At this moment, when the drama we are recounting is about to enter one of those tragic clouds which cover the beginning of the reign of Louis Philippe, it is quite necessary that this book should give an explanation about that king. Louis Philippe had entered upon the royal authority without violence or direct action on his part, through a revolutionary change of wind, which was evidently very distinct from the real object of the revolution, but in which he, the Duc d'Orléans, had no personal initiative. He was born a prince, and believed himself elected king; he had not given himself these functions, nor had he taken them; they were offered to him and he accepted, convinced—wrongly as we think, but still convinced—that the offer was in accordance with right, and the acceptance in harmony with duty. Hence came an honest possession, and we say in all conscience that, as Louis Philippe was honest in the possession, and democracy honest in its attack, the amount of terror disengaged from social struggles cannot be laid either on the king or the democracy. A collision of principles resembles a collision of elements; ocean defends the water and the hurricane the air; the king defends royalty, democracy defends the people; the relative, which is monarchy, resists the absolute, which is the republic; society bleeds from this conflict, but what is its suffering to-day will be its salvation at a later date; and in any case those who struggle must not be blamed, for one party must be mistaken. Right does not stand, like the Colossus of Rhodes, on two shores at once, with one foot in the republic, the other in royalty, but is indivisible, and entirely on one side; those who are mistaken are honestly mistaken, and a blind man is no more a culprit than a Vendean is a brigand. We must, therefore, only impute these formidable collisions to the fatality of things, and, whatever these tempests may be, human irresponsibility is mixed up with them.
Let us finish our statement: The Government of 1830 had a hard life of it from the beginning, and born yesterday it was obliged to combat to-day. Scarce installed, it felt everywhere the vague movements of faction beneath the foundation of July, which had so recently been laid, and was still anything but solid. Resistance sprang up on the morrow, and might, perhaps, have been born on the day before, and from month to month the hostility increased, and instead of being dull became patent. The revolution of July, frowned upon by kings out of France, was diversely interpreted in France. God imparts to men His will visible in events, an obscure text written in a mysterious language. Men at once make themselves translations of it,—hasty, incorrect translations, full of errors, gaps, and misunderstandings. Very few minds comprehend the divine language; the more sagacious, the calmer, and the more profound decipher slowly, and when they arrive with their version, the work has been done long before; there are already twenty translations offered for sale. From each translation springs a party, and from each misunderstanding a failure, and each party believes that it has the only true text, and each faction believes that it possesses the light. Often enough power itself is a faction, and there are in revolutions men who swim against the current; they are the old parties. As revolutions issue from the right to revolt, the old parties that cling to heirdom by grace of God fancy that they have a right to revolt against them; but this is an error, for in revolutions the rebel is not the people but the king. Revolution is precisely the contrary of revolt; every revolution, being a normal accomplishment, contains its legitimacy within itself, which false revolutionists sometimes dishonor, but which endures even when sullied, and survives even when bleeding. Revolutions issue, not from an accident, but a necessity; for they are a return from the factitious to the real, and they take place because they must take place.
The old legitimist parties did not the less assail the revolution of 1830 with all the violence which springs from false reasoning. Errors are excellent projectiles, and they skilfully struck it at the spot where it was vulnerable,—the flaw in its cuirass, its want of logic,—and they attacked this revolution in its royalty. They cried to it, "Revolution, why this king?" Factions are blind men who aim accurately. This cry the revolutionists also raised, but coming from them it was logical. What was blundering in the legitimists was clear-sightedness in the democrats; 1830 had made the people bankrupt, and indignant democracy reproached it with the deed. The establishment of July struggled between these attacks, made by the past and the future; it represented the minute contending on one side with monarchical ages, on the other with eternal right; and then, again, 1830, no longer a revolution, and becoming a monarchy, was obliged to take precedence of Europe, and it was a further difficulty to maintain peace, for a harmony desired against the grain is often more onerous than a war. From this sullen conflict, ever muzzled but ever grumbling, emerged armed peace, that ruinous expedient of civilization suspecting itself. The royalty of July reared in the team of European cabinets, although Metternich would have liked to put a kicking-strap upon it. Impelled by progress in France, it impelled in its turn the slowly-moving European monarchies, and while towed, it towed too.
At home, however, pauperism, beggary, wages, education, the penal code, prostitution, the fall of woman, wealth, misery, production, consumption, division, exchange, money, capital, the rights of capital, and the rights of labor,—all these questions were multiplied above society, and formed a crushing weight. Outside of political parties, properly so called, another movement became manifest, and a philosophic fermentation responded to the democratic fermentation, and chosen minds felt troubled like the crowd,—differently, but quite as much. Thinking men meditated, while the soil, that is to say, the people, traversed by revolutionary currents, trembled beneath them with vague epileptic shocks. These thinkers, some isolated, but others assembled in families and almost in communities, stirred up social questions peacefully but deeply; they were impassive miners, who quietly hollowed their galleries beneath volcanoes, scarce disturbed by the dull commotions and the fires of which they caught a glimpse. This tranquillity was not the least beautiful spectacle of this agitated epoch, and these men left to political parties the question of rights, to trouble themselves about the question of happiness. What they wished to extract from society was the welfare of man; hence they elevated material questions, and questions about agriculture, trade, and commerce, almost to the dignity of a religion. In civilization, such as it has been constituted a little by God and a great deal by man, instincts are combined, aggregated, and amalgamated so as to form a real hard rock, by virtue of a law of dynamics which is carefully studied by social economists, those geologists of politics. These men, who grouped themselves under different appellations, but who may all be designated by the generic title of socialists, tried to pierce this rock and cause the living waters of human felicity to gush forth; their labors embraced all questions, from that of the scaffold to that of war, and they added to the rights of man as proclaimed by the French revolutions, the rights of the woman and the child.
For various reasons we cannot thoroughly discuss here, from the theoretical point of view, the questions raised by socialism, and we limit ourselves to an indication of them. All the questions which the socialists proposed—laying aside cosmogonic visions, reverie, and mysticism—may be carried back to two original problems, the first of which is, to produce wealth, and the second, to distribute it. The first problem contains the question of labor, the second the question of wages; in the first, the point is the employment of strength, and in the second, the distribution of enjoyments. From a good employment of strength results public power, and from a good distribution of enjoyments individual happiness. By good distribution we mean, not equal, but equitable, distribution, for the first equality is equity. From these two things—combined public power abroad and individual happiness at home—results social prosperity; that is to say, man happy, the citizen free, and the nation great.
England solves the first of these two problems,—she creates wealth admirably, but distributes it badly. This solution, which is completely on one side, fatally leads her to these two extremes,—monstrous opulence and monstrous misery; all the enjoyments belong to the few, all the privations to the rest, that is to say, to the people, and privileges, exceptions, monopoly, and feudalism spring up from labor itself. It is a false and dangerous situation to base public power on private want, and to root the grandeur of the state in the sufferings of the individual; it is a badly composed grandeur, in which all the material elements are combined, in which no moral element enters. Communism and the agrarian law fancy that they solve the second question, but they are mistaken. Their distribution kills production, and equal division destroys emulation and consequently labor. It is a distribution made by the butcher who slaughters what he divides. Hence it is impossible to be satisfied with these pretended solutions, for killing riches is not distributing them. The two problems must be solved together in order to be properly solved; the two solutions demand to be combined, and only form one. If you solve but the first of these problems you will be Venice, you will be England; you will have, like Venice, an artificial power, like England, a material power, and you will be the wicked rich man; you will perish by violence, as Venice died, or by bankruptcy, as England will fall; and the world will leave you to die and fall, because it allows everything to die and fall which is solely selfishness, and everything which does not represent a virtue or an idea to the human race. Of course it will be understood that by the words Venice and England we do not mean the peoples, but the social constructions; the oligarchies that weigh down the nations, but not the nations themselves. Nations ever have our respect and sympathy. Venice, as a people, will live again; England, as the aristocracy, will fall, but England the nation is immortal. This said, let us continue.
Solve the two problems, encourage the rich and protect the poor, suppress misery, put an end to the unjust exhaustion of the weak by the strong, bridle the iniquitous jealousy which the man still on the road feels for him who has reached the journey's end, adjust mathematically and paternally the wage to the labor, blend gratuitous and enforced education with the growth of childhood and render science the basis of manhood, develop intelligence while occupying the arms, be at once a powerful people and a family of happy men, democratize property, not by abolishing but by universalizing it, so that every citizen without exception may be a land-owner,—an easier task than it may be supposed,—in two words, know how to produce wealth and to distribute it, and you will possess at once material greatness and moral greatness, and be worthy to call yourself France. Such was what socialism, above and beyond a few mistaken sects, said; this is what it sought in facts and stirred up in minds: they were admirable efforts and sacred attempts!
These doctrines, theories, and resistances; the unexpected necessity for the statesman of settling with the philosophers; glimpses caught of confused evidences; a new policy to create, agreeing with the old world, while not disagreeing too greatly from the revolutionary ideal, a situation in which Lafayette must be used to defend Polignac, the intuition of progress apparent behind the riots, the chambers, and the street; the king's faith in the revolution; rivalries to be balanced around him, possibly some eventual resignation sprung from the vague acceptance of a definite and superior right; his wish to remain here, his race, his family affections, his sincere respect for the people, and his own honesty,—all these painfully affected Louis Philippe, and at times, though he was so strong and courageous, crushed him beneath the difficulty of being a king. He felt beneath his feet a formidable disintegration, which, however, was not a crumbling to dust, as France was more France than ever. Dark storm-clouds were collected on the horizon; a strange, gradually increasing shadow was extended over men, things, and ideas; it was a shadow that sprang from anger and systems. Everything that had been hastily suppressed stirred and fermented, and at times the conscience of the honest man held its breath, as there was such an uneasy feeling produced by this atmosphere, in which sophisms were mixed with truths. Minds trembled in the social anxiety, like leaves on the approach of a storm, and the electric tension was such that at some moments the first-comer, a stranger, would produce a flash, but then the twilight obscurity fell over the whole scene again. At intervals, deep and muttered rolling allowed an opinion to be formed of the amount of lightning which the cloud must contain.
Twenty months had scarce elapsed since the revolution of July, and the year 1832 opened with an imminent and menacing appearance. The distress of the people, workmen without bread; the Prince of Condé suddenly departed from the world; Brussels expelling the Nassaus, as Paris had done the Bourbons; Belgium offering itself to a French prince and given to an English prince; the Russian hatred of Nicholas; behind us two demons of the South, Ferdinand in Spain and Miguel in Portugal; the earth trembling in Italy; Metternich stretching out his hand over Bologna; France confronting Austria at Ancona; in the North the sinister sound of a hammer, enclosing Poland again in its coffin; throughout Europe angry eyes watching France; England, a suspicious ally, prepared to push any one who staggered and to throw herself on him who fell; the Peerage taking refuge behind Beccaria to refuse four heads to the law; the fleurs-de-lys erased from the king's coaches; the cross dragged from Notre Dame; Lafayette enfeebled, Laffitte ruined; Benjamin Constant dead in poverty; Casimir Perier dead in the exhaustion of power; a political and a social disease declaring themselves simultaneously in the two capitals of the kingdom,—one the city of thought, the other the city of toil; in Paris a civil war, in Lyons a servile war; and in both cities the same furnace-glow, a volcanic purple on the brow of the people; the South fanaticized, the West troubled, the Duchesse de Berry in the Vendée; plots, conspiracies, insurrections, and cholera adding to the gloomy rumor of ideas the gloomy tumult of events.
A few days after this visit of a ghost to Father Mabœuf,—it was on a Monday, the day of the five-franc piece which Marius borrowed of Courfeyrac for Thénardier,—Marius placed the coin in his pocket, and before carrying it to the prison, resolved to "take a little walk," hoping that on his return this would make him work. It was, however, eternally thus. As soon as he rose, he sat down before a book and paper to set about some translation, and his work at this time was the translation into French of a celebrated German quarrel, the controversy between Gans and Savigny. He took up Gans, he took up Savigny, read four pages, tried to write one but could not, saw a star between his paper and himself, and got up from his chair, saying, "I will go out, that will put me in the humor," and he proceeded to the Lark's field, where he saw the star more than ever, and Gans and Savigny less. He went home, tried to resume his task, and did not succeed; he could not join a single one of the threads broken in his brain, and so said to himself, "I will not go out to-morrow, for it prevents me from working." But he went out every day.
He lived in the Lark's field more than at Courfeyrac's lodging, and his right address was Boulevard de la Santé, at the seventh tree past the Rue Croulebarbe. On this morning he had left the seventh tree and was seated on the parapet of the bridge over the little stream. The merry sunbeams were flashing through the expanded and luminous leaves. He thought of "Her," and his reverie, becoming a reproach, fell back on himself; he thought bitterly of the indolence and mental paralysis which were gaining on him, and of the night which constantly grew denser before him, so that he could no longer even see the sun. Still, through this painful evolution of indistinct ideas which was not even a soliloquy, as action was so weak in him, and he had no longer the strength to try to feel sad; through this melancholy absorption, we say, sensations from without reached him. He heard behind, below, and on both sides of him, the washerwomen of the Gobelins beating their linen, and above him the birds twittering and singing in the elms. On one side the sound of liberty, happy carelessness, and winged leisure, on the other the sound of labor. Two joyous sounds made him think deeply and almost reflect. All at once he heard amid his depressed ecstasy a voice he knew, that said,—
"Ah, here he is!"
He raised his eyes and recognized the unhappy girl who had come to him one morning, Éponine, the elder of Thénardier's daughters; he now knew what her name was. Strange to say, she had grown poorer and more beautiful, two things which he had not thought possible. She had accomplished a double progress, toward light and toward distress. Her feet were bare and her clothes torn, as on the day when she so boldly entered his room, but the tatters were two months older, the holes larger, and the rags filthier. She had the same hoarse voice, the same forehead wrinkled and bronzed by exposure, the same free, absent, and wandering look, but she had, in addition, on her countenance, something startled and lamentable, which passing through prisons adds to misery. She had pieces of straw and hay in her hair, not that, like Ophelia, she had gone mad through contagion with Hamlet's lunacy, but because she had slept in some stable-loft.
And with all that she was beautiful. What a star thou art, O youth!
She had stopped in front of Marius with a little joy on her livid face, and something like a smile, and it was some minutes ere she could speak.
"I have found you!" she said at last. "Father Mabœuf was right, it was in this boulevard! How I have sought you, if you only knew! Do you know that I have been in quod for a fortnight? They let me go as there was no charge against me, and besides I had not attained years of discretion by two months. Oh, how I have looked for you the last six weeks! So you no longer live down there?"
"No," said Marius.
"Ah, I understand, on account of that thing; well, such disturbances are unpleasant, and you moved. Hilloh, why do you wear an old hat like that? A young man like you ought to be handsomely dressed. Do you know, Monsieur Marius, that M. Mabœuf calls you Baron Marius,—I forget what, but you are not a Baron, are you? Barons are old swells, who walk in front of the Luxembourg Palace, where there is the most sun, and read the Quotidienne for a sou. I went once with a letter for a Baron who was like that, and more than a hundred years of age. Tell me, where do you live now?"
Marius did not answer.
"Ah," she added, "you have a hole in your shirt-front, I must mend it for you."
Then she continued with an expression which gradually grew gloomier,—
"You do not seem pleased to see me?"
Marius held his tongue. She was also silent for a moment, and then exclaimed,—
"If I liked, I could compel you to look pleased."
"What do you mean?" Marius asked.
She bit her lip, and apparently hesitated, as if suffering from some internal struggle. At length she seemed to make up her mind.
"All the worse, but no matter, you look sad and I wish you to be pleased, only promise me, though, that you will laugh, for I want to see you laugh and hear you say, 'Ah! that is famous!' Poor Monsieur Marius! you know you promised you would give me all I wanted."
"Yes, but speak, can't you?"
She looked at Marius intently and said, "I have the address."
Marius turned pale, and all his blood flowed to his heart.
"What address?"
"The address which you asked me for;" and she added, as if with a great effort, "the address,—you surely understand?"
"Yes," stammered Marius.
"The young lady's."
These words uttered, she heaved a deep sigh. Marius leaped from the parapet on which he was sitting, and wildly seized her hand.
"Oh, lead me to it! Tell me! Ask of me what you please! Where is it?"
"Come with me," she answered; "I don't exactly know the street or the number, and it is quite on the other side of town; but I know the house well, and will take you to it."
She withdrew her hand, and continued in a tone which would have made an observer's heart bleed, but did not at all affect the intoxicated and transported lover,—
"Oh, how pleased you are!"
A cloud passed over Marius's forehead, and he clutched Éponine's arm.
"Swear one thing."
"Swear?" she said. "What do you mean by that? Indeed, you want me to swear?"
And she burst into a laugh.
"Your father! Promise me, Éponine,—swear to me that you will never tell your father that address."
She turned to him with an air of stupefaction. "Éponine! how do you know that is my name?"
"Promise me what I ask you."
But she did not seem to hear him.
"That is nice! You called me Éponine!"
Marius seized both her arms.
"Answer me in Heaven's name! Pay attention to what I am saying,—swear to me that you will not tell your father the address which you know."
"My father?" she remarked, "oh, yes, my father. He's all right in a secret cell. Besides, what do I care for my father?"
"But you have not promised!" Marius exclaimed.
"Let me go!" she said, as she burst into a laugh; "how you are shaking me! Yes, yes, I promise it; I swear it! How does it concern me? I will not tell my father the address. There, does that suit you; is that it?"
"And no one else?" said Marius.
"And no one else."
"Now," Marius continued, "lead me there."
"At once?"
"Yes."
"Come on! Oh, how glad he is!" she said.
A few yards farther on she stopped.
"You are following me too closely, Monsieur Marius; let me go on in front and do you follow me, as if you were not doing so. A respectable young man like you must not be seen with such a woman as I am."
No language could render all that was contained in the word "woman," thus pronounced by this child. She went a dozen paces and stopped again. Marius rejoined her, and she said to him aside without turning to him,—
"By the bye, you know that you promised me something?"
Marius felt in his pocket; he had nothing in the world but the five-franc piece destined for Father Thénardier, but he laid the coin in Éponine's hand. She let it slip through her fingers on the ground, and looking at him frowningly said,—
"I do not want your money."
It seemed as if this garden, created in former times to conceal libertine mysteries, had been transformed and become fitting to shelter chaste mysteries. There were no longer any cradles, bowling-greens, covered walks, or grottos; but there was a magnificent tangled obscurity which fell all around, and Paphos was changed into Eden. A penitent feeling had refreshed this retreat, and the coquettish garden, once on a time so compromised, had returned to virginity and modesty. A president assisted by a gardener, a good fellow who believed himself the successor of Lamoignon, and another good fellow who fancied himself the successor of Lenôtre, had turned it about, clipped it, and prepared it for purposes of gallantry, but nature had seized it again, filled it with shadow, and prepared it for love. There was, too, in this solitude a heart which was quite ready, and love had only to show itself; for there were here a temple composed of verdure, grass, moss, the sighs of birds, gentle shadows, waving branches, and a soul formed of gentleness, faith, candor, hope, aspirations, and illusions.
Cosette left the convent while still almost a child. She was but little more than fourteen, and at the "unpromising age," as we have said. With the exception of her eyes, she seemed rather ugly than pretty; still she had no ungraceful feature, but she was awkward, thin, timid and bold at the same time, in short, a grown-up little girl. Her education was finished, that is to say, she had been taught religion, and more especially devotion, also "history," that is to say, the thing so called in a convent; geography, grammar, the participles, the kings of France, and a little music, drawing, etc.; but in other respects she was ignorant of everything, which is at once a charm and a peril. The mind of a young girl ought not to be left in darkness, for at a later date, mirages too sudden and vivid are produced in it as in a camera obscura. She should be gently and discreetly enlightened, rather by the reflection of realities than by their direct and harsh light; for this is a useful and gracefully obscure semi-light which dissipates childish fears and prevents falls. There is only the maternal instinct,—that admirable intuition into which the recollections of the virgin and the experience of the wife enter,—that knows how or of what this semi-light should be composed. Nothing can take the place of this instinct, and in forming a girl's mind, all the nuns in the world are not equal to one mother. Cosette had had no mother, she had only had a great many mothers: as for Jean Valjean, he had within him every possible tenderness and every possible anxiety; but he was only an old man who knew nothing at all. Now, in this work of education, in this serious matter of preparing a woman for life, what knowledge is needed to contend against the other great ignorance which is called innocence! Nothing prepares a girl for passions like the convent, for it directs her thoughts to the unknown. The heart is driven back on itself, and hence come visions, suppositions, conjectures, romances sketched, adventures longed for, fantastic constructions, and edifices built entirely on the inner darkness of the mind,—gloomy and secret dwellings in which the passions alone find a lodging so soon as passing through the convent gate allows it. The convent is a compression which must last the whole life, if it is to triumph over the human heart. On leaving the convent, Cosette could not have found anything sweeter or more dangerous than the house in the Rue Plumet. It was the commencement of solitude with the commencement of liberty, a closed garden, but a sharp, kind, rich, voluptuous, and odorous nature; there were the same dreams as in the convent, but glimpses could be caught of young men,—it was a grating, but it looked on the street. Still, we repeat, when Cosette first came here, she was but a child. Jean Valjean gave over to her this uncultivated garden, and said to her, "Do what you like with it." This amused Cosette, she moved all the tufts and all the stones in search of "beasts;" she played about while waiting till the time came to think, and she loved this garden for the sake of the insects which she found in the grass under her feet, while waiting till she should love it for the sake of the stars she could see through the branches above her head.
And then, too, she loved her father, that is to say, Jean Valjean, with all her soul, with a simple filial passion, which rendered the worthy man a desired and delightful companion to her. Our readers will remember that M. Madeleine was fond of reading, and Jean Valjean continued in the same track; he had learned to speak well, and he possessed the secret wealth and the eloquence of a humble, true, and self-cultivated intellect. He had retained just sufficient roughness to season his kindness, and he had a rough mind and a soft heart. During their tête-à-têtes in the Luxembourg garden he gave her long explanations about all sorts of things, deriving his information from what he had read, and also from what he had suffered. While Cosette was listening to him, her eyes vaguely wandered around. This simple man was sufficient for Cosette's, thoughts, in the same way as the wild garden was for her eyes. When she had chased the butterflies for a while she would run up to him panting, and say, "Oh! how tired I am!" and he would kiss her forehead. Cosette adored this good man, and she was ever at his heels, for wherever Jean Valjean was, happiness was. As he did not live either in the pavilion or the garden, she was more attached to the paved back-yard than to the flower-laden garden, and preferred the little outhouse with the straw chairs to the large drawing-room hung with tapestry, along which silk-covered chairs were arranged. Jean Valjean at times said to her with a smile of a man who is delighted to be annoyed: "Come, go to your own rooms! leave me at peace for a little while."
She scolded him in that charming tender way which is so graceful when addressed by a daughter to a parent.
"Father, I feel very cold in your room; why don't you have a carpet and a stove?"
"My dear child, there are so many persons more deserving than myself who have not even a roof to cover them."
"Then, why is there fire in my room and everything that I want?"
"Because you are a woman and a child."
"Nonsense! then men must be cold and hungry?"
"Some men."
"Very good! I'll come here so often that you will be obliged to have a fire."
Or else it was,—
"Father, why do you eat such wretched bread as that?"
"Because I do, my daughter."
"Well, if you eat it I shall eat it too."
And so to prevent Cosette from eating black bread Jean Valjean ate white. Cosette remembered her childhood but confusedly, and she prayed night and morning for the mother whom she had never known. The Thénardiers were like two hideous beings seen in a dream, and she merely remembered that she had gone "one day at night" to fetch water in a wood,—she thought that it was a long distance from Paris. It seemed to her as if she had commenced life in an abyss, and that Jean Valjean had drawn her out of it, and her childhood produced on her the effect of a time when she had had nought but centipedes, spiders, and snakes around her. When she thought at night before she fell asleep, as she had no very clear idea of being Jean Valjean's daughter, she imagined that her mother's soul had passed into this good man, and had come to dwell near her. When he was sitting down she rested her cheek on his white hair, and silently dropped a tear, while saying to herself, "Perhaps this man is my mother!" Cosette, strange though it is to say, in her profound ignorance as a girl educated in a convent, and as, too, maternity is absolutely unintelligible to virginity, eventually imagined that she had had as little of a mother as was possible. This mother's name she did not know, and whenever it happened that she spoke to Jean Valjean on the subject he held his tongue. If she repeated her question he answered by a smile, and once, when she pressed him, the smile terminated in a tear. This silence on his part cast a night over Fantine. Was it through prudence? Was it through respect? Or was it through a fear of intrusting this name to the chances of another memory besides his own?
So long as Cosette was young Jean Valjean readily talked to her about her mother; but when she grew up it was impossible for him to do so,—he felt as if he dared not do it. Was it on account of Cosette or of Fantine? He felt a species of religious horror at making this shadow enter Cosette's thoughts, and rendering a dead woman a third person in their society. The more sacred this shade was to him, the more formidable was it. He thought of Fantine, and felt himself overwhelmed by the silence. He saw vaguely in the darkness something that resembled a finger laid on a lip. Had all the modesty which was in Fantine, and which during her life quitted her with violence, returned after her death, to watch indignantly over the dead woman's peace, and sternly guard her in the tomb? Was Jean Valjean himself unconsciously oppressed by it? We who believe in death are not prepared to reject this mysterious explanation, and hence arose the impossibility of pronouncing, even to Cosette, the name of Fantine. One day Cosette said to him,—
"Father, I saw my mother last night in a dream. She had two large wings, and in life she must have been a sainted woman."
"Through martyrdom," Jean Valjean replied. Altogether, though, he was happy; when Cosette went out with him she leaned on his arm, proudly and happily, in the fulness of her heart. Jean Valjean felt his thoughts melt into delight at all these marks of a tenderness so exclusive and so satisfied with himself alone. The poor wretch, inundated with an angelic joy, trembled; he assured himself with transport that this would last his whole life; he said to himself that he had not really suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God in the depths of his soul for having allowed him—the wretched—to be thus loved by this innocent being.
The reduction of the Universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being as far as God,—such is love.
Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.
How sad the soul is when it is sad through love! What a void is the absence of the being who of her own self fills the world! Oh, how true it is that the beloved being becomes God! We might understand how God might be jealous, had not the Father of all evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul for love.
The soul only needs to see a smile in a white crape bonnet in order to enter the palace of dreams.
God is behind everything, but everything conceals God. Things are black and creatures are opaque, but to love a being is to render her transparent.
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when the soul is kneeling, no matter what the attitude of the body may be.
Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand chimerical things, which, however, have their reality. They are prevented seeing each other, and they cannot write, but they find a number of mysterious ways to correspond. They send to each other the song of birds, the light of the sun, the sighs of the breeze, the rays of the stars, and the whole of creation; and why should they not? All the works of God are made to serve love. Love is sufficiently powerful to interest all nature with its messages.
Oh, Spring, thou art a letter which I write to her.
The future belongs even more to hearts than to minds. Loving is the only thing which can occupy and fill the immensity, for the infinite needs the inexhaustible.
Love is a portion of the soul itself, and is of the same nature as it. Like it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, and imperishable. It is a point of fire within us, which is immortal and infinite; which nothing can limit, and nothing extinguish. We feel it burning even in the marrow of our bones, and see its flashing in the depths of the heavens.
Oh, love! adoration! voluptuousness of two minds which comprehend each other, of two hearts which are exchanged, of two glances that penetrate one another! You will come to me, oh happiness, will you not? Walks with her in the solitudes, blest and radiant days! I have dreamed that from time to time hours were detached from the lives of the angels, and came down here to traverse the destinies of men.
God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except giving them endless duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is in truth an augmentation; but it is impossible even for God to increase in its intensity the ineffable felicity which love gives to the soul in this world. God is the fulness of heaven, love is the fulness of man.
You gaze at a star for two motives, because it is luminous and because it is impenetrable. You have by your side a sweeter radiance and greater mystery,—woman.
All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. If they fail us, air fails us, and we stifle and die. Dying through want of love is frightful, for it is the asphyxia of the soul.
When love has blended and moulded two beings in an angelic and sacred union, they have found the secret of life; henceforth they are only the two terms of the same destiny, the two wings of one mind. Love and soar!
On the day when a woman who passes before you emits light as she walks, you are lost, for you love. You have from that moment but one thing to do; think of her so intently that she will be compelled to think of you.
What love begins can only be completed by God.
True love is in despair, or enchanted by a lost glove or a found handkerchief, and it requires eternity for its devotion and its hopes. It is composed at once of the infinitely great and the infinitely little.
If you are a stone, be a magnet; if you are a plant, be sensitive; if you are a man, be love.
Nothing is sufficient for love. You have happiness and you wish for Paradise. You have Paradise, and you crave for heaven. Oh, ye who love each other, all this is in love, contrive to find it there. Love has, equally with heaven, contemplation, and more than heaven, voluptuousness.
Does she still go to the Luxembourg? No, sir.—Does she attend mass in that church? She does not go there any longer.—Does she still live in this house? She has removed.—Where has she gone to live? She did not leave her address.
What a gloomy thing it is not to know where to find one's soul.
Love has its childishness, and other passions have their littleness. Shame on the passions that makes a man little! Honor to the one which makes him a child!
It is a strange thing, are you aware of it? I am in the night. There is a being who vanished and took heaven with her.
Oh! to lie side by side in the same tomb, hand in hand, and to gently caress a finger from time to time in the darkness, would suffice for my eternity.
You who suffer because you love, love more than ever. To die of love is to live through it.
Love, a gloomy starry transfiguration, is mingled with this punishment, and there is ecstasy in the agony.
Oh, joy of birds! they sing because they have the nest.
Love is the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of Paradise.
Profound hearts, wise minds, take life as God makes it; it is a long trial, an unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for man with the first step in the interior of the tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the definite. The definite, reflect on that word. The living see the infinite, but the definite only shows itself to the dead. In the mean while, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas, to the man who has only loved bodies, shapes, and appearances! Death will strip him of all that. Try to love souls, and you will meet them again.
I have met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the elbows in holes; the water passed through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.
What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a grander thing still to love! The heart becomes heroic by the might of passion. Henceforth it is composed of nought but what is pure, and is only supported by what is elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more germinate in it than a nettle on a glacier. The lofty and serene soul, inaccessible to emotions and vulgar passions, soaring above the clouds and shadows of the world,—follies, falsehoods, hatreds, vanities, and miseries,—dwells in the azure of the sky, and henceforth only feels the profound and subterranean heavings of destiny as the summit of the mountains feels earthquakes.
If there were nobody who loved, the sun would be extinguished.
This being the case, is every social danger dissipated? Certainly not. There is no Jacquerie, and society may be reassured on that side; the blood will not again rush to its head, but it must pay attention to the way in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer to be apprehended, but there is consumption, and social consumption is called wretchedness. People die as well when undermined as when struck by lightning. We shall never grow weary of repeating, that to think first of all of the disinherited and sorrowful classes, to relieve, ventilate, enlighten, and love them, to magnificently enlarge their horizon, to lavish upon them education in every shape, to offer them the example of labor, and never that of indolence, to lessen the weight of the individual burden by increasing the notion of the universal object, to limit poverty without limiting wealth, to create vast fields of public and popular activity, to have, like Briareus, a hundred hands to stretch out on all sides to the crushed and the weak, to employ the collective power in opening workshops for every arm, schools for every aptitude, and laboratories for every intellect, to increase wages, diminish the toil, and balance the debit and credit, that is to say, proportion the enjoyment to the effort, and the satisfaction to the wants,—in a word, to evolve from the social machine, on behalf of those who suffer and those who are ignorant, more light and more comfort,—is, and sympathetic souls must not forget it, the first of brotherly obligations, and, let egotistic hearts learn the fact, the first of political necessities; And all this, we are bound to add, is only a beginning, and the true question is this, labor cannot be law, without being a right. But this is not the place to dwell on such a subject.
If nature is called Providence, society ought to call itself foresight. Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than natural amelioration; knowledge is a viaticum; thinking is a primary necessity, and truth is nourishment, like wheat. A reason fasting for knowledge and wisdom grows thin, and we must pity minds that do not eat quite as much as stomachs. If there be anything more poignant than a body pining away for want of bread, it is a mind that dies of hunger for enlightenment. The whole of our progress tends toward the solution, and some day people will be stupefied As the human race ascends, the deepest strata will naturally emerge from the zone of distress, and the effacement of wretchedness will be effected by a simple elevation of the level. We would do wrong to doubt this blessed solution. The past, we grant, is very powerful at the present hour, and is beginning again. This rejuvenescence of a corpse is surprising. It seems victorious; this dead man is a conqueror. Behold him advancing and arriving! he arrives with his legion, superstitions; with his sword, despotism; with his barrier, ignorance; and during some time past he has gained ten battles. He advances, he threatens, he laughs, he is at our gates. But we have no reason to despair; let us sell the field on which Hannibal is encamped. What can we, who believe, fear? A recoil of ideas is no more possible than it is for a river to flow up a hill. But those who desire no future ought to reflect; by saying no to progress they do not condemn the future, but themselves; and they give themselves a deadly disease by inoculating themselves with the past. There is only one way of refusing to-morrow, and that is, by dying. We wish for no death,—that of the body as late as possible, and that of the soul never. Yes, the sphinx will speak, and the problem will be solved; the people sketched by the eighteenth century will be finished by the nineteenth. He is an idiot who doubts it. The future, the speedy bursting into flower of universal welfare, is a divinely fatal phenomenon. Immense and combined impulsions pushing together govern human facts, and lead them all within a given time to the logical state, that is to say, to equilibrium, or in other words, to equity. A force composed of earth and heaven results from humanity and governs it; this force is a performer of miracles, and marvellous denouements are as easy to it as extraordinary incidents. Aided by science, which comes from man, and the event, which comes from another source, it is but little frightened by those contradictions in the posture of problems which seem to the vulgar herd impossibilities. It is no less skilful in producing a solution from the approximation of ideas than in producing instruction from the approximation of facts, and we may expect anything and everything from the mysterious power of progress, which, on fine days, confronts the East and the West in a sepulchre, and makes the Imams hold conference with Bonaparte in the interior of the Great Pyramid. In the meanwhile, there is no halt, no hesitation, no check, in the grand forward march of minds. Social philosophy is essentially the source of peace; it has for its object, and must have as result, the dissolution of passions by the study of antagonisms. It examines, scrutinizes, and analyzes, and then it recomposes; and it proceeds by the reducing process, by removing hatred from everything.
It has more than once occurred, that a society has been sunk by the wind which is let loose on men. History is full of the shipwrecks of peoples and empires; one day, that stranger, the hurricane, passes, and carries away manners, laws, and religions. The civilizations of India, Chaldæa, Persia, Assyria, and Egypt have disappeared in turn; why? We are ignorant. What are the causes of these disasters? We do not know. Could those societies have been saved? Was it any fault of their own? Did they obstinately adhere to some fatal vice which destroyed them? What amount of suicide is there in these terrible deaths of a nation and a race? These are unanswerable questions, for darkness covers the condemned civilizations. They have been under water since they sank, and we have no more to say; and it is with a species of terror that we see in the background of that sea which is called the past, and behind those gloomy waves, centuries, those immense vessels,—Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, and Rome,—sunk by the terrific blast which blows from all the mouths of the darkness. But there was darkness then, and we have light; and if we are ignorant of the diseases of ancient civilizations, we know the infirmities of our own, and we contemplate its beauties and lay bare its deformities. Wherever it is wounded we probe it; and at once the suffering is decided, and the study of the cause leads to the discovery of the remedy. Our civilization, the work of twenty centuries, is at once the monster and the prodigy, and is worth saving; it will be saved. To aid it is much, and to enlighten it is also something. All the labors of modern social philosophy ought to converge to this object; and the thinker of the present day has a grand duty to apply the stethoscope to civilization. We repeat it, this auscultation is encouraging; and we intend to finish these few pages, which are an austere interlude in a mournful drama, by laying a stress on this encouragement. Beneath the social mortality the human imperishableness is felt, and the globe does not die because here and there are wounds in the shape of craters and ringworms in the shape of solfatari and a volcano which breaks out and scatters its fires around. The diseases of the people do not kill the man.
And yet some of those who follow the social clinics shake their heads at times, and the strongest, the most tender, and the most logical, have their hours of dependency. Will the future arrive? It seems as if we may almost ask this question on seeing so much terrible shadow. There is a sombre, face-to-face meeting of the egotists and the wretched. In the egotist we trace prejudices, the cloudiness of a caste education, appetite growing with intoxication, and prosperity that stuns, a fear of suffering which in some goes so far as an aversion from the sufferers, an implacable satisfaction, and the feeling of self so swollen that it closes the soul. In the wretched we find covetousness, envy, the hatred of seeing others successful, the great bounds of the human beast toward gorging, hearts full of mist, sorrow, want, fatality, and foul and common ignorance. Must we still raise our eyes to heaven? Is the luminous point which we notice there one of those which die out? The ideal is frightful to look on thus lost in the depths, small, isolated, imperceptible, and brilliant, but surrounded by all those great black menaces monstrously collected around it; for all that, though, it is in no more danger than a star in the yawning throat of the clouds.
The next day—it was June 3, 1832, a date to which we draw attention owing to the grave events which were at that moment hanging over the horizon of Paris in the state of lightning-charged clouds—Marius at nightfall was following the same road as on the previous evening, with the same ravishing thoughts in his heart, when he saw between the boulevard trees Éponine coming toward him. Two days running,—that was too much; so he sharply turned back, changed his course, and went to the Rue Plumet by the Rue Monsieur. This caused Éponine to follow him as far as the Rue Plumet, a thing she had never done before; hitherto, she had contented herself with watching him as he passed along the boulevard, without attempting to meet him: last evening was the first time that she ventured to address him. Éponine followed him, then, without his suspecting it: she saw him move the railing-bar aside and step into the garden.
"Hilloh!" she said, "he enters the house."
She went up to the railing, felt the bars in turn, and easily distinguished the one which Marius had removed; and she muttered in a low voice, and with a lugubrious accent,—"None of that, Lisette!"
She sat down on the stone-work of the railing, close to the bar, as if she were guarding it. It was exactly at the spot where the railings joined the next wall, and there was there a dark corner, in which Éponine entirely disappeared. She remained thus for more than an hour without stirring or breathing, absorbed in thought. About ten o'clock at night, one of the two or three passers along the Rue Plumet, an old belated citizen, who was hurrying along the deserted and ill-famed street, while passing the railing, heard a dull menacing voice saying,—
"I am not surprised now that he comes every evening."
The passer-by looked around him, saw nobody, did not dare to peer into this dark corner, and felt horribly alarmed. He redoubled his speed, and was quite right in doing so, for in a few minutes six men, who were walking separately, and at some distance from each other, under the walls, and who might have been taken for a drunken patrol, entered the Rue Plumet: the first who reached the railings stopped and waited for the rest, and a second after, all six were together, and began talking in whispered slang.
"It's here," said one of them.
"Is there a cab [dog] in the garden?" another asked.
"I don't know. In any case I have brought a bullet which we will make it eat."
"Have you got some mastic to break a pane?"
"Yes."
"The railings are old," remarked the fifth man, who seemed to have the voice of a ventriloquist.
"All the better," said the second speaker; "it will make no noise when sawn, and won't be so hard to cut through."
The sixth, who had not yet opened his mouth, began examining the railings as Éponine had done an hour ago, and thus reached the bar which Marius had unfastened. Just as he was about to seize this bar, a hand suddenly emerging from the darkness clutched his arm; he felt himself roughly thrust back, and a hoarse voice whispered to him, "There's a cab." At the same time he saw a pale girl standing in front of him. The man had that emotion which is always produced by things unexpected; his hair stood hideously on end. Nothing is more formidable to look at than startled wild beasts. Their affrighted look is hideous. He fell back and stammered,—
"Who is this she-devil?"
"Your daughter."
It was, in truth, Éponine speaking to Thénardier. Upon her apparition, the other five men, that is to say, Claquesous, Gueulemer, Babet, Montparnasse, and Brujon, approached noiselessly, without hurry or saying a word, but with the sinister slowness peculiar to these men of the night. Some hideous tools could be distinguished in their hands, and Gueulemer held a pair of those short pincers which burglars call fauchons (small scythes).
"Well, what are you doing here? What do you want? Are you mad?" Thénardier exclaimed, as far as is possible to exclaim in a whisper. "Have you come to prevent us from working?"
Éponine burst into a laugh and leaped on his neck. "I am here, my little papa, because I am here; are not people allowed to sit down on the stones at present? It is you who oughtn't to be here; and what have you come to do, since it is a biscuit? I told Magnon so, and there is nothing to be done here. But embrace me, my good little papa, it is such a time since I saw you. You are out, then?"
Thénardier tried to free himself from Éponine's arms, and growled,—
"There, there, you have embraced me. Yes, I am out, and not in. Now be off."
But Éponine did not loose her hold, and redoubled her caresses.
"My dear papa, how ever did you manage? You must have been very clever to get out of that scrape, so tell me all about it. And where is mamma? Give me some news of her."
Thénardier answered,—
"She's all right. I don't know; leave me and be off, I tell you."
"I do not exactly want to go off," Éponine said with the pout of a spoiled child; "you send me away, though I haven't seen you now for four months, and I have scarce had time to embrace you."
And she caught her father again round the neck.
"Oh, come, this is a bore," said Babet.
"Make haste," said Gueulemer, "the police may pass."
The ventriloquial voice hummed,—
"Nous n'sommes pas le jour de l'an,
A bécoter papa, maman."
Éponine turned to the five bandits:—
"Why, that's Monsieur Brujon. Good-evening, Monsieur Babet; good-evening, Monsieur Claquesous. What, don't you know me, Monsieur Gueulemer? How are you, Montparnasse?"
"Yes, they know you," said Thénardier; "but now good-night, and be off; leave us alone."
"It is the hour of the foxes, and not of the chickens," said Montparnasse.
"Don't you see that we have work here?" Babet added.
Éponine took Montparnasse by the hand. "Mind," he said, "you will cut yourself, for I have an open knife."
"My dear Montparnasse," Éponine replied very gently, "confidence ought to be placed in people, and I am my father's daughter, perhaps. Monsieur Babet, Monsieur Gueulemer, I was ordered to examine into this affair."
It is remarkable that Éponine did not speak slang; ever since she had known Marius that frightful language had become impossible to her. She pressed Gueulemer's great coarse fingers in her little bony hand, which was as weak as that of a skeleton, and continued,—"You know very well that I am no fool, and people generally believe me. I have done you a service now and then; well, I have made inquiries, and you would run a needless risk. I swear to you that there is nothing to be done in this house."
"There are lone women," said Gueulemer.
"No, they have moved away."
"Well, the candles haven't," Babet remarked; and he pointed over the trees to a light which was moving about the garret. It was Toussaint, who was up so late in order to hang up some linen to dry. Éponine made a final effort.
"Well," she said, "they are very poor people, and there isn't a penny piece in the house."
"Go to the devil," cried Thénardier; "when we have turned the house topsy-turvy, and placed the cellar at top and the attics at the bottom, we will tell you what there is inside, and whether they are balles, ronds, or broques [francs, sous, or liards]."
And he thrust her away that he might pass.
"My kind M. Montparnasse," Éponine said, "I ask you, who are a good fellow, not to go in."
"Take care, you'll cut yourself," Montparnasse replied.
Thénardier remarked, with that decisive accent of his,—
"Decamp, fairy, and leave men to do their business."
Éponine let go Montparnasse's hand, which she had seized again, and said,—
"So you intend to enter this house?"
"A little," the ventriloquist said with a grin.
She leaned against the railings, faced these six men armed to the teeth, to whom night gave demoniac faces, and said in a firm, low voice,—
"Well, I will not let you!"
They stopped in stupefaction, but the ventriloquist completed his laugh. She continued,—
"Friends, listen to me, for it's now my turn to speak. If you enter this garden or touch this railing I will scream, knock at doors, wake people; I will have you all six seized, and call the police."
"She is capable of doing it," Thénardier whispered to the ventriloquist and Brujon.
She shook her head, and added,—
"Beginning with my father."
Thénardier approached her.
"Not so close, my good man," she said.
He fell back, growling between his teeth, "Why, what is the matter?" and added, "chienne."
She burst into a terrible laugh.
"As you please, but you shall not enter; but I am not the daughter of a dog, since I am the whelp of a wolf. You are six, but what do I care for that? You are men and I am a woman. You won't frighten me, I can tell you, and you shall not enter this house because it does not please me. If you come nearer I bark; I told you there was a dog, and I am it. I do not care a farthing for you, so go your way, for you annoy me! Go where you like, but don't come here, for I oppose it. Come on, then, you with your stabs and I with my feet."
She advanced a step toward the bandits and said, with the same frightful laugh,—
"Confound it! I'm not frightened. This summer I shall be hungry, and this winter I shall be cold. What asses these men must be to think they can frighten a girl! Afraid of what? You have got dolls of mistresses who crawl under the bed when you talk big, but I am afraid of nothing!"
She fixed her eye on Thénardier, and said,—"Not even of you, father."
Then she continued, as she turned her spectral, bloodshot eyeballs on each of the bandits in turn,—
"What do I care whether I am picked up to-morrow on the pavement of the Rue Plumet stabbed by my father, or am found within a year in the nets of St. Cloud, or on Swan's Island, among old rotting corks and drowned dogs?"
She was compelled to break off, for she was attacked by a dry cough, and her breath came from her weak, narrow chest like the death-rattle.
She continued,—
"I have only to cry out and people will come, patatras. You are six, but I am the whole world."
Thénardier moved a step toward her.
"Don't come near me," she cried.
He stopped, and said gently,—
"Well, no; I will not approach you; but do not talk so loud. Do you wish to prevent us from working, my daughter? And yet we must earn a livelihood. Do you no longer feel any affection for your father?"
"You bore me," said Éponine.
"Still we must live; we must eat—"
"Burst!"
This said, she sat down on the coping of the railings and sang,—
"Mon bras si dodu,
Ma jambe bien faite,
Et le temps perdu."
She had her elbow on her knee, and her chin in her hand, and balanced her foot with a careless air. Her ragged gown displayed her thin shoulder-blades, and the neighboring lamp lit up her profile and attitude. Nothing more resolute or more surprising could well be imagined. The six burglars, amazed and savage at being held in check by a girl, went under the shadow of the lamp and held council, with humiliated and furious shrugs of their shoulders. She, however, looked at them with a peaceful and stern air.
"There's something the matter with her," said Babet; "some reason for it. Is she fond of the cab? It's a pity to miss the affair. There are two women who live alone, an old cove who lives in a yard, and very decent curtains up to the windows. The old swell must be a sheney, and I consider the affair a good one."
"Well, do you fellows go in," Montparnasse exclaimed, "and do the trick. I will remain here with the girl, and if she stirs—"
He let the knife which he held in his hand glisten in the lamp-light. Thénardier did not say a word, and seemed ready for anything they pleased. Brujon, who was a bit of an oracle, and who, as we know, "put up the job," had not yet spoken, and seemed thoughtful. He was supposed to recoil at nothing, and it was notorious that he had plundered a police office through sheer bravado. Moreover, he wrote verses and songs, which gave him a great authority. Babet questioned him.
"Have you nothing to say, Brujon?"
Brujon remained silent for a moment, then tossed his head in several different ways, and at length decided on speaking,—
"Look here. I saw this morning two sparrows fighting, and to-night I stumble over a quarrelsome woman: all that is bad, so let us be off."
They went away, and while doing so Montparnasse muttered,—
"No matter; if you had been agreeable I would have cut her throat."
Babet replied,—
"I wouldn't; for I never strike a lady."
At the corner of the street they stopped, and exchanged in a low voice this enigmatical dialogue.
"Where shall we go and sleep to-night?"
"Under Pantin [Paris]."
"Have you your key about you, Thénardier?"
"Of course."
Éponine, who did not take her eyes off them, saw them return by the road along which they had come. She rose and crawled after them, along the walls and the houses. She followed them thus along the boulevard; there they separated, and she saw the six men bury themselves in the darkness, where they seemed to fade away.
Nothing is more extraordinary than the commencement of a riot, for everything breaks out everywhere at once. Was it foreseen? Yes. Was it prepared? No. Where does it issue from? From the pavement. Where does it fall from? The clouds. At one spot the insurrection has the character of a plot, at another of an improvisation. The first-comer grasps a current of the mob and leads it whither he pleases. It is a beginning full of horror, with which a sort of formidable gayety is mingled. First there is a clamor; shops are closed, and the goods disappear from the tradesmen's windows; then dropping shots are heard; people fly; gateways are assailed with the butts of muskets, and servant-maids may be heard laughing in the yards of the houses and saying, "There's going to be a row."
A quarter of an hour had not elapsed: this is what was going on simultaneously at twenty different points of Paris. In the Rue St. Croix de la Bretonnerie, twenty young men, with beards and long hair, entered a wine-shop and came out a moment after carrying a horizontal tricolor flag covered with crape, and having at their head three men armed, one with a sabre, the second with a gun, and the third with a pike. In the Rue des Nonaindières, a well-dressed bourgeois, who had a large stomach, a sonorous voice, bald head, lofty forehead, black beard, and one of those rough moustaches which cannot be kept from bristling, publicly offered cartridges to passers-by. In the Rue St. Pierre Montmartre bare-armed men carried about a black flag, on which were read these words, in white letters: "Republic or death." In the Rue des Jeûneurs, Rue du Cadran, Rue Montorgueil, and Rue Mandar, groups appeared waving flags, on which could be distinguished in gold letters the word "Section," with a number. One of these flags was red and blue, with an imperceptible parting line of white. A weapon factory in the Boulevard St. Martin and three gunsmiths' shops—the first in the Rue Beaubourg; the second, Rue Michel le Comte; and the third, Rue du Temple—were pillaged. In a few minutes the thousand hands of the mob seized and carried off two hundred and thirty guns nearly all double-barrelled, sixty-four sabres, and eighty-three pistols. In order to arm as many persons as possible, one took the musket, the other the bayonet. Opposite the Quai de la Grève young men armed with muskets stationed themselves in the rooms of some ladies in order to fire; one of them had a wheel-lock gun. They rang, went in and began making cartridges, and one of the ladies said afterwards, "I did not know what cartridges were till my husband told me." A crowd broke into a curiosity-shop on the Rue des Vieilles-Haudriettes, and took from it yataghans and Turkish weapons. The corpse of a mason killed by a bullet lay in the Rue de la Perle. And then, on the right bank and the left bank, on the quays, on the boulevards, in the Quartier Latin, and on the Quartier of the Halles, panting men, workmen, students, and sectionists read proclamations, shouted "To arms!" broke the lanterns, unharnessed vehicles, tore up the pavement, broke in the doors of houses, uprooted trees, searched cellars, rolled up barrels, heaped up paving-stones, furniture, and planks, and formed barricades.
Citizens were forced to lend a hand; the rioters went to the wives, compelled them to surrender the sabre and musket of their absent husbands, and then wrote on the door in chalk, "The arms are given up." Some signed with their own names receipts for musket and sabre, and said, "Send for them to-morrow at the Mayoralty." Isolated sentries and National Guards proceeding to their gathering-place were disarmed in the streets. Epaulettes were torn from the officers, and in the Rue du Cimetière St. Nicolas an officer of the National Guard, pursued by a party armed with sticks and foils, found refuge with great difficulty in a house, where he was compelled to remain till night, and then went away in disguise. In the Quartier St. Jacques the students came out of their lodging-houses in swarms, and went up the Rue Sainte Hyacinthe to the Café du Progrès, or down to the Café des Sept Billards in the Rue des Mathurins; there the young men stood on benches and distributed arms; and the timber-yard in the Rue Transnonain was pillaged to make barricades. Only at one spot did the inhabitants offer resistance,—at the corner of the Rue Sainte Avoye and Simon le Franc, where they themselves destroyed the barricade. Only at one point too did the insurgents give way; they abandoned a barricade begun in the Rue du Temple, after firing at a detachment of the National Guard, and fled along the Rue de la Corderie. The detachment picked up on the barricade a red flag, a packet of cartridges, and three hundred pistol bullets; the National Guards tore up the flag, and carried off the strips on the point of their bayonets. All this which we are describing here slowly and successively was going on simultaneously at all parts of the city, in the midst of a vast tumult, like a number of lightning flashes in a single peal of thunder.
In less than an hour twenty-seven barricades issued from the ground in the single quarter of the Halles; in the centre was that famous house No. 50, which was the fortress of Jeanne and her hundred-and-six companions, and which, flanked on one side by a barricade at St. Merry, and on the other by a barricade in the Rue Maubuée, commanded the three streets, Des Arcis, St. Martin, and Aubry le Boucher, the last of which it faced. Two square barricades retreated, the one from the Rue Montorgueil into la Grande Truanderie, the other from the Rue Geoffroy Langevin into the Rue Sainte Avoye. This is without counting innumerable barricades in twenty other districts of Paris, as the Marais and the Montagne Sainte Geneviève; one in the Rue Ménilmontant, in which a gate could be seen torn off its hinges; and another near the little bridge of the Hôtel Dieu, made of an overthrown vehicle. Three hundred yards from the Préfecture of Police, at the barricade in the Rue des Ménétriers, a well-dressed man distributed money to the artisans; at the barricade in the Rue Grenetat a horseman rode up and handed to the man who seemed to be the chief of the barricade a roll, which looked like money. "Here," he said, "is something to pay the expenses,—the wine, etc." A light-haired young man, without a cravat, went from one barricade to another, carrying the passwords; and another, with drawn sabre and a blue forage-cap on his head, stationed sentries. In the interior, within the barricades, the wine-shops and cabarets were converted into guard-rooms, and the riot was managed in accordance with the most skilful military tactics. The narrow, uneven, winding streets, full of corners and turnings, were admirably selected,—the vicinity of the Halles more especially, a network of streets more tangled than a forest. The society of the Friends of the People had, it was said, taken the direction of the insurrection in the Sainte Avoye district, and a plan of Paris was found on the body of a man killed in the Rue du Ponceau.
What had really assumed the direction of the insurrection was a sort of unknown impetuosity that was in the atmosphere. The insurrection had suddenly built barricades with one hand, and with the other seized nearly all the garrison posts. In less than three hours the insurgents, like a powder-train fired, had seized and occupied on the right bank the Arsenal, the Mayoralty of the Place Royale, all the Marais, the Popincourt arms-factory, the Galiote the Château d'Eau, and all the streets near the Halles; on the left bank the Veterans' barracks, Sainte Pélagie, the Place Maubert, the powder manufactory of the Deux Moulins, and all the barrières. At five in the evening they were masters of the Bastille, the Lingerie, and the Blancs-Manteaux; while their scouts were close to the Place des Victoires and menaced the Bank, the barracks of the Petits-Pères and the Post-office. One third of Paris was in the hands of the revolt. On all points the struggle had begun on a gigantic scale, and the result of the disarmaments, the domiciliary visits, and the attack on the gunsmiths' shops, was that the fight which had begun with stone-throwing was continued with musket-shots.
About six in the evening the Passage du Saumon became the battle-field; the rioters were at one end and the troops at the other, and they fired from one gate at the other. An observer, a dreamer, the author of this book, who had gone to have a near look at the volcano, found himself caught between two fires in the passage, and had nothing to protect him from the bullets but the projecting semi-columns which used to separate the shops; he was nearly half an hour in this delicate position. In the mean while the tattoo was beaten, the National Guards hurriedly dressed and armed themselves, the legions issued from the Mayoralty, and the regiments from the barracks. Opposite the Passage de l'Ancre a drummer was stabbed; another was attacked in the Rue du Cygne by thirty young men, who ripped up his drum and took his sabre, while a third was killed in the Rue Grenier St. Lazare. In the Rue Michel le Comte three officers fell dead one after the other, and several municipal guards, wounded in the Rue des Lombards, recoiled. In front of the Cour Batave, a detachment of National Guards found a red flag, bearing this inscription, "Republican Revolution, No. 127." Was it really a revolution? The insurrection had made of the heart of Paris a sort of inextricable, tortuous, and colossal citadel; there was the nucleus, there the question would be solved; all the rest was merely skirmishing. The proof that all would be decided there lay in the fact that fighting had not yet begun there.
In some regiments the troops were uncertain, which added to the startling obscurity of the crisis; and they remembered the popular ovation which, in July, 1830, greeted the neutrality of the 53d line. Two intrepid men, tried by the great wars, Marshal de Lobau and General Bugeaud, commanded,—Bugeaud under Lobau. Enormous patrols, composed of battalions of the line enclosed in entire companies of the National Guard, and preceded by the Police Commissary in his scarf, went to reconnoitre the insurgent streets. On their side, the insurgents posted-vedettes at the corner of the streets, and audaciously sent patrols beyond the barricades. Both sides were observing each other; the Government, with an army in its hand, hesitated, night was setting in, and the tocsin of St. Mary was beginning to be heard. Marshal Soult, the Minister of War at that day, who had seen Austerlitz, looked at all this with a gloomy air. These old sailors, habituated to correct manœuvres, and having no other resource and guide but tactics, the compass of battles, are completely thrown out when in the presence of that immense foam which is called the public anger. The wind of revolutions is not favorable for sailing. The National Guards of the suburbs ran up hastily and disorderly; a battalion of the 12th Light Infantry came at the double from St. Denis; the 14th line arrived from Courbevoie, the batteries of the military school had taken up position at the Carrousel, and guns were brought in from Vincennes.
Solitude set in at the Tuileries. Louis Philippe was full of serenity.
On reaching St. Jean market, the post at which had been disarmed already, Gavroche proceeded "to effect his junction" with a band led by Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Feuilly. They were all more or less armed, and Bahorel and Prouvaire had joined them, and swelled the group. Enjolras had a double-barrelled fowling-piece, Combeferre a National Guard's musket bearing the number of a legion, and in his waist-belt two pistols, which his unbuttoned coat allowed to be seen; Jean Prouvaire an old cavalry carbine, and Bahorel a rifle; Courfeyrac brandished a sword drawn from a cane, while Feuilly with a naked sabre in his hand walked along shouting. "Long live Poland! They reached the Quai Morland without neck-cloths or hats, panting for breath, drenched with rain, but with lightning in their eyes. Gavroche calmly approached them,—
"Where are we going?"
"Come," said Courfeyrac.
Behind Feuilly marched or rather bounded Bahorel, a fish in the water of revolt. He had a crimson waistcoat, and uttered words which smash everything. His waistcoat upset a passer-by, who cried wildly, "Here are the reds!"
"The reds, the reds!" Bahorel answered; "that's a funny fear, citizen. For my part, I do not tremble at a poppy, and the little red cap does not inspire me with any terror. Citizen, believe me, we had better leave a fear of the red to horned cattle."
He noticed a corner wall, on which was placarded the most peaceful piece of paper in the world, a permission to eat eggs, a Lent mandamus addressed by the Archbishop of Paris to his "flock." Bahorel exclaimed,—
"A flock! a polite way of saying geese." And he tore the paper down. This conquered Gavroche, and from this moment he began studying Bahorel.
"Bahorel," Enjolras observed, "you are wrong; you should have left that order alone, for we have nothing to do with it, and you uselessly expended your anger. Keep your stock by you; a man does not fire out of the ranks any more with his mind than with his gun."
"Every man has his own way, Enjolras," Bahorel replied; "the bishop's prose offends me, and I insist on eating eggs without receiving permission to do so. Yours is the cold burning style, while I amuse myself; moreover, I am not expending myself, but getting the steam up, and if I tore that order down, Hercle! it is to give me an appetite."
This word hercle struck Gavroche, for he sought every opportunity of instructing himself, and this tearing down of posters possessed his esteem. Hence he asked,—
"What's the meaning of hercle?"
Bahorel answered,—
"It means cursed name of a dog in latin."
Here Bahorel noticed at a window a pale young man, with a black beard, who was watching them pass, probably a Friend of the A. B. C He shouted to him,—
"Quick with the cartridges, para bellum!"
"A handsome man [bel homme], that's true," said Gavroche, who now comprehended Latin.
A tumultuous crowd accompanied them,—students, artists, young men affiliated to the Cougourde of Aix, artisans, and lightermen, armed with sticks and bayonets, and some, like Combeferre, with pistols passed through their trouser-belt. An old man, who appeared very aged, marched in this band; he had no weapon, and hurried on, that he might not be left behind, though he looked thoughtful. Gavroche perceived him.
"Keksekça?" said he to Courfeyrac.
"That is an antique."
It was M. Mabœuf.
Bahorel, delighted with the barricade, exclaimed, "How well the street looks décolleté!"
Courfeyrac, while gradually demolishing the public-house, tried to console the widowed landlady.
"Mother Hucheloup, were you not complaining the other day that you had been summoned by the police, because Gibelotte shook a counterpane out of the window?"
"Yes, my good Monsieur Courfeyrac. Ah! good gracious! are you going to put that table too in your horror? Yes, and the Government also condemned me to a fine of one hundred francs on account of a flower-pot that fell out of the garret into the street. Is that not abominable?"
"Well, Mother Hucheloup, we are going to avenge you."
Mother Hucheloup did not exactly see the advantage accruing to her from the reparation made her. She was satisfied after the fashion of the Arab woman who, having received a box on the ears from her husband, went to complain to her father, crying vengeance, and saying, "Father, you owe my husband affront for affront." The father asked, "On which cheek did you receive the blow?" "On the left cheek." The father boxed her right cheek, and said, "Now you must be satisfied. Go and tell your husband that he buffeted my daughter, but I have buffeted his wife." The rain had ceased, and recruits began to arrive. Artisans brought under their blouses a barrel of gunpowder, a hamper containing carboys of vitriol, two or three carnival torches, and a basket full of lamps, "remaining from the king's birthday," which was quite recent, as it was celebrated on May 1. It was said that this ammunition was sent by a grocer in the Faubourg St. Antoine named Pépin. The only lantern in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and all those in the surrounding streets, were broken. Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac directed everything, and now two barricades were erected simultaneously, both of which were supported by Corinth and formed a square; the larger one closed the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and the smaller the Rue Mondétour on the side of the Rue du Cygne. This latter barricade, which was very narrow, was merely made of barrels and paving-stones. There were about fifty workmen there, of whom three were armed with guns, for on the road they had borrowed a gunsmith's entire stock.
Nothing could be stranger or more motley than this group: one had a sleeved waistcoat, a cavalry sabre, and a pair of holster pistols; another was in shirt-sleeves, with a round hat, and a powder-flask hung at his side; while a third was cuirassed with nine sheets of gray paper, and was armed with a saddler's awl. There was one who shouted, "Let us exterminate to the last, and die on the point of our bayonet!" This man had no bayonet. Another displayed over his coat the belts and pouch of a National Guard, with these words sewn in red worsted on the cover, "Public order." There were many muskets, bearing the numbers of legions, few hats, no neckties, a great many bare arms, and a few pikes; add to this all ages, all faces, short pale youths, and bronzed laborers at the docks. All were in a hurry, and while assisting each other, talked about the possible chances,—that they were sure of one regiment, and Paris would rise. There were terrible remarks, with which a sort of cordial joviality was mingled; they might have been taken for brothers, though they did not know one another's names. Great dangers have this beauty about them, that they throw light on the fraternity of strangers.
A fire was lighted in the kitchen, and men were melting in a bullet-mould, bowls, spoons, forks, and all the pewter articles of the public-house. They drank while doing this, and caps and slugs lay pell-mell on the table with glasses of wine. In the billiard-room Mame Hucheloup, Matelote, and Gibelotte, variously affected by terror,—as one was brutalized by it, another had her breath stopped, while the third was awakened,—were tearing up old sheets and making lint; three insurgents helped them,—three hairy, bearded, and moustached fellows, who pulled the linen asunder with the fingers of a sempstress and made them tremble. The tall man, whom Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Enjolras had noticed as he joined the band at the corner of the Rue des Billetes, was working at the small barricade and making himself useful; Gavroche was working at the large one; and as for the young man who had waited for Courfeyrac at his lodgings and asked after M. Marius, he disappeared just about the time when the omnibus was overthrown.
Gavroche, who was perfectly radiant, had taken the arrangements on himself; he came, went, ascended, descended, went up again, rustled and sparkled. He seemed to be there for the encouragement of all. Had he a spur? Certainly, in his misery. Had he wings? Certainly, in his joy. Gavroche was a whirlwind; he was seen incessantly, and constantly heard, and he filled the air, being everywhere at once. He was a sort of almost irritating ubiquity, and it was impossible to stop with him. The enormous barricade felt him on its crupper; he annoyed the idlers, excited the slothful, reanimated the fatigued, vexed the thoughtful, rendered some gay and gave others time to breathe, set some in a passion and all in motion; he piqued a student and stung a workman; he halted, then started again, flew over the turmoil and the efforts, leaped from one to the other, murmured, buzzed, and harassed the whole team; he was the fly of the immense revolutionary coach. Perpetual movement was in his little arms, and perpetual clamor in his little lungs.
"Push ahead; more paving-stones, more barrels, more vehicles! Where are there any? We want a hodload of plaster to stop up this hole. Your barricade is very small, and must mount. Put everything into it; smash up the house; a barricade is Mother Gibou's tea. Hilloh! there's a glass door."
This made the workmen exclaim,—
"A glass door! What would you have us do with that, tubercule?"
"Hercules yourselves," Gavroche retorted; "a glass door in a barricade is excellent, for though it does not prevent the attack, it makes it awkward to take it. Have you never boned apples over a wall on which there was broken glass? A glass door cuts the corns of the National Guards when they try to climb up the barricade. By Job! glass is treacherous. Well, you fellows have no very bright imagination."
He was furious with his useless pistol, and went from one to the other, saying, "A gun! I want a gun! Why don't you give me a gun?"
"A gun for you?" said Combeferre.
"Well, why not?" Gavroche answered; "I had one in 1830, when we quarrelled with Charles X."
Enjolras shrugged his shoulders.
"When all the men have guns we will give them to boys."
Gavroche turned firmly, and answered him,—
"If you are killed before me I will take yours."
"Gamin!" said Enjolras.
"Puppy!" said Gavroche.
A dandy lounging past the end of the street created a diversion; Gavroche shouted to him,—
"Come to us, young man! What, will you do nothing for your old country?"
The dandy fled.
Marius, still concealed at the corner of the Rue Mondétour, had watched the first phase of the combat with shuddering irresolution. Still he was unable to resist for any length of time that mysterious and sovereign dizziness which might be called the appeal from the abyss; and at the sight of the imminence of the peril, of M. Mabœuf's death, that mournful enigma, Bahorel killed, Courfeyrac shouting for help, this child menaced, and his friends to succor or revenge, all hesitation vanished, and he rushed into the medley, pistols in hand. With the first shot he saved Gavroche, and with the second delivered Courfeyrac. On hearing the shots, and the cries of the guards, the assailants swarmed up the intrenchment, over the crest of which could now be seen more than half the bodies of Municipal Guards, troops of the line, and National Guards from the suburbs, musket in hand. They already covered more than two thirds of the barricade, but no longer leaped down into the enclosure, and hesitated, as if they feared some snare. They looked down into the gloomy space as they would have peered into a lion's den; and the light of the torch only illumined bayonets, bearskin shakos, and anxious and irritated faces.
Marius had no longer a weapon, as he had thrown away his discharged pistols; but he had noticed the barrel of gunpowder near the door of the ground-floor room. As he half turned to look in that direction a soldier levelled his musket at him, and at the moment when the soldier was taking steady aim at Marius, a hand was laid on the muzzle of his musket and stopped it up; the young workman in the velvet trousers had rushed forward. The shot was fired, the bullet passed through the hand, and probably through the workman, for he fell, but it did not hit Marius. Marius, who was entering the wine-shop, hardly noticed this; still he had confusedly seen the gun pointed at him, and the hand laid on the muzzle, and had heard the explosion. But in minutes like this things that men see vacillate, and they do not dwell on anything, for they feel themselves obscurely impelled toward deeper shadows still, and all is mist. The insurgents, surprised but not terrified, had rallied, and Enjolras cried, "Wait; do not throw away your shots!" and, in truth, in the first moment of confusion they might wound each other. The majority had gone up to the first-floor and attic windows, whence they commanded the assailants; but the more determined, with Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, and Combeferre, were haughtily standing against the houses at the end, unprotected, and facing the lines of soldiers and guards who crowned the barricade. All this was done without precipitation, and with that strange and menacing gravity which precedes a combat; on both sides men were aiming at each other within point-blank range, and they were so near that they could converse. When they were at the point where the spark was about to shoot forth, an officer wearing a gorget and heavy epaulettes stretched out his sword and said,—
"Throw down your arms!"
"Fire!" Enjolras commanded.
The two detonations took place at the same moment, and everything disappeared in smoke,—a sharp and stifling smoke,—in which the dying and the wounded writhed, with faint and hollow groans. When the smoke dispersed, the two lines of combatants could be seen thinned, but at the same spot, and silently reloading their guns. All at once a thundering voice was heard shouting,—
"Begone, or I will blow up the barricade!"
All turned to the quarter whence the voice came.
Marius had entered the wine-shop, fetched the barrel of gunpowder, and then, taking advantage of the smoke and obscure mist which filled the intrenched space, glided along the barricade up to the cage of paving-stones in which the torch was fixed. To tear out the torch, place in its stead the barrel of powder, throw down the pile of paving-stones on the barrel, which was at once unheaded with a sort of terrible obedience, had only occupied so much time as stooping and rising again; and now all, National Guards and Municipal Guards, officers and privates, collected at the other end of the barricade, gazed at him in stupor, as he stood with one foot on the paving-stones, the torch in his hand, his haughty face illumined by a fatal resolution, approaching the flame of the torch to the formidable heap, in which the broken powder-barrel could be distinguished, and uttering the terrifying cry,—
"Begone, or I will blow up the barricade!"
Marius, on this barricade after the octogenarian, was the vision of the young revolution after the apparition of the old one.
"Blow up the barricade!" a sergeant said, "and yourself too!"
Marius answered, "And myself too!"
And he lowered the torch toward the barrel of gunpowder; but there was no one left on the barricade. The assailants, leaving their dead and their wounded, fell back pell-mell and in disorder to the end of the street, and disappeared again in the night. It was a sauve qui peut.
The barricade was saved.
In the mean while an adventure had happened to Gavroche; after conscientiously stoning the lamp in the Rue du Chaume, he approached the Rue des Vieilles Haudriettes, and not seeing "a cat" there, found the opportunity excellent for striking up a song at the full pitch of his lungs. His march, far from being checked by the singing, became accelerated, and he sowed along the sleeping or terrified houses the following incendiary verses:—
"L'oiseau médit dans les charmilles,
Et prétend qu'hier Atala
Avec un Russe s'en alla.
Où vont les belles filles,
Lon la.
"Mon ami Pierrot, tu babilles,
Parce que l'autre jour Mila
Cogna sa vitre, et m'appela.
Où vont les belles filles,
Lon la.
"Les drôlesses sont fort gentilles,
Leur poison qui m'ensorcela
Griserait Monsieur Orfila.
Où vont les belles filles,
Lon la.
"J'aime l'amour et ses bisbilles,
J'aime Agnès, j'aime Paméla,
Lise en m'allumant se brûla.
Où vont les belles filles,
Lon la.
"Jadis, quand je vis les mantilles
De Suzette et de Zéila,
Mon âme à leurs plis se mêla.
Où vont les belles filles,
Lon la.
"Amour, quand, dans l'ombre où tu brilles,
Tu coiffes de roses Lola,
Je me damnerais pour cela.
Où vont les belles filles,
Lon la.
"Jeanne, à ton miroir tu t'habilles!
Mon cœur un beau jour s'envola;
Je crois que c'est Jeanne qui l'a.
Où vont les belles filles,
Lon la.
"Le soir, en sortant des quadrilles,
Je montre aux étoiles Stella,
Et je leur dis: 'Regardez-la.'
Où vont les belles filles,
Lon la."
Gavroche, while singing, was lavish of his pantomime, for gesture is the mainstay of a chorus. His face, an inexhaustible repertory of masks, made grimaces more convulsive and more fantastic than the mouths of a torn sheet in a stiff breeze. Unluckily, as he was alone and in the dark, this was neither seen nor visible. Much wealth is lost in this way. Suddenly he stopped short.
"We must interrupt the romance," he said.
His catlike eye had just distinguished inside a gateway what is called in painting an ensemble, that is to say, a being and a thing; the thing was a handcart, the being an Auvergnat sleeping inside it. The shafts of the cart were upon the pavement, and the Auvergnat's head leaned on the backboard of the truck. His body lay along this inclined plane, and his feet touched the ground. Gavroche, with his experience of the things of this world, recognized a drunkard: it was some street-corner porter who had drunk too much and was sleeping too much.
"Such is the use," Gavroche thought, "to which summer nights may be turned. The Auvergnat sleeps in his truck. I take the truck for the republic, and leave the Auvergnat for the monarchy."
His mind had just been illumined by this flash.
"That truck would be famous on our barricade!"
The Auvergnat was snoring. Gavroche gently pulled the truck behind and the Auvergnat in front, that is to say, by the feet, and in a second the porter was lying imperturbably flat on the pavement. The truck was liberated. Gavroche, accustomed constantly to face unexpected events, had always everything about him. He felt in one of his pockets and pulled out a scrap of paper and a piece of red pencil stolen from some carpenter. He wrote
République Française
Received this truck.
And he signed, GAVROCHE.
This done, he placed the paper in the snoring porter's velvet waistcoat pocket, seized the handcart, and started in the direction of the markets, thrusting the truck before him at a gallop with a glorious triumphal row. This was dangerous, for there was a post at the Royal Printing Office, and Gavroche did not think of that. This post was held by suburban National Guards; a certain amount of alarm was beginning to arouse the squad, and heads were raised in the guard-beds. Two lamps broken so shortly after each other, and this singing at the pitch of the lungs, were a good deal for these cowardly streets, which like to go to bed at sunset, and put the extinguisher on their candle at so early an hour. For an hour past the gamin had been making in this peaceful district the noise of a fly in a bottle. The suburban sergeant listened and waited, for he was a prudent man. The wild rolling of the truck filled up the measure of possible awaiting, and determined the sergeant to attempt a reconnoisance.
"There must be a whole band of them," he said, "so we will advance gently."
It was clear that the hydra of anarchy had emerged from its box, and was playing the deuce in the quarter, so the sergeant ventured out of the guard-house on tiptoe. All at once, Gavroche, pushing his truck, found himself, just as he was turning out of the Rue des Vieilles Haudriettes, face to face with a uniform, a shako, a pompon, and a musket. For the second time he stopped short.
"Hilloh!" he said, "it's he. Good-day, public order."
Gavroche's surprises were short and rapidly thawed.
"Where are you going, scamp?" the sergeant cried.
"Citizen," said Gavroche, "I have not yet called you bourgeois, so why do you insult me?"
"Where are you going, scoundrel?"
"Sir," Gavroche continued, "it is possible that you were a man of sense yesterday, but you must have sent in your resignation this morning."
"I ask you where you are going, villain?"
Gavroche answered,—
"You speak politely. Really, no one would fancy you that age. You ought to sell your hair at one hundred francs apiece, and that would bring you in five hundred francs."
"Where are you going, where are you going, where are you going, bandit?"
Gavroche retorted,—
"Those are ugly words. The first time they give you the breast they ought to wash your mouth out better."
The sergeant levelled his bayonet.
"Will you tell me where you are going or not, wretch?"
"My general," said Gavroche, "I am going to fetch the doctor for my wife, who is taken in labor."
"To arms!" the sergeant shouted.
It is the masterpiece of powerful minds to save themselves by what has ruined them; and Gavroche measured the whole situation at a glance. It was the truck that had compromised him, and so the truck must now protect him. At the moment when the sergeant was going to rush on Gavroche, the truck, converted into a projectile and launched at full speed, rolled upon him furiously, and the sergeant, struck in the stomach, fell back into the gutter, while his musket was discharged in the air. On hearing their sergeant's cry, the guard hurried forth pell-mell; the shot produced a general discharge blindly, after which the guns were reloaded, and they began again. This blindman's buff firing lasted a good quarter of an hour, and killed sundry panes of glass. In the mean while, Gavroche, who had turned back, stopped five or six streets off, and sat down panting on the bench at the corner of the Enfants Rouges, and listened. After breathing for a few minutes, he turned in the direction where the musketry was raging, raised his left hand to the level of his nose, and thrust it out thrice, while striking the back of his head with his right hand,—a sovereign gesture, in which the Parisian gamins have condensed French irony, and which is evidently effective, as it has already lasted more than half a century. This gayety was troubled by a bitter reflection.
"Yes," he said, "I am delighted, I overflow with joy, I crack my sides, but I am losing my way, and shall be obliged to steer a roundabout course. I only hope I shall reach the barricade betimes."
After saying this he ran off again, and while running asked himself, "Where was I?" and he began his song again, which gradually died out in the darkness of the streets.
"Mais il reste encor des bastilles,
Et je vais mettre le holà
Dans l'ordre public que voilà.
Où vont les belles filles,
Lon la.
"Quelqu'un veut-il jouer aux quilles?
Tout l'ancien monde s'écroula,
Quand la grosse boule roula.
Où vont les belles filles,
Lon la.
"Vieux bon peuple, à coups de béquilles,
Cassons ce Louvre où s'étala
La monarchie en falbala.
Où vont les belles filles,
Lon la.
"Nous en avons forcé les grilles,
Le roi Charles-Dix ce jour-là
Tenait mal, et se décolla.
Où vont les belles filles,
Lon la."
The turn-out of the Guard produced some results, for a truck was captured and the drunkard made prisoner. The first was placed in the Green Yard, while the second was afterwards brought before a court-martial as an accomplice. The public minister of that day displayed in this circumstance his indefatigable zeal in the defence of society. Gavroche's adventure, which has remained as a tradition in the Temple quarter, is one of the most terrible reminiscences of the old bourgeois of the Marais, and is entitled in their memory,—"The night attack on the guard-house of the Royal Printing Office."
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