Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  The sun was low on the horizon when he reached the unhallowed spot and realized, with a slight tremor, that he was near the beast’s lair. He crossed over a ditch, negotiated a hedge, raised a barrier, entered an untidy garden and, advancing boldly across it, came in sight of the dwelling itself, half-hidden by tall shrubs.

  It was a low-roofed, primitive cabin, small and clean, with a climbing vine fixed to the front. Seated by the door in an old wheelchair, a peasant’s chair, was a white-haired man smiling at the sun, and standing beside him was the boy who did his errands, in the act of handing him a bowl of milk.

  While the bishop stood regarding them the old man spoke.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That is all I want.’ He turned his head from the sunset to look smiling at the boy.

  The bishop moved forward and at the sound of his footsteps the old man looked towards him, his face expressing as much astonishment as a man is capable of feeling at the end of a long life.

  ‘You are the first person to visit me in all the time I have been here,’ he said. ‘Who are you, Monsieur?’

  ‘My name is Bienvenu Myriel,’ replied the bishop.

  ‘Bienvenu Myriel! I haven’t heard the name. Is it you whom the people call Monseigneur Bienvenu?’

  ‘It is.’

  The old man said with a half-smile, ‘In that case, you are my bishop.’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘You are welcome, Monsieur.’

  He held out his hand, but the bishop did not take it. He merely said:

  ‘I am glad to see that I have been misinformed. You certainly don’t look very ill.’

  ‘I shall be cured of my affliction,’ said the old man. He paused and said: ‘I shall be dead in three hours.’

  He went on: ‘I know something of medicine. I know how the end comes. Yesterday only my feet were numb. This morning the chill had reached my knees and now I feel it extending to my waist. When it reaches my heart I shall cease to live. The sunset is beautiful, is it not? I asked the boy to wheel me out here so that I might have a last look at things. Please talk to me if you wish, it doesn’t tire me. You did well to come to see a dying man. It is right that there should be a witness at such a moment. One has one’s whims; I had hoped to live until the dawn, but I know that I have barely three hours. It will be dark, but what does that signify? Dying is a simple matter. No need of daylight. I shall die by the light of the stars.’ He turned to the boy. ‘Go and lie down. You’re tired. You were up all night.’

  The boy withdrew into the cabin, and the old man, gazing after him, murmured as though to himself:

  ‘I shall die while he’s asleep. Our two slumbers will go well together.’

  The bishop was less moved than he felt he should have been. He could not feel the presence of God in this manner of dying. To tell the truth – for the inconsistencies of a noble spirit must be depicted with the rest – he who laughed so readily when addressed as Your Greatness was a little shocked at not being addressed as Monseigneur and half-inclined to say ‘Citizen’ in return. He was tempted to resort to the bluff familiarity which is common enough among doctors and priests but was not his own habit. When all was said, this man, this former member of the Convention, this representative of the people, had in his day been one of the great ones of the earth. Perhaps for the first time in his life the bishop was disposed to be stern.

  But the representative of the people was regarding him with a diffident friendliness in which might have been discerned the humility proper to a man who knows that his end is near. The bishop, for his part, although as a rule he guarded himself against the display of inquisitive curiosity, which he held to be impertinent, could not prevent himself from studying the man with an attentiveness which, since it was not born of sympathy, would probably have caused his conscience to reproach him in the case of any other person. To him a revolutionary was little better than an outlaw and even beyond the law of charity.

  Seated calmly and almost upright, his voice resonant, G— was one of those octogenarians who confound the physiologists. The Revolution knew many men of this kind, of a stature matching the time they lived in. One could feel the old man’s capacity for endurance. Even now, with his end so near, he retained the appearance of health. In the clarity of his gaze, the firmness of his voice, and the vigorous movement of his shoulders, there was something that defied death. Azrael, the angel of the Muhammadan sepulchre, would have turned back, thinking he had come to the wrong door. G— seemed to be dying because he wished to die. There was a sense of liberation in his agony. Only his legs were motionless; it was here that the darkness had a hold on him. His feet were dead, but his head was still fully alive and he seemed in complete control of all his faculties. In that solemn moment he was like the king in the eastern fable, flesh above and marble below.

  There was a stone by the doorway and the bishop seated himself upon it. He began his exordium without preliminaries.

  ‘You are to be congratulated,’ he said in a cold voice. ‘At least you did not vote for the death of the king.’

  The old man appeared to disregard the acid implications of the words ‘at least’. He replied unsmilingly, meeting reproof with austerity.

  ‘Do not go too far in your congratulations, Monsieur. I voted for the overthrow of a tyrant.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked the bishop.

  ‘I mean that man is ruled by a tyrant whose name is Ignorance, and that is the tyrant I sought to overthrow. That is the tyrant which gave birth to monarchy, and monarchy is authority based on falsehood, whereas knowledge is authority based on truth. Man should be ruled by knowledge.’

  ‘And by conscience,’ said the bishop.

  ‘They are the same thing. Conscience is the amount of inner knowledge that we possess.’

  The bishop heard this with some astonishment. To him it was a new way of looking at things. The old revolutionary went on:

  ‘In the case of Louis XVI, I voted against his death. I do not think I have the right to kill a man, but I believe it is my duty to abolish evil. I voted for the overthrow of the tyrant – that is to say, for an end to the prostitution of women, the enslavement of men, the dark night of the child. Those are the things I voted for in voting for the Republic. I voted for fraternity, for harmony, for a new dawn. I helped to bring about the downfall of prejudice and error, that their crumbling might let in light. We overturned the old world, we revolutionaries, and it was like the overthrow of a hothouse; from being a forcing-house of misery the world became a vessel of joy.’

  ‘Not unmixed joy,’ said the bishop.

  ‘You may call it uncertain joy, and now, after the fateful return of the past that is called the Restoration, vanished joy. Our work, alas, was not completed. We destroyed the structure of the ancien régime, but we could not wholly destroy its thought. It is not enough to abolish abuses; custom must also be transformed. The mill was pulled down, but the wind still blows.’

  ‘You destroyed. Destruction may be necessary, but I mistrust it when it is inspired by rage.’

  ‘Justice has its anger, my lord Bishop, and the wrath of justice is an element of progress. Whatever else may be said of it, the French Revolution was the greatest step forward by mankind since the coming of Christ. It was unfinished, I agree, but still it was sublime. It released the untapped springs of society; it softened hearts, appeased, tranquillized, enlightened, and set flowing through the world the tides of civilization. It was good. The French Revolution was the anointing of humanity.’

  The bishop could not refrain from murmuring: ‘And 1793 – the Terror?’

  The man of the Convention raised himself in his chair with an almost awesome solemnity and, as loudly as his dying state permitted, exclaimed:

  ‘Ah, 1793. I thought we should come to that! The clouds had been gathering for fifteen hundred years and at last the storm broke. What you are condemning is a thunderclap.’

  The bishop felt, perhaps without admitting it to himself, that th
ese words had gone home. Nevertheless he put a good face on it.

  ‘The judge speaks in the name of justice,’ he said. ‘The priest speaks in the name of pity, which is only a higher form of justice. A thunderclap must not make mistakes.’ He looked steadily at the other. ‘And Louis XVII?’

  The dying man reached out a hand and took him by the arm.

  ‘Louis XVII. What are you mourning? An innocent child? If so, I will weep with you. But if you are mourning a royal child I will ask you to consider. To me the case of the brother of Cartouche, an innocent child who was hanged by the armpits on the Place de Grève until he died, for no other crime than that he was the brother of Cartouche, is no less grievous than that of the grandson of Louis XV, an innocent child martyred in the Temple for the crime of being the grandson of Louis XV.’

  ‘I do not care for that association of names,’ said the bishop.

  ‘Cartouche? Louis XV? To which do you object?’

  There was a brief silence. The bishop was almost sorry he had come; yet he felt obscurely and strangely moved.

  ‘Monsieur le Prêtre,’ said the dying man, ‘you do not care for the cruder aspects of truth. Christ cared. He drove the money-lenders from the temple. His scourge was a great teller of truths. When he said, “Suffer them to come unto me” he made no distinction between the children. He would have made no bones about associating the son of Barabbas with the son of Herod. Innocence wears its own crown, Monsieur; it needs no added dignity; it is as sublime in rags as in royal robes.’

  ‘That is true,’ said the bishop in a low voice.

  ‘You have named Louis XVII. Let us understand one another. Are we weeping for all innocents, all martyrs, all children, whether low-born or of high estate? Then I weep with you. But, as I said, we must then go back far beyond ’93 and Louis XVII. I will weep with you for the children of kings if you will weep with me for the children of the people.’

  ‘I weep for them all.’

  ‘But equally! And if the balance is to be tilted either way it must be on the side of the people, for they have suffered longer.’

  There was another silence and it was the revolutionary who broke it. He raised himself on his elbow, pinching a fold of his cheek between his thumb and forefinger as one does mechanically in moments of questioning and judgement, and addressed the bishop with eyes so aflame with the intensity of his waning life that his words had the effect of an explosion.

  ‘The people have suffered a long time, Monsieur. But that is not all. Who are you that you should question me and talk to me of Louis XVII? I do not know you. Since I came here I have lived alone in this place, never setting a foot outside it or seeing anyone except the boy who serves me. It is true that your name has reached me, confusedly, but, I may say, spoken not without respect. But that means nothing. A clever man has plenty of ways of winning the trust of simple people. I did not, for example, hear the sound of your carriage as you drove here; no doubt you left it a short distance away, perhaps at the fork in the road. I repeat, I do not know you. You tell me that you are a bishop, but that tells me nothing about your true self. I ask you again, who are you? You are a bishop, a Prince of the Church, a man richly provided for. The See of Digne, stipend fifteen thousand, expenses ten thousand, total, twenty-five thousand francs a year! You have your palace and your liveried retainers, your kitchens and your loaded table where water-fowl is served on Fridays, your carriage in which you journey in the name of Christ, who went barefoot. You are a prelate, amply supplied with earthly comforts, and like all prelates you rejoice in them. But to say that is to say too much or too little. It does not enlighten me as to your true worth, your essential value, now that you have come here, as I suppose, to bring me words of wisdom. To whom am I speaking? Who are you?’

  The bishop bowed his head and murmured a line of the Psalms: ‘Vermis sum – But I am a worm and no man.’

  ‘A worm in a carriage!’ grunted the man of the people.

  It was he who now wore a stern aspect and the bishop who was humble. The bishop said gently:

  ‘Suppose it to be so. But you have still to explain to me how my carriage, which you say is waiting beyond the trees, my loaded table, the moorhen I eat on Fridays, my palace, my retainers, my twenty-five thousand francs income – you have still to explain how all this proves that compassion is not a virtue and clemency a duty, and that the year 1793 was not beyond all forgiveness.’

  The old man passed a hand over his forehead as though to wipe away a mist.

  ‘Before I answer you,’ he said, ‘I must ask your pardon. I have behaved badly, Monsieur. You are my guest and I have failed in courtesy. We are discussing my ideas, and I should answer you in terms of reason. Your wealth and privileges afford me an advantage in debate which it is tasteless to use. I shall not refer to them again.’

  ‘I thank you,’ said the bishop.

  ‘You have asked me for an explanation. Where were we? You said, I think, that 1793 was unforgiveable.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the bishop. ‘What have you to say to Marat applauding the guillotine?’

  ‘And what have you to say to Bossuet singing the Te Deum when the dragoons savaged the Protestants?’

  It was a rough answer, but it went home like a sword-thrust. The bishop was shaken, finding no reply, and at the same time he was irritated by the reference to Bossuet. The best minds have their blind spots and sometimes feel vaguely outraged by a lack of respect for logic.

  The old man had begun to gasp, overtaken by the breathlessness of the dying; but although his voice had weakened there was no dimming of the clarity of his gaze.

  ‘We may pursue the matter a little further. The Revolution, considered as a whole, was an immense human affirmation of which, alas, the year 1793 was a denial. You find it unforgiveable; but, Monsieur, what of the monarchy as a whole? Carrier was a criminal, but what would you call Montreval? Fouquier-Tinville was a villain, but what would you call Lamoignon-Baville? Maillard was abominable, but what of Saulx-Tavannes? Was Jourdain-Coupe-Tête any more a monster than the Marquis de Louvois? Monsieur, I grieve for Marie-Antoinette, an archduchess and a queen, but I grieve no less for the Huguenot woman, then nursing an infant, who under the great Louis was bound to a post, naked to the waist, while the child was held in front of her. Her breasts swelled with milk and her heart with anguish as the starving child cried to be fed and her gaoler said, “Recant!”, offering her the choice between the death of her baby and the death of her conscience. What have you to say, Monsieur, to this torment of Tantalus inflicted on a mother? You must remember this: the Revolution had its reasons. Its fury will be absolved by the future. Its outcome is a better world. Out of its most dreadful acts there emerges an embrace for mankind. But I need not go on. I have too good a case. Besides, I’m dying.’

  No longer gazing at the bishop, he summed up his thought in a few quiet words.

  ‘The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.’

  He did not know, the man of the people, that one by one he had broken down the bishop’s defences. But a last one remained, and from this supreme stronghold Monseigneur Bienvenu uttered words scarcely less harsh than those with which the interview had begun.

  ‘Progress must believe in God. The good cannot be served by impiety. An atheist is an evil leader of the human race.’

  The old man did not answer. A tremor shook him. He looked up at the sky and a tear formed slowly in his eye, to brim over and roll down his pale cheek. Still gazing upward and almost stammering, he murmured to himself:

  ‘Thou who art Perfection! Thou who alone exist.’

  The bishop was inexpressibly moved.

  After a pause the old man pointed to the sky and said: ‘The infinite has being. It is there. If infinity had no self then self would not be. But it is. Therefore it has a self. The self of infinity is God.’

  He had spoken those last words in
a clear voice and with a quiver of ecstasy, as though he saw some living presence. Then he closed his eyes. The effort had exhausted him. It was plain that in the course of a moment he had lived the few hours that remained to him. His last utterance had brought him very near to death.

  The bishop saw that there was no time to lose. He had come there as a priest. His mood of extreme aloofness had changed by degrees to one of deep emotion. Gazing at the closed eyes and taking the old, cold, wrinkled hand in his, he leaned towards the dying man.

  ‘This hour belongs to God,’ he said. ‘Do you not think it would be sad if we should have met in vain?’

  The old man opened his eyes. There was a shadowed gravity upon his face.

  ‘My lord bishop,’ he said, speaking with a slowness that was perhaps due more to the dignity of the spirit than to failing strength, ‘I have passed my life in meditation, study, and contemplation. I was sixty when my country summoned me to take part in her affairs. I obeyed the summons. There were abuses and I fought against them, tyrannies and I destroyed them, rights and principles and I asserted them. Our country was invaded and I defended it; France was threatened and I offered her my life. I was never rich; now I am poor. I was among the masters of the State, and the Treasury vaults were so filled with wealth that we had to buttress the walls lest they collapse under the weight of gold and silver; but I dined in Poverty Street at twenty-two sous a head. I succoured the oppressed and consoled the suffering. I tore up the altar-cloths, it is true; but it was to bind our country’s wounds. I have always striven for the advance of mankind towards the light, and sometimes I have resisted progress that was without mercy. I have on occasion protected my rightful adversaries, your fellow-priests. At Peteghem in Flanders, on the spot where the Merovingian kings once had their summer palace, there is an Urbanist convent, the Abbaye de Sainte-Claire en Beaulieu, which I saved from destruction in 1793.1 have done my duty, and what good I could, so far as was in my power. And I have been hounded and persecuted, mocked and defamed, cursed and proscribed. I have long known that many people believe they have the right to despise me, and that for the ignorant crowd I wear the face of the damned. I have accepted the isolation of hatred, hating no one. Now at the age of eighty-six I am on the point of death. What do you ask of me?’