Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  La Magnon possessed what passed for elegance in her own sphere. She dressed with care. She shared her wretched but showily furnished apartment with a Frenchified Englishwoman who was a skilful thief. This Parisienne by adoption, who had wealthy contacts and a close connection with the diamonds of Mlle Mars, later became prominent in the police records. She was nicknamed ‘Mamselle Miss’.

  The two little boys had no reason to complain. Being worth eighty francs a head, they were carefully looked after, like any other valuable property – well-clad, well-fed, treated almost like little gentlemen – far better off under their false mother than under the real one. La Magnon, who aspired to gentility, used no coarse language in their presence.

  Thus they lived for some years, and Thénardier began to envisage new possibilities. He said one day to La Magnon, when she brought him the monthly ten francs, ‘Their “father” will have to see to their education.’

  But suddenly the two unhappy children, hitherto well enough protected, even though it was by their misfortune, were flung neck and crop into real life and forced to start living it.

  A mass-arrest of malefactors like that which had taken place in the Jondrettes’ garret, which inevitably leads to further police investigation and imprisonments, is a disaster having wide repercussions in the criminal underworld. The downfall of the Thénardiers led to the downfall of La Magnon.

  Shortly after La Magnon had passed the letter about the Rue Plumet on to Éponine, the police descended on the Rue Clocheperce. La Magnon and Mamselle Miss were arrested and the whole house, which harboured a number of suspicious characters, was searched. The two little boys were playing in a back-yard when this happened, and knew nothing about it. When they tried to go home they found the doors locked and the house empty. A cobbler, whose shop was across the street, called to them and gave them a written message from their ‘mother’. It bore the address of Monsieur Barge, debt-collector, 8 Rue du Roi-de-Sicile – that is to say, Monsieur Gillenormand’s man of affairs. ‘You don’t live here any more,’ the cobbler said. ‘You must go to this address. It’s quite near, first turning on the left. Keep the paper in case you have to ask the way.’

  They went off together, the older boy in the lead, clutching the scrap of paper. But he was cold, and his small, stiff fingers did not grip it tightly enough. A gust of wind along the Rue Clocheperce blew it out of his hand, and since it was growing dark he could not find it again.

  After this they strayed at random through the streets.

  II

  In which the boy Gavroche profits by the great Napoleon

  Springtime in Paris is often marred by harsh and bitter winds by which one is chilled if not quite frozen; they may spring up on the finest day, and their effect is like that of an icy draught blowing through a leaky window or ill-closed door into a warm room. It is as though the grim portals of winter had been left ajar. In the spring of 1832, the year of the first great European epidemic, these winds were more keen and piercing than ever; the door left ajar was not merely the door of winter but of the tomb: those gusts of wind were the breath of cholera. Their peculiarity, from a meteorological point of view, was that they did not exclude a high degree of electrical tension. There were frequent thunderstorms at that time.

  On an evening when the wind was particularly vigorous, so much so that it might have been January, and the well-to-do had got out their winter overcoats, the boy Gavroche, shivering in his rags but still cheerful, stood gazing in apparent delight at a hairdresser’s window in the neighbourhood of Orme-Saint-Gervais. He had somewhere acquired a woman’s shawl, which he was using as a muffler. Ostensibly he was admiring the wax figure of a woman in a bridal gown, with a low-cut décolletée and a headdress of orange-blossom, which smiled at the populace as it slowly revolved on a stand between two lights; but the truth is that he was considering whether he might not ‘lift’ one or two of the cakes of soap in an open stall in the shop’s doorway, thereafter to sell them at a sou apiece to a barber in another part of the town. He had often dined on one of those cakes of soap. It was a form of enterprise for which he had some talent and which he called ‘trimming the trimmer’.

  While he stood there with one eye on the revolving figure and the other on the array of soap he communed with himself in a low-voiced monologue as follows: ‘Tuesday … Was it Tuesday? … It can’t have been … Well, but perhaps it was … Yes, it was Tuesday.’ The subject of the soliloquy is not known, but if it referred to the occasion of his last meal then that must have been three days ago, for the present day was Friday.

  The barber, shaving a customer in his well-warmed shop, was keeping a sharp eye on this potential enemy, a frozen, impudent urchin with his hands plunged deep in his pockets but his wits plainly about him.

  While Gavroche was studying the situation, glancing from the window to the Brown Windsor soap, two respectably clad small boys, both younger than himself, timidly opened the door and, entering the shop, asked for something in plaintive voices that sounded more like a sob than a plea. Both talked at once, and it was impossible to make out what they were saying because the voice of the younger was choked with misery and the teeth of the elder were chattering with cold. The barber turned furiously upon them and, still with his razor in his hand, thrust them back to the street exclaiming:

  ‘Opening the door and letting the cold in for no reason!’

  The children walked dolefully away, and now it was beginning to rain. Gavroche went after them.

  ‘What’s up with you two?’ he demanded.

  ‘We’ve nowhere to sleep,’ the older boy said.

  ‘Is that all?’ said Gavroche. ‘Well it’s nothing to cry about. You aren’t kittens.’ And he went on, with a protective note under his air of lofty scorn. ‘Come with me, moppets.’

  They obeyed him instantly, as though he had been an archbishop, and both stopped crying. Gavroche led them up the Rue Saint-Antoine in the direction of the Bastille, but not without backward glances, at the hairdresser’s shop.

  ‘That’s a cold fish, that one,’ he muttered. ‘Probably English.’

  A woman of the town, seeing them as they walked in single file with Gavroche at the head, gave a loud and disrespectful titter.

  ‘Don’t mention it, Miss Open-to-all,’ said Gavroche.

  But then he returned to the subject of the hairdresser.

  ‘I got the wrong animal. He’s not a fish but a snake. I’ll get hold of a locksmith and tie a bell to his tail.’

  The thought of the hairdresser had made him truculent. Crossing a gutter, they came up with a bearded caretaker, worthy to encounter Faust on the Brocken, with a broom in her hand.

  ‘Madame,’ he inquired, ‘are you going to fly away on it?’

  At the same time he splashed the freshly shined boots of a man who was passing.

  ‘Young devil!’ the man exclaimed furiously.

  Gavroche stuck his chin out over the shawl.

  ‘Monsieur has a complaint to make?’

  ‘I’m complaining about you!’

  ‘Sorry. No more complaints today. The office is closed.’

  But further up the street he noticed, shivering in a doorway, a beggar girl of thirteen or fourteen whose skirts were so short that they left her knees uncovered. She was beginning to be too old to go about like that. These are the tricks that growing up plays. Skirts become too short when nakedness becomes indecent.

  ‘Poor kid,’ said Gavroche. ‘She hasn’t even got drawers on. Here, take this.’

  He unwound the thick wool from around his neck and draped it over her skinny shoulders, and the muffler again became a shawl. The girl stared at him in astonishment, accepting the gift in silence. At the level of utmost poverty wits are too dulled to complain at misfortune or give thanks for a benefaction.

  ‘Brrr!’ said Gavroche, now shivering more than St Martin himself, who at least had kept half his cloak. And as though encouraged by the ‘brrr’ the rain came pouring down. Those black skies punish
good deeds. ‘And now what?’ said Gavroche. ‘Raining again. If it goes on like this I shall ask for my money back. All the same,’ he went on, looking at the girl as she drew the shawl tightly about her, ‘there’s one person who can keep warm.’ And he glared defiantly at the heavens. ‘So that’s one up to me!’

  He walked on with the two little boys following closely behind him, and when they came to the barred window which was the sign of a baker’s shop – for bread must be as rigorously protected as gold – he turned to them and said:

  ‘Talking of which, have you kids had anything to eat?’

  ‘Not since this morning, sir,’ the elder boy replied.

  ‘But haven’t you any parents?’ Gavroche demanded.

  ‘Yes, sir, I beg your pardon, we have a father and mother, but we don’t know where they are.’

  ‘We’ve been walking for hours,’ the elder boy went on. ‘We’ve even looked in the gutters for something to eat, but we couldn’t find anything.’

  ‘I know,’ said Gavroche. ‘The dogs get everything.’ He paused to consider and then said: ‘So – the parents gone astray and no knowing what’s become of them. That’s bad, my children. It’s a mistake to mislay grown-ups. Well, we’ve got to get a bite somewhere.’

  He asked no further questions. To be homeless was no novelty in his life. But the elder of the two little boys, who had now almost entirely recovered the ready heedlessness of childhood, exclaimed:

  ‘It’s queer all the same. Mamma said she’d take us to get some box for the decorations of Palm Sunday.’

  ‘My eye!’ said Gavroche.

  ‘Mamma’s a lady and she lives with Mamselle Miss.’

  ‘Does she now!’ said Gavroche.

  They were still standing outside the baker’s shop, and for some moments he had been exploring the numerous recesses in his ragged attire. Finally he looked up with what he hoped was an air of calm satisfaction but which was really one of triumph.

  ‘Don’t worry, lads. This will do for supper for three.’ And he brought a single sou out of one of his pockets.

  Without giving them time to stare, he pushed them ahead of him into the shop and slapped the sou down on the counter, exclaiming:

  ‘Baker’s boy! Five centimes’ worth of bread.’

  The man behind the counter, who was in fact the baker himself, picked up a loaf and a knife.

  ‘Three slices, boy,’ said Gavroche, and added in a dignified manner, ‘There are three of us.’ Then, seeing that the baker, after a glance at the three diners, had selected a cheap loaf, he put a finger to his nose with a sniff as lordly as if it conveyed a pinch of Frederick the Great’s snuff, and cried in outraged indignation:

  ‘Wossat?’

  Any reader who may be disposed to mistake this utterance for a word of Russian or Polish, or for one of those cries which the Mohawks or the Ojibasays address to one another across a river in the American far west, is hereby informed that it is an expression which he (the reader) commonly uses in place of the words, ‘What is that?’ The baker understood perfectly and replied:

  ‘Why, it’s bread, of course. Excellent second-class bread.’

  ‘Meaning larton brutal, black bread, prison bread,’ said Gavroche with cool disdain. ‘What I want is white bread. The real, polished stuff. I’m in a spending mood.’

  The baker could not restrain a smile, and while he cut the required loaf he surveyed his customers with an expression of sympathy, which outraged Gavroche.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing,’ he demanded, ‘looking us over like that?’ The three of them laid end to end would have come to little more than six feet.

  When the bread had been cut and the baker had pocketed his sou, Gavroche said to the two children, ‘Well, sail in!’ They stared in bewilderment and he burst out laughing. ‘They’re too small to know the language yet. Eat is what I mean.’ He picked up two of the three slices, and thinking that the older boy was more deserving of his notice and should be encouraged to assuage his larger appetite, he handed him the larger of the two. ‘Stop your gob with this.’

  He kept the smallest slice for himself.

  The little boys were ravenous, as was Gavroche. Standing there devouring the bread, they cluttered up the shop, and the owner, having got his money, was beginning to look sourly at them.

  ‘Outside,’ said Gavroche, and they continued on their way to the Bastille.

  Now and then when they passed a lighted shop-window the smaller boy paused to look at the time by a gunmetal watch hanging on a string round his neck.

  ‘A pampered chick,’ reflected Gavroche; but then he muttered between his teeth: ‘All the same, if I had brats I’d look after them better than that.’

  By the time they had finished the bread they had come to the corner of the dismal Rue des Ballets, at the end of which the low, forbidding doorway of the prison of La Force is to be seen.

  ‘Is that you, Gavroche?’ a voice said.

  ‘Is that you, Montparnasse?’ said Gavroche.

  The man who had spoken was indeed Montparnasse, concealed behind blue-tinted spectacles but perfectly recognizable to Gavroche.

  ‘My word!’ said Gavroche. ‘A coat that fits like a poultice and blue goggles like a professor! Classy, that’s what we are.’

  ‘Not so bad,’ said Montparnasse, and drew him away from the shop lights. The two little boys followed automatically, holding hands. When they were installed under the archway of a house entrance, out of earshot and sheltered from the rain, Montparnasse said:

  ‘Know where I’m going?’

  ‘To the gallows, like as not.’

  ‘Idiot. I’m going to meet Babet.’

  ‘So that’s her name,’ said Gavroche.

  ‘Not her – him.’

  ‘What – you mean Babet?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But I thought he’d been jugged.’

  ‘Yes, but he’s skipped,’ said Montparnasse, and he went on to describe how Babet, having been transferred to the Conciergerie, had escaped that same morning by slipping into the wrong file at the inspection parade. Gavroche greatly admired this act of cunning.

  ‘What an artist!’ he said.

  ‘But that’s not all,’ said Montparnasse.

  While he was listening to further details Gavroche had taken hold of the case Montparnasse was carrying. He tugged at the handle and the blade of a dagger came to light.

  ‘Hey!’ he said, hastily thrusting it back. ‘So you’re ready for action under the classy get-up!’ Montparnasse winked. ‘Are you expecting trouble with the cops?’

  ‘You never know,’ said Montparnasse airily. ‘Just as well to be prepared.’

  ‘Well, what exactly are you up to?’

  ‘Things,’ said Montparnasse, resuming his portentous manner. He then changed the subject. ‘By the way, a queer thing happened to me the other day.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘A few days ago it was. I held up a respectable old gent and he handed me a sermon and his purse. I put it in my pocket, but when I looked for it a few minutes later there was nothing there.’

  ‘Except the sermon,’ said Gavroche.

  ‘But what about you? What are you up to?’

  ‘I’m going to put these kids to bed.’

  ‘Put them to bed? Where?’

  ‘In my place.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘My home.’

  ‘You mean you’ve got a lodging?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, where is it?’

  ‘It’s in the elephant,’ said Gavroche.

  Montparnasse was not easily astonished, but this caused him to open his eyes.

  ‘In the elephant?’

  ‘That’s right. The Bastille elephant. What’s wrong with that?’

  Montparnasse’s face cleared and he looked approvingly at Gavroche.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘The elephant. What’s it like?’

  ‘Could
n’t be better. Real comfort. No draughts like you get under the bridges.’

  ‘But how do you get in?’

  ‘I manage.’

  ‘You mean there’s a hole?’

  ‘You bet. But you mustn’t let on. It’s between the front legs. The cops haven’t spotted it.’

  ‘So you climb up. Yes, I see.’

  ‘It takes me about two seconds. But I’ll have to find a ladder for these kids.’

  Montparnasse glanced at them and laughed.

  ‘How the devil did you come by them?’

  ‘A barber made me a present of them,’ said Gavroche simply.

  Another thought had now occurred to Montparnasse. ‘You recognized me pretty easily,’ he muttered.

  He got two small objects out of his pocket – two short lengths of quill bound with cotton – and inserted one in each nostril. They gave him a new nose.

  ‘That changes you quite a bit,’ said Gavroche. ‘A great improvement. You should always wear them.’

  Montparnasse was a good-looking youth but he could take a joke.

  ‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘what’s it like?’

  His tone of voice had also changed. In the twinkling of an eye he had become a different person.

  ‘Marvellous. How about giving us Punch and Judy?’

  At this the two little boys, who had hitherto paid no attention to the conversation, being too busy picking their own noses, turned and looked hopefully up at Montparnasse; but the latter, unfortunately, had grown solemn. He laid a hand on Gavroche’s shoulder and said gravely:

  ‘I don’t mind telling you, lad, that if I were in the market-place with my dogue, my dague, and my digue and you were so prodigal as to offer me ten sous I wouldn’t mind digging for them. But this isn’t Mardi Gras.’