Les Misérables
Columbines, jolted along high above the passers-by, all possible
grotesquenesses, from the Turk to the savage, Hercules supporting
Marquises, fishwives who would have made Rabelais stop up his ears just
as the Mænads made Aristophanes drop his eyes, tow wigs, pink tights,
dandified hats, spectacles of a grimacer, three-cornered hats of Janot
tormented with a butterfly, shouts directed at pedestrians, fists on
hips, bold attitudes, bare shoulders, immodesty unchained; a chaos of
shamelessness driven by a coachman crowned with flowers; this is what
that institution was like.
Greece stood in need of the chariot of Thespis, France stands in need
of the hackney-coach of Vadé.
Everything can be parodied, even parody. The Saturnalia, that grimace
of antique beauty, ends, through exaggeration after exaggeration, in
Shrove Tuesday; and the Bacchanal, formerly crowned with sprays of vine
leaves and grapes, inundated with sunshine, displaying her marble
breast in a divine semi-nudity, having at the present day lost her
shape under the soaked rags of the North, has finally come to be called
the Jack-pudding.
The tradition of carriage-loads of maskers runs back to the most
ancient days of the monarchy. The accounts of Louis XI. allot to the
bailiff of the palace “twenty sous, Tournois, for three coaches of
mascarades in the crossroads.” In our day, these noisy heaps of
creatures are accustomed to have themselves driven in some ancient
cuckoo carriage, whose imperial they load down, or they overwhelm a
hired landau, with its top thrown back, with their tumultuous groups.
Twenty of them ride in a carriage intended for six. They cling to the
seats, to the rumble, on the cheeks of the hood, on the shafts. They
even bestride the carriage lamps. They stand, sit, lie, with their
knees drawn up in a knot, and their legs hanging. The women sit on the
men’s laps. Far away, above the throng of heads, their wild pyramid is
visible. These carriage-loads form mountains of mirth in the midst of
the rout. Collé, Panard and Piron flow from it, enriched with slang.
This carriage which has become colossal through its freight, has an air
of conquest. Uproar reigns in front, tumult behind. People vociferate,
shout, howl, there they break forth and writhe with enjoyment; gayety
roars; sarcasm flames forth, joviality is flaunted like a red flag; two
jades there drag farce blossomed forth into an apotheosis; it is the
triumphal car of laughter.
A laughter that is too cynical to be frank. In truth, this laughter is
suspicious. This laughter has a mission. It is charged with proving the
Carnival to the Parisians.
These fishwife vehicles, in which one feels one knows not what shadows,
set the philosopher to thinking. There is government therein. There one
lays one’s finger on a mysterious affinity between public men and
public women.
It certainly is sad that turpitude heaped up should give a sum total of
gayety, that by piling ignominy upon opprobrium the people should be
enticed, that the system of spying, and serving as caryatids to
prostitution should amuse the rabble when it confronts them, that the
crowd loves to behold that monstrous living pile of tinsel rags, half
dung, half light, roll by on four wheels howling and laughing, that
they should clap their hands at this glory composed of all shames, that
there would be no festival for the populace, did not the police
promenade in their midst these sorts of twenty-headed hydras of joy.
But what can be done about it? These be-ribboned and be-flowered
tumbrils of mire are insulted and pardoned by the laughter of the
public. The laughter of all is the accomplice of universal degradation.
Certain unhealthy festivals disaggregate the people and convert them
into the populace. And populaces, like tyrants, require buffoons. The
King has Roquelaure, the populace has the Merry-Andrew. Paris is a
great, mad city on every occasion that it is a great sublime city.
There the Carnival forms part of politics. Paris,—let us confess
it—willingly allows infamy to furnish it with comedy. She only demands
of her masters—when she has masters—one thing: “Paint me the mud.” Rome
was of the same mind. She loved Nero. Nero was a titanic lighterman.
Chance ordained, as we have just said, that one of these shapeless
clusters of masked men and women, dragged about on a vast calash,
should halt on the left of the boulevard, while the wedding train
halted on the right. The carriage-load of masks caught sight of the
wedding carriage containing the bridal party opposite them on the other
side of the boulevard.
“Hullo!” said a masker, “here’s a wedding.”
“A sham wedding,” retorted another. “We are the genuine article.”
And, being too far off to accost the wedding party, and fearing also,
the rebuke of the police, the two maskers turned their eyes elsewhere.
At the end of another minute, the carriage-load of maskers had their
hands full, the multitude set to yelling, which is the crowd’s caress
to masquerades; and the two maskers who had just spoken had to face the
throng with their comrades, and did not find the entire repertory of
projectiles of the fishmarkets too extensive to retort to the enormous
verbal attacks of the populace. A frightful exchange of metaphors took
place between the maskers and the crowd.
In the meanwhile, two other maskers in the same carriage, a Spaniard
with an enormous nose, an elderly air, and huge black moustache, and a
gaunt fishwife, who was quite a young girl, masked with a _loup_,67 had
also noticed the wedding, and while their companions and the passers-by
were exchanging insults, they had held a dialogue in a low voice.
Their aside was covered by the tumult and was lost in it. The gusts of
rain had drenched the front of the vehicle, which was wide open; the
breezes of February are not warm; as the fishwife, clad in a low-necked
gown, replied to the Spaniard, she shivered, laughed and coughed.
Here is their dialogue:
“Say, now.”
“What, daddy?”
“Do you see that old cove?”
“What old cove?”
“Yonder, in the first wedding-cart, on our side.”
“The one with his arm hung up in a black cravat?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“I’m sure that I know him.”
“Ah!”
“I’m willing that they should cut my throat, and I’m ready to swear
that I never said either you, thou, or I, in my life, if I don’t know
that Parisian.” [_pantinois_.]
“Paris in Pantin to-day.”
“Can you see the bride if you stoop down?”
“No.”
“And the bridegroom?”
“There’s no bridegroom in that trap.”
“Bah!”
“Unless it’s the old fellow.”
“Try to get a sight of the bride by stooping very low.”
“I can’t.”
“Never mind, that old cove who has something the matter with his paw I
know, and that I’m positive.”
“And what good does it do to know him?”
“No one can tell. Sometimes it does!”
“I don’t care a hang for old fellows, that I don’t!”
“I know him.”
“Know him, if you want to.”
“How the devil does he come to be one of the wedding party?”
“We are in it, too.”
“Where does that wedding come from?”
“How should I know?”
“Listen.”
“Well, what?”
“There’s one thing you ought to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Get off of our trap and spin that wedding.”
“What for?”
“To find out where it goes, and what it is. Hurry up and jump down,
trot, my girl, your legs are young.”
“I can’t quit the vehicle.”
“Why not?”
“I’m hired.”
“Ah, the devil!”
“I owe my fishwife day to the prefecture.”
“That’s true.”
“If I leave the cart, the first inspector who gets his eye on me will
arrest me. You know that well enough.”
“Yes, I do.”
“I’m bought by the government for to-day.”
“All the same, that old fellow bothers me.”
“Do the old fellows bother you? But you’re not a young girl.”
“He’s in the first carriage.”
“Well?”
“In the bride’s trap.”
“What then?”
“So he is the father.”
“What concern is that of mine?”
“I tell you that he’s the father.”
“As if he were the only father.”
“Listen.”
“What?”
“I can’t go out otherwise than masked. Here I’m concealed, no one knows
that I’m here. But to-morrow, there will be no more maskers. It’s Ash
Wednesday. I run the risk of being nabbed. I must sneak back into my
hole. But you are free.”
“Not particularly.”
“More than I am, at any rate.”
“Well, what of that?”
“You must try to find out where that wedding party went to.”
“Where it went?”
“Yes.”
“I know.”
“Where is it going then?”
“To the Cadran-Bleu.”
“In the first place, it’s not in that direction.”
“Well! to la Rapée.”
“Or elsewhere.”
“It’s free. Wedding parties are at liberty.”
“That’s not the point at all. I tell you that you must try to learn for
me what that wedding is, who that old cove belongs to, and where that
wedding pair lives.”
“I like that! that would be queer. It’s so easy to find out a wedding
party that passed through the street on a Shrove Tuesday, a week
afterwards. A pin in a hay-mow! It ain’t possible!”
“That don’t matter. You must try. You understand me, Azelma.”
The two files resumed their movement on both sides of the boulevard, in
opposite directions, and the carriage of the maskers lost sight of the
“trap” of the bride.
CHAPTER II—JEAN VALJEAN STILL WEARS HIS ARM IN A SLING
To realize one’s dream. To whom is this accorded? There must be
elections for this in heaven; we are all candidates, unknown to
ourselves; the angels vote. Cosette and Marius had been elected.
Cosette, both at the mayor’s office and at church, was dazzling and
touching. Toussaint, assisted by Nicolette, had dressed her.
Cosette wore over a petticoat of white taffeta, her robe of Binche
guipure, a veil of English point, a necklace of fine pearls, a wreath
of orange flowers; all this was white, and, from the midst of that
whiteness she beamed forth. It was an exquisite candor expanding and
becoming transfigured in the light. One would have pronounced her a
virgin on the point of turning into a goddess.
Marius’ handsome hair was lustrous and perfumed; here and there,
beneath the thick curls, pale lines—the scars of the barricade—were
visible.
The grandfather, haughty, with head held high, amalgamating more than
ever in his toilet and his manners all the elegances of the epoch of
Barras, escorted Cosette. He took the place of Jean Valjean, who, on
account of his arm being still in a sling, could not give his hand to
the bride.
Jean Valjean, dressed in black, followed them with a smile.
“Monsieur Fauchelevent,” said the grandfather to him, “this is a fine
day. I vote for the end of afflictions and sorrows. Henceforth, there
must be no sadness anywhere. Pardieu, I decree joy! Evil has no right
to exist. That there should be any unhappy men is, in sooth, a disgrace
to the azure of the sky. Evil does not come from man, who is good at
bottom. All human miseries have for their capital and central
government hell, otherwise, known as the Devil’s Tuileries. Good, here
I am uttering demagogical words! As far as I am concerned, I have no
longer any political opinions; let all men be rich, that is to say,
mirthful, and I confine myself to that.”
When, at the conclusion of all the ceremonies, after having pronounced
before the mayor and before the priest all possible “yesses,” after
having signed the registers at the municipality and at the sacristy,
after having exchanged their rings, after having knelt side by side
under the pall of white moire in the smoke of the censer, they arrived,
hand in hand, admired and envied by all, Marius in black, she in white,
preceded by the suisse, with the epaulets of a colonel, tapping the