As time went on the elderly gentleman ceased to go as far as the corner of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, and would stop and turn back half way along the Rue Saint-Louis; and one day he went only as far as the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine, from which point he had a distant view of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. Then he shook his head, as though rejecting something, and turned back. Before long he did not go even as far as the Rue Saint-Louis, but stopped at the Rue Pavée. Then it was the Rue des Trois-Pavillons, and then the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux. His daily walk grew steadily shorter, like the pendulum of a clock that has not been re-wound and gradually ceases to swing. Every day he set out upon the same walk and perhaps was unaware of the fact that he constantly shortened it. His expression seemed to say, ‘What is the use?’ There was no longer any light in his eyes, nor did the tears gather as formerly. But his head was still thrust forward, painfully revealing the folds in his thin neck. Sometimes in bad weather he carried an umbrella, but he never opened it. The goodwives of the quarter said, ‘He’s simple,’ and the children laughed as they followed him.
Book Nine
Supreme Shadow, Supreme Dawn
I
Pity for the unhappy, but indulgence for the happy
TO BE happy is a terrible thing. How complacent we are, how self-sufficing. How easy it is, being possessed of the false side of life, which is happiness, to forget the real side, which is duty.
Yet it would be wrong to blame Marius. As we have said, before his marriage Marius asked no questions of Monsieur Fauchelevent, and since then he had been afraid to question Jean Valjean. He had regretted the promise which he had been induced to make and had said to himself more than once that he should not have made that concession to despair. And so he had by degrees excluded Valjean from his house and effaced him as far as possible from the thoughts of Cosette, deliberately intervening between them, but in such a way as to ensure that she would not realize what was happening. It was more than effacement; it was eclipse.
Marius was doing what he held to be right and necessary. He believed that in keeping Valjean at a distance, without harshness but also without weakness, he was acting upon serious grounds, some of which we already know and others of which we have still to learn. In the course of a law-suit in which he had been professionally involved he had met a former clerk in the Laffitte banking-house and had received from him certain information which he was unable to investigate further because of his promise of secrecy and Valjean’s perilous situation. At the same time he believed that he had a serious duty to perform, namely, the restitution of six hundred thousand francs to some person whose identity he was seeking to discover as discreetly as possible. In the meantime he did not touch the money.
As for Cosette, she knew nothing of all these secrets; but she, too, was scarcely to be blamed. Marius’s power over her was such that instinctively and almost automatically she did what he wanted. She sensed a ‘feeling’ on the part of Marius where Valjean was concerned, and without his having to say anything she blindly acquiesced in it. Her obedience in this respect consisted in not remembering things that Marius had forgotten. It cost her no effort. Without her knowing why, or being in any way to blame, her spirit had become so merged in that of her husband that what was expunged from Marius’s mind was also expunged from her own.
But we must not carry this too far. In the case of Jean Valjean her forgetfulness was only superficial. She was bemused rather than forgetful. In her heart she still loved the man whom for so long she had called father. But she loved her husband even more, and it was this that had somewhat disturbed the balance of her affections, causing her to lean to one side.
Occasionally she spoke of Jean Valjean, expressing astonishment at his absence. Marius reminded her that he had said he was going away. And this was true. He was in the habit of going away from time to time, although never for so long as this. Several times she sent Nicolette to the Rue de l’Homme-Armé to ask if ‘Monsieur Jean’ had returned. The answer, sent by Valjean himself, was always no. Cosette was not unduly perturbed, having only one need in life, and that was for Marius.
We may mention that Marius and Cosette had themselves been away. They had been to Vernon, where Marius had taken Cosette to his father’s grave. Little by little Marius had detached Cosette from Jean Valjean, and she had allowed it to happen.
For the rest, what is sometimes over-severely described as the ingratitude of the young is not always so reprehensible as one may suppose. It is the ingratitude of Nature herself. Nature, as we have said elsewhere, always ‘looks ahead’; she divides living creatures into those who are arriving and those who are leaving. Those leaving look towards darkness, and those arriving look towards light. Hence the gulf between them, fateful to the old, involuntary on the part of the young. The gulf, at first imperceptible, grows gradually wider, like the spreading branches of a tree. It is not the fault of the branches that, without detaching themselves from the trunk, they grow remote from it. Youth goes in search of joy and festivity, bright light and love. Age moves towards the end. They do not lose sight of one another, but there is no longer any closeness between them. Young folk feel the cooling of life; old people feel the chill of the grave. Let us not be too hard on the young.
II
Last flickers of a lamp without oil
One day Jean Valjean walked downstairs and a few paces along the street, then seated himself on a kerbstone, the same one on which Gavroche had found him on the night of 5 June. He stayed there a few minutes, then went upstairs again. It was the last swing of the pendulum. The next day he did not leave his room, and on the following day he did not leave his bed.
The concierge, who prepared his meagre repast, consisting of cabbage or a few potatoes with a little bacon, looked at the brown earthenware plate and exclaimed:
‘But you ate nothing yesterday, my poor man.’
‘Yes I did,’ said Valjean.
‘The plate’s still full.’
‘If you look at the water-jug you’ll see that it’s empty.’
‘Well, that proves that you’ve had a drink, but not that you’ve eaten anything.’
‘So perhaps all I wanted was water.’
‘If you don’t eat as well as drink it means that you’ve got a fever.’
‘I’ll eat something tomorrow.’
‘Or next week, perhaps. Why put it off till tomorrow? And those new potatoes were so good.’
Valjean took the old woman’s hand.
‘I’ll promise to eat them,’ he said in his kindly voice.
‘I’m not at all pleased with you,’ she said.
Valjean saw no one except this old woman. There are streets in Paris along which no one passes and houses which no one enters, and he lived in one of them. While he had been in the habit of going out he had bought a small copper cross which he nailed to the wall facing his bed. A cross is always good to look at.
During the week that followed Valjean did not get out of bed. The concierge said to her husband: ‘He doesn’t get up and he doesn’t eat anything. He isn’t going to last long. He’s very unhappy about something. I can’t help feeling that his daughter has made a bad marriage.’
Her husband replied with lordly indifference:
‘If he’s rich enough he’d better send for the doctor; if he’s too poor he can’t afford to, and in that case he’ll die.’
‘But if he does send for the doctor?’
‘He’ll probably the anyway.’
The concierge was pulling up the blades of grass that had sprouted between the stones of what she called her own strip of pavement. She saw a local doctor passing the end of the street and took it upon herself to ask him to go upstairs.
‘It’s the second floor,’ she said. ‘He never gets out of bed and so the key’s always in the door.’
When he came down the doctor said:
‘The man’s very ill indeed.’
‘What’s the matter with him?’
‘Everything and
nothing. From the look of him I would say that he has lost someone very dear to him. One can die of that.’
‘What did he say to you?’
‘He said he was quite well.’
‘Will you come again, doctor?’
‘Yes,’ said the doctor. ‘But he needs someone other than myself.’
III
The weight of a quill-pen
One evening Jean Valjean had difficulty in raising himself on his elbow. His pulse was so weak that he could not feel it; his breath came in short, faint gasps. He realized that he was weaker than he had ever been. And so, no doubt because he was impelled to do so by some over-riding consideration, he sat up with a great effort and got dressed. He put on his old workman’s clothes. Now that he had given up going out he preferred them to any other. He had to pause several times to rest, and the business of getting his arms into the sleeves of his jacket caused sweat to drip from his forehead.
Now that he was alone he had moved his bed into the living-room in order to occupy as little of the apartment as possible. He opened the valise and, getting out Cosette’s trousseau of small garments, spread them on the bed. The bishop’s candlesticks were in their usual place on the mantelpiece; he got two wax candles out of a drawer and, putting them in the candlesticks, lighted them, although it was broad daylight. One may see candles lighted in rooms occupied by the dead. Every step he took, moving from one room to the other, exhausted him, and he had frequently to sit down and rest. It was not just a case of ordinary fatigue which uses up energy and recovers it; it was the last effort of which he was capable, exhausted life spending itself in an effort which it will not be able to repeat.
One of the chairs into which he sank was opposite the mirror, so disastrous for him and so providential for Marius, in which he had read the blotted handwriting of Cosette. He looked at himself in the mirror and did not recognize what he saw. He was eighty years old. Before Cosette’s marriage he might have been taken for fifty. The wrinkles on his forehead were not the wrinkles of age but the mysterious stamp of death; one could see the impress of that inexorable finger. His cheeks sagged, and the colour of his skin was such as to make one feel that there was earth beneath it. The corners of his mouth drooped as in the masks that the ancients carved for the tombs of the dead. He was staring blankly in front of him, but with an expression of reproach, like one of those great figures of tragedy who rise in condemnation of some other man.
He was at the point, the last stage of despair, when pain is no longer active; the soul, as it were, has grown numb. It was growing dark. With great labour he dragged a table and chair close to the mantelpiece, and arranged writing materials on the table. Having done this he fainted, and upon recovering consciousness found that he was thirsty. Not being able to lift the water-jug to his lips, he tilted it painfully towards him and sipped from it. Then he turned towards the bed, and, still seated, for he could no longer stand, looked at the little black frock and the other garments that were so dear to him. He stayed looking at them for a long time, until with a shiver he realized that he was cold; then, leaning forward over the table lit by the bishop’s candlesticks, he picked up his pen.
Since neither pen nor ink had been used for a considerable time, the quill was warped and the ink had dried. He had to get up and pour a few drops of water into the ink-pot, which he only managed to do with several pauses for rest, and he had to write with the reverse side of the quill. Now and then he wiped his forehead. His hand was shaking. Slowly he wrote the following lines:
Cosette, I bless you. There is something I must explain. Your husband was right to make me understand that I must go away. What he supposed was not altogether correct, but still he was right. He is a good man. You must go on loving him after I am dead. And you, Monsieur Pontmercy, you must go on loving my beloved child. Cosette, you will find figures on this paper if I have the strength to recall them. That is why I am writing to you, to assure you that the money is really yours. This is how it is. White jade comes from Norway, black jade from England, and black glass from Germany. Jade is lighter, more rare and more expensive. Imitations can be made in France as they can in Germany. You need a small mould two inches square and a spirit lamp to soften the wax. The wax used to be made of resin and lampblack, but I hit upon the idea of making it of lacquer and turpentine. It costs no more than thirty sous and it is much better. The buckles are made of purple glass fixed with wax in a black metal frame. The glass should be purple for metal frames and black for gold ornaments. A lot is sold in Spain, which is the country where …
And here the pen slipped from his fingers and he sank down, sobbing from the depths of his heart, with his head clasped in his hands.
‘Alas, alas,’ he cried within himself (those dreadful lamentations that are heard only by God), ‘it’s all over. I shall not see her again. It was a smile that came into my life and departed. I shall go into darkness without seeing her. If I could hear her voice, touch her dress, look at her just once more! To die is nothing, but it is terrible to die without seeing her. She would smile at me, she would say a word, and what harm would it do anyone? But it is all over and I am alone. God help me, I shall not see her again!’
At this moment there was a knock on the door.
IV
Marius receives a letter
That same day, or, more exactly, that same evening, Marius having withdrawn to his study after dinner to work on a brief, Basque brought him a letter, saying, ‘The writer is waiting in the hall.’ Cosette at the time was strolling with her grandfather-in-law in the garden.
A letter, like a person, can have a displeasing appearance – coarse paper, careless folding – the very sight of them can be unpleasant. This was such a letter. It smelt of tobacco. Nothing is more evocative than a smell. Marius remembered that tobacco, and looking at the superscription he read: ‘To Monsieur le Baron Pontmerci, At his home’. The familiar smell of the tobacco reminded him of the handwriting, and in a sudden flash of divination he put certain things together: the smell of tobacco, the quality of the paper, the way it was folded, the pale watered ink – all this brought a picture to his mind, that of the Jondrette attic … By the strangest of chances, one of the two men for whom he had searched so diligently, thinking never to find him, had of his own accord come his way!
Eagerly unsealing the letter, he read:
Monsieur le baron,
If the Supreme Being had endowed me with talent I might be the Baron Thénard,* member of the Academy, but I am not. I simply bear the same name as his, and I shall be happy if this recommends me to your favor. Any kindness which you may do me will be resiprocated. I am in possession of a secret concerning a certain person. This person concerns you. I am keeping the secret for your ears alone, being desirus of being useful to you. I can provide you with the means of driving this person out of your house where he has no right to be, Madame la Baronne being a lady of noble birth. Virtue and crime cannot be allowed to go on living together any longer.
I await Monsieur le Baron’s instructions,
Respectfully,
The letter was signed THÉNARD.
The signature was not wholly false, being merely a little abbreviated. But the style and orthography completed the picture. There could be no doubt whatever as to the writer’s identity.
Marius’s agitation was extreme. After his first surprise came a feeling of satisfaction. If he could now find the other man he sought, the one who had saved his life, all his troubles of conscience would be at an end. He went to his desk, got some banknotes out of a drawer, put them in his pocket, closed the drawer and then rang the bell. Basque appeared.
‘Show the gentleman in,’ said Marius.
‘Monsieur Thénard,’ Basque announced.
And now Marius had another surprise. The man who entered was completely unknown to him.
He was an elderly man with a big nose, his chin buried in his cravat, with green-tinted spectacles and grey hair smoothed and plastered down over his forehea
d like the wigs of coachmen to the English nobility. He was clad entirely in black, his garments being worn but clean, and a bunch of fobs hanging from his waistcoat pocket suggested that he possessed a watch. He was carrying an old hat in his hand. He walked with a stoop, and the curve of his back made his bow upon entering all the deeper.
The first thing that struck Marius was that the suit he was wearing, although carefully buttoned, was too large and seemed to have been made for someone else. And here a brief digression becomes necessary.
There existed in those days in Paris, in a hovel near the Arsenal, an ingenious Jew whose business in life was transforming rogues into respectable men. Not for too long, since this might have made them uncomfortable. The change, which was simply one of appearance, lasted one or two days, at the rate of thirty sous a day, and was based on a set of clothes conforming as far as possible to accepted notions of propriety. The practitioner in question was called ‘the Changer’, this being the only name by which he was known to the denizens of the Paris underworld. He possessed a large stock, and the garments he hired out to his customers were more or less presentable. They covered all categories. From every hook in his establishment there hung, used and worn, a social status, that of a magistrate, banker, priest, retired army man, man of letters or statesman. He was in short the costumier of the great repertory theatre of Paris rascality, and his shop was the place whence every kind of crime emerged, and to which it returned. A ragged footpad went there, deposited his thirty sous, selected whatever clothes suited the particular project he had in mind, and came out looking another man. Next day the garments were faithfully returned; the Changer, who dealt exclusively with thieves, was himself never robbed. But the clothes he hired out had one drawback: they didn’t fit. Anyone whose physical dimensions in any way departed from the normal was uncomfortable in them: he must not be too fat or too thin, the Changer catered only for the average. This created problems which his customers had to solve as best they could. The statesman’s outfit, for example, would have been too large for Pitt and too small for Louis-Philippe. We may quote the note in the Changer’s catalogue: ‘Coat of black cloth, black knee-breeches, silk waistcoat, boots and linen’ – to which was appended in the margin, ‘former ambassador’, together with an additional note which read: ‘In a separate box a neatly frizzed wig, green-tinted spectacles, fobs and two quill-tubes an inch long wrapped in cotton-wool’. All this came from the same source, the ‘former ambassador’, and all was somewhat the worse for wear, with the seams whitening and a slit in one of the elbows. Moreover a button was missing from the breast of the jacket. This, however, was a detail, the statesman’s hand being always laid upon his heart to cover the deficiency. Marius would at once have recognized this outfit had he been familiar with the seamy side of Paris life.
Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774) Page 140
