Les Misérables, v. 3/5: Marius

by Victor Hugo

  The cry "Audace!" is a _Fiat lux_. In order that the human race mayprogress, it must have proved lessons of courage permanently beforeit. Rashness dazzles history, and is one of the great brightnesses ofman. The dawn dares when it breaks. To attempt, to brave, persist,and persevere, to be faithful to one's self, to wrestle with destiny,to astound the catastrophe by the slight fear which it causes us, atone moment to confront unjust power, at another to insult intoxicatedvictory, to hold firm and withstand,--such is the example which peopleneed and which electrifies them. The same formidable flash goes fromthe torch of Prometheus to the short clay pipe of Cambronne.

  CHAPTER XII.

  THE FUTURE LATENT IN THE PEOPLE.

  As for the Parisian people, even when full grown, it is always thegamin. Depicting the lad is depicting the city, and that is the reasonwhy we have studied the eagle in the sparrow.

  The Parisian race, we say again, is found most truly in the faubourg;there it is pure-blooded, there we find the real physiognomy, therethe people work and suffer, and toil and suffering are the two facesof the man. There are there immense numbers of strange beings, amongwhom may be found the wildest types, from the porter of la Râpée to thequarryman of Montfauçon. _Fœx urbis_, Cicero exclaims; "Mob," Burkeadds, indignantly; a crowd, a multitude, a population,--these wordsare quickly uttered; but no matter! what do I care that they go aboutbarefoot? They cannot read; all the worse. Will you abandon them onthat account? Will you convert their distress into a curse? Cannotlight penetrate these masses? Let us revert to that cry of light,and insist upon it, light, light! who knows whether this opaquenessmay not become transparent? For are not revolutions themselvestransfigurations? Come, philosophers, teach, enlighten, illumine,think aloud, speak loudly, run joyfully into the sunshine, fraternizewith the public places, announce the glad tidings, spread alphabetsaround, proclaim the right, sing the Marseillaise, sow enthusiasm, andpluck green branches from the oaks. Make a whirlwind of the idea. Thiscrowd may be sublimated, so let us learn how to make use of that vastconflagration of principles and virtues which crackles and bursts intoa flame at certain hours. These bare feet, these naked arms, theserags, this ignorance, this abjectness, this darkness, may be employedfor the conquest of the ideal. Look through the people, and you willperceive the truth; the vile sand which you trample under foot, whencast into the furnace and melted will become splendid crystal, and byits aid Galileo and Newton discover planets.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  LITTLE GAVROCHE.

  Eight or nine years after the events recorded in the second portion ofthis story, there might be noticed on the Boulevard du Temple and inthe regions of the Château d'Eau, a boy of about eleven or twelve yearsof age, who would have tolerably well realized the ideal of a gaminas sketched above, had he not had, with the smile of his age on hislips, a heart absolutely gloomy and void. This child was dressed in aman's trousers, but he had not got them from his father, and a woman'sjacket, which did not come from his mother. Some persons had clothedhim in rags out of charity. Yet he had a father and a mother, but hisfather did not think of him and his mother did not love him. He was oneof those children worthy of pity before all, who have father and motherand are orphans.

  This child was never so comfortable anywhere as in the street, forthe paving-stones were less hard to him than his mother's heart. Hisparents had kicked him out into life, and he had simply tried hiswings. He was a noisy, pale, active, sharp, impudent lad, with acunning and sickly look. He came and went, sang, played at hop-scotch,searched the gutters, pilfered a little, but gayly, like cats andsparrows, laughed when he was called a scamp, and felt angry whencalled a thief. He had no bed, no bread, no fire, no love: but he washappy because he was free. When these poor beings are men, the millof social order nearly always crushes them: but so long as they arechildren they escape because they are small. The slightest hole savesthem.

  Still, abandoned as this child was, it happened every two or threemonths that he said,--"Well, I'll go and see mamma." Then he quittedthe boulevard, the circus, the Porte St. Martin, went along the quay,crossed the bridge, reached the Salpêtrière, and arrived where? Exactlyat that double No. 50-52, which the reader knows,--the Maison Gorbeau.At this period No. 50-52, which was habitually deserted and eternallydecorated with a bill of "Lodgings to Let," was, strange to say,inhabited by several persons who had no acquaintance with each other,as is always the case in Paris. All belonged to that indigent classwhich begins with the last small tradesman in difficulties, and isprolonged from wretchedness to wretchedness to those two beings to whomall the material things of civilization descend,--the scavenger and therag-picker.

  The chief lodger of Jean Valjean's day was dead, and her place had beentaken by another exactly like her. I forget now what philosopher said,"There is never any want of old women." This new old woman was calledMadame Burgon, and had nothing remarkable in her life save a dynasty ofthree parrots, which had successively reigned over her soul. The mostwretched of all the persons inhabiting the house were a family of fourpersons, father, mother, and two nearly grown-up daughters, all fourliving in the same attic, one of the cells to which we have alluded.

  This family offered at the first glance nothing very peculiar beyondits poverty; and the father, on hiring the room, stated that hisname was Jondrette. A short time after he moved in, which had bornea striking resemblance--to employ the memorable remark of the chieflodger--to the coming in of nothing at all, this Jondrette had said tothe woman, who, like her predecessor, was also portress and swept thestairs, "Mother So-and-so, if any one were to ask by chance for a Pole,or an Italian, or perhaps a Spaniard, I am the party."

  This was the family of the merry little vagabond. He joined it, andfound distress, and, what is sadder still, not a smile; a cold hearthand cold heart. When he entered, they asked him, "Where do you comefrom?" and he answered, "From the street:" when he went away, "Whereare you going?" and he answered, "To the street." His mother wouldsay to him, "What do you want here?" The boy lived in this absenceof affection like the pale grass which grows in cellars. He was nothurt by its being so, and was not angry with any one: he did not knowexactly how a father and mother ought to be. Moreover, his mother lovedhis sisters.

  We have forgotten to mention that on the boulevard the lad was calledLittle Gavroche. Why was he called Gavroche? Probably because hisfather's name was Jondrette. Breaking the thread seems the instinct ofsome wretched families. The room which the Jondrettes occupied at theMaison Gorbeau was the last in the passage, and the cell next to it wasoccupied by a very poor young man of the name of Monsieur Marius. Letus state who this Monsieur Marius was.

  BOOK II.

  LE GRAND BOURGEOIS.

  CHAPTER I.

  NINETY YEARS AND TWO-AND-THIRTY TEETH.

  There are still a few persons residing in the Rue Boucherat, Rue deNormandie, and Rue de Saintonge, who can remember a gentleman of thename of M. Gillenormand, and speak kindly about him. This good man wasold when they were young. This profile has not entirely disappeared,with those who look sadly at the vague congregation of shadows calledthe past, from the labyrinth of streets near the Temple, which in thereign of Louis XIV. received the names of all the provinces of France,exactly in the same way as in our time the names of all the capitalsof Europe have been given to the streets in the new Tivoli quarter; aprogression, by the bye, in which progress is visible.

  M. Gillenormand, who was most lively in 1831, was one of those menwho have become curious to look on solely because they have lived along time, and are strange because they once resembled everybody andnow no longer resemble any one. He was a peculiar old man, and mostcertainly the man of another age, the genuine, perfect bourgeois ofthe 18th century, who carried his honest old bourgeoisie with the sameair as Marquises did their marquisate. He had passed his ninetiethyear, walked upright, talked loudly, saw clearly, drank heartily, andate, slept, and snored. He still had his two-and-thirty teeth, andonly wore spectacles to read with. He was of an amorous temper, buts
aid that for the last ten years he had decidedly and entirely givenup the sex. "He could not please," he said: and he did not add "I amtoo old," but "I am too poor. If I were not ruined--he, he, he!" Infact, all that was left him was an income of about fifteen thousandfrancs. His dream was to make a large inheritance, and have one hundredthousand francs a year, in order to keep mistresses. As we see, hedid not belong to that weak variety of octogenarians, who, like M. deVoltaire, were dying all their life; his longevity was not that of thecracked jug, and this jolly old gentleman had constantly enjoyed goodhealth. He was superficial, rapidly and easily angered, and he wouldstorm at the slightest thing, most usually an absurd trifle. When hewas contradicted, he raised his cane and thrashed his people, as folkused to do in the great age. He had a daughter, upwards of fifty yearsof age and unmarried, whom he gave a hearty thrashing to when he wasin a passion, and whom he would have liked to whip, for he fancied hereight years of age. He boxed his servant's ears energetically, andwould say, "Ah, carrion!" One of his oaths was, "By the _pantoflouche_of the _pantouflochade_!" His tranquillity was curious; he was shavedevery morning by a barber who had been mad and who detested him, forhe was jealous of M. Gillenormand on account of his wife, who was apretty little coquette. M. Gillenormand admired his own discernment ineverything, and declared himself extremely sagacious. Here is one ofhis remarks,--"I have in truth some penetration. I am able to say, whena flea bites me, from what woman I caught it." The words he employedmost frequently were "the sensitive man" and "nature," but he did notgive to the latter word the vast acceptation of our age. But there wasa certain amount of homeliness in his satirical remarks. "Nature," hewould say, "anxious that civilization may have a little of everything,even gives it specimens of amusing barbarism. Europe has specimens ofAsia and Africa in a reduced size; the cat is a drawing-room tiger,the lizard a pocket crocodile. The ballet girls at the opera arepink savages; they do not eat men, but they live on them: the littlemagicians change them into oysters and swallow them. The Caribsonly leave the bones, and they only leave the shells. Such are ourmanners; we do not devour, but we nibble; we do not exterminate, but wescratch."

  CHAPTER II.

  LIKE MASTER, LIKE HOME.

  He lived in the Marais, at No. 6 Rue des Filles de Calvaire, and thehouse belonged to him. This house has since been pulled down andrebuilt, and the number has probably been changed in the numberingrevolutions which the streets of Paris undergo. He occupied an oldand vast suite of rooms on the first floor, furnished up to theceiling with large Gobelins and Beauvais tapestry, representingshepherd scenes; the subjects of the ceiling and panels were repeatedin miniature upon the chairs. He surrounded his bed with an immensescreen of Coromandel lacquer-work; long curtains hung from the windows,and made very splendid, large, broken folds. The garden immediatelyunder the windows was reached by a flight of twelve or fifteen stepsrunning from one of them, which the old gentleman went up and downvery nimbly. In addition to a library adjoining his bed-room, he hada boudoir, which he was very fond of, a gallant withdrawing-roomhung with a magnificent fleur-de-lysed tapestry, made in the galleysof Louis XIV., which M. de Vivonne had ordered of his convicts forhis mistress. M. Gillenormand inherited this from a stern maternalgreat-aunt, who died at the age of one hundred. He had had two wives.His manners were midway between those of the courtier, which he hadnever been, and of the barrister, which he might have been. He was gayand pleasing when he liked; in his youth he had been one of those menwho are always deceived by their wives and never by their mistresses,because they are at once the most disagreeable husbands and the mostcharming lovers imaginable. He was a connoisseur of pictures, and hadin his bed-room a marvellous portrait of somebody unknown, painted byJordaens with bold strokes of the brush, and with an infinitude ofdetails. M. Gillenormand's coat was not in the style of Louis XV.,or even Louis XVI., but it was in the style of the exquisites of theDirectory. He had believed himself quite a youth at that time, andfollowed the fashions. His coat was of light cloth with large cuffs, along codfish tail, and large steel buttons. Add to these knee-breechesand buckle-shoes. He always had his hands in his fobs, and saidauthoritatively, "The French Revolution is a collection of ruffians."

  CHAPTER III.

  LUC ESPRIT.

  At the age of sixteen, when at the opera one night, he had the honor ofbeing examined simultaneously by two beauties, at that time, celebratedand sung by Voltaire,--la Camargo, and la Salle. Caught between twofires, he beat an heroic retreat towards a little dancing--girl ofthe name of Naheury, sixteen years of age, like himself, obscure as acat, of whom he was enamoured. He abounded in recollections, and wouldexclaim, "How pretty that Guimard-Guimardini-Guimardinette was, thelast time I saw her at Longchamps, with her hair dressed in 'sustainedfeelings,' her 'come and see them' of turquoises, her dress of thecolor of 'newly-arrived people,' and her muff of 'agitation.'" He hadworn in his youth a jacket of Nain-Londeur, to which he was fond ofalluding: "I was dressed like a Turk of the Levantine Levant." MadameBoufflers, seeing him accidentally when he was twenty years of age,declared him to be "a charming madcap." He was scandalized at allthe names he saw in politics and power, and considered them low andbourgeois. He read the journals, the _newspapers,_ the _gazettes_, ashe called them, and burst into a laugh. "Oh!" he would say, "who arethese people? Corbière! Humann! Casimir Périer! There's a ministry foryou! I can imagine this in a paper,--M. Gillenormand, Minister; itwould be a farce, but they are so stupid that it might easily happen."He lightly called everything by its proper or improper name, and wasnot checked by the presence of ladies; and he uttered coarseness,obscenity, and filth with a peculiarly calm and slightly amazed accentin which was elegance. Such was the loose manner of the age. It is tobe remarked that the season of circumlocution in verse was that ofcrudities in prose. His grandfather had predicted that he would be aman of genius, and gave him the two significant Christian names, LucEsprit.

  CHAPTER IV.

  AN ASPIRING CENTENARIAN,

  He gained prizes in his youth at the college of Moulins, in which townhe was born, and was crowned by the hand of the Due de Nivernais,whom he called the Due de Nevers. Neither the Convention, the deathof Louis XVI., Napoleon, nor the return of the Bourbons, had effacedthe recollection of this coronation. The Due de Nevers was to him thegrand figure of the age. "What a charming nobleman!" he would say, "andhow well his blue ribbon became him!" In the eyes of M. Gillenormand,Catherine II. repaired the crime of the division of Poland bypurchasing of Bestucheff, for three thousand roubles, the secret of theelixir of gold, and on this point he would grow animated. "The elixirof gold!" he would exclaim. "Bestucheff's yellow tincture and thedrops of General Lamotte were, in the 18th century, at one louis thehalf-ounce bottle, the grand remedy for love catastrophes, the panaceaagainst Venus. Louis XV. sent two hundred bottles of it to the Pope."He would have been greatly exasperated had he been told that the goldelixir is nothing but perchloride of iron. M. Gillenormand adored theBourbons, and held 1789 in horror; he incessantly described in whatway he had escaped during the Reign of Terror, and how he had beenobliged to display great gayety and wit in order not to have his headcut off. If any young man dared in his presence to praise the Republic,he turned blue, and grew so angry as almost to faint. Sometimes healluded to his ninety years, and said, "I trust that I shall not seeninety-three twice." At other times, he informed persons that heintended to live to be a hundred.

  CHAPTER V.

  BASQUE AND NICOLETTE.

  He had his theories; here is one of them: "When a man passionatelyloves women, and himself has a wife for whom he cares little,--a wifethat is ugly, legitimate, full of her rights, reliant on the Code, andjealous when she likes to be so, he has only one way of getting outof the hobble and living at peace; it is to leave his purse--stringsto his wife. This abdication renders him free; the wife is henceforthoccupied, grows passionately fond of handling specie, verdigrises herfingers, undertakes to instruct the peasants and train the farmers,harangues the notaries, visits the
ir offices, follows the course oflawsuits, draws up leases, dictates contracts, knows she is absolute,sells, buys, regulates, orders, promises and compromises, yields,concedes and recedes, arranges, deranges, saves, and squanders; shecommits follies, and this affords her supreme personal pleasure andconsolation. While her husband disregards her she has the satisfactionof ruining her husband." This theory M. Gillenormand applied tohimself, and it became his history. His wife, the second one, managedhis fortune in such a manner that one fine day when he found himselfa widower, he had just enough to live on, by buying an annuity, threefourths of which would expire with him. He had not hesitated, for hedid not care much about leaving anything to his heir, and, besides,he had seen that patrimonies had their adventures, and, for instance,became "National Property;" he had seen the avatars of the three percent consols, and put but little faith in the great Book. "All thatis Rue Quincampoix!" he would say. His house in the Rue des Filles duCalvaire belonged, as we stated, to him, and he had, two servants,"a he and a she." When a servant came into his house M. Gillenormandrechristened him, and gave the men the name of their province, Nîmois,Comtois, Poitevin, or Picard. His last valet was a fat cunning man offifty-five, incapable of running twenty yards; but as he was born atBayonne, M. Gillenormand called him Basque. As for the maid-servants,he called them all Nicolette (even la Magnon, to whom we shallallude directly). One day a bold cook, a Cordon Bleu, of the proudconcierge race, presented herself "What wages do you expect a month?"M. Gillenormand asked her. "Thirty francs." "What is your name?""Olympie." "I will give you forty, and call you Nicolette."