بخش 3 کتاب 5

BOOK FIVE

THE VIRTUES OF ADVERSITY

MARIUS DESTITUTE

LIFE BECAME TOUGH for Marius. Eating his clothes and his watch was nothing. He had to swallow something more galling, which was his pride, forced as he was to “live off the smell of an oily rag,” as they say. A horrible thing that includes days without bread, nights without sleep, evenings without a candle, a fireplace without a fire, weeks without work, a future without hope, a coat worn through at the elbows, a hat so battered it makes girls giggle, a door you find closed at night because you can’t pay the rent, the insolence of the porter and the pothouse proprietor, the snickering of neighbours, humiliation, dignity trampled underfoot, any odd jobs snapped up, disgust, bitterness, dejection. Marius learned how one devours all that and how these are often all there is to devour. At that stage of existence when a man needs pride because he needs love, he felt derided because he was badly dressed and ridiculed because he was poor. At an age when the sap rises in a young man’s heart with overweening arrogance, he more than once looked down at his gaping boots and felt the unjust shame and heartrending embarrassment of destitution. A trial both awesome and terrible, out of which the weak emerge vile and the strong emerge sublime. Crucible into which fate hurls a man, whenever it wants to make a mongrel or a demigod.

For many great deeds are performed in the small struggles of life. There are dogged and unseen acts of bravery, which defend themselves every inch of the way behind the scenes against the deadly invasion of necessity and depravity. Noble and mysterious triumphs that no other eyes see, that no renown rewards, that no fanfare salutes.

Life, adversity, loneliness, abandonment, poverty are battlefields that have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious ones.

Steadfast and rare natures are forged this way; misery, almost always a stepmother, is sometimes a mother; deprivation begets strength of soul and mind; distress nurtures pride; adversity is just the milk the magnanimous need.

There was a moment in Marius’s life when he swept his own doorstep, when he bought Brie by the sou at the grocer’s, when he waited for dusk to fall to duck into the baker’s and buy a loaf of bread, which he would then spirit away to the garret as though he had stolen it. Sometimes, slipping into the local butcher’s in the thick of jeering cooks who jostled him, you would see an awkward young man with books tucked under his arm, looking timid and furious, who, when he came in, would take off his hat, the sweat beading on his forehead, bow deeply to the astonished butcher’s wife, bow again to the butcher’s boy, ask for a mutton chop, pay six or seven sous for it, wrap it in paper, stick it under his arm between a couple of books and be off. This was Marius. On this one chop, which he cooked himself, he could live for three days.

The first day he would eat the meat, the second day he would eat the fat, the third day he would gnaw the bone.

Several times, Aunt Gillenormand made overtures, sending him the sixty pistoles again. Marius always sent them back, saying he didn’t need anything.

He was still in mourning for his father when the revolution that we have described occurred in him. From that day forth, he never abandoned black clothes. His clothes, however, abandoned him. The day came when he had no coat left. The trousers were still all right. What was he to do? Courfeyrac, for whom he, on his side, had done a few good turns, gave him an old coat of his. For thirty sous, Marius had it turned by some porter or other, and it was as good as new. But the coat was green. So Marius only went out after dark. That turned the coat black. Wanting to remain in mourning at all times, he clothed himself in night.

Through all this, he got himself admitted to the bar. He was supposed to occupy Courfeyrac’s chambers, which were decent and where a certain number of law books, bolstered and filled out by odd volumes of novels, made up the library required by the regulations. He saw to it that any correspondence was addressed to him care of Courfeyrac.

When Marius became a lawyer, he informed his grandfather of the fact in a letter that was cold but full of humility and respect. Monsieur Gillenormand took the letter in trembling hands, read it, ripped it in half and chucked it into the wastepaper basket. Two or three days later, Mademoiselle Gillenormand heard her father alone in his room talking out loud. This happened to him whenever he was really agitated. She cocked her ear; the old man was saying: “If you weren’t such a noodle, you’d know you can’t be a baron and a lawyer at the same time.” MARIUS POOR

MISERY IS LIKE anything else. It reaches the point where it is bearable. It ends up taking shape and assuming a form. You vegetate, meaning you evolve in a certain stunted fashion, but that is enough to live on. This is how the existence of Marius Pontmercy had arranged itself: He had got through the worst of it; the defile was opening out a little before him. By dint of toil, courage, perseverance, and will, he had managed to get about seven hundred francs a year out of his work. He had learned German and English; thanks to Courfeyrac, who had put him in touch with his friend the bookseller, Marius played, in the literary section of the bookshop, the modest role of hack. He drew up prospectuses, translated journals, annotated editions, compiled biographies, etc. Net result, year in, year out: seven hundred francs. He could live off that. Not too badly. How? We’ll tell you.

Marius occupied in the Gorbeau slum, at the annual rate of thirty francs, a rathole with no fireplace known as his “chambers,” where there was nothing by way of furniture but what was strictly indispensable. This furniture was his. He gave the old chief tenant three francs a month to come and sweep out the rathole and bring him, every morning, a small supply of hot water, a fresh egg, and a little bread roll worth one sou. This bread roll and this egg were his breakfast. The cost of his breakfast varied from two to four sous, depending on whether eggs were cheap or dear. At six o’clock in the evening, he went down the rue Saint-Jacques to dine at Rousseau’s,1 opposite Basset’s, the print dealer at the corner of the rue des Mathurins. He didn’t eat any soup. He would have the meat dish for six sous, a half-serving of vegetables for three sous, and a dessert for three sous. For three sous, as much bread as he could eat. As for wine, he drank water. When he paid at the counter, where Madame Rousseau held sway, fat as ever but still fresh in those days, he gave a sou to the waiter and Madame Rousseau gave him a smile. Then he took himself off. For sixteen sous, he had a smile and a meal.

This restaurant Rousseau, where so few bottles and so many carafes were emptied, was a balm more than a restaurant. It no longer exists today. The proprietor had a great nickname; they called him Rousseau, the Aquatic.

So, at four sous for breakfast and sixteen sous for dinner, his food cost him twenty sous a day, which came to three hundred and sixty-five francs a year. Add the thirty francs rent and the thirty-six francs for the old girl, plus a few minor expenses, and for four hundred and fifty francs, Marius was fed, housed, and waited on. His clothing cost him a hundred francs, his linen fifty francs, his laundry fifty francs. The whole did not exceed six hundred and fifty francs. This left him fifty francs. He was rich. He occasionally lent a friend ten francs; Courfeyrac was once able to borrow sixty francs from him. As for heating, not having a fireplace, Marius had “simplified” things.

Marius always had two complete suits; one of them was old, “for everyday,” the other was brand-new, for special occasions. Both were black. He only had three shirts, one on his back, one in his chest of drawers, and the third at the laundry. He replaced them as they wore out. They were usually frayed, which meant he buttoned his coat right up to his chin.

For Marius to reach this state of prosperity had taken years. Tough years, some hard to get through, others hard to get out of. Marius had never faltered for a single day. He had endured every kind of deprivation; he had done everything except get into debt. He paid himself this tribute, that never had he owed anyone a sou. For him, owing money was the beginning of slavery. He even told himself that a creditor was worse than a boss; for a boss only owns your person, but a creditor owns your dignity and can slap it around. Rather than borrow, he went without eating. There had been many days of fasting. Feeling that all extremes meet and that, if you are not careful, abasement of fortune may lead to baseness of soul, he jealously watched over his pride. A phrase or an approach that in any other situation would have looked like respect to him, struck him as obsequious, and he would brace himself against it. He took no risks, not wanting to take a backward step. His face was covered in angry red blotches. He was so shy he was rude.

In all these trials and tribulations he felt heartened and sometimes even buoyed by a secret force within. The soul assists the body and at certain moments uplifts it. It is the only bird that can lift up its cage.

Alongside his father’s name, another name was engraved in Marius’s heart, the name Thénardier. With his passionate and grave nature, Marius surrounded the man to whom he owed his father’s life, or so he thought, that fearless sergeant who had saved the colonel as the cannonballs and bullets of Waterloo were raining down, in a sort of glory. He never separated the memory of this man from the memory of his father and in his veneration he connected them together. It was a sort of worship on two levels, with the big altar for the colonel and the little one for Thénardier. What intensified the tenderness of his gratitude was the notion of the misfortune that had befallen Thénardier and engulfed him. Marius had learned in Montfermeil of the ruin and bankruptcy of the hapless innkeeper. Since then he had made unbelievable efforts to pick up the scent and track him down in the black pit of misery where Thénardier had disappeared. Marius had combed the countryside; he had gone to Chelles, Bondy, Gournay, Nogent, Lagny. For three years he had been hard at it, spending what little money he had saved in these explorations. Nobody had been able to give him any news of Thénardier; he was thought to have gone abroad. His creditors had looked for him, too, with less love than Marius, but with just as much keenness, and had not been able to get their hands on him. Marius blamed himself and almost hated himself for not getting anywhere in his searches. It was the sole debt that the colonel had left to him and Marius considered it a point of honour that he should pay it. “Heavens!” he thought. “When my father lay dying on the battlefield, Thénardier managed to find him through all the smoke and the grapeshot and he carried him on his shoulders, and yet he owed him nothing, and I, I who owe so much to Thénardier, can’t manage to reach him in this darkness where he lies in agony and bring him back, in my turn, from death to life! Oh, I’ll find him all right!” To find Thénardier, indeed, Marius would have given his right arm, and to rescue him from misery, all his blood. To see Thénardier, to do something, anything, for the man, to say to him: “You don’t know me but I know you! I’m here! Do what you will with me!”—this was the sweetest and the most glorious of Marius’s dreams.

MARIUS GROWN UP

MARIUS WAS NOW twenty years old. It was three years since he had left his grandfather. They had remained on the same terms on both sides, without any attempt at reconciliation or at seeing each other again. Besides, what was the point of seeing each other again? To get into a tussle? Which one would have come off best? Marius was a bronze vase, but old man Gillenormand was an iron pot.

We must say, Marius was wrong about his grandfather’s heart. He imagined that Monsieur Gillenormand had never loved him and that this abrupt, hard, derisive old man, who swore, yelled, stormed, and raised his cane, at most felt for him that affection at once slight and severe that the Gérontes of comedy felt. Marius was mistaken. There are fathers who do not love their sons; there is no grandfather in the world who does not love his grandson. At the end of the day, as we have said, Monsieur Gillenormand idolized Marius. He idolized him in his own way, to the accompaniment of shoves and even the odd slap; but with the boy gone, he felt a black emptiness in his heart. He insisted that no one mention him in front of him again, regretting to himself quietly that he should be so perfectly obeyed. At first he hoped that this Buonapartist, this Jacobin, this terrorist, this Septembrist,1 would come crawling back. But the weeks went by, the months went by, the years went by; to Monsieur Gillenormand’s great despair, the bloodsucker never reappeared. “Yet I could hardly have done anything other than kick him out,” the grandfather told himself, and he asked himself, “If it were to happen again, would I do it all over again?” His pride promptly answered yes, but his old head, which he shook in silence, sadly answered no. He had his hours of dejection. He missed Marius. Old men need affection like the sun. It means heat. However strong his nature, the absence of Marius had changed something inside him. He wouldn’t for all the world have taken a step toward the “little bastard,” but he suffered. He never inquired about him but he thought about him constantly. He lived more and more like a recluse in the Marais. He was gay and violent yet, as before, but his gaiety had a convulsive hardness about it as though it contained pain and anger, and his violent outbursts always ended in a sort of sweet and gloomy exhaustion. He sometimes said: “Oh, if he turned up here again, I’d give him such a hiding!” As for the aunt, she thought too little to love a lot; Marius was no longer anything more to her than a kind of blurred black outline; and she had wound up busying herself with him a good deal less than with the cat or the parrot she probably kept.

What increased the secret suffering of old man Gillenormand is that he kept it completely bottled up inside and never let any of it show. His chagrin was like those newly invented furnaces that burn their own smoke. Sometimes it happened that some blundering officious person would speak to him of Marius and ask him: “What is Monsieur, your grandson, doing now, what’s become of him?” The old bourgeois would answer, with a sigh if he was too sad, or giving his cuff a flick if he wanted to appear casual: “Monsieur le baron Pontmercy is pettifogging in some hole.”

While the old man was having his regrets, Marius was rejoicing. As with all good hearts, adversity had taken away his bitterness. He thought of Monsieur Gillenormand only with kindness, but he was determined never to receive anything more from the man “who had been rotten to his father.” This was now the toned-down translation of his initial expressions of outrage. Furthermore, he was happy to have suffered and to suffer still. It was for his father. His hard life satisfied and pleased him. He told himself with a sort of joy that “it was the very least he could do”; that it was atonement; that, without that, he would have been punished, in a different way and later on, for his unholy indifference to his father, and to such a father; that it would not have been right for his father to have had all the suffering and for him to have none; and that, in any case, his travails and his deprivation were nothing next to the heroic life of the colonel; that, in the end, the only way he could get closer to his father and to be like him was to be valiant in the face of poverty just as his father had been brave in the face of the enemy; and that that was no doubt what the colonel had meant by the words “he will be worthy of it.” Words that Marius continued to carry around with him, not on his breast, the colonel’s note having disappeared, but in his heart.

Then again, when his grandfather had kicked him out, he was still a child; now he was a man. He felt it. Misery, we will say again, had been good for him. Poverty in youth, when it succeeds, has this magnificent effect: It turns the whole will toward effort and the whole soul toward aspiration. Poverty immediately pares down material life and makes it hideous; hence those inexpressible yearnings for the ideal life. The rich young man has a hundred brilliant and vulgar distractions, the horse races, hunting, dogs, smoking, gambling, wining and dining, and the rest; occupations for the nether regions of the soul at the expense of the higher and more delicate regions. The poor young man has to toil for his daily bread; he eats, and when he has eaten, all he can do is dream. He gets in for nothing to the shows God puts on for him; he looks at the sky, space, the stars, the flowers, children, humanity among whom he suffers, creation in which he shines. He looks so hard at humanity, he sees its soul; he looks so hard at creation, he sees God. He dreams and he feels grand; he dreams on and he feels full of love. He goes from the self-obsession of the suffering man to the compassion of the meditative man. A wonderful feeling grows inside him, self-forgetfulness and pity for all. In thinking of the numberless pleasures nature offers, gives, and lavishes on those with open hearts—and refuses to closed hearts—he ends up feeling sorry for the millionaires of money, for he is a millionaire of the mind. All hatred goes out of his heart as all light enters his mind. Anyway, is he unhappy? No. The misery of a young man is never miserable. Any young man whatever, no matter how poor he may be, with his health, his strength, his lively step, his shining eyes, his blood racing through his veins, his black hair, his fresh cheeks, his rosy lips, his white teeth, his pure breath, will always be the envy of an aged emperor. Then again, every morning he sets out to earn his bread again; and while his hands are gaining his bread, his backbone is gaining firmness, his brain is gaining ideas. When his job is done, he returns to ineffable ecstasies, to contemplations, to sheer delights; he lives with his feet in affliction, in impediment, on the cobblestones, in the brambles, sometimes in the mud, but with his head in the light. He is strong, serene, gentle, peaceful, attentive, serious, content with little, benevolent; and he praises God for having given him these two riches that are lacking in many of the rich: work, which makes him free, and thought, which makes him worthy.

This is what had happened to Marius. He had even erred on the side of contemplation, if the truth be known. The day he managed to earn his living more or less securely, he had stopped there, finding it good to be poor and cutting back on work to give more time to thought. Which meant he sometimes spent whole days daydreaming, lost and absorbed like a visionary in the mute ravishment of ecstasy and inner radiance. This is how he posed the problem of his life: to work as little as possible at material work in order to work as much as possible at immaterial work; in other words, to give a few hours to real life and to pour the rest into infinity. He could not see, thinking that he lacked for nothing, that contemplation thus interpreted ends up becoming a form of laziness; that he had been content to master the primary necessities of life and was resting on his laurels too soon.

It was obvious that, for such an energetic and generous nature, this could only be a transitory phase and that at the first collision with the inevitable complications of fate, Marius would snap out of it.

Meanwhile, although he was a lawyer and whatever old man Gillenormand might think, he was not busy pleading, he was not even busy pettifogging. Reverie had turned him away from the practice of law. Hanging around with attorneys, following the courts, looking for causes—boring! What was the point? He could see no reason for boosting his livelihood that way. The obscure commercial bookshop had ended up providing him with secure work, work that didn’t involve much labour, and this, as we have just explained, was enough for him.

One of the booksellers for whom he worked, Monsieur Magimel,2 I think, had offered to put him up at his place, to give him a decent room, furnish him with regular work, and pay him fifteen hundred francs a year. To have a decent room! Fifteen hundred francs! All very well. But to give up his freedom! To be a wage earner! A kind of lettered clerk! To Marius’s mind, if he accepted this offer, his position would be both better and worse at once; he would gain material well-being and lose his dignity; it was complete and beautiful adversity turned into ugly and absurd inconvenience, something similar to a blind man’s gaining sight in one eye. He turned the offer down.

Marius lived a solitary life. Through his inclination to stay on the outside of everything, and also because he had been really scared off, he quite deliberately did not throw himself into the group presided over by Enjolras. They had stayed good friends; they were ready to help each other out in every possible way should the occasion arise; but nothing more. Marius had two true friends, one young, Courfeyrac, and one old, Monsieur Mabeuf. He leaned toward the old one. For a start, he was indebted to him for the revolution that had occurred inside him; he was indebted to him for having known and loved his father. “He removed my cataracts,” he said to himself.

Certainly, the churchwarden had been decisive.

But in that particular instance Monsieur Mabeuf had not been anything more than the imperturbable and calm agent of fate. He had enlightened Marius by chance and unwittingly, like a candle that someone happens to be carrying; he had been the candle and not the someone.

As for Marius’s inner political revolution, Monsieur Mabeuf was wholly incapable of understanding it, of wanting it, or of directing it.

Since we will come across Monsieur Mabeuf later, a few words are not out of place here.

MONSIEUR MABEUF

THE DAY MONSIEUR MABEUF said to Marius: “Of course, I approve of political opinions,” he was expressing his true frame of mind. All political opinions were indifferent to him and he approved of all of them without distinguishing between them, so that they would leave him in peace, much the way the Greeks called the Furies “the beautiful, the good, the charming,” the Eumenides!1 Monsieur Mabeuf’s own political stance was to love plants with a passion, and books more than anything in the world. Like everyone else, he was an -ist, without which no one in those days could have survived, but he was neither a royalist nor a Bonapartist, nor a Chartist, nor an Orléanist, nor an anarchist; he was a bouquiniste, devoted to old books.

He did not understand how men could waste their time hating each other over such poppycock as the Charter, democracy, legitimism, the monarchy, the Republic, and so on, when there were in this world all sorts of mosses, grasses, and shrubs that they could look at, and heaps of folios and even thirty-two-mo editions that they could leaf through. He took good care not to be useless; having books did not stop him from reading, being a botanist did not stop him from being a gardener. In the days when he knew Pontmercy, there had been this sympathy between the colonel and himself, which was that what the colonel did for flowers, he did for fruit. Monsieur Mabeuf had managed to produce seedling pears as tasty as the pears of Saint-Germain; one of these hybrids gave birth, it would seem, to the early autumn mirabelle plum so celebrated today and no less fragrant than the summer mirabelle. He went to mass more out of goodness than devoutness and also because, though he loved people’s faces, he hated their noise and it was only in church that he found them gathered together in silence. Feeling that he ought to be something in government, he had chosen the career of churchwarden. Apart from this, he had never loved any woman as much as a tulip bulb or any man as much as an Elzevir typeface. He was way past sixty when someone asked him one day: “Haven’t you ever been married?” “I forget.”

When he occasionally let loose—and who doesn’t?—with an: “Oh, if only I were rich!”—it was not ogling some young filly, like old man Gillenormand, but gazing at a book. He lived alone with an old housekeeper. He was a bit gouty and when he slept his old fingers, stiff with rheumatism, clutched at the sheets. He had produced and published a Flora of the Environs of Cauteretz with coloured plates, a fairly highly regarded work of which he owned the copperplates and which he sold himself. People came two or three times a day to ring the bell of his home in the rue Mézières to buy it. He made a good two thousand francs a year from it; that was more or less the sum total of his fortune. Although he was poor, he had had the talent to amass, through patience, self-denial, and time, a precious collection of rare editions in all genres. He never went out without a book under his arm and he often came home with two. The only decoration in the four rooms on the ground floor that, along with a garden, comprised his dwelling, were framed herbariums and old master engravings. The sight of a sabre or a gun froze him. He had never gone near a cannon in his life, not even at the Invalides. He had a reasonably strong stomach, a brother who was a curé, completely white hair, no more teeth left either in his mouth or in his mind, a tremor that shook his whole body, a Picardy accent, a boyish laugh, a propensity to frighten easily, and the look of an old woolly sheep. With all that, no other friend or intimate acquaintance among the living than an old bookseller of the porte Saint-Jacques called Royol. His dream was to adapt and grow indigo in France.

His housekeeper, too, was a permutation on innocence. The poor old soul was a virgin. Sultan, her tomcat, who could have meowed Allegri’s Miserere in the Sistine Chapel, had filled her heart and been enough for the quota of passion she had in her. None of her dreams had gone as far as a man. She had never been able to get beyond her cat. Like him, she had whiskers. Her glory lay in her bonnets, which were always white. She whiled away her time on Sundays after mass counting the linen in her trunk and spreading out on her bed all the dress material she bought piecemeal and had never run up. She could read. Monsieur Mabeuf had nicknamed her Mother Plutarch.

Monsieur Mabeuf had taken to Marius because Marius, being young and gentle, warmed up his old age without stirring up his timidity. Gentleness in the young is like the sun without the wind to old people. When Marius was saturated with military glory, with cannon powder, marches and countermarches, and all the fabulous battles in which his father had given and received such great sabre slashes, he went to see Monsieur Mabeuf and Monsieur Mabeuf would tell him about his hero from the flowers’ point of view.

Around 1830, his brother the curé died and almost immediately, as at nightfall, the whole horizon darkened for Monsieur Mabeuf. A bankruptcy—of a notary public—stripped him of ten thousand francs, which was all the money he possessed of his brother’s or his own. The July Revolution2 ushered in a crisis in the book trade. In times of tightening belts, the first thing that does not sell is a Flora. The Flora of the Environs of Cauteretz stopped selling altogether. Weeks went by without a single buyer. Sometimes Monsieur Mabeuf would jump up at the sound of a bell.

“Monsieur,” Mother Plutarch would say to him sadly, “it’s only the water carrier.”

In short, one day Monsieur Mabeuf left the rue Mézières, abdicated his duties as churchwarden, gave up Saint-Sulpice, sold not his books but part of his prints—what he prized least—and set himself up in a little house in the boulevard Montparnasse, where he only stayed three months, in any case, for two reasons: first, the ground floor and the garden cost three hundred francs and he did not dare put more than two hundred francs aside for his rent; second, being next to the Fatou shooting range, he had to listen to pistol shots all day long, which he found unbearable.

He carted off his Flora, his copperplates, his herbariums, his portfolios, and his books and set up near La Salpêtrière in a kind of cottage in the village of Austerlitz,3 where he had three rooms and a hedged-in garden with a well for fifty écus a year. He took advantage of the move to sell nearly all his furniture. The day he stepped into the new place, he was very lighthearted and himself hammered in the nails required to hang the engravings and herbariums; he dug up his garden the rest of the day and, that evening, seeing Mother Plutarch down in the dumps and brooding, he clapped her on the shoulder and said to her with a smile: “Now then! We still have the indigo!” Only two visitors, the bookseller from the porte Saint-Jacques and Marius, were allowed in to see him in his cottage in Austerlitz—a flash name which, if the truth be known, he didn’t much like.

Be that as it may, as we have just pointed out, brains caught up in either wisdom or madness, or, as often happens, in both at the same time, only very slowly open up to the business of living. Their own destiny is far removed from them. This kind of concentration results in a passivity that, when it is thought through, resembles philosophy. You decline, you descend, you dwindle, you even drop without being particularly aware of it. This always finishes, it is true, in an awakening, but a tardy one. Meanwhile, it seems that you are neutral in the game being played out between your happiness and your unhappiness. You are the stakes, yet you look on the match with indifference.

And so, through all the dark clouds gathering around him, with all his hopes being snuffed out one by one, Monsieur Mabeuf remained serene, a little childishly, but profoundly. His mental habits had the swing of a pendulum. Once wound up by an illusion, he went for a long time, even when the illusion had vanished. A clock doesn’t suddenly stand still the exact moment you lose the key that winds it.

Monsieur Mabeuf had innocent pleasures. These pleasures were cheap and unlooked for; the slightest accident provided them. One day Mother Plutarch was reading a novel in a corner of the room. She was reading out loud, as she found she could follow better that way. To read out loud is to assure yourself of what you are reading. There are those who read very loudly as though they are giving themselves their word of honour about what they are reading.

Mother Plutarch was reading with that kind of energy the novel she held in her hands. Monsieur Mabeuf could hear her but was not listening.

As she read, Mother Plutarch came to this sentence. It was about an officer of dragoons and some belle: “… The belle was brooding, and the dragoon …”

Here she broke off to wipe her glasses.

“Buddha and the dragon,” mused Monsieur Mabeuf sotto voce. “Yes, that’s right, there was once a dragon who, from deep in its lair, spewed flames out of its maw and burned the sky. Several stars had already been set alight by this monster who, on top of that, had the claws of a tiger. Buddha went into its den and managed to convert the dragon. You’ve got yourself a good book there, Mother Plutarch. There is no more beautiful legend.” And Monsieur Mabeuf fell into a delicious reverie.

POVERTY, MISERY’S GOOD NEIGHBOUR

MARIUS WAS GENUINELY fond of this open old man who saw himself slowly going under and yet managed to be amazed by it without yet being depressed. Marius ran into Courfeyrac, he ran to Monsieur Mabeuf. Very rarely, though, once or twice a month at most.

Marius’s great pleasure was to take long walks alone along the outer boulevards or in the Champ de Mars or along the less frequented allées of the Luxembourg gardens. He sometimes spent half a day at a time gazing at a market garden, square beds of lettuce, hens scratching in the dung, and a horse turning the chain of a waterwheel. Passersby would study him with surprise and a few found he had a suspicious demeanour and a sinister face. He was just a young man with no money, dreaming aimlessly.

It was on one of these promenades that he had discovered the Gorbeau slum, and its isolation and low rent tempted him, so he moved in. There, everyone knew him only as Monsieur Marius.

Some of his father’s old generals and old comrades had invited him, when they found out who he was, to come and see them, and Monsieur Marius had not refused. These were opportunities to talk about his father. And so from time to time he went to see Comte Pajol, General Bellavesne, and General Fririon,1 at home in the Invalides. There was music there and dancing. On those evenings, Marius would put on his good coat. But he never went to these parties or balls except on days when it was cold and dry enough to split stone, for he could not afford a cab and he did not want to turn up unless his boots were polished to a mirror finish by the frost.

He sometimes said, though without bitterness: “Men are so made that, in a salon, you could be caked with mud all over, except for your shoes. In a salon, to be welcomed with open arms, you are asked to be irreproachable in one thing only. Your conscience? No. Your boots.” All passions, other than those of the heart, are dissipated by daydreaming. Marius’s political fevers had evaporated. The revolution of 1830 had satisfied him and calmed him down and so had helped on this score. He had stayed the same, minus his anger. He still held the same views, only, they had mellowed. Actually he no longer had views as such, he had sympathies. Whose side was he on? On the side of humanity. Within humanity, he chose France; within the nation, he chose the people; within the people, he chose women. It was to women especially that his heart went out. He now preferred an idea to a deed, a poet to a hero, and he admired a book like Job2 even more than an event like Marengo. And then again when, after a day of meditation, he strolled home in the evening along the boulevards and saw, through the branches of the trees, the endless space, the nameless lights, the void, the dark, the mystery, all that is merely human seemed pretty paltry to him.

He felt that he finally understood, and perhaps he did finally understand, what life was all about, and what human philosophy was all about, and he ended up scarcely looking at anything but the heavens, the only thing that truth can see from the bottom of its well.

This did not prevent him from making plan after plan, devising schemes, erecting scaffoldings, elaborating projects for the future. In this state of reverie, an eye that could see inside Marius would have been dazzled by the purity of his soul. In fact, if it were given to our eyes of flesh to see inside other people’s minds, we would judge a man a great deal more accurately by his dreams than by his thoughts. There is something deliberate about thought, but there is no such thing in dreams. Even when it involves immensity and the ideal, a dream that is entirely spontaneous takes on and keeps the shape of our mind. Nothing emerges more directly and more genuinely from the very depths of our soul than our unthinking untamed aspirations toward the splendours of destiny. In such aspirations, much more than in composed, reasoned, and ordered ideas, we see every man’s true character. Our fantasies are what most closely resemble us. Each of us dreams of the unknown and the impossible according to his nature.

Toward the middle of that year, 1831, the old woman who served Marius told him that his neighbours, the miserable Jondrette family, were going to be shown the door. Marius, who spent almost all his days away, hardly knew he had neighbours.

“Why are they kicking them out?” he asked.

“Because they didn’t pay the rent. They owed six months.”

“How much is that?”

“Twenty francs.”

Marius had thirty francs in reserve in a drawer.

“Here,” he said to the old woman, “here’s twenty-five francs. Pay for these poor people, give them the extra five francs and don’t say it’s from me.”

THE SUBSTITUTE

AS LUCK WOULD have it, the regiment Lieutenant Théodule belonged to came to be garrisoned in Paris. This was the occasion for Aunt Gillenormand to have a second idea. Initially she had imagined having Marius spied on by Théodule; now she plotted to have Marius supplanted by Théodule.

At all events, and in case the grandfather should feel a vague need to have a young face about the place—these rays of dawn are sometimes soft to ruins—it was expedient to come up with another Marius. “Yes,” she thought, “it’s just a printing error such as I sometimes see in books. For Marius, read Théodule.” A grandnephew is almost a grandson; for want of a lawyer, they could take a lancer.

One morning, as Monsieur Gillenormand was in the process of reading some rag like the Quotidienne,1 his daughter came in and said to him in her sweetest voice, since it concerned her favourite: “Father, dear, Théodule is coming over this morning to pay you his respects.” “Who’s that? Théodule?”

“Your grandnephew.”

“Ah!” said the great-uncle.

At which he resumed his reading without giving his grandnephew another thought, as he was just another Théodule after all; soon he was in a very excited mood, which almost always happened when he read. The “broadsheet” he was holding, which was of course royalist—that goes without saying—announced for the following day, most ungraciously, one of the little daily occurrences of the Paris of the time: The students of the faculties of law and medicine would gather at the place du Panthéon at twelve noon—to deliberate. At issue was one of the questions of the moment, namely the artillery of the National Guard and a conflict between the minister of war2 and “the citizen militia” over some cannons parked in the courtyard of the Louvre. The students were to “deliberate” over this. It didn’t take much more to get Monsieur Gillenormand going.

He thought of Marius, who was a student and who, probably, would go, like the others, “to deliberate, at twelve noon, at the place du Panthéon.”

As he was dwelling on this painful thought, Lieutenant Théodule came strutting in dressed like a bourgeois, which was a clever move, and he was discreetly introduced by Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The lancer had reasoned as follows: “The old troglodyte hasn’t yet put all his money into buying an annuity. That’s worth the trouble of disguising myself as a civilian from time to time.” Mademoiselle Gillenormand said, loudly, to her father: “Théodule, your grandnephew.”

And, softly, to the lieutenant: “Agree with everything he says.”

And with that, she withdrew.

The lieutenant, little accustomed to encountering such venerable personages, stammered rather timidly, “Hello, Uncle,” and performed a mixed salutation consisting of an involuntary and mechanical attempt at a military salute finishing in a bourgeois bow.

“Oh, it’s you! Right, right, sit down,” said the old man.

That said, he forgot all about the lancer.

Théodule sat down and Monsieur Gillenormand stood up.

Monsieur Gillenormand began to pace up and down, his hands in his pockets, talking out loud and tormenting with his agitated old fingers the two watches he had in the two fob pockets of his waistcoat.

“That bunch of snotty-nosed upstarts! Calling a meeting at the place du Panthéon! I’ll be a monkey’s uncle! Cheeky little twirps! They’re only just out of the nursery! If you squeezed their noses, milk would come running out! And that’s what’s deliberating at twelve noon tomorrow! What is the world coming to? What is the world coming to? It’s clear we’re headed for the abyss. That’s where those descamisados3 have led us! Citizen artillery! Deliberate about the citizen artillery! Fancy going and jabbering in the open air about the farting of the National Guard! And who are they going to find themselves among there? Just see where Jacobinism gets you. I bet you all the money you like, a million to one, that the only people there will be fugitives from justice and freed convicts. Republicans and galley slaves go together like a nose and a handkerchief. Carnot said: ‘Where do you want me to go, traitor?’ Fouché answered:4 ‘Wherever you like, you moron!’ That’s republicans for you.” “Hear, hear,” said Théodule.

Monsieur Gillenormand turned his head half round, spotted Théodule and went on: “When I think that that little bastard has had the audacity to turn himself into a Carbonaro! Why did you leave my house? To go and make yourself a republican. Aaagh! To start with, the people don’t want anything to do with your republic, they don’t want it, they’ve got common sense, they know very well that there have always been kings and there always will be, they know very well that the people, after all, are just the people, they laugh at it, your republic, do you hear, you little dimwit! Is it horrible enough for you, this little whim of yours? To fall for Père Duchesne, make eyes at the guillotine, sing romances and play the guitar under the balcony of ‘93, it’s enough to make you want to spit on all those young men, they are such dunderheads! They’re all at it. Not one has escaped. All it takes is to breathe the air blowing down the street and you go stark raving mad. The nineteenth century is poison. The first little squirt that comes along grows his little goatee, thinks he’s a genuine rogue, and leaves his old relatives in the lurch. That’s republican, that’s romantic. What the hell is romantic about that? Have the goodness to tell me, what the hell is that? Every crazy notion that pops into your head. A year ago, you all went to Hernani.5 I ask you, Hernani! Nothing but antitheses, abominations not even written in French! And then they stick cannons in the courtyard of the Louvre. That’s the sort of dastardly deed they go in for these days.” “Too right, Uncle,” said Théodule.

Monsieur Gillenormand went on: “Cannons in the courtyard of the museum! What for? Cannons, I tell you! So you want to blast the Apollo Belvedere? What have cartridge pouches to do with the Venus de Médicis? Oh, the young people of today, they’re scoundrels, every one of them! What a nobody their Benjamin Constant6 is! And those that aren’t little rotters are nincompoops! They all do their level best to be ugly, they’re badly dressed, they’re frightened of women, around a bit of skirt they have the air of begging, which makes the fillies laugh in their faces; my word of honour, you’d think they were paupers, ashamed of love. They’re grotesque, and they top it off by being morons; they trot out old puns of Tiercelin’s and Potier’s, they have coats that look like sacks, jockey’s waistcoats, coarse cotton shirts, coarse cotton trousers, coarse leather boots, and all they manage to achieve is to look as if they’re wearing feathers. You could resole their old clodhoppers with the jargon they use. And all these hopeless runts reckon they have political opinions. It ought to be strictly forbidden to have political opinions. They fabricate systems, they rebuild society, they dismantle the monarchy, they trample all laws underfoot, they put the attic where the cellar is and my porter where the king is, they turn Europe on its head, they remake the world, and what they get out of it all is to slyly peek at the washerwomen’s legs when they climb up into their carts! Ah, Marius! Ah, you little beggar! Go and pontificate in the public arena! Discuss, debate, take measures! They call those measures, for God’s sake! Disorder gets diminished and becomes inane. I’ve seen chaos, I see the damage done. Schoolboys deliberating about the National Guard, you won’t see that among the Ojibways or the Cadodaches! Savages getting about stark naked, their noggins tizzed up like shuttlecocks, with clubs in their paws, aren’t as savage as these gay young blades! Marmosets worth four sous apiece, making innuendos and pathetic wisecracks! It deliberates and ratiocinates! It’s the end of the world. It’s obviously the end of this miserable terraqueous globe. All it needed was some final hiccup and France has come up with it. Deliberate, you little turds! This sort of thing will keep happening as long as they go off and read the newspapers under the arches of the Odéon. It costs them a sou—and their common sense, and their intelligence, and their heart, and their soul, and their mind. Then they clear out and go home to their families. All newspapers are a scourge; all of them, even the Drapeau blanc! At bottom, Martainville7 was a Jacobin. Ah, heavens above! You can certainly boast that you’ve caused your grandfather to despair, you can certainly do that!” “Obviously,” said Théodule.

And, taking advantage of Monsieur Gillenormand’s pausing for breath, the lancer added magisterially: “There should be no other newspaper apart from the Moniteur and no other book apart from the Annuaire militaire.” Monsieur Gillenormand went on: “He’s like their Sieyès!8 A regicide winding up as a senator! For that’s the way they always end up. They slash at each other with their ‘citizen this’ and ‘citizen that’ only to wind up getting about as Monsieur le comte. Monsieur le comte, my eye! The butchers of September! The philosopher Sieyès! I’ll say this for myself: At least I have never taken any more notice of the philosophies of those particular philosophers than of the goggles of the clown who pulls faces at the Tivoli! One day I saw some senators passing along the quai Malaquais in mantles of violet velvet strewn with bees and wearing hats like Henri IV.9 They were hideous. You’d have said they were monkeys from the court of a tiger. Citizens, I tell you that your progress is lunacy, that your humanity is a dream, that your revolution is a crime, that your republic is a monster, that your young virginal France comes straight from the brothel, and I maintain it to all of you, whoever you may be, whether you are publicists, whether you are economists, whether you are legal experts, whether you are more connoisseurs of liberty, equality, and fraternity than of the blade of the guillotine! That’s what I say, my good fellows!” “Good Lord!” cried the lieutenant. “Not a truer word was spoken.”

Monsieur Gillenormand broke off a gesture he had begun to make, wheeled round, looked the lancer Théodule straight in the eye and said to him: “You are a moron.”