Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  Cosette sobbed more loudly than ever.

  ‘Stop that noise!’ the woman shouted.

  The stranger turned abruptly towards the street door, opened it, and went out. Madame Thénardier took advantage of his sudden disappearance to administer a kick under the table which drew a cry from Cosette.

  In a very short time the stranger was back, and now he was carrying the fabulous doll which during that day had been coveted by every child in the village. He set it upright in front of Cosette and said:

  ‘Here – it’s for you.’

  During the hour or so that he had been in that place, lost in his thoughts, he must, it seems, have been obscurely aware of the bric-à-brac stall across the way, its profusion of offerings so brightly lighted that the glow was visible through the windows of the tavern.

  Cosette looked up, as dazzled by his appearance with the doll as she might have been by a burst of sunshine. She heard the unbelievable words, ‘It’s for you’ and stared, first at him, then at the doll, and then she slowly shrank back, withdrawing as far as she could under the table to huddle, silent and motionless, against the wall, scarcely daring to breathe.

  Mme Thénardier, Éponine, and Azelma were standing like statues. The drinkers themselves had paused. A silence had fallen upon the room.

  Mme Thénardier, thunderstruck, was again reduced to conjecture. What was this man? Was he a pauper or a millionaire? Or a combination of both, a criminal?

  Over her husband’s face passed the look of strained intensity that characterizes the human countenance when it is seized with a dominating passion. Glancing from the doll to the traveller, he seemed to sniff the man as he might have sniffed a hoarded treasure. But this lasted only an instant. He drew near his wife and murmured:

  ‘That thing cost at least thirty francs. Don’t be a fool. Crawl to him.’

  Coarseness and innocence are alike in this, that they have no sense of contradiction.

  ‘Well, Cosette,’ said Mme Thénardier in the mildest of voices, ‘aren’t you going to take your doll?’

  Cosette crept out of her retreat.

  ‘The gentleman has given you a doll, dear child,’ said Mme Thénardier. ‘It’s yours. You must play with it.’

  Cosette gazed at the miraculous doll with a kind of terror. Her face was still wet with tears, but her eyes, like the sky at dawn, were beginning to glow with a strange new brightness. If someone had said to her out of the blue, ‘Child, you are the Queen of France,’ her feelings would have been little different from what they now were. And still she was afraid to touch the doll lest it exploded in thunder – a not unwarranted misgiving, with all the reasons she had for dreading her mistress’s wrath. But her longing was even stronger. Drawing nearer to it, she looked up timidly and asked:

  ‘May I really, madame?’ No words can convey the mingling of anguish and ecstasy in her voice.

  ‘But of course,’ said Mme Thénardier. ‘It’s yours. The gentleman has given it to you.’

  ‘Is it true, monsieur? Is it really true? Is the lady mine?’

  The stranger seemed so near to tears that he could not speak. He nodded to Cosette and put the hand of ‘the lady’ in hers.

  Cosette hastily withdrew her hand as though the lady’s touch had burnt her. She stayed for a moment staring at the floor, and we have to record that during that moment she put out her tongue as far as it would go. Then she looked up and seized the doll.

  ‘I shall call her Catherine,’ she said.

  It was a queer moment, the child’s ragged garments enfolding the pink muslin finery of the doll.

  ‘May I sit her on a chair, madame?’

  ‘Of course, dear child,’ said Mme Thénardier.

  While Éponine and Azelma enviously looked on, Cosette sat Catherine on a chair and then herself sat on the floor, where she remained motionless and silent, simply looking at her.

  ‘You must play with her, Cosette,’ the stranger said.

  ‘But I am playing,’ she replied.

  At that moment there was no one on earth whom Mme Thénardier detested more than she did this stranger who had descended upon Cosette like a visitant from another world. She had to keep herself in hand, but accustomed though she was to dissimulation in her constant striving to emulate her husband in all things, the effort to control her present feelings was almost too much for her. She hurriedly sent her daughters off to bed and then went so far as to ask the ‘yellow man’ for permission to send Cosette to bed as well, observing in motherly accents that the child had had a tiring day. Cosette departed with Catherine in her arms.

  Mme Thénardier then crossed the room to where her husband was seated, and there relieved her feelings by pouring out a flood of words that were the more venomous because they had to be spoken in an undertone.

  ‘That old lunatic, what’s got into him, coming here and turning the place upside down, wanting the brat to play, giving her dolls – a forty-franc doll for a slut that I wouldn’t give forty sous for! Next thing you know he’ll be calling her “your Highness”! Is the man mad?’

  ‘Well, but why shouldn’t he spoil her if it amuses him?’ retorted Thénardier. ‘It suits you to make the child work, and it suits him to see her play. He’s in his rights. The customer can do what he likes so long as he pays. What does it matter to you whether he’s a philanthropist or an imbecile? He’s evidently got money.’ Unanswerable words, coming from the master of the house, an innkeeper into the bargain.

  The stranger meanwhile had returned to his attitude of meditation, sitting with an elbow on the table. The other customers, travelling salesmen and carriers, had drawn a little apart from him and were no longer singing. They were watching him with a kind of awed respect. A man so poorly clad who nevertheless produced crown pieces at the drop of a hat and bestowed princely gifts on a little creature in clogs, was a phenomenon deserving of notice.

  Several hours went by. The midnight mass had been celebrated, the revelry was ended and the revellers departed; the room was now deserted and the fire had burnt low, but the stranger remained where he was, still in the same posture, only now and then shifting from one elbow to the other. Nothing more than that. Since Cosette’s departure he had not spoken a word.

  The Thénardiers lingered on, from precaution and also out of curiosity. ‘Is he going to spend the night like this?’ Mme Thénardier muttered. But when the clock struck two she admitted defeat. ‘I’m going to bed,’ she said to her husband. ‘You can do what you like.’ Thénardier seated himself at a corner table, lit a candle, and settled down to read the Courrier français. During the next hour or so he read the whole paper twice through, from the date on the first page to the name of the printer on the back, and still the stranger did not move.

  Thénardier fidgeted, coughed, spat, blew his nose, and made his chair creak, all to no purpose. ‘Is he asleep?’ he wondered. The man was not asleep but it seemed that nothing could rouse him. Finally Thénardier took off his cap, went up to him and ventured to ask:

  ‘Is monsieur not going to retire?’

  He had chosen the word with care. ‘Retire’ sounded more respectful, less peremptory and familiar, than ‘go to bed’. The phrase had the especial virtue that it would be reflected in tomorrow’s bill. A room where one merely goes to bed costs twenty sous, but a room where one retires may cost twenty francs.

  ‘Of course,’ said the stranger. ‘You’re quite right. Where is your stable?’

  ‘If monsieur will allow me,’ said Thénardier smiling, ‘I will lead the way.’

  The man picked up his stick and his bundle. Candle in hand, Thénardier conducted him to a room on the first floor, a room of unexpected splendour with mahogany furniture and a red-curtained four-poster bed.

  ‘But what’s this?’ the stranger asked.

  ‘It was our wedding-chamber,’ said Thénardier. ‘My wife and I now sleep in another room. This one is not used more than three or four times in a year.’

  ‘I should have been qui
te content in the stable,’ the man said sharply.

  Thénardier affected not to hear. He lighted two new wax candles standing on the mantelpiece. A fire was already burning in the hearth. Under a glass case on the mantelpiece was a woman’s headdress of silver thread and orange-blossom.

  ‘What is that?’ the stranger asked.

  ‘It’s my wife’s bridal bonnet,’ Thénardier said.

  The stranger inspected it as though marvelling at this evidence that that female monster had once been a virgin. But in fact Thénardier was lying. When he had rented the house to turn it into a tavern he had left this room as it was, merely taking over the furniture and throwing in a secondhand bridal bonnet to do honour to his ‘wife’ and shed a lustre of respectability upon their establishment.

  When the stranger looked round he found himself alone. Thénardier had silently withdrawn without saying good night, not wanting to treat with excessive friendliness a person whom he intended to fleece handsomely in the morning.

  He found his wife in bed but not asleep. She looked up as he entered their bedroom and said:

  ‘I suppose you know I’m going to get rid of Cosette tomorrow.’

  ‘You’re always in a hurry,’ he replied coldly.

  Nothing more was said, and a few minutes later their candle was blown out.

  The stranger meanwhile, having disposed of his stick and bundle, was seated meditating in an armchair. Presently he took off his shoes, picked up one candle and blew out the other, opened the door and stood as though wondering which way to go. He walked along the passage to the stairs and heard the faint sound of a child’s breathing. Following this sound he came to a sort of triangular recess, a doorless cupboard, under the stairs. Here, amid the jumble it contained of old baskets, boxes, and broken crockery, amid the dust and cobwebs, there was a bed – if a worn mattress, with straw bursting out of its seams, and a tattered blanket may be so described. There was no other covering. The mattress was on the floor and Cosette was asleep on it.

  He stood looking at her.

  Cosette was soundly asleep and fully dressed. She never undressed in winter because of the cold. The doll was clasped in her arms, its wide eyes gleaming in the candlelight. From time to time the little girl gave a deep sigh as though she were on the verge of waking, and then, with an almost convulsive movement, tightened her hold on the doll. One of her wooden shoes, but only one, lay beside the mattress.

  An open door near Cosette’s cubby-hole afforded a glimpse of a fair-sized room which was in darkness. The stranger went in. At the far end, beyond a glass-paned door, he could see two small twin beds with very white coverlets. They were those of Azelma and Éponine, and they half-concealed an uncurtained wicker cradle containing the little boy whose wails had been heard throughout the evening.

  The stranger surmised that this room communicated with that of the Thénardiers, and he was about to withdraw when his eye fell upon the fireplace. It was one of those vast inn hearths where, if there is any fire at all, it is always insufficient, so that the very sight of them is chilling. In the present case there was no fire, or even any ashes; but what had caught the stranger’s eye were two small, elegant shoes which were not a pair, since they were of different sizes. He recalled the charming, age-old custom whereby on Christmas Eve children put a shoe in the hearth, hoping to find next morning that their good fairy had left a present in it. Éponine and Azelma had not neglected to do this, and bending down the stranger saw that the good fairy, that is to say their mother, had already been that way. A bright new ten-sou piece shone in each shoe.

  He was again about to withdraw when he noticed something else. At some distance from these two shoes there was a third, a wooden clog of the crudest, ugliest kind, caked in ashes and dried mud. It was empty.

  The stranger felt in his waistcoat pocket and put a gold coin in it, a louis d’or.

  Then he went silently back to his room.

  IX

  Thénardier transacts business

  A good two hours before daylight the next morning, Thénardier, seated pen in hand at a table in the general room, was composing the stranger’s bill by the light of a candle, while his wife stood looking over his shoulder. Neither spoke. Their respective attitudes were, on the one side, one of intense calculation, and, on the other, awed respect for this lofty manifestation of the power of the human intellect. A bumping sound was to be heard in the distance. It was Cosette sweeping the stairs.

  After a good quarter-of-an-hour’s labour and a number of crossings out Thénardier produced the following masterpiece:

  Bedroom No. 1

  Supper

  3 francs

  Room

  10 francs

  Candle

  5 francs

  Fire

  4 francs

  Service

  1 francs

  Total

  23 francs

  The ‘word ‘service’ was spelt ‘serviss’.

  ‘Twenty-three francs!’ exclaimed the lady in a tone of rapture not unmingled with apprehension.

  Like all great artists, Thénardier was not satisfied with his work. ‘Pah!’ he said, and it might have been Castlereagh drawing up France’s bill at the Congress of Vienna.

  ‘You’re quite right, my dear,’ his wife said, thinking of the doll given to Cosette in the presence of her daughters. ‘It’s fair. But it’s a great deal. Do you think he’ll pay?’

  ‘He’ll pay,’ said her husband with his small, cold laugh.

  The laugh was the expression of perfect assurance and authority. There was nothing more to be said, and his wife did not pursue the matter. She began to tidy the room while he paced up and down. After a silence he said:

  ‘I owe a good fifteen hundred francs.’

  He dropped on to the settle in the corner of the hearth and sat brooding with his feet in the warm ashes.

  ‘While I think of it,’ the woman said, ‘you haven’t forgotten, have you, that I’m turning Cosette out today? The sight of that doll makes me sick. I’d sooner be married to Louis XVIII than keep her here another minute.’

  Thénardier was lighting his pipe. He said between puffs, ‘Give the man his bill.’ Then he got up and went out.

  He had scarcely done so when the stranger entered, and instantly Thénardier reappeared behind him, standing in the half-open doorway, visible only to his wife.

  The stranger was carrying his stick and bundle.

  ‘Up so early!’ said Mme Thénardier. ‘Is monsieur leaving us already?’

  She was twisting the bill awkwardly in her hands as she spoke, her harsh face wearing an unaccustomed expression of diffidence or scruple. It was not easy to present a man who looked so obviously poor with a bill that size.

  ‘Yes,’ said the stranger in a preoccupied manner, ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘Monsieur has no business to attend to in Montfermeil?’

  ‘No, I’m only passing through. How much do I owe you, madame?’

  Without answering, Mme Thénardier handed him the folded slip of paper. He glanced at it, but his thoughts were evidently elsewhere.

  ‘Tell me, madame, are you doing well here in Montfermeil?’

  ‘Fairly well,’ said Madame Thénardier, for the moment astounded that the sight of the bill had not produced an immediate explosion. But then she resumed in a voice of extreme pathos. ‘Times are very hard, monsieur, and we get so few visitors in these parts. This is poor country. If it weren’t for an occasional rich and generous traveller like yourself, monsieur, I don’t know how we’d manage. We have so many expenses. There’s that child, for instance – you’ve no idea how much she costs

  ‘What child?’

  ‘Why, the one you saw last night, Cosette. “The lark”, as the people round here call her. These stupid peasants with their nicknames. She’s more like a bat than a lark. We don’t ask for charity and we can’t afford to give it. We earn very little and we’re always having to pay out money. There’s our licence and all
the taxes, doors and windows and everything, monsieur knows what this government is like. And I have my own daughters to consider. I can’t keep other people’s children as well.’

  The stranger hesitated and then said in a voice which he strove to make casual but which trembled slightly.

  ‘Suppose I were to take her off your hands?’

  ‘What–Cosette?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The woman’s red, coarse face was illumined with a sudden, atrocious radiance.

  ‘Why, monsieur, my dear monsieur, take her! Take her away, take charge of her, care for her, cosset her, pamper her, and may you be blessed by the Holy Virgin and all the saints in Paradise!’

  ‘Well then, I will.’

  ‘Truly? You mean to take her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And at once?’

  ‘Certainly. Call her in here.’

  ‘Cosette!’ cried Mme Thénardier.

  ‘In the meantime,’ said the stranger, ‘I might as well pay what I owe you. How much is it?’

  He looked at the slip of paper and started slightly. ‘Twenty-three francs!’ Looking hard at his hostess, he repeated the amount in a tone that was half one of amazement and half a question.

  But Mme Thénardier had had time to steel herself for the ordeal. She answered calmly:

  ‘Certainly, monsieur – twenty-three francs.’

  The stranger placed five five-franc pieces on the table.

  ‘Well, go and fetch the child,’ he said.

  But at this moment Thénardier came right into the room saying:

  ‘Monsieur owes twenty-six sous.’

  ‘What!’ exclaimed his wife.

  ‘Twenty for the room,’ said Thénardier coldly, ‘and six for his supper. As for the child, that is something that I must discuss with the gentleman. Kindly leave us, my dear.’

  Mme Thénardier had one of those flashes of enlightenment that are the reward of natural talent. Perceiving that the leading actor had now entered the stage she said nothing and withdrew.