CHAPTER VI.

MARIUS HAGGARD, JAVERT LACONIC.

Let us describe what was going on in Marius's thoughts. Our readers will remember his state of mind, for, as we just now said, everything was only a vision to him. His appreciation was troubled, for he was (we urge the fact) beneath the shadow of the great gloomy wings opened above the dying. He felt that he had entered the tomb, he fancied that he was already on the other side of the wall, and he only saw the faces of the living with the eyes of a dead man. How was M. Fauchelevent present? Why was he here, and what did he come to do? Marius did not ask himself all these questions. Moreover, as our despair has the peculiar thing about it that it envelops others as it does ourselves, it appeared to him logical that everybody should die. Still he thought of Cosette with a contraction of the heart. However, M. Fauchelevent did not speak to him, did not look at him, and did not even seem to hear Marius when he raised his voice, saying, "I know him." As for Marius, this attitude of M. Fauchelevent relieved him, and if such a word were permissible for such impressions, we might say that it pleased him. He had ever felt an absolute impossibility in addressing this enigmatical man, who was at once equivocal and imposing to him. It was a very long time too since he had seen him; and this augmented the impossibility for a timid and reserved nature like Marius's.

The five men selected left the barricade by the Mondétour Lane, perfectly resembling National Guards. One of them wept as he went away, and before doing so they embraced those who remained. When the five men sent back to life had left, Enjolras thought of the one condemned to death. He went to the ground-floor room, where Javert, tied to the post, was reflecting.

"Do you want anything?" Enjolras asked him.

Javert answered,—

"When will you kill me?"

"Wait. We require all our cartridges at this moment."

"In that case, give me some drink," Javert said.

Enjolras himself held out to him a glass of water, and, as Javert was bound, helped him to drink.

"Is that all?" Enjolras resumed.

"I feel uncomfortable at this post," Javert replied; "you did not act kindly in leaving me fastened to it the whole night. Bind me as you please, but you might surely lay me on a table, like the other man."

And with a nod of the head he pointed to M. Mabœuf's corpse. It will be remembered that there was at the end of the room a long, wide table on which bullets had been run and cartridges made. All the cartridges being made, and all the powder expended, this table was free. By Enjolras's order, four insurgents unfastened Javert from the post, and while they did so a fifth held a bayonet to his chest. His hands remained fastened behind his back, a thin strong cord was attached to his feet, which enabled him to step fifteen inches, like those who are going to ascend the scaffold, and he was forced to walk to the table at the end of the room, on which they laid him, securely fastened round the waist. For greater security, a system of knotting was employed by means of a cord fastened to the neck, which rendered any escape impossible; it was the sort of fastening called in prisons a martingale, which starts from the nape, of the neck, is crossed on the stomach, and is turned round the hands after passing between the legs. While Javert was being bound, a man standing in the doorway regarded him with singular attention, and the shadow this man cast caused Javert to turn his head. He raised his eyes and recognized Jean Valjean, but he did not even start; he merely looked down haughtily, and restricted himself to saying, "It is all plain."


CHAPTER VI.

FUTURE PROGRESS.

Digging the sewerage of Paris was no small task. The last ten centuries have toiled at it without being able to finish, any more than they could finish Paris. The sewer, in fact, receives all the counterstrokes of the growth of Paris. It is in the ground a species of dark polypus with a thousand antennæ, which grows below, equally with the city above. Each time that the city forms a street, the sewer stretches out an arm. The old monarchy only constructed twenty-three thousand three hundred metres of sewers, and Paris had reached that point on Jan. 1, 1806. From this period, to which we shall presently revert, the work has been usefully and energetically taken up and continued. Napoleon built—and the figures are curious—four thousand eight hundred and four metres; Charles X., ten thousand eight hundred and thirty-six; Louis Philippe, eighty-nine thousand and twenty; the Republic of 1848, twenty-three thousand three hundred and eighty-one; the present government, seventy thousand five hundred: all together two hundred and twenty-six thousand six hundred metres, or sixty leagues, of sewer,—the enormous entrails of Paris,—an obscure ramification constantly at work, an unknown and immense construction. As we see, the subterranean labyrinth of Paris is, at the present day, more than tenfold what it was at the beginning of the century. It would be difficult to imagine all the perseverance and efforts required to raise this cloaca to the point of relative perfection at which it now is. It was with great trouble that the old monarchical Provostry, and in the last ten years of the eighteenth century the revolutionary Mayoralty, succeeded in boring the five leagues of sewers which existed prior to 1806. All sorts of obstacles impeded this operation; some peculiar to the nature of the soil, others inherent in the prejudices of the working population of Paris. Paris is built on a stratum strangely rebellious to the pick, the spade, the borer, and human manipulation. Nothing is more difficult to pierce and penetrate than this geological formation on which the marvellous historical formation called Paris is superposed. So soon as labor in any shape ventures into this layer of alluvium, subterranean resistances abound. They are liquid clay, running springs, hard rocks, and that soft and deep mud which the special science calls "mustard." The pick advances laboriously in the calcareous layers alternating with very thin veins of clay and schistose strata incrusted with oyster-shells, which are contemporaries of the Pre-Adamite oceans. At times a stream suddenly bursts into a tunnel just commenced, and inundates the workmen, or a slip of chalk takes place and rushes forward with the fury of a cataract, breaking like glass the largest supporting shores. Very recently at La Villette, when it was found necessary to carry the collecting sewer under the St. Martin canal without stopping the navigation or letting off the water, a fissure formed in the bed of the canal, and the water poured into the tunnel deriding the efforts of the draining-pumps. It was found necessary to employ a diver to seek for the fissure which was in the mouth of the great basin, and it was only stopped up with great difficulty. Elsewhere, near the Seine, and even at some distance from the river, as, for instance, at Belleville, Grande Rue, and Passage Lunière, bottomless sands are found, in which men have been swallowed up. Add asphyxia by miasmas, interment by slips and sudden breaking in of the soil; add typhus, too, with which the workmen are slowly impregnated. In our days, after having hollowed the gallery of Clichy with a banquette to convey the mainwater conduit of the Ourque, a work performed by trenches ten metres in depth; after having arched the Bièvre from the Boulevard de l'Hôpital to the Seine, in the midst of earth-slips and by the help of trenching often through putrid matter, and of shores; after having, in order to deliver Paris from the torrent-like waters of the Montmartre, and give an outlet to the fluviatic pond of twenty-three acres which stagnated near the Barrière des Martyrs; after having, we say, constructed the line of sewers from the Barrière Blanche to the Aubervilliers road, in four months, by working day and night at a depth of eleven metres; after having—a thing unknown before—executed subterraneously a sewer in the Rue Barre du Bec, without trench, at a depth of six metres, the surveyor Monnot died. After arching three thousand metres of sewer in all parts of the city, from the Rue Traversière St. Antoine to the Rue de l'Ourcine; after having, by the Arbalète branch, freed the Censier-Mouffetard square from pluvial inundations; after having constructed the St. George sewer through liquid sand upon rubble and béton, and after having lowered the formidable pitch of the Nôtre Dame de Nazareth branch, the engineer Duleau died. There are no bulletins for such acts of bravery, which are more useful, however, than the brutal butchery of battle-fields.

The sewers of Paris were in 1832 far from being what they are now. Bruneseau gave the impulse, but it required the cholera to determine the vast reconstruction which has taken place since. It is surprising to say, for instance, that in 1821 a portion of the begirding sewer, called the Grand Canal, as at Venice, still stagnated in the open air, in the Rue des Gourdes. It was not till 1823 that the city of Paris found in its pocket the twenty-six thousand six hundred and eighty francs, six centimes, needed for covering this turpitude. The three absorbing wells of the Combat, la Cunette, and St. Mandé, with their disgorging apparatus, draining-wells, and deodorizing branches, merely date from 1836. The intestine canal of Paris has been re-made, and, as we said, augmented more than tenfold during the last quarter of a century. Thirty years ago, at the period of the insurrection of June 5 and 6, it was still in many parts almost the old sewer. A great number of streets, now convex, were at that time broken causeways. There could be frequently seen at the bottom of the water-sheds of streets and squares, large square gratings, whose iron glistened from the constant passage of the crowd, dangerous and slippery for vehicles, and throwing horses down. The official language of the department of the roads and bridges gave these gratings the expressive name of Cassis. In 1832 in a number of streets,—Rue de l'Étoile, Rue St. Louis, Rue du Temple, Rue Vieille du Temple, Rue Nôtre Dame de Nazareth, Rue Folie Méricourt, Quai aux Fleurs, Rue du Petit Muse, Rue de Normandie, Rue Pont aux Biches, Rue des Marais, Faubourg St. Martin, Rue Nôtre Dame des Victoires, Faubourg Montmartre, Rue Grange Batelière, at the Champs Élysées, the Rue Jacob, and the Rue de Tournon, the old Gothic cloaca still cynically displayed its throats. They were enormous stone orifices, sometimes surrounded with posts, with a monumental effrontery. Paris in 1806 was much in the same state as regards sewers as in May, 1663,—five thousand three hundred and twenty-eight toises. After Bruneseau, on Jan. 1, 1832, there were forty thousand three hundred metres. From 1806 to 1831 seven hundred and fifty metres were on the average constructed annually; since then eight and even ten thousand metres have been made every year in brick-work, with a coating of concrete on a foundation of b£ton. At two hundred francs the metre, the sixty leagues of drainage in the Paris of to-day represent forty-eight million francs.

In addition to the economic progress to which we alluded at the outset, serious considerations as to the public health are attached to this immense question,—the drainage of Paris. Paris is situated between two sheets,—a sheet of water and a sheet of air. The sheet of water, lying at a very great depth, but already tapped by two borings, is supplied by the stratum of green sandstone situated between the chalk and the Jurassic limestone; this stratum may be represented by a disc with a radius of twenty-five leagues; a multitude of rivers and streams drip into it, and the Seine, the Marne, the Yonne, the Oisin, the Aisne, the Cher, the Vienne, and the Loire are drunk in a glass of water from the Grenelle well. The sheet of water is salubrious, for it comes from the sky first, and then from the earth; but the sheet of air is unhealthy, for it comes from the sewer. All the miasmas of the cloaca are mingled with the breathing of the city; hence this bad breath. The atmosphere taken from above a dungheap, it has been proved scientifically, is purer than the atmosphere taken from over Paris. Within a given time, by the aid of progress, improvements in machinery, and enlightenment, the sheet of water will be employed to purify the sheet of air, that is to say, to wash the sewer. It is known that by washing the sewer we mean restoring the ordure to the earth by sending dung to the arable lands and manure to the grass lands. Through this simple fact there will be for the whole social community a diminution of wretchedness and an augmentation of health. At the present hour the radiation of the diseases of Paris extends for fifty leagues round the Louvre, taken as the axle of this pestilential wheel.

We might say that for the last ten centuries the cloaca has been the misery of Paris, and the sewer is the viciousness which the city has in its blood. The popular instinct has never been deceived, and the trade of the sewer-man was formerly almost as dangerous and almost as repulsive to the people as that of the horse-slaughterer, which so long was regarded with horror and left to the hangman. Great wages were required to induce a bricklayer to disappear in this fetid sap; the ladder of the well-digger hesitated to plunge into it. It was said proverbially, "Going into the sewer is entering the tomb;" and all sorts of hideous legends, as we said, covered this colossal cesspool with terrors. It is a formidable fosse which bears traces of the revolutions of the globe as well as the revolutions of men; and vestiges may be found there of every cataclysm from the shells of the Deluge to the ragged sheet of Marat.


BOOK III.

MUD, BUT SOUL.


CHAPTER VI.

THE FONTIS.

Jean Valjean found himself in presence of a fontis: this sort of breaking-in was frequent at that day in the subsoil of the Champs Élysées, which was difficult to manage in hydraulic works, and not preservative of subterranean constructions, owing to its extreme fluidity. This fluidity exceeds even the inconsistency of the sands of the Quartier St. Georges, which could only be overcome by laying rubble on béton, and of the gas-infected clay strata in the Quartier des Martyrs, which are so liquid that a passage could be effected under the gallery only by means of an iron tube. When in 1836 the authorities demolished and rebuilt under the Faubourg St. Honoré the old stone sewer in which Jean Valjean is now engaged, the shifting sand which is the subsoil of the Champs Élysées as far as the Seine offered such an obstacle that the operation lasted six months, to the great annoyance of those living on the water-side, especially such as had mansions and coaches. The works were more than difficult, they were dangerous; but we must allow that it rained for four and a half months, and the Seine overflowed thrice. The fontis which Jean Valjean came across was occasioned by the shower of the previous evening. A giving way of the pavement, which was badly supported by the subjacent sand, had produced a deposit of rain-water, and when the filtering had taken place the ground broke in, and the roadway, being dislocated, fell into the mud. How far? It was impossible to say, for the darkness was denser there than anywhere else; it was a slough of mud in a cavern of night. Jean Valjean felt the pavement depart from under him as he entered the slough; there was water at top and mud underneath. He must pass it, for it was impossible to turn back; Marius was dying, and Jean Valjean worn out. Where else could he go? Jean Valjean advanced; the slough appeared but of slight depth at the first few steps, but as he advanced his legs sank in. He soon had mud up to the middle of the leg, and water up to the middle of the knee. He walked along, raising Marius with both arms as high as he could above the surface of the water; the mud now came up to his knees and the water to his waist. He could no longer draw back, and he sank in deeper and deeper. This mud, dense enough for the weight of one man, could not evidently bear two; Marius and Jean Valjean might have had a chance of getting out separately; but, for all that, Jean Valjean continued to advance, bearing the dying man, who was perhaps a corpse. The water came up to his armpits, and he felt himself drowning; he could scarce move in the depth of mud in which he was standing, for the density which was the support was also the obstacle. He still kept Marius up, and advanced with an extraordinary expenditure of strength, but he was sinking. He had only his head out of water and his two arms sustaining Marius. In the old paintings of the Deluge there is a mother holding her child in the same way. As he still sank he threw back his face to escape the water and be able to breathe; any one who saw him in this darkness would have fancied he saw a mask floating on the gloomy waters; he vaguely perceived above him Marius's hanging head and livid face; he made a desperate effort and advanced his foot, which struck against something solid,—a resting-place. It was high time.

He drew himself up, and writhed and rooted himself with a species of fury upon this support. It produced on him the effect of the first step of a staircase reascending to life. This support, met with in the mud at the supreme moment, was the beginning of the other side of the roadway, which had fallen in without breaking, and bent under the water like a plank in a single piece. A well-constructed pavement forms a curve, and possesses such firmness. This fragment of roadway, partly submerged, but solid, was a real incline, and once upon it they were saved. Jean Valjean ascended it, and attained the other side of the slough. On leaving the water his foot caught against a stone and he fell on his knees. He found that this was just, and remained on them for some time, with his soul absorbed in words addressed to God.

He rose, shivering, chilled, polluted, bent beneath the dying man he carried, all dripping with filth, but with his soul full of a strange brightness.


CHAPTER VI.

THE TWO OLD MEN, EACH IN HIS FASHION,
DO EVERYTHING FOR COSETTE'S HAPPINESS.

All preparations were made for the marriage, and the physician, on being consulted, declared that it might take place in February. It was now December; and a few ravishing weeks of perfect happiness slipped away. The least happy man was not the grandfather: he sat for a whole quarter of an hour contemplating Cosette.

"The admirably pretty girl!" he would exclaim, "and she has so soft and kind an air! She is the most charming creature I have ever seen in my life. Presently she will have virtues with a violet scent. She is one of the Graces, on my faith! A man can only live nobly with such a creature. Marius, my lad, you are a baron, you are rich; so do not be a pettifogger, I implore you."

Cosette and Marius had suddenly passed from the sepulchre into paradise: the transition had not been prepared, and they would have been stunned if they had not been dazzled.

"Do you understand anything of all this?" Marius would say to Cosette.

"No," Cosette answered; "but it seems to me as if the good God were looking at us."

Jean Valjean did everything, smoothed everything, conciliated everything, and rendered everything easy. He hurried toward Cosette's happiness with as much eagerness and apparently with as much joy as Cosette herself. As he had been Mayor, he was called to solve a delicate problem, the secret of which he alone possessed,—the civil status of Cosette. To tell her origin openly might have prevented the marriage; but he got Cosette out of all the difficulties. He arranged for her a family of dead people, a sure method of not incurring any inquiry. Cosette was the only one left of an extinct family. Cosette was not his daughter, but the daughter of another Fauchelevent. Two brothers Fauchelevent had been gardeners at the convent of the Little Picpus. They proceeded to this convent; the best testimonials and most satisfactory character were given; for the good nuns, little suited and but little inclined to solve questions of paternity, had never known exactly of which of the two Fauchelevents Cosette was the daughter. They said what was wanted, and said it zealously. An instrument was drawn up by a notary and Cosette became by law Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent, and was declared an orphan both on the father's and mother's side. Jean Valjean managed so as to be designated, under the name of Fauchelevent, as guardian of Cosette, with M. Gillenormand as supervising guardian. As for the five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs, they were a legacy left to Cosette by a dead person who wished to remain unknown. The original legacy had been five hundred and ninety-four thousand francs, but ten thousand had been spent in the education of Mademoiselle Euphrasie, five thousand of which had been paid to the convent. This legacy, deposited in the hands of a third party, was to be handed over to Cosette upon her majority, or at the period of her marriage. All this was highly acceptable, as we see, especially when backed up by more than half a million francs. There were certainly a few singular points here and there, but they were not seen, for one of the persons interested had his eyes bandaged by love, and the others by the six hundred thousand francs.

Cosette learned that she was not the daughter of the old man whom she had so long called father; he was only a relation, and another Fauchelevent was her real father. At another moment this would have grieved her, but in the ineffable hour she had now reached it was only a slight shadow, a passing cloud; and she had so much joy that this cloud lasted but a short time. She had Marius. The young man came; the old man disappeared: life is so. And then, Cosette had been accustomed for many long years to see enigmas around her; every being who has had a mysterious childhood is ever ready for certain renunciations. Still she continued to call Jean Valjean "father." Cosette, who was among the angels, was enthusiastic about Father Gillenormand; it is true that he overwhelmed her with madrigals and presents. While Jean Valjean was constructing for Cosette an unassailable position in society, M. Gillenormand attended to the wedding trousseau. Nothing amused him so much as to be magnificent; and he had given Cosette a gown of Binche guipure, which he inherited from his own grandmother. "These fashions spring up again," he said; "antiquities are the great demand, and the young ladies of my old days dress themselves like the old ladies of my youth." He plundered his respectable round-bellied commodes of Coromandel lacquer, which had not been opened for years. "Let us shrive these dowagers," he said, "and see what they have in their paunch." He noisily violated drawers full of the dresses of all his wives, all his mistresses, and all his female ancestry. He lavished on Cosette Chinese satins, damasks, lampas, painted moires, gros de Naples dresses, Indian handkerchiefs embroidered with gold that can be washed, Genoa and Alençon point lace, sets of old jewelry, ivory bonbon boxes adorned with microscopic battles, laces, and ribbons. Cosette, astounded, wild with love for Marius and with gratitude to M. Gillenormand, dreamed of an unbounded happiness, dressed in satin and velvet. Her wedding-basket seemed to her supported by seraphim, and her soul floated in ether with wings of Mechlin lace. The intoxication of the lovers was only equalled, as we stated, by the ecstasy of the grandfather, and there was something like a flourish of trumpets in the Rue des Filles du Calvaire. Each morning there was a new offering of bric-à-brac from the grandfather to Cosette, and all sorts of ornaments were spread out splendidly around her. One day Marius, who not unfrequently talked gravely through his happiness, said, with reference to some incident which I have forgotten,—

"The men of the revolution are so great that they already possess the prestige of centuries, like Cato and like Phocion, and each of them seems a mémoire antique."

"Moire antique!" exclaimed the old gentleman; "thank you, Marius, that is the very idea which I was seeking for."

And on the morrow a splendid tea-colored moire antique dress was added to Cosette's outfit. The grandfather extracted a wisdom from this frippery:—

"Love is all very well, but this is required with it. Something useless is required in happiness; happiness is only what is absolutely necessary, but season it, say I, with an enormous amount of superfluity. A palace and her heart; her heart and the Louvre. Give me my shepherdess, and try that she be a duchess. Bring me Phillis crowned with corn-flowers, and add to her one thousand francs a year. Open for me an endless Bucolic under a marble colonnade. I consent to the Bucolic and also to the fairy scene in marble and gold. Dry happiness resembles dry bread; you eat it, but you do not dine. I wish for superfluity, for the useless, for extravagance, for that which is of no use. I remember to to have seen in Strasburg Cathedral a clock as tall as a three-storied house, which marked the hour, which had the kindness to mark the hour, but did not look as if it was made for the purpose; and which, after striking midday or midnight,—midday, the hour of the sun, and midnight, the hour of love, or any other hour you please,—gave you the moon and the stars, earth and sea, birds and fishes, Phœbus and Phœbe, and a heap of things that came out of a corner, and the twelve apostles, and the Emperor Charles V., and Éponine and Sabinus, and a number of little gilt men who played the trumpet into the bargain, without counting the ravishing chimes which it scattered in the air on every possible occasion, without your knowing why. Is a wretched, naked clock, which only marks the hours, worth that? I am of the opinion of the great clock of Strasburg, and prefer it to the Black Forest cuckoo clock."

M. Gillenormand talked all sorts of nonsense about the marriage, and all the ideas of the eighteenth century passed pell-mell into his dithyrambs.

"You are ignorant of the art of festivals, and do not know how to get up a day's pleasure in these times," he exclaimed. "Your nineteenth century is soft, and is deficient in excess: it is ignorant of what is rich and noble. In everything it is close-shorn. Your third estate is insipid and has no color, smell, or shape. The dream of your bourgeoises, who establish themselves, as they call it, is a pretty boudoir freshly decorated with mahogany and calico. Make way, there! The Sieur Grigou marries the Demoiselle Grippesou. Sumptuousness and splendor. A louis d'or has been stuck to a wax candle. Such is the age. I insist on flying beyond the Sarmatians. Ah, so far back as 1787 I predicted that all was lost on the day when I saw the Due de Rohan, Prince de Léon, Duc de Chabot, Duc de Montbazon, Marquis de Soubise, Vicomte de Thouars, Peer of France, go to Longchamps in a tapecul: that bore its fruits. In this century men have a business, gamble on the Stock Exchange, win money, and are mean. They take care of and varnish their surface: they are carefully dressed, washed, soaped, shaved, combed, rubbed, brushed, and cleaned externally, irreproachable, as polished as a pebble, discreet, trim, and at the same time,—virtue of my soul!—they have at the bottom of their conscience dungheaps and cess-pools, at which a milkmaid who blows her nose with her fingers would recoil. I grant the present age this motto,—dirty cleanliness. Marius, do not be annoyed; grant me the permission to speak, for I have been saying no harm of the people, you see. I have my mouth full of your people, but do let me give the bourgeoisie a pill. I tell you point-blank that at the present day people marry, but no longer know how to marry. Ah, it is true, I regret the gentility of the old manners; I regret it all,—that elegance, that chivalry, that courteous and dainty manner, that rejoicing luxury which every one possessed, the music forming part of the wedding, symphony above and drums beating below stairs, the joyous faces seated at table, the spicy madrigals, the songs, the fireworks, the hearty laugh, the devil and his train, and the large ribbon bows. I regret the bride's garter, for it is first cousin of the girdle of Venus. On what does the siege of Troy turn? Parbleu! on Helen's garter. Why do men fight? Why does the divine Diomedes smash on the head of Merioneus that grand brass helmet with the ten points? Why do Achilles and Hector tickle each other with lances? Because Helen let Paris take her garter. With Cosette's garter Homer would write the Iliad; he would place in his poem an old chatterer like myself, and call him Nestor. My friends, in former times, in those amiable former times, people married learnedly: they made a good contract and then a good merry-making. So soon as Cujas had gone out, Gamacho came in. Hang it all! the stomach is an agreeable beast, that demands its due, and wishes to hold its wedding too. We supped well, and had at table a pretty neighbor without a neckerchief, who only concealed her throat moderately. Oh, the wide laughing mouths, and how gay people were in those days! Youth was a bouquet, every young man finished with a branch of lilac or a posy of roses; if he were a warrior, he was a shepherd, and if by chance he were a captain of dragoons, he managed to call himself Florian. All were anxious to be pretty fellows, and they wore embroidery and rouge. A bourgeois looked like a flower, and a marquis like a precious stone. They did not wear straps, they did not wear boots; they were flashing, lustrous, gilt, light, dainty, and coquettish, but it did not prevent them wearing a sword by their side; they were humming-birds with beak and nails. It was the time of the Indes galantes. One of the sides of that age was delicate, the other magnificent; and, by the vertu-choux! people amused themselves. At the present day they are serious; the bourgeois is miserly, the bourgeoise prudish,—your age is out of shape. The Graces would be expelled because their dresses were cut too low in the neck. Alas! beauty is concealed as an ugliness. Since the revolution all wear trousers, even the ballet girls; a ballet girl must be serious, and your rigadoons are doctrinaire. A man must be majestic, and would feel very much annoyed at not having his chin in his cravat. The idea of a scamp of twenty, who is about to marry, is to resemble Monsieur Royer-Collard. And do you know what people reach by this majesty? They are little. Learn this fact: joy is not merely joyous, it is grand. Be gayly in love; though, hang it all! marry, when you do marry, with fever and amazement and tumult, and a hurly-burly of happiness. Gravity at church, if you will; but so soon as the mass is ended, sarpejeu! you ought to make a dream whirl round your wife. A marriage ought to be royal and chimerical, and parade its ceremony from the Cathedral of Rheims to the Pagoda of Chante-loup. I have a horror of a scrubby marriage. Ventre-goulette! Be in Olympus at least upon that day. Be gods. Ah, people might be sylphs, jests and smiles, Argyraspides, but they are scrubs! My friends, every newly-married man ought to be Prince Aldobrandini. Take advantage of this unique moment of life to fly into the Empyrean with the swans and the eagles, even if you fall back to-morrow into the bourgeoisie of frogs. Do not save upon the hymeneal rites; do not nibble at this splendor, nor split farthings on the day when you are radiant. A wedding is not housekeeping. Oh, if I had my way it should be a gallant affair, and violins should be heard in the trees. Here is my programme: sky-blue and silver. I would mingle in the fête the rustic divinities, and convene the Dryads and the Nereids. The wedding of Amphitrite, a pink cloud, nymphs with their hair carefully dressed and quite nude, an academician offering quatrains to the Deess, a car drawn by marine monsters.

'Triton trottait devant, et tirait de sa conque,
Des sons si ravissants qu'il ravissait quiconque!'

There is a programme for a fête, or I'm no judge, sac à papier!"

While the grandfather, in the heat of his lyric effusion, was listening to himself, Cosette and Marius were intoxicating themselves by looking freely at each other. Aunt Gillenormand regarded all this with her imperturbable placidity; she had, during the last five or six months, a certain amount of emotions; Marius returned, Marius brought back bleeding, Marius brought from a barricade, Marius dead, then living, Marius reconciled, Marius affianced, Marius marrying a poor girl, Marius marrying a millionnaire. The six hundred thousand francs had been her last surprise, and then the indifference of a leading communicant returned to her. She went regularly to her mass, told her beads, read her euchology, whispered in one corner of the house her Aves, while "I love you" was being whispered in another, and saw Marius and Cosette vaguely like two shadows. The shadow was herself. There is a certain state of inert asceticism in which the mind, neutralized by torpor, and a stranger to what might be called the business of living, does not perceive, with the exception of earthquakes and catastrophes, any human impressions, either pleasant or painful. "This devotion," Father Gillenormand would say to his daughter, "resembles a cold in the head; you smell nothing of life, neither a good odor nor a bad one." However, the six hundred thousand francs had settled the old maid's indecision. Her father was accustomed to take her so little into account that he had not consulted her as to the consent to Marius's marriage. He had acted impetuously, according to his wont, having, as a despot who had become a slave, but one thought, that of satisfying Marius. As for the aunt, he had scarce remembered that the aunt existed, and that she might have an opinion of her own, and, sheep though she was, this had offended her. Somewhat roused internally, but externally impassive, she said to herself, "My father settles the marriage question without me, and I will settle the question of the inheritance without him." She was rich, in fact, and her father was not so, and it is probable that if the marriage had been poor she would have left it poor. "All the worse for my nephew! If he chose to marry a beggar, he may be a beggar too." But Cosette's half a million of francs pleased the aunt and changed her feelings with respect to the loving couple; consideration is due to six hundred thousand francs, and it was evident that she could not do otherwise than leave her fortune to these young people, because they no longer required it.

It was arranged that the couple should reside at M. Gillenormand's, and the grandfather insisted on giving them his bed-room, the finest room in the house. "It will make me younger," he declared. "It is an old place. I always had the idea that the wedding should take place in my room." He furnished this room with a heap of old articles of gallantry; he had it hung with an extraordinary fabric which he had in the piece, and believed to be Utrecht, a gold satin ground with velvet auriculas. "It was with that stuff," he said, "that the bed of the Duchess d'Anville à la Rocheguyon was hung." He placed on the mantel-piece a figure in Saxon porcelain carrying a muff on its naked stomach. M. Gillenormand's library became the office which Marius required; for an office, it will be borne in mind, is insisted upon by the council of the order.


CHAPTER VI.

THE GRASS HIDES, AND THE RAIN EFFACES.

There is at the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, in the vicinity of the poor side, far from the elegant quarter of this city of sepulchres, far from those fantastic tombs which display in the presence of eternity the hideous fashions of death, in a deserted corner near an old wall, under a yew up which bind-weed climbs, and amid couch-grass and moss, a tombstone. This stone is no more exempt than the others from the results of time, from mildew, lichen, and the deposits of birds. Water turns it green and the atmosphere blackens it. It is not in the vicinity of any path, and people do not care to visit that part because the grass is tall and they get their feet wet. When there is a little sunshine the lizards disport on it; there is all around a rustling of wild oats, and in spring linnets sing on the trees. This tombstone is quite bare. In cutting it, only the necessities of the tomb were taken into consideration; no further care was taken than to make the stone long enough and narrow enough to cover a man.

No name can be read on it.

Many, many years ago, however, a hand wrote on it in pencil these lines, which became almost illegible through rain and dust, and which are probably effaced at the present day:—

"Il dort. Quoique le sort fût pour lui bien étrange,
Il vivait. Il mourut quand il n'eut pas son ange;
La chose simplement d'elle-même arriva,
Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s'en va."

THE END.






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