Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Victor Hugo

  The girls whispered and chattered like uncaged warblers. They were delirious with joy. Now and then they would playfully pat the young men. Intoxication of the morning of life! Adorable years!

  As to Fantine, she was joy itself. Her splendid teeth had evidently been endowed by God with one function—that of laughing. She carried in her hand rather than on her head her little hat of sewed straw, with long, white strings. Her thick blond tresses, inclined to wave, and easily escaping from their confinement, obliging her to fasten them continually, seemed designed for the flight of Galatea under the willows. Her rosy lips babbled with enchantment. The corners of her mouth, turned up voluptuously like the antique masks of Erigone, seemed to encourage audacity; but her long, shadowy eyelashes were cast discreetly down towards the lower part of her face as if to check its festive tendencies. Her whole toilette was indescribably harmonious and enchanting. She wore a dress of mauve barege, little reddish-brown buskins, the strings of which were crossed over her fine, white, open-worked stockings, and that species of spencer, invented at Marseilles, the name of which, canezou, a corruption of the words quinze août in the Canebière dialect, signifies fine weather, warmth, and noon. The three others, less timid as we have said, wore low-necked dresses, which in summer, beneath bonnets covered with flowers, are full of grace and allurement; but by the side of this daring toilette, the canezou of the blond Fantine, with its transparencies, indiscretions, and concealments, at once hiding and disclosing, seemed a provocative godsend of decency; and the famous court of love, presided over by the Viscountess de Cette, with the sea-green eyes, might have given the prize for coquetry to this canezou, which had entered the lists for that of modesty. The simplest is sometimes the wisest. So things go.

  A brilliant face, delicate profile, eyes of a deep blue, heavy eyelashes, small, arching feet, the wrists and ankles neatly encased, the white skin showing here and there the azure aborescence of the veins; a cheek small and fresh, a neck robust as that of Egean Juno; the nape firm and supple, shoulders modelled as if by Coustou, with a voluptuous dimple in the centre, just visible through the muslin: a gaiety tempered with reverie, sculptured and exquisite—such was Fantine, and you divined beneath this dress and these ribbons a statue, and in this statue a soul.

  Fantine was beautiful, without being too conscious of it. Those rare dreamers, the mysterious priests of the beautiful, who silently compare all things with perfection, would have had a dim vision in this little workwoman, through the transparency of Parisian grace, of the ancient sacred Euphony. This daughter of obscurity had race. She possessed both types of beauty—style and rhythm. Style is the force of the ideal, rhythm is its movement.

  We have said that Fantine was joy; Fantine also was modesty.

  For an observer who had studied her attentively would have found through all this intoxication of youth, of the season, and of love, an unconquerable expression of reserve and modesty. She still seemed surprised at having a lover. This chaste restraint is the shade which separates Psyche from Venus. Fantine had the long, white, slender fingers of the vestals that stir the ashes of the sacred fire with a golden rod.y Although she would have refused nothing to Tholomyès, as we shall see only too well, her face, in repose, was in the highest degree maidenly; a kind of serious and almost austere dignity suddenly possessed it at times, and nothing could be more strange or disquieting than to see gaiety vanish there so quickly, and reflection instantly succeed to delight. This sudden seriousness, sometimes strangely marked, resembled the disdain of a goddess. Her forehead, nose, and chin presented that equilibrium of line, quite distinct from the equilibrium of proportion, which produces harmony of features; in the characteristic interval which separates the base of the nose from the upper lip, she had that almost imperceptible but charming fold, the mysterious sign of chastity, which enamoured Barbarossa with a Diana, found in the excavations of Iconium.z

  Love is a fault; be it so. Fantine was innocence floating upon the surface of this fault.7

  4

  THOLOMYÈS IS SO MERRY THAT HE SINGS A SPANISH SONG

  THAT DAY was sunshine from one end to the other. All nature seemed to be out on a holiday. The flowerbeds of Saint Cloud were balmy with perfumes ; the breeze from the Seine gently waved the leaves; the boughs were gesticulating in the wind; the bees were pillaging the jessamine, a whole gypsy crew of butterflies had settled in the milfoil, clover, and wild oats. The august park of the King of France was invaded by a swarm of vagabonds, the birds.

  The four joyous couples shone resplendently in concert with the sunshine, the flowers, the fields, and the trees.

  And in this paradisaical community, speaking, singing, running, dancing, chasing butterflies, gathering bindweed, wetting their pink open-worked stockings in the high grass, fresh, wild, but not wicked, stealing kisses from each other indiscriminately now and then, all except Fantine, who was shut up in her vague, dreary, severe resistance, and who was in love. “You always have the air of being out of sorts,” said Favourite to her.

  These are true pleasures. These passages in the lives of happy couples are a profound appeal to life and nature, and call forth endearment and light from everything. There was once upon a time a fairy, who created meadows and trees expressly for lovers. Thence, among the groves, that everlasting school for lovers, always in session. Thence the popularity of spring among thinkers. The patrician and the plebeian, the duke and peer, and the magistrate, the men of the court, and the men of the town, as was said in olden times, all play a part in this festivity. They laugh, they look for each other, the air seems filled with a new brightness; what a transfiguration is it to love! Law clerks are gods. And the little shrieks, the pursuits among the grass, the waists encircled by stealth, that silly chatter which is melody, that adoration which breaks forth in the way one says a syllable, those cherries snatched from one pair of lips by another—all flame up, and become transformed into celestial glories. Beautiful girls lavish their charms with sweet prodigality. We fancy that it will never end. Philosophers, poets, painters behold these ecstasies and know not what to make of them. So dazzling are they. The departure for Cythera! exclaims Watteau ; Lancret, the painter of the common man, contemplates his bourgeois soaring in the sky; Diderot stretches out his arms to all these loves, and d‘Urfé associates them with the Druids.

  After breakfast, the four couples went to see, in what was then called the king’s garden plot, a plant newly arrived from the Indies, the name of which escapes us at present, and which at this time was attracting all Paris to Saint Cloud: it was a strange and beautiful shrub with a long stalk, the innumerable branches of which, fine as threads, tangled, and leafless, were covered with millions of little white blossoms, which gave it the appearance of flowing hair, powdered with flowers. There was always a crowd admiring it.

  When they had viewed the shrub, Tholomyès exclaimed, “I propose donkeys,” and making a bargain with a donkey-driver, they returned through Vanvres and Issy. At Issy, they had an adventure. The park, a National Preserve, owned at this time by the munitions manufacturer Bourguin, was by sheer good luck open. They passed through the grating, visited the statue of a hermit in his grotto, and tried the little, mysterious effects of the famous cabinet of mirrors—a wanton trap, worthy of a satyr become a millionaire, or Turcaret metamorphosed into Priapus.aa They swung stoutly in the great swing, attached to the two chestnut trees, celebrated by the Abbé de Bernis. While swinging the girls, one after the other, and making folds of flying crinoline that Greuze would have found worth his study, the Toulousian Tholomyès, who was something of a Spaniard—Toulouse is cousin to Tolosa—sang in a melancholy key, the old gallega song, probably inspired by some beautiful damsel swinging in the air between two trees.

  Soy de Badaioz.

  Amor me llama.

  Toda mi alma

  Es en mi ojos

  Porque enseñas

  A tus piernas.

  Fantine alone refused to swing.

  “I do not lik
e that kind of affectation,” murmured Favourite, rather sharply.

  They left the donkeys for a new pleasure, crossed the Seine in a boat, and walked from Passy to the Barrière de l‘Etoile. They had been on their feet, it will be remembered, since five in the morning, but bah! there is no weariness on Sunday, said Favourite; on Sunday fatigue has a holiday. Towards three o‘clock, the four couples, wild with happiness, were climbing down from the roller-coaster, a peculiar construction where sinuous contour you could see above the trees of the Champs-Elysées.

  From time to time Favourite exclaimed:

  “But the surprise? I want the surprise.”

  “Be patient,” answered Tholomyès.

  5

  AT BOMBARDA’S

  Having tired of the roller-coaster, they thought of dinner, and the happy eight a little weary at last, stranded on Bombarda‘s, a branch establishment, set up in the Champs- Elysées by the celebrated restaurateur, Bombarda, whose sign was then seen on the Rue de Rivoli, near the Delorme arcade.

  6

  A CHAPTER OF SELF-ADMIRATION

  TABLE TALK and lovers’ talk equally elude the grasp; lovers’ talk is clouds, table talk is smoke.

  Fameuil and Dahlia hummed airs; Tholomyès drank, Zéphine laughed, Fantine smiled. Listolier blew a wooden trumpet that he had bought at Saint Cloud. Favourite looked tenderly at Blacheville and said:

  “Blacheville, I adore you.”

  This brought forth a question from Blacheville:

  “What would you do, Favourite, if I should leave you?”

  “Me!” cried Favourite. “Oh! do not say that, even in sport! If you should leave me, I would run after you, I would scratch you, I would pull your hair, I would throw water on you, I would have you arrested.”

  Blacheville smiled with the effeminate foppery of a man whose self-love is tickled. Favourite continued:

  “Yes! I would call the police! I wouldn’t hold back! I would scream, for example: scoundrel!”

  Blacheville, in ecstasy, leaned back in his chair, and closed both eyes with a satisfied air.

  Dahlia, still eating, whispered to Favourite in the hubbub:

  “Are you really so fond of your Blacheville, then?”

  “I detest him,” whispered Favourite, taking up her fork. “He is stingy; I am in love with the little fellow over the way from where I live. He is a nice young man; do you know him? Anybody can see that he was born to be an actor! I love actors. As soon as he comes into the house, his mother cries out: ‘Oh, dear! my peace is all gone. There, he is going to hallo! You will split my head;’ just because he goes into the garret among the rats, into the dark corners, as high as he can go, and sings and declaims—something or other so loud that they can hear him below! He already makes twenty sous a day by copying documents for a lawyer. He is the son of an old chorister of Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas! Oh, he is a nice young man! He is so fond of me that he said one day, when he saw me making dough for pancakes: ‘Mamselle, make your gloves into fritters and I will eat them.’ Nobody but artists can say things like these; I am on the high road to go crazy about this little fellow. It is all the same, I tell Blacheville that I adore him. How I lie! Oh, how I lie!”

  Favourite paused, then continued:

  “Dahlia, you see I am melancholy. It has done nothing but rain all summer ; the wind irritates me, it is always in a bad mood. Blacheville is very stingy; there are hardly any green peas in the market yet, people care for nothing but eating; I have the spleen, as the English say; butter is so dear! and then, just think of it—it is horrible! We are dining in a room with a bed in it. I am disgusted with life.”

  7

  THE WISDOM OF THOLOMYES

  AT THIS MOMENT, Favourite, crossing her arms and turning round her head, looked fixedly at Tholomyès and said:

  “Come! the surprise?”

  “Precisely. The moment has come,” replied Tholomyès. “Gentlemen, the hour has come for surprising these ladies. Ladies, wait for us a moment.”

  “It begins with a kiss,” said Blacheville.

  “On the forehead,” added Tholomyès.

  Each one gravely placed a kiss on the forehead of his mistress; after which they directed their steps towards the door, all four in file, laying their fingers on their lips.

  Favourite clapped her hands as they went out.

  “It is amusing already,” said she.

  “Do not be too long,” murmured Fantine. “We are waiting for you.”ab

  8 (9)

  JOYOUS END OF JOY

  THE GIRLS, left alone, leaned their elbows on the window sills in couples, and chattered together, bending their heads and speaking from one window to the other.

  They saw the young men go out of Bombarda‘s, arm in arm; they turned round, made signals to them laughingly, then disappeared in the dusty Sunday crowd which takes possession of the Champs-Elysées once a week.

  “Do not be long!” cried Fantine.

  “What are they going to bring us?” said Zéphine.

  “Surely something pretty,” said Dahlia.

  “I hope it will be gold,” resumed Favourite.

  Some time passed in this manner. Suddenly Favourite started as if from sleep.

  “Well!” said she, “and the surprise?”

  “Yes,” returned Dahlia, “the famous surprise.”

  “They are taking a very long time!” said Fantine.

  As Fantine finished the sigh, the boy who had waited at dinner entered. He had in his hand something that looked like a letter.

  “What is that?” asked Favourite.

  “It is a paper that the gentlemen left for these ladies,” he replied.

  “Why did you not bring it at once?”

  “Because the gentlemen ordered me not to give it to the ladies before an hour,” returned the boy.

  Favourite snatched the paper from his hands. It was really a letter.

  “Stop!” said she. “There is no address; but see what is written on it:

  “THIS IS THE SURPRISE.”

  She hastily unsealed the letter, opened it, and read (she knew how to read):

  “Oh, our lovers!

  “Know that we have parents. Parents—you scarcely know the meaning of the word, they are what are called fathers and mothers in the civil code, simple but honest. Now these parents bemoan us, these old men claim us, these good men and women call us prodigal sons, desire our return and offer to kill for us the fatted calf. We obey them, being virtuous. At the moment when you read this, five mettlesome horses will be bearing us back to our papas and mammas. We are pitching our camps, as Bossuet says. We are going, we are gone. We fly in the arms of Laffitte, and on the wings of Caillard. The Toulouse stage snatches us from the abyss, and you are this abyss, our beautiful darlings! We are returning to society, to duty and order, on a full trot, at the rate of seven miles an hour. It is necessary to the country that we become, like everybody else, prefects, fathers of families, rural guards, and councillors of state. Venerate us. We sacrifice ourselves. Mourn for us rapidly, and replace us speedily. If this letter rends you, rend it in turn. Adieu.

  “For nearly two years we have made you happy. Bear us no ill will for it.”

  SIGNED: BLACHEVILLE,

  FAMEUIL,

  LISTOLIER,

  FÉLIX THOLOMYÈS.

  “P.S. The dinner is paid for.”

  The four girls gazed at each other.

  Favourite was the first to break silence.

  “Well!” said she, “it is a good farce all the same.”

  “It is very droll,” said Zéphine.

  “It must have been Blacheville that had the idea,” resumed Favourite. “This makes me in love with him. Soon loved, soon gone. That is the story.”

  “No,” said Dahlia, “it is an idea of Tholomyès. This is clear.”

  “In that case,” returned Favourite, “down with Blacheville, and long live Tholomyès!”

  “Long live Tholomyès!” cried Dahlia and Zéphine.


  And they burst into laughter.

  Fantine laughed like the rest.

  An hour afterwards, when she had returned to her bedroom, she wept. It was her first love, as we have said; she had given herself to this Tholomyès as to a husband, and the poor girl had a child.

  BOOK FOUR

  TO ENTRUST IS SOMETIMES TO ABANDON

  1

  ONE MOTHER MEETS ANOTHER

  THERE WAS, during the first quarter of the present century, at Montfermeil, near Paris, a sort of tavern; it is not there now. It was kept by a man and his wife, named Thénardier and was situated in the Boulanger Alley. Above the door, nailed flat against the wall, was a board, upon which something was painted that looked like a man carrying on his back another man wearing the heavy epaulettes of a general, gilt and with large silver stars; red blotches typified blood; the remainder of the picture was smoke, and probably represented a battle. Beneath was this inscription: THE SERGEANT OF WATERLOO PLACE.

  Nothing is commoner than a cart or wagon before the door of an inn; nevertheless the vehicle, or more properly speaking, the fragment of a vehicle which obstructed the street in front of the Sergeant of Waterloo one evening in the spring of 1818, certainly would have attracted by its bulk the attention of any painter who might have been passing.

  It was the fore-carriage of one of those drays for carrying heavy articles, used in wooded countries for transporting beams and trunks of trees: it consisted of a massive iron axle-tree with a pivot to which a heavy pole was attached, and which was supported by two enormous wheels. As a whole, it was squat, crushing, and misshapen: it might have been fancied a gigantic gun-carriage.