He handed her the wrapping containing the four letters. She clapped her hands and cried:
‘We looked for that everywhere!’
Seizing it eagerly, she began to unfold it, talking as she did so:
‘Heavens, if you knew how we’d searched, my sister and me! And so you’re the one who found it. On the boulevard, wasn’t it? It must have been. We were running, and my sister went and dropped it, the silly kid, and when we got home we found it was gone. So because we didn’t want to be beaten, because where’s the sense in it, what earthly good does it do, it’s simply stupid, we said we’d delivered the letters to the people they were written to and they hadn’t coughed up anything. And here they are, the wretched letters. How did you know they were mine? Oh, of course, the handwriting. So you’re the person we bumped into yesterday evening? It was too dark to see. I said to my sister, “Was it a gentleman?” and she said, “I think it was.”’
By now she had fished out the letter addressed to ‘The Benevolent Gentleman outside the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas’.
‘Ah, this is for the old boy who goes to Mass. Well, it’s nearly time so I’d better run along and catch him. Perhaps he’ll give me enough for our dinner.’ She burst out laughing again. ‘And do you know what that will mean? It will be breakfast and dinner for yesterday and the day before – the first meal for three days. Well, who cares? If you don’t like it you’ve got to lump it.’
This reminded Marius of why she had called upon him. He felt in his waistcoat pockets, while she went on talking as though she had forgotten his existence.
‘Sometimes I go out at night and don’t come home. Last winter, before coming here, we lived under the bridges. You had to huddle together not to freeze and it made my little sister cry. Water’s dreadful, isn’t it? Sometimes I wanted to drown myself, but then I thought, No, it’s too cold. I go off on my own when I feel like it and sleep in a ditch, likely as not. You know, at night when I’m walking along the boulevards the trees look to me like pitchforks, and the houses, they’re so tall and black, like the towers of Notre-Dame, and when you come to a strip of white wall it’s like a patch of water. And the stars are like street lamps and you’d think they were smoking, and sometimes the wind blows them out and I’m always surprised, as though a horse had come and snorted in my ear; and although it’s night-time I think I can hear street-organs and the rattle of looms, all kinds of things. And sometimes I think people are throwing stones at me and I run away and everything goes spinning round me. When you’ve had nothing to eat it’s very queer.’
She was gazing absently at him. Marius, exploring his pockets, had now succeeded in retrieving a five-franc piece and sixteen sous, all the money he possessed at that moment. Enough for today’s dinner, he reflected, and as for tomorrow, we’ll hope for the best. So he kept the sixteen sous and offered her the five francs.
‘The sun’s come out at last!’ she cried, eagerly accepting the coin; and as though the sun had power to release a torrent of the popular jargon that was her every day speech she declaimed:
‘Well, if that isn’t prime! Five jimmy-o’-goblins! Enough to stuff us for two days. You’re a true nobleman, mister, and I tips my lid to you. Tripe and sausage and the tipple to wash it down for two whole blooming days.’ Hitching up her chemise and making Marius a profound curtsey, she turned with a wave of her hand towards the door. ‘Well, good day to you, mister, and your humble servant. I’ll be getting back to the gaffer.’
On her way to the door she noticed a crust of stale bread gathering dust on the chest of drawers. She snatched it up and started to devour it.
‘It’s good, it’s tough – something to get your teeth into!’
And she departed.
V
The peep-hole
Marius had lived through five years of penury and deprivation, sometimes of great hardship; but, as he perceived, he had never known the real meaning of poverty, utter destitution, until he encountered it in the person of that girl. To witness the abjection of men is not enough: one must also witness the abjection of women: and even this pales before the abjection of a child.
People reduced to the last extremity of need are also driven to the utmost limit of their resources, and woe to any defenceless person who comes their way. Work and wages, food and warmth, courage and goodwill – all this is lost to them. The daylight dwindles into shadow and darkness enters their hearts; and within this darkness man seizes upon the weakness of woman and child and forces them into ignominy. No horror is then excluded. Desperation is bounded only by the flimsiest of walls, all giving access to vice and crime.
Health and youth, honour and the sacred, savage delicacy of still-young flesh, truth of heart, virginity, modesty, those protective garments of the soul, all are put to the vilest of uses in the blind struggle for survival that must encounter, and submit to, every outrage. Fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, men and women alike merge into a composite, like a mineral alloy, in the murky promiscuity of sexes, relationships, ages, infamy and innocence. They huddle together, back to back, in a kind of spiritual hovel, exchanging glances of lamentable complicity. How pale they are, those unfortunates, how cold they are! They might be the inhabitants of a planet far more distant from the sun than our own.
To Marius the girl was in some sort an emissary of that underworld, disclosing a hideous aspect of its darkness. He was near to reproaching himself for his habit of abstraction and for the love-affair which until then had prevented him from giving a thought to his neighbours. The payment of their rent had been an automatic response, an impulse that might have occurred to anyone; he, Marius, should have done better. Only a thin partition separated him from that small cluster of lost souls groping in darkness and sundered from the living world; he had heard them living, or rather suffering, within a few yards of him – and he had paid no attention. All day and every day he had been conscious of their movements through the wall as they came and went and talked together, and he had not listened. Groans had been mingled with the words they spoke, but he had not heeded them. His thoughts had been elsewhere, squandered in dreams, infatuation, while these, his fellow-creatures and brothers in Christ, were slowly rotting beside him, abandoned to their agony. Indeed, it seemed to him that he was a part of their misfortune and had aggravated it. If they had had a different neighbour, one less self-absorbed and more concerned for others, a man of normal, charitable instincts, their desperate state would not have gone unnoticed, their distress-signals would have been heard, and perhaps they would have been rescued by now. Certainly they appeared utterly depraved, corrupt, vile and odious; but it is rare for those who have sunk so low not to be degraded in the process, and there comes a point, moreover, where the unfortunate and the infamous are grouped together, merged in a single, fateful word. They are les misérables– the outcasts, the underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most need of charity?
While he thus lectured himself – for there were times when, like all truly honest persons, he was his own schoolmaster and took himself to task more sternly than he deserved – Marius was staring at the wall which separated him from the Jondrettes, as though by the act of doing so the warmth of his pitying gaze might be made to pass through it and comfort their distress. The wall was in fact no more than a lath-and-plaster partition with a few upright posts, through which, as we have said, every movement and sound of voices could be distinctly heard. Only a dreamer like Marius could have been unconscious of the fact. It was not papered on either side, so that its crude nakedness was apparent. Half-unconsciously Marius examined it while still pursuing his train of thought. Suddenly he stood up. In the upper part of the wall, near the ceiling, there was a triangular hole between three laths where the plaster had crumbled away. By standing on the chest of drawers one could see through it into the Jondrette’s garret. Curiosity is, and must be, a part of compassion. The hole was like a Judas-window. It is lawful to take surreptitious note of misfor
tune for the purpose of relieving it. ‘Let us see what these people are like,’ said Marius, ‘and how bad things really are.’
He got up on the chest of drawers, put his eye to the aperture and looked through.
VI
The beast in his lair
Cities, like forests, have their retreats in which the most evil and fearful of their denizens lurk in hiding. But whereas the dwellers in city dens are ferocious, malignant, and small – in a word, ugly – those in the forest lairs are fierce, wild, and generally large – that is to say, beautiful. All things considered, the animal den is preferable to the human den. A cave is better than a city slum.
What Marius was peering into was the latter.
Marius was poor and his own room was a barren place, but, as his poverty was high-minded so was his garret clean. The dwelling into which he looked was filthy, squalid, evil-smelling, and altogether noisome. Its only furnishings were a wicker chair, a rickety table, a few cracked dishes and, in opposite corners, two frowzy trucklebeds; its only lighting came through the grimy, cobwebbed panes of a small dormer-window which admitted just sufficient light to make the face of a man look like that of a ghost. The walls had a leprous appearance, being covered with cracks and scars like a human face disfigured by some repellent disease, oozing with damp, and inscribed here and there with crudely obscene drawings in charcoal.
Marius’s room had a flooring of worn tiles; this place had no flooring other than the original rough-cast of the building, now blackened by the tread of feet; dust was, so to speak, incrusted in the rough surface, which was virgin soil only in the sense that it had never been touched by a broom, and it was littered with squalid garments and old worn footgear. For the rest, the room had a fireplace, on account of which it was rented for forty francs a year, and this open hearth housed a great variety of objects – a cooking-stove, a stew-pan, some sticks of firewood, rags hanging on nails, a birdcage, ashes and even a small fire, of which the embers were sullenly smoking.
The generally repellent appearance of the garret was enhanced by the fact that it was large, a big, irregularly-shaped place of projections and recesses, nooks and crannies, the ups and downs of its attic roof, dark corners which looked as though they must harbour spiders big as a man’s fist, cockroaches long as his foot, perhaps even human monstrosities.
The two beds were on either side of the fireplace, one by the door and the other by the window, both facing Marius. From his point of observation he could see, hanging on the wall in a black wooden frame, a coloured engraving at the foot of which, in large letters, were the words, THE DREAM. It depicted a sleeping woman with a sleeping child on her lap. Above them hovered an eagle in a cloud carrying a crown in its beak, and the woman was thrusting the crown away from the child’s head, without, however, awakening. In the background was the figure of Napoleon enveloped in radiance and leaning against a pillar inscribed as follows:
MARINGO
AUSTERLITS
IENA
WAGRAMME
ELOT
Below this picture something that looked like a wooden panel, taller than it was broad, and which appeared to have been wrenched off some building, stood leaning against the wall, presenting its rough, reverse side to the beholder, as though it, too, had some kind of daub painted on its other side and was waiting to be hung.
Seated at the table, on which Marius could see a pen, paper, and ink, was a man of about sixty, small, lean, sallow-faced, and haggard, with an expression of restless, venomous and wary cunning. A most unpleasant rogue. Lavater, the physiognomist, would have seen in him a combination of vulture and prosecuting attorney, one complementing the other, the man of legal trickery making the bird of prey ignoble, and the bird making the trickster repellent. He had a long, grey beard. He was clad above the waist in a woman’s chemise, exposing a shaggy chest and arms covered with grey hair, and below the waist in muddied trousers and a pair of top-boots from which his toes protruded.
He was smoking a pipe (there might be no food in the place, but there was still tobacco!) and busily writing – doubtless a letter similar to those Marius had already seen. A battered volume lying on the table proclaimed by its russet binding that it was one of a standard edition of popular fiction issued for the use of public libraries. The title, printed in large capital letters, was: God, the King, Honour and the Ladies by Ducray-Dumeuil, 1814.
The man was talking while he wrote.
‘Equalityl There’s no such blooming thing even when you’re dead. You’ve only got to go to Père-Lachaise. The fine folk, anyone who can pay, they’re up at the top, round the acacia alley, where it is paved. They can be driven there in hearses. But the small fry, the paupers, they’re down at the bottom where there’s no paving, no drams, nothing but mud. They stick ’em in there so they’ll rot the quicker. If you want to visit their graves you walk in mud up to the knees.’ He broke off to pound with his fist on the table, and said savagely: ‘I’d like to eat the whole bloody lot!’
A burly woman who might have been aged forty or a hundred was squatting on bare heels by the fireplace. She, too, was clad only in chemise and a tattered skirt, patched with odd fragments of material and half-hidden beneath a coarse apron. Although she was in a crouching position she was evidently a very tall woman, a giantess by comparison with her husband. She had dingy russet hair, turning grey, which she constantly pushed back with a large, greasy stubby-fingered hand. A book lay open on the floor beside her, similar in format to the one on the table and probably another volume of the same romance.
On one of the truckle-beds a skinny, pale-faced child, almost naked, was seated with her legs dangling, seeming not to see or hear anything, or even to be alive. This was presumably the younger sister of the one who had called on Marius. At first sight she appeared to be no more than eleven or twelve, but a second glance showed that she was at least fifteen. It must be she who had said, ‘I didn’t half run for it!’
She was one of those children who, being at first retarded, suddenly and rapidly mature, sickly human plants nurtured in poverty who have known neither childhood nor adolescence. At fifteen they look twelve years old, and at sixteen they look twenty, little girls one day and women the next, as though they were racing through life to be done with it the sooner. For the present, she still looked like a child.
There was nothing in the room to indicate that any work was ever done there, no tool or implement of any trade except a few dubious-looking metal objects lying in one corner. It was pervaded with the apathy that succeeds despair and precedes the death-agony, and Marius, looking down into it, found it more dreadful to contemplate than the grave itself, for it still harboured life and the living spirit. The garret and the cellar, those ditches sheltering the poorest dregs of humanity, are not the tomb but its antechamber; they are a vestibule where Death, closing in upon them, seems to parade his choicest terrors, as the rich display their greatest splendours at the entrance to their palaces.
The man had fallen silent, the woman had not spoken and the girl seemed not to be breathing. There was silence, broken only by the scratching of the pen, until the man exclaimed, without ceasing to write:
‘Filth, filth, all is filth!’
This variation of the ‘All is vanity’ of the preacher drew a sigh from the woman.
‘There, there, my dear, you mustn’t get upset. It’s beneath you to be writing to all these people.’
Bodies huddle close together in poverty as they do in cold, but hearts grow distant. To all appearances this woman must once have bestowed on the man all the love of which she was capable; but it was probable that the bickerings of daily life in the loathsome circumstances to which they were reduced had extinguished her love, leaving only its ashes. Nevertheless, as often happens, the forms of affection remained. She still addressed him as ‘dear’ and ‘love’, but they were words spoken with the lips, not from the heart.
He went on with his writing.
VII
Strategy
and tactics
Marius, with a heavy heart, was about to get down from his post of observation when a sound caused him to stay where he was. The door opened abruptly and the elder girl came in.
She was wearing a pair of large men’s shoes encrusted with the mud that had splashed over her ankles, and a tattered cloak which she had not worn when she visited Marius but had perhaps deliberately discarded, the better to win his compassion. Slamming the door behind her she paused to get her breath, for she had evidently been running, and then cried in triumph:
‘He’s coming!’
Her father and mother looked up at her, but the younger girl did not move.
‘Who’s coming?’ the father asked.
‘The old gent, the philanthropist from the Église Saint-Jacques.’
‘He’s really coming?’
‘He’s following me.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure. He’s coming in a fiacre.’
‘A fiacre! Good God, he must be a Rothschild!’
The man had risen to his feet.
‘But how can you be sure? If he’s coming in a fiacre, how did you manage to get here ahead of him? Did he get the address right? Did you tell him it’s the last door on the right at the end of the corridor? Let’s hope he doesn’t make any mistake. You found him in the church, did you? Did he read my letter? What did he say?’
‘The way you go on!’ said the girl. ‘Well, look. I found him in his usual place in the church, and I made him a bob and gave him your letter, and he read it and said, “Where do you live, child?” So I said, “I’ll take you there, Monsieur,” but he said no, his daughter had some shopping to do, if I’d give him the address he’d hire a cab and be here the same time as me. So I told him the address and he looked surprised. He sort of hesitated, but then he said, “Well, I’ll come anyway. “I saw him and his daughter leave the church and get into a fiacre, and I did tell him about it being the door at the end of the corridor.’
Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774) Page 76
