Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  Louis XVIII had been dead four years, but no matter.

  The high colour drained out of the old man’s face until his cheeks were as white as his hair. He turned towards the bust of the Duc de Berry and bowed deeply to it in a gesture of singular dignity. Then, twice, he silently paced the length of the room, from the hearth to the window and back, causing the parquet flooring to creak beneath his feet as though a figure of stone were moving over it. The second time he paused and bent over his daughter, who, like an elderly sheep, had witnessed the scene in stupefied consternation. He said with a smile that was almost calm:

  ‘A baron like this gentleman and a bourgeois like myself cannot live under the same roof.’

  Then, white and trembling, his forehead swelling in the terrible blaze of his wrath, he pointed a hand at Marius and cried:

  ‘Clear out!’

  Marius left the house.

  On the following day Monsieur Gillenormand said to his daughter:

  ‘You will send that blood-drinker sixty pistoles every six months, and you will never again utter his name in my presence.’

  He had addressed her formally as vous instead of tu. Having a great accumulation of rage to get rid of, and no other outlet for it, he continued to do this for more than three months.

  Marius had left the house in an equal fury which was aggravated by a particular circumstance, one of those trifling mishaps which complicate family dramas. The quarrel remains the same, but the sense of grievance is rendered more acute. In hastily gathering up his belongings from the floor of the salon at the old man’s order, and carrying them up to his bedroom, Nicolette had dropped the black medallion containing the colonel’s letter, probably somewhere in the darkness of the attic stairs. It could never be found. Marius was convinced that ‘Monsieur Gillenormand’ (whom thenceforward he never referred to in any other terms) had deliberately destroyed his father’s ‘testament’. Since he knew the words by heart there was no real loss, but the paper itself, the handwriting, that sacred relic, had been very dear to him.

  He went off without saying where he was going, or knowing himself, with thirty francs in his pocket, his watch and a few clothes in an overnight bag. Hailing a cab, he had himself driven at random to the Latin quarter.

  What was to become of Marius?

  Book Four

  The ABC Society

  I

  A group which nearly became historic

  BENEATH THE surface of that seemingly apathetic age there was a faint revolutionary stir. Gusts from the depths of ’89 and ’92 were again to be felt in the air. Youth, if we may be allowed the phrase, was on the move. Attitudes were changing, almost unconsciously, in accordance with the changing times. The compass needle swinging over its dial has its equivalent in men’s souls. Everyone was preparing for a forward step. Royalists were becoming liberal, liberals were becoming democrats.

  It was like a rising tide complicated by a thousand eddies. It is the nature of an eddy that it confuses things, hence the conjunction of oddly assorted ideas. Napoleon was venerated and, with him, liberty. We are describing a period in history, and these were its mirages. Opinions go through phases. Voltairian royalism, that weird variant, had a no less strange pendant – Bonapartist liberalism.

  Other schools of thought were more sober-minded. There were those who looked for basic principles, those who stood for law. There was a passion for the Absolute, affording a glimpse of limitless achievement. The Absolute, by its very rigidity, sends spirits soaring heavenwards. Nothing excels dogma as a begetter of dreams: and nothing excels dreaming as a begetter of the future. Today’s Utopia is the flesh and blood of tomorrow.

  Advanced opinion was ambivalent. The mysterious beginnings of change threatened the established order, which was both suspect and crafty. In this lay a clear hint of revolution. The secret aims of power conflict fundamentally with the secret aims of the people. The incubation of revolt is the reply to the planning of coups d’état.

  There did not yet exist in France such vast, widespread organizations as the German Tugendbund or the Italian Carbonari; but small, obscure cells were ramifying. The Cougourde was taking shape in Aix, and in Paris, along with similar bodies, there was the Society of the Friends of the ABC.

  The ostensible purpose of the ABC Society was the education of children, but its real purpose was the elevation of men. The letters ABC, as pronounced in French, make the word abaissé, that is to say, the under-dog, the people. The people were to assert themselves. To deride the pun would have been a mistake. A pun can be weighty in politics, as witness Castratus ad castra, which made of the eunuch Narses a Roman general, and ‘You are Peter (the rock) and on this rock I will build my church.’

  The ABC Society was small in numbers, no more than a secret society in embryo; we might almost call it a clique, if cliques gave birth to heroes. They had two meeting-places in Paris, the one a drinking-place called Corinthe, near Les Halles, of which there will be mention later on, and the other a small café on the Place Saint-Michel, the Café Musain. The first was handy for the workers, the second for the students.

  The councils of the ABC Society were held as a rule in a back room at the Café Musain. The room, which was at some distance from the café proper, and separated from it by a long passage, had two windows and a door leading to an inconspicuous flight of steps down to the narrow Rue des Grès. Its frequenters smoked and drank, played cards and laughed, talking in loud voices about general matters and in low voices about particular ones. Nailed to the wall – a portent calculated to arouse the suspicions of any police agent – was an old map of France under the Republic

  Most of the members of the ABC Society were students having friendly relations with a number of workers. These are the names of the more important, those who have, to some extent, a place in history: Enjolras, Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Courfeyrac, Bahorel, Lesgle or Laigle, Joly, Grantaire. These young men formed a sort of family, united by friendship. All except Laigle came from the Midi.

  They formed a remarkable group, one which has vanished into the limbo of the years that lie behind us, but at this point in our story it may be of value to shed some light on their youthful countenances before the reader follows them as they plunge into the shadow of a tragic adventure.

  We have named Enjolras first, and the reason for this will be seen later. He was the only son of wealthy parents, a charming young man who was capable of being a terror. He was angelically good-looking, an untamed Antinous. From the thoughtfulness of his gaze one might have supposed that in some previous existence he had lived through all the turmoil of the Revolution. He was familiar with every detail of that great event; he had it in his blood as though he had been there. His was a nature at once scholarly and warlike, and this is rare in an adolescent. He was both thinker and man of action, a soldier of democracy in the short term and at the same time a priest of the ideal rising above the contemporary movement. He had deep eyes, their lids slightly reddened, a thick lower lip which readily curled in disdain, and a high forehead – a large expanse of forehead in a face like a wide stretch of sky on the horizon. In common with certain young men of the beginning of this century and the end of the last who achieved distinction early in life, he had the glow of over-vibrant youth, with a skin like a girl’s but with moments of pallor. Grown to manhood, he still appeared a youth, his twenty-two years seeming no more than seventeen. He was austere, seeming not to be aware of the existence on earth of a creature called woman. His sole passion was for justice, his sole thought to overcome obstacles. On the Aventine hill he would have been Gracchus, in the Convention he would have been Saint-Just. He scarcely noticed a rose, was unconscious of the springtime and paid no heed to the singing of birds. The bared bosom of the nymph Evadne would have left him unmoved, and like Harmodius he had no use for flowers except to conceal a sword. He was austere in all his pleasures, chastely averting his eyes from everything that did not concern the republic, a marble lover of Liberty. His speec
h was harsh and intense, with a lyrical undertone, and given to unexpected flights of eloquence. It would have gone hard with any love-affair that sought to lead him astray. Had a grisette from the Place Cambrai or the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais, seeing that schoolboy face, the pageboy figure, the long, fair lashes over blue eyes, the hair ruffled in the breeze, the fresh lips and perfect teeth, been so taken with his beauty as to seek to thrust herself upon him, she would have encountered a cold, dismissive stare, like the opening of an abyss, which would have taught her not to confuse the Cherubini of Beaumarchais with the cherubim of Ezekiel.

  At the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of revolution, was Combeferre, representing its philosophy. The difference between logic and philosophy is that the one can decide upon war, whereas the other can only be fulfilled by peace. Combeferre supplemented and restrained Enjolras. He was less lofty but broader of mind. He sought to instil principles in terms of basic ideas, saying, ‘Revolution, but civilization’ and spreading wider horizons round the stern peaks of dogma. In all his thinking there was an element of the attainable and the practicable. Revolution with Combeferre was more breatheable than with Enjolras. Enjolras stood for its divine right, Combeferre for its natural right. The first went all the way with Robespierre, the second stopped at Condorcet. Combeferre lived closer than Enjolras to the life of everyday. Had it been given to these two young men to attain to the pages of history, the one would have been the man of principle, the other the man of wisdom. Enjolras was the more virile, but Combeferre was the more human - homo and vir, this was the distinction between them. Combeferre was as gentle as Enjolras was rigid, from innate purity. He respected the word ‘citizen’ but preferred the word ‘man’, and would gladly have called his fellows hombre, as the Spaniards do. He read everything, went to the theatre and attended public lectures, learning from Arago, the director of the Observatory, about the polarization of light and from Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire about the functions of the external and internal arteries, one of which serves the face and the other the brain. He was in touch with scientific developments, contrasted Saint-Simon with Fourier, deciphered hieroglyphics, broke up pebbles to study geology, could draw a silk-worm moth from memory, pointed out errors in the Dictionnaire de 1’Académie, studied Puységur and Deleuze, vouched positively for nothing, not even the miracles, denied nothing, not even the existence of ghosts, browsed in the files of the Moniteur, and meditated. He declared that the future lay in the hands of the schoolmaster and was much concerned with the question of education. He believed that society should strive incessantly for the raising of intellectual and moral standards, the popularization of science, the dissemination of ideas and the enlightenment of the young, and he feared that the inadequacy of present methods, the poverty of literary teaching confined to the two or three centuries said to be ‘classical’, the tyrannical dogmatism of official pedants, their prejudices and rigid routines, would end by making our schools mere artificial forcing-houses. He was learned and a purist, precise, eclectic, hard-thinking, and at the same time imaginative ‘to the point of fantasy’, his friends said. He shared every dream for the future – the development of railways, the elimination of suffering by surgery, the fixing of pictures in a darkroom, the electric telegraph, the guided balloon. For the rest, he was undismayed by the barriers to human progress erected by superstition, despotism, and prejudice, being among those who believe that knowledge must always prevail in the end. Enjolras was a commander; Combeferre was a guide. One was moved to combat the former but to accompany the latter. This is not to say that Combeferre was incapable of fighting; he was ready if need be to assail an obstacle and attack it with violence. But it suited him better to make men aware of their destiny by persuasion and the use of reason and precept. Of the two extremes, he preferred enlightenment to conflagration. A bonfire will cast a glow, but why not await the rising of the sun? A volcano sheds a light, but the light of dawn is better. Combeferre perhaps preferred the white purity of the good to the savage splendour of the sublime. Light mingled with smoke, progress achieved by violence, these only partly satisfied his gentle, earnest soul. The sudden plunging of a nation into truth, the events of 1793, this frightened him; but he was even more repelled by apathy, in which he saw putrefaction and death. All in all, he preferred spray to mist, the torrent to the cloaca, Niagara to the Lac de Montfaucon. He wanted neither immobility nor over-haste. While his exuberant friends, chivalrously in love with the Absolute, extolled the splendid lottery of revolution, he was more disposed to let progress take its course, sane progress, cold-blooded perhaps but undefiled, methodical but irreproachable, phlegmatic but unshakeable. Combeferre would have prayed on his knees for the future to come in all simplicity, with nothing to trouble the vast, virtuous evolution of mankind. ‘Good must be innocent,’ he constantly said. And indeed, if it is the grandeur of revolution that, with eyes fixed on the blinding ideal, it flies like an eagle towards it with blood and flame in its talons, the beauty of progress resides in the fact that it is unsullied. Between Washington who represents the one and Danton who embodies the other, the difference is that between the angel with swan’s wings and the angel with eagle’s wings.

  Jean Prouvaire was a shade more soft-hearted than Combeferre. He called himself Jehan, with the touch of fantasy that characterized the profound and widespread impulse of that time, which has given rise to our most necessary study of the middle ages. Jean Prouvaire was a lover; he cherished a pot of flowers, played the flute, wrote verses, loved the people, pitied women, wept over the lot of children, divided his faith equally between the future and God, and reproached the Revolution for having cut off an illustrious head, that of André Chénier. His voice, which was ordinarily soft, would suddenly become masterful. He was widely-read to the point of erudition and near to being an orientalist. Above all he was kind; and (a matter easily understandable by those who know how closely kindness is akin to greatness,) in poetry he favoured the grandiose. He knew Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but the four languages served him for the reading of only four poets, Dante, Juvenal, Aeschylus, and Isaiah. In French he preferred Corneille to Racine and Agrippa d’Aubigné to Corneille. He loved to stroll through meadows of wild flowers and was scarcely less interested in the passage of the clouds than in the passage of events. There were two sides to his mind, the side of men and the side of God; he studied, or he meditated. During the day he pored over social questions – wages, capital, credit, marriage, religion, freedom of thought, freedom to love, education, the penal system, poverty, the right of free association, property, production and distribution, the riddle of the lowest stratum which spreads its shadow over the human ant-heap; and at night he contemplated the immensity of the heavens. Like Enjolras he was rich and an only son. He talked gently, bowed his head, smiled self-consciously, blushed for no reason, was awkward and extremely shy – and, for the rest, fearless.

  Feuilly was a fan-maker, orphaned of both father and mother, who laboriously earned three francs a day and whose mind was obsessed with a single thought, to liberate the world. His other preoccupation was to educate himself, which he called self-liberation. He had taught himself to read and write, and everything he knew he had learned in solitude. He had a warm heart, an immense capacity for affection. Being an orphan he had adopted mankind as his parents. His country took the place of his mother. He hated to think that there should be any man without a country. With the profound instinct of a man of the people he cherished in his heart something that we now call the ‘idea of nationality’. He read history precisely in order that his protest might be well-informed in this matter. In that youthful circle of Utopians, which was concerned principally with France, he stood for the world outside, specializing in Greece, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Italy. The names cropped up constantly in his discourse, with or without reason, with the obstinacy of conscious rightness. The rape of Crete and Thessaly by Turkey, of Warsaw by Russia, of Venice by Austria, these things outraged him. Above all, the firs
t partition of Poland in 1772 roused him to fury. There is no more powerful eloquence than that of indignation based on true conviction, and this was the power that he possessed. He never wearied of talking about that infamous event, a noble and gallant race subdued by treachery, a crime with three participants, a monstrous trap, the prototype and forerunner of all the shameful acts of oppression which had subsequently afflicted other nations, eliminating them, so to speak, in the moment of their birth. All contemporary social assassinations derive from the partition of Poland; it is a proposition of which all current political misdeeds are corollaries. Not a despot, not a traitor in the past near-century but in one way and another has paraphrased and endorsed that criminal act. When the history of modern betrayals is compiled, it will be first on the list. The Congress of Vienna examined it before committing its own crime. The ‘tally-ho’ was in 1772, the ‘kill’ in 1815. Such was Feuilly’s thesis. The penniless workman had constituted himself the guardian of Justice, and Justice had rewarded him with a touch of greatness. The right, indeed, is indestructible. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be Teutonic. Kings waste their energies in that contention, and lose their honour. Sooner or later the submerged nation rises again to the surface; Greece is still Greece and Italy, Italy. The struggle of the right against the deed persists for ever. The theft of a people can never be justified. These august swindles have no future. A nation cannot be shaped as though it were a pocket handkerchief.

  Courfeyrac had a father who was addressed as Monsieur de Courfeyrac, a belief in that particle being one of the misconceptions of the Restoration bourgeoisie in the matter of aristocracy and titles of nobility. As we know, it has no real significance. But the bourgeoisie in the days of La Minerve esteemed it so highly that many who had legitimately borne it were constrained to abandon it, Monsieur de Constant de Rebecque becoming plain Benjamin Constant, and Monsieur de Lafayette plain Monsieur Lafayette. Not wishing to be behindhand, Courfeyrac called himself plain Courfeyrac