Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  His first act on reaching Paris had been to buy a complete set of mourning for an eight-year-old girl, after which he had rented a lodging. It will be recalled that on the occasion of his first escape from arrest he had paid a mysterious visit to Montfermeil, or to its environs, concerning which the police had certain theories. But he was still believed to be dead, and this was his greatest safeguard. Reading the report in a newspaper he had felt reassured and almost at peace, as though he had really died.

  On the evening of the day when he rescued Cosette from the Thénardiers they returned together to Paris, entering the city after dark by the Monceaux barrier. Here he took a cab to the Esplanade de I’Observatoire, and then, with the little girl’s hand in his, walked through deserted alleyways to the Boulevard de l’Hôpital.

  It had been a strange day for Cosette, filled with extraordinary happenings. They had sat under hedges eating bread and cheese bought at remote inns, they had travelled by different conveyances but had also walked a good deal of the way. She had not complained, but she was very tired and Jean Valjean felt her hand tug more heavily at his as they walked. So he picked her up and set her on his back, and Cosette, without letting go of Catherine, laid her head on his shoulder and slept.

  Book Four

  The Gorbeau Tenement

  I

  A vanishing quarter

  A STROLLER forty years ago penetrating beyond the Salpêtrière, by way of the Boulevard de l’Hôpital as far as the Barrière d’Italie, would have come to a region where Paris seemed to disappear. It was not a wilderness, for there were inhabitants; not country, for there were streets and houses; not town, for the streets were rutted like country roads, and grass grew in them; nor was it a village, for the houses were too high. What, then was it? It was an inhabited place where there was no one, a deserted place where there was someone, a city boulevard, a Paris street, wilder by night than the forest, more melancholy by day than a graveyard. It was the ancient quarter of the horse-market, the Marché-aux-Chevaux.

  Should he go beyond the crumbling walls of the market and even beyond the Rue du Petit-Banquier, past a courtyard enclosed in high walls, then an open space with stacks of tanner’s bark looking like giant beaver-dams, then a timber-yard, then a long, ruined, moss-covered wall on which flowers grew in the spring, then a dismally decrepit building bearing the legend Défense d’afficher, our bold explorer, having ventured thus far into the unknown, would find himself in the Rue des Vignes-Saint-Michel. Here, close by a factory and between two garden walls, there stood in those days an ancient building which seemed at first sight to be no bigger than a cottage but was in fact as vast as a cathedral. Only one gabled end was visible from the street, and a single window. The rest was hidden, and it was all on one floor.

  A detail which might have struck the observer was that whereas the door was only suited to a cottage, the window, had it been built of shaped stone instead of plastered cob, would have been worthy of a mansion. The door itself was nothing but a makeshift collection of planks held together by crudely cut crossbars. It opened directly on to a steep stairway as wide as itself, with high muddied treads, which from the street looked like a ladder vanishing into the darkness between two walls. At the top of the misshapen door-frame was a thin transverse beam in which a triangular aperture had been cut to allow the passage of light and air when the door was closed. On the inside of the door the figure 52 had been inscribed with an inked brush, but on the outside, above this aperture, was the figure 50, giving rise to some confusion. Where exactly was one? No. 50 on the outside, 52 inside. A few nondescript, dusty-coloured rags served as a curtain over the aperture.

  The window was wide and lofty, with large panes and Venetian shutters; but the panes had been damaged in a variety of ways which were both concealed and made manifest by ingenious bandaging with strips of paper, and the shutters, unhinged and hanging loose, were more a threat to the passer-by than a protection to the inmates. A good many of the horizontal slats were missing and had been crudely replaced by boards nailed vertically: what had once been Venetian had ended up more like the conventional shutters.

  This contrast in the same house between the squalid door and the respectable if dilapidated shutters had something of the effect of two ill-assorted beggars walking side-by-side, wholly different beneath their tattered garments, one having been a beggar all his life and the other having been once a gentleman.

  The stairs led up to a huge building which looked like a converted warehouse. On either side of a long central corridor were a series of compartments of varying sizes, habitable at a pinch and more like cubicles than prison-cells. Such windows as they possessed looked out on to the waste land surrounding the house. The whole place was sepulchral – dark, gloomy, and unpleasant – pierced, according to whether the crevices were in the roof or the door, by chilly rays of sunlight or icy draughts. An interesting and picturesque feature of buildings of this kind is the enormous size of the spiders that infest them.

  To the left of the door on the boulevard, at about shoulder height, a small walled-up window formed a recess piled with stones which children threw into it as they passed.

  A part of this building has recently been demolished, but enough remains to show what it was originally like. The whole was probably not more than a century old – youth in the case of a church, but old age in the case of an ordinary house. It would seem that man’s dwellings share his brevity and those of God His eternity.

  The postmen called the tenement No. 50–52; but it was known in the neighbourhood as the house of Gorbeau. We must explain how this name originated.

  The snappers-up of unconsidered trifles, who collect anecdotes as a botanist collects wild flowers and register unimportant dates in their memories, will know that round about the year 1770 there were two leading attorneys practising at the Palais du Châtelet, whose names respectively were Corbeau and Renard – Crow and Fox. The echo of La Fontaine’s fable was too good to be overlooked, and scurrilous verses, parodying La Fontaine, went the rounds of the Palais.

  The worthy practitioners, embarrassed by the innuendoes and ruffled in their dignity by the laughter that pursued them, resolved to change their names and applied to the King for permission to do so. The plea was presented to Louis XV on the day when two clerical dignitaries, one the Papal Nuncio and the other the Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon, both on their knees, had in the presence of His Majesty each placed a slipper on the naked foot of Madame Du Barry as she got out of bed. The King, still laughing, moved on from the bishops to the two attorneys who, by his indulgence, were permitted to make trifling alterations to their names. Maître Corbeau was given leave to add a tail to his initial letter, so that he became Gorbeau. Maître Renard was less fortunate, the only concession he obtained was leave to add a ‘P’ to his name, so that Renard the fox became Prenard the grasper, which was scarcely an improvement.

  According to local tradition Maître Gorbeau had been the owner of No. 50–52 Boulevard de l’Hôpital and had, moreover, been responsible for its impressive window. Hence the name la maison Gorbeau.

  Among the trees lining the boulevard there stands, outside No. 50–52, a tall, moribund elm; almost exactly opposite is the Rue de la Barrière des Gobelins, at that time an unsurfaced roadway in which there were no houses, planted with stunted trees that were green or mud-spattered according to the season, leading directly to the Paris wall. A smell of copper sulphate blew in waves from a near-by factory. The barrier was near by, for in 1823 the City wall still existed.

  The barrier itself had macabre associations. It was on the road to Bicêtre, along which, under the Empire and Restoration, criminals condemned to death were brought into Paris on the day of their execution. It was also the scene of the crime known as the ‘Fontainebleau barrier murder’, of which the perpetrators were not discovered, an ugly mystery that has never been resolved. A little further on is the Rue Croulebarbe where Ulbach stabbed the goat-girl from Ivry in a thunderstorm, amid all the trapp
ings of melodrama. Still further on are the polled elms of the Barrière Saint-Jacques, masking the scaffold, that shabby and ignominious place of execution contrived by a bourgeois, shop-keeping society which sought to thrust capital punishment out of sight, being too pusillanimous to abolish it with magnanimity or to maintain it with authority.

  Thirty-seven years ago, setting aside the Place Saint-Jacques, which seemed to have been expressly designed for its purpose and was always horrible, the most depressing spot in the whole dreary boulevard, and it is little more attractive today, was the site occupied by the tenement building, No. 50–52.

  Respectable dwellings only began to appear some twenty-five years later. The place was utterly dismal. In addition to its own funereal aspect one was conscious of being between the Salpêtrière, part women’s prison and part mad-house, of which the cupola was visible, and Bicêtre with its barrier – between the madness of women and the madness of men. As far as sight could reach there was nothing to be seen but slaughter-houses, the wall, and an occasional factory looking like a barracks or a monastery; shanties and heaps of rubble, strips of old wall black as shrouds and of new wall white as winding-sheets; trees in parallel rows, featureless edifices in long, cold lines, with the monotony of right-angles. No accident of terrain, not an architectural flourish, not a bend or curve: a glacial setting, rectilinear and hideous. Nothing chills the heart like symmetry, for symmetry is ennui and ennui is at the heart of grief, Despair is a yawn. It is possible to conceive of something even more terrible than a hell of suffering, and that is a hell of boredom. If such a hell exists, that stretch of the Boulevard de l’Hôpital might have been the road leading to it.

  But at nightfall, particularly in winter, at the time when the last light faded and the wind whipped the last brown leaves off the elms, when the darkness was at its deepest, unrelieved by stars, or when wind and moonlight pierced gaps in the clouds, the boulevard became suddenly frightening. Its straight lines seemed to merge and dissolve in shadow like stretches of infinity. The pedestrian was reminded of the gallows-tradition of that place, and its solitude, which had been the scene of so many crimes, was nightmarish. There seemed to be pitfalls hidden in the dark, every patch of deeper shadow was suspect, the spaces between the trees resembled graves. By day the place was ugly; in the evening it was melancholy; at night it was sinister.

  On summer evenings old women might be seen seated under the trees on wooden benches half-rotted by the rain. They were much given to begging.

  For the rest, the quarter, which looked more outmoded than antique, was already being transformed. Anyone wanting to see it as it had been needed to make haste, for every day brought some small change. The terminus of the Paris-Orléans railway line, situated only a short distance from the old faubourg, has for the past twenty years contributed to the process. Wherever a railway-station is built on the outskirts of a capital city it leads to the death of a suburb and the growth of the town. It would seem that around these centres of mass-movement, the powerful machines, the huge horses of civilization devouring coal and spewing flame, the polluted earth trembles and splits open to swallow up the ancient dwellings of men and allow new ones to appear.

  Since the terminus of the Orléans line invaded the territory of the Salpêtrière, the ancient, narrow streets round the Fosses Saint-Victor and the Jardin des Plantes are being swept away by the stream of coaches, fiacres, and omnibuses which in the course of time have thrust back the houses on either side. These are phenomena which, however improbable they may seem, are nevertheless fact; and just as it may truly be said that the sun causes the southern aspects of city houses to vegetate and grow, so it is undeniable that the press of traffic widens the streets. The signs of a new life become manifest. In the most backward corners of that old, provincial quarter, paving stones made their appearance and sidewalks began to be built even before there were any walkers. On a memorable morning in July 1845, the smoke of tar-wagons was to be seen, and it may be said that on that day civilization reached the Rue Lourcine and Paris spread to the Faubourg Saint-Marceau.

  II

  Nest for owl and fledgling

  Jean Valjean came to a stop outside the Gorbeau tenement. Like a bird of prey he had sought out the remotest spot he could find for the building of his nest. Still carrying Cosette, he got a sort of passkey out of his waistcoat pocket, opened the door and, after closing it carefully behind him, climbed the stairs.

  Arrived at the corridor, he produced another key with which he opened one of the doors. The room he entered, again at once closing the door, was a fair-sized garret furnished with a mattress on the floor, a table, a few chairs, and a lighted stove of which the glow was visible in one corner. A street-lamp on the boulevard cast a faint light into this drab interior. At the far end was a small inner room with a trestle-bed. Jean Valjean laid the child on this without waking her.

  A candle stood in readiness on the table, together with flint and steel. After lighting it Valjean stood gazing at Cosette as he had done the night before, with an expression of devoted tenderness that was almost exaltation. With the perfect confidence that denotes the presence of either great strength or extreme weakness she had fallen asleep without knowing whom she was with, and she continued to sleep without knowing where she was. He bent and kissed her hand. Nine months previously he had kissed the hand of her mother, when she, too, had fallen asleep. The same, almost religious feeling, anguished and compassionate, pierced him to the heart. He went on his knees beside the bed.

  The new day dawned with Cosette still sleeping, while the pallid beams of December sunshine, filtering through the garret window, traced long patterns of light and shadow on the ceiling. But suddenly the noise of a heavily-laden cart rumbling over the cobbles in the boulevard caused her to start up trembling.

  ‘Yes, madame!’ she cried. ‘Yes. Yes. I’m coming!’

  Still half-asleep, she scrambled out of bed and groped about her.

  ‘Heavens, where’s my broom?’

  Then, with eyes fully opened, she saw the smiling face of Jean Valjean.

  ‘Why, of course!’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s all true! Good morning, monsieur.’

  Children instantly and familiarly accept rejoicing and happiness because this is their natural element. Seeing Catherine at the foot of the bed, Cosette picked her up and, while she nursed her, showered Valjean with questions. Where were they? – Was Paris a very huge place? – Was Madame Thénardier a long way off? – Would she come after them? … And suddenly she exclaimed: ‘How lovely it is here!’

  It was the most squalid of garrets, but she felt free.

  ‘Don’t you want me to sweep the floor?’ she presently asked.

  ‘No,’ said Jean Valjean. ‘You’re to enjoy yourself.’

  Thus the day passed. Without caring that she understood nothing of what had occurred, Cosette was inexpressibly happy with her protector and her doll.

  III

  Misfortunes shared create happiness

  At daybreak the next morning Jean Valjean again stood at Cosette’s bedside waiting for her to awake.

  Something quite new was taking place within him.

  Valjean had never loved anything. For twenty-five years he had been alone in the world, never a father, a lover, husband, or friend. In prison he had been sullen, gloomy, chaste, ignorant, and ferocious. Nothing had ever touched the heart of that ex-convict. The feeling he had once had for his sister and her children had become so remote as to have vanished almost entirely. He had done what he could to find them and, failing, had dismissed them from his mind. Such is the way of human nature. The other affections of his youth, if there had been any, were wholly lost.

  But when he had seen Cosette, snatched her up and borne her out of captivity, something had stirred within him. Everything in him that was passionate and capable of affection had been aroused and had flowed out to the child. To stand at her bedside watching while she slept was to experience a shiver of ecstasy. He discovered a mother’s
agonized tenderness without knowing what it was, for nothing is deeper or sweeter than the overwhelming impulse of a heart moved suddenly to love – a saddened, ageing heart made new!

  But since he was fifty-five years old and Cosette only eight, all the loves that his life might have contained were now merged in a kind of splendour. This was the second of the two visions he had met with. The bishop had taught him the meaning of virtue; Cosette had now taught him the meaning of love. Their first days passed in this bemused state.

  Cosette also became a different being, but without knowing it, poor child. She had been so young when her mother left her that she did not remember her. Like all children, like the tendrils of a vine reaching for something to cling to, she had looked for love, but she had not found it. They had all repulsed her, the Thénardiers, their children, and other children. There had been a dog which she had loved, but it had died. Apart from this, nothing had needed her and no one had wanted her. The sad fact was that at the age of eight her heart had been cold and untouched, not through any fault of hers or because she lacked the capacity to love, but because there had been no possibility of loving. But now, from the first day they were together, everything in her that could think and feel went out to this man. She experienced something that she had never known before, a sense of unfolding.

  She did not think of Jean Valjean as being old and poor; she found him handsome, just as she found their garret pretty. Such were the effects of youth and happiness, in which change of scene and a new way of life also played their part. Nothing is more charming than the glow of happiness amid squalor. There is a rose-tinted attic in all our lives.