Les Misérables
“I know how to read, I do!”
She eagerly seized a book which lay open on the table, and read with
tolerable fluency:—
“—General Bauduin received orders to take the château of Hougomont
which stands in the middle of the plain of Waterloo, with five
battalions of his brigade.”
She paused.
“Ah! Waterloo! I know about that. It was a battle long ago. My father
was there. My father has served in the armies. We are fine Bonapartists
in our house, that we are! Waterloo was against the English.”
She laid down the book, caught up a pen, and exclaimed:—
“And I know how to write, too!”
She dipped her pen in the ink, and turning to Marius:—
“Do you want to see? Look here, I’m going to write a word to show you.”
And before he had time to answer, she wrote on a sheet of white paper,
which lay in the middle of the table: “The bobbies are here.”
Then throwing down the pen:—
“There are no faults of orthography. You can look. We have received an
education, my sister and I. We have not always been as we are now. We
were not made—”
Here she paused, fixed her dull eyes on Marius, and burst out laughing,
saying, with an intonation which contained every form of anguish,
stifled by every form of cynicism:—
“Bah!”
And she began to hum these words to a gay air:—
“J’ai faim, mon père.”
Pas de fricot.
J’ai froid, ma mère.
Pas de tricot.
Grelotte,
Lolotte!
Sanglote,
Jacquot!”
I am hungry, father.
I have no food.
I am cold, mother.
I have no clothes.
Lolotte!
Shiver,
Sob,
Jacquot!”
She had hardly finished this couplet, when she exclaimed:—
“Do you ever go to the play, Monsieur Marius? I do. I have a little
brother who is a friend of the artists, and who gives me tickets
sometimes. But I don’t like the benches in the galleries. One is
cramped and uncomfortable there. There are rough people there
sometimes; and people who smell bad.”
Then she scrutinized Marius, assumed a singular air and said:—
“Do you know, Mr. Marius, that you are a very handsome fellow?”
And at the same moment the same idea occurred to them both, and made
her smile and him blush. She stepped up to him, and laid her hand on
his shoulder: “You pay no heed to me, but I know you, Mr. Marius. I
meet you here on the staircase, and then I often see you going to a
person named Father Mabeuf who lives in the direction of Austerlitz,
sometimes when I have been strolling in that quarter. It is very
becoming to you to have your hair tumbled thus.”
She tried to render her voice soft, but only succeeded in making it
very deep. A portion of her words was lost in the transit from her
larynx to her lips, as though on a piano where some notes are missing.
Marius had retreated gently.
“Mademoiselle,” said he, with his cool gravity, “I have here a package
which belongs to you, I think. Permit me to return it to you.”
And he held out the envelope containing the four letters.
She clapped her hands and exclaimed:—
“We have been looking everywhere for that!”
Then she eagerly seized the package and opened the envelope, saying as
she did so:—
“Dieu de Dieu! how my sister and I have hunted! And it was you who
found it! On the boulevard, was it not? It must have been on the
boulevard? You see, we let it fall when we were running. It was that
brat of a sister of mine who was so stupid. When we got home, we could
not find it anywhere. As we did not wish to be beaten, as that is
useless, as that is entirely useless, as that is absolutely useless, we
said that we had carried the letters to the proper persons, and that
they had said to us: ‘Nix.’ So here they are, those poor letters! And
how did you find out that they belonged to me? Ah! yes, the writing. So
it was you that we jostled as we passed last night. We couldn’t see. I
said to my sister: ‘Is it a gentleman?’ My sister said to me: ‘I think
it is a gentleman.’”
In the meanwhile she had unfolded the petition addressed to “the
benevolent gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas.”
“Here!” said she, “this is for that old fellow who goes to mass. By the
way, this is his hour. I’ll go and carry it to him. Perhaps he will
give us something to breakfast on.”
Then she began to laugh again, and added:—
“Do you know what it will mean if we get a breakfast today? It will
mean that we shall have had our breakfast of the day before yesterday,
our breakfast of yesterday, our dinner of to-day, and all that at once,
and this morning. Come! Parbleu! if you are not satisfied, dogs,
burst!”
This reminded Marius of the wretched girl’s errand to himself. He
fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, and found nothing there.
The young girl went on, and seemed to have no consciousness of Marius’
presence.
“I often go off in the evening. Sometimes I don’t come home again. Last
winter, before we came here, we lived under the arches of the bridges.
We huddled together to keep from freezing. My little sister cried. How
melancholy the water is! When I thought of drowning myself, I said to
myself: ‘No, it’s too cold.’ I go out alone, whenever I choose, I
sometimes sleep in the ditches. Do you know, at night, when I walk
along the boulevard, I see the trees like forks, I see houses, all
black and as big as Notre Dame, I fancy that the white walls are the
river, I say to myself: ‘Why, there’s water there!’ The stars are like
the lamps in illuminations, one would say that they smoked and that the
wind blew them out, I am bewildered, as though horses were breathing in
my ears; although it is night, I hear hand-organs and
spinning-machines, and I don’t know what all. I think people are
flinging stones at me, I flee without knowing whither, everything
whirls and whirls. You feel very queer when you have had no food.”
And then she stared at him with a bewildered air.
By dint of searching and ransacking his pockets, Marius had finally
collected five francs sixteen sous. This was all he owned in the world
for the moment. “At all events,” he thought, “there is my dinner for
to-day, and to-morrow we will see.” He kept the sixteen sous, and
handed the five francs to the young girl.
She seized the coin.
“Good!” said she, “the sun is shining!”
And, as though the sun had possessed the property of melting the
avalanches of slang in her brain, she went on:—
“Five francs! the shiner! a monarch! in this hole! Ain’t this fine!
You’re a jolly thief! I’m your humble servant! Bravo for the good
fellows! Two days’ wine! and meat! and stew! we’ll have a royal feast!
and a good fill!”
She pulled her chemise up on her shoulders, made a low bow to Marius,
then a familiar sign with her hand, and went towards the door, saying:—
“Good morning, sir. It’s all right. I’ll go and find my old man.”
As she passed, she caught sight of a dry crust of bread on the commode,
which was moulding there amid the dust; she flung herself upon it and
bit into it, muttering:—
“That’s good! it’s hard! it breaks my teeth!”
Then she departed.
CHAPTER V—A PROVIDENTIAL PEEP-HOLE
Marius had lived for five years in poverty, in destitution, even in
distress, but he now perceived that he had not known real misery. True
misery he had but just had a view of. It was its spectre which had just
passed before his eyes. In fact, he who has only beheld the misery of
man has seen nothing; the misery of woman is what he must see; he who
has seen only the misery of woman has seen nothing; he must see the
misery of the child.
When a man has reached his last extremity, he has reached his last
resources at the same time. Woe to the defenceless beings who surround
him! Work, wages, bread, fire, courage, good will, all fail him
simultaneously. The light of day seems extinguished without, the moral
light within; in these shadows man encounters the feebleness of the
woman and the child, and bends them violently to ignominy.
Then all horrors become possible. Despair is surrounded with fragile
partitions which all open on either vice or crime.
Health, youth, honor, all the shy delicacies of the young body, the
heart, virginity, modesty, that epidermis of the soul, are manipulated
in sinister wise by that fumbling which seeks resources, which
encounters opprobrium, and which accommodates itself to it. Fathers,
mothers, children, brothers, sisters, men, women, daughters, adhere and
become incorporated, almost like a mineral formation, in that dusky
promiscuousness of sexes, relationships, ages, infamies, and
innocences. They crouch, back to back, in a sort of hut of fate. They
exchange woe-begone glances. Oh, the unfortunate wretches! How pale
they are! How cold they are! It seems as though they dwelt in a planet
much further from the sun than ours.
This young girl was to Marius a sort of messenger from the realm of sad
shadows. She revealed to him a hideous side of the night.
Marius almost reproached himself for the preoccupations of reverie and
passion which had prevented his bestowing a glance on his neighbors up
to that day. The payment of their rent had been a mechanical movement,
which any one would have yielded to; but he, Marius, should have done
better than that. What! only a wall separated him from those abandoned
beings who lived gropingly in the dark outside the pale of the rest of
the world, he was elbow to elbow with them, he was, in some sort, the
last link of the human race which they touched, he heard them live, or
rather, rattle in the death agony beside him, and he paid no heed to
them! Every day, every instant, he heard them walking on the other side
of the wall, he heard them go, and come, and speak, and he did not even
lend an ear! And groans lay in those words, and he did not even listen
to them, his thoughts were elsewhere, given up to dreams, to impossible
radiances, to loves in the air, to follies; and all the while, human
creatures, his brothers in Jesus Christ, his brothers in the people,
were agonizing in vain beside him! He even formed a part of their
misfortune, and he aggravated it. For if they had had another neighbor
who was less chimerical and more attentive, any ordinary and charitable
man, evidently their indigence would have been noticed, their signals
of distress would have been perceived, and they would have been taken
hold of and rescued! They appeared very corrupt and very depraved, no
doubt, very vile, very odious even; but those who fall without becoming
degraded are rare; besides, there is a point where the unfortunate and
the infamous unite and are confounded in a single word, a fatal word,
_the miserable_; whose fault is this? And then should not the charity
be all the more profound, in proportion as the fall is great?
While reading himself this moral lesson, for there were occasions on
which Marius, like all truly honest hearts, was his own pedagogue and
scolded himself more than he deserved, he stared at the wall which
separated him from the Jondrettes, as though he were able to make his
gaze, full of pity, penetrate that partition and warm these wretched
people. The wall was a thin layer of plaster upheld by lathes and
beams, and, as the reader had just learned, it allowed the sound of
voices and words to be clearly distinguished. Only a man as dreamy as
Marius could have failed to perceive this long before. There was no
paper pasted on the wall, either on the side of the Jondrettes or on
that of Marius; the coarse construction was visible in its nakedness.
Marius examined the partition, almost unconsciously; sometimes reverie
examines, observes, and scrutinizes as thought would. All at once he
sprang up; he had just perceived, near the top, close to the ceiling, a
triangular hole, which resulted from the space between three lathes.