Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  But the mother loved his sisters.

  We have omitted to mention that on the Boulevard du Temple the boy was known as Gavroche. Why Gavroche? Perhaps for the same reason that had caused his father to adopt the name of Jondrette. To tear up the roots seems to be instinctive with some families of the very poor.

  The Jondrettes’ garret in the Gorbeau tenement was at the far end of the corridor. The cell next to theirs was occupied by a penniless young man called Monsieur Marius.

  It is with this Monsieur Marius that we are now concerned.

  Book Two

  A Grand Bourgeois

  I

  Ninety years and thirty-two teeth

  THERE ARE still a few former inhabitants of the Rue Boucherat, the Rue de Normandie, and the Rue de Saintonge who remember a gentleman called Monsieur Gillenormand and take pleasure in recalling him. He was an old man when they were young, but for those who look back nostalgically at the confusion of shadows that we call the past his figure has not wholly vanished from that labyrinth of streets round the Temple which in the reign of Louis XIV were given the names of French provinces, just as in our own day the streets in the new Tivoli quarter have been given the names of European capitals; a development, it may be said, in which progress is made manifest.

  M. Gillenormand, who was full of life in the year 1831, was one of those persons who have become interesting simply because they have lived a long time, and peculiar because whereas they were once like everyone else they are now like no one else. He was an idiosyncratic old gentleman and most decidedly a man belonging to another age, the complete picture of the somewhat aloof bourgeois of the eighteenth century, wearing his middle-class respectability with all the assurance of a marquis wearing his title. He was over ninety but still walked erect, talked loudly, saw clearly, took wine, ate, slept and snored. He possessed all his thirty-two teeth and wore spectacles only for reading. He was of an amorous disposition but declared that for ten years past he had positively and absolutely renounced women. He said that he could no longer please them, failing to add that it was because he was too old, but saying that it was because he was too poor. ‘If I were not ruined,’ he said, ‘well … 1’ In fact, all that remained of his fortune was an income of about fifteen thousand francs, and he dreamed of inheriting an income of a hundred thousand and being again able to keep a mistress. He was not, as we see, one of those hypochondriacs like Monsieur de Voltaire, who spend their life dying; his was not the longevity of the cracked pot. The dashing old boy had always enjoyed good health. He was frivolous, quick-witted, and easily irritated, flying into a rage on the least provocation and generally against all reason. When contradicted he was liable to raise his stick and hit people, as they did in the grand siècle. He had an unmarried daughter of over fifty whom he shouted at and abused when he was in a temper and whom he would gladly have whipped, thinking of her as though she were a child of eight. He lustily abused his servants, using old-fashioned oaths. He had strange whims, allowing himself to be shaved daily by a barber who had once been mad and who detested him, being furiously jealous on account of his pretty and flirtatious wife. Monsieur Gillenormand had a high opinion of his own judgement in all things and considered himself extremely sagacious. ‘The fact is,’ he said, ‘that I have unusual powers of discernment, so much so that if a flea bites me I can always tell what woman it came off.’ The words most frequently on his lips were ‘the person of refinement’ and ‘Nature’; but he did not use the latter in the sense generally accepted nowadays. When he brought it into his fireside discourse it was ramer as follows – ‘In order that civilization may have a bit of everything, Nature has even provided us with amusing specimens of barbarism. Europe has its tame samples of Asia and Africa. The cat is a drawing-room tiger and the lizard a pocket crocodile. The dancers at the Opéra are our rose-pink cannibals. They do not eat men but suck them dry, but rather, being sorceresses, they turn them into oysters and swallow them whole. The natives of the Carribees leave only the skeleton – they leave only the shell. That is the way we live now. We do not devour, we nibble; we do not exterminate, we scratch.’

  II

  The man and his dwelling

  He lived in the Marais, at 6 Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. The house was his property. It has since been pulled down and rebuilt, and no doubt has been given a new number in the process of re-numbering that has affected so many of the Paris streets. He occupied a vast ancient apartment on the ground floor, between the street and the gardens at the back, hung with Gobelin and Beauvais tapestries depicting pastoral scenes, details of which were repeated on the upholstery of the furniture. His bed was enclosed in a huge, nine-panelled screen of Coromandel lacquer, and the long curtains covering the windows fell in rich and ample folds. The garden immediately below his window was reached by a flight of steps up and down which the old man skipped in the most sprightly fashion. In addition to the library next to his bedroom he had a sitting-room in which he took great pride since it contained a magnificent straw tapestry with a fleur-de-lis design made in the prisons of Louis XIV, having been commissioned by Monsieur de Vivonne, the brother of Madame de Montespan and at that time Captain-General of the king’s galleys, for his mistress. Monsieur Gillenormand had inherited this from an eccentric maternal great-aunt who lived to be a hundred. He had had two wives. His manners were midway between those of a courtier, which he had never been, and those of a man of law, which he might have become. He could be gay and confiding when he chose. In his youth he had been one of those men who are always deceived by their wives but never by their mistresses, because they are at once the most disagreeable of husbands and the most charming of lovers. He was a connoisseur of painting. There hung in his bedroom a wonderful portrait of some person unknown, painted by Jordaens with sweeping strokes of the brush and containing a mass of detail crammed in as though at random. His dress was in the style of neither Louis XV nor Louis XVI but rather that of the incroyables under the Directory. Up to that time he had still thought himself young and followed the fashion. His coat was of light cloth with broad lapels and long tails, and he wore knee-breeches and buckled shoes. He always had his hands in his pockets. He said roundly: ‘The French Revolution was a load of scoundrels.’

  III

  Luc-Esprit

  One night at the Opéra he had caught the eye simultaneously of two reigning beauties hymned by Voltaire, La Camargo, and La Sallé. Caught between these two fires he had beaten a heroic retreat in the direction of a dancing girl the same age as himself, an entirely undistinguished little creature named Nahenry with whom he was in love. But he abounded in romantic memories. ‘La Guimard,’ he would exclaim, ‘how ravishing she was when last I saw her at Long-Champs, robed in exquisite sentiments, jewelled in hopefulness, clad in invitation to her very muff.’ He had fond recollections of the waistcoats he had worn in his youth. ‘I was as richly clad as a Levantine Turk!’ The Marquise de Boufflers, who saw him when he was twenty, described him as a charming rogue. He was outraged by the men now in power, finding them low-born and bourgeois. He read the daily papers, the ‘newsprints’ as he called them, with bursts of sardonic laughter. ‘Corbière – Humann – Casimir Périer – and those are Ministers! Why not Monsieur Gillenormand, Minister? It would be farcical, but among those fools it would pass.’ He made no bones about calling things by their proper or improper names, even in mixed company. He uttered obscenities and enormities with an elegant unconcern which was the permissiveness of his century. It may be remarked that that age of circumlocution in verse was also an age of crudity in prose. His godfather, predicting that he would be a man of genius, had bestowed on him the portentous baptismal names of Luc-Esprit.

  IV

  An aspirant centenarian

  He had won prizes in his youth at the Collège in Moulins, the town of his birth, and the laurel-wreath had been placed on his head by no less a personage than the Duc de Nivernais, whom he called the Duc de Nevers. Nothing, not the Convention, the death of Louis
XVI, Napoleon, or the return of the Bourbons, could efface the memory of that occasion. To him the Duc de Nevers was the great man of the century. ‘Such a charming nobleman,’ he said. ‘So distinguished in his blue sash’ … In Monsieur Gillenormand’s eyes Catherine of Russia had atoned for the crime of the partition of Poland when she bought the secret of Bestuchef’s gold for three thousand roubles. On this subject he was eloquent. ‘The gold elixir, Bestuchef’s yellow dye, General Lamotte’s drops – in the eighteenth century those, at the price of a louis the half-ounce bottle, were the sovereign remedy for disasters in love, the panacea for the ills caused by Venus. Louis XVI sent the pope two hundred bottles.’ He would have been beside himself if anyone had told him that this golden elixir was nothing but perchlorate of iron. Monsieur Gillenormand revered the Bourbons and held the year 1789 in horror. He never tired of relating how he had escaped the Terror, and the resourcefulness and ready wit he had needed to avoid having his head cut off. If any young man dared to praise the Republic in his hearing he turned purple in the face to the point of apoplexy. Sometimes, referring to his age of ninety, he said, ‘I trust I shan’t see ninety-three again.’ But at other times he proclaimed his intention of living to be a hundred.

  V

  Basque and Nicolette

  He had theories, of which the following is one: ‘If a man is a passionate lover of women but has a wife whom he does not greatly care for – plain, nagging, legitimate, conscious of her rights, steeped in the marriage code and sometimes jealous – he has only one way of dealing with the situation and securing his own peace of mind, and that is to hand the purse-strings over to her. In so doing he frees himself. The wife has something to keep her busy. She becomes addicted to the handling of banknotes until her fingers turn green; she watches over the farmers’ stocks and building repairs, deals with bailiffs and lawyers, dictates to scriveners, pursues slow payers, draws up agreements, buys, sells, bargains and chaffers, passes judgement, interferes, arranges and disarranges. Even her blunders are a consolation to her, being her magisterial privilege. If her husband disdains her she has the satisfaction of ruining him.’ Monsieur Gillenormand applied this theory in practice and it had become the story of his life. His second wife had so mismanaged his affairs that after her death he found that what remained of his fortune was only enough to provide him with a competence of fifteen thousand francs a year, three-quarters of the capital being invested in an annuity which would expire with him. He made this arrangement without hesitation, having no wish to leave anything behind him. Besides he had seen that patrimonies were a chancy business and might be confiscated as ‘national property’; he had witnessed such machinations and had little fondness for the death-duty laws, the ‘Grand-Livre de la Dette Publique’. ‘All that has a smell of the Rue Quincampoix,’ he said, referring to the financier John Law and the South Sea Bubble.

  As we have said, the house in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire belonged to him. He had two servants, one male and one female. He gave them new names when they came to him, calling the men after their country of origin, Nîmois, Comtois, Poitevin or Picard. His latest valet was a plump, short-winded man of fifty-five incapable of running a dozen paces, and since he had been born in Bayonne he called him Basque. As for the women, he called them all Nicolette (even La Magnon, of whom we shall hear more). When a haughty cook, a cordon bleu descended from a long line of concierges, presented herself he asked her what wages she expected. Thirty francs a month, was the answer. ‘And what is your name?’ … ‘Olympie’ … ‘Well, I’ll pay you fifty and your name will be Nicolette.’

  VI

  We meet La Magnon and her two children

  With Monsieur Gillenormand suffering expressed itself in rage; unhappiness made him furious. He had all the prejudices and allowed himself every licence. The picture of himself which he liked to display for the sake of appearances and his private satisfaction was, as we have seen, that of the vert-galant, the ever-youthful lover. This, he said, was to have a ‘royal reputation’, and it was one which brought him unexpected blessings. A large basket, like an oyster hamper, was one day delivered at his house and found to contain a lusty, new-born male child, carefully swaddled and bawling its head off, of which a maid-servant whom he had dismissed six months previously claimed that he was the father. Since Monsieur Gillenormand was then eighty this caused an indignant outcry in his household. The audacity of it! Did the slut really suppose anyone would believe the story? But the old gentleman himself was not at all put out. Contemplating the bundle with a gratified smile, he exclaimed in ringing tones: ‘What are you making a fuss about? What is so remarkable? You’re simply showing your ignorance. The Duc d’Angoulême, Charles IX’s bastard, was married at the age of eighty-five to a girl of fifteen. The Marquis d’Alluye, brother of the Cardinal de Sourdis, Archbishop of Bordeaux, when he was eighty-three had a son by a chambermaid of the wife of Monsieur Jacquin, a real love-child who became a Knight of Malta and a State Counsellor. One of the great men of our own century, the Abbé Tabaraud, was the son of a man of eighty-seven. These things are not unusual. You have only to read your Bible. Having said which I must declare that this young gentleman is not mine. However that is not his fault and he must still be looked after.’ A handsome way of dealing with the situation. But the slut in question, the one called La Magnon, sent him a second present a year later, another boy. This was too much for Monsieur Gillenormand. He returned the two brats to their mother, undertaking to pay eight francs a month for their keep provided she did not do it again. He also said, ‘I wish them to be properly cared for and I shall come to see them from time to time.’ ‘Which he did.

  He had a brother in the priesthood who after being Rector of the Académie de Poitiers for thirty-three years had died at the age of seventy-nine. (‘He died young,’ said Monsieur Gillenormand.) The brother, whom he scarcely remembered, had been a peaceable skinflint who, being a priest, felt it his duty to give alms to such of the poor as he encountered; but the coins he gave them were always obsolete currency, and thus he found means of going to Hell by way of Paradise. As for their father, he had never stinted his alms but gave willingly and nobly. He had been benevolent, brusque, and charitable, and if he had been rich his way of life would have been magnificent. He liked everything concerning him to be done in the grand manner, even knavery. When he was cheated over an inheritance in a particularly crude and obvious fashion by a man of business he said solemnly: ‘That is a disgusting way to behave. I am really ashamed of these shabby methods. Upon my soul, that is not the way a man of my sort should be plucked. I have been robbed like a traveller in the woods, but meanly robbed. Sylvae sint consule dignae – let the woods be worthy of a consul.’

  Monsieur Gillenormand, as we have said, had had two wives and a daughter by each of them. The older daughter was still a spinster, but the younger had died at the age of thirty, having married a soldier of fortune who had served in the armies of the Republic and the Empire, been decorated at Austerlitz and promoted colonel at Waterloo. ‘A disgrace to the family,’ the old gentleman declared. He took a great deal of snuff, dusting his lace jabot with the back of his hand in a particularly elegant gesture. He had very little faith in God.

  VII

  A golden rule: never receive visitors except in the evening

  Such was Monsieur Luc-Esprit Gillenormand, who had lost none of his hair, which was more grey than white and combed in fastidious ringlets. He was, when all is said, a gentleman worthy of esteem but belonging to the frivolity and greatness of the eighteenth century.

  During the early years of the Restoration, Monsieur Gillenormand, who was still comparatively young (a mere seventy-four in 1814), had lived in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the Rue Servandoni by the Église Saint-Sulpice. He moved to the Marais only when he retired from society, well after his eightieth birthday.

  His retirement was governed by certain fixed habits of which the first and most immutable was that his door was closed throughout the day. N
o caller, on no matter what business, was admitted to his presence until the evening. He dined at five and thereafter received visitors. Such was the fashion of his century, to which he resolutely clung. Daytime is vulgar, he said, and deserving only of closed shutters; the best people light their wits only when the heavens light their stars. He shut himself away from all men, even though it were the king himself, in the ancient elegance of his day.

  VIII

  Two, but not of a kind

  We have mentioned Monsieur Gillenormand’s daughters. There was a gap of ten years in their ages. In their youth there had been little resemblance between them, whether of looks or character; they were indeed as unlike sisters as possible. The younger was a delightful creature attracted towards everything that glitters, a lover of flowers, poetry and music, an ardent spirit soaring into boundless spaces who from her childhood had been in love with a romantic idea of heroism. The elder also had her daydream: what she saw on the horizon was something like a substantial contractor, perhaps a purveyor of military supplies, rich and splendidly stupid, the walking embodiment of a million francs. Or possibly a Prefect – and visions ran riot in her mind of official receptions with uniformed flunkeys at the door, magnificent balls, resounding speeches, and herself Madame la Préfète. The sisters, then, had this in common when they were girls, that each had her dream, each had wings, those of an angel in the one case and those of a goose in the other.