بخش 5 کتاب 6

BOOK SIX

A SLEEPLESS NIGHT

FEBRUARY 16, 1833

THE NIGHT OF the sixteenth of February, 1833, was a blessed night. Above its shadow sat the open sky. It was Marius and Cosette’s wedding night.

The day had been wonderful.

It had not been the sky blue fête of the grandfather’s dreams, a spectacular fairyland with a welter of cherubs and cupids over the married couple’s heads, a wedding worthy of featuring in a frieze above a door; but it had been sweet and happy.

The fashion for weddings in 1833 was not what it is today. France had not yet borrowed from England the supreme refinement of abducting your wife, running off as soon as you are out the church door, hiding your happiness in shame and generally behaving like a bankrupt emulating the ravishment portrayed in the Song of Songs.2 They had not yet realized how terribly chaste, exquisite, and decent it is to go bumping your taste of paradise about in a post chaise, to chop your secret pleasure up with clickety-clacks, to take a bed in an inn as the nuptial bed and leave behind, in the banal alcove at so much a night, the most sacred of life’s memories all jumbled up indiscriminately with the tête-à-tête you had with the stagecoach driver and the servant at the inn.

In this second half of the nineteenth century in which we live, the mayor and his sash, the priest and his chasuble,3 the law and God, are no longer enough; we have to top them up with the Longjumeau postilion: blue jacket with red lapels and bell-shaped buttons; badge worn as an armband, green leather breeches, curses directed at Norman horses with knotted tails, imitation galloons, oilskin hat, big powdered hair, enormous whip, and sturdy boots. France has not yet carried elegance as far as the English nobility, who shower down-at-the-heel slippers and old worn-out shoes on the married couple’s post barouche, in memory of Churchill, later Marlborough,4 or Malbrouck, who was assailed on his wedding day by the wrath of an aunt that brought him luck. The old shoes and the slippers are not yet part of our nuptial celebrations. But, patience; with good taste continuing to spread, we will get there. In 1833, a hundred years ago, the act of marriage was not performed at a brisk trot.

They still imagined in those days, oddly enough, that a wedding was an intimate social fête, that a patriarchal banquet did not spoil the domestic solemnity, that gaiety, even when excessive, provided it remained decent, did not hurt happiness, and that, in the end, it was noble and good that the fusion of two destinies from which a family would emerge should begin at home, and that the nuptial chamber should be a witness from that moment on to the union. And they had the cheek to marry at home.

The wedding reception took place, then, after this now-outdated fashion, at Monsieur Gillenormand’s.

As natural and normal as the business of marrying may be, there is always some complication with the banns to be published, the acts to be drawn up, the mairie, the church. They could not be ready before February 16.

Now, we note this detail for the sheer satisfaction of being precise, it so happened that February 16 was a Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday. Hesitations, scruples, particularly on the part of Aunt Gillenormand.

“A Mardi Gras!” cried the grandfather. “So much the better. There is a proverb:

A Mardi Gras wedding match

And you’ll avoid ungrateful brats.5

“Let’s carry on regardless. The sixteenth it is! You don’t want to put it back, do you, Marius?”

“No, of course not!” replied the lover.

“Let’s get married, then,” said the grandfather.

And so the wedding took place on the sixteenth, notwithstanding the public festivities. It rained that day, but there is always a little pocket of blue in the sky at the service of happiness, which lovers see even when the rest of creation is huddled under an umbrella.

The night before, Jean Valjean had handed Marius the five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs in the presence of Monsieur Gillenormand. The marriage being based on joint ownership of property, the acts were straightforward.

Toussaint was now of no use to Jean Valjean; Cosette had inherited her and had promoted her to the rank of lady’s maid. As for Jean Valjean, there was in the Gillenormand house a lovely room done up just for him, and Cosette had said to him so irresistibly, “Father, please, I implore you,” that she had more or less got him to promise he would come and live in it.

A few days before the day fixed for the wedding, Jean Valjean had had an accident; he had injured his right thumb. It was not serious and he would not allow anyone to look at it, or bandage it, or even to see that he was in pain, not even Cosette. But it had forced him nonetheless to wrap up his hand in some linen and to wear his arm in a sling, and so had prevented him from signing anything. Monsieur Gillenormand, as Cosette’s surrogate guardian, had stood in for him.

We will not take the reader either to the mairie or to the church. It is not done to follow two lovers as far as that, the usual practice being to turn one’s back to the drama as soon as a bridegroom’s sprig is safely in its buttonhole. We will restrict ourselves to noting an incident that, although unnoticed by the wedding party, marked the trip from the rue des Filles-du-Calvaire to the church of Saint-Paul.6 At the time, the north end of the rue Saint-Louis was being repaved. It was cordoned off from the rue du Parc-Royal on. This meant it was impossible for the two wedding cars to go directly to Saint-Paul’s. There was no choice but to change the itinerary, and the simplest thing to do was to turn off at the boulevard. One of the guests observed that it was Mardi Gras and that the place would be packed with carriages there. “Why?” asked Monsieur Gillenormand. “Because of the masks.”7 “Splendid!” said the grandfather. “Let’s go that way. These young people are getting married. They’re about to enter the serious business of life. Getting a look at a bit of a masquerade will set them up nicely.” They took the boulevard. The first of the wedding berlins contained Cosette and Aunt Gillenormand, Monsieur Gillenormand, and Jean Valjean. Marius, still kept apart from his fiancée, according to custom, came only in the second. The nuptial cortège, on leaving the rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, joined the long procession of carriages that formed an endless chain from the Madeleine to the Bastille and from the Bastille to the Madeleine.

Masks were to be seen all over the boulevard. It could rain all it liked, as often as it liked, Paillasse, Pantaloon, and Gilles8 were not about to call it a day. In the good-humoured atmosphere of the winter of 1833, Paris had disguised itself as Venice.9 You don’t see Mardi Gras like that anymore. All that exists now being one great carnival, there is no carnival anymore.

The side alleys were choked with people out and about and windows were crammed with the curious. The loggias that crown the peristyles of the theatres were overflowing with onlookers. Apart from the masks, they were lapping up the parade, peculiar to Mardi Gras and Longchamp, of vehicles of all kinds—fiacres, citadines, covered breaks known as tapissières, charabancs, carioles, gigs, all rolling along in orderly fashion, rigorously hooked up to each other by police regulations as though running on rails. Anyone sitting in these vehicles is at once spectator and spectacle. Police constables on the sides of the boulevard were keeping these two interminable parallel lines moving in opposite directions and watching closely to ensure that nothing hampered the twin flow of the two streams of cars running upstream and downstream, either toward the chaussée d’Antin or toward the faubourg Saint-Antoine. The emblazoned carriages of the peers of France and the ambassadors stuck to the middle of the road where they could come and go untrammelled. Certain magnificent and rowdy cortèges, notably the Fat Ox,10 the special model of a prize ox, enjoyed the same privilege. In this gay Paris, England cracked its whip; the post chaise of Lord Seymour,11 harassed by a vulgar nickname, rolled along with much racket.

In the double line, which Municipal Guards galloped up and down like sheepdogs, honest-to-goodness family berlingots,12 loaded up with great-aunts and grandmothers, displayed at their doors clusters of fresh-faced children in disguise, seven-year-old Pierrots, six-year-old Pierrettes,13 ravishing little creatures who, sensing that they were officially part of the public rejoicing, were pervaded by the dignity of the harlequinade and were as grave as public servants.

From time to time a traffic jam occurred somewhere in the procession of vehicles, and one or the other of the two lines would stop just long enough for the knot to be disentangled; one carriage held up was enough to bring the whole line to a standstill. Then they would resume their course.

The wedding coaches were in the line heading toward the Bastille and hugging the right side of the boulevard. Where the rue du Pont-aux-Choux comes in, there was a halt. Almost at the same moment, on the other shoulder, the line going the other way toward the Madeleine also stopped.

These cars, or, to be more precise, these cartloads of masks, are only too familiar to Parisians. If they were missing from a Mardi Gras or a mid-Lent carnival,14 people would see something sinister in it and they would say: “There’s something behind this. The ministry’s probably about to go.” A heap of Cassandras, Harlequins, and Columbines, jigging past over the heads of the onlookers, every possible grotesque from the Turk to the Savage, Hercules ferrying marquises, fishwives who would make Rabelais block his ears just as the maenads15 caused Aristophanes to lower his gaze, hemp wigs, pink costumes, loud swaggerers’ hats, buffoonish glasses, pirates’ cocked hats teased by butterflies, shouts hurled at pedestrians, hands on hips, brazen posturing, bare shoulders, masked faces, unfettered shamelessness; a chaotic profusion of effrontery driven about by a coach driver with flowers in his hair—that is the institution in a nutshell.

Greece needed Thespis’s chariot, France needs Vadé’s fiacre.16

Everything can be parodied, even parody. The saturnalia, that grimace of antique beauty, gets bigger and bigger all the time until it turns into Mardi Gras; and the bacchanal, once crowned with vines, flooded with sunshine, and showing marble breasts in divine semi-nakedness, has today gone flabby under the wet rags of the north and has ended up calling itself a chie-en-lit, a shit-a-bed, or shambles of the more demoniac kind.

The tradition of cars of masks—masked revellers—goes back as far as the earliest years of the monarchy. Louis XI’s accounts allocate to the bailiff “twenty sous minted at Tours for three coaches for boulevard masquerades.” In our time, these boisterous piles of creatures usually get themselves lugged about in some ancient contraption where they clutter the top deck, or they tumultuously overwhelm a government landau with its hood folded back. Twenty of them pile in a car built for six. There they are, on the box, on the folding seat, on the sides of the hood, on the trailing arm. They even straddle the carriage lanterns. They stand, lie, sit, legs curled up, legs dangling; the women camp on the men’s knees. You can see the frantic pyramid they form in the distance over the teeming heads. These cartloads are mountains of merriment in the middle of the throng. Collé, Panard, and Piron,17 those masters of vaudeville, come from here, spiced up with a bit of slang. The vulgar catechism is spat at the people from up there. That fiacre, which has ballooned with its load, has an air of conquest. Hubbub is out in front, hurly-burly brings up the rear. They scream and shout up there, they practise their scales, they howl, they explode, they wriggle with glee; hilarity roars up there, sarcasm blazes, joviality flaunts itself as though born to the purple; two nags drag farce along up there flourishing as apotheosis; it is the triumphal cart of Laughter.

A laughter too cynical to be frank. And indeed that laughter is suspect. That laughter has a mission. Its job is to prove to Parisians that there is such a thing as a carnival.

These gaudy cars, which exude a brooding darkness you can feel, give the philosopher pause for thought. There is a whiff of the government about them. In them we can put our finger on the mysterious affinity between public figures and public women—prostitutes.

That depraved acts should stack up to yield a total of gaiety; that ignominy piled on top of opprobrium should entice a people; that espionage, propping prostitution up like a caryatid, should amuse the hordes by confronting them; that the crowd should enjoy seeing go by, on the four wheels of a fiacre, this monstrous living heap, tattered tinsel, half trash, half light, barking and singing; that people should applaud this glory that is made up of every kind of disgrace; that there should be no fête for the multitudes unless the police parade among them these sorts of hydras of jubilation with twenty heads—yes, that is sad. But what can you do about it? These tumbrels of beribboned and flower-bedecked slime are both insulted and amnestied by public laughter. The laughter of all is complicit in the universal degradation. Certain unwholesome fêtes cause the people to disintegrate and degenerate into plebs; and plebs, like tyrants, require buffoons. The king has Roquelaure, the people have Paillasse18 the clown. Paris is the great city of the madcap, whenever it is not the great city of the sublime. The carnival is part of politics there. Paris, let’s admit it, is only too happy to let infamy provide it with comedy. It asks of its masters—when it has masters—only one thing: dress up the muck for us. Rome was of the same temperament. Rome loved Nero. Nero was a colossal float hauler.

Chance would have it, as we said, that one of this amorphous gaggles of masked men and women, trundling along in a vast barouche, stopped on the left of the boulevard just as the wedding cortège stopped on the right. From the opposite side of the boulevard, the car with the masks was facing the car with the bride.

“Look!” said a mask. “A wedding.”

“A sham wedding,” said another mask. “We’re the real thing.”

And, too far away to be able to call out to the wedding party, and also fearing to be stopped by the police, the two masks looked elsewhere.

The whole masked cartload had enough on their plates a moment later when the multitude began to boo it, which is the crowd’s seal of approval in masquerades; and the two masks that had just spoken had to stand up to everyone else along with their cohorts and needed all the projectiles in the Les Halles repertoire to respond to the enormous barbs hurled at them by the people. An alarming exchange of metaphors occurred between masks and throng.

Meanwile, two other masks in the same car, an old-fashioned-looking Spaniard with an outsize nose and an enormous black moustache, and a skinny fishwife of a young girl wearing an eye mask, or loup, had also noticed the wedding party, and while their companions and the passersby were busy insulting each other, they carried on a dialogue in a muted tone.

Their private conversation was covered by the tumult and swallowed up by it. Gusts of rain had drenched the wide-open car; the February wind is not warm; all the while answering the Spaniard, the fishwife, in her low-cut dress, shivered, chortled, and coughed.

This is how the dialogue went:

“Well, I never!”

“What, pop?”

“You see that old geezer?”

“What old geezer?”

“There, in the first caravan of that wedding party, on our side.”

“The one with his arm hooked up in a black cravat?”

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“I’m sure I know him.”

“Ah!”

“I’ll be hanged and I’ll eat my hat if I’m not acquainted with that pantinois of a Parisian there.”

“It’s today that Paris is Pantin.”19

“Can you see the bride, if you lean forward?”

“No.”

“What about the groom?”

“There’s no groom in that caravan.”

“Bah!”

“Unless it’s the other old geezer.”

“Lean right over and try and get a gander at the bride.”

“I can’t.”

“Never mind, the old geezer with the thing on his mitt, I’m sure I know him.”

“And what’s it to you if you do know him?”

“You never know. It might come in handy!”

“I don’t give two hoots about any old geezer, myself.”

“Don’t I know it!”

“You can know him all you like.”

“How in hell did he get to be at a wedding?”

“We’re at it too, good as.”

“Where’s it come from, this wedding party?”

“How would I know?”

“Listen.”

“What?”

“There’s something you have to do.”

“What?”

“Hop down from our caravan and tail the wedding party.”

“What for?”

“To find out where they’re going and what they’re up to. Hurry up and get down, go on, hop it, my little elf, you’re the young one.” “I can’t leave the carriage.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve been hired.”

“Bugger!”

“I owe the prefecture my day as a fishwife.”

“That’s true.”

“If I leave the carriage the first inspector that claps eyes on me’ll arrest me. You know very well.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Today, I’ve been bought by that show-off, the governor.”

“Never mind. That old geezer’s getting my goat.”

“Old geezers always get your goat. And you’re not even a young girl.”

“He’s in the front car.”

“So?”

“In the bride’s caravan.”

“What of it?”

“So he’s the father.”

“What’s that to me?”

“I’m telling you he’s the father.”

“He isn’t the only father in the world.”

“Listen.”

“What?”

“I can hardly get out unless I’m masked. Here I’m hidden, no one knows I’m here. But tomorrow, that’s it for the masks. It’s Ash Wednesday. I’ll be lucky if I don’t get nabbed. I’ll have to crawl back into my hole. You, you’re free.” “Not so free.”

“Freer than me.”

“So what?”

“I want you to try and find out where that wedding party’s going.”

“Where it’s going?”

“Yes.”

“I know.”

“So where’s it going?”

“To the Cadran Bleu.”

“In the first place, that’s not the way.”

“Well, then! To La Rapée.”20

“Or somewhere else.”

“It’s free. Weddings are free.”

“That’s not all there is to it. I tell you, I want you to try and find out for me what’s going on with that wedding party that the old geezer’s part of, and where that wedding party lives.” “Not on your life! Talk about rich. You’d think there was nothing to it—one week later, finding a wedding party that went by in Paris at Mardi Gras! Like looking for a needle in a lousy haystack! Can it even be done?” “Doesn’t matter, I want you to give it a go. You hear me, Azelma?”

The two lines began moving again in opposite directions on either side of the boulevard, and the car with the masks lost sight of the bride’s “caravan.” JEAN VALJEAN STILL HAS HIS ARM IN A SLING

TO HAVE YOUR dreams come true. To whom is that given? There must be elections for this in heaven; we are all candidates without knowing it; the angels vote. Cosette and Marius had been elected.

Cosette, at the mairie and in church, was at once stunning and moving. It was Toussaint, with a little help from Nicolette, who had dressed her.

Cosette wore her gown of Binche guipure lace over a taffeta petticoat, a veil in point d’Angleterre lace, a necklace of fine pearls, a crown of orange blossoms;1 all this was in white and, in all this whiteness, she shone. It was exquisite candour opening and being transfigured into luminosity. She looked like a virgin on her way to becoming a goddess.

Marius’s beautiful hair was lustrous and perfumed; you could see faint lines here and there under the thick curls that were the scars from the barricade.

The grandfather, superb, his head held high, uniting more than ever in his toilette and in his manners all the elegance of the days of Barras,2 gave Cosette away. He replaced Jean Valjean who, because he still had his arm in that sling, could not give the bride his hand.

Jean Valjean, in black, followed behind, smiling.

“Monsieur Fauchelevent,” the grandfather said to him, “what a great day it is. I vote for an end to affliction and chagrin. There should be no sadness anywhere from now on. Good Lord! I decree joy! Bad has no right to exist. The fact that there are unhappy men truly does shame the blue of the skies above. Bad does not come from man, who is, at bottom, good. All forms of human misery have, as their administrative seat and central government, hell—in other words, the devil’s Tuileries. Good, now I’m talking like a demagogue! As for me, I don’t have any political opinions anymore; let all men be rich, that is, full of joy, that’s all I ask for.” When all phases of the ceremony were fully completed, after every possible “yes” had been uttered before the mayor and before the priest, after the registers at the municipality and at the sacristy had been signed, after their rings had been exchanged, after they had knelt together elbow to elbow under the canopy of white moiré in the smoke from the censer, hand in hand, admired and envied by all, Marius in black, she in white, preceded by the Swiss Guard with his colonel’s epaulettes striking the flagstones with his halberd, between two rows of marvelling onlookers, they reached the portal of the church, whose double doors were open, ready to climb back into the carriage again now that it was all over, Cosette still could not believe it. She looked at Marius, she looked at the crowd, she looked at the sky; it seemed she was afraid to wake up. Her stunned and anxious air made her even more mysteriously enchanting. For the return journey, they got into the same carriage together, with Marius next to Cosette and Monsieur Gillenormand and Jean Valjean sitting opposite. Aunt Gillenormand had taken a step back and was in the second carriage. “My children,” the grandfather was saying, “here you are Monsieur le baron and Madame la baronne with a living of thirty thousand pounds a year.” And Cosette, leaning up close into Marius, caressed his ear with this angelic whisper: “So it’s true. My name is Marius. I am Madame You.” Those two shone. They had reached that irreversible and unrepeatable moment, the dazzling point where youth and joy meet and achieve perfection. They were the very embodiment of Jean Prouvaire’s poem; together they did not have forty years between them. It was marriage made sublime; those two children were as innocent as two white lilies. They did not see each other, they contemplated each other. Cosette perceived Marius in a glory; Marius perceived Cosette on an altar. And on that altar and in that glory, the two apotheoses merging, somewhere in the background, who knows how—perhaps behind a cloud for Cosette, in a blaze for Marius—there lay the ideal thing, the real thing, the rendezvous of the kiss and the dream, the nuptial pillow.

All the torment they had felt came back to them as intoxication. It seemed to them that the heartache, the sleepless nights, the tears, the anguish, the horror, the despair, having turned to caresses and rays of light, made the moment that was approaching even lovelier; and that their sorrows were so many servants dressing their joy for the occasion. How good to have suffered! Their unhappiness formed a halo over their happiness. The long agony of their love ended in an ascension.

Both their souls were under the same spell, nuanced with voluptuous anticipation in Marius and with modest awe in Cosette. They whispered quietly to each other: We’ll go back and see our little garden in the rue Plumet again. The folds of Cosette’s frock flowed over Marius’s legs.

A day like this is an ineffable mixture of dream and certainty. You possess and you assume. You still have enough time ahead of you to guess. Being at midday dreaming of midnight on such a day is an overwhelming emotion. The delight these two hearts felt spilled over onto the crowd and gave the onlookers a joyful lift.

People stopped in the rue Saint-Antoine in front of Saint-Paul’s to peer through the carriage windows and watch the orange blossom quiver on Cosette’s head.

Then the party went back to the rue des Filles-du-Calvaire—their home. Marius, with Cosette at his side, climbed the stairs, triumphant and beaming, the same stairs he had been dragged up half dead. The poor, gathered together in front of the door and receiving a share of their purses, blessed them. There were flowers everywhere. The house was no less filled with fragrance than the church; after the incense, roses. They thought they could hear voices singing in infinity; they had God in their hearts; destiny appeared to them as a ceiling of stars; they saw above their heads a glimmer of the rising sun. All of a sudden, the clock rang out. Marius gazed at Cosette’s lovely bare arms and the pink bits you could vaguely make out through the lace of her bodice, and Cosette, seeing Marius look, began to blush to the roots of her hair.

A good number of old friends of the Gillenormand family had been invited and they buzzed around Cosette, vying with each other to call her Madame la baronne.

The officer Théodule Gillenormand, now captain, had come up from Chartres, where he was in charge of the garrison, to attend the wedding of his cousin Pontmercy. Cosette did not recognize him.

He, for his part, accustomed to being found good-looking by the ladies, did not remember Cosette any more than any other woman.

“How right I was not to believe that story about the lancer!” old Gillenormand said to himself.

Cosette had never been more loving to Jean Valjean. She was as one with old Gillenormand; while he elevated joy into aphorisms and maxims, she gave off love and goodness like a perfume. Happiness wants everyone to be happy.

Talking to Jean Valjean, she once more hit the note she’d struck in the days when she was a little girl. She enveloped him with her smile.

A banquet had been set up in the dining room. Lighting as bright as natural light is the required seasoning for great joy. Haze and dimness are not accepted by the happy. They do not consent to being black. Night, yes; dark, no. If you don’t have sunlight, you have to make it.

The dining room was ablaze with cheery brilliance. In the centre, above the dazzling white table, there was a Venetian chandelier with flat crystal drops and every kind of coloured bird, blue, violet, red, green, perched among the candles; around the chandelier, candelabra, on the wall, reflecting lamps with three or four branches; mirrors, crystal, glassware, tableware, porcelain, faience, ceramics, goldplate, silverware, everything sparkled and rejoiced. The spaces between the candelabra were filled with bouquets, so that wherever there wasn’t a light there was a flower. In the antechamber, three violins and a flute softly played Haydn’s quartets.

Jean Valjean sat down on a chair in the salon, behind the door where one of the door panels folded back on him in such a way as virtually to hide him. A few moments before everyone took their seats at the table, Cosette came, as though on a sudden impulse, to give him a low curtsy, spreading out her bridal frock with both hands and, with a lovingly impish look, she asked him: “Father, are you happy?” “Yes,” said Jean Valjean, “I’m happy.”

“Well then, laugh.”

Jean Valjean started to laugh.

A few seconds later, Basque announced that dinner was served.

The guests, preceded by Monsieur Gillenormand, who gave his arm to Cosette, filed into the dining room and spread out, taking their appointed places around the table.

Two big armchairs had been placed to right and left of the bride, the first for Monsieur Gillenormand, the second for Jean Valjean. Monsieur Gillenormand took his seat. The other armchair remained empty.

All eyes sought “Monsieur Fauchelevent.” He was not there anymore. Monsieur Gillenormand called out to Basque.

“Do you know where Monsieur Fauchelevent is?”

“Monsieur,” answered Basque, “exactly. Monsieur Fauchelevent said to tell Monsieur that he is suffering a little from his sore hand and that he could not dine with Monsieur le baron and Madame la baronne. He said he begged to be excused. He said he’d come tomorrow morning. He’s just left.” That empty armchair put a damper on the exuberance of the wedding feast momentarily. But if Monsieur Fauchelevent was not there, Monsieur Gillenormand was, and the grandfather shone enough for two. He declared that Monsieur Fauchelevent was right to go to bed early if he was in pain, but that it was only a scratch. This declaration was all that was needed. Besides, what is one dark patch in such a deluge of joy? Cosette and Marius were in one of those blessed selfish moments when you can’t see anything but happiness. And then, Monsieur Gillenormand had an idea.

“By Jove, this armchair is empty. Come here, Marius. Your aunt has a right to you, but she’ll let you. This armchair is for you. It’s legal and it’s nice. Fortunatus next to Fortunata.” General applause. And so Marius took Jean Valjean’s place next to Cosette; and things worked out in such a way that Cosette, at first sad about Jean Valjean’s absence, ended up being happy about it. If Marius were to sit in for Him, Cosette would not have missed the Lord Himself. She placed her sweet little foot, shod in white satin, on Marius’s.

With the armchair occupied, Monsieur Fauchelevent was erased; and nothing was lacking. And, five minutes later, the whole table was laughing from one end to the other with all the gusto of forgetting.

At dessert, Monsieur Gillenormand got to his feet, a glass of champagne in hand, only half full so that the tremor of his ninety-two years would not cause it to spill, and toasted the health of the bride and groom.

“You will not escape two sermons,” he cried. “This morning you had the curé’s, tonight you shall have the grandfather’s. Bear with me. I’m going to give you a word of advice: Adore one another. I won’t beat about the bush, I’ll go straight to the point: Be happy. The only wise creatures in all of creation are the turtledoves. The philosophers say: Joy in moderation. I say: Let your joy run wild. Be madly, passionately in love. Be rabid. The philosophers drivel on. I’d like to ram their philosophy down their throats. Can there be too many perfumes, too many rosebuds opening, too many nightingales singing, too many green leaves, too many dawns in life? Can you love one another too much? Can you please one another too much? Look out, Estelle, you’re too pretty! Look out, Némorin,3 you’re too handsome! What piffle! Can you enchant each other too much, kiss and cuddle each other too much, bewitch each other too much? Can you be too alive? Can you be too happy? Joy in moderation. What poppycock! Down with the philosophers! Wisdom is jubilation. Let you jubilate, let us jubilate. Are we happy because we are good, or are we good because we are happy? Is the Sancy diamond called the Sancy4 because it once belonged to Harley de Sancy or because it weighs a hundred and six carats? I don’t have a clue. Life is full of such problems. The important thing is to have the Sancy, and happiness. Let’s be happy without quibbling. Let’s blindly obey the sun. What is the sun? It is love. Whoever says love, says woman. Ah! Ah! Now, there’s one thing that’s omnipotent and it is woman. Ask this rabble-rouser of a Marius if he is not a slave to this little tyrant of a Cosette. And of his own accord, the coward! Woman! There is no Robespierre who can hold out, woman rules. I am no longer a royalist except when it comes to that particular royalty. What is Adam? He is the kingdom of Eve. No ‘89 for Eve. There was the royal sceptre surmounted by a fleur-de-lis, there was the imperial sceptre surmounted by a globe, there was Charlemagne’s sceptre which was iron, there was the Great Louis’s sceptre which was gold, the Revolution twisted them between its thumb and forefinger like worthless wisps of straw. It’s finished, it’s broken, it’s on the ground, there is no more sceptre. But you try and give me any revolution against this little embroidered hankie that smells of patchouli! I’d like to see you at it. Just you try. Why is it so solid? Because it’s a bit of cloth. Ah, you are the nineteenth century? Well, then, what of it? We were the eighteenth, we were! And we were every bit as stupid as you. Don’t imagine you’ve changed much in the universe, just because your trousse-galant, as they used to call it, now goes by the name of cholera morbus,5 and just because your bourrée goes by the name of the cachucha. In the end, we can’t help but love women always. I defy you to get out of that one. These she-devils are our angels. Yes, love, women, kissing—it is a circle I defy you to get out of. As for me, I’d like to get back in. Which of you has seen the star Venus, that great coquette of the void, the Célimène of the ocean, rising in the infinite sky, calming all below her, gazing down on the flowing waters like a woman? The ocean, now there’s a rude Alceste.6 Well, then, he can grumble all he likes; Venus appears, and he can’t help but smile. The silly brute submits. We are all the same. Rage, fury, thunderbolts, spume up to the rafters. A woman enters the scene, a star rises; you fall flat on your face! Marius was fighting six months ago, now he’s marrying. And so he should. Yes, Marius, yes, Cosette, you are right. Live life to the full for one another, cuddle each other to death, make us die of rage that we can’t do the same, idolize one another to bits. Take all the little bits of bliss that there are on this earth in your two beaks and make yourselves a nest out of them for life. By Jove, to love and be loved, that’s the great miracle of being young! Don’t think for a second that you invented it. I, too, have dreamed, I have mooned about, I have sighed; I, too, have had my pocket full of moonbeams. Love has a right to a long white beard. Methuselah7 is a mere toddler next to Cupid. For sixty centuries men and women have got out of trouble by loving each other. The devil, who is cunning, took to hating man; man, who is even more cunning, took to loving woman. In this way, he did himself more good than the devil did him harm. This particular bit of shrewdness was stumbled on in the earliest days of our earthly paradise. My friends, the invention goes back a long way, but it is always brand-new. Take advantage of it. Be Daphnis and Chloë while you’re waiting to play Philemon and Baucis.8 Behave in such a way that when you are with each other, nothing is lacking, and Cosette is the sun for Marius and Marius is the world for Cosette. Cosette, let the good weather for you be your husband’s smile; Marius, let the rain for you be your wife’s tears. And let it never rain in your home. You picked the lucky number in the lottery—love in the sacrament; you win first prize, hang on tight to it, put it under lock and key, don’t waste it, adore one another, and to hell with the rest. Believe what I tell you. It’s common sense. Common sense can’t lie. Be a religion to each other.

“Everyone has their own way of worshipping God. Struth! The best way to worship God is to love your wife. I love you! That’s my catechism for you. Whoever loves is orthodox. Henri IV’s favourite swearword puts sanctity between a blowout and drunkenness. Ventre-saint-gris! Holy-Grey-Guts, indeed! I don’t follow the religion of that swearword. Woman has been left out. That amazes me for a curse coming from Henri IV. My friends, long live woman! I am old, so they tell me; it’s amazing how much younger I feel I’m growing again! I’d like to go and listen to musettes in the woods. These children here, who manage to be beautiful and happy, make my head swim. I’d get well and truly married myself if someone would have me. It’s impossible to imagine that God made us for anything else but this: to idolize, to bill and coo, to strut and plume, to be pigeons, to be cocks, to peck at our loves from morning to night, to gaze at our reflections in our little woman, to be proud, to be triumphant, to puff ourselves up; that’s what life is all about. That, whether you like it or not, is what we used to think, we old-timers, in our day, when we were the young blades. Ah, blow me down if there weren’t charming women about in those days, and the pretty little faces, and the slips of girls! I wreaked havoc. So, love one another. If we didn’t love one another, I really can’t see the good in having a spring; and, as for myself, I’d ask the good Lord to pack up all the beautiful things he lays out before us and take them back and stick the flowers and the birds and the pretty girls back in his box. My children, receive this old boy’s blessing.” The evening was lively, gay, genial. The grandfather’s sovereign good humour set the tone for the whole fête and everyone tuned themselves according to this very nearly centenarian cordiality. They danced a little, they laughed a lot; it was a good-natured wedding. You could have invited good old Once Upon a Time to it. In any case, he was there in the person of old Gillenormand.

There was tumult, then silence. The bride and groom disappeared. A bit after midnight, the Gillenormand household turned into a temple.

We will stop there. On the threshold of wedding nights, an angel stands, smiling, a finger to its lips. The soul enters into contemplation before this sanctuary where the celebration of love takes place.

There must be glimmers above houses like this one. The joy they contain must escape through the stones of the walls as light and dimly streak the darkness. This sacred and fateful celebration is simply bound to send a celestial shimmer into infinity. Love is the sublime crucible in which a man and a woman melt together; the one being, the triple being, the final being, the human trinity, result. This birth of two souls in one must move deep night. The lover is priest, the rapt virgin filled with fear. Something of this joy travels up to God. Wherever there is a real marriage, meaning where there is love, the ideal is involved. A nuptial bed creates a pocket of dawn light in the darkness. If it were given to our eye of flesh and blood to see the fearsome and lovely sights of the higher life, we would probably see the forms of the night, winged strangers, the blue bystanders of the invisible, bend down, a throng of dark heads, over the luminous house, satisfied, blessing, pointing out to each other, sweetly alarmed, the virgin bride, and wearing the reflection of human bliss on their divine faces. If, at that supreme moment, the newlyweds, dazed with sensual rapture and believing themselves alone, were to listen, they would hear in their room the muted sound of fluttering wings. Perfect happiness implies the solidarity of angels. This little dark nook is overhung by the whole heavens. When two mouths, sanctified by love, come together to create, that ineffable kiss is simply bound to set the mysterious stars shuddering throughout immensity.

This is the real bliss. There is no joy beyond these joys. Love is the sole ecstasy here. Everything else weeps.

To love or to have loved is enough. Don’t ask for anything more. There is no other pearl to be found in the shadowy folds of life. To love is an achievement.

THE INSEPARABLE

WHAT HAD HAPPENED to Jean Valjean?

Immediately after giving Cosette a laugh, at her sweet behest, with no one paying him any attention, Jean Valjean had got to his feet and gained the antechamber, unseen. This was the same room that he had entered, eight months before, black with mud, blood, and gunpowder, bringing the grandson home to his grandfather. The old woodwork was garlanded with leaves and flowers; the musicians were sitting on the sofa where they had laid Marius. Basque, in black habit, short breeches, white stockings, and white gloves, was laying crowns of roses around each of the dishes they were about to serve. Jean Valjean had shown him his arm in a sling, had asked him to explain his absence for him, and left.

The windows of the dining room looked out onto the street. Jean Valjean stood motionless in the dark for a few minutes under those blazing windows, listening. The muffled noise reached him. He heard the exalted and brilliant speech of the grandfather, the violins, the clatter of the plates and clink of the glasses, the peals of laughter, and in all this gay uproar he clearly made out Cosette’s sweet joyful voice.

He left the rue des Filles-du-Calvaire and turned to go back to the rue de l’Homme-Armé.

The way he took was the rue Saint-Louis, the rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine, and the rue des Blancs-Manteaux; it was a little longer, but it was the way he had got used to coming, every day for the past three months, from the rue de l’Homme-Armé to the rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, with Cosette, thereby avoiding the congestion and mud of the rue Vieille-du-Temple. The fact that Cosette had come this way ruled out every other route for him.

Jean Valjean arrived home. He lit his candle and went upstairs. The apartment was empty. Even Toussaint was not there now. Jean Valjean’s footsteps made more of a noise than usual through the rooms. All the cupboards were open. He went into Cosette’s room. There were no sheets on the bed. The pillow of drill, without pillowcase and without lacework, was placed on the folded blankets at the foot of the mattress, of which you could see the ticking and on which no one would be sleeping ever again. All the little feminine objects Cosette held so dear had been taken away; only the heavy furniture and the four walls remained. Toussaint’s bed was also stripped. A single bed was made up and seemed to be waiting for someone, and that someone was himself, Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean looked at the walls, shut a few of the cupboard doors, wandered about from room to room. Then he found himself back in his room, and he put his candle down on a table.

He had taken his arm out of the sling and was using his right hand as though it did not hurt a bit.

He went over to his bed, and his eyes fell—was it by chance? was it intentional?—on the “inseparable,” which Cosette had been jealous of—the little trunk that never left his side. On June 4, when he’d arrived at the rue de l’Homme-Armé, he had put it on an occasional table beside the bed. He bounded over to this table, took a key from his pocket, and opened the suitcase.

He slowly pulled out the clothes in which, ten years before, Cosette had left Montfermeil; first, the little black dress, then the black fichu, then the good old chunky children’s shoes that Cosette could still almost get into, her feet were so small, then the child’s vest of good thick fustian, then the knitted petticoat, then the smock with pockets, then the woolen stockings. These stockings, still gracefully moulded to the shape of little legs, were scarcely any longer than Jean Valjean’s hand. All the things were black. It was he who had brought these clothes to Montfermeil for her. As he took them out of the suitcase, he laid them on the bed. He was thinking. He was remembering. It was winter, a very cold December, she was shivering half-naked in her rags, her poor little feet red raw in clogs. He, Jean Valjean, had got her to take off those tatters and to put on this mourning outfit. The mother must have been happy in her grave to see her daughter wearing mourning for her, and especially to see that she was all dressed up and that she was warm. He thought about the forest of Montfermeil; they had crossed it together, Cosette and he; he thought about the weather at the time, about the leafless trees, about the birdless woods, about the sunless sky; that hadn’t mattered, it was lovely. He arranged the tiny old clothes on the bed, the fichu next to the petticoat, the stockings beside the shoes, the little vest beside the dress, and he looked at them, one by one. She was only just so high, she had her big doll in her arms, she had put her gold louis in the pocket of this smock, she was laughing, they were walking together hand in hand, she had nobody in all the world but him.

Then his venerable white head dropped onto the bed, his stoical old heart broke, he buried his face, so to speak, in Cosette’s clothes, and if anyone had passed on the stairs at that moment, they would have heard the sound of heartrending sobs.

IMMORTALE JECUR1

THE OLD TREMENDOUS struggle, of which we have seen several phases, started all over again.

Jacob wrestled with the angel2 for only one night. Alas! How many times have we seen Jean Valjean seized in the dark in hand-to-hand combat by his conscience and fighting desperately against it!

An unbelievable struggle! At certain moments, you lose your footing; at other times, the ground gives way. How many times had his conscience, in a frenzy to be good, tackled him and brought him down! How many times had the truth, inexorable, planted its knee on his chest! How many times, bowled over by the light, had he begged it for mercy! How many times had that implacable light, lit within him and over him by the bishop, dazzled him by force when all he wanted was to be blind! How many times had he got back on his feet to resume the fight, pinned to the rock, leaning back on sophism, dragged through the dust, sometimes toppling his conscience underneath him, sometimes toppled by it! How many times, after some equivocation, after a bout of the treacherous and specious reasoning of self-interest, had he heard his angry conscience shout in his ear: “It’s a setup! Miserable bastard!” How many times had his recalcitrant thoughts convulsively railed under the obviousness of duty! Resisting God. Sweating like a man dying. All the secret wounds that he alone felt bleeding! All the flaying alive of his lamentable existence! How many times had he got back up covered in blood, bruised, broken, enlightened, despair in his heart, serenity in his soul! and, conquered, felt himself the conqueror. And, after having torn him apart, tortured him and broken him, his conscience, standing over him, fearsome, luminous, tranquil, would quietly say to him: “Now go in peace!” But, coming out of such a grim struggle, what gloomy peace, alas!

That particular night, though, Jean Valjean felt he was fighting his last fight. A question presented itself, one that stabbed him through the heart.

Predestined paths are not all straight; they don’t evolve into a rectilinear avenue in front of the predestined; they have their blind alley’s, obscure twists and turns, disturbing crossroads offering alternative paths. Jean Valjean was poised this moment at the most perilous of such crossroads.

He had come to the final crossing of good and evil. That was the dark intersection he now had before his eyes. And, once again, as in past painful crises, two roads opened up before him; one tempting, the other terrifying. Which one should he take?

The terrifying one was recommended by the mysterious pointing finger that we all see whenever we stare straight into the shadows.

Jean Valjean, yet again, had the choice between the frightening haven and the beckoning ambush. Can it be true, then? That the soul can be cured; but fate, no. What an appalling thing! An incurable destiny!

The question that presented itself was this:

How was Jean Valjean going to conduct himself in the face of Cosette and Marius’s happiness? A happiness he himself had wanted, that he himself had made; he was the one who had stabbed himself in the guts with it, and, at this moment, looking back on it, he could feel the sort of satisfaction an armourer would have felt, recognizing his trademark on a blade as he yanked it, all fuming, out of his chest.

Cosette had Marius, Marius possessed Cosette. They had it all, even wealth. And it was his doing.

But this happiness, now that it existed, now that it was there—what was he going to do with it, he, Jean Valjean? Was he to impose himself on this happiness? Was he to treat it as belonging to him? There was no doubt that Cosette belonged to another; but was he, Jean Valjean, to hold back all that he could hold back from Cosette? Was he to remain the sort of father, rarely seen but respected, that he had been till then? Was he to quietly worm his way into Cosette’s house? Was he to bring his past into that future, without saying a word? Was he to just turn up there as though he had the right and go and take a seat, disguised, at that luminous hearth? Was he to take the hands of those innocents in his two tragic hands, smiling at them all the while? Was he to put his feet up on the peaceful firedogs of the Gillenormand salon, dragging along behind them as they did the shaming shadow of the law? Was he to cast in his lot with Cosette and Marius? Was he to deepen the darkness over his head and the cloud over theirs? Was he to put his third of catastrophe in with their two shares of bliss? Was he to continue to keep quiet? In a word, was he to be the sinister mute of destiny beside those two happy souls?

You have to be used to the twists of fate and being caught up in them to dare lift your eyes when certain questions appear in all their horrible starkness. Good or evil are behind the stern question mark. What are you going to do? asks the sphinx.3 The habit of undergoing trials by fire is one Jean Valjean had acquired. He looked the sphinx full in the face. He examined the merciless problem from every angle.

Cosette, that lovely presence, was the life raft in this shipwreck. What was he to do? Cling on, or let go? If he clung on, he would escape disaster, he would clamber back into the sunlight, he would let the bitter water run off his clothes and his hair, he would be saved, he would live. If he let go? Then, the abyss.

And so he held dolorous counsel with his thoughts. Or, more exactly, he struggled; he thrashed around furiously inside himself, now against his will, now against his conviction.

It was just as well for Jean Valjean that he had been able to cry. That perhaps brightened him. But the beginning was fierce. A storm more violent than the one that had once driven him to Arras broke inside him. The past came back to him in a showdown with the present; he compared and he sobbed. Once the floodgates of tears were opened, the desperate man doubled up in pain.

He felt blighted.

Alas, in this unrelenting brawl between our egoism and our duty, when we thus recoil step by step before our immutable ideal, bewildered, dogged, exasperated at yielding, fighting tooth and nail, hoping for some escape route, looking for a way out, what brusque and sinister resistance the wall at our backs puts up! To feel the holy shadow barring the way! The inexorable invisible, what an obsession!

We are never done, then, with conscience. Make up your mind what to do with it, Brutus; make up your mind what to do with it, Cato.4 It is without end, being God. We throw into this bottomless pit a lifetime of labour, we throw into it our fortune, we throw into it our wealth, we throw into it our success, we throw into it our liberty or our country, we throw into it our well-being, we throw into it our repose, we throw into it our joy. More! More! More! Empty the vessel! Tip out the urn! We are forced in the end to throw in our hearts. Somewhere in the mists of the old underworld there is a barrel like that.

Can’t a person be forgiven for refusing in the end? Can the inexhaustible have a right? Aren’t endless chains beyond human endurance? Who, then, would blame Sisyphus or Jean Valjean for saying: “That’s enough!” The compliance of matter is limited by friction; isn’t there a limit to the compliance of the soul? If perpetual motion is impossible, is perpetual devotion really due?

The first step is nothing; it is the last step that is hard. What was the Champmathieu affair beside the marriage of Cosette and all that it implied? What was this: to go back to jail, beside this: to sink into oblivion?

O, first step on the way down, how gloomy you are! O, second step, how black you are! How could he not turn his head the other way this time?

Martyrdom is a kind of moral purification, a corrosive kind of purification. It is a form of torture that crowns. You can consent to it for the first hour or so; you sit down on the throne of red-hot iron, you set the crown of red-hot iron on your head, you accept the globe of red-hot iron, you take the sceptre of red-hot iron, but you still have to put on the mantle of flames; and isn’t there a moment when the miserable flesh revolts and when you abdicate the torment?

At last Jean Valjean began to feel the calmness of utter devastation. He weighed, he reflected, he considered the alternatives presented by the mysterious balance of light and shadow. To impose his jail term on these two dazzling children, or to himself bring about his own irremediable demise. On one side, the sacrifice of Cosette, on the other, of himself.

What solution did he choose? What decision did he make? What was, in his heart of hearts, his final answer to the incorruptible interrogation of fate? What door did he decide to open? What side of his life did he make up his mind to close off and condemn? Between all these unfathomable sheer drops that surrounded him, what was his choice? What extremity did he accept? To which of these gulfs did he give the nod?

His dizzying reverie lasted all night.

He stayed there till daybreak, in the same position, bent double over his bed, prostrate under the enormity of fate, perhaps crushed, alas! his fists clenched, his arms stretched out at right angles like a crucified man taken down from the cross and cast facedown on the ground. He stayed twelve hours, the twelve hours of a long winter’s night, frozen, without lifting his head and without uttering a word. He was as still as a corpse, while his thoughts rolled on the ground or soared, now like a hydra, now like an eagle. To have seen him motionless like this you would have thought he was dead; but all of a sudden he shuddered convulsively and his mouth, stuck to Cosette’s clothes, kissed them; then you could see that he was alive.

Who is this “you?” Since Jean Valjean was alone, and there was no one there?

The You who is in the darkness.