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BOOK THREE

IN THE YEAR 1817

I. THE YEAR 1817

EIGHTEEN SEVENTEEN IS the year that Louis XVIII, with a certain royal aplomb not devoid of arrogance, called the twenty-second year of his reign.1 It is the year Monsieur Bruguière de Sorsum,2 the translator of Shakespeare, became famous. All the wigmakers’ shops, hoping for the return of powdered wigs along with the royal bird, were awash with azure and fleurs-de-lis.3 It was the age of innocence when the comte Lynch4 sat every Sunday as churchwarden in the official pew at Saint-Germain-des-Prés decked out as a peer of France, with his red sash and his long beak and that majestic profile peculiar to a man who has done a remarkable deed. The remarkable deed performed by Monsieur Lynch was that, as mayor of Bordeaux, he had handed the town over a little too soon to Monsieur le duc d’Angoulême,5 on March 12, 1814. Hence his peerage. In 1817, it was all the rage to bury the heads of little boys from four to six years old under enormous tanned leather caps with earflaps, which looked rather like Eskimo cowls. The French army was dressed in white, Austrian style, the regiments were known as legions, and instead of numbers they wore the names of départements. Napoléon was on Saint Helena, and as England refused his request for green cloth, he was having his old riding habits turned.6 In 1817, Pellegrini sang, Mademoiselle Bigottini danced, Potier reigned, Odry did not yet exist.7 Madame Saqui took over from Forioso.8 There were still Prussians in France.9 Monsieur Delalot10 was somebody. Legitimacy11 reared its ugly head, first by cutting off the hand, then the head, of Pleignier, Carbonneau, and Tolleron.12 The prince de Talleyrand, grand chamberlain, and the abbé Louis, finance minister designate, looked at each other and laughed the laugh of a pair of soothsayers, both having celebrated the mass of the Federation in the Champ de Mars, on July 14, 1790, Talleyrand saying the mass as bishop, Louis serving him as deacon.13 In 1817, on the footpaths that laced the same Champ de Mars, big wooden cylinders were to be seen, lying on their sides on the grass, rotting in the rain, their blue paint still bearing traces of eagles and bees that were losing their gold leaf. These were the columns that, two years previously, had supported the emperor’s podium in the Champ de Mai.14 They were scorched and charred here and there by the bivouac fires of the Austrians camped in barracks close to Gros-Caillou.15 Two or three of the columns had disappeared altogether in these fires, which warmed the great hands of the kaiserlichen, or imperialists. What was remarkable about the Champ de Mai celebration was that it was held on the Champ de Mars and in the month of June. In the year 1817, two things were popular: the Touquet edition of Voltaire16 and the Touquet snuffbox à la Charte. The latest Paris sensation was the murder committed by Dautun,17 who had hurled his brother’s head into the Marché-aux-Fleurs fountain. The ministry of the navy was beginning to be questioned over the sinking of the doomed frigate the Medusa,18 an event that was to cover the captain Chaumareix with shame and the painter Géricault with glory. Colonel Selves19 went to Egypt to become Suleiman Pasha there. The Palais des Thermes, in the rue de la Harpe, served as a cooper’s shopfront. You could still see on the roof of the Hôtel de Cluny’s octagonal tower the little clapboard shed that had served as an observatory to Messier,20 naval astronomer to Louis XVI. The duchesse de Duras21 read the unpublished manuscript of Ourika to three or four friends in her boudoir, done out by X in sky blue satin. The Ns were all scratched out at the Louvre.22 The pont d’Austerlitz abdicated and called itself the pont du Jardin du Roi,23 a double riddle that disguised both the pont d’Austerlitz and the Jardin des Plantes. Louis XVIII, who was busily annotating Horace with his thumbnail and worrying about heroes who get themselves made emperors and clogmakers who get themselves made dauphins, had two causes for concern: Napoléon and Mathurin Bruneau.24 The Académie Française proposed an essay prize25 on this theme: “the happiness that comes from study.” Monsieur Bellart was officially eloquent. Broë’s future attorney general could be seen germinating in his shadow, before becoming, when ripe, the butt of Paul-Louis Courier’s sarcasm.26 A Chateaubriand impersonator named Marchangy popped up, followed by a Marchangy impersonator named d’Arlincourt.27 Claire d’Albe and Malek-Adel were masterpieces and Madame Cottin28 was declared the premier writer of the age. The Institut de France let the academician Napoléon Bonaparte29 be struck off its list of members. A royal ordinance established a naval school at Angoulême,30 for the duc d’Angoulême being a grand admiral of the fleet, it was obvious that the town of Angoulême had to be found by rights to have all the qualities of a seaport, failing which the whole principle of monarchy would have been dented. Ministerial councils fretted over the issue of whether the vignettes of acrobatics that spiced up Franconi’s posters31 and lured the street rabble should be tolerated. Monsieur Paër, author of L’Agnese, a good old fellow with a square face and a wart on one cheek, directed the small private concerts offered by the marquise de Sassenaye, rue de la Ville-l’Évêque. All the young girls sang “L’Ermite de Saint-Avelle,” with words by Edmond Géraud.32 The Nain jaune turned into the Miroir.33 The Café Lemblin was for the emperor, as opposed to the Café Valois,34 which was for the Bourbons. Monsieur le duc de Berry had just been married off to a Sicilian princess, though the duc was already regarded most darkly by Louvel.35 Madame de Staël36 had been dead a year. The bodyguards hissed and booed Mademoiselle Mars.37 The big newspapers were quite small. The format had shrunk but freedom of expression had mushroomed. The Constitutionnel was constitutional.38 The Minerve39 spelled Chateaubriand Chateaubriant, like the steak, and that final t gave the bourgeoisie a lot of laughs at the great writer’s expense. In the turncoat press, old newspaper hacks prostituted themselves and insulted the outlaws of 1815:40 David had lost his talent, Arnault had lost his wit, Carnot had lost his integrity, Soult had never won a battle, and certainly Napoléon had lost his genius.41 Everyone knows that letters addressed to a man in exile rarely reach him,42 the police making it a religious duty to intercept them. This is nothing new; Descartes complained about it when he was banished.43 But when David moaned about not receiving the letters people wrote to him, in the columns of some Belgian newspaper, the royalists found this hilarious and jeered at the exile in their rags. Whether you said “regicides” or “voters,” “enemies” or “allies,” “Napoléon” or “Buonaparte”44 divided you from the next man more decisively than any yawning chasm. All reasonable people agreed45 that the age of revolutions had been closed forever by King Louis XVIII, fondly known as “the immortal author of the Charter.” On the tip of the central island by the Pont-Neuf the word Redivivus was sculpted on the pedestal that awaited the statue of Henri IV.46 In the rue Thérèse, no. 4, Monsieur Pieté47 was hatching his plans for the consolidation of the monarchy. In critical situations, the leaders of the right invariably wheeled out the phrase: “We must write to Bacot.”48 The ultra-royalists Messieurs Canuel, O’Mahony, and de Chappedelaine were working, not entirely without the approbation of Monsieur, the king’s brother, on what would later become known as “the Waterside Conspiracy.”49 The ex-army officers of L’Épingle Noir were also plotting away. Delaverderie teamed up with Trogoff.50 Monsieur Decazes, showing somewhat liberal tendencies as police minister, prevailed.51 Chateaubriand, on his feet every morning at the window at no. 27, rue Saint-Dominique, in stirrup trousers and slippers, his grey hair tied up in a Madras scarf, his eyes glued to a mirror, a complete dental surgeon’s kit open in front of him, was cleaning his teeth, which were perfect, while dictating variations on La Monarchie selon la Charte52 to his secretary, Monsieur Pilorge. The most influential critics preferred Lafon to Talma.53 Monsieur de Féletz signed himself “A”; Monsieur Hoffmann54 signed “Z.” Charles Nodier55 wrote Thérèse Aubert. Divorce was abolished.56 High schools were called colleges. The college students, sporting decorative gold fleurs-de-lis on their collars, thrashed each other over the king of Rome.57 The palace secret police informed her royal highness, Madame,58 about the portrait, everywhere on show, of Monsieur le duc d’Orléans,59 who looked better in the uniform of a colonel general of hussars than Monsieur le duc de Berry in the uniform of a colonel general of dragoons—which was a real worry. The city of Paris dipped into its own coffers to have the dome of the Invalides60 regilded. Serious men wondered what Monsieur de Trinquelague would do on such and such an occasion; Monsieur Clausel de Montals differed, on this or that point, with Monsieur Clausel de Coussergues; Monsieur de Salaberry was not happy.61 The actor Picard,62 who belonged to the Académie, which Molière had never been able to get into, put on Les deux Philibert at the Odéon,63 on the pediment of which, though the letters had been torn off, you could still clearly read: THÉÂTRE DE L’IMPÉRATRICE. You were either for Cugnet de Montarlot64 or against him. Fabvier was seditious; Bavoux65 was revolutionary. The bookseller Pélicier66 brought out an edition of Voltaire under the title The Works of Voltaire, by the Académie Française. “That brings the customers in,” the naïve publisher reckoned. Popular opinion had it that Monsieur Charles Loyson67 would turn out to be the genius of the century; envy was beginning to nip at his heels, a sure sign of glory, and he was the butt of this line of verse: Even when Loyson takes wing, you know his paws are firmly on the ground.

Cardinal Fesch refused to step down, so Monsieur de Pins, archbishop of Amasie, took over the administration of the diocese of Lyon.68 The fight over the valley of Dappes69 kicked off between France and Switzerland with a memo from Captain Dufour, who was later made a general. Saint-Simon,70 then unknown, was busy constructing his sublime dream. At the Académie des Sciences, there was a celebrated Fourier whom posterity has forgotten, and in some godforsaken attic or other, there was a Fourier the future will remember.71 Lord Byron was beginning to shine; a note in a poem of Millevoye’s introduced him to France as “a certain Lord Baron.” David d’Angers72 tried to knead marble. The abbé Caron spoke with praise, in a small committee of seminarists, in the cul-de-sac of the Feuillantines, of an unknown priest named Félicité Robert, who was later known as Lamennais.73 A thing that smoked and sloshed along the Seine with a noise like a dog swimming came and went beneath the windows of the Tuileries, from the pont Royal to the pont Louis XV; it was a crummy bit of machinery, a sort of toy, the invention of a daydreaming crackpot, a utopia: in a word, a steamboat. Parisians regarded the useless object with indifference. Monsieur de Vaublanc,74 an Institut de France reformer whose preferred tools were the coup d’état, the royal decree, and the lot, proved to be the making of several academicians, but did not manage to become one himself. The faubourg Saint-Germain and the pavillon Marsan75 wanted Monsieur Delavau76 as chief of police because of his devoutness. Dupuytren and Récamier77 argued in the amphitheatre of the École de Médecine and virtually came to blows over the divinity of Jesus Christ. Cuvier,78 with one eye on Genesis and the other on Nature, tried to satisfy the bigots79 by getting fossils to fit in with the scriptural record and having Moses backed up by the mastodons. Monsieur François de Neufchâteau, the praiseworthy keeper of the flame of Parmentier’s memory,80 did his level best to see that pomme de terre—potato—was pronounced parmentière, but he did not pull it off. The abbé Grégoire,81 ex-bishop, ex-Conventionist, ex-senator, acquired the status of “the infamous Grégoire” in royalist polemics. The expression just used—“to acquire the status of”—was denounced as a neologism by Monsieur Royer-Collard.82 You could still distinguish by its whiteness, under the third arch of the pont d’Iéna,83 the new stone that plugged the hole made two years earlier by Blücher84 when he tried to blow up the bridge. The Law called to its bar a man who, on seeing the comte d’Artois85 enter Notre-Dame, was reckless enough to say out loud: “I’ll be buggered! How I miss the days when I used to see Bonaparte and Talma going into the Bal-Sauvage arm in arm.”86 Seditious words—six months’ jail. Traitors crawled out of the woodwork; men who had gone over to the enemy the day before a battle did not bother hiding a sou of what they’d earned in bribes and strutted about shamelessly in broad daylight full of the cynicism wealth and honours bring; the deserters of Ligny and Quatre-Bras,87 in their unchecked and financially rewarded depravity, paraded their monarchical devotion brazenly, for all to see—forgetting what is written on lavatory walls in England: Please adjust your dress before leaving.

And that, willy-nilly, is what dimly survives of the year 1817, otherwise now largely forgotten. History neglects nearly every one of these little details and cannot do otherwise if it is not to be swamped by the infinite minutiae. And yet, the details, which are wrongly described as little—there are no little facts in the human realm, any more than there are little leaves in the realm of vegetation—are useful. The face of the century is made up of the lines of the years.

In the year 1817, four young Parisians played “a great practical joke.”

II. A DOUBLE FOURSOME

ONE OF THESE Parisians was from Toulouse, one from Limoges, the third from Cahors, and the fourth from Montauban; but they were students, and once you’re a student, you’re a Parisian; to study in Paris is to be born in Paris.1 These young men were of no account, everyone has seen their type. Pull the first four passersby off the street and they would be perfect examples; neither good nor bad, neither knowledgeable nor ignorant, neither geniuses nor morons; good-looking in that charming fresh-faced way known as being twenty. They were four Oscar what’s-his-names, for in those days Arthurs had not yet come into their own. “Burn the perfumes of Arabia for him,” the romance cries, “Oscar2 is coming, Oscar—soon, I’ll see him!” Everything was straight out of Ossian,3 elegance was either Scandinavian or Caledonian, and the first of the Arthurs, Wellington, had only just won the battle of Waterloo.

These Oscars were called Félix Tholomyès, of Toulouse, Listolier, of Cahors, Fameuil, of Limoges, and lastly, Blachevelle, of Montauban. Naturally, each one had his mistress. Blachevelle loved Favourite, so named because she had been to England;4 Listolier adored Dahlia, who had adopted the name of a flower as her nom de guerre;5 Fameuil idolized Zéphine, a diminutive of Joséphine; Tholomyès had Fantine, known as “the Blonde” because of her beautiful hair, the colour of sunlight.

Favourite, Dahlia, Zéphine, and Fantine were four ravishing girls, perfumed and sparkling, still a bit on the working-class side, not having entirely abandoned their sewing needles, troubled by torrid romances of the railway novel kind, but with traces of the serenity of labour on their faces and in their hearts that bloom of purity that survives a woman’s first fall from grace. One of the four was known as “the baby” because she was the youngest; and one was known as “the old girl.” The old girl was twenty-three. To be frank, the first three were more experienced, more nonchalant, and more familiar with the ways of the world than Fantine, the Blonde, who still harboured a few illusions.

The same could not be said for Dahlia, Zéphine, and especially not Favourite. There had already been more than one chapter in their barely begun romantic novel, and the amorous young man who was called Adolphe in the first chapter turned into Alphonse in the second and Gustave in the third. Poverty and coquetry are two deadly counsellors; one upbraids, the other flatters, and the beautiful daughters of the working class have both of them whispering in their ears, each with its own agenda. Such defenceless creatures listen. Hence their falls from grace and the stones thrown at them. The splendour of all that is immaculate and inaccessible is hurled at them, heaped upon them. Alas! What if the Jungfrau6 had been starving?

Favourite, having been to England, was much admired by Zéphine and Dahlia. She’d had a home of her own at a very early age. Her father was an old brute of a mathematics teacher who swaggered like a Gascon7 and was an out-and-out braggart; he had never married and he still chased skirt despite his age. When he was young, this teacher had one day seen a chambermaid’s dress snag on a fender, and he had fallen in love with the accident. Favourite was the result. She ran into her father from time to time and he would say hello. One morning an old woman who looked a bit dotty turned up on her doorstep and said, “Don’t you know me, Mademoiselle?” “No.” “I’m your mother.” Then the old woman opened the buffet cupboard, ate and drank her fill, sent for a mattress she had lying about somewhere, and settled in. This mother, a terrible nag and pious on top of it, never spoke to Favourite, could sit for hours on end without uttering a sound, ate enough breakfast, lunch, and dinner for four, and would go down to the porter’s lodge to peer at visitors and stab her daughter in the back.

What had driven Dahlia into Listolier’s arms and, perhaps, into the arms of others, into an idle life, was her pink fingernails, which were far too pretty. How could anyone expect those nails to do any work? If a girl wants to remain virtuous she can’t be too soft on her hands. As for Zéphine, she had conquered Fameuil with her cute little mutinous way of simpering: “Oui, monsieur.” The young men were pals, the young women, friends. Such love affairs are always coupled with such friendships.

It’s one thing to be good and quite another to be philosophical; the proof, if proof were needed, is that Favourite, Zéphine, and Dahlia were able to come to terms with these illicit little pairings off because they were philosophical, but Fantine was a good girl.

Good, I hear you say? What about Tholomyès? Solomon would reply that love is part of goodness. We’ll say only that Fantine’s was a first love, a unique love, a faithful love.

She was the only one of the four to whom one man alone had whispered sweet nothings.

Fantine was one of those beings who spring up, so to speak, in the very bosom of the people. Emerging from the absolute dregs of the social morass, she bore the mark of anonymity and disconnection on her forehead. She was born at Montreuil-sur-mer. Who were her parents? Who could say? No one had ever known her to have a father or a mother. She called herself Fantine. Why Fantine? No one had ever known her to go by any other name. At the time of her birth, the Directoire8 still held sway. She had no family name, since she had no family; she had no Christian name, since the Church had become a spent force. She was called whatever the first person who had happened along felt like calling her when they ran across her as a tiny toddler padding around the streets barefoot. A name had fallen upon her the same way water from the clouds fell on her head when it rained. They called her la petite Fantine. That was all anyone knew about her. This human being had come into existence just like that. At the age of ten, Fantine left town and went into service with a farming family in the district. At fifteen, she came to Paris “to seek her fortune.” Fantine was beautiful and remained pure for as long as she could. A pretty blonde with beautiful teeth, she had gold and pearls for a dowry, but her gold was on her head and her pearls were in her mouth.

She worked in order to live; then, also in order to live, she loved, for the heart has its own hunger.

She loved Tholomyès.

For him it was a simple love affair, for her, passion. The streets of the quartier Latin, which were crawling with students and working girls,9 saw the beginning of this idyll. In the labyrinth of the Panthéon hill, where so many amorous adventures coalesce and dissolve, Fantine had run away from Tholomyès for a long time, but always in such a way that she would run into him again. There is a way of running away that looks a lot like chasing after. To cut a long story short, the pastoral idyll happened.

Blachevelle, Listolier, and Fameuil formed a sort of group with Tholomyès at the head. He was the wit.

Tholomyès was the original world-weary student. He was rich, with four thousand francs annual income10—four thousand francs, annual income—a splendid scandal on the montagne Sainte-Geneviève.11 Tholomyès was a wasted high roller of thirty. He was wrinkled and gap-toothed, and he was starting to develop a bald patch, of which he himself said without a hint of regret: “the noggin at thirty, the knees at forty.”12 His digestion was pretty poor and he had suddenly developed a weeping eye. But the more his youth faded, the gayer a blade he became; he replaced his teeth with gibes, his hair with hilarity, his health with irony, and his weeping eye laughed nonstop. He was falling apart yet blooming. His youth, packing it in long before its time, beat an orderly retreat in a fit of laughter, and all that could be seen of it was its fire. He’d had a play turned down at the Vaudeville. He would toss off mediocre verses whenever he had the urge. What’s more, he maintained a superior skepticism about all things, a great strength in the eyes of the weak. And so, being ironic and bald, he was the chief. Iron is a strong metal. Could that be where the irony came in?

One day Tholomyès took the other three aside, made an oracular gesture, and said to them: “It’s nearly a year since Fantine, Dahlia, Zéphine, and Favourite have been asking us for a surprise. We promised them solemnly to give them one. They keep harping on it, especially to me. Just as the old women of Naples cry to Saint Janvier, Faccia gialluta, fa o miracolo—’Yellow face, do your miracle!’—so our beauties are always saying to me, ‘Tholomyès, when are you going to produce your surprise?’ At the same time our parents are appealing to us. Let’s kill two birds with the one stone. The time has come, it seems to me. Let’s see what we can come up with.” On that note, Tholomyès lowered his voice and mysteriously intoned something so hysterically funny that a huge and wildly enthusiastic guffaw went up from all four in concert and Blachevelle cried: “Now, that’s not a bad idea!” A small smoke-filled bar cropped up, they went in, and the rest of their conference was lost in shadow.

The result of this secret conference was a wonderful pleasure trip that took place the following Sunday, the four young men inviting the four young women along.

III. FOUR BY FOUR

WHAT A TRIP to the country meant for students and their girls forty-five years ago can hardly be imagined today. Paris no longer has the same outskirts; the face of what we might call circum-Parisian life has completely changed in half a century. Where there was once the battered old rattletrap there is now the railway car; where there was once the rickety old two-masted cutter, there is now the steamboat; today we say Fécamp the way we once said Saint-Cloud.1 The Paris of 1862 is a city that has the whole of France as its suburbs.

The four couples conscientiously got through all the folies champêtres2 then possible in the country. It was the start of the holidays and a bright hot summer’s day. The night before, Favourite, the only one who could write, had written a note to Tholomyès on behalf of all four: “It is a good time to set out in good time.” This is why they got up at five o’clock in the morning. They caught the coach to Saint-Cloud, looked at the dry waterfall, and cried, “Must be fabulous when there’s water!” had breakfast at the Tête-Noire, to which Castaing3 had not yet been, treated themselves to a game of quoits on the paths by the main pool, climbed up to Diogenes’ Lantern, bet macaroons on the roulette wheel at the pont de Sèvres, picked bunches of flowers at Puteaux, bought toy reed pipes at Neuilly,4 ate apple turnovers everywhere they went, and were perfectly happy.

The girls trilled and twittered away like warblers who’d escaped from their cages. They were delirious. Now and then they’d give the young men a few soft girlish pokes. Ah, the intoxication of life’s clear morning! What wonderful years! The wings of dragonflies are quivering. Oh, whoever you are, don’t you remember? Have you never walked in the undergrowth beneath the trees, holding branches out of the way because of the lovely head following behind you? Have you never slipped, laughing, on a slope wet with rain with a woman you love holding on to you by the hand and squealing: “Oh, my brand-new lace-up boots! Look at them now!” We hasten to add that this good-humoured crowd missed out on that thrilling setback, the squall, even though Favourite had said at the outset, in an authoritative and motherly tone, “The slugs are wandering all over the paths. Sign of rain, children.” All four girls were deliriously pretty. A good old classic poet well-known at the time, the knight of Labouïsse5—a nice man who had an Eléanore stashed away somewhere—was strolling under the chestnuts of Saint-Cloud that day and when he saw them go by at about ten in the morning, he shrieked, “There’s one too many!”—thinking, of course, of the Graces. Favourite, Blachevelle’s girlfriend, the one who was twenty-three, the old girl, was running ahead under the great green branches, jumping over ditches, madly leaping over bushes, and presiding over the general high spirits with the verve of a young female faun. As chance would have it, Zéphine and Dahlia were beautiful in a complementary way that was enhanced when they were seen together, so they never left each other’s side, more out of some instinctive vanity than out of affection; leaning on each other’s arm, they struck English poses. The first sentimental keepsakes had just started to appear at the time, melancholy was coming into vogue for women just as Byronism would later be all the rage for men, and the hair of the tender sex was beginning to stream down in a weeping habit. Zéphine and Dahlia wore their hair in rolls. Listolier and Fameuil were engaged in a discussion about their teachers and were explaining the difference between Monsieur Delvincourt and Monsieur Blondeau6 to Fantine.

Blachevelle seemed to have been born to carry Favourite’s limp dun-coloured shawl on his arm on Sundays.

Tholomyès brought up the rear, dominating the group from behind. He was as gay as a lark, but you could sense that it was all very controlled; there was a whiff of the dictatorial about his joviality—he was pulling the strings. His principal adornment was a pair of “elephant-legs”—ballooning nankeen trousers, with stirrups of copper braid; he had a strong rattan cane in his hand that had cost two hundred francs, and, as his boldness knew no bounds, he had the strangest thing, a cigar, in his mouth. Since nothing was sacred to him, he’d taken up smoking.

“You’ve got to hand it to Tholomyès,” said the others with reverence. “Those pantaloons! All that energy!”

As for Fantine, she was pure joy. Her magnificent teeth had clearly been given her by God with one purpose only, and that was to laugh. She had a little straw hat with long white ribbons, which she preferred to carry in her hand rather than to wear on her head. Her thick blond hair, which was inclined to come adrift and needed to be pinned back up constantly, seemed made for some enactment of Galatea’s flight beneath the willows,7 tresses floating free. Her rosy lips babbled with delight. The corners of her mouth, voluptuously turned up like those of the antique masks of Erigone,8 seemed to encourage bold advances; but her long shadowy eyelashes were discreetly cast down over the suggestive animation of the lower part of her face, as though to rein it in. Her whole getup had something wildly poetic and flamboyant about it. She wore a frock of mauve barège, little bronze-coloured ankle boots whose laces traced Xs on her fine white openwork stockings, and a sort of muslin spencer, originally invented in Marseilles and called a canezou, the name being a corruption of the words quinze août—15 August—as pronounced on the Canebière9 in Marseilles, and connoting the warm sunny weather of the south. The other three were not so timid, as we said, and wore boldly low-cut dresses without further ado; in summer, under hats covered in flowers, they looked extremely graceful and alluring, but next to such daring attire, the canezou of the blond Fantine—transparent, indiscreet, yet understated, covering and revealing at the same time—seemed like one of decency’s more provocative brainwaves, and the famous court of love presided over by the vicomtesse de Cette,10 the woman with the sea green eyes, would perhaps have awarded the prize for seduction and sex appeal to this little canezou that had entered the modesty stakes. The most naïve is sometimes the most knowing. It can happen.

Stunning face-on, delicate in profile, with her deep blue eyes, lustrous eyelids, small, beautifully high-arched feet, wrists and ankles admirably turned, white skin that showed, here and there, a bluish arborescence of veins, fresh young cheeks, the robust neck of the Aegean Juno, the nape firm and supple, shoulders modelled as though by Coustou,11 with a voluptuous hollow between them visible through the muslin; a gaiety cooled by dreaminess; sculptural and exquisite … That was Fantine. You could sense the statue beneath the ribbons and glad rags, and in this statue, a soul.

Fantine was beautiful, without being too conscious of the fact. Those rare dreamers, mysterious priests of the beautiful, who compare all things to perfection, would have glimpsed the sacred antique harmony in this little working-class miss through the transparency of Parisian grace. This daughter of darkness had class. She possessed both types of beauty—style and rhythm. Style is the shape the ideal takes, rhythm, its movement.

We said Fantine was joy itself. Fantine was also decency.

What any observer studying her closely would have picked up, emanating from her through all the intoxication of her age, the season, her little love affair, was invincible reserve and modesty. She was always a bit on the wide-eyed side. That peculiarly chaste bewilderment is the subtle difference between Psyche and Venus.12 Fantine had the slender long white fingers of the vestal virgins who once stirred the ashes of the sacred fire with golden rods. Although she would never have refused Tholomyès anything, as was all too clear, her face at rest was utterly virginal; a sort of serious and almost austere dignity would suddenly come over it at certain moments, and nothing was as strange and disturbing as seeing the gaiety so swiftly eclipsed by withdrawal—without any transition. This sudden gravity, sometimes severely pronounced, was like the contempt of a goddess. Her forehead, nose, and chin offered that balance of line, as distinct from the balance of proportion, that constitutes the harmony of the whole face; in the expressive space that separates the base of the nose from the upper lip, she had that barely perceptible but enchanting line that is a mysterious sign of chastity and that made Barbarossa fall in love with a Diana dug up in the excavations in Iconium.

Illicit love is a sin; so be it. Fantine was the innocence that rises above this sin.

IV. THOLOMYÈS IS SO CHEERY HE SINGS A SPANISH DITTY

THAT PARTICULAR DAY was pure sunshine from dawn to dusk. All of nature seemed to be on holiday and to smile on them. The parterres of Saint-Cloud were fragrant with scent; the breeze from the Seine gently stirred the leaves; the branches waved in the wind; the bees were having their way with the jasmine; a whole bohemia of butterflies fluttered in the milfoil, clover, and wild oats; there was a swarm of those vagabonds, the birds, in the stately playground of the king of France.

The four frolicking couples, at one with the sun, the fields, the flowers, the trees, were radiant with happiness, too.

And in this shared magic, talking, singing, running, dancing, chasing butterflies, picking convolvulus, getting their stockings wet in the long grass, fresh, wild, but nice, all the girls earned kisses now and then from all the boys, except Fantine, remote in her vague resistance, dreamy and fierce, and full of love. “You know,” Favourite said to her, “you always come across as a bit odd.” These are the joys of life. This casual coming together of happy couples is a profound rallying of life and nature and brings out the light and the love in everything. Once upon a time, there was a fairy who made meadows and trees just for people in love. Whence the eternal clandestine school of the open air, that school of love that just keeps starting over again and that will keep on as long as there are bushes and schoolboys. Whence the popularity of spring among thinkers. The patrician and the small-time operator, the duke and the peer and the gownsman, the people of the court and the people of the town, as they used to be called, are all in thrall to this good fairy. You laugh, you play hide-and-seek, the air has never been so bright and clear, love transfigures every little thing! Notary clerks are gods. And the little squeals, the games of chasing in the grass, waists encircled on the sly, all that mumbo jumbo that is music to the ear, the adoration that breaks out in the way a syllable is said, those cherries sucked from one mouth by another—all this blazes and burns into heavenly rapture. Beautiful girls throw themselves away so sweetly. You feel that it will never end. Philosophers, poets, painters look on these ecstasies and don’t know what to do with them, so dazzled are they. “The embarkation for Cythera!” cries Watteau; Lancret, the commoner’s painter, contemplates these bourgeois sailing off into the blue; Diderot opens his arms wide to all the fleeting romances, and d’Urfé sticks a few Druids in among them for good measure.1 After breakfast, the four couples went off to what was then called the king’s patch to look at a plant that had just arrived from India, the name of which escapes us for the moment but which drew all Paris to Saint-Cloud at the time; it was a bizarre and lovely shrub with a long stem and numerous fine threadlike branches, all tangled and leafless and covered with thousands of tiny white stars, which made the bush look like a head of hair crawling with flowers like lice. There was always a crowd standing around admiring it.

The bush having been viewed, Tholomyès shouted: “Donkeys, everyone—my treat!” And once they agreed on a price with the donkey man, they rode back via Vanves and Issy. At Issy, there was a bit of an incident. The park, now part of the Bien National2 but at the time owned by the army supply officer Bourguin,3 was open, as luck would have it. They went in through the gates, visited the statue of the anchorite4 in its grotto, gave themselves a few thrills in the famous hall of mirrors, a lascivious snare fit for a satyr-cum-millionaire or a Turcaret metamorphosed into Priapus.5 They rattled the swing that hung from two chestnuts celebrated by the abbé de Bernis.6 While he gave each gorgeous girl a turn on the swing, one after the other, amid general hilarity due to a flying up of skirts that would have been grist for the mill for Greuze,7 the Toulousian Tholomyès, who was something of a Spaniard, Toulouse being a sister city of Tolosa, sang to the tune of a melancholy lament the old gallega song8 probably inspired by some beautiful girl zooming high in the air on a rope between two trees: I am from Badajoz.

Love calls me.

My whole soul

Is in my eyes

Because you are showing

Your legs.

Fantine alone refused to swing.

“Talk about laying it on thick,” Favourite muttered sharply.

The donkeys finished with, a new pleasure: They took a boat down the Seine and then walked from Passy to the barrière de l’Étoile.9 They had been on their feet since five o’clock in the morning, as you’ll recall, but that meant nothing! “No petering out on Sunday,” according to Favourite. “Tiredness doesn’t work Sundays.” Toward three o’clock the four couples, delirious with happiness, were racing down the roller coaster, a strange structure that sat on Beaujon heights10 then, and whose snaking line could be seen over the tops of the trees in the Champs-Élysées.

From time to time, Favourite cried out:

“What about the surprise? I want the surprise!”

“Patience,” Tholomyès retorted.

V. AT BOMBARDA’S

THE ROLLER COASTER exhausted, thoughts turned to dinner, and the radiant eight, finally a little weary, came to rest at the Cabaret Bombarda, a branch establishment opened on the Champs-Élysées by the famous restaurateur Bombarda,1 whose sign could then be seen hanging on the rue de Rivoli next to the passage Delorme.

A big but ugly bedroom, with an alcove and a bed at the back (given how full the dive was on Sundays they had to put up with this as a place to rest); from two windows you could gaze through the elms at the quai and the river; a magnificent shaft of August sunlight grazed the windows; two tables, on one, a triumphant mountain of bouquets interspersed with men’s and women’s hats, on the other, at which our four couples had plonked themselves down, a cheery clutter of dishes, plates, glasses and bottles, jugs of beer jumbled up with flasks of wine—not much order on the table, quite a bit of disorder under it.

As Molière2 says:

Their feet made under the table

The worst racket that they were able.3

So that was as far as they had got, at four-thirty in the afternoon, with the pastoral gambol that had started at five in the morning. The sun was going down and appetite was fading.

The Champs-Élysées, full of sunshine and people, was nothing more than glare and dust, the two components of a haze of glory. The Marly horses,4 those whinnying chunks of marble, reared up in a golden cloud. Carriages drove up and down. A squadron of magnificent Gardes du Corps, bugler at the head, was passing down the avenue de Neuilly; the white flag, faintly pink in the setting sun, floated over the dome of the Tuileries.5 The place de la Concorde, by that time once more the place Louis XV,6 was crawling with happy strollers. Many of them were sporting the silver fleur-de-lis dangling from the moiré ribbon that, in 1817, had not yet disappeared7 from all buttonholes. Here and there, in the middle of a circle of applauding spectators, clusters of little girls were tossing off a Bourbon round then famous, intended to crush the Hundred Days;8 the chorus went like this: Give us back our Père de Gand.9

Give us back our Father.10

A host of faubourg folk decked out in their Sunday best, sometimes even sporting a fleur-de-lis like good bourgeois,11 were scattered over the great carré Marigny,12 playing skittles and zipping round on the merry-go-round on wooden horses; others were drinking; a few apprentice printers were wearing paper caps; you could hear them laughing. Everyone was radiant. It was a time of incontestable peace and of profound security of a royalist kind; it was the age when a private and special report on the Paris faubourgs, drawn up by the prefect of police, Anglès,13 and handed to the king, ended with these lines: “All things carefully considered, Your Majesty, there is nothing to fear from these particular people. They are as carefree and indolent as cats. The lower echelons of the provinces are restless, those of Paris are not. They are all small men. Your Majesty, two of them would need to be placed end to end to make up one of your grenadiers. There is nothing to worry about on the part of the populace of the capital. It is remarkable that the average height has fallen further in this group in the last fifty years; and the populace of the Paris faubourgs are smaller than before the Revolution. They are not dangerous. To sum up, rabble they are, but good rabble.” Police chiefs don’t think a cat can possibly turn into a lion; and yet, it happens. And that is the miracle of the people of Paris. Besides, the cat, so despised by the comte Anglès, enjoyed the esteem of the republics of antiquity; the cat was freedom incarnate in their eyes, and, as though to serve as a counterpart for the wingless Minerva14 of Piraeus, there used to be a bronze colossus of a cat in the public square in Corinth. The simpleminded police of the Restoration tended to view the people of Paris through rose-coloured glasses. They are not quite the “good rabble” some people think. The Parisian is to the French person in general what the Athenian was to the Greek; no one sleeps more soundly, no one is more openly frivolous and lazy, no one seems quite so oblivious. But don’t be fooled; the Parisian is given to every species of nonchalance, but when there is glory to be had, he comes through in the end, proving capable of all kinds of rage. Give him a pike and he’ll do you the tenth of August;15 give him a gun and you’ll get Austerlitz.16 He is Napoléon’s crutch and Danton’s mainstay.17 Is the homeland at stake? He signs up! Is it freedom that’s at stake? He rips up the cobblestones. Watch out! That hair standing up on his head in fury is epic; his smock drapes itself into an antique chlamys, a purple cloak. Take care. He will turn the first rue Greneta that crops up into the Caudine Forks.18 If the tocsin tolls, this faubourien, a product of the backblocks, this will grow, this little man will rise up and his eyes will be merciless and his breath will blast like a tempest, and from that narrow, weedy chest he’ll produce enough wind to rearrange the folds of the Alps. It’s thanks to the Paris faubourien that revolution conquers Europe, once the armies get involved. He sings, it’s what he loves to do. Tailor the song to his nature and stand back! As long as he has only the “Carmagnole”19 for a refrain, he will only overthrow Louis XVI; get him to sing the “Marseillaise,” and he will free the world.

Having scribbled this note in the margins of the Anglès report, we can now get back to our four couples. The dinner, as we were saying, was winding down.

VI. A CHAPTER WHERE EVERYONE ADORES ONE ANOTHER

TABLE TALK AND amorous talk are equally impossible to grasp; amorous talk is all pretty bubbles, table talk, hot air.

Fameuil and Dahlia were humming; Tholomyès was drinking; Zéphine was giggling; Fantine smiled. Listolier blew into a wooden trumpet bought at Saint-Cloud. Favourite gazed at Blachevelle tenderly and said: “Blachevelle, I adore you.” This prompted a question from Blachevelle: “What would you do, Favourite, if I stopped loving you?”

“Me!” cried Favourite. “Ah, don’t say that, not even for a laugh! If you stopped loving me, I’d race after you, I’d claw you to bits, I’d scratch your eyes out, I’d throw water over you, I’d have you arrested.” Blachevelle smiled with the self-satisfied smugness of a man whose vanity is tickled. Favourite went on: “Oh yes, and I’d set the guards on you! Hah! I wouldn’t think twice, you mongrel!” Blachevelle, in ecstasy, leaned back in his chair and proudly closed both eyes.

Dahlia, still eating, whispered to Favourite through all the din: “Do you really idolize him that much, then, your Blachevelle?”

“Me? I can’t stand him,” replied Favourite in the same tone, taking up her fork once more. “He’s a cheapskate. I’m in love with the character over the road from my place. He’s very good-looking, is that young man, do you know the one I mean? You can tell he’d make a good actor. I love actors. As soon as he gets home, his mother says: ‘Oh, Lord! There goes my peace and quiet. He’ll be shouting his head off again any moment. Dear boy, you give me such a headache.’ Because he goes up to the very top of the house, right up to the attic, with all the rats, up into some dark cubbyhole, up as high as he can go, and he sings and recites and carries on—you can hear him down in the street! He’s already making twenty sous a day working for an attorney writing out crooked legal stuff. He’s the son of an old chorister from Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas.1 Oh, he’s gorgeous and he idolizes me! I mean, one day when he saw me making pancake batter, he said, ‘Mamselle, make your gloves into fritters and I’ll eat them.’ Only an artist could come up with a line like that. Ah, he really is gorgeous. I’m nearly going crazy over him. But, so what? I still tell Blachevelle I adore him. What a whopper, eh? What a whopper!” Favourite paused, then added: “Dahlia, you know, I feel quite sad. It’s done nothing but rain all summer, the wind is driving me nuts, it never stops, Blachevelle’s too mean to roll downhill, it’s hard to find fresh peas at the markets, no one knows what to eat anymore—I’ve got the blues, as the English say—butter is so dear! And then, you know, to top it off, what could be worse than dining in a joint with a bed in it?! It makes me tired of living.” VII. THE WISDOM OF THOLOMYÈS

MEANWHILE, WHILE SOME were singing, others were talking away at the top of their lungs and all at the same time; the place was nothing but noise. Tholomyès decided to intervene: “Let’s not just say whatever comes into our heads or talk too fast,” he shouted. “Let’s think about what we’re saying if we want to sparkle. Too much improvisation drains the old brain. Flowing beer gathers no head. Messieurs, what’s the hurry? Let’s season this blowout with a bit of dignity; let’s eat with a bit of restraint; let’s savour the feast—slowly. Let’s take our time. Take spring; if it comes too early, it’s had it, meaning everything’s frostbitten. Too much zeal is the death of peach trees and apricots. Too much zeal kills the grace and joy of a fine meal. No zeal, gentlemen! Grimod de la Reynière is of the same opinion as Talleyrand!”1 Mutiny rumbled through the group.

“Tholomyès, cut it out,” said Blachevelle.

“Down with the tyrant!” said Fameuil.

“Bombarda, Bombance, and Bambouche!” cried Listolier.

“There’s such a thing as Sunday, you know,” Fameuil resumed.

“We are sober, what’s more,” added Listolier.

“Tholomyès,” put in Blachevelle, “behold mon calme.”

“You are the marquis of calm,” replied Tholomyès.

This mediocre play on words—the marquis de Montcalm was a famous royalist of the day—had the effect of a stone tossed into a pond. All the frogs stopped croaking.

“Friends,” cried Tholomyès in the tone of a man regaining control of his empire, “as you were. You mustn’t let yourselves be so stunned by this rather stunning pun. Not everything that falls out of the sky is worthy of enthusiasm and respect. Puns are the droppings of the mind in flight. The joke falls where it will; and the mind, after releasing its inane remark, takes off into the blue. A whitish spot splattering a rock does not stop the condor from soaring. Far be it from me though to put down the pun! I give it its due, nothing more. All the most august, the most sublime, the most delightful minds of humanity, and perhaps beyond humanity, have gone in for the play on words. Jesus Christ made a pun about Saint Peter—Petrus, the Rock—Moses about Isaac, Aeschylus about Polynices, Cleopatra about Octavius. And note that Cleopatra’s pun preceded the battle of Actium and that, without it, no one would have remembered the city of Toryna,2 whose name derives from a Greek word for dipping spoon. Having conceded that, I return to my exhortation. Brethren, I repeat, no zeal, no din, no excess, even of witticisms, quips, jubilant bons mots, and plays on words. Hear me out, for I have the prudence of Amphiaraüs3 and the baldness of Caesar. There must be a limit, even to conundrums. Est modus in rebus.4 There must be a limit, even to dinners. You like apple turnovers, mesdames, but don’t eat too many of them. Even with turnovers, art and good sense are required. Gluttony punishes the glutton. Gula punishes Gulax.5 Indigestion was invented by God to force morality on stomachs. And remember this: Each of our passions, even love, has a stomach that must not be overloaded. In all things, we must write the word finis in time, we must contain ourselves, even when our urges are urgent, we must slam the door on our appetite and shoot the bolt, stick fantasy in the lockup, turn ourselves in. He is a wise man who knows when the moment has come to put himself under arrest. Have a little faith in me. Just because I’ve done my bit of law, or so my exam results tell me, just because I know the difference between a hypothetical matter and a matter pending, just because I’ve submitted a thesis in Latin on the ways torture was meted out in Rome in the days when Munatius Demens was quaestor of parricide,6 and just because it seems I’m about to be made a doctor of law, it does not necessarily follow that I am a complete idiot. I recommend moderation in your desires. As sure as my name is Félix Tholomyès, what I say is well said. Happy is he who, when the time comes, makes a heroic stand and abdicates, like Sulla or Origen of Alexandria.”7 Favourite listened as though she hung on every word.

“Félix!” she cried. “Such a pretty name! I love it. It’s Latin. It means Prospero.”8

Tholomyès went on: “Quirites, gentlemen, caballeros, mes amis! Do you hope to feel no sting of desire, to pass up the nuptial bed and thumb your nose at love? Nothing easier. Here’s the formula: drink lemonade, get far too much exercise, do hard labour; wear yourselves out, drag around heavy logs, do not sleep, stay up all night, fill yourself till you’re ready to burst with carbonated drinks and water-lily tisanes, sip emulsions of poppies and agnus-castus; season this for me with a strict diet, practically starve to death, and throw in cold baths, herbal belts, applications of lead poultices, lotions containing lead solution, and fomentations of vinegar and water.” “I’d prefer a woman,” said Listolier.

“Woman!” Tholomyès shot back. “Never trust Woman. Woe to him who surrenders to her changing heart! Woman is perfidious and devious.9 She hates the serpent out of professional rivalry. The serpent is the shop across the road.” “Tholomyès,” cried Blachevelle, “you’re drunk!”

“Like hell I am!” said Tholomyès.

“Well, lighten up a little, then,” Blachevelle insisted.

“All right, then, I will,” said Tholomyès.

And, filling his glass, he got to his feet.

“Glory be to wine! Nunc te, Bacche, canam!10 Sorry, girls, that’s Spanish. And the proof of that, señoras, is this: Give me the wine cask and I’ll give you the people. The arroba of Castille contains sixteen litres, the cantaro of Alicante twelve, the almuda of the Canaries twenty-five, the cuartin of the Baleares twenty-six, Czar Peter’s boot thirty. Long live the czar, who was big, and long live his boot, which was even bigger! Mesdames, a friendly word of advice: Go to bed with the wrong man, if you feel like it. The whole point of love is to stray. A love affair is not meant to grovel and slave like a frowsy British maid with calluses on her knees from scrubbing. It’s not made for that; it’s made to rove gaily, sweet fling! They say: To err is human. I say: To err is to be in love. Mesdames, I idolize you all. O Zéphine, O Joséphine, with your face like a slapped backside, you’d be lovely if you weren’t so cross. You look like you had a pretty face until someone accidentally sat on it. As for Favourite, O nymphs and muses! One day Blachevelle was crossing the gutter at the rue Guérin-Boisseau when he spotted a beautiful girl with taut white stockings showing off her legs. The overture was to his liking, so Blachevelle fell in love. The one he loved was Favourite. O Favourite, you have Ionian lips. There was once a Greek painter named Euphorion who was known as the painter of lips. Only this Greek would have been worthy of painting your mouth. Listen! Before you came along, there was no creature worthy of the name Favourite. You are made to be handed the apple, like Venus,11 or to eat it, like Eve. Beauty begins with you. I just mentioned Eve, it is you who created her. You deserve a patent for inventing the beautiful woman. O Favourite, I’ll stop using the familiar form of address, since I’m now moving from poetry to prose. Just now, you spoke my name. I was deeply moved; but, whoever we are, let’s not get stuck on names. Names can be deceptive. My name is Félix but I’m not happy. Words lie. Let’s not blindly accept what they tell us. It would be a mistake to write to Liège for corks or to Pau for gloves.12 Miss Dahlia, if I were you, I’d call myself Rose. Flowers should smell good and a woman should have wit. I’ll say nothing of Fantine, she is a thinker, a dreamer, a ponderer, a sensitive soul; she is a phantom in the form of a nymph with the prudery of a nun who has strayed into the life of a grisette, but who takes refuge in her illusions, and who sings and prays and gazes up into the blue without a clue what she’s seeing or what she’s doing; with her eyes planted on the heavens, she wanders into a garden where there are more birds than exist in real life! O Fantine, know this: I, Tholomyès, I am an illusion. But she doesn’t even hear me, this blond daughter of pipe dreams! Everything about her is fresh, smooth, young, sweet morning light. O Fantine, a girl worthy of calling yourself Marguerite13 or Pearl, you are a woman of the most beautiful Orient. Mesdames, a second bit of advice: Don’t get married. Marriage is like a grafted plant; it either takes well or not at all; shun the risk. But, heavens! What am I going on about? I’m wasting my breath. Girls are incurable when it comes to weddings; and no matter what the rest of us, we wise men, may say, nothing will prevent these vest makers and bootie knitters from dreaming of husbands loaded with diamonds. Well, so be it; but, sweethearts, remember this: You eat too much sugar. You have only one fault, O women, and that is nibbling sweets. O gnawing sex, your pretty little white teeth crave sugar. So, listen carefully, sugar is a salt. All salt is drying. Sugar is the most drying of all salts. It sucks the fluids out of the blood through the veins; coagulation follows, then the blood solidifies; then you get tuberculosis in the lungs, then death. This is why diabetes verges on consumption. So don’t munch on sugar and you will live! I now turn to the menfolk. Messieurs, make your conquests. Steal your beloveds from each other remorselessly. Thrust and parry. In love, there are no friends. Wherever there is a pretty woman there is open hostility. No quarter, all-out war! A pretty woman is a casus belli; a pretty woman is a flagrante delicto. All the invasions in history have been caused by petticoats. Woman is Man’s right. Romulus carried off the Sabine women, William the Conqueror carried off the Saxon women, Caesar carried off the women of Rome. The man who is not loved hovers like a vulture over other men’s lovers; and, as for me, to all those unfortunate men without women, I throw down the sublime proclamation Bonaparte delivered to the Italian army: ‘Soldiers, the enemy has everything you lack!’” Tholomyès broke off.

“Take a breather, Tholomyès,” said Blachevelle.

At the same time, Blachevelle, backed by Listolier and Fameuil, struck up to the tune of a lament one of those workingmen’s songs composed of the first words that spring to mind, heavily rhymed or not at all, as meaningless as the movement of a tree or the noise of the wind, which emerge out of pipe smoke and lift and evaporate with it. This is the ditty they came up with in response to Tholomyès’s harangue: The father turkeys gave

Some money to an agent

So ‘is Grace Clermont-Tonnerre14

Was made pope on Midsummer’s Day;

But Clermont could not be

Made pope, not being a priest;

So their raging agent

Gave ‘em their money back.15

This was not effective in dampening Tholomyès’s improvisation; he tossed back his glass, refilled it, and started off again.

“Down with wisdom! Forget everything I said. Let’s not be prudes or prudent or prudhommes. I drink to merriment; let’s be merry! Let’s polish off our little lesson in law with madness and food. Indigestion and the Digest. Let Justinian be male and revelry female! Joy to the very depths! Live, O creation! The world is a great fat diamond! I am happy. The birds are amazing. It’s all one big party! The nightingale is as good as Elleviou16—and it’s free. Summer, I salute you. O Luxembourg, O Georgics of the rue Madame and of the allée de l’Observatoire!17 O dreamy chickadiddies! O, all those lovely maids who keep themselves amused sketching their little charges while they mind them! The pampas of South America would appeal to me, if I didn’t have the arcades of the Odéon. My soul soars over virgin forests and savannas. Everything is beautiful. The flies buzz in the sunbeams. The sun has sneezed hummingbirds. Kiss me, Fantine.” He kissed Favourite by mistake.

VIII. DEATH OF A HORSE

“THE FOOD’S BETTER at Edon’s1 than at this Bombarda’s!” cried Zéphine.

“I prefer Bombarda to Edon,” declared Blachevelle. “It’s more luxurious. It’s more Asian. Look at the room downstairs. It has great looking-glasses on the walls.” “I prefer glaces2 on my plate,” said Favourite.

Blachevelle was not deterred.

“Look at the knives. The handles are silver at Bombarda’s and bone at Edon’s. Well, silver’s worth more than bone.”

“Unless you’ve got a silver chin,” Tholomyès observed.

At that moment he was gazing out at the dome of the Invalides, visible from Bombarda’s windows.

There was a lull.

“Tholomyès,” cried Fameuil, “a moment ago, Listolier and I were having a discussion.”

“A discussion is good,” replied Tholomyès, “an argument is better.”

“We were arguing about philosophy.”

“So far so good.”

“Who do you prefer—Descartes or Spinoza?”3

“Désaugiers,”4 said Tholomyès.

This ruling handed down, he drank and resumed: “I agree to live. All is not over on this earth, since we can still go on ranting. For this, I give thanks to the immortal gods. We lie, but we laugh. We assert, but we doubt. The unexpected springs out of a syllogism. That is beautiful. There are still human beings here below who can merrily open and shut the surprise box of paradox. What you are quietly drinking, mesdames, is Madeira, don’t you know, from the Coural das Freiras vineyard, which is three hundred and seventeen fathoms above sea level! Take note while you drink! Three hundred and seventeen fathoms! And Monsieur Bombarda, the magnificent restaurateur, gives you these three hundred and seventeen fathoms for four francs fifty centimes!” Fameuil butted in once more: “Tholomyès, your opinion is law. Who’s your favourite author?”

“Ber—”

“—Quin?”

“No. Choux.”5

Tholomyès went on: “All honour to Bombarda! He would be on a par with Munophis of Elephanta if only he could pick me up an almeh—a dancing girl, to you—and with Thygelion of Cheroneus6 if only he could bring me a hetaera! For, O mesdames, there were Bombardas in Greece and Egypt. So Apuleius7 tells us. Alas, it’s always the same old story, there is nothing original anymore in the creator’s creation! Nil sub sole novum, 8 as Solomon says—nothing new under the sun; amor omnibus idem,9 says Virgil—love is the same for all of us. Julie hops in a boat at Saint-Cloud with her Jules, just as Aspasia embarked with Pericles in the fleet of Samos.10 One last word. Do you know who this Aspasia was, ladies? Though she lived at a time when women did not yet have souls, she had a soul; a soul tinged pink and purple, hotter than fire, fresher than the dawn. Aspasia was a creature in whom Woman’s two extremes met; she was the prostitute goddess. Socrates, plus Manon Lescaut.11 Aspasia was created in case Prometheus12 needed a trollop.” Tholomyès was off and racing and would have been hard to stop if a horse had not fallen down in front of them on the quai at that precise moment. The shock stopped both the cart and the orator in their tracks. It was a mare from Beauce,13 old and skinny and ready for the knacker’s, and it had been pulling a very heavy cart. Having got as far as Bombarda’s, the exhausted animal was overcome and refused to budge another inch. The incident had drawn a crowd. The outraged cart driver, cursing furiously, had barely had time to pronounce with suitable energy the sacramental word mongrel! backed by an implacable lash of the whip, when the nag fell, never to get up again. At the clamour of the bystanders, Tholomyès’s merry little audience whipped round and Tholomyès took the opportunity to close his address with this melancholy verse: She was of this world where cuckoos and carriages

Have the same fate,

And, rotten as she was, she lived the way the rotten live,

For the space of a morning—the mongrel!14

“Poor horse,” sighed Fantine.

And Dahlia cried: “There goes Fantine, pitying horses now. Have you ever seen anyone so soft in the head!”

At that point, Favourite, crossing her arms and throwing her head back, looked Tholomyès firmly in the eye and said: “Right! So, what about the surprise?” “Quite right. The moment has come,” replied Tholomyès. “Gentlemen, the hour has struck when we surprise the ladies. Ladies, wait for us a moment.” “It begins with a kiss,” said Blachevelle.

“On the forehead,” added Tholomyès.

Each man gravely planted a kiss on his mistress’s forehead; then all four men headed for the door in single file, placing a finger over their lips.

Favourite clapped her hands as they filed out.

“It’s already fun,” she said.

“Don’t be too long,” murmured Fantine. “We’re waiting.”

IX. HAPPY ENDING TO HAPPINESS

LEFT TO THEIR own devices, the girls propped their elbows on the windowsills in pairs, chatting and leaning their heads out the window and talking over one another.

They saw the young men leave the Cabaret Bombarda arm in arm; the men looked back and waved, laughing, then vanished in the dusty Sunday throng that invades the Champs-Élysées once a week.

“Don’t be long!” Fantine shouted.

“Wonder what they’ll bring us back?” said Zéphine.

“Something nice, that’s for sure,” said Dahlia.

“I hope it will be something in gold,” Favourite contributed.

They were soon distracted by the commotion at the water’s edge, which they could make out through the branches of the great trees and which absorbed their attention completely. It was the hour when the mail coaches and diligences set out. Nearly all the stagecoaches heading for the south and the west took the Champs-Élysées in those days. Most of them followed the quai and went out through the barrière Passy. Every minute some great hulking carriage painted yellow and black and heavily loaded, harnesses jingling noisily, deformed by all the chests and luggage packed under tarpaulins, bristling with heads that swiftly vanished, grinding along the road surface jarring all the cobblestones and bricks, hurtled past the crowd in a shower of sparks, like a mobile forge, billowing dust like smoke in a fit of frenzy. This racket delighted the girls. Favourite exclaimed: “What a din! Sounds like a heap of chains flying off.” It so happened that one of these carriages, which could only just be made out through the thick foliage of the elms, stopped for a moment and then set off again at a gallop. This amazed Fantine.

“That’s strange!” she said. “I didn’t think the diligence ever stopped.”

Favourite shrugged her shoulders.

“That Fantine is amazing! I never cease to marvel. She’s dazzled by the simplest things. Here’s an idea for you: Suppose I’m a traveller and I say to the diligence: ‘I’m going ahead, you pick me up on the quai on your way.’ The diligence comes along, sees me, stops, and picks me up. It happens every day. My darling, you know nothing of life.” Some time passed in this way. Suddenly Favourite sat up, alert, as though she’d just woken up.

“Well, now,” she said, “what’s happened to this surprise?”

“Now you mention it, yes,” said Dahlia, “the famous surprise!”

“They’re taking their time!” said Fantine.

Just as Fantine’s sigh died, the waiter who had served dinner came in. He was holding what looked like a letter.

“What’s that?” asked Favourite.

The waiter replied: “It’s a note that the gentlemen left for the ladies.”

“Why didn’t you bring it right away?”

“Because the gentlemen ordered me not to give it to the ladies until an hour was up.”

Favourite tore the note from the waiter’s hands. It was, indeed, a letter.

“Well, well, well!” she said. “There’s no address. But here’s what it says on the outside: THIS IS THE SURPRISE!”

She swiftly broke the seal, opened it out and read (for she could read):

O, lovers of ours!

Know that we have parents. Parents are not something you know much about. They are called mothers and fathers in the civil code, which is puerile but honest. Now, these parents are moaning, these old men want to claim us, these good old men and women call us prodigal sons; they want us to return and offer to kill fatted calves for us. Being virtuous, we obey them. By the time you read this, five fiery steeds will be bringing us back to our mamas and papas. We are packing up our tents, as Bossuet would say. We are leaving, we have left. We are fleeing in the arms of Laffitte and on the wings of Caillard. The Toulouse diligence1 is tearing us away from the abyss and the abyss is you, O, our beautiful little darlings! We are returning to society, to duty and to order, at a great clip, at the rate of three leagues an hour. It is important for the homeland that we be, like everyone else, police commissioners, fathers of families, council employees, and members of the Council of State. Venerate us. We are sacrificing ourselves. Mourn us rapidly and replace us pronto. If this letter tears you apart, tear it apart back. Adieu.

For nearly two years, we have made you happy. Don’t hold it against us.

Signed: BLACHEVELLE

FAMEUIL

LISTOLIER

FÉLIX THOLOMYÈS

Post-Scriptum. The meal is paid for.

The four girls looked at each other.

Favourite was the first to break the silence.

“Well!” she cried. “That’s a pretty good joke, I’ll give them that.”

“Very droll,” said Zéphine.

“It must have been Blachevelle’s idea,” Favourite went on. “It makes me feel quite in love with him. No sooner lost than loved. That’s the way it goes.” “No,” said Dahlia, “it’s Tholomyès’s idea. You can tell.”

“In that case,” retorted Favourite, “down with Blachevelle and long live Tholomyès!”

“Long live Tholomyès!” cried Dahlia and Zéphine.

And they burst out laughing.

Fantine laughed with them.

An hour later, when she was back in her room, she cried. He was, as we said, her first love; she had given herself to this Tholomyès as to a husband, and the poor girl had a child.