Summer and autumn came and went. Now it was winter, and neither Monsieur Leblanc nor Mademoiselle Lanoire had set foot again in Luxembourg Park. Yet Marius had only one goal: to gaze once more on that sweet, adorable face. He searched constantly, looking everywhere for her, but found nothing.
The young man relentlessly heaped reproach upon reproach on himself. He would ask, “Why did I follow her? I was so happy with the mere sight of her. Why wasn’t I satisfied with that? Her eyes seemed to offer me her love. Wasn’t that enough? What more did I need? My actions have been absurd. This is my own fault.” He was completely devastated and spent more and more time alone. His inner anguish was overwhelming, and he felt like a wolf in a trap. He was dazed by his love, and he searched for the object of that love every waking moment.
On one occasion, he saw a man on the street dressed like a workingman, wearing a cap with a long visor. Protruding from beneath the cap, however, were locks of beautiful white hair. Seeing the man from behind, Marius noticed that the man’s hair, build, and demeanor were nearly identical to that of Monsieur Leblanc. Yet for some unexplainable reason, perhaps the fact that Marius was so absorbed in his own painful thoughts, he walked very slowly behind the man. Finally, upon putting these clues together, he had a sudden impulse to follow the old man. But the thought came to him too late, and before he knew it, the man was gone. He attempted to brush the encounter aside, saying to himself that the old gentleman he knew would never be dressed in such common working clothes anyway.
Having no other option, Marius was forced to move on with his life. His preoccupation with the young woman had taken its toll on his finances, so now he threw himself headlong into his work as an attorney. Then early one morning, around seven o’clock, as he was working on a pressing case in his room, he heard a soft knock on the door. Before he could respond, he heard a second gentle knock. Because he had so few possessions, he typically kept his door unlocked, so upon hearing the second knock, he called out, “Come in!”
As the door swung open, he heard what he thought was the voice of an old man seemingly hardened by too much liquor. The voice said, “Excuse me, sir,” but when he turned to see who was speaking, he saw a young woman standing before him in the half opened door. The faint light of early dawn fell across an emaciated, frail figure who was wearing nothing but a thin petticoat. She had the form of a young woman who had bypassed her youth, as she stood in the doorway shivering from the cold and looking more like a haggard old woman of fifty than her actual age of fifteen.
As Marius stared at her face, he thought he remembered having seen her somewhere. Then he asked the poor girl, “What do you want, mademoiselle?”
She replied in her voice that sounded like that of a drunken convict, “I have a letter for you, Monsieur Marius.”
Marius receives a letter delivered by Jondrette’s oldest daughter.
The young woman had called Marius by name, so he could not doubt she had the right person, but he wondered who she could be and how she knew his name. As he pondered this, she stepped into the room and handed him the letter. He broke its wax seal, and as he did so, he noticed it was still moist, which told him the letter could not have traveled very far. Then he began reading the letter, which said:
My dear, gracious young man,
I am your next-door neighbor and recently have learned of your goodness to me—the fact that six months ago you paid the rent for my family and me. May God bless you for that, young man. My oldest daughter, who has delivered this letter to you, can confirm to you that we have not had even one morsel of bread for two days. There are four of us in our family without food, and now my wife is ill. Unless I am a terrible judge of character, I believe your generous heart will be moved upon reading my words, and that you will overlook my forwardness in asking you for help. I close, wishing you the best for being such a worthy benefactor of those less fortunate.
Jondrette
P.S. My daughter will await your orders, dear Monsieur Marius.
Jondrette, in severe distress, was simply preying upon what he perceived to be a young man who could be easily persuaded to give and give again. As Marius read the letter, the young woman strutted back and forth across the room, seemingly unconcerned about her near nakedness. Then she walked to his table and grabbed a book that lay open on it. She said, “Ah, books! I know how to read!” To prove her point, she read aloud, “General Bauduin received orders to take the chateau of Hougomont, which stands in the middle of the plain of Waterloo, with five battalions of his brigade.” At this she stopped reading and proclaimed, “Waterloo! I know all about that. It was a battle fought long ago, and, in fact, my father served in the army there. We are all fine Bonapartist Democrats in our house—yes we are!”
She then grabbed a piece of paper and a pen, while saying, “I can write too! I’ll show you. Here’s what no Bonapartist ever wants to hear.” As she said this, she dipped the pen in ink and wrote these words in capital letters: THE POLICE ARE HERE!
Suddenly the young woman seemed to scrutinize Marius, took on a totally different expression, and said to him, “Did you know, Monsieur Marius, you are a very handsome man?” Then she smiled as he blushed. Placing her hand on his shoulder, she continued, “You have never paid any attention to me, but I know you, Monsieur Marius. You have passed right by me in the stairwell numerous times, and sometimes I have even followed you on your way to church. By the way, I really like your hair tossed over to the side this way.”
These last few words she attempted to say very softly, which only succeeded in deepening her voice. In fact, a number of her words seemed to get lost somewhere between her larynx and her lips, like notes on a piano with a few missing keys. As she spoke, Marius slowly backed away, all the while thrusting both hands into his pockets as though he were searching for something. Finally, he pulled five francs and sixteen sous from his pocket. At the moment, this was all the money he had in the world, but he handed the five-franc coin to the girl and kept only the sixteen sous for himself.
Grabbing the coin, she shouted with glee, “Great! The sun is shining again!” Then she straightened the straps of her petticoat on her shoulders, bowed deeply toward Marius, and walked toward the door, while saying, “Good day, sir. I’ll take this money to my old man.” On the way out, however, she saw an old, dusty and moldy crust of bread sitting on a cabinet, which she grabbed and quickly bit into, before muttering with a smile, “This is good! But it breaks my teeth!” Then she departed.
By this point in his life, Marius had lived five years in relative poverty—at least when compared to the years lived with his grandfather. He had lived through times of great distress but had not known real misery and abject poverty such as he had just seen. Now perceiving the misery of his neighbors, he heaped reproach on himself for being so blind and uncaring, and for putting his own peace and passions above the needs of others. And to know that only a mere wall separated him from the misery of seemingly abandoned people only made him feel much worse. He had paid no heed to them, yet he was possibly their last link to the human race for help out of their agony.
Marius’s thoughts had been elsewhere and had been totally devoted to his dreams. Yet all the while, people in his own building—people he saw as his brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ—were agonizing in vain right beside him! Yes, he saw them as corrupt, depraved, and vile, but he gave them the benefit of the doubt, for he believed it was rare for someone to fall to their level without becoming debased. He also believed there was something the unfortunate and the infamous had in common, and he summed it up by calling them les misérables—“the miserable.”
As he reviewed his beliefs on this moral issue, Marius felt the further someone has fallen the further someone else should go in extending charity. He saw destitution as something that often was not the fault of the destitute. Marius kept scolding himself, but often more harshly than he deserved. He would stare at the wall that separated his room from the Jondrette family, as though his gaze would bring warmth and hope to these wretchedly poor people.
Prior to this time, Marius had been so absorbed in his own problems he never had noticed he could clearly distinguish the conversations taking place on the other side of the thin plaster wall. And as Marius stared at that wall, he noticed a small hole in the plaster near the top of it. He discovered that by standing on his dresser he could see straight through to the Jondrettes’ room. His curiosity overwhelmed him at this point, and he began to rationalize it was okay to gaze at misfortune if his goal were to relieve it.
He thought, I’ll just get some idea what these people are like and simply see how bad their condition is. Marius climbed onto the dresser and began spying through the small hole. What he saw was miserable, filthy, and vile.
Marius was still poor and his room was not elaborately furnished at all. Yet he maintained a sense of pride in his home, and at least his room was clean and neat. But what he now was seeing was total squalor. The poor family’s room was a shrine to abject poverty, covered with dirt, and obviously pest ridden. Their only furniture consisted of a broken-down wicker chair and a rickety old table with a few pieces of chipped dinnerware sitting on it. Their apparent beds were two filthy makeshift pallets on the floor in opposing corners of the room. A single window, which was covered with spiderwebs and had a number of cracks in the panes, provided the only light. There was just enough light to make out the face of a man who had the hollow look of a ghost. Even the walls of the room were hideous. They seemed to have moisture exuding from them that was causing the plaster to peel, and they were covered with obscenities scrawled in charcoal.
About an hour had passed since the desperate young woman had left his room, and while Marius continued to watch, suddenly he saw her burst into the room on the other side of his wall. Her cold, chapped ankles and the bulky pair of men’s shoes she wore were splattered with mud, and she now was wrapped in a torn and ragged old coat. From this, Marius reasoned she must have left the coat outside his door upon visiting him in order to elicit more pity. She entered her room completely breathless, as though she had been running, and then joyfully exclaimed with an air of triumph, “He is coming!”
Her ghostly looking father and her mother turned toward her, while her smaller sister did not stir. Then her father demanded, “Who is coming?”
“The gentleman!”
“You mean that charitable fellow?” he questioned.
“Yes, of course.”
“The old man from Saint Jacques Church?” he persisted.
“Yes, one and the same,” she answered.
“When is he coming?”
“He will be here soon. He is coming in his carriage.”
“That’s interesting,” her father said, smiling, “He must be richer than I thought. A Rothschild!” Then questioning the young woman again, he asked, “If he’s coming in a carriage, how did you get here before him? Did he read my letter?”
Attempting to explain fully, she said, “When I entered the church, he was in his usual place and I handed him the letter. After reading it, he said, ‘Where do you live, my child?’ I told him I would show him, but he said, ‘No, give me your address, for we have some purchases to make. Once we finish, we will meet you at your house.’ But when I told him we lived in the Gorbeau House, he seemed surprised and hesitated for a moment. Then he said, ‘Never mind. I’ll be there soon.’ When the Mass was finished, I saw him and his daughter leave in a carriage, and that same carriage has just turned down our street. I ran the last block or so, which is why I’m so out of breath.”
Hearing this, suddenly the father seemed propelled to action and yelled at his wife, “Put out the fire!” The woman, looking confused, just stared at him. Not waiting for her to act, he grabbed a jug of water and doused the fire in the stove, before explaining, “We can’t have a wealthy man coming here without looking as poor as possible, and we certainly can’t do that with a fire going in the stove!”
Then turning to his older daughter, he demanded, “You! Pull the straw out of that chair!” But the girl obviously did not understand, so he grabbed the wicker chair and with one kick knocked the seat out of it. As he pulled his leg out of the chair, he asked his daughter, “Is it cold outside?”
“Yes, it’s very cold. In fact, it’s snowing.”
The father then turned to the younger daughter, who was sitting on one of the filthy pallets, and thundered at her, “Get off that bed, you lazy thing! You never do anything! Get up and break a pane of glass in the window.” The smaller girl jumped off the bed with a shudder but stood motionless before him in seeming bewilderment. So he screamed at her, “Can you hear me? Get over there and break some glass!” The poor child moved toward the window out of a sense of terrified obedience and struck one of the windowpanes with her fist. The glass broke and fell loudly to the floor.
“Good. Thank you,” the father said sarcastically. Turning once again toward his wife, he instructed, “Get into bed, my dear.” She obeyed by falling heavily onto one of the pallets. Then he heard a quiet sob come from another corner, and seeing his younger daughter, he demanded, “What’s wrong with you?” Not answering aloud, she simply held out her bleeding fist as she cowered in the corner.
At this, the mother began to shout as well. “Now see what you’ve done!” she yelled toward her husband. “She’s cut herself on that windowpane!”
“Actually, I saw that coming. So much the better!” he said slyly. Then tearing a strip of cloth from his own dirty shirt, he hastily wrapped the girl’s bleeding hand and wrist. Finally, looking around the room and then examining his torn shirt with an air of satisfaction, he added, “This all looks great! We are now ready to receive our gentleman of charity.”
Yet the father, with a worried expression on his face, abruptly said, “It’s deathly cold in this demon’s pit! What if our friend does not come? Right now he’s probably saying to himself, ‘Oh, they can wait. What else do they have to do!’ Oh, how I hate the rich! I would love to strangle them all!” But just as he finished his ranting, a light knock could be heard on the door. The angry man rushed to the door, quickly opened it, smiled adoringly, and then while bowing, said, “Enter, my dear sir, and your charming young daughter as well.” Then using the assumed last name he had used to sign his letter to the man, Jondrette said, “We are the Fabantou family.”
An old but rugged-looking man and a young girl entered the deceptive family’s filthy room. At this point, Marius, who had continued to peer through the hole in the wall, was completely dumbstruck with what he saw. It was “She”!
His feelings at this moment completely surpassed the powers of the human tongue to describe. The beautiful vision that had been lost was found! Even more amazing was the fact that she had reappeared amid such a horrific setting.
She was as pretty as ever. A soft velvet bonnet of pale lavender framed her delicate face, and her lovely figure was concealed beneath her floor-length dress of black satin. Her long dress partially revealed her petite feet that were wearing black silk boots. The young woman, who was accompanied by Monsieur Leblanc, took a few steps into the room and set a large package onto the table.
With a kind but sad look in his eyes, Monsieur Leblanc said to Monsieur Jondrette, “Sir, I was moved by the letter explaining your family’s desperate situation, which your daughter gave me in church. So my daughter and I have brought you some new clothes, woolen socks, and blankets.”
“You are an angel! Your kindness overwhelms me!” Jondrette exclaimed, bowing once again. Then hoping to take full advantage of his newfound resource, he continued, “See, dear sir, we have no bread and no fire for heat. My poor children and my wife, who is sick in bed, have no heat. My only chair is totally unusable without a seat. And this window! Look at it! Broken in this miserably cold weather!” Then Jondrette turned toward his younger daughter, who was continuing to sob in pain, and said, “My poor daughter is hurt. She badly cut her hand in an accident at a factory where she earned a meager six sous a day! Now she can’t work, and it may even be necessary to remove her arm because of infection.”
At this, the beautiful young woman, whom Marius referred to as “his Ursula,” walked to the hurting girl and said, “You poor, dear child!”
Then Jondrette continued with his long list of woes by saying, “All I have to wear is this torn shirt, so I am unable to go out because of my lack of a warm coat. And today is February 3rd, which is the last day of grace my landlord has given me. If I am unable to pay my rent by tonight, all four of us will be turned out of here tomorrow with no shelter from the rain or the snow. My landlord has been very gracious, but we are a full year behind in our rent. I owe sixty francs, and you are the last hope for my poor family. If you do not help us, my sick wife, my hurt daughter—all four of us—will be thrown into the street!”
Still listening and watching from the other side of the wall, Marius knew Jondrette was lying. Marius himself had paid two months’ rent for the family less than six months ago. Plus he knew that a year’s rent for them was only forty francs.
Monsieur Leblanc took off his heavy brown outer coat and tossed it over the back of the broken chair. Then pulling five francs from his pocket, he set them on the table and said, “Monsieur Fabantou, this is all the money I have on me at the present time, but I will take my daughter home and return later this evening.”
Jondrette’s face lit up at the idea of the man returning later, and he made a spirited reply. “Oh, thank you! I must be at my landlord’s by eight o’clock.”
“Then I will return promptly at six and will bring you sixty francs.” Taking his daughter’s arm, Monsieur Leblanc turned toward the door.
“Six o’clock will be fine,” Jondrette replied.
As the man and his daughter were walking toward the door, the older of the Jondrette girls noticed the overcoat on the chair and said, “Sir, you are forgetting your coat.”
If looks could kill, Jondrette’s angry glance at his daughter would have annihilated her. But Monsieur Leblanc turned around and said with a smile, “I’m not forgetting it. I’m leaving it.”
“You are too kind, sir!” Jondrette said with all the sincerity he could muster, and added, “You nearly make me cry.”
“I’ll see you later tonight, sir,” was Monsieur Leblanc’s simple response.
During this entire encounter, Jondrette had been scrutinizing his benefactor as though he knew him from somewhere. As the charitable man spoke, there was something about him that reminded him of someone. Jondrette was frantically searching the dusty archives of his mind—yet he couldn’t quite place him.