Les Misérables
easily frightened. Add to this, that he had no other friendship, no
other acquaintance among the living, than an old bookseller of the
Porte-Saint-Jacques, named Royal. His dream was to naturalize indigo in
France.
His servant was also a sort of innocent. The poor good old woman was a
spinster. Sultan, her cat, which might have mewed Allegri’s miserere in
the Sixtine Chapel, had filled her heart and sufficed for the quantity
of passion which existed in her. None of her dreams had ever proceeded
as far as man. She had never been able to get further than her cat.
Like him, she had a moustache. Her glory consisted in her caps, which
were always white. She passed her time, on Sundays, after mass, in
counting over the linen in her chest, and in spreading out on her bed
the dresses in the piece which she bought and never had made up. She
knew how to read. M. Mabeuf had nicknamed her Mother Plutarque.
M. Mabeuf had taken a fancy to Marius, because Marius, being young and
gentle, warmed his age without startling his timidity. Youth combined
with gentleness produces on old people the effect of the sun without
wind. When Marius was saturated with military glory, with gunpowder,
with marches and countermarches, and with all those prodigious battles
in which his father had given and received such tremendous blows of the
sword, he went to see M. Mabeuf, and M. Mabeuf talked to him of his
hero from the point of view of flowers.
His brother the curé died about 1830, and almost immediately, as when
the night is drawing on, the whole horizon grew dark for M. Mabeuf. A
notary’s failure deprived him of the sum of ten thousand francs, which
was all that he possessed in his brother’s right and his own. The
Revolution of July brought a crisis to publishing. In a period of
embarrassment, the first thing which does not sell is a _Flora. The
Flora of the Environs of Cauteretz_ stopped short. Weeks passed by
without a single purchaser. Sometimes M. Mabeuf started at the sound of
the bell. “Monsieur,” said Mother Plutarque sadly, “it is the
water-carrier.” In short, one day, M. Mabeuf quitted the Rue Mésières,
abdicated the functions of warden, gave up Saint-Sulpice, sold not a
part of his books, but of his prints,—that to which he was the least
attached,—and installed himself in a little house on the Rue
Montparnasse, where, however, he remained but one quarter for two
reasons: in the first place, the ground floor and the garden cost three
hundred francs, and he dared not spend more than two hundred francs on
his rent; in the second, being near Faton’s shooting-gallery, he could
hear the pistol-shots; which was intolerable to him.
He carried off his _Flora_, his copper-plates, his herbariums, his
portfolios, and his books, and established himself near the
Salpêtrière, in a sort of thatched cottage of the village of
Austerlitz, where, for fifty crowns a year, he got three rooms and a
garden enclosed by a hedge, and containing a well. He took advantage of
this removal to sell off nearly all his furniture. On the day of his
entrance into his new quarters, he was very gay, and drove the nails on
which his engravings and herbariums were to hang, with his own hands,
dug in his garden the rest of the day, and at night, perceiving that
Mother Plutarque had a melancholy air, and was very thoughtful, he
tapped her on the shoulder and said to her with a smile: “We have the
indigo!”
Only two visitors, the bookseller of the Porte-Saint-Jacques and
Marius, were admitted to view the thatched cottage at Austerlitz, a
brawling name which was, to tell the truth, extremely disagreeable to
him.
However, as we have just pointed out, brains which are absorbed in some
bit of wisdom, or folly, or, as it often happens, in both at once, are
but slowly accessible to the things of actual life. Their own destiny
is a far-off thing to them. There results from such concentration a
passivity, which, if it were the outcome of reasoning, would resemble
philosophy. One declines, descends, trickles away, even crumbles away,
and yet is hardly conscious of it one’s self. It always ends, it is
true, in an awakening, but the awakening is tardy. In the meantime, it
seems as though we held ourselves neutral in the game which is going on
between our happiness and our unhappiness. We are the stake, and we
look on at the game with indifference.
It is thus that, athwart the cloud which formed about him, when all his
hopes were extinguished one after the other, M. Mabeuf remained rather
puerilely, but profoundly serene. His habits of mind had the regular
swing of a pendulum. Once mounted on an illusion, he went for a very
long time, even after the illusion had disappeared. A clock does not
stop short at the precise moment when the key is lost.
M. Mabeuf had his innocent pleasures. These pleasures were inexpensive
and unexpected; the merest chance furnished them. One day, Mother
Plutarque was reading a romance in one corner of the room. She was
reading aloud, finding that she understood better thus. To read aloud
is to assure one’s self of what one is reading. There are people who
read very loud, and who have the appearance of giving themselves their
word of honor as to what they are perusing.
It was with this sort of energy that Mother Plutarque was reading the
romance which she had in hand. M. Mabeuf heard her without listening to
her.
In the course of her reading, Mother Plutarque came to this phrase. It
was a question of an officer of dragoons and a beauty:—
“—The beauty pouted, and the dragoon—”
Here she interrupted herself to wipe her glasses.
“Bouddha and the Dragon,” struck in M. Mabeuf in a low voice. “Yes, it
is true that there was a dragon, which, from the depths of its cave,
spouted flame through his maw and set the heavens on fire. Many stars
had already been consumed by this monster, which, besides, had the
claws of a tiger. Bouddha went into its den and succeeded in converting
the dragon. That is a good book that you are reading, Mother Plutarque.
There is no more beautiful legend in existence.”
And M. Mabeuf fell into a delicious reverie.
CHAPTER V—POVERTY A GOOD NEIGHBOR FOR MISERY
Marius liked this candid old man who saw himself gradually falling into
the clutches of indigence, and who came to feel astonishment, little by
little, without, however, being made melancholy by it. Marius met
Courfeyrac and sought out M. Mabeuf. Very rarely, however; twice a
month at most.
Marius’ pleasure consisted in taking long walks alone on the outer
boulevards, or in the Champs-de-Mars, or in the least frequented alleys
of the Luxembourg. He often spent half a day in gazing at a market
garden, the beds of lettuce, the chickens on the dung-heap, the horse
turning the water-wheel. The passers-by stared at him in surprise, and
some of them thought his attire suspicious and his mien sinister. He
was only a poor young man dreaming in an objectless way.
It was during one of his strolls that he had hit upon the Gorbeau
house, and, tempted by its isolation and its cheapness, had taken up
his abode there. He was known there only under the name of M. Marius.
Some of his father’s old generals or old comrades had invited him to go
and see them, when they learned about him. Marius had not refused their
invitations. They afforded opportunities of talking about his father.
Thus he went from time to time, to Comte Pajol, to General Bellavesne,
to General Fririon, to the Invalides. There was music and dancing
there. On such evenings, Marius put on his new coat. But he never went
to these evening parties or balls except on days when it was freezing
cold, because he could not afford a carriage, and he did not wish to
arrive with boots otherwise than like mirrors.
He said sometimes, but without bitterness: “Men are so made that in a
drawing-room you may be soiled everywhere except on your shoes. In
order to insure a good reception there, only one irreproachable thing
is asked of you; your conscience? No, your boots.”
All passions except those of the heart are dissipated by reverie.
Marius’ political fevers vanished thus. The Revolution of 1830 assisted
in the process, by satisfying and calming him. He remained the same,
setting aside his fits of wrath. He still held the same opinions. Only,
they had been tempered. To speak accurately, he had no longer any
opinions, he had sympathies. To what party did he belong? To the party
of humanity. Out of humanity he chose France; out of the Nation he
chose the people; out of the people he chose the woman. It was to that
point above all, that his pity was directed. Now he preferred an idea
to a deed, a poet to a hero, and he admired a book like Job more than
an event like Marengo. And then, when, after a day spent in meditation,
he returned in the evening through the boulevards, and caught a glimpse
through the branches of the trees of the fathomless space beyond, the
nameless gleams, the abyss, the shadow, the mystery, all that which is
only human seemed very pretty indeed to him.
He thought that he had, and he really had, in fact, arrived at the
truth of life and of human philosophy, and he had ended by gazing at
nothing but heaven, the only thing which Truth can perceive from the
bottom of her well.
This did not prevent him from multiplying his plans, his combinations,
his scaffoldings, his projects for the future. In this state of
reverie, an eye which could have cast a glance into Marius’ interior
would have been dazzled with the purity of that soul. In fact, had it
been given to our eyes of the flesh to gaze into the consciences of
others, we should be able to judge a man much more surely according to
what he dreams, than according to what he thinks. There is will in
thought, there is none in dreams. Reverie, which is utterly
spontaneous, takes and keeps, even in the gigantic and the ideal, the
form of our spirit. Nothing proceeds more directly and more sincerely
from the very depth of our soul, than our unpremeditated and boundless
aspirations towards the splendors of destiny. In these aspirations,
much more than in deliberate, rational co-ordinated ideas, is the real
character of a man to be found. Our chimæras are the things which the
most resemble us. Each one of us dreams of the unknown and the
impossible in accordance with his nature.
Towards the middle of this year 1831, the old woman who waited on
Marius told him that his neighbors, the wretched Jondrette family, had
been turned out of doors. Marius, who passed nearly the whole of his
days out of the house, hardly knew that he had any neighbors.
“Why are they turned out?” he asked.
“Because they do not pay their rent; they owe for two quarters.”
“How much is it?”
“Twenty francs,” said the old woman.
Marius had thirty francs saved up in a drawer.
“Here,” he said to the old woman, “take these twenty-five francs. Pay
for the poor people and give them five francs, and do not tell them
that it was I.”
CHAPTER VI—THE SUBSTITUTE
It chanced that the regiment to which Lieutenant Théodule belonged came
to perform garrison duty in Paris. This inspired Aunt Gillenormand with
a second idea. She had, on the first occasion, hit upon the plan of
having Marius spied upon by Théodule; now she plotted to have Théodule
take Marius’ place.
At all events and in case the grandfather should feel the vague need of
a young face in the house,—these rays of dawn are sometimes sweet to
ruin,—it was expedient to find another Marius. “Take it as a simple
erratum,” she thought, “such as one sees in books. For Marius, read
Théodule.”
A grandnephew is almost the same as a grandson; in default of a lawyer
one takes a lancer.
One morning, when M. Gillenormand was about to read something in the