Les Misérables
future on future, the young spirit encumbered with plans, with
projects, with pride, with ideas and wishes; he was a lost dog. He fell
into a black melancholy. All was over. Work disgusted him, walking
tired him. Vast nature, formerly so filled with forms, lights, voices,
counsels, perspectives, horizons, teachings, now lay empty before him.
It seemed to him that everything had disappeared.
He thought incessantly, for he could not do otherwise; but he no longer
took pleasure in his thoughts. To everything that they proposed to him
in a whisper, he replied in his darkness: “What is the use?”
He heaped a hundred reproaches on himself. “Why did I follow her? I was
so happy at the mere sight of her! She looked at me; was not that
immense? She had the air of loving me. Was not that everything? I
wished to have, what? There was nothing after that. I have been absurd.
It is my own fault,” etc., etc. Courfeyrac, to whom he confided
nothing,—it was his nature,—but who made some little guess at
everything,—that was his nature,—had begun by congratulating him on
being in love, though he was amazed at it; then, seeing Marius fall
into this melancholy state, he ended by saying to him: “I see that you
have been simply an animal. Here, come to the Chaumière.”
Once, having confidence in a fine September sun, Marius had allowed
himself to be taken to the ball at Sceaux by Courfeyrac, Bossuet, and
Grantaire, hoping, what a dream! that he might, perhaps, find her
there. Of course he did not see the one he sought.—“But this is the
place, all the same, where all lost women are found,” grumbled
Grantaire in an aside. Marius left his friends at the ball and returned
home on foot, alone, through the night, weary, feverish, with sad and
troubled eyes, stunned by the noise and dust of the merry wagons filled
with singing creatures on their way home from the feast, which passed
close to him, as he, in his discouragement, breathed in the acrid scent
of the walnut-trees, along the road, in order to refresh his head.
He took to living more and more alone, utterly overwhelmed, wholly
given up to his inward anguish, going and coming in his pain like the
wolf in the trap, seeking the absent one everywhere, stupefied by love.
On another occasion, he had an encounter which produced on him a
singular effect. He met, in the narrow streets in the vicinity of the
Boulevard des Invalides, a man dressed like a workingman and wearing a
cap with a long visor, which allowed a glimpse of locks of very white
hair. Marius was struck with the beauty of this white hair, and
scrutinized the man, who was walking slowly and as though absorbed in
painful meditation. Strange to say, he thought that he recognized M.
Leblanc. The hair was the same, also the profile, so far as the cap
permitted a view of it, the mien identical, only more depressed. But
why these workingman’s clothes? What was the meaning of this? What
signified that disguise? Marius was greatly astonished. When he
recovered himself, his first impulse was to follow the man; who knows
whether he did not hold at last the clue which he was seeking? In any
case, he must see the man near at hand, and clear up the mystery. But
the idea occurred to him too late, the man was no longer there. He had
turned into some little side street, and Marius could not find him.
This encounter occupied his mind for three days and then was effaced.
“After all,” he said to himself, “it was probably only a resemblance.”
CHAPTER II—TREASURE TROVE
Marius had not left the Gorbeau house. He paid no attention to any one
there.
At that epoch, to tell the truth, there were no other inhabitants in
the house, except himself and those Jondrettes whose rent he had once
paid, without, moreover, ever having spoken to either father, mother,
or daughters. The other lodgers had moved away or had died, or had been
turned out in default of payment.
One day during that winter, the sun had shown itself a little in the
afternoon, but it was the 2d of February, that ancient Candlemas day
whose treacherous sun, the precursor of a six weeks’ cold spell,
inspired Mathieu Laensberg with these two lines, which have with
justice remained classic:—
Qu’il luise ou qu’il luiserne,
L’ours rentre dans en sa caverne.26
Marius had just emerged from his: night was falling. It was the hour
for his dinner; for he had been obliged to take to dining again, alas!
oh, infirmities of ideal passions!
He had just crossed his threshold, where Ma’am Bougon was sweeping at
the moment, as she uttered this memorable monologue:—
“What is there that is cheap now? Everything is dear. There is nothing
in the world that is cheap except trouble; you can get that for
nothing, the trouble of the world!”
Marius slowly ascended the boulevard towards the barrier, in order to
reach the Rue Saint-Jacques. He was walking along with drooping head.
All at once, he felt some one elbow him in the dusk; he wheeled round,
and saw two young girls clad in rags, the one tall and slim, the other
a little shorter, who were passing rapidly, all out of breath, in
terror, and with the appearance of fleeing; they had been coming to
meet him, had not seen him, and had jostled him as they passed. Through
the twilight, Marius could distinguish their livid faces, their wild
heads, their dishevelled hair, their hideous bonnets, their ragged
petticoats, and their bare feet. They were talking as they ran. The
taller said in a very low voice:—
“The bobbies have come. They came near nabbing me at the half-circle.”
The other answered: “I saw them. I bolted, bolted, bolted!”
Through this repulsive slang, Marius understood that gendarmes or the
police had come near apprehending these two children, and that the
latter had escaped.
They plunged among the trees of the boulevard behind him, and there
created, for a few minutes, in the gloom, a sort of vague white spot,
then disappeared.
Marius had halted for a moment.
He was about to pursue his way, when his eye lighted on a little
grayish package lying on the ground at his feet. He stooped and picked
it up. It was a sort of envelope which appeared to contain papers.
“Good,” he said to himself, “those unhappy girls dropped it.”
He retraced his steps, he called, he did not find them; he reflected
that they must already be far away, put the package in his pocket, and
went off to dine.
On the way, he saw in an alley of the Rue Mouffetard, a child’s coffin,
covered with a black cloth resting on three chairs, and illuminated by
a candle. The two girls of the twilight recurred to his mind.
“Poor mothers!” he thought. “There is one thing sadder than to see
one’s children die; it is to see them leading an evil life.”
Then those shadows which had varied his melancholy vanished from his
thoughts, and he fell back once more into his habitual preoccupations.
He fell to thinking once more of his six months of love and happiness
in the open air and the broad daylight, beneath the beautiful trees of
Luxembourg.
“How gloomy my life has become!” he said to himself. “Young girls are
always appearing to me, only formerly they were angels and now they are
ghouls.”
CHAPTER III—QUADRIFRONS
That evening, as he was undressing preparatory to going to bed, his
hand came in contact, in the pocket of his coat, with the packet which
he had picked up on the boulevard. He had forgotten it. He thought that
it would be well to open it, and that this package might possibly
contain the address of the young girls, if it really belonged to them,
and, in any case, the information necessary to a restitution to the
person who had lost it.
He opened the envelope.
It was not sealed and contained four letters, also unsealed.
They bore addresses.
All four exhaled a horrible odor of tobacco.
The first was addressed: _“To Madame, Madame la Marquise de Grucheray,
the place opposite the Chamber of Deputies, No.—”_
Marius said to himself, that he should probably find in it the
information which he sought, and that, moreover, the letter being open,
it was probable that it could be read without impropriety.
It was conceived as follows:—
Madame la Marquise: The virtue of clemency and piety is that which most
closely unites sosiety. Turn your Christian spirit and cast a look of
compassion on this unfortunate Spanish victim of loyalty and attachment
to the sacred cause of legitimacy, who has given with his blood,
consecrated his fortune, evverything, to defend that cause, and to-day
finds himself in the greatest missery. He doubts not that your
honorable person will grant succor to preserve an existence exteremely
painful for a military man of education and honor full of wounds,
counts in advance on the humanity which animates you and on the
interest which Madame la Marquise bears to a nation so unfortunate.
Their prayer will not be in vain, and their gratitude will preserve
theirs charming souvenir.
My respectful sentiments, with which I have the honor to be
Madame,
DON ALVARÈS, Spanish Captain of Cavalry, a royalist who has take
refuge in France, who finds himself on travells for his country,
and the resources are lacking him to continue his travells.
No address was joined to the signature. Marius hoped to find the
address in the second letter, whose superscription read: _À Madame,
Madame la Comtesse de Montvernet, Rue Cassette, No. 9_. This is what
Marius read in it:—
MADAME LA COMTESSE: It is an unhappy mother of a family of six
children the last of which is only eight months old. I sick since
my last confinement, abandoned by my husband five months ago,
haveing no resources in the world the most frightful indigance.
In the hope of Madame la Comtesse, she has the honor to be, Madame,
with profound respect,
MISTRESS BALIZARD.
Marius turned to the third letter, which was a petition like the
preceding; he read:—
Monsieur PABOURGEOT, Elector, wholesale stocking merchant, Rue
Saint-Denis on the corner of the Rue aux Fers.
I permit myself to address you this letter to beg you to grant me
the pretious favor of your simpaties and to interest yourself in a
man of letters who has just sent a drama to the Théâtre-Français.
The subject is historical, and the action takes place in Auvergne
in the time of the Empire; the style, I think, is natural, laconic,
and may have some merit. There are couplets to be sung in four
places. The comic, the serious, the unexpected, are mingled in a
variety of characters, and a tinge of romanticism lightly spread
through all the intrigue which proceeds misteriously, and ends,
after striking altarations, in the midst of many beautiful strokes
of brilliant scenes.
My principal object is to satisfi the desire which progressively
animates the man of our century, that is to say, the fashion, that
capritious and bizarre weathervane which changes at almost every
new wind.
In spite of these qualities I have reason to fear that jealousy,
the egotism of priviliged authors, may obtaine my exclusion from
the theatre, for I am not ignorant of the mortifications with which
newcomers are treated.
Monsiuer Pabourgeot, your just reputation as an enlightened
protector of men of litters emboldens me to send you my daughter
who will explain our indigant situation to you, lacking bread and
fire in this wynter season. When I say to you that I beg you to
accept the dedication of my drama which I desire to make to you and
of all those that I shall make, is to prove to you how great is my
ambition to have the honor of sheltering myself under your