Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  In the year 1827, when Marius had just reached the age of seventeen, he came home one evening to find his grandfather awaiting him with a letter in his hand.

  ‘Marius,’ said Monsieur Gillenormand, ‘you are to go to Vernon tomorrow.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Marius.

  ‘To see your father.’

  Marius trembled slightly. The last thing that had occurred to him was that he would ever be required to visit his father. Nothing could have been more unexpected, more surprising or, it must be said, more disagreeable to him. That their estrangement should be ended by enforced contact caused him no particular apprehension: it was simply tedious. Apart from his political reasons for disapproving of him, Marius was persuaded that his father – ‘the swashbuckler’, as Monsieur Gillenormand called him in his lighter moments – had no affection for him: why else should he have abandoned him to the care of others? Feeling himself unloved, he gave no affection in return; to him it was as simple as that.

  He was so astonished that he asked no other question. His grandfather continued:

  ‘It seems that he’s ill. He wants to see you.’

  There was a further pause.

  ‘You’ll have to start early,’ Monsieur Gillenormand said. ‘I understand there’s a coach that leaves the Cour des Fontaines at six and gets there by evening. You’ll have to catch that. He says it’s urgent.’

  He crumpled the letter and put it in his pocket. Marius might, in feet, have left that evening and been with his father next morning, for there was a night-coach to Rouen which left from the Rue du Bouloi and went by way of Vernon. But neither his grandfather nor he thought to inquire.

  He reached Vernon at dusk next evening, when the candles were being lit, and asked the first person he met the way to the home of ‘Monsieur Pontmercy’; for he took the Restoration view and did not think of his father as either a baron or a colonel. Arrived at the house, he rang the bell and a woman carrying a small lamp opened the door to him.

  ‘Monsieur Pontmercy?’ said Marius.

  She looked at him without speaking.

  ‘Is this where he lives?’

  She nodded.

  ‘May I speak to him?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘But I’m his son,’ said Marius. ‘He’s expecting me.’

  ‘Not any longer,’ the woman said, and he saw that she was in tears.

  She pointed to the door of a low-ceilinged room and he entered.

  There were three men in the room, which was lighted by a tallow candle on the mantleshelf, one standing, one on his knees and the third, in his nightshirt, lying on the floor. The first two were the doctor and a priest; the third was the colonel.

  He had been attacked by brainfever three days before and feeling that the attack was serious had written to Monsieur Gillenormand asking to see his son. He had grown worse, and that evening had risen from his bed, despite his housekeeper’s efforts to restrain him, crying in delirium, ‘My son is late. I must go to meet him.’ He had collapsed in the antechamber and there had died. The doctor and the curé had been sent for, but both had arrived too late – like his son. By the dim light of the candle a tear was to be discerned on the colonel’s pallid cheek. The eye from which it came was sightless, but the tear had not yet dried: it was the measure of his son’s delay.

  Marius stood looking down at this man whom he was seeing for the first and last time, the venerable, masculine face, the open eyes which saw nothing, the white hair, the once powerful limbs marked here and there with the furrows of old sabre-cuts and the red stars of bullet-wounds. He gazed at the huge scar imprinted by heroism on a face where God had imprinted kindness. He reflected that this man was his father and now was dead, and he was unmoved. The grief he felt was no greater than the grief he would have felt in the presence of any dead man.

  Nevertheless an agony of mourning filled the room. The housekeeper was lamenting in a corner, the priest was praying and sobs were mingled with his prayers, the doctor was wiping his eyes; the very corpse was weeping.

  The three of them in their affliction looked at Marius without speaking; he was a stranger. And Marius was ashamed at his lack of feeling. He had his hat in his hand, and he let it fall to the floor, to give the impression that grief had robbed him of the power to hold it. And then he despised himself for having done so. Was it his fault that he had not loved his father?

  The colonel had left nothing. The sale of his possessions barely sufficed to cover the cost of the funeral. The housekeeper found a sheet of paper which she handed to Marius. It bore the following message, written in the colonel’s hand.

  For my son. The Emperor created me a baron on the field of Waterloo. Since the Restoration has refused me this title, paid for with my blood, my son will adopt it and bear it. It goes without saying that he will be worthy of it.

  There was a further message on the other side.

  My life was saved by a sergeant after Waterloo. His name was Thénardier. I believe that recently he kept a small inn in a village not far from Paris, Chelles or Montfermeil. If my son should find him he will do Thénardier every service in his power.

  Not from any sense of duty towards his father, but from that vague respect for the wishes of the dead which is so strong in all men’s hearts, Marius kept that missive.

  Nothing else remained of the colonel. Monsieur Gillenormand sold his sword and uniform to a secondhand dealer. The neighbours looted his garden of its rare flowers and the rest grew rank or died.

  Marius spent only forty-eight hours in Vernon. Directly the funeral was over he returned to Paris and resumed his law studies, giving no more thought to his father than if he had never lived. The colonel was buried in two days and forgotten in three.

  Marius wore a black band on his hat, and that was all.

  V

  How attendance at mass may create a revolutionary

  Marius clung to the religious habits of his childhood. He went regularly to hear Mass at Saint-Sulpice, in the little lady-chapel where he had always sat with his aunt; but one day in a fit of absentmindedness he seated himself unthinkingly behind a pillar on a velvet-upholstered chair bearing the name of ‘Monsieur Mabeuf, churchwarden’. The service had scarcely begun when an old man approached him and said:

  ‘Monsieur, that is my place.’

  Marius hastily moved and the old man took his seat. But at the end of the service he again approached him.

  ‘You must forgive me for having disturbed you, Monsieur, and for now taking up a minute of your time. You must have thought me uncivil. I should like to explain.’

  ‘There’s no need at all,’ said Marius.

  ‘There is indeed. I would not wish to leave you with a bad impression of myself. I should like to tell you why I have a particular fondness for that place. It was from there that for some years, at intervals of two or three months, I watched an unhappy father who had no other opportunity of observing his son because he was debarred by a family compact from doing so. He came at the time when he knew the boy would be taken to Mass. The son had no idea that his father was there – indeed, he may not even have known that he had a father. The father concealed himself behind that pillar and watched the boy with tears in his eyes. He loved him deeply, as I could not help seeing. So the place has become as it were hallowed for me and it is there that I always hear Mass, preferring it to the churchwarden’s bench where I am entitled to sit. I became acquainted with the unhappy man. There was a father-in-law and a wealthy aunt – and possibly other members of the family – who threatened to disinherit the boy if he had any contact with his parent. The father sacrificed himself for the sake of his son’s future happiness. It was all to do with politics. Of course people must have political opinions, but there are some who go too far. The fact that a man fought at Waterloo does not make him a monster! It is not a sufficient reason for separating a father from his child. The gentleman was one of Bonaparte’s colonels. He died, I believe, not long ago. He lived at Vernon, wher
e my brother is curé. I forget his name – Pontmarie or Montpercy or something of the kind. He had a great scar on his face, from a sabre-cut.’

  ‘The name is Pontmercy,’ said Marius, who had turned pale.

  ‘Yes, that’s it! But did you know him?’

  ‘He was my father,’ Marius said.

  The old churchwarden stared at him and exclaimed:

  ‘So you’re the child! Well, of course, you would be grown up by now. My dear lad, you had a father who greatly loved you.’

  Marius offered the old man his arm and walked with him to his dwelling. The next day he said to his grandfather:

  ‘Some friends and I are planning a shooting-party. Will you allow me to be away for three days?’

  ‘Four if you like,’ said Monsieur Gillenormand. ‘Have a good time.’ And winking at his daughter he murmured, ‘Some wench, I’ll be bound!’

  VI

  Outcome of a chance meeting

  We shall see later where Marius went. He was away three days, and when he returned to Paris he went straight to the library of the School of Law and asked to see the file of the Moniteur.

  He read the Moniteur and went on to read a number of histories of the Republic and the Empire, the Memoirs from St Helena, biographies, newsprints, official bulletins and proclamations, everything he could lay hands on. His first sight of his father’s name in a Grande Armée bulletin put him in a fever of excitement for a week. He called upon generals under whom his father had served. He kept in touch with the churchwarden and learned from him something of his father’s life in Vernon, his flowers and his solitude. In the end he formed a true picture of the gallant and gentle-hearted man, a mingling of a lion and lamb, who had been his father.

  While this was going on, and it occupied all his leisure time and all his thoughts, he saw very little of his grandfather and aunt. He appeared at mealtimes but at other times he was not to be found. His aunt was aggrieved, but Monsieur Gillenormand chuckled, ‘It’s the time for wenching.’ But he also remarked, ‘I must say, I thought it was nothing but an escapade. It’s beginning to look like a grand passion.’

  It was certainly a passion.

  Marius was beginning to worship his father. At the same time his ideas were undergoing a remarkable change, a transformation which took place in a series of stages. Since this story is the portrayal of a large number of the people of our time, we must look at these stages as they occurred.

  The first effect upon him of his new insight into recent history was one of bewilderment.

  Hitherto the Republic and the Empire had to him been words of ill-omen, the Republic a guillotine in the dusk, the Empire a sword in the night. But when he came to look closely into what he had supposed to be a chaos of darkness he found, with feelings of the utmost astonishment mingled with trepidation and delight, that it was a night filled with stars – Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, Danton, and then the rising of a sun which was Napoleon. He felt that he was losing his bearings and drew back, dazzled by so much brilliance. But collecting his wits after that first amazement and being able to contemplate the events with less abhorrence and the personalities with less apprehension, he came to see that these two groups of men and events might be resolved into two enormous facts, namely, that the Republic represented the sovereignty of civic rights transferred to the masses, and that the Empire represented the sovereignty of the French Idea, imposed upon Europe. The grand figure of the People was what emerged from the Revolution, and from the Empire there emerged the grand figure of France.

  We have no need to dwell upon all that was disregarded in this summary and too-synthetic appraisal. We are tracing the gradual development of an unfolding mind. Progress does not happen overnight.

  Marius now perceived that hitherto he had understood his country no more than he had understood his father. He had known neither; as it were, he had deliberately closed his eyes. Now his eyes were opened and he was filled with admiration for the one and adoration for the other.

  He was overwhelmed with sorrow at the thought that now there was no one except the dead to whom he could talk of what was in his mind. If God in His compassion had spared his father, how eagerly he would have gone to him, how ardently have cried: ‘Father, I am here! I am your son! I think as you do!’ How tenderly he would have clasped his hands and gazed at that scar, ready to kiss the hem of his garment. Why had he died so soon, before age or justice or his son’s love could reach him? There was a constant sob of grief in Marius’s heart, while at the same time he became more truly serious, more truly purposeful, more sure in his thinking and his faith. New lights were constantly dawning upon him, and it was as though a new being were taking shape within him. He was conscious of a sort of natural growth fostered in himself by these two discoveries, his father and his country.

  It was as though a key had been placed in his hand and a door opened so that now he could interpret things that he had hated and account for things he had abhorred. He had a clear vision of the hand of Providence, human and divine, in great matters that he had been taught to abominate and great men he had been taught to revile. Thinking of the views he had held as recently as yesterday, which now seemed buried in the past, he was at once outraged and inclined to laugh.

  The rehabilitation of his father led in the natural course of events to the rehabilitation of Napoleon; but this, it must be said, did not come easily to him.

  He had been instilled from childhood with the views of the men of 1814. All the prejudices of the Restoration, its every interest and instinct, were directed towards the defamation of Napoleon, whom it execrated even more than it did Robespierre. It had cunningly exploited both the war-weariness of the nation and the hatred of the nation’s mothers. Bonaparte had become a sort of fabulous monster, and to make him comprehensible to the simple minds of the people he had been depicted in every kind of terrifying guise, from the awe-inspiring and grandiose to the ugly and grotesque, as a Tiberius and as a buffoon. In referring to Bonaparte one might gnash one’s teeth or explode with laughter, provided always that the basis was hatred. Marius had never had any other conception of ‘that man’, and he clung to it with all the obstinacy of his nature. There was a stubborn being within him who abominated Napoleon.

  But his study of recent history, above all documents and firsthand materials, caused the veil which had hidden Napoleon from Marius’s eyes to be gradually dispelled. He began to perceive something immense, and to suspect that until then he had been as mistaken about Bonaparte as he had been about other matters. His vision grew daily clearer and, at first reluctantly but with a growing sense of exhilaration, as though drawn by an irresistible spell, he made the slow ascent from darkness to half-light and at length into the full blaze of enthusiasm.

  There was a night when he sat alone at his desk by the open window of his small top-floor room, reading by the light of a candle, his thoughts interwoven with the impressions coming to him out of the dark infinity beyond the window, the starlit sky, the mysterious murmurs of the night. He was reading dispatches of the Grande Armée, those epic reports written on the field of battle, now and then coming upon a mention of his father and, constantly recurring, the name of the Emperor. All the greatness of the Empire was suddenly manifest as though a tide had risen within him. At moments he seemed to feel the nearness of his father’s spirit and to hear his voice in his ear. He fell into a mystical trance, hearing the drums and trumpets, the thunder of gunfire, the steady tramp of marching men, and the distant gallop of horses. Looking upward he saw vast constellations shining in the immeasurable depths of the sky while great events took shape in the written words beneath his eyes. His heart was wrung. He was transported, breathless with revelation; and suddenly, not knowing what impulse prompted him, he got to his feet, leaned out of the window with arms outstretched, and gazing up into the silent immensity of the heavens cried, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

  For him this was the decisive moment. From that time on th
e Corsican Ogre, the Usurper, the tyrant, the monster who had been the lover of his sisters, the play-actor who took lessons from Talma, the poisoner of Jaffa, the tiger, the alien Bonaparte – all vanished, to be replaced in his thoughts by a remote and dazzling effulgence in which at an inaccessible height a marble Caesar shone. To his father the Emperor had been simply the beloved captain whom he revered and devotedly served; but to Marius he became more than this. He was the pre-ordained founder of the French power destined to succeed the Roman power in the domination of the world, the prodigious architect of a collapse, the successor of Charlemagne, Louis XI, Richelieu, Louis XIV and the revolutionary Committee of Public Safety, having his flaws, no doubt, his failings and even his crimes, since he was a man; but princely in his very failings, brilliant in his defects, powerful in his crimes. He was the Man of Destiny who had compelled all nations to acknowledge ‘the great nation’. He was more even than this; he was France incarnate, conquering Europe with the sword and the world with the light he cast. Marius saw in Bonaparte the awesome spirit who would always arise on the frontier to safeguard the future: a despot, but issuing from a republic and summarizing a revolution. Napoleon became for him Man-and-People, as Jesus is Man-and-God.

  As we can see, like all new converts to a religion, in the intoxication of his conversion he went too far. It was his nature to do so: being set upon a given slope it was nearly impossible for him to hold back. A fanatical ardour for the sword gained possession of him, bedevilling in his mind his ardour for the idea. He did not perceive that with his worship of the genius was indiscriminately mingled the worship of force: that is to say, that he was identifying himself with the two sides of his idol, the side which was brutal as well as the side which was divine. He erred in many other respects. He accepted everything. There are ways of falling into error while pursuing the truth. His was a kind of burning sincerity which made no distinctions. In the new course on which he was embarked, condemning the faults of the ancien régime in the measure that he extolled the glory of Napoleon, he disregarded all that might be said in its favour.