Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  What is admirable in the clash of young minds is that no one can foresee the spark that sets off an explosion, or predict what kind of explosion it will be. A moment of light-heartedness produces a burst of laughter, and then, at the height of the merriment, a serious note is struck. A hasty word or an idle phrase may give the proceedings an entirely new turn, opening up unexplored fields. Chance is the conductor of those youthful symphonies.

  A sudden thought pierced through the confusion of a talk to which Grantaire, Bahorel, Prouvaire, Bossuet, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac were all contributing. How does it happen that a single phrase may suddenly attract the notice of every person in a room? As we have said, there is no knowing. In the midst of the hubbub Bossuet concluded whatever he had been saying to Combeferre by citing a date:

  ‘18 June 1815 – Waterloo.’

  At the mention of Waterloo, Marius, who had been leaning over his table with his chin resting on his hand and a glass of water beside him, suddenly looked up and gazed fixedly at the company.

  ‘Strange, isn’t it,’ said Courfeyrac. ‘I’ve always been struck by that number, 18. It is Bonaparte’s fatal number. Put Louis in front of it, and Brumaire after it – Louis XVIII and 18 Brumaire – and you have the man’s whole destiny, the end triggered by the beginning.’

  Enjolras, who had hitherto been silent, now spoke.

  ‘You should say, the crime matched by its expiation.’

  The word ‘crime’ was more than Marius could accept, excited as he already was by the mention of Waterloo. He rose and walked slowly to the map of France hanging on the wall. In the bottom corner, in a separate compartment, was the map of Corsica.

  ‘Corsica,’ he said, pointing to it. ‘A small island that made France great.’

  It was as though a cold wind had blown. All conversation ceased and a feeling of expectancy filled the room. Enjolras, whose blue eyes seemed to be gazing into space, said without looking at Marius:

  ‘France did not need Corsica to make her great. She is great because she is France.’

  But Marius was not disposed to leave it at that. He turned to face Enjolras and spoke in a voice trembling with emotion.

  ‘God forbid that I should seek to diminish France. But to associate her with Napoleon is not to diminish her. Let us be clear about that. I am a newcomer among you, and I must confess that you astonish me. Where do we all stand? Who are you, and who am I? Where do we stand about the Emperor? I’ve heard you call him Buonaparte, putting the accent on the “u” as the royalists do, and I may tell you that my grandfather goes even further and pronounces the final “e” as well. I think of you as young men, but where does your allegiance lie and what do you do about it? Whom do you admire if you do not admire the Emperor? What more do you want, what other great men, if that one is not good enough for you? He had everything. He was entire. He had in his brain the whole range of human faculties. He coded the laws like Justinian, was dictator like Caesar, and his conversation mingled the lightnings of Pascal with the thunderbolts of Tacitus. He made history and wrote it – his bulletins are epics. He combined the mathematics of Newton with the metaphors of Mahomet, and left behind him in the East words as great as the pyramids. At Tilsit he taught kingliness to emperors, at the Académie des Sciences he answered Laplace and in the Council of State he held his ground with Merlin. He infused soul into the calculations of some and the machinations of others. He was a lawyer among lawyers and an astronomer among astronomers. Like Cromwell, blowing out every other candle, he went to the Temple to bargain for a curtain-tassel. He saw everything and knew everything, which did not prevent him from rejoicing like the simplest of men over the cradle of his newborn son. And suddenly Europe found itself listening in terror to the march of armies, the thunder of artillery columns, the clouds of cavalry galloping like a tempest, the cries and the bugle-calls, the trembling of thrones while frontiers vanished from the map. They heard the sound of a superhuman blade being drawn from its sheath and they saw him towering on the horizon with flame in his hands and a dazzling light in his eyes, spreading amid the thunder his two great wings, the Grande Armée and the Vieille Garde, and they knew him for the Archangel of War!’

  All were silent, and Enjolras bowed his head. Silence has always something of the effect of acquiescence or of the building of a wall. Scarcely pausing for breath, Marius continued with increasing vehemence.

  ‘Let us be fair, my friends. What more splendid destiny could befall any nation than to be the Empire of such an Emperor, when the nation is France and its genius is added to the genius of such a man? To rise and prevail, to march in triumph from capital to capital, to make kings of grenadiers and decree the downfall of dynasties; to change the face of Europe at the pace of a cavalry-charge; to feel, when you are threatened, that the sword you hold is the sword of God; to follow Hannibal, Caesar, and Charlemagne in the person of one man; to be the nation whose every dawn is greeted with the tidings of a new victory; to awaken to the salvoes of gunfire from the Invalides, and live in the brilliance of imperishable names, Marengo, Arcole, Austerlitz, Iéna, Wagram! … To make the French Empire the successor of Rome; to be the great nation that gave birth to the Grande Armée, sending its legions to the four corners of the world like a mountain sending forth its eagles; to be a nation ablaze with glory, sounding its titanic fanfare to echo down the corridors of history; to conquer the world twice over, by force of arms and by brilliance – all this is sublime! What can possibly be greater?’

  ‘To be free,’ said Combeferre.

  And now it was Marius who bowed his head. The cool, incisive words had pierced like a swordthrust to the heart of his eloquence, and he felt his ardour evaporate. When at length he looked up, Combeferre was no longer there. Satisfied, no doubt, with that devastating reply, he had left the room, and the others had followed him, all save Enjolras, who, left alone with Marius, was now gravely regarding him. Marius, having by now somewhat recovered, did not yet consider himself beaten. Something of his fire remained, and would doubtless have been poured out in a further exordium to Enjolras had they not heard a voice in the passage outside. It was Combeferre, and this is the song he sang:

  If Caesar had offered me

  Glory and war

  For which I must abandon

  My mother’s love

  I would say to great Caesar:

  ‘Take back your sceptre and your chariot.

  I love my mother more, alas,

  I love my mother more.’

  The wistful tenderness with which Combeferre sang it invested the little song with a strange grandeur. Marius was staring thoughtfully at the ceiling. He repeated, half-unconsciously, ‘My mother? …’

  And Enjolras laid a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Citizen,’ he said, ‘my mother is the Republic’

  VI

  Domestic matters

  That evening left Marius profoundly shaken and with a sense of obscure sadness, such a feeling as perhaps the earth knows when the ploughshare furrows it for the sowing of seed. It feels only the wound. The stirring of the seed and the joy of harvest come later.

  Marius was filled with gloom. Having so lately found a faith, must he now renounce it? He told himself that he need not; he resolved not to doubt, and began despite himself to do so. To be torn between two creeds, one which one has not yet wholly abandoned and one which one has not yet embraced, this is intolerable; it is a half-light in which only a bat can be at ease. Marius, with his candid gaze, needed a true light; the twilight of doubt tormented him. However great his desire to stand firm and leave things as they were, he was inexorably compelled to go further; to reflect, to speculate, to prove. Where was his thinking to lead him? He greatly feared lest, having drawn so close to his father, he might now be drawn away from him, and the more he brooded the more did his perturbation grow. A barrier seemed to enclose him. He was in step neither with his grandfather nor with his friends, outrageous to the former and behind the times for the latter, and he had a sen
se of double isolation, both from the old and from the young. He gave up going to the Café Musain.

  In his troubled state of mind, he gave little heed to certain prosaic aspects of life; but they were matters that could not be ignored. They brought themselves abruptly to his notice. The hotelkeeper came to his room and said:

  ‘Monsieur Courfeyrac has vouched for you, has he not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I need money.’

  ‘Will you please ask Monsieur Courfeyrac if he can spare me a moment?’

  Courfeyrac came to see him, and Marius told him what he had not thought of telling him until then, that for practical purposes he was alone in the world, having no parents.

  ‘So what’s to become of you?’ asked Courfeyrac.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Marius.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How much money have you?’

  ‘Fifteen francs.’

  ‘Do you want me to lend you some?’

  ‘No – never.’

  ‘Have you any clothes?’

  ‘Only these.’

  ‘Any jewellery?’

  ‘A watch.’

  ‘Silver?’

  ‘Gold. Here it is.’

  ‘I know a second-hand dealer who will take your tail-coat and spare pair of trousers.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘That’ll leave you with one pair of trousers, a waistcoat, a hat, and a jacket’

  ‘And my boots.’

  ‘You mean you won’t go barefoot? What luxury!’

  ‘That ought to be enough.’

  ‘And I know a clockmaker who will buy your watch.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘No, it isn’t good. What will you do when the money’s gone?’

  ‘Whatever I have to do – anything honest.’

  ‘Do you know English?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘German?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s a pity.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A friend of mine, a bookseller, is compiling a sort of encyclopedia. You might have translated articles for it, from English or German. It’s badly paid work, but one can live on it.’

  ‘Then I’ll learn English and German.’

  ‘And in the meantime?’

  ‘I’ll live on my clothes and my watch.’

  The clothes fetched twenty francs and the watch forty-five francs.

  ‘That’s not bad,’ said Marius when they got back to the hotel. ‘With the fifteen francs I already have that makes eighty altogether.’

  ‘And what about the hotel bill?’ said Courfeyrac.

  ‘Oh, lord, I’d clean forgotten!’

  The bill came to seventy francs.

  ‘The devil!’ said Courfeyrac. ‘So you’re to live on five francs while you’re learning English and five more while you’re learning German. You’ll either have to digest a language very quickly or make a hundred sous go a very long way.’

  Meanwhile Aunt Gillenormand, who was at least a good soul in emergencies, had succeeded in discovering Marius’s address. One morning he received a letter from her and a sealed package containing the ‘sixty pistoles’ his grandfather had authorized – that is to say, six hundred francs in gold. He returned the money with a graceful letter saying that he had found a means of livelihood which would supply him with all his needs. At the moment he had three francs in the world.

  His aunt did not tell his grandfather of this, fearing to add to the old gentleman’s fury. Besides which, he had told her never to mention that ‘blood-drinker’ again.

  Marius left the Hôtel de la Porte Saint-Jacques, not wanting to run further into debt.

  Book Five

  The Virtues of Misfortune

  I

  Marius penniless

  LIFE BECAME very hard for Marius. To have eaten his clothes and his watch was nothing; he had now to chew the cud of utmost necessity. It was a horrible time of days without food, nights without sleep, evenings without light, a hearth without a fire, weeks without work, and a future without hope; threadbare clothes, doors slammed behind him because he had not paid the rent, the insolence of underlings, the scorn of neighbours, humiliation, loss of self-respect, menial tasks performed, disgust, bitterness, and despair. Marius learned to swallow all these things and to know what it was to have nothing else to swallow. In that condition of life when a man has most need of self-esteem because he lacks love, he felt himself mocked because he was ill-clad, and ridiculous because he was penniless. At the age when the heart of youth should be filled with a lordly confidence his eyes were cast down to his worn boots and he suffered all the slights and unjust abasement of extreme poverty: a stern and terrible trial which brings the weak to infamy and the strong to nobility; the crucible into which Destiny casts a man, to make of him a ne’er-do-well or a demi-god.

  For many great deeds are accomplished in times of squalid struggle. There is a kind of stubborn, unrecognized courage which in the lowest depths tenaciously resists the pressures of necessity and ill-doing; there are noble and obscure triumphs observed by no one, unacclaimed by any fanfare. Hardship, loneliness, and penury are a battlefield which has its own heroes, sometimes greater than those lauded in history. Strong and rare characters are thus created; poverty, nearly always a foster-mother, may become a true mother; distress may be the nursemaid of pride, and misfortune the milk that nourishes great spirits.

  There was a time in Marius’s life when he swept his own landing, bought a penn’orth of cheese from the grocer and waited until dusk before going to the bakery to buy a small loaf which he took furtively away as though he had stolen it. He would sidle into the neighbouring butcher’s shop, elbowed by the chattering housewives – an awkward young man with books under his arm, at once timid and resentful, raising his hat obsequiously to the astonished butcher – and buy a mutton-chop wrapped in paper for six or seven sous. He would cook it himself and live on it sometimes for three days, first the lean, then the fat, and on the third day he would gnaw the bone.

  Aunt Gillenormand tried more than once to come to his aid, sending him the sixty pistoles; but he always returned the money, saying that he did not need it.

  He had been in mourning for his father when the upheaval in his life had occurred, and since then he had continued to wear black. But his clothes were gradually falling to pieces, and a day came when his jacket was no longer wearable, although he could still wear his trousers. In this emergency Courfeyrac, whom he had served in certain small ways, gave him an old jacket of his own. He had it turned at a cost of thirty sous so that it was as good as new. But it was made of green cloth. Accordingly he went out only after dark, when it looked black. Wishing still to go in mourning, he clad himself in darkness.

  With all this he continued his law-studies and qualified as an advocate. Officially he shared Courfeyrac’s chambers, which were presentable and contained a sufficient number of law-books, filled out with tattered novels, to constitute the library required by regulations. He had his letters sent to Courfeyrac’s address.

  When he had qualified he notified his grandfather of the fact in a formally worded letter that was, however, filled with dutiful respect. Monsieur Gillenormand’s hands trembled as he read it, but having done so he tore it up and threw it in the wastepaper basket. A few days later his daughter overheard him talking aloud to himself in his room, a thing that always happened when he was in a highly agitated state. He was saying, ‘If you weren’t an imbecile you would realize that one can’t be at the same time a baron and an advocate.’

  II

  Marius poor

  Poverty is like everything else. In the end it becomes bearable. It acquires a pattern and comes to terms with itself. One vegetates – that is to say, continues to exist in a wretched sort of way that is just sufficient to sustain life. This is what happened to Marius Pont-mercy.

  He had got over the worst and the road ahead of him
looked somewhat smoother. By dint of hard work, courage, perseverance and resolution, he contrived to earn about seven hundred francs a year. He learned German and English, and thanks to Courfeyrac, who introduced him to his bookseller friend, he was able to fill the humble role of a literary ‘devil’. He wrote prospectuses, translated newspaper articles, annotated new editions, helped to compile biographies and so on. The net result was an average income of seven hundred francs, on which he contrived to live, not too badly, in the manner which we will now describe.

  He rented what passed for a room in the Gorbeau tenement at a price of thirty francs a year. Such furniture as it contained was his own. He paid the elderly ‘chief tenant’ three francs a month to sweep the floor and bring him a little hot water in the mornings, and an egg and a roll costing one sou. These constituted his breakfast, which fluctuated a few sous in price according to the price of eggs. At six in the evening he went down the Rue Saint-Jacques to dine chez Rousseau, opposite the print-dealer’s on the corner of the Rue des Mathurins. He had no first course. His meal consisted of a portion of meat, at six sous, a half-portion of vegetables at three sous, and a dessert at three sous, with unlimited bread, costing another three sous. He drank no wine, but only water. When he paid at the desk, majestically occupied by Madame Rousseau, who in those days was already plump but still youthful, he gave the waiter a sou and Madame Rousseau gave him a smile. Then he left, having purchased for sixteen sous a dinner and a smile.

  The Restaurant Rousseau, where so little wine was drunk and so much water, was a place of rest rather than stimulation. It no longer exists. Its proprietor was known as ‘Rousseau l’aquatique’, a play on the word ruisseau, meaning a stream.

  So, breakfast for four sous and dinner for sixteen sous. His food cost him a franc a day, or 365 francs a year. Adding the thirty francs rent, the thirty-six for the old woman and something for minor expenses, Marius was fed, housed, and served for 450 francs a year. His outer clothing cost him a hundred francs a year, his linen and his laundry fifty francs each. The whole did not exceed 650 francs. He had fifty francs left, which made him rich, able occasionally to lend a friend ten francs. Courfeyrac had once borrowed sixty from him. The problem of heating was simplified by the fact that his room had no fireplace.