Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  But at about the same time two other persons were approaching the pond. They were a gentleman nearing fifty and a six-year-old boy, evidently father and son. The boy was clutching a large bun.

  In those days, certain near-by houses in the Rue Madame and the Rue d’Enfer had keys to the Luxembourg which their occupants could use when the gates were closed – a privilege that has since been abolished. No doubt this accounted for the presence of the new arrivals.

  The two strays, seeing, the ‘quality’ approach, tried to hide more securely.

  The gentleman was of the middle-class, possibly the same one whom Marius, in the fever of love, had overheard in this very place counselling his child to avoid all excesses. He had a complacent, affable manner and a mouth which, since it never closed, was always smiling; a mechanical smile, the result of too much jaw and too little flesh, which displayed his teeth rather than his nature. The child, who had bitten into his bun but not finished it, looked over-fed. He was dressed in the uniform of the Garde Nationale, whereas his father was prudently wearing civilian attire.

  Father and son stopped by the pond to look at its two swans, for which the gentleman seemed to have an especial admiration. He even resembled them, in the sense that he walked like them. At that moment, however, the swans were swimming, this being their principal talent, and they looked, and were, superb.

  If the two ragamuffins had been near enough, and old enough to understand, they might have profited by the words of a citizen of solid worth.

  ‘A wise man contents himself with little,’ said the father. ‘Look at me, my boy. I have no love of display. You’ll never see me in robes of gold and precious stones. I leave such false adornments to persons of less regulated minds.’

  Here there was a louder burst of sound from the direction of Les Halles, an uproar of voices and the tolling of a bell.

  ‘What is that?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Saturnalia,’ the sage replied. He had suddenly noticed the ragamuffins, huddled and motionless behind the green-painted shanty that housed the swans. ‘And this is the beginning,’ he said, adding after an impressive pause, ‘Anarchy has entered the garden.’

  His son, meanwhile, had taken a mouthful of his bun. He spat it out and suddenly burst into tears.

  ‘What are you crying about?’ the father asked.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ the boy replied.

  The father’s smile expanded.

  ‘One doesn’t need to be hungry to eat a cake.’

  ‘I don’t like it. It’s stale.’

  ‘You don’t want any more?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then throw it to our web-footed friends.’

  The son hesitated. The fact that one does not want one’s cake is not a reason for giving it away.

  ‘Be generous,’ said the father. ‘We must always be kind to animals.’

  Taking the bun, he tossed it into the pond. It fell not far from the edge, and the swans, who were plunging their heads in the middle of the pond, did not see it. The sage, fearing that it might be wasted, flapped his arms like a semaphore to attract their attention. Upon which, seeing something floating on the water, they proceeded slowly towards it, with the solemn stateliness that befits white creatures.

  ‘You see?’ said the sage, and delivered himself of a happy play on words: ‘Les cygnes comprennent les signes.’

  There was another and still louder burst of tumult from that distant part of the town, and this time it sounded ominous. It can happen that one puff of wind may speak more authoritatively than another. This one clearly conveyed to the Luxembourg the roll of drums, the rat-a-tat of musketry, the bellow of voices, the thud of cannon, and the mournful tolling of the bell. Moreover at that moment a cloud obscured the sun.

  The swans were still on their way.

  ‘We must go home,’ the father said. ‘They’re attacking the Tuileries.’ He took his son’s hand. ‘It is no great distance from the Tuileries to the Luxembourg, no greater than the distance separating Royalty from the peerage.* There will be shooting.’ He glanced up at the cloud. ‘And perhaps it is going to rain as well. Even the heavens are taking a hand. We must hurry.’

  ‘I want to see the swans eat my bun,’ the little boy said.

  ‘That would be imprudent,’ the father said. And he led away his bourgeois offspring, who kept looking back until a clump of trees got in the way.

  The bun was still floating on the surface of the pond, and now the two ragamuffins, as well as the swans, were approaching it, the younger with his eyes intent upon it and the elder with an eye on the retreating gentleman.

  When father and son were out of sight the older boy flung himself down at the water’s edge and, leaning over the stone rim of the pond as far as he dared, tried to fish out the bun with the stick he was holding in his right hand. The swans, seeing a rival, increased their speed and in doing so set up a ripple which helped the small fisherman. The bun was driven gently towards him, and by the time the swans arrived it was within reach of his stick. He swiftly drew it in, flourished his stick to frighten off the swans, then fished it out and got to his feet. The bun was soaked, but the boys were both hungry and thirsty. The elder boy divided it into two parts, one large and one small, and handing his brother the larger of the two said, ‘There you are. Stop your gob with that.’

  XVII

  Interlude

  Marius had dashed out beyond the barricade with Combeferre behind him. But it was too late. Gavroche was dead. Combeferre brought back the basket of ammunition while Marius brought back the boy, reflecting sadly as he did so that he was repaying the service Thénardier had done his father, with the difference that his father had been still alive. When he returned to the stronghold with the body in his arms his face, like that of Gavroche, was covered with blood. A bullet had grazed his scalp without his noticing it.

  Courfeyrac loosened his cravat and bandaged his forehead. Gavroche was laid on the table beside Monsieur Mabeuf, and the same black shawl sufficed to cover the bodies of the old man and the boy.

  Combeferre doled out the captured cartridges – fifteen rounds to each man. But when he offered his share to Jean Valjean, who had not moved but was still seated motionless on his kerbstone, the latter shook his head.

  ‘An eccentric fellow,’ Combeferre muttered to Enjolras. ‘He comes to join us but doesn’t want to fight.’

  ‘Which doesn’t prevent him lending a hand,’ said Enjolras.

  ‘Heroes come in all shapes,’ said Combeferre; and Courfeyrac, overhearing, remarked: ‘He’s a different kind from Père Mabeuf.’

  It is worthy of note that the fire hammering the barricade scarcely troubled the defenders within the stronghold. Persons who have never experienced this kind of warfare can have no idea of the strange lulls which punctuate its more violent moments. Men move about, talking, jesting, even loitering. An acquaintance of the writer heard a combatant remark, in the middle of an attack with grapeshot, ‘We might be at a school picnic.’ The interior of this stronghold in the Rue de la Chanvrerie appeared, we must repeat, extremely calm. Every possible contingency and development had been, or was soon to be, experienced. From being critical the situation had become menacing, and before long, no doubt, it would become desperate. And as it worsened so did the heroism of the defenders glow more brightly, presided over by a dour-faced Enjolras, like a young Spartan devoting his drawn sword to the genius of Epidotas.

  Combeferre, with an apron tied round him, was bandaging the wounded. Bossuet and Feuilly were making more cartridges with the powder taken by Gavroche from the dead corporal, and Bossuet remarked to his companion, ‘We shall soon be taking a trip to another world.’ Courfeyrac was spreading out his entire arsenal on the small heap of paving-stones he had constructed for himself near Enjolras – his swordstick, his musket, two cavalry-pistols, and a pocket pistol – arranging them with the meticulous care of a girl tidying her workbox. Jean Valjean was silently contemplating the wall opposite him. A workman
was tying a large straw hat belonging to Mère Hucheloup on his head – ‘To guard against sunstroke,’ he said. The young men of the Cougourde d’Aix were gaily chatting together, as though not to waste the chance of talking their native patois for the last time. Joly had got Mère Hucheloup’s mirror down from the wall. Several men, having found some rather mouldy crusts of bread in a drawer, were avidly devouring them. Marius was worrying about what his father would have to say to him.

  XVIII

  The vulture becomes prey

  We must lay stress on a psychological fact peculiar to the barricades. Nothing characteristic of this astonishing street warfare should be omitted.

  Despite their strange aspect of interior calm, these strongholds have for those within them a kind of unreality. Civil war, wherein the fog of the unknown mingles with the flame of furious outburst, has always an apocalyptic quality; revolution is a sphinx, and he who has undergone the experience of fighting on the barricades may feel that he has lived through a dream.

  What one experiences, as we have indicated in the case of Marius (and we shall see the consequences of this), is something at once greater and less than life. Emerging from the barricade, we are no longer fully conscious of what we have seen. We have done terrible things and do not know it. We have been caught up in a conflict of ideas endorsed with human faces, our heads bathed in the light of the future. There were corpses prostrate and ghosts walking erect. The hours were immeasurable, like the hours of eternity. We lived in death. Shadows passed before our eyes, and what were they? We saw bloodstained hands. It was a state of appalling deafness, but also of dreadful silence. There were open mouths that cried aloud, and open mouths that uttered no sound. We were enveloped in smoke, perhaps in darkness, seeming to touch the sinister exhalations of unknown depths. We see something red in a finger-nail, but we do not remember.

  To return to the Rue de la Chanvrerie: suddenly, in between two volleys, they heard the striking of a clock.

  ‘Midday,’ said Combeferre.

  Before it had finished striking Enjolras sprang to his feet and gave the following order in a ringing voice:

  ‘Paving-stones are to be brought into the house to reinforce the first floor and attic window-sills. Half the men to stand by with muskets, the rest to bring in the paving-stones. There’s not a minute to be lost.’

  A squad of sappers with axes over their shoulders had appeared in battle-order at the end of the street. They could only be the head of a column, surely an attacking column, since the sappers, whose business was to break down the barricade, always preceded the soldiers who had to climb over it.

  Enjolras’s order was carried out with the precise haste that is proper to fighting ships and barricades, these being the two places whence escape is impossible. In less than a minute two-thirds of the paving-stones which Enjolras had caused to be piled in the Corinth doorway had been carried up to the first floor and the attic, and before another minute had passed they had been neatly disposed so as to block half the first-floor window and the attic windows. A few loopholes, carefully arranged by Feuilly, the chief architect, permitted the passage of the musket barrels. This precaution was the more easily carried out since there had been a lull in the firing of grapeshot. The two cannons were now trained on the middle of the barricade for the purpose of making a hole in it and, if possible, creating a breach through which the assault might pass.

  When the paving-stones, that ultimate rampart, were in position, Enjolras had the bottles which he had placed under the table on which Mabeuf was lying taken up to the first floor.

  ‘Who’s to drink them?’ Bossuet asked.

  ‘The defenders,’ said Enjolras.

  The ground-floor window was then barricaded and the iron bars used to fasten the tavern door at night were placed in readiness.

  The fortress was now completely prepared. The barricade was its outer rampart, and the tavern was its keep. Such paving-stones as remained were used to fill the gap in the barricade.

  Since the defenders of a street barricade are always obliged to husband their ammunition, and the attackers are aware of this, the attackers go about their business with an irritating deliberation, taking their time and exposing themselves before the fighting starts, although more in appearance than in reality. The preparations for the attack are always carried out with a certain methodical slowness, after which comes the holocaust.

  This delay enabled Enjolras to oversee and perfect everything. He felt that since men such as these were about to die, their death must be a masterpiece. He said to Marius: ‘We are the two leaders. I shall give the last orders inside while you keep watch on the outside.’

  Marius took up his post of observation on top of the barricade.

  Enjolras had the door of the kitchen, which as we know was the casualty ward, nailed up.

  ‘To keep the wounded from being hit by splinters,’ he said.

  He gave his last orders in the downstairs room, speaking tersely but in a profoundly calm voice. Feuilly took note of them and spoke for everyone.

  ‘Axes to cut down the stairs should be ready on the first floor. Are they there?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fleury.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Two, and a pole-axe.’

  ‘Good. We are twenty-six able-bodied defenders. How many muskets are there?’

  ‘Thirty-four.’

  ‘Eight more than we need. They should be loaded like the rest and kept handy. Sabres and pistols in men’s belts. Twenty men on the barricade and six in the attic and on the first floor to fire through the loopholes. Not a man must be wasted. When the drum beats for the assault the twenty men down below must make a rush for the barricade. Those who get there first will have the best positions.’

  Having thus made his plans, Enjolras turned to Javert.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten you,’ he said. Putting a pistol on the table, he went on, ‘The last man to leave this place will blow out this spy’s brains.’

  ‘Here?’ someone asked.

  ‘No. We don’t want his body to be mixed up with our own. Anyone can get over the small barricade in the Rue Mondétour. It’s only four feet high. The man’s securely bound. He’s to be taken there and executed.’

  Only one man at that moment was more impassive than Enjolras; it was Javert himself.

  At this point Jean Valjean intervened. He had been in the main group of defenders. He now left them and said to Enjolras:

  ‘You’re the leader, are you not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A short time ago you thanked me.’

  ‘I thanked you in the name of the Republic. Two men saved the barricade – Marius Pontmercy and yourself.’

  ‘Do you think I deserve a reward?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Then I will ask for one.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘That I may be allowed to blow that man’s brains out.’

  Javert looked up and, seeing Valjean, made a slight movement of his head.

  ‘That’s fair.’

  Enjolras was reloading his carbine. He looked about him and asked:

  ‘Does anyone object?’

  There was silence and he turned to Valjean.

  ‘All right. You can have the spy.’

  Valjean took possession of Javert by seating himself on the end of the table. He picked up the pistol, and the sound of a click indicated that he had cocked it. But at almost the same instant there was a sound of trumpets.

  ‘On guard!’ cried Marius from the top of the barricade.

  Javert laughed in the silent manner that was peculiar to himself. He looked coolly at the defenders.

  ‘You’re scarcely in any better case than I am.’

  ‘Everybody out!’ cried Enjolras.

  The men rushed out, receiving in their backs, if we may be allowed the expression, Javert’s parting words:

  ‘It won’t be long!’

  XIX

  The vengeance of Jean Valjean


  When Jean Valjean was alone with Javert he undid the rope tied round the prisoner’s body, of which the knot was under the table. He then signed to him to stand up. Javert obeyed with the indefinable smile which is the expression of captive supremacy. Valjean took him by the belt of his greatcoat, much as one takes an animal by its halter, and tugging him behind him led him out of the tavern, but slowly, because Javert, his legs stiff, could walk only with difficulty. Valjean had a pistol in his other hand.

  Thus they crossed the interior of the stronghold, while its defenders, intent upon the coming attack, had their backs to them. Only Marius, at the end of the barricade, saw them pass, and that sinister pair, victim and executioner, reflected the sense of doom in his own spirit.

  Jean Valjean with some difficulty helped Javert, bound as he was, to climb over the barricade leading to the Rue Mondétour, without, however, letting go of him for an instant. Having done so they were in the narrow alleyway, where the corner of the house hid them from the insurgents. The dead bodies dragged off the barricade formed a dreadful heap a few paces away, and among them was an ashen face, a pierced heart and the breast of a half-naked woman – Éponine.

  Javert glanced sidelong at the dead body and murmured in a voice of profound calm:

  ‘I think I know that girl.’

  Then he turned to Valjean who, with the pistol under his arm, was regarding him in a manner which rendered the words, ‘You know me, too,’ unnecessary.

  ‘Take your revenge,’ said Javert.

  Valjean got a clasp-knife out of his pocket and opened it.

  ‘A knife-thrust!’ exclaimed Javert. ‘You’re quite right. That suits you better.’