Les Misérables
muffled up in a pair of man’s trousers, but he did not get them from
his father, and a woman’s chemise, but he did not get it from his
mother. Some people or other had clothed him in rags out of charity.
Still, he had a father and a mother. But his father did not think of
him, and his mother did not love him.
He was one of those children most deserving of pity, among all, one of
those who have father and mother, and who are orphans nevertheless.
This child never felt so well as when he was in the street. The
pavements were less hard to him than his mother’s heart.
His parents had despatched him into life with a kick.
He simply took flight.
He was a boisterous, pallid, nimble, wide-awake, jeering, lad, with a
vivacious but sickly air. He went and came, sang, played at hopscotch,
scraped the gutters, stole a little, but, like cats and sparrows, gayly
laughed when he was called a rogue, and got angry when called a thief.
He had no shelter, no bread, no fire, no love; but he was merry because
he was free.
When these poor creatures grow to be men, the millstones of the social
order meet them and crush them, but so long as they are children, they
escape because of their smallness. The tiniest hole saves them.
Nevertheless, abandoned as this child was, it sometimes happened, every
two or three months, that he said, “Come, I’ll go and see mamma!” Then
he quitted the boulevard, the Cirque, the Porte Saint-Martin, descended
to the quays, crossed the bridges, reached the suburbs, arrived at the
Salpêtrière, and came to a halt, where? Precisely at that double number
50-52 with which the reader is acquainted—at the Gorbeau hovel.
At that epoch, the hovel 50-52 generally deserted and eternally
decorated with the placard: “Chambers to let,” chanced to be, a rare
thing, inhabited by numerous individuals who, however, as is always the
case in Paris, had no connection with each other. All belonged to that
indigent class which begins to separate from the lowest of petty
bourgeoisie in straitened circumstances, and which extends from misery
to misery into the lowest depths of society down to those two beings in
whom all the material things of civilization end, the sewer-man who
sweeps up the mud, and the rag-picker who collects scraps.
The “principal lodger” of Jean Valjean’s day was dead and had been
replaced by another exactly like her. I know not what philosopher has
said: “Old women are never lacking.”
This new old woman was named Madame Bourgon, and had nothing remarkable
about her life except a dynasty of three paroquets, who had reigned in
succession over her soul.
The most miserable of those who inhabited the hovel were a family of
four persons, consisting of father, mother, and two daughters, already
well grown, all four of whom were lodged in the same attic, one of the
cells which we have already mentioned.
At first sight, this family presented no very special feature except
its extreme destitution; the father, when he hired the chamber, had
stated that his name was Jondrette. Some time after his moving in,
which had borne a singular resemblance to _the entrance of nothing at
all_, to borrow the memorable expression of the principal tenant, this
Jondrette had said to the woman, who, like her predecessor, was at the
same time portress and stair-sweeper: “Mother So-and-So, if any one
should chance to come and inquire for a Pole or an Italian, or even a
Spaniard, perchance, it is I.”
This family was that of the merry barefoot boy. He arrived there and
found distress, and, what is still sadder, no smile; a cold hearth and
cold hearts. When he entered, he was asked: “Whence come you?” He
replied: “From the street.” When he went away, they asked him: “Whither
are you going?” He replied: “Into the streets.” His mother said to him:
“What did you come here for?”
This child lived, in this absence of affection, like the pale plants
which spring up in cellars. It did not cause him suffering, and he
blamed no one. He did not know exactly how a father and mother should
be.
Nevertheless, his mother loved his sisters.
We have forgotten to mention, that on the Boulevard du Temple this
child was called Little Gavroche. Why was he called Little Gavroche?
Probably because his father’s name was Jondrette.
It seems to be the instinct of certain wretched families to break the
thread.
The chamber which the Jondrettes inhabited in the Gorbeau hovel was the
last at the end of the corridor. The cell next to it was occupied by a
very poor young man who was called M. Marius.
Let us explain who this M. Marius was.
BOOK SECOND—THE GREAT BOURGEOIS
CHAPTER I—NINETY YEARS AND THIRTY-TWO TEETH
In the Rue Boucherat, Rue de Normandie and the Rue de Saintonge there
still exist a few ancient inhabitants who have preserved the memory of
a worthy man named M. Gillenormand, and who mention him with
complaisance. This good man was old when they were young. This
silhouette has not yet entirely disappeared—for those who regard with
melancholy that vague swarm of shadows which is called the past—from
the labyrinth of streets in the vicinity of the Temple to which, under
Louis XIV., the names of all the provinces of France were appended
exactly as in our day, the streets of the new Tivoli quarter have
received the names of all the capitals of Europe; a progression, by the
way, in which progress is visible.
M. Gillenormand, who was as much alive as possible in 1831, was one of
those men who had become curiosities to be viewed, simply because they
have lived a long time, and who are strange because they formerly
resembled everybody, and now resemble nobody. He was a peculiar old
man, and in very truth, a man of another age, the real, complete and
rather haughty bourgeois of the eighteenth century, who wore his good,
old bourgeoisie with the air with which marquises wear their
marquisates. He was over ninety years of age, his walk was erect, he
talked loudly, saw clearly, drank neat, ate, slept, and snored. He had
all thirty-two of his teeth. He only wore spectacles when he read. He
was of an amorous disposition, but declared that, for the last ten
years, he had wholly and decidedly renounced women. He could no longer
please, he said; he did not add: “I am too old,” but: “I am too poor.”
He said: “If I were not ruined—Héée!” All he had left, in fact, was an
income of about fifteen thousand francs. His dream was to come into an
inheritance and to have a hundred thousand livres income for
mistresses. He did not belong, as the reader will perceive, to that
puny variety of octogenaries who, like M. de Voltaire, have been dying
all their life; his was no longevity of a cracked pot; this jovial old
man had always had good health. He was superficial, rapid, easily
angered. He flew into a passion at everything, generally quite contrary
to all reason. When contradicted, he raised his cane; he beat people as
he had done in the great century. He had a daughter over fifty years of
age, and unmarried, whom he chastised severely with his tongue, when in
a rage, and whom he would have liked to whip. She seemed to him to be
eight years old. He boxed his servants’ ears soundly, and said: “Ah!
carogne!” One of his oaths was: “By the pantoufloche of the
pantouflochade!” He had singular freaks of tranquillity; he had himself
shaved every day by a barber who had been mad and who detested him,
being jealous of M. Gillenormand on account of his wife, a pretty and
coquettish barberess. M. Gillenormand admired his own discernment in
all things, and declared that he was extremely sagacious; here is one
of his sayings: “I have, in truth, some penetration; I am able to say
when a flea bites me, from what woman it came.”
The words which he uttered the most frequently were: _the sensible
man_, and _nature_. He did not give to this last word the grand
acceptation which our epoch has accorded to it, but he made it enter,
after his own fashion, into his little chimney-corner satires:
“Nature,” he said, “in order that civilization may have a little of
everything, gives it even specimens of its amusing barbarism. Europe
possesses specimens of Asia and Africa on a small scale. The cat is a
drawing-room tiger, the lizard is a pocket crocodile. The dancers at
the opera are pink female savages. They do not eat men, they crunch
them; or, magicians that they are, they transform them into oysters and
swallow them. The Caribbeans leave only the bones, they leave only the
shell. Such are our morals. We do not devour, we gnaw; we do not
exterminate, we claw.”
CHAPTER II—LIKE MASTER, LIKE HOUSE
He lived in the Marais, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6. He owned the
house. This house has since been demolished and rebuilt, and the number
has probably been changed in those revolutions of numeration which the
streets of Paris undergo. He occupied an ancient and vast apartment on
the first floor, between street and gardens, furnished to the very
ceilings with great Gobelins and Beauvais tapestries representing
pastoral scenes; the subjects of the ceilings and the panels were
repeated in miniature on the armchairs. He enveloped his bed in a vast,
nine-leaved screen of Coromandel lacquer. Long, full curtains hung from
the windows, and formed great, broken folds that were very magnificent.
The garden situated immediately under his windows was attached to that
one of them which formed the angle, by means of a staircase twelve or
fifteen steps long, which the old gentleman ascended and descended with
great agility. In addition to a library adjoining his chamber, he had a
boudoir of which he thought a great deal, a gallant and elegant
retreat, with magnificent hangings of straw, with a pattern of flowers
and fleurs-de-lys made on the galleys of Louis XIV. and ordered of his
convicts by M. de Vivonne for his mistress. M. Gillenormand had
inherited it from a grim maternal great-aunt, who had died a
centenarian. He had had two wives. His manners were something between
those of the courtier, which he had never been, and the lawyer, which
he might have been. He was gay, and caressing when he had a mind. In
his youth he had been one of those men who are always deceived by their
wives and never by their mistresses, because they are, at the same
time, the most sullen of husbands and the most charming of lovers in
existence. He was a connoisseur of painting. He had in his chamber a
marvellous portrait of no one knows whom, painted by Jordaens, executed
with great dashes of the brush, with millions of details, in a confused
and hap-hazard manner. M. Gillenormand’s attire was not the habit of
Louis XIV. nor yet that of Louis XVI.; it was that of the Incroyables
of the Directory. He had thought himself young up to that period and
had followed the fashions. His coat was of light-weight cloth with
voluminous revers, a long swallow-tail and large steel buttons. With
this he wore knee-breeches and buckle shoes. He always thrust his hands
into his fobs. He said authoritatively: “The French Revolution is a
heap of blackguards.”
CHAPTER III—LUC-ESPRIT
At the age of sixteen, one evening at the opera, he had had the honor
to be stared at through opera-glasses by two beauties at the same
time—ripe and celebrated beauties then, and sung by Voltaire, the
Camargo and the Sallé. Caught between two fires, he had beaten a heroic
retreat towards a little dancer, a young girl named Nahenry, who was
sixteen like himself, obscure as a cat, and with whom he was in love.
He abounded in memories. He was accustomed to exclaim: “How pretty she
was—that Guimard-Guimardini-Guimardinette, the last time I saw her at
Longchamps, her hair curled in sustained sentiments, with her
come-and-see of turquoises, her gown of the color of persons newly