LIFE BECAME very hard for Marius. To have eaten his clothes and his watch was nothing; he had now to chew the cud of utmost necessity. It was a horrible time of days without food, nights without sleep, evenings without light, a hearth without a fire, weeks without work, and a future without hope; threadbare clothes, doors slammed behind him because he had not paid the rent, the insolence of underlings, the scorn of neighbours, humiliation, loss of self-respect, menial tasks performed, disgust, bitterness, and despair. Marius learned to swallow all these things and to know what it was to have nothing else to swallow. In that condition of life when a man has most need of self-esteem because he lacks love, he felt himself mocked because he was ill-clad, and ridiculous because he was penniless. At the age when the heart of youth should be filled with a lordly confidence his eyes were cast down to his worn boots and he suffered all the slights and unjust abasement of extreme poverty: a stern and terrible trial which brings the weak to infamy and the strong to nobility; the crucible into which Destiny casts a man, to make of him a ne’er-do-well or a demi-god.
For many great deeds are accomplished in times of squalid struggle. There is a kind of stubborn, unrecognized courage which in the lowest depths tenaciously resists the pressures of necessity and ill-doing; there are noble and obscure triumphs observed by no one, unacclaimed by any fanfare. Hardship, loneliness, and penury are a battlefield which has its own heroes, sometimes greater than those lauded in history. Strong and rare characters are thus created; poverty, nearly always a foster-mother, may become a true mother; distress may be the nursemaid of pride, and misfortune the milk that nourishes great spirits.
There was a time in Marius’s life when he swept his own landing, bought a penn’orth of cheese from the grocer and waited until dusk before going to the bakery to buy a small loaf which he took furtively away as though he had stolen it. He would sidle into the neighbouring butcher’s shop, elbowed by the chattering housewives – an awkward young man with books under his arm, at once timid and resentful, raising his hat obsequiously to the astonished butcher – and buy a mutton-chop wrapped in paper for six or seven sous. He would cook it himself and live on it sometimes for three days, first the lean, then the fat, and on the third day he would gnaw the bone.
Aunt Gillenormand tried more than once to come to his aid, sending him the sixty pistoles; but he always returned the money, saying that he did not need it.
He had been in mourning for his father when the upheaval in his life had occurred, and since then he had continued to wear black. But his clothes were gradually falling to pieces, and a day came when his jacket was no longer wearable, although he could still wear his trousers. In this emergency Courfeyrac, whom he had served in certain small ways, gave him an old jacket of his own. He had it turned at a cost of thirty sous so that it was as good as new. But it was made of green cloth. Accordingly he went out only after dark, when it looked black. Wishing still to go in mourning, he clad himself in darkness.
With all this he continued his law-studies and qualified as an advocate. Officially he shared Courfeyrac’s chambers, which were presentable and contained a sufficient number of law-books, filled out with tattered novels, to constitute the library required by regulations. He had his letters sent to Courfeyrac’s address.
When he had qualified he notified his grandfather of the fact in a formally worded letter that was, however, filled with dutiful respect. Monsieur Gillenormand’s hands trembled as he read it, but having done so he tore it up and threw it in the wastepaper basket. A few days later his daughter overheard him talking aloud to himself in his room, a thing that always happened when he was in a highly agitated state. He was saying, ‘If you weren’t an imbecile you would realize that one can’t be at the same time a baron and an advocate.’
Poverty is like everything else. In the end it becomes bearable. It acquires a pattern and comes to terms with itself. One vegetates – that is to say, continues to exist in a wretched sort of way that is just sufficient to sustain life. This is what happened to Marius Pont-mercy.
He had got over the worst and the road ahead of him looked somewhat smoother. By dint of hard work, courage, perseverance and resolution, he contrived to earn about seven hundred francs a year. He learned German and English, and thanks to Courfeyrac, who introduced him to his bookseller friend, he was able to fill the humble role of a literary ‘devil’. He wrote prospectuses, translated newspaper articles, annotated new editions, helped to compile biographies and so on. The net result was an average income of seven hundred francs, on which he contrived to live, not too badly, in the manner which we will now describe.
He rented what passed for a room in the Gorbeau tenement at a price of thirty francs a year. Such furniture as it contained was his own. He paid the elderly ‘chief tenant’ three francs a month to sweep the floor and bring him a little hot water in the mornings, and an egg and a roll costing one sou. These constituted his breakfast, which fluctuated a few sous in price according to the price of eggs. At six in the evening he went down the Rue Saint-Jacques to dine chez Rousseau, opposite the print-dealer’s on the corner of the Rue des Mathurins. He had no first course. His meal consisted of a portion of meat, at six sous, a half-portion of vegetables at three sous, and a dessert at three sous, with unlimited bread, costing another three sous. He drank no wine, but only water. When he paid at the desk, majestically occupied by Madame Rousseau, who in those days was already plump but still youthful, he gave the waiter a sou and Madame Rousseau gave him a smile. Then he left, having purchased for sixteen sous a dinner and a smile.
The Restaurant Rousseau, where so little wine was drunk and so much water, was a place of rest rather than stimulation. It no longer exists. Its proprietor was known as ‘Rousseau l’aquatique’, a play on the word ruisseau, meaning a stream.
So, breakfast for four sous and dinner for sixteen sous. His food cost him a franc a day, or 365 francs a year. Adding the thirty francs rent, the thirty-six for the old woman and something for minor expenses, Marius was fed, housed, and served for 450 francs a year. His outer clothing cost him a hundred francs a year, his linen and his laundry fifty francs each. The whole did not exceed 650 francs. He had fifty francs left, which made him rich, able occasionally to lend a friend ten francs. Courfeyrac had once borrowed sixty from him. The problem of heating was simplified by the fact that his room had no fireplace.
He always had two suits, an old one for everyday and a new one for special occasions. Both were black. He had only three shirts, one on his back, one in reserve, and one at the laundry. He replaced these when they wore out. They were generally frayed, for which reason he kept his jacket buttoned to the chin.
It took Marius some years to achieve this satisfactory state. They had been rough years, difficult to live through and surmount. He had never given up. He had suffered everything conceivable in the way of hardship and done everything except run into debt. He could pride himself on the fact that he had never owed anyone a sou. To him a debt was the beginning of slavery. He went so far as to say that a creditor is worse than a master; for a master owns only your physical presence, whereas a creditor owns your dignity and may affront it. Rather than borrow money he went without food. He had known many days of fasting. Realizing that all extremes meet, and that, if one is not on one’s guard, material abasement may end in spiritual abasement, he set particular store by his pride. Words and gestures which in other circumstances he might have considered acts of ordinary politeness seemed to him to contain a hint of obsequiousness, and he recoiled from them. He offered nothing, fearing to be rebuffed. There was a kind of aloofness in his manner. He was withdrawn to the point of surliness.
In all his trials he was sustained and at times even exalted by a secret strength in himself. The soul aids the body and at moments uplifts it. It is the only bird that can endure a cage.
With the name of his father another name was imprinted in Marius’s heart – the name of Thénardier. His naturally ardent and earnest temperament had caused him to invest with a sort of halo the man who, as he believed, had saved his father at Waterloo, the intrepid sergeant who had rescued him amid a hail of bullets. He never thought of his father without also thinking of that man, associating the two in an aura of almost religious veneration, a high altar for the one and a low altar for the other. His concern for Thénardier was heightened by the fact that he knew him to have been overtaken by misfortune. Since learning in Montfermeil of his bankruptcy and disappearance, he had done everything in his power to find him. He had scoured the region, visiting Chelles, Bouchy, Gourney, Nogent and Lagny, and the search, which had now gone on for three years, had cost him all the little money he could spare. No one had been able to give him news of Thénardier, and it was rumoured that he had left the country. His creditors had also been looking for him, no less assiduously than Marius, if for somewhat different reasons, but had not been able to run him to earth. This was the only debt Marius’s father had bequeathed to him, and he held it to be a point of honour that he should pay it. ‘My father lay dying on the field of battle,’ he thought, ‘and Thénardier rescued him amid the smoke and gunfire and carried him to safety on his back. And he owed my father nothing. How can I, who owe Thénardier so much, fail to seek him out in the trouble which has overtaken him and restore him to life. I must surely find him!’ … Indeed, Marius would have given his right hand to find Thénardier, and would have shed his last drop of blood to rescue him from destitution. To find him and do him some signal service; to be able to say to him, ‘You don’t know me but I know you. Here I am – ask what you will of me’ – this was Marius’s most cherished and glorious dream.
Marius was now twenty. It was three years since he had parted from his grandfather, and the situation between them remained unchanged.
They had not met or sought to be reconciled. A meeting would, it seemed, have served only to renew a quarrel in which neither would give way. If Marius was the irresistible force, old Gillenormand was the immovable object.
It must be said that Marius had misunderstood his grandfather. He had come to believe that Monsieur Gillenormand had never had any real fondness for him, that the forthright, sardonic old man who cursed and shouted and flourished his stick had never felt for him anything more than the harsh, casual affection of a stage stepfather. In this he was wrong. There are fathers who do not love their sons, but there has never been a grandfather who did not adore his grandson. The truth, as we have said, is that Monsieur Gillenormand idolized Marius; but he did so in his own fashion, to an accompaniment of chiding and even blows. The boy’s departure had left a black emptiness in his heart. He had ordered that his name should never be spoken, and yet was sorry that the order was so faithfully obeyed. At first he had hoped that the youthful rebel, the Bonapartist and Jacobin, would come back. But the weeks passed, the months and years, and to the old man’s grief he did not do so. ‘What else could I have done but turn him out?’ he asked himself; and then he wondered whether he would do the same thing if it were to be done again. His pride promptly answered yes, but his old head, shaking in the silence, mournfully answered no. He had periods of utter dejection, so greatly did he miss Marius. Old people need love as they need sunshine; it is warmth. For all his strength of character, something in him had been changed by Marius’s absence. Not for anything in the world would he have reached out a hand towards ‘that young monster’; but he suffered. He never asked after him but constantly thought of him. He continued to live in the Marais, more secluded than ever, still cheerful and forthright as he had always been, but now there was a note of harshness in his gaiety, as though it expressed both pain and anger, and his outbursts of fury were always succeeded by a fit of gloomy depression. He sometimes said to himself, ‘If he were to come back, how I’d box his ears!’
As for his daughter, she was too shallow-minded to be capable of any deep affection. Marius became a remote and shadowy figure to her, and in the end she thought far less about him than about the cat or parrot which she doubtless possessed.
Old Gillenormand’s unhappiness was rendered more acute by the fact that he contained it wholly within himself, never allowing it any outward expression; it was like one of those recently invented furnaces which consume their own smoke. It happened sometimes that an inquisitive acquaintance would ask after Marius – ‘What is your grandson doing these days?’ To which the old gentleman would reply, sighing if he was in melancholy mood, or shooting his cuffs if he wished to appear gay, ‘The Baron Pontmercy is pursuing his career somewhere or other.’
And while the old man grieved, Marius congratulated himself. As with all brave hearts, misfortune had robbed him of bitterness. He thought of Monsieur Gillenormand only with kindness, but he had made up his mind that he could accept nothing from the man who had treated his father so badly. The rigours of his present life gratified and pleased him. He told himself with a kind of satisfaction that it was the least he deserved, an expiation; that otherwise he must have been punished in some other way, at some later date, for his unfilial indifference to his father; that it would have been unjust for his father to suffer everything and himself nothing. What were his own hardships and misfortunes, compared with the colonel’s heroic life? It seemed to him that the only way he could emulate his father was by facing the trials of poverty as bravely as his father had faced the enemy, and he had no doubt that this was what the colonel had meant by the words, ‘he will be worthy of it’ – words which Marius could not wear on his breast, since the letter had been destroyed, but which he would wear forever in his heart
And then, although he had been no more than a youth when his grandfather had turned him out, he was now a man. He felt like a man. Poverty, we must repeat, had been good for him. Poverty in youth, when it is mastered, has the sovereign quality that it concentrates the will-power upon striving and the spirit upon hope. By stripping our material existence to its essentials and exposing its drabness, it fosters in us an inexpressible longing for the ideal life. The well-to-do young man is offered a hundred dazzling and crude distractions – horses, hunting and gambling, rich food, tobacco, and all the rest – occupations for his baser nature at the expense of everything in him that is high-minded and sensitive. The poor young man struggles to stay alive; he contrives to eat, and his only solace is in dreaming. His only theatre is the free show that God provides, the sky and the stars, flowers and children, mankind whose sufferings he shares and the created world in which he is trying his wings. He lives so close to humanity that he sees its soul, so close to the divine creation that he sees God. He dreams and feels his own greatness; dreams again and feels tenderness. He progresses from the egotism of the man who suffers to the compassion of the man who meditates, and an admirable sentiment is born in him, of self-forgetfulness and feeling for others. Reflecting on the countless delights that nature showers on minds open to receive them, and denied to those whose minds are closed, he ends, a millionaire of the spirit, by pitying the millionaire of nothing but money. All hatred disappears from his heart as enlightenment grows in him. Indeed, is he really unhappy? No, he is not. A young man’s poverty is never miserable. Any youngster, poor as he may be, with health and strength, a buoyant stride and clear eyes, hot-flowing blood, dark hair, fresh cheeks, white teeth and clean breath, is an object of envy to any aged emperor. And then, he gets up every morning to earn his livelihood, and while his hands are busily employed his backbone gains in pride and his mind gains in ideas. His day’s work done, he returns to the delights of his contemplative life. He may live with feet enmeshed in affliction and frustration, hard-set on earth amid the brambles and sometimes deep in mud; but his head is in the stars. He is steadfast and serene, gentle, peaceable, alert, sober-minded, content with little, and benevolent; and he blesses God for having bestowed on him those two riches which the rich so often lack – work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom.
This was the road which Marius had travelled, and, if the truth be told, he was now inclined a little too much to the side of contemplation. From the moment when he felt reasonably sure of earning a livelihood he had slowed down, finding it good to be poor and working the less to allow himself more time for musing. He sometimes spent whole days in reverie, plunged in dreams like a visionary in the debauch of an inward exaltation. He had settled the problem of his life in this fashion: to do as little material work as possible in order to work the more at immaterial things: in a word, to devote a few hours to practical affairs and squander the rest on the infinite. He failed to perceive, believing that he lacked nothing, that contemplation carried to this point becomes a form of sloth, and that, in contenting himself with having secured the bare essentials of life, he was relaxing too soon. It was clear that for a young man of his ardent and energetic nature this could be only a temporary state, and that upon his first encounter with the inevitable complexities of life Marius would wake up.
In the meantime, although he was now an advocate, contrary to what his grandfather supposed, he did not plead in the courts and engaged in no legal transactions. Day-dreaming had given him a distaste for the law. The thought of consorting with attorneys, hanging about the courts, chasing after briefs, was odious to him. Why take the trouble? He saw no reason to change his present way of life. His work as a bookseller and publisher’s hack was not too demanding, and it sufficed for his needs.
One of the booksellers for whom he worked – it was, I believe, Monsieur Magimel – had offered him a permanent situation with lodging thrown in, regular work and a salary of fifteen hundred francs a year. The offer was attractive, but it would mean forfeiting his liberty. He would become a wage-slave, an employed man-of-letters. To Marius’s way of thinking he would be both better and worse off, a gainer in petty comfort and a loser in dignity, exchanging a state of high-minded, unsullied poverty for one of dubious security, rather like a blind man becoming one-eyed. He refused.
His life was a lonely one, partly from his desire to remain uninvolved and also because, having been horrified by the circle presided over by Enjolras, he was not at all disposed to join it. They remained on friendly terms, ready to help one another when the need arose, but that was all. Marius had two real friends, a young man, Courfeyrac, and an old man, Monsieur Mabeuf, the churchwarden. Of the two he leaned rather towards the latter, to whom he owed the transformation in his life, the opening of his eyes which had caused him to know and love his father.
Yet in this matter Monsieur Mabeuf had been no more than the passive, unwitting instrument of providence. It was purely by chance that he had shed a light for Marius, doing so as unconsciously as the candle, not the bringer.
As for the upheaval which had taken place in Marius, this was something which Monsieur Mabeuf was quite incapable of understanding, still less of desiring or contriving. Since we are to meet him again later in the story it may be as well, at this point, to say a few words about him.
When Monsieur Mabeuf said to Marius, ‘Of course I approve of people holding political opinions,’ he had been expressing his own attitude of mind. All political opinions came alike to him and he approved of them all without seeking to distinguish between them, like the Greeks, who referred to the Eumenides as ‘beautiful, good, delightful’ … asking only that they would leave them alone. His politics were confined to his passionate love of plants and, even more, of books. Like everyone else he had a label, since at that time nobody could live without one, but his ‘ism’ was of a non-committed kind: he was not a royalist, a Bonapartist, a chartist, an Orleanist, or an anarchist – simply a book-ist.
He could not understand why men should expend themselves in fury over such trivialities as the Charter, democracy, monarchy, republicanism and so forth when there were mosses, grasses, and shrubs for them to look at and folios and octavos for them to browse in. He was far from being idle; his passion for collecting books no more prevented him from reading them than did the study of botany prevent him from being a gardener. His friendship with Colonel Pontmercy had been based on the fact that what the colonel did for flowers, he did for fruit. He had produced a strain of pears as well-flavoured as the pears of Saint-Germain; and it is to him, it seems, that we owe the October mirabelle plum, which has become famous and is as well-liked as the summer mirabelle. He attended Mass more in a spirit of acquiescence than of devoutness, and also because, liking the faces of men but disliking the noise they made, Church was the only place where he could find them together and silent. Feeling that it was his duty to perform some civic function, he had become a churchwarden. For the rest, he had never succeeded in being as fond of any woman as he could be of a tulip-bulb, or of any man as of a manuscript. When he was well past sixty someone had asked him, ‘Were you never married?’ and he had answered, ‘I forget.’ And when it happened to him to exclaim (as who does not?), ‘If only I were rich!’ the thought was prompted, not, as in the case of Monsieur Gillenormand, by the sight of a pretty girl, but by the sight of a volume which he could not afford to buy.
He lived alone with an old housekeeper. He was somewhat gouty, and his rheumaticky fingers stiffened under the blankets when he was asleep. He had published a book with colour plates on The Flora of the Cauteretz Region which was well thought of and of which he owned the plates, selling the volume himself. Two or three purchasers a day called at his dwelling in the Rue Mézières, and this brought him in about two thousand francs a year, nearly his whole income. Poor though he was, he had contrived over the years, by patience and self-denial, to form a collection of rare books of all kinds. He never left home without a book under his arm, and often came back with two. The only adornment of the four-room ground-floor apartment, with a small garden, where he lived, was some framed dried grasses and a few engravings of Old Masters. The sight of a sabre or musket chilled his heart. He had never in his life gone near a cannon, not even at the Invalides. He had a reasonably good digestion, a brother who was a curé, white hair, no teeth in his head and no bite in his spirit, a slight tremor that pervaded his whole body, a Picardy accent, a childlike laugh, a readiness to take fright, and the general look of an old sheep. For the rest, he had no friendships or place of call among the living other than the establishment of an old bookseller near the Porte Saint-Jacques whose name was Royol. It was his ambition to produce a strain of indigo that would grow in France.
His housekeeper was another embodiment of innocence, an excellent, elderly virgin. Her tom-cat, Sultan, who might have mewed Allegri’s ‘Miserere’ in the Sistine Chapel, satisfied all her emotional needs. She had never desired any man or been able to live without a cat. Like him, she had a moustache. Her pride was in her bonnets, which were always white. She passed her leisure hours after Sunday Mass counting the linen in her trunk and spreading out on her bed the dress materials which she bought but never had made into dresses. She knew how to read. Monsieur Mabeuf had nicknamed her Mère Plutarque.
Monsieur Mabeuf had taken a fancy to Marius because Marius, being young and gentle, warmed his old age without ruffling his diffidence. To the old a gentle youth is like sunshine without wind. At the time when Marius was immersed in military history, cannon-fire and counter-marches, all the prodigious battles in which his father had dealt and received tremendous sabre-cuts, he would go to call on Monsieur Mabeuf, who would talk to him about heroes as though they were flowers.
But when, in 1830, his brother the curé had died, Monsieur Mabeuf’s whole life had been plunged in darkness. The bankruptcy of an attorney had led to a loss often thousand francs, the greater part of the capital that he and his brother had shared. The July Revolution caused a crisis in the book trade. The last thing to sell in any time of upheaval is a book on plants, and the sales of The Flora of the Cauteretz Region abruptly ceased. Weeks went by without a purchaser. Monsieur Mabeuf would start up hopefully at the sound of the bell only to be told sadly by Mère Plutarque, ‘It’s only the water carrier, Monsieur’ … In short, a day came when Monsieur Mabeuf was obliged to leave the Rue Mézières, give up his post of churchwarden at Saint-Sulpice, and sell a part, not of his books but of his prints, those he valued the least. He moved to a small house on the Boulevard Montparnasse, which, however, he left at the end of the first quarter, for two reasons – first, because the rent of the ground-floor apartment and garden was three hundred francs, and two hundred was all he could afford; and secondly because, being adjacent to the Fatou shooting-gallery, he was troubled all day by the sound of pistol-shots, and this he found unendurable.
Taking with him his Flora, his plates, his dried grasses, books and portfolios, he removed to a small cottage near the Salpêtrière, in what was then the village of Austerlitz. Here, for fifty crowns, he acquired three rooms and a garden with a well, enclosed by a hedge. At the same time he sold the bulk of his furniture. On the day when he took up residence he was particularly cheerful and himself drove in the nails on which to hang his engravings and grasses. He spent the rest of the day digging the garden, and in the evening, seeing the look of gloom on Mère Plutarque’s face, he patted her on the shoulder and said, smiling, ‘Cheer up! We still have the indigo.’
Only two visitors, the bookseller from the Porte Saint-Jacques and Marius, ever called at his Austerlitz cottage – a name, be it said, of which the warlike flavour by no means pleased him.
In general, as we have already suggested, minds absorbed in wisdom or in folly, or in both at once as often happens, are little affected by the vicissitudes of daily life. Their personal destiny is a thing remote from them. Such detachment creates a state of acquiescence which, if it were the outcome of reflection, might be termed philosophical. But they submit to losses and reverses, even to physical decay, without being much aware of them. It is true that in the end there is an awakening, but it is late in coming. In the meantime they stand as it were aloof from the play of personal fortune and misfortune, pawns in a game of which they are detached spectators.
Thus it was that with the shadows deepening about him, with his hopes fading one after another, Monsieur Mabeuf had remained serene, rather childishly but profoundly so. His spiritual states resembled the swing of a pendulum. Once set in motion by an illusion, the swing continued for a long time, even after the illusion had vanished. A clock does not stop the moment one loses the key.
Monsieur Mabeuf had innocent pleasures, inexpensive and unexpected, bestowed on him by trifles. One day Mère Plutarque was reading a novel in a corner of the room. She read aloud, finding it easier in this way to understand what she was reading. To read aloud is to assure oneself that one is reading, and there are persons who read very loudly indeed, as though positively proclaiming the fact. She was reading in this fashion and Monsieur Mabeuf was half-listening but not really attending. The tale had to do with a dragoon officer and a village beauty, and she read:
‘The beauty pouted and the dragoon …’ The French words Were ‘bouda’ and ‘dragon’.
Here she paused to wipe her glasses, and Monsieur Mabeuf, looking up, repeated:
‘Buddha and the dragon … Well, there is said to have been a dragon which lived in a cave and poured such torrents of flame from its nostrils that it scorched the sky. It had even set several stars on fire, and moreover it had tiger’s claws. Buddha boldly entered its cave and converted it. That is a good book that you are reading, Mère Plutarque. There is no more charming legend.’
And he fell into a delicious abstraction.
Marius had an affection for the simple-minded old man who was drifting by degrees into utter poverty, with a growing sense of perplexity but still with no feeling of dismay. He saw Courfeyrac from time to time, and he called on Monsieur Mabeuf; but only on rare occasions, once or twice a month.
Marius enjoyed going for long walks – along the outer boulevards or the Champ de Mars, or in the less frequented streets round the Luxembourg. He would spend long periods contemplating the market gardens – vegetable plots, poultry scratching amid the dung, a horse turning the wheel of a hoist. Strangers looked at him with surprise, and sometimes even with suspicion. But it was only an impecunious young man dreaming the hours away.
It was during one of these walks that he had discovered the Gorbeau tenement and, attracted by its cheapness and isolation, had rented a room there. He was known there only as Monsieur Marius.
A few retired officers, former comrades of his father, one or two generals among them, having learned of his existence occasionally invited him to their homes. He did not refuse these invitations, which gave him a chance to talk about his father. So from time to time he visited Comte Pajol, General Bellavesne, and General Fririon, at the Invalides. There was music and dancing. On these occasions he wore his better suit. But he went only on nights when the streets were dry, because he could not afford a cab and refused to show himself except with boots shining like mirrors. He sometimes remarked, but without bitterness: ‘That is how things are. You may go to a polite salon with muddy garments but not with muddy boots. That is the sole requirement, the one thing that must be irreproachable – not your conscience.’
All passions except those of the heart are dissolved by reverie. Marius’s political ardours had vanished, helped by the 1830 revolution, which had calmed and appeased him. He was the same young man, but without the fire, holding the same opinions but less vehemently. To be exact, he no longer had opinions, but only sympathies. The only party he belonged to was that of humanity. Among nations he preferred the French, within the nation he preferred the masses, and of the masses he preferred the women. It was they, above all, whom he pitied. He had come to prefer books to events and poets to heroes; and most particularly he preferred a book like Job to an event like Marengo. When after a day spent in meditation he returned home by the evening light of the boulevards, and saw through the branches of the trees the measureless space of the infinite, the nameless lights, the darkness and mystery, it seemed to him that all things that were not simply human were of very little account. He believed, and perhaps he was right, that he had penetrated to the heart of life and human philosophy, and he came to pay little attention to anything except the sky, which is the only thing that Truth can see from the bottom of her well.
But this did not prevent him from devising countless plans and projects for the future. A person able to look into Marius’s heart, during that period of dreaming, would have marvelled at its purity. Indeed, if our earthly eyes possessed this power of seeing into the hearts of others, we would judge men far more surely by their dreams than by their thoughts. Thought must always contain an element of desire, but there is none in dreaming. The dream, which is wholly spontaneous, adopts and preserves, even in our utmost flights of fancy, the pattern of our spirit; nothing comes more truly from the very depths of the soul than those unconsidered and uncontrolled aspirations to the splendours of destiny. It is in these, much more than in our reasoned thoughts, that a man’s true nature is to be found. Our imaginings are what most resemble us. Each of us dreams of the unknown and the impossible in his own way.
About halfway through that year of 1831 the old woman who ran errands for Marius told him that his neighbours in the tenement, a wretchedly poor family named Jondrette, were to be evicted. Marius, who spent so much of his time elsewhere, had scarcely realized that he had any neighbours.
‘Why are they being turned out?’ he asked.
‘Because they’re behind with their rent. They owe two quarters.’
‘How much does it come to?’
‘Twenty francs.’
Marius kept a reserve of thirty francs in a drawer.
‘Here are twenty-five francs,’ he said to the old woman. ‘Pay the back rent and give the poor souls five francs for themselves. But don’t tell them that the money comes from me.’
It so happened that Lieutenant Théodule’s regiment was transferred to garrison duties in Paris, and the circumstance inspired Aunt Gillenormand with another idea. Her first idea had been to ask Théodule to spy on Marius; her second was to make him Marius’s successor.
In any event, and more especially if Monsieur Gillenormand should feel the need of a young face about the house, these rays of morning light being grateful to old ruins, it was expedient that Marius should be replaced. ‘It amounts to no more than changing a name in a book,’ she reflected. For Marius read Théodule. A great-nephew was near enough to a grandson, and a lancer was surely as acceptable as a lawyer.
One morning when Monsieur Gillenormand was engaged in reading some such journal as La Quotidienne, his daughter entered the room and said in the mellowest of voices, for she was talking about her favourite:
‘Father, Théodule is calling this morning to pay his respects.’
‘And who is Théodule?’
‘Your great-nephew.’
‘Aha.’
The old gentleman returned to his reading, dismissing this unimportant great-nephew from his mind, and, as so often happened when he read the newspaper, was soon simmering with fury. The paper, which, it goes without saying, was of the royalist persuasion, announced without comment that on the following day one of those events was to take place which were then of daily occurrence in the life of Paris. The students from the faculties of Law and Medicine were to hold a meeting at twelve o’clock in the Place du Panthéon – ‘for the purpose of discussion’. The subject of the meeting was one of the questions of the hour: that of the artillery of the Garde Nationale, and the dispute that had arisen between the Ministry of War and the Civil Militia over the guns parked in the courtyard of the Louvre. The students were having the temerity to debate this matter in public. It was nearly enough to bring Monsieur Gillenormand to boiling-point.
And Marius, being a student, would no doubt be taking part in the proceedings on the Place du Panthéon!
It was as the old gentleman was digesting this painful thought that Théodule, who had had the prudence to wear civilian clothes, was tactfully ushered in by Mlle Gillenormand. The lancer had reasoned as follows: ‘The old druid hasn’t put all his money into an annuity. It’s worth dressing up from time to time, just to humour him.’
‘Father,’ said Mlle Gillenormand, ‘here is your great-nephew Théodule.’ And she murmured to the young man, ‘Mind you agree with everything he says.’
She then withdrew. The lieutenant, unaccustomed to meeting persons of such antiquity, mumbled a greeting and performed an awkward gesture which started automatically as an army salute and finished up as a civilian bow.
‘So it’s you, is it? Well, sit down,’ said the old man.
Having said this he forgot all about the visitor and resumed his train of thought. As Théodule seated himself he rose from his chair and began to pace the room, talking in a loud voice and fiddling with the watches in his two waistcoat pockets.
‘That riff-raff holding a meeting in the Place du Panthéon! A bunch of young scallywags, God save us, only just out of the nursery! If you gave their noses a tweak milk would come out. And they’re to debate in public! In God’s name, what’s the country coming to? Everything’s going to the dogs! Civil militia! Civilians armed with cannon! And they’ll be airing their views on the Garde Nationale! That’s what Jacobinism leads to. And who else will be there, I ask you? I’ll bet you a million to one there’ll be no one else there except fugitives from justice and discharged convicts – republicans and gaolbirds, they’re one and the same thing. Carnot asked, “Where do you want me to go, traitor?” and Fouché answered, “Wherever you like, imbecile!” That’s the republicans for you!’
‘Quite right,’ said Théodule.
Monsieur Gillenormand gave him a glance and continued:
‘To think that that wretched youth should have had the impudence to join the rebels! Why did he leave my house? To become a republican. But in the first place the people don’t want his republic, they don’t want it, they’ve got enough sense to know that there have always been kings, and always will be, and that the people are simply the people. They laugh at his republic, the young idiot Can there be any more horrible notion? To fall in love with Père Duchêne, think fondly of the guillotine, serenade the men of ’93 – the young of today are so stupid one wants to spit on them! And they’re all alike, no exceptions. You have only to breathe the air in the streets to be driven half insane. This nineteenth century is poisonous, full of young apes who think they amount to something because they’ve grown a goat’s beard and left their parents in the lurch. If it’s republican it’s romantic. And what is this romanticism all about? I will tell you. It is about every imaginable lunacy. Last year they were all going to that play Hernani.* Hernani – I ask you! A mass of contradictions and abominations, and not even written in decent French. And cannons in the Louvre! That’s the sort of thing that goes on nowadays.’
‘You’re perfectly right, uncle,’ said Théodule.
‘Cannons in the courtyard of a museum! Will you tell me what they’re for? Do you want to bombard the Belvedere Apollo or blow up the Venus de Medici? The young men of today are all rascals, as useless as their Benjamin Constant. And when they’re not scoundrels they’re hobbledehoys. They do their best to make themselves unattractive, they dress badly, they’re scared of women, they shy away from petticoats in a way that makes the girls laugh. Upon my word, I believe the poor little fools are afraid of love! They’re uncouth, and on top of that they’re stupid. They repeat music-hall jokes. They wear sack-coats, stableboys’ waistcoats, coarse linen shirts, homespun trousers and boots of rough leather, and their talk is as coarse as their clothes. You could use their jargon to sole their slippers. And then they presume to have political opinions! They want to invent new systems, re-shape society, abolish the monarchy, do away with the law, rebuild the universe, turn everything upside down and inside-out, and their idea of excitement is a sneaking glance at a washerwoman’s legs as she’s climbing on to her cart! Oh, Marius, Marius, poor young idiot! To be holding forth in public places, discussing, debating, taking measures! They call that “measures”, God save us! Disorder reverting to childishness. Schoolboys debating on the Garde Nationale – you wouldn’t get that among the Ojibways or the Cherokees. Those naked savages with heads like shuttlecocks, brandishing their tomahawks, are a lot less brutish than our young bachelors of arts. Rapscallions without two sous to rub together posing as men of learning and competence, propounding and arguing! It’s the end of this wretched terrestrial globe. One final belch was needed and France has produced it. All right, my lads, go on debating! This state of affairs will continue as long as they can stand reading the papers under the arcade at the Odéon. It costs them one sou, and it robs them of whatever good sense and intelligence they possess, and of their heart and soul and spirit. They soak up that stuff, and good-bye to home and family. All the newspapers are a plague, even the Drapeau blanc. So there it is, my boy, and you can pride yourself on having plunged your old grandfather in despair!’
‘Hear, hear!’ said Théodule. Taking advantage of the pause while Monsieur Gillenormand got his breath, he added pontifically: ‘All newspapers should be banned except the Moniteur and all books except the Army List.’
Monsieur Gillenormand proceeded:
‘Like their man Sieyès, a regicide who ended up a senator, the way they all do. They start by calling everybody “citizen” and end up being called Monsieur le Comte. Pot-bellied counts who were once murderers! The philosopher Sieyès! In justice to myself I may say that I have never rated all their philosophizing any more highly than a clown’s bladder. I once saw the senators going along the Quai Malaquais, in purple velvet cloaks embroidered with bees, and Henry IV hats. They were a dreadful sight, like a flock of monkeys in tiger-skins. I tell you, Citizens, that what you call progress is madness, your humanity a dream, your revolution a crime, your republic a monster, and that your young, virginal France comes out of a brothel. I say it to all of you, whether you’re publicists, economists, jurists or greater experts in liberty, equality and fraternity than the blades of the guillotine. That’s what I have to say to you, my good fellows!’
‘Splendid!’ cried the lieutenant. ‘Every word of it is true!’
Monsieur Gillenormand paused on the verge of a gesture, turned, looked hard at the young man and said:
‘You’re a damned fool.’