Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  An old woman who lived in the house taught her the art of living in penury. There are two stages – living on little, and living on nothing. They are like two rooms, the first dark, the second pitch-black.

  Fantine learned how to dispense entirely with a fire in winter, how to give up the tame bird which eats a handful of seed a day, how to turn a petticoat into a blanket and a blanket into a petticoat, and how to save candles by eating by the light from the window across the street. The rest of us have little notion of the use that a fragile being, grown old in privation and honesty, can make of a single sou. It becomes a talent in the end, one that Fantine acquired and with it a regrowth of courage.

  She said to her neighbour: ‘Well, what I say is, if I only sleep five hours a night and work the rest of the time I can just about earn enough to live on. And when you’re unhappy you eat less. So what with work and not much food on the one hand, and grieving on the other, I can keep alive.’

  To have had her child with her in her distress would have been happiness of a kind. She thought of sending for her. But was she to make her share her own destitution? And then, she owed money to Thénardier. How was that debt to be paid, and how pay the cost of the journey?

  The old spinster who had instructed her in what may be termed the art of poverty was named Marguerite. She was truly devout, poor herself and charitable not only to the poor but also to the rich, just sufficiently educated to be able to sign her name ‘Margueritte’, and firm in her trust in God, which is the root of wisdom. There are many such virtuous souls in the depths who will one day rise higher; they are lives which have a tomorrow.

  At first Fantine had been so overcome by shame that she had been afraid to leave the house. She felt in the streets that everyone looked at her; the heads turned but no one greeted her; and this ostracism pierced her like a keen wind, body and soul. In a small town the fallen woman is as it were exposed naked to the scorn and prying eyes of all-comers. In Paris she is at least unknown, and her anonymity is a garment. Fantine would have given all she possessed to be able to take refuge in Paris, but it was impossible. She had to learn to endure disdain as she learned to accustom herself to penury, and by degrees she did so. In two or three months she had shrugged off her shame and went about as though nothing had happened, pretending not to care. She came and went with her head held high and a bitter smile on her lips, and felt that she was becoming brazen.

  Madame Victurnien, seeing her pass beneath her window and noting the wretched condition of the ‘creature’ who thanks to her public spirit had been ‘put in her place’, was highly gratified. The cruel of heart have their own black happiness.

  Excess of work exhausted Fantine, and the small, dry cough from which she suffered grew worse. She said sometimes to Marguerite, ‘Feel how hot my hands are.’

  But in the mornings, combing with a broken comb the hair that flowed like silk over her shoulders, she still had moments of happy vanity.

  X

  Continued success of Madame Victurnien

  Fantine had been dismissed at the end of the winter. She survived the summer, but then came the next winter, shorter days and shorter working hours. Winter! No warmth, no light, no midday, morning merging into evening, fog, twilight, and nothing to be clearly seen through the misted window. The sky had become a grating, the day a cellar, the sun a poor man at the door. The terrible winter season, which turns the rain from Heaven and the hearts of men to stone! Fantine’s creditors were harassing her.

  She could not earn enough and her debts grew. The Thénardiers bombarded her with letters, heartrending in tone and ominous in their exactions. They wrote to say that Cosette was obliged to go almost naked in the cold and that at least ten francs were needed to buy her a woollen dress. Receiving this letter, Fantine carried it crumpled in her hand throughout the day, and in the evening went to the barber at the corner of the street and withdrew her comb, letting her fair hair fall down to her waist.

  ‘Such beautiful hair!’ said the barber.

  ‘What will you give me for it?’ she asked.

  ‘Ten francs.’

  ‘Then cut it off.’

  She bought a woollen dress and sent it to the Thénardiers, who were furious. The money was what they wanted. They gave the dress to their daughter Éponine, and the little lark, Cosette, went on shivering.

  ‘My daughter’s not cold any more,’ thought Fantine. ‘I have dressed her in my hair.’ She wore small mob-caps to hide her shorn head and still looked pretty.

  But a dark change was taking place within her. Now that she could no longer do up her hair she conceived a hatred for all mankind. She had long shared the universal veneration for Père Madeleine, but now, by dint of telling herself that he had dismissed her and was the cause of all her troubles, she came to hate him more than any man. When she passed the factory gates at the time when the workers were waiting to be let in she affected to sing and laugh derisively, which caused one old woman to remark, ‘There’s a wench that’ll come to a bad end.’

  In a spirit of defiance, and with fury in her heart, she took a lover, a chance acquaintance for whom she cared nothing. He was some sort of travelling musician, indolent and feckless. He beat her and finally left her, as repelled as she was herself.

  But still she worshipped her child. The deeper she sank, the darker the shades that closed about her, the more radiant did that vision appear. ‘Someday I’ll be rich and have Cosette with me,’ she said to herself, and this alone could cause her to smile. The cough did not get better and she had night sweats.

  The following letter came from the Thénardiers:

  ‘Cosette has caught the disease that is sweeping through the region, what they call a miliary fever. The medicine is very expensive. It is ruining us and we can no longer pay. If you do not send us forty francs within a week the child will die.’

  This caused Fantine to burst into hysterical laughter, and she said to Marguerite:

  ‘How wonderful! A mere forty francs! Two napoléons. Where do they expect me to get them? Are they mad?’

  She re-read the letter standing by a window on the landing, and then, still laughing, ran downstairs and out into the street. To someone who asked what she found so funny she replied:

  ‘A silly joke in a letter I’ve just had from some country people. They want forty francs from me, the poor, ignorant peasants!’

  Crossing the market-square she saw a crowd gathered round a strangely shaped vehicle from which a man clad in red was addressing them. He was an itinerant dentist selling sets of false teeth, opiates, powders, and elixirs. Drawing closer, Fantine joined in the laughter at his oratory, in which slang for the common people was interlarded with highflown language for the well-to-do; and seeing her laugh, the dentist cried:

  ‘You’ve got a fine set of teeth, my lass. If you’d care to sell me your two incisors I’ll pay you a gold napoléon for each.’

  ‘What are my incisors?’

  ‘Your two top front teeth.’

  ‘How horrible!’ exclaimed Fantine.

  ‘Two napoléons,’ grumbled a toothless old woman standing near. ‘She’s in luck!’

  Fantine fled, covering her ears to shut out the man’s hoarse voice as he shouted after her:

  ‘Think it over, my girl. Two napoléons are worth having. If you change your mind you’ll find me this evening at the Tillac d’argent.’

  Fantine ran home in a fury of indignation and told Marguerite what had happened.

  ‘Would you believe it! The abominable man – how can they allow such creatures to travel round the country? He wanted to pull my two front teeth out. I should be hideous! Hair grows again, but not teeth. Oh, the monster! I’d sooner throw myself out of a top-storey window. He said he’d be at the Tillac d’argent this evening.’

  ‘How much did he say he’d pay?’ asked Marguerite.

  ‘Two napoléons.’

  ‘That’s forty francs.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fantine. ‘That’s forty fra
ncs.’

  She went thoughtfully on with her work. After a quarter of an hour she stopped sewing and went on to the landing to re-read the Thénardiers’ letter. She returned and said to Marguerite:

  ‘What is this miliary fever? Have you heard of it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the old woman. ‘It’s an illness.’

  ‘Does it need a lot of medicine?’

  ‘Yes, very strong medicine.’

  ‘How do you get it?’

  ‘It’s just an illness that you catch.’

  ‘And children catch it?’

  ‘Especially children.’

  ‘Do they die of it?’

  ‘Very often,’ said Marguerite.

  Fantine left the room and went on to the landing to read the letter again. That evening she went out and was seen hurrying in the direction of the Rue de Paris, where the inns are.

  When Marguerite entered Fantine’s room next morning, doing so before daybreak because they always worked together and thus could share a candle, she found her seated cold and shivering on her bed. She had not been to bed. She was sitting with her bonnet on her knees, and the candle, which had been burning all night, was almost burned away.

  Standing horror-stricken in the doorway, Marguerite cried:

  ‘Heavens! You’ve used up a whole candle! What has happened?’

  Fantine turned her cropped head towards her, and it seemed that she had aged ten years overnight.

  ‘Lord preserve usl’ cried Marguerite. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Nothing is the matter with me,’ said Fantine. ‘I’m happy. My baby isn’t going to the of that dreadful disease for lack of medicine.’

  She pointed to two napoléons that lay gleaming on the table.

  ‘A fortune,’ murmured Marguerite. ‘A fortune! Where did you get them?’

  ‘I earned them,’ said Fantine.

  She smiled as she said it, and the candle lighted her face. It was a bloodstained smile. There were flecks of blood at the corners of her mouth and a wide gap beneath her upper lip.

  She sent the forty francs to Montfermeil.

  Needless to say, the Thénardiers were lying. Cosette was not ill.

  Fantine threw away her mirror. She had long since exchanged her small room on the second floor for an attic under the sloping roof, against the beams of which she constantly bumped her head. Paupers cannot reach the end of their abode, or of their destiny, except by crouching ever lower. She no longer possessed a bed but only a mattress on the floor, a tattered blanket and a rickety chair. A potted rose in one corner of the room had died of neglect. In another corner was a butter-tub which served as a water bucket; the water froze in winter, and its different levels were marked during long periods by rings of ice. She had lost all shame and was losing all personal pride. She wore soiled bonnets in the street and, from lack of time or from indifference, no longer mended her undergarments. As the heels of her stockings wore out she stuffed the stockings down into her shoes, a fact which was apparent from their wrinkles. She patched her old, worn stays with fragments of calico which tore at the least strain. The people to whom she owed money allowed her no peace, making scenes in the street and on the stairway. She spent whole nights in tears and brooding, her eyes over bright and with a constant pain in her back, at the top of her left shoulder-blade. She coughed a great deal. Profoundly hating Père Madeleine, she uttered no complaint against him. She stitched seventeen hours a day; but a contractor for prison labour, who was able to get the work done more cheaply, brought the free workers’ daily wage down to nine sous. Nine sous for seventeen hours work! Her creditors became more insatiable than ever, the second-hand dealer, who had got back nearly all his furniture, never stopped badgering her. In God’s name, what more could she do? Feeling hunted, she developed some of the instincts of a wild beast. And then Thénardier wrote to say that his patience was at an end and that if she did not send a hundred francs forthwith he would be obliged to turn Cosette out into the street, still convalescent after her grave illness, to fend for herself amid the rigours of the season and live or the as the case might be.

  A hundred francs! In what calling was it possible to earn a hundred sous a day? There was only one. ‘Well,’ thought Fantine, ‘I may as well sell the rest.’

  She became a prostitute.

  XI

  Christus nos liberavit

  What is the true story of Fantine? It is the story of society’s purchase of a slave. A slave purchased from poverty, hunger, cold, loneliness, defencelessness, destitution. A squalid bargain: a human soul for a hunk of bread. Poverty offers and society accepts.

  Our society is governed by the precepts of Jesus Christ but is not yet imbued with them. We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.

  It afflicts women, that is to say, it preys on grace, frailty, beauty, motherhood. It is not the least of man’s shames.

  At the sad point which our tale has now reached there is nothing left of the girl who was once Fantine. In becoming dirt, she has been turned to stone. To touch her is to feel a chill. She submits to and ignores the customer; she is the unmoving countenance of the dishonoured. Life and the social order have said their last word to her; everything has happened to her that can happen. She has known everything, borne and suffered everything, lost everything and shed her last tear. She is resigned with the resignation that resembles indifference as death resembles sleep. She no longer seeks to escape from anything, nor does she fear anything. Let the heavens fall, let the tides of the sea engulf her, and what can it matter, she has had her fill.

  Or so she believes, but it is an error to suppose that we can ever exhaust Fate or reach the end of anything. What is the riddle of these countless scattered destinies, whither are they bound, why are they as they are?

  He who knows the answer to this knows all things. He is alone. His name is God.

  XII

  The idleness of Monsieur Bamatabois

  In every small town, and this was particularly so in Montreuil-sur-mer, there is a class of young men who squander an income of fifteen hundred francs in the provinces much as their peers in Paris squander an income of two hundred thousand. They belong to the great species of neuters, the geldings, parasites, nonentities who own a little land, a little silliness, and a little wit; who would look like clods in a fashionable salon but think themselves gentlemen in a tavern; who talk about ‘my fields and my peasants’, who boo actresses in the theatre to prove themselves men of taste, pick quarrels with the officers of the garrison to prove that they are men of spirit, shoot, smoke, yawn, drink, smell of tobacco, play billiards, watch the travellers descending from the stage-coach, live in the café, dine at the inn, own a dog which eats scraps under the table and a mistress who sets the dishes on top of it, watch their pennies, carry current fashions to the extreme, patronize the drama, despise women, wear out their old boots, copy London by way of Paris and Paris by way of Pont-à-Mousson, and grow old and feeble-minded having never worked or served any purpose or done any great harm.

  Monsieur Félix Tholomyès, had he stayed in the provinces and never come to Paris, would have been one of these.

  Richer, they would be called bucks or fops; poorer, they would be vagabonds. They are simply idlers, boring or bored or daydreaming idlers, with a few wags among them.

  At that period a fop sported a high collar, a spreading cravat, a watch with a fob, three superimposed waistcoats of different colours, the blue and the red being underneath, a high-waisted, olive-coloured, fish-tailed coat with a double row of silver buttons sewn close together and rising up to the shoulders, and trousers of a lighter olive adorned with pleats on either side, always an equal number ranging from one to eleven, this limit being never exceeded. To which may be added low boots with metal heelcaps, a narrow-brimmed tall hat, a very large cane and conversation sparkling with witticisms borrowed from Potier of
the Théâtre des Variétés. Above all, spurs and a moustache. The moustache in those days was the hallmark of a civilian, the spurs were the mark of a pedestrian. The provincial fop wore longer spurs and a bushier moustache.

  It was the period of the struggle of the South American republics against Spain, of Bolívar against Morillo. The narrow-brimmed hats, indicative of monarchist sympathies, were called morillos. Liberals wore broad-brimmed hats called bolivars.

  Some eight or ten months after the events just recorded, on a snowy evening at the beginning of January 1824, one of these elegant idlers, a gentleman of orthodox opinions, for he was wearing a morillo and was in addition warmly clad in the sort of greatcoat that completed the fashionable costume in cold weather, was exercising his wit at the expense of a woman in a low-cut evening-gown with flowers in her hair who was prowling to and fro outside the officers’ café.

  The gentleman was smoking, this being highly fashionable. Each time the woman passed, he blew a cloud of smoke in her direction and favoured her with a fresh sally reflecting on her looks, her attire and anything else that occurred to him. The name of the gentleman was Monsieur Bamatabois. The woman, a sad and garish ghost coming and going through the snow, paid no attention to him, but with the sombre resignation of a soldier condemned to a flogging, continued her silent patrol, which every few minutes brought her within range of his sarcasms. Finding that he was producing no effect, the gentleman got to his feet, crept up behind her, scooped up a handful of snow and thrust it down her back between her bare shoulders. The woman uttered a cry and, turning, sprang at him like a tigress, ripping his face with her finger-nails and screaming at him in language that might have shocked an army sergeant. The stream of obscenities, uttered in a voice coarsened by cheap brandy, poured hideously out of a gap-toothed mouth. The woman was Fantine.

  The noise brought the officers running out of the café. A circle of laughing, hooting, applauding spectators formed round this whirlwind composed of two creatures whom it was difficult to recognize as a man and a woman, the man seeking to defend himself with his hat knocked off, the woman hitting, kicking, and screaming, frenzied and horrible.