Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  People from the working-class districts in their Sunday clothes, some wearing the bourgeois fleur-de-lis, were scattered over the open spaces, drinking, playing skittles, riding on the roundabouts. There were printer’s apprentices in paper caps. There was laughter everywhere. It was a time of settled peace and royalist security. A confidential report to the King from the Prefect of Police, the Comte Anglès, on the Paris working population ended as follows: ‘All things considered, Sire, there is nothing to be feared from these people. They are as heedless and indolent as cats. The lower orders in the provinces are restive, but not those in Paris. The men are all small in size. It would take two of them put together, Sire, to make one of your grenadiers. We have nothing to fear from the working people of the capital. What is remarkable is that their physical stature has further shrunk during the past fifty years and the people of the Paris suburbs are smaller than they were before the Revolution. They are not dangerous. An easy-going riff-raff, to sum up.’

  No Prefect of Police believes that a cat can turn into a lion; nevertheless the thing happens, and that is the miracle of the people of Paris. Moreover the cat, so despised by Comte Anglès, was held in reverence as the embodiment of liberty by the republics of antiquity; a bronze colossus of a cat stood in the main square at Corinth, as though it were complementary to the wingless Minerva of the Piraeus. The simple-minded Restoration police took a too rosy view of the Paris populace; it was not an ‘easy-going riff-raff’ as they thought. The Parisian is to the French what the Athenian was to the Greeks: no one sleeps better than he, no one is more openly frivolous and idle, no one appears more heedless. But this is misleading. He is given to every kind of listlessness, but when there is glory to be won he may be inspired with every kind of fury. Give him a pike and he will enact the tenth of August, a musket and you have Austerlitz. He was the springboard of Napoleon and the mainstay of Danton. At the cry of ‘la patrie’ he enrols, and at the call of liberty he tears up the pavements. Beware of him! His hair rising in anger assumes an epic quality, his shirt becomes a Grecian mantle, the first street uprising becomes a Caudine Fork. When the tocsin sounds the dweller in the back streets gains in stature, the little man assumes a terrible look and the breath from his narrow chest becomes a gale to change the skyline of the Alps. It is thanks to the little man of Paris that the Revolution, inspiring the armies, conquered Europe. He delights in song. Suit his song to his nature and you will understand. With just the ‘Carmagnole’ to sing he will only overthrow Louis XVI; but give him the ‘Marseillaise’ and he will liberate the world.

  Having added this footnote to Comte Anglès’s report we must return to our four couples, whose meal, as we have seen, was ending.

  VI

  I adore you

  Table-talk and lovers’ talk, both fleeting as air. Lovers’ talk is the mist and table-talk the scent.

  Fameuil and Dahlia were humming, Tholomyès was drinking, Zéphine was laughing, and Fantine was smiling. Listolier was blowing a wooden trumpet he had bought at Saint-Cloud. Gazing tenderly at her lover, Favourite said:

  ‘Blachevelle, I adore you.’

  This drew from him a question.

  ‘What would you do, Favourite, if I stopped loving you?’

  ‘Me?’ she cried. ‘You mustn’t say such things, even as a joke! If you stopped loving me I’d come after you, I’d beat you, I’d scratch your eyes out, I’d have you arrested.’

  While Blachevelle smiled the fatuous smile of gratified male vanity, she added: ‘I’d scream the place down! I’d rouse the whole neighbourhood, you brute!’

  Blachevelle by now was leaning back with his eyes closed in a simper of delight. Dahlia, who was still eating, murmured in an aside to Favourite:

  ‘Are you really as fond of him as all that?’

  ‘I can’t stand him,’ said Favourite in the same undertone, picking up her fork. ‘He’s mean. I like the boy over the way. Do you know the one I mean? You can see he’s cut out to be an actor. I like actors. When he comes home in the evening his mother says, “Well, that’s the end of peace for today; he’ll start shouting till he’s given me a headache” – because he goes up to the top of the house, right up to the attic with the rats, and he sings and recites and I don’t know what so loud that you can hear him on the ground floor. He’s earning twenty sous a day already, copying rubbish for a lawyer. His father was a chorister in Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. But he’s really nice, and he adores me so much that one day when I was making batter for pancakes he said, “Mamselle, if you were to make your gloves into fritters I’d eat them.” It takes a real artist to say a thing like that. He’s sweet. I’m crazy about him. But I go on telling Blachevelle I adore him. I’m an awful liar, aren’t I?’

  Favourite was silent for a moment but then continued:

  ‘I’m in a bad mood, Dahlia. Nothing but rain all this summer, and the wind gets on my nerves, it never seems to drop, and Blache-velle’s really too mean for anything, and there are scarcely any peas to be had in the market and butter’s so dear one doesn’t know what to buy and – oh, well, I’ve got the spleen, as the English say. And to cap everything, here we are, dining in a room with a bed in it. I think life’s disgusting!’

  VII

  The wisdom of Tholomyès

  Some members of the party were singing and others loudly talking. The room was in a state of uproar which Tholomyès now sought to abate.

  ‘Let us talk with more reason and less speed,’ he said. ‘We must think if we wish to shine. Blurted conversation is an expense of spirit. Flowing beer gathers no head. Let us not be hasty, gentlemen, but mingle dignity with revelry, deliberation with appetite. Festina lente. Let us take a lesson from the spring. If it comes too soon it burns itself out – that is to say it freezes. Its excess of zeal destroys the peaches and apricots. And excess of zeal kills elegance and a good dinner. In this matter Grimod de la Reynière, the gourmet, was on the side of Talleyrand – “Surtout, messieurs, pas trop de zéle.”’

  There was a chorus of protest from his audience.

  ‘Leave us alone, Tholomyès,’ said Blachevelle.

  ‘Down with the tyrant!’ cried Fameuil. ‘It’s Sunday.’

  ‘And we’re all sober,’ said Listolier.

  ‘My dear Tholomyès,’ said Blachevelle, ‘observe my state of calm.’

  ‘You are the very marquis of calm,’ said Tholomyès.

  The Marquis of Montcalm was a prominent monarchist of the period. The pun, indifferent though it was, had the effect of a stone dropped into a pool: the frogs fell silent.

  ‘Take comfort, my friends,’ said Tholomyès in the cool tone of a leader reasserting his authority. ‘Do not be too much impressed by a jest let fall in passing. Such trifles fallen from heaven are not necessarily deserving of respect. Puns are the droppings of the spirit in its flight. They may fall anywhere, and the spirit, having voided itself of a flippancy, rises into the blue. A white splash on a rock does not prevent the eagle from soaring. Not that I am a despiser of puns. I give them the credit they deserve, but no more. The loftiest spirits in mankind and perhaps beyond mankind, the most illustrious and delightful, have had resort to the play on words. Jesus made a pun about Peter, the Rock. Moses made a pun about Isaac, Aeschylus about Polynices, Cleopatra about Octavius. And we may note that without Cleopatra’s pun, made before the Battle of Actium, no one would remember the town of Toryna, whose name is derived from a Greek word meaning a wooden spoon. But having conceded all this, let me return to my original matter. I repeat, dear brothers and sisters, pas de zèle – no clamour, no excess, even of gaiety, wit and merriment. Hear me, for I have the prudence of Amphiaraus and the baldness of Caesar. There must be a limit even to riddle-making – modus in rebus – and even to dining. Ladies you like apple-turnovers, but you must not over-indulge in them. Art and good sense must play their part even in the eating of apple-turnovers. Gluttony punishes the glutton. Indigestion was designed by God to impose morality on stomachs. And remember this:
each of our passions, even that of love, has a stomach that must not be surfeited. We must write finis to all things at the proper time, exercise restraint when desire is still urgent, lock the door on appetite, put fantasy in the stocks and ourselves under arrest. The wise man is he who knows when the moment has come. Have faith in me, because I have read a little law, or so the examination results tell me, and can distinguish between what is explicit and what is implicit; because I have written a thesis in Latin on the methods of torture used in Rome at the time when Munatius Demens was Quaestor of Parricide; because it appears that I am shortly to be awarded my doctorate, from which it would seem that I am not wholly an imbecile. I urge you to be moderate in your desires, and as surely as my name is Félix Tholomyès this is wise counsel. Happy is he who when the hour strikes takes the heroic course and abdicates, like Sulla or Origen.’

  Favourite had been listening with profound attention.

  ‘Félix,’ she said. ‘Such a lovely name. It’s Latin. It means happy.’

  ‘My friends and brothers,’ Tholomyès continued, ‘do you wish to escape the pricks of desire, to dispense with the nuptial couch and defy love? It is easily done, and this is the prescription: lemonade and hard labour. You must exhaust yourselves in sleepless toil, drink tisanes of herbs and flowers, so limit your diet that you nearly starve, wear a hair shirt and take cold baths.’

  ‘I’d sooner have a woman,’ said Listolier.

  ‘Woman!’ exclaimed Tholomyès. ‘Beware of woman! Woe to him who trusts himself to her inconstant heart. Woman is perfidious and devious. She hates the serpent as a professional rival. The serpent is in the house across the way.’

  ‘Tholomyès, you’re drunk,’ cried Blachevelle.

  ‘Perhaps I am.’

  ‘Then at least be cheerful.’

  ‘Very well.’ And filling his glass, Tholomyès got to his feet.

  ‘To the glory of wine! Nunc te, Bacche, canam. Forgive me, ladies, that’s Spanish. The measure of a people is the measure of their wine. The arroba of Castille holds sixteen litres, the cantaro of Alicante twelve, the almuda of the Canaries twenty-five, the cuatrin of the Balearios twenty-six – and the jackboot of Tsar Peter thirty! All honour to the great Tsar, and to his boot which was greater still! Ladies, a word of friendly advice: change partners whenever you choose. It is proper that love should stray. The love-affair was never meant to be debased like an English charwoman with calloused knees, but to rove and flutter in gaiety of heart. To err is human, it is said; but I say that to err is to love. Ladies, I adore you all. Zéphine, Josephine, with your indignant expressions you would be enchanting if you were less reproving. And Favourite! One day when Blachevelle was crossing the gutter in the Rue Guérin-Boisseau he saw a girl in trim white stockings who showed her legs, and the sight so delighted him that he fell in love. Favourite, you have Grecian lips. There was a painter called Euphorion who was known as the painter of lips, and he alone would have been worthy to paint your mouth. And no one before you was worthy of the name of Favourite. You deserve to be awarded the apple, like Venus, and to eat it, like Eve. Just now you spoke of my name and I was touched. But names can be deceptive. My name is Félix but I am not happy. Words can be liars, we must not blindly believe what they say. In your place, Miss Dahlia, I would call myself Rose. A flower should be fragrant and a woman should have wit. Of Fantine I say nothing. She is a dreamer, a sensitive soul, a wraith shaped like a nymph with the downcast eyes of a nun who has drifted into the life of a grisette but takes refuge in illusion. She sings and prays, looks heavenward without much knowing what she sees or does, strays in a garden where there are more birds than exist in life. Take heed of what I say, Fantine – I, Tholomyès, am an illusion … But she is not even listening, lost in her golden-head dreams. Everything in her is freshness, softness, youth, and morning light. Dear Fantine, you should be called Marguerite or Pearl, you are a woman of the most splendid East … Ladies, a second counsel: do not marry. But why am I saying this? Why waste my breath? In the matter of marriage women are incorrigible, and nothing that wise men can say will prevent the stay-maker and the seamstress from dreaming of a husband loaded with diamonds. So be it: but, ladies, remember this – you eat too much sugar. If you have a fault it is that you are forever nibbling sweets. Your pretty white teeth crave sugar. But you must bear in mind that sugar is a salt; all salts are desiccating and sugar is the most desiccating of all. It heightens the rush of blood through the veins, leading to coagulation, to tubercles in the lung, to death. That is why diabetes leads to consumption. Therefore, ladies do not eat sugar, and live long … I turn now to the men. Gentlemen, make conquests. Be ruthless in robbing your comrade of his mistress. Thrust and parry – in love there is no friendship. Wherever there is a pretty woman there is open warfare, no quarter, war to the knife. A pretty woman is a causus belli; she is flagrante delicto. Petticoats have been the cause of every invasion in history. Woman is man’s rightful prey, Romulus carried off the Sabine women, William of Normandy the Saxon women, Caesar the women of Rome. The man who is not loved preys like a vulture on the loves of other men, and for my part, to these unfortunates without a mistress I repeat the sublime proclamation of Bonaparte to the army of Italy: “Soldiers, you lack everything. The enemy has it.”’

  Tholomyès here paused for breath, and Blachevelle, supported by Listolier and Fameuil, broke into a nonsense-song, a topical catch with more rhyme than reason of the kind that springs up amid tobacco-smoke and is as swiftly blown away. The effect was to drive Tholomyès to higher flights. Draining his glass, he re-filled it and concluded his discourse as follows:

  ‘Down with wisdom! Forget everything I have said. Let us be neither prudish nor prudent. I drink to merriment. Let us be merry and end our course on law with folly and with food. Indigestion and the Digest, Justinian the male principle and festivity the female. How splendid is creation, how filled with gaiety, the world glittering like a gem in the benefaction of summer, the blackbird pouring forth its un-fee’d song, the paths of the Luxembourg, the Rue Madame and the Avenue de l’Observatoire rich with the dreams of delicious nursemaids as they watch over the young. I would delight in the South American pampas if I had not the arcades of the Odéon. My soul flies out to virgin forests and savannahs. Everything is beautiful. The flies swarm in the sunlight and the humming-bird is born of the sun. Kiss me, Fantine.’

  And absent-mindedly he kissed Favourite.

  VIII

  Death of a horse

  ‘The food is better at Edon’s than in this place,’ said Zéphine.

  ‘I prefer Bombarda,’ said Blachevelle. ‘The setting is more luxurious, more oriental. There are mirrors on the walls downstairs.’

  ‘I’m more interested in what’s on my plate,’ said Favourite.

  ‘But look at these knives, with their silver handles. They’re bone at Edon’s. Silver is worth more than bone.’

  ‘Except to those who wear it on their chin,’ said Tholomyès.

  He was gazing out of the window at the dome of the Invalides. There was a brief pause.

  ‘Tholomyès,’ said Fameuil, ‘Listolier and I have been disputing.’

  ‘To dispute is excellent,’ said Tholomyès. ‘To quarrel is even better.’

  ‘We were discussing a matter of philosophy. Which do you prefer – Descartes or Spinoza?’

  ‘I prefer Desaugiers,’ said Tholomyès. Desaugiers was a cabaret-singer.

  Having thus pronounced judgement he continued:

  ‘I am content to live. The world is not yet ended since we can still talk nonsense, and for this I give thanks to the immortal gods. We lie, but we laugh. We affirm, but we doubt. And that is admirable. The unexpected springs out of the syllogism. There are still people on earth who take pleasure in opening and closing that box of surprises, the paradox. The wine you are so peacefully drinking, ladies, is a Madeira from the Coural das Freiras vineyard, which is three hundred and seventeen fathoms above sea-level. Take heed of this as you drin
k. Three hundred and seventeen fathoms, and Monsieur Bombarda, that princely restauranteur, lets us have them for four francs fifty a litre.’

  Fameuil attempted to interrupt.

  ‘Tholomyès, your opinion is law. But do you think –’

  Tholomyès brushed this aside.

  ‘All honour to Bombarda! He would be the equal of Munophis of Elephanta if he could find me a dancing-girl, and of Thygelion of Cheroneus if he could bring me a hetaera. For believe me, ladies, there were Bombardas in Greece and Egypt, as Apuleius tells us. Alas, as Solomon said, there is nothing new under the sun, and as Virgil said, amor omnibus idem, love is the same for all of us. Lisette goes off with her Louis in a boat at Saint-Cloud just as Aspasia embarked with Pericles in the fleet at Samos. Do you know who Aspasia was, ladies? She lived in an age when women were not supposed to possess souls, yet she had a soul that was both rose-pink and scarlet, hotter than flame and cooler than the dawn. She encompassed the two extremities of woman, she was the prostitute goddess, part Socrates, part Manon Lescaut. She was created for the service of Prometheus, should he desire a wanton.’

  Being again in full spate Tholomyès might have been difficult to stop, but at that moment a horse fell in the street directly below their windows. It was a lean, aged mare, fit only for the knacker’s yard, harnessed to a heavy cart. Exhaustion had brought it to a halt outside Bombarda’s and it refused to go further. A crowd gathered. The carter, cursing loudly, applied his whip, whereupon the creature collapsed and could not be got to its feet again. The hubbub caused Tholomyès’s audience to rise and go to the window.