Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  Each of us, whoever he may be, has his breathing self. Lacking this, or lacking air, we suffocate. And then we the. To the for lack of love is terrible. It is the stifling of the soul.

  When love has melted and merged two persons in a sublime and sacred unity, the secret of life has been revealed to them: they are no longer anything but the two aspects of a single destiny, the wings of a single spirit. To love is to soar!

  On the day when a woman in passing sheds light for you as she goes, you are lost, you are in love. There is only one thing to be done, to fix your thoughts upon her so intently that she is compelled to think of you.

  That which love begins can be completed only by God.

  True love is plunged in despair or rapture by a lost glove or by a found handkerchief; but it needs eternity for all its devotion and its hopes. It is composed of both the infinitely great and the infinitely small.

  If you are stone, be magnetic; if a plant, be sensitive; but if you are human be love.

  Nothing satisfies love. We achieve happiness and long for Eden; we gain paradise and long for Heaven.

  I say to you who love that all these things are contained in love. You must learn to find them. Love encompasses all Heaven, all contemplation, and, more than Heaven, physical delight.

  ‘Does she still visit the Luxembourg?’ … ‘No, Monsieur’ … ‘It is in this church, is it not, that she attends Mass? … ‘She does not come here any more’ … ‘Does she still live in this house?’ … ‘She has moved elsewhere’ … ‘Where has she gone to live?’ … ‘She did not say.’

  How grievous not to know the address of one’s soul!

  Love has its childishness; other passions have pettiness. Shame on the passions that make us petty; honour to the one that makes us a child!

  A strange thing has happened, do you know? I am in darkness. There is a person who, departing, took away the sun.

  Oh, to lie side by isde in the same tomb and now and then caress with a finger-tip in the shades, that will do for my eternity!

  You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love is to live by it.

  Love! A dark and starry transfiguration is mingled with that torment. There is ecstasy in the agony.

  Oh, the happiness of birds! It is because they have a nest that they have a song.

  Love is a heavenly breath of the air of Paradise.

  Deep hearts and wise minds accept life as God made it. It is a long trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This destiny, his true one, begins for man on the first stair within the tomb. Something appears to him, and he begins to perceive the finality. Take heed of that word, finality. The living see infinity; the finality may be seen only by the dead. In the meantime, love and suffer, hope and meditate. Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.

  I encountered in the street a penniless young man who was in love. His hat was old and his jacket worn, with holes at the elbows; water soaked through his shoes, but starlight flooded through his soul.

  How wonderful it is to be loved, but how much greater to love! The heart becomes heroic through passion; it rejects everything that is not pure and arms itself with nothing that is not noble and great. An unworthy thought can no more take root in it than a nettle on a glacier. The lofty and serene spirit, immune from all base passion and emotion, prevailing over the clouds and shadows of this world, the follies, lies, hatreds, vanities and miseries, dwells in the azure of the sky and feels the deep and subterranean shifts of destiny no more than the mountain-peak feels the earthquake.

  If there were no one who loved the sun would cease to shine.

  V

  Cosette after reading the letter

  As she read this Cosette grew more and more thoughtful. Just as she finished it the young cavalry officer swaggered past the gate, this being his regular time. She thought him odious.

  She turned back to the notebook, and now she found the handwriting delightful, always the same hand but in ink that varied in intensity, being sometimes dense black and sometimes pale, as happens when one writes over a period of days and adds water from time to time to the ink. It seemed that these were thoughts that had overflowed on to paper, a string of sighs set down at random, without order or selection or purpose. Cosette had never before read anything like it. The manuscript, in which she saw more clarity than obscurity, affected her like the opening of a closed door. Each of its enigmatic lines, shining with splendour in her eyes, kindled a new awareness in her heart. Her teachers at the convent had talked much of the soul but never of earthly love, rather as one might talk of the poker without mentioning the fire. These fifteen handwritten pages had abruptly but gently opened her eyes to the nature of all love and suffering, destiny, life, eternity, the beginning and the end, as though a hand, suddenly opening, had released a shaft of light. She could discern the author behind them, his passionate, generous, and candid nature, his great unhappiness and great hope, his captive heart and overflowing ecstasy. What was this manuscript if not a letter? A letter unaddressed, without name or date or signature, urgent, with no demands, a riddle composed of truths, a token of love to be delivered by a winged messenger and read by virgin eyes, an appointment to meet in some place not on earth, the love-letter of a ghost written to a vision. A calm but passionate unknown, who seemed ready to take refuge in death, had sent to his absent beloved the secret of human destiny, the key to life and love. He had written with a foot in the tomb and a finger in the sky. The lines, falling haphazard on the paper, were like raindrops falling from a soul.

  And where did they come from? Who was their author? Cosette had not a moment’s doubt. They could have come from only one person – from him.

  The light of day was revived in her, everything was made good. She had a sense of inexpressible delight and anguish. It was he! He had been there, and it was his arm that had been thrust through the hedge! While she had been forgetful, he had searched and found her. But had she really forgotten him? Never! She was mad to have believed so, even for a moment. She had loved him from the first. The fire had been damped and had died down, but, as she now knew, it had only burned the more deeply in her, and now it had burst again into flame and the flame filled her whole being. The notebook was like a match flung by that other soul into her own, and she felt the fire break out again. She pored over the written words, thinking ‘How well I know them! I have read it all before in his eyes.’

  As she finished reading it for the third time Lieutenant Théodule reappeared beyond the gate, clicking his heels on the cobbles. Cosette was forced to look up. She now thought him fatuous, uncouth, impertinent, and altogether repellent, and she turned her head away indignantly, wishing she could throw something at him.

  She went back into the house and up to her bedroom, to read the notebook yet again, learn it by heart, ponder on it. At length she kissed it and hid it in her bosom. The matter was decided. Cosette was again plunged in the anguished ecstasies of love; the infinity of Eden had opened for her once again.

  She lived through that day in a state of bemusement, scarcely thinking, a thousand fancies tumbling through her head. She could guess at nothing, and the hopes amid her tremors were all vague; she dared be sure of nothing, but she would not reject anything. Pallors sped over her face, and shivers ran through her body. At moments she felt that she must be dreaming and asked herself, ‘Can it be real?’ But then she touched the notebook under her dress and pressing it to her heart felt its shape against her flesh. If Jean Valjean had seen her at those moments he would have trembled at the new look in her eyes. ‘Oh, yes,’ she thought. ‘It can only be he; it comes to me from him!’ And she thought that an intervention of the angels, some celestial chance, had restored him to her.

  The wonders conjured up by love! The fantasies! That intervention of the angels, that celestial chance, was like the hunk of bread tossed from one inmate to another, from
one courtyard to another, over the walls of the prison of La Force.

  VI

  No place for the aged

  Jean Valjean went out that evening, and Cosette dressed up.

  She did her hair in the way that suited her best and put on a gown that had been cut a little low at the neck so that it allowed the beginning of her bosom to be seen and was, as young ladies say, ‘somewhat immodest’. It was not in the least immodest and more pretty than otherwise. She made these preparations without knowing why. Was she going anywhere? Was she expecing a visitor? No.

  As evening fell she went into the garden. Toussaint was busy in the kitchen, which looked out on the back-yard. She walked under the trees, thrusting aside the branches now and then since some were very low. She came to the bench and found the stone still there.

  She sat down and softly stroked it as though in gratitude. And suddenly she had that feeling that sometimes comes to us, of someone behind her. She looked round and started to her feet.

  It was he.

  He was bareheaded and he looked pale and thinner. His dark clothing was scarcely visible in the dusk which cast a veil over his forehead and buried his eyes in shadow; beneath his incomparable sweetness of expression there was something of death and something of the night, and his face was faintly illumined with the light of the dying day and the suggestion of a soul in flight, as though he were still not a ghost but no longer a living man. He had dropped his hat, which lay in the bushes.

  Cosette, near to fainting, did not utter a sound. She drew slowly away, because she felt herself drawn towards him. He did not move, but something emanated from him, a kind of warmth and sadness which must be in the eyes that she could not see.

  In withdrawing Cosette found herself with her back to a tree, and she leaned against it. Without it she would have fallen.

  Then he began to speak, in that voice that she had never heard before, speaking so softly that it was scarcely raised above the rustle of the leaves.

  ‘Forgive me for being here. I have been in such distress, I could not go on living the way things were, and so I had to come. Did you read what I left on the bench? Do you perhaps recognize me? You mustn’t be afraid. It’s a long time ago, but do you remember the day when you first looked at me – in the Luxembourg, near the Gladiator? And the day when you walked past me? Those things happened on the 16th of June and the 2nd of July – nearly a year ago. After that I did not see you for a long time. I asked the woman who collects the chair-rents and she said she hadn’t seen you. You were living in a new house in the Rue de l’Ouest, on the third floor. I found out, you see. I followed you. What else could I do? And then you disappeared. I thought I saw you once when I was reading the newspapers under the Odéon arcade and I ran after you, but it wasn’t you, only someone wearing a hat like yours. I come here at night, but don’t worry, no one sees me. I come and look up at your windows, and I walk very quietly so as not to disturb you. I was behind you the other evening when you looked round, and I hid and ran for it. Once I heard you singing and it made me very happy. Does it matter to you if I listen to you singing through the shutters? It can do you no harm. But you don’t mind, do you? To me, you see, you’re an angel. You must let me come sometimes. I think I’m going to the. If you knew how I adore you! Forgive me for talking like this, I don’t know what I’m saying, perhaps I’m annoying you. Am I annoying you?’

  ‘Mother!’ she murmured, and sank down as though she herself were dying.

  He caught her as she fell and clasped her tightly in his arms without knowing that he did so. He held her, trembling, feeling as though his head were filled with a mist in which lightnings flashed, feeling, in the tumult of his thoughts, that he was performing a religious rite that was also an act of profanation. For the rest, he felt no spark of physical desire for this enchanting girl whose body was now pressed so closely to his own. He was lost in love.

  She took his hand and laid it against her heart, and he felt the shape of the notebook under her dress. He stammered:

  ‘Then – you love me?’

  She answered in a voice so low that it was scarcely to be heard: ‘Of course! You know I do.’ And she hid her russet head against the breast of the triumphant and marvelling young man.

  He fell back on to the bench with her at his side. Neither could speak. The stars, were beginning to show. How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.

  Both were trembling. They looked at each other with eyes shining in the dusk, unconscious of the cool of the night, the chill of the stone bench, the dampness of the earth, the dew on the grass; they looked at each other, their hearts filled with their thoughts. Without knowing it, they had clasped hands.

  She did not ask him, or even wonder, how he had contrived to get into the garden. It seemed to her so right that he should be there. From time to time their knees touched and both quivered. Now and then Cosette stammered a word, her soul trembling on her lips like a dewdrop on the petal of a flower.

  And gradually they began to speak. Outpouring followed the silence which is fulfilment. The night was calm and splendid above their heads. Pure as disembodied spirits, they told each other about themselves, their dreams and their follies, their delights, their fantasies, their failings; how they had come to love each other at a distance, to long for each other, and their despair when they no longer saw each other. In an intimacy which nothing could ever make more perfect they told each other of all that was most secret and hidden in themselves, recounting, with an innocent trust in their illusions, everything that love and youth, and the vestiges of childhood that still clung to them, put into their heads. Two hearts were exchanged, so that when an hour had passed they were a youth enriched with the soul of a girl and a girl enriched with a young man’s soul. Each pervaded, enchanted, and enraptured the other.

  When they had finished, when everything had been said, she laid her head on his shoulder and asked:

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘My name is Marius. And yours?’

  ‘Cosette.’

  Book Six

  The Boy Gavroche

  I

  Scurvy trick played by the wind

  SINCE 1823, while the tavern at Montfermeil was gradually sinking, not in the deeps of bankruptcy but in the sump of petty debt, the Thénardiers had had two more children, both boys, making five altogether, two girls and three boys. It was rather a lot. Mme Thénardier had rid herself of the last two, while they were still very young, in a singularly happy fashion.

  ‘Rid herself’ is the right way to put it. She was a woman possessing only a limited store of humanity, a phenomenon of which there are many instances. Like the Maréchale de la Mothe-Houdancourt, who mothered three duchesses, Mme Thénardier was a mother only to her daughters; her maternal instinct extended no further. Her hostility to mankind in general began with her sons, and it was here that her malice reached its peak. She detested the eldest, as we have seen, but she abominated the two others. Why? Because. The most terrible and unanswerable of reasons. ‘Because I’ve no use for a litter of squalling brats,’ she said. We must describe how the Thénardiers managed to get rid of their two youngest children and even make a profit out of them.

  The woman Magnon, formerly the servant of Monsieur Gillenormand, of whom mention has already been made, had succeeded in getting her employer to support her two sons. She went to live on the Quai des Célestins, at the corner of the ancient Rue du Petit-Musc, of which the name does something to redeem its evil-smelling reputation. Some readers will recall the epidemic of croup which ravaged the riverside quarters of Paris thirty-five years ago and enabled medical science to experiment on a large scale with treatment by inhalation of alum, now superseded by the external application of iodine. Both La Magnon’s sons were carried off by the epidemic at a tender age and on the s
ame day – one in the morning and the other in the evening. It was a sad blow to their mother, for the children were valuable, each being worth eighty francs a month. The money was paid with meticulous regularity, on Mon sieur Gillenormand’s instructions, by his man of affairs, a retired lawyer’s clerk living in the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile. The death of the children threatened to bring this happy state of affairs to an end, and La Magnon looked round for a way out of the difficulty. In the dark freemasonry of ill-doing of which she was a member all things are known, all secrets kept and each man helps his fellow. La Magnon needed two children and the Thénardiers had two to dispose of, of the same sex and age, a most fortunate coincidence. So the little Thénardiers became little Magnons, and La Magnon went to live in the Rue Clocheperce. In Paris to change the street in which one lives is to change one’s identity.

  Officialdom, not having been notified, raised no objection, and the transaction was carried out with the greatest ease. Mme Thénardier demanded a monthly rent of ten francs apiece for the two little boys, which La Magnon agreed to and, in fact, paid. It goes without saying that Monsieur Gillenormand kept up his payments. He visited the children every six months, but noticed no change. ‘How like you they’re growing, Monsieur!’ said La Magnon.

  Thénardier, with his usual adaptability, took advantage of the circumstance to turn himself into Jondrette. His two daughters and Gavroche had scarcely had time to notice that they had two small brothers. There is a level of poverty at which we are afflicted with a kind of indifference which causes all things to seem unreal: those closest to us become no more than shadows, scarcely distinguishable against the dark background of our daily life, and easily lost to view.

  Nevertheless on the evening of the day on which she handed the boys over to La Magnon, with the firm resolve to be rid of them for ever, the Thénardier woman had, or pretended to have, a fit of conscience. She said to her husband, ‘But it’s abandoning our children!’, to which he replied tersely and magisterially, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau did even worse.’ With her scruples thus disposed of, she became apprehensive: ‘But suppose we have the police after us? Is it legal, what we’ve done, Monsieur Thénardier?’ … ‘Of course it is, and anyway who’s going to notice? Who worries about pauper children?’