Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  ‘And there we’ll be taken,’ said another voice. ‘They’ll see a man in a smock and cap and they’ll want to know where he comes from. They’ll look at his hands, they’ll smell powder, and he’ll be shot.’

  Without replying Enjolras touched Combeferre’s shoulder and the two of them went into the tavern. They re-emerged a minute later, Enjolras carrying the four uniforms stripped off the bodies of the dead soldiers and Combeferre with their belts and helmets.

  ‘Anyone can pass through the soldiers’ ranks wearing these,’ Enjolras said. “They’ll do for four of you.’ He dropped the uniforms on the ground.

  Their stoical audience still showed no sign of obeying, and Combeferre now addressed them:

  ‘We must show a little pity,’ he said. ‘Don’t you see what this means? It concerns the women. Have none of you any womenfolk, or any children? Have you or haven’t you? What of the mothers rocking the cradles with their young around them? If there is one among you who has never seen a nursing breast let him raise his hand. You want to get yourself killed, and so do I, but I don’t like the thought of women wringing their phantom hands over me. The by all means, but do not cause others to the. The act of suicide we have resolved upon is sublime; but suicide is a private matter that admits of no extension, and when it is passed on to those nearest us it becomes murder. Think of small heads of fair hair, and old, white heads. Enjolras has just told me that on the fifth floor of a house at the corner of the Rue du Cygne he saw a candle burning and, silhouetted against the window-pane, the nodding head of an old woman who looked as though she had sat up waiting all night. If she is the mother of any one of you then he should hurry back to her and say, “Mother, here I am.” He need not worry, the rest of us will do the job here. Those supporting a family by their labour have no right to sacrifice their lives – it is an act of desertion. Those of you who have daughters or sisters – have you thought of them? Who will feed them when you are dead? It is a terrible thing for a girl to go hungry. A man may beg, but a woman has to sell. Those charming creatures who are the delight of your life, the Jeannes or Lises or Mimis who fill your home with innocent gaiety and fragrance – are you to leave them to starve? What am I to say to you? There is a market in human flesh, and it is not your disembodied hands, fluttering over them, that will protect them from being drawn into it. Think of the streets, the shops outside which women go to and fro in low-cut gowns with their feet in the mud. Those women, too, were once chaste. Think of your sisters, those of you who have any. Prostitution, the police, the Saint-Lazare prison – that is what they will come to, those delicate, modest creatures, those marvels of gentleness and beauty. And you will no longer be there to protect them. You wanted to rescue the people from Royalty, and so you have handed your daughters over to the police. Take care, my friends; show compassion. Women, poor souls, are not much given to thinking. We pride ourselves on the fact that they are less educated than men. We prevent them from reading, from thinking, from concerning themselves with politics. Will you not also prevent them from going to the morgue tonight to identify your bodies? Those of you who have families must be sensible fellows and shake us by the hand and clear out leaving the rest of us to see this business through. I know it is not easy to run away. It’s difficult. But the greater the difficulty the greater the merit. You say to yourself: “I’ve got a musket and here I am, and here I stay.” It is easily said. But there is tomorrow, friends. You won’t be living, but your families will. Think of their sufferings. Have you thought of what will happen to the rosy-cheeked, laughing, chattering infant that feels so warm in your embrace? I remember one such, no higher than my knee. The father died and some poor people took it in out of charity, but they had not enough to eat themselves. The child was always hungry. It never cried. It huddled near the cooking-stove, which was never lighted. The chimney had been patched with clay. The child with its small hands scratched out fragments of the clay and ate them. It breathed with difficulty; it was white-faced, with weak limbs and a swollen stomach. It said nothing and did not answer when it was spoken to. It was taken to the Necker hospital, which is where I saw it. I was a junior physician at that hospital. The child died. If there are parents among you, fathers who know the happiness of going for a walk on Sunday with a child clinging to his strong, protective hand, they should think of that dead child as though it were their own. I can see him now, that poor little boy, lying naked on the dissecting-table, with the ribs standing out under his skin like the furrows of a ploughed field. We found mud in his stomach and ashes in his teeth. Let us search our conscience and take counsel with our hearts. Statistics show that fifty-five per cent of abandoned children die. I repeat, we have the women to consider – mothers, girls and babies. Have I said anything about yourselves? I know very well what you are. I know that you are brave, and that your hearts are uplifted at the thought of shedding your lives in our great cause. I know that each of you feels that he has been chosen to the usefully and magnificently and that each wants his share in the triumph. That is splendid, but you are not alone in the world. You have to think of others. You must not be egoists.’

  His audience gloomily bowed their heads.

  Strange are the contradictions of the human heart, even in its noblest moments! Combeferre, who said these things, was not an orphan. He remembered other men’s mothers, but not his own. He was himself one of the ‘egoists’.

  Marius, fasting and feverish, plunged from the heights of hope to the depths of despair and, seeing his personal shipwreck approach its end, was becoming ever more deeply sunk in that state of visionary stupor which precedes the fateful moment deliberately invited. A pyschologist might have studied in him the increasing symptoms of that classic condition well known to science, which bears the same relation to suffering as sensuality does to physical delight. Despair has its own ecstasies and Marius had reached them. He was witnessing events as though from outside, and the things going on around him seemed to him remote, a pattern to be conscious of, but of which the details were disregarded. He saw the figures of men coming and going in a haze, and heard the sound of voices speaking in a void.

  But one thing troubled him. There was in his situation one thought that touched and aroused him. Although his only desire was to die, and nothing must be allowed to distract him from his purpose, the thought recurred to him in his desolate, befogged state, that this resolve must not prevent him from saving the life of some other person.

  He suddenly spoke.

  ‘Enjolras and Combeferre are right,’ he said. ‘I agree with them that there must be no unnecessary sacrifice. And there is no time to be lost As Combeferre has said, some of you have families – mothers, wives, and children. Those men must leave at once.’

  No man stirred.

  ‘Married men and the supporters of families are to break ranks!’ Marius repeated.

  His authority was great. Enjolras was captain of the fortress, but Marius was its saviour.

  ‘That is an order!’ shouted Enjolras.

  ‘I beseech you,’ said Marius.

  And then, stirred by Combeferre’s address, shaken by Enjolras’s order, and touched by Marius’s plea, the heroic defenders began to denounce one another. “That’s right,’ a youth said to another man. ‘You’re a father of a family. You must go’ … ‘You’re keeping your two sisters,’ the older man replied. And the strangest of altercations broke out, as to who should not stay to be killed.

  ‘Be quick,’ said Courfeyrac. ‘In another quarter of an hour it will be too late.’

  ‘Citizens,’ said Enjolras, ‘this is the Republic, where universal suffrage prevails. You must decide by vote who is to go.’

  He was obeyed. Within a few minutes five men had been selected and they stepped out of the ranks.

  ‘Five!’ exclaimed Marius. ‘But there are only four uniforms.’

  ‘Then,’ said the five men, ‘one of us must stay.’

  And the noble-hearted dispute was resumed, as to which had the b
est reason for going.

  ‘You have a wife who loves you … You have an old mother … You have neither Father nor mother, but what about your three younger brothers? … You’re the father of five children … You have a right to go on living; at seventeen you’re too young to die …’

  Those great revolutionary barricades were gathering places of heroism. The improbable became natural, and no man surprised his fellow.

  ‘Hurry up!’ repeated Courfeyrac.

  Someone shouted to Marius:

  ‘You decide which one’s to stay.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the five men. ‘You choose and we’ll obey.’

  Marius had thought that he was no longer capable of any profound emotion, but at the idea that he should select a man for death he felt his blood run cold. He would have turned pale, had he not been pale already.

  He moved forward and the five men, their eyes blazing with the fire that is the message of Thermopylae, greeted him with cries of ‘Me! … Me! …Me! …’

  Marius, in his stupor, counted them. There were still five. Then he looked down at the four uniforms.

  As he did so a fifth uniform was added to the heap, as though it had fallen from the clouds. The fifth man was saved!

  Looking round, Marius recognized Monsieur Fauchelevent.

  Jean Valjean had entered the stronghold.

  Whether acting on information, or by instinct or chance, he had come by way of the Rue Mondétour, and, in his National Guard uniform, had had no difficulty in getting through. The rebel sentry posted in the alley had seen no reason to raise the alarm on account of a single man but had let him pass, reflecting that either he had come to join them or, at the worst, would be taken prisoner. In any event, the situation was too acute for the sentry to leave his post.

  No one had noticed Valjean when he appeared, all eyes being intent on the five men and the four uniforms. Valjean had stood listening, and, grasping the situation, had silently stripped off his uniform and dropped it on the pile.

  The sensation was enormous.

  ‘Who is this man?’ demanded Bossuet.

  ‘At least,’ said Combeferre, ‘he’s ready to save another man’s life.’

  Marius said authoritatively:

  ‘I know him.’

  This was enough for them. Enjolras turned to Jean Valjean.

  ‘Citizen, you are welcome.’ And he added. ‘You know that we are about to die.’

  Valjean, without replying, helped the man he had saved to put on his uniform.

  V

  The world as seen from the top of the barricade

  Their situation, in that fateful hour and that inexorable place, found its ultimate and utmost expression in the supreme melancholy of Enjolras.

  Enjolras embodied in himself the fullness of revolution. Yet he was incomplete, in so far as the absolute may be incomplete. There was in him too much of Saint-Just, too little of Anacharsis Clootz.* Nevertheless his thinking, in the ABC Society, had been to some extent influenced by the outlook of Combeferre. Gradually ridding himself of the narrow restrictions of dogma, he had begun to consider the wider aspect of progress, and had come to accept, as the final, magnificent goal of social evolution, the expansion of the great French Republic into the republic of all mankind. As for the immediate steps to be taken, since they were in a situation of violence he desired them to be violent; in this he was unshakeable, a follower of that epic, redoubtable school of thought which may be summed up in a date, the year 1793.

  Enjolras was standing on the steps of the barricade with one arm resting on the muzzle of his carbine. He was thinking, quivering as though swayed in a breeze under the gallows – influenced by that place of death. A kind of dark fire smouldered in his absent, meditative eye. Suddenly he raised his head, and with his fair hair flowing back like that of the angel on his dark chariot of stars, or like a lion’s mane, he cried:

  ‘Citizens, can you conceive of the future? Streets in cities bathed in light, green branches on the thresholds of the houses and all nations sisters, all men upright; old men blessing the young, and the past loving the present; thinkers wholly free to pursue their thought, and religious believers all equal before the law; Heaven itself the one religion, God its immediate priest and the conscience of mankind its altar. An end to hatred: the brotherhood of the workshop and the school; notoriety both punishment and reward; work for all men, justice for all men, and peace, an end to bloodshed and to war. To tame the natural world is the first step, and the second step is to achieve the ideal. Consider what progress has already been accomplished. The primitive races of mankind were terrified by the hydra that flew upon the water, by the dragon that belched fire, by the griffin, that aerial monster with the wings of an eagle and a tiger’s claws – fearful creatures beyond the control of men. But man set his traps, the miraculous traps conceived by human intelligence, and in the end he captured them.

  ‘We have tamed the hydra, and its new name is the steamship; we have tamed the dragon, and it is the locomotive; we have not yet tamed the griffin, but we have captured it and its name is the balloon. On the day when this Promethean task is completed and man has finally harnessed to his will the ancient triple chimera of the hydra, the dragon, and the griffin he will be the master of fire, air, and water, and he will have become to the rest of living Creation what the Gods of antiquity were to him. Have courage, citizens! We must go forward. But what are we aiming at? At government by knowledge, with the nature of things the only social force, natural law containing its penalties and sanctions within itself, and based on its evident truth: a dawn of truth corresponding to the laws of daylight. We are moving towards the union of nations and the unity of mankind. No more make-believers and no more parasites. Reality governed by truth, that is our aim. Civilization will hold its court in Europe and later will preside over all the continents in a Grand Parliament of Intelligence. History has already known something of the kind. The Amphictyonic League held two sessions a year, one at Delphi, the place of the Gods, and the other at Thermopylae, the place of heroes. Europe will have its Amphictyon, and presently the whole world. France carries this sublime future in her loins. It is here that the nineteenth century is being conceived. What Greece first essayed is worthy to be achieved by France. Listen to me, my friend Feuilly, sturdy workman that you are, man of the people and of all peoples. I honour you. You see clearly into the future, and see rightly. You knew neither father nor mother, Feuilly; you have made humanity your mother and justice your father. You are to die in this place, which is to say that you are to triumph. Citizens, no matter what happens today, in defeat no less than victory, we shall be making a revolution. Just as a great fire lights up all the town, so a revolution lights up all mankind. And what is the revolution that we shall make? I have already told you: it is the revolution of Truth. In terms of policy there is only one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself, and this sovereignty of me over me is called Liberty. Where two or more of these sovereignties are gathered together, that is where the State begins. But there can be no withdrawal from this association. Each sovereignty must concede some portion of itself to establish the common law, and the portion is the same for all. The common law is nothing but the protection of all men based on the rights of each, and the equivalent sacrifice that all men make is called Equality. The protection of all men by every man is Fraternity, and the point at which all these sovereignties intersect is called Society. Since this intersection is a meeting point, the point is a knot – hence what is called the “social bond”. It is sometimes called the social contract, which comes to the same thing, since the word “contract” is etymologically based on the idea of drawing together. But equality, citizens, does not mean that all plants must grow to the same height – a society of tall grass and dwarf trees, a jostle of conflicting jealousies. It means, in civic terms, an equal outlet for all talents; in political terms, that all votes will carry the same weight; and in religious terms that all beliefs will enjoy equal rights. Equality h
as a means at its disposal – compulsory free education. The right to learn the alphabet, that is where we must start. Primary school made obligatory for everyone and secondary school available to everyone, that must be the law. And from those identical schools the egalitarian society will emerge. Yes, education! Light! – light – all things are born of light and all things return to it! Citizens, our nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Nothing in it will resemble ancient history. Today’s fears will all have been abolished – war and conquest, the clash of armed nations, the course of civilization dependent on royal marriages, the birth of hereditary tyrannies, nations partitioned by a congress or the collapse of a dynasty, religions beating their heads together like rams in the wilderness of the infinite. Men will no longer fear famine or exploitation, prostitution from want, destitution born of unemployment – or the scaffold, or the sword, or any other malice of chance in the tangle of events. One might almost say, indeed, that there will be no more events. Men will be happy. Mankind will fulfil its own laws as does the terrestrial globe, and harmony will be restored between the human souls and the heavens. The souls will circle about the Truth as the planets circle round the sun. I am speaking to you, friends, in a dark hour; but this is the hard price that must be paid for the future. A revolution is a toll-gate. But mankind will be liberated, uplifted and consoled. We here affirm it, on this barricade. Whence should the cry of love proceed, if not from the sacrificial altar? Brothers, this is the meeting place of those who reflect and those who suffer. This barricade is not a matter of rubble and paving-stone; it is built of two components, of ideas and of suffering. Here wretchedness and idealism come together. Day embraces night and says to her, “I shall die with you, and you will be reborn with me.” It is of the embraces of despair that faith is born. Suffering brings death, but the idea brings immortality. That agony and immortality will be mingled and merged in one death. Brothers, we who die here will die in the radiance of the future. We go to a tomb flooded with the light of dawn.’