Les Misérables
embraced that white head, bathed his hair in tears, gazed upon his
scar, pressed his hands, adored his garment, kissed his feet! Oh! Why
had his father died so early, before his time, before the justice, the
love of his son had come to him? Marius had a continual sob in his
heart, which said to him every moment: “Alas!” At the same time, he
became more truly serious, more truly grave, more sure of his thought
and his faith. At each instant, gleams of the true came to complete his
reason. An inward growth seemed to be in progress within him. He was
conscious of a sort of natural enlargement, which gave him two things
that were new to him—his father and his country.
As everything opens when one has a key, so he explained to himself that
which he had hated, he penetrated that which he had abhorred;
henceforth he plainly perceived the providential, divine and human
sense of the great things which he had been taught to detest, and of
the great men whom he had been instructed to curse. When he reflected
on his former opinions, which were but those of yesterday, and which,
nevertheless, seemed to him already so very ancient, he grew indignant,
yet he smiled.
From the rehabilitation of his father, he naturally passed to the
rehabilitation of Napoleon.
But the latter, we will confess, was not effected without labor.
From his infancy, he had been imbued with the judgments of the party of
1814, on Bonaparte. Now, all the prejudices of the Restoration, all its
interests, all its instincts tended to disfigure Napoleon. It execrated
him even more than it did Robespierre. It had very cleverly turned to
sufficiently good account the fatigue of the nation, and the hatred of
mothers. Bonaparte had become an almost fabulous monster, and in order
to paint him to the imagination of the people, which, as we lately
pointed out, resembles the imagination of children, the party of 1814
made him appear under all sorts of terrifying masks in succession, from
that which is terrible though it remains grandiose to that which is
terrible and becomes grotesque, from Tiberius to the bugaboo. Thus, in
speaking of Bonaparte, one was free to sob or to puff up with laughter,
provided that hatred lay at the bottom. Marius had never
entertained—about _that man_, as he was called—any other ideas in his
mind. They had combined with the tenacity which existed in his nature.
There was in him a headstrong little man who hated Napoleon.
On reading history, on studying him, especially in the documents and
materials for history, the veil which concealed Napoleon from the eyes
of Marius was gradually rent. He caught a glimpse of something immense,
and he suspected that he had been deceived up to that moment, on the
score of Bonaparte as about all the rest; each day he saw more
distinctly; and he set about mounting, slowly, step by step, almost
regretfully in the beginning, then with intoxication and as though
attracted by an irresistible fascination, first the sombre steps, then
the vaguely illuminated steps, at last the luminous and splendid steps
of enthusiasm.
One night, he was alone in his little chamber near the roof. His candle
was burning; he was reading, with his elbows resting on his table close
to the open window. All sorts of reveries reached him from space, and
mingled with his thoughts. What a spectacle is the night! One hears
dull sounds, without knowing whence they proceed; one beholds Jupiter,
which is twelve hundred times larger than the earth, glowing like a
firebrand, the azure is black, the stars shine; it is formidable.
He was perusing the bulletins of the grand army, those heroic strophes
penned on the field of battle; there, at intervals, he beheld his
father’s name, always the name of the Emperor; the whole of that great
Empire presented itself to him; he felt a flood swelling and rising
within him; it seemed to him at moments that his father passed close to
him like a breath, and whispered in his ear; he gradually got into a
singular state; he thought that he heard drums, cannon, trumpets, the
measured tread of battalions, the dull and distant gallop of the
cavalry; from time to time, his eyes were raised heavenward, and gazed
upon the colossal constellations as they gleamed in the measureless
depths of space, then they fell upon his book once more, and there they
beheld other colossal things moving confusedly. His heart contracted
within him. He was in a transport, trembling, panting. All at once,
without himself knowing what was in him, and what impulse he was
obeying, he sprang to his feet, stretched both arms out of the window,
gazed intently into the gloom, the silence, the infinite darkness, the
eternal immensity, and exclaimed: “Long live the Emperor!”
From that moment forth, all was over; the Ogre of Corsica,—the
usurper,—the tyrant,—the monster who was the lover of his own
sisters,—the actor who took lessons of Talma,—the poisoner of
Jaffa,—the tiger,—Buonaparte,—all this vanished, and gave place in his
mind to a vague and brilliant radiance in which shone, at an
inaccessible height, the pale marble phantom of Cæsar. The Emperor had
been for his father only the well-beloved captain whom one admires, for
whom one sacrifices one’s self; he was something more to Marius. He was
the predestined constructor of the French group, succeeding the Roman
group in the domination of the universe. He was a prodigious architect,
of a destruction, the continuer of Charlemagne, of Louis XI., of Henry
IV., of Richelieu, of Louis XIV., and of the Committee of Public
Safety, having his spots, no doubt, his faults, his crimes even, being
a man, that is to say; but august in his faults, brilliant in his
spots, powerful in his crime.
He was the predestined man, who had forced all nations to say: “The
great nation!” He was better than that, he was the very incarnation of
France, conquering Europe by the sword which he grasped, and the world
by the light which he shed. Marius saw in Bonaparte the dazzling
spectre which will always rise upon the frontier, and which will guard
the future. Despot but dictator; a despot resulting from a republic and
summing up a revolution. Napoleon became for him the man-people as
Jesus Christ is the man-God.
It will be perceived, that like all new converts to a religion, his
conversion intoxicated him, he hurled himself headlong into adhesion
and he went too far. His nature was so constructed; once on the
downward slope, it was almost impossible for him to put on the drag.
Fanaticism for the sword took possession of him, and complicated in his
mind his enthusiasm for the idea. He did not perceive that, along with
genius, and pell-mell, he was admitting force, that is to say, that he
was installing in two compartments of his idolatry, on the one hand
that which is divine, on the other that which is brutal. In many
respects, he had set about deceiving himself otherwise. He admitted
everything. There is a way of encountering error while on one’s way to
the truth. He had a violent sort of good faith which took everything in
the lump. In the new path which he had entered on, in judging the
mistakes of the old regime, as in measuring the glory of Napoleon, he
neglected the attenuating circumstances.
At all events, a tremendous step had been taken. Where he had formerly
beheld the fall of the monarchy, he now saw the advent of France. His
orientation had changed. What had been his East became the West. He had
turned squarely round.
All these revolutions were accomplished within him, without his family
obtaining an inkling of the case.
When, during this mysterious labor, he had entirely shed his old
Bourbon and ultra skin, when he had cast off the aristocrat, the
Jacobite and the Royalist, when he had become thoroughly a
revolutionist, profoundly democratic and republican, he went to an
engraver on the Quai des Orfévres and ordered a hundred cards bearing
this name: _Le Baron Marius Pontmercy_.
This was only the strictly logical consequence of the change which had
taken place in him, a change in which everything gravitated round his
father.
Only, as he did not know any one and could not sow his cards with any
porter, he put them in his pocket.
By another natural consequence, in proportion as he drew nearer to his
father, to the latter’s memory, and to the things for which the colonel
had fought five and twenty years before, he receded from his
grandfather. We have long ago said, that M. Gillenormand’s temper did
not please him. There already existed between them all the dissonances
of the grave young man and the frivolous old man. The gayety of Géronte
shocks and exasperates the melancholy of Werther. So long as the same
political opinions and the same ideas had been common to them both,
Marius had met M. Gillenormand there as on a bridge. When the bridge
fell, an abyss was formed. And then, over and above all, Marius
experienced unutterable impulses to revolt, when he reflected that it
was M. Gillenormand who had, from stupid motives, torn him ruthlessly
from the colonel, thus depriving the father of the child, and the child
of the father.
By dint of pity for his father, Marius had nearly arrived at aversion
for his grandfather.
Nothing of this sort, however, was betrayed on the exterior, as we have
already said. Only he grew colder and colder; laconic at meals, and
rare in the house. When his aunt scolded him for it, he was very gentle
and alleged his studies, his lectures, the examinations, etc., as a
pretext. His grandfather never departed from his infallible diagnosis:
“In love! I know all about it.”
From time to time Marius absented himself.
“Where is it that he goes off like this?” said his aunt.
On one of these trips, which were always very brief, he went to
Montfermeil, in order to obey the injunction which his father had left
him, and he sought the old sergeant to Waterloo, the inn-keeper
Thénardier. Thénardier had failed, the inn was closed, and no one knew
what had become of him. Marius was away from the house for four days on
this quest.
“He is getting decidedly wild,” said his grandfather.
They thought they had noticed that he wore something on his breast,
under his shirt, which was attached to his neck by a black ribbon.
CHAPTER VII—SOME PETTICOAT
We have mentioned a lancer.
He was a great-grand-nephew of M. Gillenormand, on the paternal side,
who led a garrison life, outside the family and far from the domestic
hearth. Lieutenant Théodule Gillenormand fulfilled all the conditions
required to make what is called a fine officer. He had “a lady’s
waist,” a victorious manner of trailing his sword and of twirling his
moustache in a hook. He visited Paris very rarely, and so rarely that
Marius had never seen him. The cousins knew each other only by name. We
think we have said that Théodule was the favorite of Aunt Gillenormand,
who preferred him because she did not see him. Not seeing people
permits one to attribute to them all possible perfections.
One morning, Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder returned to her
apartment as much disturbed as her placidity was capable of allowing.
Marius had just asked his grandfather’s permission to take a little
trip, adding that he meant to set out that very evening. “Go!” had been
his grandfather’s reply, and M. Gillenormand had added in an aside, as
he raised his eyebrows to the top of his forehead: “Here he is passing
the night out again.” Mademoiselle Gillenormand had ascended to her
chamber greatly puzzled, and on the staircase had dropped this
exclamation: “This is too much!”—and this interrogation: “But where is
it that he goes?” She espied some adventure of the heart, more or less
illicit, a woman in the shadow, a rendezvous, a mystery, and she would