For the rest, he had renounced everything, engaging in no movement or conspiracy, dividing his thoughts between the harmless things he did and the great things he had done – the growth of a carnation and the memory of Austerlitz.
M. Gillenormand had no dealings with his son-in-law. To him the colonel was a ‘brigand’, and to the colonel he was an old fool. He never referred to the colonel except occasionally to make a mocking allusion to his ‘barony’. It had been expressly agreed that the colonel would make no attempt to see or communicate with his son, on pain of the boy’s being instantly turned out of the house and disinherited. To the Gillenormands Pontmercy was a leper, and they were resolved to bring up the child according to their own ideas. Perhaps the colonel was wrong to accept these conditions, but he did it for the best, believing himself to be the only sufferer. The child’s expectations from his grandfather were small enough, but his aunt was another matter. Mlle Gillenormand had succeeded to a substantial fortune on her mother’s side, and her sister’s son was her natural heir.
The little boy, whose name was Marius, knew that he had a father, but that was all he knew. No one had told him more. However, the whisperings, the becks and nods and muttered asides in the society his grandfather frequented had made an impression on his child’s mind, and being naturally disposed to accept the notions and opinions of the world around him, which were so to speak the air he breathed, he had come by degrees to think of his father with a sense of shame and with no desire to know him.
Thus he grew up; but every two or three months the colonel paid a surreptitious visit to Paris, like a convict breaking parole, and, hiding behind a pillar of the church of Saint-Sulpice at the hour when Aunt Gillenormand took Marius to Mass, was able to catch a glimpse of his son. He did so in fear and trembling lest the lady should see him. The battle-scarred warrior was frightened of the old maid.
It was to this circumstance that he owed his friendship with the curé of Vernon, Abbé Mabeuf.
This worthy priest was the brother of a churchwarden at Saint-Sulpice who had several times noticed a man staring at the little boy, a man with a scar on his cheek and tears in his eyes. The churchwarden had been struck by the fact that a man looking so much a man should have wept like a woman, and the face had stayed in his mind. One day when he was visiting his brother in Vernon he had come face to face with Colonel Pontmercy on the bridge and had recognized him. He had told the curé and they had found a pretext for calling on the colonel together. The visit had led to others. The colonel had at first been very reticent, but finally he had unbosomed himself and the curé and churchwarden had heard the story of how he had sacrificed his happiness for the sake of his son’s future. As a result the curé conceived a great respect and affection for the colonel which the colonel returned. In any case, when both are honest and warm-hearted, no two men are more fitted to understand one another than an old priest and an old soldier. Indeed, they are the same man. One has served his country here below and the other serves his country in Heaven. There is no other difference.
Twice a year, on New Year’s Day and the feast of St George, Marius wrote a letter to his father, dictated by his aunt, which might have been copied from a book on the art of letter-writing. This was all Monsieur Gillenormand would allow. The colonel replied with long, affectionate letters which the old man stuffed in his pocket without reading them.
III
R.I.P.
Mme de T—’s salon was all Marius knew of the world, the only opening that afforded him a view of life; a gloomy place and an opening that admitted more chill than warmth, more darkness than light. The boy, who was all high spirits when he entered that strange world, became quickly subdued and, which was even more foreign to his age, earnest-minded. Surrounded by those oppressive and idiosyncratic personalities, he looked about him in a kind of sober amazement which everything conspired to enhance. There were highly venerable elderly ladies in Mme de T—’s circle with names such as Mathan, Noé, Lévis which was pronounced Lévi, and Cambis, pronounced Cambyse. The aged countenances and biblical names were mingled in his mind with the Old Testament which he knew almost by heart, and when he contemplated them seated in a circle round a dying fire by the dim light of a green-shaded lamp, the stern profiles, the white or grey hair, the flowing skirts in the fashion of another age, their drab colours scarcely discernible, letting fall at rare intervals remarks that were at once majestic and astonishing, the little boy did so with startled eyes and with a feeling that these were not women but matriarchs and witches, not living beings but ghosts.
Mingled with the ghosts were a number of priests and noblemen, among the latter the Marquis de Sassenay, official secretary to the Duchesse de Berry, the Vicomte de Valroy who published mono-rhyming odes under the pseudonym of ‘Charles-Antoine’, the Prince de Beauffremont, still young but with greying hair and a lively and pretty wife whose low-cut dresses of red velvet with gold trimmings affronted the prevailing gloom, the Marquis de Coriolis d’Espinouse, celebrated for his mastery of ‘measured politeness’, the Comte d’Amendre with his amiable chin and the Chevalier de Port de Guy, mainstay of the Bibliothèque du Louvre, which was known as ‘the king’s study’. Monsieur de Port de Guy, who was bald and elderly rather than really old, was fond of recounting how in 1793, when he was sixteen, he had been imprisoned for subversion and manacled to the octogenarian Bishop of Mirepoix, also imprisoned for subversion but as a priest, whereas he himself had been charged as a soldier. This was at Toulon, and they had had the duty of going after dark to remove from the scaffold the heads and bodies of persons guillotined during the day. They had carried the bodies away on their backs, and their red convict smocks had acquired a thick caking of gore, damp at night but dry by the morning. Gruesome tales of this kind abounded in Mme de T—’s salon, where the reviling of Marat made it obligatory to sing the praises of Trestaillon, the leader of the White Terror in Nîmes. A few die-hard deputies met there to play a rubber of whist, and the Bailli de Ferrette, the former boon companion of the Comte d’ Artois, looked in on his way to visit Monsieur de Talleyrand.
Among the priests may be mentioned the Abbé Halma, whose collaborator on La Foudre had once said to him, ‘Bah! Who is there under the age of fifty? Only a few greenhorns!’ There was also the papal nuncio, Monsignor Macchi, and two cardinals, Monsieur de la Luzerne and Monsieur de Clermont-Tonnerre. Cardinal de la Luzerne was a writer who was later to distinguish himself by having signed articles published in Le Conservateur side-by-side with those of Chateaubriand. Monsieur de Clermont-Tonnerre was Archbishop of Toulouse but paid frequent visits to Paris; a lively little old man who displayed red stockings under his hitched-up cassock and whose particular attributes were his detestation of the Encyclopedia and his passion for billiards. He had been introduced to Mme de T—’s salon by his closest friend, the former Bishop of Senlis, Monsieur de Roquelaure, who was noted for his tallness of stature and the assiduity of his work as a member of the Académie Française. These ecclesiastics, who for the most part were courtiers as well as churchmen, made their own contribution to the aristocratic tone of a salon which included five Peers of France. Nevertheless, since in this century the Revolution must make itself felt everywhere, that feudal gathering, as we have said, was dominated by a man of the middle-class, Monsieur Gillenormand.
The salon represented the essence and quintessence of ‘white’ reactionary Paris society. Prominent public figures, even those professedly royalist, were kept at arm’s length, there being always an element of anarchy in current reputation. Chateaubriand, had he entered that drawing-room, would have been viewed with the utmost suspicion. Nevertheless a few royalists who had accepted the Republic were admitted on sufferance, among them Comte Beugnot, who had held a high position under the Empire.
Our present aristocratic salons bear no resemblance to that one. The Faubourg Saint-Germain of today has a smell of heresy. Our royalists have become democratic, and it is to their credit.
In Mme de T
—’s superior world the most delicate and lofty sentiments prevailed, couched in terms of flowery politeness. Old forms that were the very spirit of the ancien régime, buried but still living, were unconsciously preserved, and some of these, particularly in the matter of language, would seem very odd today. The superficial student indeed might have mistaken for provincialisms what were merely survivals. A lady would be addressed as ‘Madame la Générale’, and even ‘Madame la Colonelle’ was not unknown. The charming Madame de Léon, no doubt recalling the Duchesses of Longueville and Chevreuse, preferred this form of address to her title of Princess, and the Marquise de Créquy was ‘Madame la Colonelle’. That small world also adopted the habit, in private conversation with the king at the Tuileries, of addressing him in the third person as ‘the king’, the conventional ‘your Majesty’ having been ‘debased by the Usurper’.
These were the terms in which men and events were judged. The age was mocked, which made it unnecessary to understand it. It was a circle of the blind leading the blind, each man sustaining the illusions of his fellow. The years following Coblenz were treated as though they had never happened. Just as Louis XVIII was, by the Grace of God, in the twenty-fifth year of his reign (the Charter of 1814 was officially issued in the nineteenth year of his reign, the Bonaparte interregnum being ignored), so might that little world of returned emigrés be said to be in the twenty-fifth year of their adolescence.
All was harmony; nothing was too much alive, a word was scarcely a breath, and a newspaper, like the salon itself, was a papyrus. There were young people, but they were partly dead. The liveries in the antechamber were faded. These totally outmoded persons were attended by servants of the same kind. Everything had an air of having lived a long time ago and of stubbornly holding out against the tomb. To conserve – conservation – conservative – the words constituted nearly their whole vocabulary. To be ‘in good odour’, that was the important consideration; and indeed aromatics played a significant part in the thinking of that world, their notions had a smell of vetiver. The masters were embalmed, and the valets stuffed with straw. A certain elderly marchioness, who had returned from emigration so penniless that she could only afford one maid, still talked about ‘my people’.
In short, Mme de T—’s salon was ‘ultra’. Since that word no longer has any meaning, although what it represents has perhaps not wholly disappeared, we must explain it.
To be ‘ultra’ is to go to the extreme. It is to attack the sceptre in the name of the throne and the mitre in the name of the altar; to abuse the cause one supports; to rush one’s fences, outdo the executioner in the grilling of heretics, charge the idol with insufficient idolatry, insult by excessive adulation, find the pope insufficiently papist and the king insufficiently royalist. It is to denigrate the whiteness of alabaster or snow or the swan or the lily in the name of flawless whiteness; to be a partisan of causes to the point of becoming their enemy; to be so vehemently for as to be in fact against.
This spirit of ‘ultraism’ especially characterized the first phase of the Restoration. There has been nothing in history resembling that short period which began in 1814 and was ended in 1820 by the coming of Monsieur de Villèle, the statesman of the Right. Those six years were an extraordinary interlude, at once boisterous and bleak, gay and gloomy, lighted as though by the rays of a new dawn but at the same time overcast by the shadow of the great catastrophes still darkening the sky and only gradually receding into the past. In that mingling of light and dark a small world which was at once old and new, riotous and sad, youthful and senile, was rubbing its eyes. Nothing so resembles an awakening as a return. They eyed France with resentment, and France looked back at them with irony, old marquises like owls stalking the streets, returned emigrés and ghosts, ’ci-devant’ aristocrats amazed by everything, brave and noble gentlemen smiling to be back in France but also weeping, delighted to see their country again but in despair at not finding the monarchy they had known; the aristocracy of the crusader reviling the aristocracy of the Empire, that is to say, of the sword; historic clans who had lost all sense of history, descendants of the companions of Charlemagne disdaining the companions of Napoleon. Old insults were repaid; the sword of Fontenoy was a rusted mockery, the sword of Marengo odious and nothing but a sabre. The long-ago disowned yesterday. There was no longer any sense of what was great and what ridiculous. There was someone who called Bonaparte Scapin the clown … That world is gone. Let us repeat it, nothing of that world remains. If, by recalling certain of its elements, we seek to reconstruct it, it seems as strange as the world before the flood. And indeed it has been swept away by a flood. It has vanished under two revolutions. What greater flood can there be than the flood of ideas? How quickly they submerge all that they set out to destroy, how rapidly do they create terrifying depths!
This, broadly, was the physiognomy of the ‘ultra’ salons in that distant and ingenuous age when Monsieur Martainville, the founder of the Drapeau blanc, was held to be a wittier man than Voltaire. They had their own literature and politics, devotedly absorbing the works of writers and publicists whose names are now forgotten. Napoleon was the irredeemable Ogre of Corsica. When later the Marquis de Buonaparté was allowed on to the stage of history as lieutenant-general of the king’s armies, this was a concession to the changing spirit of the times.
They did not long retain their purity. As early as 1818 doctrinaires were beginning to appear among them, an unsettling development. These were royalists, in principle, but apologetically. Where the ultras proudly asserted their faith, the doctrinaires were a little ashamed of it. They were forthright but with silences, their political dogma appropriately tinged with irony; and they should have been successful. They made effective if excessive use of the white cravat and buttoned jacket. Their mistake, or their misfortune, was to put old heads on young shoulders. They posed as sages, hoping to leaven absolute, extremist principles with power exercised in moderation. They answered destructive liberalism with conservative liberalism, sometimes with rare intelligence. Their creed was as follows:
‘Let us be grateful to monarchism. It has served us well. It has restored tradition, reverence, religion, and self-respect. It is loyal, brave, chivalrous, loving, and devoted. It dilutes, however reluctantly, the new-found greatness of the nation with the secular greatness of monarchy. It errs in not understanding the Revolution, the Empire, glory, liberty, new ideas, the younger generation, and the present century. But if it is mistaken in us, are we not sometimes mistaken in it? The Revolution, of which we are the heirs, should be aware of everything. The attack on monarchism is the reverse of liberalism. What a blunder and what blindness! Revolutionary France is lacking in respect for historic France, that is to say for its mother, for itself. The noblesse of the monarchy was treated after the 5th September as the noblesse of Empire was treated after the 8th July.* They were unjust to the Eagle and we are being unjust to the fleur-de-lis. It seems that something must always be condemned. But what purpose is served by tarnishing the crown of Louis XIV and abolishing the escutcheon of Henri IV? We laugh at Monsieur de Vaublanc, who removed the letter N from the Pont d’Iéna, but what he did was what we are now doing ourselves. Bouvines belongs to us, as does Marengo. The fleurs-de-lis are ours, and so is the N. These are our heritage. Why diminish it? We should no more disavow our country in the past than in the present. Why not accept all our history? Why not love all France?’
Thus did the doctrinaires criticize and defend monarchism, which was restive under criticism and furious at being defended.
The ultras represented the first phase of monarchism and the Congregation was characteristic of the second.
We may leave it at that. In the telling of this story the author has come upon this odd moment of contemporary history; he has been obliged to glance at it and to give some account of that vanished society. But he has done so rapidly and without bitterness or any thought of derision. He is attached to it by bonds of affectionate and respectful memory, since
they relate to his mother. And it must be said that that small world had its own greatness. We may smile at it, but we cannot hate or despise it. It was the France of a bygone age.
Marius Pontmercy received the haphazard education of children of his class. When he grew too old for his Aunt Gillenormand, his grandfather entrusted him to a worthy tutor of unsullied classical innocence; thus his growing mind was subject first to a prude and then to a pedant. He did his years of high-school and read law at the university. He was a fanatical and austere royalist with little affection for his grandfather, whose frivolity and cynicism irked him, and with dark thoughts of his father. An ardent but reserved young man, high-minded, generous, proud, religious, impulsive; aloof to the point of asperity, uncompromising to the point of unsociability.
IV
Death of a brigand
The conclusion of Marius’s classical studies coincided with the retirement of Monsieur Gillenormand from society. Bidding farewell to the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the salon of Mme de T—, the old gentleman withdrew to the Marais and his house in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. In addition to the porter, his two servants were the housemaid Nicolette who succeded La Magnon, and the shortwinded Basque of whom mention has already been made.
Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774) Page 63
