Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  Decidedly the man was an enigma. The know-alls saved their faces by saying, ‘Well anyway he’s up to something.’

  The district owed him a great deal and the poor owed him everything. He was so invaluable that he had to be honoured and so kindly that he had to be loved. His workpeople in particular adored him, and he accepted their adoration with a kind of grave melancholy. When it became known that he was extremely rich the ‘society’ of the town took notice of him, addressing him as Monsieur Madeleine; but his workpeople and the children still called him Père Madeleine, and it was this that drew from him his warmest smile. As he rose in the world, invitations were showered on him. ‘Society’ sought him out. The doors of Montreuil’s most select drawing-rooms, which had of course been closed to the tradesman, were flung wide to welcome the millionaire. Frequent approaches were made to him, but he rejected them all.

  And here the gossips were on firmer ground. He was, they said, an ignorant and uneducated man. No one knew where he came from. He would not know how to behave in polite society. It was not even certain that he could read.

  When he was seen to be making money they had said, ‘He’s a business man.’ When he scattered his money in charity they said, ‘He’s a careerist.’ When he refused to accept honours they said, ‘He’s an adventurer.’ When he rejected polite society they said, ‘He’s a peasant.’

  By 1820, five years after his arrival in Montreuil-sur-mer, the services he had rendered were so outstanding, and public opinion was so unanimous, that the king again appointed him mayor of the town. Again he refused; but this time, faced by the prefect’s rejection of his refusal, the insistence of the local dignitaries and the supplications of the people in the streets, he finally gave way. It was said that what had induced him to change his mind were the words shouted at him almost angrily by an old woman standing in her doorway – ‘A good mayor is a useful person. How can you hold back when you have the chance to do good?’

  This was the third stage of his rise in the world. ‘Le père Madeleine’ had become Monsieur Madeleine, and Monsieur Madeleine had become Monsieur le Meire.

  III

  Sums deposited with Laffitte

  In other respects he remained as simple as on the day of his arrival. He was grey-haired and grave-eyed, with the tanned complexion of a working man and the thoughtful countenance of a philosopher. He ordinarily wore a broad-brimmed hat and a long tail-coat of broad-cloth buttoned to the chin. He performed his official duties as mayor, but otherwise kept himself to himself, speaking to few people, evading courtesies, exchanging brief greetings and hastily passing on, smiling to avoid the need for speech and giving alms to avoid the need for smiling. The women called him ‘a kind old bear’. His greatest pleasure was to go for walks through the countryside.

  He always took his meals alone, with a book at his elbow. He had a small but well-selected library. He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends. It seemed that as his leisure increased with his growing fortune he made use of it to improve himself. His use of language became more refined, less uncouth, and more discriminating.

  He often carried a shotgun on his walks but seldom used it. When he did so, however, he was a terrifyingly good marksman. He never killed a harmless animal or shot at a small bird.

  Although he was no longer young it was said of him that he was immensely strong. He had a helping hand for whoever needed it, would hoist a fallen horse to its feet, put a shoulder to a bogged-down wheel, grasp the horns of an escaped bull. He always left home with a pocketful of small change and came back with it empty. When he walked through a village the ragged children ran after him in delight, swarming round him like flies.

  He must at some time have lived in the country, for he possessed much recondite knowledge which he passed on to the peasants. He taught them how to destroy corn-moth by spraying the barn and soaking the cracks in the floor with a solution of common salt, and how to get rid of boll-weevil by hanging bunches of orviot in blossom on the walls and in the roofs of store-rooms and cottages. He had recipes against vetch and ground-ivy and other parasitic weeds that invade a cornfield. He protected a rabbit-enclosure against rats simply with the scent of a small Barbary pig which he installed in it.

  On one occasion he watched a party of countryfolk busily engaged in pulling up nettles. Contemplating the uprooted and withering plants, he said: ‘They’re dead. But it would be a good thing if use were made of them. The young nettle is an excellent vegetable, and as it ages it develops fibres like those of hemp or flax. Nettle-cloth is as good as hemp-cloth. Chopped nettles can be fed to poultry and mashed nettles are good for cattle; nettle-seed mixed with their fodder gives the animals a glossy skin; the roots mixed with salt produce an admirable yellow dye. Moreover, nettles are a crop that can be harvested twice a year. And they need almost nothing – very little space and no husbanding or cultivation. Their only drawback is that the seed falls as it ripens and is difficult to harvest. With very little trouble nettles can be put to use; being neglected they become obnoxious and are therefore destroyed. How many men share the fate of the nettle!’ After a moment of silence he added: ‘My friends, remember this, there are no bad plants or bad men. There is only bad husbandry.’

  The children loved him especially because he knew how to make fascinating toys out of straw and coconuts.

  When he saw a church-door draped in black he entered, seeking out funerals as other men seek out christenings. Widowhood and the afflictions of others appealed to his strongly compassionate nature; he mingled with the mourners and the priests chanting round a coffin. It seemed that the words of the funeral psalms, with their vision of another world, were especially attuned to his thoughts. He listened with eyes uplifted, as though straining towards the mysteries of the infinite, to the sad voices singing on the threshold of the abyss of death.

  He performed countless acts of kindness with as much precaution as though they were misdeeds. He would secretly enter a house after dark and go furtively up the stairs; and some poor devil, returning to his attic, would find that his door had been opened, and even forced, in his absence. His instant thought would be that he had been robbed, but then he would find nothing gone and a gold piece lying on the table. The ‘miscreant’ was Père Madeleine.

  He was a friendly but sad figure. People said of him: ‘A rich man who is not proud. A fortunate man who does not look happy.’

  He was a man of mystery. It was said of him that he allowed no one to enter his bedroom, a real anchorite’s cell furnished with winged hour-glasses and decorated with skulls and crossbones. This tale was repeated so often that certain elegant and audacious young ladies called upon him and asked, ‘Monsieur le Maire, may we be allowed to see your bedroom? It is said to be like a cave.’ He smiled and at once showed them in, putting them greatly out of countenance. It was a room with commonplace mahogany furniture, as ugly as such furniture generally is, and with cheap paper on the walls. They found nothing remarkable in it except two candlesticks of an antiquated design on the mantelpiece, which were presumably silver ‘because they were stamped’ – an observation very typical of the small-town mind.

  But despite this, people went on saying that no one ever entered that room, and that it was like a tomb or a hermit’s cave.

  It was also rumoured that he had ‘immense sums’ on deposit with Laffitte, and that by a special arrangement these were held at his immediate disposal, so that he could walk into the bank whenever he chose and after signing a receipt walk out with two or three millions in his pocket. The reality of those ‘two or three millions’ was, as we have said, a sum of six hundred and thirty or forty thousand francs.

  IV

  Monsieur Madeleine in mourning

  Early in 1821 the newspapers announced the passing of Monsieur Myriel, Bishop of Digne, ‘known as Monseigneur Bienvenu’, who had died in the odour of sanctity at the age of eighty-two. A detail may be added which the newspapers omitted to mention. For several years prior to his deat
h the bishop had been blind but contented in his blindness, having his sister at his side.

  We may remark in passing that to be blind and beloved may, in this world where nothing is perfect, be among the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. To have a wife, daughter, or sister continually at call, a devoted being who is there because we have need of her and because she cannot live without us; to be able to measure her affection by the constancy of her presence and reflect, ‘If she gives me all her time it is because I have all her heart’; to see the thought in default of the face, weigh fidelity in exclusion of the world, hear the rustle of a dress as though it were the rustling of wings, the comings and goings, the everyday speech, the snatch of song; to be conscious every minute of our own attraction, feeling the more powerful for our weakness, becoming in obscurity and through obscurity the star around which an angel gravitates – there are few felicities to equal this. The supreme happiness in life is the assurance of being loved; of being loved for oneself, even in spite of oneself; and this assurance the blind man possesses. In his affliction, to be served is to be caressed. Does he lack anything? No. Possessing love he is not deprived of light. A love, moreover, that is wholly pure. There can be no blindness where there is this certainty. Soul gropes for soul and finds it. And the found and proven soul is a woman. A hand sustains you, and it is hers; lips touch your forehead and they are her lips; the breathing at your side is her breath. To possess her every feeling from devotion to pity, to be never left in solitude, to have the support of that gentle frailty, that slender, unbreakable reed, to feel the touch of Providence in her hands and be able to clasp it in your arms, a palpable God – what happiness can be greater? The heart, that secret, celestial flower, mysteriously blossoms, and one would not exchange one’s darkness for all light. The angel spirit is there, always there; if she moves away it is to return, she fades like a dream to reappear like reality. We feel the approaching warmth, and, with its coming, serenity, our gaiety and ecstasy overflow; we are radiant in our darkness. There are the countless small cares, those trifles that become huge in our void. The tenderest tones of the feminine voice are used for our comfort and replace the vanished world; they are a spiritual caress; seeing nothing we feel ourselves adored. It is a paradise in shadow.

  This was the paradise from which Monseigneur Bienvenu passed to the other.

  His death was reported in the local paper at Montreuil-sur-mer, and on the following day Monsieur Madeleine appeared clad in black with a band of crêpe round his hat. The matter was much discussed in the town since it seemed to throw a light on his background. ‘He’s in mourning for the Bishop of Digne,’ said the drawing-rooms, and this redounded greatly to his credit, entitling him, for the moment, to a higher degree of consideration on the part of the aristocracy of Montreuil-sur-mer. The infinitesimal Faubourg Saint-Germain of the town was disposed to abandon its attitude of aloofness, since he appeared to be related to a bishop. Monsieur Madeleine was made aware of his promotion by an increase in the number of curtsies he received from the older ladies and smiles from the younger ones. One evening a dowager of that small circle, entitled by her ancient lineage to be inquisitive, ventured to question him. ‘No doubt, Monsieur le Maire, the late Bishop of Digne was your cousin?’

  ‘No, Madame.’

  ‘But,’ said the lady, ‘you are in mourning for him.’

  He replied: ‘That is because in my youth I was a lackey in his family.’

  It was also noted that whenever a vagrant boy appeared in the town looking for chimneys to sweep, the mayor sent for him, asked his name and gave him money. The word went round among the young ‘Savoyards’ and a great many of them came.

  V

  Flickers on the horizon

  By degrees all opposition to him had died down. At first M. Madeleine had been subjected to the ill-report and calumny that by a sort of law afflict all those who become prominent; this had gradually dwindled into malicious anecdote and gossip which at length had ceased entirely. Respect and cordial esteem for him had grown until, in about 1821, the words Monsieur le Maire were spoken in Montreuil-sur-mer in much the same tone as the words Monseigneur l’Evêque had been spoken in Digne in 1815. People came from twenty miles around to consult Monsieur Madeleine. He resolved disputes, prevented law-suits, reconciled enemies. Every man trusted him to judge fairly, as though his guiding spirit were a book of natural law. It was like an epidemic of veneration spreading, in a matter of six or seven years, throughout the province.

  One man only was wholly immune from the contagion and, regardless of what M. Madeleine did, refused to succumb to it as though from an unassailable instinct of wariness and distrust. It seems indeed that there exists in some men a genuinely animal instinct, pure and authentic as are all instincts, which determines their antipathies and sympathies, inexorably discriminating between one person and another without hesitation or afterthought, neither weakening nor contradicting itself; which is lucid within its own obscurity, infallible and overweening, rejecting every counsel of intelligence and every compromise of reason, and which, disdaining all outward appearances, secretly warns the man-dog of the presence of the man-cat, the man-fox of the presence of the man-lion.

  It happened often that Monsieur Madeleine, walking amiably through the streets and receiving the affectionate greetings of his fellow-citizens, was observed by a tall man in a grey tail-coat carrying a heavy stick and wearing a low-brimmed hat. This person would watch him until he was out of sight, standing with arms crossed, slowly shaking his head and thrusting his lower lip against the upper until it reached his nose in a sort of purposeful grimace which seemed to say, ‘Who is that man? I’ve seen him before. Anyway, he isn’t fooling me.’

  He was one of those people who, even glimpsed, make an immediate impression; there was an intensity about him that was almost a threat. His name was Javert and he belonged to the police.

  In Montreuil-sur-mer he performed the distasteful but necessary duties of a police-inspector. He had not witnessed Madeleine’s beginnings. When he took up his present post, which he owed to the influence of the Paris Prefect of Police, the manufacturer’s fortune was already made and Père Madeleine had become Monsieur Madeleine.

  Certain police officers have a particular cast of countenance in which primitive instincts are mingled with an air of authority. Javert had the air of authority, but without the primitive instincts.

  It is our belief that if the soul were visible to the eye every member of the human species would be seen to correspond to some species of the animal world and a truth scarcely perceived by thinkers would be readily confirmed, namely, that from the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at a time.

  Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought. But since they are no more than shadows, He has not made them educable in the full sense of the word – Why should He do so? Our souls, on the other hand, being realities with a purpose proper to themselves, have been endowed with intelligence, that is to say, the power to learn. Well-managed social education can extract from any human spirit, no matter of what kind, such usefulness as it contains.

  This, of course, is to confine the matter within the limits of our visible earthly life, without prejudging the deeper question of the anterior and ulterior nature of creatures which are not men. The visible personality affords us no grounds for denying the existence of a latent personality. Having made this reservation, we may proceed.

  Granted the supposition that in every man there is contained a species of the animal kingdom, we may at once place Inspector Javert. The Asturian peasants believe that in every wolf-litter there is a dog-whelp which the mother kills, because otherwise when it grows larger it will devour the rest of her young. Endow this dog with a human face, and you have Javert.

  He had
been born in prison, the son of a fortune-teller whose husband was in the galleys. As he grew older he came to believe that he was outside society with no prospect of ever entering it. But he noted that there were two classes of men whom society keeps inexorably at arm’s length – those who prey upon it, and those who protect it. The only choice open to him was between those two. At the same time, he was a man with a profound instinct for correctitude, regularity, and probity, and with a consuming hatred for the vagabond order to which he himself belonged. He joined the police.

  He did well. At the age of forty he was an inspector, having as a young man been a prison-warder in the Midi. But before going further let us look more closely at the human face which we have ascribed to Javert.

  It consisted of a flat nose with two wide nostrils flanked by huge side-whiskers. A first glance at those two thickets enclosing two caverns was disconcerting. When Javert laughed, a rare and terrible occurrence, his thin lips parted to display not only his teeth but his gums, and a deep and savage furrow formed on either side of his nose as though on the muzzle of a beast of prey. Javert unsmiling was a bulldog; when he laughed he was a tiger. For the rest – a narrow brow and a large jaw, locks of hair concealing the forehead and falling over the eyebrows, permanent wrinkles between the eyes resembling a star of wrath, a dark gaze, a tight, formidable mouth, a look of fierce command.

  His mental attitude was compounded of two very simple principles, admirable in themselves but which, by carrying them to extremes, he made almost evil – respect for authority and hatred of revolt against it. Theft, murder and every other crime were to him all forms of revolt. Everybody who played any part in the running of the State, from the First Minister to the garde champêtre, was invested in his eyes with a kind of mystical sanctity, and he felt nothing but contempt, aversion and disgust for those who, even if only once, transgressed beyond the bounds of law. His judgements were absolute, admitting no exceptions. He said on the one hand, ‘The official cannot be wrong, the magistrate is always right,’ and on the other hand, ‘Those others are lost, no good can come of them.’ He shared unreservedly the extreme views of those who attribute to human law some sort of power to damn or, if you prefer, to place on record the damned, and who set a river Styx at the entrance to society. He was stoical, earnest and austere, given to gloomy pondering, and like all fanatics, both humble and arrogant. His eyes were cold and piercing as a gimlet. His whole life was contained in two words, wakefulness and watchfulness. He drew a straight line through all that is most tortuous in this world. He possessed the conscience appropriate to his function, and his duties were his religion; he was a spy in the way that other men are priests. Woe to those who fell into his hands! He would have arrested his own father escaping from prison and denounced his mother for breaking parole, and he would have done it with a glow of conscious rectitude. His life was one of rigorous austerity, isolation, self-denial and chastity without distractions; a life of unswerving duty, with the police service playing the role that Sparta played for the Spartans – ceaseless alertness, fanatical honesty, the spy carved in marble, a mingling of Brutus and Vidocq.*