The two most memorable barricades which the observer of social diseases can mention do not belong to the period in which the action of this book is laid. These two barricades, both symbols under different aspects of a formidable situation, emerged from the earth during the fatal insurrection of June, 1848, the greatest street-war which history has seen. It happens sometimes that the canaille, that great despairing crowd, contrary to principles, even contrary to liberty, equality, and fraternity, even contrary to the universal vote, the government of all by all, protests, in the depths of its agony, its discouragement, its destitution, its fevers, its distresses, its miasmas, its ignorance, and its darkness, and the populace offers battle to the people. The beggars attack the common right, the ochlocracy rises in insurrection against the demos. Those are mournful days; for there is always a certain amount of right even in this mania, there is suicide in this duel, and these words, intended to be insults, such as beggars, canaille, ochlocracy, and populace, prove, alas! rather the fault of those who reign than the fault of those who suffer; rather the fault of the privileged than the fault of the disinherited. For our part, we never pronounce these words without grief and respect, for when philosophy probes the facts with which they correspond it often finds much grandeur by the side of misery. Athens was an ochlocracy; the beggars produced Holland; the populace more than once saved Rome; and the canaille followed the Saviour. There is no thinker who has not at times contemplated the magnificence below. Saint Jerome doubtless thought of this canaille, of all these poor people, all these vagabonds, and all the wretches whence the apostles and martyrs issued, when he uttered the mysterious words,—"Fex urbis, lux orbis."
The exasperations of this mob, which suffers and which bleeds, its unwilling violence against the principles which are its life, its assaults upon the right, are popular coups d'état, and must be repressed. The just man devotes himself, and through love for this very mob, combats it. But how excusable he finds it while resisting it; how he venerates it, even while opposing it! It is one of those rare moments in which a man while doing his duty feels something that disconcerts him, and almost dissuades him from going further; he persists, and must do so, but the satisfied conscience is sad, and the accomplishment of the duty is complicated by a contraction of the heart. June, 1848, was, let us hasten to say, a separate fact, and almost impossible to classify in the philosophy of history. All the words we have uttered must be laid aside when we have to deal with this extraordinary riot, in which the holy anxiety of labor claiming its right was felt. It must be combated, and it was a duty to do so, for it attacked the Republic; but, in reality, what was June, 1848? A revolt of the people against itself. When the subject is not left out of sight there is no digression, and hence we may be permitted to concentrate the reader's attention momentarily upon the two absolutely unique barricades to which we have alluded, and which characterized this insurrection. The one blocked up the entrance to the Faubourg St. Antoine, the other defended the approaches to the Faubourg du Temple; those before whom these two frightful masterpieces of civil war were raised in the dazzling June sun will never forget them.
The St. Antoine barricade was monstrous; it was three stories high and seven hundred feet in width. It barred from one corner to the other the vast mouth of the faubourg, that is to say, three streets; ravined, slashed, serrated, surmounted by an immense jagged line, supported by masses which were themselves bastions, pushing out capes here and there, and powerfully reinforced by the two great promontories of the houses of the faubourg, it rose like a Cyclopean wall at the back of the formidable square which had seen July 14. There were nineteen barricades erected in the streets behind the mother barricade; but, on seeing it, you felt in the faubourg the immense agonizing suffering which had reached that extreme stage in which misery desires to come to a catastrophe. Of what was this barricade made? Of the tumbling in of three six-storied houses demolished on purpose, say some; of the prodigy of all the passions, say others. It possessed the lamentable aspect of all the buildings of hatred, ruin. You might ask who built this, and you might also ask who destroyed this. It was the improvisation of the ebullition. Here with that door, that grating, that awning, that chimney, that broken stove, that cracked stewpan! Give us anything! Throw everything in! Push, roll, pick, dismantle, overthrow, and pull down everything! It was a collaboration of the pavement-stones, beams, iron bars, planks, broken windows, unseated chairs, cabbage-stalks, rags, tatters, and curses. It was great and it was little; it was the abyss parodied on the square by the hurly-burly. It was the mass side by side with the atom, a pulled-down wall and a broken pipkin, a menacing fraternization of all fragments, into which Sisyphus had cast his rock and Job his potsherds. Altogether it was terrible,—it was the acropolis of the barefooted. Overturned carts studded the slope; an immense wagon spread out across it, with its wheels to the sky, and looked like a scar on this tumultuous façade; an omnibus gayly hoisted by strength of arm to the very top of the pile, as if the architects of this savage edifice had wished to add mockery to the horror, offered its bare pole to the horses of the air. This gigantic mound, the alluvium of the riot, represented to the mind an Ossa upon Pelion of all revolutions,—'93 upon '89, the 9th Thermidor upon the 10th August, the 18th Brumaire upon January 21st, Vendémiaire upon Prairial, 1848 upon 1830. The place was worth the trouble, and this barricade was worthy of appearing upon the very spot whence the Bastille had disappeared. If the ocean made dykes it would build them in this way, and the fury of the tide was stamped on this shapeless encumbrance. What tide? The multitude. You fancied that you saw a petrified riot, and heard the enormous dark bees of violent progress humming about this barricade as if they had their hive there. Was it a thicket? Was it a Bacchanalian feast? Was it a fortress? Vertigo seemed to have built it with the flapping of its wings! There was a sewer in this redoubt, and something Olympian in this mass. You saw there in a confused heap, full of desperation, gables of roofs, pieces of garrets with their painted paper, window-frames with all their panes planted in the rubbish and awaiting the cannon, pulled-down mantelpieces, chests of drawers, tables, benches, a howling topsy-turvy, and those thousand wretched things cast away even by a beggar which contain at once fury and nothingness. It may be said that it was the rags of a people, rags of wood, of iron, of bronze, of stone; that the Faubourg St. Antoine had swept them to their door with a gigantic broom, and made a barricade of their misery. Logs resembling executioners' blocks, disjointed chains, anvil-frames of the shape of gallows, horizontal wheels emerging from the heap, produced on this edifice of anarchy the representation of the old punishment suffered by the people. The St. Antoine barricade made a weapon of everything. All that civil war can throw at the head of society came from it; it was not a fight but a paroxysm: the muskets which defended this redoubt, among which were several blunderbusses, discharged stones, bones, coat-buttons, and even the casters of night-commodes, very dangerous owing to the copper. This barricade was furious; it hurled an indescribable clamor into the clouds; at certain moments when challenging the army it was covered with a crowd and a tempest; it had a prickly crest of guns, sabres, sticks, axes, pikes, and bayonets; a mighty red flag fluttered upon it in the breeze, and the cries of command, the songs of attack, the rolling of the drum, the sobs of women, and the sardonic laughter of men dying of starvation could be heard there. It was immeasurable and living, and a flash of lightning issued from it as from the back of an electric animal. The spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this summit, where that voice of the people which resembles the voice of God was growling, and a strange majesty was disengaged from this Titanic mass of stones. It was a dungheap, and it was Sinai.
As we said above, it attacked in the name of the revolution—what? The revolution. It, this barricade, an accident, a disorder, a misunderstanding, an unknown thing, had, facing it, the constituent assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage, the nation, the republic: and it was the Carmagnole defying the Marseillaise. A mad defiance, but heroic, for this old faubourg is a hero. The faubourg and its redoubt supported each other; the faubourg rested on the redoubt, and the redoubt backed against the faubourg. The vast barricade was like a cliff against which the strategy of the African generals was broken. Its caverns, its excrescences, its warts, its humps, made grimaces, if we may employ the expression, and grinned behind the smoke. The grape-shot vanished in the shapeless heap; shells buried themselves in it and were swallowed up; cannon-balls only succeeded in forming holes, for of what use is it bombarding chaos? And the regiments, accustomed to the sternest visions of war, gazed with anxious eye at this species of wild-beast redoubt, which was a boar through its bristling and a mountain through its enormity.
A quarter of a league farther on, at the corner of the Rue du Temple, which debouches on the boulevard near the Chateau d'Eau, if you boldly advanced your head beyond the point formed by the projection of the magazine Dallemagne, you could see in the distance across the canal, and at the highest point of the ascent to Belleville, a strange wall rising to the second floor and forming a sort of connecting link between the houses on the right and those on the left, as if the street had folded back its highest wall in order to close itself up. This was built of paving-stones; it was tall, straight, correct, cold, perpendicular, and levelled with the plumb-line and the square; of course there was no cement, but, as in some Roman walls, this in no way disturbed its rigid architecture. From its height, its thickness could be guessed, for the entablature was mathematically parallel to the basement At regular distances almost invisible loopholes, resembling black threads, could be distinguished in the gray wall, separated from each other by equal intervals. This street was deserted throughout its length, and all the windows and doors were closed. In the background rose this bar, which converted the street into a blind alley; it was a motionless and tranquil wall; no one was seen, nothing was heard, not a cry, nor a sound, nor a breath. It was a sepulchre. The dazzling June sun inundated this terrible thing with light,—it was the barricade of the Faubourg du Temple. So soon as you reached the ground and perceived it, it was impossible even for the boldest not to become pensive in the presence of this mysterious apparition. It was adjusted, clamped, imbricated, rectilinear, symmetrical, and funereal; science and darkness were there. You felt that the chief of this barricade was a geometrician or a spectre, and as you gazed you spoke in a whisper. From time to time if any one—private, officer, or representative of the people—ventured to cross the solitary road, a shrill faint whistling was heard, and the passer-by fell wounded or dead; or, if he escaped, a bullet could be seen to bury itself in some shutter, or the stucco of the wall. Sometimes it was a grape-shot, for the man of the barricade had made out of gas-pipes, stopped up at one end with tow and clay, two small cannon. There was no useless expenditure of gunpowder, and nearly every shot told. There were a few corpses here and there, and patches of blood on the pavement. I remember a white butterfly that fluttered up and down the street; summer does not abdicate. All the gateways in the vicinity were crowded with corpses, and you felt in this street that you were covered by some one you could not see, and that the whole street was under the marksman's aim.
The soldiers of the attacking column, massed behind the species of ridge which the canal bridge forms at the entrance of the Faubourg du Temple, watched gravely and thoughtfully this mournful redoubt, this immobility, this impassiveness, from which death issued. Some crawled on their stomachs to the top of the pitch of the bridge, while careful not to let their shakos pass beyond it. Brave Colonel Monteynard admired this barricade with a tremor. "How it is built," he said to a representative; "not a single paving-stone projects beyond the other. It is made of porcelain." At this moment a bullet smashed the cross on his chest and he fell. "The cowards!" the troops shouted, "Why do they not show themselves? They dare not! They hide!" The barricade of the Faubourg du Temple, defended by eighty men and attacked by ten thousand, held out for three days, and on the fourth day the troops acted as they had done at Zaatcha and Constantine,—they broke through houses, passed along roofs, and the barricade was taken. Not one of the eighty cowards dreamed of flying; all were killed with the exception of Barthélemy, the chief, to whom we shall allude directly. The barricade of St. Antoine was the tumult of the thunder; the barricade of the Temple was the silence. There was between the two barricades the same difference as exists between the formidable and the sinister. The one seemed a throat, the other a mask. Admitting that the gigantic and dark insurrection of June was composed of a fury and an enigma, the dragon was seen in the first barricade and the sphinx behind the second.
These two fortresses were built by two men, Cournet and Barthélemy: Cournet made the St. Antoine barricade, Barthélemy the Temple barricade, and each of them was the image of the man who built it. Cournet was a man of tall stature; he had wide shoulders, a red face, a smashing fist, a brave heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible eye. He was intrepid, energetic, irascible, and stormy; the most cordial of men, and the most formidable of combatants. War, contest, medley were the air he breathed, and put him in good temper. He had been an officer in the navy, and from his gestures and his voice it could be divined that he issued from the ocean and came from the tempest; he continued the hurricane in battle. Omitting the genius, there was in Cournet something of Danton, as, omitting the divinity, there was in Danton something of Hercules. Barthélemy, thin, weak, pale, and taciturn, was a species of tragical gamin, who, having been struck by a policeman, watched for him, waited for him, and killed him, and at the age of seventeen was sent to the galleys. He came out and built this barricade. At a later date, when both were exiles in London, Barthélemy killed Cournet: it was a melancholy duel. Some time after that, Barthélemy, caught in the cog-wheels of one of those mysterious adventures in which passion is mingled, catastrophes in which French justice sees extenuating circumstances and English justice only sees death, was hanged. The gloomy social edifice is so built that, owing to maternal denudation and moral darkness, this wretched being, who had had an intellect, certainly firm and possibly great, began with the galleys in France and ended with the gibbet in England. Barthélemy only hoisted one flag,—it was the black one.
Paris casts twenty-five millions of francs annually into the sea; and we assert this without any metaphor. How so, and in what way? By day and night. For what object? For no object. With what thought? Without thinking. What to do? Nothing. By means of what organ? Its intestines. What are its intestines? Its sewers. Twenty-five millions are the most moderate of the approximative amounts given by the estimates of modern science. Science, after groping for a long time, knows now that the most fertilizing and effective of manures is human manure. The Chinese, let us say it to our shame, knew this before we did; not a Chinese peasant—it is Eckeberg who states the fact—who goes to the city, but brings at either end of his bamboo a bucket full of what we call filth. Thanks to the human manure, the soil in China is still as youthful as in the days of Abraham, and Chinese wheat yields just one hundred and twenty fold the sowing. There is no guano comparable in fertility to the detritus of a capital, and a large city is the strongest of stercoraries. To employ the town in manuring the plain would be certain success; for if gold be dung, on the other hand our dung is gold.
What is done with this golden dung? It is swept into the gulf. We send at a great expense fleets of ships to collect at the southern pole the guano of petrels and penguins, and cast into the sea the incalculable element of wealth which we have under our hand. All the human and animal manure which the world loses, if returned to the land instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world. Do you know what those piles of ordure are, collected at the corners of streets, those carts of mud carried off at night from the streets, the frightful barrels of the night-man, and the fetid streams of subterranean mud which the pavement conceals from you? All this is a flowering field, it is green grass, it is mint and thyme and sage, it is game, it is cattle, it is the satisfied lowing of heavy kine at night, it is perfumed hay, it is gilded wheat, it is bread on your table, it is warm blood in your veins, it is health, it is joy, it is life. So desires that mysterious creation, which is transformation on earth and transfiguration in heaven; restore this to the great crucible, and your abundance will issue from it, for the nutrition of the plains produces the nourishment of men. You are at liberty to lose this wealth and consider me ridiculous into the bargain; it would be the masterpiece of your ignorance. Statistics have calculated that France alone pours every year into the Atlantic a sum of half a milliard. Note this; with these five hundred millions one quarter of the expenses of the budget would be paid. The cleverness of man is so great that he prefers to get rid of these five hundred millions in the gutter. The very substance of the people is borne away, here drop by drop, and there in streams, by the wretched vomiting of our sewers into the rivers, and the gigantic vomiting of our rivers into the ocean. Each eructation of our cloacas costs us one thousand francs, and this has two results,—the earth impoverished and the water poisoned; hunger issuing from the furrow and illness from the river. It is notorious that at this very hour the Thames poisons London; and as regards Paris, it has been found necessary to remove most of the mouths of the sewers down the river below the last bridge.
A double tubular apparatus supplied with valves and flood-gates, a system of elementary drainage as simple as the human lungs, and which is already in full work in several English parishes, would suffice to bring into bur towns the pure water of the fields and send to the fields the rich water of the towns; and this easy ebb and flow, the most simple in the world, would retain among us the five hundred millions thrown away. But people are thinking of other things. The present process does mischief while meaning well. The intention is good, but the result is sorrowful; they believe they are draining the city, while they are destroying the population. A sewer is a misunderstanding; and when drainage, with its double functions, restoring what it takes, is everywhere substituted for the sewer, that simple and impoverishing washing, and is also combined with the data of a new social economy, the produce of the soil will be increased tenfold, and the problem of misery will be singularly attenuated. Add the suppression of parasitisms, and it will be solved. In the mean while the public wealth goes to the river, and a sinking takes place,—sinking is the right word, for Europe is being ruined in this way by exhaustion. As for France, we have mentioned the figures. Now, as Paris contains one twenty-fifth of the whole French population, and the Parisian guano is the richest of all, we are beneath the truth when we estimate at twenty-five millions the share of Paris in the half-milliard which France annually refuses. These twenty-five millions, employed in assistance and enjoyment, would double the splendor of Paris, and the city expends them in sewers. So that we may say, the great prodigality of Paris, its marvellous fête, its Folie Beaujon, its orgie, its lavishing of gold, its luxury, splendor, and magnificence, is its sewerage. It is in this way that in the blindness of a bad political economy people allow the comfort of all to be drowned and wasted in the water; there ought to be St. Cloud nets to catch the public fortunes.
Economically regarded, the fact may be thus summarized: Paris is a regular spendthrift. Paris, that model city, that pattern of well-conducted capitals, of which every people strives to have a copy, that metropolis of the ideal, that august home of initiative, impulse, and experiment, that centre and gathering-place of minds, that nation city, that beehive of the future, that marvellous composite of Babylon and Corinth, would make a peasant of Fo-Kian shrug his shoulders, from our present point of view. Imitate Paris, and you will ruin yourself; moreover, Paris imitates itself particularly in this immemorial and insensate squandering. These surprising follies are not new; it is no youthful nonsense. The ancients acted like the moderns. "The cloacas of Rome," says Liebig, "absorbed the entire welfare of the Roman peasant." When the Campagna of Rome was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome exhausted Italy; and when it had placed Italy in its cloaca, it poured into it Sicily, and then Sardinia, and then Africa. The sewer of Rome swallowed up the world. This cloaca offered its tunnels to the city and to the world. Urbi et orbi. Eternal city and unfathomable drain.
For these things, as for others, Rome gives the example, and this example Paris follows with all the folly peculiar to witty cities. For the requirements of the operation which we have been explaining, Paris has beneath it another Paris, a Paris of sewers, which has its streets, squares, lanes, arteries, and circulation, which is mud, with the human forces at least. For nothing must be flattered, not even a great people. Where there is everything, there is ignominy by the side of sublimity; and if Paris contain Athens the city of light, Tyre the city of power, Sparta the city of virtue, Nineveh the city of prodigies, it also contains Lutetia the city of mud. Moreover, the stamp of its power is there too, and the Titanic sewer of Paris realizes among monuments the strange ideal realized in humanity by a few men like Machiavelli, Bacon, and Mirabeau,—the grand abject. The subsoil of Paris, if the eye could pierce the surface, would offer the aspect of a gigantic madrepore; a sponge has not more passages and holes than the piece of ground, six leagues in circumference, upon which the old great city rests. Without alluding to the catacombs, which are a separate cellar, without speaking of the inextricable net of gas-pipes, without referring to the vast tubular system for the distribution of running water, the drains alone form on either bank of the river a prodigious dark ramification, a labyrinth which has its incline for its clew. In the damp mist of this labyrinth is seen the rat, which seems the produce of the accouchement of Paris.
It was in the sewer of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself. This is a further resemblance of Paris with the sea, as in the ocean the diver can disappear there. It was an extraordinary transition, in the very heart of the city. Jean Valjean had left the city, and in a twinkling, the time required to lift a trap and let it fall again, he had passed from broad daylight to complete darkness, from midday to midnight, from noise to silence, from the uproar of thunder to the stagnation of the tomb, and, by an incident far more prodigious even than that of the Rue Polonceau, from the extremest peril to the most absolute security. A sudden fall into a cellar, disappearance in the oubliette of Paris, leaving this street where death was all around for this species of sepulchre in which was life,—it was a strange moment. He stood for some minutes as if stunned, listening and amazed. The trap-door of safety had suddenly opened beneath him, and the Celestial Goodness had to some extent taken him by treachery. Admirable ambuscades of Providence! Still, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not know whether what he was carrying in this pit were alive or dead.
His first sensation was blindness, for he all at once could see nothing. He felt too that in a moment he had become deaf, for he could hear nothing more. The frenzied storm of murder maintained a few yards above him only reached him confusedly and indistinctly, and like a noise from a depth. He felt that he had something solid under his feet, but that was all; still, it was sufficient. He stretched out one arm, then the other; he touched the wall on both sides and understood that the passage was narrow; his foot slipped, and he understood that the pavement was damp. He advanced one foot cautiously, fearing a hole, a cesspool, or some gulf, and satisfied himself that the pavement went onwards. A fetid gust warned him of the spot where he was. At the expiration of a few minutes he was no longer blind, a little light fell through the trap by which he descended, and his eye grew used to this vault He began to distinguish something. The passage in which he had run to earth—no other word expresses the situation better—was walled up behind him; it was one of those blind alleys called in the professional language branches. Before him he had another wall,—a wall of night. The light of the trap expired ten or twelve feet from the spot where Jean Valjean was, and scarce produced a livid whiteness on a few yards of the damp wall of the sewer. Beyond that the opaqueness was massive; to pierce it appeared horrible, and to enter it seemed like being swallowed up. Yet it was possible to bury one's self in this wall of fog, and it must be done; and must even be done quickly. Jean Valjean thought that the grating which he had noticed in the street might also be noticed by the troops, and that all depended on chance. They might also come down into the well and search, so he had not a minute to lose. He had laid Marius on the ground and now picked him up,—that is again the right expression,—took him on his shoulders, and set out. He resolutely entered the darkness.
The truth is, that they were less saved than Jean Valjean believed; perils of another nature, but equally great, awaited them. After the flashing whirlwind of the combat came the cavern of miasmas and snares; after the chaos, the cloaca. Jean Valjean had passed from one circle of the Inferno into another. When he had gone fifty yards he was obliged to stop, for a question occurred to him; the passage ran into another, which it intersected, and two roads offered themselves. Which should he take? Ought he to turn to the left, or right? How was he to find his way in this black labyrinth? This labyrinth, we have said, has a clew in its slope, and following the slope leads to the river. Jean Valjean understood this immediately; he said to himself that he was probably in the sewer of the markets; that if he turned to the left and followed the incline he would arrive in a quarter of an hour at some opening on the Seine between the Pont au Change and the Pont Neuf, that is to say, appear in broad daylight in the busiest part of Paris. Perhaps he might come out at some street opening, and passers-by would be stupefied at seeing two blood-stained men emerge from the ground at their feet. The police would come up and they would be carried off to the nearest guard-room; they would be prisoners before they had come out. It would be better, therefore, to bury himself in the labyrinth, confide in the darkness, and leave the issue to Providence.
He went up the incline and turned to the right; when he had gone round the corner of the gallery the distant light from the trap disappeared, the curtain of darkness fell on him again, and he became blind once more. For all that he advanced as rapidly as he could; Marius's arms were passed round life neck, and his feet hung down behind. He held the two arms with one hand and felt the wall with the other. Marius's cheek touched his and was glued to it, as it was bloody, and he felt a warm stream which came from Marius drip on him and penetrate his clothing. Still, a warm breath in his ear, which touched the wounded man's mouth, indicated respiration, and consequently life. The passage in which Jean Valjean was now walking was not so narrow as the former, and he advanced with some difficulty. The rain of the previous night had not yet passed off, and formed a small torrent in the centre, and he was forced to hug the wall in order not to lave his feet in the water. He went on thus darkly, like a creature of the night groping in the invisible, and subterraneously lost in the veins of gloom. Still, by degrees, either that a distant grating sent a little floating light into this opaque mist, or that his eyes grew accustomed to the obscurity, he regained some vague vision, and began to notice confusedly, at one moment the wall he was touching, at another the vault under which he was passing. The pupil is dilated at night and eventually finds daylight in it, in the same way as the soul is dilated in misfortune and eventually finds God in it.
To direct himself was difficult, for the sewers represent, so to speak, the outline of the streets standing over them. There were in the Paris of that day two thousand two hundred streets, and imagine beneath them that forest of dark branches called the sewer. The system of sewers existing at that day, if placed end on end, would have given a length of eleven leagues. We have already said that the present network, owing to the special activity of the last thirty years, is no less than sixty leagues. Jean Valjean began by deceiving himself; he fancied that he was under the Rue St. Denis, and it was unlucky that he was not so. There is under that street an old stone drain, dating from Louis XIII., which runs straight to the collecting sewer, called the Great Sewer, with only one turn on the right, by the old Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the St. Martin sewer, whose four arms cut each other at right angles. But the passage of the Little Truanderie, whose entrance was near the Corinth wine-shop, never communicated with the sewer of the Rue St. Denis; it falls into the Montmartre sewer, and that is where Jean Valjean now was. There opportunities for losing himself were abundant, for the Montmartre drain is one of the most labyrinthian of the old network. Luckily Jean Valjean had left behind him the sewer of the markets, whose geometrical plan represents a number of entangled top-gallant-masts; but he had before him more than one embarrassing encounter, and more than one street corner—for they are streets—offering itself in the obscurity as a note of interrogation. In the first place on his left, the vast Plâtrière sewer, a sort of Chinese puzzle, thrusting forth and intermingling its chaos of T and Z under the Post Office, and the rotunda of the grain-markets, as far as the Seine, where it terminates in Y; secondly, on his right the curved passage of the Rue du Cadran, with its three teeth, which are so many blind alleys; thirdly, on his left the Mail branch, complicated almost at the entrance by a species of fork, and running with repeated zigzags to the great cesspool of the Louvre, which ramifies in every direction; and lastly, on his right the blind alley of the Rue des Jeûneurs, without counting other pitfalls, ere he reached the engirdling sewer, which alone could lead him to some issue sufficiently distant to be safe.
Had Jean Valjean had any notion of all we have just stated he would have quickly perceived, merely by feeling the wall, that he was not in the subterranean gallery of the Rue St. Denis. Instead of the old freestone, instead of the old architecture, haughty and royal even in the sewer, with its arches and continuous courses of granite, which cost eight hundred livres the fathom, he would feel under his hand modern cheapness, the economic expedient, brick-work supported on a layer of béton, which costs two hundred francs the metre,—that bourgeois masonry known as à petits matériaux; but he knew nothing of all this. He advanced anxiously but calmly, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, plunged into chance, that is to say, swallowed up in Providence. By degrees, however, we are bound to state that a certain amount of horror beset him, and the shadow which enveloped him entered his mind. He was walking in an enigma. This aqueduct of the cloaca is formidable, for it intersects itself in a vertiginous manner, and it is a mournful thing to be caught in this Paris of darkness. Jean Valjean was obliged to find, and almost invent, his road without seeing it. In this unknown region each step that he ventured might be his last. How was he to get out of it? Would he find an issue? Would he find it in time? Could he pierce and penetrate this colossal subterranean sponge with its passages of stone? Would he meet there some unexpected knot of darkness? Would he arrive at something inextricable and impassable? Would Marius die of hemorrhage, and himself of hunger? Would they both end by being lost there, and form two skeletons in a corner of this night? He did not know; he asked himself all this and could not find an answer. The intestines of Paris are a precipice, and like the prophet he was in the monster's belly.
He suddenly had a surprise; at the most unexpected moment, and without ceasing to walk in a straight line, he perceived that he was no longer ascending; the water of the gutter plashed against his heels instead of coming to his toes. The sewer was now descending; why? Was he about to reach the Seine suddenly? That danger was great, but the peril of turning back was greater still, and he continued to advance. He was not proceeding toward the Seine; the shelving ridge which the soil of Paris makes on the right bank empties one of its water-sheds into the Seine and the other into the Great Sewer. The crest of this ridge, which determines the division of the waters, designs a most capricious line; the highest point is in the Sainte Avoye sewer, beyond the Rue Michel-le-comte, in the Louvre sewer, near the boulevards, and in the Montmartre drain, near the markets. This highest point Jean Valjean had reached, and he was proceeding toward the engirdling sewer, or in the right direction, but he knew it not. Each time that he reached a branch he felt the corners, and if he found the opening narrower than the passage in which he was he did not enter, but continued his march, correctly judging that any narrower way must end in a blind alley, and could only take him from his object, that is to say, an outlet. He thus avoided the fourfold snare laid for him in the darkness by the four labyrinths which we have enumerated. At a certain moment he recognized that he was getting from under that part of Paris petrified by the riot, where the barricades had suppressed circulation, and returning under living and normal Paris. He suddenly heard above his head a sound like thunder, distant but continuous; it was the rolling of vehicles.
He had been walking about half an hour, at least that was the calculation he made, and had not thought of resting; he had merely changed the hand which held Marius up. The darkness was more profound than ever, but this darkness reassured him. All at once he saw his shadow before him; it stood out upon a faint and almost indistinct redness, which vaguely impurpled the roadway at his feet and the vault above his head, and glided along the greasy walls of the passage. Stupefied, he turned around.
Behind him, in the part of the passage he had come from, at a distance which appeared immense, shone a sort of horrible star, obliterating the dark density, which seemed to be looking at him. It was the gloomy police star rising in the sewer. Behind this star there moved confusedly nine or ten black, upright, indistinct, and terrible forms.
Some time after the events which we have just recorded, the Sieur Boulatruelle had a lively emotion. The Sieur Boulatruelle is the road-mender of Montfermeil of whom we have already caught a glimpse in the dark portions of this book. Boulatruelle, it will possibly be remembered, was a man occupied with troubled and various things. He broke stones and plundered travellers on the highway. Road-mender and robber, he had a dream: he believed in the treasures buried in the forest of Montfermeil. He hoped some day to find money in the ground at the foot of a tree, and in the mean while willingly fished for it in the pockets of passers-by. Still, for the present he was prudent, for he had just had a narrow escape. He was, as we know, picked up with the other ruffians in Jondrette's garret. There is some usefulness in a vice, for his drunkenness saved him, and it never could be cleared up whether he were there as a robber or as a robbed man. He was set at liberty on account of his proved intoxication on the night of the attack, and returned to the woods. He went back to his road from Gagny to Lagny, to break stones for the State, under surveillance, with hanging head and very thoughtful, slightly chilled by the robbery which had almost ruined him, but turning with all the more tenderness to the wine which had saved him.
As for the lively emotion which he had a short time after his return beneath the turf-roof of his road-mender's cabin, it was this: One morning Boulatruelle, while going as usual to work and to his lurking-place, possibly a little before daybreak, perceived among the branches a man whose back he could alone see, but whose shape, so he fancied, through the mist and darkness, was not entirely unknown to him. Boulatruelle, though a drunkard, had a correct and lucid memory, an indispensable defensive weapon for any man who is at all on bad terms with legal order.
"Where the devil have I seen some one like that man?" he asked.
But he could give himself no reply, save that he resembled somebody of whom he had a confused recollection. Boulatruelle, however, made his comparisons and calculations, though he was unable to settle the identity. This man did not belong to those parts, and bad come there evidently afoot, as no public vehicle passed through Montfermeil at that hour. He must have been walking all night Where did he come from? No great distance, for he had neither haversack nor bundle. Doubtless from Paris. Why was he in this wood? Why was lie there at such an hour? What did he want there? Boulatruelle thought of the treasure. By dint of racking his memory he vaguely remembered having had, several years previously, a similar alarm on the subject of a man who might very well be this man. While meditating he had, under the very weight of his meditation, hung his head, a natural but not clever thing. When he raised it again the man had disappeared in the forest and the mist.
"By the deuce!" said Boulatruelle, "I will find him again, and discover to what parish that parishioner belongs. This walker of Patron-Minette has a motive, and I will know it. No one must have a secret in my forest without my being mixed up in it."
He took up his pick, which was very sharp. "Here's something," he growled, "to search the ground and a man."
And as one thread is attached to another thread, covering the steps as well as he could in the direction which the man must have pursued, he began marching through the coppice. When he had gone about a hundred yards, day, which was beginning to break, aided him. Footsteps on the sand here and there, trampled grass, broken heather, young branches bent into the shrubs and rising with a graceful slowness, like the arms of a pretty woman who stretches herself on waking, gave him a species of trail. He followed it and then lost it, and time slipped away; he got deeper into the wood and reached a species of eminence. An early sportsman passing at a distance along a path, and whistling the air of Guillery, gave him the idea of climbing up a tree, and though old, he was active. There was on the mound a very large beech, worthy of Tityrus and Boulatruelle, and he climbed up the tree as high as he could. The idea was a good one; for while exploring the solitude on the side where the wood is most entangled, Boulatruelle suddenly perceived the man, but had no sooner seen him than he lost him out of sight again. The man entered, or rather glided, into a rather distant clearing, masked by large trees, but which Boulatruelle knew very well, because he had noticed near a large heap of stones a sick chestnut-tree bandaged with a zinc plate nailed upon it. This clearing is what was formerly called the Blaru-bottom, and the pile of stones, intended no one knows for what purpose, which could be seen there thirty years ago, is doubtless there still. Nothing equals the longevity of a heap of stones, except that of a plank paling. It is there temporarily; what a reason for lasting!
Boulatruelle, with the rapidity of joy, tumbled off the tree rather than came down it. The lair was found, and now he had only to seize the animal. The famous treasure he had dreamed of was probably there. It was no small undertaking to reach the clearing by beaten paths which make a thousand annoying windings; it would take a good quarter of an hour. In a straight line through the wood, which is at that spot singularly dense, very thorny, and most aggressive, it would take half an hour at least This is what Boulatruelle was wrong in not understanding; he believed in the straight line,—a respectable optical illusion which has ruined many men. The wood, bristling though it was, appeared to him the right road.
"Let us go by the Rue de Rivoli of the wolves," he said.
Boulatruelle, accustomed to crooked paths, this time committed the error of going straight, and resolutely cast himself among the shrubs. He had to contend with holly, nettles, hawthorns, eglantines, thistles, and most irascible roots, and was fearfully scratched. At the bottom of the ravine he came to a stream which he was obliged to cross, and at last reached the Blaru clearing after forty minutes, perspiring, wet through, blowing, and ferocious. There was no one in the clearing. Boulatruelle hurried to the heap of stones; it was still in its place, and had not been carried off. As for the man, he had vanished in the forest. He had escaped. Where? In which direction? Into which clump of trees? It were impossible to guess. And, most crushing thing of all, there was behind the heap of stones and in front of the zinc-banded tree a pick, forgotten or abandoned, and a hole; but the hole was empty.
"Robber!" Boulatruelle cried, shaking his fists at heaven.
The night of February 16 was a blessed night, for it had above its shadow the open sky. It was the wedding-night of Marius and Cosette.
The day had been adorable; it was not the blue festival dreamed of by the grandfather, a fairy scene, with a confusion of cherubim and cupids above the head of the married couple, a marriage worthy of being represented over a door, but it had been sweet and smiling. The fashion of marrying in 1833 was not at all as it is now. France had not yet borrowed from England that supreme delicacy of carrying off a wife, of flying on leaving the church, hiding one's self as if ashamed of one's happiness, and combining the manœuvres of a bankrupt with the ravishment of the Song of Songs. We had not yet understood how chaste, exquisite, and decent it is to jolt one's paradise in a postchaise; to vary the mystery with click-clacks of the whip; to select an inn bed as the nuptial couch, and to leave behind one, at the conventional alcove at so much per night, the most sacred recollection of life, jumbled with the tête-à-têtes of the guard of the diligence and the chamber-maid. In the second half of the nineteenth century, in which we now are, the mayor and his scarf, the priest and his chasuble, the law and God, are no longer sufficient; they must be complemented by the postilion of Lonjumeau; blue jacket with red facings and bell buttons, a leather-bound plate, green leather breeches, oaths to the Norman horses with their knotted tails, imitation gold lace, oil-skin hat, heavy, dusty horses, an enormous whip, and strong boots. France does not carry the elegance to such an extent as to shower on the postchaise, as the English nobility do, old shoes and battered slippers, in memory of Churchill, afterwards Marlborough or Malbrouck, who was assailed on his wedding-day by the anger of an aunt which brought him good luck. Shoes and slippers do not yet form part of our nuptial celebrations; but, patience, with the spread of good taste we shall yet come to it.
In 1833,—it is a century since then,—marriage was not performed at a smart trot; people still supposed at that epoch, whimsically enough, that a marriage is a private and social festival, that a patriarchal banquet does not spoil a domestic solemnity; that gayety, even if it be excessive, so long as it is decent, does no harm to happiness; and finally, that it is venerable and good for the fusion of these two destinies from which a family will issue, to begin in the house, and that the household may have in future the nuptial chamber as a witness; and people were so immodest as to many at home. The wedding took place, then, according to this fashion which is now antiquated, at M. Gillenormand's; and though this affair of marrying is so simple and natural, the publication of the banns, drawing up the deeds, the mayoralty, and the church always cause some complication, and they could not be ready before February 16. Now—we note this detail for the pure satisfaction of being exact—it happened that the 16th was Mardi Gras. There were hesitations and scruples, especially on the part of Aunt Gillenormand.
"A Mardi Gras!" the grandfather exclaimed; "all the better. There is a proverb that,—
'Mariage un Mardi gras
N'aura point d'enfants ingrats.'
All right. Done for the 16th. Do you wish to put it off, Marius?"
"Certainly not," said the amorous youth.
"We'll marry then," said the grandfather.
The marriage, therefore, took place on the 16th, in spite of the public gayety. It rained on that day, but there is always in the sky a little blue patch at the service of happiness, which lovers see, even when the rest of creation are under their umbrellas. On the previous day Jean Valjean had handed to Marius, in the presence of M. Gillenormand, the five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs. As the marriage took place in the ordinary way, the deeds were very simple. Toussaint was henceforth useless to Jean Valjean, so Cosette inherited her, and promoted her to the rank of lady's-maid. As for Jean Valjean, a nice room was furnished expressly for him at M. Gillenormand's, and Cosette had said to him so irresistibly, "Father, I implore you," that she had almost made him promise that he would come and occupy it. A few days before that fixed for the marriage an accident happened to Jean Valjean; he slightly injured the thumb of his right hand. It was not serious, and he had not allowed any one to poultice it, or even see it, not even Cosette. Still, it compelled him to wrap up his hand in a bandage and wear his arm in a sling, and this, of course, prevented him from signing anything. M. Gillenormand, as supervising guardian to Cosette, took his place. We will not take the reader either to the mayoralty or to church. Two lovers are not usually followed so far, and we are wont to turn our back on the drama so soon as it puts a bridegroom's bouquet in its button-hole. We will restrict ourselves to noting an incident which, though unnoticed by the bridal party, marked the drive from the Rue des Filles du Calvaire to St. Paul's Church.
The Rue St. Louis was being repaired at the time, and it was blocked from the Rue du Parc Royal, hence it was impossible for the carriage to go direct to St. Paul's. As they were obliged to change their course, the most simple plan was to turn into the boulevard. One of the guests drew attention to the fact that, as it was Mardi Gras, there would be a block of vehicles. "Why so?" M. Gillenormand asked. "On account of the masks." "Famous," said the grandfather; "we will go that way. These young people are going to marry and see the serious side of life, and seeing the masquerade will be a slight preparation for it." They turned into the boulevard: the first of the wedding carriages contained Cosette and Aunt Gillenormand, M. Gillenormand, and Jean Valjean. Marius, still separated from his bride, according to custom, was in the second. The nuptial procession, on turning out of the Rue des Filles du Calvaire, joined the long file of vehicles making an endless chain from the Madeleine to the Bastille, and from the Bastille to the Madeleine. Masks were abundant on the boulevard: and though it rained every now and then, Paillasse, Pantalon, and Gille were obstinate. In the good humor of that winter of 1833 Paris had disguised itself as Venus. We do not see a Mardi Gras like this now-a-days, for as everything existing is a wide-spread carnival, there is no carnival left. The sidewalks were thronged with pedestrians, and the windows with gazers; and the terraces crowning the peristyles of the theatres were covered with spectators. In addition to the masks, they look at the file—peculiar to Mardi Gras as to Longchamp—of vehicles of every description, citadines, carts, curricles, and cabs, marching in order rigorously riveted to each other by police regulations, and, as it were, running on rails. Any one who happens to be in one of these vehicles is at once spectator and spectacle. Policemen standing by the side of the boulevard kept in place these two interminable files moving in a contrary direction, and watched that nothing should impede the double current of these two streams, one running up, the other down, one towards the Chaussée d'Antin, the other towards the Faubourg St. Antoine. The escutcheoned carriages of the Peers of France and Ambassadors held the crown of the causeway, coming and going freely; and certain magnificent and gorgeous processions, notably the Bœuf Gras, had the same privilege. In this Parisian gayety England clacked his whip, for the post-chaise of Lord Seymour, at which a popular sobriquet was hurled, passed with a great noise.
In the double file, along which Municipal Guards galloped like watch-dogs, honest family arks, crowded with great-aunts and grandmothers, displayed at windows healthy groups of disguised children, Pierrots of seven and Pierrettes of six, ravishing little creatures, feeling that they officially formed part of the public merriment, penetrated with the dignity of their Harlequinade, and displaying the gravity of functionaries. From time to time a block occurred somewhere in the procession of vehicles; one or other of the two side files stopped until the knot was untied, one impeded vehicle sufficing to block the whole line. Then they started again. The wedding carriages were in the file, going towards the Bastille on the right-hand side of the boulevard. Opposite the Rue du Pont-aux-Choux there was a stoppage, and almost at the same moment the file on the other side proceeding towards the Madeleine stopped too. At this point of the procession there was a carriage of masks. These carnages, or, to speak more correctly, these cartloads of masks, are well known to the Parisians; if they failed on Mardi Gras or at mid-Lent, people would say, "There's something behind it. Probably we are going to have a change of Ministry." A heap of Harlequins, Columbines, and Pantaloons jolted above the heads of the passers-by,—all possible grotesques, from the Turk to the savage. Hercules supporting Marquises, fish-fags who would make Rabelais stop his ears, as well as Mænads who would make Aristophanes look down, tow perukes, pink fleshings, three-cornered hats, pantaloons, spectacles, cries given to the pedestrians, hands on hips, bold postures, naked shoulders, masked faces, and unmuzzled immodesty; a chaos of effronteries driven by a coachman in a head-dress of flowers,—such is this institution. Greece felt the want of Thespis' cart, and France needs Vadé's fiacre. All may be parodied, even parody. The Saturnalia, that grimace of antique beauty, by swelling and swelling becomes the Mardi Gras: and the Bacchanal, formerly crowned with vine-leaves, inundated by sunshine, and displaying marble breasts in a divine semi-nudity, is now flabby under the drenched rags of the North, has ended by being called a chie-en-lit.
The tradition of the coaches of masks dates back to the oldest times of the Monarchy. The accounts of Louis XI. allow the Palace steward "twenty sous tournois for three coaches of masquerades." In our time these noisy piles of creatures generally ride in some old coucou the roof of which they encumber, or cover with their tumultuous group a landau the hood of which is thrown back. There are twenty in a carriage intended for six. You see them on the seat, on the front stool, on the springs of the hood, and on the pole, and they even straddle across the lamps. They are standing, lying down, or seated, cross-legged, or with pendent legs. The women occupy the knees of the men, and this wild pyramid is seen for a long distance over the heads of the crowd. These vehicles form mountains of merriment in the midst of the mob, and Collé, Panard, and Piron flow from them enriched with slang, and the fish-fag's catechism is expectorated from above upon the people. This fiacre, which has grown enormous through its burden, has an air of conquest; Hubbub is in front and Hurly-burly behind. People shout in it, sing in it, yell in it, and writhe with happiness in it; gayety roars there, sarcasm flashes, and joviality is displayed like a purple robe; two jades drag in it farce expanded into an apotheosis, and it is the triumphal car of laughter,—a laughter, though, too cynical to be frank, and in truth this laughter is suspicious. It has a mission,—that of verifying the carnival to the Parisians. These fish-fag vehicles, in which some strange darkness is perceptible, cause the philosopher to reflect; there is something of the government in them, and you lay your finger there on a curious affinity between public men and public women. It is certainly a sorry thought, that heaped-up turpitudes give a sum-total of gayety; that a people can be amused by building up ignominy on opprobrium; that spying, acting as a caryatid to prostitution, amuses the mob while affronting it; that the crowd is pleased to see pass on four wheels this monstrous living pile of beings, spangled rags, one half ordure, one half light, who bark and sing; that they should clap their hands at all this shame, and that no festival is possible for the multitude unless the police promenade in its midst these twenty-headed hydras of joy. Most sad this certainly is, but what is to be done? These tumbrels of beribboned and flowered filth are insulted and pardoned by the public laughter, and the laughter of all is the accomplice of the universal degradation. Certain unhealthy festivals disintegrate the people and convert them into populace; but a populace, like tyrants, requires buffoons. The king has Roquelaure, and the people has Paillasse. Paris is the great mad city wherever it is not the great sublime city, and the carnival there is political. Paris, let us confess it, willingly allows infamy to play a farce for its amusement, and only asks of its masters—when it has masters—one thing, "paint the mud for me." Rome was of the same humor; she loved Nero, and Nero was a Titanic débardeur.
Accident willed it, as we have just said, that one of the shapeless groups of masked men and women collected in a vast barouche stopped on the left of the boulevard while the wedding party stopped on the right. The carriage in which the masks were, noticed opposite to it the carriage in which was the bride.
"Hilloh!" said a mask, "a wedding."
"A false wedding," another retorted, "we are the true one."
And, as they were too far off to address the wedding party, and as they also feared the interference of the police, the two masks looked elsewhere. The whole vehicle-load of masquers had plenty of work a moment after, for the mob began hissing it, which is the caress given by the mob to masquerades, and the two masks who had just spoken were obliged to face the crowd with their comrades, and found all the missiles of the market repertory scarce sufficient to reply to the atrocious jaw-lashing from the people. A frightful exchange of metaphors took place between the masks and the crowd. In the mean while two other masks in the same carriage, a Spaniard with an exaggerated nose, an oldish look, and enormous black moustaches, and a thin and very youthful fish-girl, wearing a half-mask, had noticed the wedding also, and while their companions and the spectators were insulting each other, held a conversation in a low voice. Their aside was covered by the tumult and was lost in it. The showers had drenched the open carriage; the February wind is not warm, and so the fish-girl while answering the Spaniard shivered, laughed, and coughed. This was the dialogue, which we translate from the original slang:—
"Look here."
"What is it, pa?"
"Do you see that old man?"
"What old man?"
"There, in the wedding coach, with his arm in a sling."
"Yes. Well?"
"I feel sure that I know him."
"Ah!"
"May my neck be cut, and I never said you, thou, or I, in my life, if I do not know that Parisian."
"To-day Paris is Pantin."
"Can you see the bride by stooping?"
"No."
"And the bridegroom?"
"There is no bridegroom in that coach."
"Nonsense."
"Unless it be the other old man."
"Come, try and get a look at the bride by stooping."
"I can't."
"No matter, that old fellow who has something the matter with his paw, I feel certain I know him."
"And what good will it do you, your knowing him?"
"I don't know. Sometimes!"
"I don't care a curse for old fellows."
"I know him."
"Know him as much as you like."
"How the deuce is he at the wedding?"
"Why, we are there too."
"Where does the wedding come from?"
"How do I know?"
"Listen."
"Well, what is it?"
"You must do something."
"What is it?"
"Get out of our trap and follow that wedding."
"What to do?"
"To know where it goes and what it is. Make haste and get down; run, my daughter, for you are young."
"I can't leave the carriage."
"Why not?"
"I am hired."
"Oh, the devil!"
"I owe the Préfecture my day's work."
"That's true."
"If I leave the carriage, the first inspector who sees me will arrest me. You know that."
"Yes, I know it."
"To-day I am bought by Pharos" (the government).
"No matter, that old fellow bothers me."
"All old men bother you, and yet you ain't a chicken yourself."
"He is in the first carriage."
"Well, what then?"
"In the bride's carriage."
"What next?"
"So he is the father."
"How does that concern me?"
"I tell you he is the father."
"You do nothing but talk about that father."
"Listen."
"Well, what?"
"I can only go away masked, for I am hidden here, and no one knows I am here. But to-morrow there will be no masks, for it is Ash Wednesday, and I run a risk of being nailed. I shall be obliged to go back to my hole, but you are free."
"Not quite."
"Well, more so than I am."
"Well, what then?"
"You must try to find out where that wedding party is going to."
"Going to?"
"Yes."
"Oh, I know."
"Where to, then?"
"To the Cadran Bleu."
"But that is not the direction."
"Well, then! to La Rapée."
"Or elsewhere."
"They can do as they like, for weddings are free."
"That is not the thing. I tell you that you must try to find out for me what that wedding is, and where it comes from."
"Of course! that would be funny. It's so jolly easy to find out a week after where a wedding party has gone to that passed during the Mardi Gras. A pin in a bundle of hay. Is it possible?"
"No matter, you must try. Do you hear, Azelma?"
The two files recommenced their opposite movement on the boulevard, and the carriage of masks lost out of sight that which contained the bride.
The day after a wedding is solitary, for people respect the retirement of the happy, and to some extent their lengthened slumbers. The confusion of visits and congratulations does not begin again till a later date. On the morning of Feb. 17 it was a little past midday when Basque, with napkin and feather-brush under his arm, dusting the anteroom, heard a low tap at the door. There had not been a ring, which is discreet on such a day. Basque opened and saw M. Fauchelevent; he conducted him to the drawing-room, which was still topsy-turvy, and looked like the battle-field of the previous day's joys.
"Really, sir," observed Basque, "we woke late."
"Is your master up?" Jean Valjean asked.
"How is your hand, sir?" Basque replied.
"Better. Is your master up?"
"Which one, the old or the new?"
"Monsieur Pontmercy."
"Monsieur le Baron!" said Basque, drawing himself up.
A baron is before all a baron to his servants; a portion of it comes to them, and they have what a philosopher would call the spray of the title, and that flatters them. Marius, we may mention in passing, a militant republican as he had proved, was now a baron in spite of himself. A little revolution had taken place in the family with reference to this title; it was M. Gillenormand who was attached to it, and Marius who had fallen away from it. But Colonel Pontmercy had written, "My son will bear my title," and Marius obeyed. And then Cosette, in whom the woman was beginning to germinate, was delighted at being a baroness.
"Monsieur le Baron?" repeated Basque; "I will go and see. I will tell him that Monsieur Fauchelevent is here."
"No, do not tell him it is I. Tell him that some one wishes to speak to him privately, and do not mention my name."
"Ah!" said Basque.
"I wish to surprise him."
"Ah!" Basque repeated, giving himself his second "Ah!" as an explanation of the first.
And he left the room, and Jean Valjean remained alone. The drawing-room, as we said, was all in disorder, and it seemed as if you could still hear the vague sounds of the wedding. On the floor were all sorts of flowers, which had fallen from garlands and head-dresses, and the candles burned down to the socket added wax stalactites to the crystal of the lustres. Not an article of furniture was in its place; in the corner three or four easy-chairs, drawn close together, and forming a circle, looked as if they were continuing a conversation. The ensemble was laughing, for there is a certain grace left in a dead festival, for it has been happy. Upon those disarranged chairs, amid those fading flowers and under those extinguished lamps, persons have thought of joy. The sun succeeded the chandelier, and gayly entered the drawing-room. A few moments passed, during which Jean Valjean remained motionless at the spot where Basque left him. His eyes were hollow, and so sunk in their sockets by sleeplessness that they almost disappeared. His black coat displayed the fatigued creases of a coat which has been up all night, and the elbows were white with that down which friction with linen leaves on cloth. Jean Valjean looked at the window designed on the floor at his feet by the sun. There was a noise at the door, and he raised his eyes. Marius came in with head erect, laughing mouth, a peculiar light over his face, a smooth forehead, and a flashing eye. He, too, had not slept.
"It is you, father!" he exclaimed, on perceiving Jean Valjean; "why, that ass Basque affected the mysterious. But you have come too early; it is only half-past twelve, and Cosette is asleep."
That word, father, addressed to M. Fauchelevent by Marius, signified supreme felicity. There had always been, as we know, a cliff, a coldness and constraint between them; ice to melt or break. Marius was so intoxicated that the cliff sank, the ice dissolved, and M. Fauchelevent was for him, as for Cosette, a father. He continued, the words overflowed with him, which is peculiar to these divine paroxysms of joy,—
"How delighted I am to see you! If you only knew how we missed you yesterday! Good-day, father. How is your hand? Better, is it not?"
And, satisfied with the favorable answer which he gave himself, he went on,—
"We both spoke about you, for Cosette loves you so dearly. You will not forget that you have a room here, for we will not hear a word about the Rue de l'Homme Armé. I do not know how you were able to live in that street, which is sick, and mean, and poor, which has a barrier at one end, where you feel cold, and which no one can enter! You will come and install yourself here, and from to-day, or else you will have to settle with Cosette. She intends to lead us both by the nose, I warn you. You have seen your room; it is close to ours, and looks out on the gardens. We have had the lock mended; the bed is made; it is all ready, and you have only to move in. Cosette has placed close to your bed a large old easy-chair, of Utrecht velvet, to which she said, 'Hold out your arms to him!' Every spring a nightingale comes to the clump of acacias which faces your windows, and you will have it in two months. You will have its nest on your left, and ours on your right; at night it will sing, and by day Cosette will talk. Your room faces due south; Cosette will arrange, your books in it; the Travels of Captain Cook, and the other, Vancouver's Travels, and all your matters. There is, I believe, a valise to which you are attached, and I have arranged a corner of honor for it. You have won my grandfather, for you suit him. We will live together. Do you know whist? You will over-whelm my grandfather if you are acquainted with whist. You will take Cosette for a walk on the day when I go to the Courts; you will give her your arm, as you used to do, you remember, formerly at the Luxembourg. We are absolutely determined to be very happy, and you will share in our happiness, do you hear, father? By the bye, you will breakfast with us this morning?"
"Sir!" said Jean Valjean, "I have one thing to say to you. I am an ex-convict."
The limit of the perceptible acute sounds may be as well exceeded for the mind as for the ear. These words, "I am an ex-convict," coming from M. Fauchelevent's mouth and entering Marius's ear went beyond possibility. Marius did not hear. It seemed to him as if something had been just said to him, but he knew not what. He stood with gaping mouth. Jean Valjean unfastened the black handkerchief that supported his right arm, undid the linen rolled round his hand, bared his thumb, and showed it to Marius.
"I have nothing the matter with my hand," he said.
Marius looked at the thumb.
"There was never anything the matter with it," Jean Valjean added.
There was, in fact, no sign of a wound. Jean Valjean continued,—
"It was proper that I should be absent from your marriage, and I was so as far as I could be. I feigned this wound in order not to commit a forgery, and render the marriage-deeds null and void."
Marius stammered,—
"What does this mean?"
"It means," Jean Valjean replied, "that I have been to the galleys."
"You are driving me mad!" said the horrified Marius.
"Monsieur Pontmercy," said Jean Valjean, "I was nineteen years at the galleys for robbery. Then I was sentenced to them for life; for robbery and a second offence. At the present moment I am an escaped convict."
Although Marius recoiled before the reality, refused the facts, and resisted the evidence, he was obliged to yield to it. He was beginning to understand, and as always happens in such a case, he understood too much. He had the shudder of a hideous internal flash, and an idea that made him shudder crossed his mind. He foresaw a frightful destiny for himself in the future.
"Say all, say all," he exclaimed; "you are Cosette's father!"
And he fell back two steps, with a movement of indescribable horror. Jean Valjean threw up his head with such a majestic attitude that he seemed to rise to the ceiling.
"It is necessary that you should believe me here, sir, although the oath of men like us is not taken in a court of justice—"
Here there was a silence, and then with a sort of sovereign and sepulchral authority he added, speaking slowly and laying a stress on the syllables,—
"You will believe me. I, Cosette's father! Before Heaven, no, Monsieur le Baron Pontmercy. I am a peasant of Faverolles, and earned my livelihood by pruning trees. My name is not Fauchelevent, but Jean Valjean. I am nothing to Cosette, so reassure yourself."
Marius stammered,—
"Who proves it to me?"
"I do, since I say it."
Marius looked at this man: he was mournful and calm, and no falsehood could issue from such calmness. What is frozen is sincere, and the truth could be felt in this coldness of the tomb.
"I do believe you," said Marius.
Jean Valjean bowed his head, as if to note the fact, and continued,—
"What am I to Cosette? A passer-by. Ten years ago I did not know that she existed. I love her, it is true, for men love a child which they have seen little when old themselves; when a man is old he feels like a grandfather to all little children. You can, I suppose, imagine that I have something which resembles a heart. She was an orphan, without father or mother, and needed me, and that is why I came to love her. Children are so weak that the first comer, even a man like myself, may be their protector. I performed this duty to Cosette. I cannot suppose that so small a thing can be called a good action: but if it be one, well, assume that I did it. Record that extenuating fact. To-day Cosette leaves my life, and our two roads separate. Henceforth I can do no more for her; she is Madame Pontmercy; her providence has changed, and she has gained by the change, so all is well. As for the six hundred thousand francs, you say nothing of them, but I will meet your thought half-way: they are a deposit. How was it placed in my hands? No matter. I give up the deposit, and there is nothing more to ask of me. I complete the restitution by stating my real name, and this too concerns myself, for I am anxious that you should know who I am."
And Jean Valjean looked Marius in the face. All that Marius experienced was tumultuous and incoherent, for certain blasts of the wind of destiny produce such waves in our soul. We have all had such moments of trouble in which everything is dispersed within us: we say the first things that occur to us, which are not always precisely those which we ought to say. There are sudden revelations which we cannot bear, and which intoxicate like a potent wine. Marius was stupefied by the new situation which appeared to him, and spoke to this man almost as if he were angry at the avowal.
"But why," he exclaimed, "do you tell me all this? Who forces you to do so? You might have kept your secret to yourself. You are neither denounced, nor pursued, nor tracked. You have a motive for making the revelation so voluntarily. Continue; there is something else: for what purpose do you make this confession? For what motive?"
"For what motive?" Jean Valjean answered in a voice so low and dull that it seemed as if he were speaking to himself rather than Marius. "For what motive, in truth, does this convict come here to say, 'I am a convict'? Well, yes, the motive is a strange one: it is through honesty. The misfortune is that I have a thread in my heart which holds me fast, and it is especially when a man is old that these threads are most solid. The whole of life is undone around, but they resist. Had I been enabled to tear away that thread, break it, unfasten or cut the knot, and go a long way off, I would be saved and needed only to start. There are diligences in the Hue du Bouloy; you are happy, and I am off. I tried to break that thread. I pulled at it, it held out, it did not break, and I pulled out my heart with it. Then I said, I cannot live anywhere else, and must remain. Well, yes, but you are right. I am a fool; why not remain simply? You offer me a bed-room in the house. Madame Pontmercy loves me dearly, she said to that fauteuil, 'Hold out your arms to him;' your grandfather asks nothing better than to have me. I suit him, we will live all together, have our meals in common, I will give my arm to Cosette,—to Madame Pontmercy, forgive me, but it is habit,—we will have only one roof, one table, one fire, the same chimney-corner in winter, the same walk in summer: that is joy, that is happiness, that is everything. We will live in one family."
At this word Jean Valjean became fierce. He folded his arms, looked at the board at his feet, as if he wished to dig a pit in it, and his voice suddenly became loud.
"In one family? No. I belong to no family; I do not belong to yours, I do not even belong to the human family. In houses where people are together I am in the way. There are families, but none for me; I am the unhappy man, I am outside. Had I a father and mother? I almost doubt it. On the day when I gave you that child in marriage, it was all ended; I saw her happy, and that she was with the man she loved, that there is a kind old gentleman here, a household of two angels, and every joy in this house, and I said to myself, Do not enter. I could lie, it is true, deceive you all, and remain Monsieur Fauchelevent; so long as it was for her, I was able to lie, but now that it would be for myself I ought not to do so. I only required to be silent, it is true, and all would have gone on. You ask me what compels me to speak? A strange sort of thing, my conscience. It would have been very easy, however, to hold my tongue; I spent the night in trying to persuade myself into it. You are shriving me, and what I have just told you is so extraordinary that you have the right to do so. Well, yes, I spent the night in giving myself reasons. I gave myself excellent reasons, I did what I could. But there are two things in which I could not succeed; I could neither break the string which holds me by the heart, fixed, sealed, and riveted here, nor silence some one who speaks to me in a low voice when I am alone. That is why I have come to confess all to you this morning,—all, or nearly all, for it is useless to tell what only concerns myself, and that I keep to myself. You know the essential thing. I took my mystery, then, and brought it to you and ripped it up before your eyes. It was not an easy resolution to form, and I debated the point the whole night. Ah! you may fancy that I did not say to myself that this was not the Champmathieu affair, that in hiding my name I did no one any harm, that the name of Fauchelevent was given me by Fauchelevent himself in gratitude for a service rendered, and that I might fairly keep it, and that I should be happy in this room which you offer me, that I should net be at all in the way, that I should be in my little corner, and that while you had Cosette I should have the idea of being in the same house with her; each would have his proportioned happiness. Continuing to be Monsieur Fauchelevent arranged everything. Yes, except my soul; there would be joy all over me, but the bottom of my soul would remain black. Thus I should have remained Monsieur Fauchelevent. I should have hidden my real face in the presence of your happiness; I should have had an enigma, and in the midst of your broad sunshine I should have had darkness; thus, without crying 'Look out,' I should have introduced the hulks to your hearth, I should have sat down at your table with the thought that if you knew who I was you would expel me, and let myself be served by the servants who, had they known, would have said, 'What a horror!' I should have touched you with my elbow, which you have a right to feel offended at, and swindled you out of shakes of the hand. There would have been in your house a divided respect between venerable gray hairs and branded gray hairs; in your most intimate hours, when all hearts formed themselves to each other, when we were all four together, the grandfather, you two, and I, there would have been a stranger there. Hence I, a dead man, would have imposed myself on you who are living, and I should have sentenced her for life. You, Cosette, and I would have been three heads in the green cap! Do you not shudder? I am only the most crushed of men, but I should have been the most monstrous. And this crime I should have committed every day, and this falsehood I should have told every day, and this face of night I should have worn every day, and to you I should have given a portion of my stain everyday,—to you, my beloved, to you, my children, to you, my innocents! Holding one's tongue is nothing? Keeping silence is simple? No, it is not simple, for there is a silence which lies; and my falsehood, and my fraud, and my indignity, and my cowardice, and my treachery, and my crime I should have drunk drop by drop; I should have spat it out, and then drunk it again; I should have ended at midnight and begun again at midday, and my good day would have lied, and my good night would have lied, and I should have slept upon it, and eaten it with my bread; and I should have looked at Cosette, and responded to the smile of the angel with the smile of the condemned man; and I should have been an abominable scoundrel, and for what purpose? To be happy. I, happy! Have I the right to be happy? I am out of life, sir."
Jean Valjean stopped, and Marius listened, for such enchainments of ideas and agonies cannot be interrupted. Jean Valjean lowered his voice again, yet it was no longer the dull voice, but the sinister voice.
"You ask why I speak? I am neither denounced, nor pursued, nor tracked, you say. Yes, I am denounced! Yes, I am pursued! Yes, I am tracked! By whom? By myself. It is I who bar my own passage, and I drag myself along, and I push myself, and I arrest myself, and execute myself, and when a man holds himself he is securely held."
And, seizing his own collar, and dragging it toward Marius, he continued,—
"Look at this fist. Do you not think that it holds this collar so as not to let it go? Well, conscience is a very different hand! If you wish to be happy, sir, you must never understand duty; for so soon as you have understood it, it is implacable. People may say that it punishes you for understanding it; but no, it rewards you for it, for it places you in a hell where you feel God by your side. A man has no sooner torn his entrails than he is at peace with himself."
And with an indescribable accent he added,—
"Monsieur Pontmercy, that has no common-sense. I am an honest man. It is by degrading myself in your eyes that I raise myself in my own. This has happened to me once before, but it was less painful; it was nothing. Yes, an honest man. I should not be one if you had, through my fault, continued to esteem me; but now that you despise me I am so. I have this fatality upon me, that as I am never able to have any but stolen consideration, this consideration humiliates and crushes me internally, and in order that I may respect myself people must despise me. Then I draw myself up. I am a galley-slave who obeys his conscience. I know very well that this is not likely; but what would you have me do? It is so. I have made engagements with myself and keep them. There are meetings which bind us; there are accidents which drag us into duty. Look you, Monsieur Pontmercy, things have happened to me in my life."
Jean Valjean made another pause, swallowing his saliva with an effort, as if his words had a bitter after-taste, and he continued,—
"When a man has such a horror upon him; he has no right to make others share it unconsciously; he has no right to communicate his plague to them; he has no right to make them slip over his precipice without their perceiving it; he has no right to drag his red cap over them, and no right craftily to encumber the happiness of another man with his misery. To approach those who are healthy and touch them in the darkness with his invisible ulcer is hideous. Fauchelevent may have lent me his name, but I have no right to use it: he may have given it to me, but I was unable to take it. A name is a self. Look you, sir, I have thought a little and read a little, though I am a peasant, and you see that I express myself properly. I explain things to myself, and have carried out my own education. Well, yes; to abstract a name and place one's self under it is dishonest. The letters of the alphabet may be filched like a purse or a watch. To be a false signature in flesh and blood, to be a living false key, to enter among honest folk by picking their lock, never to look, but always to squint, to be internally infamous,—no! no! no! no! It is better to suffer, bleed, weep, tear one's flesh with one's nails, pass the nights writhing in agony, and gnaw one's stomach and soul That is why I have come to tell you all this,—voluntarily, as you remarked."
He breathed painfully, and uttered this last remark,—
"Formerly I stole a loaf in order to live; to-day I will not steal a name in order to live."
"To live!" Marius interrupted; "you do not require that name to live."
"Ah! I understand myself," Jean Valjean replied, raising and drooping his head several times in succession. There was a stillness; both remained silent, sunk as they were in a gulf of thought. Marius was sitting near a table, and supporting the corner of his mouth on one of his fingers. Jean Valjean walked backwards and forwards; he stopped before a glass and remained motionless. Then, as if answering some internal reasoning, he said, as he looked in this glass, in which he did not see himself,—
"While at present I am relieved."
He began walking again, and went to the other end of the room. At the moment when he turned he perceived that Marius was watching his walk, and he said to him, with an indescribable accent,—
"I drag my leg a little. You understand why, now."
Then he turned round full to Marius.
"And now, sir, imagine this. I have said nothing. I have remained Monsieur Fauchelevent. I have taken my place in your house. I am one of your family. I am in my room. I come down to breakfast in my slippers; at night we go to the play, all three. I accompany Madame Pontmercy to the Tuileries and to the Place Royale; we are together, and you believe me your equal. One fine day I am here, you are there. We are talking and laughing, and you hear a voice cry this name,—Jean Valjean! and then that fearful hand, the police, issues from the shadow and suddenly tears off my mask!"
He was silent again. Marius had risen with a shudder and Jean Valjean continued,—
"What do you say to that?"
Marius's silence replied, and Jean Valjean continued:—
"You see very well that I did right in not holding my tongue. Be happy, be in heaven, be the angel of an angel, be in the sunshine and content yourself with it, and do not trouble yourself as to the way in which a poor condemned man opens his heart and does his duty; you have a wretched man before you, sir."
Marius slowly crossed the room, and when he was by Jean Valjean's side offered him his hand. But Marius was compelled to take this hand which did not offer itself. Jean Valjean let him do so, and it seemed to Marius that he was pressing a hand of marble.
"My grandfather has friends" said Marius. "I will obtain your pardon."
"It is useless," Jean Valjean replied; "I am supposed to be dead, and that is sufficient. The dead are not subjected to surveillance, and are supposed to rot quietly. Death is the same thing as pardon."
And liberating the hand which Marius held, he added with a sort of inexorable dignity,—
"Moreover, duty, my duty, is the friend to whom I have recourse; and I only need one pardon, that of my conscience."
At this moment the door opened gently at the other end of the drawing-room, and Cosette's head appeared in the crevice. Only her sweet face was visible. Her hair was in admirable confusion, and her eyelids were still swollen with sleep. She made the movement of a bird thrusting its head out of the nest, looked first at her husband, then at Jean Valjean, and cried to them laughingly,—it looked like a smile issuing from a rose,—
"I will bet that you are talking politics. How stupid that is, instead of being with me!"
Jean Valjean started.
"Cosette," Marius stammered, and he stopped. They looked like two culprits; Cosette, radiant, continued to look at them both, and there were in her eyes gleams of Paradise.
"I have caught you in the act," Cosette said; "I just heard through this, Father Fauchelevent saying, 'Conscience, doing one's duty.' That is politics, and I will have none of it. People must not talk politics on the very next day; it is not right."
"You are mistaken, Cosette;" Marius replied, "we are talking of business. We are talking about the best way of investing your six hundred thousand francs."
"I am coming," Cosette interrupted. "Do you want me here?"
And resolutely passing through the door, she entered the drawing-room. She was dressed in a large combing gown with a thousand folds and large sleeves, which descended from her neck to her feet. There are in the golden skies of old Gothic paintings, these charming bags to place an angel in. She contemplated herself from head to foot in a large mirror, and then exclaimed with an ineffable outburst of ecstasy,—
"There was once upon a time a king and queen. Oh, how delighted I am!"
This said, she courtesied to Marius and Jean Valjean.
"Then," she said, "I am going to install myself near you in an easy-chair; we shall breakfast in half an hour. You will say all you like, for I know very well that gentlemen must talk, and I will be very good."
Marius took her by the arm and said to her lovingly,—
"We are talking about business."
"By the way," Cosette answered, "I have opened my window, and a number of sparrows [pierrots] have just entered the garden. Birds, not masks. To-day is Ash Wednesday, but not for the birds."
"I tell you that we are talking of business, so go, my little Cosette; leave us for a moment. We are talking figures, and they would only annoy you."
"You have put on a charming cravat this morning, Marius. You are very coquettish, Monseigneur. No, they will not annoy me."
"I assure you that they will."
"No, since it is you, I shall not understand you, but I shall hear you. When a woman hears voices she loves, she does not require to understand the words they say. To be together is all I want, and I shall stay with you,—there!"
"You are my beloved Cosette! Impossible."
"Impossible?"
"Yes."
"Very good," Cosette remarked; "I should have told you some news. I should have told you that grandpapa is still asleep, that your aunt is at Mass, that the chimney of my papa Fauchelevent's room smokes, that Nicolette has sent for the chimney-sweep, that Nicolette and Toussaint have already quarrelled, and that Nicolette ridicules Toussaint's stammering. Well, you shall know nothing. Ah, it is impossible? You shall see, sir, that in my turn I shall say, 'It is impossible.' Who will be caught then? I implore you, my little Marius, to let me stay with you two."
"I assure you that we must be alone."
"Well, am I anybody?"
Jean Valjean did not utter a word, and Cosette turned to him.
"In the first place, father, I insist on your coming and kissing me. What do you mean by saying nothing, instead of taking my part? Did one ever see a father like that? That will show you how unhappy my marriage is, for my husband beats me. Come and kiss me at once."
Jean Valjean approached her, and Cosette turned to Marius.
"I make a face at you."
Then she offered her forehead to Jean Valjean, who moved a step towards her. All at once Cosette recoiled.
"Father, you are pale; does your arm pain you?"
"It is cured," said Jean Valjean.
"Have you slept badly?"
"No."
"Are you sad?"
"No."
"Kiss me. If you are well, if you sleep soundly, if you are happy, I will not scold you."
And she again offered him her forehead, and Jean Valjean set a kiss on this forehead, upon which there was a heavenly reflection.
"Smile."
Jean Valjean obeyed, but it was the smile of a ghost.
"Now, defend me against my husband."
"Cosette—" said Marius.
"Be angry, father, and tell him I am to remain. You can talk before me. You must think me very foolish. What you are saying is very astonishing, then! Business,—placing money in a bank,—that is a great thing. Men make mysteries of nothing. I mean to say I am very pretty this morning. Marius, look at me."
And with an adorable shrug of the shoulders and an exquisite pout she looked at Marius. Something like a flash passed between these two beings, and they cared little about a third party being present.
"I love you," said Marius.
"I adore you," said Cosette.
And they irresistibly fell into each other's arms.
"And now," Cosette continued, as she smoothed a crease in her dressing-gown, with a little triumphant pout, "I remain."
"No," Marius replied imploringly, "we have something to finish."
"Again, no?"
Marius assumed a serious tone.
"I assure you, Cosette, that it is impossible."
"Ah, you are putting on your man's voice, sir; very good, I will go. You did not support me, father; and so you, my hard husband, and you, my dear papa, are tyrants. I shall go and tell grandpapa. If you believe that I intend to return and talk platitudes to you, you are mistaken. I am proud, and I intend to wait for you at present. You will see how wearisome it will be without me. I am going, very good."
And she left the room, but two seconds after the door opened again, her fresh, rosy face passed once again between the two folding-doors, and she cried to them,—
"I am very angry."
The door closed again, and darkness returned. It was like a straggling sunbeam, which, without suspecting it, had suddenly traversed the night. Marius assured himself that the door was really closed.
"Poor Cosette!" he muttered, "when she learns—"
At these words Jean Valjean trembled all over, and he fixed his haggard eyes on Marius.
"Cosette! Oh, yes, it is true. You will tell Cosette about it. It is fair.—Stay, I did not think of that. A man has strength for one thing, but not for another. I implore you, sir, I conjure you, sir, give me your most sacred word,—do not tell her. Is it not sufficient for you to know it? I was able to tell it of my own accord, without being compelled. I would have told it to the universe, to the whole world, and I should not have cared; but she,—she does not know what it is, and it would horrify her. A convict. What! You would be obliged to explain to her, tell her it is a man who has been to the galleys. She saw the chain-gang once. Oh, my God!"
He sank into a chair and buried his face in his hands; it could not be heard, but from the heaving of his shoulders it could be seen that he was weeping. They were silent tears, terrible tears. There is a choking in a sob; a species of convulsion seized on him, he threw himself back in the chair, letting his arms hang, and displaying to Marius his face bathed in tears, and Marius heard him mutter so low that his voice seemed to come from a bottomless abyss, "Oh! I would like to die!"
"Be at your ease," Marius said; "I will keep your secret to myself."
And, less affected than perhaps he ought to have been, but compelled for more than an hour to listen to unexpected horrors, gradually seeing a convict taking M. Fauchelevent's place, gradually overcome by this mournful reality, and led by the natural state of the situation to notice the gap which bad formed between himself and this man, Marius added,—
"It is impossible for me not to say a word about the trust money which you have so faithfully and honestly given up. That is an act of probity, and it is but fair that a reward should be given you; fix the sum yourself, and it shall be paid you. Do not fear to fix it very high."
"I thank you, sir," Jean Valjean replied gently.
He remained pensive for a moment, mechanically passing the end of his forefinger over his thumb-nail, and then raised his voice,—
"All is nearly finished; there is only one thing left me."
"What is it?"
Jean Valjean had a species of supreme agitation, and voicelessly, almost breathlessly, he stammered, rather than said,—
"Now that you know, do you, sir, who are the master, believe that I ought not to see Cosette again?"
"I believe that it would be better," Marius replied coldly.
"I will not see her again," Jean Valjean murmured. He walked toward the door; he placed his hand upon the handle, the door opened, Jean Valjean was going to pass out, when he suddenly closed it again, then opened the door again and returned to Marius. He was no longer pale, but livid, and in his eyes was a sort of tragic flame instead of tears. His voice bad grows strangely calm again.
"Stay, sir," he said; "if you are wilting, I will come to see her, for I assure you that I desire it greatly. If I had not longed to see Cosette I should not have made you the confession I have done, but have gone away; but wishing to remain at the spot where Cosette is, and continue to see her, I was obliged to tell you everything honestly. You follow my reasoning, do you not? It is a thing easy to understand. Look you, I have had her with me for nine years: we lived at first in that hovel on the boulevard, then in the convent, and then near the Luxembourg. It was there that you saw her for the first time, and you remember her blue plush bonnet. Next we went to the district of the Invalides, where there were a railway and a garden, the Rue Plumet. I lived in a little back yard where I could hear her pianoforte. Such was my life, and we never separated. That lasted nine years and seven months; I was like her father, and she was my child. I do not know whether you understand me, M. Pontmercy, but it would be difficult to go away now, see her no more, speak to her no more, and have nothing left. If you have no objection, I will come and see Cosette every now and then, but not too often, and I will not remain long. You can tell them to show me into the little room on the ground-floor; I would certainly come in by the back door, which is used by the servants, but that might cause surprise, so it is better, I think, for me to come by the front door. Really, sir, I should like to see Cosette a little, but as rarely as you please. Put yourself in my place. I have only that left. And then, again, we must be careful, and if I did not come at all it would have a bad effect, and appear singular. For instance, what I can do is to come in the evening, when it is beginning to grow dark."
"You can come every evening," said Marius, "and Cosette will expect you."
"You are kind, sir," said Jean Valjean.
Marius bowed to Jean Valjean, happiness accompanied despair to the door, and these two men parted.
On the morrow, at nightfall, Jean Valjean tapped at the gateway of the Gillenormand mansion, and it was Basque who received him. Basque was in the yard at the appointed time, as if he had had his orders. It sometimes happens that people say to a servant, "You will watch for Mr. So-and-so's arrival." Basque, without waiting for Jean Valjean to come up to him, said,—
"Monsieur le Baron has instructed me to ask you, sir, whether you wish to go upstairs or stay down here?"
"Stay down here," Jean Valjean replied.
Basque, who, however, was perfectly respectful in his manner, opened the door of the ground-floor room, and said, "I will go and inform her ladyship." The room which Jean Valjean entered was a damp, arched, basement room, employed as a cellar at times, looking out on the street, with a flooring of red tiles, and badly lighted by an iron-barred window. This room was not one of those which are harassed by the broom and mop, and the dust was quiet there. No persecution of the spiders had been organized; and a fine web, extensively drawn out, quite black, and adorned with dead flies, formed a wheel on one of the window-panes. The room, which was small and low-ceiled, was furnished with a pile of empty bottles collected in a corner. The wall, covered with a yellow-ochre wash, crumbled off in large patches; at the end was a mantel-piece of panelled black wood, with a narrow shelf, and a fire was lighted in it, which indicated that Jean Valjean's reply, "Stay down here," had been calculated on. Two chairs were placed, one in each chimney-corner, and between the chairs was spread, in guise of carpet, an old bed-room rug, which displayed more cord than wool. The room was illumined by the flickering of the fire, and the twilight through the window. Jean Valjean was fatigued; for several days he had not eaten or slept, and he fell into one of the arm-chairs. Basque returned, placed a lighted candle on the mantelpiece, and withdrew. Jean Valjean, who was sitting with hanging head, did not notice either Basque or the candle, till all at once he started up, for Cosette was behind him: he had not seen her come in, but he felt that she was doing so. He turned round and contemplated her; she was adorably lovely. But what he gazed at with this profound glance was not the beauty, but the soul.
"Well, father," Cosette exclaimed, "I knew that you were singular, but I could never have expected this. What an idea! Marius told me that it was your wish to see me here."
"Yes, it is."
"I expected that answer, and I warn you that I am going to have a scene with you. Let us begin with the beginning: kiss me, father."
And she offered her cheek, but Jean Valjean remained motionless.
"You do not stir: I mark the fact! It is the attitude of a culprit. But I do not care, I forgive you. Christ said, 'Offer the other cheek;' here it is."
And she offered the other cheek, but Jean Valjean did not stir; it seemed as if his feet were riveted to the floor.
"Things are growing serious," said Cosette. "What have I done to you? I am offended, and you must make it up with me; you will dine with us?"
"I have dined."
"That is not true, and I will have you scolded by M. Gillenormand. Grandfathers are made to lay down the law to fathers. Come, go with me to the drawing-room. At once."
"Impossible!"
Cosette here lost a little ground; she ceased to order and began questioning.
"But why? And you choose the ugliest room in the house to see me in. It is horrible here."
"You know—"
Jean Valjean broke off—
"You know, Madame, that I am peculiar, and have my fancies."
"Madame—you know—more novelties; what does this all mean?"
Jean Valjean gave her that heart-broken smile to which he sometimes had recourse.
"You wished to be Madame. You are."
"Not for you, father."
"Do not call me father."
"What?"
"Call me Monsieur Jean, or Jean, if you like."
"You are no longer father? I am no longer Cosette? Monsieur Jean? Why, what does it mean? These are revolutions. What has happened? Look me in the face, if you can. And you will not live with us! And you will not accept our bed-room! What have I done to offend you? Oh, what have I done? There must be something."
"Nothing."
"In that case, then?"
"All is as usual."
"Why do you change your name?"
"You have changed yours."
He smiled the same smile again, and added,—
"Since you are Madame Pontmercy, I may fairly be Monsieur Jean."
"I do not understand anything, and all this is idiotic. I will ask my husband's leave for you to be Monsieur Jean, and I hope that he will not consent. You cause me great sorrow; and though you may have whims, you have no right to make your little Cosette grieve. That is wrong, and you have no right to be naughty, fear you are so good."
As he made no reply, she seized both his hands eagerly, and with an irresistible movement raising them to her face she pressed them against her neck under her chin, which is a profound sign of affection.
"Oh," she said, "be kind to me!" And she continued: "This is what I call being kind,—to behave yourself, come and live here, for there are birds here as in the Rue Plumet; to live with us, leave that hole in the Rue de l'Homme Armé, give us no more riddles to guess; to be like everybody else, dine With us, breakfast with us, and be my father."
He removed her hands,—
"You no longer want a father, as you have a husband."
Cosette broke out,—
"I no longer want a father! Things like that have no common sense, and I really do not know what to say."
"If Toussaint were here," Jean Valjean continued, like a man seeking authorities and who clings to every branch, "she would be the first to allow that I have always had strange ways of my own. There is nothing new in it, for I always loved my dark corner."
"But it is cold here, and we cannot see distinctly; and it is abominable to wish to be Monsieur Jean; and I shall not allow you to call me Madame."
"As I was coming along just now," Jean Valjean replied, "I saw a very pretty piece of furniture at a cabinet-maker's in the Rue St. Louis. If I were a pretty woman, I should treat myself to it It is a very nice toilette table in the present fashion, made of rosewood, I think you call it, and inlaid. There is a rather large glass with drawers, and it is very nice."
"Hou! the ugly bear!" Cosette replied. And clenching her teeth, and parting her lips in the most graceful way possible, she blew at Jean Valjean; it was a grace imitating a cat.
"I am furious," she went on, "and since yesterday you have all put me in a passion. I do not understand it at all; you do not defend me against Marius, Marius does not take my part against you, and I am all alone. I have a nice room prepared, and if I could have put my dear father in it, I would have done so; but my room is left on my hands and my lodger fails me. I order Nicolette to prepare a nice little dinner, and—they will not touch your dinner, Madame. And my father Fauchelevent wishes me to call him Monsieur Jean, and that I should receive him in a frightful old, ugly, mildewed cellar, in which the walls wear a beard, and empty bottles represent the looking-glasses, and spiders' webs the curtains. I allow that you are a singular man, it is your way; but a truce is accorded to newly-married folk, and you ought not to have begun to be singular again so soon. You are going to be very satisfied, then, in your Rue de l'Homme Armé; well, I was very wretched there. What have I done to offend you? You cause me great sorrow. Fie!"
And suddenly growing serious, she looked intently at Jean Valjean and added,—
"You are angry with me for being happy; is that it?"
Simplicity sometimes penetrates unconsciously very deep, and this question, simple for Cosette, was profound for Jean Valjean. Cosette wished to scratch, but she tore. Jean Valjean turned pale, he remained for a moment without answering, and then murmured with an indescribable accent, and speaking to himself,—
"Her happiness was the object of my life, and at present God may order my departure. Cosette, thou art happy, and my course is run."
"Ah! you said thou to me," Cosette exclaimed, and leaped on his neck.
Jean Valjean wildly strained her to his heart, for he felt as if he were almost taking her back again.
"Thank you, father," Cosette said to him.
The excitement was getting too painful for Jean Valjean; he gently withdrew himself from Cosette's arms, and took up his hat.
"Well?" said Cosette.
Jean Valjean replied,—
"I am going to leave you, Madame, as you will be missed."
And on the threshold he added,—
"I said thou to you; tell your husband that it shall not happen again. Forgive me."
Jean Valjean left Cosette stupefied by this enigmatical leave-taking.
It is a terrible thing to be happy! How satisfied people are! How sufficient they find it! How, when possessed of the false object of life, happiness, they forget the true one, duty! We are bound to say, however, that it would be unjust to accuse Marius. Marius, as we have explained, before his marriage asked no questions of M. Fauchelevent, and since had been afraid to ask any of Jean Valjean. He had regretted the promise which he had allowed to be drawn from him, and had repeatedly said to himself that he had done wrong in making this concession to despair. He had restricted himself to gradually turning Jean Valjean out of his house, and effacing him as far as possible in Cosette's mind. He had to some extent constantly stationed himself between Cosette and Jean Valjean, feeling certain that in this way she would not perceive it or think of it. It was more than an effacement,—it was an eclipse. Marius did what he considered necessary and just; he believed that he had serious reasons, some of which we have seen, and some we have yet to see, for getting rid of Jean Valjean, without harshness, but without weakness. Chance having made him acquainted, in a trial in which he was retained, with an ex-clerk of Laffitte's bank, he had obtained, without seeking it, mysterious information, which, in truth, he had not been able to examine, through respect for the secret he had promised to keep, and through regard for Jean Valjean's perilous situation. He believed, at this very moment, that he had a serious duty to perform,—the restitution of the six hundred thousand francs to some one whom he was seeking as discreetly as he could. In the mean while he abstained from touching that money.
As for Cosette, she was not acquainted with any of these secrets, but it would be harsh to condemn her either. Between Marius and her was an omnipotent magnetism, which made her do instinctively and almost mechanically whatever Marius wished. She felt a wish of Marius in the matter of Monsieur Jean, and she conformed to it. Her husband had said nothing to her, but she suffered the vague but clear pressure of his tacit intentions, and blindly obeyed. Her obedience in this case consisted in not remembering what Marius forgot; and she had no effort to make in doing so. Without knowing why herself, and without there being anything to blame her for, her mind had so thoroughly become that of her husband, that whatever covered itself with a shadow in Marius's thoughts was obscured in hers. Let us not go too far, however; as regards Jean Valjean, this effacement and this forgetfulness were only superficial, and she was thoughtless rather than forgetful. In her heart she truly loved the man whom she had so long called father; but she loved her husband more, and this had slightly falsified the balance of this heart, which weighed down on one side only. It happened at times that Cosette would speak of Jean Valjean and express her surprise, and then Marius would calm her. "He is away, I believe; did he not say that he was going on a journey?" "That is true," Cosette thought, "he used to disappear like that, but not for so long a time." Twice or thrice she sent Nicolette to inquire in the Rue de l'Homme Armé whether Monsieur Jean had returned from his tour, and Jean Valjean sent answer in the negative. Cosette asked no more, as she had on earth but one want,—Marius. Let us also say that Marius and Cosette had been absent too. They went to Vernon, and Marius took Cosette to his father's tomb. Marius had gradually abstracted Cosette from Jean Valjean, and Cosette had allowed it. However, what is called much too harshly in certain cases the ingratitude of children is not always so reprehensible a thing as may be believed. It is the ingratitude of nature; for nature, as we have said elsewhere, "looks before her," and divides living beings into arrivals and departures. The departures are turned to the darkness, and the arrivals toward light. Hence a divergence, which on the part of the old is fatal, on the part of the young is involuntary; and this divergence, at first insensible, increases slowly, like every separation of branches, and the twigs separate without detaching themselves from the parent stem. It is not their fault, for youth goes where there is joy, to festivals, to bright light, and to love, while old age proceeds toward the end. They do not lose each other out of sight, but there is no longer a connecting link: the young people feel the chill of life, and the old that of the tomb. Let us not accuse these poor children.