Les Misérables
and which, after having struck midday, or midnight,—midday, the hour of
the sun, or midnight, the hour of love,—or any other hour that you
like, gave you the moon and the stars, the earth and the sea, birds and
fishes, Phœbus and Phœbe, and a host of things which emerged from a
niche, and the twelve apostles, and the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and
Éponine, and Sabinus, and a throng of little gilded goodmen, who played
on the trumpet to boot. Without reckoning delicious chimes which it
sprinkled through the air, on every occasion, without any one’s knowing
why. Is a petty bald clock-face which merely tells the hour equal to
that? For my part, I am of the opinion of the big clock of Strasburg,
and I prefer it to the cuckoo clock from the Black Forest.”
M. Gillenormand talked nonsense in connection with the wedding, and all
the fripperies of the eighteenth century passed pell-mell through his
dithyrambs.
“You are ignorant of the art of festivals. You do not know how to
organize a day of enjoyment in this age,” he exclaimed. “Your
nineteenth century is weak. It lacks excess. It ignores the rich, it
ignores the noble. In everything it is clean-shaven. Your third estate
is insipid, colorless, odorless, and shapeless. The dreams of your
bourgeois who set up, as they express it: a pretty boudoir freshly
decorated, violet, ebony and calico. Make way! Make way! the Sieur
Curmudgeon is marrying Mademoiselle Clutch-penny. Sumptuousness and
splendor. A louis d’or has been stuck to a candle. There’s the epoch
for you. My demand is that I may flee from it beyond the Sarmatians.
Ah! in 1787, I predict that all was lost, from the day when I beheld
the Duc de Rohan, Prince de Léon, Duc de Chabot, Duc de Montbazon,
Marquis de Soubise, Vicomte de Thouars, peer of France, go to
Longchamps in a tapecu! That has borne its fruits. In this century, men
attend to business, they gamble on ’Change, they win money, they are
stingy. People take care of their surfaces and varnish them; every one
is dressed as though just out of a bandbox, washed, soaped, scraped,
shaved, combed, waked, smoothed, rubbed, brushed, cleaned on the
outside, irreproachable, polished as a pebble, discreet, neat, and at
the same time, death of my life, in the depths of their consciences
they have dung-heaps and cesspools that are enough to make a cow-herd
who blows his nose in his fingers, recoil. I grant to this age the
device: ‘Dirty Cleanliness.’ Don’t be vexed, Marius, give me permission
to speak; I say no evil of the people as you see, I am always harping
on your people, but do look favorably on my dealing a bit of a slap to
the bourgeoisie. I belong to it. He who loves well lashes well.
Thereupon, I say plainly, that nowadays people marry, but that they no
longer know how to marry. Ah! it is true, I regret the grace of the
ancient manners. I regret everything about them, their elegance, their
chivalry, those courteous and delicate ways, that joyous luxury which
every one possessed, music forming part of the wedding, a symphony
above stairs, a beating of drums below stairs, the dances, the joyous
faces round the table, the fine-spun gallant compliments, the songs,
the fireworks, the frank laughter, the devil’s own row, the huge knots
of ribbon. I regret the bride’s garter. The bride’s garter is cousin to
the girdle of Venus. On what does the war of Troy turn? On Helen’s
garter, parbleu! Why did they fight, why did Diomed the divine break
over the head of Meriones that great brazen helmet of ten points? why
did Achilles and Hector hew each other up with vast blows of their
lances? Because Helen allowed Paris to take her garter. With Cosette’s
garter, Homer would construct the _Iliad_. He would put in his poem, a
loquacious old fellow, like me, and he would call him Nestor. My
friends, in bygone days, in those amiable days of yore, people married
wisely; they had a good contract, and then they had a good carouse. As
soon as Cujas had taken his departure, Gamacho entered. But, in sooth!
the stomach is an agreeable beast which demands its due, and which
wants to have its wedding also. People supped well, and had at table a
beautiful neighbor without a guimpe so that her throat was only
moderately concealed. Oh! the large laughing mouths, and how gay we
were in those days! youth was a bouquet; every young man terminated in
a branch of lilacs or a tuft of roses; whether he was a shepherd or a
warrior; and if, by chance, one was a captain of dragoons, one found
means to call oneself Florian. People thought much of looking well.
They embroidered and tinted themselves. A bourgeois had the air of a
flower, a Marquis had the air of a precious stone. People had no straps
to their boots, they had no boots. They were spruce, shining, waved,
lustrous, fluttering, dainty, coquettish, which did not at all prevent
their wearing swords by their sides. The humming-bird has beak and
claws. That was the day of the _Galland Indies_. One of the sides of
that century was delicate, the other was magnificent; and by the green
cabbages! people amused themselves. To-day, people are serious. The
bourgeois is avaricious, the bourgeoise is a prude; your century is
unfortunate. People would drive away the Graces as being too low in the
neck. Alas! beauty is concealed as though it were ugliness. Since the
revolution, everything, including the ballet-dancers, has had its
trousers; a mountebank dancer must be grave; your rigadoons are
doctrinarian. It is necessary to be majestic. People would be greatly
annoyed if they did not carry their chins in their cravats. The ideal
of an urchin of twenty when he marries, is to resemble M.
Royer-Collard. And do you know what one arrives at with that majesty?
at being petty. Learn this: joy is not only joyous; it is great. But be
in love gayly then, what the deuce! marry, when you marry, with fever
and giddiness, and tumult, and the uproar of happiness! Be grave in
church, well and good. But, as soon as the mass is finished, sarpejou!
you must make a dream whirl around the bride. A marriage should be
royal and chimerical; it should promenade its ceremony from the
cathedral of Rheims to the pagoda of Chanteloup. I have a horror of a
paltry wedding. Ventregoulette! be in Olympus for that one day, at
least. Be one of the gods. Ah! people might be sylphs. Games and
Laughter, argiraspides; they are stupids. My friends, every recently
made bridegroom ought to be Prince Aldobrandini. Profit by that unique
minute in life to soar away to the empyrean with the swans and the
eagles, even if you do have to fall back on the morrow into the
bourgeoisie of the frogs. Don’t economize on the nuptials, do not prune
them of their splendors; don’t scrimp on the day when you beam. The
wedding is not the housekeeping. Oh! if I were to carry out my fancy,
it would be gallant, violins would be heard under the trees. Here is my
programme: sky-blue and silver. I would mingle with the festival the
rural divinities, I would convoke the Dryads and the Nereids. The
nuptials of Amphitrite, a rosy cloud, nymphs with well dressed locks
and entirely naked, an Academician offering quatrains to the goddess, a
chariot drawn by marine monsters.
“Triton trottait devant, et tirait de sa conque
Des sons si ravissants qu’il ravissait quiconque!”65
—there’s a festive programme, there’s a good one, or else I know
nothing of such matters, deuce take it!”
While the grandfather, in full lyrical effusion, was listening to
himself, Cosette and Marius grew intoxicated as they gazed freely at
each other.
Aunt Gillenormand surveyed all this with her imperturbable placidity.
Within the last five or six months she had experienced a certain amount
of emotions. Marius returned, Marius brought back bleeding, Marius
brought back from a barricade, Marius dead, then living, Marius
reconciled, Marius betrothed, Marius wedding a poor girl, Marius
wedding a millionairess. The six hundred thousand francs had been her
last surprise. Then, her indifference of a girl taking her first
communion returned to her. She went regularly to service, told her
beads, read her euchology, mumbled _Aves_ in one corner of the house,
while _I love you_ was being whispered in the other, and she beheld
Marius and Cosette in a vague way, like two shadows. The shadow was
herself.
There is a certain state of inert asceticism in which the soul,
neutralized by torpor, a stranger to that which may be designated as
the business of living, receives no impressions, either human, or
pleasant or painful, with the exception of earthquakes and
catastrophes. This devotion, as Father Gillenormand said to his
daughter, corresponds to a cold in the head. You smell nothing of life.
Neither any bad, nor any good odor.
Moreover, the six hundred thousand francs had settled the elderly
spinster’s indecision. Her father had acquired the habit of taking her
so little into account, that he had not consulted her in the matter of
consent to Marius’ marriage. He had acted impetuously, according to his
wont, having, a despot-turned slave, but a single thought,—to satisfy
Marius. As for the aunt,—it had not even occurred to him that the aunt
existed, and that she could have an opinion of her own, and, sheep as
she was, this had vexed her. Somewhat resentful in her inmost soul, but
impassible externally, she had said to herself: “My father has settled
the question of the marriage without reference to me; I shall settle
the question of the inheritance without consulting him.” She was rich,
in fact, and her father was not. She had reserved her decision on this
point. It is probable that, had the match been a poor one, she would
have left him poor. “So much the worse for my nephew! he is wedding a
beggar, let him be a beggar himself!” But Cosette’s half-million
pleased the aunt, and altered her inward situation so far as this pair
of lovers were concerned. One owes some consideration to six hundred
thousand francs, and it was evident that she could not do otherwise
than leave her fortune to these young people, since they did not need
it.
It was arranged that the couple should live with the grandfather—M.
Gillenormand insisted on resigning to them his chamber, the finest in
the house. “That will make me young again,” he said. “It’s an old plan
of mine. I have always entertained the idea of having a wedding in my
chamber.”
He furnished this chamber with a multitude of elegant trifles. He had
the ceiling and walls hung with an extraordinary stuff, which he had by
him in the piece, and which he believed to have emanated from Utrecht
with a buttercup-colored satin ground, covered with velvet auricula
blossoms.—“It was with that stuff,” said he, “that the bed of the
Duchesse d’Anville at la Roche-Guyon was draped.”—On the chimney-piece,
he set a little figure in Saxe porcelain, carrying a muff against her
nude stomach.
M. Gillenormand’s library became the lawyer’s study, which Marius
needed; a study, it will be remembered, being required by the council
of the order.
CHAPTER VII—THE EFFECTS OF DREAMS MINGLED WITH HAPPINESS
The lovers saw each other every day. Cosette came with M.
Fauchelevent.—“This is reversing things,” said Mademoiselle
Gillenormand, “to have the bride come to the house to do the courting
like this.” But Marius’ convalescence had caused the habit to become
established, and the armchairs of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire,
better adapted to interviews than the straw chairs of the Rue de
l’Homme Armé, had rooted it. Marius and M. Fauchelevent saw each other,
but did not address each other. It seemed as though this had been
agreed upon. Every girl needs a chaperon. Cosette could not have come
without M. Fauchelevent. In Marius’ eyes, M. Fauchelevent was the