Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  ‘By the way, you remember you promised me something?’

  Marius felt in his pocket. All he had in the world was the five-franc piece intended for her father. He got it out and thrust it into her hand, and she opened her fingers and let the coin fall to the ground. She looked sombrely at him.

  ‘I don’t want your money,’ she said.

  Book Three

  The House in the Rue Plumet

  I

  The secret house

  ROUND ABOUT the middle of the last century a Judge of the High Court and member of the Parliament of Paris, having a mistress and preferring to conceal the fact – for in those days great aristocrats were accustomed to parade their mistresses, but lesser mortals kept quiet about them – built himself a small house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the unfrequented Rue Blomet, now the Rue Plumet.

  The house was a two-storey villa, with two reception rooms and a kitchen on the ground-floor, two bedrooms and a sitting-room on the first floor, an attic under the roof and in the front a garden with a wide wrought-iron gate to the street. The garden was about an acre in extent, and this was all that could be seen from the street; but behind the villa there was a narrow courtyard, with, on its far side, a two-room cottage with a cellar, designed, if the need arose, to harbour a nurse and child. This cottage communicated, by a concealed door, with a very long, narrow, winding passageway, enclosed in high walls and open to the sky, so skilfully hidden that it seemed lost in the tangle of small-holdings of which it followed the many twists and turns, until eventually it emerged, by another concealed door, at the deserted end of the Rue de Babylone, in what was virtually another quarter, half-a-mile away.

  This was the entrance used by the villa’s original owner, so cunningly contrived that even had anyone troubled to follow him on his frequent visits to the Rue de Babylone, they could not have guessed that his ultimate destination was the Rue Blomet. By shrewd purchases of land the ingenious magistrate had gained possession of the whole area and was thus able to construct his secret passage without anyone being the wiser. When, later, he had divided up the land and sold it for vegetable-plots and the like, the new owners had supposed that their boundary-wall was also that of their neighbour on the other side, never suspecting that in fact there were two walls with a narrow, flagged footpath between them. Only the birds had observed this curiosity, which doubtless was the subject of much interested speculation among the sparrows and finches of a century ago.

  The villa, built of stone in the style of Mansart and wainscoted and furnished in the manner of Watteau, rococo within and austere without, enclosed in a triple flowering hedge, was a blend of discretion, coyness, and solemnity such as befitted an amorous diversion of the magistrature. Both it and its passage have now vanished, but it was still standing fifteen years ago. In 1793 it was bought by a speculator who intended to pull it down, but being unable to complete the purchase he was forced into bankruptcy, so that in a sense it was the house that pulled down the speculator. Thereafter it remained uninhabited, crumbling slowly to ruins as any house does that has no human occupants to keep it alive. But it still had its original furnishings and was still offered for sale or rent, as the very rare passers-by along the Rue Plumet were informed by the faded billboard fixed in 1810 to the garden gate. And towards the end of the Restoration these same observers might have noted that the billboard had been taken down and that the ground-floor shutters were no longer closed. The house was again occupied, and the fact that there were double curtains in the windows suggested the presence of a woman.

  In October 1829, a gentleman getting on in life had rented the property as it stood, including, of course, the cottage at the back of the villa and the passage leading to the Rue de Babylone, and had restored the two concealed doorways. As we say, the villa was already more or less furnished. The new tenant, having made good certain deficiencies, and put in hand repairs to the stairs and parquet flooring, the windows and the square tiling of the yard, had quietly moved in with a young girl and an elderly servant, more in the manner of an interloper than a man taking possession of his own house. The event had occasioned no gossip among the neighbours for the excellent reason that there were no neighbours.

  This unobtrusive tenant was Jean Valjean, and the girl was Cosette. The servant was an unmarried woman named Toussaint whom Jean Valjean had saved from the workhouse, and who was old and provincial and talked with a stammer, three attributes which had predisposed him in her favour. He had rented the property under the name of Monsieur Fauchelevent, of private means. In the events that have already been related the reader will no doubt have been even more quick to recognize Jean Valjean than was Thénardier.

  But why had Jean Valjean left the Petit-Picpus convent? What had happened?

  The answer is that nothing had happened.

  Jean Valjean, as we know, was happy at the convent, so much so that in the end it troubled his conscience. Seeing Cosette every day, and with the sense of paternal responsibility growing in him, he brooded over her spiritual well-being, saying to himself that she was his and that nothing could take her from him, that certainly she would become a nun, being surrounded by soft inducements to do so; that the convent must henceforth be the whole world for both of them, where he would grow old while she grew into womanhood, until eventually he died and she grew old; and that, ecstatic thought, there would be no other separation between them. But as he thought about this he began to have misgivings, asking himself whether he was entitled to so much happiness, whether in fact it would not be gained at the expense of another person, a child, whereas he was already an old man; whether, in short, it was not an act of theft. He told himself that the child had a right to know something about the world before renouncing it; that to deny her in advance, without consulting her, all the joys of life on the pretext of sparing her its trials, to take advantage of her ignorance and isolated state to prompt her to adopt an artificial vocation, was to do outrage to a human being and tell a lie to God. It might be that eventually, realizing all this and finding that she regretted her vows, Cosette would come to hate him. It was this last thought, almost a selfish one and certainly less heroic than the others, that he found intolerable. He resolved to leave the convent.

  He resolved upon it, recognizing with despair that it must be done. There was no serious obstacle. Five years of retreat and disappearance within those four walls had dispelled all cause for alarm, so that he could now return to the world of men with an easy mind. He had aged and everything had changed. Who would now recognize him? Moreover the risk, at the worst, was only to himself, and he had no right to condemn Cosette to imprisonment in the convent because he himself had incurred a life-sentence. What did the risk matter, anyway, compared with his duty? Finally, there was nothing to prevent him from being prudent and taking precautions. As for Cosette’s education, it was now virtually complete.

  Having made up his mind he awaited a favourable opportunity, and this soon came. Old Fauchelevent died.

  Jean Valjean applied to the Prioress for an audience and told her that, his brother’s death having brought him a modest legacy sufficient to enable him to live without working, he wished to leave the convent, taking his daughter with him; but since it was unjust that Cosette should have been brought up free of charge for five years without taking her vows, he begged the Reverend Mother to allow him to pay the community an indemnity of 5,000 francs. In this fashion he and Cosette departed from the Convent of the Perpetual Adoration.

  When they did so he himself carried, not caring to entrust it to any other person, the small valise of which he had always kept the key in his possession. The little case had always intrigued Cosette because of the odour of embalming which emanated from it. We may add that thereafter Valjean was never separated from it. He kept it always in his bedroom, and it was the first and sometimes the only thing he took with him when he changed his abode. Cosette laughed at it, calling it ‘the inseparable’ and saying that it made her jealous.

/>   For the rest, Valjean did not return to the outside world without profound apprehension. He discovered the house in the Rue Plumet and hid himself in it, going by the name of Ultime Fauchelevent. But at the same time he rented two apartments in Paris, partly so that he might not attract attention by always remaining in the same quarter, but also so as to have a place of retreat if he should need one and, above all, not be taken at a loss as he had been on the night when he had so miraculously escaped from Javert. Both apartments were modest and of poor appearance and were situated in widely separated parts of the town, one being in the Rue de l’Ouest and the other in the Rue de l’Homme-Armé.

  Every now and then he would go to live in one or the other for a month or six weeks, taking Cosette with him but not their housekeeper, Toussaint. They were waited on by the porters of the two apartment-houses, and he let it be known that he was a gentleman of private means living outside Paris who found it convenient to keep a pied-à-terre for his use in the town. Thus this high-principled man had three homes in Paris for the purpose of evading the police.

  II

  Jean Valjean – Garde Nationale

  Properly speaking, his home was in the Rue Plumet, and he had arranged matters as follows:

  Cosette and the servant occupied the villa. The main bedroom with its painted pillars, the boudoir with its gilt mouldings, the late magistrate’s salon hung with tapestries and furnished with huge armchairs – all these were hers; and she also had the garden. Valjean had installed in the bedroom a bed with a canopy of ancient damask in three colours and a very fine old Persian rug bought in the Rue du Figuier-Saint-Paul, but he had enlivened these austere antique splendours with gay and elegant furnishings suited to a young girl, a whatnot, a bookcase with gold-embossed volumes, a work-table inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a brightly decorated dressing-table, and a washstand of Japanese porcelain. Long damask curtains in three colours on a red background, matching the bed-canopy, draped the first-floor windows; and there were tapestry curtains on the ground floor. In winter Cosette’s little house was heated from top to bottom. Valjean himself lived in the sort of porter’s lodge across the yard, with a mattress on a truckle-bed, a plain wooden table, two rush-bottomed chairs, an earthenware water-jug, a few books on a shelf and never any fire. He dined with Cosette, and there was a loaf of black bread for him on the table. He had said to Toussaint when she first entered their employment, ‘You must understand that Mademoiselle is the mistress of the house.’ ‘But w-what about you, Monsieur?’ asked Toussaint in astonishment … ‘I am something better than the master – I am the father.’

  Cosette had been taught the rudiments of housekeeping at the convent and she had charge of the household budget, which was extremely modest. Jean Valjean took her for a walk every day, always to the Luxembourg Garden and to its least frequented alleyway, and on Sundays they attended Mass, always at Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, since it was a long way from their home. That is a very poor neighbourhood and he was generous with alms, which made him well-known to the beggars haunting the church. This it was that had prompted Thénardier to address him as ‘The benevolent gentleman of the Church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas’. He liked to take Cosette with him when he visited the poor and the sick, but no visitor ever came to the house in the Rue Plumet. Toussaint did the shopping and Valjean himself etched water from a near-by pump in the boulevard. Their store of wine and firewood was kept in a sort of semi-underground cellar near the Porte-de-Babylone door, of which the walls were carved in the semblance of a cave. It had served the late magistrate as a grotto: for without a grotto, in that time of follies and petites-maisons, no clandestine love-affair had been complete.

  In the Rue de Babylone door there was a box designed for the reception of letters and newspapers; but since the present occupants of the villa were accustomed to receive neither, the only use of this former receptacle of billets-doux was for the reception of tax-demands and notices concerned with guard-duty. For Monsieur Fauchelevent, gentleman of private means, was a member of the Garde Nationale, not having been able to slip through the meshes of the census of 1831. The municipal inquiries undertaken at that time had penetrated even into the Petit-Picpus convent, a hallowed institution which had endowed Ultime Fauchelevent with an aura of respectability, so that when he left it he was considered worthy to join the Garde.

  Accordingly, three or four times a year Jean Valjean donned his uniform and did his spell of duty – very readily, it may be said, because this was a trapping of orthodoxy which enabled him to mingle with the outside world without otherwise emerging from his solitude. Valjean had in fact just turned sixty, the age of legal exemption, but he did not look more than fifty and had no desire in any case to escape the sergeant-major or fail the Comte de Lobau. He had no standing in the community; he was concealing his true name and identity as well as his age; but, as we say, he was very willing to be a National Guard. His whole ambition was to appear like any other man who pays his taxes; his ideal was to be an angel in private and, in public, a respectable citizen.

  One detail, however, must be noted. When Valjean went out with Cosette he dressed in the manner we have described and could easily be mistaken for a retired officer. But when he went out alone, which was generally at night, he always wore workman’s clothes and a peaked cap which hid his face. Was this from caution or humility? It was from both. Cosette, accustomed by now to the strangeness of his life, scarcely noticed her father’s eccentricities. As for Toussaint, she held him in veneration and approved of everything he did. When their butcher, having caught a glimpse of him, remarked, ‘He’s a queer customer, isn’t he?’ she answered, ‘He’s a s-saint.’

  None of them ever used the door on the Rue de Babylone. Except for an occasional glimpse of them through the wrought-iron gate, it would have been difficult for anyone to guess that they lived in the Rue Plumet. That gate was always locked, and Valjean left the garden untended in order that it might not attract notice.

  In this, perhaps, he was mistaken.

  III

  Of leaves and branches

  This garden, left to its own devices for more than half a century, had become unusual and charming. Pedestrians of forty years ago stopped in the street to peer into it through the grille, having no notion of the secrets concealed behind its dense foliage. More than one dreamer in those days allowed his gaze and his thoughts to travel beyond the twisted bars of that ancient, padlocked gate hung between two moss-grown stone pillars and grotesquely crowned with a pattern of intricate arabesques.

  There was an old stone bench in one corner, one or two lichen-covered statues, a few rotting remains of trellis-work that had blown off the wall; but there were no lawns or garden paths, and couch-grass grew everywhere. Gardeners had deserted it and Nature had taken charge, scattering it with an abundance of weeds, a fortunate thing to happen to any patch of poor soil. The gillyflowers in bloom were splendid. Nothing in that garden hindered the thrust of things towards life, and the sacred process of growth found itself undisturbed. The trees leaned down to the brambles, and the brambles rose up into the trees; plants had climbed and branches had bent; creepers spreading on the ground had risen to join flowers blossoming in the air, and things stirred by the wind had stooped to the level of things lingering in the moss. Trunks and branches, leaves, twigs, husks, and thorns had mingled, married and cross-bred; vegetation in a close and deep embrace had celebrated and performed, under the satisfied eye of the Creator, the holy mystery of its consanguinity, a symbol of human fraternity in that enclosure some three hundred feet square. It was no longer a garden but one huge thicket, that is to say, something as impenetrable as a forest and as populous as a town, quivering like a bird’s nest, dark as a cathedral, scented as a bouquet, solitary as a tomb, and as living as a crowd.

  In the spring this giant thicket, untrammelled behind its iron gate and four walls, went on heat in the universal labour of seeding and growth, trembled in the warmth of the rising sun like an animal which bre
athes the scent of cosmic love and feels the April sap rise turbulent in its veins, and, shaking its tangled green mane, sprinkles over the damp earth, the crumbling statues, the steps of the villa, and even the empty street outside, a star-shower of blossom, of dew-like pearls, fruitfulness, beauty, life, rapture and fragrance. At midday a host of white butterflies hovered about it, and their fluttering in its shadows, like flakes of summer snow, was a heavenly sight. Under that gay canopy of verdure a host of innocent voices was raised, and what the twitter of birds neglected to say the buzz of insects supplied. In the evening a dreamlike haze rose up from it and enveloped it, a shroud of mist, a calm, celestial sadness covered it, and the intoxicating scent of honeysuckle and columbine emanated from it like an exquisite and subtle poison. The last calls could be heard of pigeon and wagtail nesting in the branches, and that secret intimacy of bird and tree could be felt: by day the flutter of wings rejoiced the leaves, and by night the leaves sheltered the wings.

  In winter the house could just be seen through the bare, shivering tangle of the thicket. Instead of blossom and dewdrops there were the long, silvery trails of slugs winding over the thick carpet of dead leaves; but in any event, in all its aspects and in every season, that little enclosure breathed out an air of melancholy and contemplation, solitude and liberty, the absence of man and the presence of God. The rusty iron gate seemed to be saying: ‘This garden belongs to me.’

  It mattered little that the streets of Paris lay all around it, the classic, stately mansions of the Rue de Varenne no more than a stone’s throw away, the dome of the Invalides very near and the Chamber of Deputies not far distant. Carriages might roll majestically along the Rue de Bourgogne and the Rue Saint-Dominique; yellow, brown, white and red omnibuses might pass at the nearby intersection; but the Rue Plumet remained deserted. The death of former house-owners, the passage of a revolution, the collapse of ancient fortunes, forty years of abandonment and neglect had restored to that favoured spot fern and hemlock, clover and foxglove, tall plants with pallid leaves, lizards, blindworms, beetles and all manner of insects, so that within those four walls there had risen from the depths of the earth an indescribable wildness and grandeur. Nature, which disdains the contrivances of men and gives her whole heart wherever she gives at all, whether in the ant-hill or the eagle’s nest, had reproduced in this insignificant Paris garden the savage splendour of a virgin forest in the New World.