They conferred in low voices.
‘Sure this is the place?’
‘Is there a dog?’
‘I don’t know. Anyway, I’ve brought something for it to eat.’
‘Have you brought the gummed paper to do the window-pane?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s an old gate,’ said a fifth man, speaking in a voice like that of a ventriloquist.
‘So much the better. We can cut through the bars all the easier.’
The sixth man, who had not yet spoken, proceeded to examine the gate as Éponine had done an hour before and was not slow to discover the bar loosened by Marius. But as he was about to wrench it aside a hand emerging from the darkness seized him by the arm. He felt himself thrust backward and a husky voice said in a warning undertone, ‘There’s a dog!’ The lanky figure of a girl rose up before him.
The man recoiled with the shock of the unexpected. He seemed to bristle, and nothing is more dismaying than the sight of a startled wild animal; their very fright is frightening. He drew back, exclaiming:
‘Who the devil are you?’
‘Your daughter.’
The man was Thénardier.
At this the five other men, Claquesous, Gueulemer, Babet, Montparnasse, and Brujon, gathered round them, moving silently, without haste and without speech, in the slow, deliberate manner that is proper to creatures of the night. They were equipped with a variety of sinister implements. Gueulemer had one of those curved crowbars that are known as jemmies.
‘What are you doing here? What do you want? Have you gone crazy?’ cried Thénardier, so far as anyone can be said to cry who is keeping his voice low. ‘Have you come to try and put me off?’
Éponine laughed and flung her arms round his neck.
‘I’m here because I’m here, dearest father. Aren’t I even allowed to sit down in the street? You’re the one who shouldn’t be here. What’s the use of coming here when it’s no good? I told Magnon it was a biscuit. There’s nothing to be got here. But you might at least kiss me. It’s a long time since we saw each other. So you’re out again?’
Thénardier grunted, trying to release himself from her arms:
‘That’s enough. You’ve kissed me. Yes, I’m not inside any more. And now, clear out.’
But Éponine still clung to him.
‘But how did you do it? It was very clever of you to get out. You must tell me how you did it. And mother - where is she? You must tell me about mother.’
‘She’s all right,’ said Thénardier. ‘I don’t know where she is. And now, clear out, can’t you?’
‘But I don’t want to go,’ said Éponine, pouting like a spoilt child. ‘I haven’t seen you for four months, and you want to send me away.’ And she tightened her grip on him.
‘This is getting silly,’ said Babet.
‘Hurry it up,’ said Gueulemer. ‘The cops’ll be along.
Éponine turned to the other men.
‘Why, it’s Monsieur Brujon! And Monsieur Babet. Good evening, Monsieur Claquesous. Don’t you recognize me, Monsieur Gueulemer? And how are you, Montparnasse?’
‘That’s all right, they all know you,’ said Thénardier. ‘Well, you’ve said hallo, and now for God’s sake go away and leave us in peace.’
‘This is a time for foxes, not for hens,’ said Montparnasse.
‘You can see we’ve got a job to do,’ said Babet.
Éponine took Montparnasse’s hand.
‘Careful,’ he said. ‘You’ll cut yourself. My knife’s open.’
‘Montparnasse, my love,’ said Éponine very sweetly, ‘you must learn to trust people. Aren’t I my father’s daughter? Don’t you remember, Monsieur Babet and Monsieur Gueulemer, that I was sent to look this place over?’
It is worthy of note that Éponine did not speak a word of argot. Since she had known Marius thieves’ slang had become impossible for her. She pressed her thin, bony fingers into Gueulemer’s rugged palm and went on:
‘You know I’m not stupid. People generally believe me. I’ve been useful to you more than once. Well, I’ve found things out, and I swear there’s nothing for you here. You’d be running risks for no reason.’
‘Two women alone,’ said Gueulemer.
‘No. The people have left.’
“The candles haven’t,’ said Babet.
And he pointed through the tree-tops to a flickering light in the attic, where Toussaint, staying up later than usual, was hanging out washing to dry.
Éponine made a last effort.
‘Anyway, they’re very poor, nothing there of any value.’
‘Go to the devil!’ exclaimed Thénardier. ‘When we’ve ransacked the house from top to bottom we’ll know if there’s anything worth having.’
He thrust her aside.
‘Montparnasse, you’re my friend,’ said Éponine. ‘You’re a good lad. Don’t go in!’
‘Watch out you don’t cut yourself,’ said Montparnasse.
Thénardier spoke with the authority he knew how to assume.
‘Off you go, girl, and leave the men to get on with their business.’
Éponine let go of Montparnasse’s hand and said:
‘So you’re determined to break in!’
‘That’s right,’ said the ventriloquist and chuckled.
‘Well, I won’t let you,’ said Éponine.
She stood with her back to the gate, facing the six men, all armed to the teeth and looking like demons in the dark. She went on in a low, resolute voice:
‘Listen to me. I mean this. If you try to get into the garden, if you so much as touch this gate, I’ll scream the place down. I’ll rouse the whole neighbourhood and have the lot of you pinched.’
‘She will, too,’ muttered Thénardier to Brujon and the ventriloquist.
Éponine nodded vigorously, adding, ‘And my father for a start!’
Thénardier moved towards her.
‘You keep your distance,’ she said.
He drew back, furiously muttering, ‘What’s got into her?’ And he spat the word at her: ‘Bitch!’
She laughed derisively.
‘Say what you like, you aren’t going in. I’m not a dog’s daughter but a wolf’s. There are six of you, six men and I’m one woman, but I’m not afraid of you. You aren’t going to break into this house, because I don’t choose to let you. I’m the watchdog, and if you try it I’ll bark. So you might as well be on your way. Go anywhere you like, but don’t come here. I won’t have it’
She took a step towards them, and she was awe-inspiring. She laughed again.
‘My God, do you think I’m scared? I’m used to starving in summer and freezing in winter. You poor fools, you think you can frighten any woman because you’ve got soft little sluts of mistresses who cower under the bedclothes when you talk rough. But I’m not scared.’ She looked at her father. ‘Not even of you.’ With fiery eyes she glared round at the other men. ‘What do I care if my body’s picked up in the street tomorrow morning, beaten to death by my own father - or found in a year’s time in the ditches round Saint-Cloud or the Île des Cygnes, along with the garbage and the dead dogs?’
She was interrupted by a fit of coughing, a hollow sound that came from the depths of her narrow, sickly chest.
‘I’ve only got to yell, you know, and people will come running. There are six of you, but I’m the public.’
Thénardier again made a move towards her. ‘Keep away!’ she cried. He stopped and said mildly: ‘All right, I won’t come any nearer, but don’t talk so loud. My girl, are you trying to prevent me working? After all, we have to earn our living. Have you no more feeling for your father?’
‘You sicken me,’ said Éponine.
‘But we’ve got to eat.’
‘I don’t care if you starve.’
Having said which she sat down again on the step, humming the refrain of ‘Ma grand’mère’ by Béranger, the most renowned songwriter of the day:
Combien je regrette
/>
Mon bras si dodu,
Ma jambe bien faite
Et le temps perdu*
She sat with her legs crossed, her elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand, swinging her foot with an air of indifference, the glow of a nearby street-lamp illuminating her posture and her profile. Through the rents in her tattered garment her thin shoulder-blades were to be seen. It would be hard to conceive a picture more determined or more surprising.
The six ruffians, disconcerted at being kept at bay by a girl, withdrew into the shadows and conferred together with furious shruggings of their shoulders, while she calmly but resolutely surveyed them.
‘There must be some reason,’ said Babet. ‘D’you think she’s fallen in love with the dog? But it would be a shame to pass it up. Two women and an old man who lives in the back-yard. There are good curtains in the windows. If you ask me, the man’s a Jew. I reckon it’s worth trying.’
‘Well, you lot go in,’ said Montparnasse. ‘I’ll stick with the girl, and if she gives so much as a squeak…’ He flourished the knife which he kept up his sleeve.
Thénardier said nothing, seeming content to leave the decision to the others.
Brujon, who was something of an oracle, and who, as we know, was the original promoter of the enterprise, had not so far spoken. He seemed to be thinking. It was said of him that he would stop at nothing, and he was known to have looted a police post out of sheer bravado. Moreover, he made up poems and songs, and this caused him to be highly esteemed.
Babet now looked at him:
‘Why aren’t you saying anything?’
Brujon remained silent for some moments, and then, portentously wagging his head, spoke as follows:
‘Well, listen. This morning I saw two sparrows fighting, and
this afternoon I bumped into a woman who abused me. Those are bad signs. Let’s go.’
So they went away. Montparnasse muttered:
‘All the same, if wanted, I was ready to give the girl a clout.’
‘I wouldn’t have,’ said Babet. ‘I don’t hit women.’
At the bend of the street they paused to exchange a few cryptic words.
‘Where are we going to sleep tonight?’
‘Under the town.’
‘Have you the key to the grating, Thénardier?’
‘Maybe.’
Éponine, intently watching, saw them move off the way they had come. She got up and stole along behind them, keeping close to walls and housefronts until they reached the boulevard. Here they separated, and melted like shadows into the night.
V
Things of the night
With the departure of the robber band the Rue Plumet resumed its night-time aspect.
What had happened in that street would not have been unusual in a jungle. Trees and thickets, tangled branches, creepers and undergrowth live their own dark lives, witnessing amid their savage growth sudden manifestations of the life they cannot grasp. What lives on a higher plane than man peers down through the mist at what is lower, and things unknown by daylight encounter each other in the dark. Wild, bristling Nature takes fright at what it feels to be supernatural. The powers of darkness know each other and preserve a mysterious balance between them. Tooth and claw respect the intangible. Animals that drink blood, voracious appetites in search of prey, instinct equipped with jaws and talons, with no source or aim other than the belly, apprehensively sniff the shrouded spectral figure, stalking in filmy, fluttering garments, that seems to them imbued with a terrible dead life. Those brutish creatures, wholly material, instinctively fight shy of the measureless obscurity contained in any unknown being. A dark figure barring the way stops a wild animal in its tracks. What emerges from the burial-ground alarms and dismays that which emerges from the lair; the bloodthirsty fears the sinister; the wolf recoils from the ghoul.
VI
Marius gives Cosette his address
While that human watchdog was guarding the gate, and the six ruffians were giving in to a girl, Marius was with Cosette.
Never had the night been more starry and enchanting, the trees more tremulous, the scent of grass more pungent; never had the birds twittered more sweetly as they fell asleep amid the leaves, or the harmonies of a serene universe been more in tune with the unsung music of love; and never had Marius been more enraptured and entranced. But he had found Cosette unhappy. She had been weeping and her eyes were red. It was the first cloud in their clear sky.
His first words to her were, ‘What’s the matter?’, and seated beside him on their bench by the steps into the villa she told him of her troubles.
‘My father said this morning that I must be ready. He has business to attend to and we may have to leave this place.’
Marius trembled. At the end of life death is a departure; but at life’s beginning a departure is a death.
In the past six weeks Marius, by gradual degrees, had been taking possession of Cosette: possession in ideal terms but deeply rooted. As we have said, in a first love it is the soul that is first captured, then the body; later the body comes before the soul, which may be forgotten altogether. Cynics may maintain that this is because the soul does not exist, but fortunately that sarcasm is a blasphemy. Marius possessed Cosette only in spirit; but his whole soul bound her jealously to him, and with overwhelming assurance. He possessed her smiles, the light of her blue eyes and the fragrance of her breath, the softness of her skin when he touched her hand, the magical grace of her neck, her every thought. They had vowed never to sleep without each dreaming of the other, and so he possessed all Cosette’s dreams. His gaze dwelt endlessly on the small hairs on the nape of her neck, which sometimes he stirred with his breathing, and he told himself that there was not one of them that did not belong to him. He studied and adored the things she wore – ribbons, gloves, cuffs, slippers – seeing them as hallowed objects of which he was the proprietor. He thought of himself as the owner of the tortoiseshell comb in her hair, and went so far – such are the first stirrings of a growing sensuality – as to consider that there was not a tape in her garments, a stitch in her stockings, a fold in her corset, that did not belong to him. Seated beside Cosette he felt himself to be lord of his domain, master of his estate, near his ruler and his slave. It seemed to him, so deeply merged were their souls, that if they had tried to separate them they would not have been able to tell which part belonged to which… ‘That bit’s mine’… ‘No, it’s mine’… ‘I’m sure you’re wrong. That bit is me’… ‘No. What you think is you is really me’… Marius was a part of Cosette, and Cosette was a part of Marius; he felt her life within him. To have Cosette, to possess her, this to him was no different from breathing. It was into this entranced state of absolute, virginal possession, this state of sovereignty, that the words, ‘We may be going away,’ suddenly fell; and it was the peremptory voice of reality warning him, ‘Cosette is not yours!’
Marius suddenly woke up. For six weeks he had been living outside life. Now he was brought harshly back to earth.
He could not speak, but Cosette felt his hand grow cold. She asked, as he had done, ‘What’s the matter?’ and he replied, so low that she could scarcely hear:
‘I don’t understand what you mean.’
‘Father told me this morning that I must get ready,’ she said. ‘He said that he had to go on a journey and we would go together. He would give me his clothes to pack, and I must see to everything –a big trunk for me and a little one for him. It must all be ready within a week, and perhaps we should be going to England.’
‘But that’s monstrous!’ cried Marius.
It is unquestionable that, to Marius at that moment, no act of despotic tyranny in the whole course of history, from Tiberius to Henry VIII, could rank with this in infamy – that Monsieur Fauchelevent should take his daughter to England because he had business there! He asked in a stifled voice:
‘And when, precisely, will you be leaving?’
‘He didn’t say.’
‘And
when will you be coming back?’
‘He didn’t tell me that, either.’
Marius rose to his feet and said coldly:
‘Cosette, are you going?’
She looked distractedly up at him.
‘But –’
‘Are you going to England?’
‘Why are you being so cruel to me?’
‘I’m simply asking if you’re going.’
‘But what else can I do?’ she cried, wringing her hands.
‘So you are going?’
‘But if my father goes…’
Cosette reached for Marius’s hand. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Then I shall go away.’
Cosette felt the words, rather than understood them, and turned so pale that her face gleamed whitely in the darkness. She murmured:
‘What do you mean?’
Marius looked away from her without answering; but then, looking back at her, he found that she was smiling. The smile of a woman one loves is discernible even in the dark.
‘Marius, how silly we’re being! I’ve got an idea.’
‘What is it?’
‘If we go you must come too. I’ll tell you where, and you must meet me there, wherever it is.’
Marius was now fully awake. He had come down to earth with a bump.
‘How can I possibly do that?’ he cried. ‘Are you crazy? It takes money to go to England, and I haven’t any. I already owe Courfeyrac more than ten louis - he’s a friend of mine. And I wear a hat that isn’t worth three francs, and I’ve lost half the buttons off my jacket, and my cuffs are frayed and my boots leak. I haven’t thought about things like that for six weeks. I haven’t told you, Cosette, but I’m a pauper. You only see me at night and you give me your hand; if you saw me by daylight you’d give me alms. England! I can’t even afford a passport.’
He got up and stood with his face pressed to the trunk of a tree with his arms above his head, unconscious of the roughness of the bark against his cheek and almost ready to collapse – a statue of despair. He stayed in this posture for a long time; depths such as these are timeless. Finally he turned, having heard a small, stifled sound behind him. Cosette was in tears.
Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774) Page 102
