Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  He always had two suits, an old one for everyday and a new one for special occasions. Both were black. He had only three shirts, one on his back, one in reserve, and one at the laundry. He replaced these when they wore out. They were generally frayed, for which reason he kept his jacket buttoned to the chin.

  It took Marius some years to achieve this satisfactory state. They had been rough years, difficult to live through and surmount. He had never given up. He had suffered everything conceivable in the way of hardship and done everything except run into debt. He could pride himself on the fact that he had never owed anyone a sou. To him a debt was the beginning of slavery. He went so far as to say that a creditor is worse than a master; for a master owns only your physical presence, whereas a creditor owns your dignity and may affront it. Rather than borrow money he went without food. He had known many days of fasting. Realizing that all extremes meet, and that, if one is not on one’s guard, material abasement may end in spiritual abasement, he set particular store by his pride. Words and gestures which in other circumstances he might have considered acts of ordinary politeness seemed to him to contain a hint of obsequiousness, and he recoiled from them. He offered nothing, fearing to be rebuffed. There was a kind of aloofness in his manner. He was withdrawn to the point of surliness.

  In all his trials he was sustained and at times even exalted by a secret strength in himself. The soul aids the body and at moments uplifts it. It is the only bird that can endure a cage.

  With the name of his father another name was imprinted in Marius’s heart – the name of Thénardier. His naturally ardent and earnest temperament had caused him to invest with a sort of halo the man who, as he believed, had saved his father at Waterloo, the intrepid sergeant who had rescued him amid a hail of bullets. He never thought of his father without also thinking of that man, associating the two in an aura of almost religious veneration, a high altar for the one and a low altar for the other. His concern for Thénardier was heightened by the fact that he knew him to have been overtaken by misfortune. Since learning in Montfermeil of his bankruptcy and disappearance, he had done everything in his power to find him. He had scoured the region, visiting Chelles, Bouchy, Gourney, Nogent and Lagny, and the search, which had now gone on for three years, had cost him all the little money he could spare. No one had been able to give him news of Thénardier, and it was rumoured that he had left the country. His creditors had also been looking for him, no less assiduously than Marius, if for somewhat different reasons, but had not been able to run him to earth. This was the only debt Marius’s father had bequeathed to him, and he held it to be a point of honour that he should pay it. ‘My father lay dying on the field of battle,’ he thought, ‘and Thénardier rescued him amid the smoke and gunfire and carried him to safety on his back. And he owed my father nothing. How can I, who owe Thénardier so much, fail to seek him out in the trouble which has overtaken him and restore him to life. I must surely find him!’ … Indeed, Marius would have given his right hand to find Thénardier, and would have shed his last drop of blood to rescue him from destitution. To find him and do him some signal service; to be able to say to him, ‘You don’t know me but I know you. Here I am – ask what you will of me’ – this was Marius’s most cherished and glorious dream.

  III

  Marius grown up

  Marius was now twenty. It was three years since he had parted from his grandfather, and the situation between them remained unchanged.

  They had not met or sought to be reconciled. A meeting would, it seemed, have served only to renew a quarrel in which neither would give way. If Marius was the irresistible force, old Gillenormand was the immovable object.

  It must be said that Marius had misunderstood his grandfather. He had come to believe that Monsieur Gillenormand had never had any real fondness for him, that the forthright, sardonic old man who cursed and shouted and flourished his stick had never felt for him anything more than the harsh, casual affection of a stage stepfather. In this he was wrong. There are fathers who do not love their sons, but there has never been a grandfather who did not adore his grandson. The truth, as we have said, is that Monsieur Gillenormand idolized Marius; but he did so in his own fashion, to an accompaniment of chiding and even blows. The boy’s departure had left a black emptiness in his heart. He had ordered that his name should never be spoken, and yet was sorry that the order was so faithfully obeyed. At first he had hoped that the youthful rebel, the Bonapartist and Jacobin, would come back. But the weeks passed, the months and years, and to the old man’s grief he did not do so. ‘What else could I have done but turn him out?’ he asked himself; and then he wondered whether he would do the same thing if it were to be done again. His pride promptly answered yes, but his old head, shaking in the silence, mournfully answered no. He had periods of utter dejection, so greatly did he miss Marius. Old people need love as they need sunshine; it is warmth. For all his strength of character, something in him had been changed by Marius’s absence. Not for anything in the world would he have reached out a hand towards ‘that young monster’; but he suffered. He never asked after him but constantly thought of him. He continued to live in the Marais, more secluded than ever, still cheerful and forthright as he had always been, but now there was a note of harshness in his gaiety, as though it expressed both pain and anger, and his outbursts of fury were always succeeded by a fit of gloomy depression. He sometimes said to himself, ‘If he were to come back, how I’d box his ears!’

  As for his daughter, she was too shallow-minded to be capable of any deep affection. Marius became a remote and shadowy figure to her, and in the end she thought far less about him than about the cat or parrot which she doubtless possessed.

  Old Gillenormand’s unhappiness was rendered more acute by the fact that he contained it wholly within himself, never allowing it any outward expression; it was like one of those recently invented furnaces which consume their own smoke. It happened sometimes that an inquisitive acquaintance would ask after Marius – ‘What is your grandson doing these days?’ To which the old gentleman would reply, sighing if he was in melancholy mood, or shooting his cuffs if he wished to appear gay, ‘The Baron Pontmercy is pursuing his career somewhere or other.’

  And while the old man grieved, Marius congratulated himself. As with all brave hearts, misfortune had robbed him of bitterness. He thought of Monsieur Gillenormand only with kindness, but he had made up his mind that he could accept nothing from the man who had treated his father so badly. The rigours of his present life gratified and pleased him. He told himself with a kind of satisfaction that it was the least he deserved, an expiation; that otherwise he must have been punished in some other way, at some later date, for his unfilial indifference to his father; that it would have been unjust for his father to suffer everything and himself nothing. What were his own hardships and misfortunes, compared with the colonel’s heroic life? It seemed to him that the only way he could emulate his father was by facing the trials of poverty as bravely as his father had faced the enemy, and he had no doubt that this was what the colonel had meant by the words, ‘he will be worthy of it’ – words which Marius could not wear on his breast, since the letter had been destroyed, but which he would wear forever in his heart

  And then, although he had been no more than a youth when his grandfather had turned him out, he was now a man. He felt like a man. Poverty, we must repeat, had been good for him. Poverty in youth, when it is mastered, has the sovereign quality that it concentrates the will-power upon striving and the spirit upon hope. By stripping our material existence to its essentials and exposing its drabness, it fosters in us an inexpressible longing for the ideal life. The well-to-do young man is offered a hundred dazzling and crude distractions – horses, hunting and gambling, rich food, tobacco, and all the rest – occupations for his baser nature at the expense of everything in him that is high-minded and sensitive. The poor young man struggles to stay alive; he contrives to eat, and his only solace is in dreaming. His only theatre
is the free show that God provides, the sky and the stars, flowers and children, mankind whose sufferings he shares and the created world in which he is trying his wings. He lives so close to humanity that he sees its soul, so close to the divine creation that he sees God. He dreams and feels his own greatness; dreams again and feels tenderness. He progresses from the egotism of the man who suffers to the compassion of the man who meditates, and an admirable sentiment is born in him, of self-forgetfulness and feeling for others. Reflecting on the countless delights that nature showers on minds open to receive them, and denied to those whose minds are closed, he ends, a millionaire of the spirit, by pitying the millionaire of nothing but money. All hatred disappears from his heart as enlightenment grows in him. Indeed, is he really unhappy? No, he is not. A young man’s poverty is never miserable. Any youngster, poor as he may be, with health and strength, a buoyant stride and clear eyes, hot-flowing blood, dark hair, fresh cheeks, white teeth and clean breath, is an object of envy to any aged emperor. And then, he gets up every morning to earn his livelihood, and while his hands are busily employed his backbone gains in pride and his mind gains in ideas. His day’s work done, he returns to the delights of his contemplative life. He may live with feet enmeshed in affliction and frustration, hard-set on earth amid the brambles and sometimes deep in mud; but his head is in the stars. He is steadfast and serene, gentle, peaceable, alert, sober-minded, content with little, and benevolent; and he blesses God for having bestowed on him those two riches which the rich so often lack – work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom.

  This was the road which Marius had travelled, and, if the truth be told, he was now inclined a little too much to the side of contemplation. From the moment when he felt reasonably sure of earning a livelihood he had slowed down, finding it good to be poor and working the less to allow himself more time for musing. He sometimes spent whole days in reverie, plunged in dreams like a visionary in the debauch of an inward exaltation. He had settled the problem of his life in this fashion: to do as little material work as possible in order to work the more at immaterial things: in a word, to devote a few hours to practical affairs and squander the rest on the infinite. He failed to perceive, believing that he lacked nothing, that contemplation carried to this point becomes a form of sloth, and that, in contenting himself with having secured the bare essentials of life, he was relaxing too soon. It was clear that for a young man of his ardent and energetic nature this could be only a temporary state, and that upon his first encounter with the inevitable complexities of life Marius would wake up.

  In the meantime, although he was now an advocate, contrary to what his grandfather supposed, he did not plead in the courts and engaged in no legal transactions. Day-dreaming had given him a distaste for the law. The thought of consorting with attorneys, hanging about the courts, chasing after briefs, was odious to him. Why take the trouble? He saw no reason to change his present way of life. His work as a bookseller and publisher’s hack was not too demanding, and it sufficed for his needs.

  One of the booksellers for whom he worked – it was, I believe, Monsieur Magimel – had offered him a permanent situation with lodging thrown in, regular work and a salary of fifteen hundred francs a year. The offer was attractive, but it would mean forfeiting his liberty. He would become a wage-slave, an employed man-of-letters. To Marius’s way of thinking he would be both better and worse off, a gainer in petty comfort and a loser in dignity, exchanging a state of high-minded, unsullied poverty for one of dubious security, rather like a blind man becoming one-eyed. He refused.

  His life was a lonely one, partly from his desire to remain uninvolved and also because, having been horrified by the circle presided over by Enjolras, he was not at all disposed to join it. They remained on friendly terms, ready to help one another when the need arose, but that was all. Marius had two real friends, a young man, Courfeyrac, and an old man, Monsieur Mabeuf, the churchwarden. Of the two he leaned rather towards the latter, to whom he owed the transformation in his life, the opening of his eyes which had caused him to know and love his father.

  Yet in this matter Monsieur Mabeuf had been no more than the passive, unwitting instrument of providence. It was purely by chance that he had shed a light for Marius, doing so as unconsciously as the candle, not the bringer.

  As for the upheaval which had taken place in Marius, this was something which Monsieur Mabeuf was quite incapable of understanding, still less of desiring or contriving. Since we are to meet him again later in the story it may be as well, at this point, to say a few words about him.

  IV

  Monsieur Mabeuf

  When Monsieur Mabeuf said to Marius, ‘Of course I approve of people holding political opinions,’ he had been expressing his own attitude of mind. All political opinions came alike to him and he approved of them all without seeking to distinguish between them, like the Greeks, who referred to the Eumenides as ‘beautiful, good, delightful’ … asking only that they would leave them alone. His politics were confined to his passionate love of plants and, even more, of books. Like everyone else he had a label, since at that time nobody could live without one, but his ‘ism’ was of a non-committed kind: he was not a royalist, a Bonapartist, a chartist, an Orleanist, or an anarchist – simply a book-ist.

  He could not understand why men should expend themselves in fury over such trivialities as the Charter, democracy, monarchy, republicanism and so forth when there were mosses, grasses, and shrubs for them to look at and folios and octavos for them to browse in. He was far from being idle; his passion for collecting books no more prevented him from reading them than did the study of botany prevent him from being a gardener. His friendship with Colonel Pontmercy had been based on the fact that what the colonel did for flowers, he did for fruit. He had produced a strain of pears as well-flavoured as the pears of Saint-Germain; and it is to him, it seems, that we owe the October mirabelle plum, which has become famous and is as well-liked as the summer mirabelle. He attended Mass more in a spirit of acquiescence than of devoutness, and also because, liking the faces of men but disliking the noise they made, Church was the only place where he could find them together and silent. Feeling that it was his duty to perform some civic function, he had become a churchwarden. For the rest, he had never succeeded in being as fond of any woman as he could be of a tulip-bulb, or of any man as of a manuscript. When he was well past sixty someone had asked him, ‘Were you never married?’ and he had answered, ‘I forget.’ And when it happened to him to exclaim (as who does not?), ‘If only I were rich!’ the thought was prompted, not, as in the case of Monsieur Gillenormand, by the sight of a pretty girl, but by the sight of a volume which he could not afford to buy.

  He lived alone with an old housekeeper. He was somewhat gouty, and his rheumaticky fingers stiffened under the blankets when he was asleep. He had published a book with colour plates on The Flora of the Cauteretz Region which was well thought of and of which he owned the plates, selling the volume himself. Two or three purchasers a day called at his dwelling in the Rue Mézières, and this brought him in about two thousand francs a year, nearly his whole income. Poor though he was, he had contrived over the years, by patience and self-denial, to form a collection of rare books of all kinds. He never left home without a book under his arm, and often came back with two. The only adornment of the four-room ground-floor apartment, with a small garden, where he lived, was some framed dried grasses and a few engravings of Old Masters. The sight of a sabre or musket chilled his heart. He had never in his life gone near a cannon, not even at the Invalides. He had a reasonably good digestion, a brother who was a curé, white hair, no teeth in his head and no bite in his spirit, a slight tremor that pervaded his whole body, a Picardy accent, a childlike laugh, a readiness to take fright, and the general look of an old sheep. For the rest, he had no friendships or place of call among the living other than the establishment of an old bookseller near the Porte Saint-Jacques whose name was Royol. It was h
is ambition to produce a strain of indigo that would grow in France.

  His housekeeper was another embodiment of innocence, an excellent, elderly virgin. Her tom-cat, Sultan, who might have mewed Allegri’s ‘Miserere’ in the Sistine Chapel, satisfied all her emotional needs. She had never desired any man or been able to live without a cat. Like him, she had a moustache. Her pride was in her bonnets, which were always white. She passed her leisure hours after Sunday Mass counting the linen in her trunk and spreading out on her bed the dress materials which she bought but never had made into dresses. She knew how to read. Monsieur Mabeuf had nicknamed her Mère Plutarque.

  Monsieur Mabeuf had taken a fancy to Marius because Marius, being young and gentle, warmed his old age without ruffling his diffidence. To the old a gentle youth is like sunshine without wind. At the time when Marius was immersed in military history, cannon-fire and counter-marches, all the prodigious battles in which his father had dealt and received tremendous sabre-cuts, he would go to call on Monsieur Mabeuf, who would talk to him about heroes as though they were flowers.

  But when, in 1830, his brother the curé had died, Monsieur Mabeuf’s whole life had been plunged in darkness. The bankruptcy of an attorney had led to a loss often thousand francs, the greater part of the capital that he and his brother had shared. The July Revolution caused a crisis in the book trade. The last thing to sell in any time of upheaval is a book on plants, and the sales of The Flora of the Cauteretz Region abruptly ceased. Weeks went by without a purchaser. Monsieur Mabeuf would start up hopefully at the sound of the bell only to be told sadly by Mère Plutarque, ‘It’s only the water carrier, Monsieur’ … In short, a day came when Monsieur Mabeuf was obliged to leave the Rue Mézières, give up his post of churchwarden at Saint-Sulpice, and sell a part, not of his books but of his prints, those he valued the least. He moved to a small house on the Boulevard Montparnasse, which, however, he left at the end of the first quarter, for two reasons – first, because the rent of the ground-floor apartment and garden was three hundred francs, and two hundred was all he could afford; and secondly because, being adjacent to the Fatou shooting-gallery, he was troubled all day by the sound of pistol-shots, and this he found unendurable.