Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  ‘Now remember – one by the barrier and the other at the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier. Don’t take your eyes off the door of the house, and if you see anything, get back here at the double. You’ve got a key.’

  ‘A fine job!’ the older girl called back. ‘Keeping look-out barefoot in the snow.’

  ‘Tomorrow you shall have fur-lined boots,’ was the reply.

  They went on down the stairs, and the sound of the front door closing indicated that they had gone out.

  There was now no one left in the house except Marius and the Jondrette couple; and, presumably, the mysterious beings of whom he had caught a glimpse in the darkness of the unoccupied room.

  XVII

  Use made of Marius’s five francs

  Marius decided that it was time for him to return to his post of observation, and within an instant, moving with the suppleness of youth, he was back on the chest of drawers with his eye to the peep-hole.

  The aspect of the Jondrette dwelling was singularly changed. He could now account for the strange light he had seen. A candle was burning in a tarnished candlestick, but this was not its source; the garret was flooded with the glare of a fair-sized brazier standing in the hearth and filled with glowing charcoal. The brazier itself was red hot, and the blue name dancing on top of the charcoal helped him to discern the outline of the chisel bought by Jondrette in the Rue Pierre-Lombard, which had been thrust into it. In a corner by the door, as though put there for a specific purpose, were two piles of objects, one a heap of what looked like scrap-iron and the other a pile of rope. To an observer not knowing what was going on all this would have suggested two ideas, one very sinister and the other very simple. The den, thus illumined, looked more like a smithy than a gateway to the inferno; but Jondrette by the same light looked more like a demon than a blacksmith.

  The heat of the brazier was so great that the candle, which stood on the table, was melting on the side nearest it. An antiquated copper dark-lantern, worthy of a Diogenes turned housebreaker, stood on the mantelshelf. The brazier was standing amid the cooling ashes of the hearth so that its smoke went up the chimney and did not drift into the room. The moon shining through the four small panes of the window mingled its whiteness with the ruddy glow that filled the garret, and to the poetic fancy of Marius, a dreamer even in this moment of action, it was like a thought of Heaven mingling with the ugly fantasies of earth. A faint draught from the broken window helped to dispel the fumes of burning charcoal.

  The Jondrettes’ garret, as the reader may recall from what has been said about the Gorbeau tenement, was admirably suited to acts of darkness and violence, a perfect setting for crime. It was the end room of the most isolated house in the least frequented boulevard in Paris. If ambushes had never existed, it was here that they might have been invented. The whole depth of the house and a row of unoccupied rooms separated this one from the boulevard, and its only window looked on to a wide expanse of open country broken by walls and fences.

  Jondrette had lit his pipe and sat smoking on the seatless chair. His wife was talking to him in a low voice. If Marius had been Courfeyrac, that is to say, one of those young men who find humour in all things, the sight of her would have made him laugh. She was wearing a black hat with feathers not unlike those worn by the herald-at-arms at the coronation of Charles X, a vast tartan shawl, a woollen skirt and the men’s shoes which her daughter had so despised earlier in the day. This was the get-up that had won her husband’s approval, causing her to look ‘respectable’. He himself was still wearing the overcoat bestowed on him by Monsieur Leblanc, and the contrast between this and his cotton trousers still presented the incongruity which Courfeyrac held to be the hall-mark of a poet. Suddenly he raised his voice:

  ‘I’ve just thought of something. He’ll be bound to come in a fiacre in this weather. Light the lantern and go downstairs with it and wait at the front door. Open the door directly you hear the cab draw up. Light him up the stairs, then run down again, pay off the cab, and send it away.’

  ‘What about the money?’

  Jondrette felt in his pocket and handed her a five-franc piece.

  ‘Where does this come from?’ she exclaimed.

  ‘From him next door, this morning,’ said Jondrette with dignity. Another thought struck him. ‘You know something? We need two chairs.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To sit on.’

  A shiver ran down Marius’s spine as the woman said calmly:

  ‘I’ll get them from next door.’

  She rose at once and left the room.

  ‘Take the candle,’ shouted Jondrette.

  ‘It would only hamper me. I shall have two chairs to carry. There’s moonlight enough.’

  It was a physical impossibility for Marius to get down from the chest and under the bed in time. A hand groped heavily at his door, feeling for the handle, and then the door opened. Marius stayed where he was, rigid with dismay.

  The woman entered. The dormer window allowed a narrow spread of moonlight to enter the room, framed by two wider spheres of darkness, one of which entirely covered the wall against which Marius was standing so that for practical purposes he was invisible. She looked about her without seeing him, picked up the two chairs, the only ones he possessed, and went out with them, leaving the door to swing noisily to behind her.

  ‘Here they are,’ she said, re-entering their own room.

  ‘And here’s the lantern,’ said her husband. ‘Now cut along downstairs.’

  She hurried out again, leaving the man alone.

  Jondrette placed the chairs on either side of the table, twisted the chisel in the burning charcoal and moved an old screen in front of the hearth to hide the brazier. Then he bent over the pile of rope as though inspecting it. Marius now realized that what he had supposed to be nothing but rope was in fact a well-made rope ladder with wooden rungs and two iron hooks to hang it by. Neither the ladder nor the several large implements, like bludgeons, among the scrap-iron in the other heap, had been in the room that morning. Jondrette must have brought them in during the afternoon, while Marius was out.

  ‘They’re metal-worker’s tools,’ thought Marius. Had he been better versed in these matters he would have recognized, among what he supposed to be ordinary workshop tools, certain more sinister implements used for the forcing of doors and locks, and others capable of cutting and splitting, burglars’ chisels and jemmies.

  The fireplace, and the table with the chairs on either side, were exactly opposite Marius. Now that the brazier was hidden the room was lighted only by the candle. The smallest objects, on the table or the mantelshelf, cast huge shadows, that of the broken water-jug covering half the wall behind it. The room was filled with a black and ominous calm, the forerunner of dreadful events.

  Jondrette had let his pipe go out, in itself a sign of tension, and was again seated. The light of the candle threw into relief the sharp, bestial lines and hollows of his face. His eyebrows rose and fell and his right hand nervously opened and closed as though he were answering the last admonition of some counsellor within himself. In the course of this silent colloquy he abruptly pulled open the table drawer, got out a long table-knife and tested its edge with his finger. Then he put it back again and closed the drawer.

  Marius got the pistol out of his right-hand fob pocket and cocked it, making a sharp click as he did so. Jondrette started and half rose from his chair.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he called.

  Marius held his breath, and after a moment Jondrette laughed, saying:

  ‘I’m getting jumpy. Nothing but a board creaking.’

  Marius kept the pistol in his hand.

  XVIII

  The two chairs

  Of a sudden a distant, melancholy sound caused the windows to vibrate slightly. Six o’clock was striking at the church of Saint-Médard.

  Jondrette noted each stroke with a nod of his head, and when the sixth had sounded he snuffed out the candle with his fingers.
Then he began to pace the room, stood listening at the door, paced and listened again. ‘So long as he comes!’ he muttered, and returned to his chair. Scarcely had he seated himself than the door opened.

  His wife stood in the corridor, her hideous grimace of welcome lighted from below by one of the apertures in the dark-lantern.

  ‘Please to come in, Monsieur,’ she said.

  ‘My noble benefactor, enter!’ cried Jondrette, hastily rising.

  Monsieur Leblanc appeared. His serene bearing lent him a singular dignity. He placed four louis on the table.

  ‘That is for your rent and urgent requirements, Monsieur Fabantou,’ he said. ‘We have to consider what else is needed.’

  ‘May God reward you, most generous sir,’ said Jondrette; and in a swift aside to his wife: ‘Get rid of the cab.’

  She vanished, and had reappeared by the time Jondrette with many bows and fulsome expressions of gratitude had seated Monsieur Leblanc on one of the chairs. She gave him a nod. The snow was so thick on the ground that the fiacre had made no sound in arriving or departing. Jondrette now took the chair facing Monsieur Leblanc.

  If he is to gain a true impression of the scene that follows the reader must take into account the ice-cold night, the snow-covered spaces around the Salpêtrière shining whitely under the moon as though enveloped in a shroud, the street-lamps here and there relieving with a ruddy glow the desolate boulevards with their long lines of black elms, no moving figure to be seen within perhaps half a mile, and the Gorbeau tenement in its state of total silence, squalor, and darkness; and within the tenement, its shadows and its empty places, the large irregular garret lighted by a single candle with two men seated at the table, one serene of aspect and the other leering and dreadful, the woman hovering like a she-wolf in the background, and Marius, standing unseen on the other side of the partition with his eye to the aperture, intently following every word and every gesture with a pistol in his hand.

  Marius’s feeling was one of abhorrence but not of fear. Tightening his grip on the pistol-butt, he was reassured. ‘I can stop the brute whenever I please,’ he thought. The police were hidden somewhere close at hand, waiting for the summons to intervene. Moreover he was hopeful that this violent encounter between Monsieur Leblanc and Jondrette would throw some light on the things that he so longed to know.

  XIX

  The visitors

  Monsieur Leblanc’s first act when he was seated was to look round at the two empty beds. ‘How is the hurt child?’ he asked.

  ‘Not well,’ said Jondrette with a smile of mournful gratitude. ‘She’s in great pain. Her sister has taken her to the hospital to have the wound dressed. But you will be seeing them, my dear sir. They will be back soon.’

  ‘Madame Fabantou seems to have recovered,’ said Monsieur Leblanc, glancing at the weird attire of the Jondrette woman, who was standing between him and the door as though guarding the exit, in a posture of menace almost as if she was offering battle.

  ‘She’s desperately ill,’ said Jondrette. ‘But what is one to do? She has so much courage, you see. She’s more than a woman – she’s an ox.’

  The elegant compliment drew a simper from the lady and she exclaimed coyly:

  ‘You always flatter me, Monsieur Jondrette.’

  ‘Jondrette?’ said Monsieur Leblanc. ‘I thought your name was Fabantou?’

  ‘It’s either,’ said Jondrette promptly. ‘Jondrette is my stage name.’

  He gave his wife a look which Leblanc failed to notice and launched into a loud and unctuous discourse.

  ‘We have always lived so happily together, my dear wife and I. Without that, what would become of us? We are so unfortunate, honoured sir. We have the will to work, we have the heart, but the work is not to be had. I do not know how the Government arranges these things, but I give you my word, my dear sir – and I am not a Jacobin or one of your half-baked democrats, although I wish them no harm – I give you my word that if I were a minister things would be very different. I will give you an example. I wanted my daughters to learn the packing trade. You will say, “What? A trade?” Yes, sir, a trade, a humble trade to earn an honest living. A sad decline, my noble benefactor. A degradation, considering what we once were. But alas, nothing remains to us of our former prosperity. Or rather, only one thing, a painting which I greatly value but which I shall have to part with if we are to live. For we have to live, do we not? We have to go on living.’

  While Jondrette was thus holding forth with a seeming incoherence strangely at odds with his cool, calculating expression, Marius, looking beyond him, saw someone who had not been there before. A man had stolen into the room, moving so cautiously that the door-hinges had made no sound. He was wearing no shirt but a tattered waistcoat that gaped at every seam, loose corduroy trousers and ropesoled slippers; his bare arms were tattooed and his face was blackened. He was now seated with folded arms on the nearest bed, partly hidden behind the tall form of the Jondrette woman.

  The kind of magnetic instinct that alerts our senses caused Monsieur Leblanc to notice him at almost the same moment as Marius, and he gave a start which Jondrette did not fail to perceive.

  ‘You’re looking at your overcoat,’ he cried, drawing its folds more closely about him. ‘The one you were so kind as to leave with me. It’s a splendid fit, isn’t it?’

  ‘Who is that man?’ asked Monsieur Leblanc.

  ‘Him?’ said Jondrette. ‘He’s a neighbour. Pay no attention to him.’

  The neighbour had certainly an odd appearance. But chemical factories abound in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, and it is not uncommon for factory-workers to have grimy faces. In any event, Monsieur Leblanc’s attitude was still one of easy and untroubled confidence.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘What were you saying, Monsieur Fabantou?’

  ‘I was telling you, my most noble patron,’ said Jondrette, leaning forward with his elbows on the table and gazing tenderly at Monsieur Leblanc with eyes not unlike those of a boa-constrictor, ‘that I have a picture for sale.’

  A slight sound came from the door. A second man had entered and seated himself on the bed. Like the first he was bare-armed, and his face, too, was blackened with ink or soot. Although he had literally slid into the room, he had not been able to prevent Monsieur Leblanc from hearing him.

  ‘Don’t worry about them,’ Jondrette said. ‘They’re just people living in the house. I was saying that I have a valuable picture. Perhaps you will allow me to show it to you.’

  He rose and picking up the panel leaning against the wall turned it round and left it leaning there. The light of the candle was sufficient to show that it was indeed some sort of picture. Marius could make out none of the details because Jondrette was standing in the way. He had a brief glimpse of an ill-drawn figure crudely embellished with the garish colours of a fairground placard.

  ‘What on earth is it?’ asked Monsieur Leblanc.

  ‘It is a masterpiece, my dear sir,’ cried Jondrette. ‘A picture of great price, and one which I cherish as I do my own daughters. It conjures up memories. But as I have said – and I cannot gainsay it – I have been reduced to such straits that I am forced to part with it!’

  Perhaps by chance, or because he was growing uneasy, Monsieur Leblanc, while examining the picture, also glanced round. There were now four strangers, present, three seated on the bed and one standing by the door, all bare-armed, motionless and with blackened faces. One of the three on the bed was half-lying with his back against the wall and his eyes closed, as though he were asleep. He was old, his white hair in horrid contrast to his daubed face. The other two seemed to be young men, one bearded and the other longhaired. None wore boots. Those not in slippers were barefoot.

  Catching the direction of Monsieur Leblanc’s glance, Jondrette said:

  ‘They’re friends of mine, all neighbours. They’re furnacemen; they have dirty faces because they do dirty work. Don’t worry about them, noble benefactor, but buy my picture
. Have pity on my distress. I’ll let you have it cheap. What do you consider it is worth?’

  Monsieur Leblanc was looking closely at him, like a man now on his guard.

  ‘It’s an old inn-sign,’ he said. ‘It’s worth about three francs.’

  Jondrette said softly:

  ‘Have you your wallet on you? I will accept a thousand crowns.’

  Monsieur Leblanc rose, and standing with his back to the wall looked rapidly round the room. Jondrette was on his left, at the end nearest the window, and the woman and the four men were on his right near the door. The men did not stir, and seemed not even to see him. Jondrette continued to talk in a wailing voice, his gaze so distraught and his accents so pitiable that Monsieur Leblanc might have been pardoned for thinking that he had nothing more to deal with than a man driven out of his wits by misfortune.

  ‘If you do not buy my picture, noble benefactor, then I shall have no recourse but to throw myself into the river. I wanted my daughters to learn the packing-trade, and rough packaging at that, foodstuffs and suchlike. But for that you need a solid edged table, with a flange, so that jars don’t fell off it; you need all kinds of implements, a stove for heating glue to different temperatures according to the kind of material you’re using, whether it’s wood or metal or cardboard, cutters and shapers and pincers and stamps and lord knows what besides. And what do you earn by it? Four sous a day for four hours’ work! And everything to be kept spotlessly clean. I ask you! Four sous a day. How is anyone to live on that?’

  Jondrette was not looking at Monsieur Leblanc while he spoke. Monsieur Leblanc’s eyes were fixed intently upon him, but Jondrette was watching the door. Marius, for his part, was gazing breathlessly from one to the other. Monsieur Leblanc seemed to be asking himself, ‘Is the man mad?’ Jondrette was babbling. He repeated several times, in varying accents of self-pity, ‘Nothing left but to throw myself in the river… The other day I went down the steps by the Pont d’Austerlitz …’