One day Marius, who with all his happiness enjoyed serious conversation, remarked for some reason that I do not recall:
‘The men of the Revolution were so great that their deathless fame is already assured. Like Cato and Phocion they have become figures of antiquity.’
‘Antiquity – antique moiré!’ the old man cried. ‘Marius, I thank you – just the idea I was looking for!’ And the next day a magnificent dress of antique moiré the colour of tea was added to Cosette’s wardrobe.
The old man drew morals from this finery.
‘Love is all very well, but something more is needed. There must be extravagance in happiness, rapture must be spiced with superfluity. Let me have a milkmaid, but make her a duchess. Let me view an endless countryside from a colonnade of marble. Happiness unadorned is like unbuttered bread: one may eat it but one does not dine. I want the superfluous, the embellishment, the thing that serves no purpose. In Strasbourg Cathedral there is a clock the size of a three-storey house which condescends to tell you the time but does not seem to exist for that alone. Whatever hour it strikes, midday, the hour of the sun, or midnight, the hour of love, it seems to be giving you the sun and the stars, earth and ocean, kings, emperors and the twelve apostles, and a troop of little gilded men playing the trumpet – all this thrown in! How does a mere bare dial pointing the hours compare with that? The great clock of Strasbourg, and not just a Black Forest cuckoo-clock, is what suits me.’
Monsieur Gillenormand dwelt especially on the subject of festivity, invoking all the gaieties of the eighteenth century.
‘You have lost the art in these days,’ he cried. ‘This nineteenth century is flat, lacking in excess, ignorant of what is rich and noble, insipid, colourless, and without form. Your bourgeois ideal is a chintz upholstered boudoir! But I can look back. On the day in 1787 when I saw the Duc du Rohan, who was Prince de Léon, and other peers of France drive to Longchamp, not in stately coaches but in chaises, I knew it was the beginning of the end. Look what follows. In these days people do business, play the market, make money and are rotten – smooth, neat, polished, irreproachable on the surface; but go deeper and you will raise a stench that would make a cow-hand hold his nose! You must not mind, Marius, if I talk like this. I say nothing against the people, but I have a bone to pick with the bourgeoisie. I am one myself, and that is how I know. There is so much that I regret – the elegance, the chivalry, the courtly manners, and the songs … The bride’s garter, which was akin to the girdle of Venus. What else caused the Trojan war, if not Helen’s garter? Why else did Hector and Achilles deal each other mortal blows? Homer might have made the Iliad out of Cosette’s garter, and put in an old babbler like me whom he would call Nestor. In the good old days, my friends, people married wisely – a good marriage contract followed by a good blow-out. One did oneself proud, sitting beside a pretty woman who did not unduly hide her bosom. Those laughing mouths, how gay they were! People set out to look pretty with make-up and embroidery. Your bourgeoise looked like a flower, your marquise like a statue. It was a great time, fastidious on the one hand and splendid on the other – and how we enjoyed ourselves! People nowadays are serious. The bourgeois is miserly and a prude. A wretched century – the Graces would be considered too lightly clad. Beauty is hidden as though it were ugliness. Everyone wears pantaloons since the Revolution, even the dancers. Songs are solemn, they have to have a message. People have to look important, and the result is that they all look insignificant. Listen, my children – joy is not simply joyous, it is great! Be gaily in love, and when you marry do so in all the fever and excitement of happiness. Decorum in church is proper, but when that’s over – bang! A wedding should be royal and magical. I detest solemn weddings. That moment in life should be a flight to Heaven with the birds, even if next day you have to fall back to earth among the bourgeoisie and the frogs. There should be nothing meagre about that day. If I had my way it would be a day of enchantment, with violins in the trees, a sky of silver and blue, and the singing of nymphs and nereids, a chorus of naked girls. That is the programme I would like to see.’
Aunt Gillenormand viewed these matters with her customary placidity. She had had much to unsettle her in recent months – Marius fighting on the barricades, brought home more dead than alive, reconciled to his grandfather, engaged to be married to a pauper who turned out to be an heiress. The 600,000 francs were the culminating astonishment, after which she had reverted to her customary state of religious torpor, regularly attending Mass, telling her beads, murmuring Aves in one corner of the house while the words ‘I love you’ were being exchanged in another. There is a state of asceticism in which the benumbed spirit, remote from everything that we call living, is scarcely aware of any happening less catastrophic than an earthquake, nothing human, whether pleasant or unpleasant. ‘It’s like a bad cold in the head,’ Monsieur Gillenormand said. ‘You can’t smell a thing, good or bad.’
It was the money that had decided the matter for her. Her father was so in the habit of ignoring her that he had not asked her whether he should give his consent to Marius’s marriage, and this had ruffled her, although she had given no sign of it. She had thought to herself: ‘Well, my father may decide about the marriage but I can decide about the means.’ She was in fact rich, which her father was not. She had kept an open mind, but the probability is that if they had been poor she would have let them go on being poor – if her nephew chose to marry a pauper that was his affair. But a fortune of six hundred thousand francs is deserving of esteem, and since they no longer needed it she would undoubtedly leave them her own fortune.
It was arranged that the couple should live with Marius’s grandfather. The old man insisted on giving up his bedroom, the best room in the house. ‘It will make me young again,’ he said. ‘I have always wanted to have a honeymoon in that room.’ He filled it with old, gay furniture and hung it with a remarkable material, golden flowers on a satin background, which he believed had come from Utrecht. ‘The same as draped the bed of the Duchesse d’Anville à la Roche Guyon,’ he said. And on the mantelpiece he put a little Saxon figurine holding a muff over her naked tummy. His library became Marius’s advocate’s office, this, as we know, being a legal requirement.
VII
Happiness and dreams
The lovers saw each other every day, Cosette coming with Monsieur Fauchelevent. ‘It’s not at all right,’ said Mlle Gillenormand, ‘for the lady to come to the gentleman.’ But they had got into the habit during Marius’s convalescence, and the greater comfort of the armchairs in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, more suited to the tête-à-tête, had been an added inducement. Marius and Monsieur Fauchelevent saw one another but scarcely spoke, as though by tacit agreement. Every girl needs a chaperon, and so Cosette could not have come without him. Marius accepted him for this reason. They exchanged an occasional word on the political situation and once, when Marius asserted his conviction that education should be free and available to everyone, they found themselves in agreement and had a brief discussion. Marius found that although Monsieur Fauchelevent talked well, with an excellent command of language, there was something lacking in him. He was something less than a man of the world, and something more.
All sorts of questions concerning Monsieur Fauchelevent, who treated him with a cool civility, were at the back of Marius’s mind. His illness had left a gap in his memory in which much had been lost. He found himself wondering whether he could really have seen that calm, sober man at the barricade. But no amount of happiness can prevent us from looking back into the past. There were moments when Marius, taking his head in his hands, recalled the death of Mabeuf, heard Gavroche singing amid the musket-fire and felt his lips pressed to Éponine’s cold forehead. Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire – the figures of all his friends appeared to him and then vanished. Had they really existed, and where were they now? Was it true that they were all dead – all gone, except himself? All that had vanished like the fall of the curtain at the ending of
a play. And was he himself the same man? He had been poor and now was rich, solitary and now he had a family, desolate and now he was to marry Cosette. He felt that he had passed through a tomb, black when he entered it but white when he emerged – and the others had remained in it. There were moments when those figures from the past crowded in upon him and filled his mind with darkness; then the thought of Cosette restored him to serenity. Nothing less than his present happiness could have washed out that disaster.
And Monsieur Fauchelevent had become almost one of those vanished figures. Seeing him quietly seated beside Cosette, Marius found it hard to believe that this was the man who had been with him at the barricade. That earlier Fauchelevent seemed rather a figment of his delirium. And there was a gap between them which Marius did not think of bridging. It is less rare than one may think for two men sharing a common experience to agree by tacit consent never to refer to it. Only once did Marius make the attempt. Bringing the Rue de la Chanvrerie into the conversation, he turned to Monsieur Fauchelevent and said:
‘You know the street, do you not?’
‘What street was that?’
‘The Rue de la Chanvrerie.’
‘I don’t know the name of any such street,’ replied Monsieur Fauchelevent with the greatest calm.
This reply, bearing simply on the name of the street, appeared to Marius more conclusive than it really was.
‘I must have dreamed it,’ he reflected. ‘It was someone like him, but certainly not Monsieur Fauchelevent.’
VIII
Two men impossible to find
His state of rapture, great though it was, did not relieve Marius’s mind of other preoccupations; and while the wedding preparations were going forward he subjected himself to scrupulous self-examination. He owed debts of gratitude both on his father’s account and on his own. There was Thénardier, and there was the stranger who had brought him to Monsieur Gillenormand’s house. He was resolved to find these two men, since otherwise they might cast a shadow on his life. Before moving joyously into the future he wanted to feel that he had paid due quittance to the past.
That Thénardier was a villain did not alter the fact that he had saved the life of Colonel Pontmercy. He was a rogue in the eyes of all the world except Marius. And Marius, not knowing what had really happened at Waterloo, was ignorant of the fact that although his father owed Thénardier his life, he owed him no gratitude. But the agents employed by Marius could find no trace of Thénardier. The woman had died in prison during the trial, and the man and his daughter Azelma, the sole survivors of that lamentable group, had vanished into obscurity.
The woman being dead, Boulatruelle acquitted, Claquesous vanished and the leading members of the gang having escaped from prison, the matter of the Gorbeau tenement conspiracy had been more or less abandoned. Two minor figures, Panchaud, known as Bigrenaille, and Demi-Liard, known as Deux Milliards, had been sentenced to ten years in the galleys, while their accomplices had been condemned in their absence to hard labour for life. Thénardier, as the instigator and leader, had been condemned to death, also in his absence. And that was all that was known of Thénardier.
As for that other man, the one who had saved Marius, the inquiries had at first produced some result but then had come to a dead end. The fiacre was found which had brought Marius to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. The coachman declared that on the afternoon of 6 June, acting on the orders of a police agent, he had remained stationed on the Quai des Champs-Élysées from three o’clock until nightfall, and that about nine o’clock that evening the sewer-gate giving on to the river had opened and a man had come out carrying another man who seemed to be dead. The police agent had arrested the living man, and on his orders the cab-driver had ‘taken the whole lot’ to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. He recognized Marius as the supposedly dead man. He had then driven the two other men to a spot near the Porte des Archives. And that was all he knew. Marius himself remembered nothing except that a strong hand had gripped him just as he was sinking unconscious to the ground at the barricade.
He was lost in conjecture. How had it happened that, having fallen in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, he had been picked up by a policeman on the bank of the Seine near the Pont des Invalides? Someone must have carried him there from the quarter of Les Halles, and how could he have done so except by way of the sewer? It was a wonderful act of devotion. This man, his saviour, was the man whom Marius sought, without discovering any trace of him. Although it had to be done with great discretion, he pursued his inquiries even as far as the Préfecture de Police, only to discover that they knew even less than the driver of the fiacre. They knew nothing of any arrest at the gate of the main sewer, and were inclined to think that the coachman had invented the story. A cabby looking for a tip is capable of anything, even of imagination. But Marius could no more doubt the truth of the story than he could doubt his own identity
The whole thing was wrapped in mystery. What had become of this man who had rescued him and then been arrested, presumably as a rebel? And what had become of the agent who had arrested him? Why had he kept silent? And how had the man escaped? Had he bribed the agent? Why had he not got in touch with Marius, who owed him so much? No one could tell him anything. Basque and Nicolette had had no eyes for anyone except their young master. Only the porter with his candle had noticed the man and all he could say was, ‘He was a terrible sight.’ In the hope that they might provide him with some clue, Marius had kept the blood-stained garments in which he had been rescued. He made a queer discovery when he examined the jacket. A small piece was missing.
One evening when Marius was talking to Cosette and Jean Valjean about the mystery and his fruitless efforts to solve it, he became irritated by ‘Monsieur Fauchelevent’s’ air of apparent indifference. He exclaimed almost angrily:
‘Whoever he was, that man was sublime. Do you realize, Monsieur, what he did? He came to my rescue like an angel from Heaven. He plunged into the battle, picked me up, opened the sewer and then carried me for a league and a half through those appalling underground passages, bent double with a man on his back! And why did he do it? Simply to save a dying man. He said to himself, “There may be a chance for him, and so I must risk my life.” He risked it twenty times over, with every step he took! And the proof is that no sooner had we left the sewer than he was arrested. And he did all this without any thought of reward. What was I to him? Simply a rebel. Oh, if all Cosette’s money were mine.’
‘It is yours,’ Jean Valjean interrupted.
‘I would give it all,’ said Marius, ‘to find that man!’
Jean Valjean was silent.
Book Six
The Sleepless Night
I
16 February 1833
THE NIGHT of 16 February was a blessed one, with a clear sky shading into darkness. It was the night of Marius and Cosette’s wedding day.
The day itself had been delightful, not perhaps Monsieur Gillenormand’s vision of cherubs and cupids fluttering above the heads of the bridal pair, but gentle and gay.
Wedding customs in 1833 were not what they are today. France had not yet borrowed from England the supreme refinement of abducting the bride, carrying her off from the church as though ashamed of her happiness like an escaping bankrupt or like rape in the manner of the Song of Songs. The chastity and propriety of whisking one’s paradise into a post-chaise to consummate it in a tavern-bed at so much a night, mingling the most sacred of life’s memories with a hired driver and tavern serving maids, was not yet understood in France.
In this second half of the nineteenth century in which we live the mayor in his robes and the priest in his chasuble are not enough. We must have the Longjumeau postilion in his blue waistcoat with brass buttons, his green leather breeches, waxed hat, whip and top boots. France has not yet carried elegance, like the English nobility, to the point of showering the bridal pair with worn-out slippers, in memory of Marlborough, who was assailed by an angry aunt at his wedding by way of wishing
him luck. These are not yet a part of our wedding celebrations – but patience, they will doubtless come.
There was a strange belief in those days that a wedding was a quiet family affair, that a patriarchal banquet in no way marred its solemnity, that even an excess of gaiety, provided it was honest, did no harm to happiness, and finally that it was right and proper that the linking of two lives from which a family was to ensue should take place in the domestic nuptial chamber. In short, people were so shameless as to get married at home.
So the wedding reception took place, in this now outmoded fashion, at the house of Monsieur Gillenormand. But there are formalities in these matters, banns to be read and so forth, and they could not be ready before the 16th. This, as it happened, was Mardi gras, to the perturbation of Aunt Gillenormand.
‘Mardi gras!’ exclaimed the old man. ‘Well, why not? There’s a proverb which says that no graceless child is ever born of a Mardi gras marriage. Do you want to put it off, Marius?’
‘Certainly not,’ said the young man.
‘Very well then, the sixteenth it is.’
And so it was, regardless of public festivity. The day was a rainy one, as it happened, but there is always a patch of blue sky visible to lovers, although the rest of the world may see nothing but their umbrellas.
On the previous day Jean Valjean, in the presence of Monsieur Gillenormand, had handed Marius the 584,000 francs. The marriage deeds were very simple.
Since Valjean no longer needed Toussaint he had passed her on to Cosette, who had promoted her to the rank of lady’s maid. As for Valjean himself, a handsome room in Monsieur Gillenormand’s house had been expressly furnished for him, and Cosette had said so bewitchingly, ‘Father, I beseech you!’, that he had almost promised to live in it. But a few days before the wedding he had an accident, injuring his right thumb. It was a trifling matter, but it obliged him to wrap up his hand and keep his arm in a sling, which meant that he could not sign any documents. Monsieur Gillenormand, as deputy-guardian, had done so in his place.
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