بخش 3 کتاب 3

BOOK THREE

GRANDFATHER AND GRANDSON

AN OLD-WORLD SALON

WHEN MONSIEUR GILLENORMAND LIVED in the rue Servandoni, he haunted several very good and very noble salons. Although bourgeois, Monsieur Gillenormand was accepted. As he was doubly witty, first with the wit he actually had and then with the wit attributed to him, he was even sought after and lionized. He never went anywhere except on condition that he dominate proceedings. There are people who will go to great lengths to have influence and to be made a fuss of; where they can’t be oracles, they turn themselves into buffoons. Monsieur Gillenormand was not that kind of man; his dominance in the royalist salons he frequented did not cost him an iota of self-respect. He was an oracle everywhere he went. He sometimes held his own with Monsieur de Bonald and even Monsieur Bengy-Puy-Vallée.1 Around 1817, he invariably spent two afternoons a week in a house in his neighbourhood, rue Férou, at Madame la baronne de T——,2 a worthy and respectable eminence whose husband had been ambassador of France in Berlin under Louis XVI. The baron de T——, who had been a passionate devotee of ecstasies and magnetic visions in his lifetime, had died ruined in the Emigration, leaving, as sum total of his fortune, very curious memoirs on Mesmer and his tub, in ten manuscript volumes bound in red morocco with gilt edging. Madame de T—— had not published the memoirs out of a sense of dignity and supported herself on a small income that had lingered on unaccountably. Madame de T—— lived far from the court, “a very mixed bag,”3 she reckoned, in splendid isolation, proud and poor. A few friends gathered twice a week around her widow’s fireside and this constituted an unadulteratedly royalist salon. They took tea there and gave out groans or cries of horror, according to whether the wind was blowing in favour of the elegy or the dithyrambic, over the age, over the Charter, over the Buonapartists, over the prostitution of the blue sash to the bourgeois, or over the Jacobinism of Louis XVIII,4 and they discussed in very low voices their hopes for Monsieur, later Charles X.5 They greeted with transports of joy vulgar songs in which Napoléon was nicknamed Nicolas. Duchesses, the most delicate and the most charming women in the world, went into raptures there over couplets like the following, addressed to “the federates”:6 Pull up your breeches

Your shirts are hangin’ out.

Don’t let ‘em say patriots

Harboured the white flag!7

They had tremendous fun with puns they thought were fantastic, with plays on innocent words they considered deadly, with quatrains and even distiches; thus on the Dessolles ministry, a cabinet of moderates of which messieurs Decazes and Deserre8 were members: To shore up the throne shaken to its foundations,

You need a change of soil, greenhouse and pot.9

Or else they reworked the list of the Chamber of Peers, “an abominably Jacobin chamber,” and joined names together from this list to make, for example, phrases like this one: Damas, Sabran, Gouvion-Saint-Cyr.10 All this, gay as larks.

In that world they liked to parody the Revolution. For some reason, they seemed to feel the need to put the same anger to use, but the other way round, and sharper. They sang their own little “Ça ira.” Ah! It’ll be all right! it’ll be all right! it’ll be all right!

Let the Buonapartists string from the lampposts!12

Songs are like the guillotine; they chop indifferently, today this head, tomorrow, that one. All just variations on the same theme.

In the Fualdès affair,13 which dates from around that time, 1816, they sided with Bastide and Jausion because Fualdès was “a Buonapartist.” Liberals were described as “the brothers and friends,”14 which was the greatest possible insult.

Like certain church towers, the salon of Madame la baronne de T—— had two cocks. One was Monsieur Gillenormand, the other was the comte de Lamothe-Valois, of whom it was whispered in somewhat awed tones: “Did you know? He’s the Lamothe of the Necklace Affair.” Parties have strange amnesties.15 We might add this: In the bourgeoisie, honourable positions are diminished by too easy relations; you have to be careful who you let in, for just as there is a loss of heat in the vicinity of those who are cold, so there is a dwindling of respect in being approached by people who are frowned upon. The old world of high society held itself above that particular rule as above all others. Marigny, brother of La Pompadour,16 had privileged access to the home of Monsieur le prince de Soubise.17 Even though? No, because. Du Barry, godfather of La Vaubernier,18 is more than welcome at Monsieur le maréchal de Richelieu’s.19 That world is Olympus. Mercury20 and the prince de Guéménée are at home in it. A thief is accepted, as long as he is a god.

Le comte de Lamothe, who was an old man of seventy-five in 1815, had nothing remarkable about him except for his silent and sententious air, his angular and cold face, his perfectly polished manners, his coat buttoned right up to his cravat, and his great long legs, always crossed in long, loose trousers the colour of burnt sienna. His face was the colour of his trousers.

This Monsieur de Lamothe was “somebody” in this salon because of his “celebrity” and, strange but true, because of the name of Valois.

As for Monsieur Gillenormand, respect for him was absolutely genuine. He was an authority because he was an authority. As unashamedly light as he was and without detracting in any way from his gaiety, he had a certain way of being, imposing, dignified, honest, and arrogant in a bourgeois sort of way; and his great age added to the effect. You are not an entire era for nothing. The years end up giving a head a windswept look that is most distinguished.

He also had a way with words, the kind of words that put the sparkle in old rock. And so, when the king of Prussia, after seeing to the restoration of Louis XVIII, came and paid him a visit under the assumed name of the comte de Ruppin, he was received by Louis XIV’s descendant somewhat like a marquis de Brandenburg21 and with the most refined impertinence. Monsieur Gillenormand approved. “Any king who is not the king of France is a provincial king.” One day this exchange occurred in his hearing: “What was the editor of the Courrier français22 sentenced to?” “To being hung up for a spell.” “Up is superfluous,” observed Monsieur Gillenormand. Bons mots of the kind stand a man in good stead. At an anniversary Te Deum celebrating the return of the Bourbons, seeing Monsieur de Talleyrand23 go by, he said: “There goes His Excellency, Evil.” Monsieur Gillenormand usually went accompanied by his daughter, that elongated mademoiselle who had just turned forty and looked fifty, as well as by a beautiful little boy of seven, white, rosy, fresh-faced, with happy, trusting eyes, who never appeared in the salon without hearing voices buzzing around him: “What a beautiful boy!” “What a shame!” “Poor child!” This child was the one we mentioned a moment ago. They referred to him as “poor child” because he had “a brigand of the Loire” for a father.

This brigand of the Loire24 was Monsieur Gillenormand’s son-in-law mentioned above, whom Monsieur Gillenormand described as “the disgrace of the family.” ONE OF THE RED GHOSTS OF THE TIME

ANYONE PASSING THROUGH the small town of Vernon1 in those days and taking a stroll over the beautiful monumental bridge that will soon be replaced, let’s hope, by some hideous wrought-iron affair, would have been able to see, if they looked down from the parapet, a man of about fifty wearing a leather cap and dressed in trousers and a jacket of coarse grey woolen cloth, to which something yellow was sewn which had once been a red ribbon, shod in clogs, weathered by the sun, his face almost black and his hair almost white, with a large scar across his forehead that ran on down his cheek, bent, buckled, old before his time, strolling around virtually all day, with a spade or a billhook in hand, inside one of those walled plots of land right next to the bridge that line the left bank of the Seine like a chain of terraces—lovely enclosures full of flowers that you would describe as gardens if they were a lot bigger, and, if they were a lot smaller, as bouquets. All these enclosures end in the river at one end and in a house at the other. The man with the jacket and clogs lived around 1817 in the tiniest of the enclosures and the humblest of the houses. He lived there alone, single and solitary, silently and in poverty, except for a woman who was neither young nor old, neither beautiful nor ugly, neither peasant nor bourgeoise, who waited on him. The patch of dirt he called his garden was famous in town for the beauty of the flowers he grew there. Flowers were his stock-in-trade.

By dint of hard work, perseverance, attention, and buckets of water, he had managed to create, following in the Creator’s footsteps, and he had invented certain tulips and certain dahlias that nature seemed to have left out. He was ingenious; he was ahead of Soulange-Bodin2 in building up small flowerbeds of peaty soil for the cultivation of rare and precious shrubs from America and China. At the crack of dawn in summer he would be out on one of his paths, digging, pruning, weeding, watering, walking among his flowers with an air of sad, gentle goodness, sometimes daydreaming without moving a muscle for hours on end, listening to a bird singing in a tree, a baby babbling in a house somewhere, or else with his eye fixed on a drop of dew at the tip of a blade of grass, which the sun was turning into a precious gem. His table was extremely frugal and he drank more milk than wine. Any rogue could get the better of him and his servant scolded him. He was timid to the point of seeming fierce, rarely went out, and saw no one but the poor who knocked on his window and his priest, the abbé Mabeuf, who was a good old sort. Yet if any townspeople or strangers of whatever stripe came and rang the bell at his house, curious to see his tulips and roses, he would open his door with a smile. This was the brigand of the Loire.

Anyone who, in that same period, read military memoirs, biographies, the Moniteur, and the bulletins of the Grande Armée would have been struck by a name that cropped up regularly, the name Georges Pontmercy.3 When he was very young, this Georges Pontmercy had been a soldier in the Saintonge regiment. Then the Revolution broke out. The Saintonge regiment was part of the Army of the Rhine, for the old regiments of the monarchy kept their provincial names, even after the fall of the monarchy, and were not dragooned into the army until 1794. Pontmercy fought at Spires, Worms, Neustadt, Turkheim, Alzey, and Mayence,4 where he was one of the two hundred who made up Houchard’s rear guard. He was one of the twelve men who held their ground against the prince of Hesse’s entire corps behind the old ramparts of Audernach5 and who did not fall back on the main body of the army until the enemy cannon fire opened a breach from the line of the parapet to the submerged embankment. He was under Kléber at Marchiennes and in the battle of Mont-Palissel, where he got his arm broken by a musket ball. He then went on to the Italian front and was one of the thirty grenadiers to defend the Col di Tende with Joubert.6 Joubert was made adjutant general and Pontmercy second lieutenant. Pontmercy was by Berthier’s side in the thick of the storm of grapeshot on that day at Lodi7 that moved Bonaparte to say: “Berthier was canoneer, cavalier, and grenadier rolled into one.” He saw his old general Joubert fall at Novi just as he raised his sword and cried “Forward!” Having been embarked with his company according to the requirements of the campaign in a barge, which went from Genoa to who knows which little port on the coast, he fell into a hornets’ nest of seven or eight English clippers. The Genoese captain wanted to throw the cannon overboard, hide the soldiers in the hold, and slip away into the darkness like a merchant ship. Pontmercy had the red, white, and blue8 hoisted to the halyards of the flag mast and passed proudly under the cannon of the British frigates. Fifty miles farther on, growing bolder than ever, with his barge he attacked and captured a large English transport ship ferrying troops to Sicily, so loaded up with men and horses that the vessel was full to the hatches. In 1805, he was in the Malher division that took Günzburg from the archduke Ferdinand. At Wettingen,9 under a shower of balls, he held in his arms Colonel Maupetit, mortally wounded at the head of the 9th Dragoons. He distinguished himself at Austerlitz in that wonderful march in echelon under enemy fire. When the cavalry of the Russian Imperial Guard crushed a battalion of the 4th of the Line, Pontmercy was among those who took revenge and overwhelmed the Guard. The emperor gave him the cross. One after the other, Pontmercy saw Wurmser taken prisoner in Mantua, Mélas in Alexandria, Mack in Ulm.10 He was part of the eighth corps of the Grande Armée that Mortier commanded and that captured Hamburg. Then he moved to the 55th of the Line, which was the old Flanders regiment. At Eylau,11 he was in the cemetery where the heroic captain Louis Hugo,12 uncle of the author of this book, alone with his company of eighty-three men, held out, for two hours, against the entire effort of the enemy army. Pontmercy was one of the three who came out of that cemetery alive. He was at Friedland. Then he saw Moscow, then the Beresina,13 then Lützen, Bautzen, Dresden, Wachau, Leipzig, and the defiles of Gelenhausen;14 then Montmirail, Château-Thierry, Craon, the banks of the Marne, the banks of the Aisne, and the redoubtable position of Laon.15 At Arnay-le-Duc, being captain, he sabred ten cossacks and saved not his general but his corporal. He was badly wounded on that occasion and twenty-seven fragments of shot were taken out of his left arm alone. Eight days before the capitulation16 of Paris, he changed places with a comrade and joined the cavalry. He was what was called in the ancien régime “two-handed,” signalling equal dexterity in handling a sabre or a musket as a soldier and a squadron or a battalion as an officer. It is this dexterity, perfected by military training, that has given rise to certain special units, the dragoons, for instance, who are both cavalry and infantry at once. He accompanied Napoléon to the island of Elba. At Waterloo, he led a squadron of cuirassiers in Dubois’s brigade. He was the one who took the colours of the Lunebourg battalion. He went and threw the colours at the emperor’s feet. He was covered in blood. In seizing the colours, he had received a sabre cut across his face. The emperor, pleased, shouted to him: “You are a colonel, you are a baron, you are an officer of the Légion d’Honneur!” Pontmercy replied: “Sir, I thank you on my widow’s behalf.” One hour later, he fell into the Ohain gully … Now, what was this Georges Pontmercy? He was this same brigand of the Loire.

We have already seen something of his history. After Waterloo, having been pulled out of the sunken road of Ohain, Pontmercy had managed to get back to the army and had dragged himself from ambulance to ambulance as far as the billets of the Loire.

The Restoration put him on half pay,17 then put him in a home—in other words, under surveillance—in Vernon. King Louis XVIII, considering as and void anything that had been done in the Hundred Days, recognized neither his standing as officer of the Légion d’Honneur, nor his rank as colonel, nor his title as baron.18 He, for his part, never missed an opportunity to sign himself Colonel Baron Pontmercy. He had only an old blue coat and never went out without pinning on it the rosette of an officer of the Légion d’Honneur. The crown prosecutor put him on notice that he would be prosecuted for “illegal wearing of said decoration.” When this notice was handed to him by an officious intermediary, Pontmercy answered with a bitter smile: “I don’t know if it is I who no longer understand French or you who no longer speak it, but the fact is, I don’t understand a word.” He promptly stepped out every day for a week with his rosette in place. No one dared rile him. Two or three times the war minister and the general commanding the département wrote to him, addressing him as Major Pontmercy. He sent the letters back, marked Return to Sender, unopened. At that same moment, Napoléon on Saint Helena was dealing similarly with the missives of Sir Hudson Lowe19 addressed to General Bonaparte. Pontmercy had ended up with the same bile in his mouth, if you’ll forgive the expression, as his emperor. In Rome, too, there were Carthaginian soldiers taken prisoner who had a little of Hannibal’s soul and refused to salute Flaminius.

One morning he came across the crown prosecutor in a street in Vernon, went up to him and said: “Monsieur procureur du roi, am I allowed to wear my scar?” He had nothing but his measly half-pay as squadron chief to live on and so he had rented the smallest house he could find in Vernon. He lived there alone—how, we have just seen. Under the Empire, between the wars, he had found time to marry Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The old bourgeois, outraged at heart, had consented with a sigh and this remark: “The greatest families are forced to do it.”20 In 1815, Madame Pontmercy, who was in all things admirable, in any case, high-minded and rare and worthy of her husband, had died, leaving a child. This child would have been the pride and joy of the colonel in his loneliness; but the grandfather had imperiously claimed his grandson, declaring that, if he was not handed over, he would disinherit him. The father had yielded in the little boy’s interests and, not being able to have his son, had turned to flowers.

He had given up everything, anyway, neither aspiring nor conspiring. He divided his thoughts between the innocuous things he now did and the great things he had done. He passed his time either anticipating a carnation or remembering Austerlitz.

Monsieur Gillenormand had no contact with his son-in-law. The colonel was for him “a bandit” and he was for the colonel “an old codger.” Monsieur Gillenormand never spoke of the colonel except occasionally to make some scathing allusion to “his barony.” It was expressly agreed that Pontmercy would never try to see his son or to speak to him—or the boy would be handed back, driven out and disinherited. For the Gillenormands, Pontmercy was a leper. They intended to bring the child up as they pleased. The colonel was perhaps wrong to accept these conditions, but he bowed to them believing he was doing the right thing and hurting only himself. Old man Gillenormand’s legacy was nothing much, but the legacy from Mademoiselle Gillenormand21 the elder was considerable. This aunt, who had remained unmarried, was extremely rich on her mother’s side and the son of her sister was her natural heir.

The child, who was called Marius, knew he had a father, but that’s as far as it went. Nobody breathed a word to him about him. But in the social world his grandfather took him to, the whispers, hints, and winks finally ended up coming together in the little boy’s mind; he wound up understanding something; and as he naturally picked up, by a sort of slow trickle-down process like osmosis, the ideas and opinions that were, so to speak, the air he breathed, little by litle he came to think of his father only with a lump in his throat and a sense of shame.

While he was growing up in this fashion, two or three times a month, the colonel would escape and speed furtively to Paris like a fugitive from justice breaking his bans, and head for Saint-Sulpice, where he would take up his post at the hour when Aunt Gillenormand took Marius to mass. There, shaking for fear that the aunt would turn round, hiding behind a pillar,22 motionless, hardly daring to breathe, he would watch his son. This battle-scarred hero was afraid of the old maid.

It was actually from this that his friendship with the curé de Vernon, Abbé Mabeuf, came about. This worthy priest was the brother of a Saint-Sulpice churchwarden who had several times noticed the man gazing at the child, and the scar on his cheek, and the fat tears in his eyes. This man, who looked so much the man and yet cried like a woman, had struck the churchwarden. The face stayed in his mind. One day, having gone to Vernon to visit his brother, he came across Colonel Pontmercy on the bridge and recognized the man from Saint-Sulpice. The churchwarden spoke to the curé about it and they both paid the colonel a visit on some pretext or other. This visit led to others. The colonel was at first very closed but finally opened up, and the priest and the churchwarden came to know the whole story, and how Pontmercy had sacrificed his own happiness to his son’s future. This caused the curé to feel real veneration and tenderness for him and the colonel on his side took to the curé with affection. In any case, whenever both happen to be sincere and good, no one gets on as well or becomes as close as an old priest and an old soldier. Deep down, they are the same man. One has dedicated himself to the homeland here below, the other to the homeland up above; there is no other difference.

Twice a year, on the first of January and on Saint George’s feast day, Marius wrote dutiful letters to his father that his aunt dictated and that you would have said were copied from some manual; this was all Monsieur Gillenormand would tolerate; and the father answered with overwhelmingly tender letters that the old man pocketed without reading.

REQUIESCANT—R.I.P.

THE SALON OF Madame T—— was all that Marius Pontmercy knew of the world. It was the sole opening through which he could look at life. This opening was grim and such a tiny window on the world brought him more cold than heat, more darkness than daylight. This child, who was all joy and light whenever he stepped into this strange world, became sad there in a very short space of time and, what is even more unusual at his age, grave. Surrounded by all these imposing and singular persons, he looked around him with serious amazement. Everything conspired to intensify his stupefaction. There were in Madame de T——’s salon noble and extremely venerable old ladies named Mathan, Noé, Lévis which was pronounced Lévi, Cambis which was pronounced Cambyse. These antique figures with their biblical names got mixed up in the little boy’s mind with the Old Testament that he was learning by heart, and when they were all there together, sitting in a circle around a dying fire, scarcely illuminated by a lamp veiled in green, with their severe profiles, their grey or white hair, their long frocks from another age with their morbid colours that were barely discernible, dropping words at once majestic and savage at rare intervals, little Marius would study them with startled eyes believing that he saw, not real beings, but phantoms.

Blending in with these phantoms were several priests, habitués of the old salon, and a few gentlemen: the marquis de Sassenay, secretary-in-chief to Madame de Berry, the vicomte de Valory, who published monorhymed odes under the pseudonym of Charles-Antoine, the prince de Beauffremont, who, though still fairly young, was going grey and who had a pretty and witty wife whose extremely low-cut scarlet velvet frocks with gold trim scared off the gloom, the marquis de Coriolis d’Espinouse, the man in all France who best managed “measured politeness,” the comte d’Amendre, a good old stick with a benevolent chin, and the chevalier de Port de Guy, pillar of the Bibliothèque du Louvre, which was known as “the king’s study.” Monsieur de Port de Guy, bald and more elderly than old, reckoned that in 1793, when he was sixteen years old, he had been thrown into jail as a recalcitrant and chained to an octogenarian, the bishop of Mirepoix, also a recalcitrant, only as a priest, whereas he was a recalcitrant soldier. This was in Toulon. Their job had been to go at night and collect from the scaffold the heads and bodies of those guillotined during the day; they then carried off these streaming trunks on their backs and their red convict smocks had a permanent crust of blood at the back of the neck, wet at night, dry in the morning. Such tragic tales abounded in the salon of Madame de T——;1 and by dint of cursing Marat, they were forced to applaud the terrorist Trestaillon.2 A few deputies of the kind that can’t be pinned down played their whist there—Monsieur Thibord du Chalard, Monsieur Lemarchant de Gomicourt, and the celebrated right-wing comic Monsieur Cornet-Dincourt. The bailiff of Ferrette, with his short breeches and his skinny legs, occasionally breezed through the salon on his way to Monsieur de Talleyrand’s.3 He had been the boon companion in debauchery of the comte d’Artois4 and in a move that was the complete reverse of Aristotle squatting under Campaspe, he had made La Guimard5 walk around on all fours, thereby displaying for all the ages the image of a philosopher avenged by a bailiff.

As for the priests, these were the abbé Halma, the same to whom Monsieur Larose, his collaborator at the Foudre, said: “Bah! Who isn’t at least fifty years old? A few whippersnappers, perhaps!”; the abbé Letourneur, preacher to the king; the abbé Frayssinous,6 who was not yet a count or a bishop or a minister or a peer, and who wore an old soutane with the buttons missing; and the abbé Keravenant, curé of Saint-Germain-des-Prés; plus the pope’s nuncio, at that time Monsignor Macchi, archbishop of Nisibis, later cardinal, remarkable for his long pensive nose; and another monsignor with the title Abbate Palmieri, domestic prelate, one of the seven participating protonotaries of the Holy See, canon of the Insignia of the Liberian Basilicate, advocate of the saints,7 postula-tore di santi, which deals with matters of canonization and more or less means master of requests for the paradise branch; and last two cardinals, Monsieur de la Luzerne and Monsieur de Clermont-Tonnerre. Monsieur le cardinal de Luzerne was a writer and was to have the honour, a few years later, of signing articles in the Conservateur alongside Chateaubriand;8 Monsieur de Clermont-Tonnerre was archbishop of Toulouse and often came to Paris on holiday, staying with his nephew, the marquis de Tonnerre, who had been a minister of the navy and of war. The cardinal de Clermont-Tonnerre was a chirpy little old-timer who flashed a bit of a red stocking underneath a hitched-up soutane; his specialty was hating the Encyclopædia9 and being mad about billiards, and anyone out and about on a summer evening who happened to stroll down the rue Madame, where the hôtel de Clermont-Tonnerre then was, would stop to listen to the clicking of billiard balls and the sharp voice of the cardinal yelling at his fellow conclavist, Monseigneur Cottret, bishop in partibus of Caryste: “See that, Abbé, I’m sending them crashing.” The cardinal de Clermont-Tonnerre had been brought along to Madame de T——’s by his closest friend, Monsieur de Roquelaure, former bishop of Senlis and one of the famous Quarante—the forty members of the Académie Française. Monsieur de Roquelaure was impressive for his great height and his zeal at the Académie; through the glass door of the adjoining room of the library where the Académie Française then held its sessions every Thursday, the curious could contemplate the former bishop of Senlis, habitually on his feet, freshly powdered and in violet stockings and with his back turned to the door, apparently the better to show off his little cape. Though most were men of the court as much as men of the church, all these ecclesiastics added to the gravity of the T—— salon, whose seigneurial side was accentuated by five peers of France, the marquis de Vibraye, the marquis de Talaru, the marquis d’Herbouville, the vicomte Dambray, and the duc de Valentinois. This duc de Valentinois, though prince of Monaco, that is, a foreign sovereign prince, had such an elevated idea of France and of the peerage that he saw everything in terms of them. It was he who said: “Cardinals are the Roman peers of France; lords are the English peers of France.” And the funny thing was—for in this century the Revolution has to muscle in everywhere—that this impeccably feudal salon was, as we have said, dominated by a bourgeois. Monsieur Gillenormand held sway there.

This, then, was the essence and quintessence of White—legitimist—Paris society.10 People of renown were shunned there, even when they were royalists. There is always a bit of anarchy in renown. Had Chateaubriand set foot there, he would have had the same effect as Père Duchesne.11 A few royalists who had rallied to the Republic managed to penetrate this orthodox world, though only under sufferance. Comte Beugnot12 was received there as a matter of good manners.

The “noble” salons of today no longer bear any resemblance to those salons. The current faubourg Saint-Germain has a whiff of heresy about it. The royalists of the moment are demagogues—to their credit,13 we might add.

In the superior world of Madame de T——’s salon, taste was exquisite and exalted, buoyed by the most flowery politeness. Little customs there involved all manner of unconscious refinements which were the ancien régime itself, buried but alive. Some of these customs, especially the linguistic ones, now seem bizarre. Superficial observers would have taken as provincial what was merely old-fashioned. A woman would be referred to as Madame la générale, and Madame la colonelle had not entirely fallen out of use. The charming Madame de Léon, no doubt in memory of the duchesses de Longueville and de Chevreuse,14 preferred this form of address to her title of princesse. The marquise de Créquy, too, called herself Madame la colonelle.

It was this rarefied small world that invented the refinement of always, when speaking to the king in closed circles at the Tuileries, referring to him in the third person as the king and never Your Majesty, the term Your Majesty having been “besmirched by the usurper.”15 Events and people were put on trial there. The age was mightily mocked, which exempted a person from trying to understand it. They bolstered each other’s stunned amazement. They each passed on to the rest what little light they could shed. Methuselah informed Epimenides.16 The deaf kept the blind up to speed. The time that had gone by since Koblenz17 was declared nonexistant. Just as Louis XVIII was in the twenty-fifth year of his reign, by the grace of God, so the émigrés were, by rights, in the twenty-fifth year of their adolescence.

All was harmony; no one was too much alive, speech was barely a whisper, and a newspaper, in keeping with the salon, was like papyrus. There were young people there but they were all a bit dead. In the antechamber, the liveried attendants were dowdy; for those completely out-of-date characters were waited on by domestics of the same ilk. Everything had the air of having lived a long time ago and of holding out doggedly against the grave. Conserve, Conservation, Conservative—that was more or less the entire lexicon. To smell good—that was the thing. Indeed, aromatics entered into the opinions of these venerable bastions and their ideas reeked of violets. It was a mummified world. The masters were embalmed, the valets were stuffed. A worthy old marquise émigrée who had returned ruined, with only one maid left, went on saying: “My people.” What did they do in Madame de T——’s salon? They were Ultra—that is, ultra-royalists; this word no longer means anything today, although what it represents has not perhaps entirely disappeared. We should explain.

To be Ultra is to go one better. It is to attack the sceptre in the name of the throne and the mitre in the name of the altar; it is to maltreat the thing you trundle around; it is to kick over the traces; it is to quibble with the stake over the degree of cooking required for heretics; it is to attack the idol for lacking in idolatry; to insult through excessive respect; to find too little popery in the pope, too little royalty in the king, and too much light in night; it is to find alabaster, snow, the swan, and the lily sadly wanting when it comes to whiteness; to support things in a partisan spirit to the point where you become their enemy; it is to be so strongly for that you are against. The Ultra spirit is especially characteristic of the initial phase of the Restoration.

Nothing in history remotely resembles those fifteen minutes that begin in 1814 and end around 1820 with the advent of Monsieur de Villèle,18 the pragmatist of the Right. Those six years were an extraordinary interlude, both noisy and grim, sunny and sombre, luminous with the radiance of a new dawn and smothered in the gloom of the great catastrophes still choking the horizon, only slowly sinking into the past. In all that light and dark, a whole little world—new and old, comical and sad, juvenile and senile—stood there, rubbing its eyes. Nothing resembles an awakening so much as a return. This world regarded France with bad-tempered wistfulness and France regarded it with irony; the streets were full of marquises who looked like wise old owls, revenants,19 and returned émigrés, ci-devants20 stunned by everything, brave and noble gentlemen beaming at being back in France and weeping over it, too; thrilled to see their homeland again, and in despair not to find the monarchy still in place; the nobility of the Crusades21 booing off the stage the nobility of the Empire, meaning the nobility of the sword; historic clans who had lost the thread of history; sons of the companions of Charlemagne looking down on the companions of Napoléon. Swords, as we said, batted insults back and forth; the sword of Fontenoy was laughable, nothing more than a stick of rust; the sword of Marengo22 was base, nothing more than a sabre. Yesteryear disowned Yesterday. The sense of what was great was lost along with a sense of the ridiculous. Someone called Bonaparte, Scapin the clown … That world is no more. Nothing, we repeat, is left of it today. Whenever we happen to dredge up some feature of it and try to bring it to life again in imagery, it seems as strange to us as something from some antediluvian world. The fact is that it, too, has been engulfed by a deluge like the biblical Flood. It has disappeared beneath two revolutions. Ideas are such torrents! How swiftly they cover all they set out to destroy and bury, and how promptly they create terrifyingly fathomless depths!

Such were the features of the salons of those distant and candid times when Monsieur de Martainville23 was considered wittier than Voltaire.

These salons had their very own literature and politics. They believed in Fiévée there. Monsieur Agier24 ruled. They commented on Monsieur Colnet, the specialist in public law who was a secondhand bookseller—a bouquiniste—on the quai Malaquais. Napoléon came into his own as the Ogre of Corsica there; later on, the entry into history of Monsieur le marquis Buonaparté, lieutenant general of the king’s armies, was a concession to the spirit of the age.

These salons did not stay pure for long. As early as 1818, a few doctrinaire types began to crop up in them, which was a disquieting development. The tactics these types employed were to carry on like royalists but apologize for it. Where the Ultras were extremely proud of who they were, the doctrinaires were a bit shamefaced. They were witty, but they were a little too silent; their political dogma was properly starched with arrogance, but they were a little too driven. They overdid the white cravats and buttoned-up coats, though this was effective. The mistake, or misfortune, of the doctrinaire party lay in creating old young people. They adopted the pose of sages. They dreamed of grafting moderate power on absolute and excessive principle. They opposed, sometimes with a rare intelligence, a destructive liberalism with a conservative liberalism. They could be heard saying: “Go easy on royalism! It hasn’t done too badly. It has brought back tradition, worship, religion, respect. It is loyal, brave, chivalrous, loving, devout. It has come to infuse, however regretfully, the new splendours of the nation with the secular splendours of the monarchy. It is wrong not to understand the Revolution, the Empire, glory, liberty, new ideas, the younger generations, the age. But the wrong that it does us, don’t we sometimes do the same wrong to it? The Revolution, whose heirs we are, ought to understand everything. To attack royalism is misdirected on the part of liberalism. What a mistake! And what blindness! Revolutionary France lacks respect for historic France, that is, its mother, that is, itself. After the fifth of September, the nobility of the monarchy was treated the same way as the nobility of the Empire was treated after the eighth of July.25 They were unjust about the eagle, just as we are unjust about the fleur-de-lis. We always have to have something to outlaw! Removing the gilt from Louis XIV’s crown, scratching Henri IV’s coat of arms—is that really helpful? We laugh at Monsieur de Vaublanc26 for effacing the Ns from the pont d’Iéna! What on earth was he doing? Exactly what we are doing now. Bouvines is as much ours as Marengo. The fleur-de-lis belongs to us just as much as those Ns. It is our heritage. What’s the good of diminishing it? We should no more deny our homeland in the past than in the present. Why not embrace all of history? Why not love all of France?” This is how the doctrinaires criticized and defended royalism, which did not like being criticized and was furious at being defended. The Ultras marked the first phase of royalism: The Congregation27 characterized the second.

Ardour was elbowed aside by cunning. Let’s leave this sketch right there.

In the course of this tale, the author of this book has come across this curious moment in contemporary history on his travels; he could not help but cast a glance at it in passing and outline some of the singular features of that long-lost social world. But he does so rapidly and without a hint of bitterness or derision. Memories, fond and respectful since they touch on his mother, attach him to that past. Besides, let’s admit it, this same small world had its grandeur. You can smile about it but you can’t despise or hate it. It was the France of days gone by.

Marius Pontmercy, like all children, received some sort of education or other. Once he was off his aunt Gillenormand’s hands, his grandfather put him in the care of a worthy professor of the purest classical innocence. This budding young soul changed hands from a prude to a pedantic prig. Marius had his years of college, then he entered law school. He was royalist, fanatical, and an aesthete. He had little love for his grandfather, whose frivolity and cynicism rubbed him the wrong way, and his heart was dark in relation to his father.

Apart from that, he was an ardent but aloof boy, noble, generous, proud, religious, exalted, dignified to the point of being hard, pure to the point of being savage.

END OF THE BRIGAND

THE COMPLETION OF Marius’s classical studies coincided with Monsieur Gillenormand’s exit from the world. The old man said goodbye to the fauboug Saint-Germain and to the salon of Madame de T—— and went and set up in the Marais, in his house on the rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. In addition to the porter, his servants included the particular Nicolette who had taken over from the Magnon woman as chambermaid and the huffing and puffing Basque we spoke of earlier.

In 1827, Marius had just turned seventeen. One night when he came home, he saw his grandfather with a letter in his hand.

“Marius,” said Monsieur Gillenormand, “you will leave tomorrow for Vernon.”

“Why?” said Marius.

“To see your father.”

Marius gave a shudder. He had thought of everything but this, that the day might come when he would have to see his father. Nothing could have been more unexpected, more surprising, and, we have to say, more unpleasant. It was distance forced into proximity, compulsory intimacy. There was no chagrin, no; it was just a tiresome chore.

Apart from his feelings of political antipathy, Marius was convinced that his father, the swashbuckler, as Monsieur Gillenormand called him on his better days, did not love him; this was obvious, since he had clearly abandoned him, leaving him to the care of others. Feeling himself to be unloved, he did not feel love, either. As simple as that, he told himself.

He was so stunned that he did not question Monsieur Gillenormand. The grandfather went on: “It appears he is sick. He is asking for you.”

After a silence, he added: “Go tomorrrow morning. I believe there is a coach that leaves from the cour des Fontaines at six o’clock and gets there in the evening. Take it. He says it’s urgent.” He then screwed the letter up and shoved it in his pocket. Marius could have left that same night and been at his father’s side the following morning. A coach from the rue du Bouloi made the trip to Rouen at night in those days and it passed through Vernon. But neither Monsieur Gillenormand nor Marius thought of inquiring.

The next day at dusk Marius arrived in Vernon. Candles were just being lit as he asked the first person he came across for “the home of Monsieur Pontmercy.” For in his thoughts he was of the same view as the Restoration and he, too, did not acknowledge his father as either a baron or a colonel.

A building was pointed out to him. He rang the bell; a woman came and opened the door, a small lamp in hand.

“Monsieur Pontmercy?” said Marius.

The woman did not move.

“Is this the place?”

The woman gave an affirmative nod of the head.

“Could I speak to him?”

The woman gave a negative shake of the head.

“But I’m his son,” Marius went on. “He’s expecting me.”

“Not anymore, he’s not,” said the woman.

It was then that he noticed she was in tears.

She pointed to the door of a low-ceilinged room. He went in.

In this room, which was lit by a tallow rushlight sitting on the mantelpiece, there were three men, one standing, one kneeling, one on the floor stretched out in his shirtsleeves on the tiles. The one on the floor was the colonel.

The other two were a doctor and a priest, who was busily praying.

The colonel had been struck down by brain fever three days before. At the onset of the disease, having a bad premonition, he had written to Monsieur Gillenormand to ask for his son. His condition had deteriorated. The very evening Marius arrived in Vernon, the colonel had had a bout of delirium; he had got out of bed in spite of the servant, crying: “My son hasn’t arrived yet! I’ll go and wait for him!” He promptly ran out of his room and fell on the tiled floor of the antechamber. He had only just died.

The doctor and the curé had been sent for. The doctor had got there too late, the curé had got there too late. The son, too, had got there too late.

By the crepuscular light of the candle, you could make out on the cheeks of the pale and prostrate colonel, the fat tears that had run from his death-stricken eyes. The eyes were extinguished but the tears had not yet dried. Those tears were the son’s delay.

Marius gazed at this man, seeing him for the first, and the last, time—that noble manly face, the open eyes that did not see, the white hair, the robust limbs on which you could make out the brown lines of sabre cuts and the red stars of bullet holes here and there. He gazed at the gigantic scar that stamped heroism on this face where God had imprinted goodness. He thought how this man was his father and the man was dead and he remained unmoved.

The sadness he felt was the sadness he would have felt confronted by any man he had seen lying there, dead.

Yet mourning, a poignant mourning, was in that room. The servant lamented in a corner by herself, the curé prayed and could be heard sobbing, the doctor dried his eyes; the corpse itself wept.

The doctor, the priest, and the woman looked at Marius in their affliction without saying a word; he was the stranger here. Marius, too little moved, felt awkward and ashamed of his attitude; he had his hat in his hand and so he let it drop to the floor to make them think he felt so much grief, he didn’t have the strength to hold on to it.

At the same time, he felt something like remorse and he despised himself for acting this way. But was it his fault? So he didn’t love his father—what of it?

The colonel left nothing. The sale of his furniture barely paid for his funeral. The servant found a scrap of paper, which she handed to Marius. It was written in the colonel’s handwriting and this is what it contained: For my son.—The Emperor made me a baron on the battlefield of Waterloo. Since the Restoration contests this title, which I have paid for with my blood, my son will take it and bear it. It goes without saying that he will be worthy of it.

On the back, the colonel had added:

At this same Battle of Waterloo, a sergeant saved my life. This man is named Thénardier. In recent times, I believe he was keeping an inn in a village on the outskirts of Paris, in Chelles or Montfermeil. If my son should meet up with him, he will do whatever he can for Thénardier.

Not from any sense of religious duty toward his father, but out of that vague respect for death which is always so imperious in the human heart, Marius took the note and held it tight.

Nothing else remained of the colonel. Monsieur Gillenormand had his sword and uniform sold to a secondhand clothes dealer. The neighbours raided the garden and made off with the rare flowers there. The other plants became bushy and straggly or died.

Marius had only stayed in Vernon for forty-eight hours. After the funeral, he went straight back to Paris and got stuck into law again, without giving his father another thought, as though his father had never lived. In two days, the colonel had been buried and in three days, forgotten.

Marius wore a band of crepe on his hat. That was all.

THE USEFULNESS OF GOING TO MASS IF YOU WANT TO BE A REVOLUTIONARY

MARIUS HAD STUCK to the religious habits of his childhood. One Sunday when he had gone to hear mass at Saint-Sulpice, in the same chapel of the Virgin that his aunt used to take him to when he was little, being even more absentminded and dreamy than usual that day, he took a seat behind a pillar and knelt, without paying it any attention, on a Utrecht velvet chair on the back of which was written the name M. Mabeuf, churchwarden. Mass had scarcely begun when an old man appeared and said to Marius: “Monsieur, that is my place.” Marius swiftly moved along and the old man took his chair.

When mass was over, Marius remained pensive as he moved along; the old man came up again and said to him: “I beg your pardon, Monsieur, for having disturbed you a moment ago and for disturbing you again now, but you must have found me most annoying and so I must explain.” “Monsieur,” said Marius, “that is not necessary.”

“Yes it is!” the old man pursued. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me. You see, that place means a lot to me. It seems to me that mass is better from there. Why? I’ll tell you. It is from that place, there, that I used to watch, for years, regularly every two or three months, a poor brave father who had no other opportunity and no other way of seeing his son, because, for family reasons, he was prevented from doing so. He used to come at the time he knew that his son was brought along to mass. The little boy had no idea that his father was there. Perhaps he didn’t even know he had a father, poor innocent babe! The father, well, he would stand behind that pillar so he couldn’t be seen. He would watch his boy and he would cry. He adored the little fellow, that poor man! I could see that. That spot has become sort of sacred for me and I’ve got into the habit of going there to hear mass. I prefer it to the churchwarden’s bench I have a right to as churchwarden. I even got to know the poor unfortunate gentleman a little. He had a father-in-law, a rich sister-in-law, relatives, I don’t know exactly, who threatened to disinherit the boy if he, the father, saw him. He sacrificed himself so that his boy would be rich one day and happy. They kept him away from the boy because of his political opinions. Of course, I approve of politial opinions, but some people just don’t know where to draw the line. My God! Because a man was at Waterloo, that doesn’t make him a monster; you don’t separate a father from his son for that. He was one of Bonaparte’s colonels. He is dead now, I think. He lived in Vernon, where I have a brother who is a curé, and his name was something like Pontmarie or Montpercy. He had a beautiful sabre cut, incredible.” “Pontmercy?” said Marius, going white.

“Exactly. Pontmercy. Did you know him?”

“Monsieur,” said Marius, “he was my father.”

The old churchwarden joined his hands and cried: “Ah! You are the child! Yes, that’d be right, he’d have to be a man by now. Well! My poor child, you can say you had a father who loved you more than all the world.” Marius offered the old man his arm and walked him home. The next day, he said to Monsieur Gillenormand: “We’ve organized a hunting party with a few friends. Would you mind if I went away for three days?” “Four!” replied the grandfather. “Go and enjoy yourself.” And with a wink, he whispered to his daughter: “Some little minx!”

WHAT IT IS TO HAVE MET A CHURCHWARDEN

WHERE MARIUS WENT, we will see a bit further on.

Marius was away for three days, then he returned to Paris, where he went straight to the law school library and asked for the collection of the Moniteur.

He read the Moniteur,1 he read all the histories of the Republic and the Empire, the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène,2 all the memoirs, newspapers, bulletins, proclamations; he devoured the lot. The first time he came across his father’s name in the bulletins of the Grande Armée,3 he had a fever for a whole week. He went to see the generals under whom Georges Pontmercy had served, among others, the comte H——. Mabeuf, the churchwarden, whom he went to see again, had given him an account of life in Vernon, the colonel’s retirement, his flowers, his loneliness. Marius ended up knowing very well this rare, sublime, and gentle man, this rather lamblike lion who had been his father.

Meanwhile, engrossed as he was in all this study, which took up all his time and all his waking thoughts, he almost never saw the Gillenormands anymore. At mealtimes, he appeared; then, when they looked for him, he was gone. The aunt grumbled. Old man Gillenormand smiled. “Bah! Bah! He’s at the age when you become girl-crazy!” Sometimes the old man would add: “Good God! I thought it was just a fling, but it looks like it’s real passion.” It certainly was real passion. Marius was beginning to worship his father.

At the same time, an extraordinary change took shape in his ideas. The phases of this change were numerous and sequential. As this is the story of many minds of our times, we believe it useful to follow these phases step by step and to flag each one. The history he had just cast his eyes on floored him. His initial reaction was dazzlement.

The Republic, the Empire, had been nothing but monstrous words for him till that moment. The Republic, a guillotine at dusk; the Empire, a sabre at night. He had now looked into it and found that, where he was expecting only a chaos of darkness, he saw, in a sort of earth-shattering jolt mingled with fear and joy, bright shining stars, Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, Danton;4 and he had seen a sun rise, Napoléon. He did not know where he was. He reeled back, blinded by so much light. Little by little, when amazement passed and he got used to this radiance, he gazed upon actions without feeling dizzy, he studied the characters involved without feeling terror. The Revolution and the Empire placed themselves luminously in perspective before his visionary eyes, and he saw how each of these two groups of men and events came down to two hugely momentous developments: the Republic’s establishing the sovereignty of civil law and restoring it to the masses; the Empire’s establishing the sovereignty of the French ideal and imposing it on Europe. He saw the great figure of the People emerge from the Revolution, and from the Empire, the great figure of France. He declared in his conscience that all that had been for the good.

What he neglected in his dazzlement in this initial, far too sweeping assessment, we feel no need to spell out here. We are describing the state of a mind on the move. Progress doesn’t happen overnight. That said, once and for all, and for what precedes as well as what follows, we will plow on.

He then realized that until that moment he had not understood his country any more than he had understood his father. He had known neither one nor the other and he had deliberately kept himself in the dark. Now he could see and he admired the one and adored the other.

He was full of regret and remorse and he thought with despair how all that his heart held, he could now only say to a grave. Oh, if only his father were still alive, if he still had him, if God in his mercy and goodness had only allowed his father to go on living, how he would have run, how he would have flown, how he would have cried out to his father: “Father! Here I am! It’s me! My heart is the same as yours! I am your son!” How he would have kissed his old white head, flooded his hair with tears, admired his scar, squeezed his hands, adored his clothes, kissed his feet! Oh, why had his father died so soon, before his time, before justice was done, before his son came to love him! Marius had a permanent sob in his heart that said at every moment: alas! At the same time, he became more genuinely serious, more genuinely grave, more sure of his faith and of his thinking. At every instant, glimmers of the truth carried his reasoning further. A sort of inner growth occurred in him. He felt a sort of natural expansion that these two things brought him, new as they were for him—his father and his country.

As though he had a key, everything opened; he could explain to himself what he had hated, he could fathom what he had abhorred; from that moment on, he could see clearly the providential, divine, and human meaning of great things he had been taught to detest and of great men he had been trained to curse. When he thought of his previous views, which only went back as far as the day before, though they seemed already so old, he felt furious with himself and he smiled.

From the rehabilitation of his father he naturally went on to the rehabilitation of Napoléon. Yet the latter, to be honest, was pretty hard work.

From infancy he had been imbued with the verdict of the party of 1814 concerning Bonaparte. Of course, all the prejudices of the Restoration, all its interests, all its self-serving instincts, tended to disfigure Napoléon. It execrated the man even more than Robespierre. It had exploited cleverly enough the nation’s weariness and the hate mothers felt. Bonaparte had become an almost fabulous monster and in order to defile him in the popular imagination, which, as we pointed out a moment ago, is like the imagination of children, the party of 1814 whipped out every frightening mask it could marshal, one after the other, from the terrible that remains grandiose to the terrible that verges on the grotesque, from Tiberius to the bogeyman. Thus, in speaking of Bonaparte, you were free to sob or to gasp with laughter, provided your reaction was based on hate. Marius had never had—about “that man,” as he was called—any other notions in his head. They matched the tenacity that was part of his nature. There was in him a stubborn little man who hated Napoléon.

By reading history and especially by studying documents and firsthand records, the veil that hid Napoléon from Marius’s eyes was lifted bit by bit. He glimpsed something that was immense, and suspected that he had been wrong about Bonaparte till that moment as about all the rest; every day he saw better and he began to climb slowly, one by one, almost reluctantly at first, then with intoxication and as though drawn by an irresistible fascination, steps that started off dark then gradually became dimly illuminated, only to end in the luminous and splendid blaze of enthusiasm.

One night, he was alone in his little room under the eaves. His candle was burning and he was reading, leaning on the table beside his open window. All kinds of dreamy notions came to him from space and mingled with his thoughts. What a spectacle night is! You hear faint sounds without knowing where they come from, you see Jupiter, which is twelve hundred times bigger than earth, glowing red like embers; the skies are black, the stars shine, it is tremendous.

He was reading the bulletins of the Grande Armée, those Homeric stanzas written on the field of battle; now and again, he saw his father’s name there, always, the name of the emperor; the whole great empire appeared to him; he felt as though a tide were swelling inside him and that it was rising; it seemed to him at times that his father brushed past him like a breath and spoke in his ear; he gradually became strange; he thought he could hear drums, cannon, trumpets, the measured tread of the battalions, the dull and distant gallop of the cavalries; from time to time, he lifted his eyes to the sky and looked at the colossal constellations glimmering in the limitless depths, then his eyes dropped back onto his book and he saw there other colossal things stir in the shadows. His heart was hammering. He was transported, trembling, panting; suddenly, without knowing himself what had got into him and what impulse he was obeying, he stood up, stretched both arms out the window, stared into the darkness, the silence, tenebrous infinity, the eternal immensity, and he shouted: “Long live the emperor!” From that moment, it was all over. The Ogre of Corsica, the usurper, the tyrant, the monster who was his sisters’ lover, the ham actor who took lessons from Talma, the poisoner of Jaffa,5 the tiger, Buonaparte—all that evaporated and made way in his mind for an indistinct and dazzling radiance where the pale marble phantom of Caesar shone out from an inaccessible height. For his father, the emperor had only been the beloved captain you admire and to whom you devote yourself; he was, for Marius, something more. He was the predestined builder of the French order succeeding the Roman order in world domination. He was the prodigious architect of a collapse, the heir of Charlemagne, of Louis XI, of Henri IV, of Richelieu, of Louis XIV, and of the Committee of Public Safety,6 doubtless having his blemishes, his faults, and even his crimes, for he was human, after all. But august in his faults, brilliant in his blemishes, mighty in his crimes. He was the foreordained man of destiny who had forced all nations to say: that great nation. He was more than this, even; he was the very incarnation of France, conquering Europe by the sword he held in his hand, and the world by the light he gave out. Marius saw in Bonaparte the dazzling spectre that will always rise up at the frontier and watch over the future. Dictator, but despot; despot issuing from a republic and symbolizing a revolution. Napoléon became for him the man who was also the people, just as Jesus was the man who was also God.

As you can see, like all newcomers to a religion, he was intoxicated by his conversion, and, in his headlong rush to join, he went too far. That was his nature; once he was on an incline, it was almost impossible for him to hold back. A fanatical passion for the sword took hold of him and muddied his enthusiasm for the ideal. He did not realize that, along with the genius, what he admired—indiscriminately—was force; in other words, he was setting up, in the twin compartments of his idolatry, what is divine on one side and, on the other, what is brutal. In several respects, he began to deceive himself in other matters. He accepted everything. There is a way of falling into error on the road to truth. He had a kind of violent good faith that swallowed everything outright—lock, stock, and barrel. On this new path he had taken, in condemning the wrongs of the ancien régime as in measuring the glory of Napoléon, he neglected all extenuating circumstances.

Be that as it may, a mighty leap had been taken. Where he had once seen the fall of the monarchy, he now saw the emergence of France. His whole orientation had shifted. Sunset had turned into sunrise. He had turned around.

All these revolutions were accomplished in him without his family being any the wiser.

When, in this mysterious travail, he had completely shed his old Bourbon and Ultra skin, when he had stripped off the aristocrat, the Jacobin, and the royalist, when he was fully revolutionary, profoundly democratic, and almost republican, he went to an engraver on the quai des Orfèvres and ordered from him a hundred calling cards bearing this name: Baron Marius Pontmercy.7 Which was merely a perfectly logical consequence of the change that had been effected in him, a change in which everything revolved around his father. Only, as he knew no one and could not spray his cards around to any porters, he stuck them in his pocket.

By another natural consequence, the closer he came to his father, to his memory, and to the things for which the colonel had fought for twenty-five years, the further away he moved from his grandfather. As we said, for a long while Monsieur Gillenormand’s outlook had rubbed him the wrong way. There was already between them all the friction there can be between an earnest young man and a frivolous old-timer. Géronte’s gaiety shocks and exasperates the melancholy Werther.8 For as long as they had shared the same political views and the same ideas, Marius had stood together with Monsieur Gillenormand as on a bridge. When the bridge fell, the gulf opened. And then, above all, Marius felt inexpressibly revolted in thinking that it was Monsieur Gillenormand who, for entirely stupid reasons, had torn him mercilessly from the colonel, thereby depriving the father of the son and the son of the father.

Out of piety for his father, Marius had almost come to feel aversion for his grandfather.

But, as we said, nothing of this was betrayed outwardly. Only, he grew colder and colder, was laconic at meals, and hardly ever home. When his aunt scolded him for this, he was very sweet and gave as an excuse his studies, courses, exams, symposia, and so on. The grandfather stuck to his infallible diagnosis: “In love! I know what I’m talking about.” Every so often, Marius stayed away from home.

“Where can he possibly have got to?” his aunt would ask.

On one of these excursions afield, which were always very short, he went to Montfermeil in compliance with his father’s injunction and he had looked for the former sergeant of Waterloo, Thénardier, the innkeeper. Thénardier had gone bankrupt, the inn was closed, and nobody knew what had become of him. For this research, Marius was away from home for four days.

“Yes, indeed,” said the grandfather, “he’s going to a lot of trouble.”

They thought they noticed that he was wearing something on his chest under his shirt and that was attached to his neck by a black ribbon.

A BIT OF SKIRT

WE MENTIONED A lancer.

He was a great-grandnephew of Monsieur Gillenormand’s on the paternal side, and he led the life of the garrison, away from the family and far from any domestic hearth. Lieutenant Théodule Gillenormand fulfilled all the desirable criteria of what is known as a good-looking officer.1 He had “a girl’s waist,” a way of carelessly trailing his victorious sabre, and a handlebar moustache. He only very rarely came to Paris, so rarely that Marius had never set eyes on him. The two cousins knew each other only by name. Théodule was, as I think we said, the favourite of dear old Aunt Gillenormand, who preferred him because she never saw him. Not seeing people allows you to think of them as perfect in all kinds of ways.

One morning, Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder retired to her cubbyhole as excited as her placid temperament would allow. Marius had just asked his grandfather once more for permission to make another little trip away, adding that he counted on leaving that very night. “Go!” the grandfather had replied and then Monsieur Gillenormand had added an aside, lifting his eyebrows practically to his hairline: “When it comes to sleeping away from home, he’s becoming a repeat offender.” Mademoiselle had gone up to her room most intrigued and had thrown this exclamation mark at the stairs, “That’s a bit rich!” and this question mark, “Where on earth does he get to?” She foresaw some affair of the heart, more or less illicit, a woman in the shadows, a rendezvous, a mystery, and she would not have minded sticking her beak in it. Savouring a mystery is like being first one in on a scandal; holy souls are not at all averse to such things. There is in the secret compartments of bigotry a certain taste for scandal.

So she was vaguely gripped by a need to know the whole story.

To distract herself from such prurient curiosity, which shook her up a bit more than was her wont, she had taken refuge in her talents and had sat down to embellishing, in cotton on cotton, one of those embroideries of the Empire and the Restoration that involve a lot of cabriolet wheels. Dreary work, crabby worker. She had been on her backside in her chair for several hours when the door swung open. Mademoiselle Gillenormand lifted her beak; Lieutenant Théodule was before her, making her the standard salute. She let out a shriek of delight. You may be old, you may be a prude, you may be devout, you may be the aunt; but it is always nice to see a lancer step into your bedroom.

“There you are, Théodule!” she cried.

“Just passing by, Auntie.”

“Well, give me a kiss, then.”

“Here you go!” said Théodule.

And he kissed her. Aunt Gillenormand went to her secretaire and opened it.

“You’ll be staying with us at least this week?”

“Auntie, I’m off again this evening.”

“That’s not possible!”

“Mathematically.”

“Stay, my darling Théodule, please.”

“My heart says yes, but my orders say no. It’s a simple story. We’re moving garrisons; we were in Melun, now they’re putting us in Gaillon. To get from the old garrison to the new one, you have to go through Paris. So I said to myself: I know what I’ll do. I’ll go and see my auntie.” “And this is for your trouble.”

She put ten louis in his hand.

“You mean for my pleasure, auntie dear.”

Théodule kissed her a second time and she had the thrill of having her neck grazed a little by the braid of his uniform.

“And are you doing the trip on horseback with your regiment?” she asked him.

“No, Auntie. I so wanted to see you, I’ve got special leave. My groom’s taking my horse; I’ll be going by coach. Speaking of which, I have to ask you something.” “What?”

“My cousin Marius Pontmercy is travelling that way, too, is he not?”

“How should I know?” said the aunt, her curiosity suddenly violently piqued.

“As I was coming over, I went to the coach to reserve a seat in the coupé.”

“And?”

“A traveller had already come and reserved a seat on top.2 I saw his name on the sheet.”

“What name?”

“Marius Pontmercy.”

“That no-hoper!” cried the aunt. “Ah, your cousin is not a good steady boy like you. To think he’ll be spending the night in a coach!”

“Like me.”

“But you, it’s out of duty; him, it’s sheer dissipation.”

“Goodness!” gulped Théodule.

Here, something happened to Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder; she had an idea. If she had been a man, she would have slapped her forehead. She shouted at Théodule: “Do you know your cousin doesn’t know who you are?” “No. I’ve seen him, all right, but he has never deigned to notice me.”

“So you’ll be travelling together like that?”

“Him on top, me inside.”

“Where’s this coach going?”

“To Les Andelys.”

“That’s where Marius is going, then?”

“Unless, like me, he stops en route. I’ll be getting out at Vernon to pick up the connection for Gaillon. I don’t know anything about Marius’s itinerary.” “Marius! What a horrible name! Why on earth did we call him Marius! Whereas you, at least, are called Théodule!”3

“I’d prefer to be called Alfred,” said the officer.

“Listen, Théodule.”

“I’m listening, Auntie.”

“Listen carefully.”

“I am listening carefully.”

“Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, Marius often stays away.”

“Ha, ha!”

“He travels.”

“Ah! Ah!”

“He sleeps away from home.”

“Oh! Oh!”

“We’d like to know what’s at the bottom of it.”

Théodule answered with all the calm of a man in the artillery: “Some skirt.”

And with that stifled chuckle that betrays certainty, he added: “Some little minx.”

“Evidently!” cried his aunt, who could have sworn she was hearing Monsieur Gillenormand and who felt her own conviction firmed up by that word minx pronounced in almost the same way by the great-uncle and the grandnephew. She went on: “Do us a favour. Follow Marius for a while. He doesn’t know who you are, so it will be easy for you. Since there is some minx, try and see this minx. You can tell us all about it by letter. It will amuse his grandfather.” Théodule did not much like spying of the sort; but he was very much moved by the ten louis and thought he could see more of them lining up. He accepted the commission, saying: “Just as you like, Auntie.” And he added to himself: “So now I’m a chaperone.” Mademoiselle Gillenormand kissed him.

“You’re not one to get up to that sort of mischief, Théodule. You follow discipline, you’re a slave to orders, you’re a man of scruple and duty; you’d never leave your family in the lurch to go gallivanting about with some shameless creature.” The lancer gave the complacent grin of a pickpocket praised for his probity, Cartouche revered.

On the evening that followed this tête-à-tête, Marius hopped up on the coach without suspecting that he was under surveillance. As for the detective, the first thing he did was fall asleep. His sleep was sound and conscientious. Argus snored all night.4 At daybreak, the coach driver cried out: “Vernon! Vernon relay next stop! Passengers for Vernon!” And Lieutenant Théodule woke up.

“Right,” he mumbled, still half-asleep. “This is where I get off.”

Then his memory gradually unfogged, an effect of waking up, and he thought of his aunt, the ten louis, and the account he had agreed to give of Marius’s comings and goings. It made him laugh.

“Maybe he’s not on the coach anymore,” he thought, as he buttoned up his uniform jacket. “He might have stopped at Poissy; he might have stopped at Triel; if he didn’t get out at Meulan, he might have got out at Mantes; unless he got out at Rolleboise, or unless he pushed on to Pacy, where you can either head left toward Évreux or right toward Laroche-Guyon. You run after him, Auntie. What the hell am I going to write to her, the dear old thing?” At that moment a pair of black trousers clambered down from the top deck and appeared at the coach window.

“Could that be Marius?” the lieutenant wondered.

It was Marius.

A little peasant girl, at the back of the car, mixed up among the horses and the postilions, was offering flowers to the travellers. “Give your ladies flowers,” she cried.

Marius approached her and bought the most beautiful flowers on her tray.

“Now that,” said Théodule, jumping down from the car, “has got me going. Who the hell is he going to take those flowers to? It’d take a damned pretty woman for such a beautiful bouquet. I’d like to see that one.” And so, no longer by proxy now but out of personal curiosity, like a dog hunting on its own behalf, he began to trail Marius.

Marius paid no attention whatsoever to Théodule. Some elegant women got down from the coach but he did not even give them a glance. He seemed not to see anything around him.

“He’s in love—and how!” thought Théodule.

Marius headed for the church.

“This gets better,” Théodule said to himself. “The church! Of course. Nothing like spicing up a rendezvous with a bit of a mass. What could be more exquisite than eyeing someone over the good Lord.” Marius reached the church, but did not go in; instead he turned and went behind the chevet. He disappeared around the corner of one of the buttresses of the apse.

“The rendezvous must be outside in the open,” said Théodule. “Let’s see the girl.”

And he advanced on the tips of his boots toward the corner Marius had turned.

When he reached it, he was flummoxed.

Marius was kneeling in the grass over a grave, with his head in both hands. He had scattered his bouquet over it. At the far end of the grave, at a bulge that marked the head, there was a black wooden cross with this name in white letters: COLONEL BARON PONTMERCY. You could hear Marius sobbing.

The girl was a grave.

MARBLE VERSUS GRANITE

THIS WAS WHERE Marius had come the first time he had absented himself from Paris. This was where he returned each time Monsieur Gillenormand said: “He’s sleeping away from home.” Lieutenant Théodule was absolutely floored by this unexpectedly close contact with a sepulchre; he experienced an unpleasant and odd sensation that he was incapable of analyzing, which had to do with respect for a grave combined with respect for a colonel. He backed away, leaving Marius alone in the cemetery, and there was something that smacked of military discipline in this backtracking. Death appeared to him with outsize epaulets and he almost gave it a military salute. Not knowing what to write to his aunt, he opted to write nothing at all; and perhaps nothing would have come of the discovery made by Théodule about Marius’s love life if, through one of those mysterious coincidences that so frequently happen, the scene in Vernon had not had a sort of repercussion almost immediately in Paris.

Marius returned from Vernon early in the morning on the third day, got out at his grandfather’s, and, weary after two nights spent in the coach, and feeling the need to make up for his lack of sleep by an hour at the swimming school, ran up to his room, took only enough time to remove his travelling coat and the black ribbon round his neck, and went off to the baths.

Monsieur Gillenormand had risen early, like all old men in the pink of health, and had heard him come in and had rushed as fast as his old pins would carry him upstairs to the rooftop landing where Marius’s room was, to give him a hug—and ask him a few questions while he was at it in the hope of finding out a bit more about where he’d been.

But the young man had taken less time to go down than the octogenarian to climb up, and when old man Gillenormand stepped into the attic room, Marius was no longer there.

The bed had not been slept in and on the bed were laid out, trustingly, the coat and the black ribbon.

“I prefer that,” said Monsieur Gillenormand.

And a moment later he made his entrance into the drawing room where Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder was already in position, embroidering her cabriolet wheels.

His entrance was triumphant.

Monsieur Gillenormand held the coat in one hand and the neck ribbon in the other and he cried: “Victory! We are about to penetrate the mystery! We are going to find out how the story ends! We are going to put the finger on our sly little friend’s debauchery. We’re cutting straight to the romance! I have the portrait!” Indeed, a black shagreen locket, similar to a medallion, was hanging from the ribbon. The old man grabbed this locket and studied it for a while without opening it, with the greedy, ravished, angry eyes of a poor starving wretch eyeing a sumptuous meal not meant for him as it passes under his nose.

“For obviously this is a portrait. I know what I’m talking about. It’s worn tenderly over the heart. What dunderheads they are! Some ugly tart that’d make you shudder, I’ll warrant! Young men have such bad taste these days!” “Let’s see, father,” said the old maid.

The locket opened when you pressed a spring. All they found in it was a piece of paper, folded.

“The same old story,” Monsieur Gillenormand said, bursting out laughing. “I know what this is. It’s a love letter!”

“Ah, let’s read it then!” said the aunt.

And she put her spectacles on. They unfolded the note and read the following: “For my son.—The Emperor made me a baron on the battlefield of Waterloo. Since the Restoration contests this title, which I have paid for with my blood, my son will take it and bear it. It goes without saying that he will be worthy of it.” What the father and daughter felt words can never tell. They felt themselves chilled to the marrow by the breath from a death’s-head. They did not exchange a word. Only, Monsieur Gillenormand said in a low voice, as though talking to himself: “It’s that swashbuckler’s writing.” The aunt examined the note, turned it over and around, then put it back in the locket.

At the same moment, a tiny oblong parcel wrapped in blue paper fell from a coat pocket. Mademoiselle Gillenormand picked it up and undid the blue paper. It was Marius’s set of one hundred calling cards. She passed one to Monsieur Gillenormand, who read: “Baron Marius Pontmercy.” The old man rang. Nicolette came. Monsieur Gillenormand took the ribbon, the locket, and the coat, threw the lot into the middle of the room, and said: “Take this trash away.” A good hour passed in the deepest silence.

The old man and the old maid were sitting with their backs to each other and were probably thinking, each on their own, the same things. At the end of the hour, Aunt Gillenormand said: “Lovely!” A few minutes later Marius appeared. He came in through the front door. Before he had even put a foot in the door of the drawing room, he saw his grandfather, who was holding one of his calling cards in his hand and who, on seeing him, cried out with his crushing air of sneering bourgeois superiority: “Well, well! Well, well, well! You are a baron now? I present you with my compliments. What does this mean?” Marius went slightly red and replied: “It means that I’m my father’s son.”

Monsieur Gillenormand stopped laughing and said in a harsh voice: “Your father? I am your father.”

“My father,” Marius went on, his eyes downcast and his manner stern, “was a humble and heroic man who served the Republic and France gloriously, who was great in the greatest history that men have ever made, who lived for a quarter of a century in a camp, under cannon fire and musket fire during the day, at night, in snow, in mud, in rain, who captured two standards, who received twenty wounds, who died forgotten and abandoned, and who only ever did one thing wrong, which was to love two ungrateful wretches too much—his country and me!” This was more than Monsieur Gillenormand could bear to hear. At that word Republic, he had got to his feet, or rather, shot to his feet. Every one of the words that Marius had just uttered had inflicted on the face of the old royalist the effect of blasts of forge bellows on a burning brand. He went from black to red, from red to purple, and from purple to a dangerous flare.

“Marius!” he yelled. “You abominable child! I don’t know what your father was! I don’t want to know! I don’t know anything about him and I don’t know him! But what I do know is that there has never been anything but miserable bastards among all those sorts of scum! They are all, every one of them, rogues, cutthroats, red caps, thieves!1 Every one of them, I tell you! Every one of them, I tell you! I don’t know anyone! I say every one of them! You hear me, Marius! Don’t you see, you’re as much a baron as my slipper! They were all bandits who worked for Robespierre! Doing his dirty work! All the brigands who served Buo-na-parte! All traitors who betrayed, betrayed, betrayed! Their legitimate king! All cowards who ran away from the Prussians and from the English at Waterloo! There you have what I know. If Monsieur your father is among them, I don’t know, I’m sorry, too bad, I am your servant!” It was Marius’s turn to be the brand and Monsieur Gillenormand the bellows. Marius was shaking all over, he did not know where to look, his head was on fire. He was the priest who sees all his hosts thrown to the wind, the fakir who sees some passerby spit on his idol. Such things could not be said with impunity in front of him. But what could he do? His father had just been trampled underfoot and stamped on in his presence, but by whom? By his grandfather. How could he avenge one without outraging the other? He couldn’t possibly insult his grandfather and it was equally impossible not to stand up for his father. On the one hand, a sacred tomb, on the other, white hair. For a moment or two he stood, drunk and tottering, with this whirlwind swirling around in his head; then he looked up, stared hard at his grandfather and shouted in a thundering voice: “Down with the Bourbons and that fat pig of a Louis XVIII!” Louis XVIII had been dead four years,2 but he didn’t care.

The old man, red as a beetroot as he was, suddenly went whiter than his hair. He turned toward a bust of the duc de Berry3 on the mantelpiece and bowed deeply to it with a sort of singular majesty. Then he strode twice, slowly and in silence, from the fireplace to the window and from the window to the fireplace, crossing the whole length of the room, causing the parquet to creak, like a stone statue on the move. The second time, he bent over his daughter, who was bearing up under this shock with the stupor of an old sheep, and said to her with an almost calm smile: “A baron like monsieur and a bourgeois like me cannot remain under the same roof.” And suddenly standing erect again, wan, trembling, terrible, his forehead swelling with the frightening radiance of anger, he stretched his arm toward Marius and shouted: “Get out.” Marius left the house.

The next day, Monsieur Gillenormand said to his daughter: “You will send that bloodsucker sixty pistoles4 every six months and never speak to me of him again.” Having an immense reserve of fury to vent and not knowing what to do with it, he continued to address his daughter coldly as vous for over three months.

Marius, for his part, had stormed out in outrage. One circumstance we must mention further aggravated his exasperation. Such piddling coincidences always complicate domestic dramas. Grievances are intensified by them, even though in reality they don’t make anything any worse. In swiftly carting Marius’s “trash” to his room on his grandfather’s orders, Nicolette had, without realizing, dropped the medallion of black shagreen with the note written by the colonel in it, probably on the attic stairs, which were in darkness. Neither this note nor the medallion could ever be found. Marius was convinced that “Monsieur Gillenormand”—from that day forth he never called him anything else—had thrown his father’s “will” into the fire. He knew by heart the few lines the colonel had written and, consequently, nothing was lost. But the piece of paper itself, the handwriting, that sacred relic, all this was his heart itself. What had they done with it?

Marius had gone away without saying where he was going, without knowing where he was going, with nothing but thirty francs, his watch, and a few rags in an overnight bag. He had climbed up into a cabriolet parked at the cab stand, had rented it by the hour, and set out willy-nilly for the quartier Latin.

What was to become of Marius?