Les Misérables
engrossed the mind of M. Gillenormand. He had not been able to sleep on
the previous night, and he had been in a fever all day long. In the
evening, he had gone to bed very early, recommending that everything in
the house should be well barred, and he had fallen into a doze through
sheer fatigue.
Old men sleep lightly; M. Gillenormand’s chamber adjoined the
drawing-room, and in spite of all the precautions that had been taken,
the noise had awakened him. Surprised at the rift of light which he saw
under his door, he had risen from his bed, and had groped his way
thither.
He stood astonished on the threshold, one hand on the handle of the
half-open door, with his head bent a little forward and quivering, his
body wrapped in a white dressing-gown, which was straight and as
destitute of folds as a winding-sheet; and he had the air of a phantom
who is gazing into a tomb.
He saw the bed, and on the mattress that young man, bleeding, white
with a waxen whiteness, with closed eyes and gaping mouth, and pallid
lips, stripped to the waist, slashed all over with crimson wounds,
motionless and brilliantly lighted up.
The grandfather trembled from head to foot as powerfully as ossified
limbs can tremble, his eyes, whose corneæ were yellow on account of his
great age, were veiled in a sort of vitreous glitter, his whole face
assumed in an instant the earthy angles of a skull, his arms fell
pendent, as though a spring had broken, and his amazement was betrayed
by the outspreading of the fingers of his two aged hands, which
quivered all over, his knees formed an angle in front, allowing,
through the opening in his dressing-gown, a view of his poor bare legs,
all bristling with white hairs, and he murmured:
“Marius!”
“Sir,” said Basque, “Monsieur has just been brought back. He went to
the barricade, and....”
“He is dead!” cried the old man in a terrible voice. “Ah! The rascal!”
Then a sort of sepulchral transformation straightened up this
centenarian as erect as a young man.
“Sir,” said he, “you are the doctor. Begin by telling me one thing. He
is dead, is he not?”
The doctor, who was at the highest pitch of anxiety, remained silent.
M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with an outburst of terrible laughter.
“He is dead! He is dead! He is dead! He has got himself killed on the
barricades! Out of hatred to me! He did that to spite me! Ah! You
blood-drinker! This is the way he returns to me! Misery of my life, he
is dead!”
He went to the window, threw it wide open as though he were stifling,
and, erect before the darkness, he began to talk into the street, to
the night:
“Pierced, sabred, exterminated, slashed, hacked in pieces! Just look at
that, the villain! He knew well that I was waiting for him, and that I
had had his room arranged, and that I had placed at the head of my bed
his portrait taken when he was a little child! He knew well that he had
only to come back, and that I had been recalling him for years, and
that I remained by my fireside, with my hands on my knees, not knowing
what to do, and that I was mad over it! You knew well, that you had but
to return and to say: ‘It is I,’ and you would have been the master of
the house, and that I should have obeyed you, and that you could have
done whatever you pleased with your old numskull of a grandfather! you
knew that well, and you said:
“No, he is a Royalist, I will not go! And you went to the barricades,
and you got yourself killed out of malice! To revenge yourself for what
I said to you about Monsieur le Duc de Berry. It is infamous! Go to bed
then and sleep tranquilly! he is dead, and this is my awakening.”
The doctor, who was beginning to be uneasy in both quarters, quitted
Marius for a moment, went to M. Gillenormand, and took his arm. The
grandfather turned round, gazed at him with eyes which seemed
exaggerated in size and bloodshot, and said to him calmly:
“I thank you, sir. I am composed, I am a man, I witnessed the death of
Louis XVI., I know how to bear events. One thing is terrible and that
is to think that it is your newspapers which do all the mischief. You
will have scribblers, chatterers, lawyers, orators, tribunes,
discussions, progress, enlightenment, the rights of man, the liberty of
the press, and this is the way that your children will be brought home
to you. Ah! Marius! It is abominable! Killed! Dead before me! A
barricade! Ah, the scamp! Doctor, you live in this quarter, I believe?
Oh! I know you well. I see your cabriolet pass my window. I am going to
tell you. You are wrong to think that I am angry. One does not fly into
a rage against a dead man. That would be stupid. This is a child whom I
have reared. I was already old while he was very young. He played in
the Tuileries garden with his little shovel and his little chair, and
in order that the inspectors might not grumble, I stopped up the holes
that he made in the earth with his shovel, with my cane. One day he
exclaimed: Down with Louis XVIII.! and off he went. It was no fault of
mine. He was all rosy and blond. His mother is dead. Have you ever
noticed that all little children are blond? Why is it so? He is the son
of one of those brigands of the Loire, but children are innocent of
their fathers’ crimes. I remember when he was no higher than that. He
could not manage to pronounce his Ds. He had a way of talking that was
so sweet and indistinct that you would have thought it was a bird
chirping. I remember that once, in front of the Hercules Farnese,
people formed a circle to admire him and marvel at him, he was so
handsome, was that child! He had a head such as you see in pictures. I
talked in a deep voice, and I frightened him with my cane, but he knew
very well that it was only to make him laugh. In the morning, when he
entered my room, I grumbled, but he was like the sunlight to me, all
the same. One cannot defend oneself against those brats. They take hold
of you, they hold you fast, they never let you go again. The truth is,
that there never was a cupid like that child. Now, what can you say for
your Lafayettes, your Benjamin Constants, and your Tirecuir de
Corcelles who have killed him? This cannot be allowed to pass in this
fashion.”
He approached Marius, who still lay livid and motionless, and to whom
the physician had returned, and began once more to wring his hands. The
old man’s pallid lips moved as though mechanically, and permitted the
passage of words that were barely audible, like breaths in the death
agony:
“Ah! heartless lad! Ah! clubbist! Ah! wretch! Ah! Septembrist!”
Reproaches in the low voice of an agonizing man, addressed to a corpse.
Little by little, as it is always indispensable that internal eruptions
should come to the light, the sequence of words returned, but the
grandfather appeared no longer to have the strength to utter them, his
voice was so weak, and extinct, that it seemed to come from the other
side of an abyss:
“It is all the same to me, I am going to die too, that I am. And to
think that there is not a hussy in Paris who would not have been
delighted to make this wretch happy! A scamp who, instead of amusing
himself and enjoying life, went off to fight and get himself shot down
like a brute! And for whom? Why? For the Republic! Instead of going to
dance at the Chaumière, as it is the duty of young folks to do! What’s
the use of being twenty years old? The Republic, a cursed pretty folly!
Poor mothers, beget fine boys, do! Come, he is dead. That will make two
funerals under the same carriage gate. So you have got yourself
arranged like this for the sake of General Lamarque’s handsome eyes!
What had that General Lamarque done to you? A slasher! A chatter-box!
To get oneself killed for a dead man! If that isn’t enough to drive any
one mad! Just think of it! At twenty! And without so much as turning
his head to see whether he was not leaving something behind him! That’s
the way poor, good old fellows are forced to die alone, nowadays.
Perish in your corner, owl! Well, after all, so much the better, that
is what I was hoping for, this will kill me on the spot. I am too old,
I am a hundred years old, I am a hundred thousand years old, I ought,
by rights, to have been dead long ago. This blow puts an end to it. So
all is over, what happiness! What is the good of making him inhale
ammonia and all that parcel of drugs? You are wasting your trouble, you
fool of a doctor! Come, he’s dead, completely dead. I know all about
it, I am dead myself too. He hasn’t done things by half. Yes, this age
is infamous, infamous and that’s what I think of you, of your ideas, of
your systems, of your masters, of your oracles, of your doctors, of
your scape-graces of writers, of your rascally philosophers, and of all
the revolutions which, for the last sixty years, have been frightening
the flocks of crows in the Tuileries! But you were pitiless in getting
yourself killed like this, I shall not even grieve over your death, do
you understand, you assassin?”
At that moment, Marius slowly opened his eyes, and his glance, still
dimmed by lethargic wonder, rested on M. Gillenormand.
“Marius!” cried the old man. “Marius! My little Marius! my child! my
well-beloved son! You open your eyes, you gaze upon me, you are alive,
thanks!”
And he fell fainting.
BOOK FOURTH—JAVERT DERAILED
CHAPTER I
Javert passed slowly down the Rue de l’Homme Armé.
He walked with drooping head for the first time in his life, and
likewise, for the first time in his life, with his hands behind his
back.
Up to that day, Javert had borrowed from Napoleon’s attitudes, only
that which is expressive of resolution, with arms folded across the
chest; that which is expressive of uncertainty—with the hands behind
the back—had been unknown to him. Now, a change had taken place; his
whole person, slow and sombre, was stamped with anxiety.
He plunged into the silent streets.
Nevertheless, he followed one given direction.
He took the shortest cut to the Seine, reached the Quai des Ormes,
skirted the quay, passed the Grève, and halted at some distance from
the post of the Place du Châtelet, at the angle of the Pont Notre-Dame.
There, between the Notre-Dame and the Pont au Change on the one hand,
and the Quai de la Mégisserie and the Quai aux Fleurs on the other, the
Seine forms a sort of square lake, traversed by a rapid.
This point of the Seine is dreaded by mariners. Nothing is more
dangerous than this rapid, hemmed in, at that epoch, and irritated by
the piles of the mill on the bridge, now demolished. The two bridges,
situated thus close together, augment the peril; the water hurries in
formidable wise through the arches. It rolls in vast and terrible
waves; it accumulates and piles up there; the flood attacks the piles
of the bridges as though in an effort to pluck them up with great
liquid ropes. Men who fall in there never reappear; the best of
swimmers are drowned there.
Javert leaned both elbows on the parapet, his chin resting in both
hands, and, while his nails were mechanically twined in the abundance
of his whiskers, he meditated.
A novelty, a revolution, a catastrophe had just taken place in the
depths of his being; and he had something upon which to examine
himself.
Javert was undergoing horrible suffering.
For several hours, Javert had ceased to be simple. He was troubled;
that brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; that
crystal was clouded. Javert felt duty divided within his conscience,
and he could not conceal the fact from himself. When he had so
unexpectedly encountered Jean Valjean on the banks of the Seine, there
had been in him something of the wolf which regains his grip on his
prey, and of the dog who finds his master again.