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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 Caesar 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 fouriers[32] who do nothing but prepare lodgings for principles.


[32] In olden times, fouriers were the officials who preceded
the Court and allotted the lodgings.


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.

A capital error which led this family to lay its hand once more
on the guarantees "granted" in 1814, on the concessions, as it
termed them.  Sad.  A sad thing!  What it termed its concessions
were our conquests; what it termed our encroachments were our rights.

When the hour seemed to it to have come, the Restoration,
supposing itself victorious over Bonaparte and well-rooted in
the country, that is to say, believing itself to be strong and deep,
abruptly decided on its plan of action, and risked its stroke.
One morning it drew itself up before the face of France, and, elevating
its voice, it contested the collective title and the individual
right of the nation to sovereignty, of the citizen to liberty.
In other words, it denied to the nation that which made it a nation,
and to the citizen that which made him a citizen.

This is the foundation of those famous acts which are called
the ordinances of July.  The Restoration fell.

It fell justly.  But, we admit, it had not been absolutely hostile
to all forms of progress.  Great things had been accomplished,
with it alongside.

Under the Restoration, the nation had grown accustomed to calm discussion,
which had been lacking under the Republic, and to grandeur in peace,
which had been wanting under the Empire.  France free and strong
had offered an encouraging spectacle to the other peoples of Europe.
The Revolution had had the word under Robespierre; the cannon
had had the word under Bonaparte; it was under Louis XVIII.
and Charles X. that it was the turn of intelligence to have
the word.  The wind ceased, the torch was lighted once more.
On the lofty heights, the pure light of mind could be seen flickering.
A magnificent, useful, and charming spectacle.  For a space of
fifteen years, those great principles which are so old for the thinker,
so new for the statesman, could be seen at work in perfect peace,
on the public square; equality before the law, liberty of conscience,
liberty of speech, liberty of the press, the accessibility of
all aptitudes to all functions.  Thus it proceeded until 1830.
The Bourbons were an instrument of civilization which broke in the
hands of Providence.

The fall of the Bourbons was full of grandeur, not on their side,
but on the side of the nation.  They quitted the throne with gravity,
but without authority; their descent into the night was not one of
those solemn disappearances which leave a sombre emotion in history;
it was neither the spectral calm of Charles I., nor the eagle scream
of Napoleon.  They departed, that is all.  They laid down the crown,
and retained no aureole.  They were worthy, but they were not august.
They lacked, in a certain measure, the majesty of their misfortune.
Charles X. during the voyage from Cherbourg, causing a round table
to be cut over into a square table, appeared to be more anxious
about imperilled etiquette than about the crumbling monarchy.
This diminution saddened devoted men who loved their persons, and serious
men who honored their race.  The populace was admirable.  The nation,
attacked one morning with weapons, by a sort of royal insurrection,
felt itself in the possession of so much force that it did not go
into a rage.  It defended itself, restrained itself, restored things
to their places, the government to law, the Bourbons to exile, alas! and
then halted!  It took the old king Charles X. from beneath that dais
which had sheltered Louis XIV.  and set him gently on the ground.
It touched the royal personages only with sadness and precaution.
It was not one man, it was not a few men, it was France,
France entire, France victorious and intoxicated with her victory,
who seemed to be coming to herself, and who put into practice,
before the eyes of the whole world, these grave words of Guillaume
du Vair after the day of the Barricades:--

"It is easy for those who are accustomed to skim the favors
of the great, and to spring, like a bird from bough to bough,
from an afflicted fortune to a flourishing one, to show themselves
harsh towards their Prince in his adversity; but as for me,
the fortune of my Kings and especially of my afflicted Kings,
will always be venerable to me."

The Bourbons carried away with them respect, but not regret.
As we have just stated, their misfortune was greater than they were.
They faded out in the horizon.

The Revolution of July instantly had friends and enemies throughout
the entire world.  The first rushed toward her with joy and enthusiasm,
the others turned away, each according to his nature.  At the first blush,
the princes of Europe, the owls of this dawn, shut their eyes,
wounded and stupefied, and only opened them to threaten.
A fright which can be comprehended, a wrath which can be pardoned.
This strange revolution had hardly produced a shock; it had not even
paid to vanquished royalty the honor of treating it as an enemy,
and of shedding its blood.  In the eyes of despotic governments,
who are always interested in having liberty calumniate itself,
the Revolution of July committed the fault of being formidable
and of remaining gentle.  Nothing, however, was attempted or
plotted against it.  The most discontented, the most irritated,
the most trembling, saluted it; whatever our egotism and our rancor
may be, a mysterious respect springs from events in which we are
sensible of the collaboration of some one who is working above man.

The Revolution of July is the triumph of right overthrowing the fact.
A thing which is full of splendor.

Right overthrowing the fact.  Hence the brilliancy of the Revolution
of 1830, hence, also, its mildness.  Right triumphant has no need
of being violent.

Right is the just and the true.

The property of right is to remain eternally beautiful and pure.
The fact, even when most necessary to all appearances, even when most
thoroughly accepted by contemporaries, if it exist only as a fact,
and if it contain only too little of right, or none at all,
is infallibly destined to become, in the course of time, deformed,
impure, perhaps, even monstrous.  If one desires to learn at one blow,
to what degree of hideousness the fact can attain, viewed at the
distance of centuries, let him look at Machiavelli.  Machiavelli is
not an evil genius, nor a demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer;
he is nothing but the fact.  And he is not only the Italian fact;
he is the European fact, the fact of the sixteenth century.
He seems hideous, and so he is, in the presence of the moral idea
of the nineteenth.

This conflict of right and fact has been going on ever since the origin
of society.  To terminate this duel, to amalgamate the pure idea
with the humane reality, to cause right to penetrate pacifically
into the fact and the fact into right, that is the task of sages.



CHAPTER II

BADLY SEWED


But the task of sages is one thing, the task of clever men is another.
The Revolution of 1830 came to a sudden halt.

As soon as a revolution has made the coast, the skilful make haste
to prepare the shipwreck.

The skilful in our century have conferred on themselves the title
of Statesmen; so that this word, statesmen, has ended by becoming
somewhat of a slang word.  It must be borne in mind, in fact,
that wherever there is nothing but skill, there is necessarily pettiness.
To say "the skilful" amounts to saying "the mediocre."

In the same way, to say "statesmen" is sometimes equivalent
to saying "traitors."  If, then, we are to believe the skilful,
revolutions like the Revolution of July are severed arteries; a prompt
ligature is indispensable.  The right, too grandly proclaimed, is shaken.
Also, right once firmly fixed, the state must be strengthened.
Liberty once assured, attention must be directed to power.

Here the sages are not, as yet, separated from the skilful,
but they begin to be distrustful.  Power, very good.  But, in the
first place, what is power?  In the second, whence comes it?
The skilful do not seem to hear the murmured objection, and they
continue their manoeuvres.

According to the politicians, who are ingenious in putting the
mask of necessity on profitable fictions, the first requirement
of a people after a revolution, when this people forms part
of a monarchical continent, is to procure for itself a dynasty.
In this way, say they, peace, that is to say, time to dress
our wounds, and to repair the house, can be had after a revolution.
The dynasty conceals the scaffolding and covers the ambulance.
Now, it is not always easy to procure a dynasty.

If it is absolutely necessary, the first man of genius or even the first
man of fortune who comes to hand suffices for the manufacturing of
a king.  You have, in the first case, Napoleon; in the second, Iturbide.

But the first family that comes to hand does not suffice to make
a dynasty.  There is necessarily required a certain modicum of antiquity
in a race, and the wrinkle of the centuries cannot be improvised.

If we place ourselves at the point of view of the "statesmen," after
making all allowances, of course, after a revolution, what are the
qualities of the king which result from it?  He may be and it is useful
for him to be a revolutionary; that is to say, a participant in his
own person in that revolution, that he should have lent a hand to it,
that he should have either compromised or distinguished himself therein,
that he should have touched the axe or wielded the sword in it.

What are the qualities of a dynasty?  It should be national; that is
to say, revolutionary at a distance, not through acts committed,
but by reason of ideas accepted.  It should be composed of past
and be historic; be composed of future and be sympathetic.

All this explains why the early revolutions contented themselves
with finding a man, Cromwell or Napoleon; and why the second
absolutely insisted on finding a family, the House of Brunswick
or the House of Orleans.

Royal houses resemble those Indian fig-trees, each branch of which,
bending over to the earth, takes root and becomes a fig-tree itself.
Each branch may become a dynasty.  On the sole condition that it shall
bend down to the people.

Such is the theory of the skilful.

Here, then, lies the great art:  to make a little render to success
the sound of a catastrophe in order that those who profit by it may
tremble from it also, to season with fear every step that is taken,
to augment the curve of the transition to the point of retarding progress,
to dull that aurora, to denounce and retrench the harshness of enthusiasm,
to cut all angles and nails, to wad triumph, to muffle up right,
to envelop the giant-people in flannel, and to put it to bed
very speedily, to impose a diet on that excess of health, to put
Hercules on the treatment of a convalescent, to dilute the event
with the expedient, to offer to spirits thirsting for the ideal
that nectar thinned out with a potion, to take one's precautions
against too much success, to garnish the revolution with a shade.

1830 practised this theory, already applied to England by 1688.

1830 is a revolution arrested midway.  Half of progress, quasi-right. Now,
logic knows not the "almost," absolutely as the sun knows not the candle.

Who arrests revolutions half-way? The bourgeoisie?

Why?

Because the bourgeoisie is interest which has reached satisfaction.
Yesterday it was appetite, to-day it is plenitude, to-morrow it will
be satiety.

The phenomenon of 1814 after Napoleon was reproduced in 1830 after
Charles X.

The attempt has been made, and wrongly, to make a class of
the bourgeoisie.  The bourgeoisie is simply the contented portion
of the people.  The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down.
A chair is not a caste.

But through a desire to sit down too soon, one may arrest the very march
of the human race.  This has often been the fault of the bourgeoisie.

One is not a class because one has committed a fault.  Selfishness is
not one of the divisions of the social order.

Moreover, we must be just to selfishness.  The state to which
that part of the nation which is called the bourgeoisie aspired
after the shock of 1830 was not the inertia which is complicated
with indifference and laziness, and which contains a little shame;
it was not the slumber which presupposes a momentary forgetfulness
accessible to dreams; it was the halt.

The halt is a word formed of a singular double
and almost contradictory sense:  a troop
on the march, that is to say, movement; a stand, that is to say, repose.

The halt is the restoration of forces; it is repose armed and on
the alert; it is the accomplished fact which posts sentinels
and holds itself on its guard.

The halt presupposes the combat of yesterday and the combat of to-morrow.

It is the partition between 1830 and 1848.

What we here call combat may also be designated as progress.

The bourgeoisie then, as well as the statesmen, required a man
who should express this word Halt.  An Although-Because.
A composite individuality, signifying revolution and
signifying stability, in other terms, strengthening
the present by the evident compatibility of the past with the future.

This man was "already found."  His name was Louis Philippe d'Orleans.

The 221 made Louis Philippe King.  Lafayette undertook the coronation.

He called it the best of republics.  The town-hall of Paris took
the place of the Cathedral of Rheims.

This substitution of a half-throne for a whole throne was "the work
of 1830."

When the skilful had finished, the immense vice of their
solution became apparent.  All this had been accomplished
outside the bounds of absolute right.  Absolute right cried:
"I protest!" then, terrible to say, it retired into the darkness.



CHAPTER III

LOUIS PHILIPPE


Revolutions have a terrible arm and a happy hand, they strike firmly
and choose well.  Even incomplete, even debased and abused and reduced
to the state of a junior revolution like the Revolution of 1830,
they nearly always retain sufficient providential lucidity to prevent
them from falling amiss.  Their eclipse is never an abdication.

Nevertheless, let us not boast too loudly; revolutions also may
be deceived, and grave errors have been seen.

Let us return to 1830.  1830, in its deviation, had good luck.
In the establishment which entitled itself order after the revolution
had been cut short, the King amounted to more than royalty.
Louis Philippe was a rare man.

The son of a father to whom history will accord certain attenuating
circumstances, but also as worthy of esteem as that father had been
of blame; possessing all private virtues and many public virtues;
careful of his health, of his fortune, of his person, of his affairs,
knowing the value of a minute and not always the value of a year;
sober, serene, peaceable, patient; a good man and a good prince;
sleeping with his wife, and having in his palace lackeys charged
with the duty of showing the conjugal bed to the bourgeois,
an ostentation of the regular sleeping-apartment which had become
useful after the former illegitimate displays of the elder branch;
knowing all the languages of Europe, and, what is more rare,
all the languages of all interests, and speaking them; an admirable
representative of the "middle class," but outstripping it, and in every
way greater than it; possessing excellent sense, while appreciating
the blood from which he had sprung, counting most of all on his
intrinsic worth, and, on the question of his race, very particular,
declaring himself Orleans and not Bourbon; thoroughly the first
Prince of the Blood Royal while he was still only a Serene Highness,
but a frank bourgeois from the day he became king; diffuse in public,
concise in private; reputed, but not proved to be a miser;
at bottom, one of those economists who are readily prodigal at their
own fancy or duty; lettered, but not very sensitive to letters;
a gentleman, but not a chevalier; simple, calm, and strong;
adored by his family and his household; a fascinating talker,
an undeceived statesman, inwardly cold, dominated by immediate interest,
always governing at the shortest range, incapable of rancor and
of gratitude, making use without mercy of superiority on mediocrity,
clever in getting parliamentary majorities to put in the wrong
those mysterious unanimities which mutter dully under thrones;
unreserved, sometimes imprudent in his lack of reserve, but with
marvellous address in that imprudence; fertile in expedients,
in countenances, in masks; making France fear Europe and Europe France!
Incontestably fond of his country, but preferring his family;
assuming more domination than authority and more authority than dignity,
a disposition which has this unfortunate property, that as it turns
everything to success, it admits of ruse and does not absolutely
repudiate baseness, but which has this valuable side, that it
preserves politics from violent shocks, the state from fractures,
and society from catastrophes; minute, correct, vigilant, attentive,
sagacious, indefatigable; contradicting himself at times and giving
himself the lie; bold against Austria at Ancona, obstinate against
England in Spain, bombarding Antwerp, and paying off Pritchard;
singing the Marseillaise with conviction, inaccessible to despondency,
to lassitude, to the taste for the beautiful and the ideal,
to daring generosity, to Utopia, to chimeras, to wrath, to vanity,
to fear; possessing all the forms of personal intrepidity; a general
at Valmy; a soldier at Jemappes; attacked eight times by regicides
and always smiling.  brave as a grenadier, courageous as a thinker;
uneasy only in the face of the chances of a European shaking up,
and unfitted for great political adventures; always ready to risk
his life, never his work; disguising his will in influence, in order
that he might be obeyed as an intelligence rather than as a king;
endowed with observation and not with divination; not very attentive
to minds, but knowing men, that is to say requiring to see in order
to judge; prompt and penetrating good sense, practical wisdom,
easy speech, prodigious memory; drawing incessantly on this memory,
his only point of resemblance with Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon;
knowing deeds, facts, details, dates, proper names, ignorant
of tendencies, passions, the diverse geniuses of the crowd,
the interior aspirations, the hidden and obscure uprisings of souls,
in a word, all that can be designated as the invisible currents
of consciences; accepted by the surface, but little in accord
with France lower down; extricating himself by dint of tact;
governing too much and not enough; his own first minister;
excellent at creating out of the pettiness of realities an obstacle
to the immensity of ideas; mingling a genuine creative faculty
of civilization, of order and organization, an indescribable spirit
of proceedings and chicanery, the founder and lawyer of a dynasty;
having something of Charlemagne and something of an attorney; in short,
a lofty and original figure, a prince who understood how to create
authority in spite of the uneasiness of France, and power in spite
of the jealousy of Europe.  Louis Philippe will be classed among
the eminent men of his century, and would be ranked among the most
illustrious governors of history had he loved glory but a little,
and if he had had the sentiment of what is great to the same degree
as the feeling for what is useful.

Louis Philippe had been handsome, and in his old age he remained graceful;
not always approved by the nation, he always was so by the masses;
he pleased.  He had that gift of charming.  He lacked majesty; he wore
no crown, although a king, and no white hair, although an old man;
his manners belonged to the old regime and his habits to the new;
a mixture of the noble and the bourgeois which suited 1830;
Louis Philippe was transition reigning; he had preserved the
ancient pronunciation and the ancient orthography which he placed
at the service of opinions modern; he loved Poland and Hungary,
but he wrote les Polonois, and he pronounced les Hongrais.  He wore
the uniform of the national guard, like Charles X., and the ribbon
of the Legion of Honor, like Napoleon.

He went a little to chapel, not at all to the chase, never to the opera.
Incorruptible by sacristans, by whippers-in, by ballet-dancers;
this made a part of his bourgeois popularity.  He had no heart.
He went out with his umbrella under his arm, and this umbrella
long formed a part of his aureole.  He was a bit of a mason, a bit
of a gardener, something of a doctor; he bled a postilion who had
tumbled from his horse; Louis Philippe no more went about without
his lancet, than did Henri IV.  without his poniard.  The Royalists
jeered at this ridiculous king, the first who had ever shed blood
with the object of healing.

For the grievances against Louis Philippe, there is one deduction
to be made; there is that which accuses royalty, that which
accuses the reign, that which accuses the King; three columns
which all give different totals.  Democratic right confiscated,
progress becomes a matter of secondary interest, the protests of the
street violently repressed, military execution of insurrections,
the rising passed over by arms, the Rue Transnonain, the counsels
of war, the absorption of the real country by the legal country,
on half shares with three hundred thousand privileged persons,--
these are the deeds of royalty; Belgium refused, Algeria too
harshly conquered, and, as in the case of India by the English,
with more barbarism than civilization, the breach of faith,
to Abd-el-Kader, Blaye, Deutz bought, Pritchard paid,--these are
the doings of the reign; the policy which was more domestic than
national was the doing of the King.

As will be seen, the proper deduction having been made, the King's
charge is decreased.

This is his great fault; he was modest in the name of France.

Whence arises this fault?

We will state it.

Louis Philippe was rather too much of a paternal king; that incubation
of a family with the object of founding a dynasty is afraid
of everything and does not like to be disturbed; hence excessive
timidity, which is displeasing to the people, who have the
14th of July in their civil and Austerlitz in their military tradition.

Moreover, if we deduct the public duties which require to be fulfilled
first of all, that deep tenderness of Louis Philippe towards his
family was deserved by the family.  That domestic group was worthy
of admiration.  Virtues there dwelt side by side with talents.
One of Louis Philippe's daughters, Marie d'Orleans, placed the name
of her race among artists, as Charles d'Orleans had placed it
among poets.  She made of her soul a marble which she named Jeanne
d'Arc. Two of Louis Philippe's daughters elicited from Metternich
this eulogium:  "They are young people such as are rarely seen,
and princes such as are never seen."

This, without any dissimulation, and also without any exaggeration,
is the truth about Louis Philippe.

To be Prince Equality, to bear in his own person the contradiction
of the Restoration and the Revolution, to have that disquieting
side of the revolutionary which becomes reassuring in governing
power, therein lay the fortune of Louis Philippe in 1830;
never was there a more complete adaptation of a man to an event;
the one entered into the other, and the incarnation took place.
Louis Philippe is 1830 made man.  Moreover, he had in his favor that
great recommendation to the throne, exile.  He had been proscribed,
a wanderer, poor.  He had lived by his own labor.  In Switzerland,
this heir to the richest princely domains in France had sold an old
horse in order to obtain bread.  At Reichenau, he gave lessons
in mathematics, while his sister Adelaide did wool work and sewed.
These souvenirs connected with a king rendered the bourgeoisie
enthusiastic.  He had, with his own hands, demolished the iron cage
of Mont-Saint-Michel, built by Louis XI, and used by Louis XV.
He was the companion of Dumouriez, he was the friend of Lafayette;
he had belonged to the Jacobins' club; Mirabeau had slapped
him on the shoulder; Danton had said to him:  "Young man!"
At the age of four and twenty, in '93, being then M. de Chartres,
he had witnessed, from the depth of a box, the trial of Louis
XVI., so well named that poor tyrant.  The blind clairvoyance
of the Revolution, breaking royalty in the King and the King
with royalty, did so almost without noticing the man in the fierce
crushing of the idea, the vast storm of the Assembly-Tribunal,
the public wrath interrogating, Capet not knowing what to reply,
the alarming, stupefied vacillation by that royal head beneath that
sombre breath, the relative innocence of all in that catastrophe,
of those who condemned as well as of the man condemned,--he had looked
on those things, he had contemplated that giddiness; he had seen
the centuries appear before the bar of the Assembly-Convention;
he had beheld, behind Louis XVI., that unfortunate passer-by
who was made responsible, the terrible culprit, the monarchy,
rise through the shadows; and there had lingered in his soul
the respectful fear of these immense justices of the populace,
which are almost as impersonal as the justice of God.

The trace left in him by the Revolution was prodigious.  Its memory
was like a living imprint of those great years, minute by minute.
One day, in the presence of a witness whom we are not permitted
to doubt, he rectified from memory the whole of the letter A in the
alphabetical list of the Constituent Assembly.

Louis Philippe was a king of the broad daylight.  While he
reigned the press was free, the tribune was free, conscience and
speech were free.  The laws of September are open to sight.
Although fully aware of the gnawing power of light on privileges,
he left his throne exposed to the light.  History will do justice
to him for this loyalty.

Louis Philippe, like all historical men who have passed from the scene,
is to-day put on his trial by the human conscience.  His case is,
as yet, only in the lower court.

The hour when history speaks with its free and venerable accent,
has not yet sounded for him; the moment has not come to pronounce
a definite judgment on this king; the austere and illustrious
historian Louis Blanc has himself recently softened his first verdict;
Louis Philippe was elected by those two almosts which are called
the 221 and 1830, that is to say, by a half-Parliament, and
a half-revolution; and in any case, from the superior point of view
where philosophy must place itself, we cannot judge him here, as the
reader has seen above, except with certain reservations in the name
of the absolute democratic principle; in the eyes of the absolute,
outside these two rights, the right of man in the first place,
the right of the people in the second, all is usurpation; but what we
can say, even at the present day, that after making these reserves is,
that to sum up the whole, and in whatever manner he is considered,
Louis Philippe, taken in himself, and from the point of view
of human goodness, will remain, to use the antique language
of ancient history, one of the best princes who ever sat on a throne.

What is there against him?  That throne.  Take away Louis Philippe
the king, there remains the man.  And the man is good.  He is good at
times even to the point of being admirable.  Often, in the midst of his
gravest souvenirs, after a day of conflict with the whole diplomacy
of the continent, he returned at night to his apartments, and there,
exhausted with fatigue, overwhelmed with sleep, what did he do?
He took a death sentence and passed the night in revising a criminal suit,
considering it something to hold his own against Europe, but that it
was a still greater matter to rescue a man from the executioner.
He obstinately maintained his opinion against his keeper of the seals;
he disputed the ground with the guillotine foot by foot against the
crown attorneys, those chatterers of the law, as he called them.
Sometimes the pile of sentences covered his table; he examined them all;
it was anguish to him to abandon these miserable, condemned heads.
One day, he said to the same witness to whom we have recently referred:
"I won seven last night."  During the early years of his reign,
the death penalty was as good as abolished, and the erection of a
scaffold was a violence committed against the King.  The Greve having
disappeared with the elder branch, a bourgeois place of execution
was instituted under the name of the Barriere-Saint-Jacques;
"practical men" felt the necessity of a quasi-legitimate guillotine;
and this was one of the victories of Casimir Perier, who represented
the narrow sides of the bourgeoisie, over Louis Philippe,
who represented its liberal sides.  Louis Philippe annotated Beccaria
with his own hand.  After the Fieschi machine, he exclaimed:
"What a pity that I was not wounded!  Then I might have pardoned!"
On another occasion, alluding to the resistance offered by his ministry,
he wrote in connection with a political criminal, who is one of the most
generous figures of our day:  "His pardon is granted; it only remains
for me to obtain it."  Louis Philippe was as gentle as Louis IX.
and as kindly as Henri IV.

Now, to our mind, in history, where kindness is the rarest of pearls,
the man who is kindly almost takes precedence of the man who is great.

Louis Philippe having been severely judged by some, harshly, perhaps,
by others, it is quite natural that a man, himself a phantom at
the present day, who knew that king, should come and testify in his
favor before history; this deposition, whatever else it may be,
is evidently and above all things, entirely disinterested; an epitaph
penned by a dead man is sincere; one shade may console another shade;
the sharing of the same shadows confers the right to praise it;
it is not greatly to be feared that it will ever be said of two
tombs in exile:  "This one flattered the other."



CHAPTER IV

CRACKS BENEATH THE FOUNDATION


At the moment when the drama which we are narrating is on the point
of penetrating into the depths of one of the tragic clouds which
envelop the beginning of Louis Philippe's reign, it was necessary
that there should be no equivoque, and it became requisite that
this book should offer some explanation with regard to this king.

Louis Philippe had entered into possession of his royal authority
without violence, without any direct action on his part, by virtue
of a revolutionary change, evidently quite distinct from the real
aim of the Revolution, but in which he, the Duc d'Orleans,
exercised no personal initiative.  He had been born a Prince,
and he believed himself to have been elected King.  He had not served
this mandate on himself; he had not taken it; it had been offered
to him, and he had accepted it; convinced, wrongly, to be sure,
but convinced nevertheless, that the offer was in accordance with
right and that the acceptance of it was in accordance with duty.
Hence his possession was in good faith.  Now, we say it in
good conscience, Louis Philippe being in possession in perfect
good faith, and the democracy being in good faith in its attack,
the amount of terror discharged by the social conflicts weighs neither
on the King nor on the democracy.  A clash of principles resembles
a clash of elements.  The ocean defends the water, the hurricane
defends the air, the King defends Royalty, the democracy defends
the people; the relative, which is the monarchy, resists the absolute,
which is the republic; society bleeds in this conflict, but that
which constitutes its suffering to-day will constitute its safety
later on; and, in any case, those who combat are not to be blamed;
one of the two parties is evidently mistaken; the right is not,
like the Colossus of Rhodes, on two shores at once, with one
foot on the republic, and one in Royalty; it is indivisible,
and all on one side; but those who are in error are so sincerely;
a blind man is no more a criminal than a Vendean is a ruffian.
Let us, then, impute to the fatality of things alone these
formidable collisions.  Whatever the nature of these tempests may be,
human irresponsibility is mingled with them.

Let us complete this exposition.

The government of 1840 led a hard life immediately.  Born yesterday,
it was obliged to fight to-day.

Hardly installed, it was already everywhere conscious of vague
movements of traction on the apparatus of July so recently laid,
and so lacking in solidity.

Resistance was born on the morrow; perhaps even, it was born on
the preceding evening.  From month to month the hostility increased,
and from being concealed it became patent.

The Revolution of July, which gained but little acceptance outside
of France by kings, had been diversely interpreted in France,
as we have said.

God delivers over to men his visible will in events, an obscure text
written in a mysterious tongue.  Men immediately make translations
of it; translations hasty, incorrect, full of errors, of gaps,
and of nonsense.  Very few minds comprehend the divine language.
The most sagacious, the calmest, the most profound, decipher slowly,
and when they arrive with their text, the task has long been completed;
there are already twenty translations on the public place.
From each remaining springs a party, and from each misinterpretation
a faction; and each party thinks that it alone has the true text,
and each faction thinks that it possesses the light.

Power itself is often a faction.

There are, in revolutions, swimmers who go against the current;
they are the old parties.

For the old parties who clung to heredity by the grace of God,
think that revolutions, having sprung from the right to revolt,
one has the right to revolt against them.  Error.  For in these
revolutions, the one who revolts is not the people; it is the king.
Revolution is precisely the contrary of revolt.  Every revolution,
being a normal outcome, contains within itself its legitimacy,
which false revolutionists sometimes dishonor, but which remains even
when soiled, which survives even when stained with blood.

Revolutions spring not from an accident, but from necessity.
A revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real.  It is
because it must be that it is.

None the less did the old legitimist parties assail the Revolution
of 1830 with all the vehemence which arises from false reasoning.
Errors make excellent projectiles.  They strike it cleverly in its
vulnerable spot, in default of a cuirass, in its lack of logic;
they attacked this revolution in its royalty.  They shouted to it:
"Revolution, why this king?"  Factions are blind men who aim correctly.

This cry was uttered equally by the republicans.  But coming from them,
this cry was logical.  What was blindness in the legitimists was
clearness of vision in the democrats.  1830 had bankrupted the people.
The enraged democracy reproached it with this.

Between the attack of the past and the attack of the future,
the establishment of July struggled.  It represented the minute
at loggerheads on the one hand with the monarchical centuries,
on the other hand with eternal right.

In addition, and beside all this, as it was no longer revolution and had
become a monarchy, 1830 was obliged to take precedence of all Europe.
To keep the peace, was an increase of complication.  A harmony
established contrary to sense is often more onerous than a war.
From this secret conflict, always muzzled, but always growling,
was born armed peace, that ruinous expedient of civilization which
in the harness of the European cabinets is suspicious in itself.
The Royalty of July reared up, in spite of the fact that it caught
it in the harness of European cabinets.  Metternich would gladly
have put it in kicking-straps. Pushed on in France by progress,
it pushed on the monarchies, those loiterers in Europe.  After having
been towed, it undertook to tow.

Meanwhile, within her, pauperism, the proletariat, salary,
education, penal servitude, prostitution, the fate of the woman,
wealth, misery, production, consumption, division, exchange,
coin, credit, the rights of capital, the rights of labor,--
all these questions were multiplied above society, a terrible slope.

Outside of political parties properly so called, another movement
became manifest.  Philosophical fermentation replied to democratic
fermentation.  The elect felt troubled as well as the masses;
in another manner, but quite as much.

Thinkers meditated, while the soil, that is to say, the people,
traversed by revolutionary currents, trembled under them with
indescribably vague epileptic shocks.  These dreamers, some isolated,
others united in families and almost in communion, turned over
social questions in a pacific but profound manner; impassive miners,
who tranquilly pushed their galleries into the depths of a volcano,
hardly disturbed by the dull commotion and the furnaces of which they
caught glimpses.

This tranquillity was not the least beautiful spectacle of this
agitated epoch.

These men left to political parties the question of rights,
they occupied themselves with the question of happiness.

The well-being of man, that was what they wanted to extract
from society.

They raised material questions, questions of agriculture, of industry,
of commerce, almost to the dignity of a religion.  In civilization,
such as it has formed itself, a little by the command of God, a great
deal by the agency of man, interests combine, unite, and amalgamate in a
manner to form a veritable hard rock, in accordance with a dynamic law,
patiently studied by economists, those geologists of politics.
These men who grouped themselves under different appellations,
but who may all be designated by the generic title of socialists,
endeavored to pierce that rock and to cause it to spout forth the
living waters of human felicity.

From the question of the scaffold to the question of war, their works
embraced everything.  To the rights of man, as proclaimed by the French
Revolution, they added the rights of woman and the rights of the child.

The reader will not be surprised if, for various reasons, we do
not here treat in a thorough manner, from the theoretical point
of view, the questions raised by socialism.  We confine ourselves
to indicating them.

All the problems that the socialists proposed to themselves,
cosmogonic visions, revery and mysticism being cast aside, can be
reduced to two principal problems.

First problem:  To produce wealth.

Second problem:  To share it.

The first problem contains the question of work.

The second contains the question of salary.

In the first problem the employment of forces is in question.

In the second, the distribution of enjoyment.

From the proper employment of forces results public power.

From a good distribution of enjoyments results individual happiness.

By a good distribution, not an equal but an equitable distribution
must be understood.

From these two things combined, the public power without,
individual happiness within, results social prosperity.

Social prosperity means the man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

England solves the first of these two problems.  She creates
wealth admirably, she divides it badly.  This solution which is
complete on one side only leads her fatally to two extremes:
monstrous opulence, monstrous wretchedness.  All enjoyments for some,
all privations for the rest, that is to say, for the people;
privilege, exception, monopoly, feudalism, born from toil itself.
A false and dangerous situation, which sates public power or
private misery, which sets the roots of the State in the sufferings
of the individual.  A badly constituted grandeur in which are combined
all the material elements and into which no moral element enters.

Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem.
They are mistaken.  Their division kills production.  Equal partition
abolishes emulation; and consequently labor.  It is a partition
made by the butcher, which kills that which it divides.  It is
therefore impossible to pause over these pretended solutions.
Slaying wealth is not the same thing as dividing it.

The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved.
The two problems must be combined and made but one.

Solve only the first of the two problems; you will be Venice,
you will be England.  You will have, like Venice, an artificial
power, or, like England, a material power; you will be the wicked
rich man.  You will die by an act of violence, as Venice died,
or by bankruptcy, as England will fall.  And the world will allow
to die and fall all that is merely selfishness, all that does
not represent for the human race either a virtue or an idea.

It is well understood here, that by the words Venice, England,
we designate not the peoples, but social structures; the oligarchies
superposed on nations, and not the nations themselves.  The nations
always have our respect and our sympathy.  Venice, as a people,
will live again; England, the aristocracy, will fall, but England,
the nation, is immortal.  That said, we continue.

Solve the two problems, encourage the wealthy, and protect the poor,
suppress misery, put an end to the unjust farming out of the
feeble by the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy
of the man who is making his way against the man who has reached
the goal, adjust, mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor,
mingle gratuitous and compulsory education with the growth of childhood,
and make of science the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping
arms busy, be at one and the same time a powerful people and a family
of happy men, render property democratic, not by abolishing it,
but by making it universal, so that every citizen, without exception,
may be a proprietor, an easier matter than is generally supposed;
in two words, learn how to produce wealth and how to distribute it,
and you will have at once moral and material greatness; and you will
be worthy to call yourself France.

This is what socialism said outside and above a few sects
which have gone astray; that is what it sought in facts,
that is what it sketched out in minds.

Efforts worthy of admiration!  Sacred attempts!

These doctrines, these theories, these resistances, the unforeseen
necessity for the statesman to take philosophers into account,
confused evidences of which we catch a glimpse, a new system
of politics to be created, which shall be in accord with the old
world without too much disaccord with the new revolutionary ideal,
a situation in which it became necessary to use Lafayette to
defend Polignac, the intuition of progress transparent beneath
the revolt, the chambers and streets, the competitions to be
brought into equilibrium around him, his faith in the Revolution,
perhaps an eventual indefinable resignation born of the vague
acceptance of a superior definitive right, his desire to remain
of his race, his domestic spirit, his sincere respect for the people,
his own honesty, preoccupied Louis Philippe almost painfully,
and there were moments when strong and courageous as he was,
he was overwhelmed by the difficulties of being a king.

He felt under his feet a formidable disaggregation, which was not,
nevertheless, a reduction to dust, France being more France than ever.

Piles of shadows covered the horizon.  A strange shade,
gradually drawing nearer, extended little by little over men,
over things, over ideas; a shade which came from wraths and systems.
Everything which had been hastily stifled was moving and fermenting.
At times the conscience of the honest man resumed its breathing,
so great was the discomfort of that air in which sophisms were
intermingled with truths.  Spirits trembled in the social anxiety
like leaves at the approach of a storm.  The electric tension
was such that at certain instants, the first comer, a stranger,
brought light.  Then the twilight obscurity closed in again.
At intervals, deep and dull mutterings allowed a judgment to be formed
as to the quantity of thunder contained by the cloud.

Twenty months had barely elapsed since the Revolution of July,
the year 1832 had opened with an aspect of something impending
and threatening.

The distress of the people, the laborers without bread, the last Prince
de Conde engulfed in the shadows, Brussels expelling the Nassaus
as Paris did the Bourbons, Belgium offering herself to a French
Prince and giving herself to an English Prince, the Russian hatred
of Nicolas, behind us the demons of the South, Ferdinand in Spain,
Miguel in Portugal, the earth quaking in Italy, Metternich extending
his hand over Bologna, France treating Austria sharply at Ancona,
at the North no one knew what sinister sound of the hammer nailing up
Poland in her coffin, irritated glances watching France narrowly all
over Europe, England, a suspected ally, ready to give a push to that
which was tottering and to hurl herself on that which should fall,
the peerage sheltering itself behind Beccaria to refuse four heads
to the law, the fleurs-de-lys erased from the King's carriage,
the cross torn from Notre Dame, Lafayette lessened, Laffitte ruined,
Benjamin Constant dead in indigence, Casimir Perier dead in the
exhaustion of his power; political and social malady breaking
out simultaneously in the two capitals of the kingdom, the one
in the city of thought, the other in the city of toil; at Paris
civil war, at Lyons servile war; in the two cities, the same glare
of the furnace; a crater-like crimson on the brow of the people;
the South rendered fanatic, the West troubled, the Duchesse
de Berry in la Vendee, plots, conspiracies, risings, cholera,
added the sombre roar of tumult of events to the sombre roar of ideas.



CHAPTER V

FACTS WHENCE HISTORY SPRINGS AND WHICH HISTORY IGNORES


Towards the end of April, everything had become aggravated.
The fermentation entered the boiling state.  Ever since 1830,
petty partial revolts had been going on here and there,
which were quickly suppressed, but ever bursting forth afresh,
the sign of a vast underlying conflagration.  Something terrible
was in preparation.  Glimpses could be caught of the features still
indistinct and imperfectly lighted, of a possible revolution.
France kept an eye on Paris; Paris kept an eye on the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which was in a dull glow, was beginning
its ebullition.

The wine-shops of the Rue de Charonne were, although the union
of the two epithets seems singular when applied to wine-shops,
grave and stormy.

The government was there purely and simply called in question.
There people publicly discussed the question of fighting or of
keeping quiet.  There were back shops where workingmen were made to
swear that they would hasten into the street at the first cry of alarm,
and "that they would fight without counting the number of the enemy."
This engagement once entered into, a man seated in the corner of the
wine-shop "assumed a sonorous tone," and said, "You understand!
You have sworn!"

Sometimes they went up stairs, to a private room on the first floor,
and there scenes that were almost masonic were enacted.  They made
the initiated take oaths to render service to himself as well as
to the fathers of families.  That was the formula.

In the tap-rooms, "subversive" pamphlets were read.  They treated
the government with contempt, says a secret report of that time.

Words like the following could be heard there:--

"I don't know the names of the leaders.  We folks shall not
know the day until two hours beforehand."  One workman said:
"There are three hundred of us, let each contribute ten sous,
that will make one hundred and fifty francs with which to procure
powder and shot."

Another said:  "I don't ask for six months, I don't ask for even two.
In less than a fortnight we shall be parallel with the government.
With twenty-five thousand men we can face them."  Another said:
"I don't sleep at night, because I make cartridges all night."
From time to time, men "of bourgeois appearance, and in good coats"
came and "caused embarrassment," and with the air of "command,"
shook hands with the most important, and then went away.  They never
stayed more than ten minutes.  Significant remarks were exchanged
in a low tone:  "The plot is ripe, the matter is arranged."  "It was
murmured by all who were there," to borrow the very expression of one
of those who were present.  The exaltation was such that one day,
a workingman exclaimed, efore the whole wine-shop: "We have no arms!"
One of his comrades replied:  "The soldiers have!" thus parodying
without being aware of the fact, Bonaparte's proclamation to the army
in Italy:  "When they had anything of a more secret nature on hand,"
adds one report, "they did not communicate it to each other."
It is not easy to understand what they could conceal after what they
said.

These reunions were sometimes periodical.  At certain ones of them,
there were never more than eight or ten persons present, and they
were always the same.  In others, any one entered who wished,
and the room was so full that they were forced to stand.
Some went thither through enthusiasm and passion; others because
it was on their way to their work.  As during the Revolution,
there were patriotic women in some of these wine-shops who embraced
new-comers.

Other expressive facts came to light.

A man would enter a shop, drink, and go his way with the remark:
"Wine-merchant, the revolution will pay what is due to you."

Revolutionary agents were appointed in a wine-shop facing the Rue
de Charonne.  The balloting was carried on in their caps.

Workingmen met at the house of a fencing-master who gave lessons
in the Rue de Cotte.  There there was a trophy of arms formed of
wooden broadswords, canes, clubs, and foils.  One day, the buttons
were removed from the foils.

A workman said:  "There are twenty-five of us, but they don't
count on me, because I am looked upon as a machine."  Later on,
that machine became Quenisset.

The indefinite things which were brewing gradually acquired a strange
and indescribable notoriety.  A woman sweeping off her doorsteps said
to another woman:  "For a long time, there has been a strong force
busy making cartridges."  In the open street, proclamation could
be seen addressed to the National Guard in the departments.
One of these proclamations was signed:  Burtot, wine-merchant.

One day a man with his beard worn like a collar and with an Italian
accent mounted a stone post at the door of a liquor-seller in the
Marche Lenoir, and read aloud a singular document, which seemed
to emanate from an occult power.  Groups formed around him,
and applauded.

The passages which touched the crowd most deeply were collected and
noted down.  "--Our doctrines are trammelled, our proclamations torn,
our bill-stickers are spied upon and thrown into prison."--"The
breakdown which has recently taken place in cottons has converted
to us many mediums."--"The future of nations is being worked out in
our obscure ranks."--" Here are the fixed terms:  action or reaction,
revolution or counter-revolution. For, at our epoch, we no longer
believe either in inertia or in immobility.  For the people
against the people, that is the question.  There is no other."--"On
the day when we cease to suit you, break us, but up to that day,
help us to march on."  All this in broad daylight.

Other deeds, more audacious still, were suspicious in the eyes of the
people by reason of their very audacity.  On the 4th of April, 1832,
a passer-by mounted the post on the corner which forms the angle
of the Rue Sainte-Marguerite and shouted:  "I am a Babouvist!"
But beneath Babeuf, the people scented Gisquet.

Among other things, this man said:--

"Down with property!  The opposition of the left is cowardly
and treacherous.  When it wants to be on the right side,
it preaches revolution, it is democratic in order to escape
being beaten, and royalist so that it may not have to fight.
The republicans are beasts with feathers.  Distrust the republicans,
citizens of the laboring classes."

"Silence, citizen spy!" cried an artisan.

This shout put an end to the discourse.

Mysterious incidents occurred.

At nightfall, a workingman encountered near the canal a "very
well dressed man," who said to him:  "Whither are you bound,
citizen?"  "Sir," replied the workingman, "I have not the honor
of your acquaintance."  "I know you very well, however."  And the
man added:  "Don't be alarmed, I am an agent of the committee.
You are suspected of not being quite faithful.  You know that if you
reveal anything, there is an eye fixed on you."  Then he shook hands
with the workingman and went away, saying:  "We shall meet again soon."

The police, who were on the alert, collected singular dialogues,
not only in the wine-shops, but in the street.

"Get yourself received very soon," said a weaver to a cabinet-maker.

"Why?"

"There is going to be a shot to fire."

Two ragged pedestrians exchanged these remarkable replies,
fraught with evident Jacquerie:--

"Who governs us?"

"M. Philippe."

"No, it is the bourgeoisie."

The reader is mistaken if he thinks that we take the word Jacquerie
in a bad sense.  The Jacques were the poor.

On another occasion two men were heard to say to each other as they
passed by:  "We have a good plan of attack."

Only the following was caught of a private conversation between four
men who were crouching in a ditch of the circle of the Barriere
du Trone:--

"Everything possible will be done to prevent his walking about Paris
any more."

Who was the he?  Menacing obscurity.

"The principal leaders," as they said in the faubourg, held themselves
apart.  It was supposed that they met for consultation in a wine-shop
near the point Saint-Eustache. A certain Aug--, chief of the Society
aid for tailors, Rue Mondetour, had the reputation of serving
as intermediary central between the leaders and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

Nevertheless, there was always a great deal of mystery about
these leaders, and no certain fact can invalidate the singular
arrogance of this reply made later on by a man accused before
the Court of Peers:--

"Who was your leader?"

"I knew of none and I recognized none."

There was nothing but words, transparent but vague; sometimes
idle reports, rumors, hearsay.  Other indications cropped up.

A carpenter, occupied in nailing boards to a fence around
the ground on which a house was in process of construction,
in the Rue de Reuilly found on that plot the torn fragment
of a letter on which were still legible the following lines:--


The committee must take measures to prevent recruiting in the
sections for the different societies.


And, as a postscript:--


We have learned that there are guns in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonniere,
No. 5 [bis], to the number of five or six thousand, in the house
of a gunsmith in that court.  The section owns no arms.


What excited the carpenter and caused him to show this thing to his
neighbors was the fact, that a few paces further on he picked up
another paper, torn like the first, and still more significant,
of which we reproduce a facsimile, because of the historical interest
attaching to these strange documents:--

+------------------------------------------------------------+ | Q
| C | D | E | Learn this list by heart.  After so doing | | | | |
| you will tear it up.  The men admitted | | | | | | will do the
same when you have transmitted | | | | | | their orders to them.
| | | | | | Health and Fraternity, | | | | | | u og a fe L. |
+------------------------------------------------------------+


It was only later on that the persons who were in the secret
of this find at the time, learned the significance of those four
capital letters:  quinturions, centurions, decurions, eclaireurs
[scouts], and the sense of the letters:  u og a fe, which was a date,
and meant April 15th, 1832.  Under each capital letter were inscribed
names followed by very characteristic notes.  Thus:  Q. Bannerel.
8 guns, 83 cartridges.  A safe man.--C. Boubiere.  1 pistol,
40 cartridges.--D. Rollet.  1 foil, 1 pistol, 1 pound of powder.--
E. Tessier.  1 sword, 1 cartridge-box. Exact.--Terreur.  8 guns.
Brave, etc.

Finally, this carpenter found, still in the same enclosure,
a third paper on which was written in pencil, but very legibly,
this sort of enigmatical list:--

          Unite:  Blanchard: Arbre-Sec. 6.
          Barra.  Soize.  Salle-au-Comte.
          Kosciusko. Aubry the Butcher?
          J. J. R.
          Caius Gracchus.
          Right of revision.  Dufond.  Four.
          Fall of the Girondists.  Derbac.  Maubuee.
          Washington.  Pinson.  1 pistol, 86 cartridges.
          Marseillaise.
          Sovereignty of the people. Michel. Quincampoix. Sword.
          Hoche.
          Marceau.  Plato.  Arbre-Sec.
          Warsaw.  Tilly, crier of the Populaire.


The honest bourgeois into whose hands this list fell knew
its significance.  It appears that this list was the complete nomenclature
of the sections of the fourth arondissement of the Society of the Rights
of Man, with the names and dwellings of the chiefs of sections.
To-day, when all these facts which were obscure are nothing more than
history, we may publish them.  It should be added, that the foundation
of the Society of the Rights of Man seems to have been posterior to
the date when this paper was found.  Perhaps this was only a rough draft.

Still, according to all the remarks and the words, according to
written notes, material facts begin to make their appearance.

In the Rue Popincourt, in the house of a dealer in bric-abrac, there
were seized seven sheets of gray paper, all folded alike lengthwise
and in four; these sheets enclosed twenty-six squares of this
same gray paper folded in the form of a cartridge, and a card,
on which was written the following:--

           Saltpetre . . . . . . . . . . .  12 ounces.
           Sulphur   . . . . . . . . . . .   2 ounces.
           Charcoal  . . . . . . . . . . .   2 ounces and a half.
           Water     . . . . . . . . . . .   2 ounces.


The report of the seizure stated that the drawer exhaled a strong
smell of powder.

A mason returning from his day's work, left behind him a little
package on a bench near the bridge of Austerlitz.  This package
was taken to the police station.  It was opened, and in it were
found two printed dialogues, signed Lahautiere, a song entitled:
"Workmen, band together," and a tin box full of cartridges.

One artisan drinking with a comrade made the latter feel him to see
how warm he was; the other man felt a pistol under his waistcoat.

In a ditch on the boulevard, between Pere-Lachaise and the Barriere
du Trone, at the most deserted spot, some children, while playing,
discovered beneath a mass of shavings and refuse bits of wood,
a bag containing a bullet-mould, a wooden punch for the preparation
of cartridges, a wooden bowl, in which there were grains of
hunting-powder, and a little cast-iron pot whose interior presented
evident traces of melted lead.

Police agents, making their way suddenly and unexpectedly at five
o'clock in the morning, into the dwelling of a certain Pardon,
who was afterwards a member of the Barricade-Merry section and got
himself killed in the insurrection of April, 1834, found him standing
near his bed, and holding in his hand some cartridges which he
was in the act of preparing.

Towards the hour when workingmen repose, two men were seen to meet
between the Barriere Picpus and the Barriere Charenton in a little
lane between two walls, near a wine-shop, in front of which there
was a "Jeu de Siam."[33] One drew a pistol from beneath his blouse
and handed it to the other.  As he was handing it to him, he noticed
that the perspiration of his chest had made the powder damp.
He primed the pistol and added more powder to what was already
in the pan.  Then the two men parted.


[33] A game of ninepins, in which one side of the ball is smaller
than the other, so that it does not roll straight, but describes
a curve on the ground.


A certain Gallais, afterwards killed in the Rue Beaubourg in the
affair of April, boasted of having in his house seven hundred
cartridges and twenty-four flints.

The government one day received a warning that arms and two hundred
thousand cartridges had just been distributed in the faubourg.
On the following week thirty thousand cartridges were distributed.
The remarkable point about it was, that the police were not able to
seize a single one.

An intercepted letter read:  "The day is not far distant when,
within four hours by the clock, eighty thousand patriots will be
under arms."

All this fermentation was public, one might almost say tranquil.
The approaching insurrection was preparing its storm calmly in the
face of the government.  No singularity was lacking to this still
subterranean crisis, which was already perceptible.  The bourgeois
talked peaceably to the working-classes of what was in preparation.
They said:  "How is the rising coming along?" in the same tone in
which they would have said:  "How is your wife?"

A furniture-dealer, of the Rue Moreau, inquired:  "Well, when are
you going to make the attack?"

Another shop-keeper said:--

"The attack will be made soon."

"I know it.  A month ago, there were fifteen thousand of you,
now there are twenty-five thousand."  He offered his gun,
and a neighbor offered a small pistol which he was willing to sell
for seven francs.

Moreover, the revolutionary fever was growing.  Not a point in Paris
nor in France was exempt from it.  The artery was beating everywhere.
Like those membranes which arise from certain inflammations and form
in the human body, the network of secret societies began to spread
all over the country.  From the associations of the Friends
of the People, which was at the same time public and secret,
sprang the Society of the Rights of Man, which also dated from one
of the orders of the day:  Pluviose, Year 40 of the republican era,
which was destined to survive even the mandate of the Court of
Assizes which pronounced its dissolution, and which did not hesitate
to bestow on its sections significant names like the following:--

     Pikes.
     Tocsin.
     Signal cannon.
     Phrygian cap.
     January 21.
     The beggars.
     The vagabonds.
     Forward march.
     Robespierre.
     Level.
     Ca Ira.

The Society of the Rights of Man engendered the Society of Action.
These were impatient individuals who broke away and hastened ahead.
Other associations sought to recruit themselves from the great
mother societies.  The members of sections complained that they
were torn asunder.  Thus, the Gallic Society, and the committee
of organization of the Municipalities.  Thus the associations for the
liberty of the press, for individual liberty, for the instruction
of the people against indirect taxes.  Then the Society of Equal
Workingmen which was divided into three fractions, the levellers,
the communists, the reformers.  Then the Army of the Bastilles,
a sort of cohort organized on a military footing, four men commanded
by a corporal, ten by a sergeant, twenty by a sub-lieutenant, forty by
a lieutenant; there were never more than five men who knew each other.
Creation where precaution is combined with audacity and which seemed
stamped with the genius of Venice.

The central committee, which was at the head, had two arms,
the Society of Action, and the Army of the Bastilles.

A legitimist association, the Chevaliers of Fidelity, stirred about
among these the republican affiliations.  It was denounced
and repudiated there.

The Parisian societies had ramifications in the principal cities,
Lyons, Nantes, Lille, Marseilles, and each had its Society
of the Rights of Man, the Charbonniere, and The Free Men.
All had a revolutionary society which was called the Cougourde.
We have already mentioned this word.

In Paris, the Faubourg Saint-Marceau kept up an equal buzzing with
the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and the schools were no less moved than
the faubourgs.  A cafe in the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe and the wine-shop
of the Seven Billiards, Rue des Mathurins-Saint-Jacques, served
as rallying points for the students.  The Society of the Friends
of the A B C affiliated to the Mutualists of Angers, and to the
Cougourde of Aix, met, as we have seen, in the Cafe Musain.
These same young men assembled also, as we have stated already, in a
restaurant wine-shop of the Rue Mondetour which was called Corinthe.
These meetings were secret.  Others were as public as possible,
and the reader can judge of their boldness from these fragments
of an interrogatory undergone in one of the ulterior prosecutions:
"Where was this meeting held?"  "In the Rue de la Paix."
"At whose house?"  "In the street."  "What sections were there?"
"Only one."  "Which?"  "The Manuel section."  "Who was its leader?"
"I." "You are too young to have decided alone upon the bold course
of attacking the government.  Where did your instructions come from?"
"From the central committee."

The army was mined at the same time as the population, as was proved
subsequently by the operations of Beford, Luneville, and Epinard.
They counted on the fifty-second regiment, on the fifth, on the eighth,
on the thirty-seventh, and on the twentieth light cavalry.
In Burgundy and in the southern towns they planted the liberty tree;
that is to say, a pole surmounted by a red cap.

Such was the situation.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, more than any other group of the population,
as we stated in the beginning, accentuated this situation and made
it felt.  That was the sore point.  This old faubourg, peopled like
an ant-hill, laborious, courageous, and angry as a hive of bees,
was quivering with expectation and with the desire for a tumult.
Everything was in a state of agitation there, without any interruption,
however, of the regular work.  It is impossible to convey an idea
of this lively yet sombre physiognomy.  In this faubourg exists
poignant distress hidden under attic roofs; there also exist rare
and ardent minds.  It is particularly in the matter of distress
and intelligence that it is dangerous to have extremes meet.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine had also other causes to tremble;
for it received the counter-shock of commercial crises, of failures,
strikes, slack seasons, all inherent to great political disturbances.
In times of revolution misery is both cause and effect.  The blow
which it deals rebounds upon it.  This population full of proud virtue,
capable to the highest degree of latent heat, always ready to fly
to arms, prompt to explode, irritated, deep, undermined, seemed to
be only awaiting the fall of a spark.  Whenever certain sparks
float on the horizon chased by the wind of events, it is impossible
not to think of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and of the formidable
chance which has placed at the very gates of Paris that powder-house
of suffering and ideas.

The wine-shops of the Faubourg Antoine, which have been more than
once drawn in the sketches which the reader has just perused,
possess historical notoriety.  In troublous times people grow
intoxicated there more on words than on wine.  A sort of prophetic
spirit and an afflatus of the future circulates there, swelling hearts
and enlarging souls.  The cabarets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine
resemble those taverns of Mont Aventine erected on the cave of
the Sibyl and communicating with the profound and sacred breath;
taverns where the tables were almost tripods, and where was drunk
what Ennius calls the sibylline wine.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine is a reservoir of people.
Revolutionary agitations create fissures there, through which
trickles the popular sovereignty.  This sovereignty may do evil;
it can be mistaken like any other; but, even when led astray,
it remains great.  We may say of it as of the blind cyclops, Ingens.

In '93, according as the idea which was floating about was good
or evil, according as it was the day of fanaticism or of enthusiasm,
there leaped forth from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine now savage legions,
now heroic bands.

Savage.  Let us explain this word.  When these bristling men,
who in the early days of the revolutionary chaos, tattered, howling,
wild, with uplifted bludgeon, pike on high, hurled themselves
upon ancient Paris in an uproar, what did they want?  They wanted
an end to oppression, an end to tyranny, an end to the sword,
work for men, instruction for the child, social sweetness for
the woman, liberty, equality, fraternity, bread for all, the idea
for all, the Edenizing of the world.  Progress; and that holy,
sweet, and good thing, progress, they claimed in terrible wise,
driven to extremities as they were, half naked, club in fist, a roar
in their mouths.  They were savages, yes; but the savages of civilization.

They proclaimed right furiously; they were desirous, if only
with fear and trembling, to force the human race to paradise.
They seemed barbarians, and they were saviours.  They demanded
light with the mask of night.

Facing these men, who were ferocious, we admit, and terrifying,
but ferocious and terrifying for good ends, there are other men,
smiling, embroidered, gilded, beribboned, starred, in silk stockings,
in white plumes, in yellow gloves, in varnished shoes, who, with their
elbows on a velvet table, beside a marble chimney-piece, insist gently
on demeanor and the preservation of the past, of the Middle Ages,
of divine right, of fanaticism, of innocence, of slavery, of the
death penalty, of war, glorifying in low tones and with politeness,
the sword, the stake, and the scaffold.  For our part, if we were
forced to make a choice between the barbarians of civilization
and the civilized men of barbarism, we should choose the barbarians.

But, thank Heaven, still another choice is possible.  No perpendicular
fall is necessary, in front any more than in the rear.

Neither despotism nor terrorism.  We desire progress with a gentle slope.

God takes care of that.  God's whole policy consists in rendering
slopes less steep.



CHAPTER VI

ENJOLRAS AND HIS LIEUTENANTS


It was about this epoch that Enjolras, in view of a possible catastrophe,
instituted a kind of mysterious census.

All were present at a secret meeting at the Cafe Musain.

Enjolras said, mixing his words with a few half-enigmatical
but significant metaphors:--

"It is proper that we should know where we stand and on whom we
may count.  If combatants are required, they must be provided.
It can do no harm to have something with which to strike.
Passers-by always have more chance of being gored when there are
bulls on the road than when there are none.  Let us, therefore,
reckon a little on the herd.  How many of us are there?
There is no question of postponing this task until to-morrow.
Revolutionists should always be hurried; progress has no time to lose.
Let us mistrust the unexpected.  Let us not be caught unprepared.
We must go over all the seams that we have made and see whether they
hold fast.  This business ought to be concluded to-day. Courfeyrac,
you will see the polytechnic students.  It is their day to go out.
To-day is Wednesday.  Feuilly, you will see those of the Glaciere,
will you not?  Combeferre has promised me to go to Picpus.
There is a perfect swarm and an excellent one there.  Bahorel will
visit the Estrapade.  Prouvaire, the masons are growing lukewarm;
you will bring us news from the lodge of the Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honore.
Joly will go to Dupuytren's clinical lecture, and feel the pulse
of the medical school.  Bossuet will take a little turn in the court
and talk with the young law licentiates.  I will take charge of the
Cougourde myself."

"That arranges everything," said Courfeyrac.

"No."

"What else is there?"

"A very important thing."

"What is that?" asked Courfeyrac.

"The Barriere du Maine," replied Enjolras.

Enjolras remained for a moment as though absorbed in reflection,
then he resumed:--

"At the Barriere du Maine there are marble-workers, painters,
and journeymen in the studios of sculptors.  They are an enthusiastic
family, but liable to cool off.  I don't know what has been the matter
with them for some time past.  They are thinking of something else.
They are becoming extinguished.  They pass their time playing dominoes.
There is urgent need that some one should go and talk with them a little,
but with firmness.  They meet at Richefeu's. They are to be found
there between twelve and one o'clock. Those ashes must be fanned into
a glow.  For that errand I had counted on that abstracted Marius,
who is a good fellow on the whole, but he no longer comes to us.
I need some one for the Barriere du Maine.  I have no one."

"What about me?" said Grantaire.  "Here am I."

"You?"

"I."

"You indoctrinate republicans! you warm up hearts that have grown
cold in the name of principle!"

"Why not?"

"Are you good for anything?"

"I have a vague ambition in that direction," said Grantaire.

"You do not believe in everything."

"I believe in you."

"Grantaire will you do me a service?"

"Anything.  I'll black your boots."

"Well, don't meddle with our affairs.  Sleep yourself sober from
your absinthe."

"You are an ingrate, Enjolras."

"You the man to go to the Barriere du Maine!  You capable of it!"

"I am capable of descending the Rue de Gres, of crossing the Place
Saint-Michel, of sloping through the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, of taking
the Rue de Vaugirard, of passing the Carmelites, of turning into the
Rue d'Assas, of reaching the Rue du Cherche-Midi, of leaving behind
me the Conseil de Guerre, of pacing the Rue des Vielles Tuileries,
of striding across the boulevard, of following the Chaussee du Maine,
of passing the barrier, and entering Richefeu's. I am capable of that.
My shoes are capable of that."

"Do you know anything of those comrades who meet at Richefeu's?"

"Not much.  We only address each other as thou."

"What will you say to them?"

"I will speak to them of Robespierre, pardi!  Of Danton.
Of principles."

"You?"

"I. But I don't receive justice.  When I set about it, I am terrible.
I have read Prudhomme, I know the Social Contract, I know my
constitution of the year Two by heart.  `The liberty of one citizen
ends where the liberty of another citizen begins.'  Do you take me
for a brute?  I have an old bank-bill of the Republic in my drawer.
The Rights of Man, the sovereignty of the people, sapristi!  I am
even a bit of a Hebertist.  I can talk the most superb twaddle
for six hours by the clock, watch in hand."

"Be serious," said Enjolras.

"I am wild," replied Grantaire.

Enjolras meditated for a few moments, and made the gesture of a man
who has taken a resolution.

"Grantaire," he said gravely, "I consent to try you.  You shall go
to the Barriere du Maine."

Grantaire lived in furnished lodgings very near the Cafe Musain.
He went out, and five minutes later he returned.  He had gone home
to put on a Robespierre waistcoat.

"Red," said he as he entered, and he looked intently at Enjolras.
Then, with the palm of his energetic hand, he laid the two scarlet
points of the waistcoat across his breast.

And stepping up to Enjolras, he whispered in his ear:--

"Be easy."

He jammed his hat on resolutely and departed.

A quarter of an hour later, the back room of the Cafe Musain
was deserted.  All the friends of the A B C were gone, each in his
own direction, each to his own task.  Enjolras, who had reserved
the Cougourde of Aix for himself, was the last to leave.

Those members of the Cougourde of Aix who were in Paris then met
on the plain of Issy, in one of the abandoned quarries which are
so numerous in that side of Paris.

As Enjolras walked towards this place, he passed the whole situation
in review in his own mind.  The gravity of events was self-evident.
When facts, the premonitory symptoms of latent social malady,
move heavily, the slightest complication stops and entangles them.
A phenomenon whence arises ruin and new births.  Enjolras descried
a luminous uplifting beneath the gloomy skirts of the future.
Who knows?  Perhaps the moment was at hand.  The people were
again taking possession of right, and what a fine spectacle!
The revolution was again majestically taking possession of France and
saying to the world:  "The sequel to-morrow!" Enjolras was content.
The furnace was being heated.  He had at that moment a powder train
of friends scattered all over Paris.  He composed, in his own mind,
with Combeferre's philosophical and penetrating eloquence,
Feuilly's cosmopolitan enthusiasm, Courfeyrac's dash, Bahorel's smile,
Jean Prouvaire's melancholy, Joly's science, Bossuet's sarcasms,
a sort of electric spark which took fire nearly everywhere at once.
All hands to work.  Surely, the result would answer to the effort.
This was well.  This made him think of Grantaire.

"Hold," said he to himself, "the Barriere du Maine will not take me
far out of my way.  What if I were to go on as far as Richefeu's?
Let us have a look at what Grantaire is about, and see how he
is getting on."

One o'clock was striking from the Vaugirard steeple when Enjolras
reached the Richefeu smoking-room.

He pushed open the door, entered, folded his arms, letting the door
fall to and strike his shoulders, and gazed at that room filled
with tables, men, and smoke.

A voice broke forth from the mist of smoke, interrupted by another voice.
It was Grantaire holding a dialogue with an adversary.

Grantaire was sitting opposite another figure, at a marble Saint-Anne
table, strewn with grains of bran and dotted with dominos.  He was
hammering the table with his fist, and this is what Enjolras heard:--

"Double-six."

"Fours."

"The pig!  I have no more."

"You are dead.  A two."

"Six."

"Three."

"One."

"It's my move."

"Four points."

"Not much."

"It's your turn."

"I have made an enormous mistake."

"You are doing well."

"Fifteen."

"Seven more."

"That makes me twenty-two." [Thoughtfully, "Twenty-two!"]

"You weren't expecting that double-six. If I had placed it
at the beginning, the whole play would have been changed."

"A two again."

"One."

"One!  Well, five."

"I haven't any."

"It was your play, I believe?"

"Yes."

"Blank."

"What luck he has!  Ah!  You are lucky!  [Long revery.] Two."

"One."

"Neither five nor one.  That's bad for you."

"Domino."

"Plague take it!"



BOOK SECOND.--EPONINE


CHAPTER I

THE LARK'S MEADOW


Marius had witnessed the unexpected termination of the ambush upon
whose track he had set Javert; but Javert had no sooner quitted
the building, bearing off his prisoners in three hackney-coaches,
than Marius also glided out of the house.  It was only nine
o'clock in the evening.  Marius betook himself to Courfeyrac.
Courfeyrac was no longer the imperturbable inhabitant of the
Latin Quarter, he had gone to live in the Rue de la Verrerie "for
political reasons"; this quarter was one where, at that epoch,
insurrection liked to install itself.  Marius said to Courfeyrac:
"I have come to sleep with you."  Courfeyrac dragged a mattress off
his bed, which was furnished with two, spread it out on the floor,
and said:  "There."

At seven o'clock on the following morning, Marius returned to
the hovel, paid the quarter's rent which he owed to Ma'am Bougon,
had his books, his bed, his table, his commode, and his two chairs
loaded on a hand-cart and went off without leaving his address,
so that when Javert returned in the course of the morning,
for the purpose of questioning Marius as to the events of the
preceding evening, he found only Ma'am Bougon, who answered:
"Moved away!"

Ma'am Bougon was convinced that Marius was to some extent an
accomplice of the robbers who had been seized the night before.
"Who would ever have said it?" she exclaimed to the portresses
of the quarter, "a young man like that, who had the air of a girl!"

Marius had two reasons for this prompt change of residence.
The first was, that he now had a horror of that house, where he
had beheld, so close at hand, and in its most repulsive and most
ferocious development, a social deformity which is, perhaps,
even more terrible than the wicked rich man, the wicked poor man.
The second was, that he did not wish to figure in the lawsuit
which would insue in all probability, and be brought in to testify
against Thenardier.

Javert thought that the young man, whose name he had forgotten,
was afraid, and had fled, or perhaps, had not even returned home
at the time of the ambush; he made some efforts to find him,
however, but without success.

A month passed, then another.  Marius was still with Courfeyrac.
He had learned from a young licentiate in law, an habitual frequenter
of the courts, that Thenardier was in close confinement.  Every Monday,
Marius had five francs handed in to the clerk's office of La Force
for Thenardier.

As Marius had no longer any money, he borrowed the five francs
from Courfeyrac.  It was the first time in his life that he had ever
borrowed money.  These periodical five francs were a double riddle
to Courfeyrac who lent and to Thenardier who received them.  "To whom
can they go?" thought Courfeyrac.  "Whence can this come to me?"
Thenardier asked himself.

Moreover, Marius was heart-broken. Everything had plunged through
a trap-door once more.  He no longer saw anything before him;
his life was again buried in mystery where he wandered fumblingly.
He had for a moment beheld very close at hand, in that obscurity,
the young girl whom he loved, the old man who seemed to be her father,
those unknown beings, who were his only interest and his only hope
in this world; and, at the very moment when he thought himself on
the point of grasping them, a gust had swept all these shadows away.
Not a spark of certainty and truth had been emitted even in the
most terrible of collisions.  No conjecture was possible.  He no
longer knew even the name that he thought he knew.  It certainly
was not Ursule.  And the Lark was a nickname.  And what was he to
think of the old man?  Was he actually in hiding from the police?
The white-haired workman whom Marius had encountered in the vicinity
of the Invalides recurred to his mind.  It now seemed probable that
that workingman and M. Leblanc were one and the same person.  So he
disguised himself?  That man had his heroic and his equivocal sides.
Why had he not called for help?  Why had he fled?  Was he,
or was he not, the father of the young girl?  Was he, in short,
the man whom Thenardier thought that he recognized?  Thenardier might
have been mistaken.  These formed so many insoluble problems.
All this, it is true, detracted nothing from the angelic charms
of the young girl of the Luxembourg.  Heart-rending distress;
Marius bore a passion in his heart, and night over his eyes.
He was thrust onward, he was drawn, and he could not stir.
All had vanished, save love.  Of love itself he had lost the instincts
and the sudden illuminations.  Ordinarily, this flame which burns
us lights us also a little, and casts some useful gleams without.
But Marius no longer even heard these mute counsels of passion.
He never said to himself:  "What if I were to go to such a place?
What if I were to try such and such a thing?"  The girl whom he could
no longer call Ursule was evidently somewhere; nothing warned Marius
in what direction he should seek her.  His whole life was now summed
up in two words; absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.
To see her once again; he still aspired to this, but he no longer
expected it.

To crown all, his poverty had returned.  He felt that icy breath
close to him, on his heels.  In the midst of his torments, and long
before this, he had discontinued his work, and nothing is more
dangerous than discontinued work; it is a habit which vanishes.
A habit which is easy to get rid of, and difficult to take up again.

A certain amount of dreaming is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses.
It lulls to sleep the fevers of the mind at labor, which are
sometimes severe, and produces in the spirit a soft and fresh
vapor which corrects the over-harsh contours of pure thought,
fills in gaps here and there, binds together and rounds off the
angles of the ideas.  But too much dreaming sinks and drowns.
Woe to the brain-worker who allows himself to fall entirely from
thought into revery!  He thinks that he can re-ascend with equal ease,
and he tells himself that, after all, it is the same thing.  Error!

Thought is the toil of the intelligence, revery its voluptuousness.
To replace thought with revery is to confound a poison with a food.

Marius had begun in that way, as the reader will remember.
Passion had supervened and had finished the work of precipitating
him into chimaeras without object or bottom.  One no longer emerges
from one's self except for the purpose of going off to dream.
Idle production.  Tumultuous and stagnant gulf.  And, in proportion
as labor diminishes, needs increase.  This is a law.  Man, in a state
of revery, is generally prodigal and slack; the unstrung mind cannot
hold life within close bounds.

There is, in that mode of life, good mingled with evil,
for if enervation is baleful, generosity is good and healthful.
But the poor man who is generous and noble, and who does not work,
is lost.  Resources are exhausted, needs crop up.

Fatal declivity down which the most honest and the firmest as well
as the most feeble and most vicious are drawn, and which ends
in one of two holds, suicide or crime.

By dint of going outdoors to think, the day comes when one goes
out to throw one's self in the water.

Excess of revery breeds men like Escousse and Lebras.

Marius was descending this declivity at a slow pace, with his eyes
fixed on the girl whom he no longer saw.  What we have just written
seems strange, and yet it is true.  The memory of an absent being
kindles in the darkness of the heart; the more it has disappeared,
the more it beams; the gloomy and despairing soul sees this light
on its horizon; the star of the inner night.  She--that was Marius'
whole thought.  He meditated of nothing else; he was confusedly
conscious that his old coat was becoming an impossible coat, and that
his new coat was growing old, that his shirts were wearing out,
that his hat was wearing out, that his boots were giving out,
and he said to himself:  "If I could but see her once again before
I die!"

One sweet idea alone was left to him, that she had loved him,
that her glance had told him so, that she did not know his name,
but that she did know his soul, and that, wherever she was,
however mysterious the place, she still loved him perhaps.
Who knows whether she were not thinking of him as he was thinking
of her?  Sometimes, in those inexplicable hours such as are experienced
by every heart that loves, though he had no reasons for anything but
sadness and yet felt an obscure quiver of joy, he said to himself:
"It is her thoughts that are coming to me!"  Then he added:
"Perhaps my thoughts reach her also."

This illusion, at which he shook his head a moment later,
was sufficient, nevertheless, to throw beams, which at times
resembled hope, into his soul.  From time to time, especially at
that evening hour which is the most depressing to even the dreamy,
he allowed the purest, the most impersonal, the most ideal
of the reveries which filled his brain, to fall upon a notebook
which contained nothing else.  He called this "writing to her."

It must not be supposed that his reason was deranged.
Quite the contrary.  He had lost the faculty of working and of
moving firmly towards any fixed goal, but he was endowed with
more clear-sightedness and rectitude than ever.  Marius surveyed
by a calm and real, although peculiar light, what passed before
his eyes, even the most indifferent deeds and men; he pronounced
a just criticism on everything with a sort of honest dejection
and candid disinterestedness.  His judgment, which was almost
wholly disassociated from hope, held itself aloof and soared on high.

In this state of mind nothing escaped him, nothing deceived him,
and every moment he was discovering the foundation of life,
of humanity, and of destiny.  Happy, even in the midst of anguish,
is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of unhappiness!
He who has not viewed the things of this world and the heart of man
under this double light has seen nothing and knows nothing of
the true.

The soul which loves and suffers is in a state of sublimity.

However, day followed day, and nothing new presented itself.
It merely seemed to him, that the sombre space which still remained
to be traversed by him was growing shorter with every instant.
He thought that he already distinctly perceived the brink of the
bottomless abyss.

"What!" he repeated to himself, "shall I not see her again before then!"

When you have ascended the Rue Saint-Jacques, left the barrier on
one side and followed the old inner boulevard for some distance,
you reach the Rue de la Sante, then the Glaciere, and, a little
while before arriving at the little river of the Gobelins, you come
to a sort of field which is the only spot in the long and monotonous
chain of the boulevards of Paris, where Ruysdeel would be tempted
to sit down.

There is something indescribable there which exhales grace, a green
meadow traversed by tightly stretched lines, from which flutter
rags drying in the wind, and an old market-gardener's house,
built in the time of Louis XIII., with its great roof oddly
pierced with dormer windows, dilapidated palisades, a little
water amid poplar-trees, women, voices, laughter; on the horizon
the Pantheon, the pole of the Deaf-Mutes, the Val-de-Grace, black,
squat, fantastic, amusing, magnificent, and in the background,
the severe square crests of the towers of Notre Dame.

As the place is worth looking at, no one goes thither.  Hardly one
cart or wagoner passes in a quarter of an hour.

It chanced that Marius' solitary strolls led him to this plot of ground,
near the water.  That day, there was a rarity on the boulevard,
a passer-by. Marius, vaguely impressed with the almost savage beauty
of the place, asked this passer-by:--"What is the name of this spot?"

The person replied:  "It is the Lark's meadow."

And he added:  "It was here that Ulbach killed the shepherdess
of Ivry."

But after the word "Lark" Marius heard nothing more.  These sudden
congealments in the state of revery, which a single word suffices
to evoke, do occur.  The entire thought is abruptly condensed around
an idea, and it is no longer capable of perceiving anything else.

The Lark was the appellation which had replaced Ursule in the depths
of Marius' melancholy.--"Stop," said he with a sort of unreasoning
stupor peculiar to these mysterious asides, "this is her meadow.
I shall know where she lives now."

It was absurd, but irresistible.

And every day he returned to that meadow of the Lark.



CHAPTER II

EMBRYONIC FORMATION OF CRIMES IN THE INCUBATION OF PRISONS


Javert's triumph in the Gorbeau hovel seemed complete, but had
not been so.

In the first place, and this constituted the principal anxiety,
Javert had not taken the prisoner prisoner.  The assassinated man
who flees is more suspicious than the assassin, and it is probable that
this personage, who had been so precious a capture for the ruffians,
would be no less fine a prize for the authorities.

And then, Montparnasse had escaped Javert.

Another opportunity of laying hands on that "devil's dandy"
must be waited for.  Montparnasse had, in fact, encountered Eponine
as she stood on the watch under the trees of the boulevard, and had
led her off, preferring to play Nemorin with the daughter rather
than Schinderhannes with the father.  It was well that he did so.
He was free.  As for Eponine, Javert had caused her to be seized;
a mediocre consolation.  Eponine had joined Azelma at Les Madelonettes.

And finally, on the way from the Gorbeau house to La Force, one of
the principal prisoners, Claquesous, had been lost.  It was not known
how this had been effected, the police agents and the sergeants "could
not understand it at all."  He had converted himself into vapor,
he had slipped through the handcuffs, he had trickled through the
crevices of the carriage, the fiacre was cracked, and he had fled;
all that they were able to say was, that on arriving at the prison,
there was no Claquesous.  Either the fairies or the police had had a
hand in it.  Had Claquesous melted into the shadows like a snow-flake
in water?  Had there been unavowed connivance of the police agents?
Did this man belong to the double enigma of order and disorder?
Was he concentric with infraction and repression?  Had this
sphinx his fore paws in crime and his hind paws in authority?
Javert did not accept such comminations, and would have bristled up
against such compromises; but his squad included other inspectors
besides himself, who were more initiated than he, perhaps, although they
were his subordinates in the secrets of the Prefecture, and Claquesous
had been such a villain that he might make a very good agent.
It is an excellent thing for ruffianism and an admirable thing for
the police to be on such intimate juggling terms with the night.
These double-edged rascals do exist.  However that may be,
Claquesous had gone astray and was not found again.  Javert appeared
to be more irritated than amazed at this.

As for Marius, "that booby of a lawyer," who had probably become
frightened, and whose name Javert had forgotten, Javert attached
very little importance to him.  Moreover, a lawyer can be hunted
up at any time.  But was he a lawyer after all?

The investigation had begun.

The magistrate had thought it advisable not to put one of these men
of the band of Patron Minette in close confinement, in the hope that he
would chatter.  This man was Brujon, the long-haired man of the Rue du
Petit-Banquier. He had been let loose in the Charlemagne courtyard,
and the eyes of the watchers were fixed on him.

This name of Brujon is one of the souvenirs of La Force.
In that hideous courtyard, called the court of the Batiment-Neuf (New
Building), which the administration called the court Saint-Bernard,
and which the robbers called the Fosseaux-Lions (The Lion's Ditch),
on that wall covered with scales and leprosy, which rose on the
left to a level with the roofs, near an old door of rusty iron
which led to the ancient chapel of the ducal residence of La Force,
then turned in a dormitory for ruffians, there could still be seen,
twelve years ago, a sort of fortress roughly carved in the stone
with a nail, and beneath it this signature:--

                       BRUJON, 1811.


The Brujon of 1811 was the father of the Brujon of 1832.

The latter, of whom the reader caught but a glimpse at the
Gorbeau house, was a very cunning and very adroit young spark,
with a bewildered and plaintive air.  It was in consequence of this
plaintive air that the magistrate had released him, thinking him
more useful in the Charlemagne yard than in close confinement.

Robbers do not interrupt their profession because they are in the hands
of justice.  They do not let themselves be put out by such a trifle
as that.  To be in prison for one crime is no reason for not beginning
on another crime.  They are artists, who have one picture in the salon,
and who toil, none the less, on a new work in their studios.

Brujon seemed to be stupefied by prison.  He could sometimes
be seen standing by the hour together in front of the sutler's
window in the Charlemagne yard, staring like an idiot at the
sordid list of prices which began with:  garlic, 62 centimes,
and ended with:  cigar, 5 centimes.  Or he passed his time in trembling,
chattering his teeth, saying that he had a fever, and inquiring
whether one of the eight and twenty beds in the fever ward was vacant.

All at once, towards the end of February, 1832, it was discovered
that Brujon, that somnolent fellow, had had three different
commissions executed by the errand-men of the establishment,
not under his own name, but in the name of three of his comrades;
and they had cost him in all fifty sous, an exorbitant outlay
which attracted the attention of the prison corporal.

Inquiries were instituted, and on consulting the tariff of
commissions posted in the convict's parlor, it was learned that
the fifty sous could be analyzed as follows:  three commissions;
one to the Pantheon, ten sous; one to Val-de-Grace, fifteen sous;
and one to the Barriere de Grenelle, twenty-five sous.  This last
was the dearest of the whole tariff.  Now, at the Pantheon,
at the Val-de-Grace, and at the Barriere de Grenelle were situated
the domiciles of the three very redoubtable prowlers of the barriers,
Kruideniers, alias Bizarre, Glorieux, an ex-convict, and Barre-Carosse,
upon whom the attention of the police was directed by this incident.
It was thought that these men were members of Patron Minette;
two of those leaders, Babet and Gueulemer, had been captured.
It was supposed that the messages, which had been addressed,
not to houses, but to people who were waiting for them in the street,
must have contained information with regard to some crime that
had been plotted.  They were in possession of other indications;
they laid hand on the three prowlers, and supposed that they had
circumvented some one or other of Brujon's machinations.

About a week after these measures had been taken, one night,
as the superintendent of the watch, who had been inspecting the lower
dormitory in the Batiment-Neuf, was about to drop his chestnut in
the box--this was the means adopted to make sure that the watchmen
performed their duties punctually; every hour a chestnut must be
dropped into all the boxes nailed to the doors of the dormitories--
a watchman looked through the peep-hole of the dormitory and beheld
Brujon sitting on his bed and writing something by the light of the
hall-lamp. The guardian entered, Brujon was put in a solitary cell
for a month, but they were not able to seize what he had written.
The police learned nothing further about it.

What is certain is, that on the following morning, a "postilion"
was flung from the Charlemagne yard into the Lions' Ditch, over the
five-story building which separated the two court-yards.

What prisoners call a "postilion" is a pallet of bread
artistically moulded, which is sent into Ireland, that is to say,
over the roofs of a prison, from one courtyard to another.
Etymology:  over England; from one land to another; into Ireland.
This little pellet falls in the yard.  The man who picks it up opens
it and finds in it a note addressed to some prisoner in that yard.
If it is a prisoner who finds the treasure, he forwards the note to
its destination; if it is a keeper, or one of the prisoners secretly
sold who are called sheep in prisons and foxes in the galleys,
the note is taken to the office and handed over to the police.

On this occasion, the postilion reached its address,
although the person to whom it was addressed was, at that moment,
in solitary confinement.  This person was no other than Babet,
one of the four heads of Patron Minette.

The postilion contained a roll of paper on which only these two
lines were written:--

"Babet.  There is an affair in the Rue Plumet.  A gate on a garden."

This is what Brujon had written the night before.

In spite of male and female searchers, Babet managed to pass
the note on from La Force to the Salpetriere, to a "good friend"
whom he had and who was shut up there.  This woman in turn transmitted
the note to another woman of her acquaintance, a certain Magnon,
who was strongly suspected by the police, though not yet arrested.
This Magnon, whose name the reader has already seen, had relations
with the Thenardier, which will be described in detail later on,
and she could, by going to see Eponine, serve as a bridge between the
Salpetriere and Les Madelonettes.

It happened, that at precisely that moment, as proofs were wanting
in the investigation directed against Thenardier in the matter
of his daughters, Eponine and Azelma were released.  When Eponine
came out, Magnon, who was watching the gate of the Madelonettes,
handed her Brujon's note to Babet, charging her to look into
the matter.

Eponine went to the Rue Plumet, recognized the gate and the garden,
observed the house, spied, lurked, and, a few days later,
brought to Magnon, who delivers in the Rue Clocheperce, a biscuit,
which Magnon transmitted to Babet's mistress in the Salpetriere.
A biscuit, in the shady symbolism of prisons, signifies:  Nothing to
be done.

So that in less than a week from that time, as Brujon and Babet met
in the circle of La Force, the one on his way to the examination,
the other on his way from it:--

"Well?" asked Brujon, "the Rue P.?"

"Biscuit," replied Babet.  Thus did the foetus of crime engendered
by Brujon in La Force miscarry.

This miscarriage had its consequences, however, which were perfectly
distinct from Brujon's programme.  The reader will see what they were.

Often when we think we are knotting one thread, we are tying
quite another.



CHAPTER III

APPARITION TO FATHER MABEUF


Marius no longer went to see any one, but he sometimes encountered
Father Mabeuf by chance.

While Marius was slowly descending those melancholy steps
which may be called the cellar stairs, and which lead to places
without light, where the happy can be heard walking overhead,
M. Mabeuf was descending on his side.

The Flora of Cauteretz no longer sold at all.  The experiments on
indigo had not been successful in the little garden of Austerlitz,
which had a bad exposure.  M. Mabeuf could cultivate there only
a few plants which love shade and dampness.  Nevertheless, he did
not become discouraged.  He had obtained a corner in the Jardin
des Plantes, with a good exposure, to make his trials with indigo "at
his own expense."  For this purpose he had pawned his copperplates
of the Flora.  He had reduced his breakfast to two eggs, and he left
one of these for his old servant, to whom he had paid no wages for
the last fifteen months.  And often his breakfast was his only meal.
He no longer smiled with his infantile smile, he had grown morose
and no longer received visitors.  Marius did well not to dream
of going thither.  Sometimes, at the hour when M. Mabeuf was on
his way to the Jardin des Plantes, the old man and the young man
passed each other on the Boulevard de l'Hopital. They did not speak,
and only exchanged a melancholy sign of the head.  A heart-breaking
thing it is that there comes a moment when misery looses bonds!
Two men who have been friends become two chance passers-by.

Royal the bookseller was dead.  M. Mabeuf no longer knew his books,
his garden, or his indigo:  these were the three forms which happiness,
pleasure, and hope had assumed for him.  This sufficed him for
his living.  He said to himself:  "When I shall have made my balls
of blueing, I shall be rich, I will withdraw my copperplates from
the pawn-shop, I will put my Flora in vogue again with trickery,
plenty of money and advertisements in the newspapers and I will buy,
I know well where, a copy of Pierre de Medine's Art de Naviguer,
with wood-cuts, edition of 1655."  In the meantime, he toiled
all day over his plot of indigo, and at night he returned home
to water his garden, and to read his books.  At that epoch,
M. Mabeuf was nearly eighty years of age.

One evening he had a singular apparition.

He had returned home while it was still broad daylight.
Mother Plutarque, whose health was declining, was ill and in bed.
He had dined on a bone, on which a little meat lingered, and a bit
of bread that he had found on the kitchen table, and had seated
himself on an overturned stone post, which took the place of a bench
in his garden.

Near this bench there rose, after the fashion in orchard-gardens,
a sort of large chest, of beams and planks, much dilapidated,
a rabbit-hutch on the ground floor, a fruit-closet on the first.
There was nothing in the hutch, but there were a few apples in
the fruit-closet,--the remains of the winter's provision.

M. Mabeuf had set himself to turning over and reading, with the
aid of his glasses, two books of which he was passionately fond
and in which, a serious thing at his age, he was interested.
His natural timidity rendered him accessible to the acceptance of
superstitions in a certain degree.  The first of these books was the
famous treatise of President Delancre, De l'inconstance des Demons;
the other was a quarto by Mutor de la Rubaudiere, Sur les Diables
de Vauvert et les Gobelins de la Bievre.  This last-mentioned old
volume interested him all the more, because his garden had been
one of the spots haunted by goblins in former times.  The twilight
had begun to whiten what was on high and to blacken all below.
As he read, over the top of the book which he held in his hand,
Father Mabeuf was surveying his plants, and among others
a magnificent rhododendron which was one of his consolations;
four days of heat, wind, and sun without a drop of rain, had passed;
the stalks were bending, the buds drooping, the leaves falling;
all this needed water, the rhododendron was particularly sad.
Father Mabeuf was one of those persons for whom plants have souls.
The old man had toiled all day over his indigo plot, he was worn out
with fatigue, but he rose, laid his books on the bench, and walked,
all bent over and with tottering footsteps, to the well, but when he
had grasped the chain, he could not even draw it sufficiently to
unhook it.  Then he turned round and cast a glance of anguish toward
heaven which was becoming studded with stars.

The evening had that serenity which overwhelms the troubles of man
beneath an indescribably mournful and eternal joy.  The night
promised to be as arid as the day had been.

"Stars everywhere!" thought the old man; "not the tiniest cloud!
Not a drop of water!"

And his head, which had been upraised for a moment, fell back upon
his breast.

He raised it again, and once more looked at the sky, murmuring:--

"A tear of dew!  A little pity!"

He tried again to unhook the chain of the well, and could not.

At that moment, he heard a voice saying:--

"Father Mabeuf, would you like to have me water your garden for you?"

At the same time, a noise as of a wild animal passing became
audible in the hedge, and he beheld emerging from the shrubbery
a sort of tall, slender girl, who drew herself up in front of him
and stared boldly at him.  She had less the air of a human being
than of a form which had just blossomed forth from the twilight.

Before Father Mabeuf, who was easily terrified, and who was, as we
have said, quick to take alarm, was able to reply by a single syllable,
this being, whose movements had a sort of odd abruptness in the darkness,
had unhooked the chain, plunged in and withdrawn the bucket,
and filled the watering-pot, and the goodman beheld this apparition,
which had bare feet and a tattered petticoat, running about among
the flower-beds distributing life around her.  The sound of the
watering-pot on the leaves filled Father Mabeuf's soul with ecstasy.
It seemed to him that the rhododendron was happy now.

The first bucketful emptied, the girl drew a second, then a third.
She watered the whole garden.

There was something about her, as she thus ran about among paths,
where her outline appeared perfectly black, waving her angular arms,
and with her fichu all in rags, that resembled a bat.

When she had finished, Father Mabeuf approached her with tears
in his eyes, and laid his hand on her brow.

"God will bless you," said he, "you are an angel since you take
care of the flowers."

"No," she replied.  "I am the devil, but that's all the same to me."

The old man exclaimed, without either waiting for or hearing
her response:--

"What a pity that I am so unhappy and so poor, and that I can
do nothing for you!"

"You can do something," said she.

"What?"

"Tell me where M. Marius lives."

The old man did not understand.  "What Monsieur Marius?"

He raised his glassy eyes and seemed to be seeking something
that had vanished.

"A young man who used to come here."

In the meantime, M. Mabeuf had searched his memory.

"Ah! yes--" he exclaimed.  "I know what you mean.  Wait!
Monsieur Marius--the Baron Marius Pontmercy, parbleu!  He lives,--
or rather, he no longer lives,--ah well, I don't know."

As he spoke, he had bent over to train a branch of rhododendron,
and he continued:--

"Hold, I know now.  He very often passes along the boulevard,
and goes in the direction of the Glaciere, Rue Croulebarbe.
The meadow of the Lark.  Go there.  It is not hard to meet him."

When M. Mabeuf straightened himself up, there was no longer any
one there; the girl had disappeared.

He was decidedly terrified.

"Really," he thought, "if my garden had not been watered, I should
think that she was a spirit."

An hour later, when he was in bed, it came back to him,
and as he fell asleep, at that confused moment when thought,
like that fabulous bird which changes itself into a fish in order
to cross the sea, little by little assumes the form of a dream
in order to traverse slumber, he said to himself in a bewildered way:--

"In sooth, that greatly resembles what Rubaudiere narrates
of the goblins.  Could it have been a goblin?"



CHAPTER IV

AN APPARITION TO MARIUS


Some days after this visit of a "spirit" to Farmer Mabeuf, one morning,--
it was on a Monday, the day when Marius borrowed the hundred-sou
piece from Courfeyrac for Thenardier--Marius had put this coin
in his pocket, and before carrying it to the clerk's office,
he had gone "to take a little stroll," in the hope that this would
make him work on his return.  It was always thus, however.  As soon
as he rose, he seated himself before a book and a sheet of paper
in order to scribble some translation; his task at that epoch
consisted in turning into French a celebrated quarrel between Germans,
the Gans and Savigny controversy; he took Savigny, he took Gans,
read four lines, tried to write one, could not, saw a star between him
and his paper, and rose from his chair, saying:  "I shall go out.
That will put me in spirits."

And off he went to the Lark's meadow.

There he beheld more than ever the star, and less than ever Savigny
and Gans.

He returned home, tried to take up his work again, and did not succeed;
there was no means of re-knotting a single one of the threads which
were broken in his brain; then he said to himself:  "I will not go
out to-morrow. It prevents my working."  And he went out every day.

He lived in the Lark's meadow more than in Courfeyrac's lodgings.
That was his real address:  Boulevard de la Sante, at the seventh
tree from the Rue Croulebarbe.

That morning he had quitted the seventh tree and had seated himself
on the parapet of the River des Gobelins.  A cheerful sunlight
penetrated the freshly unfolded and luminous leaves.

He was dreaming of "Her."  And his meditation turning to a reproach,
fell back upon himself; he reflected dolefully on his idleness,
his paralysis of soul, which was gaining on him, and of that night
which was growing more dense every moment before him, to such a point
that he no longer even saw the sun.

Nevertheless, athwart this painful extrication of indistinct ideas
which was not even a monologue, so feeble had action become in him,
and he had no longer the force to care to despair, athwart this
melancholy absorption, sensations from without did reach him.
He heard behind him, beneath him, on both banks of the river,
the laundresses of the Gobelins beating their linen, and above
his head, the birds chattering and singing in the elm-trees.
On the one hand, the sound of liberty, the careless happiness
of the leisure which has wings; on the other, the sound of toil.
What caused him to meditate deeply, and almost reflect, were two
cheerful sounds.

All at once, in the midst of his dejected ecstasy, he heard
a familiar voice saying:--

"Come!  Here he is!"

He raised his eyes, and recognized that wretched child who had come to him
one morning, the elder of the Thenardier daughters, Eponine; he knew
her name now.  Strange to say, she had grown poorer and prettier,
two steps which it had not seemed within her power to take.
She had accomplished a double progress, towards the light and
towards distress.  She was barefooted and in rags, as on the day
when she had so resolutely entered his chamber, only her rags were two
months older now, the holes were larger, the tatters more sordid.
It was the same harsh voice, the same brow dimmed and wrinkled with tan,
the same free, wild, and vacillating glance.  She had besides,
more than formerly, in her face that indescribably terrified
and lamentable something which sojourn in a prison adds to wretchedness.

She had bits of straw and hay in her hair, not like Ophelia
through having gone mad from the contagion of Hamlet's madness,
but because she had slept in the loft of some stable.

And in spite of it all, she was beautiful.  What a star art thou,
O youth!

In the meantime, she had halted in front of Marius with a trace
of joy in her livid countenance, and something which resembled a smile.

She stood for several moments as though incapable of speech.

"So I have met you at last!" she said at length.  "Father Mabeuf
was right, it was on this boulevard!  How I have hunted for you!
If you only knew!  Do you know?  I have been in the jug.  A fortnight!
They let me out! seeing that there was nothing against me,
and that, moreover, I had not reached years of discretion.  I lack
two months of it.  Oh! how I have hunted for you!  These six weeks!
So you don't live down there any more?"

"No," said Marius.

"Ah!  I understand.  Because of that affair.  Those take-downs
are disagreeable.  You cleared out.  Come now!  Why do you wear old
hats like this!  A young man like you ought to have fine clothes.
Do you know, Monsieur Marius, Father Mabeuf calls you Baron Marius,
I don't know what.  It isn't true that you are a baron?  Barons are
old fellows, they go to the Luxembourg, in front of the chateau,
where there is the most sun, and they read the Quotidienne for a sou.
I once carried a letter to a baron of that sort.  He was over a hundred
years old.  Say, where do you live now?"

Marius made no reply.

"Ah!" she went on, "you have a hole in your shirt.  I must sew it
up for you."

She resumed with an expression which gradually clouded over:--

"You don't seem glad to see me."

Marius held his peace; she remained silent for a moment, then exclaimed:--

"But if I choose, nevertheless, I could force you to look glad!"

"What?" demanded Marius.  "What do you mean?"

"Ah! you used to call me thou," she retorted.

"Well, then, what dost thou mean?"

She bit her lips; she seemed to hesitate, as though a prey to some
sort of inward conflict.  At last she appeared to come to a decision.

"So much the worse, I don't care.  You have a melancholy air,
I want you to be pleased.  Only promise me that you will smile.
I want to see you smile and hear you say:  `Ah, well, that's good.'
Poor Mr. Marius! you know?  You promised me that you would give me
anything I like--"

"Yes!  Only speak!"

She looked Marius full in the eye, and said:--

"I have the address."

Marius turned pale.  All the blood flowed back to his heart.

"What address?"

"The address that you asked me to get!"

She added, as though with an effort:--

"The address--you know very well!"

"Yes!" stammered Marius.

"Of that young lady."

This word uttered, she sighed deeply.

Marius sprang from the parapet on which he had been sitting
and seized her hand distractedly.

"Oh!  Well! lead me thither!  Tell me!  Ask of me anything you wish!
Where is it?"

"Come with me," she responded.  "I don't know the street or number
very well; it is in quite the other direction from here, but I know
the house well, I will take you to it."

She withdrew her hand and went on, in a tone which could have rent
the heart of an observer, but which did not even graze Marius
in his intoxicated and ecstatic state:--

"Oh! how glad you are!"

A cloud swept across Marius' brow.  He seized Eponine by the arm:--

"Swear one thing to me!"

"Swear!" said she, "what does that mean?  Come!  You want me to swear?"

And she laughed.

"Your father! promise me, Eponine!  Swear to me that you will not
give this address to your father!"

She turned to him with a stupefied air.

"Eponine!  How do you know that my name is Eponine?"

"Promise what I tell you!"

But she did not seem to hear him.

"That's nice!  You have called me Eponine!"

Marius grasped both her arms at once.

"But answer me, in the name of Heaven! pay attention to what I am
saying to you, swear to me that you will not tell your father this
address that you know!"

"My father!" said she.  "Ah yes, my father!  Be at ease.
He's in close confinement.  Besides, what do I care for my father!"

"But you do not promise me!" exclaimed Marius.

"Let go of me!" she said, bursting into a laugh, "how you do shake me!
Yes!  Yes!  I promise that!  I swear that to you!  What is that to me?
I will not tell my father the address.  There!  Is that right?
Is that it?"

"Nor to any one?" said Marius.

"Nor to any one."

"Now," resumed Marius, "take me there."

"Immediately?"

"Immediately."

"Come along.  Ah! how pleased he is!" said she.

After a few steps she halted.

"You are following me too closely, Monsieur Marius.  Let me go
on ahead, and follow me so, without seeming to do it.  A nice
young man like you must not be seen with a woman like me."

No tongue can express all that lay in that word, woman, thus pronounced
by that child.

She proceeded a dozen paces and then halted once more; Marius joined her.
She addressed him sideways, and without turning towards him:--

"By the way, you know that you promised me something?"

Marius fumbled in his pocket.  All that he owned in the world
was the five francs intended for Thenardier the father.  He took
them and laid them in Eponine's hand.

She opened her fingers and let the coin fall to the ground,
and gazed at him with a gloomy air.

"I don't want your money," said she.



BOOK THIRD.--THE HOUSE IN THE RUE PLUMET



CHAPTER I

THE HOUSE WITH A SECRET


About the middle of the last century, a chief justice in the Parliament
of Paris having a mistress and concealing the fact, for at that period
the grand seignors displayed their mistresses, and the bourgeois
concealed them, had "a little house" built in the Faubourg Saint-Germain,
in the deserted Rue Blomet, which is now called Rue Plumet,
not far from the spot which was then designated as Combat des Animaux.

This house was composed of a single-storied pavilion; two rooms
on the ground floor, two chambers on the first floor, a kitchen
down stairs, a boudoir up stairs, an attic under the roof, the whole
preceded by a garden with a large gate opening on the street.
This garden was about an acre and a half in extent.  This was all
that could be seen by passers-by; but behind the pavilion there was
a narrow courtyard, and at the end of the courtyard a low building
consisting of two rooms and a cellar, a sort of preparation destined
to conceal a child and nurse in case of need.  This building communicated
in the rear by a masked door which opened by a secret spring,
with a long, narrow, paved winding corridor, open to the sky,
hemmed in with two lofty walls, which, hidden with wonderful art,
and lost as it were between garden enclosures and cultivated land,
all of whose angles and detours it followed, ended in another door,
also with a secret lock which opened a quarter of a league away,
almost in another quarter, at the solitary extremity of the Rue
du Babylone.

Through this the chief justice entered, so that even those who were
spying on him and following him would merely have observed that the
justice betook himself every day in a mysterious way somewhere,
and would never have suspected that to go to the Rue de Babylone
was to go to the Rue Blomet.  Thanks to clever purchasers of land,
the magistrate had been able to make a secret, sewer-like passage on
his own property, and consequently, without interference.  Later on,
he had sold in little parcels, for gardens and market gardens,
the lots of ground adjoining the corridor, and the proprietors
of these lots on both sides thought they had a party wall before
their eyes, and did not even suspect the long, paved ribbon winding
between two walls amid their flower-beds and their orchards.
Only the birds beheld this curiosity.  It is probable that the
linnets and tomtits of the last century gossiped a great deal about
the chief justice.

The pavilion, built of stone in the taste of Mansard,
wainscoted and furnished in the Watteau style, rocaille on
the inside, old-fashioned on the outside, walled in with a
triple hedge of flowers, had something discreet, coquettish,
and solemn about it, as befits a caprice of love and magistracy.

This house and corridor, which have now disappeared, were in
existence fifteen years ago.  In '93 a coppersmith had purchased
the house with the idea of demolishing it, but had not been able
to pay the price; the nation made him bankrupt.  So that it was
the house which demolished the coppersmith.  After that, the house
remained uninhabited, and fell slowly to ruin, as does every
dwelling to which the presence of man does not communicate life.
It had remained fitted with its old furniture, was always for sale
or to let, and the ten or a dozen people who passed through
the Rue Plumet were warned of the fact by a yellow and illegible
bit of writing which had hung on the garden wall since 1819.

Towards the end of the Restoration, these same passers-by might have
noticed that the bill had disappeared, and even that the shutters
on the first floor were open.  The house was occupied, in fact.
The windows had short curtains, a sign that there was a woman about.

In the month of October, 1829, a man of a certain age had presented
himself and had hired the house just as it stood, including, of course,
the back building and the lane which ended in the Rue de Babylone.
He had had the secret openings of the two doors to this passage repaired.
The house, as we have just mentioned, was still very nearly
furnished with the justice's old fitting; the new tenant had
ordered some repairs, had added what was lacking here and there,
had replaced the paving-stones in the yard, bricks in the floors,
steps in the stairs, missing bits in the inlaid floors and the glass
in the lattice windows, and had finally installed himself there
with a young girl and an elderly maid-servant, without commotion,
rather like a person who is slipping in than like a man who is
entering his own house.  The neighbors did not gossip about him,
for the reason that there were no neighbors.

This unobtrusive tenant was Jean Valjean, the young girl was Cosette.
The servant was a woman named Toussaint, whom Jean Valjean had
saved from the hospital and from wretchedness, and who was elderly,
a stammerer, and from the provinces, three qualities which had
decided Jean Valjean to take her with him.  He had hired the
house under the name of M. Fauchelevent, independent gentleman.
In all that has been related heretofore, the reader has, doubtless,
been no less prompt than Thenardier to recognize Jean Valjean.

Why had Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Petit-Picpus? What
had happened?

Nothing had happened.

It will be remembered that Jean Valjean was happy in the convent,
so happy that his conscience finally took the alarm.  He saw
Cosette every day, he felt paternity spring up and develop within
him more and more, he brooded over the soul of that child, he said
to himself that she was his, that nothing could take her from him,
that this would last indefinitely, that she would certainly become
a nun, being thereto gently incited every day, that thus the convent
was henceforth the universe for her as it was for him, that he
should grow old there, and that she would grow up there, that she
would grow old there, and that he should die there; that, in short,
delightful hope, no separation was possible.  On reflecting upon this,
he fell into perplexity.  He interrogated himself.  He asked himself
if all that happiness were really his, if it were not composed of
the happiness of another, of the happiness of that child which he,
an old man, was confiscating and stealing; if that were not theft?
He said to himself, that this child had a right to know life before
renouncing it, that to deprive her in advance, and in some sort
without consulting her, of all joys, under the pretext of saving her
from all trials, to take advantage of her ignorance of her isolation,
in order to make an artificial vocation germinate in her,
was to rob a human creature of its nature and to lie to God.
And who knows if, when she came to be aware of all this some day,
and found herself a nun to her sorrow, Cosette would not come
to hate him?  A last, almost selfish thought, and less heroic than
the rest, but which was intolerable to him.  He resolved to quit
the convent.

He resolved on this; he recognized with anguish, the fact
that it was necessary.  As for objections, there were none.
Five years' sojourn between these four walls and of disappearance
had necessarily destroyed or dispersed the elements of fear.
He could return tranquilly among men.  He had grown old,
and all had undergone a change.  Who would recognize him now?
And then, to face the worst, there was danger only for himself,
and he had no right to condemn Cosette to the cloister for the reason
that he had been condemned to the galleys.  Besides, what is danger
in comparison with the right?  Finally, nothing prevented his being
prudent and taking his precautions.

As for Cosette's education, it was almost finished and complete.

His determination once taken, he awaited an opportunity.
It was not long in presenting itself.  Old Fauchelevent died.

Jean Valjean demanded an audience with the revered prioress and told
her that, having come into a little inheritance at the death of
his brother, which permitted him henceforth to live without working,
he should leave the service of the convent and take his daughter
with him; but that, as it was not just that Cosette, since she had
not taken the vows, should have received her education gratuitously,
he humbly begged the Reverend Prioress to see fit that he
should offer to the community, as indemnity, for the five years
which Cosette had spent there, the sum of five thousand francs.

It was thus that Jean Valjean quitted the convent
of the Perpetual Adoration.

On leaving the convent, he took in his own arms the little valise
the key to which he still wore on his person, and would permit
no porter to touch it.  This puzzled Cosette, because of the odor
of embalming which proceeded from it.

Let us state at once, that this trunk never quitted him more.
He always had it in his chamber.  It was the first and only thing
sometimes, that he carried off in his moving when he moved about.
Cosette laughed at it, and called this valise his inseparable, saying:
"I am jealous of it."

Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not reappear in the open air without
profound anxiety.

He discovered the house in the Rue Plumet, and hid himself from
sight there.  Henceforth he was in the possession of the name:--
Ultime Fauchelevent.

At the same time he hired two other apartments in Paris, in order
that he might attract less attention than if he were to remain
always in the same quarter, and so that he could, at need,
take himself off at the slightest disquietude which should assail him,
and in short, so that he might not again be caught unprovided
as on the night when he had so miraculously escaped from Javert.
These two apartments were very pitiable, poor in appearance,
and in two quarters which were far remote from each other, the one
in the Rue de l'Ouest, the other in the Rue de l'Homme Arme.

He went from time to time, now to the Rue de l'Homme Arme,
now to the Rue de l'Ouest, to pass a month or six weeks,
without taking Toussaint.  He had himself served by the porters,
and gave himself out as a gentleman from the suburbs, living on
his funds, and having a little temporary resting-place in town.
This lofty virtue had three domiciles in Paris for the sake
of escaping from the police.



CHAPTER II

JEAN VALJEAN AS A NATIONAL GUARD


However, properly speaking, he lived in the Rue Plumet, and he
had arranged his existence there in the following fashion:--

Cosette and the servant occupied the pavilion; she had the big
sleeping-room with the painted pier-glasses, the boudoir with the
gilded fillets, the justice's drawing-room furnished with tapestries
and vast arm-chairs; she had the garden.  Jean Valjean had a canopied
bed of antique damask in three colors and a beautiful Persian rug
purchased in the Rue du Figuier-Saint-Paul at Mother Gaucher's, put
into Cosette's chamber, and, in order to redeem the severity of these
magnificent old things, he had amalgamated with this bric-a-brac all
the gay and graceful little pieces of furniture suitable to young girls,
an etagere, a bookcase filled with gilt-edged books, an inkstand,
a blotting-book, paper, a work-table incrusted with mother of pearl,
a silver-gilt dressing-case, a toilet service in Japanese porcelain.
Long damask curtains with a red foundation and three colors,
like those on the bed, hung at the windows of the first floor.
On the ground floor, the curtains were of tapestry.  All winter long,
Cosette's little house was heated from top to bottom.  Jean Valjean
inhabited the sort of porter's lodge which was situated at the end
of the back courtyard, with a mattress on a folding-bed, a white
wood table, two straw chairs, an earthenware water-jug, a few old
volumes on a shelf, his beloved valise in one corner, and never
any fire.  He dined with Cosette, and he had a loaf of black bread
on the table for his own use.

When Toussaint came, he had said to her:  "It is the young lady who is
the mistress of this house."--"And you, monsieur?"  Toussaint replied in
amazement.--"I am a much better thing than the master, I am the father."

Cosette had been taught housekeeping in the convent, and she
regulated their expenditure, which was very modest.  Every day,
Jean Valjean put his arm through Cosette's and took her for a walk.
He led her to the Luxembourg, to the least frequented walk,
and every Sunday he took her to mass at Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas,
because that was a long way off.  As it was a very poor quarter,
he bestowed alms largely there, and the poor people surrounded him
in church, which had drawn down upon him Thenardier's epistle:
"To the benevolent gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas."
He was fond of taking Cosette to visit the poor and the sick.
No stranger ever entered the house in the Rue Plumet.  Toussaint brought
their provisions, and Jean Valjean went himself for water to a
fountain near by on the boulevard.  Their wood and wine were put
into a half-subterranean hollow lined with rock-work which lay near
the Rue de Babylone and which had formerly served the chief-justice
as a grotto; for at the epoch of follies and "Little Houses" no love
was without a grotto.

In the door opening on the Rue de Babylone, there was a box destined
for the reception of letters and papers; only, as the three inhabitants
of the pavilion in the Rue Plumet received neither papers nor letters,
the entire usefulness of that box, formerly the go-between of a
love affair, and the confidant of a love-lorn lawyer, was now limited
to the tax-collector's notices, and the summons of the guard.
For M. Fauchelevent, independent gentleman, belonged to the national
guard; he had not been able to escape through the fine meshes of the
census of 1831.  The municipal information collected at that time had
even reached the convent of the Petit-Picpus, a sort of impenetrable
and holy cloud, whence Jean Valjean had emerged in venerable guise,
and, consequently, worthy of mounting guard in the eyes of the townhall.

Three or four times a year, Jean Valjean donned his uniform and
mounted guard; he did this willingly, however; it was a correct
disguise which mixed him with every one, and yet left him solitary.
Jean Valjean had just attained his sixtieth birthday, the age
of legal exemption; but he did not appear to be over fifty;
moreover, he had no desire to escape his sergeant-major nor
to quibble with Comte de Lobau; he possessed no civil status,
he was concealing his name, he was concealing his identity,
so he concealed his age, he concealed everything; and, as we have
just said, he willingly did his duty as a national guard; the sum
of his ambition lay in resembling any other man who paid his taxes.
This man had for his ideal, within, the angel, without, the bourgeois.

Let us note one detail, however; when Jean Valjean went out with Cosette,
he dressed as the reader has already seen, and had the air of a
retired officer.  When he went out alone, which was generally at night,
he was always dressed in a workingman's trousers and blouse, and wore
a cap which concealed his face.  Was this precaution or humility?
Both.  Cosette was accustomed to the enigmatical side of her destiny,
and hardly noticed her father's peculiarities.  As for Toussaint,
she venerated Jean Valjean, and thought everything he did right.

One day, her butcher, who had caught a glimpse of Jean Valjean,
said to her:  "That's a queer fish."  She replied:  "He's a saint."

Neither Jean Valjean nor Cosette nor Toussaint ever entered or emerged
except by the door on the Rue de Babylone.  Unless seen through
the garden gate it would have been difficult to guess that they
lived in the Rue Plumet.  That gate was always closed.  Jean Valjean
had left the garden uncultivated, in order not to attract attention.

In this, possibly, he made a mistake.



CHAPTER III

FOLIIS AC FRONDIBUS


The garden thus left to itself for more than half a century had
become extraordinary and charming.  The passers-by of forty years
ago halted to gaze at it, without a suspicion of the secrets which
it hid in its fresh and verdant depths.  More than one dreamer
of that epoch often allowed his thoughts and his eyes to penetrate
indiscreetly between the bars of that ancient, padlocked gate,
twisted, tottering, fastened to two green and moss-covered pillars,
and oddly crowned with a pediment of undecipherable arabesque.

There was a stone bench in one corner, one or two mouldy statues,
several lattices which had lost their nails with time, were rotting
on the wall, and there were no walks nor turf; but there was
enough grass everywhere.  Gardening had taken its departure,
and nature had returned.  Weeds abounded, which was a great piece
of luck for a poor corner of land.  The festival of gilliflowers
was something splendid.  Nothing in this garden obstructed the
sacred effort of things towards life; venerable growth reigned
there among them.  The trees had bent over towards the nettles,
the plant had sprung upward, the branch had inclined, that which crawls
on the earth had gone in search of that which expands in the air,
that which floats on the wind had bent over towards that which trails
in the moss; trunks, boughs, leaves, fibres, clusters, tendrils,
shoots, spines, thorns, had mingled, crossed, married, confounded
themselves in each other; vegetation in a deep and close embrace,
had celebrated and accomplished there, under the well-pleased
eye of the Creator, in that enclosure three hundred feet square,
the holy mystery of fraternity, symbol of the human fraternity.
This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket,
that is to say, something as impenetrable as a forest, as peopled
as a city, quivering like a nest, sombre like a cathedral,
fragrant like a bouquet, solitary as a tomb, living as a throng.

In Floreal[34] this enormous thicket, free behind its gate and within
its four walls, entered upon the secret labor of germination,
quivered in the rising sun, almost like an animal which drinks
in the breaths of cosmic love, and which feels the sap of April
rising and boiling in its veins, and shakes to the wind its
enormous wonderful green locks, sprinkled on the damp earth,
on the defaced statues, on the crumbling steps of the pavilion,
and even on the pavement of the deserted street, flowers like stars,
dew like pearls, fecundity, beauty, life, joy, perfumes.  At midday,
a thousand white butterflies took refuge there, and it was a divine
spectacle to see that living summer snow whirling about there
in flakes amid the shade.  There, in those gay shadows of verdure,
a throng of innocent voices spoke sweetly to the soul, and what the
twittering forgot to say the humming completed.  In the evening,
a dreamy vapor exhaled from the garden and enveloped it; a shroud
of mist, a calm and celestial sadness covered it; the intoxicating
perfume of the honeysuckles and convolvulus poured out from every
part of it, like an exquisite and subtle poison; the last appeals
of the woodpeckers and the wagtails were audible as they dozed among
the branches; one felt the sacred intimacy of the birds and the trees;
by day the wings rejoice the leaves, by night the leaves protect
the wings.


[34] From April 19 to May 20.


In winter the thicket was black, dripping, bristling, shivering,
and allowed some glimpse of the house.  Instead of flowers on the branches
and dew in the flowers, the long silvery tracks of the snails were
visible on the cold, thick carpet of yellow leaves; but in any fashion,
under any aspect, at all seasons, spring, winter, summer, autumn,
this tiny enclosure breathed forth melancholy, contemplation,
solitude, liberty, the absence of man, the presence of God; and
the rusty old gate had the air of saying:  "This garden belongs to me."

It was of no avail that the pavements of Paris were there on
every side, the classic and splendid hotels of the Rue de Varennes
a couple of paces away, the dome of the Invalides close at hand,
the Chamber of Deputies not far off; the carriages of the Rue de
Bourgogne and of the Rue Saint-Dominique rumbled luxuriously, in vain,
in the vicinity, in vain did the yellow, brown, white, and red
omnibuses cross each other's course at the neighboring cross-roads;
the Rue Plumet was the desert; and the death of the former proprietors,
the revolution which had passed over it, the crumbling away of
ancient fortunes, absence, forgetfulness, forty years of abandonment
and widowhood, had sufficed to restore to this privileged spot ferns,
mulleins, hemlock, yarrow, tall weeds, great crimped plants,
with large leaves of pale green cloth, lizards, beetles, uneasy and
rapid insects; to cause to spring forth from the depths of the earth
and to reappear between those four walls a certain indescribable
and savage grandeur; and for nature, which disconcerts the petty
arrangements of man, and which sheds herself always thoroughly
where she diffuses herself at all, in the ant as well as in
the eagle, to blossom out in a petty little Parisian garden with
as much rude force and majesty as in a virgin forest of the New World.

Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the profound
and penetrating influence of nature knows this.  Although no
absolute satisfaction is given to philosophy, either to circumscribe
the cause or to limit the effect, the contemplator falls into
those unfathomable ecstasies caused by these decompositions
of force terminating in unity.  Everything toils at everything.

Algebra is applied to the clouds; the radiation of the star profits
the rose; no thinker would venture to affirm that the perfume of the
hawthorn is useless to the constellations.  Who, then, can calculate
the course of a molecule?  How do we know that the creation of worlds
is not determined by the fall of grains of sand?  Who knows the
reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely
little, the reverberations of causes in the precipices of being,
and the avalanches of creation?  The tiniest worm is of importance;
the great is little, the little is great; everything is balanced
in necessity; alarming vision for the mind.  There are marvellous
relations between beings and things; in that inexhaustible whole,
from the sun to the grub, nothing despises the other; all have
need of each other.  The light does not bear away terrestrial
perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing what it is doing;
the night distributes stellar essences to the sleeping flowers.
All birds that fly have round their leg the thread of the infinite.
Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a meteor
and with the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places on
one level the birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates.
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins.  Which of the two
possesses the larger field of vision?  Choose.  A bit of mould
is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars.
The same promiscuousness, and yet more unprecedented, exists between
the things of the intelligence and the facts of substance.
Elements and principles mingle, combine, wed, multiply with each other,
to such a point that the material and the moral world are brought
eventually to the same clearness.  The phenomenon is perpetually
returning upon itself.  In the vast cosmic exchanges the universal life
goes and comes in unknown quantities, rolling entirely in the invisible
mystery of effluvia, employing everything, not losing a single dream,
not a single slumber, sowing an animalcule here, crumbling to bits
a planet there, oscillating and winding, making of light a force
and of thought an element, disseminated and invisible, dissolving all,
except that geometrical point, the I; bringing everything back to
the soul-atom; expanding everything in God, entangling all activity,
from summit to base, in the obscurity of a dizzy mechanism,
attaching the flight of an insect to the movement of the earth,
subordinating, who knows?  Were it only by the identity of the law,
the evolution of the comet in the firmament to the whirling
of the infusoria in the drop of water.  A machine made of mind.
Enormous gearing, the prime motor of which is the gnat, and whose
final wheel is the zodiac.



CHAPTER IV

CHANGE OF GATE


It seemed that this garden, created in olden days to conceal
wanton mysteries, had been transformed and become fitted to shelter
chaste mysteries.  There were no longer either arbors, or bowling greens,
or tunnels, or grottos; there was a magnificent, dishevelled obscurity
falling like a veil over all.  Paphos had been made over into Eden.
It is impossible to say what element of repentance had rendered
this retreat wholesome.  This flower-girl now offered her blossom
to the soul.  This coquettish garden, formerly decidedly compromised,
had returned to virginity and modesty.  A justice assisted by a gardener,
a goodman who thought that he was a continuation of Lamoignon,
and another goodman who thought that he was a continuation of Lenotre,
had turned it about, cut, ruffled, decked, moulded it to gallantry;
nature had taken possession of it once more, had filled it with shade,
and had arranged it for love.

There was, also, in this solitude, a heart which was quite ready.
Love had only to show himself; he had here a temple composed
of verdure, grass, moss, the sight of birds, tender shadows,
agitated branches, and a soul made of sweetness, of faith, of candor,
of hope, of aspiration, and of illusion.

Cosette had left the convent when she was still almost a child;
she was a little more than fourteen, and she was at the "ungrateful age";
we have already said, that with the exception of her eyes, she was
homely rather than pretty; she had no ungraceful feature, but she
was awkward, thin, timid and bold at once, a grown-up little girl,
in short.

Her education was finished, that is to say, she has been taught religion,
and even and above all, devotion; then "history," that is to say
the thing that bears that name in convents, geography, grammar,
the participles, the kings of France, a little music, a little
drawing, etc.; but in all other respects she was utterly ignorant,
which is a great charm and a great peril.  The soul of a young
girl should not be left in the dark; later on, mirages that are
too abrupt and too lively are formed there, as in a dark chamber.
She should be gently and discreetly enlightened, rather with the
reflection of realities than with their harsh and direct light.
A useful and graciously austere half-light which dissipates puerile
fears and obviates falls.  There is nothing but the maternal instinct,
that admirable intuition composed of the memories of the virgin
and the experience of the woman, which knows how this half-light
is to be created and of what it should consist.

Nothing supplies the place of this instinct.  All the nuns in
the world are not worth as much as one mother in the formation
of a young girl's soul.

Cosette had had no mother.  She had only had many mothers,
in the plural.

As for Jean Valjean, he was, indeed, all tenderness, all solicitude;
but he was only an old man and he knew nothing at all.

Now, in this work of education, in this grave matter of preparing
a woman for life, what science is required to combat that vast
ignorance which is called innocence!

Nothing prepares a young girl for passions like the convent.
The convent turns the thoughts in the direction of the unknown.
The heart, thus thrown back upon itself, works downward within itself,
since it cannot overflow, and grows deep, since it cannot expand.
Hence visions, suppositions, conjectures, outlines of romances,
a desire for adventures, fantastic constructions, edifices built
wholly in the inner obscurity of the mind, sombre and secret abodes
where the passions immediately find a lodgement as soon as the open
gate permits them to enter.  The convent is a compression which,
in order to triumph over the human heart, should last during the
whole life.

On quitting the convent, Cosette could have found nothing more
sweet and more dangerous than the house in the Rue Plumet.
It was the continuation of solitude with the beginning of liberty;
a garden that was closed, but a nature that was acrid, rich, voluptuous,
and fragrant; the same dreams as in the convent, but with glimpses
of young men; a grating, but one that opened on the street.

Still, when she arrived there, we repeat, she was only a child.
Jean Valjean gave this neglected garden over to her.  "Do what you
like with it," he said to her.  This amused Cosette; she turned
over all the clumps and all the stones, she hunted for "beasts"; she
played in it, while awaiting the time when she would dream in it;
she loved this garden for the insects that she found beneath
her feet amid the grass, while awaiting the day when she would
love it for the stars that she would see through the boughs above
her head.

And then, she loved her father, that is to say, Jean Valjean,
with all her soul, with an innocent filial passion which made
the goodman a beloved and charming companion to her.  It will be
remembered that M. Madeleine had been in the habit of reading a
great deal.  Jean Valjean had continued this practice; he had come
to converse well; he possessed the secret riches and the eloquence
of a true and humble mind which has spontaneously cultivated itself.
He retained just enough sharpness to season his kindness; his mind
was rough and his heart was soft.  During their conversations
in the Luxembourg, he gave her explanations of everything,
drawing on what he had read, and also on what he had suffered.
As she listened to him, Cosette's eyes wandered vaguely about.

This simple man sufficed for Cosette's thought, the same as the wild
garden sufficed for her eyes.  When she had had a good chase after
the butterflies, she came panting up to him and said:  "Ah!  How I
have run!"  He kissed her brow.

Cosette adored the goodman.  She was always at his heels.
Where Jean Valjean was, there happiness was.  Jean Valjean lived
neither in the pavilion nor the garden; she took greater pleasure
in the paved back courtyard, than in the enclosure filled with flowers,
and in his little lodge furnished with straw-seated chairs than
in the great drawing-room hung with tapestry, against which stood
tufted easy-chairs. Jean Valjean sometimes said to her, smiling at
his happiness in being importuned:  "Do go to your own quarters!
Leave me alone a little!"

She gave him those charming and tender scoldings which are
so graceful when they come from a daughter to her father.

"Father, I am very cold in your rooms; why don't you have a carpet
here and a stove?"

"Dear child, there are so many people who are better than I
and who have not even a roof over their heads."

"Then why is there a fire in my rooms, and everything that is needed?"

"Because you are a woman and a child."

"Bah! must men be cold and feel uncomfortable?"

"Certain men."

"That is good, I shall come here so often that you will be obliged
to have a fire."

And again she said to him:--

"Father, why do you eat horrible bread like that?"

"Because, my daughter."

"Well, if you eat it, I will eat it too."

Then, in order to prevent Cosette eating black bread, Jean Valjean
ate white bread.

Cosette had but a confused recollection of her childhood.  She prayed
morning and evening for her mother whom she had never known.
The Thenardiers had remained with her as two hideous figures
in a dream.  She remembered that she had gone "one day, at night,"
to fetch water in a forest.  She thought that it had been very far
from Paris.  It seemed to her that she had begun to live in an abyss,
and that it was Jean Valjean who had rescued her from it.
Her childhood produced upon her the effect of a time when there
had been nothing around her but millepeds, spiders, and serpents.
When she meditated in the evening, before falling asleep, as she
had not a very clear idea that she was Jean Valjean's daughter,
and that he was her father, she fancied that the soul of her mother had
passed into that good man and had come to dwell near her.

When he was seated, she leaned her cheek against his white hair,
and dropped a silent tear, saying to herself:  "Perhaps this man is
my mother."

Cosette, although this is a strange statement to make,
in the profound ignorance of a girl brought up in a convent,--
maternity being also absolutely unintelligible to virginity,--
had ended by fancying that she had had as little mother as possible.
She did not even know her mother's name.  Whenever she asked Jean Valjean,
Jean Valjean remained silent.  If she repeated her question,
he responded with a smile.  Once she insisted; the smile ended in a tear.

This silence on the part of Jean Valjean covered Fantine with darkness.

Was it prudence?  Was it respect?  Was it a fear that he should
deliver this name to the hazards of another memory than his own?

So long as Cosette had been small, Jean Valjean had been willing to talk
to her of her mother; when she became a young girl, it was impossible
for him to do so.  It seemed to him that he no longer dared.  Was it
because of Cosette?  Was it because of Fantine?  He felt a certain
religious horror at letting that shadow enter Cosette's thought;
and of placing a third in their destiny.  The more sacred this
shade was to him, the more did it seem that it was to be feared.
He thought of Fantine, and felt himself overwhelmed with silence.

Through the darkness, he vaguely perceived something which appeared
to have its finger on its lips.  Had all the modesty which had been
in Fantine, and which had violently quitted her during her lifetime,
returned to rest upon her after her death, to watch in indignation
over the peace of that dead woman, and in its shyness, to keep her in
her grave?  Was Jean Valjean unconsciously submitting to the pressure?
We who believe in death, are not among the number who will reject
this mysterious explanation.

Hence the impossibility of uttering, even for Cosette, that name
of Fantine.

One day Cosette said to him:--

"Father, I saw my mother in a dream last night.  She had two big wings.
My mother must have been almost a saint during her life."

"Through martyrdom," replied Jean Valjean.

However, Jean Valjean was happy.

When Cosette went out with him, she leaned on his arm, proud and happy,
in the plenitude of her heart.  Jean Valjean felt his heart melt within
him with delight, at all these sparks of a tenderness so exclusive,
so wholly satisfied with himself alone.  The poor man trembled,
inundated with angelic joy; he declared to himself ecstatically
that this would last all their lives; he told himself that he
really had not suffered sufficiently to merit so radiant a bliss,
and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted
him to be loved thus, he, a wretch, by that innocent being.



CHAPTER V

THE ROSE PERCEIVES THAT IT IS AN ENGINE OF WAR


One day, Cosette chanced to look at herself in her mirror,
and she said to herself:  "Really!"  It seemed to her almost that
she was pretty.  This threw her in a singularly troubled state
of mind.  Up to that moment she had never thought of her face.
She saw herself in her mirror, but she did not look at herself.
And then, she had so often been told that she was homely;
Jean Valjean alone said gently:  "No indeed! no indeed!"
At all events, Cosette had always thought herself homely, and had
grown up in that belief with the easy resignation of childhood.
And here, all at once, was her mirror saying to her, as Jean Valjean
had said:  "No indeed!"  That night, she did not sleep.  "What if I
were pretty!" she thought.  "How odd it would be if I were pretty!"
And she recalled those of her companions whose beauty had produced
a sensation in the convent, and she said to herself:  "What!  Am I to
be like Mademoiselle So-and-So?"

The next morning she looked at herself again, not by accident this time,
and she was assailed with doubts:  "Where did I get such an idea?"
said she; "no, I am ugly."  She had not slept well, that was all,
her eyes were sunken and she was pale.  She had not felt very joyous
on the preceding evening in the belief that she was beautiful,
but it made her very sad not to be able to believe in it any longer.
She did not look at herself again, and for more than a fortnight she
tried to dress her hair with her back turned to the mirror.

In the evening, after dinner, she generally embroidered in wool
or did some convent needlework in the drawing-room, and Jean
Valjean read beside her.  Once she raised her eyes from her work,
and was rendered quite uneasy by the manner in which her father
was gazing at her.

On another occasion, she was passing along the street,
and it seemed to her that some one behind her, whom she
did not see, said:  "A pretty woman! but badly dressed."
"Bah!" she thought, "he does not mean me.  I am well dressed
and ugly."  She was then wearing a plush hat and her merino gown.

At last, one day when she was in the garden, she heard poor old
Toussaint saying:  "Do you notice how pretty Cosette is growing, sir?"
Cosette did not hear her father's reply, but Toussaint's words
caused a sort of commotion within her.  She fled from the garden,
ran up to her room, flew to the looking-glass,--it was three
months since she had looked at herself,--and gave vent to a cry.
She had just dazzled herself.

She was beautiful and lovely; she could not help agreeing with
Toussaint and her mirror.  Her figure was formed, her skin had
grown white, her hair was lustrous, an unaccustomed splendor had
been lighted in her blue eyes.  The consciousness of her beauty
burst upon her in an instant, like the sudden advent of daylight;
other people noticed it also, Toussaint had said so, it was
evidently she of whom the passer-by had spoken, there could no
longer be any doubt of that; she descended to the garden again,
thinking herself a queen, imagining that she heard the birds singing,
though it was winter, seeing the sky gilded, the sun among the trees,
flowers in the thickets, distracted, wild, in inexpressible delight.

Jean Valjean, on his side, experienced a deep and undefinable
oppression at heart.

In fact, he had, for some time past, been contemplating with terror
that beauty which seemed to grow more radiant every day on Cosette's
sweet face.  The dawn that was smiling for all was gloomy for him.

Cosette had been beautiful for a tolerably long time before she
became aware of it herself.  But, from the very first day,
that unexpected light which was rising slowly and enveloping the whole
of the young girl's person, wounded Jean Valjean's sombre eye.
He felt that it was a change in a happy life, a life so happy
that he did not dare to move for fear of disarranging something.
This man, who had passed through all manner of distresses,
who was still all bleeding from the bruises of fate, who had been
almost wicked and who had become almost a saint, who, after having
dragged the chain of the galleys, was now dragging the invisible
but heavy chain of indefinite misery, this man whom the law had
not released from its grasp and who could be seized at any moment
and brought back from the obscurity of his virtue to the broad
daylight of public opprobrium, this man accepted all, excused all,
pardoned all, and merely asked of Providence, of man, of the law,
of society, of nature, of the world, one thing, that Cosette might
love him!

That Cosette might continue to love him!  That God would not prevent
the heart of the child from coming to him, and from remaining with him!
Beloved by Cosette, he felt that he was healed, rested, appeased,
loaded with benefits, recompensed, crowned.  Beloved by Cosette,
it was well with him!  He asked nothing more!  Had any one said
to him:  "Do you want anything better?" he would have answered:
"No." God might have said to him:  "Do you desire heaven?" and he
would have replied:  "I should lose by it."

Everything which could affect this situation, if only on the surface,
made him shudder like the beginning of something new.  He had never
known very distinctly himself what the beauty of a woman means;
but he understood instinctively, that it was something terrible.

He gazed with terror on this beauty, which was blossoming out ever
more triumphant and superb beside him, beneath his very eyes,
on the innocent and formidable brow of that child, from the depths
of her homeliness, of his old age, of his misery, of his reprobation.

He said to himself:  "How beautiful she is!  What is to become
of me?"

There, moreover, lay the difference between his tenderness
and the tenderness of a mother.  What he beheld with anguish,
a mother would have gazed upon with joy.

The first symptoms were not long in making their appearance.

On the very morrow of the day on which she had said to herself:
"Decidedly I am beautiful!"  Cosette began to pay attention to
her toilet.  She recalled the remark of that passer-by: "Pretty,
but badly dressed," the breath of an oracle which had passed
beside her and had vanished, after depositing in her heart one
of the two germs which are destined, later on, to fill the whole
life of woman, coquetry.  Love is the other.

With faith in her beauty, the whole feminine soul expanded within her.
She conceived a horror for her merinos, and shame for her plush hat.
Her father had never refused her anything.  She at once acquired
the whole science of the bonnet, the gown, the mantle, the boot,
the cuff, the stuff which is in fashion, the color which is becoming,
that science which makes of the Parisian woman something so charming,
so deep, and so dangerous.  The words heady woman were invented for
the Parisienne.

In less than a month, little Cosette, in that Thebaid of the Rue
de Babylone, was not only one of the prettiest, but one of the
"best dressed" women in Paris, which means a great deal more.

She would have liked to encounter her "passer-by," to see
what he would say, and to "teach him a lesson!"  The truth is,
that she was ravishing in every respect, and that she distinguished
the difference between a bonnet from Gerard and one from Herbaut
in the most marvellous way.

Jean Valjean watched these ravages with anxiety.  He who felt
that he could never do anything but crawl, walk at the most,
beheld wings sprouting on Cosette.

Moreover, from the mere inspection of Cosette's toilet,
a woman would have recognized the fact that she had no mother.
Certain little proprieties, certain special conventionalities,
were not observed by Cosette.  A mother, for instance, would have
told her that a young girl does not dress in damask.

The first day that Cosette went out in her black damask gown
and mantle, and her white crape bonnet, she took Jean Valjean's arm,
gay, radiant, rosy, proud, dazzling.  "Father," she said, "how do
you like me in this guise?"  Jean Valjean replied in a voice which
resembled the bitter voice of an envious man:  "Charming!"  He was the
same as usual during their walk.  On their return home, he asked Cosette:--

"Won't you put on that other gown and bonnet again,--you know
the ones I mean?"

This took place in Cosette's chamber.  Cosette turned towards
the wardrobe where her cast-off schoolgirl's clothes were hanging.

"That disguise!" said she.  "Father, what do you want me to do with it?
Oh no, the idea!  I shall never put on those horrors again.
With that machine on my head, I have the air of Madame Mad-dog."

Jean Valjean heaved a deep sigh.

From that moment forth, he noticed that Cosette, who had always
heretofore asked to remain at home, saying:  "Father, I enjoy myself
more here with you," now was always asking to go out.  In fact,
what is the use of having a handsome face and a delicious costume
if one does not display them?

He also noticed that Cosette had no longer the same taste for the
back garden.  Now she preferred the garden, and did not dislike
to promenade back and forth in front of the railed fence.
Jean Valjean, who was shy, never set foot in the garden.
He kept to his back yard, like a dog.

Cosette, in gaining the knowledge that she was beautiful, lost the
grace of ignoring it.  An exquisite grace, for beauty enhanced by
ingenuousness is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as a dazzling
and innocent creature who walks along, holding in her hand the key
to paradise without being conscious of it.  But what she had lost
in ingenuous grace, she gained in pensive and serious charm.
Her whole person, permeated with the joy of youth, of innocence,
and of beauty, breathed forth a splendid melancholy.

It was at this epoch that Marius, after the lapse of six months,
saw her once more at the Luxembourg.



CHAPTER VI

THE BATTLE BEGUN


Cosette in her shadow, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire.
Destiny, with its mysterious and fatal patience, slowly drew together
these two beings, all charged and all languishing with the stormy
electricity of passion, these two souls which were laden with love
as two clouds are laden with lightning, and which were bound
to overflow and mingle in a look like the clouds in a flash of fire.

The glance has been so much abused in love romances that it has
finally fallen into disrepute.  One hardly dares to say, nowadays,
that two beings fell in love because they looked at each other.
That is the way people do fall in love, nevertheless, and the
only way.  The rest is nothing, but the rest comes afterwards.
Nothing is more real than these great shocks which two souls convey
to each other by the exchange of that spark.

At that particular hour when Cosette unconsciously darted
that glance which troubled Marius, Marius had no suspicion
that he had also launched a look which disturbed Cosette.

He caused her the same good and the same evil.

She had been in the habit of seeing him for a long time, and she had
scrutinized him as girls scrutinize and see, while looking elsewhere.
Marius still considered Cosette ugly, when she had already begun
to think Marius handsome.  But as he paid no attention to her,
the young man was nothing to her.

Still, she could not refrain from saying to herself that he had
beautiful hair, beautiful eyes, handsome teeth, a charming tone
of voice when she heard him conversing with his comrades, that he
held himself badly when he walked, if you like, but with a grace
that was all his own, that he did not appear to be at all stupid,
that his whole person was noble, gentle, simple, proud, and that,
in short, though he seemed to be poor, yet his air was fine.

On the day when their eyes met at last, and said to each other
those first, obscure, and ineffable things which the glance lisps,
Cosette did not immediately understand.  She returned thoughtfully
to the house in the Rue de l'Ouest, where Jean Valjean, according to
his custom, had come to spend six weeks.  The next morning, on waking,
she thought of that strange young man, so long indifferent and icy,
who now seemed to pay attention to her, and it did not appear to her
that this attention was the least in the world agreeable to her.
She was, on the contrary, somewhat incensed at this handsome and
disdainful individual.  A substratum of war stirred within her.
It struck her, and the idea caused her a wholly childish joy, that she
was going to take her revenge at last.

Knowing that she was beautiful, she was thoroughly conscious,
though in an indistinct fashion, that she possessed a weapon.
Women play with their beauty as children do with a knife.
They wound themselves.

The reader will recall Marius' hesitations, his palpitations,
his terrors.  He remained on his bench and did not approach.
This vexed Cosette.  One day, she said to Jean Valjean:
"Father, let us stroll about a little in that direction."
Seeing that Marius did not come to her, she went to him.  In such cases,
all women resemble Mahomet.  And then, strange to say, the first
symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a young girl it
is boldness.  This is surprising, and yet nothing is more simple.
It is the two sexes tending to approach each other and assuming,
each the other's qualities.

That day, Cosette's glance drove Marius beside himself, and Marius'
glance set Cosette to trembling.  Marius went away confident,
and Cosette uneasy.  From that day forth, they adored each other.

The first thing that Cosette felt was a confused and profound melancholy.
It seemed to her that her soul had become black since the day before.
She no longer recognized it.  The whiteness of soul in young girls,
which is composed of coldness and gayety, resembles snow.  It melts
in love, which is its sun.

Cosette did not know what love was.  She had never heard the word
uttered in its terrestrial sense.  On the books of profane music
which entered the convent, amour (love) was replaced by tambour (drum)
or pandour.  This created enigmas which exercised the imaginations
of the big girls, such as:  Ah, how delightful is the drum! or,
Pity is not a pandour.  But Cosette had left the convent too early
to have occupied herself much with the "drum."  Therefore, she did
not know what name to give to what she now felt.  Is any one
the less ill because one does not know the name of one's malady?

She loved with all the more passion because she loved ignorantly.
She did not know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing,
useful or dangerous, eternal or temporary, allowable or prohibited;
she loved.  She would have been greatly astonished, had any
one said to her:  "You do not sleep?  But that is forbidden!
You do not eat?  Why, that is very bad!  You have oppressions
and palpitations of the heart?  That must not be!  You blush
and turn pale, when a certain being clad in black appears at
the end of a certain green walk?  But that is abominable!"
She would not have understood, and she would have replied:
"What fault is there of mine in a matter in which I have no power
and of which I know nothing?"

It turned out that the love which presented itself was exactly
suited to the state of her soul.  It was a sort of admiration at
a distance, a mute contemplation, the deification of a stranger.
It was the apparition of youth to youth, the dream of nights
become a reality yet remaining a dream, the longed-for phantom
realized and made flesh at last, but having as yet, neither name,
nor fault, nor spot, nor exigence, nor defect; in a word,
the distant lover who lingered in the ideal, a chimaera with a form.
Any nearer and more palpable meeting would have alarmed Cosette
at this first stage, when she was still half immersed in the
exaggerated mists of the cloister.  She had all the fears of children
and all the fears of nuns combined.  The spirit of the convent,
with which she had been permeated for the space of five years,
was still in the process of slow evaporation from her person,
and made everything tremble around her.  In this situation he
was not a lover, he was not even an admirer, he was a vision.
She set herself to adoring Marius as something charming, luminous,
and impossible.

As extreme innocence borders on extreme coquetry, she smiled at him
with all frankness.

Every day, she looked forward to the hour for their walk with impatience,
she found Marius there, she felt herself unspeakably happy,
and thought in all sincerity that she was expressing her whole
thought when she said to Jean Valjean:--

"What a delicious garden that Luxembourg is!"

Marius and Cosette were in the dark as to one another.  They did
not address each other, they did not salute each other, they did
not know each other; they saw each other; and like stars of heaven
which are separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing
at each other.

It was thus that Cosette gradually became a woman and developed,
beautiful and loving, with a consciousness of her beauty,
and in ignorance of her love.  She was a coquette to boot through
her ignorance.



CHAPTER VII

TO ONE SADNESS OPPOSE A SADNESS AND A HALF


All situations have their instincts.  Old and eternal Mother Nature
warned Jean Valjean in a dim way of the presence of Marius.
Jean Valjean shuddered to the very bottom of his soul.  Jean Valjean
saw nothing, knew nothing, and yet he scanned with obstinate attention,
the darkness in which he walked, as though he felt on one side of him
something in process of construction, and on the other, something which
was crumbling away.  Marius, also warned, and, in accordance with
the deep law of God, by that same Mother Nature, did all he could
to keep out of sight of "the father."  Nevertheless, it came to pass
that Jean Valjean sometimes espied him.  Marius' manners were no
longer in the least natural.  He exhibited ambiguous prudence and
awkward daring.  He no longer came quite close to them as formerly.
He seated himself at a distance and pretended to be reading;
why did he pretend that?  Formerly he had come in his old coat,
now he wore his new one every day; Jean Valjean was not sure that he
did not have his hair curled, his eyes were very queer, he wore gloves;
in short, Jean Valjean cordially detested this young man.

Cosette allowed nothing to be divined.  Without knowing just what
was the matter with her she was convinced that there was something
in it, and that it must be concealed.

There was a coincidence between the taste for the toilet which had
recently come to Cosette, and the habit of new clothes developed
by that stranger which was very repugnant to Jean Valjean.  It might
be accidental, no doubt, certainly, but it was a menacing accident.

He never opened his mouth to Cosette about this stranger.  One day,
however, he could not refrain from so doing, and, with that vague
despair which suddenly casts the lead into the depths of its despair,
he said to her:  "What a very pedantic air that young man has!"

Cosette, but a year before only an indifferent little girl,
would have replied:  "Why, no, he is charming."  Ten years later,
with the love of Marius in her heart, she would have answered:
"A pedant, and insufferable to the sight!  You are right!"--
At the moment in life and the heart which she had then attained,
she contented herself with replying, with supreme calmness:
"That young man!"

As though she now beheld him for the first time in her life.

"How stupid I am!" thought Jean Valjean.  "She had not noticed him.
It is I who have pointed him out to her."

Oh, simplicity of the old! oh, the depth of children!

It is one of the laws of those fresh years of suffering and trouble,
of those vivacious conflicts between a first love and the first
obstacles, that the young girl does not allow herself to be caught
in any trap whatever, and that the young man falls into every one.
Jean Valjean had instituted an undeclared war against Marius,
which Marius, with the sublime stupidity of his passion and his age,
did not divine.  Jean Valjean laid a host of ambushes for him;
he changed his hour, he changed his bench, he forgot his handkerchief,
he came alone to the Luxembourg; Marius dashed headlong into
all these snares; and to all the interrogation marks planted
by Jean Valjean in his pathway, he ingenuously answered "yes."
But Cosette remained immured in her apparent unconcern and in her
imperturbable tranquillity, so that Jean Valjean arrived at the
following conclusion:  "That ninny is madly in love with Cosette,
but Cosette does not even know that he exists."

None the less did he bear in his heart a mournful tremor.
The minute when Cosette would love might strike at any moment.
Does not everything begin with indifference?

Only once did Cosette make a mistake and alarm him.  He rose from
his seat to depart, after a stay of three hours, and she said:
"What, already?"

Jean Valjean had not discontinued his trips to the Luxembourg, as he
did not wish to do anything out of the way, and as, above all things,
he feared to arouse Cosette; but during the hours which were so
sweet to the lovers, while Cosette was sending her smile to the
intoxicated Marius, who perceived nothing else now, and who now saw
nothing in all the world but an adored and radiant face, Jean Valjean
was fixing on Marius flashing and terrible eyes.  He, who had
finally come to believe himself incapable of a malevolent feeling,
experienced moments when Marius was present, in which he thought he
was becoming savage and ferocious once more, and he felt the old
depths of his soul, which had formerly contained so much wrath,
opening once more and rising up against that young man.  It almost
seemed to him that unknown craters were forming in his bosom.

What! he was there, that creature!  What was he there for?
He came creeping about, smelling out, examining, trying!
He came, saying:  "Hey!  Why not?"  He came to prowl about his,
Jean Valjean's, life! to prowl about his happiness, with the
purpose of seizing it and bearing it away!

Jean Valjean added:  "Yes, that's it!  What is he in search of?
An adventure!  What does he want?  A love affair!  A love affair!
And I?  What!  I have been first, the most wretched of men,
and then the most unhappy, and I have traversed sixty years of life
on my knees, I have suffered everything that man can suffer, I have
grown old without having been young, I have lived without a family,
without relatives, without friends, without life, without children,
I have left my blood on every stone, on every bramble, on every
mile-post, along every wall, I have been gentle, though others have
been hard to me, and kind, although others have been malicious,
I have become an honest man once more, in spite of everything,
I have repented of the evil that I have done and have forgiven
the evil that has been done to me, and at the moment when I
receive my recompense, at the moment when it is all over,
at the moment when I am just touching the goal, at the moment
when I have what I desire, it is well, it is good, I have paid,
I have earned it, all this is to take flight, all this will vanish,
and I shall lose Cosette, and I shall lose my life, my joy,
my soul, because it has pleased a great booby to come and lounge at
the Luxembourg."

Then his eyes were filled with a sad and extraordinary gleam.

It was no longer a man gazing at a man; it was no longer an enemy
surveying an enemy.  It was a dog scanning a thief.

The reader knows the rest.  Marius pursued his senseless course.
One day he followed Cosette to the Rue de l'Ouest. Another day he
spoke to the porter.  The porter, on his side, spoke, and said
to Jean Valjean:  "Monsieur, who is that curious young man who is
asking for you?"  On the morrow Jean Valjean bestowed on Marius
that glance which Marius at last perceived.  A week later,
Jean Valjean had taken his departure.  He swore to himself that he
would never again set foot either in the Luxembourg or in the Rue
de l'Ouest. He returned to the Rue Plumet.

Cosette did not complain, she said nothing, she asked no questions,
she did not seek to learn his reasons; she had already reached the point
where she was afraid of being divined, and of betraying herself.
Jean Valjean had no experience of these miseries, the only miseries
which are charming and the only ones with which he was not acquainted;
the consequence was that he did not understand the grave significance
of Cosette's silence.

He merely noticed that she had grown sad, and he grew gloomy.
On his side and on hers, inexperience had joined issue.

Once he made a trial.  He asked Cosette:--

"Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?"

A ray illuminated Cosette's pale face.

"Yes," said she.

They went thither.  Three months had elapsed.  Marius no longer
went there.  Marius was not there.

On the following day, Jean Valjean asked Cosette again:--

"Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?"

She replied, sadly and gently:--

"No."

Jean Valjean was hurt by this sadness, and heart-broken
at this gentleness.

What was going on in that mind which was so young and yet already
so impenetrable?  What was on its way there within?  What was taking place
in Cosette's soul?  Sometimes, instead of going to bed, Jean Valjean
remained seated on his pallet, with his head in his hands, and he
passed whole nights asking himself:  "What has Cosette in her mind?"
and in thinking of the things that she might be thinking about.

Oh! at such moments, what mournful glances did he cast towards
that cloister, that chaste peak, that abode of angels, that inaccessible
glacier of virtue!  How he contemplated, with despairing ecstasy,
that convent garden, full of ignored flowers and cloistered virgins,
where all perfumes and all souls mount straight to heaven!
How he adored that Eden forever closed against him, whence he had
voluntarily and madly emerged!  How he regretted his abnegation
and his folly in having brought Cosette back into the world,
poor hero of sacrifice, seized and hurled to the earth by his
very self-devotion! How he said to himself, "What have I done?"

However, nothing of all this was perceptible to Cosette.
No ill-temper, no harshness.  His face was always serene and kind.
Jean Valjean's manners were more tender and more paternal than ever.
If anything could have betrayed his lack of joy, it was his
increased suavity.

On her side, Cosette languished.  She suffered from the absence of
Marius as she had rejoiced in his presence, peculiarly, without exactly
being conscious of it.  When Jean Valjean ceased to take her on
their customary strolls, a feminine instinct murmured confusedly,
at the bottom of her heart, that she must not seem to set store
on the Luxembourg garden, and that if this proved to be a matter
of indifference to her, her father would take her thither once more.
But days, weeks, months, elapsed.  Jean Valjean had tacitly accepted
Cosette's tacit consent.  She regretted it.  It was too late.
So Marius had disappeared; all was over.  The day on which she returned
to the Luxembourg, Marius was no longer there.  What was to be done?
Should she ever find him again?  She felt an anguish at her heart,
which nothing relieved, and which augmented every day; she no
longer knew whether it was winter or summer, whether it was raining
or shining, whether the birds were singing, whether it was the season
for dahlias or daisies, whether the Luxembourg was more charming
than the Tuileries, whether the linen which the laundress brought
home was starched too much or not enough, whether Toussaint had

done "her marketing" well or ill; and she remained dejected,
absorbed, attentive to but a single thought, her eyes vague
and staring as when one gazes by night at a black and fathomless
spot where an apparition has vanished.

However, she did not allow Jean Valjean to perceive anything of this,
except her pallor.

She still wore her sweet face for him.

This pallor sufficed but too thoroughly to trouble Jean Valjean.
Sometimes he asked her:--

"What is the matter with you?"

She replied:  "There is nothing the matter with me."

And after a silence, when she divined that he was sad also,
she would add:--

"And you, father--is there anything wrong with you?"

"With me?  Nothing," said he.

These two beings who had loved each other so exclusively,
and with so touching an affection, and who had lived so long for
each other now suffered side by side, each on the other's account;
without acknowledging it to each other, without anger towards
each other, and with a smile.



CHAPTER VIII

THE CHAIN-GANG


Jean Valjean was the more unhappy of the two.  Youth, even in
its sorrows, always possesses its own peculiar radiance.

At times, Jean Valjean suffered so greatly that he became puerile.
It is the property of grief to cause the childish side of man
to reappear.  He had an unconquerable conviction that Cosette was
escaping from him.  He would have liked to resist, to retain her,
to arouse her enthusiasm by some external and brilliant matter.
These ideas, puerile, as we have just said, and at the same time senile,
conveyed to him, by their very childishness, a tolerably just notion
of the influence of gold lace on the imaginations of young girls.
He once chanced to see a general on horseback, in full uniform,
pass along the street, Comte Coutard, the commandant of Paris.
He envied that gilded man; what happiness it would be, he said to himself,
if he could put on that suit which was an incontestable thing;
and if Cosette could behold him thus, she would be dazzled, and when
he had Cosette on his arm and passed the gates of the Tuileries,
the guard would present arms to him, and that would suffice for Cosette,
and would dispel her idea of looking at young men.

An unforeseen shock was added to these sad reflections.

In the isolated life which they led, and since they had come
to dwell in the Rue Plumet, they had contracted one habit.
They sometimes took a pleasure trip to see the sun rise, a mild
species of enjoyment which befits those who are entering life
and those who are quitting it.

For those who love solitude, a walk in the early morning is equivalent
to a stroll by night, with the cheerfulness of nature added.
The streets are deserted and the birds are singing.  Cosette, a bird
herself, liked to rise early.  These matutinal excursions were
planned on the preceding evening.  He proposed, and she agreed.
It was arranged like a plot, they set out before daybreak,
and these trips were so many small delights for Cosette.
These innocent eccentricities please young people.

Jean Valjean's inclination led him, as we have seen, to the least
frequented spots, to solitary nooks, to forgotten places.
There then existed, in the vicinity of the barriers of Paris,
a sort of poor meadows, which were almost confounded with the city,
where grew in summer sickly grain, and which, in autumn,
after the harvest had been gathered, presented the appearance,
not of having been reaped, but peeled.  Jean Valjean loved to haunt
these fields.  Cosette was not bored there.  It meant solitude
to him and liberty to her.  There, she became a little girl
once more, she could run and almost play; she took off her hat,
laid it on Jean Valjean's knees, and gathered bunches of flowers.
She gazed at the butterflies on the flowers, but did not catch them;
gentleness and tenderness are born with love, and the young girl
who cherishes within her breast a trembling and fragile ideal has
mercy on the wing of a butterfly.  She wove garlands of poppies,
which she placed on her head, and which, crossed and penetrated
with sunlight, glowing until they flamed, formed for her rosy face a
crown of burning embers.

Even after their life had grown sad, they kept up their custom
of early strolls.

One morning in October, therefore, tempted by the serene perfection
of the autumn of 1831, they set out, and found themselves at break
of day near the Barriere du Maine.  It was not dawn, it was daybreak;
a delightful and stern moment.  A few constellations here and there
in the deep, pale azure, the earth all black, the heavens all white,
a quiver amid the blades of grass, everywhere the mysterious
chill of twilight.  A lark, which seemed mingled with the stars,
was carolling at a prodigious height, and one would have declared
that that hymn of pettiness calmed immensity.  In the East,
the Valde-Grace projected its dark mass on the clear horizon
with the sharpness of steel; Venus dazzlingly brilliant was rising
behind that dome and had the air of a soul making its escape from
a gloomy edifice.

All was peace and silence; there was no one on the road;
a few stray laborers, of whom they caught barely a glimpse,
were on their way to their work along the side-paths.

Jean Valjean was sitting in a cross-walk on some planks deposited at
the gate of a timber-yard. His face was turned towards the highway,
his back towards the light; he had forgotten the sun which was on the
point of rising; he had sunk into one of those profound absorptions
in which the mind becomes concentrated, which imprison even the eye,
and which are equivalent to four walls.  There are meditations
which may be called vertical; when one is at the bottom of them,
time is required to return to earth.  Jean Valjean had plunged into
one of these reveries.  He was thinking of Cosette, of the happiness
that was possible if nothing came between him and her, of the light
with which she filled his life, a light which was but the emanation
of her soul.  He was almost happy in his revery.  Cosette, who was
standing beside him, was gazing at the clouds as they turned rosy.

All at once Cosette exclaimed:  "Father, I should think some one
was coming yonder."  Jean Valjean raised his eyes.

Cosette was right.  The causeway which leads to the ancient Barriere
du Maine is a prolongation, as the reader knows, of the Rue
de Sevres, and is cut at right angles by the inner boulevard.
At the elbow of the causeway and the boulevard, at the spot where
it branches, they heard a noise which it was difficult to account
for at that hour, and a sort of confused pile made its appearance.
Some shapeless thing which was coming from the boulevard was turning
into the road.

It grew larger, it seemed to move in an orderly manner,
though it was bristling and quivering; it seemed to be a vehicle,
but its load could not be distinctly made out.  There were horses,
wheels, shouts; whips were cracking.  By degrees the outlines
became fixed, although bathed in shadows.  It was a vehicle,
in fact, which had just turned from the boulevard into the highway,
and which was directing its course towards the barrier near which sat
Jean Valjean; a second, of the same aspect, followed, then a third,
then a fourth; seven chariots made their appearance in succession,
the heads of the horses touching the rear of the wagon in front.
Figures were moving on these vehicles, flashes were visible
through the dusk as though there were naked swords there,
a clanking became audible which resembled the rattling of chains,
and as this something advanced, the sound of voices waxed louder,
and it turned into a terrible thing such as emerges from the cave
of dreams.

As it drew nearer, it assumed a form, and was outlined behind the trees
with the pallid hue of an apparition; the mass grew white; the day,
which was slowly dawning, cast a wan light on this swarming heap
which was at once both sepulchral and living, the heads of the figures
turned into the faces of corpses, and this is what it proved to be:--

Seven wagons were driving in a file along the road.  The first
six were singularly constructed.  They resembled coopers' drays;
they consisted of long ladders placed on two wheels and forming
barrows at their rear extremities.  Each dray, or rather let us say,
each ladder, was attached to four horses harnessed tandem.
On these ladders strange clusters of men were being drawn.
In the faint light, these men were to be divined rather than seen.
Twenty-four on each vehicle, twelve on a side, back to back,
facing the passers-by, their legs dangling in the air,--this was
the manner in which these men were travelling, and behind their backs
they had something which clanked, and which was a chain, and on
their necks something which shone, and which was an iron collar.
Each man had his collar, but the chain was for all; so that if these
four and twenty men had occasion to alight from the dray and walk,
they were seized with a sort of inexorable unity, and were obliged
to wind over the ground with the chain for a backbone, somewhat after
the fashion of millepeds.  In the back and front of each vehicle,
two men armed with muskets stood erect, each holding one end
of the chain under his foot.  The iron necklets were square.
The seventh vehicle, a huge rack-sided baggage wagon, without a hood,
had four wheels and six horses, and carried a sonorous pile of
iron boilers, cast-iron pots, braziers, and chains, among which were
mingled several men who were pinioned and stretched at full length,
and who seemed to be ill.  This wagon, all lattice-work, was
garnished with dilapidated hurdles which appeared to have served for
former punishments.  These vehicles kept to the middle of the road.
On each side marched a double hedge of guards of infamous aspect,
wearing three-cornered hats, like the soldiers under the Directory,
shabby, covered with spots and holes, muffled in uniforms
of veterans and the trousers of undertakers' men, half gray,
half blue, which were almost hanging in rags, with red epaulets,
yellow shoulder belts, short sabres, muskets, and cudgels; they were
a species of soldier-blackguards. These myrmidons seemed composed
of the abjectness of the beggar and the authority of the executioner.
The one who appeared to be their chief held a postilion's whip
in his hand.  All these details, blurred by the dimness of dawn,
became more and more clearly outlined as the light increased.
At the head and in the rear of the convoy rode mounted gendarmes,
serious and with sword in fist.

This procession was so long that when the first vehicle reached
the barrier, the last was barely debauching from the boulevard.
A throng, sprung, it is impossible to say whence, and formed in
a twinkling, as is frequently the case in Paris, pressed forward
from both sides of the road and looked on.  In the neighboring lanes
the shouts of people calling to each other and the wooden shoes
of market-gardeners hastening up to gaze were audible.

The men massed upon the drays allowed themselves to be jolted
along in silence.  They were livid with the chill of morning.
They all wore linen trousers, and their bare feet were thrust into
wooden shoes.  The rest of their costume was a fantasy of wretchedness.
Their accoutrements were horribly incongruous; nothing is more funereal
than the harlequin in rags.  Battered felt hats, tarpaulin caps,
hideous woollen nightcaps, and, side by side with a short blouse,
a black coat broken at the elbow; many wore women's headgear,
others had baskets on their heads; hairy breasts were visible,
and through the rent in their garments tattooed designs could be descried;
temples of Love, flaming hearts, Cupids; eruptions and unhealthy red
blotches could also be seen.  Two or three had a straw rope attached
to the cross-bar of the dray, and suspended under them like a stirrup,
which supported their feet.  One of them held in his hand and raised
to his mouth something which had the appearance of a black stone
and which he seemed to be gnawing; it was bread which he was eating.
There were no eyes there which were not either dry, dulled, or flaming
with an evil light.  The escort troop cursed, the men in chains did
not utter a syllable; from time to time the sound of a blow became
audible as the cudgels descended on shoulder-blades or skulls;
some of these men were yawning; their rags were terrible; their feet
hung down, their shoulders oscillated, their heads clashed together,
their fetters clanked, their eyes glared ferociously, their fists
clenched or fell open inertly like the hands of corpses; in the rear
of the convoy ran a band of children screaming with laughter.

This file of vehicles, whatever its nature was, was mournful.
It was evident that to-morrow, that an hour hence, a pouring rain
might descend, that it might be followed by another and another,
and that their dilapidated garments would be drenched, that once soaked,
these men would not get dry again, that once chilled, they would
not again get warm, that their linen trousers would be glued to
their bones by the downpour, that the water would fill their shoes,
that no lashes from the whips would be able to prevent their jaws
from chattering, that the chain would continue to bind them
by the neck, that their legs would continue to dangle, and it was
impossible not to shudder at the sight of these human beings thus
bound and passive beneath the cold clouds of autumn, and delivered
over to the rain, to the blast, to all the furies of the air,
like trees and stones.

Blows from the cudgel were not omitted even in the case of the sick men,
who lay there knotted with ropes and motionless on the seventh wagon,
and who appeared to have been tossed there like sacks filled with misery.

Suddenly, the sun made its appearance; the immense light of the Orient
burst forth, and one would have said that it had set fire to all
those ferocious heads.  Their tongues were unloosed; a conflagration
of grins, oaths, and songs exploded.  The broad horizontal sheet
of light severed the file in two parts, illuminating heads and bodies,
leaving feet and wheels in the obscurity.  Thoughts made their
appearance on these faces; it was a terrible moment; visible demons
with their masks removed, fierce souls laid bare.  Though lighted up,
this wild throng remained in gloom.  Some, who were gay, had in
their mouths quills through which they blew vermin over the crowd,
picking out the women; the dawn accentuated these lamentable
profiles with the blackness of its shadows; there was not one of
these creatures who was not deformed by reason of wretchedness;
and the whole was so monstrous that one would have said that the
sun's brilliancy had been changed into the glare of the lightning.
The wagon-load which headed the line had struck up a song, and were
shouting at the top of their voices with a haggard joviality,
a potpourri by Desaugiers, then famous, called The Vestal; the trees
shivered mournfully; in the cross-lanes, countenances of bourgeois
listened in an idiotic delight to these coarse strains droned by spectres.

All sorts of distress met in this procession as in chaos; here were
to be found the facial angles of every sort of beast, old men, youths,
bald heads, gray beards, cynical monstrosities, sour resignation,
savage grins, senseless attitudes, snouts surmounted by caps,
heads like those of young girls with corkscrew curls on the temples,
infantile visages, and by reason of that, horrible thin skeleton faces,
to which death alone was lacking.  On the first cart was a negro,
who had been a slave, in all probability, and who could make
a comparison of his chains.  The frightful leveller from below,
shame, had passed over these brows; at that degree of abasement,
the last transformations were suffered by all in their extremest depths,
and ignorance, converted into dulness, was the equal of intelligence
converted into despair.  There was no choice possible between
these men who appeared to the eye as the flower of the mud.
It was evident that the person who had had the ordering of that
unclean procession had not classified them.  These beings had been
fettered and coupled pell-mell, in alphabetical disorder, probably,
and loaded hap-hazard on those carts.  Nevertheless, horrors,
when grouped together, always end by evolving a result; all additions
of wretched men give a sum total, each chain exhaled a common soul,
and each dray-load had its own physiognomy.  By the side of the one
where they were singing, there was one where they were howling;
a third where they were begging; one could be seen in which they
were gnashing their teeth; another load menaced the spectators,
another blasphemed God; the last was as silent as the tomb.
Dante would have thought that he beheld his seven circles of hell
on the march.  The march of the damned to their tortures, performed
in sinister wise, not on the formidable and flaming chariot of
the Apocalypse, but, what was more mournful than that, on the gibbet cart.

One of the guards, who had a hook on the end of his cudgel, made a
pretence from time to time, of stirring up this mass of human filth.
An old woman in the crowd pointed them out to her little boy five
years old, and said to him:  "Rascal, let that be a warning to you!"

As the songs and blasphemies increased, the man who appeared to be
the captain of the escort cracked his whip, and at that signal
a fearful dull and blind flogging, which produced the sound of hail,
fell upon the seven dray-loads; many roared and foamed at the mouth;
which redoubled the delight of the street urchins who had hastened up,
a swarm of flies on these wounds.

Jean Valjean's eyes had assumed a frightful expression.
They were no longer eyes; they were those deep and glassy objects
which replace the glance in the case of certain wretched men,
which seem unconscious of reality, and in which flames the reflection
of terrors and of catastrophes.  He was not looking at a spectacle,
he was seeing a vision.  He tried to rise, to flee, to make
his escape; he could not move his feet.  Sometimes, the things
that you see seize upon you and hold you fast.  He remained nailed
to the spot, petrified, stupid, asking himself, athwart confused
and inexpressible anguish, what this sepulchral persecution signified,
and whence had come that pandemonium which was pursuing him.
All at once, he raised his hand to his brow, a gesture habitual
to those whose memory suddenly returns; he remembered that this was,
in fact, the usual itinerary, that it was customary to make this
detour in order to avoid all possibility of encountering royalty on
the road to Fontainebleau, and that, five and thirty years before,
he had himself passed through that barrier.

Cosette was no less terrified, but in a different way.  She did
not understand; what she beheld did not seem to her to be possible;
at length she cried:--

"Father!  What are those men in those carts?"

Jean Valjean replied:  "Convicts."

"Whither are they going?"

"To the galleys."

At that moment, the cudgelling, multiplied by a hundred hands,
became zealous, blows with the flat of the sword were mingled
with it, it was a perfect storm of whips and clubs; the convicts
bent before it, a hideous obedience was evoked by the torture,
and all held their peace, darting glances like chained wolves.

Cosette trembled in every limb; she resumed:--

"Father, are they still men?"

"Sometimes," answered the unhappy man.

It was the chain-gang, in fact, which had set out before daybreak
from Bicetre, and had taken the road to Mans in order to avoid
Fontainebleau, where the King then was.  This caused the horrible
journey to last three or four days longer; but torture may surely
be prolonged with the object of sparing the royal personage a sight of it.

Jean Valjean returned home utterly overwhelmed.  Such encounters
are shocks, and the memory that they leave behind them resembles
a thorough shaking up.

Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not observe that, on his way back
to the Rue de Babylone with Cosette, the latter was plying him
with other questions on the subject of what they had just seen;
perhaps he was too much absorbed in his own dejection to notice
her words and reply to them.  But when Cosette was leaving him
in the evening, to betake herself to bed, he heard her say in a
low voice, and as though talking to herself:  "It seems to me,
that if I were to find one of those men in my pathway, oh, my God,
I should die merely from the sight of him close at hand."

Fortunately, chance ordained that on the morrow of that tragic day,
there was some official solemnity apropos of I know not what,--
fetes in Paris, a review in the Champ de Mars, jousts on the Seine,
theatrical performances in the Champs-Elysees, fireworks at
the Arc de l'Etoile, illuminations everywhere.  Jean Valjean did
violence to his habits, and took Cosette to see these rejoicings,
for the purpose of diverting her from the memory of the day before,
and of effacing, beneath the smiling tumult of all Paris,
the abominable thing which had passed before her.  The review
with which the festival was spiced made the presence of uniforms
perfectly natural; Jean Valjean donned his uniform of a national
guard with the vague inward feeling of a man who is betaking himself
to shelter.  However, this trip seemed to attain its object.
Cosette, who made it her law to please her father, and to whom,
moreover, all spectacles were a novelty, accepted this diversion
with the light and easy good grace of youth, and did not pout too
disdainfully at that flutter of enjoyment called a public fete;
so that Jean Valjean was able to believe that he had succeeded,
and that no trace of that hideous vision remained.

Some days later, one morning, when the sun was shining brightly,
and they were both on the steps leading to the garden, another infraction
of the rules which Jean Valjean seemed to have imposed upon himself,
and to the custom of remaining in her chamber which melancholy had
caused Cosette to adopt, Cosette, in a wrapper, was standing erect
in that negligent attire of early morning which envelops young girls
in an adorable way and which produces the effect of a cloud drawn over
a star; and, with her head bathed in light, rosy after a good sleep,
submitting to the gentle glances of the tender old man, she was picking
a daisy to pieces.  Cosette did not know the delightful legend,
I love a little, passionately, etc.--who was there who could
have taught her?  She was handling the flower instinctively,
innocently, without a suspicion that to pluck a daisy apart is to
do the same by a heart.  If there were a fourth, and smiling Grace
called Melancholy, she would have worn the air of that Grace.
Jean Valjean was fascinated by the contemplation of those tiny
fingers on that flower, and forgetful of everything in the radiance
emitted by that child.  A red-breast was warbling in the thicket,
on one side.  White cloudlets floated across the sky, so gayly,
that one would have said that they had just been set at liberty.
Cosette went on attentively tearing the leaves from her flower;
she seemed to be thinking about something; but whatever it was,
it must be something charming; all at once she turned her head
over her shoulder with the delicate languor of a swan, and said
to Jean Valjean:  "Father, what are the galleys like?"



BOOK FOURTH.--SUCCOR FROM BELOW MAY TURN OUT TO BE SUCCOR FROM ON
HIGH



CHAPTER I

A WOUND WITHOUT, HEALING WITHIN


Thus their life clouded over by degrees.

But one diversion, which had formerly been a happiness, remained to them,
which was to carry bread to those who were hungry, and clothing to those
who were cold.  Cosette often accompanied Jean Valjean on these visits
to the poor, on which they recovered some remnants of their former
free intercourse; and sometimes, when the day had been a good one,
and they had assisted many in distress, and cheered and warmed
many little children, Cosette was rather merry in the evening.
It was at this epoch that they paid their visit to the Jondrette den.

On the day following that visit, Jean Valjean made his appearance
in the pavilion in the morning, calm as was his wont, but with a
large wound on his left arm which was much inflamed, and very angry,
which resembled a burn, and which he explained in some way or other.
This wound resulted in his being detained in the house for a month
with fever.  He would not call in a doctor.  When Cosette urged him,
"Call the dog-doctor," said he.

Cosette dressed the wound morning and evening with so divine an air
and such angelic happiness at being of use to him, that Jean Valjean
felt all his former joy returning, his fears and anxieties dissipating,
and he gazed at Cosette, saying:  "Oh! what a kindly wound!
Oh! what a good misfortune!"

Cosette on perceiving that her father was ill, had deserted the pavilion
and again taken a fancy to the little lodging and the back courtyard.
She passed nearly all her days beside Jean Valjean and read to him
the books which he desired.  Generally they were books of travel.
Jean Valjean was undergoing a new birth; his happiness was reviving
in these ineffable rays; the Luxembourg, the prowling young stranger,
Cosette's coldness,--all these clouds upon his soul were growing dim.
He had reached the point where he said to himself:  "I imagined all that.
I am an old fool."

His happiness was so great that the horrible discovery of the Thenardiers
made in the Jondrette hovel, unexpected as it was, had, after a fashion,
glided over him unnoticed.  He had succeeded in making his escape;
all trace of him was lost--what more did he care for! he only thought
of those wretched beings to pity them.  "Here they are in prison,
and henceforth they will be incapacitated for doing any harm,"
he thought, "but what a lamentable family in distress!"

As for the hideous vision of the Barriere du Maine, Cosette had
not referred to it again.

Sister Sainte-Mechtilde had taught Cosette music in the convent;
Cosette had the voice of a linnet with a soul, and sometimes,
in the evening, in the wounded man's humble abode, she warbled
melancholy songs which delighted Jean Valjean.

Spring came; the garden was so delightful at that season of the year,
that Jean Valjean said to Cosette:--

"You never go there; I want you to stroll in it."

"As you like, father," said Cosette.

And for the sake of obeying her father, she resumed her walks
in the garden, generally alone, for, as we have mentioned,
Jean Valjean, who was probably afraid of being seen through the fence,
hardly ever went there.

Jean Valjean's wound had created a diversion.

When Cosette saw that her father was suffering less, that he
was convalescing, and that he appeared to be happy, she experienced
a contentment which she did not even perceive, so gently and naturally
had it come.  Then, it was in the month of March, the days were
growing longer, the winter was departing, the winter always bears
away with it a portion of our sadness; then came April, that daybreak
of summer, fresh as dawn always is, gay like every childhood;
a little inclined to weep at times like the new-born being that it is.
In that month, nature has charming gleams which pass from the sky,
from the trees, from the meadows and the flowers into the heart
of man.

Cosette was still too young to escape the penetrating influence
of that April joy which bore so strong a resemblance to herself.
Insensibly, and without her suspecting the fact, the blackness
departed from her spirit.  In spring, sad souls grow light,
as light falls into cellars at midday.  Cosette was no longer sad.
However, though this was so, she did not account for it to herself.
In the morning, about ten o'clock, after breakfast, when she had
succeeded in enticing her father into the garden for a quarter
of an hour, and when she was pacing up and down in the sunlight
in front of the steps, supporting his left arm for him, she did
not perceive that she laughed every moment and that she was happy.

Jean Valjean, intoxicated, beheld her growing fresh and rosy once more.

"Oh!  What a good wound!" he repeated in a whisper.

And he felt grateful to the Thenardiers.

His wound once healed, he resumed his solitary twilight strolls.

It is a mistake to suppose that a person can stroll alone in
that fashion in the uninhabited regions of Paris without meeting
with some adventure.



CHAPTER II

MOTHER PLUTARQUE FINDS NO DIFFICULTY IN EXPLAINING A PHENOMENON


One evening, little Gavroche had had nothing to eat; he remembered
that he had not dined on the preceding day either; this was becoming
tiresome.  He resolved to make an effort to secure some supper.
He strolled out beyond the Salpetriere into deserted regions;
that is where windfalls are to be found; where there is no one,
one always finds something.  He reached a settlement which appeared
to him to be the village of Austerlitz.

In one of his preceding lounges he had noticed there an old garden
haunted by an old man and an old woman, and in that garden, a passable
apple-tree. Beside the apple-tree stood a sort of fruit-house,
which was not securely fastened, and where one might contrive to get
an apple.  One apple is a supper; one apple is life.  That which was
Adam's ruin might prove Gavroche's salvation.  The garden abutted
on a solitary, unpaved lane, bordered with brushwood while awaiting
the arrival of houses; the garden was separated from it by a hedge.

Gavroche directed his steps towards this garden; he found the lane,
he recognized the apple-tree, he verified the fruit-house, he examined
the hedge; a hedge means merely one stride.  The day was declining,
there was not even a cat in the lane, the hour was propitious.
Gavroche began the operation of scaling the hedge, then suddenly paused.
Some one was talking in the garden.  Gavroche peeped through one of
the breaks in the hedge.

A couple of paces distant, at the foot of the hedge on the other side,
exactly at the point where the gap which he was meditating would
have been made, there was a sort of recumbent stone which formed
a bench, and on this bench was seated the old man of the garden,
while the old woman was standing in front of him.  The old woman
was grumbling.  Gavroche, who was not very discreet, listened.

"Monsieur Mabeuf!" said the old woman.

"Mabeuf!" thought Gavroche, "that name is a perfect farce."

The old man who was thus addressed, did not stir.  The old
woman repeated:--

"Monsieur Mabeuf!"

The old man, without raising his eyes from the ground, made up
his mind to answer:--

"What is it, Mother Plutarque?"

"Mother Plutarque!" thought Gavroche, "another farcical name."

Mother Plutarque began again, and the old man was forced to accept
the conversation:--

"The landlord is not pleased."

"Why?"

"We owe three quarters rent."

"In three months, we shall owe him for four quarters."

"He says that he will turn you out to sleep."

"I will go."

"The green-grocer insists on being paid.  She will no longer
leave her fagots.  What will you warm yourself with this winter?
We shall have no wood."

"There is the sun."

"The butcher refuses to give credit; he will not let us have any
more meat."

"That is quite right.  I do not digest meat well.  It is too heavy."

"What shall we have for dinner?"

"Bread."

"The baker demands a settlement, and says, `no money, no bread.'"

"That is well."

"What will you eat?"

"We have apples in the apple-room."

"But, Monsieur, we can't live like that without money."

"I have none."

The old woman went away, the old man remained alone.  He fell
into thought.  Gavroche became thoughtful also.  It was almost dark.

The first result of Gavroche's meditation was, that instead
of scaling the hedge, he crouched down under it.  The branches
stood apart a little at the foot of the thicket.

"Come," exclaimed Gavroche mentally, "here's a nook!" and he curled up
in it.  His back was almost in contact with Father Mabeuf's bench.
He could hear the octogenarian breathe.

Then, by way of dinner, he tried to sleep.

It was a cat-nap, with one eye open.  While he dozed, Gavroche kept
on the watch.

The twilight pallor of the sky blanched the earth, and the lane
formed a livid line between two rows of dark bushes.

All at once, in this whitish band, two figures made their appearance.
One was in front, the other some distance in the rear.

"There come two creatures," muttered Gavroche.

The first form seemed to be some elderly bourgeois, who was bent
and thoughtful, dressed more than plainly, and who was walking slowly
because of his age, and strolling about in the open evening air.

The second was straight, firm, slender.  It regulated its pace
by that of the first; but in the voluntary slowness of its gait,
suppleness and agility were discernible.  This figure had also
something fierce and disquieting about it, the whole shape was
that of what was then called an elegant; the hat was of good shape,
the coat black, well cut, probably of fine cloth, and well fitted
in at the waist.  The head was held erect with a sort of robust grace,
and beneath the hat the pale profile of a young man could be made
out in the dim light.  The profile had a rose in its mouth.
This second form was well known to Gavroche; it was Montparnasse.

He could have told nothing about the other, except that he was
a respectable old man.

Gavroche immediately began to take observations.

One of these two pedestrians evidently had a project connected with
the other.  Gavroche was well placed to watch the course of events.
The bedroom had turned into a hiding-place at a very opportune moment.

Montparnasse on the hunt at such an hour, in such a place,
betokened something threatening.  Gavroche felt his gamin's heart
moved with compassion for the old man.

What was he to do?  Interfere?  One weakness coming to the aid
of another!  It would be merely a laughing matter for Montparnasse.
Gavroche did not shut his eyes to the fact that the old man,
in the first place, and the child in the second, would make but two
mouthfuls for that redoubtable ruffian eighteen years of age.

While Gavroche was deliberating, the attack took place,
abruptly and hideously.  The attack of the tiger on the wild ass,
the attack of the spider on the fly.  Montparnasse suddenly tossed
away his rose, bounded upon the old man, seized him by the collar,
grasped and clung to him, and Gavroche with difficulty restrained
a scream.  A moment later one of these men was underneath
the other, groaning, struggling, with a knee of marble upon
his breast.  Only, it was not just what Gavroche had expected.
The one who lay on the earth was Montparnasse; the one who was on top
was the old man.  All this took place a few paces distant from Gavroche.

The old man had received the shock, had returned it, and that
in such a terrible fashion, that in a twinkling, the assailant
and the assailed had exchanged roles.

"Here's a hearty veteran!" thought Gavroche.

He could not refrain from clapping his hands.  But it was applause
wasted.  It did not reach the combatants, absorbed and deafened
as they were, each by the other, as their breath mingled in the struggle.

Silence ensued.  Montparnasse ceased his struggles.  Gavroche indulged
in this aside:  "Can he be dead!"

The goodman had not uttered a word, nor given vent to a cry.
He rose to his feet, and Gavroche heard him say to Montparnasse:--

"Get up."

Montparnasse rose, but the goodman held him fast.
Montparnasse's attitude was the humiliated
and furious attitude of the wolf who has been caught by a sheep.

Gavroche looked on and listened, making an effort to reinforce
his eyes with his ears.  He was enjoying himself immensely.

He was repaid for his conscientious anxiety in the character
of a spectator.  He was able to catch on the wing a dialogue
which borrowed from the darkness an indescribably tragic accent.
The goodman questioned, Montparnasse replied.

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen."

"You are strong and healthy.  Why do you not work?"

"It bores me."

"What is your trade?"

"An idler."

"Speak seriously.  Can anything be done for you?  What would you
like to be?"

"A thief."

A pause ensued.  The old man seemed absorbed in profound thought.
He stood motionless, and did not relax his hold on Montparnasse.

Every moment the vigorous and agile young ruffian indulged in the
twitchings of a wild beast caught in a snare.  He gave a jerk,
tried a crook of the knee, twisted his limbs desperately, and made
efforts to escape.

The old man did not appear to notice it, and held both his arms
with one hand, with the sovereign indifference of absolute force.

The old man's revery lasted for some time, then, looking steadily
at Montparnasse, he addressed to him in a gentle voice,
in the midst of the darkness where they stood, a solemn harangue,
of which Gavroche did not lose a single syllable:--

"My child, you are entering, through indolence, on one of the most
laborious of lives.  Ah!  You declare yourself to be an idler! prepare
to toil.  There is a certain formidable machine, have you seen it?
It is the rolling-mill. You must be on your guard against it,
it is crafty and ferocious; if it catches hold of the skirt of
your coat, you will be drawn in bodily.  That machine is laziness.
Stop while there is yet time, and save yourself!  Otherwise, it is
all over with you; in a short time you will be among the gearing.
Once entangled, hope for nothing more.  Toil, lazybones! there is no
more repose for you!  The iron hand of implacable toil has seized you.
You do not wish to earn your living, to have a task, to fulfil a duty!
It bores you to be like other men?  Well!  You will be different.
Labor is the law; he who rejects it will find ennui his torment.
You do not wish to be a workingman, you will be a slave.
Toil lets go of you on one side only to grasp you again on
the other.  You do not desire to be its friend, you shall be its
negro slave.  Ah!  You would have none of the honest weariness
of men, you shall have the sweat of the damned.  Where others sing,
you will rattle in your throat.  You will see afar off, from below,
other men at work; it will seem to you that they are resting.
The laborer, the harvester, the sailor, the blacksmith, will appear
to you in glory like the blessed spirits in paradise.  What radiance
surrounds the forge!  To guide the plough, to bind the sheaves,
is joy.  The bark at liberty in the wind, what delight!  Do you,
lazy idler, delve, drag on, roll, march!  Drag your halter.
You are a beast of burden in the team of hell!  Ah!  To do nothing
is your object.  Well, not a week, not a day, not an hour shall
you have free from oppression.  You will be able to lift nothing
without anguish.  Every minute that passes will make your muscles crack.
What is a feather to others will be a rock to you.  The simplest
things will become steep acclivities.  Life will become monstrous
all about you.  To go, to come, to breathe, will be just so many
terrible labors.  Your lungs will produce on you the effect of weighing
a hundred pounds.  Whether you shall walk here rather than there,
will become a problem that must be solved.  Any one who wants to go
out simply gives his door a push, and there he is in the open air.
If you wish to go out, you will be obliged to pierce your wall.
What does every one who wants to step into the street do?  He goes
down stairs; you will tear up your sheets, little by little you
will make of them a rope, then you will climb out of your window,
and you will suspend yourself by that thread over an abyss, and it
will be night, amid storm, rain, and the hurricane, and if the
rope is too short, but one way of descending will remain to you,
to fall.  To drop hap-hazard into the gulf, from an unknown height,
on what?  On what is beneath, on the unknown.  Or you will crawl up
a chimney-flue, at the risk of burning; or you will creep through
a sewer-pipe, at the risk of drowning; I do not speak of the holes
that you will be obliged to mask, of the stones which you will have
to take up and replace twenty times a day, of the plaster that you
will have to hide in your straw pallet.  A lock presents itself;
the bourgeois has in his pocket a key made by a locksmith.  If you
wish to pass out, you will be condemned to execute a terrible work
of art; you will take a large sou, you will cut it in two plates;
with what tools?  You will have to invent them.  That is your business.
Then you will hollow out the interior of these plates, taking great
care of the outside, and you will make on the edges a thread, so that
they can be adjusted one upon the other like a box and its cover.
The top and bottom thus screwed together, nothing will be suspected.
To the overseers it will be only a sou; to you it will be a box.
What will you put in this box?  A small bit of steel.  A watch-spring,
in which you will have cut teeth, and which will form a saw.
With this saw, as long as a pin, and concealed in a sou, you will
cut the bolt of the lock, you will sever bolts, the padlock of
your chain, and the bar at your window, and the fetter on your leg.
This masterpiece finished, this prodigy accomplished, all these miracles
of art, address, skill, and patience executed, what will be your
recompense if it becomes known that you are the author?  The dungeon.
There is your future.  What precipices are idleness and pleasure!
Do you know that to do nothing is a melancholy resolution?
To live in idleness on the property of society! to be useless,
that is to say, pernicious!  This leads straight to the depth
of wretchedness.  Woe to the man who desires to be a parasite!
He will become vermin!  Ah!  So it does not please you to work?
Ah!  You have but one thought, to drink well, to eat well,
to sleep well.  You will drink water, you will eat black bread,
you will sleep on a plank with a fetter whose cold touch you
will feel on your flesh all night long, riveted to your limbs.
You will break those fetters, you will flee.  That is well.
You will crawl on your belly through the brushwood, and you will eat
grass like the beasts of the forest.  And you will be recaptured.
And then you will pass years in a dungeon, riveted to a wall,
groping for your jug that you may drink, gnawing at a horrible
loaf of darkness which dogs would not touch, eating beans that
the worms have eaten before you.  You will be a wood-louse in
a cellar.  Ah!  Have pity on yourself, you miserable young child,
who were sucking at nurse less than twenty years ago, and who have,
no doubt, a mother still alive!  I conjure you, listen to me,
I entreat you.  You desire fine black cloth, varnished shoes,
to have your hair curled and sweet-smelling oils on your locks,
to please low women, to be handsome.  You will be shaven clean,
and you will wear a red blouse and wooden shoes.  You want rings
on your fingers, you will have an iron necklet on your neck.
If you glance at a woman, you will receive a blow.  And you will
enter there at the age of twenty.  And you will come out at fifty!
You will enter young, rosy, fresh, with brilliant eyes, and all
your white teeth, and your handsome, youthful hair; you will come
out broken, bent, wrinkled, toothless, horrible, with white locks!
Ah! my poor child, you are on the wrong road; idleness is
counselling you badly; the hardest of all work is thieving.
Believe me, do not undertake that painful profession of an idle man.
It is not comfortable to become a rascal.  It is less disagreeable
to be an honest man.  Now go, and ponder on what I have said
to you.  By the way, what did you want of me?  My purse?  Here it
is."

And the old man, releasing Montparnasse, put his purse in the
latter's hand; Montparnasse weighed it for a moment, after which
he allowed it to slide gently into the back pocket of his coat,
with the same mechanical precaution as though he had stolen it.

All this having been said and done, the goodman turned his back
and tranquilly resumed his stroll.

"The blockhead!" muttered Montparnasse.

Who was this goodman?  The reader has, no doubt, already divined.

Montparnasse watched him with amazement, as he disappeared in the dusk.
This contemplation was fatal to him.

While the old man was walking away, Gavroche drew near.

Gavroche had assured himself, with a sidelong glance, that Father
Mabeuf was still sitting on his bench, probably sound asleep.
Then the gamin emerged from his thicket, and began to crawl after
Montparnasse in the dark, as the latter stood there motionless.
In this manner he came up to Montparnasse without being seen or heard,
gently insinuated his hand into the back pocket of that frock-coat
of fine black cloth, seized the purse, withdrew his hand, and having
recourse once more to his crawling, he slipped away like an adder
through the shadows.  Montparnasse, who had no reason to be on his guard,
and who was engaged in thought for the first time in his life,
perceived nothing.  When Gavroche had once more attained the point
where Father Mabeuf was, he flung the purse over the hedge, and fled
as fast as his legs would carry him.

The purse fell on Father Mabeuf's foot.  This commotion roused him.

He bent over and picked up the purse.

He did not understand in the least, and opened it.

The purse had two compartments; in one of them there was some
small change; in the other lay six napoleons.

M. Mabeuf, in great alarm, referred the matter to his housekeeper.

"That has fallen from heaven," said Mother Plutarque.



BOOK FIFTH.--THE END OF WHICH DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING



CHAPTER I

SOLITUDE AND THE BARRACKS COMBINED


Cosette's grief, which had been so poignant and lively four or five
months previously, had, without her being conscious of the fact,
entered upon its convalescence.  Nature, spring, youth, love for
her father, the gayety of the birds and flowers, caused something
almost resembling forgetfulness to filter gradually, drop by drop,
into that soul, which was so virgin and so young.  Was the fire wholly
extinct there?  Or was it merely that layers of ashes had formed?
The truth is, that she hardly felt the painful and burning spot
any longer.

One day she suddenly thought of Marius:  "Why!" said she, "I no
longer think of him."

That same week, she noticed a very handsome officer of lancers,
with a wasp-like waist, a delicious uniform, the cheeks of a young girl,
a sword under his arm, waxed mustaches, and a glazed schapka,
passing the gate.  Moreover, he had light hair, prominent blue eyes,
a round face, was vain, insolent and good-looking; quite the reverse
of Marius.  He had a cigar in his mouth.  Cosette thought that this
officer doubtless belonged to the regiment in barracks in the Rue
de Babylone.

On the following day, she saw him pass again.  She took note
of the hour.

From that time forth, was it chance? she saw him pass nearly every day.

The officer's comrades perceived that there was, in that "badly kept"
garden, behind that malicious rococo fence, a very pretty creature,
who was almost always there when the handsome lieutenant,--who is not
unknown to the reader, and whose name was Theodule Gillenormand,--
passed by.

"See here!" they said to him, "there's a little creature there
who is making eyes at you, look."

"Have I the time," replied the lancer, "to look at all the girls
who look at me?"

This was at the precise moment when Marius was descending heavily
towards agony, and was saying:  "If I could but see her before I die!"--
Had his wish been realized, had he beheld Cosette at that moment
gazing at the lancer, he would not have been able to utter a word,
and he would have expired with grief.

Whose fault was it?  No one's.

Marius possessed one of those temperaments which bury themselves
in sorrow and there abide; Cosette was one of those persons
who plunge into sorrow and emerge from it again.

Cosette was, moreover, passing through that dangerous period,
the fatal phase of feminine revery abandoned to itself, in which
the isolated heart of a young girl resembles the tendrils of the
vine which cling, as chance directs, to the capital of a marble
column or to the post of a wine-shop: A rapid and decisive moment,
critical for every orphan, be she rich or poor, for wealth does not
prevent a bad choice; misalliances are made in very high circles,
real misalliance is that of souls; and as many an unknown young man,
without name, without birth, without fortune, is a marble column
which bears up a temple of grand sentiments and grand ideas, so such
and such a man of the world satisfied and opulent, who has polished
boots and varnished words, if looked at not outside, but inside,
a thing which is reserved for his wife, is nothing more than a
block obscurely haunted by violent, unclean, and vinous passions;
the post of a drinking-shop.

What did Cosette's soul contain?  Passion calmed or lulled to sleep;
something limpid, brilliant, troubled to a certain depth,
and gloomy lower down.  The image of the handsome officer was
reflected in the surface.  Did a souvenir linger in the depths?--
Quite at the bottom?--Possibly.  Cosette did not know.

A singular incident supervened.



CHAPTER II

COSETTE'S APPREHENSIONS


During the first fortnight in April, Jean Valjean took a journey.
This, as the reader knows, happened from time to time, at very
long intervals.  He remained absent a day or two days at the utmost.
Where did he go?  No one knew, not even Cosette.  Once only,
on the occasion of one of these departures, she had accompanied him
in a hackney-coach as far as a little blind-alley at the corner
of which she read:  Impasse de la Planchette.  There he alighted,
and the coach took Cosette back to the Rue de Babylone.  It was
usually when money was lacking in the house that Jean Valjean took
these little trips.

So Jean Valjean was absent.  He had said:  "I shall return
in three days."

That evening, Cosette was alone in the drawing-room. In order to get
rid of her ennui, she had opened her piano-organ, and had begun
to sing, accompanying herself the while, the chorus from Euryanthe:
"Hunters astray in the wood!" which is probably the most beautiful
thing in all the sphere of music.  When she had finished, she remained
wrapped in thought.

All at once, it seemed to her that she heard the sound of footsteps
in the garden.

It could not be her father, he was absent; it could not be Toussaint,
she was in bed, and it was ten o'clock at night.

She stepped to the shutter of the drawing-room, which was closed,
and laid her ear against it.

It seemed to her that it was the tread of a man, and that he was
walking very softly.

She mounted rapidly to the first floor, to her own chamber,
opened a small wicket in her shutter, and peeped into the garden.
The moon was at the full.  Everything could be seen as plainly as
by day.

There was no one there.

She opened the window.  The garden was absolutely calm, and all
that was visible was that the street was deserted as usual.

Cosette thought that she had been mistaken.  She thought that she
had heard a noise.  It was a hallucination produced by the melancholy
and magnificent chorus of Weber, which lays open before the mind
terrified depths, which trembles before the gaze like a dizzy forest,
and in which one hears the crackling of dead branches beneath
the uneasy tread of the huntsmen of whom one catches a glimpse
through the twilight.

She thought no more about it.

Moreover, Cosette was not very timid by nature.  There flowed
in her veins some of the blood of the bohemian and the adventuress
who runs barefoot.  It will be remembered that she was more of a lark
than a dove.  There was a foundation of wildness and bravery in her.

On the following day, at an earlier hour, towards nightfall, she was
strolling in the garden.  In the midst of the confused thoughts
which occupied her, she fancied that she caught for an instant a sound
similar to that of the preceding evening, as though some one were
walking beneath the trees in the dusk, and not very far from her;
but she told herself that nothing so closely resembles a step on
the grass as the friction of two branches which have moved from side
to side, and she paid no heed to it.  Besides, she could see nothing.

She emerged from "the thicket"; she had still to cross a small lawn
to regain the steps.

The moon, which had just risen behind her, cast Cosette's shadow
in front of her upon this lawn, as she came out from the shrubbery.

Cosette halted in alarm.

Beside her shadow, the moon outlined distinctly upon the turf
another shadow, which was particularly startling and terrible,
a shadow which had a round hat.

It was the shadow of a man, who must have been standing on the border
of the clump of shrubbery, a few paces in the rear of Cosette.

She stood for a moment without the power to speak, or cry, or call,
or stir, or turn her head.

Then she summoned up all her courage, and turned round resolutely.

There was no one there.

She glanced on the ground.  The figure had disappeared.

She re-entered the thicket, searched the corners boldly, went as far
as the gate, and found nothing.

She felt herself absolutely chilled with terror.  Was this
another hallucination?  What!  Two days in succession!
One hallucination might pass, but two hallucinations?
The disquieting point about it was, that the
shadow had assuredly not been a phantom.  Phantoms do not wear round hats.

On the following day Jean Valjean returned.  Cosette told him what
she thought she had heard and seen.  She wanted to be reassured
and to see her father shrug his shoulders and say to her:
"You are a little goose."

Jean Valjean grew anxious.

"It cannot be anything," said he.

He left her under some pretext, and went into the garden, and she
saw him examining the gate with great attention.

During the night she woke up; this time she was sure, and she distinctly
heard some one walking close to the flight of steps beneath her window.
She ran to her little wicket and opened it.  In point of fact,
there was a man in the garden, with a large club in his hand.
Just as she was about to scream, the moon lighted up the man's profile.
It was her father.  She returned to her bed, saying to herself:
"He is very uneasy!"

Jean Valjean passed that night and the two succeeding nights
in the garden.  Cosette saw him through the hole in her shutter.

On the third night, the moon was on the wane, and had begun
to rise later; at one o'clock in the morning, possibly, she heard
a loud burst of laughter and her father's voice calling her:--

"Cosette!"

She jumped out of bed, threw on her dressing-gown, and opened
her window.

Her father was standing on the grass-plot below.

"I have waked you for the purpose of reassuring you," said he;
"look, there is your shadow with the round hat."

And he pointed out to her on the turf a shadow cast by the moon,
and which did indeed, bear considerable resemblance to the spectre of a
man wearing a round hat.  It was the shadow produced by a chimney-pipe
of sheet iron, with a hood, which rose above a neighboring roof.

Cosette joined in his laughter, all her lugubrious suppositions
were allayed, and the next morning, as she was at breakfast
with her father, she made merry over the sinister garden haunted
by the shadows of iron chimney-pots.

Jean Valjean became quite tranquil once more; as for Cosette,
she did not pay much attention to the question whether the chimney-pot
was really in the direction of the shadow which she had seen,
or thought she had seen, and whether the moon had been in the same
spot in the sky.

She did not question herself as to the peculiarity of a chimney-pot
which is afraid of being caught in the act, and which retires
when some one looks at its shadow, for the shadow had taken
the alarm when Cosette had turned round, and Cosette had thought
herself very sure of this.  Cosette's serenity was fully restored.
The proof appeared to her to be complete, and it quite vanished
from her mind, whether there could possibly be any one walking
in the garden during the evening or at night.

A few days later, however, a fresh incident occurred.



CHAPTER III

ENRICHED WITH COMMENTARIES BY TOUSSAINT


In the garden, near the railing on the street, there was a stone bench,
screened from the eyes of the curious by a plantation of yoke-elms,
but which could, in case of necessity, be reached by an arm from
the outside, past the trees and the gate.

One evening during that same month of April, Jean Valjean had
gone out; Cosette had seated herself on this bench after sundown.
The breeze was blowing briskly in the trees, Cosette was meditating;
an objectless sadness was taking possession of her little by little,
that invincible sadness evoked by the evening, and which arises,
perhaps, who knows, from the mystery of the tomb which is ajar at
that hour.

Perhaps Fantine was within that shadow.

Cosette rose, slowly made the tour of the garden, walking on
the grass drenched in dew, and saying to herself, through the
species of melancholy somnambulism in which she was plunged:
"Really, one needs wooden shoes for the garden at this hour.
One takes cold."

She returned to the bench.

As she was about to resume her seat there, she observed on the
spot which she had quitted, a tolerably large stone which had,
evidently, not been there a moment before.

Cosette gazed at the stone, asking herself what it meant.  All at once
the idea occurred to her that the stone had not reached the bench
all by itself, that some one had placed it there, that an arm had been
thrust through the railing, and this idea appeared to alarm her.
This time, the fear was genuine; the stone was there.  No doubt
was possible; she did not touch it, fled without glancing behind her,
took refuge in the house, and immediately closed with shutter,
bolt, and bar the door-like window opening on the flight of steps.
She inquired of Toussaint:--

"Has my father returned yet?"

"Not yet, Mademoiselle."

[We have already noted once for all the fact that Toussaint stuttered.
May we be permitted to dispense with it for the future.  The musical
notation of an infirmity is repugnant to us.]

Jean Valjean, a thoughtful man, and given to nocturnal strolls,
often returned quite late at night.

"Toussaint," went on Cosette, "are you careful to thoroughly
barricade the shutters opening on the garden, at least with bars,
in the evening, and to put the little iron things in the little
rings that close them?"

"Oh! be easy on that score, Miss."

Toussaint did not fail in her duty, and Cosette was well aware
of the fact, but she could not refrain from adding:--

"It is so solitary here."

"So far as that is concerned," said Toussaint, "it is true.
We might be assassinated before we had time to say ouf!
And Monsieur does not sleep in the house, to boot.
But fear nothing, Miss, I fasten the shutters up like prisons.
Lone women!  That is enough to make one shudder, I believe you!
Just imagine, what if you were to see men enter your chamber at
night and say:  `Hold your tongue!' and begin to cut your throat.
It's not the dying so much; you die, for one must die, and that's
all right; it's the abomination of feeling those people touch you.
And then, their knives; they can't be able to cut well with them!
Ah, good gracious!"

"Be quiet," said Cosette.  "Fasten everything thoroughly."

Cosette, terrified by the melodrama improvised by Toussaint,
and possibly, also, by the recollection of the apparitions of the
past week, which recurred to her memory, dared not even say to her:
"Go and look at the stone which has been placed on the bench!"
for fear of opening the garden gate and allowing "the men" to enter.
She saw that all the doors and windows were carefully fastened,
made Toussaint go all over the house from garret to cellar, locked herself
up in her own chamber, bolted her door, looked under her couch,
went to bed and slept badly.  All night long she saw that big stone,
as large as a mountain and full of caverns.

At sunrise,--the property of the rising sun is to make us laugh
at all our terrors of the past night, and our laughter is in direct
proportion to our terror which they have caused,--at sunrise Cosette,
when she woke, viewed her fright as a nightmare, and said to herself:
"What have I been thinking of?  It is like the footsteps that I
thought I heard a week or two ago in the garden at night!
It is like the shadow of the chimney-pot! Am I becoming a coward?"
The sun, which was glowing through the crevices in her shutters,
and turning the damask curtains crimson, reassured her to such an extent
that everything vanished from her thoughts, even the stone.

"There was no more a stone on the bench than there was a man in a round
hat in the garden; I dreamed about the stone, as I did all the rest."

She dressed herself, descended to the garden, ran to the bench,
and broke out in a cold perspiration.  The stone was there.

But this lasted only for a moment.  That which is terror by night
is curiosity by day.

"Bah!" said she, "come, let us see what it is."

She lifted the stone, which was tolerably large.  Beneath it was
something which resembled a letter.  It was a white envelope.
Cosette seized it.  There was no address on one side, no seal
on the other.  Yet the envelope, though unsealed, was not empty.
Papers could be seen inside.

Cosette examined it.  It was no longer alarm, it was no longer curiosity;
it was a beginning of anxiety.

Cosette drew from the envelope its contents, a little notebook
of paper, each page of which was numbered and bore a few lines
in a very fine and rather pretty handwriting, as Cosette thought.

Cosette looked for a name; there was none.  To whom was this addressed?
To her, probably, since a hand had deposited the packet on her bench.
From whom did it come?  An irresistible fascination took possession
of her; she tried to turn away her eyes from the leaflets which were
trembling in her hand, she gazed at the sky, the street, the acacias
all bathed in light, the pigeons fluttering over a neighboring roof,
and then her glance suddenly fell upon the manuscript, and she said
to herself that she must know what it contained.

This is what she read.



CHAPTER IV

A HEART BENEATH A STONE


The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion
of a single being even to God, that is love.


Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.


How sad is the soul, when it is sad through love!


What a void in the absence of the being who, by herself alone fills
the world!  Oh! how true it is that the beloved being becomes God.
One could comprehend that God might be jealous of this had not God
the Father of all evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul
for love.


The glimpse of a smile beneath a white crape bonnet with a lilac
curtain is sufficient to cause the soul to enter into the palace
of dreams.


God is behind everything, but everything
hides God.  Things are black, creatures
are opaque.  To love a being is to render that being transparent.


Certain thoughts are prayers.  There are moments when, whatever the
attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.


Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices,
which possess, however, a reality of their own.  They are
prevented from seeing each other, they cannot write to each other;
they discover a multitude of mysterious means to correspond.
They send each other the song of the birds, the perfume of the flowers,
the smiles of children, the light of the sun, the sighings
of the breeze, the rays of stars, all creation.  And why not?
All the works of God are made to serve love.  Love is sufficiently
potent to charge all nature with its messages.

Oh Spring!  Thou art a letter that I write to her.


The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds.
Love, that is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity.
In the infinite, the inexhaustible is requisite.


Love participates of the soul itself.  It is of the same nature.
Like it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible,
indivisible, imperishable.  It is a point of fire that exists
within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine,
and which nothing can extinguish.  We feel it burning even to the
very marrow of our bones, and we see it beaming in the very depths
of heaven.


Oh Love!  Adorations! voluptuousness of two minds which understand each
other, of two hearts which exchange with each other, of two glances which
penetrate each other!  You will come to me, will you not, bliss! strolls
by twos in the solitudes!  Blessed and radiant days!  I have sometimes
dreamed that from time to time hours detached themselves from the
lives of the angels and came here below to traverse the destinies of men.


God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give
them endless duration.  After a life of love, an eternity of love is,
in fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the
ineffable felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world,
is impossible, even to God.  God is the plenitude of heaven;
love is the plenitude of man.


You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous,
and because it is impenetrable.  You have beside you a sweeter
radiance and a greater mystery, woman.


All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings.  We lack air
and we stifle.  Then we die.  To die for lack of love is horrible.
Suffocation of the soul.


When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred
and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered
so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything
more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they
are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit.  Love, soar.


On the day when a woman as she passes before you emits light as she walks,
you are lost, you love.  But one thing remains for you to do:
to think of her so intently that she is constrained to think of you.


What love commences can be finished by God alone.


True love is in despair and is enchanted over a glove lost
or a handkerchief found, and eternity is required for its
devotion and its hopes.  It is composed both of the infinitely
great and the infinitely little.


If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the
sensitive plant; if you are a man, be love.


Nothing suffices for love.  We have happiness, we desire paradise;
we possess paradise, we desire heaven.

Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love.
Understand how to find it there.  Love has contemplation as well
as heaven, and more than heaven, it has voluptuousness.


"Does she still come to the Luxembourg?"  "No, sir."  "This is the church
where she attends mass, is it not?"  "She no longer comes here."
"Does she still live in this house?"  "She has moved away."
"Where has she gone to dwell?"

"She did not say."

What a melancholy thing not to know the address of one's soul!

Love has its childishness, other passions have their pettinesses.
Shame on the passions which belittle man!  Honor to the one which
makes a child of him!


There is one strange thing, do you know it?  I dwell in the night.
There is a being who carried off my sky when she went away.


Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave,
hand in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing
a finger,--that would suffice for my eternity!


Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more.  To die of love,
is to live in it.


Love.  A sombre and starry transfiguration is mingled with this torture.
There is ecstasy in agony.


Oh joy of the birds!  It is because they have nests that they sing.


Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise.


Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a
long trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny.
This destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step
inside the tomb.  Then something appears to him, and he begins to
distinguish the definitive.  The definitive, meditate upon that word.
The living perceive the infinite; the definitive permits itself
to be seen only by the dead.  In the meanwhile, love and suffer,
hope and contemplate.  Woe, alas! to him who shall have loved
only bodies, forms, appearances!  Death will deprive him of all.
Try to love souls, you will find them again.


I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love.
His hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes;
water trickled through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.


What a grand thing it is to be loved!  What a far grander thing
it is to love!  The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion.
It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer
rests on anything that is not elevated and great.  An unworthy
thought can no more germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier.
The serene and lofty soul, inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions,
dominating the clouds and the shades of this world, its follies,
its lies, its hatreds, its vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue
of heaven, and no longer feels anything but profound and subterranean
shocks of destiny, as the crests of mountains feel the shocks
of earthquake.


If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would become extinct.



CHAPTER V

COSETTE AFTER THE LETTER


As Cosette read, she gradually fell into thought.  At the very moment
when she raised her eyes from the last line of the note-book,
the handsome officer passed triumphantly in front of the gate,--
it was his hour; Cosette thought him hideous.

She resumed her contemplation of the book.  It was written in the
most charming of chirography, thought Cosette; in the same hand,
but with divers inks, sometimes very black, again whitish,
as when ink has been added to the inkstand, and consequently on
different days.  It was, then, a mind which had unfolded itself there,
sigh by sigh, irregularly, without order, without choice,
without object, hap-hazard. Cosette had never read anything like it.
This manuscript, in which she already perceived more light than
obscurity, produced upon her the effect of a half-open sanctuary.
Each one of these mysterious lines shone before her eyes and inundated
her heart with a strange radiance.  The education which she had
received had always talked to her of the soul, and never of love,
very much as one might talk of the firebrand and not of the flame.
This manuscript of fifteen pages suddenly and sweetly revealed
to her all of love, sorrow, destiny, life, eternity, the beginning,
the end.  It was as if a hand had opened and suddenly flung upon
her a handful of rays of light.  In these few lines she felt
a passionate, ardent, generous, honest nature, a sacred will,
an immense sorrow, and an immense despair, a suffering heart,
an ecstasy fully expanded.  What was this manuscript?  A letter.
A letter without name, without address, without date, without signature,
pressing and disinterested, an enigma composed of truths, a message
of love made to be brought by an angel and read by a virgin,
an appointment made beyond the bounds of earth, the love-letter of
a phantom to a shade.  It was an absent one, tranquil and dejected,
who seemed ready to take refuge in death and who sent to the absent love,
his lady, the secret of fate, the key of life, love.  This had been
written with one foot in the grave and one finger in heaven.
These lines, which had fallen one by one on the paper, were what
might be called drops of soul.

Now, from whom could these pages come?  Who could have penned them?

Cosette did not hesitate a moment.  One man only.

He!

Day had dawned once more in her spirit; all had reappeared.
She felt an unheard-of joy, and a profound anguish.  It was he! he
who had written! he was there! it was he whose arm had been thrust
through that railing!  While she was forgetful of him, he had found
her again!  But had she forgotten him?  No, never!  She was foolish
to have thought so for a single moment.  She had always loved him,
always adored him.  The fire had been smothered, and had smouldered
for a time, but she saw all plainly now; it had but made headway,
and now it had burst forth afresh, and had inflamed her whole being.
This note-book was like a spark which had fallen from that other soul
into hers.  She felt the conflagration starting up once more.

She imbued herself thoroughly with every word of the manuscript:
"Oh yes!" said she, "how perfectly I recognize all that!  That is
what I had already read in his eyes."  As she was finishing it
for the third time, Lieutenant Theodule passed the gate once more,
and rattled his spurs upon the pavement.  Cosette was forced
to raise her eyes.  She thought him insipid, silly, stupid,
useless, foppish, displeasing, impertinent, and extremely ugly.
The officer thought it his duty to smile at her.

She turned away as in shame and indignation.  She would gladly
have thrown something at his head.

She fled, re-entered the house, and shut herself up in her
chamber to peruse the manuscript once more, to learn it by heart,
and to dream.  When she had thoroughly mastered it she kissed
it and put it in her bosom.

All was over, Cosette had fallen back into deep, seraphic love.
The abyss of Eden had yawned once more.

All day long, Cosette remained in a sort of bewilderment.
She scarcely thought, her ideas were in the state of a tangled
skein in her brain, she could not manage to conjecture anything,
she hoped through a tremor, what? vague things.  She dared make
herself no promises, and she did not wish to refuse herself anything.
Flashes of pallor passed over her countenance, and shivers ran through
her frame.  It seemed to her, at intervals, that she was entering
the land of chimaeras; she said to herself:  "Is this reality?"
Then she felt of the dear paper within her bosom under her gown,
she pressed it to her heart, she felt its angles against her flesh;
and if Jean Valjean had seen her at the moment, he would have shuddered
in the presence of that luminous and unknown joy, which overflowed
from beneath her eyelids.--"Oh yes!" she thought, "it is certainly he!
This comes from him, and is for me!"

And she told herself that an intervention of the angels,
a celestial chance, had given him back to her.

Oh transfiguration of love!  Oh dreams!  That celestial chance,
that intervention of the angels, was a pellet of bread tossed
by one thief to another thief, from the Charlemagne Courtyard
to the Lion's Ditch, over the roofs of La Force.



CHAPTER VI

OLD PEOPLE ARE MADE TO GO OUT OPPORTUNELY


When evening came, Jean Valjean went out; Cosette dressed herself.
She arranged her hair in the most becoming manner, and she put on
a dress whose bodice had received one snip of the scissors too much,
and which, through this slope, permitted a view of the beginning
of her throat, and was, as young girls say, "a trifle indecent."
It was not in the least indecent, but it was prettier than usual.
She made her toilet thus without knowing why she did so.

Did she mean to go out?  No.

Was she expecting a visitor?  No.

At dusk, she went down to the garden.  Toussaint was busy
in her kitchen, which opened on the back yard.

She began to stroll about under the trees, thrusting aside
the branches from time to time with her hand, because there
were some which hung very low.

In this manner she reached the bench.

The stone was still there.

She sat down, and gently laid her white hand on this stone as though
she wished to caress and thank it.

All at once, she experienced that indefinable impression which one
undergoes when there is some one standing behind one, even when she
does not see the person.

She turned her head and rose to her feet.

It was he.

His head was bare.  He appeared to have grown thin and pale.
His black clothes were hardly discernible.  The twilight threw
a wan light on his fine brow, and covered his eyes in shadows.
Beneath a veil of incomparable sweetness, he had something about
him that suggested death and night.  His face was illuminated
by the light of the dying day, and by the thought of a soul that is
taking flight.

He seemed to be not yet a ghost, and he was no longer a man.

He had flung away his hat in the thicket, a few paces distant.

Cosette, though ready to swoon, uttered no cry.  She retreated slowly,
for she felt herself attracted.  He did not stir.  By virtue
of something ineffable and melancholy which enveloped him,
she felt the look in his eyes which she could not see.

Cosette, in her retreat, encountered a tree and leaned against it.
Had it not been for this tree, she would have fallen.

Then she heard his voice, that voice which she had really never heard,
barely rising above the rustle of the leaves, and murmuring:--

"Pardon me, here I am.  My heart is full.  I could not live on as I
was living, and I have come.  Have you read what I placed there
on the bench?  Do you recognize me at all?  Have no fear of me.
It is a long time, you remember the day, since you looked at me
at the Luxembourg, near the Gladiator.  And the day when you passed
before me?  It was on the 16th of June and the 2d of July.  It is nearly
a year ago.  I have not seen you for a long time.  I inquired of the
woman who let the chairs, and she told me that she no longer saw you.
You lived in the Rue de l'Ouest, on the third floor, in the front
apartments of a new house,--you see that I know!  I followed you.
What else was there for me to do?  And then you disappeared.
I thought I saw you pass once, while I was reading the newspapers
under the arcade of the Odeon.  I ran after you.  But no.  It was
a person who had a bonnet like yours.  At night I came hither.
Do not be afraid, no one sees me.  I come to gaze upon your windows
near at hand.  I walk very softly, so that you may not hear,
for you might be alarmed.  The other evening I was behind you,
you turned round, I fled.  Once, I heard you singing.  I was happy.
Did it affect you because I heard you singing through the shutters?
That could not hurt you.  No, it is not so?  You see, you are
my angel!  Let me come 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 chimaeras,
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 Thenardier pair had had two
other children; both males.  That made five; two girls and three boys.

Madame Thenardier 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 Marechale de La
Mothe-Houdancourt, the Thenardier 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 Thenardiers 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 Celestins,
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 Thenardiers had two.  The same sex,
the same age.  A good arrangement for the one, a good investment
for the other.  The little Thenardiers became little Magnons.
Magnon quitted the Quai des Celestins 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 Thenardier 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!"

Thenardier, 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 Thenardier had felt, or had appeared to feel, a scruple.  She said
to her husband:  "But this is abandoning our children!"  Thenardier,
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 Thenardier, is what we have done permissible?"
Thenardier 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.  Thenardier 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 Thenardier catastrophe involved the catastrophe of Magnon.


One day, a short time after Magnon had handed to Eponine 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 near by.
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 was ajar.  It was the door of the sepulchre.
In these winds one felt the breath of the cholera.

From a meteorological point of view, these cold winds possessed
this peculiarity, that they did not preclude a strong electric tension.
Frequent storms, accompanied by thunder and lightning, burst forth
at this epoch.

One evening, when these gales were blowing rudely, to such a degree
that January seemed to have returned and that the bourgeois had
resumed their cloaks, Little Gavroche, who was always shivering
gayly under his rags, was standing as though in ecstasy before a
wig-maker's shop in the vicinity of the Orme-Saint-Gervais. He was
adorned with a woman's woollen shawl, picked up no one knows where,
and which he had converted into a neck comforter.  Little Gavroche
appeared to be engaged in intent admiration of a wax bride,
in a low-necked dress, and crowned with orange-flowers, who was
revolving in the window, and displaying her smile to passers-by,
between two argand lamps; but in reality, he was taking an observation
of the shop, in order to discover whether he could not "prig"
from the shop-front a cake of soap, which he would then proceed
to sell for a sou to a "hair-dresser" in the suburbs.  He had often
managed to breakfast off of such a roll.  He called his species
of work, for which he possessed special aptitude, "shaving barbers."

While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap,
he muttered between his teeth:  "Tuesday.  It was not Tuesday.
Was it Tuesday?  Perhaps it was Tuesday.  Yes, it was Tuesday."

No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred.

Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last
occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now Friday.

The barber in his shop, which was warmed by a good stove, was shaving
a customer and casting a glance from time to time at the enemy,
that freezing and impudent street urchin both of whose hands were
in his pockets, but whose mind was evidently unsheathed.

While Gavroche was scrutinizing the shop-window and the cakes of
windsor soap, two children of unequal stature, very neatly dressed,
and still smaller than himself, one apparently about seven years
of age, the other five, timidly turned the handle and entered
the shop, with a request for something or other, alms possibly,
in a plaintive murmur which resembled a groan rather than a prayer.
They both spoke at once, and their words were unintelligible because
sobs broke the voice of the younger, and the teeth of the elder were
chattering with cold.  The barber wheeled round with a furious look,
and without abandoning his razor, thrust back the elder with his left
hand and the younger with his knee, and slammed his door, saying:
"The idea of coming in and freezing everybody for nothing!"

The two children resumed their march in tears.  In the meantime,
a cloud had risen; it had begun to rain.

Little Gavroche ran after them and accosted them:--

"What's the matter with you, brats?"

"We don't know where we are to sleep," replied the elder.

"Is that all?" said Gavroche.  "A great matter, truly.  The idea
of bawling about that.  They must be greenies!"

And adopting, in addition to his superiority, which was rather bantering,
an accent of tender authority and gentle patronage:--

"Come along with me, young 'uns!"

"Yes, sir," said the elder.

And the two children followed him as they would have followed
an archbishop.  They had stopped crying.

Gavroche led them up the Rue Saint-Antoine in the direction
of the Bastille.

As Gavroche walked along, he cast an indignant backward glance
at the barber's shop.

"That fellow has no heart, the whiting,"[35] he muttered.
"He's an Englishman."


[35] Merlan:  a sobriquet given to hairdressers because they are
white with powder.


A woman who caught sight of these three marching in a file,
with Gavroche at their head, burst into noisy laughter.  This laugh
was wanting in respect towards the group.

"Good day, Mamselle Omnibus," said Gavroche to her.

An instant later, the wig-maker occurred to his mind once more,
and he added:--

"I am making a mistake in the beast; he's not a whiting,
he's a serpent.  Barber, I'll go and fetch a locksmith, and I'll
have a bell hung to your tail."

This wig-maker had rendered him aggressive.  As he strode over
a gutter, he apostrophized a bearded portress who was worthy
to meet Faust on the Brocken, and who had a broom in her hand.

"Madam," said he, "so you are going out with your horse?"

And thereupon, he spattered the polished boots of a pedestrian.

"You scamp!" shouted the furious pedestrian.

Gavroche elevated his nose above his shawl.

"Is Monsieur complaining?"

"Of you!" ejaculated the man.

"The office is closed," said Gavroche, "I do not receive any
more complaints."

In the meanwhile, as he went on up the street, he perceived a
beggar-girl, thirteen or fourteen years old, and clad in so short
a gown that her knees were visible, lying thoroughly chilled
under a porte-cochere. The little girl was getting to be too old
for such a thing.  Growth does play these tricks.  The petticoat
becomes short at the moment when nudity becomes indecent.

"Poor girl!" said Gavroche.  "She hasn't even trousers.  Hold on,
take this."

And unwinding all the comfortable woollen which he had around his neck,
he flung it on the thin and purple shoulders of the beggar-girl,
where the scarf became a shawl once more.

The child stared at him in astonishment, and received the shawl
in silence.  When a certain stage of distress has been reached
in his misery, the poor man no longer groans over evil, no longer
returns thanks for good.

That done:  "Brrr!" said Gavroche, who was shivering more than
Saint Martin, for the latter retained one-half of his cloak.

At this brrr! the downpour of rain, redoubled in its spite,
became furious.  The wicked skies punish good deeds.

"Ah, come now!" exclaimed Gavroche, "what's the meaning of this?
It's re-raining! Good Heavens, if it goes on like this, I shall stop
my subscription."

And he set out on the march once more.

"It's all right," he resumed, casting a glance at the beggar-girl,
as she coiled up under the shawl, "she's got a famous peel."

And looking up at the clouds he exclaimed:--

"Caught!"

The two children followed close on his heels.

As they were passing one of these heavy grated lattices,
which indicate a baker's shop, for bread is put behind
bars like gold, Gavroche turned round:--

"Ah, by the way, brats, have we dined?"

"Monsieur," replied the elder, "we have had nothing to eat since
this morning."

"So you have neither father nor mother?" resumed Gavroche majestically.

"Excuse us, sir, we have a papa and a mamma, but we don't know
where they are."

"Sometimes that's better than knowing where they are," said Gavroche,
who was a thinker.

"We have been wandering about these two hours," continued the elder,
"we have hunted for things at the corners of the streets, but we
have found nothing."

"I know," ejaculated Gavroche, "it's the dogs who eat everything."

He went on, after a pause:--

"Ah! we have lost our authors.  We don't know what we have done
with them.  This should not be, gamins.  It's stupid to let old people
stray off like that.  Come now! we must have a snooze all the same."

However, he asked them no questions.  What was more simple than
that they should have no dwelling place!

The elder of the two children, who had almost entirely recovered
the prompt heedlessness of childhood, uttered this exclamation:--

"It's queer, all the same.  Mamma told us that she would take us
to get a blessed spray on Palm Sunday."

"Bosh," said Gavroche.

"Mamma," resumed the elder, "is a lady who lives with Mamselle Miss."

"Tanflute!" retorted Gavroche.

Meanwhile he had halted, and for the last two minutes he had been
feeling and fumbling in all sorts of nooks which his rags contained.

At last he tossed his head with an air intended to be merely satisfied,
but which was triumphant, in reality.

"Let us be calm, young 'uns.  Here's supper for three."

And from one of his pockets he drew forth a sou.

Without allowing the two urchins time for amazement, he pushed
both of them before him into the baker's shop, and flung his sou
on the counter, crying:--

"Boy! five centimes' worth of bread."

The baker, who was the proprietor in person, took up a loaf and a knife.

"In three pieces, my boy!" went on Gavroche.

And he added with dignity:--

"There are three of us."

And seeing that the baker, after scrutinizing the three customers,
had taken down a black loaf, he thrust his finger far up his nose
with an inhalation as imperious as though he had had a pinch of the
great Frederick's snuff on the tip of his thumb, and hurled this
indignant apostrophe full in the baker's face:--

"Keksekca?"

Those of our readers who might be tempted to espy in this
interpellation of Gavroche's to the baker a Russian or a Polish word,
or one of those savage cries which the Yoways and the Botocudos hurl
at each other from bank to bank of a river, athwart the solitudes,
are warned that it is a word which they [our readers] utter every day,
and which takes the place of the phrase:  "Qu'est-ce que c'est
que cela?"  The baker understood perfectly, and replied:--

"Well!  It's bread, and very good bread of the second quality."

"You mean larton brutal [black bread]!" retorted Gavroche,
calmly and coldly disdainful.  "White bread, boy! white bread
[larton savonne]! I'm standing treat."

The baker could not repress a smile, and as he cut the white bread
he surveyed them in a compassionate way which shocked Gavroche.

"Come, now, baker's boy!" said he, "what are you taking our measure
like that for?"

All three of them placed end to end would have hardly made a measure.

When the bread was cut, the baker threw the sou into his drawer,
and Gavroche said to the two children:--

"Grub away."

The little boys stared at him in surprise.

Gavroche began to laugh.

"Ah! hullo, that's so! they don't understand yet, they're too small."

And he repeated:--

"Eat away."

At the same time, he held out a piece of bread to each of them.

And thinking that the elder, who seemed to him the more worthy
of his conversation, deserved some special encouragement and ought
to be relieved from all hesitation to satisfy his appetite, he added,
as be handed him the largest share:--

"Ram that into your muzzle."

One piece was smaller than the others; he kept this for himself.

The poor children, including Gavroche, were famished.
As they tore their bread apart in big mouthfuls, they blocked up
the shop of the baker, who, now that they had paid their money,
looked angrily at them.

"Let's go into the street again," said Gavroche.

They set off once more in the direction of the Bastille.

From time to time, as they passed the lighted shop-windows,
the smallest halted to look at the time on a leaden watch
which was suspended from his neck by a cord.

"Well, he is a very green 'un," said Gavroche.

Then, becoming thoughtful, he muttered between his teeth:--

"All the same, if I had charge of the babes I'd lock 'em up better
than that."

Just as they were finishing their morsel of bread, and had reached
the angle of that gloomy Rue des Ballets, at the other end
of which the low and threatening wicket of La Force was visible:--

"Hullo, is that you, Gavroche?" said some one.

"Hullo, is that you, Montparnasse?" said Gavroche.

A man had just accosted the street urchin, and the man was no
other than Montparnasse in disguise, with blue spectacles,
but recognizable to Gavroche.

"The bow-wows!" went on Gavroche, "you've got a hide the color
of a linseed plaster, and blue specs like a doctor.  You're putting
on style, 'pon my word!"

"Hush!" ejaculated Montparnasse, "not so loud."

And he drew Gavroche hastily out of range of the lighted shops.

The two little ones followed mechanically, holding each other
by the hand.

When they were ensconced under the arch of a portecochere,
sheltered from the rain and from all eyes:--

"Do you know where I'm going?" demanded Montparnasse.

"To the Abbey of Ascend-with-Regret,"[36] replied Gavroche.


[36] The scaffold.


"Joker!"

And Montparnasse went on:--

"I'm going to find Babet."

"Ah!" exclaimed Gavroche, "so her name is Babet."

Montparnasse lowered his voice:--

"Not she, he."

"Ah!  Babet."

"Yes, Babet."

"I thought he was buckled."

"He has undone the buckle," replied Montparnasse.

And he rapidly related to the gamin how, on the morning of that very day,
Babet, having been transferred to La Conciergerie, had made his escape,
by turning to the left instead of to the right in "the police office."

Gavroche expressed his admiration for this skill.

"What a dentist!" he cried.

Montparnasse added a few details as to Babet's flight, and ended with:--

"Oh!  That's not all."

Gavroche, as he listened, had seized a cane that Montparnasse
held in his hand, and mechanically pulled at the upper part,
and the blade of a dagger made its appearance.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, pushing the dagger back in haste, "you have
brought along your gendarme disguised as a bourgeois."

Montparnasse winked.

"The deuce!" resumed Gavroche, "so you're going to have a bout
with the bobbies?"

"You can't tell," replied Montparnasse with an indifferent air.
"It's always a good thing to have a pin about one."

Gavroche persisted:--

"What are you up to to-night?"

Again Montparnasse took a grave tone, and said, mouthing
every syllable:  "Things."

And abruptly changing the conversation:--

"By the way!"

"What?"

"Something happened t'other day.  Fancy.  I meet a bourgeois.
He makes me a present of a sermon and his purse.  I put it in my pocket.
A minute later, I feel in my pocket.  There's nothing there."

"Except the sermon," said Gavroche.

"But you," went on Montparnasse, "where are you bound for now?"

Gavroche pointed to his two proteges, and said:--

"I'm going to put these infants to bed."

"Whereabouts is the bed?"

"At my house."

"Where's your house?"

"At my house."

"So you have a lodging?"

"Yes, I have."

"And where is your lodging?"

"In the elephant," said Gavroche.

Montparnasse, though not naturally inclined to astonishment,
could not restrain an exclamation.

"In the elephant!"

"Well, yes, in the elephant!" retorted Gavroche.  "Kekcaa?"

This is another word of the language which no one writes,
and which every one speaks.

Kekcaa signifies:  Quest que c'est que cela a?  [What's the matter
with that?]

The urchin's profound remark recalled Montparnasse to calmness
and good sense.  He appeared to return to better sentiments
with regard to Gavroche's lodging.

"Of course," said he, "yes, the elephant.  Is it comfortable there?"

"Very," said Gavroche.  "It's really bully there.  There ain't
any draughts, as there are under the bridges."

"How do you get in?"

"Oh, I get in."

"So there is a hole?" demanded Montparnasse.

"Parbleu!  I should say so.  But you mustn't tell.  It's between
the fore legs.  The bobbies haven't seen it."

"And you climb up?  Yes, I understand."

"A turn of the hand, cric, crac, and it's all over, no one there."

After a pause, Gavroche added:--

"I shall have a ladder for these children."

Montparnasse burst out laughing:--

"Where the devil did you pick up those young 'uns?"

Gavroche replied with great simplicity:--

"They are some brats that a wig-maker made me a present of."

Meanwhile, Montparnasse had fallen to thinking:--

"You recognized me very readily," he muttered.

He took from his pocket two small objects which were nothing more than
two quills wrapped in cotton, and thrust one up each of his nostrils.
This gave him a different nose.

"That changes you," remarked Gavroche, "you are less homely so,
you ought to keep them on all the time."

Montparnasse was a handsome fellow, but Gavroche was a tease.

"Seriously," demanded Montparnasse, "how do you like me so?"

The sound of his voice was different also.  In a twinkling,
Montparnasse had become unrecognizable.

"Oh!  Do play Porrichinelle for us!" exclaimed Gavroche.

The two children, who had not been listening up to this point,
being occupied themselves in thrusting their fingers up their noses,
drew near at this name, and stared at Montparnasse with dawning joy
and admiration.

Unfortunately, Montparnasse was troubled.

He laid his hand on Gavroche's shoulder, and said to him,
emphasizing his words:  "Listen to what I tell you, boy! if I
were on the square with my dog, my knife, and my wife, and if you
were to squander ten sous on me, I wouldn't refuse to work,
but this isn't Shrove Tuesday."

This odd phrase produced a singular effect on the gamin.
He wheeled round hastily, darted his little sparkling eyes about him
with profound attention, and perceived a police sergeant standing
with his back to them a few paces off.  Gavroche allowed an:
"Ah! good!" to escape him, but immediately suppressed it, and shaking
Montparnasse's hand:--

"Well, good evening," said he, "I'm going off to my elephant
with my brats.  Supposing that you should need me some night,
you can come and hunt me up there.  I lodge on the entresol.
There is no porter.  You will inquire for Monsieur Gavroche."

"Very good," said Montparnasse.

And they parted, Montparnasse betaking himself in the direction
of the Greve, and Gavroche towards the Bastille.  The little one
of five, dragged along by his brother who was dragged by Gavroche,
turned his head back several times to watch "Porrichinelle" as he went.

The ambiguous phrase by means of which Montparnasse had warned Gavroche
of the presence of the policeman, contained no other talisman than
the assonance dig repeated five or six times in different forms.
This syllable, dig, uttered alone or artistically mingled with the
words of a phrase, means:  "Take care, we can no longer talk freely."
There was besides, in Montparnasse's sentence, a literary beauty
which was lost upon Gavroche, that is mon dogue, ma dague et ma digue,
a slang expression of the Temple, which signifies my dog, my knife,
and my wife, greatly in vogue among clowns and the red-tails in the
great century when Moliere wrote and Callot drew.

Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southwest corner
of the Place de la Bastille, near the basin of the canal, excavated in
the ancient ditch of the fortress-prison, a singular monument,
which has already been effaced from the memories of Parisians,
and which deserved to leave some trace, for it was the idea of
a "member of the Institute, the General-in-chief of the army of Egypt."

We say monument, although it was only a rough model.  But this
model itself, a marvellous sketch, the grandiose skeleton of an idea
of Napoleon's, which successive gusts of wind have carried away
and thrown, on each occasion, still further from us, had become
historical and had acquired a certain definiteness which contrasted
with its provisional aspect.  It was an elephant forty feet high,
constructed of timber and masonry, bearing on its back a tower
which resembled a house, formerly painted green by some dauber,
and now painted black by heaven, the wind, and time.  In this deserted
and unprotected corner of the place, the broad brow of the colossus,
his trunk, his tusks, his tower, his enormous crupper, his four feet,
like columns produced, at night, under the starry heavens, a surprising
and terrible form.  It was a sort of symbol of popular force.
It was sombre, mysterious, and immense.  It was some mighty,
visible phantom, one knew not what, standing erect beside the invisible
spectre of the Bastille.

Few strangers visited this edifice, no passer-by looked at it.
It was falling into ruins; every season the plaster which detached
itself from its sides formed hideous wounds upon it.  "The aediles,"
as the expression ran in elegant dialect, had forgotten it ever
since 1814.  There it stood in its corner, melancholy, sick, crumbling,
surrounded by a rotten palisade, soiled continually by drunken coachmen;
cracks meandered athwart its belly, a lath projected from its tail,
tall grass flourished between its legs; and, as the level of the
place had been rising all around it for a space of thirty years,
by that slow and continuous movement which insensibly elevates
the soil of large towns, it stood in a hollow, and it looked
as though the ground were giving way beneath it.  It was unclean,
despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly in the eyes of the bourgeois,
melancholy in the eyes of the thinker.  There was something about it
of the dirt which is on the point of being swept out, and something
of the majesty which is on the point of being decapitated.
As we have said, at night, its aspect changed.  Night is the real
element of everything that is dark.  As soon as twilight descended,
the old elephant became transfigured; he assumed a tranquil and
redoubtable appearance in the formidable serenity of the shadows.
Being of the past, he belonged to night; and obscurity was in keeping
with his grandeur.

This rough, squat, heavy, hard, austere, almost misshapen,
but assuredly majestic monument, stamped with a sort of magnificent
and savage gravity, has disappeared, and left to reign in peace,
a sort of gigantic stove, ornamented with its pipe, which has replaced
the sombre fortress with its nine towers, very much as the bourgeoisie
replaces the feudal classes.  It is quite natural that a stove
should be the symbol of an epoch in which a pot contains power.
This epoch will pass away, people have already begun to understand that,
if there can be force in a boiler, there can be no force except in
the brain; in other words, that which leads and drags on the world,
is not locomotives, but ideas.  Harness locomotives to ideas,--
that is well done; but do not mistake the horse for the rider.

At all events, to return to the Place de la Bastille, the architect
of this elephant succeeded in making a grand thing out of plaster;
the architect of the stove has succeeded in making a pretty thing
out of bronze.

This stove-pipe, which has been baptized by a sonorous name, and called
the column of July, this monument of a revolution that miscarried,
was still enveloped in 1832, in an immense shirt of woodwork,
which we regret, for our part, and by a vast plank enclosure,
which completed the task of isolating the elephant.

It was towards this corner of the place, dimly lighted by the reflection
of a distant street lamp, that the gamin guided his two "brats."

The reader must permit us to interrupt ourselves here and to remind
him that we are dealing with simple reality, and that twenty
years ago, the tribunals were called upon to judge, under the charge
of vagabondage, and mutilation of a public monument, a child
who had been caught asleep in this very elephant of the Bastille.
This fact noted, we proceed.

On arriving in the vicinity of the colossus,
Gavroche comprehended the effect which
the infinitely great might produce on the infinitely small, and said:--

"Don't be scared, infants."

Then he entered through a gap in the fence into the elephant's
enclosure and helped the young ones to clamber through the breach.
The two children, somewhat frightened, followed Gavroche without
uttering a word, and confided themselves to this little Providence
in rags which had given them bread and had promised them a shelter.

There, extended along the fence, lay a ladder which by day
served the laborers in the neighboring timber-yard. Gavroche
raised it with remarkable vigor, and placed it against one of
the elephant's forelegs.  Near the point where the ladder ended,
a sort of black hole in the belly of the colossus could be distinguished.

Gavroche pointed out the ladder and the hole to his guests,
and said to them:--

"Climb up and go in."

The two little boys exchanged terrified glances.

"You're afraid, brats!" exclaimed Gavroche.

And he added:--

"You shall see!"

He clasped the rough leg of the elephant, and in a twinkling,
without deigning to make use of the ladder, he had reached
the aperture.  He entered it as an adder slips through a crevice,
and disappeared within, and an instant later, the two children
saw his head, which looked pale, appear vaguely, on the edge
of the shadowy hole, like a wan and whitish spectre.

"Well!" he exclaimed, "climb up, young 'uns!  You'll see how snug
it is here!  Come up, you!" he said to the elder, "I'll lend you
a hand."

The little fellows nudged each other, the gamin frightened and
inspired them with confidence at one and the same time, and then,
it was raining very hard.  The elder one undertook the risk.
The younger, on seeing his brother climbing up, and himself left alone
between the paws of this huge beast, felt greatly inclined to cry,
but he did not dare.

The elder lad climbed, with uncertain steps, up the rungs of the ladder;
Gavroche, in the meanwhile, encouraging him with exclamations
like a fencing-master to his pupils, or a muleteer to his mules.

"Don't be afraid!--That's it!--Come on!--Put your feet there!--
Give us your hand here!--Boldly!"

And when the child was within reach, he seized him suddenly
and vigorously by the arm, and pulled him towards him.

"Nabbed!" said he.

The brat had passed through the crack.

"Now," said Gavroche, "wait for me.  Be so good as to take
a seat, Monsieur."

And making his way out of the hole as he had entered it, he slipped
down the elephant's leg with the agility of a monkey, landed on
his feet in the grass, grasped the child of five round the body,
and planted him fairly in the middle of the ladder, then he began
to climb up behind him, shouting to the elder:--

"I'm going to boost him, do you tug."

And in another instant, the small lad was pushed, dragged, pulled,
thrust, stuffed into the hole, before he had time to recover himself,
and Gavroche, entering behind him, and repulsing the ladder with a
kick which sent it flat on the grass, began to clap his hands and to cry:--

"Here we are!  Long live General Lafayette!"

This explosion over, he added:--

"Now, young 'uns, you are in my house."

Gavroche was at home, in fact.

Oh, unforeseen utility of the useless!  Charity of great things!
Goodness of giants!  This huge monument, which had embodied
an idea of the Emperor's, had become the box of a street urchin.
The brat had been accepted and sheltered by the colossus.
The bourgeois decked out in their Sunday finery who passed the
elephant of the Bastille, were fond of saying as they scanned it
disdainfully with their prominent eyes:  "What's the good of that?"
It served to save from the cold, the frost, the hail, and rain,
to shelter from the winds of winter, to preserve from slumber
in the mud which produces fever, and from slumber in the snow
which produces death, a little being who had no father, no mother,
no bread, no clothes, no refuge.  It served to receive the innocent
whom society repulsed.  It served to diminish public crime.
It was a lair open to one against whom all doors were shut.
It seemed as though the miserable old mastodon, invaded by vermin
and oblivion, covered with warts, with mould, and ulcers, tottering,
worm-eaten, abandoned, condemned, a sort of mendicant colossus,
asking alms in vain with a benevolent look in the midst of the
cross-roads, had taken pity on that other mendicant, the poor pygmy,
who roamed without shoes to his feet, without a roof over his head,
blowing on his fingers, clad in rags, fed on rejected scraps.
That was what the elephant of the Bastille was good for.
This idea of Napoleon, disdained by men, had been taken back by God.
That which had been merely illustrious, had become august.
In order to realize his thought, the Emperor should have had porphyry,
brass, iron, gold, marble; the old collection of planks, beams and
plaster sufficed for God.  The Emperor had had the dream of a genius;
in that Titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, with trunk uplifted,
bearing its tower and scattering on all sides its merry and vivifying
waters, he wished to incarnate the people.  God had done a grander
thing with it, he had lodged a child there.

The hole through which Gavroche had entered was a breach which was
hardly visible from the outside, being concealed, as we have stated,
beneath the elephant's belly, and so narrow that it was only cats
and homeless children who could pass through it.

"Let's begin," said Gavroche, "by telling the porter that we are
not at home."

And plunging into the darkness with the assurance of a person who is
well acquainted with his apartments, he took a plank and stopped
up the aperture.

Again Gavroche plunged into the obscurity.  The children heard
the crackling of the match thrust into the phosphoric bottle.
The chemical match was not yet in existence; at that epoch the Fumade
steel represented progress.

A sudden light made them blink; Gavroche had just managed to
ignite one of those bits of cord dipped in resin which are called
cellar rats.  The cellar rat, which emitted more smoke than light,
rendered the interior of the elephant confusedly visible.

Gavroche's two guests glanced about them, and the sensation
which they experienced was something like that which one would
feel if shut up in the great tun of Heidelberg, or, better still,
like what Jonah must have felt in the biblical belly of the whale.
An entire and gigantic skeleton appeared enveloping them.  Above, a long
brown beam, whence started at regular distances, massive, arching ribs,
represented the vertebral column with its sides, stalactites of
plaster depended from them like entrails, and vast spiders'
webs stretching from side to side, formed dirty diaphragms.
Here and there, in the corners, were visible large blackish spots
which had the appearance of being alive, and which changed places
rapidly with an abrupt and frightened movement.

Fragments which had fallen from the elephant's back into his belly
had filled up the cavity, so that it was possible to walk upon it
as on a floor.

The smaller child nestled up against his brother, and whispered
to him:--

"It's black."

This remark drew an exclamation from Gavroche.  The petrified air
of the two brats rendered some shock necessary.

"What's that you are gabbling about there?" he exclaimed.
"Are you scoffing at me?  Are you turning up your noses?
Do you want the tuileries?  Are you brutes?  Come, say!  I warn you
that I don't belong to the regiment of simpletons.  Ah, come now,
are you brats from the Pope's establishment?"

A little roughness is good in cases of fear.  It is reassuring.
The two children drew close to Gavroche.

Gavroche, paternally touched by this confidence, passed from grave
to gentle, and addressing the smaller:--

"Stupid," said he, accenting the insulting word, with a caressing
intonation, "it's outside that it is black.  Outside it's raining,
here it does not rain; outside it's cold, here there's not an atom
of wind; outside there are heaps of people, here there's no one;
outside there ain't even the moon, here there's my candle,
confound it!"

The two children began to look upon the apartment with less terror;
but Gavroche allowed them no more time for contemplation.

"Quick," said he.

And he pushed them towards what we are very glad to be able to call
the end of the room.

There stood his bed.

Gavroche's bed was complete; that is to say, it had a mattress,
a blanket, and an alcove with curtains.

The mattress was a straw mat, the blanket a rather large strip
of gray woollen stuff, very warm and almost new.  This is what
the alcove consisted of:--

Three rather long poles, thrust into and consolidated, with the rubbish
which formed the floor, that is to say, the belly of the elephant,
two in front and one behind, and united by a rope at their summits,
so as to form a pyramidal bundle.  This cluster supported
a trellis-work of brass wire which was simply placed upon it,
but artistically applied, and held by fastenings of iron wire,
so that it enveloped all three holes.  A row of very heavy stones kept
this network down to the floor so that nothing could pass under it.
This grating was nothing else than a piece of the brass screens
with which aviaries are covered in menageries.  Gavroche's bed stood
as in a cage, behind this net.  The whole resembled an Esquimaux tent.

This trellis-work took the place of curtains.

Gavroche moved aside the stones which fastened the net down in front,
and the two folds of the net which lapped over each other fell apart.

"Down on all fours, brats!" said Gavroche.

He made his guests enter the cage with great precaution, then he
crawled in after them, pulled the stones together, and closed
the opening hermetically again.

All three had stretched out on the mat.  Gavroche still had
the cellar rat in his hand.

"Now," said he, "go to sleep!  I'm going to suppress the candelabra."

"Monsieur," the elder of the brothers asked Gavroche, pointing to
the netting, "what's that for?"

"That," answered Gavroche gravely, "is for the rats.  Go to sleep!"

Nevertheless, he felt obliged to add a few words of instruction
for the benefit of these young creatures, and he continued:--

"It's a thing from the Jardin des Plantes.  It's used for fierce animals.
There's a whole shopful of them there.  All you've got to do is to
climb over a wall, crawl through a window, and pass through a door.
You can get as much as you want."

As he spoke, he wrapped the younger one up bodily in a fold
of the blanket, and the little one murmured:--

"Oh! how good that is!  It's warm!"

Gavroche cast a pleased eye on the blanket.

"That's from the Jardin des Plantes, too," said he.  "I took
that from the monkeys."

And, pointing out to the eldest the mat on which he was lying,
a very thick and admirably made mat, he added:--

"That belonged to the giraffe."

After a pause he went on:--

"The beasts had all these things.  I took them away from them.
It didn't trouble them.  I told them:  `It's for the elephant.'"

He paused, and then resumed:--

"You crawl over the walls and you don't care a straw for the government.
So there now!"

The two children gazed with timid and stupefied respect on this
intrepid and ingenious being, a vagabond like themselves,
isolated like themselves, frail like themselves, who had something
admirable and all-powerful about him, who seemed supernatural
to them, and whose physiognomy was composed of all the grimaces
of an old mountebank, mingled with the most ingenuous and charming smiles.

"Monsieur," ventured the elder timidly, "you are not afraid
of the police, then?"

Gavroche contented himself with replying:--

"Brat!  Nobody says `police,' they say `bobbies.'"

The smaller had his eyes wide open, but he said nothing.
As he was on the edge of the mat, the elder being in the middle,
Gavroche tucked the blanket round him as a mother might have done,
and heightened the mat under his head with old rags, in such a way
as to form a pillow for the child.  Then he turned to the elder:--

"Hey!  We're jolly comfortable here, ain't we?"

"Ah, yes!" replied the elder, gazing at Gavroche with the expression
of a saved angel.

The two poor little children who had been soaked through,
began to grow warm once more.

"Ah, by the way," continued Gavroche, "what were you bawling about?"

And pointing out the little one to his brother:--

"A mite like that, I've nothing to say about, but the idea of a big
fellow like you crying!  It's idiotic; you looked like a calf."

"Gracious, replied the child, "we have no lodging."

"Bother!" retorted Gavroche, "you don't say `lodgings,' you say
`crib.'"

"And then, we were afraid of being alone like that at night."

"You don't say `night,' you say `darkmans.'"

"Thank you, sir," said the child.

"Listen," went on Gavroche, "you must never bawl again over anything.
I'll take care of you.  You shall see what fun we'll have.
In summer, we'll go to the Glaciere with Navet, one of my pals,
we'll bathe in the Gare, we'll run stark naked in front of the rafts
on the bridge at Austerlitz,--that makes the laundresses raging.
They scream, they get mad, and if you only knew how ridiculous they are!
We'll go and see the man-skeleton. And then I'll take you to the play.
I'll take you to see Frederick Lemaitre.  I have tickets, I know
some of the actors, I even played in a piece once.  There were a lot
of us fellers, and we ran under a cloth, and that made the sea.
I'll get you an engagement at my theatre.  We'll go to see the savages.
They ain't real, those savages ain't. They wear pink tights
that go all in wrinkles, and you can see where their elbows have
been darned with white.  Then, we'll go to the Opera.  We'll get
in with the hired applauders.  The Opera claque is well managed.
I wouldn't associate with the claque on the boulevard.  At the Opera,
just fancy! some of them pay twenty sous, but they're ninnies.
They're called dishclouts.  And then we'll go to see the guillotine work.
I'll show you the executioner.  He lives in the Rue des Marais.
Monsieur Sanson.  He has a letter-box at his door.  Ah! we'll have
famous fun!"

At that moment a drop of wax fell on Gavroche's finger, and recalled
him to the realities of life.

"The deuce!" said he, "there's the wick giving out.  Attention!
I can't spend more than a sou a month on my lighting.  When a body
goes to bed, he must sleep.  We haven't the time to read M. Paul de
Kock's romances.  And besides, the light might pass through the cracks
of the porte-cochere, and all the bobbies need to do is to see it."

"And then," remarked the elder timidly,--he alone dared talk
to Gavroche, and reply to him, "a spark might fall in the straw,
and we must look out and not burn the house down."

"People don't say `burn the house down,'" remarked Gavroche,
"they say `blaze the crib.'"

The storm increased in violence, and the heavy downpour
beat upon the back of the colossus amid claps of thunder.
"You're taken in, rain!" said Gavroche.  "It amuses me to hear
the decanter run down the legs of the house.  Winter is a stupid;
it wastes its merchandise, it loses its labor, it can't wet us,
and that makes it kick up a row, old water-carrier that it is."

This allusion to the thunder, all the consequences of which Gavroche,
in his character of a philosopher of the nineteenth century, accepted,
was followed by a broad flash of lightning, so dazzling that a
hint of it entered the belly of the elephant through the crack.
Almost at the same instant, the thunder rumbled with great fury.
The two little creatures uttered a shriek, and started up so eagerly
that the network came near being displaced, but Gavroche turned
his bold face to them, and took advantage of the clap of thunder
to burst into a laugh.

"Calm down, children.  Don't topple over the edifice.  That's fine,
first-class thunder; all right.  That's no slouch of a streak
of lightning.  Bravo for the good God!  Deuce take it!  It's almost
as good as it is at the Ambigu."

That said, he restored order in the netting, pushed the two children
gently down on the bed, pressed their knees, in order to stretch
them out at full length, and exclaimed:--

"Since the good God is lighting his candle, I can blow out mine.
Now, babes, now, my young humans, you must shut your peepers.
It's very bad not to sleep.  It'll make you swallow the strainer,
or, as they say, in fashionable society, stink in the gullet.
Wrap yourself up well in the hide!  I'm going to put out the light.
Are you ready?"

"Yes," murmured the elder, "I'm all right.  I seem to have feathers
under my head."

"People don't say `head,'" cried Gavroche, "they say `nut'."

The two children nestled close to each other, Gavroche finished arranging
them on the mat, drew the blanket up to their very ears, then repeated,
for the third time, his injunction in the hieratical tongue:--

"Shut your peepers!"

And he snuffed out his tiny light.

Hardly had the light been extinguished, when a peculiar trembling
began to affect the netting under which the three children lay.

It consisted of a multitude of dull scratches which produced a
metallic sound, as if claws and teeth were gnawing at the copper wire.
This was accompanied by all sorts of little piercing cries.

The little five-year-old boy, on hearing this hubbub overhead,
and chilled with terror, jogged his brother's elbow; but the elder
brother had already shut his peepers, as Gavroche had ordered.
Then the little one, who could no longer control his terror,
questioned Gavroche, but in a very low tone, and with bated breath:--

"Sir?"

"Hey?" said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.

"What is that?"

"It's the rats," replied Gavroche.

And he laid his head down on the mat again.

The rats, in fact, who swarmed by thousands in the carcass of
the elephant, and who were the living black spots which we have
already mentioned, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle,
so long as it had been lighted; but as soon as the cavern,
which was the same as their city, had returned to darkness,
scenting what the good story-teller Perrault calls "fresh meat,"
they had hurled themselves in throngs on Gavroche's tent,
had climbed to the top of it, and had begun to bite the meshes
as though seeking to pierce this new-fangled trap.

Still the little one could not sleep.

"Sir?" he began again.

"Hey?" said Gavroche.

"What are rats?"

"They are mice."

This explanation reassured the child a little.  He had seen white
mice in the course of his life, and he was not afraid of them.
Nevertheless, he lifted up his voice once more.

"Sir?"

"Hey?" said Gavroche again.

"Why don't you have a cat?"

"I did have one," replied Gavroche, "I brought one here, but they
ate her."

This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the little
fellow began to tremble again.

The dialogue between him and Gavroche began again for the fourth time:--

"Monsieur?"

"Hey?"

"Who was it that was eaten?"

"The cat."

"And who ate the cat?"

"The rats."

"The mice?"

"Yes, the rats."

The child, in consternation, dismayed at the thought of mice
which ate cats, pursued:--

"Sir, would those mice eat us?"

"Wouldn't they just!" ejaculated Gavroche.

The child's terror had reached its climax.  But Gavroche added:--

"Don't be afraid.  They can't get in.  And besides, I'm here!
Here, catch hold of my hand.  Hold your tongue and shut your peepers!"

At the same time Gavroche grasped the little fellow's hand
across his brother.  The child pressed the hand close to him,
and felt reassured.  Courage and strength have these mysterious
ways of communicating themselves.  Silence reigned round them
once more, the sound of their voices had frightened off the rats;
at the expiration of a few minutes, they came raging back, but in vain,
the three little fellows were fast asleep and heard nothing more.

The hours of the night fled away.  Darkness covered the vast
Place de la Bastille.  A wintry gale, which mingled with
the rain, blew in gusts, the patrol searched all the doorways,
alleys, enclosures, and obscure nooks, and in their search for
nocturnal vagabonds they passed in silence before the elephant;
the monster, erect, motionless, staring open-eyed into the shadows,
had the appearance of dreaming happily over his good deed;
and sheltered from heaven and from men the three poor sleeping children.

In order to understand what is about to follow, the reader must
remember, that, at that epoch, the Bastille guard-house was situated
at the other end of the square, and that what took place in the
vicinity of the elephant could neither be seen nor heard by the sentinel.

Towards the end of that hour which immediately precedes the dawn,
a man turned from the Rue Saint-Antoine at a run, made the circuit
of the enclosure of the column of July, and glided between
the palings until he was underneath the belly of the elephant.
If any light had illuminated that man, it might have been divined
from the thorough manner in which he was soaked that he had passed
the night in the rain.  Arrived beneath the elephant, he uttered
a peculiar cry, which did not belong to any human tongue, and which
a paroquet alone could have imitated.  Twice he repeated this cry,
of whose orthography the following barely conveys an idea:--

"Kirikikiou!"

At the second cry, a clear, young, merry voice responded from
the belly of the elephant:--

"Yes!"

Almost immediately, the plank which closed the hole was drawn aside,
and gave passage to a child who descended the elephant's leg, and fell
briskly near the man.  It was Gavroche.  The man was Montparnasse.

As for his cry of Kirikikiou,--that was, doubtless, what the child
had meant, when he said:--

"You will ask for Monsieur Gavroche."

On hearing it, he had waked with a start, had crawled out of his
"alcove," pushing apart the netting a little, and carefully drawing
it together again, then he had opened the trap, and descended.

The man and the child recognized each other silently amid the gloom:
Montparnasse confined himself to the remark:--

"We need you.  Come, lend us a hand."

The lad asked for no further enlightenment.

"I'm with you," said he.

And both took their way towards the Rue Saint-Antoine, whence
Montparnasse had emerged, winding rapidly through the long file
of market-gardeners' carts which descend towards the markets at that hour.

The market-gardeners, crouching, half-asleep, in their wagons,
amid the salads and vegetables, enveloped to their very eyes in
their mufflers on account of the beating rain, did not even glance
at these strange pedestrians.



CHAPTER III

THE VICISSITUDES OF FLIGHT


This is what had taken place that same night at the La Force:--

An escape had been planned between Babet, Brujon, Guelemer,
and Thenardier, although Thenardier was in close confinement.
Babet had arranged the matter for his own benefit, on the same day,
as the reader has seen from Montparnasse's account to Gavroche.
Montparnasse was to help them from outside.

Brujon, after having passed a month in the punishment cell,
had had time, in the first place, to weave a rope, in the second,
to mature a plan.  In former times, those severe places where the
discipline of the prison delivers the convict into his own hands,
were composed of four stone walls, a stone ceiling, a flagged pavement,
a camp bed, a grated window, and a door lined with iron, and were
called dungeons; but the dungeon was judged to be too terrible;
nowadays they are composed of an iron door, a grated window,
a camp bed, a flagged pavement, four stone walls, and a stone ceiling,
and are called chambers of punishment.  A little light penetrates
towards mid-day. The inconvenient point about these chambers which,
as the reader sees, are not dungeons, is that they allow the persons
who should be at work to think.

So Brujon meditated, and he emerged from the chamber of punishment
with a rope.  As he had the name of being very dangerous in
the Charlemagne courtyard, he was placed in the New Building.
The first thing he found in the New Building was Guelemer, the second
was a nail; Guelemer, that is to say, crime; a nail, that is
to say, liberty.  Brujon, of whom it is high time that the reader
should have a complete idea, was, with an appearance of delicate health
and a profoundly premeditated languor, a polished, intelligent sprig,
and a thief, who had a caressing glance, and an atrocious smile.
His glance resulted from his will, and his smile from his nature.
His first studies in his art had been directed to roofs.  He had
made great progress in the industry of the men who tear off lead,
who plunder the roofs and despoil the gutters by the process called
double pickings.

The circumstance which put the finishing touch on the moment
peculiarly favorable for an attempt at escape, was that the roofers
were re-laying and re-jointing, at that very moment, a portion of
the slates on the prison.  The Saint-Bernard courtyard was no longer
absolutely isolated from the Charlemagne and the Saint-Louis courts.
Up above there were scaffoldings and ladders; in other words,
bridges and stairs in the direction of liberty.

The New Building, which was the most cracked and decrepit thing
to be seen anywhere in the world, was the weak point in the prison.
The walls were eaten by saltpetre to such an extent that the
authorities had been obliged to line the vaults of the dormitories
with a sheathing of wood, because stones were in the habit of
becoming detached and falling on the prisoners in their beds.
In spite of this antiquity, the authorities committed the error
of confining in the New Building the most troublesome prisoners,
of placing there "the hard cases," as they say in prison parlance.

The New Building contained four dormitories, one above the other,
and a top story which was called the Bel-Air (FineAir). A large
chimney-flue, probably from some ancient kitchen of the Dukes de
la Force, started from the groundfloor, traversed all four stories,
cut the dormitories, where it figured as a flattened pillar,
into two portions, and finally pierced the roof.

Guelemer and Brujon were in the same dormitory.  They had been placed,
by way of precaution, on the lower story.  Chance ordained that
the heads of their beds should rest against the chimney.

Thenardier was directly over their heads in the top story
known as Fine-Air. The pedestrian who halts on the Rue
Culture-Sainte-Catherine, after passing the barracks of the firemen,
in front of the porte-cochere of the bathing establishment,
beholds a yard full of flowers and shrubs in wooden boxes, at the
extremity of which spreads out a little white rotunda with two wings,
brightened up with green shutters, the bucolic dream of Jean Jacques.

Not more than ten years ago, there rose above that rotunda
an enormous black, hideous, bare wall by which it was backed up.

This was the outer wall of La Force.

This wall, beside that rotunda, was Milton viewed through Berquin.

Lofty as it was, this wall was overtopped by a still blacker roof,
which could be seen beyond.  This was the roof of the New Building.
There one could descry four dormer-windows, guarded with bars;
they were the windows of the Fine-Air.

A chimney pierced the roof; this was the chimney which traversed
the dormitories.

The Bel-Air, that top story of the New Building, was a sort of
large hall, with a Mansard roof, guarded with triple gratings and
double doors of sheet iron, which were studded with enormous bolts.
When one entered from the north end, one had on one's left the four
dormer-windows, on one's right, facing the windows, at regular intervals,
four square, tolerably vast cages, separated by narrow passages,
built of masonry to about the height of the elbow, and the rest,
up to the roof, of iron bars.

Thenardier had been in solitary confinement in one of these cages
since the night of the 3d of February.  No one was ever able to
discover how, and by what connivance, he succeeded in procuring,
and secreting a bottle of wine, invented, so it is said, by Desrues,
with which a narcotic is mixed, and which the band of the Endormeurs,
or Sleep-compellers, rendered famous.

There are, in many prisons, treacherous employees, half-jailers,
half-thieves, who assist in escapes, who sell to the police
an unfaithful service, and who turn a penny whenever they can.

On that same night, then, when Little Gavroche picked up the two
lost children, Brujon and Guelemer, who knew that Babet, who had
escaped that morning, was waiting for them in the street as well
as Montparnasse, rose softly, and with the nail which Brujon had found,
began to pierce the chimney against which their beds stood.
The rubbish fell on Brujon's bed, so that they were not heard.
Showers mingled with thunder shook the doors on their hinges,
and created in the prison a terrible and opportune uproar.
Those of the prisoners who woke, pretended to fall asleep again,
and left Guelemer and Brujon to their own devices.  Brujon was adroit;
Guelemer was vigorous.  Before any sound had reached the watcher,
who was sleeping in the grated cell which opened into the dormitory,
the wall had, been pierced, the chimney scaled, the iron grating which
barred the upper orifice of the flue forced, and the two redoubtable
ruffians were on the roof.  The wind and rain redoubled, the roof
was slippery.

"What a good night to leg it!" said Brujon.

An abyss six feet broad and eighty feet deep separated them from
the surrounding wall.  At the bottom of this abyss, they could
see the musket of a sentinel gleaming through the gloom.
They fastened one end of the rope which Brujon had spun in his dungeon
to the stumps of the iron bars which they had just wrenched off,
flung the other over the outer wall, crossed the abyss at one bound,
clung to the coping of the wall, got astride of it, let themselves slip,
one after the other, along the rope, upon a little roof which
touches the bath-house, pulled their rope after them, jumped down
into the courtyard of the bath-house, traversed it, pushed open
the porter's wicket, beside which hung his rope, pulled this,
opened the porte-cochere, and found themselves in the street.

Three-quarters of an hour had not elapsed since they had risen
in bed in the dark, nail in hand, and their project in their heads.

A few moments later they had joined Babet and Montparnasse,
who were prowling about the neighborhood.

They had broken their rope in pulling it after them, and a bit
of it remained attached to the chimney on the roof.  They had
sustained no other damage, however, than that of scratching
nearly all the skin off their hands.

That night, Thenardier was warned, without any one being able
to explain how, and was not asleep.

Towards one o'clock in the morning, the night being very dark,
he saw two shadows pass along the roof, in the rain and squalls,
in front of the dormer-window which was opposite his cage.
One halted at the window, long enough to dart in a glance.
This was Brujon.

Thenardier recognized him, and understood.  This was enough.

Thenardier, rated as a burglar, and detained as a measure of precaution
under the charge of organizing a nocturnal ambush, with armed force,
was kept in sight.  The sentry, who was relieved every two hours,
marched up and down in front of his cage with loaded musket.
The Fine-Air was lighted by a skylight.  The prisoner had on his
feet fetters weighing fifty pounds.  Every day, at four o'clock
in the afternoon, a jailer, escorted by two dogs,--this was still
in vogue at that time,--entered his cage, deposited beside his bed
a loaf of black bread weighing two pounds, a jug of water, a bowl
filled with rather thin bouillon, in which swam a few Mayagan beans,
inspected his irons and tapped the bars.  This man and his dogs made
two visits during the night.

Thenardier had obtained permission to keep a sort of iron bolt
which he used to spike his bread into a crack in the wall, "in order
to preserve it from the rats," as he said.  As Thenardier was kept
in sight, no objection had been made to this spike.  Still, it was
remembered afterwards, that one of the jailers had said:
"It would be better to let him have only a wooden spike."

At two o'clock in the morning, the sentinel, who was an old soldier,
was relieved, and replaced by a conscript.  A few moments later,
the man with the dogs paid his visit, and went off without
noticing anything, except, possibly, the excessive youth and "the
rustic air" of the "raw recruit."  Two hours afterwards, at four
o'clock, when they came to relieve the conscript, he was found
asleep on the floor, lying like a log near Thenardier's cage.
As for Thenardier, he was no longer there.  There was a hole in
the ceiling of his cage, and, above it, another hole in the roof.
One of the planks of his bed had been wrenched off, and probably
carried away with him, as it was not found.  They also seized
in his cell a half-empty bottle which contained the remains
of the stupefying wine with which the soldier had been drugged.
The soldier's bayonet had disappeared.

At the moment when this discovery was made, it was assumed that
Thenardier was out of reach.  The truth is, that he was no longer
in the New Building, but that he was still in great danger.

Thenardier, on reaching the roof of the New Building, had found
the remains of Brujon's rope hanging to the bars of the upper trap
of the chimney, but, as this broken fragment was much too short,
he had not been able to escape by the outer wall, as Brujon and
Guelemer had done.

When one turns from the Rue des Ballets into the Rue du
Roi-de-Sicile, one almost immediately encounters a repulsive ruin.
There stood on that spot, in the last century, a house of which only
the back wall now remains, a regular wall of masonry, which rises
to the height of the third story between the adjoining buildings.
This ruin can be recognized by two large square windows which are
still to be seen there; the middle one, that nearest the right gable,
is barred with a worm-eaten beam adjusted like a prop.  Through these
windows there was formerly visible a lofty and lugubrious wall,
which was a fragment of the outer wall of La Force.

The empty space on the street left by the demolished house is
half-filled by a fence of rotten boards, shored up by five stone posts.
In this recess lies concealed a little shanty which leans against
the portion of the ruin which has remained standing.  The fence
has a gate, which, a few years ago, was fastened only by a latch.

It was the crest of this ruin that Thenardier had succeeded
in reaching, a little after one o'clock in the morning.

How had he got there?  That is what no one has ever been able
to explain or understand.  The lightning must, at the same time,
have hindered and helped him.  Had he made use of the ladders
and scaffoldings of the slaters to get from roof to roof,
from enclosure to enclosure, from compartment to compartment,
to the buildings of the Charlemagne court, then to the buildings
of the Saint-Louis court, to the outer wall, and thence to the hut
on the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile? But in that itinerary there existed
breaks which seemed to render it an impossibility.  Had he placed
the plank from his bed like a bridge from the roof of the Fine-Air
to the outer wall, and crawled flat, on his belly on the coping of the
outer wall the whole distance round the prison as far as the hut?
But the outer wall of La Force formed a crenellated and unequal line;
it mounted and descended, it dropped at the firemen's barracks,
it rose towards the bath-house, it was cut in twain by buildings,
it was not even of the same height on the Hotel Lamoignon as on
the Rue Pavee; everywhere occurred falls and right angles; and then,
the sentinels must have espied the dark form of the fugitive; hence,
the route taken by Thenardier still remains rather inexplicable.
In two manners, flight was impossible.  Had Thenardier, spurred on
by that thirst for liberty which changes precipices into ditches,
iron bars into wattles of osier, a legless man into an athlete, a gouty
man into a bird, stupidity into instinct, instinct into intelligence,
and intelligence into genius, had Thenardier invented a third mode?
No one has ever found out.

The marvels of escape cannot always be accounted for.  The man
who makes his escape, we repeat, is inspired; there is something
of the star and of the lightning in the mysterious gleam of flight;
the effort towards deliverance is no less surprising than the
flight towards the sublime, and one says of the escaped thief:
"How did he contrive to scale that wall?" in the same way that one
says of Corneille:  "Where did he find the means of dying?"

At all events, dripping with perspiration, drenched with rain,
with his clothes hanging in ribbons, his hands flayed, his elbows
bleeding, his knees torn, Thenardier had reached what children,
in their figurative language, call the edge of the wall of the ruin,
there he had stretched himself out at full length, and there his
strength had failed him.  A steep escarpment three stories high
separated him from the pavement of the street.

The rope which he had was too short.

There he waited, pale, exhausted, desperate with all the despair
which he had undergone, still hidden by the night, but telling
himself that the day was on the point of dawning, alarmed at the idea
of hearing the neighboring clock of Saint-Paul strike four within
a few minutes, an hour when the sentinel was relieved and when the
latter would be found asleep under the pierced roof, staring in
horror at a terrible depth, at the light of the street lanterns,
the wet, black pavement, that pavement longed for yet frightful,
which meant death, and which meant liberty.

He asked himself whether his three accomplices in flight had succeeded,
if they had heard him, and if they would come to his assistance.
He listened.  With the exception of the patrol, no one had passed
through the street since he had been there.  Nearly the whole of
the descent of the market-gardeners from Montreuil, from Charonne,
from Vincennes, and from Bercy to the markets was accomplished
through the Rue Saint-Antoine.

Four o'clock struck.  Thenardier shuddered.  A few moments later,
that terrified and confused uproar which follows the discovery
of an escape broke forth in the prison.  The sound of doors opening
and shutting, the creaking of gratings on their hinges, a tumult
in the guard-house, the hoarse shouts of the turnkeys, the shock
of musket-butts on the pavement of the courts, reached his ears.
Lights ascended and descended past the grated windows of the dormitories,
a torch ran along the ridge-pole of the top story of the New Building,
the firemen belonging in the barracks on the right had been summoned.
Their helmets, which the torch lighted up in the rain, went and came
along the roofs.  At the same time, Thenardier perceived in the
direction of the Bastille a wan whiteness lighting up the edge
of the sky in doleful wise.

He was on top of a wall ten inches wide, stretched out under the
heavy rains, with two gulfs to right and left, unable to stir,
subject to the giddiness of a possible fall, and to the horror
of a certain arrest, and his thoughts, like the pendulum of a clock,
swung from one of these ideas to the other:  "Dead if I fall,
caught if I stay."  In the midst of this anguish, he suddenly saw,
the street being still dark, a man who was gliding along the walls
and coming from the Rue Pavee, halt in the recess above which
Thenardier was, as it were, suspended.  Here this man was joined
by a second, who walked with the same caution, then by a third,
then by a fourth.  When these men were re-united, one of them lifted
the latch of the gate in the fence, and all four entered the enclosure
in which the shanty stood.  They halted directly under Thenardier.
These men had evidently chosen this vacant space in order that they
might consult without being seen by the passers-by or by the
sentinel who guards the wicket of La Force a few paces distant.
It must be added, that the rain kept this sentinel blocked in
his box.  Thenardier, not being able to distinguish their visages,
lent an ear to their words with the desperate attention of a wretch
who feels himself lost.

Thenardier saw something resembling a gleam of hope flash before
his eyes,--these men conversed in slang.

The first said in a low but distinct voice:--

"Let's cut.  What are we up to here?"

The second replied:  "It's raining hard enough to put out the
very devil's fire.  And the bobbies will be along instanter.
There's a soldier on guard yonder.  We shall get nabbed here."

These two words, icigo and icicaille, both of which mean ici,
and which belong, the first to the slang of the barriers, the second
to the slang of the Temple, were flashes of light for Thenardier.
By the icigo he recognized Brujon, who was a prowler of the barriers,
by the icicaille he knew Babet, who, among his other trades, had been
an old-clothes broker at the Temple.

The antique slang of the great century is no longer spoken except
in the Temple, and Babet was really the only person who spoke it in
all its purity.  Had it not been for the icicaille, Thenardier would
not have recognized him, for he had entirely changed his voice.

In the meanwhile, the third man had intervened.

"There's no hurry yet, let's wait a bit.  How do we know that he
doesn't stand in need of us?"

By this, which was nothing but French, Thenardier recognized
Montparnasse, who made it a point in his elegance to understand
all slangs and to speak none of them.

As for the fourth, he held his peace, but his huge shoulders
betrayed him.  Thenardier did not hesitate.  It was Guelemer.

Brujon replied almost impetuously but still in a low tone:--

"What are you jabbering about?  The tavern-keeper hasn't managed
to cut his stick.  He don't tumble to the racket, that he don't!
You have to be a pretty knowing cove to tear up your shirt, cut up
your sheet to make a rope, punch holes in doors, get up false papers,
make false keys, file your irons, hang out your cord, hide yourself,
and disguise yourself!  The old fellow hasn't managed to play it,
he doesn't understand how to work the business."

Babet added, still in that classical slang which was spoken
by Poulailler and Cartouche, and which is to the bold, new,
highly colored and risky argot used by Brujon what the language
of Racine is to the language of Andre Chenier:--

"Your tavern-keeper must have been nabbed in the act.  You have
to be knowing.  He's only a greenhorn.  He must have let himself be
taken in by a bobby, perhaps even by a sheep who played it on him as
his pal.  Listen, Montparnasse, do you hear those shouts in the prison?
You have seen all those lights.  He's recaptured, there!  He'll get
off with twenty years.  I ain't afraid, I ain't a coward, but there
ain't anything more to do, or otherwise they'd lead us a dance.  Don't
get mad, come with us, let's go drink a bottle of old wine together."

"One doesn't desert one's friends in a scrape," grumbled Montparnasse.

"I tell you he's nabbed!" retorted Brujon.  "At the present moment,
the inn-keeper ain't worth a ha'penny. We can't do nothing for him.
Let's be off.  Every minute I think a bobby has got me in his fist."

Montparnasse no longer offered more than a feeble resistance;
the fact is, that these four men, with the fidelity of ruffians who
never abandon each other, had prowled all night long about La Force,
great as was their peril, in the hope of seeing Thenardier make
his appearance on the top of some wall.  But the night, which was
really growing too fine,--for the downpour was such as to render
all the streets deserted,--the cold which was overpowering them,
their soaked garments, their hole-ridden shoes, the alarming noise
which had just burst forth in the prison, the hours which had elapsed,
the patrol which they had encountered, the hope which was vanishing,
all urged them to beat a retreat.  Montparnasse himself, who was,
perhaps, almost Thenardier's son-in-law, yielded.  A moment more,
and they would be gone.  Thenardier was panting on his wall like the
shipwrecked sufferers of the Meduse on their raft when they beheld
the vessel which had appeared in sight vanish on the horizon.

He dared not call to them; a cry might be heard and ruin everything.
An idea occurred to him, a last idea, a flash of inspiration;
he drew from his pocket the end of Brujon's rope, which he had detached
from the chimney of the New Building, and flung it into the space
enclosed by the fence.

This rope fell at their feet.

"A widow,"[37] said Babet.


[37] Argot of the Temple.


"My tortouse!"[38] said Brujon.


[38] Argot of the barriers.


"The tavern-keeper is there," said Montparnasse.

They raised their eyes.  Thenardier thrust out his head a very little.

"Quick!" said Montparnasse, "have you the other end of the rope, Brujon?"

"Yes."

"Knot the two pieces together, we'll fling him the rope, he can
fasten it to the wall, and he'll have enough of it to get down with."

Thenardier ran the risk, and spoke:--

"I am paralyzed with cold."

"We'll warm you up."

"I can't budge."

"Let yourself slide, we'll catch you."

"My hands are benumbed."

"Only fasten the rope to the wall."

"I can't."

"Then one of us must climb up," said Montparnasse.

"Three stories!" ejaculated Brujon.

An ancient plaster flue, which had served for a stove that had
been used in the shanty in former times, ran along the wall and
mounted almost to the very spot where they could see Thenardier.
This flue, then much damaged and full of cracks, has since fallen,
but the marks of it are still visible.

It was very narrow.

"One might get up by the help of that," said Montparnasse.

"By that flue?" exclaimed Babet, "a grown-up cove, never! it would
take a brat."

"A brat must be got," resumed Brujon.

"Where are we to find a young 'un?" said Guelemer.

"Wait," said Montparnasse.  "I've got the very article."

He opened the gate of the fence very softly, made sure that no one
was passing along the street, stepped out cautiously, shut the gate
behind him, and set off at a run in the direction of the Bastille.

Seven or eight minutes elapsed, eight thousand centuries to Thenardier;
Babet, Brujon, and Guelemer did not open their lips; at last the gate
opened once more, and Montparnasse appeared, breathless, and followed
by Gavroche.  The rain still rendered the street completely deserted.

Little Gavroche entered the enclosure and gazed at the forms of these
ruffians with a tranquil air.  The water was dripping from his hair.
Guelemer addressed him:--

"Are you a man, young 'un?"

Gavroche shrugged his shoulders, and replied:--

"A young 'un like me's a man, and men like you are babes."

"The brat's tongue's well hung!" exclaimed Babet.

"The Paris brat ain't made of straw," added Brujon.

"What do you want?" asked Gavroche.

Montparnasse answered:--

"Climb up that flue."

"With this rope," said Babet.

"And fasten it," continued Brujon.

"To the top of the wall," went on Babet.

"To the cross-bar of the window," added Brujon.

"And then?" said Gavroche.

"There!" said Guelemer.

The gamin examined the rope, the flue, the wall, the windows,
and made that indescribable and disdainful noise with his lips
which signifies:--

"Is that all!"

"There's a man up there whom you are to save," resumed Montparnasse.

"Will you?" began Brujon again.

"Greenhorn!" replied the lad, as though the question appeared
a most unprecedented one to him.

And he took off his shoes.

Guelemer seized Gavroche by one arm, set him on the roof of the shanty,
whose worm-eaten planks bent beneath the urchin's weight,
and handed him the rope which Brujon had knotted together during
Montparnasse's absence.  The gamin directed his steps towards
the flue, which it was easy to enter, thanks to a large crack
which touched the roof.  At the moment when he was on the point
of ascending, Thenardier, who saw life and safety approaching,
bent over the edge of the wall; the first light of dawn struck white
upon his brow dripping with sweat, upon his livid cheek-bones, his sharp
and savage nose, his bristling gray beard, and Gavroche recognized him.

"Hullo! it's my father!  Oh, that won't hinder."

And taking the rope in his teeth, he resolutely began the ascent.

He reached the summit of the hut, bestrode the old wall as though
it had been a horse.  and knotted the rope firmly to the upper
cross-bar of the window.

A moment later, Thenardier was in the street.

As soon as he touched the pavement, as soon as he found himself out
of danger, he was no longer either weary, or chilled or trembling;
the terrible things from which he had escaped vanished like smoke,
all that strange and ferocious mind awoke once more, and stood erect
and free, ready to march onward.

These were this man's first words:--

"Now, whom are we to eat?"

It is useless to explain the sense of this frightfully transparent remark,
which signifies both to kill, to assassinate, and to plunder.
To eat, true sense:  to devour.

"Let's get well into a corner," said Brujon.  "Let's settle it
in three words, and part at once.  There was an affair that promised
well in the Rue Plumet, a deserted street, an isolated house,
an old rotten gate on a garden, and lone women."

"Well! why not?" demanded Thenardier.

"Your girl, Eponine, went to see about the matter," replied Babet.

"And she brought a biscuit to Magnon," added Guelemer.  "Nothing to
be made there."

"The girl's no fool," said Thenardier.  "Still, it must be seen to."

"Yes, yes," said Brujon, "it must be looked up."

In the meanwhile, none of the men seemed to see Gavroche, who,
during this colloquy, had seated himself on one of the fence-posts;
he waited a few moments, thinking that perhaps his father would
turn towards him, then he put on his shoes again, and said:--

"Is that all?  You don't want any more, my men?  Now you're out
of your scrape.  I'm off.  I must go and get my brats out of bed."

And off he went.

The five men emerged, one after another, from the enclosure.

When Gavroche had disappeared at the corner of the Rue des Ballets,
Babet took Thenardier aside.

"Did you take a good look at that young 'un?" he asked.

"What young 'un?"

"The one who climbed the wall and carried you the rope."

"Not particularly."

"Well, I don't know, but it strikes me that it was your son."

"Bah!" said Thenardier, "do you think so?"