Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  We cannot be said to read when in a state of violent emotion. Rather, we twist the paper in our hands, mutilating it as though it were an enemy, scoring it with the finger-nails of our anger or delight. Our eyes skip the beginning, hurrying on to the end. With a feverish acuteness we grasp the general sense, seize upon the main point and ignore the rest. In the letter written by Marius, Jean Valjean was conscious only of the following: ‘I shall die… When you read this my soul will be very near…’

  The effect of these words was to kindle in him a horrid exaltation, so that for a moment he was as it were dumbfounded by the sudden change of feeling in himself. He stared in a kind of drunken bemusement at the letter. There, beneath his eyes, was a marvel – the death of the hated person.

  His triumph cried out hideously within him. So it was done with! His problem was solved, more rapidly than he had dared to hope. The individual who threatened his happiness was to vanish from the scene; and of his own free will. Without any action on the part of Jean Valjean, through no fault of his, this ‘other man’ was about to die, perhaps was already dead. Valjean’s fevered mind made calculations. No, he was not yet dead. The letter was evidently intended to be read by Cosette tomorrow morning. Nothing had happened after those two bursts of musket fire between eleven and midnight. The real attack on the barricade would not begin until daylight. But it made no difference. Having joined in the battle the ‘other man’ was doomed to die, swept away in the stream of events… Valjean felt that he was saved. Once again he would have Cosette to himself, without any rival, and their life together would continue as before. He had only to keep this letter in his pocket. Cosette would never know what had happened to that other man. ‘I have only to let things take their course. There is no escape for the youth. If he is not yet dead he will certainly die. What happiness!’

  But having assured himself of this, Valjean’s gloom returned; and presently he went downstairs and roused the porter.

  About an hour later he left the house again, clad in the full uniform of the National Guard and fully armed. The porter had had no difficulty in finding in the neighbourhood the means to complete his equipment. With a loaded musket and a pouch filled with cartridges he set off for Les Halles.

  IV

  Excess of ealon the part of Gavroche

  Gavroche, meanwhile, had been having an adventure. Having conscientiously shattered the street-lamp in the Rue du Chaume, he had passed on into the Rue des Vieilles-Haudriettes where, finding nothing worthy of his attention, he had seen fit to unburden himself of a lusty repertoire of song. The sleeping or terrified houses had been favoured with subversive ditties of which the following is a sample:

  The birds sit brooding in the trees

  Where distantly the river swirls

  Their chirping lingers on the breeze-

  But where are all the golden girls?

  Pierrot, my friend, you’re on your knees,

  While through your head fair fortune whirls,

  And prayer perhaps may bring you ease –

  But where are all the golden girls?

  Toiling and buzzing like the bees

  You dream of houses decked with pearls,

  But I love Agnes and Louise –

  And where are all the golden girls?…

  And so on… While he walked Gavroche was acting his song, for the weight of the refrain is in the gesture that accompanies it. His face, with its endless variety of expressions, writhed in a series of grimaces more fantastic and extraordinary than those of a torn cloth flying in the wind. Unhappily, since he was alone and in darkness, no one saw or could have seen him: and this wealth was scattered in vain.

  But suddenly he stopped short – ‘Away with sentiment,’ he said.

  His cat’s eyes had discerned in the recess of a doorway what is known to painters as an ensemble – a composition, that is to say, of man and object. The object was a handcart, the man was an Auvergnat, a peasant from the Auvergne, lying asleep in it. The handles of the cart were resting on the pavement and the man’s head was resting against the tail-board, so that he lay sloping downwards with his feet touching the ground. Gavroche, rich in worldly experience, at once knew what he had to deal with – a street carrier who had drunk rather too much and was now sleeping it off.

  ‘So here’s the use of a summer night,’ reflected Gavroche. ‘The Auvergnat is asleep in his cart. We requisition the cart for the service of the Republic and leave the Auvergnat to the Monarchy.’ For it had instantly occurred to him that the cart would come in very handy on the barricade.

  The man was snoring. Gavroche gently pulled the cart one way and the man the other by his feet, so that in a very short time the Auvergnat, undisturbed, was lying on the pavement. The cart was now free.

  Gavroche, being always prepared for emergencies, was as always well equipped. He got out of his pocket a scrap of paper and a stub of red pencil pinched from a carpenter’s shop, and wrote as follows:

  French Republic

  Received – one handcart.

  (signed) GAVROCHE

  He then put the receipt in the pocket of the snoring Auvergnat’s waistcoat, grasped the handcart by the handles, and set off for the market at a run, pushing it with a glorious clatter in front of him.

  This was dangerous, for there was a military post in the Imprimerie Royale, the royal printing-works. Gavroche did not think of this. The post was occupied by a section of the Garde Nationale from outside Paris. For some time there had been a certain restiveness in the section and heads had been raised from camp beds. The smashing of two street-lamps, followed by a song delivered at full lung-power, all this was rather surprising in unadventurous streets which were accustomed to put out their candles and go to bed at nightfall. For the past hour the urchin Gavroche had been setting up a stir in that peaceful neighbourhood that was like the buzzing of a fly in a bottle. The out-of-town sergeant was listening. But he was also waiting, being a prudent man.

  The clatter of the handcart over the cobbles robbed him of all further excuse for delay, and he decided to go out and reconnoitre. ‘– there must be a whole gang of them,’ he reflected. ‘Gently does it.’ Who could doubt that the Hydra of Anarchy had raised its head and was rampaging through the quarter? He ventured cautiously out of the post.

  And Gavroche, pushing the handcart into the Rue des Vieilles-Haudriettes, found himself suddenly confronted by a uniform, a plumed helmet, and a musket. For the second time he was brought up short.

  ‘So here we are,’ he said. ‘Authority in person. Good day to you.’ Gavroche was never long put out of countenance.

  ‘Where are you going, rascal?’ barked the sergeant.

  ‘Citizen,’ said Gavroche, ‘I haven’t called you a bourgeois. Why should you insult me?’

  ‘Where are you going, clown?’

  ‘Monsieur,’ said Gavroche, ‘yesterday you were perhaps a man of wit, but today your wits have failed you.’

  ‘I’m asking where you’re going.’

  ‘How politely you talk!’ You know, you don’t look your age. You should sell your hair at a hundred francs apiece. That would net you five hundred francs.

  ‘Where are you going? Where are you off to? What are you doing, you young scoundrel?’

  ‘That’s a very ugly word. Before you have another drink you should wash your mouth out.’

  The sergeant levelled his musket.

  ‘Will you or will you not tell me where you’re going?’

  ‘My lord General,’ said Gavroche, ‘I’m on my way to fetch the doctor for my wife, who’s in labour.’

  ‘To arms!’ shouted the sergeant.

  It is the hall-mark of great men that they can turn weaknesses into triumph. Gavroche summed up the situation at a glance. The handcart had got him into trouble and the handcart must get him out of it. As the sergeant bore down upon him, the cart, driven forward like a battering ram, took him in the stomach and he fell backwards into the gutter while his musket was discharged into
the air. The sound of his shot brought his men rushing out of the post, and that first shot was followed by a ragged burst of firing, after which they reloaded and began again. This blind-man’s-buff engagement lasted a quarter of an hour. The casualties were a number of window-panes.

  Meanwhile, Gavroche, who had taken to his heels, pulled up half-a-dozen streets away and sat down on a kerbstone to get his breath. He raised his left hand to the level of his nose and jerked it forward three times, at the same time clapping the back of his head with his right hand – the sovereign gesture with which the Paris street-urchin sums up all French irony, and which is evidently efficacious, since it has endured for half a century.

  But his triumph was damped by a sobering thought.

  ‘It’s all very fine,’ he reflected. ‘I’m laughing fit to split and having a high old time, but now I’m on the wrong road and I’ve got a long way to go. It won’t do for me to get back too late.’

  Running on he resumed his song, and the following stanza echoed through the sombre streets:

  We drain the wine-cup to the lees,

  And cheer the flag when it unfurls;

  And life and death are as you please-

  But where are all the golden girls?

  The armed sortie from the post was not without a sequel. The handcart was captured and its drunken owner taken prisoner. The one was impounded and the other half-heartedly tried by court martial as an accomplice of the rebels. Thus did authority display its zeal in the protection of society.

  Gavroche’s adventure, now a part of the folk-lore of the Temple quarter, is among the most terrifying memories of aged citizens of the Marais, its title being’ Night attack on the post at the Imprimerie Royale’.

  PART FIVE

  JEAN VALJEAN

  Book One

  War Within Four Walls

  I

  Scylla and Charybdis

  THE TWO barricades most likely to be recalled by the student of social disorder do not come within the period of this story. Both of them, each symbolic of a particular aspect of a redoubtable situation, were flung up during the insurrection of June 1848, the biggest street-war in history.

  It sometimes happens in defiance of principle, regardless of liberty, equality and fraternity, universal suffrage, and the government of the whole by the whole, that an outcast sector of the populace, the riff-raff, rises up in its anguish and frustration, its miseries and privation, its fever, ignorance, darkness, and despair, to challenge the rest of society. The down-and-outs do battle with the common law: mobocracy rebels against Demos.

  Those are melancholy occasions, for their dementia always contains an element of justice, and the conflict an element of suicide. The very words accepted as terms of abuse – down-and-outs, riffraff, mobocracy – point, alas, rather to the faults of those who rule than to the sins of those who suffer, to the misdeeds of privilege rather than to those of the disinherited. For our own part, we can never utter those words without a feeling of grief and respect, for where history scrutinizes the facts to which they correspond it often finds greatness hand-in-hand with misery. Athens was a mobocracy: down-and-outs made Holland: the common people more than once saved Rome, and the rabble followed Jesus Christ

  There is no thinker who has not at times contemplated the splendour rising from below. It was of the rabble that St Jerome must surely have been thinking – the vagabond poor, the outcasts from which the apostles and martyrs sprang – when he uttered the words, Fex urbis, lex orbis, ‘Dregs of the city, law of the world’.

  The fury of the mob which suffers and bleeds, its violence running counter to the principles which bring it life, its assault upon the rule of law, these are popular upheavals which must be suppressed. The man of probity stands firm, and from very love of the people opposes them. But he deeply understands their reason, and does so with respect. It is one of those rare occasions when doing what we are in duty bound to do, we have a sense of misgiving which almost calls on us to stay our hand. We go on because we must but with uneasy conscience: duty is burdened with a heavy heart.

  June 1848, let me hasten to say, was exceptional, an event which history finds it almost impossible to classify. All the words we have used must be discarded in respect of that extraordinary uprising, which embodied all the warranted apprehensions of labour demanding its rights. It had to be combated; this was necessary: for it was an attack on the Republic. But what, finally, was June 1848? It was a revolt of the populace against itself.

  Where the theme is not lost sight of there can be no digression. We may therefore permit ourselves to direct the reader’s attention to those two wholly unique strongholds which characterized that insurrection.

  One barred the entrance to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and the other blocked the approach to the Faubourg du Temple. No one who beheld under that brilliant June sky those two formidable creations of civil war will ever forget them.

  The Saint-Antoine barricade was enormous – some three storeys high and seven hundred feet in length. It ran from one end to the other of the vast mouth of the Faubourg – that is to say, across three streets. It was jagged, makeshift, and irregular, castellated like an immense medieval survival, buttressed with piles of rubble that were bastions in themselves, with bays and headlands and, in solid support, the two larger promontories formed by the houses at the end of the streets – a giant’s causeway along one side of the famous Place de la Bastille that had witnessed 14 July. Nineteen lesser barricades were arrayed in depth along the street behind it. The sight of this barricade alone conveyed a sense of intolerable distress which had reached the point where suffering becomes disaster. Of what was it built? Of the material of three six-storey houses demolished for the purpose, some people said. Of the phenomenon of overwhelming anger, said others. It bore the lamentable aspect of all things built by hatred – a look of destruction. One might ask, ‘Who built all that?’; but one might equally ask, ‘Who destroyed all that?’ Everything had gone on to it, doors, grilles, screens, bedroom furniture, wrecked cooking-stoves and pots and pans, piled up haphazard, the whole a composite of paving-stones and rubble, timbers, iron bars, broken window-panes, seatless chairs, rags, odds and ends of every kind – and curses. It was great and it was trivial, a chaotic parody of emptiness, a mingling of debris. Sisyphus had cast his rock upon it and Job his potsherd. In short it was terrible, an Acropolis of the destitute. Overturned carts protruded from its outer slope, axles pointing to the sky like scars on a rugged hillside: an omnibus, blithely hoisted by vigorous arms to its summit, as though the architects had sought to add impudence to terror, offered empty shafts to imaginary horses. The huge mass, jetsam of rebellion, was Pelion piled on the Ossa of all previous revolutions -1793 on 1789,9 Thermidor on 10 August, 18 Brumaire on 21 January, 1848 on 1830. The site was highly appropriate: it was a barricade worthy to appear on the place from which the grim prison had vanished. If the ocean built dykes, it was thus that it would build them: the fury of the tide itself was imprinted on that shapeless mound. And the tide was the mob. One seemed to behold riot turned to rubble. One seemed to hear, buzzing over that barricade as though it were their hive, the gigantic dark-bodied bees of violent progress. Was it a cluster of thickets, a bacchanalian orgy, or a fortress? Delirium seemed to have built it with the beating of its wings. There was something of the cloaca about it, and something of Olympus. One might see, in that hugger-mugger of desperation, roofing-ridges, fragments from garrets with their coloured wallpaper, window frames with panes intact set upright and defying cannon fire amid the rubble, uprooted fireplaces, wardrobes, tables, benches piled in clamouring disorder, a thousand beggarly objects disdained even by beggars, the expression of fury and nothingness. One might have said that it was the tattered clothing of the people – a clothing of wood, stone and iron – which the Faubourg Saint-Antoine had swept out of doors with a huge stroke of the broom, making of its poverty its protective barrier. Hunks of wood like chopping-blocks, brackets attached to wooden frames
that looked like gibbets, wheels lying flat upon the rubble – all these lent to the anarchic edifice a recollection of tortures once suffered by the people The Saint-Antoine barricade used everything as a weapon, everything that civil war can hurl at the head of society. It was not a battle but a paroxysm. The fire-arms defending the stronghold, among which were a number of blunderbusses, poured out fragments of pottery, knuckle-bones, coat buttons, and even castors, dangerous missiles because of their metalwork. That barricade was a mad thing, flinging an inexpressible clamour into the sky. At moments when it defied the army, it was covered with bodies and with tempest, surmounted by a dense array of flaming heads. It was a thing of swarming activity, with a bristling fringe of muskets, sabres, cudgels, axes, pikes and bayonets. A huge red flag flapped in the wind. The shouting of orders was to be heard, warlike song, the roll of drums, the sobbing of women, and the dark raucous laughter of the half-starved. It was beyond reason and it was alive; and, as though from the back of some electric-coated animal, lightning crackled over it. The spirit of revolution cast its shadow over that mound, resonant with the voice of the people, which resembles the voice of God: a strange nobility emanated from it. It was a pile of garbage, and it was Sinai.

  As we have said, it was raised in the name of the Revolution. But what was it fighting? It was fighting the Revolution. That barricade, which was chance, disorder, terror, misunderstanding and the unknown, was at war with the Constituent Assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage, the nation and the Republic. It was the ‘Carmagnole’ defying the ‘Marseillaise’. An insane but heroic defiance, for that ancient faubourg is a hero.