling: “I do not presume to contradict Monsieur le Baron. In any case, you must see that I am well informed. Now what I have to tell you is known only to me. It concerns the fortune of Madame la Baronne. It is an extraordinary secret. It is for sale. It is to you that I offer it first. Cheap. Twenty thousand francs. ” “I know this secret as I know the others,” said Marius. The man felt the need to lower his price a little: “Monsieur le Baron, put down ten thousand francs, and I’ll talk. ” “I repeat, you have nothing to tell me. I know what you want to tell me.” There was a new flash in the man’s eye. He cried: “But I must dine today. It’s an extraordinary secret, I tell you. Monsieur le Baron, I’m going to speak. I’m speaking. Give me twenty francs.” Marius looked at him fixedly: “I know your extraordinary secret; just as I knew the name of Jean Valjean, just as I know your name. ” “My name? ” “Yes. ” “It’s not difficult, Monsieur le Baron. I had the honor of writing it to you and telling it to you. Thénard. ” “Dier. ” “Huh? ” “Thénardier.
” “Who? In danger, the porcupine bristles, the beetle plays dead, the old guard forms a square; This man began to laugh. Then he flicked a speck of dust off the sleeve of his coat. Marius continued: “You are also the worker Jondrette, the actor Fabantou, the poet Genflot, the Spaniard Don Alvarès, and the woman Balizard. ” “The woman what? ” “And you ran a tavern in Montfermeil. ” “A tavern! Never. ” “And I tell you that you are Thénardier.” “I deny it. ” “And that you are a beggar. Here.” And Marius, taking a banknote from his pocket, threw it in his face. “Thank you! Pardon! Five hundred francs! Monsieur le Baron!” And the man, overwhelmed, bowing, seizing the note, examined it. “Five hundred francs!” he continued, astonished. And he stammered in a low voice: “A serious fafiot! ” Then abruptly: “Well, so be it,” he cried. “Let us make ourselves comfortable.” And, with the agility of a monkey, tossing his hair back, tearing off his spectacles, removing from his nose and retracting the two pen nibs mentioned earlier, and which, moreover, have already been seen on another page of this book, he removed his face as one removes one’s hat. His eye lit up; the uneven forehead, furrowed, humped in places, hideously wrinkled at the top, was freed, the nose became sharp as a beak; the ferocious and sagacious profile of the man of prey reappeared. “Monsieur le Baron is infallible,” he said in a clear voice from which all nasality had disappeared, “I am Thénardier.” And he straightened his hunched back. Thénardier, for it was indeed he, was strangely surprised; he would have been troubled if he could have been. He had come to bring astonishment, and it was he who received it. This humiliation was paid to him five hundred francs, and, all things considered, he accepted it; but he was no less stunned. He saw this Baron Pontmercy for the first time, and, despite his disguise, this Baron Pontmercy recognized him, and recognized him thoroughly . And not only was this baron acquainted with Thénardier, but he seemed to be acquainted with Jean Valjean. Who was this almost beardless young man, so icy and so generous, who knew people’s names, who knew all their names, and who opened his purse to them, who mistreated rogues like a judge and who paid them like a dupe? Thénardier, it will be remembered, although having been a neighbor of Marius, had never seen him, which is common in Paris; he had once vaguely heard his daughters speak of a very poor young man named Marius who lived in the house. He had written him, without knowing him, the letter we know. No connection was possible in his mind between this Marius and Baron Pontmercy. As for the name Pontmercy, we remember that, on the battlefield of Waterloo, he had only heard the last two syllables, for which he had always had the legitimate disdain that one owes to what is only a thank you. Moreover, through his daughter Azelma, whom he had put on the trail of the bride and groom of February 16, and through his personal searches, he had come to know many things, and, from the depths of his darkness, he had succeeded in grasping more than one mysterious thread. He had, by dint of industry, discovered, or at least, by dint of induction, guessed, who was the man he had met one day in the Great Sewer. He had easily arrived at the man’s name. He knew that Madame Baroness Pontmercy was Cosette. But on that point, he intended to be discreet. Who was Cosette? He himself did not know exactly. He could see some bastardy, Fantine’s story had always seemed suspicious to him, but what was the point of talking about it? To get paid for his silence? He had, or thought he had, something better to sell than that. And, in all appearances, to come and make, without proof, this revelation to Baron Pontmercy: _Your wife is a bastard_, would only have succeeded in attracting the husband’s boot to the loins of the revealer. In Thénardier’s mind, the conversation with Marius had not yet begun. He had had to back down, modify his strategy, abandon a position, change front; but nothing essential was yet compromised, and he had five hundred francs in his pocket. Besides, he had something decisive to say, and even against this Baron Pontmercy, so well informed and so well armed, he felt strong. For men By Thénardier’s nature, every dialogue is a combat. In the one that was about to begin, what was his situation? He did not know to whom he was speaking, but he knew what he was talking about. He quickly made this internal review of his forces, and after saying: _I am Thénardier_, he waited. Marius remained thoughtful. So he finally had Thénardier. This man, whom he had so desired to find, was there. He would therefore be able to honor the recommendation of Colonel Pontmercy. He was humiliated that this hero owed something to this bandit, and that the bill of exchange drawn from the depths of the tomb by his father on him, Marius, was to this day protested. It also seemed to him, in the complex situation in which his mind was with regard to Thénardier, that there was reason to avenge the colonel for the misfortune of having been saved by such a scoundrel. Whatever the case , he was content. He was thus at last going to deliver the colonel’s shadow from this unworthy creditor , and it seemed to him that he was going to remove his father’s memory from debtors’ prison. Besides this duty, he had another, to clarify, if possible, the source of Cosette’s fortune. The opportunity seemed to present itself. Thénardier perhaps knew something. It might be useful to see the depths of this man. He began with that. Thénardier had made the “serious fafiot” disappear into his pocket, and was looking at Marius with an almost tender gentleness. Marius broke the silence. “Thénardier, I have told you your name. Now, your secret, what you came to tell me, do you want me to tell it to you? I have my information too. You will see that I know more than you. Jean Valjean, as you have said, is a murderer and a thief.” A thief, because he robbed a wealthy manufacturer, whose ruin he caused, Monsieur Madeleine. A murderer, because he murdered the police officer Javert. “I don’t understand, Baron,” said Thénardier. “I’ll make myself understood. Listen. There was, in a district of Pas-de-Calais, around 1822, a man who had had some old run-in with the law, and who, under the name of Monsieur Madeleine, had recovered and rehabilitated himself. This man had become, in the full force of the term, a righteous man. With one industry, the manufacture of black glass beads, he had made the fortune of an entire town. As for his personal fortune, he had made that too, but secondarily and, in a way, by chance. He was the foster father of the poor. He founded hospitals, opened schools, visited the sick, gave dowries to girls, supported widows, adopted orphans; he was like the guardian of the country. He had refused the cross, he had been appointed mayor. A freed convict knew the secret of a punishment formerly incurred by this man; he denounced him and had him arrested, and took advantage of the arrest to come to Paris and have delivered to him by the banker Laffitte—I have the fact from the cashier himself—by means of a forged signature, a sum of more than half a million which belonged to M. Madeleine. This convict, who robbed M. Madeleine, is Jean Valjean. As for the other fact, you have nothing to tell me either. Jean Valjean killed the agent Javert; he killed him with a pistol shot. I, who am speaking to you, was present. Thénardier threw Marius the sovereign glance of a beaten man who has regained victory and who has just regained in a minute all the ground he had lost. But the smile returned immediately; the inferior vis-à-vis the superior must have the cuddly triumph, and Thénardier limited himself to saying to Marius: –Monsieur le Baron, we are on the wrong track. And he underlined this sentence by making his bunch of trinkets make an expressive whirl. –What! replied Marius, do you dispute that? These are facts. –These are chimeras. The confidence with which Monsieur le Baron honors me makes it my duty to tell him. Above all, truth and justice. I does not like to see people accused unjustly. Monsieur le Baron, Jean Valjean did not rob M. Madeleine, and Jean Valjean did not kill Javert. –That is strong! How so? –For two reasons. –Which? Speak. –Here is the first: he did not rob M. Madeleine, since it is Jean Valjean himself who is M. Madeleine. –What are you telling me? –And here is the second: he did not murder Javert, since the one who killed Javert was Javert. –What do you mean? –That Javert committed suicide. –Prove it! Prove it! cried Marius beside himself. Thénardier resumed, punctuating his sentence in the manner of an ancient alexandrine: –The police officer Javert was found drowned under a boat at the Pont-au-Change. “But prove it!” Thénardier took from his side pocket a large gray paper envelope that seemed to contain folded sheets of various sizes. “I have my file,” he said calmly. And he added: “Monsieur le Baron, in your interest, I wanted to know my Jean Valjean thoroughly . I say that Jean Valjean and Madeleine are the same man, and I say that Javert had no other assassin than Javert, and when I speak, it is because I have proof. Not handwritten proof— the handwriting is suspect, the handwriting is complacent—but printed proof . ” As he spoke, Thénardier extracted from the envelope two numbers of newspapers, yellowed, faded, and heavily saturated with tobacco. One of these two newspapers, broken at every fold and falling into square shreds, seemed much older than the other. “Two facts, two proofs,” said Thénardier. And he handed Marius the two unfolded newspapers. The reader is familiar with these two newspapers. One, the oldest, an issue of the White Flag of July 25, 1823, the text of which can be seen on page 148 of the third volume of this book, established the identity of M. Madeleine and Jean Valjean. The other, a Monitor of June 15, 1832, noted the suicide of Javert, adding that it resulted from a verbal report from Javert to the prefect that, taken prisoner in the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, he had owed his life to the magnanimity of an insurgent who, holding him under his pistol, instead of blowing out his brains, had fired in the air. Marius read. There was evidence, a certain date, irrefutable proof, these two newspapers had not been printed expressly to support Thénardier’s statements ; The note published in the _Moniteur_ was communicated administratively by the police prefecture. Marius could not doubt. The information from the clerk-cashier was false and he himself had been mistaken. Jean Valjean, suddenly grown up, emerged from the cloud. Marius could not suppress a cry of joy: “Well then, this unfortunate man is an admirable man! All this fortune was really his! He is Madeleine, the providence of a whole country! He is Jean Valjean, the savior of Javert! He is a hero! He is a saint! ” “He is not a saint, and he is not a hero,” said Thénardier. “He is an assassin and a thief.” And he added in the tone of a man who is beginning to feel some authority: “Let us calm down.” Thief, assassin, these words which Marius thought had disappeared, and which returned, fell on him like a shower of ice. “Again!” he said. “Always,” said Thénardier. “Jean Valjean did not steal from Madeleine, but he is a thief. He did not kill Javert, but he is a murderer. ” “Do you mean,” continued Marius, “that miserable theft of forty years ago, expiated, as your very journals show, by a whole life of repentance, self-denial, and virtue? ” “I say murder and theft, Baron. And I repeat that I am speaking of current events. What I have to reveal to you is absolutely unknown. It is unpublished. And perhaps you will find there the source of fortune.” skillfully offered by Jean Valjean to Madame la Baroness. I say skillfully, because, by a donation of this kind, to slip into an honorable house whose comfort one will share, and, at the same time, to hide one’s crime, enjoy one’s theft, bury one’s name, and create a family for oneself, that would not be very clumsy. “I could interrupt you here,” observed Marius, “but continue. ” “Monsieur le Baron, I will tell you everything, leaving the reward to your generosity. This secret is worth solid gold. You will say to me: Why did you not address yourself to Jean Valjean? For a very simple reason; I know that he has relinquished it, and relinquished it in your favor, and I find the scheme ingenious; but he no longer has a penny, he would show me his hands empty, and, since I need some money for my trip to La Joya, I prefer you, you who have everything, to him who has nothing.” I ‘m a little tired, allow me to take a chair. Marius sat down and gestured for him to sit down. Thénardier settled himself on a padded chair, took back the two newspapers, put them back in the envelope, and murmured, pecking at the White Flag with his fingernail: This one gave me some trouble to get. Having done this, he crossed his legs and lay down on his back, an attitude typical of people who are sure of what they say, then began, gravely and emphasizing the words: “Monsieur le Baron, on June 6, 1832, about a year ago, the day of the riot, a man was in the Great Sewer of Paris, on the side where the sewer joins the Seine, between the Pont des Invalides and the Pont d’Iéna. ” Marius abruptly moved his chair closer to Thénardier’s. Thénardier noticed this movement and continued with the slowness of an orator who holds his interlocutor and who senses the palpitation of his adversary beneath his words: –This man, forced to hide, for reasons moreover unrelated to politics, had taken the sewer for his home and had a key to it. It was, I repeat, June 6; it could have been eight o’clock in the evening. The man heard a noise in the sewer. Very surprised, he crouched down and watched. It was the sound of footsteps, someone was walking in the shadows, someone was coming from his side. Strange to say, there was another man in the sewer besides him. The sewer’s exit grate was not far away. A little light coming from it allowed him to recognize the newcomer and to see that this man was carrying something on his back. He was walking bent over. The man who was walking bent over was a former convict, and what he was dragging on his shoulders was a corpse. A flagrant act of murder, if ever there was one. As for the theft, it goes without saying; you don’t kill a man for free. This convict was going to throw this corpse into the river. A fact to be noted is that before arriving at the exit gate, this convict, who had come from a long way down the sewer, had necessarily encountered a terrible quagmire where it seems he could have left the body; but, the very next day, the sewer workers, working in the quagmire, would have found the murdered man there, and that was not the murderer’s lot. He had preferred to cross the quagmire, with his burden, and his efforts must have been frightening, it is impossible to risk his life more completely; I do not understand how he came out of there alive. Marius’s chair moved even closer. Thénardier took the opportunity to breathe deeply. He continued: “Monsieur le Baron, a sewer is not the Champ de Mars.” There’s a lack of everything, even space. When two men are there, they have to meet. That’s what happened. The resident and the passerby were forced to say hello, both reluctantly. The passerby said to the resident: “You see what I have on my back, I have to go out, you have the key, give it to me.” This convict was a man of terrible strength. There was no refusing. Yet the one who had the key negotiated, only to gain time. He examined this dead man, but he could do nothing. see, except that he was young, well dressed, with the air of a rich man, and all disfigured by blood. While talking, he found a way to tear and snatch from behind, without the assassin noticing, a piece of the murdered man’s clothing. Evidence, you understand; a way to recapture the trace of things and to prove the crime to the criminal. He put the evidence in his pocket. After which he opened the gate, made the man come out with his embarrassment on his back, closed the gate and ran away, caring little about being mixed up in the rest of the adventure and especially not wanting to be there when the assassin threw the murdered man into the river. You understand now. The one who carried the corpse was Jean Valjean; the one who had the key is speaking to you now; and the piece of clothing…. Thénardier finished the sentence by taking from his pocket and holding, at eye level, pinched between his two thumbs and two forefingers, a shred of torn black cloth, all covered with dark stains. Marius had risen, pale, hardly breathing, his eye fixed on the piece of black cloth, and, without uttering a word, without taking his gaze off the rag , he stepped back towards the wall and, with his right hand stretched out behind him, groped along the wall for a key that was in the lock of a cupboard near the fireplace. He found this key, opened the cupboard, and thrust his arm into it without looking, and without his frightened eyes detaching themselves from the rag that Thénardier held spread out. Meanwhile Thénardier continued: “Monsieur le Baron, I have the strongest reasons to believe that the murdered young man was a wealthy foreigner lured into a trap by Jean Valjean and carrying an enormous sum of money. “The young man was me, and here is the coat!” cried Marius, and he threw an old, bloody black coat onto the floor. Then, snatching the piece from Thénardier’s hands, he squatted over the coat and brought the torn piece closer to the shredded hem. The tear fitted exactly, and the shred completed the coat. Thénardier was petrified. He thought this: “I am astonished.” Marius sat up, trembling, desperate, beaming. He searched in his pocket and marched furiously toward Thénardier, presenting and almost pressing his fist filled with five-hundred-franc and thousand-franc notes against his face. “You are a scoundrel! You are a liar, a slanderer, a scoundrel. You came to accuse this man, you justified him; you wanted to ruin him, you only succeeded in glorifying him. And it is you who are a thief!” And you’re the one who’s a murderer! I saw you, Thénardier Jondrette, in that dive on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital. I know enough about you to send you to the galleys, and even further, if I wanted to. Here, here’s a thousand francs, you scoundrel! And he threw a thousand-franc note to Thénardier. “Ah! Jondrette Thénardier, you vile scoundrel! Let this be a lesson to you, dealer in secrets, merchant in mysteries, delver in darkness, wretch! Take these five hundred francs and get out of here! Waterloo protects you. ” “Waterloo!” grumbled Thénardier, pocketing the five hundred francs along with the thousand francs. “Yes, murderer! You saved the life of a colonel…” “A general,” said Thénardier, raising his head. “A colonel!” Marius continued angrily. “I wouldn’t give a penny for a general. And you came here to commit infamies!” I tell you that you have committed all the crimes. Go! Disappear! Just be happy, that is all I desire. Ah! Monster! Here are three thousand francs more. Take them. You will leave tomorrow, for America, with your daughter; for your wife is dead, abominable liar! I will see to your departure, bandit, and I will pay you twenty thousand francs at that moment. Go and hang yourself elsewhere! “Monsieur le Baron,” replied Thénardier, bowing to the ground, ” eternal gratitude.” And Thénardier left, understanding nothing, stupefied and delighted by this gentle crushing under bags of gold and by this lightning flashing over his head in banknotes. Struck down, he was, but pleased too; and he would have been very sorry to have a lightning rod against that lightning. Let’s finish with this man right away. Two days after the events we are now recounting, he left, through Marius’s care, for America, under a false name, with his daughter Azelma, equipped with a draft for twenty thousand francs on New York. The moral misery of Thénardier, this failed bourgeois, was irremediable; he was in America what he was in Europe. Contact with a bad man is sometimes enough to spoil a good action and to make something bad come out of it. With Marius’s money, Thénardier became a slave trader. As soon as Thénardier was outside, Marius ran to the garden where Cosette was still walking. “Cosette! Cosette!” he cried. “Come! Come quickly. Let’s go. Basque, a cab! Cosette, come. Ah! my God! It was he who saved my life! Let’s not lose a minute! Put on your shawl. ” Cosette thought he was mad, and obeyed. He was not breathing, he put his hand to his heart to suppress its beating. He paced back and forth, he embraced Cosette: “Ah! Cosette! I am a wretch!” he said. Marius was distraught. He began to glimpse in this Jean Valjean some lofty and somber figure. An unheard-of virtue appeared to him, supreme and gentle, humble in its immensity. The convict was transfigured into Christ. Marius was dazzled by this prodigy. He didn’t know exactly what he saw, but it was big. In an instant, a cab was in front of the door. Marius made Cosette get into it and dashed off. “Coachman,” he said, “Rue de l’Homme-Armé, number 7.” The cab drove off. “Ah! What joy!” said Cosette, “Rue de l’Homme-Armé. I didn’t dare speak to you about it anymore. We’re going to see Monsieur Jean. ” “Your father, Cosette! Your father more than ever. Cosette, I can guess. You told me that you never received the letter I sent you by Gavroche. It must have fallen into his hands. Cosette, he went to the barricade to save me. As it is his need to be an angel, in passing, he saved others; he saved Javert. He pulled me from that abyss to give me to you. He carried me on his back into that dreadful sewer. Ah! I am a monstrous ingrate. Cosette, after having been your providence, he has been mine. Imagine that there was a terrible quagmire, enough to drown oneself in a hundred times, to drown in the mud, Cosette! He made me cross it. I was unconscious, I saw nothing, I heard nothing, I could know nothing of my own adventure. We are going to bring him back, take him with us, whether he likes it or not, he will never leave us again. Provided he is at home! Provided we find him! I will spend the rest of my life venerating him. Yes, that must be it, you see, Cosette? It is to him that Gavroche will have given my letter. Everything is explained. You understand. Cosette did not understand a word. “You are right,” she said to her. Meanwhile the cab rolled on. Chapter 66. Night Behind Which There Is Day. At the knock he heard at his door, Jean Valjean turned around. “Come in,” he said weakly. The door opened. Cosette and Marius appeared. Cosette rushed into the room. Marius remained standing on the threshold, leaning against the doorpost. “Cosette!” said Jean Valjean, and he rose up in his chair, his arms open and trembling, haggard, livid, sinister, with immense joy in his eyes. Cosette, suffocated with emotion, fell on Jean Valjean’s breast. “Father!” she said. Jean Valjean, overwhelmed, stammered: “Cosette! She! You, madame! It’s you! Oh, my God!” And, clasped in Cosette’s arms, he cried: “It’s you! You’re here! You forgive me then!” Marius, lowering his eyelids to prevent his tears from flowing, took a step forward and murmured through lips that were convulsively contracted to stop the sobs: “My father! ” “And you, too, forgive me!” said Jean Valjean. Marius could not find a word, and Jean Valjean added: “Thank you.” Cosette tore off her shawl and threw her hat on the bed. “It bothers me,” she said. And, sitting on the old man’s knees, she parted her white hair with an adorable movement and kissed his forehead. Jean Valjean let him do it, bewildered. Cosette, who understood only very confusedly, redoubled her caresses, as if she wanted to pay Marius’s debt. Jean Valjean stammered: “How stupid we are! I thought I would never see her again.” Imagine, Monsieur Pontmercy, that at the moment you came in, I was saying to myself: It’s all over. There’s her little dress, I’m a miserable man, I’ll never see Cosette again, I said that at the very moment you were coming up the stairs. Was I an idiot! That’s how idiotic we are! But we’re not counting on God . God said: You think we’re going to abandon you, stupid! No, no, it won’t happen like that. Come, there’s a poor fellow there who needs an angel. And the angel comes; and we see his Cosette again, and we see his little Cosette again! Ah! I was very unhappy! He was unable to speak for a moment, then he continued: “I really needed to see Cosette once in a while . A heart needs a bone to gnaw on. However, I felt that I was in the way.” I gave myself reasons: They don’t need you, stay in your corner, we don’t have the right to linger. Ah! Blessed God, I can see her again! Do you know, Cosette, that your husband is very handsome? Ah! You have a pretty embroidered collar, good thing. I like that design. It was your husband who chose it, wasn’t he? And then, you’ll need cashmere. Monsieur Pontmercy, let me speak to her informally. It won’t be long. And Cosette would continue: “How wicked of you to have left us like this! Where have you gone? Why have you been so long? Formerly your trips didn’t last more than three or four days. I sent Nicolette, and they always replied: He’s away. When did you come back? Why didn’t you let us know? Do you know that you’ve changed so much? Ah! the wicked father!” He was ill, and we didn’t know it! Here, Marius, feel his hand, how cold it is! “So here you are! Monsieur Pontmercy, you forgive me!” repeated Jean Valjean. At this word, which Jean Valjean had just repeated, all that was swelling in Marius’s heart found an outlet, he burst out: “Cosette, do you hear? He’s reached that point! He asks my forgiveness. And do you know what he did to me, Cosette? He saved my life. He did more. He gave you to me. And after having saved me and after having given you to me, Cosette, what did he do with himself? He sacrificed himself. That’s the man. And, to me, the ungrateful one, to me, the forgetful one, to me, the pitiless one, to me, the guilty one, he says to me: Thank you!” Cosette, all my life spent at the feet of this man will be too little. This barricade, this sewer, this furnace, this cesspool, he has gone through everything for me, for you, Cosette! He has carried me through all the deaths that he kept from me and accepted for himself. All the courage, all the virtues, all the heroism, all the sanctities, he has them! Cosette, this man, he is the angel! “Hush! hush!” said Jean Valjean in a low voice. “Why say all this? ” “But you!” cried Marius with an anger that contained veneration , “why didn’t you say it? It’s your fault too. You save people’s lives, and you hide it from them! You do more, under the pretext of unmasking yourself, you slander yourself. It’s dreadful.” “I told the truth,” replied Jean Valjean. “No,” replied Marius, “the truth is the whole truth; and you did not tell it. You were Monsieur Madeleine, why not tell it ? You had saved Javert, why not tell it? I owed you my life, why not tell it? ” “Because I thought like you. I thought you were right. I had to go. If you had known about this business in the sewer, you would have made me stay near you. So I had to keep quiet. If I had spoken, it would have embarrassed everyone. ” “Embarrassed what! Embarrassed who!” replied Marius. “Do you think you are going to stay here? We are taking you away. Ah! my God! when I think that it was by chance that I learned all this! We are taking you away. You are part of ourselves. You are his father and mine.” You will not spend another day in this dreadful house. Don’t imagine that you will be here tomorrow. “Tomorrow,” said Jean Valjean, “I will not be here, but I will not be at your house. ” “What do you mean?” replied Marius. “Oh, we are not allowing any more travel. You will not leave us again. You belong to us. We are not letting you go. ” “This time, it’s for good,” added Cosette. “We have a carriage downstairs. I will take you away. If necessary, I will use force.” And, laughing, she made a gesture of lifting the old man in her arms. “There is still your room in our house,” she continued. “If you only knew how pretty the garden is at this time! The azaleas are doing very well there. The paths are sanded with river sand; there are little purple shells. You will eat my strawberries. I am the one who waters them.” And no more Madame, and no more Monsieur Jean, we are in a republic, everyone says _tu_, isn’t that right, Marius? The program is changed. If you knew, father, I had a sorrow, there was a robin who had made his nest in a hole in the wall, a horrible cat ate it. My poor pretty little robin who put his head out of his window and looked at me! I cried over it. I would have killed the cat! But now no one cries any more. Everyone is laughing, everyone is happy. You will come with us. How pleased grandfather will be! You will have your patch in the garden, you will cultivate it, and we will see if your strawberries are as beautiful as mine. And then, I will do everything you wish, and then, you will obey me well. Jean Valjean listened to him without hearing him. He heard the music of his voice rather than the meaning of his words; One of those large tears, which are the dark pearls of the soul, slowly germinated in his eye. He murmured: “The proof that God is good is that here it is.” “My father!” said Cosette. Jean Valjean continued: “It is quite true that it would be charming to live together. They have birds all over their trees. I would walk with Cosette. To be people who live, who say good morning to each other, who call to each other in the garden, that is sweet. We see each other in the morning. We would each cultivate a little corner. She would make me eat her strawberries, I would make her pick my roses. It would be charming. Only…” He broke off and said gently: “It is a pity.” The tear did not fall, it went back in, and Jean Valjean replaced it with a smile. Cosette took both of the old man’s hands in hers. “My God!” she said, “your hands are even colder. Are you ill?” Are you suffering? “Me? No,” replied Jean Valjean, “I am very well. Only…” He stopped. “Only what? ” “I am going to die presently. ” Cosette and Marius shuddered. “Die!” cried Marius. “Yes, but it is nothing,” said Jean Valjean. He breathed, smiled, and continued: “Cosette, you were talking to me, go on, talk again, your little robin.” is dead, speak, so that I may hear your voice! Marius, petrified, looked at the old man. Cosette gave a heart-rending cry. “Father! My father! You will live. You will live. I want you to live, do you hear!” Jean Valjean raised his head towards her with adoration. “Oh yes, forbid me to die. Who knows? Perhaps I will obey. I was dying when you arrived. That stopped me; it seemed to me that I was reborn. ” “You are full of strength and life,” cried Marius. “Do you imagine that one dies like that? You have had sorrow, you will have no more. It is I who ask your forgiveness, and on my knees again! You will live, and live with us, and live a long time. We take you back. There are two of us here who will henceforth have only one thought, your happiness!” “You see,” Cosette continued, still in tears, “that Marius says you will not die. ” Jean Valjean continued to smile. “Even if you take me back, Monsieur Pontmercy, would that mean that I am not what I am? No, God has thought as you and I have, and he does not change his mind; it is useful that I go away. Death is a good arrangement. God knows better than we what we need. That you may be happy, that Monsieur Pontmercy may have Cosette, that youth may marry the morning, that there may be around you, my children, lilacs and nightingales, that your life may be a beautiful lawn with sunshine, that all the enchantments of heaven may fill your soul, and now, I, who am good for nothing, that I die, it is certain that all that is well. You see, let us be reasonable, there is nothing more possible now, I feel quite that it is over.” An hour ago, I had a faint. And then, last night, I drank all that pot of water that ‘s there. How kind your husband is, Cosette! You’re much better off than with me. A noise was made at the door. It was the doctor coming in. “Good morning and goodbye, doctor,” said Jean Valjean. “Here are my poor children. ” Marius approached the doctor. He addressed him with a single word: “Monsieur?”… but in the way he pronounced it, there was a complete question. The doctor answered the question with an expressive glance. “Because things are displeasing,” said Jean Valjean, “that is no reason to be unjust to God.” There was a silence. Everybody’s chest was oppressed. Jean Valjean turned toward Cosette. He began to contemplate her as if he wanted to take it for eternity. In the depth of shadow into which he had already descended, ecstasy was still possible for him as he looked at Cosette. The reflection of that sweet face illuminated her pale face. The sepulchre can have its dazzle. The doctor felt his pulse. “Ah! it was you he needed!” he murmured, looking at Cosette and Marius. And, leaning towards Marius’s ear, he added very quietly: “Too late.” Jean Valjean, almost without ceasing to look at Cosette, considered Marius and the doctor with serenity. These barely articulated words were heard to emerge from his mouth : “It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live.” Suddenly he rose. These returns of strength are sometimes a sign of agony itself. He walked with a firm step to the wall, pushed aside Marius and the doctor who wanted to help him, detached from the wall the small copper crucifix that was hanging there, returned to sit down with all the freedom of movement of perfect health, and said in a loud voice as he placed the crucifix on the table: “There is the great martyr.” Then his chest sank, his head began to waver, as if the intoxication of the grave had taken hold of him, and his two hands, placed on his knees, began to dig with their nails the material of his trousers. Cosette supported his shoulders, and sobbed, and tried to speak to him without being able to. Among the words mingled with that lugubrious saliva which accompanies the tears, words like these: “Father! Do not leave us. Is it possible that we find you only to lose you?” One might say that the agony winds. It goes, comes, advances towards the sepulchre, and turns back towards life. There is a groping in the act of dying. Jean Valjean, after this half-fainting, grew firmer, shook his brow as if to make the darkness fall from it, and became almost fully lucid again. He took a piece of Cosette’s sleeve and kissed it. “He’s back! Doctor, he’s back!” cried Marius. “You are both good,” said Jean Valjean. “I will tell you what pained me. What pained me, Monsieur Pontmercy, is that you did not want to touch the money. That money is your wife’s.” I will explain to you, my children; that is why I am glad to see you. The black jet comes from England, the white jet comes from Norway. All this is in the paper here, which you will read. For the bracelets, I invented replacing the welded sheet metal slides with slides made of closely spaced sheet metal. It is prettier, better, and less expensive. You understand all the money that can be made. Cosette’s fortune is therefore truly hers. I give you these details so that you may have peace of mind. The portress had gone up and was looking through the half-open door. The doctor dismissed her, but he could not prevent this zealous good woman from shouting to the dying man before disappearing : “Do you want a priest? ” “I have one,” replied Jean Valjean. And with his finger, he seemed to point to a point above his head where one would have said he saw someone. It is likely that the bishop was indeed present at this agony. Cosette gently slipped a pillow under his back. Jean Valjean continued: “Monsieur Pontmercy, have no fear, I beg you. The six hundred thousand francs are indeed Cosette’s. I would have lost my life if you did not enjoy them! We had managed to make this glassware very well. We rivaled what is called Berlin jewels. For example, one cannot equal German black glass. A large one, which contains twelve hundred very well-cut beads, costs only three francs. When someone who is dear to us is about to die, we look at him with a look that clings to him and would like to hold him back.” Both of them, speechless with anguish, not knowing what to say to death, desperate and trembling, were standing before him, Cosette holding Marius’s hand. From moment to moment, Jean Valjean was declining. He was sinking; He was approaching the dark horizon. His breathing had become intermittent; a slight rattle interrupted it. He had difficulty moving his forearm, his feet had lost all movement, and at the same time as the misery of his limbs and the dejection of his body increased, all the majesty of his soul rose and spread across his brow. The light of the unknown world was already visible in his eyes. His face paled and at the same time smiled. Life was no longer there, there was something else. His breath fell, his gaze widened. He was a corpse on which one could feel wings. He beckoned to Cosette to approach, then to Marius; it was evidently the last minute of the last hour, and he began to speak to them in a voice so faint that it seemed to come from afar, and that one would have said that there was from now on a wall between them and him. “Come closer, come closer, both of you. I love you very much.” Oh! it’s good to die like this! You love me too, my Cosette. I knew you still had friendship for your old man. How kind of you to have put this cushion under my back! You will mourn me a little, won’t you? Not too much. I don’t want you to have real sorrows. You will have to have a lot of fun, my children. I forgot to tell you that on buckles without prongs one earned even more than on all the rest. The large one, twelve dozen, came to ten francs, and sold for sixty. It was really a good business. So you shouldn’t be surprised at the six hundred thousand francs, Monsieur Pontmercy. It’s honest money. You can be rich in peace. You will have to have a carriage, from time to time a box at the theaters, beautiful ball gowns, my Cosette, and then give good dinners to your friends, be very happy. I was writing to Cosette just now. She will find my letter. It is to her that I bequeath the two candlesticks on the mantelpiece. They are silver; but for me they are gold, they are diamonds; they change the candles that are put in them, into tapers. I don’t know if the one who gave them to me is happy with me up there. I did what I could. My children, you will not forget that I am poor, you will have me buried in the first patch of earth you come across under a stone to mark the spot. That is my will. No name on the stone. If Cosette wants to come a little sometimes, that will please me. You too, Monsieur Pontmercy. I must confess to you that I have not always loved you; I ask your forgiveness. Now, she and you, you are one to me. I am very grateful to you. I feel that you make Cosette happy. If you only knew, Monsieur Pontmercy, her beautiful rosy cheeks were my joy; when I saw her a little pale, I was sad. There is a five-hundred-franc note in the chest of drawers. I haven’t touched it. It’s for the poor. Cosette, do you see your little dress there, on the bed? Do you recognize it? It was only ten years ago. How time flies! We were very happy. It’s over. My children, don’t cry, I’m not going very far. I’ll see you from there. You’ll only have to look when it gets dark, you’ll see me smile. Cosette, do you remember Montfermeil? You were in the woods, you were very scared; do you remember when I took the handle of the bucket of water? It was the first time I touched your poor little hand. It was so cold! Ah! Your hands were red then, mademoiselle, you have them very white now. And the big doll! Do you remember? You called her Catherine. You regretted not having taken her to the convent! How you made me laugh sometimes, my sweet angel! When it had rained, you would take straws on the streams and watch them go by. One day, I gave you a wicker racket and a shuttlecock with yellow, blue, and green feathers. You forgot it. You were so mischievous when you were little! You played. You put cherries in your ears. These are things of the past. The forests where you spent your child, the trees where you walked, the convents where you hid, the games, the good laughter of childhood, they are all shadows. I had imagined that all that belonged to me. That was where my stupidity lay. Those Thénardiers were wicked. You must forgive them. Cosette, the time has come to tell you your mother’s name. Her name was Fantine. Remember that name: Fantine. Get on your knees every time you say it. She suffered greatly. She loved you greatly. She had in misfortune all that you have in happiness. These are God’s lots. He is up there, he sees us all, and he knows what he is doing among his great stars. So I am going to go, my children. Love one another always. There is hardly anything else in the world but this: to love one another. You will sometimes think of the poor old man who died here. Oh my Cosette! It is not my fault, go, if I have not seen you all these days, it broke my heart; I went as far as the corner of your street, I must have made a strange impression on the people who saw me pass, I was like a madman, once I went out without a hat. My children, now I can no longer see very clearly, I still had things to say, but it does n’t matter. Think of me a little. You are blessed beings. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I see light. Come closer. I am dying happy. Give me your dear, beloved heads, so that I can place my hands on them. Cosette and Marius fell to their knees, distraught, choking with tears, each on one of Jean Valjean’s hands. Those august hands no longer moved. He was leaning back, the light from the two candlesticks illuminated him; his white face looked up at the sky, he let Cosette and Marius cover his hands with kisses; he was dead. The night was starless and profoundly dark. Without doubt, in the shadows, some immense angel was standing, wings outstretched, waiting for the soul. Chapter 67. The grass hides and the rain erases. There is, in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, near the common grave, far from the elegant quarter of this city of sepulchers, far from all those fanciful tombs which display in the presence of eternity the hideous modes of death, in a deserted corner, along an old wall, under a large yew tree climbed by bindweed, among the couch grass and moss, a stone. This stone is no more exempt than the others from the leprosy of time, from mold, from lichen, and from bird droppings. Water turns it green, the air blackens it. It is not near any path, and people do not like to go that way, because the grass is high and their feet immediately get wet. When there is a little sun, the lizards come there. All around there is a rustling of wild oats. In spring, the warblers sing in the tree. This stone is completely bare. When it was carved, they thought only of what was necessary for the tomb, and no other care was taken than to make this stone long and narrow enough to cover a man. No name can be read on it. Only, many years ago, a hand wrote in pencil these four lines which gradually became illegible under the rain and dust, and which are probably now erased: _He sleeps. Although fate was very strange for him,_ _He lived. He died when he no longer had his angel,_ _The thing simply happened of itself,_ _As night falls when the day goes away._ Thus ends “Jean Valjean,” the final chapter of “Les Misérables,” in which Hugo seals the fate of his characters with poignant intensity . Valjean’s journey from convict to loving father finds its resolution in an act of sincerity and self-sacrifice. The revealed truths soothe some souls but leave the reader moved by injustice and human greatness. With this conclusion, Victor Hugo reminds us that love and compassion can survive suffering and time. An ending that remains etched in our hearts long after we close the book.
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