AT ABOUT four o’clock on the afternoon of that same day, Jean Valjean had been seated alone on the shady side of one of the more isolated slopes of the Champ de Mars. From caution, from the desire for solitude, or simply because of one of those unconscious changes of habit which occur in all our lives, he now seldom went out with Cosette. He was wearing his workman’s smock, grey linen trousers, and the long-peaked cap which hid his face. He was again on easy and happy terms with Cosette, his earlier anxieties having been put to rest; but during the past week or so other things had occurred to trouble him. One day as he walked along the boulevard he had seen Thénardier. Thanks to his disguise the latter had not recognized him, but since then he had seen him several times, often enough to convince him that Thénardier was now frequenting that part of the town. This had prompted him to take a major decision. Thénardier was the embodiment of all the dangers that threatened him.
Besides which, Paris was in an unsettled state, and for anyone with something to hide the present political unrest had the disadvantage that the police had become more than usually obtrusive, and might, in their search for agitators, light upon someone like Jean Valjean.
All these considerations troubled him. And something else had occurred to add to his unease, an unaccountable circumstance of which he had become aware only that morning. Rising early, before Cosette’s shutters were opened, he had gone out into the garden and had suddenly noticed an address scratched on the wall, apparently with a nail - 16, Rue de la Verrerie.
It was evidently recent. The letters stood out white against the dingy plaster, and there was fresh dust on the weeds at the foot of the wall. It might well have been done the previous night. Was it intended as a message for some third party, or was it a warning to himself? In any case it was certain that the garden had been broken into. Valjean was reminded of the other curious incidents that had disturbed the household. He pondered these matters, but said nothing to Cosette about this latest development, not wishing to alarm her.
The upshot was that, after due consideration, Jean Valjean had decided to leave Paris, and even France, and go to England. He had warned Cosette that he wanted to leave within a week. And now he sat on the grass in the Champ de Mars turning it all over in his mind - Thénardier, the police, the letters scratched on the wall, their prospective journey, and the difficulty of procuring a passport.
While he was thus engaged he saw, by the shadow cast by the sun, that someone was standing on the ridge of the slope at his back. He was about to turn when a scrap of folded paper fell on his knee, seeming to have been tossed over his head. Unfolding it, he read two words, pencilled in capital letters:
‘CLEAR OUT.’
He got up quickly, but now there was no one on the slope. Looking about him he saw a queer figure, too tall for a child but too slight for a man, clad in a grey smock and drab-coloured corduroy trousers, scramble over the parapet and drop into the ditch encircling the Champ de Mars.
Valjean went home at once, his mind much exercised.
Marius dejectedly left his grandfather’s house. He had gone there with only a gleam of hope; he left in utter despair.
The mention of a cavalry officer, his strutting cousin, Théodule, had made no impression on him, none whatever, as any student of the youthful human heart will readily understand. A playwright might have evolved complications arising out of this blunt disclosure from grandfather to grandson, but what the drama would have gained the truth would have lost. Marius was at the age when, in the matter of evil, we believe nothing; there comes a later age when we believe everything. Suspicions are nothing but wrinkles. Youth does not possess them. What overwhelms Othello leaves Candide untouched. As for suspecting Cosette, there were countless crimes which Marius could more easily have committed.
Taking refuge in the resource of the sore in heart, he wandered aimlessly through the streets, thinking of nothing that he could afterwards remember. At two in the morning he returned to Courfeyrac’s lodging and flung himself fully dressed on his mattress. It was daylight before he fell into that state of troubled slumber in which the mind goes on working, and when he awoke he found that Courfeyrac, Enjolras, Feuilly, and Combeferre were all in the room, dressed for the street and seeming very agitated.
Courfeyrac asked him:
‘Are you coming to the funeral of General Lamarque?’
For all they meant to him, the words might have been Chinese.
He went out some time after them, having put in his pocket the pistols Javert had loaned him on the occasion of the affair in February, which he had never returned. They were still loaded. It would be difficult to say what thought at the back of his mind prompted him to do this.
He roamed about all that day without knowing where he went. There were one or two showers of rain, but he did not notice them. He bought a roll at a baker’s shop, thrust it in his pocket and forgot to eat it. It seems, even, that he bathed in the Seine without knowing that he did so. There are times when the head is on fire, and Marius was in that condition. He neither hoped for anything nor feared anything; this was what he had come to since the previous evening. He was waiting feverishly for the present evening, having only one clear thought in his mind, that at nine o’clock he would see Cosette. This last brief happiness was all that the future held for him; beyond it lay darkness. At moments, as he strayed along the frequented boulevards, it struck him that there was a strange hubbub in the town, and he emerged from his preoccupations to wonder, ‘Are people fighting?’
At nightfall, at nine o’clock precisely in accordance with his promise, he was in the Rue Plumet, and as he drew near the wrought-iron gate he forgot all else. It was forty-eight hours since he had seen Cosette and now he was to see her again; all other thoughts were dispelled by this present rapture. Those minutes in which we live through centuries have the sovereign and admirable quality that at the time of their passing they wholly fill our hearts.
Marius slipped through the gate and hurried into the garden. Cosette was not in the place where ordinarily she awaited him. He crossed through the shrubbery and made for the recess by the steps. ‘She’ll be there,’ he thought - but she was not there. Looking up he saw that all the shutters were closed. He explored the garden and found it empty. Returning to the house, half-crazed with love and grief and terror, like a householder returning home at an unpropitious moment, he banged with his fists on the shutters. He banged and banged again, regardless of the risk that a window might open to reveal the scowling face of her father demanding to know what he was about. This meant nothing to him compared with what he feared. He gave up banging and began to shout, ‘Cosette! Cosette, where are you?’ There was no reply. There was no one in the house or garden, no one anywhere.
Marius stared up with despairing eyes at the mournful dwelling, as dark and silent but more empty than a tomb. He looked at the stone bench where with Cosette he had passed so many enchanted hours. Finally he sat down on the steps, his heart swelling with tenderness and resolve. He blessed his love from the depths of his being, and said to himself that, now she was gone, there was nothing for him to do but die.
Suddenly he heard a voice calling through the trees, apparently from the street.
‘Monsieur Marius!’
He looked up.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Is that you, Monsieur Marius?’
‘Yes.’
‘Monsieur Marius, your friends are waiting for you at the barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie.’
The voice was not quite unfamiliar; it resembled the coarse, husky croak of Éponine. Marius ran to the gate, shifted the loose bar and, thrusting his head through, saw someone who looked like a youth vanish at a run into the darkness.
Jean Valjean’s purse was of no service to Monsieur Mabeuf. His aged, childlike austerity had never encouraged gifts from Heaven nor was he disposed to admit that the stars could be transformed into louis d’or. Not knowing where the purse came from he took it to the local police post and left it there as an item of lost property to await a claimant. Needless to say, it was never claimed and did Monsieur Mabeuf no good.
For the rest, Monsieur Mabeuf continued on his downward course. His experiments with indigo were no more successful in the Jardin des Plantes than they had been in the Austerlitz garden. Last year he had owed his housekeeper her wages, this year he owed the rent. The pawnbroker had sold the plates of his Flora after thirteen months, and a tinker had made them into saucepans. Deprived of his plates, and unable even to finish off the incomplete sets of the Flora that he still possessed, he had sold the sheets of text and illustrations to a secondhand dealer at a knock-down price as ‘remainders’. Nothing was now left to him of his life’s work. He lived for a time on the proceeds of the sheets, and when he found that even this meagre nest-egg was nearly exhausted he gave up gardening and let his plot lie fallow. He had long ago given up the two eggs and occasional piece of beef on which he had once lived; his meals now consisted of bread and potatoes. He had sold the last of his furniture and everything he could spare in the way of clothes and bedding, also the majority of his books and engravings. But he still kept the most precious of his books, some of which, such as La Concordance des Bibles, by Pierre de Besse, and Les Marguerites de la Marguerite by Jean de la Haye, dedicated to the Queen of Navarre, were extremely rare. Monsieur Mabeuf never had a fire in his bedroom and went to bed when it grew dark to save candles. He seemed no longer to have neighbours; people avoided him when he went out and he was aware of this. The plight of a child concerns its mother and the plight of a young man may concern a girl; but the plight of an old man concerns no one, it is the most lonely of all despairs. Nevertheless Monsieur Mabeuf had not wholly lost his childlike serenity. His eyes still lighted up when they fell upon a book, and he could still smile while he pored over his edition of Diogenes Laertius, printed in 1644, which was the only copy extant. His glass-fronted bookcase was the only article of furniture he had retained, apart from bare essentials.
Mère Plutarque said to him one morning:
‘I’ve no money to buy dinner.’
By ‘dinner’ she meant a small loaf and four or five potatoes.
‘Can’t you owe for it?’ asked Monsieur Mabeuf.
‘You know very well they won’t let me.’
Monsieur Mabeuf opened the bookcase and spent a long time contemplating his books, each one in turn, like a parent compelled to sacrifice one of his children. Finally he snatched one off the shelf and went out with it under his arm. He returned two hours later with nothing under his arm and laid thirty sous on the table.
‘That will do for dinner.’
But the same thing happened next day and the day after and every day. Monsieur Mabeuf went out with a book and came back with a trifling sum of money. Seeing that he was forced to sell, the secondhand bookseller paid him twenty sous for a volume he had bought for twenty francs, sometimes at the same establishment. Thus his library dwindled. He remarked now and then, ‘After all, I’m eighty’ - perhaps with a lingering thought that he would come to the end of his days before he came to the end of his books. His melancholy increased. But one day he had a triumph. He went off with a Robert Estienne which he sold for thirty-five sous on the Quai Malaquais and came back with a volume of Aide which he had bought for forty sous in the Rue des Grès. ‘I owe five sous,’ he said happily to Mère Plutarque. That day he had no dinner.
He was a member of the Société d’Horticulture. When his state of impoverishment became known the president of the society undertook to speak on his behalf to the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce. ‘Why certainly!’ said the minister. ‘A worthy, harmless old man, a scholar, and a botanist – certainly we must do something for him.’ Next day Monsieur Mabeuf received an invitation to dine at the minister’s home, which, trembling with delight, he displayed to Mère Plutarque. ‘We’re saved!’ he said. Arriving on the appointed evening, he noted that his ragged cravat, his rusty, old-fashioned jacket and his shoes, which had been polished with white of egg, greatly astonished the footmen. Nobody spoke to him, not even the minister. At about ten o’clock, still hoping for a word from someone, he heard the minister’s wife, a handsome lady in a low-cut evening dress whom he had not ventured to approach, ask, ‘Who is that old person?’ He went home on foot, at midnight and in pouring rain, having sold a volume of Elzevir to pay for a fiacre to take him there.
He had fallen into the habit, before going to bed, of reading a few pages of his Diogenes Laertius, having sufficient knowledge of Greek to be able to savour the particulars of the version he possessed. This was now his only pleasure. A few weeks after the dinner-party Mère Plutarque fell suddenly ill. There is something even more distressing than the lack of means to buy a loaf of bread, from the baker, and that is to lack the means to buy drugs from the apothecary. The ailment grew worse, and the doctor prescribed a very expensive medicine. Monsieur Mabeuf went to his bookcase but it was now empty. The last volume had gone. All he had left was his Diogenes Laertius.
Monsieur Mabeuf put the unique volume under his arm and went out. This was on 4 June 1832. He went to Royol’s successor in the Rue Saint-Jacques and came back with a hundred francs. He put the pile of five-franc pieces on his old servant’s bedside table and retired to his bedroom without saying a word.
At dawn the next day he sat down on the overturned milestone which served him as a bench, and contemplated the still morning and his neglected garden. It rained now and then, but he did not seem to notice. During the afternoon he heard a strange commotion coming from the direction of the town, sounds that resembled rifle fire and the clamour of a vast crowd.
Monsieur Mabeuf looked up, and seeing a gardener passing on the other side of his hedge asked him what was happening. The gardener, with a spade over his shoulder, answered in the most unconcerned of voices:
‘It’s a riot.’
‘What do you mean, a riot?’
‘The people are fighting.’
‘What about?’
‘Blessed if I know,’ said the gardener.
‘Where is this happening?’ asked Monsieur Mabeuf.
‘Round by the Arsenal.’
Monsieur Mabeuf went into the house for his hat, looked round automatically for a book to tuck under his arm, found none, muttered, ‘Oh, of course,’ and set off for the town with a wild light in his eyes.