Les Misérables
And she put on her spectacles. They unfolded the paper and read as
follows:—
“_For my son_.—The Emperor made me a Baron on the battlefield of
Waterloo. Since the Restoration disputes my right to this title which I
purchased with my blood, my son shall take it and bear it. That he will
be worthy of it is a matter of course.”
The feelings of father and daughter cannot be described. They felt
chilled as by the breath of a death’s-head. They did not exchange a
word.
Only, M. Gillenormand said in a low voice and as though speaking to
himself:—
“It is the slasher’s handwriting.”
The aunt examined the paper, turned it about in all directions, then
put it back in its case.
At the same moment a little oblong packet, enveloped in blue paper,
fell from one of the pockets of the great-coat. Mademoiselle
Gillenormand picked it up and unfolded the blue paper.
It contained Marius’ hundred cards. She handed one of them to M.
Gillenormand, who read: _Le Baron Marius Pontmercy_.
The old man rang the bell. Nicolette came. M. Gillenormand took the
ribbon, the case, and the coat, flung them all on the floor in the
middle of the room, and said:—
“Carry those duds away.”
A full hour passed in the most profound silence. The old man and the
old spinster had seated themselves with their backs to each other, and
were thinking, each on his own account, the same things, in all
probability.
At the expiration of this hour, Aunt Gillenormand said:—“A pretty state
of things!”
A few moments later, Marius made his appearance. He entered. Even
before he had crossed the threshold, he saw his grandfather holding one
of his own cards in his hand, and on catching sight of him, the latter
exclaimed with his air of bourgeois and grinning superiority which was
something crushing:—
“Well! well! well! well! well! so you are a baron now. I present you my
compliments. What is the meaning of this?”
Marius reddened slightly and replied:—
“It means that I am the son of my father.”
M. Gillenormand ceased to laugh, and said harshly:—
“I am your father.”
“My father,” retorted Marius, with downcast eyes and a severe air, “was
a humble and heroic man, who served the Republic and France gloriously,
who was great in the greatest history that men have ever made, who
lived in the bivouac for a quarter of a century, beneath grape-shot and
bullets, in snow and mud by day, beneath rain at night, who captured
two flags, who received twenty wounds, who died forgotten and
abandoned, and who never committed but one mistake, which was to love
too fondly two ingrates, his country and myself.”
This was more than M. Gillenormand could bear to hear. At the word
_republic_, he rose, or, to speak more correctly, he sprang to his
feet. Every word that Marius had just uttered produced on the visage of
the old Royalist the effect of the puffs of air from a forge upon a
blazing brand. From a dull hue he had turned red, from red, purple, and
from purple, flame-colored.
“Marius!” he cried. “Abominable child! I do not know what your father
was! I do not wish to know! I know nothing about that, and I do not
know him! But what I do know is, that there never was anything but
scoundrels among those men! They were all rascals, assassins, red-caps,
thieves! I say all! I say all! I know not one! I say all! Do you hear
me, Marius! See here, you are no more a baron than my slipper is! They
were all bandits in the service of Robespierre! All who served
B-u-o-naparté were brigands! They were all traitors who betrayed,
betrayed, betrayed their legitimate king! All cowards who fled before
the Prussians and the English at Waterloo! That is what I do know!
Whether Monsieur your father comes in that category, I do not know! I
am sorry for it, so much the worse, your humble servant!”
In his turn, it was Marius who was the firebrand and M. Gillenormand
who was the bellows. Marius quivered in every limb, he did not know
what would happen next, his brain was on fire. He was the priest who
beholds all his sacred wafers cast to the winds, the fakir who beholds
a passer-by spit upon his idol. It could not be that such things had
been uttered in his presence. What was he to do? His father had just
been trampled under foot and stamped upon in his presence, but by whom?
By his grandfather. How was he to avenge the one without outraging the
other? It was impossible for him to insult his grandfather and it was
equally impossible for him to leave his father unavenged. On the one
hand was a sacred grave, on the other hoary locks.
He stood there for several moments, staggering as though intoxicated,
with all this whirlwind dashing through his head; then he raised his
eyes, gazed fixedly at his grandfather, and cried in a voice of
thunder:—
“Down with the Bourbons, and that great hog of a Louis XVIII.!”
Louis XVIII. had been dead for four years; but it was all the same to
him.
The old man, who had been crimson, turned whiter than his hair. He
wheeled round towards a bust of M. le Duc de Berry, which stood on the
chimney-piece, and made a profound bow, with a sort of peculiar
majesty. Then he paced twice, slowly and in silence, from the fireplace
to the window and from the window to the fireplace, traversing the
whole length of the room, and making the polished floor creak as though
he had been a stone statue walking.
On his second turn, he bent over his daughter, who was watching this
encounter with the stupefied air of an antiquated lamb, and said to her
with a smile that was almost calm: “A baron like this gentleman, and a
bourgeois like myself cannot remain under the same roof.”
And drawing himself up, all at once, pallid, trembling, terrible, with
his brow rendered more lofty by the terrible radiance of wrath, he
extended his arm towards Marius and shouted to him:—
“Be off!”
Marius left the house.
On the following day, M. Gillenormand said to his daughter:
“You will send sixty pistoles every six months to that blood-drinker,
and you will never mention his name to me.”
Having an immense reserve fund of wrath to get rid of, and not knowing
what to do with it, he continued to address his daughter as _you_
instead of _thou_ for the next three months.
Marius, on his side, had gone forth in indignation. There was one
circumstance which, it must be admitted, aggravated his exasperation.
There are always petty fatalities of the sort which complicate domestic
dramas. They augment the grievances in such cases, although, in
reality, the wrongs are not increased by them. While carrying Marius’
“duds” precipitately to his chamber, at his grandfather’s command,
Nicolette had, inadvertently, let fall, probably, on the attic
staircase, which was dark, that medallion of black shagreen which
contained the paper penned by the colonel. Neither paper nor case could
afterwards be found. Marius was convinced that “Monsieur
Gillenormand”—from that day forth he never alluded to him otherwise—had
flung “his father’s testament” in the fire. He knew by heart the few
lines which the colonel had written, and, consequently, nothing was
lost. But the paper, the writing, that sacred relic,—all that was his
very heart. What had been done with it?
Marius had taken his departure without saying whither he was going, and
without knowing where, with thirty francs, his watch, and a few clothes
in a hand-bag. He had entered a hackney-coach, had engaged it by the
hour, and had directed his course at hap-hazard towards the Latin
quarter.
What was to become of Marius?
BOOK FOURTH—THE FRIENDS OF THE A B C
CHAPTER I—A GROUP WHICH BARELY MISSED BECOMING HISTORIC
At that epoch, which was, to all appearances indifferent, a certain
revolutionary quiver was vaguely current. Breaths which had started
forth from the depths of ’89 and ’93 were in the air. Youth was on the
point, may the reader pardon us the word, of moulting. People were
undergoing a transformation, almost without being conscious of it,
through the movement of the age. The needle which moves round the
compass also moves in souls. Each person was taking that step in
advance which he was bound to take. The Royalists were becoming
liberals, liberals were turning democrats. It was a flood tide
complicated with a thousand ebb movements; the peculiarity of ebbs is
to create intermixtures; hence the combination of very singular ideas;
people adored both Napoleon and liberty. We are making history here.
These were the mirages of that period. Opinions traverse phases.
Voltairian royalism, a quaint variety, had a no less singular sequel,
Bonapartist liberalism.
Other groups of minds were more serious. In that direction, they
sounded principles, they attached themselves to the right. They grew
enthusiastic for the absolute, they caught glimpses of infinite
realizations; the absolute, by its very rigidity, urges spirits towards
the sky and causes them to float in illimitable space. There is nothing
like dogma for bringing forth dreams. And there is nothing like dreams
for engendering the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood to-morrow.
These advanced opinions had a double foundation. A beginning of mystery
menaced “the established order of things,” which was suspicious and
underhand. A sign which was revolutionary to the highest degree. The
second thoughts of power meet the second thoughts of the populace in
the mine. The incubation of insurrections gives the retort to the
premeditation of _coups d’état_.
There did not, as yet, exist in France any of those vast underlying
organizations, like the German _tugendbund_ and Italian Carbonarism;
but here and there there were dark underminings, which were in process
of throwing off shoots. The Cougourde was being outlined at Aix; there
existed at Paris, among other affiliations of that nature, the society
of the Friends of the A B C.
What were these Friends of the A B C? A society which had for its
object apparently the education of children, in reality the elevation
of man.
They declared themselves the Friends of the A B C,—the _Abaissé_,—the
debased,—that is to say, the people. They wished to elevate the people.
It was a pun which we should do wrong to smile at. Puns are sometimes
serious factors in politics; witness the _Castratus ad castra_, which
made a general of the army of Narses; witness: _Barbari et Barberini_;
witness: _Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram_, etc., etc.
The Friends of the A B C were not numerous, it was a secret society in
the state of embryo, we might almost say a coterie, if coteries ended
in heroes. They assembled in Paris in two localities, near the
fish-market, in a wine-shop called _Corinthe_, of which more will be
heard later on, and near the Pantheon in a little café in the Rue
Saint-Michel called the _Café Musain_, now torn down; the first of
these meeting-places was close to the workingman, the second to the
students.
The assemblies of the Friends of the A B C were usually held in a back
room of the Café Musain.
This hall, which was tolerably remote from the café, with which it was
connected by an extremely long corridor, had two windows and an exit
with a private stairway on the little Rue des Grès. There they smoked
and drank, and gambled and laughed. There they conversed in very loud
tones about everything, and in whispers of other things. An old map of
France under the Republic was nailed to the wall,—a sign quite
sufficient to excite the suspicion of a police agent.
The greater part of the Friends of the A B C were students, who were on
cordial terms with the working classes. Here are the names of the
principal ones. They belong, in a certain measure, to history:
Enjolras, Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Courfeyrac, Bahorel,
Lesgle or Laigle, Joly, Grantaire.