SOME TIME after the events we have described Boulatruelle had a severe shock.
Boulatruelle was the Montfermeil road-mender whom we met in an earlier part of this tale. He was a man of many troubles, whose stone-breaking caused vexation to travellers on the road. But he cherished a dream. He believed in the treasure buried in the woods of Montfermeil and hoped to find it. In the meantime he picked the pockets of passers-by when he could.
But for the present he was being prudent. He had had a narrow escape, having been rounded up in the Jondrette garret with the other gangsters. Drunkenness had saved him, since it could not be proved that he had been there with criminal intent, and so he had been granted an acquittal, based on his undeniably drunken state. He had then returned to the woods and the road from Gagny to Lagny where under administrative supervision and in a subdued manner, warmed only by his fondness for wine, he had continued to break stones.
The shock was as follows. One morning just before daybreak, going as usual to work but perhaps a little more awake than on most days, he had seen among the trees the back view of a stranger who did not appear wholly unfamiliar. Drinker though he was, Boulatruelle had an excellent memory, a necessary weapon for anyone somewhat at odds with the law.
‘Where the devil have I seen him?’ he wondered, but could find no answer to the question. He considered the matter. The man was not local. He must have come on foot, since no public conveyance passed at that hour. He could not have come from any great distance, since he had no bundle or haversack. Perhaps he had come from Paris. But what was he doing there? Boulatruelle thought of the hidden treasure. Ransacking his memory, he recalled a similar encounter some years before. He had bowed his head while thinking, which was natural but unwise. When he looked up the man was no longer to be seen.
‘By God I’ll find him,’ said Boulatruelle. ‘I’ll find out who he is and what he’s up to. Can’t have secrets in my woods.’ He took up his pick, which was very sharp. ‘Good for digging into the earth, or into a man.’
He set off in the general direction taken by the man. Before long he was helped by the growing daylight. Footprints here and there, crushed bushes and other indications, afforded him a rough trail, which, however, he lost. Pushing further into the wood, he climbed a small hillock and then had the idea of climbing a tree. Despite his age he was agile. There was a tall beech, and he climbed it as high as he could. From this eminence he saw the man, only to lose him again. The man had vanished into a clearing surrounded by tall trees. But Boulatruelle knew the clearing well because one of the trees was a chestnut that had been mended with a sheet of zinc nailed to the bark. Doubtless the heap of stones in the clearing is still there. There is nothing to equal the longevity of a heap of stones.
Boulatruelle almost fell out of the tree in his delight. He had run his man to earth, and doubtless the treasure as well. But to reach the clearing was not easy. Following the twisted paths, it took a quarter of an hour; but to go direct, forcing one’s way through the toughest undergrowth, took twice as long. Boulatruelle made a mistake. For once in his life he took the straight line.
It was a laborious business. When, breathless, he reached the clearing some half an hour later, he found no one there. Only the heap of stones was there; no one had taken that away. But the man himself had vanished, no one could say in what direction. Worse still, behind the heap of stones and near the tree with its zinc plate, was a pile of earth, an abandoned pick-axe, and a hole.
The hole was empty.
‘Scoundrel!’ cried Boulatruelle, flinging up his arms.
Marius lay for a long time between life and death, in a state of fever and delirium, endlessly repeating the name of Cosette. The extent of some of his wounds was serious because of the risk of gangrene, and every change in the weather caused the doctor anxiety.
‘Above all,’ he said, ‘he must not be excited.’ Dressings were difficult, sticking-plaster being unknown at that time. Nicolette tore up countless sheets, ‘enough to cover the ceiling’. While the peril remained Monsieur Gillenormand, hovering distractedly at the bedside, was like Marius himself – neither dead nor alive.
Every day, and sometimes twice a day, a white-haired, well-dressed gentleman, according to the porter, came to ask for news of the sick man and brought with him a bundle of rags for bandages.
Finally, on 7 September, three months to the day after Marius had been brought to his grandfather’s house, the doctor announced that he was out of danger. But because of the damage to his shoulder-blade he had to spend a further two months resting on a chaise-longue. There are always injuries which refuse to heal and cause great vexation to the sufferers, but on the other hand his long illness and convalescence saved Marius from the authorities. In France there is no anger, not even official, that six months do not extinguish; and uprisings, in the present state of society, are so much the fault of everyone, that it is better for eyes to be closed. We may add that Gisquet’s inexcusable order, instructing doctors to denounce the wounded, outraged not only public opinion but that of the King himself, and this protected them. Apart from one or two who were captured in the fighting, they were not troubled; and so Marius was left in peace.
Monsieur Gillenormand at first went through every kind of torment, and then through every kind of rapture. It was with great difficulty that he was restrained from spending all his nights at the bedside. He insisted that his daughter should use the best linen in the house for the patient’s bandages; but Mlle Gillenormand, prudent woman, contrived to save the best without his knowing. He personally supervised all the dressings, from which Mlle Gillenormand modestly withdrew, and when rotted flesh had to be scraped away he exclaimed in pain. Nothing was more touching than to see him tender the patient a cup of tisane with his old, shaking hand. He overwhelmed the doctor with questions, which he endlessly repeated. And on the day when the doctor announced that the danger was past, such was his happiness that he tipped the porter three louis. That night in his bedroom he danced a gavotte, snapping his fingers and singing a little song. Then he knelt down at a chair, and Basque, peeping through the partly open door, was sure that he was praying. Until then he had never believed in God.
His state of rapture grew as the patient’s condition improved. He did absurd, extravagant things, such as running up and down stairs without knowing why. His neighbour, a pretty woman be it said, was astonished to receive a large bouquet from him, greatly to her husband’s annoyance. He even tried to take Nicolette on his knee. He addressed Marius as ‘Monsieur le Baron’ and cried, ‘Long live the Republic!’ He watched over the prodigal like a mother, no longer thinking of himself. Marius had become the master of the house, and he, surrendering, was his grandson’s grandson, the most venerable of children, such was his state of happiness. He was radiant and young, his white hair lending dignity to the warmth shining in his face.
As for Marius, during all his convalescence he had but one thought in mind, that of Cosette. When he ceased to be delirious he ceased to speak her name, but this was precisely because she meant so much to him. He did not know what had happened to her or to himself. Vague pictures lingered in his mind – Éponine, Gavroche, Mabeuf, the Thénardiers, and the friends who had been with him at the barricade. The appearance of Monsieur Fauchelevent in that sanguinary affair was a riddle to him. He did not know how he had come to be saved, and no one could tell him. All they could say was that he had been brought there in a fiacre. Past, present, and future, all were befogged in his mind. There was but one clear, fixed point: his resolve to find Cosette. In this he was unshakeable, regardless of what it might cost, or the demands he might have to make of his grandfather or of life.
He did not conceal the difficulties from himself. And we must stress one point: he was not won over or much moved by his grandfather’s kindness, for one thing because he did not know of it all, and also because, in the wandering thoughts of a sick man, he saw in this new phenomenon an attempt to bring him to heel. He remained cool, and his grandfather’s aged tenderness was wasted. He thought that all would be well while things remained as they were, but that any mention of Cosette would lead to a changed situation – the old quarrel revived. So he hardened his heart in advance. And with returning life his old grievances returned, so that the figure of Colonel Pontmercy came between him and his grandfather. He felt that he could not hope for kindness from one whose attitude to his father had been so harsh. With growing health he felt a kind of acrimony towards the old man, from which the latter suffered. Without giving any sign, Monsieur Gillenormand noted that Marius now never addressed him as ‘father’. He did not, it is true, say ‘Monsieur’, but found ways of avoiding either.
Clearly a crisis was approaching. As nearly always happens, Marius skirmished before joining battle. It happened one morning that Monsieur Gillenormand, glancing at the newspaper, let fall a frivolously royalist remark on the Convention and Danton, Saint-Just and Robespierre.
‘Those men of ’93 were giants,’ Marius said angrily.
The old man did not say another word, and Marius, never forgetting the inflexible grandparent of former years, saw in his silence a manifestation of deeply buried anger, and prepared himself for the struggle that must come. He was resolved that if Cosette were denied him he would strip the bandages off his wounds and refuse all food. His wounds were his armoury. He would have Cosette or die.
One day while his daughter was tidying the room Monsieur Gillenormand bent over Marius’s bed and said to him most tenderly:
‘If I were you, dear Marius, I would begin to eat more meat than fish. A fried sole is excellent at the beginning of convalescence; but a good chop is what a man needs to put him on his feet.’
Marius, whose strength was now almost quite restored, sat up with clenched fists and glared at his grandfather.
‘There is something I have to say to you.’
‘What is it?’
‘I want to get married.’
‘But of course,’ said the old man, laughing.
‘How do you mean – of course?’
‘That’s understood. You shall have your little girl.’
Marius trembled with sheer amazement.
‘You shall have her,’ Monsieur Gillenormand repeated. ‘She comes here every day in the shape of an elderly gentleman who asks for news of you. Since your injury she has spent her time weeping and making bandages. I know all about her. She lives at No. 7, Rue de l’Homme-Armé. You didn’t think of that, did you? You thought to yourself, “I’ll put it to him squarely, that old relic of the ancien régime. He was a beau once; he had his flutter and his wenches. He had his fun, and now we’ll see.” A battle, you thought, and you’d take the bull by the horns. So I suggest that you should eat a chop and you say you want to get married! What a jump! You thought there was bound to be an argument, not knowing what an old coward I am. You didn’t expect to find your grandfather even sillier than yourself, too busy thinking of all the things you were going to say to me. But I’m not so foolish. I’ve made inquiries. I know that she’s charming and good and that she adores you. If you had died there would have been three of us – her coffin and mine alongside your own. I had thought, when you were better, of simply bringing her to your bedside; but that’s the sort of romantic situation that only happens in novels. What would your aunt have said? And the doctor? A pretty girl is no cure for fever. So there you are, and no need to say any more. I knew you did not care for me, and I thought, what can I do to make him love me? I thought, I can give him Cosette. You expected me to play the tyrant and ruin everything. Not a bit of it – Cosette is yours. Nothing could be better. Be so good as to get married, my dear sir. And be happy, my dear, dear boy.’
Having said which the old man burst into tears. He clasped Marius’s head to his chest and they wept together.
‘Father!’ cried Marius.
‘At last you love me!’ the old man said.
There was a moment of supreme happiness during which neither could speak. Then the old man stammered:
‘So at last you’ve said it – father.’
Marius gently disengaged his head.
‘Father, now that I’m so much better I think I should be allowed to see her.’
‘You shall. You shall see her tomorrow.’
‘But father –’
‘Well?’
‘Why not today?’
‘Well then, today. You have called me “father” three times and that has earned it. It is like the end of a poem by André Chénier, whose throat was cut by those vill— those giants of ’93.’
Monsieur Gillenormand thought he had caught the trace of a frown on Marius’s face, although the truth is that, his mind filled with thoughts of Cosette, Marius had not even heard him. Trembling at the thought that he might have blundered in that reference to the murderers of André Chénier, the old man hurriedly went out.
‘Well, that was not the way to put it. There was nothing evil about those great men of the Revolution. They were heroes, not a doubt of it. But they found André Chénier troublesome, and so they had him guillo— I mean, they asked him in the public interest if he wouldn’t mind …’
But he could find no way of ending the sentence. While his daughter smoothed Marius’s pillows he ran out of the room as hurriedly as his age allowed, shut the door behind him, and, foaming with rage, found himself face to face with Basque. He seized him by the collar and cried:
‘By all the gods, those villains murdered him!’
‘Murdered who?’
‘André Chénier.’
‘Certainly, monsieur,’ said the startled Basque.
Cosette and Marius saw one another again. What it meant to them we shall not attempt to say. There are things beyond description, of which the sun is one.
All the household, including Basque and Nicolette, were assembled in Marius’s room when she entered. She stood in the doorway, seeming enveloped in a glow of light. The old man, at that moment, had been about to blow his nose. He stopped short, gazing at Cosette over his handkerchief.
‘Exquisite,’ he cried and loudly blew.
Cosette was in Heaven, as dazed as a person can be by sheer happiness. She stood stammering, pale and pink, waiting to fling herself into Marius’s arms, but not venturing to do so, afraid of thus showing her love to the world. We are pitiless to happy lovers, hampering them with our presence when they only want to be alone.
Standing behind Cosette was a white-haired man, grave but nevertheless smiling – a vaguely touching smile. It was ‘Monsieur Fauchelevent’ – that is to say, Jean Valjean. As the porter had said, he was very well dressed, entirely in new black garments, with a white cravat.
The porter was not within miles of discerning, in that respectable figure, the ragged, mud-smeared person who on 7 June had brought the unconscious Marius to the door. Nevertheless his porter’s instinct was aroused, and he had not been able to refrain from saying to his wife, ‘I don’t know why it is, but I can’t help feeling I’ve seen him somewhere before.’
Monsieur Fauchelevent was standing somewhat apart from the others. He had under his arm a package that looked like a volume wrapped in paper, the paper being greenish in colour and seeming damp.
‘Does the gentleman always have a book under his arm?’ Nicolette murmured to Mlle Gillenormand, who did not care for books.
‘Why,’ said Monsieur Gillenormand in the same low tone, ‘he’s a man of learning. So what is wrong with that? Monsieur Boulard, whom I used to know, never went anywhere without a book under his arm.’
Raising his voice and bowing, he said:
‘Monsieur Tranchelevent …’ He did not do it on purpose; but inattention to proper names was one of his aristocratic habits. ‘Monsieur Tranchelevent, I have the honour, on behalf of my grandson, Baron Marius Pontmercy, to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage.’
Monsieur Tranchelevent bowed.
‘Then that is settled,’ said the old man, and turning to Marius and Cosette with arms upraised he said: ‘My children, you are free to love one another.’
They did not need telling twice. The billing and cooing began. ‘To see you again,’ Cosette murmured, standing by the chaise-longue. ‘To know that it is really you! Why did you go and fight? How dreadful! For four months I have felt that I was dead. How cruel of you, when I had done you no harm. You are forgiven, but you must never do it again. When I had the message asking me to come here I thought that I should die of joy. I have not even troubled to dress up. I must look terrible … But you don’t say anything. Why do you let me do all the talking? We’re still in the Rue de l’Homme-Armé. And your dreadful wound – I cried my eyes out. That anyone should suffer so much. Your grandfather looks very nice. No, don’t try to stand up, it might be bad for you. Oh, I’m so happy, wild with happiness! Do you still love me? We live in the Rue de l’Homme-Armé. There’s no garden. I’ve done nothing but make bandages, look at the blister on my finger, you bad man!’ …
‘Angel!’ Marius said: the word that never wears out, the one most often used by lovers … And then, since there were others present, they fell silent, only touching each other’s hand. Monsieur Gillenormand turned to the rest of the company and cried:
‘Well talk, can’t you! Make a little noise so that they can chatter in comfort!’ He bent over them. ‘And call each other tu. Don’t be afraid.’
Aunt Gillenormand with a kind of amazement was observing the bright scene in her faded home. There was nothing shocked or envious in her gaze: it was that of an innocent creature of fifty-seven, a wasted life witnessing the triumph of love. Her father said to her:
‘I told you this would happen to you …’ He paused and went on after a moment’s silence, ‘ … to see the happiness of others.’ Then he turned to Cosette. ‘So sweetly pretty, like a painting by Greuze. And to think that she’s to be all yours, you rascal! If I weren’t fifteen years too old we’d fight a duel for her. Young lady, I am in love with you, and no wonder. What a charming wedding it will be! Saint-Denis du Saint-Sacrement is our parish, but I’ll get a dispensation for you to be married in Saint-Paul, which is a nicer church, built by the Jesuits. The masterpiece of Jesuit architecture is at Namur, the church of Saint-Loup. You must go there when you’re married. I am wholly on your side, Mademoiselle; all young ladies should get married, it’s what they’re for. Be fruitful and multiply. What can be better than that?’ The old man skipped on his ninety-year-old heels and said to Marius: ‘By the way – did you not have a close friend?
‘There was Courfeyrac.’
‘What’s become of him?’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Ah, well.’
He made Cosette sit down, sat beside them and took their four hands in his own.
‘So enchanting, this Cosette, a true masterpiece. A young girl and a great lady. It’s a pity she’ll only be a baroness, she should be a marquise. Get it well into your heads, my children, that you are on the right road. Love is the folly of men and the wisdom of God. Love one another. But now I come to think of it, more than half of all I possess is tied up in an annuity. My poor children, what will you do after my death in twenty years’ time?’
A quiet voice said: ‘Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent has six hundred thousand francs.’
It was Jean Valjean who had spoken. Hitherto he had not uttered a word, but had stood silently contemplating the happy group.
‘And who is this Mademoiselle Euphrasie?’ the old man asked.
‘It’s me,’ said Cosette.
‘Six hundred thousand?’ exclaimed the old man.
‘Less a few thousand francs,’ said Valjean, and he put the parcel which Aunt Gillenormand had supposed to be a book on the table. Opening it he disclosed a bundle of banknotes, which, being counted, amounted to five hundred thousand-franc notes and one hundred and sixty-eight five-hundred-franc notes – in all, five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs.
‘Well that’s a very handsome book,’ said Monsieur Gillenormand.
‘Five hundred and eighy-four thousand francs,’ murmured the aunt.
‘That settles matters very nicely, does it not, Mlle Gillenormand?’ the old man said. ‘This young rogue of a Marius, he finds a millionairess in his dreamland. Trust the young people of nowadays. Students find girl-students worth six hundred thousand francs. Cherubino is a better man than Rothschild.’
‘Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!’ Mlle Gillenormand murmured again. ‘As good as six hundred thousand!’
But as to Marius and Cosette, they were gazing into each other’s eyes, scarcely aware of this trifle.
No lengthy explanation is needed for the reader to understand that after the Champmathieu affair Jean Valjean had been able, during his brief escape, to come to Paris and withdraw from the Laffitte bank the money he had accumulated as Monsieur Madeleine. Fearing recapture, he had buried it in the clearing in the Montfermeil wood. The sum of 630,000 francs in banknotes was not bulky and could be put in a box; but to safeguard the box from damp he had put it in an oak chest filled with chestnut shavings. In this he had also put the bishop’s candlesticks which he had taken from Montreuil-sur-mer. It was Valjean whom the road-mender, Boulatruelle, had seen. When he needed money Valjean had returned to the clearing, which accounts for the absences we have referred to; and when he knew Marius to be convalescent, foreseeing that the entire sum would come in useful, he had gone to retrieve it. This was the last time Boulatruelle had seen him. He had inherited his pickaxe.
The sum then remaining had amounted to 584,500 francs. Valjean had kept the five hundred for himself. ‘We shall see how it works out,’ he reflected.
The difference between this sum and the 630,000 francs withdrawn from Laffite represented the expenditure often years – from 1823 to 1833. The time in the convent had cost only 5,000 francs. Valjean had put the silver candlesticks on the mantelpiece, where they glittered to the great admiration of Toussaint.
For the rest, Valjean knew that he had nothing more to fear from Javert. It had been reported in the Moniteur that his drowned body had been found under a washerwoman’s boat between the Pont au Change and the Pont Neuf. He had been a policeman with an irreproachable record, highly esteemed by his superiors, who concluded that he must have committed suicide while of unsound mind. ‘Well,’ reflected Jean Valjean, ‘since he had me and let me go, that may well be true.’
Preparations for the wedding were put in hand. The month was December and the doctor, being consulted, declared that it might take place in February. Several weeks of perfect bliss ensued, and Monsieur Gillenormand was far from being the least happy. He spent hours in the contemplation of Cosette.
‘The sweet, pretty girl,’ he said. ‘So gentle and so good. Never have I seen so delightful a girl. Who could live anything but nobly with such a creature? Marius, my boy, you are a baron and you are rich. Don’t, I beseech, you, waste your time lawyering.’
Cosette and Marius had been transported so rapidly from the depths to the heights that they would have been dazed had they not been dazzled.
‘Do you understand it all?’ he asked Cosette.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘But I feel that God is watching over us.’
Jean Valjean arranged everything and made everything easy, speeding Cosette’s happiness with as much pleasure, or so it appeared, as she felt herself. Having been a mayor, he knew how to solve an awkward problem, that of Cosette’s civic status. To reveal the truth about her origin might, who knows, have prevented the marriage. He endowed her with a dead family, which meant that no one could make demands on her. She was not his daughter but the daughter of another Fauchelevent. Two Fauchelevent brothers had worked as gardeners in the Petit-Picpus convent; and the fact was confirmed by the nuns, who, little interested in the matter of paternity, had never troubled to inquire which of them was her father. They willingly said what was wanted, a document was prepared and Cosette acquired the legal state of Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent, an orphan. Jean Valjean, under the name of Fauchelevent, became her guardian and Monsieur Gillenormand her deputy guardian.
As for the money, it had been bequeathed to Cosette by a person who had preferred to remain anonymous. The original sum had been 594,000 francs; but of this 10,000 francs had been spent on little Euphrasie’s education, 500 going to the convent. The legacy, held by a trustee, was to go to Cosette when she attained her majority or when she married. All of which, it will be seen, was highly acceptable, particularly since the sum involved exceeded half a million. There were one or two trifling oddities, but these passed unnoticed.
Cosette had to learn that she was not the daughter of the old man whom for so long she had addressed as father, and that another Fauchelevent was her real parent. At any other time she would have been greatly distressed, but in her present state of happiness this scarcely troubled her. She had Marius; and the coming of the young man made the older less important. And all her life she had been surrounded by mystery, so that this last change was not hard to accept. In any case she continued to call Jean Valjean ‘father’.
She had taken a great liking to Monsieur Gillenormand, who showered presents on her. While Jean Valjean arranged her civic status, he attended to her trousseau, delighting in its magnificence. He gave her a dress of Binche lace which had come to him from his grandmother, saying that it was again becoming fashionable. ‘Old styles are all the rage,’ he said. ‘The young women nowadays dress just as they did when I was young.’ He rifled wardrobes filled with the belongings of his wives and mistresses; damask and moiré and painted Indian cloths, lacework from Genoa and Alençon, all kinds of elegant frivolity were lavished on the rapturous Cosette, whose soul soared skyward on Mechlin lace wings. It was a time of endless festivity in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.
One day Marius, who with all his happiness enjoyed serious conversation, remarked for some reason that I do not recall:
‘The men of the Revolution were so great that their deathless fame is already assured. Like Cato and Phocion they have become figures of antiquity.’
‘Antiquity – antique moiré!’ the old man cried. ‘Marius, I thank you – just the idea I was looking for!’ And the next day a magnificent dress of antique moiré the colour of tea was added to Cosette’s wardrobe.
The old man drew morals from this finery.
‘Love is all very well, but something more is needed. There must be extravagance in happiness, rapture must be spiced with superfluity. Let me have a milkmaid, but make her a duchess. Let me view an endless countryside from a colonnade of marble. Happiness unadorned is like unbuttered bread: one may eat it but one does not dine. I want the superfluous, the embellishment, the thing that serves no purpose. In Strasbourg Cathedral there is a clock the size of a three-storey house which condescends to tell you the time but does not seem to exist for that alone. Whatever hour it strikes, midday, the hour of the sun, or midnight, the hour of love, it seems to be giving you the sun and the stars, earth and ocean, kings, emperors and the twelve apostles, and a troop of little gilded men playing the trumpet – all this thrown in! How does a mere bare dial pointing the hours compare with that? The great clock of Strasbourg, and not just a Black Forest cuckoo-clock, is what suits me.’
Monsieur Gillenormand dwelt especially on the subject of festivity, invoking all the gaieties of the eighteenth century.
‘You have lost the art in these days,’ he cried. ‘This nineteenth century is flat, lacking in excess, ignorant of what is rich and noble, insipid, colourless, and without form. Your bourgeois ideal is a chintz upholstered boudoir! But I can look back. On the day in 1787 when I saw the Duc du Rohan, who was Prince de Léon, and other peers of France drive to Longchamp, not in stately coaches but in chaises, I knew it was the beginning of the end. Look what follows. In these days people do business, play the market, make money and are rotten – smooth, neat, polished, irreproachable on the surface; but go deeper and you will raise a stench that would make a cow-hand hold his nose! You must not mind, Marius, if I talk like this. I say nothing against the people, but I have a bone to pick with the bourgeoisie. I am one myself, and that is how I know. There is so much that I regret – the elegance, the chivalry, the courtly manners, and the songs … The bride’s garter, which was akin to the girdle of Venus. What else caused the Trojan war, if not Helen’s garter? Why else did Hector and Achilles deal each other mortal blows? Homer might have made the Iliad out of Cosette’s garter, and put in an old babbler like me whom he would call Nestor. In the good old days, my friends, people married wisely – a good marriage contract followed by a good blow-out. One did oneself proud, sitting beside a pretty woman who did not unduly hide her bosom. Those laughing mouths, how gay they were! People set out to look pretty with make-up and embroidery. Your bourgeoise looked like a flower, your marquise like a statue. It was a great time, fastidious on the one hand and splendid on the other – and how we enjoyed ourselves! People nowadays are serious. The bourgeois is miserly and a prude. A wretched century – the Graces would be considered too lightly clad. Beauty is hidden as though it were ugliness. Everyone wears pantaloons since the Revolution, even the dancers. Songs are solemn, they have to have a message. People have to look important, and the result is that they all look insignificant. Listen, my children – joy is not simply joyous, it is great! Be gaily in love, and when you marry do so in all the fever and excitement of happiness. Decorum in church is proper, but when that’s over – bang! A wedding should be royal and magical. I detest solemn weddings. That moment in life should be a flight to Heaven with the birds, even if next day you have to fall back to earth among the bourgeoisie and the frogs. There should be nothing meagre about that day. If I had my way it would be a day of enchantment, with violins in the trees, a sky of silver and blue, and the singing of nymphs and nereids, a chorus of naked girls. That is the programme I would like to see.’
Aunt Gillenormand viewed these matters with her customary placidity. She had had much to unsettle her in recent months – Marius fighting on the barricades, brought home more dead than alive, reconciled to his grandfather, engaged to be married to a pauper who turned out to be an heiress. The 600,000 francs were the culminating astonishment, after which she had reverted to her customary state of religious torpor, regularly attending Mass, telling her beads, murmuring Aves in one corner of the house while the words ‘I love you’ were being exchanged in another. There is a state of asceticism in which the benumbed spirit, remote from everything that we call living, is scarcely aware of any happening less catastrophic than an earthquake, nothing human, whether pleasant or unpleasant. ‘It’s like a bad cold in the head,’ Monsieur Gillenormand said. ‘You can’t smell a thing, good or bad.’
It was the money that had decided the matter for her. Her father was so in the habit of ignoring her that he had not asked her whether he should give his consent to Marius’s marriage, and this had ruffled her, although she had given no sign of it. She had thought to herself: ‘Well, my father may decide about the marriage but I can decide about the means.’ She was in fact rich, which her father was not. She had kept an open mind, but the probability is that if they had been poor she would have let them go on being poor – if her nephew chose to marry a pauper that was his affair. But a fortune of six hundred thousand francs is deserving of esteem, and since they no longer needed it she would undoubtedly leave them her own fortune.
It was arranged that the couple should live with Marius’s grandfather. The old man insisted on giving up his bedroom, the best room in the house. ‘It will make me young again,’ he said. ‘I have always wanted to have a honeymoon in that room.’ He filled it with old, gay furniture and hung it with a remarkable material, golden flowers on a satin background, which he believed had come from Utrecht. ‘The same as draped the bed of the Duchesse d’Anville à la Roche Guyon,’ he said. And on the mantelpiece he put a little Saxon figurine holding a muff over her naked tummy. His library became Marius’s advocate’s office, this, as we know, being a legal requirement.
The lovers saw each other every day, Cosette coming with Monsieur Fauchelevent. ‘It’s not at all right,’ said Mlle Gillenormand, ‘for the lady to come to the gentleman.’ But they had got into the habit during Marius’s convalescence, and the greater comfort of the armchairs in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, more suited to the tête-à-tête, had been an added inducement. Marius and Monsieur Fauchelevent saw one another but scarcely spoke, as though by tacit agreement. Every girl needs a chaperon, and so Cosette could not have come without him. Marius accepted him for this reason. They exchanged an occasional word on the political situation and once, when Marius asserted his conviction that education should be free and available to everyone, they found themselves in agreement and had a brief discussion. Marius found that although Monsieur Fauchelevent talked well, with an excellent command of language, there was something lacking in him. He was something less than a man of the world, and something more.
All sorts of questions concerning Monsieur Fauchelevent, who treated him with a cool civility, were at the back of Marius’s mind. His illness had left a gap in his memory in which much had been lost. He found himself wondering whether he could really have seen that calm, sober man at the barricade. But no amount of happiness can prevent us from looking back into the past. There were moments when Marius, taking his head in his hands, recalled the death of Mabeuf, heard Gavroche singing amid the musket-fire and felt his lips pressed to Éponine’s cold forehead. Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire – the figures of all his friends appeared to him and then vanished. Had they really existed, and where were they now? Was it true that they were all dead – all gone, except himself? All that had vanished like the fall of the curtain at the ending of a play. And was he himself the same man? He had been poor and now was rich, solitary and now he had a family, desolate and now he was to marry Cosette. He felt that he had passed through a tomb, black when he entered it but white when he emerged – and the others had remained in it. There were moments when those figures from the past crowded in upon him and filled his mind with darkness; then the thought of Cosette restored him to serenity. Nothing less than his present happiness could have washed out that disaster.
And Monsieur Fauchelevent had become almost one of those vanished figures. Seeing him quietly seated beside Cosette, Marius found it hard to believe that this was the man who had been with him at the barricade. That earlier Fauchelevent seemed rather a figment of his delirium. And there was a gap between them which Marius did not think of bridging. It is less rare than one may think for two men sharing a common experience to agree by tacit consent never to refer to it. Only once did Marius make the attempt. Bringing the Rue de la Chanvrerie into the conversation, he turned to Monsieur Fauchelevent and said:
‘You know the street, do you not?’
‘What street was that?’
‘The Rue de la Chanvrerie.’
‘I don’t know the name of any such street,’ replied Monsieur Fauchelevent with the greatest calm.
This reply, bearing simply on the name of the street, appeared to Marius more conclusive than it really was.
‘I must have dreamed it,’ he reflected. ‘It was someone like him, but certainly not Monsieur Fauchelevent.’
His state of rapture, great though it was, did not relieve Marius’s mind of other preoccupations; and while the wedding preparations were going forward he subjected himself to scrupulous self-examination. He owed debts of gratitude both on his father’s account and on his own. There was Thénardier, and there was the stranger who had brought him to Monsieur Gillenormand’s house. He was resolved to find these two men, since otherwise they might cast a shadow on his life. Before moving joyously into the future he wanted to feel that he had paid due quittance to the past.
That Thénardier was a villain did not alter the fact that he had saved the life of Colonel Pontmercy. He was a rogue in the eyes of all the world except Marius. And Marius, not knowing what had really happened at Waterloo, was ignorant of the fact that although his father owed Thénardier his life, he owed him no gratitude. But the agents employed by Marius could find no trace of Thénardier. The woman had died in prison during the trial, and the man and his daughter Azelma, the sole survivors of that lamentable group, had vanished into obscurity.
The woman being dead, Boulatruelle acquitted, Claquesous vanished and the leading members of the gang having escaped from prison, the matter of the Gorbeau tenement conspiracy had been more or less abandoned. Two minor figures, Panchaud, known as Bigrenaille, and Demi-Liard, known as Deux Milliards, had been sentenced to ten years in the galleys, while their accomplices had been condemned in their absence to hard labour for life. Thénardier, as the instigator and leader, had been condemned to death, also in his absence. And that was all that was known of Thénardier.
As for that other man, the one who had saved Marius, the inquiries had at first produced some result but then had come to a dead end. The fiacre was found which had brought Marius to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. The coachman declared that on the afternoon of 6 June, acting on the orders of a police agent, he had remained stationed on the Quai des Champs-Élysées from three o’clock until nightfall, and that about nine o’clock that evening the sewer-gate giving on to the river had opened and a man had come out carrying another man who seemed to be dead. The police agent had arrested the living man, and on his orders the cab-driver had ‘taken the whole lot’ to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. He recognized Marius as the supposedly dead man. He had then driven the two other men to a spot near the Porte des Archives. And that was all he knew. Marius himself remembered nothing except that a strong hand had gripped him just as he was sinking unconscious to the ground at the barricade.
He was lost in conjecture. How had it happened that, having fallen in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, he had been picked up by a policeman on the bank of the Seine near the Pont des Invalides? Someone must have carried him there from the quarter of Les Halles, and how could he have done so except by way of the sewer? It was a wonderful act of devotion. This man, his saviour, was the man whom Marius sought, without discovering any trace of him. Although it had to be done with great discretion, he pursued his inquiries even as far as the Préfecture de Police, only to discover that they knew even less than the driver of the fiacre. They knew nothing of any arrest at the gate of the main sewer, and were inclined to think that the coachman had invented the story. A cabby looking for a tip is capable of anything, even of imagination. But Marius could no more doubt the truth of the story than he could doubt his own identity
The whole thing was wrapped in mystery. What had become of this man who had rescued him and then been arrested, presumably as a rebel? And what had become of the agent who had arrested him? Why had he kept silent? And how had the man escaped? Had he bribed the agent? Why had he not got in touch with Marius, who owed him so much? No one could tell him anything. Basque and Nicolette had had no eyes for anyone except their young master. Only the porter with his candle had noticed the man and all he could say was, ‘He was a terrible sight.’ In the hope that they might provide him with some clue, Marius had kept the blood-stained garments in which he had been rescued. He made a queer discovery when he examined the jacket. A small piece was missing.
One evening when Marius was talking to Cosette and Jean Valjean about the mystery and his fruitless efforts to solve it, he became irritated by ‘Monsieur Fauchelevent’s’ air of apparent indifference. He exclaimed almost angrily:
‘Whoever he was, that man was sublime. Do you realize, Monsieur, what he did? He came to my rescue like an angel from Heaven. He plunged into the battle, picked me up, opened the sewer and then carried me for a league and a half through those appalling underground passages, bent double with a man on his back! And why did he do it? Simply to save a dying man. He said to himself, “There may be a chance for him, and so I must risk my life.” He risked it twenty times over, with every step he took! And the proof is that no sooner had we left the sewer than he was arrested. And he did all this without any thought of reward. What was I to him? Simply a rebel. Oh, if all Cosette’s money were mine.’
‘It is yours,’ Jean Valjean interrupted.
‘I would give it all,’ said Marius, ‘to find that man!’
Jean Valjean was silent.