WHEN MONSIEUR Gillenormand lived in the Rue Servandoni he had frequented a number of very distinguished salons. Bourgeois though he was, he was received. Indeed he was honoured and even sought after, for he possessed a twofold wit – the wit that was really his own, and the wit that others attributed to him. He went nowhere where he did not stand out. There are men who must attract notice at any price: where they cannot appear as oracles they must be clowns. But this was not Monsieur Gillenormand’s style. His eminence in the royalist salons he visited made no demands on his self-respect. He was an oracle everywhere, outfacing such notables as Monsieur de Bonald and even Monsieur Bengy-Puy-Vallée.
In 1817, or thereabouts, he had invariably called on two afternoons a week at the home of a near neighbour, the Baronne de T—, a highly-respected lady whose husband had been French ambassador in Berlin under Louis XVI. The late Baron de T—, who had been passionately interested in hypnosis and the phenomena of magnetism, had died in exile a ruined man, leaving nothing behind him except ten manuscript volumes, handsomely bound in morocco leather with gilt inscriptions, of a highly curious memoir concerning Friedrich Mesmer, his magnets and his healing séances. Madame de T— had thought it beneath her to publish these and subsisted on a small income that had somehow survived the wreck of their fortunes. She lived far removed from court circles – in a decidedly mixed world, as she said – a life of dignified poverty and isolation. But a few friends gathered twice a week round her widowed hearth, and there constituted a purely royalist salon. They drank tea and joined in loud laments, elegiac or dithyrambic according to the current set of the wind, concerning the times they lived in – the Charter, the Buonapartists, the debasement of the cordon bleu by its bestowal on persons of inferior rank, the Jacobinism of Louis XVIII – and in whispered hopes concerning Monsieur, who later became Charles X.
They were enchanted by the ribald ditties in which Napoleon was referred to as Nicolas, or ‘old Nick’. Duchesses and ladies of the utmost refinement took a delight in verses such as the following:
Renfoncez dans vos culottes
Le bout d’chemis’ qui vous pend
Qu’on n’ dis pas qu’ les patriotes
Ont arboré l’drapeau blanc!*
Execrable puns, harmless word-plays thought to be devastating, were much in vogue in these ultra-royalist coteries. Lists were compiled of the members of the Chamber of Peers – ‘the abominably Jacobin chamber’ – with the names appropriately distorted. From some innate desire to reverse the tide of fury they parodied the Revolution itself, and they had their own version of the revolutionary song.
Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
Les Buonapartist’ à la lanterne!
Songs are like the guillotine, indifferently lopping off the heads of either side.
In the Fualdès affair, which occurred in 1816, they sided with Bastide and Jausion because Fualdès was a ‘buonapartist’. They referred to the liberals as ‘the brothers and friends’ and there could have been no greater insult.
Like some church towers Mme de T—’s salon had two weathercocks, of whom one was Monsieur Gillenormand and the other the Comte de Lamothe-Valois. It was whispered of the latter in somewhat awed tones: ‘You know who he is? He’s the Lamothe of the Necklace Affair.’ Partisans are singularly inconsistent.
We may add that among the bourgeoisie positions of honour are diminished by being too easy of access. One has to be careful whom one receives. Just as there is a loss of warmth in the presence of cold-natured persons, so there is a loss of esteem in the presence of persons who are despised. The old world considered itself to be above this law as it was above all others. Marigny, the brother of Mme Pompadour, had the entry to the Prince de Soubise because of the relationship, not in spite of it. Guillaume du Barry, who bestowed his name on the woman Vaubenier, was warmly received by the Maréchal de Richelieu. That world is like Olympus – even a thief is accepted in it if he is also a god.
There was nothing remarkable about the Comte de Lamothe-Valois, an old man of seventy-five in 1815, except his taciturn, portentous bearing, his cold, angular countenance, flawless manners, coat buttoned to his stock and the long legs encased in trousers the colour of burnt sienna which he invariably crossed when seated. His face was the same colour. Nevertheless he counted for something in that salon because of his ‘celebrity’ and also, strangely enough, because of the name of Valois.
As for Monsieur Gillenormand, he was valued for himself alone, a person of authority because he was authoritative. Without his habitual gaiety of manner being in any way affected, he contrived by his dignified bearing to give an impression of bourgeois honesty and high-mindedness. One is not the embodiment of a century for nothing. The passing of the years had endowed him with a halo of venerability.
Moreover his comments had often a decided ring of the old brigade. When, for example, the King of Prussia, having restored Louis XVIII, came to visit him informally under the name of Graf Ruppin, he was received by the descendant of Louis XIV rather as though he had been the Marquis of Brandenburg. Monsieur Gillenormand approved highly of this. ‘All kings who are not the King of France,’ he said, ‘are mere provincials.’ Again, someone asked in his presence what sentence had been passed on the editor of the Courier français. The reply was that he had been suspended. ‘Suspendu,’ said Monsieur Gillenormand. ‘The first syllable is one too many. He should he pendu’ – that is to say, hanged. Remarks of this kind make reputations.
Monsieur Gillenormand as a rule visited Mme de T— accompanied by his tall, lean daughter, who was then over forty but looked fifty, and also by a pretty, bright-eyed little boy of seven who never entered that drawing-room without hearing the voices murmur around him, ‘How good-looking he is. Poor child, what a shame.’ This was the grandson we have already mentioned. He was referred to as ‘poor child’ because his father had been one of the ‘brigands of the Loire’, the name bestowed on Davout’s army, which after the fall of Paris in 1815 had withdrawn beyond that river.
The brigand in question was the son-in-law we have also mentioned, whom Monsieur Gillenormand described as a disgrace to the family.
Anyone walking through the little town of Vernon in those days, and crossing the beautiful stone bridge which, let us hope, will soon be replaced by some hideous construction of cables and girders, might have seen, if he looked down over the parapet, a man of about fifty wearing a leather cap, trousers and a jacket of grey homespun to which a faded ribbon had once been stitched, and wooden sabots. The man’s skin was so sunburnt as to be almost black, his hair was almost white, and a deep scar ran from his forehead down over his sunken and prematurely aged cheek. He passed nearly all the day with a spade or hoe in his hands in one of the walled plots of land adjoining the bridge which form as it were a string of terraces along the left bank of the Seine, delightful enclosures filled with flowers which one might call gardens if they had been a great deal larger, or bouquets if they had been smaller. All these plots have the river on one side and a house on the other. In 1817 the man in the jacket and sabots occupied the humblest of the houses with the narrowest of the plots. He lived alone, in quiet solitude, except for a housekeeper who was neither young nor old, beautiful nor ugly, town – nor country-woman. The plot of ground which he called his garden was celebrated in the town for the beauty of the flowers he grew in it. Flowers were his sole occupation.
By dint of care and toil and watering he had added to the Creator’s creation, having developed varieties of tulip and dahlia which Nature seemed to have overlooked. He was imaginative, having forestalled Soulange Bodin in the use of peat for the cultivation of certain rare shrubs from America and China. From daybreak in summer he was out on his garden-paths, weeding, clipping, hoeing and watering, busy amid his flowers with an air of gentle melancholy, sometimes passing an hour on end in motionless meditation listening to the song of a bird in a tree or the prattle of a child in a near-by house, or simply with his eyes intent on a drop of dew at the end of a blade of grass which the rays of the sun had turned into a jewel. He kept a scanty table and drank more milk than wine. A child could do what it liked with him and his housekeeper scolded him. He was shy to the point of unsociability, seldom going anywhere or seeing anyone except the poor who tapped on his window, and his curé, the Abbé Mabeuf, a good old man. But if any of the townspeople, or strangers for that matter, asked to see his tulips and roses he admitted them smiling. This was the ‘brigand of the Loire’.
Any student of the military history of the period, memoirs, biographies, the Moniteur or the bulletins of the Grande Armée, might have been struck by the frequency with which the name of Georges Pontmercy occurred in them. As a young man Georges Pontmercy had been an infantryman in the Saintonge regiment, which after the Revolution formed part of the Army of the Rhine; for the old regiments under the monarchy still bore the names of their provinces and were not incorporated in brigades until 1794. Pontmercy fought at Spire, Worms, Neustadt, Turkheim, Alzey, and Mayence, where he was one of the two hundred composing Houchard’s rearguard. He was one of the twelve men who held out against the entire corps of the Prince of Hesse behind the old ramparts of Andernach, only falling back when they were breached by enemy cannon-fire. He served under Kléber at Marchiennes and at Mont-Palissel where he had his arm broken by grapeshot. Then he was transferred to the Italian front, and he was one of the thirty grenadiers who defended the Col de Tende under Joubert. Joubert was promoted adjutant-general and Pontmercy became a sub-lieutenant. He was at Berthier’s side under the cannonade at Lodi, after which Bonaparte said: ‘Berthier was a gunner, a cavalryman, and a grenadier, all three.’ He saw his old general, Joubert, fall at Novi at the moment when, with sword upraised, he was giving the order to charge. Having embarked with his company in a pinnace for transport from Genoa to a small port along the coast he sailed into a wasps’-nest of seven or eight English vessels. The Genoese captain wanted to push the guns overboard, hide the troops under the half-deck and pass himself off as a harmless merchantman; but Pontmercy hoisted the tricolour and sailed coolly through the fire of the British guns. Some fifty miles further on, his audacity increasing, he attacked and captured with his pinnace a large English transport bound with troops for Sicily and so heavily loaded with men and horses that she was down to the scuppers. In 1805 he was one of the Malher division which captured Gunzburg from the Archduke Ferdinand. At Wettingen, under a hail of bullets, he had consoled the last minutes of Colonel Maupetit, mortally wounded at the head of the 9th Dragoons. He had distinguished himself at Austerlitz in that admirable march in echelon formation under enemy fire. When the cavalry of the Russian Imperial Guard overran a battalion of the 4th Regiment of the Line, Pontmercy had been one of the force that counter-attacked and threw back the Russians. The Emperor had awarded him a cross. Pontmercy had seen Wurmser taken prisoner in Mantua, Mélas in Alexandria and Mack in Ulm. He had been in the eighth corps of the Grande Armée which under Mortimer’s command had captured Hamburg. Then he had transferred to the 55th Regiment of the Line, the former Flanders Regiment. He had been in the cemetery at Eylau where the heroic Captain Louis Hugo, uncle of the present writer, had for two hours held out against the utmost efforts of the enemy with a company of eighty-three men, and he was one of the three who had come out of that holocaust alive. He had fought at Friedland. He had seen Moscow, the Beresina, Lützen, Bautzen, Dresden, the Wachau, Leipzig and the mountain passes of Gelenhausen; later Montmirail, Château-Thierry, Craon, the banks of the Marne and the Aisne and the formidable entrenchments of Laon. At Arnay-le-Duc, being then a captain, he had sabred ten Cossacks and saved the life not of his general but of his corporal. He was blown up on that occasion and twenty-seven splinters were extracted from his left arm alone. Eight days before the capitulation of Paris he had exchanged with a comrade and joined the cavalry. To use an old expression, he was ‘two-headed’, that is to say, equally apt at handling the sabre or musket of a common soldier, or, as an officer, at commanding a squadron or battalion. It is this especial gift, perfected by training, which has brought certain specialist units into being, such as the dragoons, which are both horsemen and infantrymen. He had gone with Napoleon to Elba, and at Waterloo had commanded a squadron of cuirassiers in Dubois’s brigade. It was he who had captured the Colours of the Luneburg battalion and, covered with blood, had flung the flag at Napoleon’s feet, having sustained a sabre-cut across his face. The Emperor in high satisfaction had cried: ‘You are hence-forth a colonel, a baron, and an officer of the Légion d’ honneur.’ To which Pontmercy had replied: ‘I thank you, Sire, on behalf of my widow.’ An hour later he had fallen in the sunken lane of Ohain … That was Georges Pontmercy, now a ‘brigand of the Loire’.
We have heard something of his story. After being extricated by Thénardier from the sunken lane he had managed to rejoin the French army and had eventually been conveyed in a series of ambulances to the Loire encampment. The Restoration had put him on half-pay and he was sent to live under surveillance at Vernon. King Louis XVIII, who chose to regard the events of the Hundred Days as non-happenings, had refused to recognize his rank as a colonel and officer of the Légion d’honneur or his title of baron. Nevertheless he missed no opportunity of signing himself ‘Colonel Baron Pontmercy’, and never went out without affixing the rosette of the Légion d’honneur to the old blue jacket which was the only one he possessed. The Procureur du Roi served him notice that he might be prosecuted for ‘the illegal wearing of a decoration’. To the official bearing this missive he said with an acid smile, ‘I don’t know whether it is because I no longer understand French or you no longer speak it, but I don’t understand a word.’ He then went out eight days in succession wearing his rosette, but no one dared to interfere. When he received letters from official sources addressed to ‘Major Pontmercy’ he returned them unopened. Napoleon at the time was treating letters addressed by Sir Hudson Lowe to ‘General Bonaparte’ in the same fashion. Pontmercy had come to have the same bitter taste in his mouth as his Emperor. One morning, meeting the representative of the Public Prosecutor in the street, he went up to him and said: ‘Monsieur, am I allowed to wear my scar?’
He had nothing but his very meagre major’s half-pay, and the cottage he rented in Vernon was the smallest he had been able to find. He lived alone, as we have seen. He had found time, between two campaigns under the Empire, to marry Mlle Gillenormand. Her outraged parent had eventually consented to the match, saying with a sigh, ‘Even the greatest families have to put up with it.’ In 1815 Mme Pontmercy, in all respects an admirable wife and worthy of her husband, had died leaving one child. The boy might have been the consolation of Colonel Pontmercy’s solitude, but his grandfather had imperiously claimed him, saying that otherwise he would disinherit him. The father had accepted this for his son’s sake and had devoted himself to flowers.
For the rest, he had renounced everything, engaging in no movement or conspiracy, dividing his thoughts between the harmless things he did and the great things he had done – the growth of a carnation and the memory of Austerlitz.
M. Gillenormand had no dealings with his son-in-law. To him the colonel was a ‘brigand’, and to the colonel he was an old fool. He never referred to the colonel except occasionally to make a mocking allusion to his ‘barony’. It had been expressly agreed that the colonel would make no attempt to see or communicate with his son, on pain of the boy’s being instantly turned out of the house and disinherited. To the Gillenormands Pontmercy was a leper, and they were resolved to bring up the child according to their own ideas. Perhaps the colonel was wrong to accept these conditions, but he did it for the best, believing himself to be the only sufferer. The child’s expectations from his grandfather were small enough, but his aunt was another matter. Mlle Gillenormand had succeeded to a substantial fortune on her mother’s side, and her sister’s son was her natural heir.
The little boy, whose name was Marius, knew that he had a father, but that was all he knew. No one had told him more. However, the whisperings, the becks and nods and muttered asides in the society his grandfather frequented had made an impression on his child’s mind, and being naturally disposed to accept the notions and opinions of the world around him, which were so to speak the air he breathed, he had come by degrees to think of his father with a sense of shame and with no desire to know him.
Thus he grew up; but every two or three months the colonel paid a surreptitious visit to Paris, like a convict breaking parole, and, hiding behind a pillar of the church of Saint-Sulpice at the hour when Aunt Gillenormand took Marius to Mass, was able to catch a glimpse of his son. He did so in fear and trembling lest the lady should see him. The battle-scarred warrior was frightened of the old maid.
It was to this circumstance that he owed his friendship with the curé of Vernon, Abbé Mabeuf.
This worthy priest was the brother of a churchwarden at Saint-Sulpice who had several times noticed a man staring at the little boy, a man with a scar on his cheek and tears in his eyes. The churchwarden had been struck by the fact that a man looking so much a man should have wept like a woman, and the face had stayed in his mind. One day when he was visiting his brother in Vernon he had come face to face with Colonel Pontmercy on the bridge and had recognized him. He had told the curé and they had found a pretext for calling on the colonel together. The visit had led to others. The colonel had at first been very reticent, but finally he had unbosomed himself and the curé and churchwarden had heard the story of how he had sacrificed his happiness for the sake of his son’s future. As a result the curé conceived a great respect and affection for the colonel which the colonel returned. In any case, when both are honest and warm-hearted, no two men are more fitted to understand one another than an old priest and an old soldier. Indeed, they are the same man. One has served his country here below and the other serves his country in Heaven. There is no other difference.
Twice a year, on New Year’s Day and the feast of St George, Marius wrote a letter to his father, dictated by his aunt, which might have been copied from a book on the art of letter-writing. This was all Monsieur Gillenormand would allow. The colonel replied with long, affectionate letters which the old man stuffed in his pocket without reading them.
Mme de T—’s salon was all Marius knew of the world, the only opening that afforded him a view of life; a gloomy place and an opening that admitted more chill than warmth, more darkness than light. The boy, who was all high spirits when he entered that strange world, became quickly subdued and, which was even more foreign to his age, earnest-minded. Surrounded by those oppressive and idiosyncratic personalities, he looked about him in a kind of sober amazement which everything conspired to enhance. There were highly venerable elderly ladies in Mme de T—’s circle with names such as Mathan, Noé, Lévis which was pronounced Lévi, and Cambis, pronounced Cambyse. The aged countenances and biblical names were mingled in his mind with the Old Testament which he knew almost by heart, and when he contemplated them seated in a circle round a dying fire by the dim light of a green-shaded lamp, the stern profiles, the white or grey hair, the flowing skirts in the fashion of another age, their drab colours scarcely discernible, letting fall at rare intervals remarks that were at once majestic and astonishing, the little boy did so with startled eyes and with a feeling that these were not women but matriarchs and witches, not living beings but ghosts.
Mingled with the ghosts were a number of priests and noblemen, among the latter the Marquis de Sassenay, official secretary to the Duchesse de Berry, the Vicomte de Valroy who published mono-rhyming odes under the pseudonym of ‘Charles-Antoine’, the Prince de Beauffremont, still young but with greying hair and a lively and pretty wife whose low-cut dresses of red velvet with gold trimmings affronted the prevailing gloom, the Marquis de Coriolis d’Espinouse, celebrated for his mastery of ‘measured politeness’, the Comte d’Amendre with his amiable chin and the Chevalier de Port de Guy, mainstay of the Bibliothèque du Louvre, which was known as ‘the king’s study’. Monsieur de Port de Guy, who was bald and elderly rather than really old, was fond of recounting how in 1793, when he was sixteen, he had been imprisoned for subversion and manacled to the octogenarian Bishop of Mirepoix, also imprisoned for subversion but as a priest, whereas he himself had been charged as a soldier. This was at Toulon, and they had had the duty of going after dark to remove from the scaffold the heads and bodies of persons guillotined during the day. They had carried the bodies away on their backs, and their red convict smocks had acquired a thick caking of gore, damp at night but dry by the morning. Gruesome tales of this kind abounded in Mme de T—’s salon, where the reviling of Marat made it obligatory to sing the praises of Trestaillon, the leader of the White Terror in Nîmes. A few die-hard deputies met there to play a rubber of whist, and the Bailli de Ferrette, the former boon companion of the Comte d’ Artois, looked in on his way to visit Monsieur de Talleyrand.
Among the priests may be mentioned the Abbé Halma, whose collaborator on La Foudre had once said to him, ‘Bah! Who is there under the age of fifty? Only a few greenhorns!’ There was also the papal nuncio, Monsignor Macchi, and two cardinals, Monsieur de la Luzerne and Monsieur de Clermont-Tonnerre. Cardinal de la Luzerne was a writer who was later to distinguish himself by having signed articles published in Le Conservateur side-by-side with those of Chateaubriand. Monsieur de Clermont-Tonnerre was Archbishop of Toulouse but paid frequent visits to Paris; a lively little old man who displayed red stockings under his hitched-up cassock and whose particular attributes were his detestation of the Encyclopedia and his passion for billiards. He had been introduced to Mme de T—’s salon by his closest friend, the former Bishop of Senlis, Monsieur de Roquelaure, who was noted for his tallness of stature and the assiduity of his work as a member of the Académie Française. These ecclesiastics, who for the most part were courtiers as well as churchmen, made their own contribution to the aristocratic tone of a salon which included five Peers of France. Nevertheless, since in this century the Revolution must make itself felt everywhere, that feudal gathering, as we have said, was dominated by a man of the middle-class, Monsieur Gillenormand.
The salon represented the essence and quintessence of ‘white’ reactionary Paris society. Prominent public figures, even those professedly royalist, were kept at arm’s length, there being always an element of anarchy in current reputation. Chateaubriand, had he entered that drawing-room, would have been viewed with the utmost suspicion. Nevertheless a few royalists who had accepted the Republic were admitted on sufferance, among them Comte Beugnot, who had held a high position under the Empire.
Our present aristocratic salons bear no resemblance to that one. The Faubourg Saint-Germain of today has a smell of heresy. Our royalists have become democratic, and it is to their credit.
In Mme de T—’s superior world the most delicate and lofty sentiments prevailed, couched in terms of flowery politeness. Old forms that were the very spirit of the ancien régime, buried but still living, were unconsciously preserved, and some of these, particularly in the matter of language, would seem very odd today. The superficial student indeed might have mistaken for provincialisms what were merely survivals. A lady would be addressed as ‘Madame la Générale’, and even ‘Madame la Colonelle’ was not unknown. The charming Madame de Léon, no doubt recalling the Duchesses of Longueville and Chevreuse, preferred this form of address to her title of Princess, and the Marquise de Créquy was ‘Madame la Colonelle’. That small world also adopted the habit, in private conversation with the king at the Tuileries, of addressing him in the third person as ‘the king’, the conventional ‘your Majesty’ having been ‘debased by the Usurper’.
These were the terms in which men and events were judged. The age was mocked, which made it unnecessary to understand it. It was a circle of the blind leading the blind, each man sustaining the illusions of his fellow. The years following Coblenz were treated as though they had never happened. Just as Louis XVIII was, by the Grace of God, in the twenty-fifth year of his reign (the Charter of 1814 was officially issued in the nineteenth year of his reign, the Bonaparte interregnum being ignored), so might that little world of returned emigrés be said to be in the twenty-fifth year of their adolescence.
All was harmony; nothing was too much alive, a word was scarcely a breath, and a newspaper, like the salon itself, was a papyrus. There were young people, but they were partly dead. The liveries in the antechamber were faded. These totally outmoded persons were attended by servants of the same kind. Everything had an air of having lived a long time ago and of stubbornly holding out against the tomb. To conserve – conservation – conservative – the words constituted nearly their whole vocabulary. To be ‘in good odour’, that was the important consideration; and indeed aromatics played a significant part in the thinking of that world, their notions had a smell of vetiver. The masters were embalmed, and the valets stuffed with straw. A certain elderly marchioness, who had returned from emigration so penniless that she could only afford one maid, still talked about ‘my people’.
In short, Mme de T—’s salon was ‘ultra’. Since that word no longer has any meaning, although what it represents has perhaps not wholly disappeared, we must explain it.
To be ‘ultra’ is to go to the extreme. It is to attack the sceptre in the name of the throne and the mitre in the name of the altar; to abuse the cause one supports; to rush one’s fences, outdo the executioner in the grilling of heretics, charge the idol with insufficient idolatry, insult by excessive adulation, find the pope insufficiently papist and the king insufficiently royalist. It is to denigrate the whiteness of alabaster or snow or the swan or the lily in the name of flawless whiteness; to be a partisan of causes to the point of becoming their enemy; to be so vehemently for as to be in fact against.
This spirit of ‘ultraism’ especially characterized the first phase of the Restoration. There has been nothing in history resembling that short period which began in 1814 and was ended in 1820 by the coming of Monsieur de Villèle, the statesman of the Right. Those six years were an extraordinary interlude, at once boisterous and bleak, gay and gloomy, lighted as though by the rays of a new dawn but at the same time overcast by the shadow of the great catastrophes still darkening the sky and only gradually receding into the past. In that mingling of light and dark a small world which was at once old and new, riotous and sad, youthful and senile, was rubbing its eyes. Nothing so resembles an awakening as a return. They eyed France with resentment, and France looked back at them with irony, old marquises like owls stalking the streets, returned emigrés and ghosts, ’ci-devant’ aristocrats amazed by everything, brave and noble gentlemen smiling to be back in France but also weeping, delighted to see their country again but in despair at not finding the monarchy they had known; the aristocracy of the crusader reviling the aristocracy of the Empire, that is to say, of the sword; historic clans who had lost all sense of history, descendants of the companions of Charlemagne disdaining the companions of Napoleon. Old insults were repaid; the sword of Fontenoy was a rusted mockery, the sword of Marengo odious and nothing but a sabre. The long-ago disowned yesterday. There was no longer any sense of what was great and what ridiculous. There was someone who called Bonaparte Scapin the clown … That world is gone. Let us repeat it, nothing of that world remains. If, by recalling certain of its elements, we seek to reconstruct it, it seems as strange as the world before the flood. And indeed it has been swept away by a flood. It has vanished under two revolutions. What greater flood can there be than the flood of ideas? How quickly they submerge all that they set out to destroy, how rapidly do they create terrifying depths!
This, broadly, was the physiognomy of the ‘ultra’ salons in that distant and ingenuous age when Monsieur Martainville, the founder of the Drapeau blanc, was held to be a wittier man than Voltaire. They had their own literature and politics, devotedly absorbing the works of writers and publicists whose names are now forgotten. Napoleon was the irredeemable Ogre of Corsica. When later the Marquis de Buonaparté was allowed on to the stage of history as lieutenant-general of the king’s armies, this was a concession to the changing spirit of the times.
They did not long retain their purity. As early as 1818 doctrinaires were beginning to appear among them, an unsettling development. These were royalists, in principle, but apologetically. Where the ultras proudly asserted their faith, the doctrinaires were a little ashamed of it. They were forthright but with silences, their political dogma appropriately tinged with irony; and they should have been successful. They made effective if excessive use of the white cravat and buttoned jacket. Their mistake, or their misfortune, was to put old heads on young shoulders. They posed as sages, hoping to leaven absolute, extremist principles with power exercised in moderation. They answered destructive liberalism with conservative liberalism, sometimes with rare intelligence. Their creed was as follows:
‘Let us be grateful to monarchism. It has served us well. It has restored tradition, reverence, religion, and self-respect. It is loyal, brave, chivalrous, loving, and devoted. It dilutes, however reluctantly, the new-found greatness of the nation with the secular greatness of monarchy. It errs in not understanding the Revolution, the Empire, glory, liberty, new ideas, the younger generation, and the present century. But if it is mistaken in us, are we not sometimes mistaken in it? The Revolution, of which we are the heirs, should be aware of everything. The attack on monarchism is the reverse of liberalism. What a blunder and what blindness! Revolutionary France is lacking in respect for historic France, that is to say for its mother, for itself. The noblesse of the monarchy was treated after the 5th September as the noblesse of Empire was treated after the 8th July.* They were unjust to the Eagle and we are being unjust to the fleur-de-lis. It seems that something must always be condemned. But what purpose is served by tarnishing the crown of Louis XIV and abolishing the escutcheon of Henri IV? We laugh at Monsieur de Vaublanc, who removed the letter N from the Pont d’Iéna, but what he did was what we are now doing ourselves. Bouvines belongs to us, as does Marengo. The fleurs-de-lis are ours, and so is the N. These are our heritage. Why diminish it? We should no more disavow our country in the past than in the present. Why not accept all our history? Why not love all France?’
Thus did the doctrinaires criticize and defend monarchism, which was restive under criticism and furious at being defended.
The ultras represented the first phase of monarchism and the Congregation was characteristic of the second.
We may leave it at that. In the telling of this story the author has come upon this odd moment of contemporary history; he has been obliged to glance at it and to give some account of that vanished society. But he has done so rapidly and without bitterness or any thought of derision. He is attached to it by bonds of affectionate and respectful memory, since they relate to his mother. And it must be said that that small world had its own greatness. We may smile at it, but we cannot hate or despise it. It was the France of a bygone age.
Marius Pontmercy received the haphazard education of children of his class. When he grew too old for his Aunt Gillenormand, his grandfather entrusted him to a worthy tutor of unsullied classical innocence; thus his growing mind was subject first to a prude and then to a pedant. He did his years of high-school and read law at the university. He was a fanatical and austere royalist with little affection for his grandfather, whose frivolity and cynicism irked him, and with dark thoughts of his father. An ardent but reserved young man, high-minded, generous, proud, religious, impulsive; aloof to the point of asperity, uncompromising to the point of unsociability.
The conclusion of Marius’s classical studies coincided with the retirement of Monsieur Gillenormand from society. Bidding farewell to the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the salon of Mme de T—, the old gentleman withdrew to the Marais and his house in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. In addition to the porter, his two servants were the housemaid Nicolette who succeded La Magnon, and the shortwinded Basque of whom mention has already been made.
In the year 1827, when Marius had just reached the age of seventeen, he came home one evening to find his grandfather awaiting him with a letter in his hand.
‘Marius,’ said Monsieur Gillenormand, ‘you are to go to Vernon tomorrow.’
‘Why?’ asked Marius.
‘To see your father.’
Marius trembled slightly. The last thing that had occurred to him was that he would ever be required to visit his father. Nothing could have been more unexpected, more surprising or, it must be said, more disagreeable to him. That their estrangement should be ended by enforced contact caused him no particular apprehension: it was simply tedious. Apart from his political reasons for disapproving of him, Marius was persuaded that his father – ‘the swashbuckler’, as Monsieur Gillenormand called him in his lighter moments – had no affection for him: why else should he have abandoned him to the care of others? Feeling himself unloved, he gave no affection in return; to him it was as simple as that.
He was so astonished that he asked no other question. His grandfather continued:
‘It seems that he’s ill. He wants to see you.’
There was a further pause.
‘You’ll have to start early,’ Monsieur Gillenormand said. ‘I understand there’s a coach that leaves the Cour des Fontaines at six and gets there by evening. You’ll have to catch that. He says it’s urgent.’
He crumpled the letter and put it in his pocket. Marius might, in feet, have left that evening and been with his father next morning, for there was a night-coach to Rouen which left from the Rue du Bouloi and went by way of Vernon. But neither his grandfather nor he thought to inquire.
He reached Vernon at dusk next evening, when the candles were being lit, and asked the first person he met the way to the home of ‘Monsieur Pontmercy’; for he took the Restoration view and did not think of his father as either a baron or a colonel. Arrived at the house, he rang the bell and a woman carrying a small lamp opened the door to him.
‘Monsieur Pontmercy?’ said Marius.
She looked at him without speaking.
‘Is this where he lives?’
She nodded.
‘May I speak to him?’
She shook her head.
‘But I’m his son,’ said Marius. ‘He’s expecting me.’
‘Not any longer,’ the woman said, and he saw that she was in tears.
She pointed to the door of a low-ceilinged room and he entered.
There were three men in the room, which was lighted by a tallow candle on the mantleshelf, one standing, one on his knees and the third, in his nightshirt, lying on the floor. The first two were the doctor and a priest; the third was the colonel.
He had been attacked by brainfever three days before and feeling that the attack was serious had written to Monsieur Gillenormand asking to see his son. He had grown worse, and that evening had risen from his bed, despite his housekeeper’s efforts to restrain him, crying in delirium, ‘My son is late. I must go to meet him.’ He had collapsed in the antechamber and there had died. The doctor and the curé had been sent for, but both had arrived too late – like his son. By the dim light of the candle a tear was to be discerned on the colonel’s pallid cheek. The eye from which it came was sightless, but the tear had not yet dried: it was the measure of his son’s delay.
Marius stood looking down at this man whom he was seeing for the first and last time, the venerable, masculine face, the open eyes which saw nothing, the white hair, the once powerful limbs marked here and there with the furrows of old sabre-cuts and the red stars of bullet-wounds. He gazed at the huge scar imprinted by heroism on a face where God had imprinted kindness. He reflected that this man was his father and now was dead, and he was unmoved. The grief he felt was no greater than the grief he would have felt in the presence of any dead man.
Nevertheless an agony of mourning filled the room. The housekeeper was lamenting in a corner, the priest was praying and sobs were mingled with his prayers, the doctor was wiping his eyes; the very corpse was weeping.
The three of them in their affliction looked at Marius without speaking; he was a stranger. And Marius was ashamed at his lack of feeling. He had his hat in his hand, and he let it fall to the floor, to give the impression that grief had robbed him of the power to hold it. And then he despised himself for having done so. Was it his fault that he had not loved his father?
The colonel had left nothing. The sale of his possessions barely sufficed to cover the cost of the funeral. The housekeeper found a sheet of paper which she handed to Marius. It bore the following message, written in the colonel’s hand.
For my son. The Emperor created me a baron on the field of Waterloo. Since the Restoration has refused me this title, paid for with my blood, my son will adopt it and bear it. It goes without saying that he will be worthy of it.
There was a further message on the other side.
My life was saved by a sergeant after Waterloo. His name was Thénardier. I believe that recently he kept a small inn in a village not far from Paris, Chelles or Montfermeil. If my son should find him he will do Thénardier every service in his power.
Not from any sense of duty towards his father, but from that vague respect for the wishes of the dead which is so strong in all men’s hearts, Marius kept that missive.
Nothing else remained of the colonel. Monsieur Gillenormand sold his sword and uniform to a secondhand dealer. The neighbours looted his garden of its rare flowers and the rest grew rank or died.
Marius spent only forty-eight hours in Vernon. Directly the funeral was over he returned to Paris and resumed his law studies, giving no more thought to his father than if he had never lived. The colonel was buried in two days and forgotten in three.
Marius wore a black band on his hat, and that was all.
Marius clung to the religious habits of his childhood. He went regularly to hear Mass at Saint-Sulpice, in the little lady-chapel where he had always sat with his aunt; but one day in a fit of absentmindedness he seated himself unthinkingly behind a pillar on a velvet-upholstered chair bearing the name of ‘Monsieur Mabeuf, churchwarden’. The service had scarcely begun when an old man approached him and said:
‘Monsieur, that is my place.’
Marius hastily moved and the old man took his seat. But at the end of the service he again approached him.
‘You must forgive me for having disturbed you, Monsieur, and for now taking up a minute of your time. You must have thought me uncivil. I should like to explain.’
‘There’s no need at all,’ said Marius.
‘There is indeed. I would not wish to leave you with a bad impression of myself. I should like to tell you why I have a particular fondness for that place. It was from there that for some years, at intervals of two or three months, I watched an unhappy father who had no other opportunity of observing his son because he was debarred by a family compact from doing so. He came at the time when he knew the boy would be taken to Mass. The son had no idea that his father was there – indeed, he may not even have known that he had a father. The father concealed himself behind that pillar and watched the boy with tears in his eyes. He loved him deeply, as I could not help seeing. So the place has become as it were hallowed for me and it is there that I always hear Mass, preferring it to the churchwarden’s bench where I am entitled to sit. I became acquainted with the unhappy man. There was a father-in-law and a wealthy aunt – and possibly other members of the family – who threatened to disinherit the boy if he had any contact with his parent. The father sacrificed himself for the sake of his son’s future happiness. It was all to do with politics. Of course people must have political opinions, but there are some who go too far. The fact that a man fought at Waterloo does not make him a monster! It is not a sufficient reason for separating a father from his child. The gentleman was one of Bonaparte’s colonels. He died, I believe, not long ago. He lived at Vernon, where my brother is curé. I forget his name – Pontmarie or Montpercy or something of the kind. He had a great scar on his face, from a sabre-cut.’
‘The name is Pontmercy,’ said Marius, who had turned pale.
‘Yes, that’s it! But did you know him?’
‘He was my father,’ Marius said.
The old churchwarden stared at him and exclaimed:
‘So you’re the child! Well, of course, you would be grown up by now. My dear lad, you had a father who greatly loved you.’
Marius offered the old man his arm and walked with him to his dwelling. The next day he said to his grandfather:
‘Some friends and I are planning a shooting-party. Will you allow me to be away for three days?’
‘Four if you like,’ said Monsieur Gillenormand. ‘Have a good time.’ And winking at his daughter he murmured, ‘Some wench, I’ll be bound!’
We shall see later where Marius went. He was away three days, and when he returned to Paris he went straight to the library of the School of Law and asked to see the file of the Moniteur.
He read the Moniteur and went on to read a number of histories of the Republic and the Empire, the Memoirs from St Helena, biographies, newsprints, official bulletins and proclamations, everything he could lay hands on. His first sight of his father’s name in a Grande Armée bulletin put him in a fever of excitement for a week. He called upon generals under whom his father had served. He kept in touch with the churchwarden and learned from him something of his father’s life in Vernon, his flowers and his solitude. In the end he formed a true picture of the gallant and gentle-hearted man, a mingling of a lion and lamb, who had been his father.
While this was going on, and it occupied all his leisure time and all his thoughts, he saw very little of his grandfather and aunt. He appeared at mealtimes but at other times he was not to be found. His aunt was aggrieved, but Monsieur Gillenormand chuckled, ‘It’s the time for wenching.’ But he also remarked, ‘I must say, I thought it was nothing but an escapade. It’s beginning to look like a grand passion.’
It was certainly a passion.
Marius was beginning to worship his father. At the same time his ideas were undergoing a remarkable change, a transformation which took place in a series of stages. Since this story is the portrayal of a large number of the people of our time, we must look at these stages as they occurred.
The first effect upon him of his new insight into recent history was one of bewilderment.
Hitherto the Republic and the Empire had to him been words of ill-omen, the Republic a guillotine in the dusk, the Empire a sword in the night. But when he came to look closely into what he had supposed to be a chaos of darkness he found, with feelings of the utmost astonishment mingled with trepidation and delight, that it was a night filled with stars – Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, Danton, and then the rising of a sun which was Napoleon. He felt that he was losing his bearings and drew back, dazzled by so much brilliance. But collecting his wits after that first amazement and being able to contemplate the events with less abhorrence and the personalities with less apprehension, he came to see that these two groups of men and events might be resolved into two enormous facts, namely, that the Republic represented the sovereignty of civic rights transferred to the masses, and that the Empire represented the sovereignty of the French Idea, imposed upon Europe. The grand figure of the People was what emerged from the Revolution, and from the Empire there emerged the grand figure of France.
We have no need to dwell upon all that was disregarded in this summary and too-synthetic appraisal. We are tracing the gradual development of an unfolding mind. Progress does not happen overnight.
Marius now perceived that hitherto he had understood his country no more than he had understood his father. He had known neither; as it were, he had deliberately closed his eyes. Now his eyes were opened and he was filled with admiration for the one and adoration for the other.
He was overwhelmed with sorrow at the thought that now there was no one except the dead to whom he could talk of what was in his mind. If God in His compassion had spared his father, how eagerly he would have gone to him, how ardently have cried: ‘Father, I am here! I am your son! I think as you do!’ How tenderly he would have clasped his hands and gazed at that scar, ready to kiss the hem of his garment. Why had he died so soon, before age or justice or his son’s love could reach him? There was a constant sob of grief in Marius’s heart, while at the same time he became more truly serious, more truly purposeful, more sure in his thinking and his faith. New lights were constantly dawning upon him, and it was as though a new being were taking shape within him. He was conscious of a sort of natural growth fostered in himself by these two discoveries, his father and his country.
It was as though a key had been placed in his hand and a door opened so that now he could interpret things that he had hated and account for things he had abhorred. He had a clear vision of the hand of Providence, human and divine, in great matters that he had been taught to abominate and great men he had been taught to revile. Thinking of the views he had held as recently as yesterday, which now seemed buried in the past, he was at once outraged and inclined to laugh.
The rehabilitation of his father led in the natural course of events to the rehabilitation of Napoleon; but this, it must be said, did not come easily to him.
He had been instilled from childhood with the views of the men of 1814. All the prejudices of the Restoration, its every interest and instinct, were directed towards the defamation of Napoleon, whom it execrated even more than it did Robespierre. It had cunningly exploited both the war-weariness of the nation and the hatred of the nation’s mothers. Bonaparte had become a sort of fabulous monster, and to make him comprehensible to the simple minds of the people he had been depicted in every kind of terrifying guise, from the awe-inspiring and grandiose to the ugly and grotesque, as a Tiberius and as a buffoon. In referring to Bonaparte one might gnash one’s teeth or explode with laughter, provided always that the basis was hatred. Marius had never had any other conception of ‘that man’, and he clung to it with all the obstinacy of his nature. There was a stubborn being within him who abominated Napoleon.
But his study of recent history, above all documents and firsthand materials, caused the veil which had hidden Napoleon from Marius’s eyes to be gradually dispelled. He began to perceive something immense, and to suspect that until then he had been as mistaken about Bonaparte as he had been about other matters. His vision grew daily clearer and, at first reluctantly but with a growing sense of exhilaration, as though drawn by an irresistible spell, he made the slow ascent from darkness to half-light and at length into the full blaze of enthusiasm.
There was a night when he sat alone at his desk by the open window of his small top-floor room, reading by the light of a candle, his thoughts interwoven with the impressions coming to him out of the dark infinity beyond the window, the starlit sky, the mysterious murmurs of the night. He was reading dispatches of the Grande Armée, those epic reports written on the field of battle, now and then coming upon a mention of his father and, constantly recurring, the name of the Emperor. All the greatness of the Empire was suddenly manifest as though a tide had risen within him. At moments he seemed to feel the nearness of his father’s spirit and to hear his voice in his ear. He fell into a mystical trance, hearing the drums and trumpets, the thunder of gunfire, the steady tramp of marching men, and the distant gallop of horses. Looking upward he saw vast constellations shining in the immeasurable depths of the sky while great events took shape in the written words beneath his eyes. His heart was wrung. He was transported, breathless with revelation; and suddenly, not knowing what impulse prompted him, he got to his feet, leaned out of the window with arms outstretched, and gazing up into the silent immensity of the heavens cried, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’
For him this was the decisive moment. From that time on the Corsican Ogre, the Usurper, the tyrant, the monster who had been the lover of his sisters, the play-actor who took lessons from Talma, the poisoner of Jaffa, the tiger, the alien Bonaparte – all vanished, to be replaced in his thoughts by a remote and dazzling effulgence in which at an inaccessible height a marble Caesar shone. To his father the Emperor had been simply the beloved captain whom he revered and devotedly served; but to Marius he became more than this. He was the pre-ordained founder of the French power destined to succeed the Roman power in the domination of the world, the prodigious architect of a collapse, the successor of Charlemagne, Louis XI, Richelieu, Louis XIV and the revolutionary Committee of Public Safety, having his flaws, no doubt, his failings and even his crimes, since he was a man; but princely in his very failings, brilliant in his defects, powerful in his crimes. He was the Man of Destiny who had compelled all nations to acknowledge ‘the great nation’. He was more even than this; he was France incarnate, conquering Europe with the sword and the world with the light he cast. Marius saw in Bonaparte the awesome spirit who would always arise on the frontier to safeguard the future: a despot, but issuing from a republic and summarizing a revolution. Napoleon became for him Man-and-People, as Jesus is Man-and-God.
As we can see, like all new converts to a religion, in the intoxication of his conversion he went too far. It was his nature to do so: being set upon a given slope it was nearly impossible for him to hold back. A fanatical ardour for the sword gained possession of him, bedevilling in his mind his ardour for the idea. He did not perceive that with his worship of the genius was indiscriminately mingled the worship of force: that is to say, that he was identifying himself with the two sides of his idol, the side which was brutal as well as the side which was divine. He erred in many other respects. He accepted everything. There are ways of falling into error while pursuing the truth. His was a kind of burning sincerity which made no distinctions. In the new course on which he was embarked, condemning the faults of the ancien régime in the measure that he extolled the glory of Napoleon, he disregarded all that might be said in its favour.
But however this might be, he had made an immense stride. Where once he had seen nothing but the fall of monarchy he now saw the rise of France. What had been for him a sunset was now a dawn. His whole direction was reversed.
All this took place in him without his family being aware of it. When in the course of his secret travail he had completely shed his former skin of a Bourbon-supporter and an ultra; when he had stripped away the aristocrat, the Jacobite and the royalist to become wholly a revolutionary, profoundly a democrat and very nearly a republican, he visited an engraver on the Quai des Orfèvres and ordered a hundred visiting-cards bearing the name ‘Le Baron Marius Pontmercy’. It was no more than a logical outcome of the change in him, in which everything gravitated around his father. But since he knew no one, and could not leave the cards with any hall-porter, he kept them in his pocket.
Another inevitable consequence was that as he drew nearer to his father, to the colonel’s memory and to the things for which he had fought for twenty-five years, so he moved further away from his grandfather. As we have said, Monsieur Gillenormand’s attitudes had for a long time jarred upon him. They were separated by all the disharmonies that must arise between a serious-minded young man and a frivolous old one. The gaiety of Gerontius affronts and exasperates the melancholy of Werther. Insofar as they had held the same political opinions and thought in the same general terms, Marius and his grandfather had met, as it were, on a bridge. But when this bridge collapsed the gulf between them was manifest. Marius was filled with resentment at the thought that Monsieur Gillenormand, for nonsensical reasons, had ruthlessly separated him from the colonel, depriving the father of his child and the child of its father. In his newfound reverence for his father he came almost to hate the old man.
But none of this was apparent. Only that he grew more and more reserved, spoke little at meals and was seldom at home. When his aunt reproached him with this he answered her gently, talking about study-courses, examinations, lectures, and so on. His grandfather stuck to his infallible diagnosis. ‘The boy’s in love. I know the symptoms.’
Now and then he went away for short periods.
‘Where does he go?’ his aunt wondered.
On one of these occasions, which were always short, he went to Montfermeil, obeying his father’s injunction to look for the former Waterloo sergeant, the innkeeper Thénardier. But Thénardier had been sold up, the inn was closed and no one knew what had become of him. Marius’s inquiries kept him away from home for four days.
‘He’s certainly got it badly,’ said his grandfather.
They had a notion that he had taken to wearing on his chest, concealed under his shirt, something that hung by a black ribbon from his neck.
Mention has been made of a cavalry-officer.
He was Monsieur Gillenormand’s great-nephew, on his father’s side, and his life was spent performing garrison duties in places remote from the family circle. Lieutenant Théodule Gillenormand had everything that was needed for a young man to be known as a fine officer. He had a ‘girl’s waist’, a dashing way of carrying his sabre and a curled moustache. He very seldom came to Paris, so seldom that Marius had never met him. He was, as we may have said, Aunt Gillenormand’s favourite, her preference being due to the fact that she almost never saw him. To see nothing of a person makes it possible to credit him with all the perfections.
One morning Mlle Gillenormand withdrew to her own room in a state of as much perturbation as her placid nature allowed. Marius had again applied to his grandfather for leave of absence. This had been granted, but the old gentleman had muttered in a frowning aside, ‘He’s getting worse than ever.’ Mlle Gillenormand, greatly intrigued, had paused on the stairs to exclaim, ‘It’s really too much!’ and had followed this with a question: ‘Where in the world does he get to?’ She suspected some more or less illicit romance, a woman veiled in secrecy, clandestine meetings, and she longed to know more. The hint of scandal is by no means abhorrent to such saintly natures.
To allay the undue excitement which these speculations aroused, she picked up her needle and settled down to one of those pieces of embroidery of which the design, under the Empire and the Restoration, consisted largely of carriage-wheels. A dull task and an absent-minded worker. She had been occupied with it for some time when the door opened and there stood Lieutenant Théodule, respectfully saluting her. She uttered a cry of delight. A woman may be elderly, prudish, devout and an aunt, but it is still pleasant to have a lancer walk into one’s sitting room.
‘You, Théodule!’ she exclaimed.
‘I’m passing through, aunt.’
‘Well, come and kiss me.’
‘There,’ said Thèodule, doing so. Aunt Gillenormand went to her writing-desk.
‘You’ll stay at least for the week?’
‘Alas, I must leave this evening.’
‘Surely not.’
‘There’s no help for it.’
‘Dear Théodule, do stay a little longer.’
‘My heart says yes, but duty says no. It’s quite simple. We’re being transferred from Melun to Faillon and we have to go by way of Paris. So I thought, I’ll look in and see my aunt.’
‘Well, this is for your trouble,’ and she pressed ten louis into his hand.
‘For my pleasure, dear aunt.’
He kissed her again, and she had the pleasure of feeling her chest scratched by the braid of a military uniform.
‘Are you riding with the rest of your regiment?’
‘No. I wanted to see you so I got a special dispensation. My groom’s taking my horse and I’m travelling by coach. And while I think of it, there’s something I want to ask you.’
‘Well?’
‘It seems that my cousin, Marius Pontmercy, will also be on the coach.’
‘How do you know that?’ exclaimed Mlle Gillenormand, suddenly all eager curiosity.
‘I saw his name on the list when I went to reserve my seat – Marius Pontmercy.’
‘The wicked fellow!’ his aunt cried. ‘I’m afraid your cousin is not a well-conducted young man like you. So he’s going to spend the night in a coach.’
‘Just like me.’
‘Yes, but with you it’s duty, with him it’s riotous living.’
‘Dear me,’ said Théodule.
At this point something remarkable happened to Mlle Gillenormand: she had an idea. Had she been a man she might well have clapped a hand to her forehead. She said urgently:
‘It’s true, is it not, that your cousin doesn’t know you?’
‘Yes. I’ve seen him, but he has never condescended to notice me.’
‘And you’ll be travelling on the same coach.’
‘Him on top, me inside.’
‘Where does the coach go?’
‘To Andelys.’
‘Is that where Marius is going?’
‘Unless he gets off somewhere on the way, as I shall be doing. I have to change at Vernon for the Gaillon coach. I’ve no idea of Marius’s destination.’
‘Marius! Such an absurd name. How can anyone be called Marius? At least your name is Théodule.’
‘I’d rather it was Alfred,’ said the young man.
‘Well, anyway, Théodule, I want you to listen to me.’
‘Yes, aunt.’
‘And pay great attention.’
‘Yes.’
‘The fact is, Marius is often away from home.’
‘Ha!’
‘He goes somewhere. He’s sometimes away for several nights.’
‘Is he indeed!’
‘We want to know what is going on.’
Théodule replied with the calm of a seasoned warrior, ‘A flutter, you can bank on it.’ He added with a boisterous laugh, ‘A wench, that’s to say.’
‘Exactly,’ said his aunt, seeming to hear the voice of Monsieur Gillenormand and fortified in her own convictions by this repetition of the word ‘wench’. ‘And I want you to do us a favour. Follow Marius if you can. He doesn’t know you, so there will be no difficulty. If it’s a girl, try to catch sight of her and write and tell us all about her. Your grandfather will be greatly interested.’
Théodule had no particular fondness for work of this kind, but he was grateful for the ten louis and had a feeling that more might follow.
‘Very well,’ he said, ‘I’ll do my best.’ And he reflected glumly: ‘So I’m to play gooseberry.’
His aunt embraced him.
‘You’re not the sort to indulge in these escapades, dear Théodule. You’re disciplined, you have principles and a sense of duty. You wouldn’t leave your home to go gallivanting after some shameless hussy.’
Théodule grinned the grin of a pickpocket commended for honesty.
Marius, when he boarded the coach that evening, had no idea that he was being watched. As for the watchdog, his first act was to fall asleep, and he snored all night. At daybreak the guard roused the passengers who had to change at Vernon and Théodule remembered that this was where he got out. Then, as his wits returned, he remembered his aunt, the ten louis and his promise to keep an eye on his cousin. The thought made him laugh.
‘He may have got out long ago,’ he reflected as he buttoned his tunic. ‘He could have got out at Poissy or Triel or Meulan or Mantes, if it wasn’t Rolleboise or Pacy. What the devil am I going to write to the old girl?’
But at this moment he saw through the window a pair of black trousers descending from the top of the coach. It was Marius.
A peasant-girl with a basket of flowers had come up as the postilions changed horses and was urging the travellers to buy bouquets for their ladies. Marius bought an extravagant bunch of the best she had to offer.
‘Upon my soul,’ reflected Théodule, ‘she must be a remarkably pretty woman if she’s worth all that lot. I must certainly have a look at her.’ And he proceeded to follow Marius, no longer because of his promise but from plain curiosity, like a hound hunting on its own account.
Marius paid no attention to him. One or two fashionably-clad women had got out of the coach, but he had not so much as glanced at them. He seemed to be unconscious of what was going on around him.
‘He’s in love, all right,’ said Théodule.
Marius was making for the church.
‘Better and better,’ reflected Théodule. ‘The church, of course. The best kind of rendez-vous is the one with a bit of religion in it. Nothing like a soulful glance under the noses of the saints!’
But when he reached the church Marius did not go inside but walked round it and vanished behind one of the buttresses.
‘So they’re meeting in the open,’ thought Théodule. ‘Well, let’s have a look at the wench.’
He advanced cautiously round the buttress and then stopped dead in dismay.
Marius was kneeling on the grass with his face hidden in his hands. He had arranged his bunch of flowers. Close by where he knelt was a cross of black wood bearing the following name in white letters: COLONEL BARON PONTMERCY.
The ‘wench’ was a grave.
It was here that Marius had come the first time he left Paris and here that he came every time, when his grandfather said, ‘He’s on the rampage.’
Lieutenant Théodule was utterly taken aback by his discovery. He experienced a disagreeable and singular emotion which he was incapable of analysing, a mingling of respect for the dead and respect for a colonel. He withdrew, leaving Marius alone in the cemetery, and there was an element of military discipline in his withdrawal. Death had confronted him wearing officer’s epaulettes and he came near to greeting it with a military salute. Not knowing what to write to his aunt, he decided to write nothing at all, and probably there would have been no sequel to his discovery had not the mysterious working of chance caused that incident in Vernon to be followed almost immediately by a repercussion in Paris.
Marius returned home in the early morning three days later, wearied by two sleepless nights of coach travel. He went straight up to his room, and feeling the need to refresh himself with an hour at the swimming school, went straight off to the baths, having only stopped to shed his top-coat and the black ribbon which he wore round his neck.
Monsieur Gillenormand, who like all elderly persons in good health had risen early, heard him come in. As nimbly as his old legs would allow, he hurried up to Marius’s attic room meaning only to embrace him and perhaps, by adroit questioning, glean some notion of where he had been. But the youth moved faster than the octogenarian, and by the time he had climbed the stairs Marius was gone.
His bed had not been touched and the top-coat and black ribbon lay trustingly upon it.
‘Better still,’ said Monsieur Gillenormand.
A minute later he was in the drawing-room, where his daughter was busy with her cartwheel embroidery. He made a triumphal entry, bringing with him the top-coat and the ribbon.
‘Victory!’ he cried. ‘Now we shall get to the bottom of the mystery. We shall put our finger on the spot. We shall plumb the riddle to its depths and spy out our cunning rascal’s romance. I have the portrait.’
A small case of black shagreen, something like a medallion, was attached to the ribbon. The old man examined it for some moments without opening it, savouring it greedily and angrily like a starving beggar witnessing the serving of a rich meal that is not for him.
‘It can only be a portrait, the sort of thing one wears on one’s heart. How absurd they are! Probably some abominable strumpet, enough to make one shudder. The young have such bad taste these days.’
‘Do open it, father,’ the old maid said.
The case opened with a spring catch. They found nothing in it but a carefully folded sheet of paper.
‘The old, old story!’ cried Monsieur Gillenormand, bursting into laughter. ‘Of course it’s a love-letter.’
‘We must read it!’ his daughter cried.
She put on her glasses and they read it together. What they read was Colonel Pontmercy’s dying message to his son.
The effect of this upon the old man and his daughter cannot be described. They were chilled as though by the presence of the dead. Neither spoke a word except that Monsieur Gillenormand muttered to himself, ‘It’s the bandit’s handwriting, no doubt of that.’
The lady, after inspecting the document from every angle, replaced it in the case. At the same time something had fallen out of a pocket of the top-coat, a small, rectangular packet wrapped in blue paper. Mlle Gillenormand picked it up and undid it. It contained Marius’s hundred visiting-cards. She handed one of them to her father, who read: Le Baron Marius Pontmercy.
The old man rang the bell for Nicolette. He picked up ribbon, case, and top-coat and tossed them into the middle of the room.
‘Take those things away.’
A full hour passed in total silence. The old man and the old maid sat with their backs to each other thinking their separate thoughts, which were probably much the same. At length Mlle Gillenormand said:
‘Pretty!’
A few minutes later Marius appeared, having just returned from the swimming-bath. Before he had even crossed the threshold his grandfather, who still had one of the visiting-cards in his hand, cried out in the sneering, bourgeois tone of voice which was so crushing in its effect:
‘Well, well, well, well – so it seems you’re a baron! My compliments. May I ask what this means?’
Marius flushed slightly.
‘It means that I’m my father’s son.’
Monsieur Gillnormand ceased to smile and said harshly:
‘I am your father.’
‘My father,’ said Marius, speaking steadfastly with lowered eyes, ‘was a humble, heroic man who gallantly served the Republic and France and was great in the greatest chapter in human history. He passed a quarter of a century under canvas, under cannon – and musket-fire by day and in snow and mud and rain at night. He captured two standards, received twenty wounds and died forgotten and neglected, having only one fault to his account, that he had given too much of his heart to two ingrates, his country and myself.’
This was more than Monsieur Gillenormand could endure. At the word ‘republic’ he had risen, or, to be more exact, leapt to his feet, and each successive word uttered by Marius had affected him, old royalist that he was, like the puff of a bellows on a brazier. His colour had mounted from grey to pink, from pink to scarlet and from scarlet to flame.
‘Marius!’ he thundered. ‘Abominable boy. I know nothing of your father and do not want to know. But I know this, that all those people were villains and scoundrels, robbers and murderers. All of them, I tell you! Every one! I admit of no exceptions. Do you hear me? As for you, you are no more a baron than my slipper. The men who served Robespierre were villains and the men who served Bonaparte were knaves. They were renegades who betrayed – betrayed – betrayed their lawful king, and cowards who ran away from the Prussians and English at Waterloo! That is what I know. If your father was one of them, so much the worse. I know nothing of him. And that is that. I am your humble servant, Monsieur.’
Now it was Marius who was the brazier and his grandfather who was the bellows. The young man stood trembling in every limb while his senses reeled. He was the priest who sees his relics scattered to the winds, the fakir who sees his idol spat upon. That such things should be said in his presence was not to be borne, but what was he to do? His father had been grossly insulted, but the offender was his grandfather. How avenge the one without assailing the other? He could not insult his grandfather, but it was equally impossible for him to ignore the insult to his father. The hallowed grave on one side and white hairs on the other. He paused for some moments in furious indecision. Then, with his eyes fixed on the old man, he cried in a ringing voice:
‘Down with the Bourbons and that fat pig Louis XVIII!’
Louis XVIII had been dead four years, but no matter.
The high colour drained out of the old man’s face until his cheeks were as white as his hair. He turned towards the bust of the Duc de Berry and bowed deeply to it in a gesture of singular dignity. Then, twice, he silently paced the length of the room, from the hearth to the window and back, causing the parquet flooring to creak beneath his feet as though a figure of stone were moving over it. The second time he paused and bent over his daughter, who, like an elderly sheep, had witnessed the scene in stupefied consternation. He said with a smile that was almost calm:
‘A baron like this gentleman and a bourgeois like myself cannot live under the same roof.’
Then, white and trembling, his forehead swelling in the terrible blaze of his wrath, he pointed a hand at Marius and cried:
‘Clear out!’
Marius left the house.
On the following day Monsieur Gillenormand said to his daughter:
‘You will send that blood-drinker sixty pistoles every six months, and you will never again utter his name in my presence.’
He had addressed her formally as vous instead of tu. Having a great accumulation of rage to get rid of, and no other outlet for it, he continued to do this for more than three months.
Marius had left the house in an equal fury which was aggravated by a particular circumstance, one of those trifling mishaps which complicate family dramas. The quarrel remains the same, but the sense of grievance is rendered more acute. In hastily gathering up his belongings from the floor of the salon at the old man’s order, and carrying them up to his bedroom, Nicolette had dropped the black medallion containing the colonel’s letter, probably somewhere in the darkness of the attic stairs. It could never be found. Marius was convinced that ‘Monsieur Gillenormand’ (whom thenceforward he never referred to in any other terms) had deliberately destroyed his father’s ‘testament’. Since he knew the words by heart there was no real loss, but the paper itself, the handwriting, that sacred relic, had been very dear to him.
He went off without saying where he was going, or knowing himself, with thirty francs in his pocket, his watch and a few clothes in an overnight bag. Hailing a cab, he had himself driven at random to the Latin quarter.
What was to become of Marius?