Qu’il luise ou qu’il luiserne
L’ours rentre en sa caverne.
Which may be rendered:
Whether it shines or pretends to shine,
The bear retreats to his den.
Marius emerged from his own den as darkness was falling. It was time for dinner, and – such alas is the weakness of romantic passion–he had been forced to revert to the habit of dining. He left the house in time to hear Ma’am Bougon, who was sweeping the doorstep, deliver herself of the following memorable observation:
‘So what’s cheap in these days? Everything costs more. Nothing’s cheap except toil and trouble, and you get those free of charge.’
Making for the Rue Saint-Jacques, Marius went slowly along the boulevard in the direction of the barrière, walking with his head bowed in thought. Suddenly he was jostled in the mist by two shabbily-dressed girls, breathlessly dashing in his direction as though they were running away from something, who bumped into him without seeing him. One was tall and thin, the other rather smaller. He had a glimpse of pale faces, dishevelled hair, tawdry bonnets, ragged skirts, and bare feet, and he caught a fragment of conversation as they passed.
The tall one was saying:
‘The cops came along. They near as anything got me.’
The other said:
‘I saw. I didn’t half run for it.’
From which Marius gathered that, young as they were, they had had a brush with the gendarmes or the city police but had managed to escape.
He stood for a moment staring after them as they disappeared under the trees of the boulevard. Then, as he was about to continue on his way, he noticed a small, greyish object lying on the ground near him. He picked it up. It was a wrapping of sorts, evidently containing papers.
One of the girls must have dropped it as they passed. He turned and called after them but failed to make them hear, and so eventually, putting the package in his pocket, he went on to dinner. In a narrow street leading into the Rue Mouffetard he saw a child’s coffin lying on three chairs, draped in black and lighted by a candle. The sight put him in mind of the two girls.
‘Unhappy mothers!’ he thought. ‘If there is anything worse than to see one’s children die it is to see them leading evil lives.’
Then dismissing these distracting shadows, and reverting to his own familiar griefs he fell to brooding again on his six months of love and happiness in the sunshine beneath the trees of the Luxembourg.
‘How sad my life has become,’ he reflected. ‘I’m always running into young girls. Once they seemed angelic; now they are creatures of darkness.’
III
Letters
When he undressed that night he found the package in his pocket, having forgotten about it, and it occurred to him that it might contain the girls’ address, or that of the owner if it was not they who had dropped it.
He undid the wrapping, which was not sealed, and found that it contained four letters, all addressed but also unsealed, and all smelling strongly of-cheap tobacco.
The first was addressed to Madame la Marquise de Grucheray, No. —, the Square behind the Chambre des Députés. Since it might contain the clue he was looking for, Marius felt justified in reading it. It ran as follows:
Madame la Marquise,
The virtues of compasion and piety are the bonds that most closely bind sosiety. I beg you to turn your Christian eyes upon an unfortunate Spaniard, the victim of his loyalty and devotion to the sacred cause of legitimacy, for which cause he has shed his blood and devoted his whole fortune and is now in desperate need. He does not doubt that your noble self will come to his aid to preserve the unhappy life of a soldier of education and honour and many wounds, counting upon your humanity and the sympathy which Madame la Marquise is known to feel for his suffering countrymen. Their prayer will not go unheard and their gratitude will cherish her memory.
I have the honour to sign myself, Madame, with expresions of the deepest respect,
Don Alvarez,
Captain in the Spanish cavalry, royalist refugee in France, travelling for his country’s sake but unable to get further through lack of funds.
No address followed the signature. Marius turned to the second letter, which was addressed to Madame la Contesse de Montvernet, 9, Rue Cassette.
Madame la Contesse,
I am the mother of six children, the last only eight months old, sick since my lying-in, diserted by my husband five months ago, in dredful poverty, not a penny in the world. I apeal to the charity of Madame la Contesse.
Yours obediantly,
Eve Balizard (wife and mother).
The third, like the others, was a begging-letter.
To Monsieur Pabourgeot, elector and wholesale milliner, Rue Saint-Denis, corner of the Rue aux Fers.
I venture to adress this letter to you to apeal for your favor and interest on behalf of a man of letters who has resently submited a play to the Théâtre-Français. The play is historical and takes place in Auvergne under the Empire. The style, I think, is natural and trenshant and, I believe, has some merit. There are verses for singing in four places. Comedy, drama and surprise are mingled with a variety of characters, with a flavor of romanticism throughout the plot which developes mysteriously with striking suprises in many brilliant scenes.
My principle aim is to satisfy the desire that progresively inspires the men of our century, namely, THE FASHION, that caprisious weathercock which changes with every change in the wind. But in spite of the merits of my play I fear that jealousy and the greed of established authors may cause it to be rejected, for I am well aware of the way they treat newcomers.
Knowing your reputation, dear Sir, as an enlightened defender of the Arts I make bold to send my daughter to call on you. She will depict for you our parlous situation, lacking food and warmth in this winter season. When I say that I beg you will allow me to dedicate this play and all the other plays I hope to write to your esteemed self, this will prove how ernestly I desire to put myself under your protection and embelish my writings with your name. If you will condesend to honor me with even the smallest gift I will at once compose a poem in token of my gratitude. This poem, which I will endeavour to make as perfect as possible, will be submited to you before being inserted at the beginning of the play and spoken on the stage.
With my most respectful regards,
Genflot, man of letters.
P.S. Even as little as forty sous.
Excuse me sending my daughter and not coming myself. Alas, the insufficiency of my wardrobe prevents me going out.
The fourth letter was addressed to ‘The Benevolent Gentleman outside the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas’.
Benevolent Sir,
If you will be so good as to acompany my daughter you will be the witnes of a shattered life and I will show you my certificates. This letter in itself will, I know, cause your generous spirit to be inspired with a sense of lively benevolense, for the truly philosophical are always a pray to strong emotions.
And you will agree, compasionate Sir, that only in the most cruel necesity will anyone take the painfull step of registering with the authorities, as though we were not free to suffer and die of starvation by ourselves while waiting for help in our distress. Fate is too cruel to some and too indulgent to others.
I await your visit or your gift, if you are so kind as to make me one, and beg you to acept the sentiments of profound respect with which I subscribe myself,
truly magnanimous Sir,
your most humble and obedient servant,
P. Fabantou, artist of the drama.
Having read the four letters, Marius found that he had not discovered what he wanted to know, since none bore the address of the writer. However, they were interesting in other respects. Although they purported to come from four different people, all were in the same handwriting, written on the same coarse, yellowed paper and impregnated with the same smell of tobacco. Moreover, although an attempt had clearly been made to vary
the style, all contained similar spelling mistakes, the ‘man of letters’, Genflot, being no more exempt from these than the Spanish captain. It was impossible not to suppose that they were written by the same person.
But to attempt to solve this trifling mystery, which might have had the appearance of a practical joke if he had not come upon the package by accident, would be a waste of time. Marius was in too dejected a state to enter into the spirit of this diversion proposed to him by the streets of Paris, as though he were the blind man in a game of‘ blind man’s buff’ with the four letters. There was nothing to indicate that they were the property of the two girls who had jostled him on the boulevard, and they were, in any event, evidently documents of no value. He wrapped them up again, tossed them into a corner and went to bed.
At about seven the next morning, by which time he had dressed and breakfasted and was trying to settle down to work, there was a tap on his door.
Since he had almost no possessions Marius was in the habit of leaving his door unlocked, except, as happened very occasionally, when he had urgent work to do. He left the key in the lock even when he went out. ‘You’ll be robbed,’ Ma’am Bougon said. ‘What of?’ said Marius. But the fact remained that he had once been robbed of an old pair of boots, much to her satisfaction.
There was a second knock, as tentative as the first.
‘Come in,’ said Marius without looking up from the papers on his writing-table. ‘What is it, Ma’am Bougon?’
But the voice that answered, saying, ‘I beg your pardon, Monsieur,’ was not that of Ma’am Bougon. It was more like the voice of a bronchitic old man, half-stifled, rendered husky as though by the drinking of spirits.
Marius looked up sharply and saw that his visitor was a girl.
IV
Rose of the underworld
A quite young girl was standing in the open doorway, facing the pallid light of the one small window in Marius’s garret, which was opposite the door. She was a lean and delicate-looking creature, her shivering nakedness clad in nothing but a chemise and skirt. Her waistband was a piece of string, and another piece tied back her hair. Bony shoulders emerged from the chemise, and the face above them was sallow and flabby. The light fell upon reddened hands, a stringy neck, a loose, depraved mouth lacking several teeth, bleared eyes both bold and wary: in short, an ill-treated girl with the eyes of a grown woman; a blend of fifty and fifteen; one of those creatures, at once weak and repellent, who cause those who set eyes on them to shudder when they do not weep.
Marius had risen to his feet and was gazing in a sort of stupefaction at what might have been one of those figures of darkness that haunt our dreams. But what was tragic about the girl was that she had not been born ugly. She might even have been pretty as a child, and the grace proper to her age was still at odds with the repulsive premature ageing induced by loose living and poverty. A trace of beauty still lingered in the sixteen-year-old face, like pale sunlight fading beneath the massed clouds of a winter’s dawn.
The face was not quite unfamiliar to Marius. He had a notion that he had seen her before.
‘What can I do for you, Mademoiselle?’
She answered in her raucous voice:
‘I’ve got a letter for you, Monsieur Marius.’
So she knew his name. But how did she come to know it?
Without awaiting any further invitation she walked in, looking about her with a pathetic boldness at the untidy room with its unmade bed. Long bare legs and bony knees were visible through the vents in her skirt, and she was shivering.
As he took the letter Marius noted that the large wafer sealing it was still damp. It could not have come very far. He read:
My warm-hearted neighbour, most estimable young man!
I have heard of the kindness you did me in paying my rent six months ago. I bless you for it. My elder daughter will tell you that for two days we have been without food, four of us, including my sick wife. If I am not deceived in my trust in humanity I venture to hope that your generous heart will be moved by our afliction and that you will relieve your feelings by again coming to my aid.
I am, with the expression of the high esteem we all owe to a benefactor of humanity,
Yours truly,
Jondrette.
P.S. My daughter is at your service, dear Monsieur Marius.
This missive threw an immediate light on the problem that had been perplexing Marius. All was now clear. It came from the same source as the other letters – the same handwriting, the same spelling, the same paper, even the same smell of rank tobacco. He now had five letters, all the work of one author. The Spanish Captain, the unhappy Mère Balizard, the dramatist Genflot, and the aged actor, Fabantou, all were Jondrette – if, indeed, that was his real name.
As we have said, during the time Marius had been living in the tenement he had paid little or no attention even to his nearest neighbours, his thoughts being elsewhere. Although he had more than once encountered members of the Jondrette family in the corridor or on the stairs, they had been to him no more than shadows of whom he had taken so little notice that he had failed to recognize the two daughters when they bumped into him on the boulevard; even now, in the shock of his pity and repugnance, he had difficulty in realizing that this must be one of them.
But now he saw it all. He realized that the business of his neighbour, Jondrette, was the writing of fraudulent begging letters under a variety of names to persons of supposed wealth and benevolence whose addresses he had managed to secure, and that these letters were delivered, at their own peril, by his daughters: for he had sunk so low that he treated the two young girls as counters in his gamble with life. To judge by the episode of the previous evening, their breathless flight and the words he had overheard, the girls were engaged in other sordid pursuits. What it came to was that in the heart of our society, as at present constituted, two unhappy mortals, neither children nor grown women, had been turned by extreme poverty into monsters at once depraved and innocent, drab creatures without name or age or sex, no longer capable of good or evil, deprived of all freedom, virtue, and responsibility; souls born yesterday and shrivelled today like flowers dropped in the street which lie fading in the mud until a cartwheel comes to crush them.
Meanwhile, while Marius watched her in painful astonishment, the girl was exploring the room like an audacious ghost, untroubled by her state of near nakedness in the ragged chemise which at moments slipped down almost to her waist. She moved chairs, examined the toilet-articles on the chest of drawers, fingered Marius’s clothes and peered into corners.
‘Well, fancy! You’ve got a mirror,’ she said.
She was humming to herself as though she were alone, snatches of music-hall songs, cheerful ditties which her raucous, tuneless voice made dismal. But beneath this show of boldness there was a hint of unease and awkward constraint. Effrontery is an expression of shame. Nothing could have been more distressing than to see her fluttering about the room like a bird startled by the light or with a broken wing. It was plain that in other circumstances of background and education her natural, uninhibited gaiety might have made of her something sweet and charming. In the animal world no creature born to be a dove turns into a scavenger. This happens only among men.
Marius sat pondering while he watched her. She drew near to his writing-table.
‘Books!’ she said.
A light dawned in her clouded eyes. She announced, with the pride in attainment from which none of us is immune: ‘I know how to read.’
Picking up a book that lay open on the table she read, without much difficulty:
‘General Bauduin was ordered to seize and occupy, with the five battalions of his brigade, the Château de Hougomont, which is in the middle of the plain of Waterloo …’
She broke off and exclaimed:
‘Waterloo! I know about that. It’s an old battle. My father was there. My father was in the army. We’re all real Bonapartists in our family. Waterloo was against the English.’
She put the book down and took up a pen. ‘I can write, too.’ She dipped the pen in the ink and looked at Marius. ‘You want to see? I’ll write something to show you.’
Before he could say anything she had written on a blank sheet lying on the table: ‘Watch out, the bogies are around.’ She laid down the pen. ‘No spelling mistakes. You can see for yourself. We’ve had some schooling, my sister and me. We haven’t always been what we are now. We weren’t brought up to be –’
But here she stopped and gazing with her dulled eyes at Marius she burst out laughing. In a tone in which the extreme of anguish was buried beneath the extreme of cynicism, she exclaimed, ‘What the hell!’
She began to hum again and then said:
‘Do you ever go to the theatre, Monsieur Marius? I do. I’ve a young brother who knows one or two actors and he gives me tickets. I don’t like the gallery, the benches are uncomfortable and it’s too crowded and there are people who smell nasty.’
She fell to examining Marius and said with a coy look:
‘Do you know, Monsieur Marius, that you’re a very handsome boy?’
The words prompted the same thought in both their minds, causing her to smile and him to blush. Drawing nearer, she laid a hand on his shoulder.
‘You never notice me, Monsieur Marius, but I know you by sight. I see you on the stairs, and I’ve seen you visiting an old man called Père Mabeuf in the Austerlitz quarter when I’ve been that way. It suits you, you know, having your hair untidy.’
She was striving to make her voice soft but could only make it sound more guttural, and some of the words got lost in their passage from her throat to her lips, as on a piano with some of the notes missing. Marius drew gently away.
‘I think, Mademoiselle,’ he said with his accustomed cold gravity, ‘that I have something belonging to you. Allow me to return it.’
Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774) Page 75
