‘You shouldn’t be so high-falutin and stand-offish,’ said Courfeyrac. ‘Let me give you a word of advice, my lad. Don’t be forever burying your nose in books. Give the girls a chance. They’d do you a lot of good, dear Marius. Always blushing and shying off the way you do, you’ll end up a priest – or a hermit.’ Courfeyrac had even been known on occasions to address him as ‘Monsieur l’abbé’.
For a week after being lectured in this fashion Marius would avoid women more strenuously than ever, both young and old; he would also avoid Courfeyrac.
But among all the regiment of women there were two whom Marius did not seek to escape from or feel the need to defend himself against. Indeed, he would have been surprised to learn that they were women. The first was the hairy-chinned old body who did out his room, concerning whom Courfeyrac remarked, ‘Seeing his cleaning-woman has a beard, Marius doesn’t grow one of his own.’ The other was a child whom he saw often but never really looked at.
During the past year or more Marius had noticed, on an alleyway in the Luxembourg garden, the one flanking the parapet of the tree-plantation, an elderly man and a very young girl, nearly always seated side by side on a bench at the more deserted end of the alleyway, near the Rue de l’Ouest. Whenever Marius’s meditative strolls took him in that direction, and this happened very often, he was likely to see them. The man, who was perhaps sixty, had a grave and serious look, his robust, wearied aspect conveying the impression that he had been a soldier. Had he worn any kind of decoration Marius would have supposed him to be a half-pay officer. He looked good-natured but unapproachable, and he never returned the glance of a passer-by. He wore blue trousers, a blue tail-coat and a wide-brimmed hat which always seemed new, a black cravat and a Quaker shirt – that is to say, of dazzling whiteness but coarse material. A shop-girl passing near remarked to her friend, ‘A nice, clean old widower’. His hair was very white.
The girl, when first Marius had noticed them, seated beside him on the bench which they seemed to have made their own property, was aged thirteen or fourteen. She was skinny to the point of ugliness, awkward and insignificant, although her eyes promised to be beautiful; but she gazed about her with a kind of unheeding assurance that he found displeasing. Her clothes were the mixture of too-old and too-young which is commonly seen on boarders at convent-schools – a badly cut dress of coarse black merino. They seemed to be father and daughter.
For a few days Marius was intrigued by this man who was not yet really old and the child who was not yet a person, but after this he ignored them. They, for their part, seemed not even to notice him. They sat peaceably together, the girl gaily chattering and the man saying little but glancing at her occasionally with a smile of profound fatherly affection.
Marius was in the habit of strolling the length of the alleyway where they sat, turning back along the same path, and often walking along it again. He did this several times a week. But although he saw the couple so frequently, no kind of salutation had ever been exchanged between them. The fact that they seemed to wish to avoid notice had, not unnaturally, aroused the interest of the students who occasionally strolled that way, the more studious after a lecture and others after a game of billiards. Courfeyrac, who belonged to the latter category, had scrutinized them, but finding the girl unattractive he made a point of passing rapidly by. Prompted by the girl’s black clothes and the man’s white hair, he had christened them ‘Mlle Lanoire’ and ‘Monsieur Leblanc ’. The names had become common currency among them. ‘Monsieur Leblanc’s on his usual bench,’ the young men said, and Marius found it convenient to do the same.
For the purpose of our story we shall, for the present, follow their example.
Thus for the first year Marius saw them almost daily in the same place at the same time. He liked the look of the man but took no interest in the girl.
II
And there was light
But it happened in the second year, at precisely the point which our story has now reached, that Marius changed his itinerary, for no particular reason, and for some six months did not set foot in that alleyway. Then one day he went back there. It was a perfect summer morning, and he was as uplifted as we all are on a fine day, feeling his spirit respond to the song of birds around him and the brightness of the blue sky shining through the leaves.
He strolled along the alleyway, and there was the same couple, seated on the same bench. But as he drew near them he was struck by a change. The man was the same, but the girl was not. What he now saw was a tall and beautiful creature, endowed with all the charms and graces of womanhood at the precise moment when these are still mingled with the innocence of childhood, a moment of fragile purity only to be conveyed by the words, ‘fifteen years old’. Soft chestnut hair flecked with gold, a forehead of marble, cheeks like rose-petals, a pale, sensitive skin, an exquisite mouth, its smiles like sunshine, like music, a head that Raphael might have used for the Virgin set on a neck that Jean Goujon might have bestowed on Venus. And finally, that nothing might be lacking in that ravishing countenance, a nose that was not beautiful but pretty, not straight or curved, Italian or Greek – a Parisian nose, which means one that is lively and sensitive, irregular and as nature made it, the despair of painters and the delight of poets.
Marius could not see her eyes, which were modestly veiled by her long, chestnut lashes; but this did not prevent her from smiling as she listened to what the white-haired man was saying, and nothing could have been more alluring than that smile from beneath lowered lids.
At the first glance Marius thought that it must be another girl altogether, perhaps the elder sister of the one he had previously seen. But when, following his former habit, he walked back along the alley and studied her more closely, he saw that it was the same. In six months the child had grown into a woman, that was all. It is the most commonplace of happenings. There comes a moment when the bud bursts overnight into flower and yesterday’s little girl becomes a woman to entrap our hearts. This one had not merely grown but was transformed. Just as three April days may suffice for some trees to cover themselves with blossom, so six months had sufficed to clothe her with beauty. Her April had come.
Moreover, she was no longer a schoolgirl in a plush hat and woollen dress, with reddened hands and schoolgirl shoes. She had acquired taste as well as beauty and was now dressed with simple, unpretentious elegance. She was wearing a black silk dress, a cape of the same material, and a hat of white crepe. Her glove enhanced the slenderness of the hand that was playing with an ivory-handled parasol, and her silken slippers disclosed the smallness of her feet. Passing near her one was conscious of the pervasive, youthful fragrance that her whole being exhaled.
The man, however, was unchanged.
She looked up when Marius passed for the second time. Her eyes were a deep, azure blue, but their candid gaze was still that of a child. She glanced as casually at Marius as she might have done at an infant toddling under the trees or the urn on the stone balustrade behind her; and Marius walked on, his thoughts absorbed with other matters. He passed their bench several times without looking at her.
During the days that followed he resumed his customary walks in the Luxembourg, and, as usual, found the ‘father and daughter’ on their usual bench, but he paid them no attention. He thought no more about the girl now that she was beautiful than he had done when she was plain. He went that way simply from force of habit.
III
The workings of spring
It was a warm day, and the Luxembourg was bathed in sunshine and shadow. The sky was clear as though the angels had scrubbed it that morning, sparrows twittered in the chestnut trees and Marius, living and breathing but thinking of nothing in particular, wholly absorbed in being alive, went by their bench. The girl looked up at him and their eyes met.
What message was to be read in her eyes? Marius could not have said. Nothing and yet everything. A spark had passed between them.
She looked down and he continued on his way. What he h
ad encountered was not the frank innocent gaze of a child. It was as though a door had suddenly opened and then had been as swiftly closed. There comes a day when every girl has this look in her eyes, and woe to him who encounters it!
That first gaze of a spirit that does not yet know itself is like the first glow of sunrise, the awakening of something radiant but still veiled. Nothing can convey the perilous charm of that unexpected gleam, shedding a sudden, hesitant light on present innocence and future passion. It is a kind of unresolved tenderness, chance-disclosed and expectant, a snare laid unwittingly by innocence, which captures a heart without intending or knowing what it does, a maid with the sudden gaze of a woman.
Rarely does it happen that a gaze such as this does not profoundly affect its victim. All purity and ardour is concentrated in that magical but fateful gleam which, more than the most calculated oglings of a coquette, has the power to implant in another heart the ominous flower, so loaded with fragrance and with poison, that is called love.
Returning to his garret that evening Marius considered the clothes he was wearing, and for the first time was conscious of the fact that he had the slovenliness, the bad taste and oafish stupidity to walk in the Luxembourg in his everyday clothes – a hat with a crumpled brim, clumsy working-man’s boots, black trousers turning grey at the knees and a black jacket threadbare at the elbows.
IV
Beginning of a grave malady
The next day, attired in his new suit – new trousers, hat and boots, and even, prodigious luxury, a pair of gloves! – Marius set out at his accustomed hour for the Luxembourg. He met Courfeyrac on the way and pretended not to see him. Courfeyrac said later to his friends: ‘I’ve just seen Marius’s new hat and suit with Marius inside them. I suppose he was going to sit for an examination. He looked thoroughly silly.’
Arrived at the Luxembourg, Marius strolled round the pond and stared at the swans, then stood for a long time contemplating a statue with a hand blackened by mould and one hip missing. A plump middle-aged gentleman passed, holding a five-year-old boy by the hand. ‘Avoid extremes, my son,’ he was saying. ‘Steer equally clear of despotism and anarchy.’ Marius made a second tour of the pond, and then drifted in the direction of the alley, slowly and as it were reluctantly, as though he were at once impelled and inhibited from going there. But he was not conscious of this and supposed himself to be doing simply what he did every day.
Monsieur Leblanc and the girl were seated on their usual bench at the far end. Marius buttoned his jacket, pulled it down to make sure that it fitted snugly, glanced with some complacency at the sheen of his trousers and walked towards the bench with a slight swagger in which there was a hint of challenge and certainly a lurking thought of conquest. It may be said that he advanced upon it like Hannibal advancing upon Rome.
Except for this he was behaving quite in his customary manner, and his mind was still absorbed with his daily preoccupations. He was thinking about a text-book issued for the benefit of university students entitled Manuel du Baccalauréat, reflecting upon the ineptitude and lack of judgement shown by its compilers, who examined three of Racine’s tragedies in their survey of literary masterpieces but only one of Molière’s comedies. There was a slight singing in his ears. As he drew near the bench he again straightened his jacket, and he kept his eyes fixed on the girl, who seemed to fill all that end of the alleyway with a kind of blue haze.
But gradually his pace slowed, and when he was a short distance from the bench, but still by no means at the end of the alley, he came to a stop, turned and retraced his steps without having intended to do so or being consciously aware that he had not reached the end. The girl could scarcely have noticed him at that distance, or seen how handsome he looked in his best clothes. Nevertheless he held himself very straight in case anyone should be observing him from behind.
He walked to the far end of the alley and again turned back, this time coming nearer to the bench. In fact he got to within three trees of it but then found it almost impossible to go further, and for a moment he paused. It had seemed to him that the girl’s face was turned towards him. With an extreme effort he overcame his hesitation and strode on, holding himself erect and looking neither to left nor right, his face flushed and a hand thrust into the opening of his jacket, like that of an elder statesman. His heart was pounding as he passed the bench. She was wearing the same silk dress she had worn the day before, and the same white hat. He heard the sound of an enchanting voice which could only be hers. She was talking quietly. She was exquisitely pretty. He felt this, although he made no attempt to look directly at her … ‘She would certainly have some esteem for me,’ he reflected, ‘if she knew that I was the real author of the note on Marcos Obregon de la Ronda which Monsieur François de Neufchâteau included in the Introduction to his edition of Gil Bias, passing it off as his own work!’
He passed the bench, turned at the end of the alley and walked back again. This time he was very pale and his feeling was one of great perturbation. He went past the bench and the girl, and the notion that she might be watching him from behind made him tremble.
He did not go near them again but, further along the alleyway, he did something he had never done before. He sat down on a bench a short distance off and stayed there for some time, casting sidelong glances and reflecting in some recess of his mind that the person whose dress and hat he so greatly admired could scarcely fail to be impressed by the elegance of his own attire. Presently he rose and made as if to walk back again towards the bench, which was now enveloped in a sort of halo. But then he stood motionless.
For the first time, after fifteen months, it occurred to him that the gentleman accompanying the girl must surely have noticed him and must be finding his conduct somewhat odd. Also for the first time, it struck him that to have christened the gentleman ‘Monsieur Leblanc’, even in a private joke, showed a certain lack of respect.
He stood for some moments with his head bowed in thought, tracing a pattern in the dust with the stick he carried, then turned abruptly away from the bench and its occupants and went home.
He forgot to dine that evening, and only became aware of the fact when it was too late to go to the restaurant in the Rue Saint-Jacques. ‘Ah well,’ he thought, and chewed a crust of bread.
Before going to bed he brushed his jacket and folded his trousers with great care.
V
Shocks for Ma’am Bougon
On the following day Ma’am Bougon (this, which may be rendered as ‘Ma Grumpy’ was the name bestowed by Courfeyrac on the elderly door-keeper, ‘chief lodger’ and maid-of-all-work of the Gorbeau tenement; her real name was Madame Burgon, but, as we know, Courfeyrac was an iconoclast who respected nothing) noted to her intense astonishment that Monsieur Marius had again gone out in his best clothes.
He went to the Luxembourg but this time did not go further along the alley than the bench where he had sat the day before, whence he had a distinct but clear view of the white hat and black dress and, in particular, of the haze surrounding them. He remained there and did not go home until the garden was closed for the night. He had not noticed Monsieur Leblanc and his daughter leave, and presumed that they had done so by way of the gate on the Rue de l’Ouest. Thinking it over some weeks after the event, he could not remember where he had dined that night.
And the next day Ma’am Bougon was startled to see Marius again in his best suit.
‘Three days running!’ she exclaimed.
She tried to follow him, but he walked so fast, with such long strides, that it was a hopeless chase, a hippopotamus waddling after a chamois. She lost him in two minutes and returned home breathless and indignant, half suffocated by her asthma. ‘Where’s the sense in it?’ she grumbled. ‘Wearing his best every day and running people off their feet!’
Marius had gone to the Luxembourg. The girl and Monsieur Leblanc were there. He passed as close to them as he dared, while pretending to be deep in a book; but he still did not go very near,
and presently he sat down on his own bench and for several hours contemplated the sparrows hopping in the alley, who seemed to be laughing at him.
Thus a fortnight passed. Marius no longer went to the Luxembourg to stroll but to seat himself always in the same place without ever asking the question, ‘Why?’ And every day he wore his best clothes.
Certainly she was wonderfully beautiful. All that could be said of her that was in any sense critical was that there seemed to be a contradiction between the look in her eyes, which tended to melancholy, and the brightness of her smile. This had a somewhat disconcerting effect, so that at moments her charming face was puzzling without ceasing to be delightful.
VI
Made captive
Towards the end of the second week, while Marius was seated in his usual place with an open book on his knee of which he had not read a page, he looked and suddenly quivered. Something had happened at the end of the alleyway. Monsieur Leblanc and his daughter had risen from their bench and were walking slowly in his direction. Marius shut his book, opened it again and made an effort to read it. He was still trembling while, as the halo drew nearer, he asked himself what attitude he should adopt. In a minute she would be within a few feet of him, treading the very dust that he so often trod, but the seconds dragged by like hours. He wanted to look impressive. It seemed to him that the gentleman was glancing his way in a somewhat irritated fashion. Was he going to address him? Marius lowered his head and did not look up again until they had drawn level with him. And as she passed the girl looked his way. She looked steadily at him with a soft pensive glance that caused him to tremble from head to foot. She seemed to be reproaching him for not having approached her in all this time, and to be saying, ‘So now I’ve come to you.’ He was dumbfounded by the play of light and shadow in her eyes.
Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774) Page 72
