بخش 5 کتاب 5

BOOK FIVE

GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER

IN WHICH WE ONCE MORE SEE THE TREE WITH THE ZINC PLASTER

SOME LITTLE TIME after the events we have just related, old Boulatruelle experienced a strong emotion.

Old Boulatruelle is the Montfermeil road-mender we have already caught sight of in the dark sections of this book.

Boulatruelle, you may remember, was a man with many and varied troubles on his mind. He broke stones and fleeced travellers on the highway. A road worker and a robber, he had a dream; he believed in treasures buried deep in the Montfermeil forest. He hoped one day to find money in the ground at the foot of a tree; meanwhile, he enjoyed looking for it in the pockets of those passing through.

And yet, for the moment, he was prudently lying low. He had just had a narrow escape. He had been, as we know, picked up in the Jondrette dive along with the other bandits. Vice can be useful: It was his drunkenness that saved him. They never could clear up whether he was there as robber or robbed. The case was dismissed due to lack of evidence, based on his clearly observable state of intoxication on the night of the ambush, and he was set free. He got away to the woods again. He went back to his old road between Gagny and Lagny to carry out graveling, on behalf of the state and under the surveillance of the administration, keeping his head down, a little downcast, extremely pensive, and with slightly cold feet as far as robbery went, since that activity had nearly sunk him, but turning all the more tenderly to drink, which had just saved his neck.

As for the strong emotion he experienced shortly after being back under the turf roof of his road-mender’s hut again, this was it:

One morning, shortly before daybreak, as he was making his way as usual to his work, and perhaps to his hideout, Boulatruelle spotted a man among the branches and though he could only see his back, the man’s bulk, it seemed to him, from a distance, through the dim light, was not entirely unfamiliar to him. Boulatruelle may have been a drunk but his memory was intact and lucid, an indispensable defensive weapon when a man is somewhat at odds with the legal order.

“Where the devil have I seen that man before?” he asked himself.

But he could not provide himself with an answer, except that he looked like someone who had left a dim trace in his mind.

Nonetheless, apart from the man’s identity, which he could not quite put his finger on, Boulatruelle made some connections and calculations. The man was not from around there. He had come there from somewhere else. On foot, obviously. No public conveyance passes at that hour at Montfermeil. He had walked all night. Where had he come from? From somewhere not far away. For he had neither a haversack nor a bundle. From Paris no doubt. Why was he in this wood? Why was he there at such an hour? What had he come there to do?

Boulatruelle thought about the treasure. By dint of digging into his memory he vaguely remembered having had a similar jolt already, several years before, in relation to a man who struck him as very possibly the same man.

While he chewed this over, he had, under the very weight of his meditation, bowed his head, which is only natural, but not too clever. When he looked up again, there was no one in sight. The man had melted into the forest and into the gloom.

“Bugger!” said Boulatruelle. “I’ll find him again, but. I’ll find out which parish this particular parishioner hails from. This stroller, up at the crack of dawn, has a why and a wherefore, and I’ll find out what it is. There are no secrets in my woods without me sticking my nose in.” He grabbed his pickaxe, which was very sharp.

“Now this,” he muttered, “is just the thing for plowing through dirt—or a man.”

And, following the path the man must have taken as exactly as he could, the way you tie one thread to another thread, he set off through the undergrowth.

When he had gone a hundred yards, day was starting to break and came to his aid. Footprints left in the sand here and there, grass flattened underfoot, ferns crushed, young branches bent back in the scrub and straightening out again at a graciously slow pace, like the arms of a pretty woman stretching out on waking, more or less pointed the way. He followed it, then he lost it. Time passed. He delved further into the woods and came to a kind of knoll. An early-morning hunter going by along a path in the distance, whistling jauntily, gave him the idea of climbing up a tree. Though old, he was agile. There was a very tall beech tree nearby, worthy of Virgil’s Tityrus,1 and of Boulatruelle. Boulatruelle climbed the beech as high as he could.

It was a good idea. Exploring the lonely expanse over where the wood is completely tangled and wild, Boulatruelle suddenly spotted his man.

Hardly had he spotted him when he lost sight of him again.

The man went, or rather slipped, into a fairly remote glade, camouflaged by tall trees, a place Boulatruelle knew well, though, having noticed, near a big pile of millstones, a sick chestnut tree bandaged with a zinc plaster nailed straight onto the bark. This glade is the clearing known as the Blaru grounds in days gone by. The pile of stones that could be seen there thirty years ago, intended for who knows what use, is doubtless still there today. Nothing can beat a pile of stones for longevity—unless it is a paling fence. It is always only temporary. What a good reason for it to stay where it is!

Boulatruelle, going hell for leather in his excitement, practically fell out of the tree climbing down. The lair had been found, now it was just a matter of bagging the game. The famous treasure of his dreams was probably there.

It was no mean feat getting to the glade. The well-trodden paths that zigzag crazily all over the place took a good quarter of an hour; the straight path through the thicket, which is incredibly thick, extremely thorny, and extremely aggressive, took a good half an hour. Boulatruelle made the mistake of not reckoning on this. He believed in the straight line—a respectable optical illusion, but one that causes a lot of people to come unstuck. The thicket, spiky as it was, seemed to him to be the right way.

“We’ll take the wolves’ rue de Rivoli,” he said.

Boulatruelle was used to straying; this time he made the mistake of going straight.

He threw himself with gusto into the mêlée of the undergrowth.

He had to tackle holly, nettles, hawthorn, dog roses, thistles, the meanest of brambles, and got himself scratched to bits.

At the bottom of a ravine, he found water that he had to wade through.

He finally reached the Blaru glade after a good forty minutes, sweating, soaked, out of breath, clawed to bits, ferocious.

No one in the glade.

Boulatruelle ran to the pile of stones. It was in place. It had not been carted away.

As for the man, he had vanished into the forest. He had escaped. Where to? Which way? In what thicket? Impossible to guess.

And, most poignantly, behind the pile of stones, in front of the tree with the zinc plaster, there was freshly dug dirt, a forgotten or abandoned pick, and a hole.

The hole was empty.

“Thief!” cried Boulatruelle, showing the horizon his two fists.

MARIUS, EMERGING FROM CIVIL WAR, GEARS UP FOR DOMESTIC WAR

FOR A LONG while Marius was neither dead nor alive. For several weeks he had a fever accompanied by delirium and serious symptoms of brain damage caused more by the concussion resulting from the wounds to the head than by the wounds themselves.

He repeated Cosette’s name for whole nights on end in the morbid loquacity induced by fever and with the grim obstinacy of approaching death. The size of certain injuries was a serious danger, pus suppurating from open wounds always being susceptible to being resorbed, and consequently killing the patient, under certain atmospheric conditions; at every change in the weather, at the least storm, the doctor became anxious. “Above all else, don’t excite him,” he would repeat. The bandages were complex and difficult, for fixing pads and cloth in place with surgical tape or sticking plaster had not yet been dreamed up at the time. Nicolette used up a sheet “as big as a ceiling,” she said, for lint. It was not without a struggle that the chlorinated lotions and the silver nitrate finally got the better of the gangrene. As long as there was danger, Monsieur Gillenormand stayed by his grandson’s bedside, distraught and, like Marius, neither dead nor alive.

Every day and sometimes twice a day, a white-haired gentleman, very well dressed, according to the description provided by the porter, came to hear the latest on the wounded man and left a fat packet of lint for bandages.

At last, on September 7, three months to the day from the painful night he was brought back dying to his grandfather’s home, the doctor declared that he was out of danger. Convalescence began. Marius, though, had to stay lying down on a chaise longue for over two months still, on account of the complications produced by the fractured collarbone. There is always one last wound that does not want to heal and so prolongs the bandaging to the great annoyance of the patient.

On the other hand, this long illness and convalescence saved him from prosecution. In France, there is no rage, not even official rage, that six months won’t snuff out. Riots, in the current state of society, are so much everybody’s fault that they are followed by a certain need to turn a blind eye.

We might add that the unspeakable directive issued by Gisquet enjoining doctors to denounce the wounded, having outraged public opinion, and not only public opinion but the king first and foremost, the wounded were shielded and protected by this outrage; and, with the exception of those who had been taken prisoner in actual combat, the courts-martial did not dare disturb any of them. And so they left Marius in peace.

Monsieur Gillenormand went through every possible anguish at first, and after that every possible ecstasy. They had a lot of trouble preventing him from spending every night by the wounded man’s side; he had his great big armchair wheeled in next to Marius’s bed; he demanded that his daughter use the best linen in the house to make poultices and bandages with. Mademoiselle Gillenormand, wise elder daughter that she was, managed to find a way of sparing the very best linen, while letting the old man think his wishes were respected. Monsieur Gillenormand would not allow anyone to explain to him that for making lint, cambric is not as good as coarse cloth and new cloth is not as good as used cloth. He watched all the dressing operations, while Mademoiselle Gillenormand absented herself for modesty’s sake. When they hacked away the dead flesh with scissors, he would wince: “Ouch! Ouch!” Nothing could be more touching than to see him handing the patient a cup of herbal tea with his slight senile tremor. He overwhelmed the doctor with questions without realizing that his questions were always the same ones.

The day the doctor told him that Marius was out of danger, the poor man went delirious. He gave his porter three louis as a bonus. That evening, when he went up to his room, he danced a gavotte, clicking his thumb and index finger like castanets, and he sang the following song: Jeanne1 was born in Fougère,

A real nest for a shepherdess;

I love her petticoat

Little rogue.

Love, you live in her;

For it is in her eyes

That you put your quiver,

Scoffer!

Me, I sing of her, and love

More than Diana, even,

Jeanne and her hard Breton

Nipples.2

Then he knelt on a chair and Basque, who watched him through the door, which was ajar, felt sure he prayed.

Until then, he hadn’t believed in God for a moment.

At each new stage of improvement, as recovery became more and more marked, the old man ranted and raved. He did all sorts of wildly gay things, quite unconsciously; he ran up and down the stairs without knowing why. A neighbour, and a pretty one at that, was quite stunned one morning to receive a huge bouquet; it was Monsieur Gillenormand who had sent it. The husband threw a jealous fit. Monsieur Gillenormand tried to pull Nicolette onto his knees. He called Marius Monsieur le baron. He cried out: “Long live the Republic!” At every turn, he asked the doctor: “There’s no danger anymore, is there?” He would look at Marius with a grandmother’s gaze. He would sit and brood over him as he ate. He did not know himself anymore, he no longer counted. Marius was the master of the house, there was abdication in the old man’s joy, he was his grandson’s grandson.

In the state of delight he was in, he was the most venerable of children. From fear of tiring or annoying the convalescent, he would stand behind him and beam down at him. He was happy, joyful, thrilled, charming, young. His white hair added sweet majesty to the shiny bright light that lay over his face. When grace tackles wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an indefinable dawning in radiant old age.

As for Marius, while letting himself be bandaged and cared for, he had only one idea in his head: Cosette. Since the fever and delirium had left him, he no longer uttered that name, and a person could be forgiven for thinking that he no longer thought about her. He kept his mouth shut, precisely because his heart would have leaped out of it.

He did not know what had become of Cosette; the whole business of the rue de la Chanvrerie was like a cloud in his memory; almost indistinct shadows flitted through his mind, Éponine, Gavroche, Mabeuf, the Thénardiers, all his friends grimly mixed up with the smoke of the barricade; the strange cameo rôle of Monsieur Fauchelevent in that gory episode struck him as a riddle in a tempest; he did not understand a thing about his own life, he did not know how or through whom he had been saved and no one around him knew, either; all they had been able to tell him was that he had been brought back to the rue des Filles-du-Calvaire at night in a fiacre; past, present, future, everything inside him was now no more than the fog of a vague idea, but in this mist there was one fixed point, a clear and precise outline, something carved in stone, a resolution, a desire: to find Cosette again. For him, the idea of life itself could not be separated from the idea of Cosette; he had decreed in his heart that he would not accept one without the other and he was unshakably determined to demand of anyone or anything that wanted to force him to live, whoever and whatever they might be—his grandfather, fate, hell—the restitution of his lost Eden.

He did not hide the obstacles from himself.

We might underline one detail here: He was not won over or much softened by all the tender loving care his grandfather showed him. In the first place, he was not entirely aware of its extent; then, in his sick man’s daydreams, which were perhaps still feverish, he mistrusted sweetness of the sort as something new and strange aimed at bringing him to heel. He remained coldly unmoved by it. The grandfather smiled his poor old smile for nothing. Marius said to himself that, yes, everything was all right as long as he, Marius, did not say anything and went along with things; but that as soon as Cosette came up, he would see a different face and that his grandfather’s true feelings would then betray themselves. The gloves would be off then; just watch the old family issues rear their ugly head again, and the clash between their positions, and every sarcastic remark and every objection all at once, Fauchelevent, Coupelevent, wealth, poverty, destitution, the old millstone around the neck, the future. Violent resistance; conclusion, refusal. Marius was steeling himself in advance.

And then, the more he recovered, the more his old grievances crept up on him, the more the old ulcers of his memory reopened, he thought once more about the past, Colonel Pontmercy once more came between Monsieur Gillenormand and himself, Marius; he told himself there was no real kindness to hope for from someone who had been so unjust and so hard on his father. And with health, a kind of bitter harshness toward his grandfather returned. The old man quietly took it on the chin and suffered in silence.

Monsieur Gillenormand noticed that since he had been brought home to him and since he had regained consciousness, Marius had not once called him father—though he did not show that he noticed this. Marius did not call him monsieur, true; but he found a way of saying neither one nor the other by using a certain manner of circumlocution. A crisis was obviously brewing.

As almost always happens in such cases, Marius, to try his hand, skirmished before giving battle. This is known as seeing how the land lies. One morning it so happened that Monsieur Gillenormand, over a newspaper that had fallen into his hands, spoke lightly of the Convention and let fall a casual royalist remark about Danton, Saint-Just, and Robespierre.

“The men of ‘93 were giants,” said Marius sternly. The old man shut up and did not breathe a whisper for the rest of the day.

Marius had always had in his mind’s eye the inflexible grandfather of his early years, and so he saw this silence as a profound concentration of anger and foresaw from it a fierce struggle, and he stepped up his preparations for battle in the innermost recesses of his mind.

He decided that if his grandfather refused, he would rip off his bandages, dislocate his collarbone, expose and open whatever wounds he still had, and push away all food. His wounds were his ammunition. He would have Cosette or die.

He waited for the right moment with the sly patience of the sick. That moment arrived.

MARIUS ATTACKS

ONE DAY, WHILE his daughter was tidying up the cups and vials on the marble top of the chest of drawers, Monsieur Gillenormand leaned over Marius and said to him in the most loving tone: “You see, my darling Marius, if I were you, I’d be eating meat now rather than fish. Fried sole is excellent at the start of convalescence, but to get a sick man on his feet, there’s nothing like a good chop.” Marius, who had regained almost all his strength, gathered it together, sat up, drove his balled fists into the bedclothes, looked his grandfather straight in the eye as fiercely as he could and said: “That brings me to something I want to say to you.” “Which is?”

“That I wish to marry.”

“It’s all taken care of,” said the grandfather. And he burst out laughing.

“What do you mean it’s all taken care of?”

“Yes, it’s all taken care of. You shall have her, your little lass.”

Marius, stunned and overcome with dizziness, trembled in every limb.

Monsieur Gillenormand went on: “Yes, you shall have her, your beautiful pretty little girl. She comes every day in the form of an old gentleman to hear your latest news. Since you were wounded, she has passed her time weeping and making lint. I made inquiries. She lives in the rue de l’Homme-Armé, number seven. Ah, so at last the truth’s out! Ah, you want her! Well, then, you shall have her. That’s got you! You’d devised your little plot, you said to yourself: ‘I’m going to come right out with it to this grandfather of mine, this embalmed mummy of the Regency1 and the Directoire, this has-been of an old rake, this Dorante who’s turned into Géronte;2 he’s had his lighter moments, too, he has, and his love affairs, and his grisettes, and his Cosettes; he’s strutted around in his finery like a peacock, he’s spread his wings, he’s sown his wild oats—surely he must remember what it was like. We’ll soon see. Let the battle begin.’ So! You take the bull by the horns. That’s good. I offer you a chop and you answer: ‘By the way, I wish to marry.’ Now, that’s what I call a leap! Ah! You were all set on a bit of a tiff! You didn’t know I was an old coward. What have you got to say about that? You’re nettled. You didn’t expect to find your grandfather even more of a fool than you are, did you? You’re losing the thread of the speech you were going to make me, Monsieur the attorney, that’s irritating. Well, then, too bad, rant away. I’m doing what you want, that’s shut you up, hasn’t it, you imbecile! Listen. I’ve made my inquiries, I’m sly, too, you know; she’s lovely, she’s good, it’s not true about the lancer, she’s made heaps of lint, she’s a gem, she adores you. If you had died, there would have been three of us; her bier would have accompanied mine. I had a strong notion, as soon as you were better, to plant her right here at your bedside, but it’s only in novels that one sticks young girls without further ado by the beds of the pretty wounded lads they’ve got their eye on. It’s just not done. What would your aunt have said? You were quite naked three quarters of the time, my good man. Ask Nicolette, who wouldn’t leave you for a second if she had anything to do with it. And, then, what would the doctor have said? A pretty girl doesn’t cure a fever. In the end, everything’s fine, let’s not talk about it any further, it’s said, it’s done, it’s taken care of, she’s yours. Such is my ferocity. You see, I saw that you didn’t love me, and I said: ‘What can I do to make that particular animal love me?’ I said: ‘Hold on, I’ve got my little Cosette at hand, I’ll give her to him, then he’ll have to love me a little, or tell me why not.’ Ah, you thought the old boy was going to kick up a stink, raise the roof, shout no, and raise my cane and shake it at love’s young dream. Not a bit of it. Cosette, well and good; love, well and good. I ask nothing more. Monsieur, do take the trouble to marry yourself off. Be happy, my dear beloved boy.” That said, the old man burst into tears.

And he took Marius’s head and cradled it with both arms against his breast, and they both wept. This is one of the ultimate forms of happiness.

“Father!” cried Marius.

“Ah! So you do love me, after all!” cried the old man.

There was an ineffable moment. They choked and could not speak.

Finally the old man stammered: “There you are then! He finally said it. He called me father.”

Marius pulled his head away from his grandfather and said, softly: “But, Father, now that I’m doing so well, it seems to me I could be allowed to see her.” “That’s taken care of, too, you’ll see her tomorrow.”

“Father!”

“What?”

“Why not today?”

“Well, today, then. Today it is. You called me Father three times, that’s got to be worth that much. I’ll see to it. She shall be brought to you. It’s taken care of, I tell you. This has already been set to verse. It’s the denoument of the elegy in André Chénier’s Le Jeune malade—the André Chénier3 who had his throat cut by the bast—by the giants of ‘93.” Monsieur Gillenormand thought he saw a slight frown on Marius’s brow, though Marius, we have to say, was actually no longer listening to him, floating off as he was in ecstasy, with his mind a lot more on Cosette than on 1793. The grandfather, trembling at having introduced André Chénier so clumsily, rushed on: “’His throat cut’ is not the right way to put it. The fact is that the great revolutionary geniuses, who were not bad men, that is incontestable, who were heroes, heavens! found that André Chénier embarrassed them a bit, and so they had him guilloti—that is to say, those great men, on the seventh of Thermidor,4 in the interests of public safety, begged André Chénier to be good enough to—” Monsieur Gillenormand could not go on; his own sentence stuck in his throat, and not being able to either finish it or retract it, while his daughter fluffed up Marius’s pillow behind him, overcome by such surges of emotion, the old man hurled himself out of the bedroom, as fast as his age would allow him, slammed the door shut behind him and, purple in the face, choking, foaming at the mouth, his eyes popping out of his head, found himself nose to nose with the honest Basque, who was polishing boots in the antechamber. He grabbed Basque by the collar and shouted furiously right in his face: “By the hundred thousand Javottes of the devil, those brigands assassinated him!” “Who, Monsieur?”

“André Chénier!”

“Yes, Monsieur,” said Basque, appalled.

MADEMOISELLE GILLENORMAND WINDS UP DECIDING IT IS NOT SUCH A BAD THING THAT MONSIEUR FAUCHELEVENT CAME WITH SOMETHING UNDER HIS ARM

COSETTE AND MARIUS saw each other again. How this meeting went we will refrain from saying. There are things we should not try to depict, among others, the sun.

The whole family, including Basque and Nicolette, were gathered together in Marius’s room when Cosette came in. She appeared at the door; she looked as though she were standing in a luminous cloud of mist. At precisely that moment, the grandfather was about to blow his nose; he stopped short, kept his nose in his handkerchief, and eyed Cosette over the top of it: “Adorable!” he cried.

Then he loudly blew his nose.

Cosette was intoxicated, rapt, frightened, in seventh heaven. She was also as terrified as a person can be by happiness. She stuttered, pale as anything, red as anything, wanting to throw herself into Marius’s arms yet not daring to, ashamed to love openly in front of all these people. People are merciless with happy lovers, hanging around when lovers most want to be alone. Lovers have no need of people at all.

With Cosette, behind her, a white-haired man had come, looking grave yet smiling, but with a small, heartbreaking smile. It was “Monsieur Fauchelevent,” otherwise known as Jean Valjean.

He was “very well decked out,” as the porter had said, entirely dressed in black and in new clothes, with a white cravat.

The porter would never in a blue moon have guessed that this upstanding bourgeois, most likely a notary, was the terrifying man hauling cadavers who had loomed at his door on the night of June 7, in rags, covered in mud, hideous, haggard, his face caked in blood and muck, supporting the unconscious Marius by the armpits; yet his porter’s nose was aroused. When Monsieur Fauchelevent turned up with Cosette, the porter could not help saying to his wife in private: “I don’t know why, but I can’t help feeling I’ve seen that face somewhere before.” Monsieur Fauchelevent, in Marius’s room, stood back from the others, as though aloof, close to the door. He had under his arm a parcel not unlike an octavo volume wrapped in paper. The wrapping paper was greenish and looked mouldy.

“Does that gentleman always go about with books under his arm like that?” Mademoiselle Gillenormand asked Nicolette in a low voice; she did not like books.

“Well,” answered Monsieur Gillenormand, who had heard her, in the same low tone, “he’s a savant. What of it? He can’t help it! Monsieur Boulard,1 whom I knew, never walked around without a book either, and that way he always had a book close to his heart.” And, bowing, he said out loud: “Monsieur Tranchelevent—”

Father Gillenormand did not do it deliberately, but inattention to proper names was an aristocratic way of his.2

“Monsieur Tranchelevent, I have the honour of asking you on behalf of my grandson, the baron Marius Pontmercy, for Mademoiselle’s hand.” “Monsieur Tranchelevent” inclined his head.

“Enough said,” said the grandfather.

And, turning to Marius and Cosette, with both arms opened wide in blessing, he cried: “Permission granted to adore each other.”

Those two did not need to be told twice. Too bad about the crowd! The cooing began. They whispered to each other, Marius leaning forward on his chaise longue, Cosette standing close by him.

“Oh, my God!” murmured Cosette, “I can’t believe I’m seeing you again. It is you! It is you, Monsieur! Fancy going off and fighting like that! What on earth for? It’s horrible. For four months, I was dead. Oh, it was so spiteful of you to have been in that battle! What did I ever do to you? I forgive you, but you needn’t think you’ll be doing anything like that again. A moment ago, when they told us to come over, I thought I was going to die again, but this time of joy. I was so sad! I didn’t take the time to dress properly, I must look a fright. Whatever will your family say, seeing me with a collar all crumpled? Well, say something! You’re letting me do all the talking. We’re still in the rue de l’Homme-Armé. It seems that your shoulder was in a terrible state. They told me you could have put your fist inside. And then it seems they cut the flesh with scissors. That was so awful. I cried so much, my eyes have disappeared. It’s funny how you can suffer like that. Your grandfather looks so nice! Don’t move, don’t lean on your elbow; careful, you’ll hurt yourself. Oh, I’m so happy! So, our troubles are over! I’m quite giddy. There are all sorts of things I wanted to tell you but I can’t remember any of them. Do you still love me? We live at the rue de l’Homme-Armé. It doesn’t have a garden. I made lint all the time, here, Monsieur, see, it’s all your fault, I’ve got calluses on my fingers.” “Angel!” crooned Marius.

Angel is the only word in the language that can’t be worn out. No other word could resist the merciless use that those in love put it to.

Then, as there were other people present, they broke off and did not say another word to each other, merely touching each other’s hand gently. Monsieur Gillenormand turned to all those in the room and shouted: “Talk among yourselves, the rest of you! Make some noise, over there in the wings. Come on, a bit of hubbub, for heaven’s sake! So these children can yap at their ease.” And, going over to Marius and Cosette, he said to them in a very low voice:

“Call each other tu. Don’t be embarrassed.”

Aunt Gillenormand watched this irruption of light in her quaint old home in amazement. Her amazement had nothing aggressive about it; it was not in the least the scandalized, envious attitude of an owl gazing upon two turtledoves; hers was the dazed eye of a poor innocent of fifty-seven; it was life that had missed out gazing on that triumph, love.

“Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder,” her father said to her, “I told you this would happen.”

He remained silent for a moment before adding: “Look at the happiness of others.”

Then he turned to Cosette: “She’s so pretty! She’s so pretty! She’s a Greuze.3 So, you’re going to have this all to yourself, then, you cheeky rascal! Ah, young scallywag, you’ve got off lightly with me, you’re happy, but if I were fifteen years younger, we’d cross swords to see who’d get her. Come now! I am in love with you, Mademoiselle. That’s only natural. It’s your right. Ah, what a beautifully pretty charming little wedding this is going to be! Saint-Denis du Saint-Sacrement is our parish, but I’ll get a dispensation so that you can marry at Saint-Paul. It’s a better church. It was built by the Jesuits. It’s smarter. It’s just opposite the Cardinal de Birague fountain. The masterpiece of Jesuit architecture is in Namur. A place called Saint-Loup. You must go there when you’re married. It’s worth the trip. Mademoiselle, I am entirely on your side, I want girls to marry, they’re made for it. There is a certain Saint Catherine4 that I’d still like to see with her hair down. To stay a maid is all very well, but it’s chilly. The Bible says: Go and multiply. To save the people, you need Joan of Arc; but to make the people, you need a Mère Gigogne.5 So marry, you beauties. I really don’t see the point of remaining a maid. I’m well aware there’s a chapel set apart in church and there’s a lot of hot air about the sorority of the Virgin;6 but, heavens above, a pretty husband, a brave boy, and, after a year, a big blond nipper that sucks heartily on your nipples, one with nice rolls of fat on his thighs, that gropes and grabs fistfuls of your breast with his little pink paws, laughing like the dawn—surely that’s better than holding a candle at vespers and singing Turris eburnea!”7 The grandfather did a pirouette on his ninety-year-old heels and began to speak again, like a spring springing back:

So, to stop the flow of your daydreams,

Alcippe, it’s true, then, in a little you’ll be married.8

“Speaking of which!”

“What, Father?”

“Didn’t you have a close friend?”

“Yes, Courfeyrac.”

“What’s happened to him?”

“He died.”

“That’s just as well.”

He sat beside them, made Cosette sit, and took their four hands in his old hands, gnarled as they were.

“She is exquisite, this little cutie. She is a masterpiece, this Cosette here! She is very much the ingénue and very much the grande dame at once. She will only be a baroness, which is demeaning, for she was born a marquise. Now those are what I call eyelashes for you! My children, get it into your thick noggins that this is for real. Love one another. Be silly with love. Love is mankind’s silliness and God’s wit. Adore one another. Only,” he added, all at once darkening, “what a sorry state of affairs! Now that I think about it! More than half of what I have is in a life annuity; while I’m alive, that’ll hold out all right, but after my death, you won’t get a sou! Your beautiful white hands, Madame la baronne, will have the honour of scraping and saving to make ends meet.” Here a grave and tranquil voice was heard to say: “Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent has six hundred thousand francs.”

It was the voice of Jean Valjean.

He had not yet uttered a word, no one seemed to realize he was still there, standing as he was, straight and motionless, behind all these happy people.

“Who is the Mademoiselle Euphrasie in question?” asked the grandfather, alarmed.

“I am,” answered Cosette.

“Six hundred thousand francs!” replied Monsieur Gillenormand.

“Less fourteen or fifteen thousand francs perhaps,” said Jean Valjean.

And he placed on the table the packet that Aunt Gillenormand had mistaken for a book. Jean Valjean himself opened the packet; it was a bundle of banknotes. They flicked through them and counted them. There were five hundred notes of a thousand francs and one hundred and sixty-eight of five hundred. In all, five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs.

“Now there’s a good book for you,” said Monsieur Gillenormand.

“Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!” murmured the aunt.

“This arranges things pretty nicely—isn’t that so, Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder?” the grandfather crowed. “That little devil Marius, he’s plucked a millionaire grisette for you from off the tree of dreams! So now you can trust in young people’s love affairs! Male students find female students worth six hundred thousand francs. Cherubino does better than Rothschild.”9 “Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!” Mademoiselle Gillenormand repeated in a hushed voice. “Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs! You might as well say six hundred thousand while you’re at it!” As for Marius and Cosette, they gazed at each other the whole time and paid scant attention to this tiny detail.

YOU ARE BETTER OFF PUTTING YOUR MONEY IN A CERTAIN FOREST THAN LEAVING IT WITH A CERTAIN NOTARY

YOU WILL NO doubt have realized, without having to be told at length, that, after the Champmathieu affair, Jean Valjean had made it to Paris, thanks to the initial escape that lasted a few days, and to withdraw in time from Laffitte’s the sum earned by him under the name of Monsieur Madeleine at Montreuil-sur-mer; and that, fearing recapture, which in fact was only a little while off, he had hidden and buried this sum in the forest of Montfermeil in the place known as the Blaru grounds. The sum, six hundred and thirty thousand francs, all in banknotes, did not take up much space and was contained in only one box. To preserve the box from damp, he had put it inside an oak casket full of chestnut shavings. In the same casket he had put his other treasure, the bishop’s candlesticks. You will recall that he had carried off the candlesticks when he escaped from Montreuil-sur-mer. The man spotted one night by Boulatruelle was Jean Valjean. Later, whenever Jean Valjean needed money, he came and got some in the Blaru glade. Hence the absences we have mentioned. He had a pick somewhere among the briars in a hiding place he alone knew about. When he saw that Marius was getting better, feeling that the time was coming when the money might be useful, he had gone and got it and it was him again whom Boulatruelle had seen in the woods, but this time in the morning, not at night. Boulatruelle inherited the pickaxe.

The real sum was five hundred and eighty-four thousand five hundred francs. Jean Valjean kept the five hundred francs for himself. “We’ll see what happens later,” he said.

The difference between this sum and the six hundred and thirty thousand francs withdrawn from Laffitte’s represented ten years’ expenses, from 1823 to 1833. The five years’ stay in the convent had only cost five thousand francs.

Jean Valjean put the two silver candlesticks on the mantelpiece, where they shone to Toussaint’s great admiration.

On top of this, Jean Valjean knew that he had been delivered from Javert. It had been mentioned in his hearing, and he had confirmed the fact in the Moniteur, which had published it, that a police inspector named Javert had been found drowned under a washerwomen’s boat between the Pont-au-Change and the Pont-Neuf and that a note left by this man, otherwise irreproachable and highly esteemed by his chiefs, indicated that he had committed suicide in a bout of insanity.

“In actual fact,” thought Jean Valjean, “since he had me there and yet let me go, he must have been mad already.”

THE TWO OLD MEN DO ALL THEY CAN, EACH IN HIS OWN WAY, TO SEE THAT COSETTE IS HAPPY

THE WEDDING PREPARATIONS were all under way. The doctor was consulted and declared that it could take place in February. This was in December. A few blissful weeks of perfect happiness rolled by.

The grandfather was far from being the least happy. He would sit gazing at Cosette for a quarter of an hour at a stretch.

“What an outrageously pretty girl!” he would cry. “And she looks so sweet and so good! No need to say cross my heart and hope to die, this is the loveliest girl I’ve ever seen in my life. Later on, she’ll be as virtuous as can be, with a whiff of violets about her. She is grace itself, don’t you know! You couldn’t help but live nobly with such a creature. Marius, my boy, you are a baron, you are rich, stop this pettifogging, I beseech you.” Cosette and Marius had suddenly stepped out of the sepulchre and into paradise. The transition had been pretty abrupt and they would have been dazed had they not been dazzled.

“Can you make head or tail of it?” Marius said to Cosette.

“No,” Cosette answered, “but it seems to me the good Lord is looking down on us.”

Jean Valjean did everything, smoothed everything, reconciled everything, made everything easy. He rushed toward Cosette’s happiness with as much eagerness and apparent joy as Cosette herself.

As he had been a mayor, he knew how to resolve a delicate problem that he alone was in on the secret of: Cosette’s civil status. To baldly state her origins, who knows? It might well have prevented the marriage. He got Cosette out of all difficulties, though. He arranged a whole family of dead people for her, a sure way of not incurring any untoward claim. Cosette was all that remained of an otherwise extinct family; she was not his own daughter but the daughter of a different Fauchelevent. Two Fauchelevent brothers had been gardeners at the Petit-Picpus convent. They went to the convent: The best information and the most respectable testimonials abounded; the good sisters had little aptitude or inclination for delving into questions of paternity, and without meaning any harm, had never really known exactly which of the two Fauchelevents little Cosette was the daughter of. They said what they were required to say and said it with gusto. A notary’s affidavit was drawn up. Cosette became Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent before the law. She was declared an orphan on both her father’s and her mother’s sides. Jean Valjean engineered things so that he was designated Cosette’s guardian, under the name of Fauchelevent, with Monsieur Gillenormand as surrogate guardian.

As for the five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs, this was a legacy left to Cosette by a dead person who wished to remain anonymous. The original legacy had been five hundred and ninety-four thousand francs, but ten thousand francs had been spent on the education of Mademoiselle Euphrasie, of which five thousand had been paid to the convent itself. This legacy, deposited in the hands of a third party, was to be handed to Cosette when she came of age or when she married. Altogether this arrangement was most acceptable, as we see, especially with an extra income of over half a million. There were, in fact, a few disparities here and there, but nobody saw them; one of the interested parties had his eyes blindfolded by love, the others by the six hundred thousand francs.

Cosette learned that she was not the daughter of the man she had so long called father. He was merely a relation; a different Fauchelevent was her real father. At any other time, this would have devastated her. But at this ineffably wonderful moment in her life, the news was just a patch of shadow, a small dark cloud, and she felt so much joy that the cloud soon dissolved. She had Marius. The young man surged to the fore, the old man faded into the background. Such is life.

And then, Cosette had been accustomed to finding herself surrounded by unanswered questions for many a long year; anyone who has had a mysterious childhood is always ready to give certain things up. But she continued to call Jean Valjean father.

In her rapture, Cosette was wild about old Gillenormand. It is true that he showered her with compliments and gifts. While Jean Valjean was busy building a normal place for Cosette in society and possession of an unassailable status, Monsieur Gillenormand saw to the wedding presents. Nothing amused him like being extravagantly generous. He had given Cosette a dress of Binche guipure lace which had come down to him from his very own grandmother.

“This is back in fashion again,” he said. “Vintage clothes are all the rage, and the young women of my dotage dress like the old women of my childhood.” He rummaged through his respectable potbellied Coromandel lacquer chests of drawers, which had not been opened in years. “Let’s get these old dowagers to cough up,” he said. “Let’s see what they’ve got in their paunches.” He noisily violated bulging drawers full of the outfits of all his wives, all his mistresses, all his grandmothers. Pekins, damasks, lampases, painted moires, gowns of gros de Tours flambé damask, handkerchiefs from India embroidered with a washable gold, bits of reversible silk velvets known as dauphines, bobbin-made point de Gênes lace and needle-made point d’Alençon lace, sets of jewels in old goldplate and silverplate, ivory sweet boxes decorated with microscopic battles, frippery, ribbons—he lavished the lot on Cosette. Cosette, marvelling, frantic with love for Marius and wild with gratitude for Monsieur Gillenormand, dreamed of boundless happiness decked out in satin and velvet. Her stock of wedding presents appeared to her held aloft by seraphim. Her soul reeled off into the blue on wings of Mechlin lace.

The intoxication of the lovers, we say again, was equalled only by the ecstasy of the grandfather. It was as though there was a brass band playing in the rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.

Every morning, a new offering of bric-a-brac from the grandfather to Cosette. All possible frills and flounces bloomed splendidly around her.

One day Marius, who was given to talking seriously in the midst of his happiness, said apropos who knows what incident: “The men of the Revolution are so great, they already have the lustre of the centuries, like Cato and Phocion, and every one of them already seems like a figure of antiquity.” “Antique moiré!” cried the old man. “Thank you, Marius. That’s exactly what I was after.”

And the next day a magnificent gown of antique moiré the colour of tea was added to Cosette’s stock of wedding presents. The grandfather derived wisdom from these fine confections: “Love is all very well, but you need this with it. You need the useless for happiness. Happiness is only the bare necessity. Season it for me with a good pinch of the superfluous. A palace and her heart. Her heart and the Louvre. Her heart and the great fountains of Versailles. Give me my shepherdess but try and see to it that she’s a duchesse with it. Bring me Phyllis crowned with cornflowers and throw in a hundred thousand francs a year, while you’re at it. Show me a pastoral scene as far as the eye can see from under a colonnade of marble. I go along with the pastoral and with the fairyland enchantment of marble and gold, too. Plain unadulterated happiness is like plain unadulterated bread: You eat, but you don’t dine. I want the superfluous, the useless, the extravagant, the too-much, something that serves no purpose at all. I remember seeing in Strasbourg cathedral a clock1 as tall as a three-storey house that marked the hour, that was good enough to mark the hour, but that didn’t look as though it was made for the task; for, after striking midday or midnight—midday, the hour of sun, midnight, the hour of love—or any other hour you please, it gave you the moon and the stars, the earth and the sea, the birds and the fish, Phoebus and Phoebe,2 and a swarm of things that popped out of a niche, and the twelve apostles, and the emperor Charles V,3 and Éponine and Sabinus,4 and a host of little gilded chaps that played the trumpet, to boot. Not counting the ravishing chimes that it scattered into the air all the time without anyone knowing why. Can a paltry bare dial that merely tells the time compete with that? Myself, I side with the great clock of Strasbourg, and I prefer it to the cuckoo clock of the Black Forest any day.” Monsieur Gillenormand raved most especially about the wedding, and all the Louis XV vaudeville routines of the eighteenth century passed willy-nilly into his panegyrics.

“You don’t know anything about the art of fêtes. You don’t know how to put on a really wonderful celebration these days,” he cried. “This nineteenth century of yours has no gumption. It lacks excess. It knows nothing about what is rich, it knows nothing about what is noble. In all things it is so tightfisted. Your Third Estate is insipid, colourless, odourless, and shapeless. What your bourgeoise who are starting out, as they say, dream of: a pretty boudoir freshly decorated, rosewood and calico. Make way! Make way! Old Grigou is marrying old maid Grippesou,5 that skinflint. Talk about sumptuousness and splendour! They have stuck a gold louis to a candle. There you have the age in a nutshell. I ask only to run away beyond the Sarmatians. Ah, as early as 1787, I foresaw that all was lost the day I saw the duc de Rohan,6 prince de Léon, duc de Chabot, duc de Montbazon, marquis de Soubise, vicomte de Thouars, peer of France, trot off to Longchamp7 in a boneshaker! See what fruit it has born. In this century, they wheel and deal, they play the stock exchange, they earn money, and they are stingy. They polish and varnish the surface; they are all turned out immaculately, washed, soaped, raked, shaved, combed, waxed, smoothed down, rubbed, brushed, cleaned outwardly, irreproachable, polished like a pebble, discreet, neat and tidy, and at the same time, by my true love’s virtue! if they don’t have dung heaps and cesspits at the bottom of their consciences that’d make a cow-girl that blows her nose with her fingers step back in horror. I grant these times this motto: Dirty cleanliness. Marius, don’t get annoyed, let me have my say, I’m not bad-mouthing the people, you see, I can’t stop talking about this people of yours, but don’t mind me if I give the bourgeoisie a bit of a pummeling. I’m part of it. Who loves well lashes well. On that note, I say quite frankly, nowadays people marry but they no longer know how to marry. Ah, it’s true, I miss the nicety of the old ways. I miss everything about them. The elegance, the chivalry, the charming courtly manners, the delightful luxury everyone went in for, the way music was part of the wedding, symphony at the top, drumming at the bottom, the dances, the joyful faces around the table, the convoluted madrigals, the songs, the crackers, the belly laughs, every man and his dog there, the ribbons tied in big bows. I miss the bride’s garter. The bride’s garter is the cousin of the chastity belt. What does the Trojan War turn on? Helen’s garter,8 by Jove! What are they fighting for, why does the divine Diomedes smash that great bronze helmet with its ten points over Meriones’ head, why do Achilles and Hector paint each other all over with fine strokes of the pick? Because Helen let Paris take her garter. With Cosette’s garter, Homer would have made the Iliad. He’d stick an old chatterbox like me in his poem and he’d call him Nestor.9 My friends, in the old days, in the good old days, they knew how to marry; they’d have a good solid contract10 and after that a good solid spread. As soon as Cujas went out, Gamache11 came in. But, heavens! That’s because the stomach is an agreeable animal that demands its due and wants its wedding, too. You dined well, and you had at your table a beautiful neighbour without a chemisette who didn’t mind showing a bit of cleavage! Oh, the wide laughing mouths, how gay we were in those days! Youth was a bouquet; every young man ended in a branch of lilac or a bunch of roses; even if you were a warrior, you were a shepherd; and if, by chance, you were a captain of dragoons, you’d find a way of being called Florian.12 We were keen to be pretty, we embellished ourselves, we decked ourselves out in crimson. A bourgeois looked like a flower, a marquis looked like a gem. We didn’t have stirrups, we didn’t have boots. We were spruce, glossy, iridescent, brushed with gold, all aflutter, dapper, dashing. But that did not stop you from having your sword by your side. A hummingbird—beak and claws. Those were the days of Rameau’s Les Indes galantes.13 One side of the century was its delicacy, the other, its magnificence; and, saints above! we had fun. Today, they’re so serious. The bourgeois is a miser, his wife is a prude; your century is dire. They’d chase away the Graces for flashing too much bosom. Alas! They hide beauty as though it were ugly. Since the Revolution, everyone’s been wearing trousers, even the dancing girls; a strolling player must be grave; your rigadoons are doctrinaire. A person has to be stately. You would be most annoyed not to have your chin in your cravat. The ideal of some twirp of twenty about to marry is to be like Monsieur Royer-Collard.14 And do you know what the world’s coming to with that kind of stateliness? To being small. Listen and learn: Joy is not only joyful, it is big. So be in love with gusto, for God’s sake! So get married, when you marry, with all the fever and giddiness and uproar and mayhem of happiness! Gravity at church, fair enough. But, as soon as mass is over, damn it! the new bride must be surrounded by a swirling dream. A wedding should be royal and fabulous; it should take its ceremony for a stroll from the cathedral of Rheims to the pagoda of Chanteloup.15 I can’t stand a halfhearted wedding. For pity’s sake! Be on Olympus, at least that day. Be gods. Ah, you could be sylphs, those divinities, the Pleasures, Argyraspides;16 and yet you are gutless wonders! My friends, every new bridegroom should be a prince Aldobrandini.17 Take advantage of this one minute of your life to soar off into the empyrean with the swans and the eagles, even if it means dropping back down into the bourgeois world of frogs the next day. Don’t stint on the bonds of marriage, don’t cut back on its splendours; don’t skimp on the one day you are to shine. A wedding is not housework. Oh! If I had my way, it would be gallantly chic. You would hear violins in the trees. This is how I see it: sky blue and silver. I would bring the rustic divinities into the fête, I would summon the dryads and the nereids. The sea goddess Amphitrite’s wedding day, a pink cloud, nymphs with tremendous hairdos but otherwise completely naked, a member of the Académie offering the goddess quatrains, a chariot drawn by sea monsters.

Triton trotted ahead and from his conch he drew

Sounds so ravishing, he ravished young and old, too.18

“Now that’s a proper program for a fête for you, or I’m a Dutchman, by jingo!”

While the grandfather was in full lyrical flight, enjoying the sound of his own voice, Cosette and Marius were practically swooning in intoxication, now that they could gulp each other in freely by gazing.

Aunt Gillenormand studied all this with her unflappable placidity. She had had a certain dose of emotion in the space of five or six months; Marius back home; Marius carried back home covered in blood, Marius carried back home from some barricade, Marius dead, then alive, Marius reconciled, Marius engaged, Marius about to marry a pauper, Marius about to marry a millionaire. The six hundred thousand francs had been her latest surprise. Then she reverted to her usual indifference, the lack of interest of a first communicant. She regularly went to church services, said her rosary, read her prayer book, which she called a Euchologion, whispered Aves19 in one corner of the house while they were whispering I love yous in the other, looked on Marius and Cosette as two shadows. She was the shadow.

There is a certain state of inert asceticism in which the soul, neutralized by torpor, foreign to what might be called the business of living, does not pick up any human impressions, whether pleasant or painful—with the exception of earthquakes and other disasters. “This kind of devoutness,” said old Gillenormand to his daughter, “corresponds to a head cold. You can’t smell anything of life. No bad odour, but also, no good.” Still, the six hundred thousand francs had taken care of the old maid’s indecision. Her father had acquired the habit of taking so little account of her that he had not consulted her when consenting to Marius’s marriage. He had acted impetuously, as was his wont, having only one thought, now that he had gone from being a despot to being a slave, and that was to make Marius happy. As for the lad’s aunt, that that aunt should exist and that she might have an opinion was not something he had considered for a moment, and though she was as docile as a lamb, this had hurt her feelings. A tad rebellious deep within, though unflapable without, she had said to herself: “My father has settled the question of the marriage without me; I will settle the question of the inheritance without him.” She, in fact, was rich and the father was not. And so she reserved her decision on that score. It is likely that if it had been a poor match, she would have left it poor. “Too bad for Monsieur, my nephew! If he wants to marry a beggar, let him be a beggar himself.” But Cosette’s half million tickled the aunt and changed her position in regard to this particular pair of lovers. A person owes six hundred thousand francs some consideration and it was obvious that she could not do otherwise than to leave her fortune to these young people, since they no longer needed it.

It was arranged that the couple would live at the grandfather’s. Monsieur Gillenormand absolutely insisted on giving them his room, the nicest in the house. “It will rejuvenate me,” he declared. “It is an old scheme of mine. I always planned to liven up my room.” He filled the room with a swag of old gentlemanly knickknacks. He had a new ceiling put up and hung with an extraordinary fabric he happened to have a bolt of and which he thought was from Utrecht, velvet bear’s ear flowers on a satiny buttercup yellow background.

“It was with some of this fabric,” he said, “that the bed of the duchesse d’Anville was draped at La Roche-Guyon.”20

On the mantelpiece he planted a Saxony figurine holding a muff over her bare stomach.

Monsieur Gillenormand’s library became the attorney’s chambers Marius needed, chambers, you will remember, being required by the rules of the order.

DREAM EFFECTS FUSING INTO HAPPINESS

THE LOVERS SAW each other every day. Cosette came along with Monsieur Fauchelevent. “It’s doing things the wrong way round,” said Mademoiselle Gillenormand, “for the intended to come to the groom’s home and be courted like this.” But Marius’s convalescence had become a habit and the rue des Filles-du-Calvaire armchairs, better for tête-à-têtes than the straw-bottomed chairs of the rue de l’Homme-Armé, had firmly established it. Marius and Monsieur Fauchelevent saw each other but did not speak to each other. It seemed that this was some sort of agreement. Every girl needs a chaperone. Cosette would not have been able to come without Monsieur Fauchelevent. For Marius, Monsieur Fauchelevent was the condition on which he saw Cosette. He accepted him. By bringing up certain political questions, vaguely and without going into particulars, to do with the general improvement in everyone’s lot, they managed to say a bit more than yes or no to each other. Once, on the subject of education, which Marius thought should be free and compulsory, spread far and wide in all its forms, lavished on all like the air and the sun, in a word, breathable by the whole population, they were in complete agreement and almost chatted. Marius noticed on that occasion that Monsieur Fauchelevent spoke well and even with a certain linguistic flair. Yet he was lacking some indefinable quality. Monsieur Fauchelevent was something less than a man of the world—and something more.

Inwardly and at the back of his mind, Marius surrounded this Monsieur Fauchelevent, who was to him simply benevolent and cold, with all sorts of silent questions. At times, he had doubts about his own memories. There was a hole in his memory, a black spot, an abyss hollowed out by four months at death’s door. Many things had got lost down it. He had even got to the point of wondering if it was really true that he had seen Monsieur Fauchelevent, such a serious and calm man, at the barricade.

And this was not the only blank spot that the comings and goings of the past had left in his mind. It would be wrong to think that he was freed from all those obsessions of memory that force us, even when we are happy, even when we are satisfied, to look back in melancholy. The head that does not turn round toward horizons that have vanished can neither think nor love. At times, Marius covered his face with his hands and the vague but tumultuous past would travel across the dim twilight in his brain. He saw Mabeuf fall again, he heard Gavroche sing under the grapeshot, he felt the coldness of Éponine’s forehead against his lips; Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre, Bossuet, Grantaire, all his friends rose before him, then evaporated. All these beloved beings, sorrowful, valiant, charming, or tragic—were they dreams? Had they actually existed? The riot had wreathed everything in its smoke. Those great fevers produce great dreams. He questioned himself; he patted himself down; he was dizzy from all those vanished realities. Where had they all gone? Was it really true that they were all dead? A tumble in the dark had carried all away, except for him. All that seemed to him to have disappeared as though behind a theatre curtain. Curtains do come down like that on life. God skips to the next act.

And what about him? Was he actually the same man? He, the pauper, was rich; he, the abandoned, had a family; he, the hopeless, was marrying Cosette. He felt like he had been through a tomb, going in black and coming out white. But the others had stayed there. At certain moments, all these creatures from the past came back from the dead and formed a ring around him and cast a shadow over him like a dark cloud; then he would think of Cosette and he became serene once more; but nothing less than this felicity was needed to erase that catastrophe.

Monsieur Fauchelevent very nearly had a place among those vanished beings. Marius found it hard to believe that the Fauchelevent of the barricade was the same as this Fauchelevent of flesh and blood, so gravely seated by Cosette’s side. The first was probably one of those nightmares that came and went during his hours of delirium. In any case, both of them being unapproachable, there was no way Marius could put a question of any kind to Monsieur Fauchelevent. The idea did not even occur to him. We have already pointed out this typical detail.

For two men to have a common secret, yet, through a sort of tacit agreement not exchange a single word on the subject, is not as rare as you might think. Only once did Marius make an attempt of the kind. Bringing up the rue de la Chanvrerie in conversation, he turned to Monsieur Fauchelevent and asked him: “You know the street well, don’t you?” “What street?”

“The rue de la Chanvrerie.”

“I have no idea what the name of the street is,” answered Monsieur Fauchelevent in the most natural tone in the world.

The answer, which had to do with the name of the street and not the street itself, appeared to Marius more conclusive than it was.

“Obviously,” he thought, “I must have been dreaming. I must have had a hallucination. It’s someone who looks like him. Monsieur Fauchelevent was not there.” TWO MEN WHO CAN’T BE FOUND

THE ENCHANTMENT, GREAT as it was, did not wipe other preoccupations from Marius’s mind. While the wedding was gearing up and while waiting for the agreed-upon day to arrive, he had some tricky and thorough retrospective investigations carried out.

He owed gratitude on several sides; he owed some to his father, he owed some to himself. There was Thénardier; there was the unknown man who had brought him, Marius, back to Monsieur Gillenormand’s. Marius was keen to find these two men, not intending to marry, be happy, and forget them, and fearing that these debts of duty if unpaid would cast a shadow over his life, so luminous now. He was not the sort of person who could leave all these arrears overdue behind him, and he wanted, before joyfully embarking on the future, to have paid the past’s bill.

That Thénardier was a scoundrel in no way detracted from the fact that he had saved Colonel Pontmercy’s life. Thénardier was a crook to everyone else but Marius. And Marius, knowing nothing about what really happened on the battlefield of Waterloo, did not know this specific fact, which was that his father was, in relation to Thénardier, in the strange situation of owing the man his life without owing him gratitude.

None of the sundry agents Marius employed managed to pick up Thénardier’s scent. All traces seemed to have been obliterated on that side. Mother Thénardier had died in prison during the preliminary inquiry pending trial. Thénardier and his daughter Azelma, the two sole survivors of the woeful clan, had melted back into the shadows. The fathomless pit of the social Unknown had silently closed over those beings. You could no longer even see on the surface that quivering and trembling, those faint concentric circles that announce that something has fallen in and that a probe might be thrown in after them.

With mother Thénardier dead, Boulatruelle out of harm’s way, Claquesous vanished into thin air, the principal accused broken out of jail, the legal proceedings relating to the ambush in the Gorbeau slum had more or less aborted. The affair had been left up in the air. The bench of the circuit court had had to make do with two underlings, Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, and Demi-liard, alias Deux-milliards, who had been sentenced in the presence of the parties involved to ten years in the galleys. A verdict of hard labour in perpetuity had been delivered against their accomplices who had escaped and did not appear. Thénardier, chief and ringleader, had been sentenced to death, also in absentia. This sentence was the only thing left of Thénardier, casting its sinister glow on his buried name, like a candle next to a bier. Besides, by causing Thénardier to dive back down into the lowest depths for fear of being seized again, the sentence only added to the thick layer of murk that covered the man.

As for the other one, the unidentified stranger who had saved Marius’s life, the investigation initially yielded some results, then stalled. They managed to find the fiacre that had brought Marius back to the rue des Filles-du-Calvaire on the night of June 6. The driver declared that on June 6, according to a police officer’s orders, he had “parked,” from three o’clock in the afternoon till nightfall, on the quai des Champs-Élysées, above the outlet of the Grand Sewer; that, at around nine o’clock in the evening, the sewer gate that opens onto the riverbank had opened; that a man had emerged from it, carrying on his shoulders another man, who looked to be dead; that, on the officer’s orders, he, the driver, had accommodated “all those people” in his fiacre; that they had first gone to the rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; that they had put the dead man down there—that was Monsieur Marius—that he, the driver, recognized him perfectly, even though he was alive “this time round”; that, after that, they had got back in his cab, that he had whipped his horses, that, a few feet from the porte des Archives, they’d shouted at him to stop, that there, in the street, they had paid him and left him and that the officer had taken the other man with him, that he did not know anything more; that it had been a very dark night.

Marius, as we said, remembered nothing. He only remembered being grabbed from behind by a very strong hand just as he was falling backward into the barricade; then everything was a blank. He had only recovered consciousness at Monsieur Gillenormand’s.

He got bogged down in conjectures. He could not doubt his own identity. Yet how come, having fallen in the rue de la Chanvrerie, he had been picked up by the police officer on the bank of the Seine near the pont des Invalides? Somebody had carried him from Les Halles quartier to the Champs-Élysées. How? Through the sewer. Unheard-of devotion! Somebody? Who?

It was this man that Marius was looking for. Of this man, who was his saviour, nothing; not a trace; not the slightest sign.

Although forced to tread very carefully here, Marius pushed his investigations as far as the prefecture of police. There, the information obtained did not lead to any enlightenment, any more than elsewhere. The prefecture knew less than the cabdriver. They were not aware of any arrest carried out on June 6 at the gate of the Grand Sewer; they had received no officer’s report about such an action, which, at the prefecture, was regarded as a fable—a fable they attributed to the driver. A driver looking for a tip is capable of anything, even of imagination. The action had definitely happened, though, and Marius could not doubt it, unless he doubted his own identity, as we were saying a moment ago. Everything, in this strange puzzle, was inexplicable.

The man, the mystery man, who the driver had seen coming out of the gate of the Grand Sewer carrying the unconscious Marius on his back, and whom the police officer on the lookout had arrested in the act of rescuing an insurgent—what had become of him? What had become of the officer himself? Why had this officer maintained his silence? Had the man succeeded in escaping? Had he bribed the officer? Why didn’t the man give Marius some sign of life, when Marius was in his eternal debt? The man’s disinterestedness was no less staggering than his devotion. Why didn’t the man reappear? Maybe he was above a reward, but no one is above gratitude. Was he dead? What sort of man was he? What did he look like? No one could say. The driver answered: “It was a very dark night.” Basque and Nicolette, flabbergasted, had been riveted by their young master all covered in blood. The porter, whose candle had shed light on the tragic arrival of Marius, was alone in noticing the man in question, but the only description he gave of him was this: “The man was awful.” In the hope of making use of them in his investigations, Marius had had preserved the bloodstained clothes he had on when he had been brought home to his grandfather’s. On examining the coat, it was noticed that there was an odd tear. A bit was missing.

One evening, Marius was talking, in front of Cosette and Jean Valjean, about the whole peculiar episode, of the endless information he had gathered, and the pointlessness of his efforts. The stony face of “Monsieur Fauchelevent” irritated him. He cried out with a vehemence that almost had the ringing tone of anger: “Yes, that man, whoever he is, was sublime. Do you know what he did, Monsieur? He intervened, like the archangel. He would have had to hurl himself into the middle of the fray, steal me away, open up the sewer, drag me down into it, carry me through it! He would have had to go more than a league and a half, through hideous underground tunnels, bent over, buckled under, in the dark, in the cesspool, more than a league and a half, Monsieur, with a corpse on his back! And with what aim? With the single aim of saving the corpse. And the corpse was me. He said to himself: ‘There is perhaps a glimmer of life in there yet; I’m going to risk my own existence for that miserable spark!’ And his existence—he didn’t just risk it once, but twenty times! And every step of the way was dangerous. The proof is that, when he came out of the sewer, he was arrested. Did you know, Monsieur, that this man did all that? And with no reward waiting for him. What was I? An insurgent. What was I? One of the defeated. Oh, if Cosette’s six hundred thousand francs were mine—” “They are yours,” Jean Valjean cut in.

“Well, then,” Marius resumed, “I would give them all to find that man!”

Jean Valjean said nothing.