Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

Orestes fasting and Pylades drunk

  Eventually, lending each other a back and making use of the remains of the staircase, climbing up the walls and clinging to the ceiling, and hacking down the last resistance at the edge of the hatchway, some twenty of the attackers, soldiers and National and Municipal Guards, most of them suffering from wounds sustained in that final advance, blinded with their own blood, enraged and now savage, succeeded in reaching the upper room. Only one man in it was still on his feet – Enjolras. Without cartridges or a sword, his only weapon was the barrel of his carbine, the butt of which he had broken on the heads of the attackers. He had put the billiard-table between his assailants and himself, and had retreated to the corner of the room; but here, proud-eyed and erect, armed with nothing but that last fragment of a weapon, he was still sufficiently impressive for a space to be left around him. A voice cried:

  ‘He’s the leader. He’s the one who killed the artilleryman. Well, he’s set himself up for us. He’s only got to stay there and we can shoot him on the spot.’

  ‘Shoot me,’ said Enjolras.

  Flinging away the remains of the carbine and folding his arms, he offered them his breast.

  The bold defiance of death is always moving. On the instant when Enjolras folded his arms, accepting his fate, the din of battle ceased in the room and chaos was succeeded by a sort of sepulchral solemnity. It seemed that the dignity of Enjolras, weaponless and motionless, weighed upon the tumult, and that this young man, the only one unwounded, proud, blood-spattered, charming, and disdainful as though he were invulnerable, impelled the sinister group to kill him with respect. His beauty, now enhanced by pride, was radiant, and as though he could be neither fatigued nor wounded, even after the appalling twenty-four hours which had passed, his cheeks were flushed with health. Perhaps it was to him that a witness was referring when later he said to the tribunal, ‘There was one of the insurgents whom I heard called Apollo.’ A National Guard who aimed his musket at Enjolras, lowered it and said: ‘I feel as though I’d be shooting a flower.’

  Twelve men formed up in the opposite corner of the room and silently charged their muskets.

  A sergeant cried, ‘Take aim!’, but an officer intervened.

  ‘Wait’, he said.

  He spoke to Enjolras:

  ‘Would you like your eyes to be bandaged?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It really was you who killed the artillery sergeant?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Grantaire had woken up a few moments previously.

  As we may recall, he had been asleep since the previous day in the upper room of the tavern, seated on a chair and sprawled over a table.

  He had been the perfect embodiment, in all its forcefulness, of the old expression, ‘dead drunk’. The awesome mixture of absinthe, stout, and raw spirit had plunged him into a coma. Since his table was small and of no use to the defence, he had been left there. He was in his original posture, with his head resting on his arms, surrounded by glasses, tankards, and empty bottles, deep in the annihilating slumber of a hibernating bear or a bloated leech. Nothing had penetrated it, not the firing, nor the bullets and grape-shot that came in through the window, nor even the tremendous uproar of the final assault. Only the cannon had drawn an occasional snore from him; he seemed to be waiting for a ball to save him the trouble of waking up. Several dead bodies lay around him; and at first glance there was nothing to distinguish him from the truly dead.

  It is not noise that awakens a drunken man, but silence. This is a singular fact that has often been observed. The collapse of everything around him had merely served to increase Grantaire’s unconsciousness, as though it were a rocking cradle. But the pause induced by Enjolras came as a shock to his slumbers, the effect being that of a carriage drawn at a gallop which comes suddenly to a stop. The sleeper awoke. Grantaire sat up with a start, stretched his arms, rubbed his eyes, stared, yawned, and understood.

  The ending of drunkenness is like the tearing down of a curtain. One sees, as a whole and at a single glance, everything that it concealed. Memory suddenly returns, and the drunkard who knows nothing of what has happened in the past twenty-four hours, has scarcely opened his eyes before he is aware of the situation. His thoughts return to him with a brisk lucidity; the non-being of drunkenness, a sort of fog that blinds the brain, vanishes to be replaced by an instant, clear grasp of things as they are.

  The soldiers, intent upon Enjolras, had not even noticed Grantaire, who had been slumbering in a corner, partly concealed from them by the billiard-table. The sergeant was about to repeat the order, ‘Take aim!’ when suddenly a loud voice cried:

  ‘Long live the Republic! I’m one of them.’

  Grantaire had risen to his feet.

  The blazing light of the battle of which he had seen nothing, and in which he had taken no part, shone in the eyes of the transfigured sot. He repeated, ‘Long live the Republic!’ and walking steadily across the room took his stand beside Enjolras, confronting the muskets.

  ‘Might as well kill two birds with one stone,’ he said; and then, turning to Enjolras, he added gently: ‘If you don’t mind.’

  Enjolras clasped his hand and smiled.

  The smile had not ended when the volley rang out. Enjolras, pierced by eight shots, stayed leaning against the wall as though the bullets had nailed him there; only his head hung down. Grantaire collapsed at his feet.

  Within a few minutes the soldiers had driven out the last of the rebels sheltering at the top of the house. They fired through a wooden lattice into the attic. There was fighting under the roof and bodies were flung out of windows, some of them still living. Two sappers who were trying to set the overturned omnibus upright were killed by carbine-shots from the attic. A man in a smock was flung out of it with a bayonet-thrust in his belly and lay groaning on the ground. A soldier and a rebel slid together down the sloping roof-tiles and, refusing to let go of each other, fell together in a fierce embrace. There was a similar struggle in the cellar – cries, shots, desperate exertion. Then silence. The stronghold was taken.

  The soldiers began to search the surrounding houses and pursue the fugitives.

  XXIV

  Prisoner

  Marius was indeed a prisoner, and of Jean Valjean. It was Valjean’s hand that had grasped him as he fell, and whose grip he had felt before losing consciousness.

  Valjean had taken no part in the battle other than in exposing himself to it. Had it not been for him, no one in those last desperate moments would have thought of the wounded. Thanks to him, present everywhere in the carnage like a providence, those who fell were picked up, carried into the tavern, and their wounds dressed. In the intervals he mended the barricade. But he did not strike a blow, even in self-defence. He silently assisted. And, as it happened, he had scarcely a scratch. The bullets would have none of him. If he had had any thought of suicide when he entered that deadly place, he had failed in this. But we question whether he had thought of suicide, an irreligious act.

  In the dense reek of battle Valjean had not seemed to see Marius; but the truth is that he had never taken his eyes off him. When a bullet laid Marius low, Valjean leapt forward with the agility of a tiger, seized him as though he were his prey, and carried him off.

  The attack at that moment was so intensely concentrated upon Enjolras and the door of the tavern that no one saw Valjean carry Marius’s unconscious form across the stronghold and vanish round the corner of the house. This, it will be remembered, made a sort of promontory in the street, affording shelter for a few square feet from bullets and also out of sight. In the same way there is sometimes one room in a blazing house that does not burn, or a quiet stretch of water behind an outcrop of land in a storm-lashed sea. It was in this retreat within the barricades that Éponine had died.

  Here Jean Valjean stopped, lowered Marius to the ground, and with his back to the wall stood looking about him.

  The situation was appalling. For perhaps two or three minutes this corner of
wall might afford them shelter; but how to escape from the inferno? He remembered his torments eight years earlier in the Rue Polonceau, and how he had eventually got away; that had been difficult, but this time it seemed impossible. Facing him was that silent, implacable house that seemed to be inhabited only by a dead man leaning out of a window; to his right was the low barricade closing the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie, an obstacle easily surmounted; but beyond the barricade a row of bayonets was visible, those of the soldiers posted to block this way of escape. To climb the barricade would be to encounter a volley of musket-fire. And on Valjean’s left was the field of battle. Death lurked round the corner.

  It was a situation such as only a bird could have escaped from. But the matter had to be instantly decided, a device contrived, a plan made. The fight was going on within a few yards of him, and, by good fortune, it was concentrated on a single point, the door of the tavern; but if a single soldier had the idea of going round the house to attack it from the side all would be over.

  Valjean looked at the house opposite, at the barricade and then at the ground, with the intentness of utmost extremity, as though he were seeking to dig a hole in it with his eyes.

  As he looked something like a possibility emerged, as though the very intensity of his gaze had brought it to light. He saw, a few feet away, at the foot of that rigorously guarded lower barricade, half-hidden by tumbled paving-stones, an iron grille let into the street. Made of stout iron transverse bars, it was about two feet square. The stones surrounding it had been uprooted, so that it was, as it were, unsealed. Beneath the bars was a dark aperture, something like a chimney flue or a boiler cylinder. Valjean leapt forward, all his old experience of escape springing like inspiration into his mind. To shift the paving-stones, raise the grille, lift Marius’s inert body on to his shoulder, and, charged with this burden, using elbows and knees, to climb down into this fortunately shallow well; to let the heavy grille fall shut behind him, over which the stones again tumbled, and find footing on a tile surface some ten feet underground – all this was done as though in delirium, with immense strength and hawklike speed. It took only a few minutes.

  Valjean, with the still unconscious Marius, found himself in a long subterranean passage, a place of absolute peace, silence, and darkness. He was reminded of the time when he had fallen out of the street into the garden of the convent; but then it had been with Cosette.

  Like a subdued echo above his head he could still hear the formidable uproar which accompanied the capture of the tavern.

  Book Two

  The Entrails of the Monster

  I

  Land impoverished by the sea

  PARIS POURS twenty-four million francs a year into the water. That is no metaphor. She does so by day and by night, thoughtlessly and to no purpose. She does so through her entrails, that is to say, her sewers. Twenty-five millions is the most modest of the approximate figures arrived at by statistical science.

  After many experiments science today knows that the most fruitful and efficacious of all manures is human excrement. The Chinese, be it said to our shame, knew it before us. No Chinese peasant, according to Eckeberg, goes to the town without bringing back, at either end of his bamboo pole, two buckets filled with unmentionable matter; and it is thanks to this human manure that the Chinese earth is as fruitful as in the days of Abraham. The Chinese corn harvest amounts to 120 times the amount of seed. No guano is to be compared in fertility with the droppings of a town. A big city is the most powerful of dunging animals. To use the town to manure the country is to ensure prosperity. If our gold is so much waste, then, on the other hand, our waste is so much gold.

  And what do we do with this golden dung? We throw it away. At great expense we send ships to the South Pole to collect the droppings of petrels and penguins, and the incalculable wealth we ourselves produce we throw back into the sea. The human and animal manure which is lost to the world because it is returned to the sea instead of to the land would suffice to feed all mankind. Do you know what all this is – the heaps of muck piled up on the streets during the night, the scavengers’ carts and the foetid flow of sludge that the pavement hides from you? It is the flowering meadow, green grass, marjoram and thyme and sage, the lowing of contented cattle in the evening, the scented hay and the golden wheat, the bread on your table and the warm blood in your veins – health and joy and life. Such is the purpose of that mystery of creation which is transformation on earth and transfiguration in Heaven.

  Return all that to the great crucible and you will reap abundance. The feeding of the fields becomes the feeding of men. You are free to lose that richness and to find me absurd into the bargain; that will be the high point of your ignorance.

  It has been calculated that France alone through her rivers every year pours into the Atlantic half a milliard francs. You must note that those five hundred millions represent a quarter of our budget expenditure. Such is man’s astuteness that he prefers to rid himself of this sum in the streams. It is the people’s substance that is being carried away, in drops or in floods, the wretched vomit of our sewers into the rivers, and the huge vomit of the rivers into the sea. Each belch of our cloaca costs us a thousand francs, and the result is that the land is impoverished and the water made foul. Hunger lurks in the furrow and disease in the stream.

  It is notorious, for example, that in recent years the Thames has been poisoning London. As for Paris, the outlet of most of the sewers has had to be brought below the last of the bridges.

  A two-channel arrangement of locks and sluices, sucking in and pouring out, an elementary drainage system as simple as the human lung, such as is already functioning in some parts of England, would suffice to bring to our towns the pure water of the fields and to return to the fields the enriched water of the towns; and this very simple exchange would save us the five hundred millions which we fling away.

  The present process does harm in seeking to do good. The intention is good, the result lamentable. We think to cleanse the town but weaken the population. A sewer is a mistake. When drainage, with its double function of restoring what it takes away, shall have replaced the sewer, which is mere impoverishment, then this, combined with a new social economy, will increase by a hundredfold the produce of the earth and the problem of poverty will be immeasurably lessened. Add to this the elimination of parasites, and the problem is solved.

  Meanwhile wastage continues and public wealth flows into the river. Wastage is the word. Europe is exhausting itself to the point of ruin. As for France, we have named the figures. But since Paris amounts to one twenty-fifth of the total French population, and the Paris manure is the richest of all, to assess at twenty-five millions Paris’s share in the annual loss of half a milliard is an underestimate. Those twenty-five millions, used for relief-work and for amenities, would double the splendour of Paris. The city wastes them in its sewers; so that one may say that the abundance of Paris, her festivities, her noble buildings, her elegance, luxury and magnificence, and the money that she squanders with both hands – all this is sewage.

  It is in this fashion, in the blindness of a false political economy, that the well-being of the whole community is allowed to pour away. There should be nets at Saint-Cloud to trap the public wealth. Economically one may sum it up as follows: Paris is a leaky basket. This model capital city, of which every nation seeks to have a copy, this ideal metropolis, this noble stronghold of initiative, drive, and experiment, this centre and dwelling-place of minds, this nation-town and hive of the future, a composite of Babylon and Corinth, would, seen in this aspect, cause a peasant of Fo-Kian to shrug his shoulders.

  To copy Paris is to invite ruin. And Paris, in this matter of immemorial and senseless waste, copies herself. There is nothing new in her ineptitude; it is not a youthful folly. The ancients behaved like the moderns. ‘The cloaca of Rome,’ wrote Liebig, ‘absorbed all the well-being of the Roman peasant.’ When the Roman countryside was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome exhausted Italy, a
nd when she had poured Italy through her drains she disposed of Sicily, then Sardinia, then Africa. The Roman sewer engulfed the world, sapping town and country alike. Urbi et orbi or the Eternal City, the bottomless drain.

  In this, as in other matters, Rome set the example; and Paris follows it with the stupidity proper to intelligent towns. For the purpose of the operation she has beneath her another Paris, with its roads and intersections, its arteries and alleyways – the Paris of the sewers, a city of slime only lacking human kind.

  We must avoid flattery, even of a great people. Where there is everything there is ignominy as well as sublimity: and if Paris contains Athens, the city of light, Tyre, the city of power, Sparta, the city of stern virtue, Nineveh, the city of prodigy, she also contains Lutetia, the city of mud. Moreover, the mark of her greatness is there also. The huge bilge of Paris achieves the strange feat that among men only a few, such as Machiavelli, Bacon, and Mirabeau, have achieved – an abjectness of grandeur.

  The underside of Paris, if the eye could perceive it, would have the appearance of a vast sea-plant. A sponge has no more apertures and passageways than the patch of earth, six leagues around, on which the ancient city stands. Apart from the catacombs, the intricate network of gas-pipes and of piping that distributes fresh water to the street pumps, each a separate system, the sewers alone form a huge, dark labyrinth on either side of the river – a maze to which the only key is itself.

  And here, in the foetid darkness, the rat is to be found, apparently the sole product of Paris’s labour.

  II

  Ancient history of the sewer

  If one thinks of Paris lifted up like a lid, the view of the sewers from above would resemble a great tree-trunk grafted on to the river. On the right bank the main sewer would be the trunk of the tree, its lesser channels being the branches and its dead ends the twigs.