Les Misérables, v. 3/5: Marius

by Victor Hugo

  At this moment the leg of a black trouser appeared against thewindow-pane of the _coupé_.

  "Can it be Marius?" the Lieutenant said.

  It was Marius. A little peasant girl was offering flowers to thepassengers, and crying, "Bouquets for your ladies." Marius went up toher, and bought the finest flowers in her basket.

  "By Jove!" said Théodule, as he leaped out of the _coupé_, "the affairis growing piquant. Who the deuce is he going to carry those flowersto? She must be a deucedly pretty woman to deserve so handsome abouquet. I must have a look at her."

  And then he began following Marius, no longer by order, but throughpersonal curiosity, like those dogs which hunt on their own account.Marius paid no attention to Théodule. Some elegant women were gettingout of the diligence, but he did not look at them; he seemed to seenothing around him.

  "He must be preciously in love," Théodule thought. Marius proceededtowards the church.

  "That's glorious!" Théodule said to himself; "the church, that's thething. Rendezvous spiced with a small amount of Mass are the best.Nothing is so exquisite as an ogle exchanged in the presence of theVirgin."

  On reaching the church, Marius did not go in, but disappeared behindone of the buttresses of the apse.

  "The meeting outside," Théodule said; "now for a look at the girl."

  And he walked on tiptoe up to the corner which Marius had gone round,and on reaching it stopped in stupefaction. Marius, with his foreheadin both his hands, was kneeling in the grass upon a tomb, and hadspread his flowers out over it. At the head of the grave was a crossof black wood, with this name in white letters,--"COLONEL BARONPONTMERCY." Marius could be heard sobbing.

  The girl was a tomb.

  CHAPTER VIII

  MARBLE AGAINST GRANITE.

  It is hither that Marius had come the first time that he absentedhimself from Paris; it was to this spot he retired each time thatM. Gillenormand said,--"He sleeps out." Lieutenant Théodule wasabsolutely discountenanced by this unexpected elbowing of a tomb, andfelt a disagreeable and singular sensation, which he was incapableof analyzing, and which was composed of respect for a tomb, mingledwith respect for a colonel. He fell back, leaving Marius alone in thecemetery, and there was discipline in this retreat; death appearedto him wearing heavy epaulettes, and he almost gave it the militarysalute. Not knowing what to write to his aunt, he resolved not to writeat all; and there would probably have been no result from Théodule'sdiscovery of Marius's amour had not, by one of those mysteriousarrangements so frequent in accident, the scene at Vernon had almostimmediately a sort of counterpart in Paris.

  Marius returned from Vernon very early on the morning of the thirdday, and wearied by two nights spent in a diligence, and feelingthe necessity of repairing his want of sleep by an hour's swimmingexercise, he hurried up to his room, only took the time to take offhis travelling coat and the black ribbon which he had round his neck,and went to the bath. M. Gillenormand, who rose at an early hour likeall old men who are in good health, heard him come in, and hastenedas quick as his old legs would carry him up the stairs leading toMarius's garret, in order to welcome him back, and try and discover hismovements. But the young man had taken less time in descending than theoctogenarian in ascending, and when Father Gillenormand entered thegarret Marius was no longer there. The bed had been unoccupied, and onit lay the coat and black ribbon unsuspectingly.

  "I prefer that," said M. Gillenormand, and a moment later he enteredthe drawing-room, where Mlle. Gillenormand the elder was already seatedembroidering her cabriolet wheels. The entrance was triumphant; M.Gillenormand held in one hand the coat, in the other the neck-ribbon,and shouted,--

  "Victory! we are going to penetrate the mystery, we are going to knowthe cream of the joke, we are going to lay our hands on the libertinageof our cunning gentleman. Here is the romance itself, for I have theportrait."

  In fact, a box of shagreen leather, much like a miniature, wassuspended from the ribbon. The old man took hold of this box, andlooked at it for some time without opening, with the air of pleasure,eagerness, and anger of a poor starving fellow who sees a splendiddinner, of which he will have no share, carried past under his nose.

  "It is evidently a portrait, and I am up to that sort of thing. Itis worn tenderly on the heart,--what asses they are! Some abominablewench, who will probably make me shudder; for young men have such badtastes now-a-days."

  "Let us look, father," the old maid said.

  The box opened by pressing a spring, but they only found in it acarefully folded-up paper.

  "_From the same to the same_" said M. Gillenormand, bursting into alaugh. "I know what it is,--a billet-doux!"

  "Indeed! let us read it," said the aunt; and she put on her spectacles.They unfolded the paper and read as follows,--

  "_For my son_. The Emperor made me a Baron on the field of Waterloo,and as the Restoration contests this title which I purchased with myblood, my son will assume it and wear it; of course he will be worthyof it."

  What the father and daughter felt, it is not possible to describe; butthey were chilled as if by the breath of a death's-head. They did notexchange a syllable. M. Gillenormand merely said in a low voice, and asif speaking to himself, "It is that trooper's handwriting." The auntexamined the slip of paper, turned it about in all directions, and thenplaced it again in the box.

  At the same instant a small square packet wrapped up in blue paper fellfrom a pocket of the great-coat. Mlle. Gillenormand picked it up andopened the blue paper. It contained Marius's one hundred cards, and shepassed one to M. Gillenormand, who read, "Baron Marius Pontmercy." Theold man rang, and Nicolette came in. M. Gillenormand took the ribbon,the box, and the coat, threw them on the ground in the middle of theroom, and said,--

  "Remove that rubbish."

  A long hour passed in the deepest silence; the old man and the oldmaid were sitting back to back and thinking, probably both of thesame things. At the end of this hour, Mlle. Gillenormand said,--"Verypretty!" A few minutes after, Marius came in; even before he crossedthe threshold he perceived his grandfather holding one of his cards inhis hand. On seeing Marius he exclaimed, with his air of bourgeois andgrimacing superiority, which had something crushing about it,--

  "Stay! stay! stay! stay! stay! You are a Baron at present; I mustcongratulate you. What does this mean?"

  Marius blushed slightly, and answered,--

  "It means that I am my father's son."

  M. Gillenormand left off laughing, and said harshly, "I am your father."

  "My father," Marius continued with downcast eyes and a stern air,"was an humble and heroic man, who gloriously served the Republic ofFrance, who was great in the greatest history which men have evermade, who lived for a quarter of a century in a bivouac, by day undera shower of grape-shot and bullets, and at night in snow, mud, wind,and rain. He was a man who took two flags, received twenty wounds, diedin forgetfulness and abandonment, and who had never committed but onefault, that of loving too dearly two ungrateful beings,--his countryand myself."

  This was more than M. Gillenormand could bear; at the word Republic hehad risen, or, more correctly, sprung up. Each of the words that Mariushad just uttered had produced on the old gentleman's face the sameeffect as the blast of a forge-bellows upon a burning log. From gloomyhe became red, from red, purple, and from purple, flaming.

  "Marius," he shouted, "you abominable boy! I know not who your fatherwas, and do not wish to know. I know nothing about it, but what I doknow is, that there never were any but scoundrels among all thosepeople; they were all rogues, assassins, red-caps, robbers! I say all,I say all! I know nobody! I say all; do you understand me, Marius? Youmust know that you are as much a Baron as my slipper is! They wereall bandits who served Robespierre! they were all brigands who servedB-u-o-naparté! all traitors who betrayed, betrayed, betrayed theirlegitimate king! all cowards who ran away from the Prussians and theEnglish at Waterloo! That is what I know. If Monsieur your father wasamong them, I am ignorant of the
fact, and am sorry for it. I am yourhumble servant!"

  In his turn, Marius became the brand, and M. Gillenormand thebellows. Marius trembled all over, he knew not what to do, and hishead was a-glow. He was the priest who sees his consecrated waferscast to the wind, the Fakir who notices a passer-by spit on hisidol. It was impossible that such things could be said with impunityin his presence, but what was he to do? His father had just beentrampled under foot, and insulted in his presence; but by whom? Byhis grandfather. How was he to avenge the one without outraging theother? It was impossible for him to insult his grandfather, and equallyimpossible for him not to avenge his father. On one side was a sacredtomb, on the other was white hair. He tottered for a few moments like adrunken man, then raised his eyes, looked fixedly at his grandfather,and shouted in a thundering voice,--

  "Down with the Bourbons, and that great pig of a Louis XVIII.!"

  Louis XVIII. had been dead four years, but that made no differenceto him. The old man, who had been scarlet, suddenly became whiterthan his hair. He turned to a bust of the Duc de Berry which wason the mantel-piece, and bowed to it profoundly with a sort ofsingular majesty. Then he walked twice, slowly and silently, from themantel-piece to the window, and from the window to the mantel-piece,crossing the whole room, and making the boards creak as if he were awalking marble statue. The second time he leaned over his daughter, whowas looking at the disturbance with the stupor of an old sheep, andsaid to her with a smile which was almost calm,--

  "A Baron like this gentleman and a bourgeois like myself can no longerremain beneath the same roof."

  And suddenly drawing himself up, livid, trembling, and terrible, withhis forehead dilated by the fearful radiance of passion, he stretchedout his arm toward Marius, and shouted, "Begone!"

  Marius left the house, and on the morrow M. Gillenormand said to hisdaughter,--

  "You will send every six months sixty pistoles to that blood-drinker,and never mention his name to me."

  Having an immense amount of fury to expend, and not knowing what todo with it, he continued to address his daughter as "you" instead of"thou" for upwards of three months.

  Marius, on his side, left the house indignant, and a circumstanceaggravated his exasperation. There are always small fatalities of thisnature to complicate domestic dramas: the anger is augmented althoughthe wrongs are not in reality increased. In hurriedly conveying, bythe grandfather's order, Marius's rubbish to his bed-room, Nicolette,without noticing the fact, let fall, probably on the attic stairs,which were dark, the black shagreen case in which was the paper writtenby the Colonel. As neither could be found, Marius felt convinced that"Monsieur Gillenormand"--he never called him otherwise from thatdate--had thrown "his father's will" into the fire. He knew by heartthe few lines written by the Colonel, and consequently nothing waslost: but the paper, the writing, this sacred relic,--all this was hisheart. What had been done with it?

  Marius went away without saying where he was going and without knowing,with thirty francs, his watch, and some clothes in a carpet-bag. Hejumped into a cabriolet, engaged it by the hour, and proceeded atrandom towards the Pays Latin. What would become of Marius?

  BOOK IV.

  THE FRIENDS OF THE A. B. C.

  CHAPTER I.

  A GROUP THAT NEARLY BECAME HISTORICAL.

  At this epoch, which was apparently careless, a certain revolutionaryquivering was vaguely felt. There were breezes in the air whichreturned from the depths of '89 and '92; and the young men, if we maybe forgiven the expression, were in the moulting stage. Men becametransformed, almost without suspecting it, by the mere movement oftime, for the hand which moves round the clock-face also moves inthe mind. Each took the forward step he had to take; the Royalistsbecame liberals, and the Liberals democrats. It was like a rising tidecomplicated by a thousand ebbs, and it is the peculiarity of ebbs tocause things to mingle. Hence came very singular combinations of ideas,and men adored liberty and Napoleon at the same time. We are writinghistory here, and such were the mirages of that period. Opinions passthrough phases, and Voltairian royalism, a strange variety, had a noless strange pendant in Bonapartist liberalism.

  Other groups of minds were more serious; at one spot principleswere sounded, and at another men clung to their rights. They becameimpassioned for the absolute, and obtained glimpses of infiniterealizations; for the absolute, through its very rigidity, causesminds to float in the illimitable ether. There is nothing like thedogma to originate a dream, and nothing like a dream to engender thefuture; the Utopia of to-day is flesh and bone to-morrow. Advancedopinions had a false bottom, and a commencement of mystery threatened"established order," which was suspicious and cunning. This is a mostrevolutionary sign. The after-thought of the authorities meets in thesap the after-thought of the people, and the incubation of revolutionsis the reply to the premeditation of Coups d'État. There were not asyet in France any of those vast subjacent organizations, like theTugenbund of Germany or the Carbonari of Italy; but here and there weredark subterranean passages with extensive ramifications. The Cougourdewas started at Aix; and there was at Paris, among other affiliations ofthis nature, the society of the Friends of the A. B. C.

  Who were the Friends of the A. B. C.? A society whose ostensible objectwas the education of children, but the real one the elevation of men.They called themselves friends of the A. B. C.; the _Abaissé_ was thenation, and they wished to raise it. It would be wrong to laugh at thispun, for puns at times are serious in politics; witnesses of this arethe _Castratus ad castra_, which made Narses general of an army; the_Barbari_ and _Barberini; fueros fuegos; tu es Petrus et super hancPetram_, etc., etc. The Friends of the A. B. C. were few in number; itwas a secret society, in a state of embryo, and we might almost call ita coterie, if coteries produced heroes. They assembled at two placesin Paris,--at a cabaret called _Corinthe_ near the Halles, to whichwe shall revert hereafter; and near the Panthéon, in a small café onthe Place St. Michel, known as the Café Musain, and now demolished: thefirst of these meeting-places was contiguous to the workmen, and thesecond to the students. The ordinary discussions of the Friends of theA. B. C. were held in a back room of the Café Musain. This room, somedistance from the coffee-room, with which it communicated by a verylong passage, had two windows and an issue by a secret staircase intothe little Rue des Grés. They smoked, drank, played, and laughed there;they spoke very loudly about everything, and in a whisper about theother thing. On the wall hung an old map of France under the Republic,which would have been a sufficient hint for a police-agent.

  Most of the Friends of the A. B. C. were students, who maintaineda cordial understanding with a few workmen. Here are the namesof the principal members, which belong in a certain measure tohistory,--Enjolras, Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Courfeyrac,Bahorel, Lesgle or Laigle, Joly, and Grantaire. These young men formeda species of family through their friendship, and all came from theSouth, excepting Laigle. This group is remarkable, although it hasvanished in the invisible depths which are behind us. At the pointof this drama which we have now attained, it will not be labor lost,perhaps, to throw a ray of light upon these heads, before the readerwatches them enter the shadows of a tragical adventure.

  Enjolras, whom we named first, it will be seen afterwards why, was anonly son, and rich. He was a charming young man, capable of becomingterrible; he was angelically beautiful, and looked like a sternAntinous. On noticing the pensive depth of his glance you might havefancied that he had gone through the revolutionary apocalypse in somepreceding existence. He knew the traditions of it like an eye-witness,and was acquainted with all the minor details of the great thing. Hiswas a pontifical and warlike nature, strange in a young man; he was achurchman and a militant; from the immediate point of view a soldier ofdemocracy, but, above the contemporary movement, a priest of the ideal.He had a slightly red eyelid, a thick and easily disdainful lower lip,and a lofty forehead; a good deal of forehead on a face is like a gooddeal of sky in an horizon. Like certain young men of the beginning
ofthe present century and the end of the last, who became illustriousat an early age, he looked excessively young, and was as fresh as aschool-girl, though he had his hours of pallor. Although a man, heseemed still a boy, and his two-and-twenty years looked like onlyseventeen; he was serious, and did not appear to know that there wason the earth a being called woman. He had only one passion, justice,and only one thought, overthrowing the obstacle. On the Mons Aventinus,he would have been Gracchus; in the Convention, he would have been St.Just. He scarcely noticed roses, was ignorant of spring, and did nothear the birds sing; the bare throat of Evadne would have affected himas little as it did Aristogiton; to him, as to Harmodius, flowers wereonly good to conceal the sword. He was severe in his pleasures, andbefore all that was not the Republic he chastely lowered his eyes; hewas the marble lover of liberty. His language had a sharp inspirationand a species of rhythmic strain. Woe to the love which risked itselfin his direction! If any grisette of the Place Cambray or the Rue St.Jean de Beauvais, seeing this figure just escaped from college, with aneck like that of a page, long light lashes, blue eyes, hair floatingwildly in the breeze, pink cheeks, cherry lips, and exquisite teeth,had felt a longing for all this dawn, and tried the effect of hercharms upon Enjolras, a formidable look of surprise would have suddenlyshown her the abyss, and taught her not to confound the avenging cherubof Ezekiel with the gallant cherub of Beaumarchais.

  By the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of the Revolution,Combeferre represented its philosophy. Between the logic and thephilosophy of revolutions there is this difference, that the logicmay conclude in war, while its philosophy can only lead to peace.Combeferre completed and rectified Enjolras; he was not so tall, butbroader. He wished that the extended principles of general ideas shouldbe poured over minds, and said, "Revolution but civilization!" and heopened the vast blue horizon around the peaked mountain. Hence therewas something accessible and practicable in all Combeferre's views;and the Revolution with him was fitter to breathe than with Enjolras.Enjolras expressed its divine right and Combeferre its natural right;and while the former clung to Robespierre, the latter bordered uponCondorcet. Combeferre loved more than Enjolras the ordinary life ofmankind; and if these two young men had gained a place in history, theone would have been the just man, the other the sage. Enjolras wasmore manly, Combeferre more humane, and the distinction between themwas that between _homo_ and _vir_. Combeferre was gentle as Enjolraswas stern, through natural whiteness; he loved the word citizen,but preferred man, and would willingly have said _Hombre_, like theSpaniards. He read everything, went to the theatres, attended thepublic lectures, learned from Arago the polarization of light, and grewquite excited about a lecture in which Geoffroy St. Hilaire explainedthe double functions of the external and internal carotid arteries, theone which makes the face, and the other which produces the brain; hewas conversant with, and followed, science step by step, confronted St.Simon with Fourier, deciphered hieroglyphics, broke pebbles which hefound, drew from memory a bombyx butterfly, pointed out the errors inFrench in the Dictionary of the Academy, studied Puységur and Deleuze,affirmed nothing, not even miracles, denied nothing, not even ghosts,turned over the file of the _Moniteur_ and reflected. He declared thatthe future is in the hand of the schoolmaster, and busied himself witheducational questions. He wished that society should labor withoutrelaxation at the elevation of the intellectual and moral standard,at coining science, bringing ideas into circulation, and making theminds of youth grow; and he feared that the present poverty of methods,the wretchedness from the literary point of view of confining studiesto two or three centuries called classical, the tyrannical dogmatismof official pedants, scholastic prejudices, and routine would inthe end convert our colleges into artificial oyster-beds. He waslearned, a purist, polite, and polytechnic, a delver, and at the timepensive, "even to a chimera," as his friends said. He believed in alldreams,--railways, the suppression of suffering in surgical operations,fixing the image of the camera obscura, electric telegraphy, and thesteering of balloons. He was but slightly terrified by the citadelsbuilt on all sides against the human race by superstitions, despotisms,and prejudices; for he was one of those men who think that science willin the end turn the position. Enjolras was a chief, and Combeferrea guide; you would have liked to fight under one and march with theother. Not that Combeferre was incapable of fighting, he did not refuseto seize obstacles round the waist and attack them by main force; butit pleased him better to bring the human race into harmony with itsdestiny gradually, by the instruction of axioms and the promulgationof positive laws; and with a choice between two lights, his inclinationwas for illumination rather than fire. A fire may certainly produce adawn, but why not wait for daybreak? A volcano illumines, but the sundoes so far better. Combeferre perhaps preferred the whiteness of thebeautiful to the flashing of the sublime; and a brightness clouded bysmoke, a progress purchased by violence, only half satisfied his tenderand serious mind. A headlong hurling of a people into the truth, a'93, startled him; still, stagnation was more repulsive to him, for hesmelt in it putrefaction and death. Altogether he liked foam betterthan miasma, and preferred the torrent to the sewer, and the Falls ofNiagara to the Lake of Montfauçon. In a word, he desired neither haltnor haste; and while his tumultuous friends, who were chivalrouslyattracted by the absolute, adored and summoned the splendidrevolutionary adventurer, Combeferre inclined to leave progress, rightprogress, to act: it might be cold but it was pure, methodical butirreproachable, and phlegmatic but imperturbable. Combeferre wouldhave knelt down and prayed that this future might arrive with all itscandor, and that nothing might disturb the immense virtuous evolutionof the peoples. "The good must be innocent," he repeated incessantly.And in truth, if the grandeur of the revolution is to look fixedly atthe dazzling ideal, and fly toward it through the lightning, with bloodand fire in the claws, the beauty of progress is to be unspotted; andthere is between Washington, who represents the one, and Danton, whois the incarnation of the other, the same difference as that whichseparates the angel with the swan's wings from the angel with theeagle's wings.