Les Misérables, v. 5/5: Jean Valjean

by Victor Hugo

  CHAPTER XVI.

  HOW A BROTHER BECOMES A FATHER.

  There were at this very moment in the Luxembourg garden--for the eyeof the drama must be everywhere present--two lads holding each other'shand. One might be seven, the other five, years of age. As they werewet through with the rain they walked along sunshiny paths; the elderled the younger, both were in rags and pale, and they looked like wildbirds. The younger said, "I am very hungry." The elder, who had alreadya protecting air, led his brother with the left hand, and had a switchin his right. They were alone in the garden, which was deserted, as thegates were closed by police order on account of the insurrection. Thetroops who had bivouacked there had issued forth for the exigences ofthe combat. How were these children here? Perhaps they had escaped fromsome guard-room where the door was left ajar; perhaps in the vicinity,at the Barrière d'Enfer, on the esplanade of the Observatory, or in theneighboring square overshadowed by the cornice, on which may be read,_Invenerunt parvulum pannis involutum_, there was some mountebank'sbooth from which they had fled; perhaps they had on the previousevening kept out of sight of the garden inspectors at the hour ofclosing, and had spent the night in one of those summer-houses in whichpeople read the papers: the fact is, that they were wandering about,and seemed to be free. To be a wanderer, and to appear free, is to belost, and these poor little creatures were really lost The two ladswere the same about whom Gavroche had been in trouble, and whom thereader will remember, sons of Thénardier, let out to Magnon, attributedto M. Gillenormand, and now leaves fallen from all these rootlessbranches, and rolled along the ground by the wind.

  Their clothes, clean in the time of Magnon, and which served her asa prospectus to M. Gillenormand, had become rags; and these beingshenceforth belonged to the statistics of "deserted children," whomthe police pick up, lose, and find again on the pavement of Paris. Itneeded the confusion of such a day as this for these two poor littlewretches to be in this garden. If the inspectors had noticed these ragsthey would have expelled them, for poor little lads do not enter publicgardens, and yet it ought to be remembered that as children they have aright to flowers. They were here, thanks to the locked gates, and werecommitting an offence; they had stepped into the garden and remainedthere. Though locked gates do not give a holiday to the keepers, andtheir surveillance is supposed to continue, it grows weaker and rests;and the inspectors, also affected by the public affairs, and morebusied about the outside than the inside, did not look at the garden,and had not seen the two delinquents. It had rained on the previousevening, and even slightly on this morning, but in June, showers are ofno great consequence. People hardly perceive, an hour after a storm,that this fair beauteous day has wept, for the earth dries up asrapidly as a child's cheek. At this moment of the solstice the middaylight is, so to speak, poignant, and it seizes everything. It clings toand spreads itself over the earth with a sort of suction, and we mightsay that the sun is thirsty. A shower is a glass of water, and rain isat once drunk up. In the morning everything glistens, in the afternooneverything is dusty. Nothing is so admirable as verdure cleansed bythe rain and dried by the sun; it is warm freshness. Gardens andfields, having water in their roots and sunshine in their flowers,become censers of incense, and smoke with all their perfumes at once.Everything laughs, sings, and offers itself, and we feel softlyintoxicated: summer is a temporary Paradise, and the sun helps man tobe patient.

  There are beings who ask no more,--living creatures who, having theazure of heaven, say it is enough; dreamers absorbed in the prodigy,drawing from the idolatry of nature indifference to good and evil;contemplators of the Cosmos, radiantly distracted from man, who do notunderstand how people can trouble themselves about the hunger of oneperson, the thirst of another, the nudity of the poor man in winter,the lymphatic curvature of a small backbone, the truck-bed, the garret,the cell, and the rags of young shivering girls, when they can dreamunder the trees: they are peaceful and terrible minds, pitilesslysatisfied, and, strange to say, infinitude suffices them. They ignorethat great want of man, the finite which admits of an embrace, and donot dream of the finite which admits of progress, that sublime toil.The indefinite, which springs from the divine and human combinationof the infinite and the finite, escapes them, and provided that theycan be face to face with immensity, they smile. They never feel joy,but always ecstasy, and their life is one of abstraction. The historyof humanity is to them but a grand detail: the All is not in it, theAll remains outside of it. Of what use is it to trouble one's selfabout that item, man? Man suffers, it is possible, but just look atAldebaran rising! The mother has no milk left, the new-born babe isdying. I know nothing of all that, but just look at the marvellous rosemade by a sprig of hawthorn when looked at through a microscope; justcompare the finest Mechlin lace with that! These thinkers forget tolove, and the zodiac has such an attraction over them that it preventsthem seeing the weeping child. God eclipses their soul, and they are afamily of minds at once great and little. Homer belonged to it; so didGoethe, and possibly Lafontaine, magnificent egotists of the infinite,calm spectators of sorrow, who do not see Nero if the weather be fine;from whom the sun hides the pyre; who would look at a guillotining toseek a light effect in it; who hear neither cries nor sobs, nor thedeath-rattle nor the tocsin; for whom everything is good, since thereis the month of May; who so long as they have clouds of purple and goldabove their heads declare themselves satisfied; and who are determinedto be happy until the radiance of the stars and the song of birds areexhausted.

  These are darkly radiant, and they do not suspect that they are to bepitied. But they are certainly so, for the man who does not weep doesnot see. We must admire and pity them, as we would pity and admire abeing at once night and day, who had no eyes under his brows, but astar in the centre of his forehead. The indifference of these thinkersis, according to some, a grand philosophy. Be it so; but in thissuperiority there is infirmity. A man may be immortal and limp, aswitness Vulcan, and he may be more than man and less than man; thereis immense incompleteness in nature, and who knows whether the sun benot blind? But in that case, whom to trust? _Solem quis dicere falsumaudeat?_ Hence, certain geniuses, certain human deities, star-men,might be mistaken? What is above at the summit, at the zenith, whichpours so much light on the earth, might see little, see badly, not seeat all? Is not that desperate? No: but what is there above the sun? God.

  On June 6, 1832, at about eleven in the forenoon, the Luxembourg,solitary and depopulated, was delicious. The quincunxes and flower-bedssent balm and dazzlement into the light, and the branches, wild in thebrilliancy of midday, seemed trying to embrace one another. There wasin the sycamores a twittering of linnets, the sparrows were triumphal,and the woodpeckers crept along the chestnut, gently tapping holes inthe bark. The beds accepted the legitimate royalty of the lilies, forthe most august of perfumes is that which issues from whiteness. Thesharp odor of the carnations was inhaled, and the old rooks of Mariede Medicis made love on the lofty trees. The sun gilded, purpled,and illumined the tulips, which are nothing but all the varieties offlame made into flowers. All around the tulip-beds hummed the bees,the flashes of these fire-flowers. All was grace and gayety, even thecoming shower, for that relapse by which the lilies of the valleyand honeysuckles would profit had nothing alarming about it, and theswallows made the delicious menace of flying low. What was thereinhaled happiness: life smelt pleasantly, and all this nature exhaledcandor, help, assistance, paternity, caresses, and dawn. The thoughtsthat fell from heaven were as soft as a babe's little hand that wekiss. The statues under the trees, nude and white, were robed indresses of shadow shot with light; these goddesses were all ragged withsunshine, and beams hung from them on all sides. Around the great basinthe earth was already so dry as to be parched, and there was a breezesufficiently strong to create here and there small riots of dust. Afew yellow leaves remaining from the last autumn joyously pursued oneanother, and seemed to be sporting.

  The abundance of light had something strangely reassuring about it;life, sap,
heat, and exhalations overflowed, and the greatness of thesource could be felt beneath creation. In all these blasts penetratedwith love, in this movement of reflections and gleams, in thisprodigious expenditure of beams, and in this indefinite outpouring offluid gold, the prodigality of the inexhaustible could be felt; andbehind this splendor, as behind a curtain of flames, glimpses of God,that millionnaire of the stars, could be caught. Thanks to the sand,there was not a speck of mud; and, thanks to the rain, there was not agrain of dust The bouquets had just performed their ablutions, and allthe velvets, all the satins, all the varnish, and all the gold whichissue from the earth in the shape of flowers, were irreproachable.This magnificence was clean, and the grand silence of happy naturefilled the garden,--a heavenly silence, compatible with a thousandstrains of music, the fondling tones from the nests, the buzzing ofthe swarms, and the palpitations of the wind. All the harmony of theseason was blended into a graceful whole, the entrances and exits ofspring took place in the desired order, the lilacs were finishing,and the jessamine beginning, a few flowers were behindhand, a fewinsects before their time, and the vanguard of the red butterflies ofJune fraternized with the rearguard of the white butterflies of May.The plane-trees were putting on a fresh skin, and the breeze formedundulations in the magnificent enormity of the chest-nut-trees. It wassplendid. A veteran from the adjoining barracks who was looking throughthe railings said, "Spring presents arms in full dress."

  All nature was breakfasting; the creation was at table; it was thehour: the great blue cloth was laid in heaven, and the great greenone on earth, while the sun gave an _à giorno_ illumination. God wasserving His universal meal, and each being had its pasture or itspasty. The wood-pigeon found hempseed, the chaffinch found millet, thegoldfinch found chickweed, the redbreast found worms, the bee foundflowers, the fly found infusoria, and the greenfinch found flies. Theycertainly devoured one another to some extent, which is the mystery ofevil mingled with good, but not a single animal had an empty stomach.The two poor abandoned boys had got near the great basin, and somewhatconfused by all this light, tried to hide themselves, which is theinstinct of the poor and the weak in the presence of magnificence, evenwhen it is impersonal, and they kept behind the swan's house. Now andthen, at intervals when the wind blew, confused shouts, a rumbling,a sort of tumultuous death-rattle which was musketry, and dull blowswhich were cannon-shots, could be heard. There was smoke above theroofs in the direction of the markets, and a bell which seemed to besummoning sounded in the distance. The children did not seem to noticethe noises, and the younger lad repeated every now and then in a lowvoice, "I am hungry."

  Almost simultaneously with the two boys another couple approachedthe basin, consisting of a man of about fifty, leading by the hand aboy of six years of age. It was doubtless a father with his son. Theyounger of the two had a cake in his hand. At this period certaincontiguous houses in the Rue Madame and the Rue d'Enfer had keys tothe Luxembourg, by which the lodgers could let themselves in when thegates were locked; but this permission has since been withdrawn. Thisfather and son evidently came from one of these houses. The two poorlittle creatures saw "this gentleman" coming, and hid themselves alittle more. He was a citizen, and perhaps the same whom Marius duringhis love-fever had one day heard near the same great basin counsellinghis son "to avoid excesses." He had an affable and haughty look, and amouth which, as it did not close, always smiled. This mechanical smile,produced by too much jaw and too little skin, shows the teeth ratherthan the soul. The boy with the bitten cake which he had not finished,seemed glutted; the boy was dressed in a National Guard's uniform, onaccount of the riots, and the father remained in civilian garb for thesake of prudence. Father and son had halted near the great basin, inwhich the two swans were disporting. This bourgeois appeared to have aspecial admiration for the swans, and resembled them in the sense thathe walked like them. At this moment the swans were swimming, which istheir principal talent, and were superb. Had the two little fellowslistened, and been of an age to comprehend, they might have overheardthe remarks of a serious man; the father was saying to his son,--

  "The sage lives contented with little; look at me, my son, I do notcare for luxury. You never see me in a coat glistening with gold andprecious stones; I leave that false lustre to badly-organized minds."

  Here the deep shouts which came from the direction of the Halles brokeout, with a redoublement of hells and noise.

  "What is that?" the lad asked.

  The father replied,--

  "That is the saturnalia."

  All at once he perceived the two little ragged boys standing motionlessbehind the swan's green house.

  "Here is the beginning," he said.

  And after a silence he added,--

  "Anarchy enters this garden."

  In the mean while the boy bit the cake, spat it out again, and suddenlybegan crying.

  "Why are you crying?" the father asked.

  "I am no longer hungry," said the boy.

  The father's smile became more marked than ever.

  "You need not be hungry to eat a cake."

  "I am tired of cake; it is so filling."

  "Don't you want any more?"

  "No."

  The father showed him the swans.

  "Throw it to those palmipeds."

  The boy hesitated, for if he did not want any more cake that was noreason to give it away.

  The father continued,--

  "Be humane: you ought to have pity on animals."

  And, taking the cake from his son, he threw it into the basin, where itfell rather near the bank. The swans were some distance off, near thecentre of the basin, and engaged with some prey: they had seen neitherthe citizen nor the cake. The citizen, feeling that the cake ran arisk of being lost, and affected by this useless shipwreck, began atelegraphic agitation which eventually attracted the attention of theswans. They noticed something floating on the surface, tacked, like thevessels they are, and came towards the cake slowly, with the majestythat befits white beasts.

  "Swans understand signs," said the bourgeois, pleased at his owncleverness.

  At this moment the distant tumult of the city was suddenly swollen.This time it was sinister, and there are some puffs of wind whichspeak more distinctly than others. The one which blew at this momentdistinctly brought up the rolling of drums, shouts, platoon fires, andthe mournful replies of the tocsin, and the cannon. This coincided witha black cloud which suddenly veiled the sky. The swans had not yetreached the cake.

  "Let us go home," the father said; "they are attacking the Tuileries,"

  He seized his son's hand again, and then continued,---

  "From the Tuileries to the Luxembourg there is only the distance whichseparates the royalty from the peerage; and that is not far. It isgoing to rain musketry."

  He looked at the cloud,--

  "And perhaps we shall have rain of the other sort too; heaven isinterfering: the younger branch is condemned. Let us make haste home."

  "I should like to see the swans eat the cake," said the boy.

  "It would be imprudent," the father answered; and he led away hislittle bourgeois. The son, regretting the swans, turned his headtoward the basin, until a bend in the quincunxes concealed it fromhim. The two little vagabonds had in the mean while approached thecake simultaneously with the swans. It was floating on the water; thesmaller boy looked at the cake; the other looked at the citizen, whowas going off. Father and son entered the labyrinth of trees that runsto the grand staircase of the clump of trees in the direction of theRue Madame. When they were no longer in sight, the elder hurriedly laydown full length on the rounded bank of the basin, and holding by hisleft hand, while bending over the water, till he all but fell in, hestretched out his switch toward the cake with the other. The swans,seeing the enemy, hastened up, and in hastening their breasts producedan effect useful to the little fisher: the water flowed back in frontof the swans, and one of the gentle, concentric undulations slightlyimpelled the cake toward the boy's sw
itch. When the swans came up, thestick was touching the cake; the lad gave a quick blow, startled theswans, seized the cake, and arose. The cake was soaking, but they werehungry and thirsty. The elder boy divided the cake into two parts, alarge one and a small one, kept the small one for himself, and gave thelarger piece to his brother, saying,--

  "Shove that into your gun."