1831 and 1832, the two years immediately attached to the revolution of July, contain the most peculiar and striking moments of history; and these two years, amid those that precede and follow them, stand out like mountains. They possess the true revolutionary grandeur, and precipices may be traced in them. The social masses, the foundations of civilization, the solid group of superimposed and adherent interests, and the secular profiles of the ancient Gallic formations, appear and disappear every moment through the stormy clouds of systems, passions, and theories. These apparitions and disappearances were called resistance and movement, but at intervals truth, the daylight of the human soul, flashes through all.
This remarkable epoch is so circumscribed, and is beginning to become so remote from us, that we are able to seize its principal outlines. We will make the attempt. The Restoration was one of those intermediate phases which are so difficult to define, in which are fatigue, buzzing, murmurs, sleep, and tumult, and which, after all, are nought but the arrival of a great nation at a halting-place. These epochs are peculiar, and deceive the politician who tries to take advantage of them. At the outset the nation only demands repose; there is but one thirst, for peace, and only one ambition, to be small,—which is the translation of keeping quiet. "Great events, great accidents, great adventures, great men,—O Lord! we have had enough of these, and more than enough." Cæsar would be given for Prusias, and Napoleon for the Roi d'Yvetôt, who was "such a merry little king." Folk have been marching since daybreak and arrive at the evening of a long and rough journey; they made their first halt with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre, and the third with Napoleon, and they are exhausted. Everybody insists on a bed.
Worn-out devotions, crying heroisms, gorged ambitions, and made fortunes, seek, claim, implore, and solicit,—what? A resting-place, and they have it. They take possession of peace, tranquillity, and leisure, and feel satisfied. Still, at the same time certain facts arise, demand recognition, and knock at doors on their side. These facts have emerged from revolutions and wars; they exist, they live, and have the right,—the right of installing themselves in society, which they do; and in the majority of instances facts are the quarter-masters that only prepare a billet for principles.
In such a case, this is what occurs to political philosophers: at the same time as wearied men claim rest, accomplished facts demand guarantees, for guarantees for facts are the same thing as repose for men. It is this that England asked of the Stuart after the Protector, and what France asked of the Bourbons after the Empire. These guarantees are a necessity of the times, and they must be granted. The Princes concede them, but in reality it is the force of things that gives them. This is a profound truth and worth knowing, which the Stuarts did not suspect in 1662, and of which the Bourbons did not even gain a glimpse in 1814.
The predestined family which returned to France when Napoleon collapsed had the fatal simplicity of believing that it gave, and that it could take back what it had once given; that the Bourbon family possessed the right divine, and France possessed nothing, and that the political right conceded in the charter of Louis XVIII. was nothing else but a branch of the divine right, detached by the House of Bourbon and graciously permitted to the people up to the day when the king thought proper to clutch it again. Still, from the displeasure which the gift caused it, the Bourbon family ought to have felt that it did not emanate from it. It behaved in a grudging way to the 19th century, and looked with an ugly smile at every expansion of the nation. To employ a trivial, that is to say, a popular and true phrase, it was crabbed, and the people noticed it.
The Government believed that it had strength because the Empire had been removed before it, like a stage scene; but it did not perceive that it had been produced in the same way, nor see that it was held in the same hand which had removed Napoleon. It believed that it had roots, because it was the past, and was mistaken: it formed a portion of the past, but the whole of the past was France; and the roots of French society were not in the Bourbons, but in the nation. These obscure and tenacious roots did not constitute the right of a family, but the history of a people, and were everywhere, except under the throne. The House of Bourbon had been for France the illustrious and blood-stained knot of her history, but was no longer the principal element of her destiny or the necessary basis of her policy. She could do without the Bourbons as she had done for two-and-twenty years: there was a solution of continuity, but they did not suspect it. And how could they suspect it, when they imagined that Louis XVII. reigned at the 9th Thermidor, and that Louis XVIII. was reigning at the day of Marengo? Never, since the origin of history, have princes been so blind in the presence of history and that portion of the divine authority which facts contain and promulgate. Never had the nether claim, which is called the right of kings, denied to such a condition the supreme right. It was a capital error that led this family to lay their hand again on the "granted" guarantees in 1814, or on the concessions, as they entitled them. It is a sad thing that what they called their concessions were our conquests, and what they called our encroachments were our rights. When the hour appeared to have arrived, the Restoration, supposing itself victorious over Bonaparte, and rooted in the country, that is to say, believing itself strong and profound, suddenly made up its mind, and risked its stake. One morning it rose in the face of France, and, raising its voice, contested the collective title, and the individual title, the sovereignty of the nation, and the liberty of the citizen. In other terms, it denied the nation what made it a nation, and the citizen what made him a citizen. This is the substratum of those famous decrees which are called the "Ordonnances" of July. The Restoration fell, and fell justly. Still, let us add, it was not absolutely hostile to all the forms of progress, and grand things were accomplished while it stood aloof. During the Restoration the nation had grown accustomed to calm discussion, which the Republic had been deficient in, and to grandeur in peace, which was not known under the Empire. France, strong and free, had been an encouraging example for the other nations of Europe. Under Robespierre the Revolution ruled; under Bonaparte, cannon; while in the reigns of Louis XVIII. and Charles X. the turn arrived for intellect to speak. The wind ceased, and the torch was re-illumined, while a pure mental light played round the serene crests. It was a magnificent, useful, and delightful spectacle; and for fifteen years those great principles, which are so old for the thinker, so new for the statesman,—equality before the law, liberty of conscience, freedom of the press and speech, and the accessibility of all fitting men to office,—could be seen at work in a reign of peace, and publicly. Things went on thus till 1830, and the Bourbons were an instrument of civilization which broke in the hands of Providence.
The fall of the Bourbons was full of grandeur, not on their side, but on that of the nation. They left the throne with gravity, but without authority; their descent into night was not one of those solemn disappearances which impart a sombre emotion to history, and it was neither the spectral calmness of Charles I. nor the eagle cry of Napoleon. They went away, that was all; they deposited the crown and did not retain the glory, and though they were dignified, they were not august, and they were to a certain extent false to the majesty of their misfortune. Charles X., having a round table cut square during the Cherbourg voyage, seemed more anxious about the imperilled etiquette than the crumbling monarchy. This diminution saddened the devoted men who were attached to the Bourbons personally, and the serious men who honored their race. The people behaved admirably, however, and the nation, attacked one morning by a species of royalist insurrection, felt themselves so strong that they displayed no anger. They defended themselves, restrained themselves, and restored things to their place; the government in the law, the Bourbons in exile, alas! and stopped there. They took the old King Charles X. off the daïs which had sheltered Louis XIV., and gently placed him on the ground, and they only touched the royal persons cautiously and sorrowfully. It was not one man, or a few men, but France, united France, France victorious, and intoxicated by its victory, which appeared to remember, and practised in the eyes of the whole world, the serious remarks of Guillaume du Vair after the day of the Barricades. "It is easy for those who have been accustomed to obtain the favors of the great, and leap like a bird from branch to branch, from a low to a flourishing fortune, to show themselves bold against their prince in his misfortunes; but for my part the fortune of my kings will be ever venerable to me, and principally of those who are in affliction." The Bourbons bore away with them respect, but not regret; as we have said, their misfortune was greater than themselves, and they faded away on the horizon.
The revolution of July at once found friends and enemies in the whole world; the former rushed toward it enthusiastically and joyfully, while the latter turned away, each according to its nature. The princes of Europe, the owls of this dawn, at the first moment closed their eyes, which were hurt and stupefied, and only opened them again to menace,—it is a terror easy to understand and a pardonable anger. This strange revolution had scarcely required a blow, and had not even done conquered royalty the honor of treating it as an enemy and shedding its blood. In the sight of despotic governments which also have an interest in liberty calumniating itself, the revolution of July had the fault of being formidable and remaining gentle, but no attempt was made or prepared against it. The most dissatisfied and irritated persons saluted it; for whatever their selfishness or rancor may be, men feel a mysterious respect issue from events in which they feel the co-operation of some one who labors higher than man. The revolution of July is the triumph of right overthrowing fact, and is a thing full of splendor. Hence came the brilliancy of the revolution of 1830, and at the same time their mildness, for right that triumphs has no need to be violent. Right is justice and truth, and it is the property of right to remain eternally beautiful and pure. Fact, even the most necessary in appearance and best accepted by contemporaries, if it only exist as fact, and contain too little right, is no right at all, and is infallibly destined to become, with the duration of time, misshapen, foul, and perhaps even monstrous. If we wish to discover at one glance what a degree of ugliness fact can attain, when looked at through the distance of centuries, let us regard Machiavelli. He is not an evil genius, a demon, or a cowardly and servile writer: he is nothing but the fact, and not merely the Italian fact, but the European fact, the fact of the sixteenth century. He appears hideous, and is so in the presence of the moral idea of the 19th century. This struggle between right and fact has endured since the origin of societies. It is the task of wise men to terminate the duel, amalgamate the pure idea with human reality, and to make right penetrate fact and fact right pacifically.
Marius witnessed the unexpected dénouement of the snare upon whose track he had placed Javert, but the Inspector had scarce left the house, taking his prisoners with him in three hackney coaches, ere Marius stepped out of the house in his turn. It was only nine in the evening, and Marius went to call on Courfeyrac, who was no longer the imperturbable inhabitant of the Pays Latin. He had gone to live in the Rue de la Verrière, "for political reasons;" and this district was one of those in which insurrectionists of the day were fond of installing themselves. Marius said to Courfeyrac, "I am going to sleep here," and Courfeyrac pulled off one of his two mattresses, laid it on the ground, and said, "There you are!" At seven o'clock the next morning Marius returned to No. 50-52, paid his quarter's rent, and what he owed to Mame Bougon, had his books, bed, table, chest-of-drawers, and two chairs, placed on a truck, and went away without leaving his address; so that, when Javert returned in the morning to question Marius about the events of the previous evening, he only found Mame Bougon, who said to him, "Gone away." Mame Bougon was convinced that Marius was in some way an accomplice of the robbers arrested the previous evening. "Who would have thought it!" she exclaimed to the portresses of the quarter, "a young man whom you might have taken for a girl!"
Marius had two reasons for moving so promptly, the first was that he now felt a horror of this house, in which he had seen so closely, and in all its most repulsive and ferocious development, a social ugliness more frightful still, perhaps, than the wicked rich man,—the wicked poor man. The second was that he did not wish to figure at the trial,—which would in all probability ensue,—and be obliged to give evidence against Thénardier. Javert believed that the young man, whose name he forgot, had been frightened and had run away, or else had not even returned home; he made some efforts, however, to find him, which were unsuccessful. A month elapsed, then another. Marius was still living with Courfeyrac, and had learned from a young barrister, an habitual walker of the Salle des Pas Perdus, that Thénardier was in solitary confinement, and every Monday he left a five-franc piece for him at the wicket of La Force. Marius, having no money left, borrowed the five francs of Courfeyrac; it was the first time in his life that he borrowed money. These periodical five francs were a double enigma for Courfeyrac who gave them, and for Thénardier who received them. "Where can they go to?" Courfeyrac thought. "Where can they come from?" Thénardier asked himself.
Marius, however, was heart-broken, for everything had disappeared again through a trap-door. He saw nothing ahead of him, and his life was once more plunged into the mystery in which he had been groping. He had seen again momentarily and very closely the girl whom he loved, the old man who appeared her father,—the strange beings who were his only interest and sole hope in this world,—and at the moment when he fancied that he should grasp them, a breath had carried off all these shadows. Not a spark of certainty and truth had flashed even from that most terrific collision, and no conjecture was possible. He no longer knew the name of which he had felt so certain, and it certainly was not Ursule, and the Lark was a nickname; and then, what must he think of the old man? Did he really hide himself from the police? The white-haired workman whom Marius had met in the vicinity of the Invalides reverted to his mind, and it now became probable that this workman and M. Leblanc were one and the same. He disguised himself then, and this man had his heroic side and his equivocal side. Why did he not call for help? why did he fly? was he, yes or no, the father of the girl? and, lastly, was he really the man whom Thénardier fancied he recognized? Thénardier might have been mistaken. These were all so many insoluble problems. All this, it is true, in no way lessened the angelic charm of the maiden of the Luxembourg. Poignant distress,—Marius had a passion in his heart, and night over his eyes. He was impelled, he was attracted, and he could not stir; all had vanished, except love, and he had lost the sudden instincts and illuminations of even that love. Usually, this flame which burns us enlightens us a little, and casts some useful light without, but Marius no longer even heard the dumb counsel of passion. He never said to himself, Suppose I were to go there, or try this thing or the other? She whom he could no longer call Ursule was evidently somewhere, but nothing advised Marius in what direction he should seek her. All his life was now summed up in two words,—absolute uncertainty, in an impenetrable fog,—and though he still longed to see her, he no longer hoped it. As a climax, want returned, and he felt its icy breath close to him and behind him. In all these torments, and for a long time, he had discontinued his work, and nothing is more dangerous than discontinued work; for it is a habit which a man loses,—a habit easy to give up, but difficult to re-acquire.
A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic taken in discreet doses. It lulls to sleep the at times harsh fevers of the working brain, and produces in the mind a soft and fresh vapor which correct the too sharp outlines of pure thought, fills up gaps and spaces here and there, and rounds the angles of ideas. But excess of reverie submerges and drowns, and woe to the mental workman who allows himself to fall entirely from thinking into reverie! He believes that he can easily rise again, and says that, after all, it is the same thing. Error! Thought is the labor of the intellect, and reverie its voluptuousness; substituting reverie for thought is like confounding a person with his nutriment. Marius, it will be remembered, began with that; passion arrived, and finished by hurling him into objectless and bottomless chimeras. In such a state a man only leaves his home to go and dream, and it is an indolent childishness, a tumultuous and stagnant gulf, and in proportion as work diminishes, necessities increase. This is a law; man in a dreamy state is naturally lavish and easily moved, and the relaxed mind can no longer endure the contracted life. There is, in this mode of existence, good mingled with evil, for if the softening be mournful, the generosity is healthy and good. But the poor, generous, and noble-minded man who does not work is ruined; the resources dry up, and necessity arises. This is a fatal incline, on which the most honest and the strongest men are dragged down like the weakest and the most vicious, and which leads to one of two holes,—suicide or crime. Through going out to dream, a day arrives when a man goes out to throw himself into the water. Excess of dreaminess produces such men as Escousse and Libras. Marius went down this incline slowly, with his eyes fixed upon her whom he no longer saw. What we have just written seems strange, and yet it is true,—the recollection of an absent being is illumined in the gloom of the heart; the more it disappears the more radiant it appears, and the despairing and obscure soul sees this light on its horizon, the star of its inner night. She was Marius's entire thought, he dreamed of nothing else. He felt confusedly that his old coat was becoming an outrageous coat, and that his new coat was growing an old coat, that his boots were wearing out, that his hat was wearing out, that his shirts were wearing out,—that is to say, that his life was wearing out; and he said to himself, Could I but see her again before I die!
One sole sweet idea was left him, and it was that she had loved him, that her glance had told him so; and that she did not know his name but that she knew his soul, and that however mysterious the spot might be where she now was, she loved him still. Might she not be dreaming of him as he was dreaming of her? At times in those inexplicable hours which every loving heart knows, as he had only reason to be sad, and yet felt within him a certain quivering of joy, he said to himself, "Her thoughts are visiting me," and then added, "Perhaps my thoughts also go to her." This illusion, at which he shook his head a moment after, sometimes, however, contrived to cast rays which resembled hope into his soul at intervals. Now and then, especially at that evening hour which most saddens dreamers, he poured out upon virgin paper the pure, impersonal, and ideal reveries with which love filled his brain. He called this "writing to her." We must not suppose, however, that his reason was in disorder, quite the contrary. He had lost the faculty of working and going firmly toward a determined object, but he retained clear-sightedness and rectitude more fully than ever. Marius saw by a calm and real, though singular, light, all that was taking place before him, even the most indifferent men and facts, and spoke correctly of everything with a sort of honest weariness and candid disinterestedness. His judgment, almost detached from hope, soared far above him. In this state of mind nothing escaped him, nothing deceived him, and he discovered at each moment the bases of life,—humanity and destiny. Happy, even in agony, is the man to whom God has granted a soul worthy of love and misfortune! He who has not seen the things of this world and the heart of man in this double light has seen nothing of the truth and knows nothing.
The soul that loves and suffers is in a sublime state.
Days succeeded each other, and nothing new occurred; it really seemed to him that the gloomy space which he still had to traverse was becoming daily reduced. He fancied that he could already see distinctly the brink of the bottomless abyss.
"What!" he repeated to himself, "shall I not see her again before that takes place?"
After going up the Rue St. Jacques, leaving the barrière on one side, and following for some distance the old inner boulevard, you reach the Rue de la Santé, then the Glacière, and just before coming to the small stream of the Gobelins, you notice a sort of field, the only spot on the long and monotonous belt of Parisian boulevards, where Ruysdael would be tempted to sit down. I know not whence the picturesque aspect is obtained, for you merely see a green field crossed by ropes, on which rags hang to dry; an old house built in the time of Louis XIII., with its high-pitched roof quaintly pierced with garret-windows; broken-down grating; a little water between poplar trees; women's laughter and voices; on the horizon you see the Pantheon, the tree of the Sourds-Muets, the Val de Grâce, black, stunted, fantastic, amusing, and magnificent, and far in the background the stern square towers of Notre Dame. As the place is worth the trouble of visiting, no one goes there; scarce a cart or a wagon passes in a quarter of an hour. It once happened that Marius's solitary rambles led him to this field, and on that day there was a rarity on the boulevard, a passer-by. Marius, really struck by the almost savage grace of the field, asked him: "What is the name of this spot?"
The passer-by answered, "It is the Lark's field;" and added, "It was here that Ulbach killed the shepherdess of Ivry."
But, after the words "the Lark," Marius heard no more, for a word at times suffices to produce a congelation in a man's dreamy condition: the whole thought is condensed round an idea, and is no longer capable of any other perception. The Lark, that was the appellation which had taken the place of Ursule in the depths of Marius's melancholy. "Stay," he said, with that sort of unreasoning stupor peculiar to such mysterious asides, "this is her field, I shall learn here where she lives." This was absurd but irresistible, and he came daily to this Lark's field.
About the middle of the last century a president of the Parliament of Paris who kept a mistress under the rose—for at that day the nobility displayed their mistresses and the bourgeois concealed theirs—had "une petite maison" built in the Faubourg St. Germain, in the deserted Rue Blomet, which is now called Rue Plumet, and not far from the spot which was formerly known as the "Combat des Animaux." This house consisted of a pavilion only one story in height, there were two sitting-rooms on the ground-floor, two bedrooms on the first, a kitchen below, a boudoir above, an attic beneath the roof, and the whole was surrounded by a large garden with railings looking out on the street. This was all that passers-by could see. But behind the pavilion was a narrow yard, with an outhouse containing two rooms, where a nurse and a child could be concealed if necessary. In the back of this outhouse was a secret door leading into a long, paved, winding passage, open to the sky, and bordered by two lofty walls. This passage, concealed with prodigious art, and, as it were, lost between the garden walls, whose every turn and winding it followed, led to another secret door, which opened about a quarter of a mile off almost in another quarter, at the solitary end of the Rue de Babylone. The president went in by this door, so that even those who might have watched him, and observed that he mysteriously went somewhere every day, could not have suspected that going to the Rue de Babylone was going to the Rue Blomet. By clever purchases of ground, the ingenious magistrate had been enabled to make this hidden road upon his own land, and consequently uncontrolled. At a later date he sold the land bordering the passage in small lots for gardens, and the owners of these gardens on either side believed that they had a parting-wall before them, and did not even suspect the existence of this long strip of pavement winding between two walls among their flower-beds and orchards. The birds alone saw this curiosity, and it is probable that the linnets and tomtits of the last century gossiped a good deal about the President.
The pavilion, built of stone, in the Mansard taste, and panelled and furnished in the Watteau style, rock-work outside, old-fashioned within, and begirt by a triple hedge of flowers, had something discreet, coquettish, and solemn about it, befitting the caprices of love and a magistrate. This house and this passage, which have now disappeared, still existed fifteen years ago. In 1793 a brazier bought the house for the purpose of demolishing it, but as he could not pay, the nation made him bankrupt, and thus it was the house that demolished the brazier. Since then the house bad remained uninhabited, and fell slowly into ruins, like every residence to which the presence of man no longer communicates life. The old furniture was left in it, and the ten or twelve persons who pass along the Rue Plumet were informed that it was for sale or lease by a yellow and illegible placard which had been fastened to the garden gate since 1810. Toward the end of the Restoration the same passers-by might have noticed that the bill had disappeared, and even that the first-floor shutters were open. The house was really occupied, and there were short curtains at the windows, a sign that there was a lady in the house. In October, 1829, a middle-aged man presented himself and took the house as it stood, including of course the outhouse and the passage leading to the Rue de Babylone, and he had the two secret doors of this passage put in repair. The house was still furnished much as the president had left it, so the new tenant merely ordered a few necessary articles, had the paving of the yard put to rights, new stairs put in, and the windows mended, and eventually installed himself there with a young girl and an old woman, without any disturbance, and rather like a man slipping in than one entering his own house. The neighbors, however, did not chatter, for the simple reason that he had none.
The tenant was in reality Jean Valjean, and the girl was Cosette. The domestic was a female of the name of Toussaint, whom Jean Valjean had saved from the hospital and wretchedness, and who was old, rustic, and stammered,—three qualities which determined Jean Valjean on taking her with him. He hired the house in the name of M. Fauchelevent, annuitant. In all we have recently recorded, the reader will have doubtless recognized Valjean even sooner than Thénardier did. Why had he left the convent of the Little Picpus, and what had occurred there? Nothing had occurred. It will be borne in mind that Jean Valjean was happy in the convent, so happy that his conscience at last became disturbed by it. He saw Cosette daily, he felt paternity springing up and being developed in him more and more; he set his whole soul on the girl; he said to himself that she was his, that no power on earth could rob him of her, that it would be so indefinitely, that she would certainly become a nun, as she was daily gently urged to it, that henceforth the convent was the world for him as for her, that he would grow old in it and she grow up, that she would grow old and he die there; and that, finally, no separation was possible. While reflecting on this, he began falling into perplexities: he asked himself if all this happiness were really his, if it were not composed of the happiness of this child, which he confiscated and deprived her of, and whether this were not a robbery? He said to himself that this child had the right to know life before renouncing it, that depriving her beforehand, and without consulting her, of all joys under the pretext of saving her from all trials, and profiting by her ignorance and isolation to make an artificial vocation spring up in her, was denaturalizing a human creature and being false to God. And who knew whether Cosette, some day meditating on this, and feeling herself a reluctant nun, might not grow to hate him? It was a last thought, almost selfish and less heroic than the others, but it was insupportable to him. He resolved to leave the convent.
He resolved, and recognized with a breaking heart that he must do so. As for objections, there were none, for six years of residence between these walls, and of disappearance, had necessarily destroyed or dispersed the element of fear. He could return to human society at his ease, for he had grown old and all had changed. Who would recognize him now? And then, looking at the worst, there was only danger for himself, and he had not the right to condemn Cosette to a cloister, for the reason that he had been condemned to the galleys; besides, what is danger in the presence of duty? Lastly, nothing prevented him from being prudent and taking precautions; and as for Cosette's education, it was almost completed and terminated. Once the resolution was formed, he awaited the opportunity, which soon offered: old Fauchelevent died. Jean Valjean requested an audience of the reverend prioress, and told her that as he had inherited a small property by his brother's death, which would enable him to live without working, he was going to leave the convent, and take his daughter with him; but as it was not fair that Cosette, who was not going to profess, should have been educated gratuitously, he implored the reverend prioress to allow him to offer the community, for the five years which Cosette had passed among them, the sum of five thousand francs. It was thus that Jean Valjean quitted the Convent of the Perpetual Adoration.
On leaving it he carried with his own hands, and would not intrust to any porter, the small valise, of which he always had the key about him. This valise perplexed Cosette, owing to the aromatic smell which issued from it. Let us say at once that this trunk never quitted him again, he always had it in his bed-room, and it was the first and at times the only thing which he carried away in his removals. Cosette laughed, called this valise "the inseparable," and said, "I am jealous of it." Jean Valjean, however, felt a profound anxiety when he returned to the outer air. He discovered the house in the Rue Plumet, and hid himself in it, henceforth remaining in possession of the name of Ultime Fauchelevent. At the same time he hired two other lodgings in Paris, so that he might attract less attention than if he had always remained in the same quarter; that he might, if necessary, absent himself for a while if anything alarmed him; and, lastly, that he might not be taken unaware, as on the night when he so miraculously escaped from Javert. These two lodgings were of a very mean appearance, and in two quarters very distant from each other, one being in the Rue de l'Ouest, the other in the Rue de l'Homme-armé. He spent a few weeks now and then at one or the other of these lodgings, taking Cosette with him and leaving Toussaint behind. He was waited on by the porters, and represented himself as a person living in the country, who had a lodging in town. This lofty virtue had three domiciles in Paris in order to escape the police.
Their life thus gradually became overcast; only one amusement was left them which had formerly been a happiness, and that was to carry bread to those who were starving, and clothes to those who were cold. In these visits to the poor, in which Cosette frequently accompanied Jean Valjean, they found again some portion of their old expansiveness; and at times, when the day had been good, when a good deal of distress had been relieved, and many children warmed and re-animated, Cosette displayed a little gayety at night. It was at this period that they paid the visit to Jondrette's den. The day after that visit, Jean Valjean appeared at an early hour in the pavilion, calm as usual, but with a large wound in his left arm, which was very inflamed and venomous, which resembled a burn, and which he accounted for in some way or other. This wound kept him at home with a fever for more than a month, for he would not see any medical man, and when Cosette pressed him, he said, "Call in the dog-doctor." Cosette dressed his wound morning and night with an air of such divine and angelic happiness at being useful to him, that Jean Valjean felt all his old joy return, his fears and anxieties dissipated; and he gazed at Cosette, saying, "Oh, the excellent wound! the good hurt!"
Cosette, seeing her father ill, had deserted the pavilion, and regained her taste for the little outhouse and the back court. She spent nearly the whole day by the side of Jean Valjean, and read to him any books he chose, which were generally travels. Jean Valjean was regenerated. His happiness returned with ineffable radiance; the Luxembourg, the young unknown prowler, Cosette's coldness,—all these soul-clouds disappeared, and he found himself saying, "I imagined all that; I am an old fool!" His happiness was such that the frightful discovery of the Thénardiers made in Jondrettes den, which was so unexpected, had to some extent glided over him. He had succeeded in escaping, his trail was lost, and what did he care for the rest? He only thought of it to pity those wretches. They were in prison, and henceforth incapable of mischief, he thought, but what a lamentable family in distress! As for the hideous vision of the Barrière du Maine, Cosette had not spoken again about it. In the convent, Sister Sainte Mechtilde had taught Cosette music; she had a voice such as a linnet would have if it possessed a soul; and at times she sang sad songs in the wounded man's obscure room, which enlivened Jean Valjean. Spring arrived, and the garden was so delicious at that season of the year, that Jean Valjean said to Cosette, "You never go out, and I wish you to take a stroll." "As you please, father," said Cosette. And to obey her father, she resumed her walks in the garden, generally alone, for, as we have mentioned, Jean Valjean, who was probably afraid of being seen from the gate, hardly ever entered it.
Jean Valjean's wound had been a diversion; when Cosette saw that her father suffered less, and was recovering and seemed happy, she felt a satisfaction which she did not even notice, for it came so softly and naturally. Then, too, it was the month of March; the days were drawing out, winter was departing, and it always takes with it some portion of our sorrow; then came April, that daybreak of summer, fresh as every dawn, and gay like all childhoods, and somewhat tearful at times like the new-born babe it is. Nature in that month has charming beams which pass from the sky, the clouds, the trees, the fields, and the flowers into the human heart. Cosette was still too young for this April joy, which resembled her, not to penetrate her; insensibly, and without suspecting it, the dark cloud departed from her mind. In spring there is light in sad souls, as there is at midday in cellars. Cosette was no longer so very sad; it was so, but she did not attempt to account for it. In the morning, after breakfast, when she succeeded in drawing her father into the garden for a quarter of an hour, and walked him up and down while supporting his bad arm, she did not notice that she laughed every moment and was happy. Jean Valjean was delighted to see her become ruddy-cheeked and fresh once more.
"Oh, the famous wound!" he repeated to himself, in a low voice.
And he was grateful to the Thénardiers. So soon as his wound was cured he recommenced his solitary night-rambles; and it would be a mistake to suppose that a man can walk about alone in the uninhabited regions of Paris without meeting with some adventure.
Cosette's sorrow, so poignant and so sharp four or five months previously, had without her knowledge attained the convalescent stage. Nature, spring, youth, love for her father, the gayety of the flowers and birds filtered gradually, day by day and drop by drop, something that almost resembled oblivion into her virginal and young soul. Was the fire entirely extinguished; or were layers of ashes merely formed? The fact is, that she hardly felt now the painful and burning point. One day she suddenly thought of Marius; "Why," she said, "I had almost forgotten him." This same week she noticed, while passing the garden gate, a very handsome officer in the Lancers, with a wasp-like waist, a delightful uniform, the cheeks of a girl, a sabre under his arm, waxed mustaches, and lacquered schapska. In other respects, he had light hair, blue eyes flush with his head, a round, vain, insolent, and pretty face; he was exactly the contrary of Marius. He had a cigar in his mouth, and Cosette supposed that he belonged to the regiment quartered in the barracks of the Rue de Babylone. The next day she saw him pass again, and remarked the hour. From this moment—was it an accident?—she saw him pass nearly every day. The officer's comrades perceived that there was in this badly kept garden, and behind this poor, old-fashioned railing, a very pretty creature who was nearly always there when the handsome lieutenant passed, who is no stranger to the reader, as his name was Théodule Gillenormand.
"Hilloh!" they said to him, "there's a little girl making eyes at you, just look at her."
"Have I the time," the Lancer replied, "to look at all the girls who look at me?"
It was at this identical time that Marius was slowly descending to the abyss, and said, "If I could only see her again before I die!" If his wish had been realized, if he had at that moment seen Cosette looking at a Lancer, he would have been unable to utter a word, but expired of grief. Whose fault would it have been? Nobody's. Marius possessed one of those temperaments which bury themselves in chagrin and abide in it: Cosette was one of those who plunge into it and again emerge. Cosette, however, was passing through that dangerous moment,—the fatal phase of feminine reverie left to itself, in which the heart of an isolated maiden resembles those vine tendrils which cling, according to chance, to the capital of a marble column or to the sign-post of an inn. It is a rapid and decisive moment, critical for every orphan, whether she be poor or rich; for wealth does not prevent a bad choice, and misalliances take place in very high society. But the true misalliance is that of souls; and in the same way as many an unknown young man, without name, birth, or fortune, is a marble capital supporting a temple of grand sentiments and grand ideas, so a man of the world, satisfied and opulent, who has polished boots and varnished words, if we look not at the exterior but at the interior,—that is to say, what is reserved for the wife,—is nought but a stupid log obscurely haunted by violent, unclean, and drunken passions,—the inn sign-post.
What was there in Cosette's soul? Passion calmed or lulled to sleep, love in a floating state; something which was limpid and brilliant, perturbed at a certain depth, and sombre lower still. The image of the handsome officer was reflected on the surface, but was there any reminiscence at the bottom, quite at the bottom? Perhaps so, but Cosette did not know.
A singular incident occurred.
Since 1823, while the public-house at Montfermeil was sinking and gradually being swallowed up, not in the abyss of a bankruptcy, but in the sewer of small debts, the Thénardiers had had two more children, both male. These made five, two daughters and three boys, and they were a good many. The mother had got rid of the latter while still babies by a singular piece of good luck. Got rid of, that is exactly the term, for in this woman there was only a fragment of nature; it is a phenomenon, however, of which there is more than one instance. Like the Maréchale de Lamothe-Houdancourt, the Thénardier was only a mother as far as her daughters, and her maternity ended there. Her hatred of the human race began with her boys; on the side of her sons her cruelty was perpendicular, and her heart had in this respect a dismal steepness. As we have seen, she detested the eldest, and execrated the two others. Why? Because she did. The most terrible of motives and most indisputable of answers is, Because. "I do not want a pack of squalling brats," this mother said.
Let us now explain how the Thénardiers managed to dispose of their last two children, and even make a profit of them. That Magnon, to whom we referred a few pages back, was the same who continued to get an annuity out of old Gillenormand for the two children she had. She lived on the Quai des Célestins, at the corner of that ancient Rue du Petit-Musc, which has done all it could to change its bad reputation into a good odor. Our readers will remember the great croup epidemic, which, thirty-five years ago, desolated the banks of the Seine in Paris, and of which science took advantage to make experiments on a grand scale as to the efficacy of inhaling alum, for which the external application of tincture of iodine has been so usefully substituted in our day. In this epidemic Magnon lost her two boys, still very young, on the same day, one in the morning, the other in the evening. It was a blow, for these children were precious to their mother, as they represented eighty francs a month. These eighty francs were very punctually paid by the receiver of M. Gillenormand's rents, a M. Barge, a retired bailiff who lived in the Rue de Sicile. When the children were dead the annuity was buried, and so Magnon sought an expedient. In the dark free-masonry of evil of which she formed part everything is known, secrets are kept, and people help each other. Magnon wanted two children, and Madame Thénardier had two of the same size and age; it was a good arrangement for one, and an excellent investment for the other. The little Thénardiers became the little Magnons, and Magnon left the Quai des Célestins, and went to live in the Rue Cloche-Perce. In Paris the identity which attaches an individual to himself is broken by moving from one street to the others. The authorities, not being warned by anything, made no objections, and the substitution was effected in the simplest way in the world. Thénardier, however, demanded for this loan of children ten francs a month, which Magnon promised, and even paid. We need not say that M. Gillenormand continued to sacrifice himself, and went every six months to see the children. He did not notice the change. "Oh, sir," Magnon would say to him, "how like you they are, to be sure."
Thénardier, to whom avatars were an easy task, seized this opportunity to become Jondrette. His two daughters and Gavroche had scarcely had time to perceive that they had two little brothers; for in a certain stage of misery people are affected by a sort of spectral indifference, and regard human beings as ghosts. Your nearest relatives are often to you no more than vague forms of the shadow, hardly to be distinguished from the nebulous back-ground of life, and which easily become blended again with the invisible. On the evening of the day when Mother Thénardier handed over her two babes to Magnon, with the well-expressed will of renouncing them forever, she felt, or pretended to feel, a scruple, and said to her husband, "Why, that is deserting one's children!" But Thénardier, magisterial and phlegmatic, cauterized the scruple with this remark, "Jean Jacques Rousseau did better." From scruple the mother passed to anxiety: "But suppose the police were to trouble us? Tell me, Monsieur Thénardier, whether what we have done is permitted?" Thénardier replied: "Everything is permitted. Nobody will see through it out of the blue. Besides, no one has any interest in inquiring closely after children that have not a sou." Magnon was a sort of she-dandy in crime, and dressed handsomely. She shared her rooms, which were furnished in a conventional and miserable way, with a very clever Gallicized English thief. This Englishwoman, a naturalized Parisian, respectable through her powerful and rich connections, who was closely connected with medals of the library and the diamonds of Mademoiselle Mars, was at a later date celebrated in the annals of crime. She was called "Mamselle Miss." The two little ones who had fallen into Magnon's clutches had no cause to complain; recommended by the eighty francs, they were taken care of, like everything which brings in a profit. They were not badly clothed, not badly fed, treated almost like "little gentlemen," and better off with their false mother than the true one. Magnon acted the lady, and never talked slang in their presence. They spent several years there, and Thénardier augured well of it. One day he happened to say to Magnon as she handed him the monthly ten francs, "The 'father' must give them an education."
All at once these two poor little creatures, hitherto tolerably well protected, even by their evil destiny, were suddenly hurled into life, and forced to begin it. An arrest of criminals en masse, like that in the Jondrette garret, being necessarily complicated with researches and ulterior incarcerations, is a veritable disaster for that hideous and occult counter-society which lives beneath public society; and an adventure of this nature produces all sorts of convulsions in this gloomy world. The catastrophe of the Thénardiers was the catastrophe of Magnon. One day, a little while after Magnon had given Éponine the note relating to the Rue Plumet, the police made a sudden descent on the Rue Cloche-Perce. Magnon was arrested, as was Mamselle Miss, and all the inhabitants of the house which were suspected were caught in the haul. The two little boys were playing at the time in the back-yard, and saw nothing of the raid; but when they tried to go in they found the door locked and the house empty. A cobbler whose stall was opposite called to them and gave them a paper which "their mother" had left for them. On the paper was this address, "M. Barge, receiver of rents, No. 8, Rue du Roi de Sicile." The cobbler said to them: "You no longer live here. Go there, it is close by, the first street on your left. Ask your way with that paper." The boys set off, the elder leading the younger, and holding in his hand the paper which was to serve as their guide. It was cold, and his little numbed fingers held the paper badly, and at the corner of a lane a puff of wind tore it from him; and as it was night the boy could not find it again. They began wandering about the streets haphazard.
"Pigritia" is a terrible word. It engenders a world, la pègre, for which read, robbery; and a Hades, la pégrenne, for which read, hunger. Hence indolence is a mother, and has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger. Where are we at this moment? In slang. What is slang? It is at once the nation and the idiom; it is robbery in its two species, people and language. Four-and-thirty years ago, when the narrator of this grave and sombre history introduced into the middle of a work written with the same object as this one[1] a robber speaking slang, there was amazement and clamor. "Why! what! slang! why, it is frightful; it is the language of the chain-gang, of hulks and prisons, of everything that is the most abominable in society," etc. We could never understand objections of this nature. Since that period two powerful romance-writers, of whom one was a profound observer of humanity, the other an intrepid friend of the people,—Balzac and Eugène Sue,—having made bandits talk in their natural tongue, as the author of "Le dernier Jour dun Condamné" did in 1828, the same objections were raised, and people repeated: "What do writers want with this repulsive patois? Slang is odious, and produces a shudder." Who denies it? Of course it does. When the object is to probe a wound, a gulf, or a society, when did it become a fault to drive the probe too deep? We have always thought that it was sometimes an act of courage and at the very least a simple and useful action, worthy of the sympathetic attention which a duty accepted and carried out deserves. Why should we not explore and study everything, and why stop on the way? Stopping is the function of the probe, and not of the prober.
Certainly it is neither an attractive nor an easy task to seek in the lowest depths of social order, where the earth leaves off and mud begins, to grope in these vague densities, to pursue, seize, and throw quivering on the pavement that abject idiom which drips with filth when thus brought to light, that pustulous vocabulary of which each word seems an unclean ring of a monster of the mud and darkness. Nothing is more mournful than thus to contemplate, by the light of thought, the frightful vermin swarm of slang in its nudity. It seems, in fact, as if you have just drawn from its sewer a sort of horrible beast made for the night, and you fancy you see a frightful, living, and bristling polype, which shivers, moves, is agitated, demands the shadow again, menaces, and looks. One word resembles a claw, another a lustreless and bleeding eye, and some phrases seem to snap like the pincers of a crab. All this lives with the hideous vitality of things which are organized in disorganization. Now, let us ask, when did horror begin to exclude study; or the malady drive away the physician? Can we imagine a naturalist who would refuse to examine a viper, a bat, a scorpion, a scolopendra, or a tarantula, and throw them into the darkness, saying, "Fie, how ugly they are!" The thinker who turned away from slang would resemble a surgeon who turned away from an ulcer or a wart. He would be a philologist hesitating to examine a fact of language, a philosopher hesitating to scrutinize a fact of humanity. For we must tell all those ignorant of the fact, that slang is at once a literary phenomenon and a social result. What is slang, properly so called? It is the language of misery.
Here we may, perhaps, be stopped; the fact may be generalized, which is sometimes a way of alternating it; it may be observed that every trade, every profession, we might also say all the accidents of the social hierarchy, and all the forms of intelligence, have their slang. The merchant who says "Montpellier in demand, Marseille fine quality;" the broker who says, "amount brought forward, premium at end of month;" the gambler who says, "pique, répique, and capot;" the bailiff of the Norman Isles who says, "the holder in fee cannot make any claim on the products of the land during the hereditary seizure of the property of the re-lessor;" the playwright who says, "the piece was goosed;" the actor who says, "I made a hit;" the philosopher who says, "phenomenal triplicity;" the sportsman who says, "a covey of partridges, a leash of woodcocks;" the phrenologist who says, "amativeness, combativeness, secretiveness;" the infantry soldier who says, "my clarionette;" the dragoon who says, "my turkey-cock;" the fencing-master who says, "tierce, carte, disengage;" the printer who says, "hold a chapel;" all—printer, fencing-master, dragoon, infantry man, phrenologist, sportsman, philosopher, actor, playwright, gambler, stock-broker, and merchant—talk slang. The painter who says, "my grinder;" the attorney who says, "my gutter-skipper;" the barber who says, "my clerk;" and the cobbler who says, "my scrub,"—all talk slang. Rigorously taken, all the different ways of saying right and left, the sailors larboard and starboard, the scene-shifter's off-side and prompt-side, and the vergers Epistle-side and Gospel-side, are slang. There is the slang of affected girls as there was the slang of the précieuses, and the Hôtel de Rambouillet bordered to some slight extent the Cour des Miracles. There is the slang of duchesses, as is proved by this sentence, written in a note by a very great lady and very pretty woman of the Restoration: "Vous trouverez dans ces potains-là une foultitude de raisons pour que je me libertise."[2] Diplomatic ciphers are slang, and the Pontifical Chancery, writing 26 for "Rome," grkztntgzyal for "Envoy," and abfxustgrnogrkzu tu XI. for "the Duke of Modena," talk slang. The mediæval physicians who, in order to refer to carrots, radishes, and turnips, said, opoponach, perfroschinum, reptitalinus, dracatholicum, angelorum, and postmegorum, talk slang. The sugar-refiner who says, "clarified syrup, molasses, bastard, common, burned, loaf-sugar,"—this honest manufacturer talks slang. A certain school of critics, who twenty years ago said, "one half of Shakespeare is puns and playing on words," spoke slang. The poet and artist who with profound feeling would call M. de Montmorency a bourgeois, if he were not a connoisseur in verses and statues, talk slang. The classic academician who calls flowers Flora, the fruits Pomona, the sea Neptune, love the flames, beauty charms, a horse a charger, the white or tricolor cockade the rose of Bellona, the three-cornered hat the triangle of Mars,—that classic academician talks slang. Algebra, medicine, and botany have their slang. The language employed on shipboard—that admirable sea-language so complete and picturesque, which Jean Bart, Duquesne, Suffren, and Duperré spoke, which is mingled with the straining of the rigging, the sound of the speaking-trumpets, the clang of boarding-axe, the rolling, the wind, the gusts, and the cannon—is an heroic and brilliant slang, which is to the ferocious slang of robbers what the lion is to the jackal.
All this is perfectly true, but whatever people may say, this mode of comprehending the word "slang" is an extension which everybody will not be prepared to admit. For our part, we perceive the precise circumscribed and settled acceptation of the word, and restrict slang to slang. The true slang, the slang par excellence, if the two words can be coupled, the immemorial slang which was a kingdom, is nothing else, we repeat, than the ugly, anxious, cunning, treacherous, venomous, cruel, blear-eyed, vile, profound, and fatal language of misery. There is at the extremity of all abasements and all misfortunes a last misery, which revolts and resolves to contend with the ensemble of fortunate facts and reigning rights,—a frightful struggle, in which, at one moment crafty, at another violent, at once unhealthy and ferocious, it attacks the social order with pinpricks by vice, and with heavy blows by crime. For the necessities of this struggle, misery has invented a fighting language, which is called slang. To hold up on the surface and keep from forgetfulness, from the gulf, only a fragment of any language which man has spoken, and which would be lost,—that is to say, one of the elements, good or bad, of which civilization is composed and complicated,—is to extend the data of social observation and serve civilization itself. Plautus rendered this service, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, by making two Carthaginian soldiers speak Phœnician; Molière rendered it also by making so many of his characters talk Levantine and all sorts of patois. Here objections crop out afresh: Phœnician, excellent; Levantine, very good; and even patois may be allowed, for they are languages which have belonged to nations or provinces—but slang? Of what service is it to preserve slang and help it to float on the surface?
To this we will only make one remark. Assuredly, if the language which a nation or a province has spoken is worthy of interest, there is a thing still more worthy of attention and study, and that is the language which a wretchedness has spoken. It is the language which has been spoken in France, for instance, for more than four centuries, not only by a wretchedness, but by every wretchedness, by every human wretchedness possible. And then, we insist upon the fact, to study social deformities and infirmities, and point them out for cure, is not a task in which choice is permissible. The historian of morals and ideas has a mission no less austere than the historian of events. The latter has the surface of civilization, the struggles of crowned heads, the births of princes, the marriages of kings, assemblies, great public men and revolutions,—all the external part; the other historian has the interior,—the basis, the people that labors, suffers, and waits, the crushed woman, the child dying in agony, the dull warfare of man with man, obscene ferocities, prejudices, allowed iniquities, the subterranean counter-strokes of the law, the secret revolutions of minds, the indistinct shivering of multitudes, those who die of hunger, the barefooted, the bare-armed, the disinherited, the orphans, the unhappy, the infamous, and all the ghosts that wander about in obscurity. He must go down with his heart full of charity and severity, at once as a brother and as a judge, into the impenetrable dungeons in which crawl pell-mell those who bleed and those who wound, those who weep and those who cure, those who fast and those who devour, those that endure evil, and those who commit it. Are the duties of the historians of hearts and souls inferior to those of the historians of external facts? Can we believe that Alighieri has less to say than Machiavelli? Is the lower part of civilization, because it is deeper and more gloomy, less important than the upper? Do we know the mountain thoroughly if we do not know the caverns?
We will notice, by the way, that from our previous remarks a marked separation, which does not exist in our mind, might be inferred between the two classes of historians. No one is a good historian of the patent, visible, glistening, and public life of a people, unless he is at the same time to a certain extent the historian of their profound and hidden life; and no one is a good historian of the interior unless he can be, whenever it is required, historian of the exterior. The history of morals and ideas penetrates the history of events, and vice versâ; they are two orders of different facts which answer to each other, are always linked together, and often engender one another. All the lineaments which Providence traces on the surface of a nation have their gloomy, but distinct, parallels at the base, and all the convulsions of the interior produce up-heavings on the surface. As true history is a medley of everything, the real historian attends to everything. Man is not a circle with only one centre; he is an ellipse with two foci, facts being the one, and ideas the other. Slang is nothing but a vestibule in which language, having some wicked action to commit, disguises itself. It puts on these masks of words and rags of metaphors. In this way it becomes horrible, and can scarce be recognized. Is it really the French language, the great human tongue? It is ready to go on the stage and take up the cue of crime, and suited for all the parts in the repertory of evil. It no longer walks, but shambles; it limps upon the crutch of the Cour des Miracles, which may be metamorphosed into a club. All the spectres, its dressers, have daubed its face, and it crawls along and stands erect with the double movement of the reptile. It is henceforth ready for any part, for it has been made to squint by the forger, has been verdigrised by the poisoner, blackened by the soot of the incendiary, and the murderer has given it his red.
When you listen at the door of society, on the side of honest men, you catch the dialogue of those outside. You distinguish questions and answers, and notice, without comprehending it, a hideous murmur sounding almost like the human accent, but nearer to a yell than to speech. It is slang; the words are deformed, wild, imprinted with a species of fantastic bestiality. You fancy that you hear hydras conversing. It is unintelligibility in darkness; it gnashes its teeth and talks in whispers, supplementing the gloom by enigmas. There is darkness in misfortune, and greater darkness still in crime, and these two darknesses amalgamated compose slang. There is obscurity in the atmosphere, obscurity in the deeds, obscurity in the voices. It is a horrifying, frog-like language, which goes, comes, hops, crawls, slavers, and moves monstrously in that common gray mist composed of crime, night, hunger, vice, falsehood, injustice, nudity, asphyxia, and winter, which is the high noon of the wretched.
Let us take compassion on the chastised, for, alas! what are we ourselves? Who am I, who am speaking to you? Who are you, who are listening to me? Whence do we come? And is it quite sure that we did nothing before we were born? The earth is not without a resemblance to a prison, and who knows whether man is not the ticket-of-leave of Divine justice? If we look at life closely we find it so made that there is punishment everywhere to be seen. Are you what is called a happy man? Well, you are sad every day, and each of them has its great grief or small anxiety. Yesterday, you trembled for a health which is dear to you, to-day you are frightened about your own, to-morrow it will be a monetary anxiety, and the day after the diatribe of a calumniator, and the day after that again the misfortune of some friend; then the weather, then something broken or lost, or a pleasure for which your conscience and your backbone reproach you; or, another time, the progress of public affairs, and we do not take into account heart-pangs. And so it goes on; one cloud is dissipated, another forms, and there is hardly one day in one hundred of real joy and bright sunshine. And you are one of that small number who are happy; as for other men, the stagnation of night is around them. Reflecting minds rarely use the expressions "the happy" and the "unhappy," for in this world, which is evidently the vestibule of another, there are no happy beings. The true human division is into the luminous and the dark. To diminish the number of the dark, and augment that of the luminous, is the object; and that is why we cry, "Instruction and learning!" Learning to read is lighting the fire, and every syllable spelled is a spark. When we say light, however, we do not necessarily mean light; for men suffer in light, and excess of light burns. Flame is the enemy of the wings, and to burn without ceasing to fly is the prodigy of genius. When you know and when you love, you will still suffer, for the day is born in tears, and the luminous weep, be it only for the sake of those in darkness.
[1] Le dernier Jour d'un Condamné.
[2] "You will find in that tittle-tattle a multitude of reasons why I should take my liberty."
The reader has of course understood that Éponine, on recognizing through the railings the inhabitant of the house in the Rue Plumet, to which Magnon sent her, began by keeping the bandits aloof from the house, then led Marius to it; and that after several days of ecstasy before the railings, Marius, impelled by that force which attracts iron to the loadstone, and the lover toward the stones of the house in which she whom he loves resides, had eventually entered Cosette's garden, as Romeo did Juliet's. This had even been an easier task for him than for Romeo; for Romeo was obliged to scale a wall, while Marius had merely to move one of the bars of the decrepit railing loose in its rusty setting, after the fashion of the teeth of old people. As Marius was thin, he easily passed. As there never was anybody in the street, and as Marius never entered the garden save at night, he ran no risk of being seen. From that blessed and holy hour when a kiss affianced these two souls, Marius went to the garden every night. If, at this moment of her life, Cosette had fallen in love with an unscrupulous libertine, she would have been lost; for there are generous natures that surrender themselves, and Cosette was one of them. One of the magnanimities of a woman is to yield; and love, at that elevation where it is absolute, is complicated by a certain celestial blindness of modesty. But what dangers you incur, ye noble souls! You often give the heart and we take the body; your heart is left you, and you look at it in the darkness with a shudder. Love has no middle term: it either saves or destroys, and this dilemma is the whole of human destiny. No fatality offers this dilemma of ruin or salvation more inexorably than does love, for love is life, if it be not death; it is a cradle, but also a coffin. The same feeling says yes and no in the human heart, and of all the things which God has made, the human heart is the one which evolves the most light, and, alas I the most darkness. God willed it that the love which Cosette encountered was one of those loves which save. So long as the month of May of that year, 1832, lasted, there were every night in this poor untrimmed garden, and under this thicket, which daily became more fragrant and more thick, two beings composed of all the chastities and all the innocences, overflowing with all the felicities of heaven, nearer to the archangels than to man, pure, honest, intoxicated, and radiant, and who shone for each other in the darkness. It seemed to Cosette as if Marius had a crown, and to Marius as if Cosette had a glory. They touched each other, they looked at each other, they took each other by the hand, they drew close to each other; but there was a distance which they never crossed. Not that they respected it, but they were ignorant of it. Marius felt a barrier in Cosette's purity, and Cosette felt a support in the loyalty of Marius. The first kiss had also been the last; since then Marius had never gone beyond touching Cosette's hand or neck-handkerchief, or a curl with his lips. Cosette was to him a perfume, and not a woman, and he inhaled her. She refused nothing, and he asked for nothing; Cosette was happy and Marius satisfied. They lived in that ravishing state which might be called the dazzling of a soul by a soul; it was the ineffable first embrace of two virginities in the ideal, two swans meeting on the Jungfrau. At this hour of love, the hour when voluptuousness is absolutely silenced by the omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, the pure and seraphic Marius, would have sooner been able to go home with a street-walker than raise Cosette's gown as high as her ankle. Once in the moonlight Cosette stooped to pick up something on the ground, and her dress opened and displayed her neck. Marius turned his eyes away.
What passed between these two lovers? Nothing; they adored each other. At night, when they were there, this garden seemed a living and sacred spot. All the flowers opened around them and sent them their incense; and they opened their souls and spread them over the flowers. The wanton and vigorous vegetation quivered, full of sap and intoxication, around these two innocents, and they uttered words of love at which the trees shivered. What were these words? Breathings, nothing more; but they were sufficient to trouble and affect all this nature. It is a magic power which it would be difficult to understand, were we to read in a book this conversation made to be carried away and dissipated like smoke beneath the leaves by the wind. Take away from these whispers of two lovers the melody which issues from the soul, and accompanies them like a lyre, and what is left is only a shadow, and you say, "What! is it only that?" Well, yes, child's-play, repetitions, laughs at nothing, absurdities, foolishness,—all that is the most sublime and profound in the world! the only things which are worth the trouble of being said and being listened to. The man who has never heard, the man who has never uttered these absurdities and poor things is an imbecile and a wicked man. Said Cosette to Marius,—
"Do you know that my name is Euphrasie?"
"Euphrasie? No, it is Cosette."
"Oh, Cosette is an ugly name, which was given me when I was little; but my real name is Euphrasie. Don't you like that name?"
"Yes; but Cosette is not ugly."
"Do you like it better than Euphrasie?"
"Well—yes."
"In that case, I like it better too. That is true, Cosette is pretty. Call me Cosette."
Another time she looked at him intently, and exclaimed,—
"You are handsome, sir; you are good-looking; you have wit; you are not at all stupid; you are much more learned than I; but I challenge you with, 'I love you.'"
And Marius fancied that he heard a strophe sung by a star. Or else she gave him a little tap when he coughed, and said,—
"Do not cough, sir; I do not allow anybody to cough in my house without permission. It is very wrong to cough and frighten me. I wish you to be in good health, because if you were not I should be very unhappy, and what would you have me do?"
And this was simply divine.
Once Marius said to Cosette,—
"Just fancy; I supposed for a while that your name was Ursule."
This made them laugh the whole evening. In the middle of another conversation he happened to exclaim,—
"Oh! one day at the Luxembourg I felt disposed to finish breaking an invalid!"
But he stopped short, and did not complete the sentence, for he would have been obliged to allude to Cosette's garter, and that was impossible. There was a strange feeling connected with the flesh, before which this immense innocent love recoiled with a sort of holy terror. Marius imagined life with Cosette like this, without anything else,—to come every evening to the Rue Plumet, remove the old complacent bar of the president's railings, sit down elbow to elbow on this bench, look through the trees at the scintillation of the commencing night, bring the fold in his trouser-knee into cohabitation with Cosette's ample skirts, to caress her thumb-nail, and to inhale the same flower in turn forever and indefinitely. During this tune the clouds passed over their heads; and each time the wind blows it carries off more of a man's thoughts than of clouds from the sky. We cannot affirm that this chaste, almost stern love was absolutely without gallantly. "Paying compliments" to her whom we love is the first way of giving caresses and an attempted semi-boldness. A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil, and pleasure puts its sweet point upon it, while concealing itself. In the presence of the delight the heart recoils to love more. The cajoleries of Marius, all saturated with chimera, were, so to speak, of an azure blue. The birds when they fly in the direction of the angels must hear words of the same nature, still, life, humanity, and the whole amount of positivism of which Marius was capable were mingled with it It was what is said in the grotto, as a prelude to what will be said in the alcove,—a lyrical effusion, the strophe and the sonnet commingled, the gentle hyperboles of cooing, all the refinements of adoration arranged in a posy, and exhaling a subtle and celestial perfume, an ineffable prattling of heart to heart.
"Oh!" Marius muttered, "how lovely you are! I dare not look at you, and that is the reason why I contemplate you. You are a grace, and I know not what is the matter with me. The hem of your dress, where the end of your slipper passes through, upsets me. And then, what an enchanting light when your thoughts become visible, for your reason astonishes me, and you appear to me for instants to be a dream. Speak, I am listening to you, and admiring you. Oh, Cosette, how strange and charming it is; I am really mad. You are adorable, and I study your feet in the microscope and your soul with the telescope."
And Cosette made answer,—
"And I love you a little more through all the time which has passed since this morning."
Questions and answers went on as they could in this dialogue, which always agreed in the subject of love, like the elder-pith balls on the nail. Cosette's entire person was simplicity, ingenuousness, whiteness, candor, and radiance; and it might have been said of her that she was transparent. She produced on every one who saw her a sensation of April and daybreak, and she had dew in her eyes. Cosette was a condensation of the light of dawn in a woman's form. It was quite simple that Marius, as he adored, should admire. But the truth is, that this little boarding-school Miss, just freshly turned out of a convent, talked with exquisite penetration, and made at times all sorts of true and delicate remarks. Her chattering was conversation; and she was never mistaken about anything, and conversed correctly. Woman feels and speaks with the infallibility which is the tender instinct of the heart. No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep. Gentleness and depth, in those things the whole of woman is contained, and it is heaven. And in this perfect felicity tears welled in their eyes at every moment. A lady-bird crushed, a feather that fell from a nest, a branch of hawthorn broken, moved their pity, and then ecstasy, gently drowned by melancholy, seemed to ask for nothing better than to weep. The most sovereign symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable. And by the side of all this—for contradictions are the lightning sport of love—they were fond of laughing with a ravishing liberty, and so familiarly that, at times, they almost seemed like two lads. Still, even without these two hearts intoxicated with chastity being conscious of it, unforgettable nature is ever there, ever there with its brutal and sublime object; and whatever the innocence of souls may be, they feel in the most chaste tête-à-tête the mysterious and adorable distinction which separates a couple of lovers from a pair of friends.
They idolized each other. The permanent and the immutable exist,—a couple love, they laugh, they make little pouts with their lips, they intertwine their fingers, and that does not prevent eternity. Two lovers conceal themselves in a garden in the twilight, in the invisible, with the birds and the roses; they fascinate each other in the darkness with their souls which they place in their eyes; they mutter, they whisper, and during this period immense constellations of planets fill infinity.
That same day, about four in the afternoon, Jean Valjean was seated on one of the most solitary slopes of the Champ de Mars. Either through prudence, a desire to reflect, or simply in consequence of one of those insensible changes of habits which gradually introduce themselves into all existences, he now went out very rarely with Cosette. He had on his workman's jacket and gray canvas trousers, and his long peaked cap concealed his face. He was at present calm and happy by Cosette's side; what had startled and troubled him for a while was dissipated; but during the last week or fortnight anxieties of a fresh nature had sprung up. One day, while walking along the boulevard, he noticed Thénardier; thanks to his disguise, Thénardier did not recognize him, but after that Jean Valjean saw him several times again, and now felt a certainty that Thénardier was prowling about the quarter. This was sufficient to make him form a grand resolution, for Thénardier present was every peril at once; moreover, Paris was not quiet, and political troubles offered this inconvenience to any man who had something in his life to hide,—that the police had become very restless and suspicious, and when trying to find a man like Pepin or Morey, might very easily discover a man like Jean Valjean. He therefore resolved to leave Paris, even France, and go to England; he had warned Cosette, and hoped to be off within a week. He was sitting on the slope, revolving in his mind all sorts of thoughts,—Thénardier, the police, the journey, and the difficulty of obtaining a passport. From all these points of view he was anxious; and lastly, an inexplicable fact, which had just struck him, and from which he was still hot, added to his alarm. On the morning of that very day he, the only person up in the house, and walking in the garden before Cosette's shutters were opened, suddenly perceived this line on the wall, probably scratched with a nail, 16 Rue de la Verrerie.
It was quite recent; the lines were white on the old black mortar, and a bed of nettles at the foot of the wall was powdered with fine fresh plaster. This had probably been inscribed during the night. What was it,—an address, a signal for others, or a warning for himself? In any case, it was evident that the secrecy of the garden was violated, and that strangers entered it. He remembered the strange incidents which had already alarmed the house, and his mind was at work on this subject; but he was careful not to say a word to Cosette about the line written on the wall, for fear of alarming her. In the midst of his troubled thoughts he perceived, from a shadow which the sun threw, that some one was standing on the crest of the slope immediately behind him. He was just going to turn, when a folded paper fell on his knees, as if a hand had thrown it over his head; he opened the paper and read these words, written in large characters, and in pencil: LEAVE YOUR HOUSE.
Jean Valjean rose smartly, but there was no longer any one on the slope; he looked round him, and perceived a person, taller than a child and shorter than a man, dressed in a gray blouse and dust-colored cotton-velvet trousers, bestriding the parapet, and slipping down into the moat of the Champ de Mars. Jean Valjean at once went home very thoughtfully.
Of what is a revolt composed? Of nothing and of everything, of an electricity suddenly disengaged, of a flame which suddenly breaks out, of a wandering strength and a passing breath. This breath meets with heads that talk, brains that dream, souls that suffer, passions that burn, and miseries which yell, and carries them off with it. Whither? It is chance work; through the State, through the laws, through prosperity and the insolence of others. Irritated convictions, embittered enthusiasms, aroused indignations, martial instincts suppressed, youthful courage exalted, and generous blindnesses; curiosity, a taste for a change, thirst for something unexpected, the feeling which causes us to find pleasure in reading the announcement of a new piece, or on hearing the machinist's whistle; vague hatreds, rancors, disappointments, every vanity which believes that destiny has been a bankrupt to it; straitened circumstances, empty dreams, ambitions surrounded with escarpments, every man who hopes for an issue from an overthrow, and, lastly, at the very bottom, the mob, that mud which takes fire,—such are the elements of riot. The greatest and the most infamous, beings who prowl about beyond the pale of everything while awaiting an opportunity, gypsies, nameless men, highway vagabonds, the men who sleep o' nights in a desert of houses with no other roof but the cold clouds of heaven, those who daily ask their bread of chance and not of toil; the unknown men of wretchedness and nothingness, bare arms and bare feet, belong to the riot. Every man who has in his soul a secret revolt against any act of the State, of life, or of destiny, borders on riot; and so soon as it appears he begins to quiver and to feel himself lifted by the whirlwind.
Riot is a species of social atmospheric waterspout, which is suddenly formed in certain conditions of temperature, and which in its revolutions mounts, runs, thunders, tears up, razes, crushes, demolishes, and uproots, bearing with it grand and paltry natures, the strong man and the weak mind, the trunk of a tree and the wisp of straw. Woe to the man whom it carries as well as to the one it dashes at, for it breaks one against the other. It communicates to those whom it seizes a strange and extraordinary power; it fills the first comer with the force of events and converts everything into projectiles; it makes a cannon-ball of a stone, and a general of a porter. If we may believe certain oracles of the crafty policy, a little amount of riot is desirable from the governing point of view. The system is, that riot strengthens those governments which it does not overthrow; it tries the army; it concentrates the bourgeoisie, strengthens the muscles of the police, and displays the force of the social framework. It is a lesson in gymnastics, and almost hygiene; and power feels better after a riot, as a man does after a rubbing down. Riot, thirty years ago, was also regarded from other stand-points. There is for everything a theory which proclaims itself as "common sense," a mediation offered between the true and the false: explanation, admonition, and a somewhat haughty extenuation which, because it is composed of blame and apology, believes itself wisdom, and is often nothing but pedantry. An entire political school, called the "Juste milieu," emanated from this, and between cold water and hot water there is the lukewarm-water party. This school, with its false depth entirely superficial, which dissects effects without going back to causes, scolds, from the elevation of semi-science, the agitations of the public streets.
If we listen to this school we hear: "The riots which complicated the deed of 1830 deprived that grand event of a portion of its purity. The revolution of July was a fine blast of the popular wind, suddenly followed by a blue sky, and the riot caused a cloudy sky to reappear, and compelled the revolution, originally so remarkable through unanimity, to degenerate into a quarrel. In the revolution of July, as in every progress produced by a jerk, there were secret fractures; the riot rendered them perceptible. After the revolution of July only the deliverance was felt, but after the riots the catastrophe was felt. Every riot closes shops, depresses the funs, consternates the Stock Exchange, suspends trade, checks business, and entails bankruptcies; there is no money, trade is disconcerted, capital is withdrawn, labor is at a discount, there is fear everywhere, and counter-strokes take place in every city, whence come gulfs. It is calculated that the first day of riot costs France twenty millions of francs, the second forty, and the third sixty. Hence a riot of three days costs one hundred and twenty millions; that is to say, if we only regard the financial result, is equivalent to a disaster, shipwreck, or lost action, which might annihilate a fleet of sixty vessels of the line. Indubitably, riots, historically regarded, had their beauty; the war of the paving-stones is no less grand or pathetic than the war of thickets; in the one there is the soul of forests, in the other the heart of cities; one has Jean Chouan, the other has Jeanne. Riots lit up luridly but splendidly all the most original features of the Parisian character,—generosity, devotion, stormy gayety, students proving that bravery forms a part of intellect, the National Guard unswerving, bivouacs formed by shop-keepers, fortresses held by gamins, and contempt of death in the passers-by. Schools and legions came into collision, but, after all, there was only the difference of age between the combatants, and they are the same race; the same stoical men who die at the age of twenty for their ideas, and at forty for their families; the army, ever sad in civil wars, opposed prudence to audacity; and the riots, while manifesting the popular intrepidity, were the education of the bourgeois courage. That is all very well, but is all this worth the blood shed? And then add to the bloodshed the future darkened, progress compromised, anxiety among the better classes, honest liberals despairing, foreign absolutism delighted at these wounds dealt to revolution by itself, and the conquered of 1830 triumphing and shouting, 'Did we not say so?' Add Paris possibly aggrandized, France assuredly diminished. Add—for we must tell the whole truth—the massacres which too often dishonored the victory of order, which became ferocious, over liberty which went mad, and we must arrive at the conclusion that riots have been fatal."
Thus speaks that wisdom, almost, with which the bourgeoisie, that people, almost, are so readily contented. For our part, we regret the word riots as being too wide, and consequently too convenient, and make a distinction between one popular movement and another; we do not ask ourselves whether a riot costs as much as a battle. In the first place, why a battle? Here the question of war arises. Is war less a scourge than riot is a calamity? And then, are all riots calamities? And even supposing that July 14 cost one hundred and twenty millions, the establishment of Philip V. in Spain cost France two billions, and even were the price equal we should prefer the 14th July. Besides, we reject these figures, which seem reasons and are only words, and a riot being given, we examine it in itself. In all that the doctrinaire objection we have just reproduced says, the only question is the effect, and we seek for the cause.
At the moment when the insurrection, breaking out through the collision between the people and the troops in front of the Arsenal, produced a retrograde movement in the multitude that followed the hearse, and which pressed with the whole length of the boulevards upon the head of the procession, there was a frightful reflux. The ranks were broken, and all ran or escaped, some with cries of attack, others with the pallor of flight. The great stream which covered the boulevards divided in a second, overflowed on the right and left, and spread in torrents over two hundred streets at once, as if a dyke had burst. At this moment a ragged lad who was coming down the Rue Ménilmontant, holding in his hand a branch of flowering laburnum which he had picked on the heights of Belleville, noticed in the shop of a dealer in bric-à-brac an old hostler pistol. He threw his branch on the pavement, and cried,—
"Mother What's-your-name, I'll borrow your machine."
And he ran off with the pistol. Two minutes after, a crowd of frightened cits, flying through the Rue Amelot and the Rue Basse, met the lad, who was brandishing his pistol and singing,—
"La nuit on ne voit rien,
Le jour on voit très bien,
D'un écrit apocryphe
Le bourgeois s'ébouriffe,
Pratiquez la vertu,
Tutu, chapeau pointu!"
It was little Gavroche going to the wars; on the boulevard he noticed that his pistol had no hammer. Who was the composer of this couplet which served to punctuate his march, and all the other songs which he was fond of singing when he had a chance? Who knows? Himself, perhaps. Besides, Gavroche was acquainted with all the popular tunes in circulation, and mingled with them his own chirping, and, as a young vagabond, he made a pot-pourri of the voices of nature and the voices of Paris. He combined, the repertoire of the birds with that of the studios, and he was acquainted with artists' students, a tribe contiguous to his own. He had been for three months, it appears, apprenticed to a painter, and had one day delivered a message for M. Baour Lormian, one of the Forty; Gavroche was a gamin of letters.
Gavroche did not suspect, by the way, that on that wretched rainy night, when he offered the hospitality of his elephant to the two boys, he was performing the offices of Providence to his two brothers. His brothers in the evening, his father in the morning,—such had been his night. On leaving the Rue des Ballets at dawn, he hurried back to the elephant, artistically extracted the two boys, shared with them the sort of breakfast which he had invented, and then went away, confiding them to that good mother, the street, who had almost brought himself up. On leaving them he appointed to meet them on the same spot at night, and left them this speech as farewell,—"I am going to cut my stick, otherwise to say, I intend to bolt, or as they say at court, I shall make myself scarce. My brats, if you do not find papa and mamma, come here again to-night. I will give you your supper and put you to bed." The two lads, picked up by some policeman and placed at the station, or stolen by some mountebank, or simply lost in that Chinese puzzle, Paris, did not return. The substrata of the existing social world are full of such lost traces. Gavroche had not seen them again, and ten or twelve weeks had elapsed since that night. More than once he had scratched his head and asked himself, "Where the deuce are my two children?"
He reached the Rue du Pont aux Choux, and noticed that there was only one shop still open in that street, and it was worthy of reflection that it was a confectioner's. It was a providential opportunity to eat one more apple-puff before entering the unknown. Gavroche stopped, felt in his pockets, turned them inside out, found nothing, not even a sou, and began shouting, "Help!" It is hard to go without the last cake, but for all that Gavroche went on his way. Two minutes after he was in the Rue St. Louis, and on crossing the Rue du Parc Royal he felt the necessity of compensating himself for the impossible apple-puff, and gave himself the immense treat of tearing down in open daylight the play-bills. A little farther on, seeing a party of stout gentry who appeared to him to be retired from business, he shrugged his shoulders and spat out this mouthful of philosophic bile,—
"How fat annuitants are! they wallow in good dinners. Ask them what they do with their money, and they don't know. They eat it, eat their bellyful."
The Parisians, who at the present day on entering the Rue Rambuteau from the side of the Halles notice on their right, opposite the Rue Mondétour, a basket-maker's shop having for sign a basket in the shape of Napoleon the Great, with this inscription:
NAPOLÉON EST FAIT
TOUT EN OSIER,
do not suspect the terrible scenes which this very site saw hardly thirty years ago. Here were the Rue de la Chanvrerie, which old title-deeds write Chanverrerie, and the celebrated wine-shop called Corinth. Our readers well remember all that has been said about the barricade erected at this spot, and eclipsed by the way by the St. Merry barricade. It is on this famous barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, which has now fallen into deep night, that we are going to throw a little light.
For the clearness of our narrative, we may be permitted to have recourse to the simple mode which we employed for Waterloo. Those persons who wish to represent to themselves in a tolerably exact manner the mass of houses which at that day stood near Sainte Eustache at the northeast corner of the Halles de Paris, at the spot where the opening of the Rue Rambuteau now is, need only imagine an N whose two vertical strokes are the Rue de la Grande Truanderie and the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and of which the Rue de la Petite Truanderie would be the cross-stroke. The old Rue Mondétour intersected the three strokes with the most tortuous angles, so that the Dædalian entanglement of these four streets was sufficient to make, upon a space of one hundred square yards, between the Halles and the Rue St. Denis on one side, between the Rue du Cygne and the Rue des Prêcheurs, on the other side, seven islets of houses, strangely cut, of different heights, standing sideways, and as if accidentally, and scarce separated by narrow cracks, like the blocks of stone in a dock. We say narrow cracks, and cannot give a fairer idea of these obscure, narrow, angular lanes, bordered by tenements eight stories in height. These houses were so decrepit that in the Rues de la Chanvrerie and La Petite Truanderie, the frontages were supported by beams running across from one house to the other. The street was narrow and the gutter wide; the passer-by walked on a constantly damp pavement, passing shops like cellars, heavy posts shod with iron, enormous piles of filth, and gates armed with extraordinarily old palings. The Rue Rambuteau has devastated all this. The name of Mondétour exactly describes the windings of all this lay-stall. A little farther on it was found even better expressed by the Rue Pirouette, which threw itself into the Rue Mondétour. The wayfarer who turned out of the Rue St. Denis into the Rue de la Chanvrerie saw it gradually contract before him, as if he had entered an elongated funnel. At the end of the street, which was very short, he found the passage barred on the side of the Halles by a tall row of houses, and he might have fancied himself in a blind alley had he not perceived on his right and left two black cuts through which he could escape. It was the Rue Mondétour, which joined on one side the Rue des Prêcheurs, on the other the Rue du Cygne. At the end of this sort of blind alley, at the corner of the right-hand cutting, a house lower than the rest, forming a species of cape in the street, might be noticed. It is in this house, only two stories high, that an illustrious cabaret had been installed for more than three hundred years. This inn produced a joyous noise at the very spot which old Théophile indicated in the two lines:
"Là branle le squelette horrible
D'un pauvre amant qui se pendit."
The spot was good, and the landlords succeeded each other from father to son. In the time of Mathurin Régnier, this cabaret was called the Pot-aux-Roses, and as rebuses were fashionable, it had for a sign a poteau (post) painted in rose-color. In the last century, worthy Natoire, one of the fantastic masters disdained at the present day by the stiff school, having got tipsy several times in this inn at the same table where Régnier had got drunk, painted, out of gratitude, a bunch of currants on the pink post. The landlord, in his delight, changed his sign, and had the words gilded under the bunch, Au raisin de Corinthe,—hence the name of Corinth. Nothing is more natural to drunkards than ellipses, for they are the zigzags of language. Corinth had gradually dethroned the rose-pot, and the last landlord of the dynasty, Father Hucheloup, not being acquainted with the tradition, had the post painted blue.
A ground-floor room in which was the bar, a first-floor room in which was a billiard-table, a spiral wooden staircase piercing the ceiling, wine on the tables, smoke on the walls, and candles by daylight,—such was the inn. A staircase with a trap in the ground-floor room led to the cellar, and the apartments of the Hucheloups, on the second floor, were reached by a staircase more like a ladder, and through a door hidden in the wall of the large first-floor room. Under the roof were two garrets, the nests of the maid-servants, and the kitchen shared the ground-floor with the bar. Father Hucheloup might have been born a chemist, but was really a cook, and customers not only drank but ate in his wine-shop. Hucheloup had invented an excellent dish, which could be eaten only at his establishment; it was stuffed carp, which he called carpes au gras. This was eaten by the light of a tallow candle, or a lamp of the Louis XVI. style, on tables on which oil-cloth was nailed in lieu of a table-cloth. People came from a long distance; and Hucheloup one fine morning had thought it advisable to inform passers-by of his "speciality:" he dipped a brush in a pot of blacking, and as he had an orthography of his own, he improvised on his wall the following remarkable inscription:—
CARPES HO GRAS.
One winter the showers and the hail amused themselves with effacing the "S" which terminated the first word, and the "G" which began the last, and the following was left:—
CARPE HO RAS.
By the aid of time and rain a humble gastronomic notice had become a profound counsel. In this way it happened that Hucheloup, not knowing French, had known Latin, had brought philosophy out of the kitchen, and while simply wishing to eclipse Carême, equalled Horace. And the striking thing was that this also meant "enter my inn." Nothing of all this exists at the present day; the Mondétour labyrinth was gutted and widened in 1847, and probably is no longer to be found. The Rue de la Chanvrerie and Corinth have disappeared under the pavement of the Rue Rambuteau. As we have said, Corinth was a meeting-place, if not a gathering-place, of Courfeyrac and his friends, and it was Grantaire who discovered it. He went in for the sake of the carpe ho ras, and returned for the sake of the carp au gras. People drank there, ate there, and made a row there: they paid little, paid badly, or paid not at all, but were always welcome. Father Hucheloup was a worthy fellow. Hucheloup, whom we have just called a worthy fellow, was an eating-house keeper with a moustache,—an amusing variety. He always looked ill-tempered, appeared wishful to intimidate his customers, growled at persons who came in, and seemed more disposed to quarrel with them than serve them. And yet we maintain people were always welcome. This peculiarity filled his bar, and brought to him young men who said, "Let us go and have a look at Father Hucheloup." He had been a fencing-master, and would suddenly break out into a laugh; he had a rough voice, but was a merry fellow. He had a comical background with a tragical appearance; he asked for nothing better than to frighten you, something like the snuff-boxes which had the shape of a pistol,—the detonation produces a sneeze. He had for wife a Mother Hucheloup, a bearded and very ugly being. About 1830 Father Hucheloup died, and with him disappeared the secret of the carp au gras. His widow, who was almost inconsolable, carried on the business, but the cooking degenerated and became execrable, and the wine, which had always been bad, was frightful. Courfeyrac and his friends, however, continued to go to Corinth,—through pity, said Bossuet.
Widow Hucheloup was short of breath and shapeless, and had rustic recollections, which she deprived of their insipidity by her pronunciation. She had a way of her own of saying things which seasoned her reminiscences of her village and the spring: it had formerly been her delight, she declared, to hear "the red-beasts singing in the awe-thorns."[1] The first-floor room, where the restaurant was, was a large, long apartment, crowded with stools, chairs, benches, and tables, and an old rickety billiard-table. It was reached by the spiral staircase which led to a square hole in the corner of the room, like a ship's hatchway. This apartment, lighted by only one narrow window and a constantly-burning lamp, had a garret-look about it, and all the four-legged articles of furniture behaved as if they had only three. The white-washed wall had for sole ornament the following quatrain in honor of Mame Hucheloup:—
"Elle étonne à dix pas, elle épouvante à deux,
Une verrue habite en son nez hasardeux;
On tremble à chaque instant qu'elle ne vous la mouche,
Et qu'un beau jour son nez ne tombe dans sa bouche."
This was written in charcoal on the wall. Mame Hucheloup, very like her description, walked past this quatrain from morning till night with the most perfect tranquillity. Two servant-girls, called Matelote and Gibelotte, and who were never known by other names, helped Mame Hucheloup in placing on the tables bottles of blue wine, and the various messes served to the hungry guests in earthenware bowls. Matelote, stout, round, red-haired, and noisy, an ex-favorite sultana of the defunct Hucheloup, was uglier than the ugliest mythological monster; and yet, as it is always proper that the servant should be a little behind the mistress, she was not so ugly as Mame Hucheloup. Gibelotte, tall, delicate, white with a lymphatic whiteness, with blue circles round her eyes, and drooping lids, ever exhausted and oppressed, and suffering from what may be called chronic lassitude, the first to rise, the last to go to bed, waited on everybody, even the other servant, silently and gently, and smiling a sort of vague, sleepy smile through her weariness. Before entering the restaurant the following line written by Courfeyrac in chalk was legible: "Régale si tu peux et mange si tu l'oses."
[1] The original malapropism, "les loups-de-gorge chanter dans les ogrépines," is utterly untranslatable. The above is only an attempt to convey some approximative idea.
The voice which summoned Marius through the twilight to the barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie had produced on him the effect of the voice of destiny. He wished to die, and the opportunity offered; he rapped at the door of the tomb, and a hand held out the key to him from the shadows. Such gloomy openings in the darkness just in front of despair are tempting; Marius removed the bar which had so often allowed him to pass, left the garden, and said, "I will go." Mad with grief, feeling nothing fixed and solid in his brain, incapable of accepting anything henceforth of destiny, after the two months spent in the intoxication of youth and love, and crushed by all the reveries of despair at once, he had only one wish left,—to finish with it all at once. He began walking rapidly, and he happened to be armed, as he had Javert's pistols in his pocket. The young man whom he fancied that he had seen had got out of his sight in the streets.
Marius, who left the Rue Plumet by the boulevard, crossed the esplanade and bridge of the Invalides, the Champs Élysées, the square of Louis XV., and reached the Rue de Rivoli. The shops were open there, the gas blazed under the arcades, ladies were making purchases, and people were eating ices at the Café Laiter and cakes at the English pastry-cook's. A few post-chaises, however, were leaving at a gallop the Hôtel des Princes and Meurice's. Marius entered the Rue St. Honoré by the passage Delorme. The shops were closed there, the tradesmen were conversing before their open doors, people walked along, the lamps were lighted, and from the first-floor upwards the houses were illumined as usual. Cavalry were stationed on the square of the Palais Royal. Marius followed the Rue St. Honoré, and the farther he got from the Palais Royal the fewer windows were lit up; the shops were entirely closed, nobody was conversing on the thresholds, the street grew darker, and at the same time the crowd denser, for the passers-by had now become a crowd. No one could be heard speaking in the crowd, and yet a hollow, deep buzzing issued from it. Near the Fountain of Arbre Sec there were motionless mobs, and sombre groups standing among the comers and goers like stones in the middle of a running stream. At the entrance of the Rue des Prouvaires, the crowd no longer moved; it was a resisting, solid, compact, almost impenetrable mob of persons packed together and conversing in a low voice. There were hardly any black coats or round hats present, only fustian jackets, blouses, caps, and bristling beards. This multitude undulated confusedly in the night mist and its whispering had the hoarse accent of a rustling; and though no one moved, a tramping in the mud could be heard. Beyond this dense crowd there was not a window lit up in the surrounding streets, and the solitary and decreasing rows of lanterns could only be seen in them. The street-lanterns of that day resembled large red stars suspended from ropes, and cast on to the pavement a shadow which had the shape of a large spider. These streets, however, were not deserted, and piled muskets, moving bayonets, and troops bivouacking could be distinguished in them. No curious person went beyond this limit, and circulation ceased there; there the mob ended and the army began.
Marius wished with the will of a man who no longer hopes; he had been summoned and was bound to go. He found means to traverse the crowd and bivouacking troops; he hid himself from the patrols and avoided the sentries. He made a circuit, came to the Rue de Béthisy, and proceeded in the direction of the markets; at the corner of the Rue des Bourdonnais the lanterns ceased. After crossing the zone of the mob he passed the border of troops, and now found himself in something frightful. There was not a wayfarer, nor a soldier, nor a light, nothing but solitude, silence, and night, and a strangely-piercing cold; entering a street was like entering a cellar. Still he continued to advance: Some one ran close past him: was it a man?—a woman? Were there more than one? He could not have said, for it had passed and vanished. By constant circuits he reached a lane, which he judged to be the Rue de la Poterie, and toward the middle of that lane came across an obstacle. He stretched out his hands and found that it was an overturned cart, and his feet recognized pools of water, holes, scattered and piled-up paving-stones; it was a barricade which had been begun and then abandoned. He clambered over the stones and soon found himself on the other side of the obstacle; he walked very close to the posts, and felt his way along the house walls. A little beyond the barricade he fancied that he could see something white before him, and on drawing nearer it assumed a form. It was a pair of white horses, the omnibus horses unharnessed by Bossuet in the morning, which had wandered, haphazard, from street to street all day, and at last stopped here, with the stolid patience of animals which no more comprehend the actions of man than man comprehends the actions of Providence. Marius left the horses behind him, and as he entered a street which seemed to be the Rue du Contrat Social, a musket-shot, which came no one could say whence, and traversed the darkness at hazard, whizzed close past him, and pierced above his head a copper shaving-dish, hanging from a hair-dresser's shop. In 1846 this dish with the hole in it was still visible at the corner of the pillars of the markets. This shot was still life, but from this moment nothing further occurred; the whole itinerary resembled a descent down black steps, but for all that Marius did not the less advance.
Nothing came yet: it had struck ten by St. Merry's, and Enjolras and Combeferre were sitting musket in hand near the sally-port of the great barricade. They did not speak, but were listening, trying to catch the dullest and most remote sound of marching. Suddenly, in the midst of this lugubrious calm, a clear, young, gay voice, which seemed to come from the Rue St. Denis, burst forth, and began singing distinctly, to the old popular tune of "Au clair de la lune," these lines, terminating with a cry that resembled a cock-crow:—
"Mon nez est en larmes,
Mon ami Bugeaud,
Prêt'-moi tes gendarmes
Pour leur dire un mot.
En capote bleue,
La poule au shako,
Voici la banlieue!
Co-cocorico!"
They shook hands.
"'T is Gavroche," said Enjolras.
"He is warning us," said Combeferre.
Hurried footsteps troubled the deserted streets, and a being more active than a clown was seen climbing over the omnibus, and Gavroche leaped into the square, out of breath, and saying,—
"My gun! Here they are!"
An electric shudder ran along the whole barricade, and the movement of hands seeking guns was heard.
"Will you have my carbine?" Enjolras asked the gamin.
"I want the big gun," Gavroche answered, and took Javert's musket.
Two sentries had fallen back and come in almost simultaneously with Gavroche; they were those from the end of the street and the Petite Truanderie. The vedette in the Lane des Prêcheurs remained at his post, which indicated that nothing was coming from the direction of the bridges and the markets. The Rue de la Chanvrerie, in which a few paving-stones were scarce visible in the reflection of the light cast on the flag, offered to the insurgents the aspect of a large black gate vaguely opened in a cloud of smoke. Every man proceeded to his post: forty-three insurgents, among whom were Enjolras, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and Gavroche, knelt behind the great barricade, with the muzzles of their guns and carbines thrust out between the paving-stones as through loop-holes, attentive, silent, and ready to fire. Six, commanded by Feuilly, installed themselves at the upper windows of Corinth. Some minutes more elapsed, and then a measured, heavy tramp of many feet was distinctly heard from the direction of St. Leu; this noise, at first faint, then precise, and then heavy and re-echoing, approached slowly, without halt or interruption, and with a tranquil and terrible continuity. Nothing was audible but this; it was at once the silence and noise of the statute of the commendatore, but the stormy footfall had something enormous and multiple about it, which aroused the idea of a multitude at the same time as that of a spectre; you might have fancied that you heard the fearful statue Legion on the march. The tramp came nearer, nearer still, and then ceased; and the breathing of many men seemed to be audible at the end of the street. Nothing, however, was visible, though quite at the end in the thick gloom could be distinguished a multitude of metallic threads, fine as needles and almost imperceptible, which moved about like that indescribable phosphoric network which we perceive under our closed eyelids just at the moment when we are falling asleep. These were bayonets and musket-barrels on which the reflection of the torch confusedly fell. There was another pause, as if both sides were waiting. All at once a voice which was the more sinister because no one could be seen, and it seemed as if the darkness itself was speaking, shouted, "Who goes there?"
At the same time the click of muskets being cocked could be heard. Enjolras replied with a sonorous and haughty accent,—
"French Revolution!"
"Fire!" the voice commanded.
A flash lit up all the frontages in the street, as if the door of a furnace had been suddenly opened and shut, and a frightful shower of bullets hurled against the barricade, and the flag fell. The discharge had been so violent and dense that it cut the staff asunder, that is to say, the extreme point of the omnibus pole. Bullets ricochetting from the corners of the houses penetrated the barricade and wounded several men. The impression produced by this first discharge was chilling; the attack was rude, and of a nature to make the boldest think. It was plain that they had to do with a whole regiment at the least.
"Comrades," Courfeyrac cried, "let us not waste our powder, but wait till they have entered the street before returning their fire."
"And before all," Enjolras said, "let us hoist the flag again!"
He picked up the flag, which had fallen at his feet: outside, the ring of ramrods in barrels could be heard; the troops were reloading. Enjolras continued,—
"Who has a brave heart among us? Who will plant the flag on the barricade again?"
Not one replied; for to mount the barricade at this moment, when all the guns were doubtless again aimed at it, was simply death, and the bravest man hesitates to condemn himself. Enjolras even shuddered as he repeated,—
"Will no one offer?"
What are the convulsions of a city compared with the convulsions of a soul? Man is even a greater profundity than the people. Jean Valjean at this very moment was suffering from a frightful internal earthquake, and all the gulfs were reopened within him. He too was quivering, like Paris, on the threshold of a formidable and obscure revolution. A few hours had sufficed to cover his destiny and his conscience with shadows, and of him, as of Paris, it might be said, "The two principles are face to face." The white angel and the black angel are about to wrestle with each other on the brink of the abyss; which will hurl the other down?
On the evening of that same day, Jean Valjean, accompanied by Cosette and Toussaint, proceeded to the Rue de l'Homme Armé, where a tremendous incident was fated to take place. Cosette had not left the Rue Plumet without an attempt at resistance, and for the first time since they had lived together, the will of Cosette and the will of Jean Valjean had shown themselves distinct, and had contradicted each other, though they did not come into collision. There was objection on one side and inflexibility on the other: for the abrupt counsel, "Remove!" thrown to Jean Valjean by a stranger, had alarmed him to such a point as to render him absolute. He fancied himself tracked and pursued, and Cosette was compelled to yield. The pair reached the Rue de l'Homme Armé without exchanging a syllable, for each was so deep in personal thought, while Jean Valjean was so anxious that he did not notice Cosette's sadness, and Cosette was so sad that she did not notice Jean Valjean's anxiety. Jean Valjean had brought Toussaint with him, which he had never done in his previous absences, but he foresaw that he might possibly never return to the Rue Plumet, and he could neither leave Toussaint behind him nor tell her his secret. Moreover, he felt her to be devoted and sure; the treachery of a servant to a master begins with curiosity, and Toussaint, as if predestined to be Jean Valjean's servant, was not curious. She was wont to say through her stammering in her patois of a Barneville peasant, "I am so, I do my work, and the rest does not concern me." In his departure from the Rue Plumet, which was almost a flight, Jean Valjean took away with him nothing but the fragrant little portmanteau, christened by Cosette the "inseparable." Packed trunks would have required porters, and porters are witnesses; a hackney-coach had been called to the gate in the Rue de Babylone and they went away in it. It was with great difficulty that Toussaint obtained permission to pack up a little stock of linen and clothes, and a few toilet articles; Cosette herself only took her desk and blotting-book. Jean Valjean, in order to heighten the solitude and mystery of this disappearance, had so arranged as to leave the Rue Plumet at nightfall, which had given Cosette the time to write her note to Marius. They reached the Rue de l'Homme Armé when it was quite dark, and went to bed in perfect silence.
The apartments in this street were situated on a second floor in a back-yard, and consisted of two bed-rooms, a dining-room, and a kitchen adjoining, with a closet in which was a flock-bed, that fell to the lot of Toussaint. The dining-room was at the same time ante-room and separated the two bed-rooms, and the apartments were provided with the necessary articles of furniture. Human nature is so constituted that men become reassured almost as absurdly as they are alarmed; hence Jean Valjean had scarce reached the Rue de l'Homme Armé ere his anxiety cleared away and was gradually dissipated. There are calming places which act to some extent mechanically on the mind, and when a street is obscure the inhabitants are peaceful. Jean Valjean felt a contagious tranquillity in this lane of old Paris, which is so narrow that it is barred against vehicles by a cross-beam, which is dumb and deaf amid the noisy town, full of twilight in broad daylight, and, so to speak, incapable of feeling emotions between its two rows of tall centenary houses, which are silent like old folks are. There is in this street a stagnant oblivion, and Jean Valjean breathed again in it, for how was it possible that he could be found there? His first care was to place the "inseparable" by his side; he slept soundly, and night counsels, we might add, night appeases. The next morning he woke up almost gay. He considered the dining-room charming, though it was hideous, for it was furnished with an old round table, a low side-board surmounted by a mirror, a rickety easy-chair, and a few chairs encumbered with Toussaint's parcels. In one of these parcels Jean Valjean's National Guard uniform could be seen through an opening.
As for Cosette, she ordered Toussaint to bring a basin of broth to her bed-room, and did not make her appearance till evening. At about five o'clock, Toussaint, who went about very busy with getting things to rights, placed a cold fowl on the dinner-table, which Cosette consented to look at, through deference for her father. This done, Cosette protesting a persistent headache, said good-night to Jean Valjean, and shut herself up in her bed-room. Jean Valjean ate a wing of the fowl with appetite, and with his elbows on the table, and gradually growing reassured, regained possession of his serenity. While he was eating this modest dinner, he vaguely heard twice or thrice stammering Toussaint say to him, "There is a disturbance, sir, and people are fighting in Paris." But, absorbed in a multitude of internal combinations, he had paid no attention to her; truth to tell, he had not heard her. He rose and began walking from the door to the window, and from the window to the door with calmness. Cosette, his sole preoccupation, reverted to his mind, not that he was alarmed by this headache, a slight nervous attack, a girl's pouting, a momentary cloud, which would disappear in a day or two, but he thought of the future, and, as usual, thought of it gently. After all, he saw no obstacle to his happy life resuming its course: at certain hours everything seems impossible, at others everything appears easy, and Jean Valjean was in one of those good hours. They usually arrive after bad hours, as day does after night, through that law of succession and contrast which is the basis of our nature, and which superficial minds call antithesis. In this peaceful street where he had sought shelter, Jean Valjean freed himself from all that had troubled him for some time past, and from the very fact that he had seen so much darkness he was beginning to perceive a little azure. To have left the Rue Plumet without any complication or incident was a good step gained, and perhaps it would be wise to leave the country, were it only for a few months, and go to London. Well, they would go; what did he care whether he were in England or France, provided that he had Cosette by his side? Cosette was his nation, Cosette sufficed for his happiness, and the idea that he perhaps did not suffice for Cosette's happiness, that idea which had formerly been his fever and sleeplessness, did not even present itself to his mind. All his past sorrows had collapsed, and he was in the centre of optimism. Cosette, being by his side, seemed to be his, and this is an optical effect which everybody has experienced. He arranged in his mind, and with all possible facility, the departure for England with Cosette, and he saw his felicity reconstructed, no matter where, in the perspectives of his reverie.
While slowly walking up and down, his eye suddenly fell on something strange. He noticed, facing him in the inclined mirror over the side-board, and read distinctly:—
"MY WELL-BELOVED,—Alas! my father insists on our going away at once. We shall be this evening at No. 7, Rue de l'Homme Armé, and within a week in London.
COSETTE."
"June 4."
Jean Valjean stopped with haggard gaze. Cosette, on arriving, had laid her blotting-book on the side-board facing the mirror, and, immersed in her painful thoughts, had forgotten it, without even noticing that she had left it open at the very page on which she had dried the few lines she had written and intrusted to the young workman passing along the Rue Plumet. The writing was imprinted on the blotting-paper and the mirror reflected the writing. The result was what is called in geometry a symmetric image, so that the writing reversed on the blotting-paper was placed straight in the mirror, and offered its natural direction, and Jean Valjean had before his eyes the letter written on the previous evening by Cosette to Marius. It was simple and crushing. Jean Valjean walked up to the mirror and read the lines again, but did not believe in them. They produced on him the effect of appearing in a flash of lightning: it was an hallucination; it was impossible; it was not. Gradually his perception became more precise, he looked at Cosette's blotting-book, and the feeling of the real fact returned to him. He took up the blotting-book, saying, "It comes from that." He feverishly examined the lines imprinted on the blotting-paper, but as they ran backward he could see no meaning in the strange scrawl. Then he said to himself, "Why, it means nothing; there is nothing written there." And he drew a long breath with inexpressible relief. Who has not felt such wild delight in horrible moments? The soul does not surrender to despair till it has exhausted every illusion.
He held the book in his hand and gazed at it, stupidly happy, almost ready to laugh at the hallucination of which he had been the dupe. All at once his eyes fell again on the mirror, and he saw the vision again; the lines stood on it with inexorable clearness. This time it was no mirage, it was palpable, it was the writing turned straight in the mirror, and he comprehended the fact. Jean Valjean tottered, let the blotting-book slip from his grasp, and fell into the old easy-chair by the side of the side-board with hanging head and glassy, wandering eye. He said to himself that it was evident that the light of this world was eclipsed, and that Cosette had written that to somebody. Then he heard his soul, which had become terrible again, utter a hoarse roar in the darkness. Just attempt to take from the lion the dog he has in his cage! Strange, and sad to say, at that moment Marius had not yet received Cosette's letter, and accident had treacherously carried it to Jean Valjean before delivering it to Marius. Jean Valjean up to that day had never been conquered by a trial; he had been subjected to frightful assaults, not a blow of evil fortune had been spared him, and the ferocity of fate, armed with all social revenge and contempt, had taken him for its victim and furiously attacked him. He had accepted, when it was necessary, every extremity; he had surrendered his reacquired inviolability as man, given up his liberty, risked his head, lost everything and suffered everything, and he had remained disinterested and stoical to such an extent that at times he seemed to be oblivious of self, like a martyr. His conscience, hardened to all possible assaults of adversity, might seem quite impregnable; but any one who had now gazed into his heart would have been compelled to allow that it was growing weak. In truth, of all the tortures he had undergone in this long trial to which fate subjected him, this was the most formidable, and never had such a vise held him before. He felt the mysterious agitation of all his latent sensibilities, he felt the twitching of an unknown fibre. Alas! the supreme trial, we may say the sole trial, is the loss of the being whom we love.
Poor old Jean Valjean did not assuredly love Cosette otherwise than as a father; but, as we have already remarked, the very widowhood of his life had introduced all the forms of love into this paternity: he loved Cosette as his daughter, loved her as his mother, and loved her as his sister, and, as he had never had a mistress or a wife, that feeling too, the most clinging of all, was mingled with the others, vague, ignorant, pure with the purity of blindness unconscious, heavenly, angelic, and divine, less as a feeling than an instinct, less as an instinct than an attraction, imperceptible, invisible, but real; and love, properly so called, was in his enormous tenderness for Cosette as the vein of gold is in the mountain, dark and virginal. Our readers must study for a moment this state of the heart; no marriage was possible between them, not even that of souls, and yet it is certain that their destinies were wedded. Excepting Cosette, that is to say, excepting a childhood, Jean Valjean, during the whole of his life, had known nothing about things that may be loved. Those passions and loves which succeed each other had not produced in him those successive stages of green, light green, or dark green, which may be noticed on leaves that survive the winter, and in men who pass their fiftieth year. In fine, as we have more than once urged, all this internal fusion, all this ensemble, whose resultant was a lofty virtue, ended by making Jean Valjean a father to Cosette,—a strange father, forged out of the grandsire, the son, the brother, and the husband, which were in Jean Valjean; a father in whom there was even a mother; a father who loved Cosette and adored her, and who had this child for his light, his abode, his family, his country, and his paradise. Hence, when he saw that it was decidedly ended, that she was escaping from him, slipping through his fingers, concealing herself, that she was a cloud, that she was water; when he had before his eyes this crushing evidence: "Another is the object of her heart, another is the wish of her life, she has a lover, I am only the father, I no longer exist;" when he could no longer doubt, when he said to himself, "She is leaving me," the sorrow he experienced went beyond the limits of the possible. To have done all that he had done to attain this, and to be nothing! Then, as we have just stated, he had a quivering of revolt from head to foot; he felt even in the roots of his hair the immense reawaking of selfishness, and the "I" yelled in the depths of this man's soul.
There are such things as internal earthquakes; the penetration of a desperate certainty into a man is not effected without removing and breaking certain profound elements which are at times the man himself. Grief, when it attains that pitch, is a frantic flight of all the forces of the conscience, and such crises are fatal. Few among us emerge from them equal to ourselves and firm in our duty; for when the limit of suffering is exceeded, the most imperturbable virtue is disconcerted. Jean Valjean took up the blotting-book and convinced himself afresh; he bent down as if petrified, and with fixed eye, over the undeniable lines, and such a cloud collected within him that it might be believed that the whole interior of his soul was in a state of collapse. He examined this revelation through the exaggerations of reverie with an apparent and startling calmness, for it is a formidable thing when a man's calmness attains the coldness of a statue. He measured the frightful step which his destiny had taken without any suspicion on his part, he recalled his fears of the past summer, so madly dissipated, he recognized the precipice; it was still the same, but Jean Valjean was no longer at the top but at the bottom. It was an extraordinary and crushing fact that he had fallen without perceiving it, the whole light of his life had fled while he still fancied he could see the sun. His instinct did not hesitate; he brought together certain circumstances, certain dates, certain blushes, and certain palenesses of Cosette, and said to himself, "It is he!" The divination of despair is a species of mysterious bow which never misses its mark, and with its first shaft it hit Marius. He did not know the name, but at once found the man; he perceived distinctly at the bottom of the implacable evocation of memory the unknown prowler of the Luxembourg, that villanous seeker of amourettes, that romantic idler, that imbecile, that coward,—for it is cowardice to exchange loving glances with girls who have by their side a father who loves them. After feeling quite certain that this young man was at the bottom of the situation, and that all this came from him, Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had toiled so heavily in his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve his whole life, his whole misery, and his whole misfortune into love, looked into himself and saw there a spectre—hatred.
Great griefs contain exhaustion, and discourage us with life; the man into whom they enter feels something retire from him. In youth their visit is mournful, at a later date it is sinister. Alas! when the blood is hot, when the hair is black, when the head is upright on the body like the flame on the candle, when the heart, full of a yearning love, still has palpitations which may be given to it in return, when a man has time to recover from the wound, when all women are there, and all the smiles, and all the future, and the whole horizon, when the strength of life is complete,—if despair be a frightful thing under such circumstances, what is it then in old age, when years are growing more and more livid, at that twilight hour when the stars of the tomb are beginning to become visible? While Jean Valjean was thinking, Toussaint came in; he rose and asked her,—
"Do you know whereabout it is?"
Toussaint, in her stupefaction, could only answer,—
"I beg your pardon, sir."
Jean Valjean continued,—
"Did you not say just now that they were fighting?"
"Oh yes, sir," Toussaint replied; "over at St. Merry."
There are some mechanical movements which come to us, without our cognizance, from our deepest thoughts. It was doubtless under the impulse of a movement of this nature, of which he was scarce conscious, that Jean Valjean found himself five minutes later in the street. He was bareheaded, and sat down on the bench before his house, seemingly listening.
Night had set in.