Les Misérables
The policemen trooped in in force, and in a few seconds Javert’s order
had been executed.
The Thénardier female, overwhelmed, stared at her pinioned hands, and
at those of her husband, who had dropped to the floor, and exclaimed,
weeping:—
“My daughters!”
“They are in the jug,” said Javert.
In the meanwhile, the agents had caught sight of the drunken man asleep
behind the door, and were shaking him:—
He awoke, stammering:—
“Is it all over, Jondrette?”
“Yes,” replied Javert.
The six pinioned ruffians were standing, and still preserved their
spectral mien; all three besmeared with black, all three masked.
“Keep on your masks,” said Javert.
And passing them in review with a glance of a Frederick II. at a
Potsdam parade, he said to the three “chimney-builders”:—
“Good day, Bigrenaille! good day, Brujon! good day, Deuxmilliards!”
Then turning to the three masked men, he said to the man with the
meat-axe:—
“Good day, Gueulemer!”
And to the man with the cudgel:—
“Good day, Babet!”
And to the ventriloquist:—
“Your health, Claquesous.”
At that moment, he caught sight of the ruffians’ prisoner, who, ever
since the entrance of the police, had not uttered a word, and had held
his head down.
“Untie the gentleman!” said Javert, “and let no one go out!”
That said, he seated himself with sovereign dignity before the table,
where the candle and the writing-materials still remained, drew a
stamped paper from his pocket, and began to prepare his report.
When he had written the first lines, which are formulas that never
vary, he raised his eyes:—
“Let the gentleman whom these gentlemen bound step forward.”
The policemen glanced round them.
“Well,” said Javert, “where is he?”
The prisoner of the ruffians, M. Leblanc, M. Urbain Fabre, the father
of Ursule or the Lark, had disappeared.
The door was guarded, but the window was not. As soon as he had found
himself released from his bonds, and while Javert was drawing up his
report, he had taken advantage of confusion, the crowd, the darkness,
and of a moment when the general attention was diverted from him, to
dash out of the window.
An agent sprang to the opening and looked out. He saw no one outside.
The rope ladder was still shaking.
“The devil!” ejaculated Javert between his teeth, “he must have been
the most valuable of the lot.”
CHAPTER XXII—THE LITTLE ONE WHO WAS CRYING IN VOLUME TWO
On the day following that on which these events took place in the house
on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital, a child, who seemed to be coming from
the direction of the bridge of Austerlitz, was ascending the side-alley
on the right in the direction of the Barrière de Fontainebleau.
Night had fully come.
This lad was pale, thin, clad in rags, with linen trousers in the month
of February, and was singing at the top of his voice.
At the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier, a bent old woman was
rummaging in a heap of refuse by the light of a street lantern; the
child jostled her as he passed, then recoiled, exclaiming:—
“Hello! And I took it for an enormous, enormous dog!”
He pronounced the word _enormous_ the second time with a jeering swell
of the voice which might be tolerably well represented by capitals: “an
enormous, ENORMOUS dog.”
The old woman straightened herself up in a fury.
“Nasty brat!” she grumbled. “If I hadn’t been bending over, I know well
where I would have planted my foot on you.”
The boy was already far away.
“Kisss! kisss!” he cried. “After that, I don’t think I was mistaken!”
The old woman, choking with indignation, now rose completely upright,
and the red gleam of the lantern fully lighted up her livid face, all
hollowed into angles and wrinkles, with crow’s-feet meeting the corners
of her mouth.
Her body was lost in the darkness, and only her head was visible. One
would have pronounced her a mask of Decrepitude carved out by a light
from the night.
The boy surveyed her.
“Madame,” said he, “does not possess that style of beauty which pleases
me.”
He then pursued his road, and resumed his song:—
“Le roi Coupdesabot
S’en allait à la chasse,
À la chasse aux corbeaux—”
At the end of these three lines he paused. He had arrived in front of
No. 50-52, and finding the door fastened, he began to assault it with
resounding and heroic kicks, which betrayed rather the man’s shoes that
he was wearing than the child’s feet which he owned.
In the meanwhile, the very old woman whom he had encountered at the
corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier hastened up behind him, uttering
clamorous cries and indulging in lavish and exaggerated gestures.
“What’s this? What’s this? Lord God! He’s battering the door down! He’s
knocking the house down.”
The kicks continued.
The old woman strained her lungs.
“Is that the way buildings are treated nowadays?”
All at once she paused.
She had recognized the gamin.
“What! so it’s that imp!”
“Why, it’s the old lady,” said the lad. “Good day, Bougonmuche. I have
come to see my ancestors.”
The old woman retorted with a composite grimace, and a wonderful
improvisation of hatred taking advantage of feebleness and ugliness,
which was, unfortunately, wasted in the dark:—
“There’s no one here.”
“Bah!” retorted the boy, “where’s my father?”
“At La Force.”
“Come, now! And my mother?”
“At Saint-Lazare.”
“Well! And my sisters?”
“At the Madelonettes.”
The lad scratched his head behind his ear, stared at Ma’am Bougon, and
said:—
“Ah!”
Then he executed a pirouette on his heel; a moment later, the old
woman, who had remained on the door-step, heard him singing in his
clear, young voice, as he plunged under the black elm-trees, in the
wintry wind:—
“Le roi Coupdesabot
S’en allait à la chasse,
À la chasse aux corbeaux,
Monté sur deux échasses.
Quand on passait dessous,
On lui payait deux sous.”31
[THE END OF VOLUME III “MARIUS”]
VOLUME IV
SAINT-DENIS
THE IDYL IN THE RUE PLUMET AND THE EPIC IN THE RUE SAINT-DENIS
BOOK FIRST—A FEW PAGES OF HISTORY
CHAPTER I—WELL CUT
1831 and 1832, the two years which are immediately connected with the
Revolution of July, form one of the most peculiar and striking moments
of history. These two years rise like two mountains midway between
those which precede and those which follow them. They have a
revolutionary grandeur. Precipices are to be distinguished there. The
social masses, the very assizes of civilization, the solid group of
superposed and adhering interests, the century-old profiles of the
ancient French formation, appear and disappear in them every instant,
athwart the storm clouds of systems, of passions, and of theories.
These appearances and disappearances have been designated as movement
and resistance. At intervals, truth, that daylight of the human soul,
can be descried shining there.
This remarkable epoch is decidedly circumscribed and is beginning to be
sufficiently distant from us to allow of our grasping the principal
lines even at the present day.
We shall make the attempt.
The Restoration had been one of those intermediate phases, hard to
define, in which there is fatigue, buzzing, murmurs, sleep, tumult, and
which are nothing else than the arrival of a great nation at a
halting-place.
These epochs are peculiar and mislead the politicians who desire to
convert them to profit. In the beginning, the nation asks nothing but
repose; it thirsts for but one thing, peace; it has but one ambition,
to be small. Which is the translation of remaining tranquil. Of great
events, great hazards, great adventures, great men, thank God, we have
seen enough, we have them heaped higher than our heads. We would
exchange Cæsar for Prusias, and Napoleon for the King of Yvetot. “What
a good little king was he!” We have marched since daybreak, we have
reached the evening of a long and toilsome day; we have made our first
change with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre, the third with
Bonaparte; we are worn out. Each one demands a bed.
Devotion which is weary, heroism which has grown old, ambitions which
are sated, fortunes which are made, seek, demand, implore, solicit,
what? A shelter. They have it. They take possession of peace, of
tranquillity, of leisure; behold, they are content. But, at the same
time certain facts arise, compel recognition, and knock at the door in
their turn. These facts are the products of revolutions and wars, they
are, they exist, they have the right to install themselves in society,
and they do install themselves therein; and most of the time, facts are
the stewards of the household and fouriers32 who do nothing but prepare
lodgings for principles.
This, then, is what appears to philosophical politicians:—
At the same time that weary men demand repose, accomplished facts
demand guarantees. Guarantees are the same to facts that repose is to
men.
This is what England demanded of the Stuarts after the Protector; this
is what France demanded of the Bourbons after the Empire.
These guarantees are a necessity of the times. They must be accorded.
Princes “grant” them, but in reality, it is the force of things which
gives them. A profound truth, and one useful to know, which the Stuarts
did not suspect in 1662 and which the Bourbons did not even obtain a
glimpse of in 1814.
The predestined family, which returned to France when Napoleon fell,
had the fatal simplicity to believe that it was itself which bestowed,
and that what it had bestowed it could take back again; that the House
of Bourbon possessed the right divine, that France possessed nothing,
and that the political right conceded in the charter of Louis XVIII.
was merely a branch of the right divine, was detached by the House of
Bourbon and graciously given to the people until such day as it should
please the King to reassume it. Still, the House of Bourbon should have
felt, from the displeasure created by the gift, that it did not come
from it.
This house was churlish to the nineteenth century. It put on an
ill-tempered look at every development of the nation. To make use of a
trivial word, that is to say, of a popular and a true word, it looked
glum. The people saw this.
It thought it possessed strength because the Empire had been carried
away before it like a theatrical stage-setting. It did not perceive
that it had, itself, been brought in in the same fashion. It did not
perceive that it also lay in that hand which had removed Napoleon.
It thought that it had roots, because it was the past. It was mistaken;
it formed a part of the past, but the whole past was France. The roots
of French society were not fixed in the Bourbons, but in the nations.
These obscure and lively roots constituted, not the right of a family,
but the history of a people. They were everywhere, except under the
throne.
The House of Bourbon was to France the illustrious and bleeding knot in
her history, but was no longer the principal element of her destiny,
and the necessary base of her politics. She could get along without the
Bourbons; she had done without them for two and twenty years; there had
been a break of continuity; they did not suspect the fact. And how
should they have suspected it, they who fancied that Louis XVII.
reigned on the 9th of Thermidor, and that Louis XVIII. was reigning at
the battle of Marengo? Never, since the origin of history, had princes
been so blind in the presence of facts and the portion of divine
authority which facts contain and promulgate. Never had that pretension
here below which is called the right of kings denied to such a point
the right from on high.