Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  A noteworthy accident is highly esteemed among the Paris urchins. Nothing inspires more respect than to have been severely injured, ‘cut to the bone’. Nor is the clenched fist a trivial matter. ‘Me, I’m tough,’ is the commonest of boasts … To be left-handed is to be envied, and a squint is a prized attribute.

  VIII

  Records the amiability of the late King

  In summer he turns into a frog. As darkness falls in the evening he plunges head first into the Seine off the coal-barges and washerwomen’s boats by the Austerlitz and Jean bridges, shamelessly infringing the laws of decency and police regulations. But the police watch out for him, and this gives rise to a highly dramatic situation which on one occasion produced a memorable street-cry. The cry, which is one of warning from gamin to gamin, became celebrated round about 1830; it can be scanned like an Homeric couplet, its notation an echo of the antique Evohe, ‘Ohé, Titi, ohéee! y a de la grippe, y a de la cogne, prends tes zardes et va-t’en, passe par l’égout!’†

  Sometimes this gadfly (he uses the word of himself) knows how to read; sometimes he can write, and he can always draw. By some mysterious process of mutual instruction he contrives to acquire all the talents most serviceable in public life: between 1815 and 1830 he imitated the cry of a turkey, and from 1830 to 1845 he drew a pear (the King’s nickname) on the walls. One summer evening Louis-Philippe, returning home on foot, saw an undersized urchin straining on tip-toe to draw an enormous pear on one of the pillars of the Neuilly gateway. With the amiability which he inherited from Henri IV, the King helped him to finish it and then gave him a coin, a louis d’or. ‘There’s a pear on that too,’ he said.

  The gamin loves disorder, any kind of violent uproar. He abominates the priesthood. On one occasion an urchin was seen cocking a snook at the doorway of No. 69, Rue de l’Université. When asked why he did it he replied, ‘A curé lives there.’ The house is in fact the residence of the papal nuncio. But however Voltairian his attitude to religion, if he has the chance of becoming a choir-boy the gamin is quite likely to take it, in which case he decorously performs his duties. He has two consuming ambitions, never achieved: to overthrow the government and to get his trousers mended.

  The gamin at his best knows every policeman in Paris and can name them all. He lists them on his fingers, studies their habits and files them away in his memory. He knows all about them. He will say unhesitatingly: ‘So-and-so’s a cheat … So-and-so’s a dirty swine … So-and-so’s great … So-and-so’s ridiculous …’ All the words have a special meaning for him. ‘Old So-and-so thinks he owns the Pont-Neuf, he tries to stop people walking on the parapet. So-and-so likes pushing people around …’ And so on.

  IX

  The Ancient spirit of Gaul

  There was something of the Paris gamin in Poquelin the clown who was born in les Halles, and something of him in Beaumarchais. Gaminerie is a manifestation of the Gallic spirit, good sense to which a certain pungency is sometimes added, like the alcohol in wine. And this may be carried to excess. If Homer nodded, Voltaire may be said to have played the urchin.

  The gamin is respectful, sardonic, and insolent. He has bad teeth because he is underfed, and fine eyes because he has sharp wits. If Jehovah beckoned he would go scampering up the steps of Paradise. He fights with both hands and feet. He may grow in any direction. He plays in the gutter and rises above it in revolt, his audacity unchecked by musket-fire. The guttersnipe turns hero. Like the Theban boy he twists the lion’s tail. He cries ‘Aha!’ among the trumpets like the war-horse in the book of Job. In an instant the urchin may be transformed into a giant.

  In a word, he amuses himself because he is unhappy.

  X

  Ecce Paris, ecce homo

  To sum up, the gamin, the urchin of present-day Paris, is like the graeculus, the ‘little Greek’, under Rome – a child population bearing on its brow the wrinkles of an ancient world. He is at once a national emblem and a disease. A disease that must be cured. How? By light. Light that makes whole. Light that enlightens.

  All fruitful social impulses spring from knowledge, letters, the arts, and teaching. We must make whole men, whole men, by bringing light to them that they may bring us warmth. Sooner or later the splendid challenge of universal education will confront us with the authority of absolute truth; and those who govern under the scrutiny of the French Idea will then have to make this choice: Are we to have children of France or street-urchins of Paris, flames burning in the light of day or will-o’-the-wisps in shadow?

  The gamin stands for Paris, and Paris stands for the world.

  Paris is a sum total, the ceiling of the human race. The prodigious city is an epitome of dead and living manners and customs. To observe Paris is to review the whole course of history, filling the gaps with sky and stars. Paris has her Capitol, the Hôtel de Ville; her Parthenon, Notre-Dame; her Aventine Mount, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; her Asinarium, the Sorbonne; her Pantheon which bears the same name; her Via Sacra, the Boulevard des Italiens; and her Tower of Babel, which is Public Opinion, drowning the voice of rhetoric in ridicule. Everything that is to be found elsewhere is to be found in Paris; she has her bumpkin, whom she calls le Faraud; her transteverino, whom she calls le faubourien; her native bearers, whom she calls market porters; her lazzarone whom she calls le pègre; and her own brand of cockney whom she calls le gandin. Her fishwife could hold her own with Euripides’ herb-woman; the discobolus Vejanus lives again in Forioso the tightrope-walker; Therapontigonus Miles would go arm-in-arm with the grenadier Vadeboncoeur; Damasippus the second-hand dealer would loiter happily in the antique-shops; Vincennes would lay hands on Socrates, as some prison in Athens would have grabbed Diderot …

  And so on. What is there that Paris does not possess? She has her prophets and her king-makers, her quacks, conjurers, and magicians. Rome put a courtesan on the throne and Paris put a grisette: but, when all is said, if Louis XV was not the equal of Claudius, Madame Du Barry was better than Messalina. Although Plutarch said that tyrants do not live to grow old, Rome under Sulla, as under Domitian, meekly bowed her head and watered her wine, and the waters of the Tiber, if we are to believe Varus Vibiscus, were like the waters of Lethe, they caused men to forget sedition. But Paris drinks a million litres of water a day and still sounds the tocsin when the need arises.

  And with it all she is indulgent, royally accepting all things, easygoing in the realm of Venus, with callipygian leanings; ready to forgive where she is made to laugh, amused by ugliness, entertained by deformity, diverted by vice. Be comical and you will be accepted as a clown. Even hypocrisy, the supreme cynicism, does not revolt her; she is no more outraged by the posturing of Tartuffe than was Horace by the belching of Priapus. There is no aspect of the universal countenance that is not present in the face of Paris. The Bal Mabille may not be the polyhymnian dance on the Janiculum, but the shop-girl studies the actress in her finery as avidly as the procuress Staphyla studied the virgin Planesium. The Syrian hostess may have been more elegant than Mère Saguet in her Montparnasse restaurant, but you may find David d’Angers, Balzac, and Charlet seated together at a table in a Paris tavern. Paris reigns supreme and genius flowers within her. Adonais drives past with his twelve-wheel chariot of thunder and lightning; and Silenus rides in on his mule.

  Paris is the world in miniature – Athens, Rome, Sybaris, Jerusalem, Pantin – all the civilizations, and all the barbarisms as well. She would be grieved if she had no guillotine.

  A little of the Place de Grève is a good thing. What would the endless festivity amount to without that seasoning? Our laws have wisely provided it, and thanks to them the blade drips over the carnival.

  XI

  Mockery and rule

  To Paris there are no bounds. No other city has held this dominance which sometimes derides what it subjugates. ‘I seek but to please you, oh Athenians!’ cried Alexander. Paris does more than make the law, she makes the fashion; and, more than the fashion, she makes the event. She can
be foolish when the mood takes her, as it sometimes does. Then the world is foolish with her; and presently Paris opens her eyes and says, ‘How silly I am!’ and laughs in the face of humankind. The marvel of such a town! How wonderful that so much majesty is not troubled by its own parody, that the lips which today sound the summons to judgement will tomorrow play a tune on a Jew’s harp! Paris has a sovereign joviality. Her gaiety strikes like the lightning and her frolic brandishes a sceptre. Her hurricanes spring sometimes out of a grimace. Her explosions, her crises, her masterpieces, her prodigies, her epics reach to the ends of the earth, and so do her ribaldries. Her laughter is a volcanic outburst that bespatters the globe; her derision sears like flame. She thrusts her caricatures upon the nation as well as her ideals; the loftiest monuments of human civilization bow to her ironies and commemorate her gibes for all eternity. She is superb. She frees the world with her prodigious 14th July, and with her night of 4th August dissolves a thousand years of feudalism in three hours; she makes her logic the strong arm of the universal will; she reshapes herself in every form of the sublime and with her radiance lights the spirit of Washington, Kosciusko and Bolivar, of John Brown and Garibaldi. She is everywhere where the future dawns, in Boston in 1779, in Pesth in 1848, in Palermo in 1861, whispering the watchword, ‘Liberty’, in the ears of the American abolitionists at Harper’s Ferry, and of the patriots of Ancona gathered in the shadows at the water’s edge. It was her wind that bore Byron to his death at Missolonghi. She was the platform under the feet of Mirabeau, the crater under the feet of Robespierre. Her books, her theatre, her art, her science, her philosophy, these are the manuals of the human race – Pascal, Régnier, Corneille, Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire, Molière for every century. She has made of her language the universal speech, and this speech has become the Word: it instils in every mind the idea of progress, and the liberating dogmas it has forged are the sword at the bedside of future generations; all heroes of the people in all countries since 1789 have been made of the spirit of her thinkers and poets. But none of this prevents her from playing the urchin. The huge genius that is Paris, while transforming the world with the light she sheds, can still charcoal the nose of Bouginier on the wall of the Temple of Theseus and write Crédeville voleur on the Pyramids.

  Paris always shows her teeth, laughing when she does not scold.

  Such is Paris. The smoke from her chimney-tops is the thinking of the world. A cluster of mud and stone if you like, but above all things a moral entity. She is more than great, she is immense. Why? Because she dares.

  Daring is the price of progress. All splendid conquests are the prize of boldness, more or less. For the Revolution to happen it was not enough that Montesquieu predicted it, that Diderot preached it, that Beaumarchais announced it, that Condorcet planned it, that Arouet paved the way for it, that Rousseau dreamed of it – it needed Danton to dare it.

  The cry, ‘Boldness!’, is a Fiat Lux. If mankind is to advance there must be installed permanently at the head of its columns proud instances of courage. Acts of daring light the pages of history and the soul of man. The sunrise is an act of daring. To venture, to defy, to persevere, to be true to one’s self, to grapple with destiny, to dismay calamity by not being afraid of it, to challenge now unrighteous powers and now victory run wild, to stand fast and hold firm – these are the examples that the peoples need, the spark that electrifies them. The same formidable lightnings issue from the torch of Prometheus and the raucous bellow of Cambronne.

  XII

  The future latent in the people

  As for the people of Paris, the man fully grown is still the urchin. To paint the child is to paint the town, which is why we have depicted this eagle in the guise of a sparrow.

  It is above all in the back streets, let us be clear about this, that the real Parisian race is to be found, the pure stock, the true face; in the places where men work and suffer, for work and suffering are the two faces of man. There, in that ant-heap of the humble and unknown, the strangest types exist, from the stevedore of La Rapée to the horse-butcher of Montfaucon. Fex Urbis, ‘the lees of the city’, Cicero called them, and ‘mob’ was the word. Burke used mob, masses, crowd, public … the words are easily said. But what does that matter? What does it matter if they go barefoot, or if they cannot read? Will you abandon them on that account, and make of their distress a curse? Cannot light penetrate to the masses? Light! Let us repeat it again and again – Light and more Light … And then, who knows, opacity may be found to be transparent. Are not revolutions transformations? Let the philosophers continue to teach and enlighten, to think high and speak loud, turn gladly towards the sunrise, mingle in the market-place, proclaim the good news, dispense the alphabet, assert men’s rights, sing the Marseillaise, foster enthusiasm, pluck the green shoots from the oaks. Turn the idea into a whirlwind. The crowd can be made sublime. We must learn to make use of that great furnace of principles and virtues which sparks and crackles and at moments bursts into flame. Those bare feet and arms, the rags, the ignorance, the abjection, the dark places, all may be enlisted in the service of the ideal. Peer through the heart of the people and you will discover the truth. The common sand that you tread underfoot, let it be cast into the furnace to boil and melt and it will become a crystal as splendid as that through which Galileo and Newton discovered the stars.

  XIII

  The boy Gavroche

  Some eight or nine years after the events related in the second part of this tale there was to be seen on the Boulevard du Temple and in the streets around the Château-d’Eau a boy aged eleven or twelve who would have been an admirable embodiment of the gamin we have depicted except for the fact that, while the laughter of his years was on his lips, there was only darkness and emptiness in his heart. This youngster went round in a pair of man’s trousers that did not come from his father, and a woman’s blouse that did not come from his mother, castaway garments bestowed on him out of charity by comparative strangers. He had a father and mother nonetheless; but his father never gave him a thought and his mother disliked him. He was one of those children who are most to be pitied, those who possess parents but are still orphans. He was never happier than when he was in the streets, their very flagstones seeming to him less hard than his mother’s heart.

  He was a rowdy little boy, pale-faced, agile, alert and rascally, with a lively, sickly air. He darted here and there, sang, played pitch-and-toss, scratched in the gutters, stole now and then, but needlessly, like a cat or sparrow, laughed when he was called an urchin but was indignant when he was called a scamp. He had neither hearth nor home, nor any regular source of food; yet he was happy because he was free. By the time the poor have grown to man’s estate they have nearly always been caught in the wheels of the social order and become shaped to its requirements; but while they are children their smallness saves them, they can escape through the smallest crevice.

  Nevertheless, neglected though he was, it happened occasionally, two or three times a month, that the boy said to himself, ‘I’ll go and see Mamma.’ So then he left the boulevards, the Cirque and the Porte Saint-Martin, headed for the river-embankment, crossed over and, passing through the working-class streets in the direction of the Salpêtrière, arrived eventually – where? At no other place than the house numbered 50-52 which is already known to the reader, the Gorbeau tenement.

  At this particular time it happened that No. 50–52, which generally stood empty and eternally bore the notice ‘Rooms to Let’, was occupied by a number of people who, as is the common case in Paris, had no connection between them and no knowledge of one another. They all belonged to that indigent class which ranges from the lowest stratum of impoverished respectability down through every stage of pauperdom to that of the two beings who represent the nethermost rung of the social ladder, the crossing-sweeper and the chiffonier, the scavenger.

  The ‘chief tenant’ had died since the days of Jean Valjean, and had been replaced by another exactly like her. As some philosopher ha
s remarked, there is never any shortage of old women. The replacement was a Madame Bourgon and there was nothing remarkable about her life except the dynasty of three parrots who in succession had ruled over her heart.

  The most squalid of all the present occupants of the tenement was a family of four, father and mother and two daughters, quite big girls, living together in the same garret, one of the cell-like rooms we have already described.

  At first glance there was nothing remarkable about this family except its state of extreme destitution; the father, when he took the room, had given his name as Jondrette. But a short time after they had moved in – which, in the words of the chief tenant, ‘was like the moving in of nothing at all’ – he had said to the lady in question, who like her predecessor acted as door-keeper and swept the stairs, that if anyone should call asking for a Pole, an Italian, or possibly a Spaniard, he was the person they would be looking for.

  This was the family of our lively barefoot urchin. He went there to be greeted by poverty and wretchedness, and, which was worse, never a smile, by hearts as chilly as the room itself. When he entered they asked where he had come from and he answered, ‘off the streets’; when he left they asked where he was going and his answer was, ‘back ot the streets’. His mother asked, ‘Why did you come here?’

  The boy had grown up in this absence of affection like the pallid weeds that grow in cellars. His situation caused him no particular distress and he blamed no one. The fact is that he had no idea how parents ought to behave.