بخش 4 کتاب 9

BOOK NINE

WHERE ARE THEY GOING?

JEAN VALJEAN

THAT SAME DAY, at around four o’clock in the afternoon, Jean Valjean was sitting alone on the shady side of one of the most solitary slopes in the Champ de Mars. Either out of prudence or a desire to gather his thoughts, or quite simply as a result of one of those imperceptible changes of habit that creep little by little into all our lives, he now only went out with Cosette fairly rarely. He was wearing his workingman’s jacket and trousers of coarse grey cotton, and his cap with the long peak hid his face. He was now easy and happy where Cosette was concerned; what had frightened and disturbed him for a while had blown over; but, for a week or two now, worries of a different kind had been plaguing him. One day, as he was strolling along the boulevard, he had caught sight of Thénardier. Thanks to his disguise, Thénardier had not recognized him; but since then Jean Valjean had seen him again several times and he now felt sure that Thénardier had adopted the quartier as his new hunting grounds. This had been enough for him to make a momentous decision. For Thénardier to be there, hanging around, meant every shade of peril at once.

On top of this, Paris was stirring; for anyone who had something in his life to hide, the political turmoil offered this disadvantage, the fact that the police had become extremely nervous and extremely jumpy, and that in their efforts to track down men like Pépin or Morey,1 they could well uncover a man like Jean Valjean.

On all fronts, he had something to worry about.

Lastly, he had just stumbled across something inexplicable to add to his alarm and he was still reeling from it. The morning of that very day, being the only one up and about in the house and taking a stroll in the garden before Cosette’s shutters opened, he had suddenly spotted this line carved into the wall, probably with a nail: 16, rue de la Verrerie.

It was quite recent, the nicks were white in the old black mortar and a clump of nettles at the foot of the wall was powdered with fine fresh plaster. It had probably been written there during the night. What was it? An address? A signal for others? A warning to him? Whatever the case, it was clear that the entry to the garden had been forced and that unknown people were getting in. He remembered the odd incidents that had already had the household on alert. While his mind kept working on this strange tapestry, he was careful not to mention to Cosette the line written on the wall with a nail for fear of frightening her.

After carefully considering and weighing all this up, Jean Valjean had decided to leave Paris, and even France, and go over to England. He had warned Cosette. Within a week, he wanted to be gone. He sat on the slope in the Champ de Mars, turning all sorts of ideas around in his mind, Thénardier, the police, this strange line written on the wall, the voyage, and the difficulty of getting himself a passport.

While he sat mulling over these concerns, he saw, from a shadow cast by the sun, that somebody had just stopped on the crest of the slope immediately behind him. He was about to turn round when a piece of paper folded in four landed on his knees as though a hand had thrown it over his head. He took the piece of paper, unfolded it, and read these two words written in capital letters in pencil: CLEAR OUT.

Jean Valjean shot to his feet, but there was no one now on the slope; he looked all around and saw a strange-looking creature, bigger than a child, smaller than a man, dressed in a grey smock and a pair of dun-coloured velveteen trousers leaping over the parapet and sliding down into the ditch that ringed the Champ de Mars.

Jean Valjean went home immediately, deep in thought.

MARIUS

MARIUS HAD LEFT Monsieur Gillenormand’s in desolation. He had gone there with pretty small hopes. He left with immense despair.

Still, and those who have observed the first stirrings of the human heart will understand this, the lancer, the officer, that nincompoop, good old cousin Théodule, had left no shadow in his mind. Not the slightest. A playwright might be tempted to hope for a few complications arising out of such a revelation made to the grandson by the grandfather, out of the blue. But what the drama would gain, the truth would lose. Marius was at that age when you believe nothing bad; the age when you believe everything you hear comes later. Suspicions are nothing more than wrinkles. Those in the first flush of youth don’t have any. What devastates Othello is water off a duck’s back to Candide.1 Suspect Cosette! There was a whole host of crimes Marius would have committed more easily than that.

He began wandering the streets, the resort of those in pain, thinking of nothing he could later remember. At two in the morning he went home to Courfeyrac’s and threw himself on his mattress, fully clothed. The sun was high in the sky when he fell into that awful heavy sleep where your brain goes on working. When he woke up, he saw Courfeyrac, Enjolras, Feuilly, and Combeferre standing in his room, hats on heads, all ready and raring to go.

Courfeyrac said to him: “Are you coming to General Lamarque’s funeral?”2

Courfeyrac may as well have been speaking Chinese.

He left the house some time after they did, but not before putting in his pocket the pistols that Javert had entrusted to him at the time of the February 3 episode and that he had hung on to. The pistols were still loaded. It is hard to say what he was thinking, if anything, in taking them with him.

All day he prowled around without knowing where; it rained now and then, but he did not notice; for his dinner he bought a flûte, a skinny stick of bread, for a sou in a baker’s, stuck it in his pocket and forgot about it. It appears he took a bath in the Seine without being aware of doing so. There are moments when your brain is like a furnace burning in your skull. Marius was in one of those moments. He no longer hoped for anything, he no longer feared anything; that is how far he had gone since the night before. He waited for night to fall with feverish impatience, he only had one clear idea left and that was that at nine o’clock he would see Cosette. This final happiness was now his whole future; beyond that, darkness. At intervals, even though he was taking the most deserted boulevards, he seemed to hear strange noises in Paris. He poked his head out of his reverie and wondered: Are they fighting?

At nightfall, at precisely nine o’clock, as he had promised Cosette, he was at the rue Plumet. As he approached the gate, he forgot everything. It was forty-eight hours since he had seen Cosette, he was about to see her again, all other thoughts faded leaving nothing but a deep unbelievable joy. Those minutes in which we live through centuries have this supremely and wonderful peculiarity, which is that while they go past, they fill our hearts completely.

Marius shifted the gate and rushed into the garden. Cosette was not in the spot where she normally waited for him. He made his way through the bushes to the recess near the steps. “She’s waiting for me there,” he said. But Cosette was not there. He looked up and saw that the house’s shutters were all shut. He circled the garden, the garden was deserted. Then he went back to the house and, driven mad with love, giddy, terrified, wild with pain and worry, like a man who comes home at the wrong moment, he banged on the shutters. He banged, and he banged again, not caring if the window flew open and the solemn face of the father appeared, asking him “What do you want?” This was nothing now compared to what he was starting to dread. When he had finished banging, he called out to Cosette.

“Cosette!” he shouted. “Cosette!” he repeated imperiously.

No one answered. It was over. No one in the garden; no one in the house.

Marius fixed his desperate eyes on that gloomy house, as black and as silent as a tomb, and even emptier. He looked at the stone bench where he had spent so many wonderful hours by Cosette’s side. Then he sat on the steps, his heart full of sweetness and resolve, he blessed his love from the bottom of his heart and he told himself that, since Cosette had gone, all that was left for him to do now was to die.

All of a sudden, he heard a voice that seemed to come from the street and that cried through the trees: “Monsieur Marius!” He stood up.

“Eh?” said he.

“Monsieur Marius, are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Monsieur Marius,” the voice went on, “your friends are waiting for you at the barricade in the rue de la Chanvrerie.” This voice was not entirely unfamiliar to him. It resembled the rough gravelly voice of Éponine. Marius ran to the gate, pulled back the loose bar, poked his head through, and saw someone that looked to him like a young man disappearing into the twilight, running.

MONSIEUR MABEUF

JEAN VALJEAN’S PURSE WAS useless to Monsieur Mabeuf. Monsieur Mabeuf, in his venerable childlike austerity, had not accepted this gift of the stars; he had not accepted that a star could convert itself into gold louis. He had not guessed that what fell out of the sky actually came from Gavroche. He had taken the purse to the local police chief as lost property placed by the finder at the disposal of any claimants. The purse was, in fact, lost. It goes without saying that no one claimed it and it did not help Monsieur Mabeuf one bit.

What’s more, Monsieur Mabeuf had continued to go downhill.

His experiments with indigo had fared no better at the Jardin des Plantes than in his own garden at Austerlitz. The year before, he owed his housekeeper her wages; now, as we saw, he owed the rent. After thirteen months had elapsed, the pawnshop had sold the copperplates of his Flora. Some coppersmith had made saucepans out of them. With his copperplates gone, he was no longer able to complete even the odd copies of his Flora that he still owned, and so he had ceded his illustrations and text as “faulty sheets,” at a giveaway price, to a secondhand book and bric-a-brac dealer. He had nothing left now of his whole life’s work. He lived for a while off the proceeds from these odd copies. When he saw that even that meagre reserve was drying up, he gave up his garden and left it lying fallow. Before this, a long time before, he had given up the two eggs and piece of beef that he would occasionally treat himself to. He dined on bread and potatoes. He had sold his last sticks of furniture, then anything he had two of by way of bedding, clothing, and covers, followed by his herbaria and his prints. But he still had his most precious books, among which several that were extremely rare, including Les Quadrains historiques de la Bible, the 1560 edition, La Concordance des Bibles by Pierre de Besse, Les Marguerites de la Marguerite by Jean de la Haye with a dedication to the queen of Navarre, the book De la Charge et dignité de l’ambassadeur by the old de Villiers Hotman, a Florilegium rabbinicum of 1644, a Tibulle of 1567 with this splendid inscription: Venetiis, in œdibus Manutianis; and finally, a Diogenes Laertius, printed in Lyon in 1644 and containing the famous variants of manuscript 411, thirteenth century, from the Vatican and those of the two manuscripts from Venice, 393 and 394, so fruitfully consulted by Henri Estienne, and all the passages in the Doric dialect that are only found in the celebrated twelfth-century manuscript in the library of Naples. Monsieur Mabeuf never lit a fire in his bedroom and always went to bed while it was still light, to save candles. It was as if he had no neighbours anymore; people avoided him whenever he went out, and he noticed. The misery of a child is of interest to a mother, the misery of a young man is of interest to a young girl, the misery of an old man is of interest to nobody. Of all forms of distress, this is the coldest. Yet old Father Mabeuf had not entirely lost his childlike serenity. His eyes very nearly lit up whenever they settled on his books and he smiled when he thought about the Diogenes Laertius, which was the only copy extant. His glass bookcase was the sole piece of furniture that he had kept beyond what was indispensable.

One day mother Plutarch said to him: “I don’t have anything to buy dinner with.”

What she called dinner was a loaf of bread and four or five potatoes.

“What about credit?” said Monsieur Mabeuf.

“You know very well they won’t give me any.”

Monsieur Mabeuf opened his bookcase, studied all his books for a long while, one after the other, the way a father forced to slaughter his children would look at them before choosing among them, then swiftly grabbed one, shoved it under his arm, and left the house. He came back two hours later with nothing under his arm, put thirty sous on the table and said: “Now you can get dinner.” From that moment on, mother Plutarch watched a sombre veil come down over the old man’s candid face, and it never lifted again.

The next day, the day after that, every day, the whole thing had to be gone through again. Monsieur Mabeuf would go out with a book and come back with a piece of silver. As the secondhand book and bric-a-brac dealers could see that he was forced to sell, they bought off him for twenty sous what he had paid twenty francs for—sometimes to the same booksellers. Volume by volume, the whole library went south. At times he would say, “I’m eighty-four, though,” as if he had some lingering hope of coming to the end of his days before coming to the end of his books. His sadness grew. Once, though, he had a burst of real joy. He went out with a Robert Estienne, which he sold on the quai Malaquais for thirty-five sous, and he came back with an Alde which he had bought for forty sous in the rue des Grès. “I owe five sous,” he said to mother Plutarch, beaming.

That day, he did not eat.

He belonged to the Society of Horticulture. They knew about his destitution there. The president of the society came to see him, promised to speak to the minister of agriculture and commerce about him, and did so.

“Well I never!” cried the minister. “Is that so! An old savant! A botanist! A harmless old fellow! We must do something for him!” Next day Monsieur Mabeuf received an invitation to dinner at the minister’s. Trembling with joy, he showed the letter to old mother Plutarch.

“We’re saved!” he said.

On the appointed day, he went to the minister’s. He noticed that his crumpled cravat, his big old square-cut coat, and his shoes polished with egg white astounded the ushers. Nobody spoke to him, not even the minister. Getting on for ten o’clock in the evening, as he was still waiting for a word, he heard the minister’s wife, a beautiful lady in a low-cut dress whom he had not dared approach, ask: “Who on earth is that old gentleman?” He went home on foot, at midnight, in driving rain. He had sold an Elzévir to pay for the cab there.

He had acquired the habit of reading a few pages from his Diogenes Laertius every night before going to bed. He knew enough Greek to savour the particularities of the text he possessed. This was his only pleasure now. A few weeks went by. All of a sudden, mother Plutarch fell ill. If there is one thing sadder than having nothing to buy bread with at the baker’s, it is having nothing to buy drugs with at the apothecary’s. One evening, the doctor had prescribed a very expensive potion. And then the illness got worse and a nurse was needed. Monsieur Mabeuf opened his bookcase, but there was nothing left there. The last volume was gone. All he had left was the Diogenes Laertius.

He put the only extant copy under his arm and went out. This was June 4, 1832. He went to the porte Saint-Jacques to Royol’s successor and came back with a hundred francs. He placed the pile of five-franc coins on the old servant’s night table and went back to his room without saying a word.

Next day, at the crack of dawn, he went and sat on the overturned stone post in his garden; from over the hedge, he could be seen sitting motionless all morning, his head down, his eyes vaguely staring at the withered flowerbeds. It rained at times, but the old man didn’t seem to notice. In the afternoon extraordinary noises broke out in Paris. It sounded like musket shots and the clamour of a big crowd.

Old Mabeuf raised his head. He saw a gardener going past and he asked him: “What is that?”

The gardener answered, his shovel over his shoulder, and in the most placid tone: “It’s the riots.”

“What! Riots?”

“Yes. They’re fighting.”

“What are they fighting for?”

“Ah! That!” said the gardener.

“Whereabouts?” Monsieur Mabeuf continued.

“Round by the Arsenal.”

Old Mabeuf went back inside, took his hat, automatically looked around for a book to tuck under his arm, did not find any, muttered, “Ah! That’s right!” and went off looking distraught.