Les Misérables
sometimes; I think that I am going to die. If you only knew! I adore
you. Forgive me, I speak to you, but I do not know what I am saying; I
may have displeased you; have I displeased you?”
“Oh! my mother!” said she.
And she sank down as though on the point of death.
He grasped her, she fell, he took her in his arms, he pressed her
close, without knowing what he was doing. He supported her, though he
was tottering himself. It was as though his brain were full of smoke;
lightnings darted between his lips; his ideas vanished; it seemed to
him that he was accomplishing some religious act, and that he was
committing a profanation. Moreover, he had not the least passion for
this lovely woman whose force he felt against his breast. He was beside
himself with love.
She took his hand and laid it on her heart. He felt the paper there, he
stammered:—
“You love me, then?”
She replied in a voice so low that it was no longer anything more than
a barely audible breath:—
“Hush! Thou knowest it!”
And she hid her blushing face on the breast of the superb and
intoxicated young man.
He fell upon the bench, and she beside him. They had no words more. The
stars were beginning to gleam. How did it come to pass that their lips
met? How comes it to pass that the birds sing, that snow melts, that
the rose unfolds, that May expands, that the dawn grows white behind
the black trees on the shivering crest of the hills?
A kiss, and that was all.
Both started, and gazed into the darkness with sparkling eyes.
They felt neither the cool night, nor the cold stone, nor the damp
earth, nor the wet grass; they looked at each other, and their hearts
were full of thoughts. They had clasped hands unconsciously.
She did not ask him, she did not even wonder, how he had entered there,
and how he had made his way into the garden. It seemed so simple to her
that he should be there!
From time to time, Marius’ knee touched Cosette’s knee, and both
shivered.
At intervals, Cosette stammered a word. Her soul fluttered on her lips
like a drop of dew on a flower.
Little by little they began to talk to each other. Effusion followed
silence, which is fulness. The night was serene and splendid overhead.
These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other everything, their
dreams, their intoxications, their ecstasies, their chimæras, their
weaknesses, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had
longed for each other, their despair when they had ceased to see each
other. They confided to each other in an ideal intimacy, which nothing
could augment, their most secret and most mysterious thoughts. They
related to each other, with candid faith in their illusions, all that
love, youth, and the remains of childhood which still lingered about
them, suggested to their minds. Their two hearts poured themselves out
into each other in such wise, that at the expiration of a quarter of an
hour, it was the young man who had the young girl’s soul, and the young
girl who had the young man’s soul. Each became permeated with the
other, they were enchanted with each other, they dazzled each other.
When they had finished, when they had told each other everything, she
laid her head on his shoulder and asked him:—
“What is your name?”
“My name is Marius,” said he. “And yours?”
“My name is Cosette.”
BOOK SIXTH—LITTLE GAVROCHE
CHAPTER I—THE MALICIOUS PLAYFULNESS OF THE WIND
Since 1823, when the tavern of Montfermeil was on the way to shipwreck
and was being gradually engulfed, not in the abyss of a bankruptcy, but
in the cesspool of petty debts, the Thénardier pair had had two other
children; both males. That made five; two girls and three boys.
Madame Thénardier had got rid of the last two, while they were still
young and very small, with remarkable luck.
_Got rid of_ is the word. There was but a mere fragment of nature in
that woman. A phenomenon, by the way, of which there is more than one
example extant. Like the Maréchale de La Mothe-Houdancourt, the
Thénardier was a mother to her daughters only. There her maternity
ended. Her hatred of the human race began with her own sons. In the
direction of her sons her evil disposition was uncompromising, and her
heart had a lugubrious wall in that quarter. As the reader has seen,
she detested the eldest; she cursed the other two. Why? Because. The
most terrible of motives, the most unanswerable of retorts—Because. “I
have no need of a litter of squalling brats,” said this mother.
Let us explain how the Thénardiers had succeeded in getting rid of
their last two children; and even in drawing profit from the operation.
The woman Magnon, who was mentioned a few pages further back, was the
same one who had succeeded in making old Gillenormand support the two
children which she had had. She lived on the Quai des Célestins, at the
corner of this ancient street of the Petit-Musc which afforded her the
opportunity of changing her evil repute into good odor. The reader will
remember the great epidemic of croup which ravaged the river districts
of the Seine in Paris thirty-five years ago, and of which science took
advantage to make experiments on a grand scale as to the efficacy of
inhalations of alum, so beneficially replaced at the present day by the
external tincture of iodine. During this epidemic, the Magnon lost both
her boys, who were still very young, one in the morning, the other in
the evening of the same day. This was a blow. These children were
precious to their mother; they represented eighty francs a month. These
eighty francs were punctually paid in the name of M. Gillenormand, by
collector of his rents, M. Barge, a retired tip-staff, in the Rue du
Roi-de-Sicile. The children dead, the income was at an end. The Magnon
sought an expedient. In that dark free-masonry of evil of which she
formed a part, everything is known, all secrets are kept, and all lend
mutual aid. Magnon needed two children; the Thénardiers had two. The
same sex, the same age. A good arrangement for the one, a good
investment for the other. The little Thénardiers became little Magnons.
Magnon quitted the Quai des Célestins and went to live in the Rue
Clocheperce. In Paris, the identity which binds an individual to
himself is broken between one street and another.
The registry office being in no way warned, raised no objections, and
the substitution was effected in the most simple manner in the world.
Only, the Thénardier exacted for this loan of her children, ten francs
a month, which Magnon promised to pay, and which she actually did pay.
It is unnecessary to add that M. Gillenormand continued to perform his
compact. He came to see the children every six months. He did not
perceive the change. “Monsieur,” Magnon said to him, “how much they
resemble you!”
Thénardier, to whom avatars were easy, seized this occasion to become
Jondrette. His two daughters and Gavroche had hardly had time to
discover that they had two little brothers. When a certain degree of
misery is reached, one is overpowered with a sort of spectral
indifference, and one regards human beings as though they were
spectres. Your nearest relations are often no more for you than vague
shadowy forms, barely outlined against a nebulous background of life
and easily confounded again with the invisible.
On the evening of the day when she had handed over her two little ones
to Magnon, with express intention of renouncing them forever, the
Thénardier had felt, or had appeared to feel, a scruple. She said to
her husband: “But this is abandoning our children!” Thénardier,
masterful and phlegmatic, cauterized the scruple with this saying:
“Jean Jacques Rousseau did even better!” From scruples, the mother
proceeded to uneasiness: “But what if the police were to annoy us? Tell
me, Monsieur Thénardier, is what we have done permissible?” Thénardier
replied: “Everything is permissible. No one will see anything but true
blue in it. Besides, no one has any interest in looking closely after
children who have not a sou.”
Magnon was a sort of fashionable woman in the sphere of crime. She was
careful about her toilet. She shared her lodgings, which were furnished
in an affected and wretched style, with a clever gallicized English
thief. This English woman, who had become a naturalized Parisienne,
recommended by very wealthy relations, intimately connected with the
medals in the Library and Mademoiselle Mar’s diamonds, became
celebrated later on in judicial accounts. She was called _Mamselle
Miss_.
The two little creatures who had fallen to Magnon had no reason to
complain of their lot. Recommended by the eighty francs, they were well
cared for, as is everything from which profit is derived; they were
neither badly clothed, nor badly fed; they were treated almost like
“little gentlemen,”—better by their false mother than by their real
one. Magnon played the lady, and talked no thieves’ slang in their
presence.
Thus passed several years. Thénardier augured well from the fact. One
day, he chanced to say to Magnon as she handed him his monthly stipend
of ten francs: “The father must give them some education.”
All at once, these two poor children, who had up to that time been
protected tolerably well, even by their evil fate, were abruptly hurled
into life and forced to begin it for themselves.
A wholesale arrest of malefactors, like that in the Jondrette garret,
necessarily complicated by investigations and subsequent
incarcerations, is a veritable disaster for that hideous and occult
counter-society which pursues its existence beneath public society; an
adventure of this description entails all sorts of catastrophes in that
sombre world. The Thénardier catastrophe involved the catastrophe of
Magnon.
One day, a short time after Magnon had handed to Éponine the note
relating to the Rue Plumet, a sudden raid was made by the police in the
Rue Clocheperce; Magnon was seized, as was also Mamselle Miss; and all
the inhabitants of the house, which was of a suspicious character, were
gathered into the net. While this was going on, the two little boys
were playing in the back yard, and saw nothing of the raid. When they
tried to enter the house again, they found the door fastened and the
house empty. A cobbler opposite called them to him, and delivered to
them a paper which “their mother” had left for them. On this paper
there was an address: _M. Barge, collector of rents, Rue du
Roi-de-Sicile, No_. 8. The proprietor of the stall said to them: “You
cannot live here any longer. Go there. It is nearby. The first street
on the left. Ask your way from this paper.”
The children set out, the elder leading the younger, and holding in his
hand the paper which was to guide them. It was cold, and his benumbed
little fingers could not close very firmly, and they did not keep a
very good hold on the paper. At the corner of the Rue Clocheperce, a
gust of wind tore it from him, and as night was falling, the child was
not able to find it again.
They began to wander aimlessly through the streets.
CHAPTER II—IN WHICH LITTLE GAVROCHE EXTRACTS PROFIT FROM NAPOLEON THE
GREAT
Spring in Paris is often traversed by harsh and piercing breezes which
do not precisely chill but freeze one; these north winds which sadden
the most beautiful days produce exactly the effect of those puffs of
cold air which enter a warm room through the cracks of a badly fitting
door or window. It seems as though the gloomy door of winter had
remained ajar, and as though the wind were pouring through it. In the
spring of 1832, the epoch when the first great epidemic of this century
broke out in Europe, these north gales were more harsh and piercing
than ever. It was a door even more glacial than that of winter which