Les Misérables
“Aigle de Meaux, down with your paws. You produce on me no effect with
your gesture of Hippocrates refusing Artaxerxes’ bric-à-brac. I excuse
you from the task of soothing me. Moreover, I am sad. What do you wish
me to say to you? Man is evil, man is deformed; the butterfly is a
success, man is a failure. God made a mistake with that animal. A crowd
offers a choice of ugliness. The first comer is a wretch,
_Femme_—woman—rhymes with _infâme_,—infamous. Yes, I have the spleen,
complicated with melancholy, with homesickness, plus hypochondria, and
I am vexed and I rage, and I yawn, and I am bored, and I am tired to
death, and I am stupid! Let God go to the devil!”
“Silence then, capital R!” resumed Bossuet, who was discussing a point
of law behind the scenes, and who was plunged more than waist high in a
phrase of judicial slang, of which this is the conclusion:—
“—And as for me, although I am hardly a legist, and at the most, an
amateur attorney, I maintain this: that, in accordance with the terms
of the customs of Normandy, at Saint-Michel, and for each year, an
equivalent must be paid to the profit of the lord of the manor, saving
the rights of others, and by all and several, the proprietors as well
as those seized with inheritance, and that, for all emphyteuses,
leases, freeholds, contracts of domain, mortgages—”
“Echo, plaintive nymph,” hummed Grantaire.
Near Grantaire, an almost silent table, a sheet of paper, an inkstand
and a pen between two glasses of brandy, announced that a vaudeville
was being sketched out.
This great affair was being discussed in a low voice, and the two heads
at work touched each other: “Let us begin by finding names. When one
has the names, one finds the subject.”
“That is true. Dictate. I will write.”
“Monsieur Dorimon.”
“An independent gentleman?”
“Of course.”
“His daughter, Célestine.”
“—tine. What next?”
“Colonel Sainval.”
“Sainval is stale. I should say Valsin.”
Beside the vaudeville aspirants, another group, which was also taking
advantage of the uproar to talk low, was discussing a duel. An old
fellow of thirty was counselling a young one of eighteen, and
explaining to him what sort of an adversary he had to deal with.
“The deuce! Look out for yourself. He is a fine swordsman. His play is
neat. He has the attack, no wasted feints, wrist, dash, lightning, a
just parade, mathematical parries, _bigre!_ and he is left-handed.”
In the angle opposite Grantaire, Joly and Bahorel were playing
dominoes, and talking of love.
“You are in luck, that you are,” Joly was saying. “You have a mistress
who is always laughing.”
“That is a fault of hers,” returned Bahorel. “One’s mistress does wrong
to laugh. That encourages one to deceive her. To see her gay removes
your remorse; if you see her sad, your conscience pricks you.”
“Ingrate! a woman who laughs is such a good thing! And you never
quarrel!”
“That is because of the treaty which we have made. On forming our
little Holy Alliance we assigned ourselves each our frontier, which we
never cross. What is situated on the side of winter belongs to Vaud, on
the side of the wind to Gex. Hence the peace.”
“Peace is happiness digesting.”
“And you, Jolllly, where do you stand in your entanglement with
Mamselle—you know whom I mean?”
“She sulks at me with cruel patience.”
“Yet you are a lover to soften the heart with gauntness.”
“Alas!”
“In your place, I would let her alone.”
“That is easy enough to say.”
“And to do. Is not her name Musichetta?”
“Yes. Ah! my poor Bahorel, she is a superb girl, very literary, with
tiny feet, little hands, she dresses well, and is white and dimpled,
with the eyes of a fortune-teller. I am wild over her.”
“My dear fellow, then in order to please her, you must be elegant, and
produce effects with your knees. Buy a good pair of trousers of
double-milled cloth at Staub’s. That will assist.”
“At what price?” shouted Grantaire.
The third corner was delivered up to a poetical discussion. Pagan
mythology was giving battle to Christian mythology. The question was
about Olympus, whose part was taken by Jean Prouvaire, out of pure
romanticism.
Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth,
a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both
laughing and lyric.
“Let us not insult the gods,” said he. “The gods may not have taken
their departure. Jupiter does not impress me as dead. The gods are
dreams, you say. Well, even in nature, such as it is to-day, after the
flight of these dreams, we still find all the grand old pagan myths.
Such and such a mountain with the profile of a citadel, like the
Vignemale, for example, is still to me the headdress of Cybele; it has
not been proved to me that Pan does not come at night to breathe into
the hollow trunks of the willows, stopping up the holes in turn with
his fingers, and I have always believed that Io had something to do
with the cascade of Pissevache.”
In the last corner, they were talking politics. The Charter which had
been granted was getting roughly handled. Combeferre was upholding it
weakly. Courfeyrac was energetically making a breach in it. On the
table lay an unfortunate copy of the famous Touquet Charter. Courfeyrac
had seized it, and was brandishing it, mingling with his arguments the
rattling of this sheet of paper.
“In the first place, I won’t have any kings; if it were only from an
economical point of view, I don’t want any; a king is a parasite. One
does not have kings gratis. Listen to this: the dearness of kings. At
the death of François I., the national debt of France amounted to an
income of thirty thousand livres; at the death of Louis XIV. it was two
milliards, six hundred millions, at twenty-eight livres the mark, which
was equivalent in 1760, according to Desmarets, to four milliards, five
hundred millions, which would to-day be equivalent to twelve milliards.
In the second place, and no offence to Combeferre, a charter granted is
but a poor expedient of civilization. To save the transition, to soften
the passage, to deaden the shock, to cause the nation to pass
insensibly from the monarchy to democracy by the practice of
constitutional fictions,—what detestable reasons all those are! No! no!
let us never enlighten the people with false daylight. Principles
dwindle and pale in your constitutional cellar. No illegitimacy, no
compromise, no grant from the king to the people. In all such grants
there is an Article 14. By the side of the hand which gives there is
the claw which snatches back. I refuse your charter point-blank. A
charter is a mask; the lie lurks beneath it. A people which accepts a
charter abdicates. The law is only the law when entire. No! no
charter!”
It was winter; a couple of fagots were crackling in the fireplace. This
was tempting, and Courfeyrac could not resist. He crumpled the poor
Touquet Charter in his fist, and flung it in the fire. The paper
flashed up. Combeferre watched the masterpiece of Louis XVIII. burn
philosophically, and contented himself with saying:—
“The charter metamorphosed into flame.”
And sarcasms, sallies, jests, that French thing which is called
_entrain_, and that English thing which is called humor, good and bad
taste, good and bad reasons, all the wild pyrotechnics of dialogue,
mounting together and crossing from all points of the room, produced a
sort of merry bombardment over their heads.
CHAPTER V—ENLARGEMENT OF HORIZON
The shocks of youthful minds among themselves have this admirable
property, that one can never foresee the spark, nor divine the
lightning flash. What will dart out presently? No one knows. The burst
of laughter starts from a tender feeling.
At the moment of jest, the serious makes its entry. Impulses depend on
the first chance word. The spirit of each is sovereign, jest suffices
to open the field to the unexpected. These are conversations with
abrupt turns, in which the perspective changes suddenly. Chance is the
stage-manager of such conversations.
A severe thought, starting oddly from a clash of words, suddenly
traversed the conflict of quips in which Grantaire, Bahorel, Prouvaire,
Bossuet, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac were confusedly fencing.
How does a phrase crop up in a dialogue? Whence comes it that it
suddenly impresses itself on the attention of those who hear it? We
have just said, that no one knows anything about it. In the midst of
the uproar, Bossuet all at once terminated some apostrophe to
Combeferre, with this date:—
“June 18th, 1815, Waterloo.”
At this name of Waterloo, Marius, who was leaning his elbows on a
table, beside a glass of water, removed his wrist from beneath his
chin, and began to gaze fixedly at the audience.
“Pardieu!” exclaimed Courfeyrac (“Parbleu” was falling into disuse at
this period), “that number 18 is strange and strikes me. It is
Bonaparte’s fatal number. Place Louis in front and Brumaire behind, you
have the whole destiny of the man, with this significant peculiarity,
that the end treads close on the heels of the commencement.”
Enjolras, who had remained mute up to that point, broke the silence and
addressed this remark to Combeferre:—
“You mean to say, the crime and the expiation.”
This word _crime_ overpassed the measure of what Marius, who was
already greatly agitated by the abrupt evocation of Waterloo, could
accept.
He rose, walked slowly to the map of France spread out on the wall, and
at whose base an island was visible in a separate compartment, laid his
finger on this compartment and said:—
“Corsica, a little island which has rendered France very great.”
This was like a breath of icy air. All ceased talking. They felt that
something was on the point of occurring.
Bahorel, replying to Bossuet, was just assuming an attitude of the
torso to which he was addicted. He gave it up to listen.
Enjolras, whose blue eye was not fixed on any one, and who seemed to be
gazing at space, replied, without glancing at Marius:—
“France needs no Corsica to be great. France is great because she is
France. _Quia nomina leo_.”
Marius felt no desire to retreat; he turned towards Enjolras, and his
voice burst forth with a vibration which came from a quiver of his very
being:—
“God forbid that I should diminish France! But amalgamating Napoleon
with her is not diminishing her. Come! let us argue the question. I am
a newcomer among you, but I will confess that you amaze me. Where do we
stand? Who are we? Who are you? Who am I? Let us come to an explanation
about the Emperor. I hear you say _Buonaparte_, accenting the _u_ like
the Royalists. I warn you that my grandfather does better still; he
says _Buonaparté_’. I thought you were young men. Where, then, is your
enthusiasm? And what are you doing with it? Whom do you admire, if you
do not admire the Emperor? And what more do you want? If you will have
none of that great man, what great men would you like? He had
everything. He was complete. He had in his brain the sum of human
faculties. He made codes like Justinian, he dictated like Cæsar, his
conversation was mingled with the lightning-flash of Pascal, with the
thunderclap of Tacitus, he made history and he wrote it, his bulletins
are Iliads, he combined the cipher of Newton with the metaphor of
Mahomet, he left behind him in the East words as great as the pyramids,
at Tilsit he taught Emperors majesty, at the Academy of Sciences he
replied to Laplace, in the Council of State he held his own against
Merlin, he gave a soul to the geometry of the first, and to the
chicanery of the last, he was a legist with the attorneys and sidereal
with the astronomers; like Cromwell blowing out one of two candles, he