VIII. IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND A CHARMING PLEASANTRY OF THE LATE KING



IN summer, he transforms himself into a frog; and in the evening, at nightfall, opposite
the bridges of Austerlitz and Jena, from the coal rafts and washerwomen's boats, he plunges
head-foremost into the Seine, and into all sorts of infractions of the laws of modesty and
the police, However, the policemen are on the look-out, and there results from this cir-
cumstance a highly dramatic situation which, upon one occasion, gave rise to a fraternal
and memorable cry. This cry, which was quite famous about 1830, is a strategic signal
front gamin to gamin; it is scanned like averse of Homer. with a style of notation almost
as inexplicable as the Eleusinian melody of the Panathenaeans, scrolling once more the an-
cient "Evothe!" It is as follows: "Ohe! Titi, ohe! lookee yonder! they're comin' to ketch
ye! Grab yer clothes and cut through the drain!"

Sometimes this gnat--it is thus that he styles himself--can read; sometimes heron write;
he always knows how to scrawl. Ile gets by some unknown and mysterious mutual instruction,
talents which may be useful in public affairs; from 1813 to 1830, he imitated the call of
the turkey; from 1830 to 18.18. he scratched a pear on the walls. One satiates evening,
Louis Philippe retuning to the palace on foot, saw one of thent,a little fellow, so high,
sweating and stretching upon tiptoe, to make a charcoal sketch of a gigantic pear, on one
of the pillars of the Neu illv gateway;the king. with that good nature which he inherited
front Henry IV., helped the boy, completed the pear, and gave the youngster a gold Louis,
saying: "The pear's on that too!" The gamin loves uproar. Violence and noise please him.
He execrates "the" cures. One day, in the Rue de l'Universite. one of these young scamps
was making faces at the porte-cochere of No. 69. "Why are you doing that at this door?" asked
a passer-by. The boy rephed; " there's a cure there." It was, in fact, the residence of the
Papal Nuncio. Nevertheless, whatever may be the Voltairian tendencies of the gamin, should
an occasion present itself to become a choir-boy, he would, very likely, accept, and in
such case would serve the mass properly. There are two things of which he is the Tantalus,
which he ts always wishing for, but never attains--to overthrow the government. and to get
his trousers mended.

The gamin, in his perfect state, possesses all the policemen of Paris, and, always. upon
meeting one, can put a name to the countenance. He counts them off on his fingers. He
studies their ways, and has special notes of his own upon each one of them. He reads their
souls as an open book. He will tell you off-hand and without hesitating--Such a one is a
traitor; such a one is very cross; such a one is great, such a one is ridiculous; (all
these expressions, traitor, cross, great and ridiculous, have in his mouth a peculiar
signification)-- "That chap thinks the Pont Neuf belongs to him, and hinders people from
walking on the cornice outside of the parapets; that other one has a mania for pulling
persons' ears;" etc. etc.



IX. THE ANCIENT SOUL OF GAUL



THERE was something of this urchin in Poquelin, the son of the market-place; there was
something of him in Beaumarchais. The gamin style of life is a shade of the Gallic mind.
Mingled with good sense, it sometimes gives it additional strength, as alcohol does to
wine. Sometinws, it is a defect; Homer nods; one might say Voltaire plays gamin. Camille
Desmoulins was a suburban. Championnet, who brutalised miracles, was a child of the Paris
streets; he had when a little boy besprinkled the porticoes of St. Jean de Beauvais and
St. Etienne du Mont; he had chatted with the shrine of St. Genevieve enough to throw
into convulsions the sacred vial of St. Januanus.

The Paris gamin is respectful, ironical, and insolent. He has bad teeth, because be is
poorly fed, and his stomach suffers, and fine eyes because he has genius. In the very
presence of Jehovah, he would go hopping and Jumping up the steps of Paradise. He is very
good at boxing with both hands and feet. Every description of growth is possible to him.
He plays in the gutter and rises from it by revolt; his effrontery is not cured by grape;
he was a blackguard, lo! he is a hero! like the little Theban he shakes the lion's skin;
Barra the drummer was a Paris gamin; he shouts "Forward!" as the charger of Holy Writ
says "'Ha! ha!" and in a moment, he passes from the urchin to the giant.

This child of the gutter is, also, the child of the ideal. Measure this sweep of wing
which reaches from Moliere to Barra.

As sum total, and to embrace all in a world, the gamin is a being who amuses himself
because he is unfortunate.



X. ECCE PARIS, ECCE HOMO



To sum up all once more, the gamin of Paris of the present day. is as the graeulus of
Rome was in ancient times, the people as a child, with the wrinkles of the old world
on its brow.

The gamin is a beauty and, at the same time, a disease of the nation--a disease that
must be cured. How? By light.

Light makes whole.

Light enlightens.

All the generous irradiations of society spring from science, letters, the arts, and
instruction. Make men, make men. Give them light, that they may give you warmth.
Soon or late, the splendid question of universal instruction will take its position with
the irresistible authority of absolute truth; and then those who govern under the
superintendence of the French idea will have to make this choice: the children of
France or the gamins of Paris; flames in the light or will o' the wisps in the gloom.

The gamin is the expression of Paris, and Paris is the expression of the world.

For Paris is a sum total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. All this prodigious
city is an epitome of dead and living manners and customs. He who sees Paris, seems
to see all history through with sky and constellations in the intervals. Paris has a
Capitol, the Hotel de Ville; a Parthenon, Notre Dame; a Mount Aventine, the Faubourg
St; Antoine; an Asinarium, the Sorbonne: a Pantheon. the Pantheon; a Via Sacra, the
Boulevard des Italiens; a tower of the Winds; public opinion--and supplies the place
of the Gemoniae by ridicule. Its majo is the "faraud." its Trasteverino is the suburb-
an; its hammal is the strong man of the market-place; its lazzarone is the pegre; its
cockney is the gandin:. Alf that can be found anywhere can be found in Paris. The fish-
seaman of Dumarsais can hold her own with the herb-woman of Euripides. the discobolus
Vejanis lives again in Forioso the rope-dancer, Therapomimmus Miles might go arm
in arm with the grenadier Valdeboncoeur, Damasippus the curiosity broker would be
happy among the old curiosity shops, Vincennes would lay hold of Socrates just as the
whole Agora would clap Diderot into a strong box; Grimod de la Reyniere discovered
roast-beef cooked with its own fat as Curtillus had invented roast hedgehog; we see,
again. under the balloon of the are de l'Etoile the trapezium mentioned in Plautus; the
sword-eater of the Poecilium met with by Apuleius is the swallower of sabres on the
Pont-Neuf; the nephew of Raman and Curculion the parasite form a pair; Ergasilus
would get himself presented to Cambaceres by d'Aigrefeuille; the four dandies of Rome.
Alcesimarchus. Phoedromus. Diabolus, and Argyrippe may be seen going down in la Cor-
tille in the Labutat post-coach; Aulus Gellius did not stop longer in front of Congrio than
Charles Nodier before Punch and Judy; Marton is not a tigress, but Pardalisca was not
a dragon; Pantolabus the buffoon chaffs Nomentanus the fast-liver at the Cafe Anglais;
Hermogenus is a tenor in the Champs Elysees, and around him, Thrasius the beggar
in the costume of Bobeche plies his trade; the bore who buttonholes you in the Tui-
leries makes you repeat, after the lapse of two thousand years, the apostrophe of Thes-
prion: quis properantem me prehendit palliao? The wine of Surene parodies the wine of
Alba; the red rim of Desaugiers balances the huge goblet of Balatron, Pere Lachaise
exhales, under the nocturnal rains, the same lurid emanations that were seen in the
Esquilies, and the grave of the poor purchased for five years, is about the equivalent
of the hired coffin of the slave.

Ransack your memory for something which Paris has not. The vat of Trophonius contains
nothing that is not in the washtub of Mesmer; Ergaphilas is resuscitated in Cagliostro;
the Brahmin Vasapbantit is in the flesh again in the Count Saint Germain; the cemetery
of St. Medard turns out quite as good miracles as the Oumoumie mosque at Damascus.

Paris has an Aesop in Mayeux, and a Canidia in Mademoiselle Lenormand. It stands
aghast like Delphos at the blinding realities of visions; it tips tables as I Fodona did
tripods, It enthrones the grisette as Rome did the courtesan; and, in fine, if Louis XV.
is worse than Claudius. Madame Duliarry is better than Metscilina. Paris combines in
one wonderful type which has had real existence, and actually elbowed us, the Greek
nudity, the Hebrew ulcer, the Gascon jest. It mingles Diogenes, Job, and Paillasse,
dresses up a ghost in old numbers of the Constitutionnel, and produces Shadrac Duclos.

Although Plutarch may say: the tyrant never grows old, Rome, tinder Sylla as well as
under Domitian. resigned herself and of her own accord put water in her wine. The Tiber
was a Lethe, if we may believe the somewhat doctrinal eulogy pronounced upon it by
Varus Vibiscus: Contra Gracchos Tiberim habemus. Bibere Tiberim, id est seditionem
oblivisci. Paris drinks a quarter of a million of gallons of water per day, but that
does not prevent it upon occasion from beating the alarm and sounding the tocsin.

With all that, Paris is a good soul. It accepts everything right royally; it is not
difficult in the realms of Venus; its Callipyge is of the Hottentot stamp: if it but
laughs, it pardons, ugliness makes it merry; deformity puts it in a good humour, vice di-
verts its attention; be droll and you may venture to be a scamp; even hypocrisy. that
sublimity of cynicism, it doees not revolt at; it is so literary that it does not hold its
nose over Basilius, and is no more shocked at the prayer of Tartuffe than Horace
was at the hiccough of Priapus. No feature of the universal countenance is wanting
in the profile of Paris. The Mabile dancing garden is not the polyhymnian dance of
the Janiculum, but the costume-hirer devours the lorette there with her eyes exactly
as the procures Staphyla watched the virgin Planesium. The Barriere du Combat is not
a Coliseum, but there as much ferocity exhibited as though Cesar were a spectator. The
Syrian hostess has more grace than Mother Sagud, but, if Virgil haunted the Roman wine-
shop, David d'Angers, Balzac, and Charlet have sat down in the drinking-places of Paris.
Paris is regnant. Geniuses blaze on all sides, and red perukes flourish. Adonis passes
by in his twelve-wheeled car of thunder and lightning; Silenus makes his entry upon his
tun. For Silenus read Ramponnmu.

Paris is a synonym of Cosmos. Paris is Athens, Rome, Sybaris, Jerusalem, Pantin. All
the eras of civilisation are there in abridged edition, all the epochs of barbarism
also. Paris would be greatly vexed, had she no guillotine.

A small admixture of the Place de Grave is good. What would all this continual merry-
making be without that seasoning? Our laws have wisely provided for this, and, thanks
to them, this relish turns its edge upon the general carnival.



XI. RIDICULE AND REIGN



OF bounds and limits, Paris has none. No other city ever enjoyed that supreme control
which sometimes derides those whom it reduces to submission. To please you, O Athen-
ians! exclaimed Alexander. Paris does more than lay down the law it lays down the
fashion; Paris does more than lay down the fashion; it lays down the routine. Paris
may be stupid if it please; sometimes it allows itself this luxury; then, the whole u-
niverse is stupid with it. Upon this, Paris awakes, rubs its eyes, and says: "Am I stu-
pid!" and bursts out laughing in the face of mankind. What a marvel is such a city!
how strange a thing that all this mass of what is grand and what is ludicrous should be
so harmonious, that all this majesty is not disturbed by all this parody, and that the
same mouth can today blow the trump of the last judgment and tomorrow a penny-
whistle; Paris possesses an all-commanding joviality. Its gaiety is of the thunderbolt,
and its frolicking holds a sceptre. Its hurricanes spring sometimes from a wry face. Its
outbursts, its great days, its masterpieces, its prodigies, its epics fly to the ends
of the universe, and so do its cock and bull stories also. Its laughter is the mouth of
a volcano that bespatters the whole earth. Its jokes are sparks that kindle. It forces
upon the nations its caricatures as well as its ideal; the loftiest monuments of human
civilisation accept its sarcasms and lend their eternity to its waggeries. It is superb;
it has a marvellous Fourteenth of July that delivers the globe; it makes all the nations
take the oath of the tennis-court; its night of the Fourth of August disperses in three
hours a thousand years of feudalism; it makes of its logic the muscle of the unanimous
will; it multiplies itself under all the forms of the sublime; it fills with its radiance
Washington, Kosciusko, Bolivar, Botzaris, Riego, Bem, Manin, Lopez, John Brown, Gari-
baldi; it is everywhere, where the future is being enkindled, at Boston in 1779 at the
Isle de St. Leon in 1820, at Pesth in 1848, at Palermo in 1860; it whispers the mighty
watchword Liberty in the ears of the American Abolitionists grouped together in the boat
at Harper's Ferry, and also in the ears of the patriots of Ancona assembled in the gloom
at the Arai, in front of the Gleam tavern, on the seaside; it creates Canaris; it creates
Quiroga; it creates Pise cane; it radiates greatness over the earth; it is in going whi-
ther its broth impels, that Byron dies at Missolonghi, and Mazet at Barcelona; it is a
rostrum beneath the feet of hbrabeau, and a crater beneath the feet of Robespierre; its
books, its stage, its art, its science, its literature, its philosophy are the manuals
of the human race; to it belong Pascal, Regnier, Corneille, Descartes, Jean Jacques; Vol-
taire for every moment, Moliere for every century; it makes the universal mouth speak
its language, and that language becomes the Word; it builds up in every mind the idea of
progress; the liberating dogmas which it forges are swords by the pillows of the generations,
and with the soul of its thinkers and poets have all the heroes of all nations since 1789
been made; but that does not prevent it from playing the gamin; and this enormous genius
called Paris, even while transfiguring the world with its radiance, draws the nose of Bou-
ginier in charcoal on the wall of the Temple of Theseus, and writes Credeville the robber
on the Pyramids.

Paris is always showing its teeth; when it is not scolding, it is laughing.

Such is Paris. The smoke of its roofs is the ideas of the universe. A heap of mud and
stone, if you will, but above all, a moral being. It is more than great, it is immense. Why?
Because it dares.

To dare; progress is at this price.

All sublime conquests are, more or less, the rewards of daring. That the revolution should
come, it was not enough that Montesquieu should foresee it, that Diderot should preach it,
that Beaumarchais should announce it, that Condorcet should calculate it, that Arouet
should prepare it, that Rousseau should premeditate it; Danton must dare it.

That cry, "Audace," is a Fiat Lux! The onward march of the human race requires that the
heights around it should be ablaze with noble and enduring lessons of courage. Deeds of
daring dazzle history, and form one of the guiding lights of man. The dawn dares when
it rises. To strive, to brave all risks, to persist, to persevere, to be faithful to yourself,
to grapple hand to hand with destiny, to surprise defeat by the little terror it inspires,
at one time to confront unrighteous power, at another to defy intoxicated triumph, to
hold fast, to hold hard--such is the example which the nations need. and the light that
electrifies them. The same puissant lightning darts front the torch of Prometheus and
the clay-pipe of Cambronne.



XII. THE FUTURE LATENT IN THE PEOPLE



As to the people of Paris, even when grown to manhood, it is, always. the gamin; to depict
the child is to depict the city, and therefore it is that we have studied this eagle in
this open-hearted sparrow.

It is in the suburbs especially, we insist, that the Parisian race is found; there is the
pure blood; there is the true physiognomy; there this people works and suffers, and suf-
fering and toil are the two forms of men. There are vast numbers of unknown beings teeming
with the strangest types of humanity, from the stevedore of the Rapee to the horsekiller
of Montfaucon. Fex Urbis exclaims Cicero; mob, adds the indignant Burke; the herd, the multi-
tude, the populace. Those words are quickly said. But if it be so, what matters it? What
is it to me that they go barefoot? They cannot read. So much the worse. Will you abandon
them for that? Would you make their misfortune their curse? Cannot the light penetrate
these masses? Let us return to that cry: Light! and let us persist in it! Light! light!
Who knows but that these opacities will become transparent? are not revolutions trans-
figurations? Proceed, philosophers, teach, enlighten, enkindle, think aloud, speak aloud,
run joyously towards the broad daylight, fraternise in the public squares, announce the
glad tidings, scatter plenteously your alphabets, proclaim human rights, sing your Marsei-
llaises, sow enthusiasms broadcast, tear off green branches from the oak-trees. Make
thought a whirlwind. This multitude can be sublimated. Let us learn to avail ourselves
of this vast combustion of principles and virtues, which sparkles, crackles, and thrills
at certain periods. These bare feet, these naked arms, these rags, these shades of igno-
rance, these depths of abjectness, these abysses of gloom may be employed in the con-
quest of the ideal. Look through the medium of the people, and you shall discern the truth.
This lowly sand which you trample beneath your feet, if you cast it into the furnace,
and let it melt and seethe, shall become resplendent crystal, and by means of such as
it a Galileo and a Newton shall discover stars.



XIII. LITTLE GAVROCHE



ABOUT eight or nine years after the events narrated in the second part of this story,
there was seen, on the Boulevard du Temple, and in the neighbourhood of the Chateau
d'Eau, a little boy of eleven or twelve years of age, who would have realised with consid-
erable accuracy the ideal of the gamin previously sketched, if, with the laughter of his
youth upon his lips, his heart had not been absolutely dark and empty. This child was well
muffled up in a man's pair of pantaloons, but he had not got them from his father, and
in a woman's chemise, which was not an inheritance from his mother. Strangers had clothed
him in these rags out of charity. Still, he had a father and a mother. But his father nev-
er thought of him, and his mother did not love him. He was one of those children so deser-
ving of pity from all, who have fathers and mothers, and yet are orphans.

This little boy never felt so happy as when in the street. The pavement was not so hard
to him as the heart of his mother.

His parents had thrown him out into life with a kick.

He had quite ingenuously spread his wings, and taken flight.

He was a boisterous, pallid, nimble, wide-awake, roguish urchin, with an air at once viva-
cious and sickly. He went, came, sang, played pitch and toss, scraped the gutters, stole
a little, but he did it gaily, like the cats and the sparrows, laughed when people called him
an errand-boy, and got angry when they called him a ragamuffin. He had no shelter, no
food, no fire, no love, but he was light-hearted because he was free.

When these poor creatures are men, the millstone of our social system almost always comes
in contact with them, and grinds them, but while they are children they escape because they
are little. The smallest hole saves them.

However, deserted as this lad was, it happened sometimes, every two or three months that he
would say to himself: "Come, I'll go and see my mother!" Then he would leave the Boulevard,
the Cirque, the Porte Saint Martin, go down along the quays, cross the bridges, reach the
suburbs, walk as far as the Salpetriere, and arrive--where? Precisely at that double number,
50-52, which is known to the reader, the Gorbeau building.

At the period referred to. the tenement No. 50.52, usually empty. and permanently decorated
with the placard "Rooms to let," was, for a wonder, tenanted by several persons who, in all
other respects, as is always the ease at Paris. had no relation to or connection with each
other. They all belonged to that indigent class which begins with the small bourgeois in em-
barrassed circumstances, and descends. from grade to grade of wretchedness, through the
lower strata of society, until it reaches those two beings in whom all the material things
of civilisation termitutte, the scavenger and the ragpicker.

The "landlady" of the time of Jean Valjean was dead, and had been replaced by another exact-
ly like her. I do not remember what philosopher it was who said: "There is never any lack
of old women."

The new old woman was called Madame Burgon, and her life had been remarkable for nothing
except a dynasty of three paroquets, which had in succession wielded the sceptre of her af-
fections.

Among those who lived in the building, the wretcbedest of all were a family of four persons,
father, mother, and two daughters nearly grown, all four lodging in the same garret room,
one of those cells of which we have already spoken.

This family at first sight presented nothing very peculiar but its extreme destitution; the
father, in renting the room, had given his name as Jondrette. Some time after his moving in,
which had singularly resembled, to borrow the memorable expression of the landlady, the en-
trance of nothing at all, this Jondrette said to the old woman, who, like her predecessor,
was, at the same time, portress and swept the stairs: "Mother So-and-So, if anybody should
come and ask for a Pole or an Italian or, perhaps, a Spaniard, that is for me."

Now, this family was the family of our sprightly little bare-footed urchin. When he came there,
he found distress and, what is sadder still, no smile; a cold hearthstone and cold hearts. When
he came in, they would ask: "Where have you come from?" He would answer: "From the street."
When he was going away they would ask him: "Where are you going to?" He would answer: "Into
the street." His mother would say to him: "What have you come here for?"

The child lived, in this absence of affection, like those pale plants that spring up in cel-
lars. He felt no suffering from this mode of existence, and bore no ill-will to anybody. He
did not know how a father and mother ought to be.

But yet his mother loved his sisters.

We had forgotten to sae that on the Boulevard du Temple this boy went by the name of little
Gavrothe. Why was his name Gavroche? Probably because his father's name was Jondrette.

To break all links seems to he the instinct of some wretched families.

The room occupied by the Jondrettes in the Gorbeau tenement was the last at the end of the
hall. The adjoining cell was tenanted by a very poor young man who was called Monsieur Marius.

Let us see who and what Monsieur Marius was.




　　　　　　　　BOOK SECOND
　　　THE GRAND BOURGEOIS




I. NINETY YEARS OLD AND THIRTY-TWO TEETH



IN the Rue Boucherat. Rue de Normandie, and Rue de Saintongc, there still remain a few old
inhabitants who preserve a memory of a line old man named M. Gilknormand, and who like to talk
about him. This man was old when they were young. This figure, to those who look sadly upon
that vague swarm of shadows which they call the past, has not yet entirely disappeared from
the labyrinth of streets in the neighbourhood of the Temple, to which, under Louis XIV., were
given the names of all the provinces of France, precisely as in our days the names of all the
capitals of Europe have been given to the streets in the new Quarter Tivoli; an advance, be
it said by the way, in which progress is visible.

M. Gillenormand, who was as much alive as any man can be, in 1831, was one of those men who
have become curiosities, simply bemuse they have lived a long time; and who are strange, be-
cause for merly they were like everybody else, and now they are no longer like anybody else.
He was a peculiar old man, and very truly a man of another age--theg 'atebourgeoisof the eigh-
teenth century, a really perfect specimen, a little haughty, wearing his good old bourgeoisie
as marquises wen their marquisates. He had passed his ninetieth year, walked erect, spoke in
a loud yoke, saw clearly, drank hard, ate, slept. and snored. He had every one of his thirty-
two teeth. He were glasses only when reading. He was of an amorous humour, but said that for
ten years past he had decidedly and entirely renounced women. He was no longer pleasing, he
said; he did not add: "I am too old." but "I am too poor" He would say: "If I were not ruined,
he! he!" His remaining income in fact was only about fifteen thousand livres. His dream was
of receiving a windfall. and having an income of a hundred thousand francs, in order to keen
mistresses. He did not belong, as we see, to that sickly variety of octogenarians who, like
M. de Voltaire, are dying all their life: it was not a milk and water longevity; this jovial
old man was always in good health. He was superficial, hasty, easily angered. He got in a
rage on all occasions, most frequently when most unseasonable. When anybody contradicted him
he raised his cane; he beat his servants as in the time of Louis XIV. He had an unmarried
daughter over fifty years old, whom he belaboured severely when he was angry, and whom he
would gladly have horsewhipped. She seemed to him about eight years old. He cuffed his dom-
estics vigorously and would say: Ah! slut! One of his oaths was: By the big slippers of
big slipperdom! In some respects he was of a singular tranquillity: he was shaved every day
by a barber who had been crazy and who hated him, being jealous of M. Gillenormand on account
of his wife, a pretty coquettish woman. M. Gillenormand admired his own discernment in ever-
ything, and pronounced himself very sagacious; this is one of his sayings: "I have indeed
some penetration; I can tell when a flea bites me, from what woman it comes." The terms
which he oftenest used were: sensible men, and nature. He did not give to this last word
the braid acceptation which our epoch has assigned to it. But he twisted it into has own
use in his little chimney-corner satires: "Nature," he would say, "in order that civilisa-
tion may have a little of everything, gives it even some specimens of amusing barbarism.
Europe has samples of Asia and Africa, in miniature. The cat is a drawing-room tiger, the
lizard is a pocket crocodile. The danseuses of the opera are rosy savagesses. They do not
eat men, they feed upon them. Or rather, the little magicians change them into oysters, and
swallow them. The Caribs leave nothing but the bones, they leave nothing but the shells. Such
are our customs. We do not devour, we gnaw; we do not exterminate, we clutch."



II. LIKE MASTER, LIKE DWELLING



HE lived in the Marais, Rue des miles de Calvaire, No.6. The house was his own. This house
has been torn down, and rebuilt since, and its number has probably been changed in the revolu-
tions of numbering to which the streets of Paris are subject. He occupied an ancient and ample
apartment on the first story, between the street and the gardens, covered to the ceiling with
fine Gobelin and Beauvais tapestry representing pastoral scenes; the subjects of the ceiling
and the panels were repeated in miniature upon the arm-chain. He surrounded his bed with a
large screen with nine leaves varnished with Coromandel lac. Long, full curtains hung at the win-
dows, and made great, magnificent broken folds. The garden, which was immediately beneath his
windows, was connected with the angle between them by means of a staircase of twelve or fif-
teen steps. which the old man ascended and descended very blithely. In addition tp a library
adjoining his room, he had a boudoir which he thought very much of, a gay retreat, hung with
magnificent straw-colour tapestry, covered and ordered by M. de Vivonne from his convicts for
his mistress. M. Gillenormand had inherited this from a severe maternal grad-aunt, who died at
the age of a hundred. He had had two wives. His manners held a medium between the courtier
which he had never been, and the counsellor which he might have been. He was gay, and kind
when he wished to be. In his youth, he had been one of those men who are always deceived by
their wives and never by their mistresses, because they are at the same time the most disa-
greeable husbands and the most charming lovers in the world. He was a connoisseur in painting.
He had in his room a wonderful portrait of nobody knows who, painted by Jordaens, done in
great dabs with the brush, with millions of details, in a confused manner and as if by chance.
M. Gillenormand's dress was not in the fashion of Louis XV.. nor even in the fashion of Louis
XVI.: he wore the costume of the incroyables of the Directory. He had thought himself quite young
until then, and had kept up with the fashions. His coat was of light cloth, with broad facings,
a long swallow tail, and large steel buttons. Add to this short breeches and shoe buckles. He
always carried his bands in his pockets. He said authoritatively: The French Revolution is is
mess of scamps.



IlI. LUKE ESPRIT



WHEN sixteen years old, one evening, at the opera, he had had the honour of being stared at,
at the same time, by two beauties then ma-ture and celebrated and besting by Voltaire. La Cam-
argo and La Sae. Caught between two fires, he bad made a heroic retreat towards a little thms-
euse, a girl named Nahenrv, who was sixteen years old. like him obscure as a cat, and with
whom he fell in love. He was full of reminiscences. He would exclaim: "How pretty she was,
that Guimard Guimardin Guimardinette, the last time I saw her at Longchamps, frizzled
in lofty sentiments, with her curious trinkets in turquoise, her dress the colour of a new-
born child, and her muff in agitation!" He had worn in his youth a vest of London short, of
which he talked f requemly and fluently. "I was dressed like a Turk of the Levantine Levant,"
said he. Madame de Boufflers, having accidentally seen him when he was twenty yaws old, des-
cribed Juntas . a "charming fool." He ridiculed all the names which he saw in politics or
in power, finding them low and vulgar. He read the journals, the newspapers, the gazettes as
he said stifling with bursts of laughter. "Oh!" said he, "what are these peopbe! Corlare
Hunizna Casimir Nam! those are ministers for you. I imagine I see this in a journal: M.
Gillenormand, Minister: that would he a joke. Well. they are so stupid that it would go!"
He called everything freely by its name, proper or improper, and was never restrained by the
presence of women. He would say coarse, obscene, and indecent things with an inexpressible
tranquillity and coolness which was elegant. It was the off-hand way of his time. It is wor-
thy of remark, that the age of periphrases in verse was the age of crudities in prose. His
godfather had predicted that he would be a man of genius, and gave him these two significant
names: Luke Esprit.



IV. AN INSPIRING CENTENARIAN



HE had taken several prizes in his youth at the college at Moulins, where he was born, and
had been crowned by the hands of the Duke de Nivernais, whom he called the Duke de Nevers.
Neither the Convention, nor the death of Louis XVI., nor Napoleon, nor the return of the Bou-
rbons, had been able to efface the memory of this coronation. The Duke de Nevem was to him the
great figure of the century. "What a noble, great lord," said he. "and what a fine air he had
with his blue ribbon!" In Monsieur Gillenormand's eyes, Catharine II. had atoned for the
crime of the partition of Poland by buying the secret of the elixir of gold from Bestuchef,
for three thousand roubles. Over this he grew animated. "The elixir of gold," exclaimed he,
"Bestuchef's yellow dye, General Lamotte's drops, these were in the eighteenth century, at a
louis for a half ounce flask, the great remedy for the catastrophes of love, the panacea a-
gainst Venus. Louis XV. sent two hundred flasks to the Pope." He would have been greatly ex-
asperated and thrown off his balance if anybody had told him that the elixir of gold was
nothing but the perchloride of iron. Monsieur Gillenormand worshipped the Bourbons and held
1789 in honor; he was constantly relating how he saved himself during the Reign of Terror,
and how, if he had not had a good deal of gaiety and a good deal of wit, his head would have
been cut off. If any young man ventured to eulogise the republic in his presence, he turned
black in the fate, and was angry enough to faint. Sometimes he would allude to his ninety
years of age, and say, I really hope that I shall not see ninety-three twice. At other times
he intimated to his people that he intended to live a hundred years.



V. BASQUE AND NICOLETTE



He had his theories. Here is one of them: "When a man passionately loves women, and has
a wife of his own for whom he cares but little, ugly, cross, legitimate, fond of asserting her
rights, roosting on the code and jealous on occasion, he has but one way to get out of it
and keep the peace, that is to let his wife have the purse-strings. This abdication makes
him free. The wife keeps herself busy then, devotes herself to handling specie, verdigrises
her fingers, takes charge of the breeding of the tenants, the bringing up of the farmers,
convokes lawyers, presides over notaries, harangues justices, visits pettifoggers, follows
up lawsuits, writes out leases, dictates contracts, feels herself sovereign, sells, buys,
regulates, promises and compromises, binds and cancels, cedes, concedes, and retrocedes,
arranges, deranges, economises, wastes; she does foolish things, a magisterial and personal
pleasure, and this consoles her. While her husband disdains her, she has the satisfaction
of ruining her husband!" This theory, Monsieur Gillenormand had applied to himself, and it
had become his history. His wife, the second one, had administered his fortune in such wise
that there remained to Monsieur Gillenonnand, when one fine day he found himself a widower,
just enough to obtain, by turning almost everything into an annuity, an income of fifteen
thousand francs, three-quarters of which would expire with himself. He had no hesitation,
little troubled with the care of leaving an inheritance. Moreover, he had seen that patri-
monies met with adventures, and, for example, became national property; he had been present
at the avatars of the consolidated thirds, and he had little faith in the ledger. "Rue Quin-
campoix for all that" said he. His house in Rue des Pities du Calvaire, we have said, be-
longed to him. He had two domestics, "a male and a female." When a domestic entered his
service, Monsieur Gillenormand rebaptised him. He gave to the men the name of their pro-
vince: Nimon, Comtois, Ponevin, Picard. His last valet was a big, pursy. wheezy man of fifty-
five, incapable of running twenty steps, but as he was born at Bayonne, Monsieur Gillenomrind
called him Basque. As for female servants, they were all called Nicolette in his home (even
Magnon, who will reappear as we proceed). One day a proud cook, with a blue sash, of the
lofty race of porters, presented herself. "How much do you want a month?" asked Monsieur
Gillenormand. "Thirty francs." "What is your name?' Olympie." You shall have fifty francs,
and your name shall be Nicolette."



VI. IN WHICH WE SEE LA MAGNON AND HER TWO LITTLE ONES



AT M. Gillenormand's grief was translated into anger; he was furious at being in despair.
He had every prejudice, and took every licence. One of the things of which he made up his
external relief and his internal satisfaction was, we have just indicated, that he was still
a youthful gallant, and that he passed for such energetically. He called this having "royal
renown." His royal renown sometimes attracted singular presents. One day there was brought
to his house in a basket, something like an oyster basket, a big boy, new-born, crying like
the deuce, and duly wrapped in swaddling clothes, which a servant girl turned away six
months before attributed to him. Monsieur Gillenormand was at that time fully eighty-four
years old. Indignation and clamour on the part of the bystanders. And who did this bold wench
think would believe this? What effrontery! What an abominable calumny! Monsieur Gillenormand,
however, manifested no anger. He looked upon the bundle with the amiable smile of a man
who is flattered by a calumny, and said aside: "Well, what? what is it? what is the matter
there? what have we here? you are in a pretty state of amazement, and indeed seem like
any ignorant people. The Duke d'Angouleme, natural son of his majesty Charles IX., married
at eighty-five a little hussy of fifteen; Monsieur Virginal, Marquis d'Alhuye, brother of Car-
dinal de Sourdis, Archbishop of Bordeaux, at eighty-three, had, by a chambermaid of the wife
of President Jacquin, a son, a true love son, who was a Knight of Malta, and knighted Coun-
cillor of State; one of the great men of this century, Abbe Tabarand, was the son of a man
eighty-seven years old. These things are anything but uncommon. And then the Bible! Upon that,
I declare that this little gentleman is not mine. But take care of him. It is not his fault."
This process was too easy. The creature, she whose name was Magnon, made him a second pre-
sent the year after. It was a boy again. This time Monsieur Gillenormand capitulated. He
sent the two brats back to the mother, engaging to pay eighty francs a month for their sup-
port, upon condition that the said mother should not begin again. He added, "I wish the
mother to treat them well. I will come to see them from time to time." Which he did. He had
had a brother, a priest, who had been for thirty-three years rector of the Academy of Poiti-
ers, and who died at seventy-nine. "I lost him young," said he. This brother, of whom hardly
a memory is left, was a quiet miser, who, being a priest, felt obliged to give alms to the
poor whom he met, but never gave them anything more than coppers or worn-out sous, finding
thus the means of going to Hell by the road to Paradise. As to Monsieur Gillenormand, the
elder, he made no trade of alms-giving, but gave willingly and nobly. He was benevolent,
abrupt, charitable, and had he been rich, his inclination would have been to be magnificent
He wished that all that concerned him should be done in a large way, even rascalities. One
day, having been swindled in an inheritance by a business man, in a gross and palpable man-
ner, he uttered this solemn exclamation: "Fie! this is not decent! I am really ashamed of
these petty cheats. Everything is degenerate in this century, even the rascals. 'Sdeath! this
is not the way to rob a man like me. I am robbed as if in a wood, but meanly robbed. Silvae
sint consul dignae!" He had had, we have said, two wives; by the first a daughter, who had
remained unmarried, and by the second another daughter, who died when about thirty years old,
and who had married for love, or luck, or otherwise, a soldier of fortune, who had served in
the armies of the republic and the empire, had won the cross at Austerlitz, and been made
colonel at Waterloo. "This is the disgrace of my family," said the old bourgeois. He took a
great deal of snuff, and had a peculiar skill in ruffling his lace frill with the back of his
hand. He had very little belief in God.



VII. RULE:--NEVER RECEIVE ANYBODY EXCEPT IN THE EVENING



SUCH WAS M. Luke Esprit Gillenormand, who had not lost his hair, which was rather grey than
white, and always combed in dog's-ears. To sum up, and with all this, a venerable man.

He was of the eighteenth century, frivolous and great.

In 1814, and in the early years of the Restoration, Monsieur Gillenormand, who was still
young--he was only seventy-four--had lived in the Faubourg Saint Germain, Rue Servandoni,
near Saint Sulpice. He had retired to the Marais only upon retiring from society, after his
eighty years were fully accomplished.

And in retiring from society, he had walled himself up in his habits; the principal one, in
which he was invariable, was to keep his door absolutely closed by day, and never to receive
anybody whatever, on any business whatever, except in the evening. He dined at five o'clock,
then his door was open. This was the custom of his century, and he would not swerve from it.
"The day is vulgar," said he, "and only deserves closed shutters. People who are anybody
light up their wit when the zenith lights up its stars." And he barricaded himself against
everybody, were it even the king. The old elegance of his time.



VIII. TWO DO NOT MAKE A PAIR



AS TO the two daughters of Monsieur Gillenormand, we have just spoken of them. They were born
ten years apart. In their youth they resembled each other very little; and in character as well
as in countenance, were as far from being sisters as possible. The younger was a cheerful soul,
attracted towards everything that is bright, busy with flowers, poetry, and music, carried away
into the glories of space, enthusiastic, ethereal, affianced from childhood in the ideal to a dim
heroic figure. The elder had also her chimera; in the azure depth she saw a contractor, some
good, coarse commissary, very rich, a husband splendidly stupid, a million-made man, or even a
prefect; receptions at the prefecture, an usher of the ante-chamber, with the chain on his neck,
official balls, harangues at the mayor's, to be "Madame la prefete," this whirled in her imagination.
The two sisters wandered thus, each in her own fancy, when they were young girls. Both had wings,
one like an angel, the other like a goose.

No ambition is fully realised, here below at least. No paradise be-comes terrestrial at the period in
which we live. The younger had married the man of her dreams, but she was dead. The cider was not mar-
ried.

At the moment she makes her entry into the story which we are relating, she was an old piece of virtue,
an incombustible prude, one of the sharpest noses and one of the most obtuse minds which could be dis-
covered. A characteristic incident. Outside of the immediate family nobody had ever known her first
name. She was called Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder.

In cant, Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder could have given odds to an English miss, She was immod-
estly modest. She had one frightful reminiscence in her life: one day a man had seen her garter.

Age had only increased this pitiless modesty. Her dress front was never thick enough, and never
rose high enough. She multiplied hooks and pins where nobody thought of looking. The peculiarity of
prudery is to multiply sentinels, in proportion as the fortress is less threatened.

However, explain who can these ancient mysteries of innocence, she allowed herself to be kissed with-
out displeasure. by an officer of lancers who was her grand-nephew and whose name was Theodule.

Spite of this favoured lancer, the tit le Prude, under which we have classed her, fitted her absolut-
ely. Mademoiselle Gillenormand was a kind of twilight soul. Prudery is half a virtue and half a vice.

To prudery she added bigotry, a suitable lining. She was of the fraternity of the Virgin, wore a
white veil on certain feast-days, muttered special prayers, revered "the holy Wood," venerated "the
sacred heart," remained for hours in contemplation before an old-fashioned Jesuit altar in a chapel
closed to the vulgar faithful, and let her soul fly away among the little marble clouds and along
the grand rays of gilded wood.

She had a chapel friend, an old maid like herself, called Mademoiselle Vaubois, who was perfectly
stupid, and in comparison with whom Mademoiselle Gillenormand had the happiness of being an eagle.
Beyond her Agnus Deis and her Ave Marias, Mademoiselle Vaubois had no light except upon the differ-
ent modes of making sweetmeats. Mademoiselle Vaubois, perfect in her kind, was the ermine of stu-
pidity without a single stain of intelligence.

We must say that in growing old, Mademoiselle Gillenormand had rather gained than lost. This is
the case with passive natures. She had never been peevish, which is a relative goodness; and then,
years wear off angles, and the softening of time had come upon her. She was sad with an obscure sad-
ness of which she had not the secret herself. There was in her whole person the stupor of a life
ended but never commenced.

She kept her father's house. Monsieur Gillenormand had his daughter with him as we have seen Mon-
seigneur Bienvenu have his sister with him. These households of an old man and an old maid are not
rare, and always have the touching aspect of twin feeblenesses leaning upon each other.

There was besides in the house, between this old maid and this old man, a child, a little boy, always
trembling and mute before M. Gillenormand. M. Gillenormand never spoke to this child but with stern
voice, and sometimes with uplifted cane: "Here! Monsieur--rascal, black-guard, come here! Answer
me, rogue! Let me see you, scape-grace!" etc. etc. He idolised him.

It was his grandson. We shall see this child again.




　　　　　　　　BOOK THIRD
THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON



I. AN OLD MAN


WHEN M. Gillenormand lived in the Rue Servandoni, he frequented several very fine and very noble salons.
Although a bourgeoise, Gillenormand was welome. As he was twice witty, first with his own wit, then with
the wit which was attributed to him, he was even sought after and lionised. He went nowhere save on con-
dition of ruling there. There are men who at any price desire influence and to attract the attention of
others; where they cannot be oracles, they make themselves laughing-stocks. Monsieur Gillenormand was
not of this nature; his dominance in the royal salons which he frequented cost him none of his self-respect.
He was an oracle everywhere. It was his fortune to have as an antagonist, Monsieur de Bonald, and even
Monsieur Bengty-Puy-Valle.

About 1817. he always spent two afternoons a week at a house in his neighbourhood, in the Rue Ferou,
that of the Baroness of T--, a worthy and venerable lady, whose husband bad been, under Louis XVI.,
French Ambassador at Berlin. The Baron of T., who, during his life, had devoted himself passionately
to ecstasies and magnetic visions, died in the emigration, ruined, leaving no fortune but ten manu-
script volumes bound in red morocco, with gilt edges, of very curious memoirs upon Mesmer and his
trough. Madame de T. had not published the memoirs from motives of dignity, and supported herself on a
small income, which had survived the flood nobody knows how. Madame de T. lived far from the court--a
very mixed society, said she.--in a noble, proud, and poor isolation. A few friends gathered about her
widow's hearth twice a week, and this constituted a pure royalist salon. They took tea, and uttered, as
the wind set towards elegy or dithyrambic, groans or cries of horror over the century, over the charter,
over the Buonapartists, over the prostitution of the blue ribbon to bourgeois, over the Jacobinism of
Louis XVIII.; and they amused themselves in whispers with hopes which rested upon Monsieur, since
Charles X.

They hailed the vulgar songs in which Napoleon was called Nicolas with transports of joy. Duchesses,
the most delicate and the most charming women in the world, went into ecstasies over couplets like this
addressed "to the federals:"

Renforcex dans vos culottes
Le bout dicheme qui vous pent.
Onion n' dis pas qu' Its patriotes
Out;whore Direapeau bland

They amused themselves with puns which they thought terrible, with innocent plays upon words which they
supposed to be veno-mous, with quatrains and even distiches; thus upon the Dessolles ministry, a moderate
cabinet of which MM. Deceits and Deserre were members:

Pour raffemtir letronc &rant& star sa base,
II taut changer de sot, et de serge et de ease.

Or sometimes they drew up the list of the Chamber of Peers, "Chamber abominably jacobin," and in this
list they arranged the names, so as to make, for example, phrases like this: Damas. Sabran. Gouvion Saint
Cyr. All this gaily.

In this little world they parodied the revolution. They had some inclinations or other which sharpened
the same anger in the inverse sense. They sang their little faire:

Ah! ea ira! ea Ira! ea int!
its buonapartist' a Is lanteme!

Songs are like the guillotine; they cut indifferently, today this bead, to-morrow that. It is only a
variation.

In the Fualdes affair, which belongs to this time, 18I6, they took sides with Bastide and Jausion, because
Fualdes was a "Buonapartist." They called the liberals, the brothers and friends; this was the highest
degree of insult.

Like certain menageries, the Baroness de T--'s salon had two lions. One was M. Gillenormand, the other
was Count de Lamothe Valois, of whom it was whispered, with a sort of consideration: "Do you know, He
is the Lamothe of the necklace affair:'" Partisans have such singular amnesties as these.

We will add also: "Among the bourgeois, positions of honour are lowered by too easy. intercourse; you
must take care whom you receive; just as there is a loss of caloric in the neighbourhood of those who are
cold, there is a diminution of consideration in the approach of people who are despised. The old highest
society held itself above this law as it did above all others, Marigny, La Pompadour's brother. is a
visitor of the Prince de Soubise. Although? no, because. fhb Harry, godfather of La Vatthernier, is
very welcome at the: Marshal de Richelieu's. This society is Olympus. Mercury and the Prince de
Guemenee are at home there. A thief is admitted, provided he be a lord.

The Count de Lamothe, who, in 1815, was a man of seventy-five, was remarkable for nothing save his sil-
ent and sententious air, his cold, angular face, his perfectly polished manners, his coat buttoned up
to his cravat, and his long legs, always crossed in long, loose pantaloons, of the colour of burnt sie-
nna. His face was of the colour of his pantaloons.

This M. de Lamothe was "esteemed" in this salon, on account of his "celebrity," and, strange to say,
but true, on account of the name of Valois.

As to M. Gillenormand, his consideration was absolutely for himself alone. He made authority. He had,
sprightly as he was, and without detriment to his gaiety, a certain fashion of being, which was impo-
sing, worthy, honourable, and genteelly lofty; and his great age added to it. A man is not a century
for nothing. Years place at last a venerable crown upon a head.

He gave, moreover, some of these repartees which certainly have in them the genuine sparkle. Thus when
the King of Prussia, after having restored Louis XVIII., came to make him a visit under the name of
Count de Ruppin, he was received by the descendant of Louis XIV. somewhat like a Marquis of Brandenburg,
and with the most delicate impertinence. Monsieur Gillenormand approved this. "All kings who are not
the King of France," said he, "are kings of a province." The following question and answer were uttered
one day in his presence: "What is the sentence of the editor of the Courier Froncoisr "To be hung up
for awhile." "Up is superfluous," observed Monsieur Gillenormand. Sayings of this kind make position
for a man.

At an anniversary Te Deum for the return of the Bourbons, seeing Monsieur de Talleyrand pass, he said:
There goes His Excellency the Bad.

M. Gillenormand was usually accompanied by his daughter, this long mademoiselle, then past forty, and
seeming fifty, and by a beautiful little boy of seven, white, rosy, fresh-looking, with happy and trust-
ful eyes, who never appeared in this salon without hearing a buzz about him: "How pretty he is!What a
pity! poor child!" This child was the boy to whom we have but just alluded. They called him "poor child,"
because his father was "a brigand of the Loire."

This brigand of the Loire was M. Gillenormand's son-in-law, already mentioned, and whom M. Gillenormand
called the disgrace of his family.




II. ONE OF THE RED SPECTRES OF THAT TIME




WHOEVER, at that day, had passed through the little city of Vernon, and walked over that beautiful monu-
mental bridge which will be very soon replaced, let us hope, by some horrid wire bridge, would have notice-
d, as his glance fell from the top of the parapet, a man of about fifty, with a leather casque on his head,
dressed in pantaloons and waistcoat of coarse grey cloth, to which something yellow was stitched which
had been a red ribbon, shod in wooden shoes, browned by the sun, his face almost black and his hair almost
white, a large scar upon his forehead extending down his cheek, bent, bowed down, older than his years, walk-
ing nearly every day with a spade and a pruning knife in his hand, in one of those walled compartments, in
the vicinity of the bridge, which, like a chain of terraces border the left bank of the Seine--charming in-
closures full of flowers of which one would say, if they were much larger, they are gardens, and if they
were a little smaller, they are bouquets. All these inclosures are bounded by the river on one side and by
a house on the other/The man in the waistcoat and wooden shoes of whom we have just spoken lived, about
the year 1817, in the smallest of these inclosures and the humblest of these houses. He lived there solitary
and alone, in silence and in poverty, with a woman who was neither young nor old, neither beautiful nor
ugly, neither peasant nor bourgeois, who whited upon him. The square of earth which he called his garden
was celebrated in the town for the beauty of the flowers which he cultivated in it. Flowers were his occu-
pation.

By dint of labour, perseverance, attention, and pails of water, he had succeeded in creating after the
Creator, and had invented certain tulips and dahlias which seemed to have been forgotten by Nature. He
was ingenious; he anticipated Soulange Bodin in the formation of little clumps of heather earth for the
culture of rare and precious shrubs from America and China. By break of day, in summer, he was in his
walks, digging, pruning, weeding, watering, walking in the midst of his flowers with an air of kindness, sadness,
and gentleness, sometimes dreamy and motionless for whole hours listening to the song of a bird in a tree,
the prattling of a child in a house, or oftener with his eyes fixed on some drop of dew at the end of a
spear of grass, of which the sun was making a carbuncle. His table was very frugal, and he drink more milk
than wine. An urchin would make him yield, his servant scolded him. he was timid, so much so as to seem
unsociable, he rarely went out, and saw nobody put the poor who rapped at his window, and his cure, Abbe
Mabeuf, a good old man. Still, if any of the inhabitants of the city or strangers. whoever they might be,
curious to see his tulips and roses, knocked at:his little house, he opened his door with a smile. This
was the brigand Of the Loire.

Whoever, at the same time, had read the military memoirs, the biographies, the Moniteur,
and the bulletins of the Grand Army, would have been struck by a name which appears rather
often, the name of: George Pontmercy. When quite young, this George Pontmercy was a sold-
ier in the regiment of Saintonge. The revolution broke out. The regiment of Saintonge was in
the Army of the Rhine. For the old regiments of the monarchy kept their province names even
after the fall of the monarchy, and were not brigaded until .1794. Pontmercy fought at Spires,
at Worms, at Neustadt, at Turk-helm, at Alzey, at Mayence where he was one of the two
hundred who formed Houchard's rear-guard. He with eleven others held their ground against
the Prince of Hesse's corps behind the old rampart Andernach, and only fell back upon the
bulk of the army when the hostile cannon had effected a breach from the top of the parapet
to the slope of the glacis. He was under Kleber at Marchiennes, and at the battle of Mont
Palissel, where be had his arm broken by a musket-ball. Then he passed to the Italian fron-
tier, and be was one of the thirty grenadiers who defended the Col di Tende with Joubert.
Joubert was made Adjutant-General, and Pontmercy Second-Lieutenant. Pontmercy was by the
side of Berthier in the midst of the storm of balls on that day of Lodi of which Bonaparte said:
Berthier was cannoneer, cavalier, and grenadier. He saw his old general, Joubert, fall at
Novi, at the moment when, with uplifted sword, he was crying: Forward! Being embarked with
his company, through the necessities of the compaign, in a pinnace, which was on the way
from Genoa to some little port on the coast, lie fell into a wasp's-nest of seven or eight
English vessels. The Genoese captain wanted to throw the guns into the sea, bide the soldiers
in the hold, and slip . through in the dark like a merchantman. Pontmercy had the colours
seized to the halyards of the ensign-staff, and passed proudly under the guns of the British
frigates. Fifty miles further on, his boldness increasing, he attacked with his pinnace and
captured a large English transport carrying troops to Sicily, so loaded with men and horses
that the vessel was full to the hatches. In 1805, he was in that division of Malher which
captured Giinzburg from the Archduke Ferdinand. At Weltingen he received in his arms under
a shower of balls Colonel Maupetit, who was mortally wounded at the head of the 9th Dragoons.
He distinguished himself at Austerlitz in that wonderful march in echelon under the enemy's
fire. When the cavalry of the Russian Imperial Guard crushed a battalion of the 4th of the
Line, Pontmercy was one of those who revenged the repulse, and overthrew the Guard. The em-
peror gave him the cross. Pont-mercy Successively saw Wurtnser made prisoner in Mantua,
Melas in Alexandria, and Mack in Ulm. He was in the eighth corps, of the Grand Army, which
Mortier commanded, and which took Hamburg. Then he passed into the 55th of the Line, which
was the old Flanders regiment. At Eylau, he was in the churchyard where the heroic captain
Louis Hugo, uncle of the author of this book, sustained alone with his company of eighty-
three men, for two hours, the whole effort of the enemy's army. Pontmercy was one of the
three who came out of that churchyard alive. He was at Friedland. Then he saw Moscow, then
the Beresina, then Lutzen, Bautzen, Dresden, Wachau, Leipsic, and the defiles of Glenhausen,
then Montmirail, . Chateau-Thierry, Caron, the banks of the Marne, the banks of the Aisne,
and the formidable position at Laon. At Arney le Duc, a captain, he sabred ten cossacks,
and saved, not his general, but his corporal. He was wounded on that occasion, and twenty-
seven splinters were extracted from his left arm alone. Eight days before the capitulation
of Paris, he exchanged with a comrade, and entered the cavalry. He had what was called under
the old regime the double-hand, that is to say, equal skill in managing, as a soldier, the
sabre or the musket, as an officer, a squadron or a battalion. It is this skill, perfected
by military education, which gives raise to certain special arms, the dragoons, for instance,
who are both cavalry and infantry. He accompanied Napoleon to the island of Elba. At Water-
loo he led a squadron of cuirassiers in Dubois' brigade. He it was who took the colours from
the Lunenburg battalion. He carried the colours to the emperor's feet. He was covered with
blood. He had received, in seizing the colours, a sabre stroke across his face. The emperor,
well pleased, cried to him: You are a Colonel, you are a Baron, you are an Officer of the
Legion of Honour! Pontmercy answered: Sire, I thank you for my widow. An hour afterwards,
he fell in the ravine of Chain. Now who was this George Pontmercy? He was that very brigand
of the Loire.

We have already seen something of his history. After Waterloo, Pontmercy, drawn out, as will
be remembered, from the sunken road of Chain, succeeded in regaining the army, and was passed
along from ambulance to ambulance to the cantonments of the Loire.

The Restoration put him on half-pay, then sent him to a residence, that is to say under sur-
veillance at Vernon. The king, Louis XVIII., ignoring all that had been done in the Hundred
Days, recognised neither his position of officer of the Legion of Honour, nor his rank of
colonel, nor his title of baron. He, on his part, neglected no opportunity to sign him-
self Colonel Baron Pontmercy. He had only one old blue coat, and he never went out without
putting on the Cosette of an officer of the Legion of Honour. The procurer du roi notified
him that he would be prosecuted for "illegally" wearing this decoration. When this notice
was given to him by a friendly intermediart. Pontmercy answered with a bitter smile: "I do
not know whether it is that I no longer understand French. or you no longer speak it; but
the fact is I do not understand you." Then he went out every clay for a week with his ros-
ette. Nobody dared to disturb him. Two or three times the minister of war or the general
commanding the department wrote to him with this address: Monsieur Commandant Pontmercy.
He returned the letters unopened. At the same time, Napoleon at St. Helena was treating
Sir Hudson Lowe's missives addressed to General Bonaparte in the same way. Pontmercy at
last, excuse the word, came to have in his mouth the same saliva as his emperor.

So too, there were in Rome a few Carthaginian soldiers, taken prisoners, who refused to
bow to Flaminius, and who had a little of Hannibal's soul.

One morning, he met the procureur de roi in one of the streets of Vernon, went up to him
and said: "Monsieur procurcur du roi, am I allowed to wear my scar?"

He had nothing but his very scanty half-pay as chief of squadron. He hired the smallest
house he could find in Vernon. He lived there alone; how we have just seen. Under the em-
pire, between two wars, he had found time to marry Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The old
bourgeois, who really felt outraged, consented with a sigh, saying: "The greatest fami-
lies are forced to it." In 1815, Madame Pont-mercy, an admirable woman in every respect,
noble and rare, and worthy of her husband, died, leaving a child. This child would have
been the colonel's joy in his solitude; but the grandfather had imperiously demanded his
grandson, declaring that, unless he were given up to him, he would disinherit him. The
father yielded for the sake of the little boy, and not being able to have his child he
set about lov-ing flowers.

He had moreover given up everything, making no movement nor conspiring with others. He
divided his thoughts between the innocent things he was doing, and the grand things he
had done. He passed his time hoping for a pink or remembering Austerlitz.

M. Gillenormand had no intercourse with his son-in-law. The colonel was to him "a ban-
dit," and he was to the colonel "a blockhead." M. Gillenormand never spoke of the colo-
nel, unless sometimes to make mocking allusions to "his barony." It was expressly und-
erstood that Pontmercy should never endeavour to see his son or speak to him, under
pain of the boy being turned away, and disinherited. To the Gillenormands, Pontmercy
was pestiferous. They intended to bring up the child to their liking. The colonel did
wrong perhaps to accept these conditions, but he submitted to them, thinking that he
was doing right, and sacrificing himself alone.

The inheritance from the grandfather Gillenormand was a small affair, but the inheri-
tance from Mlle. Gillenormand the elder was considerable. This aunt, who had remained
single, was very rich from the maternal side, and the son of her sister was her natural
heir. The child, whose name was Marius, knew that he had a father, but nothing more.
Nobody spoke a word to him about him. However, in the society into which his grandfa-
ther took him, the whisperings; the hints, the winks, enlightened the little boy's
mind at length; he finally comprehended something of it, and as he naturally imbibed,
by a sort of infiltration and slow penetration, the ideas and opinions which formed,
so to say, the air he breathed, he came little by little to think of his father only
with shame and with a closed heart.

While he was thus growing up, every two or three months the colonel would escape, come
furtively to Paris like a fugitive from justice breaking his ban, and go to Saint Sul-
pice, at the hour when Aunt Gillenormand took Marius to mass. There, trembling lest
the aunt should turn round, concealed behind a pillar, motionless, not dating to
breathe, he saw his child. The scarred veteran was afraid of the old maid.

From this, in fact, came his connection with the cure of Vernon, Abbe Mabeuf.

This worthy priest was the brother of a warden of Saint Sulpice, who had several times
noticed this man gazing upon his child, and the scar on his cheek, and the big tears
in his eyes. This man, who had so really the appearance of a man, and who wept like a
woman, had attracted the warden's attention. This face remained in his memott One clay,
having gone to Vernon to see his brother, he met Colonel Ponunercy on the bridge, and
recognised the man of Saint Sulpice. The warden spoke of it to the cure, and the two,
under some pretext, made the colonel a visit. This visit led to others. The colonel,
who at first was very reserved, finally unbosomed himself, and the cure and the war-
den came to know the whole story, and how Pontmercy was sacrificing his own happiness
to the future of his.child. The result was that the cure felt a veneration and tender-
ness for him, and the colonel, on his part, felt an affection for the cure. And, more-
over, when it happens tlutt both are sincere and good, nothing will mix and amalgamate
more easily than an old priest and an old soldier. In reality. they are the same kind
of man. One has devoted himself to his country upon earth, the other to his country in
heaven; there is no other difference.

Twice a year, on the first of January and on St. George's Day. Marius wrote filial let-
ters to his father, which his aunt dictated, and which, one would have said, were cop-
ied from some Complete Letter Writer; this was all that M. Gillenonnand allowed; and
the father answered with very tender letters, which the grandfather thrust into his
pocket without reading.



III. REQUIESCANT



THE salon of Madame de T..was all that Matins Pontmercy knew of the world. It was the only
bpening by which he could look out into life. This opening was sombre, and through this
porthole there came more cold than NVarmth, more night than day. The child, who was no-
thing but joy and light on entering this strange world, in a little while became sad, and,
whatis still more unusual at his age, grave. Surrounded by all these imposing and singular
persons, he looked about hintwith a serious astonishment. Everything united to increase
his mazement. There were in Madame de T.'s salon some very venerable noble old ladies,
whose names were Mathan, Noah, Levis which was pronounced Levi, Cambis which was pro-
nounced Camhyse. These antique faces and these biblical names mingled in the child's mind
with his Old Testament, which he was learning by heart, and when they were all present,
seated in a circle about a dying fire, dimly lighted by a green-shaded lamp, with their stern
profiles, their grey or white hair, their long dresses of another age, in which mournful
colours only could be distinguished, at rare intervals dropping a few words which were at
once majestic and austere, the little Marius looked upon them with startled eyes, thinking
that he saw, not women, but patriarchs and magi, not real beings, but phantoms.

Among these phantoms were scattered several priests, who frequented this old salon, and
a few gentlemen; the Marquis de Sass--, secretary of commands to Madame de Berry, the Vis-
count de Val--, who published some monorhymed odes under the pseudonym of Charles An-
toine, the Prince de Beau who, quite young, was turning grey, and had a pretty and witty wife
whose dress of scarlet velvet with gold trimmings, worn very low in the neck, startled this
darkness, the Marquis de C-- d'E---, the man in all France who best understood "pro-
portioned politeness," the Count the goodman with the benevolent chin, and the Chevalier
de Port de Guy, a frequenter of the library of the Louvre, called the king's cabinet. M:
de Port de Guy, bald and rather old than aged, related that in 1793. when sixteen years
of age, he was sent to the galleys as "refractory," and chained with an octogenarian, the
Bishop of Mirepoix, refractory also, but as a priest, while be-was so as a soldier. This
was at Toulon. Their business was to go to the scaffold at night, and gather up the beads
and bodies of those that had been guillotined during the day; they carried these dripping
trunks von their backs, and their red galley caps were encrusted behind.with blood; dry
in the morning. wet at night. These tragic anecdotes abounded in Madame de T.'s salon;
and by dint of cursing Marat they came:to applaud Trestaillon. A few deputies of The un-
discoverable kind played their whist there, M. Thibord du Chalard, M. Lanarchant de Gomi-
court, and the celebrated jester; of the Right, M. Cornet Dincourt. The Bailli de Berretta,
with his short breeches and his thin legs. sometimes passed through this salon on the way
to M. de Talleyranes. He had been the pleasure companion of the Count d'Artois, and revers-
ing Aristotle cowering before Camp:ape, he had innde Guimard walk on all fours, and in this
manner shown to the centuries a philosopher avenged by a bailli.

As for the priests, there was Abbe Ilahna, the same to whom M. Larose, his assistant on La
Foudre, said: Pshaw! who is is there that is not fifty years old? a few greenhorns perhaps?
Abbe Letoumeur, the king's preacher, Abbe Brayssimnis, was not yet either count, or bishop,
or minister, or peer. and who wore an old cassock short of buttons, and Abbe Keravenant
cure de Saint Germain des Pres.: besides these the Pope's Nuncio, at that time Monsignor
Macchi, Archbishop of Nisibi, afterwards cardinal, remarkable for his long pensive note, and
another monsignor with the following titles: Ablate Palmieri, Domestic Prelate, me of the se-
ven participating pro-thonotaries of the Holy See, canon of the insignia of the Liberian Ba-
silicate.advocate of 11w Saints, postulatore eh sand, which relates to the business of canon-
isation and signifies very nearly: master of requests for the section of paradise. Finally, two
cardinals, M. de la Luzerne and Monsieur de Cl--T--. The Cardinal de la Luzerne was a writer
and was to have, some years Later, the honour of signing articles in the Comma/cm side by
side with Chateaubriand; Monsieur de Cl--T-- u as Archbishop of Tout--, and often came to
rusticate at Paris with his nephew the Marquis of T who has been Minister of Marine and of
War. The Cardinal de was a little, lively old man, showing his red stockings under his turn-
ed-up cassock; his peculiarities were hate of the Encyclopedia and desperate play at billi-
ards, and people who, at that time, on summer evenings passed along the Rue M--, where the
Hotel de t was at that time, stopped to hear the clicking of the halls mud the sharp voice
of the cardinal ening to his fellow nelavist Monseigneur Comet. Bishop in partibus of Caryst:
Mark, Abbe. I have caromed. The Cardinal de CI--T--- had been brought to Madame de T.'s by
his most intimate friend, M. de Roquelaure, formerly Bishop of Senlis and one of the Forty. M.
de Roquelaure was noteworthy for his tall stature and his assiduity at the Academy; through
the glass door of the hall near the Library, in which the French Academy then held its sessions,
the curious could every Friday gaze upon the old Bishop of Senlis: usually standing, freshly pow-
dered, with violet stockings, and turning his back to the door, apparently to show his little collar
to better advantage. All these ecclesiastics, though for the most part courtiers as well as church-
men, added to the importance of the T. salon, the lordly aspect of which was emphasised by five
peers of France, the Marquis de Vib---, the Marquis del al--, the Marquis d'Herb---, the Vis-
count Damo--, and the Duke de Val--. This Duke de Val--, although Prince de Mon--, that is to
say, a foreign sovereign prince, had so high an idea of Prance and the peerage that he saw
everything through their medium. He it was who said: The cardinals are the French peers of
Rome; the Lords are the French peers of England. Finally, since, in this century, the revo-
lution must make itself felt everywhere, this feudal salon was, as we have said, ruled by a
bourgeois. Monsieur Gillenormand reigned there.

There was the essence and the quintessence of Parisian Legiti-matist society. People of renown,
even though royalists, were held in quarantine. There h always anarchy in renown. Chateaubriand,
had he entered there, would have had the same effect as Pt2re Duchene. Some repentant backslid-
ers, however, penetrated, by sufferance, into this orthodox world. Count Beug-- was received
there by favour.

The "noble" salons of the present day bear no resemblance to those salons. The Faubourg Saint
Germain of the present smells of heresy. The royalists of this age are demagogues, we must say
it to their praise.

At Madame de T.'s, the society being superior, there was exquisite and haughty taste under a
full bloom of politeness. Their manners comported with all sorts of involuntary refinements
which were the ancient regime itself, buried, but living. Some of these peculiarities, in lannguage
especially, seemed grotesque. Superficial observers would have taken for provincial what was
only ancient. They called a woman madame to ginerale. Aladame la colonelk was not entirely
out of use. The charming Madame de Leon, in memory doubtless of the Duchesses de Longueville
and de Chevreuse, preferred this appellation to her title of Princess. The Marchioness of Cre-
quy also called herself madame to colonelle.

It was this little lofty world which invented at the Tuileries the refinement of always saying,
when speaking to the king in person, the king, in the third person, and never, your majesty,
the title your majesty having been "sullied by the usurper."

Facts and men were judged there. They ridiculed the century, which dispensed with comprehending
it. They assisted one another in astonishment. Each communicated to the rest the quantity of
light he had. Methuselah instructed Ephnenides. The deaf kept the blind informed. They declared,
that the time since Coblentz had not elapsed. just as Louis XVIII. was, by the grace of God. in
the twenty-fifth year of his reign, the emigrees were, in reality, in the twenty-fifth year of
their youth.

All was harmonious; nothing was too much alive; speech was hardly a breath; the journal, suiting
the salon, seemed a papyrus. There were young people there, but they were slightly dead. In ante-
chamber, the liveries were old. These personages, templet out of date, were served by domestics
of the same kind. Altogether they had the appearance of having lived a long time ago, and of being
obstinate with the sepulchre. Conserve. Conservatism, Conservath was nearly all the dictionary; to
be in good odour, was the point There was in fact something aromatic in the opinions of these valuable
groups, and their ideas smelt of Indian herbs. It was a mummy world. The masters were embalmed,
the valets were stuffed.

A worthy old marchioness. a ruined emigree, having now but on servant, continued to say: My people.

What was done in Madame de T.'s parlour? They were ultra.

To he ultra; this word. although what it represents has not perhaps disappeared,--this word has
now lost its meaning. Let to explain it.

To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the sceptre in the of the throne. and the mitre in
the note of the altar; it is to maltreat the thing you support; it is to kick in the traces; it is to
cavil at the stake for undercooking heretics; it is to reproach the idol wiih a lack of idolatry;
it is to insult by excess of respect; it is to find in the pope too little papistry, in the king
too little royalty, and too much light in the night: it is to be dissatisfied with the albatross,
with snow, with the swan. and the lily in the name of whiteness; it is to be the partisan of
things to the point of becoming their enemy; it is to be so very pro, that you are con.

The ultra spirit is a peculiar characteristic of the first phase of the Restoration.

There was never anything in history like this little while, beginning in 1814, and ending about
1820, on the advent of Monsieur de Villele, the practical man of the Right. These six years were
an extraordinary moment; at once brilliant and gloomy, smiling and sombre, lighted as by the rad-
iance of dawn, and at the same time enveloped in the darkness of the great catastrophes which still
filled the horizon, though they were slowly burying themselves in the past. There was there, in that
light and that shade, a little world by itself, new and old, merry and sad, juvenile and senile,
rubbing its eyes; nothing resembles an awaking so much as a return; a group which looked upon
France whimsically, and upon which France looked with irony; streets full of good old owl marquises
returned and returning, "cidevants." astounded at everything, brave and noble gentlemen smiling
at being in France. and weeping over it also: delighted to see their country again, in despair at find-
ing their monarchy no more; the nobility of the crusades spitting upon the nobility the empire, that
is to say the nobility of the sword; historic races losing the meaning of history; sons of the compan-
ions of Charlmagne disdaining the companions of Napoleon. Swords, as we have said, insulted each
other; the sword of Fontenoy was ridiculous, and nothing but rust; the sword of Marengo was hateful,
and nothing but a sabre. Formerly disowned Yesterday. The sense of the grand was lost, as well as
the sense of the ridiculous. There was somebody who called Bonaparte Scapin. That word is no more.
Nothing, we repeat, now remains of it. When we happen to draw some Emu from it, and endeavour to
make it live again in our thought, it seems as strange to us as an antediluvian world. It also, in
fact, has been swallowed up by a deluge. It has disappeared under two revolutions. What floods are
ideas! How quickly they cover all that they are commissioned to destroy and to bury, and how rapidly
they create frightful abysses!

Such was the character of the salons in those far-off and simple ages when M. Martainville was wit-
tier than Voltaire.

These salons had a literature and politics of their own. They believed in Fier& M. Agier gave laws
to them. They criticised M. Colnet, the publicist of the bookstall of the Quai Malaquais. Napo-Icon
was nothing but the Corsican Ogre. At a later day, the introduction into history of AL the Marquis
de Buonaparte, Lieutenant-General of the armies of the king, was a concession to the spirit of the
century.

These salons did not long maintain their purity. As early as 1818, doctrinaires began to bud out in
them, a troublesome species. Their style was to be royalists, and to apologise for it Just where the
ultras were proudest, the doctrinaires were a little ashamed. They were witty; they were silent; their
political dogmas were suitably starched with pride; they ought to have been successful. They indulg-
ed in what was moreover convenient, an excess of white cravat and close-buttoned cot The fault, or the
misfortune of the doctrinaire-party was the creation of an old youth. They assumed the postures of
sages. Their dream was to engraft upon an absolute and excessive principle a limited power. They op-
posed, and sometimes with a rare intelligence, destructive liberalism by conservative liberalism. We
heard them say: "Be considerate towards royalism; it has done much real service. It has brought us
Kick tradition, worship, religion, respect. It is faithful, brave, chivalric, loving, devoted. It
comes to associate, although with regret, to the new grandeur of the nation the old grandeur of the
monarchy. It is wrong in not comprehending the revolution, the empire, glory, liberty, new ideas, new
generations, the century. But this wrong which it does us, have we not sometimes done it the same?
The revolution, whose heirs we are, ought to comprehend all. To attack royalism is a misconception
of liberalism. What a blunder, and what blindness? Revolutionary Frame is wanting in respect for his-
toric France, that is to say for her mother, that is to say for herself. After the 5th of September,
the nobility of the monarchy is treated as the nobility of the empire was treated after the Sth of
July. They were unjust towards the eagle, we are unjust towards the fleur-de-lis. Must we then always
have something to proscribe? Of what use is it to deface the crown of Louis XIV., or to scratch off
the escutcheon of Henry IV.? We rail at Monsieur de Vaublanc who effaced the N's. from the Bridge of
Jena? But what did he do? What we are doing. Bouvines belongs to us as well as Marengo. The fleurs-
de-lis are ours as well as the N's. They are our patrimony. What is pined by diminishing it? We must
not disown our country in the past more than in the present. Why not desire our whole history? Why
not love all of France?"

This is the way in which the doctrinaires criticised and patronised royalism, which was displeased
at being cruised and furious at being patronised.

The ultras marked the first period of royalism; the assemblage characterised the second. To fervency
succeeded skill. Let us not prolong this sketch.

In the course of this narrative, the author of this book found in his path this strange moment of con-
temporary, history; he was obliged to glance at it in passing, and to trace some of the singubr linea-
ments of that society now unknown. But he does it rapidly and without any bitter or derisive intention.
Reminiscences, affectionate and respectful, for they relate to his mother, attach him to this period.
Besides, we must my, that same little world has its greatness. We may smile at it, but we can neither
despise it nor hate it. It was the France of former times.

Marius Pontmerey went, like all children, through various studies. When he left the hands of Aunt Gill-
enormand, his grandfather entrusted him to a worthy professor, of the purest classic innocence. This
young, unfolding soul passed from a prude ton pedant. Marks had his years at college, then he entered
the law-school. He was royalist, fanatical, and austere. He had little love for his grand father, whom
gaiety and cynicism wounded him, and the place of his father was a dark void.

For the rest, he was an ardent but cool lad, noble, generous, proud. religious, lofty; honourable even
to harshness, pure even to no-sociableness.



IV. END OF THE BRIGAND



THE completion of Marius' classical studies was coincident with M. Gillenorrnand's retirement from the
world. The old man bade farewell to the Faubourg Saint Germain. and to Madame de T.'s salon and esta-
blished himself in the Marais, at his house in the Rue des Files du Calvaire. His servants there were, in
addition to the porter, this chambermaid Nicolette who had succeeded Magnon, and this short-winded
and pursy Basque whom we have already mentioned.

In 1827, Marius had Just attained his eighteenth year. On coining in one evening, he saw his grand-
father with a letter in his hand.

"Marius," said M. Gillenormand, "you will set out tomorrow for Vernon."

"What for?" said Marius.

"To see your father."

Marius shuddered. He had thought of everything but this, that a day might come, when he would have
to see his father. Nothing could have been more unlocked for, more surprising, and, we must say,
more disagreeable. It was aversion compelled to intimacy. It was not chagrin; no, it was pure drudg-
ery.

Marius, besides his feelings of political antipathy, was convinced that his father, the taker, as M.
Gillenormand called him in the gentler moments, did not love him; that was clear, since he had aban-
doned him and left him to others. Feeling that he was not loved at all, he had no love. Nothing more
natural, said he to himself.

He was so astounded that he did not question M. Gillenormand, The grandfather continued:

"It appears that he is sick. He asks for you."

And after a moment of silence he added:

"Start to-morrow morning. I think there is at the Cour des Fon-tables a conveyance which starts at
six o'clock and arrives at night. Take it. He says the case is urgent."

Then he crumpled up the letter and put it in his pocket. Marius could have started that evening and
been with his father the next morning. A diligence then made the trip to Rotten from the Rue du Bouloi
by night passing Through Vernon. Neither M. Gillenormand nor Marius thought of inquiring.

The next day at dusk, Marius arrived at Venion. Candles were just beginning to be lighted. He asked
the first person lie met for the house of Monsieur Pontmerey. For in his feelings he agreed with the
Restoration, and he, too, recognised his father neither as Baron nor as Colonel.

The house was pointed out to him. Tie rang: a woman came and opened the door with a small lamp in her
hand.

"Monsieur Pontmerey?" said Marius.

The woman remained motionless.

"Is it here?" asked Marius.

The woman gave an affirmative nod of the head.

"Can I speak with him r'

The woman gave a negative sign."

"But I am his son!" resumed Marius. "He expects me."

"He expects you no longer." said the woman.

Then he perceived that she was in tears.

She pointed to the door of a low room; he entered.

In this room, which was lighted by a tallow candle on the motel, there were three men, one of them
standing, one on his knees, and one stripped to his shirt and lying at full length upon the floor. The
one upon the floor was the colonel.

The two others were a physician and a priest who was praying. The colonel had been three days before
attacked with a brain fever. At the beginning of the sickness, having a presentiment of ill, he had writ-
ten to Monsieur Gillenormand to ask for his son. He had grown worse. On the very evening of Marius'
arrival at Vernon, the colonel had had a fit of delirium; he sprang out of his bed in spite of the ser-
vant, crying: "My son has not come! I am going to meet him!" Then he had gone out of his room and fall-
en upon the floor of the hall. He had but just died.

The doctor and the cure had been sent for. The doctor had come to late, the cure had come too late. The
son also had come too late.

By the dint light of the candle, they could distinguish upon the cheek of the pale and prostrate col-
onel a big tear which had fallen from his death-stricken eye. The eye was glazed, but the tear was not
dry. This tear was for his son's delay.

Marius looked upon this man. whom he saw for the first time, and for the last--this venerable and manly
face, these open eyes which saw not, this white hair, these robust limbs upon which he distinguished here
and there brown lines which were sabre-cuts, and a species of red stars which were bullet-holes. He looked
upon that gigantic scar which imprinted heroism upon this face on which God had impressed goodness. He
thought that this man was his father and that this man was dead and he remained unmoved.

The sorrow which he experienced was the sorrow which he would have felt before any other man whom he
might have seen stretched out in death.

Mourning, bitter mourning was in that room. The servant was lamenting by herself in a corner, the cure
was praying, and his sobs were heard: the doctor was wiping his eyes; the corpse itself wept.

This doctor, this priest, and this woman, looked at Marius through their affliction without saying a word;
it was he who was the stranger. Marius, too little moved, felt ashamed and embarrassed at his attitude;
he had his hat in his hand, he let it fall to the floor, to make them believe that grief deprival him of
strength to hold it.

At the same time he felt something like remorse, and he despised himself for acting thus. But was it his
fault? He did not love his father, indeed!

The colonel left nothing. The sale of his furniture hardly paid for his burial. The servant found a scrap
of paper which she handed to Marius. It contained this, in the handwriting of the colonel!

"For my Son,--The emperor made me a baron upon the battlefield of Waterloo. Since the Rest-
oration contests this title which I have bought with my blood, my son will take it and bear
it. I need not say that he will be worthy of it." On the back, the colonel had added: "At
this same battle of Waterloo, a sergeant saved my life. This man's name is Thenardier. Not
long ago, I believe he was keeping a little tavern in a village in the suburbs of Paris, at
Chelles or at Montfermeil. If my son meets him, he will do Thenardier all the service he can."

Not from duty towards his father, but on account of that vague respect for death which is
always so imperious in the heart of man, Marius took this paper and pressed it.

No trace remained of the colonel. Monsieur Gillenormand had his sword and uniform sold to
a second-hand dealer. The neighbours stripped the garden and carried off the rare flowers.
The other plants became briery and scraggy, and died.

Marius remained only forty-eight hours at Vernon. After the burial, he returned to Paris and
went back to his law, thinking no more of his father than if he had never lived. In two days
the colonel had been buried, and in three days forgotten. Marius wore crape on his hat. That
was all.



V. THE UTILITY OF GOING TO MASS, TO BECOME REVOLUTIONARY



MARIUS had preserved the religious habits of his childhood. One Sunday he had gone to hear
mass at Saint Sulpice, at this same chapel of the Virgin to which his aunt took him when he
was a little boy, and being that day more absent-minded and dreamy than usual, he took his
place behind a pillar and knelt down, without noticing it, before a Utrecht velvet chair,
on The back of which this name was written: Monsieur Mabeuf, church-warden. The mass had
hardly commenced when an old man presented himself and said to Marius:

"Monsieur, this is my place."

Marius moved away readily, and the old man took his chair.

After mass, Marius remained absorbed in thought a few steps distant; the old man approached
him again and said: "I beg your pardon, monsieur, for having disturbed you a little while
ago, and for disturbing you again now; but you must have thought me impertinent, and I must
explain myself."

"Monsieur," said Marius, "it is unnecessary."

"Yes!" resumed the old man; "I do not wish you to have a bad opinion of me. You see I think
a great deal of that place. It seems to me that the mass is better there. Why? I will tell
you. To that place I have seen for ten years, regularly, every two or three months, a poor,
brave father come, who had no other opportunity and no other way of seeing his child, being
prevented through some family arrangements. He came at the hour when he knew his son was
brought to mass. The little one never suspected that his father was here. He did not even
know, perhaps, that he had a father, the innocent boy! The father, for his part, kept be-
hind a pillar, so that nobody should see him. He looked at his child, and wept. This poor
man worshipped this little boy. I saw that. This place has become sanctified, as it were,
for me, ,a.nd I have acquired the habit of coming here to hear mass. I prefer it to The
bench, where I have a right to be as a warden. I was even acquainted slightly with this
unfortunate gentleman. He had a father-in-law, a rich aunt, relatives, I do not remember
exactly, who threatened to disinherit the child if he, the father, should see him. He had
sacrificed himself that his son might some day be rich and happy. They were separated by
political opinions. Certainly I approve of political opinions, but there are people who
do not know where to stop. Bless me! because a man was at Waterloo he is not a monster;
a father is not separated from his child for that. He was one of Bonaparte's colonels. He
is dead, I believe. He lived at Vernon, where my brother is cure, and his name is some-
thing like Pontmarie, Montpercy. He had a handsome sabre cut."

"Pontmercy," said Marius, turning pale.

"Exactly; Pontmercy. Did you know him?"

"Monsieur," said Marius, "he was my father."

The old churchwarden clasped his hands, and exclaimed

"Ah! you are the child! Yes, that is it; he ought to be a man now. My poor child, you can
say that you had a father who loved you well.

Marius offered his arm to the old man, and walked with him to his house. Next day he said
to Monsieur Gillenormand:

"We have arranged a hunting party with a few friends. Will you permit me to be absent for
three days?"

"Four," answered the grandfather; "go; amuse yourself." And, with a wink he whispered to
his daughter



VI. WHAT IT IS TO HAVE MET A CHURCHWARDEN



WHERE MARIUS WENT we shall see a little further on.

Marius was absent three days, then he returned to Paris, went straight to the library of
the law-school, and asked for the files of the Moniteur,

He read the Moniteur, he read all the histories of the republic and the empire; the Memorial
de Sainte-Helene; all the memoirs, journals, bulletins, proclamations; he devoured every-
thing. The first time he met his father's name in the bulletins of the grand army he had a
fever for a whole week. He went to see the generals under whom George Pontmercy had served
--among others, Count H. The churchwarden Mabeuf, whom he had gone to see again, gave him
an account of his life at Vernon, the colonel's retreat, his flowers and his solitude.
Marius came to understand fully this rare, sublime, and gentle man, this sort of lion-lamb
who was his father.

In the meantime, engrossed in this study, which took up all his time as well as all his
thoughts, he hardly saw the Gillenormands more. At the hours of meals he appeared; then when
they looked for him, he was gone. The aunt grumbled. The grandfather smiled. "Poh, poh! it
is the age for the lasses!" Sometimes the old man added: "The devil! I thought that it was
some gallantiy . It seems to be a passion."

It was a passion, indeed. Marius was on the way to adoration for his father.

At the same time an extraordinary change took place in his ideas. The phases of this change
were numerous and gradual. As this is the history of many minds of our time, we deem it useful
to follow these phases step by step, and to indicate them all.

This history on which he had now cast his eyes, startled him.

The first effect was bewilderment.

The republic, the empire, had been to him, till then, nothing but monstrous words. The repub-
lic, a guillotine in a twilight; the empire, a sabre in the night. He had looked into them, and
there, where he expected to find only a chaos of darkness, he had seen, with a sort of as-
tounding surprise, mingled with fear and joy, stars shining, Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Saint-Just,
Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, Danton, and a sun rising, Napoleon. He knew not where he was.
He recoiled blinded by the splendours. Little by little, the astonishment passed away, he ac-
customed. himself to this radiance; he looked upon acts without dizziness, he examined person-
ages without error; the revolution and the empire set themselves in luminous perspective before
his straining eyes; he saw each of these two groups of events and men arrange themselves into
two enormous facts: the republic into the sovereignty of the civic right restored to the masses,
the empire into the sovereignty of the French idea imposed upon Europe; he saw spring out of
the revolution the grand figure of the people, and out of the empire the grand figure of France.
He declared to himself that all that had been good

What his bewilderment neglected in this first far too synthetic appreciation, we do not
think it necessary to indicate here. We are describing the state of a mind upon the march.
Progress is not accomplished at a bound. Saying this, once for all, for what precedes as
well as for what is to follow, we continue.

He perceived then that up to that time he had comprehended his country no more than he had
his father. He had known neither one nor the other, and he had had a sort of voluntary night
over his eyes. He now saw, and on the one hand he admired, on the other he worshipped.

He was full of regret and remorse and he thought with despair that all he had in his soul
he could say now only to a tomb. Oh! if his father were living, if he had had him still,
if God in his mercy and in his goodness had permitted that his father might be still a-
live, how he would have run, how he would have plunged headlong, how he would have cried
to his father: "Father! I am here! it is I! my heart is the same as yours! I am your son!"
How he would have embraced his white head, wet his hair with tears, gazed upon his scar,
pressed his hands, worshipped his garments, kissed his feet! oh! why had this father died
so soon, before the adolescence, before the justice, before the love of his son! Marius had
a continual sob in his heart which said at every moment: "Alas!" At the same time he became
more truly serious, more truly grave, surer of his faith and his thought. Gleams of the true
came at every instant to complete his reasoning. It was like an interior growth. He felt a
sort of natural aggrandisement which these two new things, his father and his country,
brought to him.

As when one has a key, everything opened; he explained to himself what he had hated, he pen-
etrated what he had abhorred; he saw clearly henceforth theprovidential, divine, and human
meaning of the great things which he had been taught to detest, and the great men whom he
had been instructed to curse. When he thought of his former opinions, which were only of
yesterday, but which seemed so ancient to him already, he became indignant at himself, and
he smiled. From the rehabilitation of his father he had naturally passed to the rehabilita-
tion of Napoleon.

This, however, we must say, was not accomplished without labour.

From childhood he had been imbued with the judgment of the PartY of 1814 in regard to Bona-
parte. Now all the prejudices of the Restoration: all its interests, all its instincts, tended to
the disfigurement of Napoleon' It execrated him still more than it did Robespierre. It made
skilful use of the fatigue of the nation and the hatred of mothers. Bonaparte had become a
sort of monster almost fabulous, and to depict him to the imagination of the people, which,
as we have already said, resembles the imagination of children, the party of 1814 present
in succession every terrifying mask, from that which is terrible, while yet it is grand, to
that which is terrible in the grotesque, from Tiberius to Bugaboo. Thus, in speaking of Bon-
aparte, you might either weep, or burst with laughter, provided hatred was the basis. Marius
had never had--about that man, as he was called--any other ideas in his mind. They had grown
together with the tenacity of his nature. There was in him a complete little man who was de-
voted to hatred of Napoleon.

On reading his history, especially in studying it in documents and materials, the veil which
covered Napoleon from Marius' eyes gradually fell away. He perceived something immense, and
suspected that he had been deceiving himself up to that moment about Bonaparte as well as a-
bout everything else; each day he saw more clearly; and he began to mount slowly, step by
step, in the beginning almost with regret, afterwards with rapture, and as if drawn by an
irresistible fascination, at first the sombre stages, then the dimly lighted stages, finally
the luminous and splendid stages of enthusiasm.

One night he was alone in his little room next the roof. His candle was lighted; he was read-
ing, leaning on his table by the open window. All manner of reveries came over him from the
expanse of space and mingled with his thought. What a spectacle is night! We hear dull sounds,
not knowing whence they come; we see Jupiter, twelve hundred times larger than the earth,
glistening like an ember, the welkin is black, the stars sparkle, it is terror-inspiring.

He was reading the bulletins of the Grand Army, those heroic strophes written on the battle-
field; he saw there at intervals his father's name, the emperor's name everywhere; the whole
of the grand empire appeared before him; he felt as if a tide were swelling and rising within
him; it seemed to him at moments that his father was passing by him like a breath, and whis-
pering in his ear; gradually he grew wandering; he thought he heard the drums, the canilon,
the trumpets, the measured tread of the bat-talions, the dull and distant gallop of the cav-
alry; from time to time he lifted his eyes to the sky and saw the colossal constellations
shining in the limitless abysses, then they fell back upon the book, and saw there other col-
ossal things moving about confusedly. His heart was full. He was transported, trembling,
breathless; suddenly, without himself knowing what moved him, or what he was obeying, he
arose, stretched his arms out of the window, gazed fixedly into the gloom, the silence, the
darkling infinite, the eternal immensity and cried: Vive l'empereur!

From that moment it was all over; the Corsican Ogre--the usurper--the tyrant--the monster
who was the lover of his sisters--the actor who took lessons from Taltna--the poisoner of
Jaffa--the tiger--Buonaparte---- all this vanished, and gave place in his mind to a suffused
and brilliant radiance in which, shone out from an inaccessible height the pale marble phan-
tom of Caesar. The emperor had been to his father only the beloved captain, whom one admires,
and for whom one devotes himself; to Marius he was something more. He was the predestined
constructor of the French group, succeeding the Roman group in the mastery of the world. He
was the stupendous architect of a downfall, the successor of Charlemagne, of Louis XL, of Hen-
ry IV., of Richelieu, of Louis XIV., and of the Committee of Public Safety, having doubtless
his blemishes, his faults, and even his crimes, that is to say being man; but august in his
faults, brilliant in his blemishes, mighty in his crimes.

He was the man foreordained to force all nations to say: the Grand Nation. He was better
still; he was the very incarnation of France, con-quering Europe by the sword which he held,
and the world by the light which he shed. Marius saw in Bonaparte the flashing spectre which
will always rise upon the frontier, and which will guard the future. Despot, but dictator,
despot resulting from a republic and summing up a revolution. Napoleon became to him the
people-man as Jesus is the God-man.

We see, like all new converts to a religion, his conversion intoxicated him, he plunged head-
long into adhesion, and he went too far. His nature was such; once upon a descent it was al-
most impossible for him to hold back. Fanaticism for the sword took possession of him, and
became com-plicated in his mind with enthusiasm for the idea. He did not perceive that along
with genius, and indiscriminately, he was admiring force, that is to say that he was install-
ing in the two compartments of his idolatry, on one side what is divine, and on the other what
is brutal. In several respects he began to deceive himself in other matters. He admitted ev-
erything. There is a way of meeting error while on the road of truth. He had a sort of wilful
implicit faith which swallowed everything in mass. On the new path upon which he had entered,
in judging the crimes of the ancient regime as well as in measuring the glory of Napoleon, he
neglected the attenuating; circumstances.

However this might be, a great step had been taken. Where he had formerly seen the fall of
the monarchy, he now saw the advent of France.

His pole-star was changed. What had been the setting, was now the rising of the sun. He had
turned around.

All these revolutions were accomplished in him without a suspicion of it in his family.

When, in this mysterious labour, he had entirely cast off his old Bourbon and ultra skin,
when he had shed the aristocrat, the Jacobite, and the royalist, when he was fully revolution-
ary, thoroughly democratic and almost republican, he went to an engraver on the Quai des
Orfe'vres, and ordered a hundred cards bearing this name: Baron Marius Pontmercy.

This was but a very logical consequence of the change which had taken place in him, a change
in which everything gravitated about his father.

However, as he knew nobody, and could not leave his cards at anybody's door, he put them in
his pocket.

By another natural consequence, in proportion as he drew nearer to his father, his memory,
and the things for which the colonel had fought for twenty-five years, he drew off from his
grandfather. As we have mentioned, for a long time M. Gillenormand's capriciousness had been
disagreeable to him. There was already between them all the distaste of a serious young man
for a frivolous old man. Geront's gaiety shocks and exasperates Werther's melancholy. So long
as the same political opinions and the same ideas had been common to them, Marius had met M.
Gillenormand by means of them as if upon a bridge. When this bridge fell, the abyss appeared.
And then, above all, Marius felt inexpressibly revolted when he thought that M. Gillenormand,
from stupid motives, had pitilessly torn him from the colonel, thus depriving the father of
the child, and the child of the father.

Through affection and veneration for his father, Marius had almost reached aversion for his
grandfather.

Nothing of this, however, as we have said was betrayed externally.

Only he was more and more frigid; laconic at meals, and scarcely ever in the house. When his
aunt scolded him for it, he was very mild, and gave as an excuse his studies, courts, examina-
tions, dissertations, etc. The grandfather did not change his infallible diagnosis: "In love?
I understand it."

Marius was absent for a while from time to time.

"Where can he go to?" asked the aunt.

On one of these journeys, which were always very short, he went to Montfermeil in obedience to
the injunction which his father had left. him, and sought for the former sergeant of Waterloo,
the in-keeper Thenardier. Thenardier had failed, the inn was closed, and nobody knew what had
become of him. While making these researches, Marius was away from the house four days.

"Decidedly," said the grandfather, "he is going astray."

They thought they noticed that he wore something, upon his breast and under his shirt, hung
front his neck by a black ribbon.



VII. SOME PETTICOAT


WE have spoken of a lancer.

He was a grand-nephew of M. Gillenormand's on the paternal side, who passed his life away from
his family, and far from all domestic hearths in garrison. Lieutenant Theodule Gillenormand
fulfilled all the conditions required for what is called a handsome officer. He had "the waist
of a girl." a way of trailing the victorious sabre, and a curling mustache. He came to Paris
very rarely, so rarely that Marius had never seen him. The two cousins knew each other only by
name. Thdodule was, we think we have mentioned, the favourite of Aunt Gilknormand, who prefer-
red him because she did not see him. Not seeing people permits us to imagine in them every per-
fection.

One morning, Mlle. Gillanormand the elder had retired to her room as much excited as her plac-
idity allowed. Marius had asked his grandfather again for permission to make a short journey,
adding that he intended to set out that evening. "Go!" the grandfather had answered, and M.
Gillenormand had added aside, lifting his eyebrows to the top of his forehead: "He is getting
to be an old offender." Mlle. Gillenonnand had returned to her room very much perplexed, drop-
ping this exclamation point on the stairs: "That is pretty!" and this interrogation point:"But
where can he be going!" She imagined some more or less illicit affair of the heart, a woman in
the shadow, a rendezvous, a mystery, and she would not have been sorry to thrust her spectacles
into it. The taste of a mystery resembles the first freshness of a slander; holy souls never
despise that. There is in the secret compartments of bigotry some curiosity for scandal.

She was therefore a prey to a blind desire for learning a story.

As a diversion from this curiosity which was giving her a little more agitation than she allow-
ed herself, she took refuge in her talents, and began to festoon cotton upon cotton, in one of
those embroideries of the time of the empire and the restoration in which a great many cab wheels
appear. Clumsy work, crabbed worker. She had been sitting in her chair for some hours when the
door opened. Mlle. Gillenormand raised her eyes; Lieutenant Theodule was before her making the
regulation bow. She uttered a cry of pleasure. You may be old, you may be a prude, you may be a
bigot, you may be his aunt, but it is always pleasant to see a lancer enter your room

"You here, Theodule!" exclaimed she.

"On my way, aunt:'

"Embrace me then."

"Here goes!" said Theodule.

And he embraced her. Aunt Gillenormand went to her secretary, and opened it.

"You stay with us at last all the week?"

"Aunt, I leave this evening."

"Impossible!"

"Mathematically."

"Stay, my dear Theodule, I beg von."

"The heart says yes, but my orders say no. The story is simple. Our station is changed; we were at
Melon, we are sent to Gaillon. To go from the old station to the new, we must pass through Paris.
I said: I am going to go and see my aunt."

"Take this for your pains."

She put ten louis into his hand.

"You mean for my pleasure, dear aunt."

Theodule embraced her a second time, and she had the happiness of having her neck a little chafed by
the braid of his uniform.

"Do you make the journey on horseback with your regiment?" she asked.

"No,aunt. I wanted to see you. I have a special permit. My servant takes my horse; I go by the dili-
gence. And, speaking of that, I have a question to ask you."

"What?"

"My cousin, Marius Pontmercy. is travelling also, is he -r"

"How do you know that r exclaimed the aunt, her curiosity sud-denly excited to the quick.

"On my arrival, I went to the diligence to secure my place in the coupe."

"Well?"

"A traveller had already secured a place On the imperial. I MN' his name on the hook."

"What name?"

"Marius Pontmercy."

"The wicked fellow!" exclaimed the aunt. "Ah!your cousin is not a steady boy like you. To think that
he is going to spend the night in a diligence."

"Like me."

"But for you, it is from duty; for him, it is from dissipation."

"What is the odds?" said Thendule.

Here, an event occurred in the life of Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder: she had an idea. If she
had been a man. she would have slapped her forehead. She apostrophised Theodule:

"Are you sure that your cousin does not know you?'

"Yes. I have seen him; but he has never deigned to notice me."

"And you are going to travel together so?"

"He on the imperiale, I in the coupe."

"Where does this diligence go?"

"To Les Andelys."

"Is there where Marius is going?"

"Unless. like me, he stops on the road. I get off at Vernon to take the branch for Gaillon. I know no-
thing of Marius's route."

"Marius! what an ugly name! What an idea it was to name him Marius! But you at least--your name is
Theodule!"

"I would rather it were Alfred," said the officer.

"Listen, Thendule."

"I am listening. Aunt."

"Pay attention."

"I am paying attention."

"Are you ready?"

"Yes."

"Well, Marius is often away."

"'Eh! eh!"

"He travels."

"Ahl ah!"

"He sleeps away."

"Oh! oh!"

"We want to know what is at the bottom of it."

Theodule answered with the calmness of a man of bronze:

"Some petticoat."

And with that stifled chuckle which reveals certainty, he added:

"A lass."

"That is clear," exclaimed the aunt, who thought she heard Monsieur Gillenormand speak, and who felt
her conviction spring irresistibly from this word lass, uttered almost in the same tone by the grand-
uncle and the grandnephew. She resumed:

"Do us a kindness. Follow Marius a little way. He does not know you, it will be easy for you. Since
there is a lass, try to see the lass. You can write us the account. It will amuse grandfather."

Theodule had no excessive taste for this sort of watching; but be was much affected by the ten louis,
and he thought he saw a possible succession of them. He accepted the commission and said: As you please,
aunt." And he added aside: "There I am, a duenna."

Mademoiselle Gillenormand embraced him.

"You would not play such pranks, Theodule. You are obedient to discipline, you are the slave of your
orders, you are a scrupulous and dutiful man, and you would not leave your family to go to see such a
creature."

The lancer put on the satisfied grimace of Canoodle praised for his honesty.

Marius, on the evening which followed this dialogue, mounted the diligence without suspecting that he
was watched. As to the watchman, the first thing that he did, was to fall asleep. His slumber was
sound and indicated a clear conscience. Argus snored all night.

At daybreak, the driver of the diligence shouted: "Vernon! Vernon relay! passengers for Vernon?" And
Lieutenant Theodule awoke.

"Good," growled he, half asleep, "here I get off."

Then, his memory clearing up by degrees, an effect of awakening. be remembered his aunt, the ten louis,
and the account be was to render of Marius' acts and deeds. It made him laugh.

"Perhaps he has left the coach," thought he, while he buttoned up his undress waistcoat. "lie may have
stopped at Poissy; he may have stopped at Triel; if he did not get off at Meuluan, he may have got off at
Mantes, unless he got off at kollelsoise, or unless he only came Pacy, with the choice of turning to the
left towards Berens, or to the right towards Laroche Guyon. Run after him, aunt. What the devil shall I
write to her, the good old woman?"

At this moment a pair of black pantaloons getting down from the imperiale, appeared before
the window of the coupe.

"Can that be Marius?" said the lieutenant.

It was Marius.

A little peasant girl, beside the coach, among the horses and postillions, was offering
flowers to the passengers. "Flowers for your ladies," cried she.

Marius approached her and bought the most beautiful flowers in her basket.

"Now," said Theodule leaping down from the coach, "there is something that interests me.
Who the deuce is he going to carry those flowers to? It ought to be a mighty pretty woman
for so fine a bouquet. I would like to see her."

And, no longer now by command, but from personal curiosity, like those dogs who hunt on
their own account, he began to follow Marius.

Marius paid no attention to Theodule. Some elegant women got out of the diligence; he
did not look at them. He seemed to see nothing about him.

"Is he in love?" thought Theodule.

Marius walked towards the church.

"All right," said Theodule to himself. "The church! that is it. These rendezvous which are
spiced with a bit of mass are the best of all. Nothing is so exquisite as an ogle which
passes across the good God."

Arriving at the church. Marius did not go in. He went behind the building. He disappeared
at the corner of one of the buttresses of the apsis.

"The rendezvous is outside," said Theodule. "Let us see the lass." And he advanced on tip-
toe towards the corner which Marius had turned.

On reaching it, he stopped, astounded.

Marius, his face hid in his hands, was kneeling in the grass, upon a grave. He had scatter-
ed his bouquet. At the end of the grave, at an elevation which marked the head, there was a
black wooden cross, with this name in white letters: COLONEL BARON PONTMERCY. He heard
Marius sobbing.

The lass was a tomb.



VIII. MARBLE AGAINST GRANITE



It was here that Marius had come the first time he absented himself from Paris. It was here
that he returned every time that M. Gillenormand said: he sleeps out.

Lieutenant Theodule was absolutely diconcerted by this unexpected encounter with a sepulchre;
he experienced a disagreeable and singular sensation which he was incapable of analysing,
and which was made up of respect for a tomb mingled with respect for a colonel. He retreated,
leaving Marius alone in the churchyard, and there was something of discipline in this retreat.
Death appeared to him with huge epaulets, and he gave him almost a military salute. Not know-
ing what to write to his aunt, he decided to write nothing at all; and probably nothing would
have resulted from the discovery made by Theodule in regard to Marius' amours, had not, by one
of those mysterious arrangements so frequently accidental, the scene at Vernon been almost
immediately followed by a sort of counter-blow at Paris.

Marius returned from Vernon early in the morning of the third day, was set down at his grand-
father's, and, fatigued by the two nights Fused in the diligence, feeling the need of making
up for hislack of sleep by an hour at the swimming school, ran quickly up to his ' room, took
only time enough to lay off his travelling coat and the black ribbon which he wore about his
neck, and went away to the bath.

M. Gillenormand, who had risen early like all old persons who are in good health, had heard
him come in, and hastened as fast as he could with his old legs, to climb to the top of the
stairs where Marius'room was, that he might embrace him, question him while embracing him,
and find out something about where he came from.

But the youth bad taken less time to go down than the octogenarian to go up. and when
Grandfather Gillenormand entered the garret room, Marius was no longer there.

The bed was not disturbed, and upon the bed were displayed without distrust the coat and the
black ribbon.

"I like that better," said M. Gillenormand.

And a moment afterwards he entered the parlour where Made' moiselle Gillenormand the elder
was already seated, embroidering her cab wheels.

The entrance was triumphal.

M. Gillenormaml held in one hand the coat and in the other the neck ribbon, and cried:

"Victory! We are going to penetrate the mystery! we shall know the end of the end, we shall
feel of the libertinism of our trickster! here we are with the romance even. I have the por-
trait!"

In fact, a black shagreen box, much like to a medallion, was fastened to the ribbon.

The old man took this box and looked at it some time without opening it, with that air of
desire, ravishment, and anger, with which a poor, hungry devil sees an excellent dinner pass
under his nose, when it is not for him.

"For it is evidently a portrait. I know all about that. This is worn tenderly upon the heart.
What fools they are! Some abominable quean, enough to make one shudder probably! Young
folks have such bad taste in these days!"

"Let us see, father," said the old maid.

The box opened by pressing a spring. They found nothing in it but a piece of paper carefully
folded.

"From the same to the same," said M. Gillenonnand, bursting with laughter. "I know what that
is. A love-letter!"

"Ah! then let us read it!" said the aunt.

And she put on her spectacles. They unfolded the paper and read this:

"For my son-.--The emperor made men baron upon the battlefield of Waterloo. Since the resto-
ration contests this title which I have bought with my blood, my son will take it and bear
it. I need not say that he will be worthy of it."

The feelings of the father and daughter cannot he described. They felt chilled as by the
breath of a death's head. They did not exchange a word. M. Gillenormand, however, said in a
low voice, and as if talking to himself:

"It is the handwriting of that sabrer."

The aunt examined the paper, turned it on all sides, then put it hack in the box.

Just at that moment, a little oblongpackage, wrapped in blue paper, fell from a pocket of the
coat. Mademoiselle enlhamrmand picked it up and unfolded the blue leper. It was Marius' hundred
eds. She passed one of them to M. Gillenonnand, who read: Baron Marius Pontmercy.

The old man rang. Nicolette came. M. Gillenormand took the rib-bon, the box, and the coat,
threw them all on the floor in the middle of the parlour, and said:

"Take away those things."

A full hour passed in complete silence. The old man and the old maid sat with their hacks turned
to one another, and were probably, each on their side, thinking over the same things. At the end
of that hour, aunt Gillenonnand said:

"Pretty!"

A few minutes afterwards, Marius made his appearance. Ile came in. Even before crossing the
threshold of the parlour, he perceived his grandfather holding one of his cards in his hand,
who, on seeing him, exclaimed with his crushing air of sneering, bourgeois superiority:

"Stop! stop! stop! stop! stop! you are a baron now. I present you my compliments. What does this
mean?"

Marius coloured slightly, and answered:

"It means that I am my father's son."

M. Gillenormand checked his laugh, and said harshly:

"Your father; I am your father."

"My father," resumed Marius with downcast eyes and stern manner, "was a humble and heroic man,
who served the republic and France gloriously, who was great in the greatest history that men
have ever made, who lived a quarter of a century in the camp, by day under grape and under balls,
by night in the snow, in the mud, and in the rain, who captured colours, who received twenty
wounds, who died forgotten and abandoned, and who had but one fault; that was in loving too dear-
ly two ingrates, his country and me."

This was more than M. Gillenonnand could listen to. At the word, Republic, he rose, or rather,
sprang to his feet. Every one of the words which Marius had pronounced, had produced the effect
upon the old royalist's face, of a blast from a bellows upon a burning coal. From dark he had be-
come red, from red purple, and from purple glowing.

"Marius!" exclaimed he, "abominable child! I don't know what your father was! I don't want to
know! I know nothing about him and I don't know him! but what I do know is, that there was nev-
er anything but miserable wretches among all that rabble! that they were all beggars, assassins,
red caps, thieves! I say all! I say all! I know nobody! I say all! do you hear, Marius? Look you,
indeed. you are as much a baron as my slipper! they were all bandits who served Robespierre! all
brigands who served Buonaparte! all traitors who betrayed, betrayed, betrayed! their legitimate
king! all cowards who ran from the Prussians and English at Waterloo! That is what I know. If your
father is among them I don't know him, I am sorry for it, so much the worse, your servant!"

In his turn, Marius now became the coal, and M. Gillenormand the bellows. Marius shuddered in ev-
ery limb, he knew not what to do, his head burned. He was the priest who sees all his wafers
thrown to the winds, the fakir who sees a passer-by spit upon his idol. He could not allow such
things to be said before him unanswered. But what could he do? His father had been trodden under
foot and stamped upon in his presence, but by whom? by his grandfather. How should he avenge
the one without outraging the other? It was impossible for him to insult his grandfather, and it
was equally impossible for him not to avenge his father. On one hand a sacred tomb, on the other
white hairs. He was for a few moments dizzy and staggering with all this whirlwind in his head;
then he raised his eyes, looked straight at his grandfather, and cried in a thundering voice:

"Down with the Bourbons, and the great hog Louis XVIII!"

Louis XVIII. had been dead for for years; but it was all the mine to him.

The old man, scarlet as be was, suddenly became whiter than his hair. He turned towards a bust
of the Duke de Berry which stood upon the mantel, and bowed to it profoundly with a sort of pec-
uliar majesty. Then he walked twice, slowly and in silence, from the fireplace to the window and
from the window to the fireplace, traversing the whole length of the room and making the floor
crack as if an image of stone were walking over it. The second time, he bent towards his daughter,
who was enduring the shock with the stupor of an aged sheep, and said to her with a smile that
was almost calm:

"A baron like Monsieur and a bourgeois like me cannot remain under the same roof."

And all at once straightening up, pallid, trembling, terrible, his forehead swelling with the fear-
ful radiance of anger, he stretched his arm towards Marius and cried to him:

"Be off."

Marius left the house.

The next day, M. Gillenormand said to his daughter:

"You will send sixty pistoles every six months to this blood-drinker, and never speak of him to
me again."

Having an immense residuum of fury to expend, and not knowing what to do with it, he spoke to his
daughter with coldness for more than three months.

Marius, for his part, departed in indignation. A circumstance, which we must mention, had aggra-
vated his exasperation still more. There are always such little fatalities complicating domestic
dramas. Feelings are embittered by them, although in reality the faults are none the greater. In
hurriedly carrying away, at the old man's command, Marius' "things" to his room, Nicolette had,
without perceiving it, dropped, prohably on the garret stairs, which were dark, the black shagreen
medallion which contained the paper written by the colonel. Neither the paper nor the medallion
could be found. Marius was convinced that "Monsieur Gillenommnd"--from that day forth he never
named him otherwise--had thrown "his father's wil!" into the fire. He knew by heart the few
lines written by the colonel, and consequently nothing was lost. But the paper, the writing.
that sacred relic, all that was his heart itself. What had been done with it?

Marius went away without saying where he was going, and without knowing where he was going. with
thirty francs. his watch, and a (melodies in a carpet kg. He hired a chrinkt by the hour, jumped
in, and drove at random towards the Latin quarter.

What was Marius to do?




　　　　　　　BOOK FOURTH
THE FRIENDS OF THE A B C



I. A GROUP WHICH ALMOST BECAME HISTORIC



AT THAT PERIOD, apparently indifferent, something of a revolutionary thrill was vaguely
felt. Whispers coming from the depths of '89 and of '92 were in the air. Young Paris was,
excuse the expression, in the process of moulting. People were transformed almost without
suspecting it, by the very movement of the time. The hand which moves over the dial moves
also among souls. Each one took the step forward which was before him. Royalists became
liberals, liberals became democrats.

It was like a rising tide, complicated by a thousand ebbs; the peculiarity of the ebb is
to make mixtures; thence very singular combinations of ideas; men worshipped at the same
time Napoleon and liberty. We are now writing history. These were the mirages of that day.
Opinions pass through phases. Voltairian royalism, a grotesque variety, had a fellow not
less strange, Bonapartist liberalism.

Other groups of minds were more serious. They fathomed principle; they attached themselves
to right. They longed for the absolute, they caught glimpses of the infinite realisations;
the absolute by its very rigidity, pushes the mind towards the boundless, and makes it
float in the illimitable. There is nothing like dream to create the future. Utopia today,
flesh and blood to-morrow.

Advanced opinions had double foundations. The appearance of mystery threatened "the estab-
lished order of things," which was sullen and suspicious--a sign in the highest degree revo-
lutionary. The reservations of power meet the reservations of the people in the sap. The
incubation of insurrections replies to the plotting of coups d'etat.

At that time there were not yet in France any of those underlying organisations like the
German Tugenbund and the Italian Carbonari; but here and there obscure excavations were
branching out. La Cougourde was assuming form at Aix; there was in Paris, among other af-
filiations of this end, the Society of the Friends of the A B C.

Who were the Friends of the A B C? A society having as its aim, in appearance the educa-
tion of children; in reality, the elevation of men.

They declared themselves the Friends of the A B C. The abaisse [the abased] were the
people. They wished to raise them up. A pun at which you should not laugh. Puns are some-
times weighty in politics, witness the Castratus ad castra, which made Narses a general
of an army; witness, Barbari et Barbarini; witness, Fueros y Fuegos; witness, Tu es Petrus
et super hanc Petram, etc., etc.

The Friends of the A B C were not numerous, it was a secret society in the embryonic state;
we should almost say a coterie, if coteries produced heroes. They met in Paris, at two
places, near the Halles, in a wine shop called Corinthe, which will be referred to here-
after, and near the Pantheon, in a little coffeehouse on the Place Saint Michel, called
Le Cafe Musain, now torn down; the first of these two places of rendezvous was near the
working-men, the second near the students.

The ordinary conventicles of the Friends of the A B C were held in a back room of the
Cafe Musain.

This room, quite distant from the cafe, with which it communicated by a very long passage,
had two windows, and an exit by a private stairway upon the little Rue des Gres. They
smoked, drank, played, and laughed there. They talked very loud about everything, and in
whispers about something else. On the wall was nailed, an indication sufficient to awaken
the suspicion of a police officer, an old map of France under the republic.

Most of the Friends of the A B C were students, in thorough under-standing with a few
working-men. The names of the principal are as follows. They belong to a certain extent
to history; Enjolras, Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Courfeyrac, Bahorel, Lesgle
or Laigle, Joly, Grataire.

These young men constituted a sort of family among themselves, by force of friendship.
All except Laigle were from the South.

This was a remarkable group. It has vanished into the invisible depths which are behind
us. At the point of this drama which we have now reached, it may not be useless to throw
a ray of light upon these young heads before the reader sees them sink into the shadow
of a tragic fate.

Enjolras, whom we have named first, the reason why will be seen by-and-by, was an only
son and was rich.

Enjolras was a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible. He was angelical-
ly beautiful. He was Antinous wild. You would have said, to see the thoughtful reflection
of his eye, that he had already, in some preceding existence, passed through the
revolutionary apocalypse. He had the tradition of it like an eye-witness. He knew all
the little details of the grand thing, a pontifical and warrior nature, strange in a youth.
He was officiating and militant; from the immediate point of view, a soldier of demo-
cracy; above the movement of the time, a priest of the ideal. He had a deep eye, lids
a little red, thick under lip, easily becoming disdainful, and a high forehead. Much fore-
head in a face is like much sky in a horizon. Like certain young men of the beginning of
this century and the end of the last century, who became illustrious in early life, lie
had an exceedingly youthful look, is fresh as a young girl's, although he had hours of
pallor. He was now a man, but he seemed a child still. His twenty-two years of age appear-
ed seventeen; he was serious, he did not seem to know that there was on the earth a being
called woman. He had but one passion, the right; but one thought, to remove all obstacles.
Upon Mount Aventine, he would have been Gracchus; in the Convention, he would have been
Saint Just. He hardly saw the roses, he ignored the spring, he did not hear the birds
sing; Evadne's bare bosom would have moved him no more than Aristogeiton; to him, as to
Harmodius, flowers were good only to hide the sword. He was severe in his pleasures. Be-
fore everything but the republic, he chastely dropped his eyes. He was the marble lover
of liberty. His speech was roughly inspired and had the tremor of a hymn. He astonished
you by his soaring. Woe to the love affair that should venture to intrude upon him! Had
any grisette of the Place Cambrai or the Rue Saint Jean de Beauvais, seeing this college
boy's face, this form of a page, those long fair lashes, those blue eyes, that hair fly-
ing in the wind, those rosy cheeks, those pure lips, those exquisite teeth, felt a desire
to taste all this dawn, and tried her beauty upon Enjolras, a surprising and terrible
look would have suddenly shown her the great gulf, and taught her not to confound with
the gallant cherubim of Beaumarchais the fearful cherubim of Ezekiel.

Beside Enjolras who represented the logic of the revolution, Combeferre represented its
philosophy. Between the logic of the revolution and its philosophy, there is this differ-
ence--that its logic could conclude with war, while its philosophy could only end in peace
Combeferre completed and corrected Enjolras He was lower and broader. His desire was to
instil into all minds the broad principles of general ideas; he said "Revolution, but civ-
ilisation;" and about the steep mountain he spread the vast blue horizon. Hence, in all
Combeferre's views, there was something attainable and practicable. Revolution with Comb-
eferre was more respirable than with Enjolras. Enjolras expressed its divine right, and
Combeferre its natural right. The first went as far as Robespierre; the second stopped at
Condorcet. Combeferre more than Enjolras lived the life of the world generally. Had it
been given to these two young men to take a place in history, one would have been the up-
right man, the other would have been the wise man. Enjolras was more manly. Combferre
was more humane. Homo and Vir indeed express the exact shade of difference. Combeferre
was gentle, as Enjolras was severe, from natural purity. He loved the word citizen, but he
preferred the word man. He would have gladly said: Hombre, like the Spaniards. He read
everything, went to the theatres, attended the public courts, learned the polarisation of light
from Arago, was enraptured with a lecture in which Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had explained
the double function of the exterior carotid artery and the interior carotid artery, one of
which supplies the face, the other the brain; he kept pace with the times, followed science
step by step, confronted Saint Simon with Fourier, deciphered hieroglyphics, broke the peb-
bles which he found and talked about geology, drew a moth-butterfly from memory, pointed
out the mistakes in French in the dictionary of the Academy, studied Puysegur and Deleuze,
affirmed nothing, not even miracles; denied nothing, not even ghosts; looked over the files
of the Moniteur, reflected. He declared the future was in the hands of the schoolmaster,
and busied himself with questions of education. He desired that society should work with-
out cawing at the elevation of the intellectual and moral level; at the coming of knowledge,
at bringing ideas into circulation, at the growth of mind in youth; and he feared that the
poverty of the methods then in vogue, the meanness of a literary world which was cir-
cumscribed by two or three centuries, called classical, the tyrannical dogmatism of offi-
cial pedants, scholastic prejudices and routine, would result in making artificial oyster-
beds of our colleges. He was learned, purist, precise, universal, a hard student, and at
the same time given to musing. "even chimerical," said his friends. He believed in all
the dreams: railroads, the suppression of suffering in surgical operations, the fixing of
the image in the camera obscura, the electric telegraph, the steering of balloons. Little
dismayed, moreover, by the citadels built upon all sides against the human race by super-
stitions, despotisms, and prejudices, he was one of those who think that science will at
last turn the position. Enjolras was a thief; Combeferre was a guide. Yon would have pre-
ferred to fight with the one and march with the other. Not that Combeferre was not capa-
ble of fighting; he did not refuse to close with an obstacle. and to attack it by main
strength and by explosion, but to put, gradually, by the teaching of axioms and the pro-
mulgation of positive laws, the human race in harmony with its destinies, pleased him
better; and of the two lights, his inclination was rather for illumination than for con-
flagration.:A fire would cause a dawn, undoubtedly, but why not wait for the break of
day? A volcano enlightens, but the morning enlightens still better. Combferre, perhaps,
preferred the pure radiance of the beautiful to the glory of the sublime. A light dis-
turbed by smoke, an advance purchased by violence but half satisfied this tender and
serious mind. A headlong plunge of a people into the truth, a '93, startled him; still
stagnation repelled him yet more, in it he felt putrefaction and death; on the whole,
be liked foam better than miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the cess-pool, and the
Falls of Niagara to the Lake of hlontfaucon. In short, he desired neither halt nor haste.
While his tumultuous friends, chivalrously devoted to the absolute, adored and asked for
splendid revolutionary adventures, Combeferre inclined to let progress do her work,--the
good progress; cold, perhaps, but pure; methodical, but irreproachable! phlegmatic, but
imperturbable. Combeferre would have knelt down and clasped his hands, asking that the
future might come in all its radiant purity and that nothing might disturb the unlimited
virtuous development of the people. "The good must be innocent," he repeated incessantly.
And in fact, if it is the grandeur of the revolution to gaze steadily upon the dazzling
ideal, and to fly to it through the lightnings, with blood and fire in its talons, it is
the beauty of progress to be without a stain; and there is between Washington, who rep-
resents the one, and Danton, who incarnates the other, the difference which separates the
angel with the wings of a swan, from the angel with the wings of an eagle.

Jean Prouvaire was yet a shade more subdued than Combeferre. He called himself Jehan,
from that little momentary fancifulness which mingled with the deep and powerful movement
from which arose the study of the Middle Aga, Own so necessary. Jean Prouvaire was addict-
ed to love; he cultivated a pot of flowers, played on the flute, made verses, loved the peo-
ple, mourned over woman, wept over childhood, confounded the future and God in the same
faith. and blamed the revolution for having cut off a royal head, that of Andre Chenier.
His voice was usually delicate, but at times suddenly became masculine. He was well read,
even to erudition, and almost an orientalist. Above all, he was good, and, a very natural
thing to one who knows how near goodness borders upon grandeur, in poetry he preferred the
grand. He understood Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; and that served him only to read
four poets: Dante, Juvenal, AEschylus, and Isaiah. In French, he preferred Corneille to
Racine, and Agrippa d'Aubigne to Corneille. He was fond of strolling in fields of wild oats
and blue-bells, and paid almost as much attention to the clouds as to passing events. His
mind had two attitudes--one towards man, the other towards God: he studied, or he contem-
plated. All day he pondered over social questions: wages, capita,. credit, marriage, reli-
gion, liberty of thought, liberty of love. education, punishment, misery, association, pro-
perty, production and distribution, the lower enigma which covers the human ant-hill with
a shadow; and at night he gazed upon the stars, those enormous beings. Like Enjolras, he
was rich. and an only son. He spoke gently. bent his head, cast down his eyes, smiled with
embarrassment, dressed badly, had an awkward air, blushed at nothing, was very timid,
still intrepid.

Feuilly was a fan-maker, an orphan, who with difficulty earned three francs a day, and who
had but one thought, to deliver the world. He had still another desire--to instruct himself;
which he al:totalled deliverance. He had taught himself to read and write; all that he knew,
he had learned alone. Feuilly was a generous heart. He had an immense embrace. This orphan
had adopted the people. Being without a mother, he had meditated upon his mother country.
He was not willing that there should he any man upon the earth without a country. He nur-
tured within himself, with the deep divination of the man of the people, what we now call
the idea of nationality. He had learned history expressly that he might base his indig-
nation upon a knowledge of its cause. In this new upper room of utopists Firtiedhrly inter-
ested in France, he represented the foreign nations. His specialty was Greece, Poland,
Hungary-, the Danubian Provinces. and Italy. He uttered these names incessantly, in sea-
son and out of season, with the tenacity of the right. Turkey upon Greece and Tito-silly,
Russia upon Warsaw, Austria upon 'Venice. these violations exasperated him. The grand high-
way robbery of 1772 excited him above all. There is no more soverign eloquence than the
truth in indignation; he was eloquent with this eloquence. He was never done with that in-
famous date. 1772, that noble and valiant people blotted out by treachery, that threefold
crime, that monstrous ambuscade, prototype and pattern of all those terrible suppressions
of states which, since, have stricken several noble nations, and have, so to say, erased
the record of their birth. All the contemporary assaults upon society date from the parti-
tion of Poland. The partition of Poland is a theorem of which all the present political
crimes are corollaries. Not a despot, not a traitor, for a century past, who has not vised,
confirmed, countersigned, and set his initials to, ne varietur, the partition of Poland.
When you examine the list of modern treasons, that appears first of all. The Congress of
Vienna took advice of this crime before consummating its own. The halloo was sounded by
1772, 1815 is the quarry. Such was the usual text of Feuilly. This poor working man had
made himself a teacher of justice. and she rewarded him by making him grand. For there is
in fact eternity in the right. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can he Teutonic
The kings lose their labour at this, and their honour. Sooner or later, the submerged
country floats to the surface and reappears. Greece again becomes Greece, Italy again be-
comes Italy. The protest of the right against the fact, persists forever. The robbery of
a temple never becomes prescriptive. These lofty swindles have no mint You cannot pick
the mark out of a nation as you can nut of a handerkerchief.

Courfeyrac had a father whose name was M. de Courfeyrac. One of the fake ideas of the
restoration in point of aristocracy and nobility was its faith in the particle. The particle,
we know, has no significance. But the bourgeois of the time of La Minerve considered this
poor de so highly that men thought themselves obliged to renounce it. M. de Chauvelin call-
ed himself M. Chauvelin, M. de Catnartin, M. Caumartin, M. de Constant de Rebecque, Benja-
min Constant, M. de Lafayette, M. Lafayette. Courfeyrac did not wish to be behind, and
called himself briefly Courfeyrae

We might almost, in what concerns Courfeyrac, stop here, and content ourselves with say-
ing as to the remainder: Courfeyrac, see Tholomyes.

Courfeyrac had in fact that youthful animation which we might call the diabolic beauty of
mind. In later life, this dies out, like the playfulness of the kitten, and all that grace
ends, on two feet in the bourgeois, and on four paws in the mouser.

This style of mind is transmitted from generation to generation of students, passed from
hand to hand by the successive growths of youth, quasi cursores, nearly always the same:
so that, as we have just indicated, any person who has listened to Courfeyrac in 1828
would have thought he was hearing Tholomyes in 1817. Courfeyrac only was a brave fellow.
Beneath the apparent similarities of the exterior mind, there was great dissimilarity be-
tween Tholomyes and him. The latent man which existed in each. was in the first altogether
different from what it was in the second. There was in Tholomyes an attorney, and in
Courfeyrae a paladin.

Enjolras was the chief, Combeferre was the guide, Courfeyrae was the centre. The others
gave more light, he gave more heat; the truth is, that he had all the qualities of a
centre, roundness and radiance.

Bahorel had figured in the bloody tumult of June, 1822, on the occasion of the burial
of young Lallemand.

Bahorel was a creature of good humour and bad company, brave, a spendthrift, prodigal al-
most to generosity, talkative almost to eloquence, bold almost to effrontery; the best
possible devil's pie; with fool-hardy waistcoats and scarlet opinions; a wholesale blust-
erer, that is to say, liking nothing so well as a quarrel unless it were emeute, and no-
thing so well as an emeute unless it were a revolution; always ready to break a paving-
stone, then to tear up a street, then to demolish a government, to see the effect of it;
a student of the eleventh year. He had adopted for his motto: never a lawyer, and for his
coat of arms a bedroom table on whichyou might discern a square cap. Whenever he passed
by the law-school, hich rarely happened, he buttoned up his overcoat, the pafetot was
not yet invented, and he took hygienic precautions. He said of the portal of the school:
what a (untold man land of the dean, If. Delvincourt: what a menu:. mem I He saw in his
studies subjects (or ditties, and in his proles son opportunities for caricature. He ate
up in doing nothing a considerable allowance, something like three thousand francs. His
His parents were peasants, in whom he had succeeded in inculcating a respect for their son.

He said of them: "They are peasants and not bourgeois; which explains their intelligence."

Bahorel, a capricious man, was scattered over several cafes; the others had habits, he had
none. He loafed. To err is human. To loaf is Parisian. At bottom, a penetrating mind and
more of a thinker than he seemed.

He served as a bond between the Friends of the A B C and some other groups which were
without definite shape, but which were to take form afterwards.

In this conclave of young heads there was one bald member.

The Marquis d'Avaray, whom Louis XVIII. made a duke for having helped him into a cab the
day that he emigrated, related that in 1814, on his return to France, as the king landed
at Calais, a man presented a petition to him. "What do you want?" said the king.

"Sire, a post-office."

"What is your name?"

"L'Aigle." [The eagle].

The king scowled, looked at the signature of the petition and saw the name written thus:
LESGLE. This orthography, anything but Bonapartist, pleased the king, and he began to
smile. " Sire," resumed the man with the petition, "my ancestor was a dog-trainer surnamed
Lesgueules [The Chaps]. This surname has become my name. My name is Lesgueules, by contrac-
tion Lesgle, and by corruption L'Aigle." This made the king finish his smile. He afterwards
gave the man the post-office at Meaux, either intentionally or inadvertently.

The bald member of the club was son of this Lesgle, or Legle, and signed his name Legle (de
Meaux). His comrades, for the sake of brevitY, called him Bossuet.

Bossuet was a cheery fellow who was unlucky. His specialty was to succeed in nothing. On the
other hand, he laughed at everything At twenty-five he was bald. His father had died owning
a house and some lanot but he, the son, had found nothing more urgent than to lose this
house and land in a bad speculation. He had nothing left: He had considerable knowledge and
wit, but he always miscarried. Everything failed him, everything deceived him; whatever he
built up fell upon him. If he split wood, he cut his finger. If he had a mistress, he very
soon discovered that he had also a friend. Every moment some misfortune happened to
him; hence his jovality. He said: I live under the roof of the falling tiles. Rarely astonished
he was always expecting some accident, he took ill luck with serenity and smiled at the vex-
ations of destiny like one who hears a jest. He was poor, but his fund of good-humour was
inexhaustible. He soon reached his last sou, never his last burst of laughter. When met by
adversity, he saluted that acquaintance cordially, he patted catastrophes on the back; he
was so familiar with fatality as to call it by its nick-name. "Good morning, old Genius,"
he would say.

These persecutions of fortune had made him inventive. He was full of resources. He had no
money, but he found means, when it seemed good to him, to go to "reckless expenses." One
night, he even spent a hundred francs on a supper with a quean, which inspired him in the
midst of the orgy with this memorable saying: "Daughter of five louis, pull off my boots."

Bossuet was slowly making his way towards the legal profession; he was doing his law, in
the manner of Bahorel. Bossuet had never much domicile, sometimes none at all. He lodged
sometimes with one, sometimes with another, oftenest with Joly. Joly was studying medicine.
He was two years younger than Bousset.

Joly was a young Malade Imaginaire. What he had learned in medicine was rather to be a pa-
tient than a physician. At twenty-three, he thought himself a valetudinarian, and passed his
time in looking at his tongue in a mirror. He declared that man is a magnet, like the needle,
and in his room he placed his bed with the head to the south and the foot to the north, so
that at night the circulation of the blood should not be interfered with by the grand magne-
tic current of the globe. In stormy weather, he felt his pulse. Nevertheless, the gayest of
all. All these incoherences, young, notional, sickly, joyous, got along very well together,
and the result was an eccentric and agreeable person whom his comrades, prodigal of conso-
nants, called Jolllly. "You can fly upon four L's," [aieles, wings] said Jean Prouvaire:-

Joly had the habit of rubbing his nose with the end of his cane which is an indication of
a sagacious mind.

All these young men, diverse as they were, and of whom, as a whole we ought only to speak
seriously, had the same religion: Progress.

All were legitimate sons of the French Revolution. The lightest became solemn when pronoun-
cing this date: '89. Their fathers according to the flesh, were or had been Feuillants, Roy-
alists, Doctrinaires; it mattered little; this hurly-burly which antedated them, had nothing
to do with them; they were young; the pure blood of principles flowed in their veins. They
attached themselves without an intermediate shade to incorruptible right and to absolute
duty.

Affiliated and initiated, they secretly sketched out their ideas.

Among all these passionate hearts and all these undoubting minds there was one sceptic. How
did he happen to be there? from juxtaposition. The name of this sceptic was Grantaire, and
he usually signed with the rebus: R [grand R, great R]. Grantaire was a man who took good
care not to believe anything. He was, moreover, one of the students who had learned most
during their course in Paris; knew that the best coffee was at the Cafe Lemblin, and the
best billiard table at the Cafe Voltaire; that you could find good rolls and good girls at
the hermitage on the Boulevard du Maine, broiled chickens at Mother Saguet's, excellent
chowders at the Barriere de la Cunette, and a peculiar light white wine at the Barriere du
Combat. He knew the good places for everything; furthermore, boxing, tennis, a few dances,
and he was a profound cudgel-player. A great drinker to boot. He was frightfully ugly; the
prettiest shoebinder of that period, Irma Boissy, revolting at his ugliness, had uttered
this sentence: "Grantaire is impossible," but Grantaire's self-conceit was not disconcerted.
He looked tenderly and fixedly upon every woman, appearing to say of them all: if I only
would; and trying to make his comrades believe that he was in general demand.

All these words: rights of the people, rights of man, social contract, French Revolution,
republic, democracy, humanity, civilisation, religion, progress, were, to Grantaire, very
nearly meaningless. He smiled at them. Scepticism, that cries of the intellect, had not
left one entire idea in his mind. He lived in irony. This was his axiom: There is only one
certainty, my full glass. He ridiculed all devotion, under all circumstances, in the bro-
ther as well as the father, in Robespierre the younger as well as Loizerolles. "They were
very forward to be dead," he exclaimed. He said of the cross: "There is a gibbet which has
made a success." A rover, a gambler, a libertine, and often drunk, he displeased these young
thinkers by singing incessantly: "I loves the girls and I loves good wine." Air: Vive Henri W.

Still, this sceptic had a fanaticism. This fanaticism was neither an idea, nor a dogma, nor
an art, nor a science; it rwas a man: Enjolras. Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjo-
lras. To whom did this anarchical doubter ally himself in this phalanx of absolute minds? To
the most absolute. In what way did Enjolras subjugate him? By ideas? No. By a character. A
phenomenon often seen. A sceptic adhering to a believer; that is as sim-ple as the law of the
complementary colours. What we lack attracts us. Nobody loves the light like the blind man.
The dwarf adores the drum-major. The toad is always looking up at the sky; why? To see the
bird .fly. Grantaire, in whom doubt was creeping, loved to see faith soaring in Enjolras. He
had need of Enjolras. Without understanding it himself clearly, and without trying to explain
it, that chaste, healthy, firm, direct, hard, candid nature charmed him. He admired by in-
stinct, his opposite. His soft, wavering, disjointed, diseased, deformed ideas, attached them-
selves to Enjolras as to a backbone. His moral spine leaned upon that firmness. Grantaire,
by the side of Enjoiras, became somebody again. He was him moreover, composed of two
apparently incompatible elements. He was himself, was ironical and cordial. His indifference
was loving. His mind dispensed with belief, yet his heart could not dispense with friendship.
A thorough contradiction; for an affection is a conviction. His nature was so. There are
men who seem born to be the opposite, the reverse, the counterpart. They are Pol-
lux, Patroclus, Nisus, Eudamidas, Hephxstion, Pechmeja. They live only upon condition of
leaning on another; their names are continuations, and are only written preceded by the
conjunction and; their existence is not their own; it is the other side of a destiny which
is not theirs. Grantaire was one of these men. He was the reverse of Enjoiras.

We might almost say that affinities commence with the letters of the alphabet. In the ser-
ies, 0 and P are inseparable. You can, as you choose, pronounce 0 and P, or Orestes and
Pylades.

Grantaire, a true satellite of Enjolras, lived in this circle of young people; he dwelt in it;
he took pleasure only in it; he followed them everywhere. His delight was to see these
forms coming and going in the fumes of the wine. He was tolerated for his good-humour.

Enjolras, being a believer, disdained this sceptic, and being sober, scorned this drunkard.
He granted him a little haughty pity. Grantaire was an unaccepted Pylades. Always rudely
treated by Enjoiras, harshly repelled, rejected,yet returning, he said of Enjolras: "What a
fine statue!"



II. FUNERAL ORATION UPON BLONDEAU, BY BOSSUET


ON A CERTAIN AFTERNOON, which had, as we shall see, some coincidence with events before
related, Laigle de Meaux was leaning lazily back against the doorway of the Cafe Musain.
He had the appearance of a caryatid in vacation; he was supporting nothing but his reverie.
He was looking at the Place Saint Michel. Leaning back is a way of lying down standing
which is not disliked by dreamers. Laigle de Meaux was thinking, without melancholy, of a
little mishap which had befallen him the day before at the law-school and which modified
his personal plans for the future--plans which were, moreover, rather indefinite.

Reverie does not hinder a cabriolet from going by, nor the dreamer from noticing the cab-
riolet. Laigle de Meaux, whose eyes were wandering in a sort of general stroll, perceived,
through all his somnambulism, a two-wheeled vehicle turning into the square, which was
moving at a walk, as if undecided. What did this cabriolet want? why was it moving at a
walk?

Laigle looked at it. There was inside, beside the driver, a young man, and before the
young man, a large carpet-bag. The bag exhibited to the passers this name, written in big
black letters upon a card sewed to the cloth: MARIUS PONTMERCY.

This name changed Laigle's attitude. He straightened up and addressed this apostrophe to
the young man in the cabriolet:

"Monsieur Marius Pontmercy?"

The cabriolet, thus called upon, stopped.

The young man, who also seemed to be profoundly musing, raised his eyes.

"Well?" said he.

"You are Monsieur Marius Pontmercy?"

"Certainly."

"I was looking for you," said Laigle de Meaux.

"How is that?" inquired Marius; for he it was, in fact he had just left his grandfather's,
and he had before him a face which he saw for the first time. "I do not know you."

"Nor I either. I do not know you," answered Laigle.

Marius thought he had met a buffoon, and that this was the beginning of a mystification in
the middle of the street. He was not in a pleasant humour just at that moment. He knit his
brows; Laigle de Meaux, imperturable, continued:

"You were not at school yesterday."

"It is possible."

"It is certain."

"You are a student?" inquired Marius.

"Yes, Monsieur. Like you. The day before yesterday I happened to go into the school. You
know, one sometimes has such notions. The professor was about to call the roll. You know
that they are very ridiculous just at that time. If you miss the third call, they erase
your name. Sixty francs gone."

Marius began to listen. Laigle continued:

"It was Blondeau who was calling the roll. You know Blondeau; he has a very sharp and
very malicious nose, and delights in smelling out the absent. He slily commenced with the
letter P. I was not listening, concerned in that letter. The roll went on well, no erasure,
the universe was present, Blondeau was sad. I said to myself, Blondeau, my love, you won't
do the slightest execution today. Suddenly, Blondeau calls Marius Pontmercy; nobody answers.
Blondeau, full of hope, repeats louder: Marius Pontmercy? And he seizes his pen. Monsieur,
I have bowels. I said to myself rapidly: Here is a brave fellow who is going to be erased.
Attention. This is a real live fellow who is not punctual. He is not a good boy. He is not a
book-worm, a student who studies, a white-billed pedant strong on science, letters, theology,
and wisdom, one of those numskulls drawn out with four pins, a pin for each faculty, He is
an honourable idler who loafs, who likes to rusticate, who cultivates the grisette, who pays
his court to beauty, who is perhaps, at this very moment, with my mistress. Let us save him.
Death to Blondeau! At that moment Blondeau dipped his pen, black with erasures into the ink,
cast his tawny eye over the room, and repeated for the third time: Marius Pontmercy! I an-
swered: Present! In that way you were not erased."

"Monsieur!--" said Marius.

"And I was," added Laigle de Meaux.

"I do not understand you," said Marius.

Laigle resumed:

"Nothing more simple. I was near the chair to answer, and near the door to escape. The pro-
fessor was looking at me with a certain fixedness. Suddenly, Blondeau, who must be the malig-
nant nose of which Boileau speaks, leaps to the letter L. L is my letter; I am of Meaux, and
my name is Lesgle."

"L'Aigle!" interrupted Marius, "what a fine name."

"Monsieur, the Blondeau re-echoes this fine name and cries: 'Laigle!' I answer: Present! Then
Blondeau looks at me with the gentleness of a tiger, smiles, and says: If you are Pontmercy,
you are not Laigle. A phrase which is uncomplimentary to you, but which brought me only to
grief. So saying, he erases me."

Marius exclaimed:

"Monsieur, I am mortified

"First of all," interrupted Laigle, "I beg leave to embalm Blondeau in a few words of feeling eu-
logy. I suppose him dead. There wouldn't be much to change in his thinness, his paleness, his
coldness, his stiffness, and his odour. And I say: Erudimini qui judicatis terram. Here lies
Blondeau, Blondeau the Nose, Blondeau Nasica, the ox of discipline, bos discipline, the Mol-
ossus of his orders, the angel of the roll, who was straight, square, exact, rigid, honest,
and hideous. God has erased him as he erased me."

Marius resumed:

"I am very sorry--"

"Young man," said Laigle of Meaux, "let this be a lesson to you. In future, be punctual."

"I really must give a thousand excuses."

"Never expose yourself again to having your neighbour erased."

"I am very sorry."

Laigle burst out laughing.

"And I, in raptures; I was on the brink of being a lawyer. This rupture saves me. I renounce
the triumphs of the bar. I shall not defend the widow and I shall not attack the orphan. No
more toga, no more probation. Here is my erasure obtained. It is to you that I owe it, Monsieur
Pontmercy. intend to pay you a solemn visit of thanks. Where do you live?"

"In this cabriolet," said Marius.

"A sign of opulence," replied Laigle calmly. "I congratulate you. you have here rent of nine
thousand francs a year."

Just then Courfeyrac came out of the cafe.

Marius smiled sadly.

"I have been paying this rent for two hours, and I hope to get out of it; but, it is the usual
story, I do not know where to go."

"Monsieur," said Courfeyrac, "come home with me."

"I should have priority," observed Laigle, "but I have no home."

"Silence, Bossuet," replied Courfeyrac.

"Bossuet," said Marius, "but I thought you called yourself Laigle. "Of Meaux," answered Laigle;
"metaphorically, Bossuet."

Courfeyrac got into the cabriolet.

"Driver," said he, "Hotel de la Porte Saint Jacques."

And that same evening, Marius was installed in a room at the Hotel de la Porte Saint Jacques,
side by side with Courfeyrac.



III. THE ASTONISHMENTS OF MARIUS



IN A FEW DAYS, Marius was the friend of Courfeyrac. Youth is the season of prompt weldings and
rapid cicatrisations, Marius, in Courfeyrac 's pres-ence, breathed freely, a new thing for him.
Courfeyrac asked him no questions. He did not even think of it. At that age, the countenance
tells all at once. Speech is useless. There are some young men of whom \' might say their phys-
iognomies are talkative. They look at one another, they know one another.

One morning, however, Courfeyrac abruptly put this question to him "By the way, have you any pol-
itical opinions?"

"What do you mean?" said Marius, almost offended at the question.

"What are you?"

"Bonapartist democrat."

"Grey shade of quiet mouse colour," said Courfeyrac.

The next day, Courfeyrac introduced Marius to the Cafe Then he whispered in his ear with a smile:
"I must give you your admission into the revolution." And he took him into the room of the Friends
of the A B C. He presented him to the other members, saying in an under tone this simple word which
Marius did not understand: "A pupil."

Marius had fallen into a mental wasps' nest. Still, although silent and serious, he was not the
less winged, nor the less armed.

Marius, up to this time solitary and inclined to soliloquy and privacy by habit and by taste, was
a little bewildered at this flock of young men about him.. All these different progressives attack-
ed him at once, and perplexed him. The tumultuous sweep and sway of all these minds at liberty and
at work set his ideas in a whirl. Sometimes, in the confusion, they went so far from him that he had
some difficulty in finding them again. He heard talk of philosophy, of literature, of art, of hist-
ory, of religion, in a style he had not looked for. He caught glimpses of strange appearances; and,
as he did not bring them into perspective, he was not sure that it was not a chaos that he saw. On
abandoning his grandfather's opinions for his father's he had thought himself settled; he now sus-
pected, with anxiety, and without daring to confess it to himself, that he was not. The angle under
which he saw all things was beginning to change anew. A certain oscillation shook the whole horizon
of his brain. A strange internal moving-day. He almost suffered from it.

It seemed that there were to these young men no "sacred things." Marius heard, upon every subject,
a singular language annoying to his still timid mind.

A-theatre poster presented itself, decorated with the title of a tragedy of the old repertory, call-
ed classic: "Down with tragedy dear to the bourgeois!" cried Bahorel. And Marius heard Combeferre
reply.

"You are wrong, Bahorel. The bourgeoisie love tragedy, and upon that point we must let the bourgeoi-
sie alone. Tragedy in a wig has its reason for being, and I am not one of those who, in the name of
AEschylus, deny it the right of existence. There are rough drafts in nature; there are, in creation,
ready-made parodies; a bill which is not a bill, wings which are not wings, fins which are not fins,
claws which are not claws, a mournful cry which inspires us with the desire to laugh, there is the
duck. Now, since the fowl exists along with the bird, I do not see why classic tragedy should not
exist in the face of antique tragedy."

At another time Marius happened to be passing through the Rue Jean Jacques Rousseau between Enjolras
and Courfeyrac.

Courfeyrac took his arm:

"Give attention. This is the Rue Platriere, now called Rue Jean Jacques Rousseau, on account of a
singular household which lived on it sixty years ago. It consisted of Jean Jacques and Therese.
From time to time, little creatures were born in it. Therese brought them forth. Jean Jacques turned
them forth."

And Enjolras replied with severity:

"Silence before Jean Jacques! I admire that man. He disowned his children; very well; but he adopted
the people."

None of these young men uttered this word: the emperor. Jean Prouvaire alone sometimes said Napoleon;
all the rest said Bonaparte. Enjoiras pronounced Buonaparte.

Marius became confusedly astonished. Initium sapientix.



IV. THE BACK ROOM OF THE CAFE MUSAIN



OF THE CONVERSATIONS among these young men which Marius frequented and in which he sometimes
took part, one shocked him severely.

This was held in the back room of the Cafe Musain. Nearly all the Friends of the A B C were together
that evening. The large lamp was ceremoniously lighted. They talked of one thing and another without
passion and with noise. Save Enjoiras and Marius, who were silent! each one harangued a little at
random. The talk of comrades does sometimes amount to these harmless tumults. It was a play and a
fracas as much as a conversation. One threw out words which another caught up. They were talking in
each of the four corners.

No woman was admitted into this back room, except Louison, the dish-washer of the cafe, who passed
through it from time to time to go from the washroom to the "laboratory." Grantaire, perfectly boozy,
was deafening the corner of which he had taken possession, he was talking sense and nonsense with all
his might; he cried:

"I am thirsty. Mortals, I have a dream: that the tun of Heidelberg has an attack of apoplexy, and
that I am the dozen leeches which is to be applied to it. I would like a drink. I desire to forget
life. Life is a hideous invention of somebody I don't know who. It doesn't last, and it is good for
nothing. You break your neck to live. Life is a stage scene in which there is little that is pract-
ical. Happiness is an old sash painted on one side. The eccleslaist says: all is vanity; I agree with
that goodman who perhaps never existed. Zero, not wishing to go entirely naked, has clothed him-
self in vanity! the patching up of everything with big words! a kitchen is a laboratory, a dancer is
a professor, a mountebank is a gymnast, a boxer is a pugilist, an apothecary is a chemist, a hod-
carrier is an architect, a jockey is a sportsman, a wood-louse is a pterygoranchiate. Vanity has a
right and a wrong side; the right side is stupid, it is the negro with his beads; the wrong side is
silly, it is the philosopher with his rags. I weep over one and I laugh over the other. That which
is called honours and dignities, and even honour and dignity, is generally pinchbeck. Kings make a
plaything of human pride. Caligula made a horse consul; Charles II. made a sirloin a knight. Now pa-
rade yourselves then between the consul Incitatus and the baronet Roast-beef. As to the intrinsic
value of people, it is hardly respectable any longer. Listeh to the panegyric which neighbours pass
upon each other. White is ferocious upon white; should the lily speak, how it would fix out the
dove? a bigot gossiping about a devotee is more venomous than the asp and the blue viper. It is
a pity that I am ignorant, for I would quote you a crowd of things, but I don't know anything. For
instance, I always was bright; when I was a pupil with Gros, instead of daubing pictures, I spent
my time in pilfering apples. So much for myself; as for the rest of you, you are just as good as I
am. I make fun of your perfections, excellences, and good qualities. Every good quality runs into
a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous are not far from the prodigal, the brave man is
close to the bully; he who says very pious says slightly sanctimonious; there are just as many
vices in virtue as there are holes in the mantle of Diogenes. Which do you admire, the slain or
the slayer, Cesar or Brutus? People generally are for the slayer. Hurrah for Brutus! he slew. That
is virtue. Virtue, if it may be, but folly also. There are some queer stains on these great men.
The Brutus who slew Caesar was in love with a statue of a little boy. This statue was by the Greek
sculptor Strongylion, who also designed that statue of an amazon called the Beautiful-limbed,
Euknemos, which Nero carried with him on his journeys. This Strongylion left nothing but two stat-
ues which put Brutus and Nero in harmony. Brutus was in love with one and Nero with the other.
All history is only a long repetition. One century plagiarises another. The battle of Marengo copies
the battle of Pydna; the Tolbach of Clovis and the Austerlitz of Napoleon are as like as two drops
of blood. I make little account of victory. Nothing is so stupid as to vanquish; the real glory is
to convince. But try now to prove something! you are satisfied with succeeding, what mediocrity!
and with conquering, what misery! Alas, vanity and cowardice everywhere. Everything obeys success,
even grammar. Si volet zisus, says Horace. I despise therefore the human race. Shall we descend
from the whole to a part? Will you have me set about admiring the peoples? what People, if you
please? Greece? The Athenians, those Parisians of old times, killed Phocion as if we should say
Coligny, and fawned upon the tyrants to such a degree that Anacephoras said of Pisistratus:
His water attracts the bees. The most considerable man in Greece for fifty' year: was that
grammarian Philetas, who was so small and so thin that he was obliged to put lead on his shoes
so as not to be blown away by the wind. There was in the grand square of Corinth a statue by
the sculptor Silanion, catalogued by Pliny; this statue represented Episthates. What did Epis-
thates do? He invented the trip in wrestling. This sums up Greece and glory. Let us pass to o-
thers. Shall I admire lingland? Shall I admire France? France? what for? on account of Paris.
I have just told you my opinion of Athens. England? for what? on account of London? I hate
Carthage, And them London, the metropolis of luxury, is the capital of misery. In the single
parish of Charing Cross, there are a hundred deaths a year from starvation. Such is Albion. I
add, as a completion, that I have seen an English girl thane with a mom of roses and blue spec-
tacles. A groan then for England, If 1 do not admire John Bug, shall I admire Brother Jonathan
then? 1 have little mite for this bouher with his slaves. Take away time is money, and what is
left of England? take away cotton is king, and what is left of America? Germany is the lymph;
Italy is the bile. Shall we go iInto ecstasies over Russia? Voltaire admired her. He admired
China also. I confess that Russia has her beauties, among others a strong despotism: but I am
sorry for the despots. Thee have very delicate health. An Alexis decapitated, a Peter stabbed,
a Paul strangled. another Paul trampled down by blows from the heeld of a boot, divers Ivans
butchered. several Nicholases and Basils poisoned, all that indicates that the palace of the
Emperors of Russia is in an alarming condition of insalubrity. All civilised nations offer to
the admiration of the thinker this circumstance: war; but war, civilised war, exhausts and sums
up every form of banditism, from the brigandage of the Trabucaires of the gorges of Mount Jima
to the marauding of the Gamanche Indians in the Doubtful Pass. Pshaw! will you tell me Europe
is better than Asia for all that? I admit that Asia is ridiculous; but I do not quite see what
right you have to laugh at the Grand Lama, you people of the Occident who have incorporated
into your fashions and your elegancies all the multifarious ordures of majesty, from gum% Isa-
bella's dirty chemise to the chamber-chair of the dauphin. Messieurs humans, I tell you, not a
bit of it! It is at Brussels that they consume the most brandy, at Madrid the most chocolate,
at Amsterdam the most gin, at London the most wine, at Constantinople die most coffee, at Paris
the must absinthe: those are all the user utnotions. Paris takes the palm on the whole. In Paris,
the mg-pickers even are Sybarites: Diogenes would have much rather been a rag-picker in the
Place Maubert than a philosopher in the Piraeus. Learn this also: the wine-shops of the rag-pickers
are called bibines: the most celebrated are the Saucepans and the Slaughter-house. Therefore, O
drinking-shops, eating shops, tavern signs, bar-rooms, tea parties, meat markets, dance houses, bro-
thels, rag-pickers' tipling shops. caravanserai of the caliphs, I swear to you, I am a voluptuary.
I eat at Richard's at forty sous a head, I must have Persian carpets on which to roll Cleopatra
naked! Where is Cleopatra? Ah! it is you, Louison! Good morning."

Thus Grantaire, more than drunk, spread himself out in words catching up the dishwasher on her
way, in his corner of the Husain back room.

Bossuet, extending his hand, endeavored to impose silence upon him, and Grantains started again
stilt more beautifully:

"Eagle of Meaux, down with your claws. You have no effect upon me with your gesture of Hippo-
crates refusing his drugs to Arxerxes. I dispense you from quieting me. Moreover, I am sad.
What would you have me tell you? Man is wicked, man is deformed;' butterfly has succeeded,
man has missed fire. God failed on t animal. A crowd gives you nothing but choice.of ugliness.
The fi man you meet will he a wretch. Femme [woman] rhymes with fame infamous]. Yes, I have the
spleen, in addition to melanchc with nostalgia, besides hypochondria, and I sneer, and I rage,
an yawn, and I mu tired, and I am knocked in the head, and I. ant b mental! Let God go to the
Devil!"

"Silence. capital R!" broke in Bossuet, who was discussing a point of law aside, and who was more
than half buried in a string of judicial argot, of which here is the conclusion:

"And as for me, although I am hardly a legist, and at best amateur attorney, I maintain this:
that by the terms of the common law of Normandy, at St. Michael's, and for every year, an equiv-
alent must be paid for the benefit of the seigneur, saving the rights of others, by each and every
of them, as well proprietaries as those seized by inheritance, and this for all terms of years,
leases, freeholds, contracts domainiary and domainial, of mortgagees and mortgagnes?"

"Echo, plaintive nymph," muttered Grantaire.

Close beside Grantaire at a table which was almost silent, a sheet of paper, an inkstand and a
pen between two wine glasses. announced that a farce was being sketched out. This important busi-
ness was carried on in a whisper, and the two heads at work touched each other.

"We must begin by finding the mimes. When we have found the. names, we will find a subject."

"That is true. Dictate: I will write."

"Monsieur Dorimon."

"Wealthy?"

"Of course."

"His slaughter Celestine."

"--tine. What next?"

"Colonel Sainval."

"Sainval is old. I would say Valsin."

Besides these dramatic aspirants, another group, who also were taking advantage of the confusion
to talk privately, were discussing a duel. An old man, of thirty, was advising a young one, of
eighteen, and explaining to him what sort of an adversary he had to deal with.

"The devil! took out for yourself. He is a beautiful sword. His play is neat. He comes to the
attack, no lost feints, a pliant wrist, sparkling play, a flash, step exact, and ripostes mathematical.
Zounds! and he is left-handed, too."

In the corner opposite to Grantaire, Joly and Bahorel were playing dominoes and talking
of love.

"You are lucky," said Joly; "you have a mistress who is always laughing."

"That is a fault of hers," answered Bahorel. "Your mistress does wrong to laugh. It en-
courages you to deceive her. Seeing her gay takes away your remorse; if you see her sad,
your conscience troubles you."

"Ingrate! A laughing woman is so good a thing! And you never quarrel!"

"That is a part of the treaty we have made. When we made our little Holy Alliance, we
assigned to each our own boundary which we should never pass. What is situated towards
the north belongs to Vaud, towards the south to Gex. Hence our peace."

"Peace is happiness digesting."

"And you, Jolllly, how do you come on in your falling out with Mamselle--you know who I
mean?"

"She sulks with cruel patience."

"So you are a lover pining away."

"Alas!"

"If I were in your place, I would get rid of her."

"That is easily said."

"And done. Isn't it Musichetta that she calls herself?"

"Yes. Ah! my poor Bahorel, she is a superb girl, very literary with small feet, small hands,
dresses well, white, plump, and has eyes like a fortune teller. I am crazy about her."

"My dear fellow, then you must please her, be fashionable, and show off your legs. Buy a
pair of doeskin pantaloons at Staub's. They yield."

"At what rate?" cried Grantaire.

The third corner had fallen a prey to a poetical discussion. The Pagan mythology was
wrestling with the Christian mythology. The subject was Olympus, for which Jean Prouvaire,
by very romanticism, took sides. Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited,
he burst forth, as gaiety characterised his enthusiasm, and he was at once laughing and
lyric.

"Let us not insult the gods," said he. "The gods, perhaps, have not left us. Jupiter does
not strike me as dead. The gods are dreams, say you. Well, even in nature, such as it now
is, we find all the grand old pagan myths again. Such a mountain with the profile of a
citadel, like the Vignemarle, for instance, is still to me the head-dress of Cybele; it
is not proved that Pan does not come at night to blow into the hollow trunks of the will-
ows, while he stops the holes with his fingers one after another; and I have always be-
lieved that Io had something to do with the cascade of Pissevache."

In the last corner, politics was the subject. They were abusing the Charter of Louis XVIII.
Combeferre defended it mildly, Courfeyrac was energetically battering it to a breach. There
was on the table an unlucky copy of the famous Touquct Charter. Courfeyrac caught it up
and shook it, mingling with his arguments the rustling of that sheet of paper.

"First, I desire no kings; were it only from the economical point of view, I desire none; a
king is a parasite. We do not have kings gratis. Listen to this: cost of kings. At the death
of Francis L, the public debt of Prance was thirty thousand livres de rents; at the death of
Louis XIV., it was two thousand six hundred millions at twenty-eight livres the mark, which
was equivalent in 1760, according to Desmarest, to four thousand five hundred millions, and
which is equivalent today to twelve thousand millions. Secondly, no offence to Combeferre,
a charter granted is a vicious expedient of civilisation. To avoid the transition, to smoothe
the passage, to deaden the shock, to make the nation pass insensibly from monarchy to demo-
cracy by the practice of constitutional fictions, these are all detestable arguments! No!
no! never give the people a false light. Principles wither and grow pale in your constitu-
tional cave. No half measures, no compromises, no grant from the king, to the people. In all
these grants, there is an Article 14. Along with the hand which gives there is the claw which
takes back. I wholly refuse your charter. A charter is a mask; the lie is beneath it. A people
who accept a charter, abdicate. Right is right only when entire. Nol no charter!"

It was winter; two logs were crackling in the fireplace. It was tempting, and Courfeyrac could
not resist. He crushed the poor Touquet Charter in his band, and threw it into the fire. The pa-
per blazed up. Combeferre looked philosophically upon the burning of Louis XV M.'s masterpiece,
and contented himself with saying:

"The charter metamorphosed in flames."

And the sarcasms, the sallies, the jests, that French thing which is called high spirits, that
English thing which is called humour, good taste and bad taste, good reasons and bad reasons,
all the commingled follies of dialogue, rising at once and crossing from all parts of the room,
made above their heads a sort of joyous bombardment.



V. ENLARGEMENT OF THE HORIZON



THE jostlings of young minds against each other have this wonderful attribute, that one can
never foresee the spark, nor predict the flash. What may spring up in a moment? Nobody knows.
A burst of laughter follows a scene of tenderness. In a moment of buffoonery, the serious makes
its entrance. Impulses depend upon a chance word. The spirit of each is sovereign. A jest suf-
fices to open the door to the unlooked for. Theirs are conferences with sharp turns where the
perspective suddenly changes. Chance is the director of these conversations.

A stern thought, oddly brought out of a clatter of words, suddenly crossed the tumult of speech
in which Grantaire, Bahorel, Prouvaire, Bossuet, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac were confusedly
fencing.

How does a phrase make its way into a dialogue? whence comes it that it makes its mark all at
once upon the attention of those who hear it? We have just said, nobody knows. In the midst of
the uproar Bossuet suddenly ended some apostrophe to Combeferre with this date:

"The 18th of June, 1815: Waterloo."

At this name, waterloo, Marius, who was leaning on a table with a glass of water by him, took
his hand away from under his chin, and began to look earnestly about the room.

"Pardieu," exclaimed Courfeyrac (Parbleu, at that period, was falling into disuse), "that number
18 is strange, and striking to me. It is the fatal number of Bonaparte. Put Louis before and
Brumaire behind, you have the whole destiny of the man, with this expressive peculiarity, that
the beginning is hard pressed by the end."

Enjolras, till now dumb, broke the silence, and thus addressed Courfeyrae:

"You mean the crime by the expiation."

This word, crime, exceeded the limits of the endurance of Marius, already much excited by the
abrupt evocation of Waterloo.

He rose, he walked slowly towards the map of France spread out upon the wall, at the bottom of
which could be seen an island in a separate compartment; he laid his finger upon this compartment
and said:

"Corsica. A little island which has made France truly. grad." This was a breath of freezing air.
All was sHent. They felt that now something was to be said.

Bahorcl, replying to Bossuet, was just assuming a pet attitude. He gave it up to listen.

Emokas, whose blue eve was not fixed upon anybody, and seemed staring into space, answered without
looking at Marius:

"France needs no Corisca to be great. France is great because she is France. Quia nominor leo."

Marius felt no desire to retreat; he turned towards Enjolras, and his voice rang with a vibration
which came from the quivering of his nerves:

"God forbid that I should lessen France! but it is not lessening her to join her with Napoleon. Come,
let us talk then. I am a newcomer among you, but I confess that you astound me. Where are we?
who are we? who are you? who am 1? Let us explain ourselves about the emperor. I hear you say Buo-
naparte, accenting the like the royalists. I can tell you that my grandfather does better yet; he
says 13uonaparte. I thought you were young men. Where is your enthusiasm then? and what do you do
with it? whom do you admire, if you do not admire the emperor? and what more must you have? If you
do not like that great man, what great men would you have? He was everything. He was complete. He
had in his brain the cube of human faculties. He made codes like Justinian, he dictated like Caesar,
his conversation joined the lightning of Pascal to the thunderbolt of Tacitus, he made history and
he wrote it, his bulletins are Iliads, he combined the figures of Newton with the metaphors of Maho-
met, he left behind him in the Orient words as grand as the pyramids, at Tilsit he taught majesty
to emperors, at the Academy of Sciences he replied to Laplace, in the Council of State he held his
ground with Merlin, be gave a soul to the geometry of those and to the trickery of these, he was
legal with the attorneys and sidereal with the astronomers; like Cromwell blowing out one candle
when two were lighted, he went to the Temple to cheapen a curtain tassel; he saw everything; he
knew everything; which did not prevent him from laughing a goodman's laugh by the cradle of his lit-
tle child; and all at once, startled Europe listened, armies set themselves in march, parks of art-
illery rolled along, bridges of boats stretched over the rivers, clouds of cavalry galloped in the
hurricane, cries, trumpets, a trembling of thrones everywhere, the frontiers of the kingdoms oscil-
lated upon the map, the sound of a superhuman blade was heard leaping from its sheath, men saw him,
him, standing erect in the horizon with a flame in his hands and a resplendence in his eyes, unfold-
ing in the thunder his two wings, the Grand Army and the Old Guard, and he was the archangel of war!"

All were silent, and Enjolras bowed his head. Silence always has something of the effect of an acquie-
scence or of a sort of pushing to the wall. Marius, almost without taking breath, continued with burst
of enthusiasm:

"Be just, my friends! to he the empire of such an emperor, what a splendid destiny for a people, when
that people is France, and when it adds its genius to the genius of such a man! To appear and to
reign to march and to triumph, to have every capital for a magazine, to, take his grenadiers and make
kings of them, to decree the downfall of dynasties, to transfigure Europe at a double quickstep, so
that men feel, when you threaten, that you lay your hand on the hilt of the sword of God, to follow,
in a single man, Hannibal, Caesar, and Charlemagne, to be the people of one who mingles with your
every dawn the glorious announcement of a battle gained, to be wakened in the morning by the cannon
of the Invalides, to hurl into the mouth of day mighty words which blaze for ever, Marengo, Arcola, Aus-
terlitz, Jena, Wagram! to call forth at every moment constellations of victories in the zenith of the
centuries, to make the French Empire, the successor of the Roman Empire, to be the grand nation and
to bring forth the grand army, to send your legions flying over the whole earth as a mountain sends
its eagles upon all sides, to vanquish, to rule, to thunderstrike, to be in Europe a kind of gilded people
through much glory, to sound through history a Titan trumpet call, to conquer the world twice, by con-
quest and by resplendence, this is sublime, and what can be more grand?"

"To be free," said Combeferre.

Marius in his turn bowed his head: these cold and simple words had pierced his epic effusion like a
blade of steel, and he felt it vanish within him. When he raised his eyes, Combeferre was there no
longer. Satisfied probably with his reply to the apotheosis, he had gone out, and all, except Enjolras,
had followed him. The room was empty. Enjolras, remaining alone with Marius, was looking at him ser-
iously. Marius, meanwhile, having rallied his ideas a little, did not consider himself beaten; there was
still something left of the ebullition within him, which doubtless was about to find expression in syllo-
gisms arrayed against Enjolras, when suddenly they heard somebody singing as he was going down-
stairs. It was Combeferre, and what he was singing is this:

Si Cesar m'avait donne
La gloire et la guerre,
Et qu'il me fallutquitter
L'amour de ma mere,
Je dirais an grand Cesar:
Reprends ton sceptre et ton char,
J'aime mieux ma mere. o gue!
Jaime micux ma mere'

If Cesar had given me
Glory and war,
And if I must abandon
The love of my mother,
I would say to great Caesar:
Take thy sceptre and car,
I prefer my mother, ah me!
I prefer my mother.

The wild and tender accent with which Combeferre sang, gave to this stanza a strange grand-
eur. Marius, thoughtful and with his eyes directed to the ceiling, repeated almost mechanic-
ally: "my mother--"

At this moment, he felt Enjoins' hand on his shoulder.

"Citizen," said Enjolras to him, "my mother is the republic."



VI. RES ANGUSTA



THAT evening left Marius in a profound agitation, with a sorrowful darkness in his soul. He
was experiencing what perhaps the earth experiences at the moment when it is furrowed with
the share that the grains of wheat may be sown; it feels the wound alone; the thrill of the
germ and the joy of the fruit do not come until later.

Marius was gloomy. He had but just attained a faith; could he so soon reject it? He decided
within himself that he could not. He declared to himself that he would not doubt, and he be-
gan to doubt in spite of himself. To be between two religions, one which you have not yet
abandoned, and another which you have not yet adoptedt is insupportable; and twilight is
pleasant only to bat-like souls. Marius was an open eye, and he needed the true light. To him
the dusk of doubt was harmful. Whatever might be his desire to stop where he was, and to
hold fast there, he was irresistibly compelled to continue, to advance, to examine, to think,
to go forward. Where was that going to lead him? he feared, after having taken so many steps
which had brought him nearer to his father, to take now any steps which should separate them.
His dejection increased with every reflection which occurred to him. Steep cliffs rose about
him. He was on good terms neither with his grandfather nor with his friends; rash towards
the former, backward towards the others; and he felt doubly isolated, from old age, and also
from youth. He went no more to the Cafe Musain.

In this trouble in which his mind was plunged he scarcely gave a thought to certain serious
phases of existence. The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten. They
came and jogged his memory sharply.

One morning, the keeper of the house entered Marius' room, and said to him

"Monsieur Courfeyrac is responsible for you."

"But I am in need of money."

"Ask Courfeyrac to come and speak with me," said Mathis.

Courfeyrac came; the host left them. Marius related to him what he had not thought of telling
him before, that he was, so to speak, alone in the world, without any relatives.

"What are von going to become?" said Courfeyrac.

"I have no idea,' answered Marius.

"What are you going to do?"

"I have no idea."

."Have you any money?"

"Fifteen francs."

"Do you wish me to lend you some?"

"Never."

"Have you any clothes?"

"What you see."

"Have you any jewellery?"

"A watch."

"A silver one?"

"Gold, here it is."

"I know a dealer in clothing who will take your overcoat and one pair of trousers."

"That is good."

"You will then have but one pair of trousers, one waistcoat, one hat, and one coat."

"And my boots."

"What? you will not go barefoot? what opulence!"

"That will be enough."

"I know a watchmaker who will buy your watch."

"That is good."

"No, it is not good. What will you do afterwards?"

"What I must. Anything honourable at least."

"Do you know English?"

"Do you know German?"

"No."

"That is bad."

"Because a friend of mine, a bookseller, is making a sort of encyclopxdia, for which you
could have translated German or English articles. It is poor pay, but it gives a living."

"I will learn English and German."

"And in the meantime?"

"In the meantime I will eat my coats and my watch."

The clothes dealer was sent for. He gave twenty francs for the clothes. They went to the
watchmaker. He gave forty-five francs for the watch.

"That is not bad," said Marius to Courfeyrac, on returning to the house; "with my fifteen
francs, this makes eighty francs."

"The hotel bill?" observed Courfeyrac.

"Ah! I forgot," said Marius.

The host presented his bill, which must be paid on the spot. It amounted to seventy francs.

"I have ten francs left," said Marius.

"The devil," said Courfeyrac, "you will have five francs to eat while you are learning Eng-
lish, and five francs while you are learning German. That will be swallowing a language very
rapidly or a hundred-sous piece very slowly."

Meanwhile Aunt Gillenormand, who was really a kind person on sad occasions, had finally
unearthed Marius' lodgings.

One morning when Marius came home from the school, he found a letter from his aunt, and
the sixty pistoles, that is to say, six hundred francs in gold, in a sealed box.

Marius sent the thirty Louis back to his aunt, with a respectful letter, in which he told
her that he had the means of living, and that he could provide henceforth for all his nec-
essities. At that time he had three francs left.

The aunt did not inform the grandfather of this refusal, lest she should exasperate, him.
Indeed, had he not said: "Let nobody ever speak to me of blood-drinker?"

Marius left the Porte Saint Jacques Hotel, unwilling to contract debt.




　　　　　　　BOOK FIFTH
THE EXCELLENCE OF MISFORTUNE



I. MARIUS NEEDY.



LIFE became stern to Marius. To eat his coat and his watch was nothing. He chewed that in-
expressible thing which is called the cud of bitterness. A horrible thing, which includes
days without bread, nights without sleep, evenings without a candle, a hearth without a fire,
weeks without labour, a future without hope, a coat out at the elbows, an old hat which makes
young girls laugh, the door found shut against you at night because you have not paid your
rent, the insolence of the porter and the landlord, the jibes of neighbours, humiliations,
self-respect outraged, any drudgery acceptable, disgust, bitterness, prostration--Marius
learned how one swallows down all these things, and how they are often the only things that
one has to swallow. At that period of existence, when man has need of pride, because he has
need of love, he felt that he was mocked at because he was badly dressed, and ridiculed be-
cause he was poor. At the age when youth swells the heart with an imperial pride, he more
than once dropped his eyes upon his worn-out boots, and experienced the undeserved shame
and the poignant blushes of misery. Wonderful and terrible trial, from which the feeble come
out infamous, from which the strong come out sublime. Crucible into which destiny casts a man
whenever she desires a scoundrel or a demi-god.

For there are many great deeds done in the small struggles of life. There is a determined
though unseen bravery, which defends itself foot to foot in the darkness against the fatal
invasions of necessity and of baseness. Noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye sees,
which no renown rewards. which no flourish of triumph salutes. Life, misfortunes, isolation,
abandonment, poverty, are battlefields which have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes
greater than the illustrious heroes.

Strong and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a step-mother, is sometimes
a mother; privation gives birth to power of soul and mind; distress is the nurse of self-
respect; misfortune is a good breast for great souls.

There was a period in Marius' life when he swept his own hall, when he bought a pennyworth of
Brie cheese at the market-woman's, when he waited for nightfall to make his way to the baker's
and buy a loaf of bread, which he carried furtively to his garret, as if he had stolen it. Sometimes
there was seen to glide into the corner meat-market, in the midst of the jeering cooks who elbowed
him, an awkward young man, with books under his arm, who had a timid and frightened appearance,
and who, as he entered, took off his hat from his forehead, which was dripping with sweat, made a
low bow to the astonished butcher, another bow to the butcher's boy, asked for a mutton cutlet,
paid six or seven sous for it, wrapped it up in paper, put it under his arm between two books, and
went away. It was Marius. On this cutlet, which he cooked himself, he lived three days.

The first day he ate the meat: the second day he ate the fat; the third day he gnawed the bone.
On several occasions, Aunt Gillenormand made overtures, and sent him the sixty pistoles. Marius
always sent them back, saying that he had no need of anything:

He was still in mourning for his father, when the revolution which we hive described was accom-
plished in his ideas. Since then, he had never left off black clothes. His clothes left him, how-
ever. A day came, at last, when he had no coat. His trousers were going also. What was to be done?
Courfeyrac, for whom he also had done some good turns, gave him an old coat. For thirty sous, Mar-
ius had it turned by some porter or other, and it was a new coat. But this coat was green. Then
Marius did not go out till after night fall. That made his coat black. Desiring always to be in
mourning, he clothed himself with night.

Through all this, he procured admission to the bar. He was reputed to occupy Courleyrac's room,
which was decent, and where a certain number of law books, supported and filled out by some odd
volumes of novels, made up the library required by the rules.

When Marius had become a lawyer, he informed his grandfather of it, in a letter which was frigid,
but full of submission and respect Gillenormand took the letter with trembling hands; read it,
and threw it. torn in pieces, into the basket. Two or three days after-wards. Mademoiselle Gill-
enormand overheard her father, who PM alone in his room, talking aloud. This was always the case
when lit was mach excited. She listened: the old man said: "If you were not a fool, you would know
that a man cannot be a baron and a lawyer at the same time."



II. MARIUS POOR



IT is with misery as with everything else. It gradually becomes endurable. It ends by taking form
and becoming fixed. You vegetate, that is to say you develop in some wretched fashion, but suffi-
cient for existence. This is the way in which Marius Pontmercy's life was arranged.

He had got out of the narrowest place; the pass widened a little before him. By dint of hard work,
courage, perseverance, and will, he had succeeded in earning by his labour about seven hundred
francs a year. He had learned German and English; thanks to Courfeyrac, who introduced him to his
friend the publisher, Marius filled, in the literary department of the bookhouse, the useful role
of utility. He made out prospectuses, translated from the journals, annotated republications, com-
piled biographies, etc., net result, year in and year out, seven hundred francs. He lived on this.
How? Not badly. We are going to tell.

Marius occupied, at an annual rent of thirty francs, a wretched little room in the Gorbeau tenement,
with no fireplace, called a cabinet, in which there was no more furniture than was indispensable.
The furniture was his own. He gave three francs a month to the old woman who had charge of the build-
ing, for sweeping his room and bringing him every morning a little warm water, a fresh egg, and a
penny loaf of bread. On this loaf and this egg he breakfasted. His breakfast varied from two or four
sous, as eggs were cheap or dear. At six o'clock in the evening he went down into the Rue Saint
Jacques, to dine at Rousseau's, opposite Basset's the print dealer's, at the corner of the Rue des
Mathurins. He ate no soup. He took a sixpenny plate of meat, a threepenny half-plate of vegetables,
and a threepenny dessert. For three sous, as much bread as he liked. As for wine, he drank water.
On paying at the counter, where Madame Rousseau was seated majestically, still plump and fresh also
in those days, he gave a sou to the waiter, and Madame Rousseau gave him a smile. Then he went away.
For sixteen sous, he had a smile and a dinner.

This Rousseau restaurant, where so few bottles and so many pitchers were emptied, was rather an ap-
peasant than a restorant. It is not kept now. The master had a fine title; he was called Rousseau
the Aquatic.

Thus, breakfast four sous, dinner sixteen sous, his food cost him twenty sous a day, which was three
hundred and sixty-five francs a year. Add the thirty francs for his lodging, and the thirty-six
francs to the old woman, and a few other trifling expenses, and for four hundred and fifty francs,
Marius was fed, lodged, and waited upon. His clothes cost him a hundred francs, his linen fifty francs,
his washing fifty francs; the whole did not exceed six hundred and fifty francs. This left him fifty
francs. He was rich. He occasionally lent ten francs to a friend. Courfeyrac borrowed sixty francs
of him once. As for fire, having no fireplace, Marius had "simplified" it.

Marius always had two complete suits, one old "for every day," the other quite new, for special occa-
sions. Both were black. He had but three shirts, one he had on, another in the drawer, the third at
the washer-woman's. He renewed them as they wore out. They were usually ragged, so he buttoned his
coat to his chin.

For Marius to arrive at this flourishing condition had required years. Hard years, and difficult ones;
those to get through, these to climb. Marius had never given up for a single day. He had undergone
everything, in the shape of privation; he had done everything, except get into debt. He gave himself
this credit, that he had never owed a sou to anybody. For him a debt was the beginning of slavery.
He felt even that a creditor is worse than a master; for a master owns only your person, a creditor
owns your dignity and can belabour that. Rather than borrow, he did not eat. He had had many days of
fasting. Feeling that all extremes meet and that if we do not take care, abasement of fortune may
lead to baseness of soul, he watched jealously over his pride. Such a habit or such a carriage as,
in any other condition, would have appeared deferential, seemed humiliating, and he braced himself
against it. He risked nothing, not wishing to take a backward step. He had a kind of stern blush
upon his face. He was timid even to rudeness.

In all his trials he felt encouraged and sometimes even upborne by a secret force within. The soul
helps the body, and at certain moments uplifts it. It is the only bird which sustains its cage.

By the side of his father's name, another name was engraven upon Marius' heart, the name of Then-
ardier. Marius, in his enthusiastic yet serious nature, surrounded with a sort of halo the man to
whom, as he thought, he owed his father's life, that brave sergeant who had saved the colonel in
the midst of the balls and bullets of Waterloo. He never separated the memory of this man from the
memory of his father, and he associated them in his veneration. It was a sort of worship with two
steps, the high altar for the colonel, the low one for Thenardier. The idea of the misfortune into
which he knew that Thenardier had fallen and been engulfed, intensified his feeling of gratitude.
Marius had learned at Montfermeil of the ruin and bankruptcy of the unlucky innkeeper. Since then,
he had made untold effort to get track of him, and to endeavour to find him, in that dark abyss
of misery in which Thenardier had disappeared. Marius had beaten the whole country; he had been
to Chelles, to Bondy, to Gournay, to Nogent, to Lagny. For three years he had been devoted to
this, spending in these explorations what little money he could spare. Nobody could give him any
news of Thenardier; it was thought he had gone abroad. His creditors had sought for him, also,
with less love than Marius, but with as much zeal, and had not been able to put their hands on
him. Marius blamed and almost hated himself for not succeeding in his researches. This was the
only debt Which the colonel had left him, and Marius made it a point of honour to pay it. "What,"
thought he, "when my father lay dying on the field of battle, Thenardier could find him through
the smoke and the grape, and bring him off on his shoulders, and yet he owed him nothing; while I,
who owe so much to Thenardier, I cannot reach him in that darkness in which he is suffering, and
restore him, in my turn, from death to life. Oh! I will find him!" Indeed, to find Thenardier,
Marius would have given one of his arms, and to save him from his wretchedness, all his blood.
To see Thenardier, to render some service to Thenardier, to say to him--"You do not know me, but
I do knowyou. Here I am, dispose of me!" This was the sweetest and most magnificent dream of Marius.



III. MARIUS A MAN



MARIUS WAS NOW twenty years old. It was three years since he had left his grandfather. They re-
mained on the same terms on both sides, without attempting a reconciliation, and without seeking to
meet. And, indeed, what was the use of meeting? to come in conflict? Which would have had the best
of it? Marius was a vase of brass, but M. Gillenormand was an iron pot.

To tell the truth, Marius was mistaken as to his grandfather's heart. He imagined that M. Gillenor-
mand had never loved him, and that this crusty and harsh yet smiling old man, who swore, screamed,
stormed, and lifted his cane, felt for him at most only the affection, at once slight and severe,
of the old men of comedy. Marius was deceived. There are fathers who do not love their children;
there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson. In reality, we have said, M. Gillenormand
worshipped Marius. He worshipped him in his own way, with an accompaniment of cuffs, and even of
blows; but, when the child was gone, he felt a dark void in his heart; he ordered that nobody
should speak of him again, and regretted that he was so well obeyed. At first he hoped that this
Buonapartist, this Jacobin, this terrorist, this Septembrist, would return. But weeks passed away,
months passed away, years passed away; to the great despair of M. Gillenormand, the blood-drinker
did not reappear! "But I could not do anything than turn him away," said the grandfather, and he
asked himself: Yes, but were to be done again, would I do it?" His pride promptly answered Yes,
but his old head, which he shook in silence, sadly answered, No. He had his hours of dejection.
He missed Marius. Old men need affection as they do sunshine. It is warmth. However strong his
nature might be, the absence of Marius had changed somethin in him. For nothing in the world would
he have taken a step towards the "little rogue;" but he suffered. He never inquired after him, but
he thought of him constantly. He lived, more and more retired, in the Marais. He was still, as
formerly, gay and violent, but his gaiety had a convulsive harshness as if it contained grief and
anger, and his bursts of violence always terminated by a sort of placid and gloomy exhaustion. He
said sometimes: "Oh! if he would come back, what a good box of the ear I would give him."

As for the aunt, she thought too little to love very much;Marius was now nothing to her but a
sort of dim, dark outline; and she finally busied herself a good deal less about him than with
the cat or the paroquet which she probably had. What increased the secret suffering of Grand fa-
ther Gillenormand, was that he shut her entirely out, and let her suspect nothing of it. His
chagrin was like those newly invented furnaces which consume their own smoke. Sometimes it hap-
pened that some blundering, officious body would speak to him of Nlarins, and ask: "What is your
grandson doing, or what has become of him?" The old bourgeois would answer, with a sigh, if he
was too sad, or giving his ruffle a tap, if he wished to seem gay: "Monsieur the Baron Pontmercy
is pettifogging in some hole."

While the old man was regretting, Marius was rejoicing. As with all good hearts, suffering had
taken away his bitterness. He thought of M. Gillenormand only with kindness, but he had deter-
mined to receive nothing more from the man who had been cruel to his father. This was now the
softened translation of his first indignation. Moreover, he was happy in having suffered, and
in suffering still. It was for his father. His hard life satisfied him, and pleased him. He said
to himself with a sort of pleasure that--it was the very least; that it was--an expiation; that--
save for this, he would have been punished otherwise and later, for his unnatural indifference
towards his father, and towards such a father;--that it would not have been just that his father
should have had all the suffering, and himself none;--what were his efforts and his privation,
moreover, compared with the heroic life of the colonel? that finally his only way of drawing near
his father, and becoming like him, was to be valiant against indigence as he had been brave a-
gainst the enemy; and that this was doubtless what the colonel meant by the words: "He will be
worthy of it." Words which Marius continued to bear, not upon his breast, the colonel's paper
having disappeared, but in his heart.

And then, when his grandfather drove him away, he was but a child; now lie was a man. He felt it.
Misery, we must insist, had been good to him. Poverty in youth, when it succeeds, is so far mag-
nificent that it turns the whole will towards effort, and the whole soul towards aspiration. Pov-
erty strips the material life entirely bare, and makes it hideous; thence arise inexpressible yearn-
ings towards the ideal life. The rich young man has a hundred brilliant and coarse amusements,
racing, hunting, dogs, cigars, gaming, feasting, and the rest; busying the lower portions of the
soul at the expense of its higher and delicate portions. The poor young man must work for his
bread; he eats; when he has eaten, he has nothing more but reverie. He goes free to the
play which God gives; he beholds the sky, space, the stars, the flowers, the children, the
humanity in which he suf fers, the creation in which he shines. He looks at humanity so
much that he sees the soul, he looks at creation so much that he sees God. He dreams, he
feels that he is great; he dreams again, and he feels that he is tender. From the egotism
of the suffering man, he passes to the compassion of the contemplating man. A wonderful
feeling springs up within him, forgetfulness of self, and pity for all. In thinking of the
numberless enjoyments which nature offers, gives, and gives lavishly to open souls, and re-
fuses to closed souls, he, a millionaire of intelligence, comes to grieve for the million-
aires of money. All hatred goes out of his heart in proportion as all light enters his mind.
And then is he unhappy? No. The misery of a young man is never miserable. The first lad you
meet, poor as he may be, with his health, his strength, his quick step, his shining eyes,
his blood which circulates warmly, his black locks, his fresh cheeks, his rosy lips, his
white teeth, his pure breath, will always be envied by an old emperor. And then every morn-
ing he sets about earning his bread; and while his hands are earning his living, his backbone
is gaining firmness, his brain is gaining ideas. When his work is done, he returns to ineffa-
ble ecstasies, to contemplation, to joy; he sees his feet in difficulties, in obstacle on the
pavement, in thorns, sometimes in the mire; his head is in the light. He is firm, serene, gen-
tle, peaceful, attentive, serious, content with little, benevolent; and he blesses God for
having given him these two estates which many of the rich are without; labour which makes
him free, and thought which makes him noble.

This is what had taken place in Marius. He had even, to tell the truth, gone a little too far
on the side of contemplation. The day on which he had arrived at the point of being almost
sure of earning his living, he stopped there, preferring to be poor, and retrenching from la-
bour to give to thought. That is to say, he passed sometimes whole days in thinking, plunged
and swallowed up like a visionary, in the mute joys of ecstasy and interior radiance. He had
put the problem of his life thus: to work as little as possible at material labour, that he
might work as much as possible at impalpable labour; in other words, to give a few hours to
real life, and to cast the rest into the infinite. He did not perceive, thinking that he lack-
ed nothing, that contemplation thus obtained comes to be one of the forms of sloth, that he
was content with subduing the primary necessities of life, and that he was resting too soon.

It was clear that, for his energetic and generous nature, this could only be a transitory state,
and that at the first shock against the inevitable complications of destiny, Marius would arouse.

Meantime, although he was a lawyer, and whatever Grandfather Gillenormand might think, he
was not pleading, he was not even pettifogging. Reverie had turned him away from the law.
To con-sort with attorneys, to attend courts, to hunt up cases, was wearisome. Why should
he do it? He saw no reason for changing his business. This cheap and obscure book-making
had procured hum sure work, work with little labour, which, as we have explained, was suf-
ficient for him.

One of the booksellers for whom he worked. M. Magimel, I think, had offered to take him
home, give him a good room, furnish him regular work, and pay him fifteen hundred francs
a year. To have a good room! fifteen hundred francs! Very well. But to give up his liberty!
to work for a salary, to be a kind of literary clerk! In Marius' opinion, to accept, would
make his position better and worse at the same time; be would gain in comfort and lose
in dignity; it was a complete and beautiful misfortune given up for an ugly and ridiculous
constraint; something like a blind man who should gain one eye. He refused.

Marius' life was solitary. From his taste for remaining outside of everything, and also
from having been startled by its excesses, he had decided not to enter the group presided
over by Enjolras. They had remained good friends; they were ready to help one another,
if need were, in all possible ways; but nothing more. Marius had two friends. one young,
Courfeyrac, and one old, M. Mabeuf. He inclined towards the old one. First he was in-
debted to him for the revolution through which he had gone; he was indebted to him for
having known and loved his father. "He operated upon me for the cataract," said he.

Certainly, this churchwarden had been decisive.

M. Mabeuf was not, however, on that occasion anything more than the calm and passive
agent of providence. He had enlightened Marius accidentally and without knowing it, as a
candle does which somebody carries; he had been the candle and not the somebody.

As to the interior political revolution in Marius. Mr. Mabeuf was entirely incapable of
comprehending it, desiring it, or directing it.

As we shall meet M. Mabeuf hereafter, a few words will not be useless.



IV. M. MABEUF



THE day that M. Mabeuf said to Marius: "Certainly, I approve of political opinions," he
expressed the real condition of his mind. All political opinions were indifferent to him,
and he approved than all without distinction. provided they left him quiet, as the Greeks
called the Furies, "the beautiful, the good, the charming." the Eumenides. M. Mabeuf's
political opinion was a passionate fondness for plants, and a still greater one for books.
He had, like everybody else, his termination in ist, without which nobody could have
lived in those times, but he was neither a royalist. nor a Bonapartist, nor a chartist,
nor an Orleanist, nor an anarchist; he was an old-bookist.

He did not understand how men could busy themselves with hating one another about such
bubbles as the charter, democracy, legitimacy, the monarch', the republic. etc.. when there
were in this world all sorts of mosses, herbs and shrubs, which they could look at. and
piles of folios and even of 32mos which they could pore over. He took good care not to be
useless; having books did not prevent him from reading, being a botanist did not prevent him
from being a gardener. When he knew Pontmercy. there was this sympathy between the colo-
nel and himself. that what the colonel did for flowers, he did for fruits. Al. Mabeuf had suc-
cededed in producing seedling pears as highly flavoured as the pears of Saint Germain; to
one of his combinations, as it appears, we owe the October Mirabelle, now famous, and not
less I ragrant titan dw Summer Mirabelle. He went to mass rather from good-feeling than from
devotion, and because he loved the faces of men, but hated their noise and he found them,
at church only, gathered together and silent. Feeling that he ought to be something in the
government. he had chosen the career of a churchwarden. Finally, he had never succeeded in
loving any woman as much as a tulip bulb or any man as much as an Elzevir. He had long pass-
ed his sixtieth year. When one day somebody asked him; "Were you never married?" "I
forget." said he. When he happened sometimes--to whom does it not happen?--to say: "Oh!
if I were rich." it was not upon ogling a pretty girl, like M. Gillenormand, but upon seeing an
old book. He lived alone, with an old governess. He was a little gouty, and when he slept,
his old fingers, stiffened with rheumatism. were clenched in the folds of the clothes. He
had written and published a Flora of the Environs of Cauteretz with coloured illustrations,
a highly esteemed work, the plates of which he owned and which he sold himself. People
came two or three times a day and rang his bell, in the Rue Mezieres, for it. He received
fully two thousand francs a year for it; this was nearly all his income. Though poor, he
had succeeded in gathering together, by means of patience, self-denial, and time, a valuable
collection of rare copies on every subject. He never went out without a book under his arm.
and he often came back with two. The only decoration of the four ground-floor rooms which,
with a small garden, formed his dwelling, were some framed herbariums and a few engravings
of old masters. The sight of a sword or a gun chilled him. In his whole life, he had never
been near a cannon. even at the Invalides. He had a passable stomach, a brother who was
a cure. hair entirely white, no teeth left either in his mouth or in his mind, a tremor of
the whole body, a Picard accent, a childlike laugh, weak nerves, and the appearance of an
old sheep. With all that, no other friend nor any other intimate acquaintance among the
living, but an old book-seller of the Porte Saint Jacques named Royol. His mania was the
naturalisation of indigo in France.

His servant was, also, a peculiar variety of innocence. The poor, good old woman was a maid.
Sultan, her cat, who could have miauled the Miserere of Allegri at the Sistine Chapel, had
filled her heart, and sufficed for the amount of passion which she possessed. None of her
dreams went as far as man. She had never got beyond her cat. She had, like him, moustaches.
Her glory was in the whiteness of her caps. She spent her time on Sunday after mass in count-
ing her linen in her trunk, and in spreading out upon her bed the dresses in the piece which
she had bought and never made up. She could read. Monsieur Mabeuf had given her the name of
Mother Plutarch.

Monsieur Mahout took Marius into favour, because Marius, being young and gentle, warmed his
old age without arousing his timidity. Youth, with gentleness, has upon old men the effect
of sunshine without wind. When Marius was full of military glory, gunpowder, marches, and
countermarches, and all those wonderful battles in which his father had given and received
such huge sabre strokes he went to see Monsieur Mabeuf, and Monsieur Mabeuf talked with him
about the hero from the floricultural point of view.

Towards 1830, his brother the cure died, and almost immediately after, as at the coming on
of night, the whole horizon of Monsieur Mabeuf was darkened. By a failure--of a notary--he
lost ten thousand francs, which was all the money that he possessed in his brother's name
and his own. The revolution of July brought on a crisis in bookselling. In hard times, the
first thing that does not sell is a Flora. The Flora of the Environs of Cauteretz stopped
short. Weeks went by without a purchaser. Sometimes Monsieur Mabeuf would start at the
sound of the bell. "Monsieur,' Mother Plutarch would say sadly, "it is the water-porter."
In short, Monsieur Mabeuf left the Rue Mezieres one day, resigned his place as church-
warden, gave up Saint Sulpice, sold a part, not of his books, but of his prints--what he
prized the least--and installed himself in a little house on the Boulevard Montparnasse,
where however he remained but one quarter, for two reasons; first, the ground floor and
the garden let for three hundred francs, and be did not dare to spend more than two hund-
red francs for his rent; secondly, being near the Paton shooting gallery, he heard pistol
slots; which was insupportable to him.

He carried off his Flora, his plates. his herbariums. his portfolios and his books, and
established himself near La Saltpetriere in a sort of cottage in the village of Austerlitz,
where at fifty crowns a year he had three rooms, a garden inclosed with a hedge, and a
well He took advantage of this change to sell nearly all his furniture. The day of his
entrance into this new dwelling, he was very gay, and drove nails himself on which to hang
the engravings and the herbariums; he dug in his garden the rest of the day, and in the
evening, seeing that Mother Plutarch had a gloomy and thoughtful air, he tapped her on
the shoulder and said with a smile: "We have the indigo."

Only two visitors, the bookseller of the Porte Saint Jacques and Marius, were admitted to
his cottage at Austerlitz, a tumultuous name which was, to tell the truth, rather disa-
greeable to him.

However, as we have just indicated, brains absorbed in wisdom, or in folly, or, as often
happens, in both at once, are but very slowly permeable by the affairs of life. Their own
destiny is far from them. There results from such concentrations of mind a pcm.sivity which,
if it were due to reason, would resemble philosophy. We decline, we descend. we fall. we
are even overthrown, and we hardly perceive it. This always ends, it is true, by an awaken-
ing. but a tardy one. In the meantime, it seems as though we were neutral in the game which
is being played between our good and our ill fortune. We are the stake, yet we look upon
the contest with indifference.

Thus it was that amid this darlow... which was gathering about him, all his hopes going
out one after another. \l.n Mallen( had remained serene, somewhat childishly. but very
thoroughly. His habits of mind had the swing of a pendul Mee wound up by an illusion,
he went a very long time, even when the illusion had disappeared. A clock does not stop
at the wry moment you lose the key.

Monsieur Mabeuf had some innocent pleasures. These pleasures were cheap and unlooked-
for; the least chances furnished them. One day Mother Plutarch was reading a romance in
one corner of the room. She read aloud, as she understood better so. To read aloud, is to as-
sure yourself of what you are reading. There are people who read very loud, and who appear
to be giving their words of honour for what they are reading.

It was with that kind of energy that Mother Plutarch was reading the romance she held in
her hand. Monsieur Mabeuf heard, but was not listening.

As she read, Mother Plutarch came to this passage. It was about an officer of dragoons
and a belle:

"The belle bouda [pouted], and the dragon [dragoon]--" Here she stopped to wipe her
spectacles.

"Bouddha and the Dragon," said Monsieur Mabeuf in an undertone. "Yes, it is true, there
was a dragon who, from the depth of his cave, belched forth flames from his jaws and was
burning up the sky. Several stars had already been set on fire by this monster. who, be-
sides, had claws like a tiger. Bouddha went into his cave and succeeded in converting the
dragon. That is a good book which you are reading there, Mother Plutarch. There is no
more beautiful legend."

And Monsieur Mabeuf fell into'a delicious reverie.



V. POVERTY A GOOD NEIGHBOUR OF MISERY



Marius had a liking for this open-hearted old man, who saw that he was being slowly seized
by indigence, and who had come gradually to be astonished at it, without, however, as yet
becoming sad. Marius met Courfcyrac, and went to see Monsieur Mabeuf. Very rarely, however;
once or twice a month, at most. '

It was Marius delight to take long walks alone on the outer boulevards, or in the Champ de
Mars, or in the less frequented walks of the Luxembourg. He sometimes spent half a day in
looking at a vegetable garden, at the beds of salad, the fowls on the dung-heap. and the
horse turning the wheel of the pump. The passers-by looked at him with surprise, and some
thought that he had a suspicious appearance and an ill-omened manner. He was only a poor
young man, dreaming without an object.

It was in one of these walks that he had discovered the Gorbeau tenement, and its isolation
and cheapness being an attraction to him, be had taken a room in it. He was only known in
it by the name of Monsieur Marius.

All passions, except those of the heart, are dissipated by reverie. Marius political fevers
were over. The revolution of 1830, by satisfying him, and soothing him. had aided in this.
He remained the same, with the exception of his passionateness. He had still the same opin-
ions. But they were softened. Properly speaking, he held opinions no longer; be had sympa-
thies. Of what party was he? of the party of humanity. Out of humanity he chose France; out
of the nation he chose the people; out of the people he chose woman. To her, above all, his
pity went out. He now preferred an idea to a fad, a poet to a hero, and he admired a book
like Job still more than an event like Marengo. And then, when, after a day of meditation,
he returned at night along the boulevards, and saw through the branches of the trees the
fathomless space, the nameless lights, the depths. the darkness, the mystery, all that
which is only human seemed to him very pretty.

Marius thought he had, and he had perhaps in fact, arrived at the truth of life and of human
philosophy, and be had finally come hardly to look at anything but the sky, the only thing
that truth can see from the bottom of her well.

This did not hinder him from multiplying plans, combinations, scaffoldings, projects for the
future. In this condition of reverie, an eye which could have looked into Marius' soul would
have been dazzled by its purity. In fact, were it given to our eye of flesh to see into the
consciences of others, we should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than
from what he thinks. There is will in the thought, there is none in the dream. The dream,
which is completely spontaneous, takes and keeps, even in the gigantic and the ideal, the
form of our mind. Nothing springs more directly and more sincerely from the very bottom
of our souls than our unreflected and indefinite aspirations towards the splendours of des-
tiny. In these aspirations, much more than in ideas which are combined, studied, and com-
pared, we can find the true character of each man. Our chimeras are what most resemble
ourselves. Each one dreams the unknown and the impossible according to his own nature.

Towards the middle of this year, MI. the old woman who waited upon Marius told him that
his neighbours, the wretched Jondrette family, were to be turned into the street. Marius,
who passed almost all his days out of doors, hardly knew that he had any neighbours.

"Why are they turned out?" said he.

"Because they do not pay their rent; they owe for two terms."

"How much is that?"

"Twenty francs." said the obi woman.

Marius had thirty francs in reserve in a drawer,

"Here," said he to the old woman. -there are twenty-five francs. Pay for these poor people,
give them the franc., and do not tell them that it is from me."



VI. THE SUPPLANTER



IT happened that the regiment to which Lieutenant TIWtultile belonged came to be stationed
at Paris. This was the occasion of a second idea occurring to Aunt Gillenormand. She hail,
the first time, thought she would have Marius watched by Thioilule; she plotted to hare
Theodule supplant Marius.

At all events, and in case the grandfather should fed a vague need of a young face in the
house--these rays of dawn are some-times grateful to ruins--it was expedient to find another
Marius. "Yes," thought site, "it is merely an erratum such as I see in the books; for Marius
read Theodule."

A grandnephew is almost a grandson; for want of a lawyer a lancer will do.

One morning, as Monsieur Gillenormand was reading something like La Quotidiettnr, his
daughter entered, and said in hear softest voice, for the matter concerned her favourite:

"Father, Theodule is coining this morning to present his re-spects to you."

"Who is that--Theodule?"

"Your grandnephew."

"Ah!" said the grandfather.

Then he resumed his reading, thought no more of the grand-nephew who was nothing more than
any Theodule, and very.soon was greatly excited; as was almost always the case when he read.
The "sheet" which he had, royalist indeed--that was a matter, of course,--announced for the
next day, without any mollification, one of the little daily occurrences of the Paris of that
time; that the students of the schools of Law and Medicine would meet in the square of the
Pantheon at noon--to deliberate. The question was one of the topics of the moment; the art-
illery of the National Guard, and a conflict between the Minister of War and "the citizen
militia" on the subject of the cannon planted in the court of .the Louvre. The students were
to "deliberate" thereupon. It did not require much more to enrage Monsieur Gillenormand.

He thought of Marius, who was a student, and who, probably, would go, like the others, "to
deliberate, at noon, in the square of the Pantheon."

While he was dwelling upon this painful thought, Lieutenant Theodule entered, in citizen's
dress, which was adroit, and was discreetly introduced by Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The
lancer reasoned thus: "The old druid has not put everything into an an-nuity. It is well
worth while to disguise oneself in taffeta occasionally.

Mademoiselle Gillenormand said aloud to her father:

"Theodule, your grandnephew."

And, in a whisper, to the lieutenant:

"Say yes to everything."

And she retired.

The lieutenant, little accustomed to such venerable encounters, stammered out with some tim-
idity: "Good morning, uncle." and made a mixed bow composed of the involuntary and mechanical
awkwardness of the military salute finished off with the bow of the Bourgeois.

"Ah it is you; very well, take a scat," said the old man. And then, he entirely forgot the
lancer.

Theodule sat down, and Monsieur Gillenormand got up.

Monsieur Gillenormand began to walk up and clown with his hands in his pockets, talking aloud,
and rubbing with his nervous old fingers the two watches which he carried in his two waistcoat
pockets.

This mess of snivellers! they meet together in the Square of the Pantheon. Virtue of my quean.
Scapegraces yesterday at nurse. If their noses were squeezed, the milk would run out! And they
deliberate at noon tomorrow! What are we coming to? what are we coming to? It is clear
that we are going to the pit. That is where the descamisados have led us! The citizen art-
illery! To deliberate about the citizen artillery! To go out and jaw in the open air about
the blowing of the National Guard! And whom will they find themselves with there! Just
see where jacobinism leads to. I will bet anything you please, a million against a fig,
that they will all be fugitives from justice and discharged convicts, Republicans and gal-
ley-slaves, they fit like a nose and a handkerchief. Canna said: 'Where would you have
me go, traitor?' Fouche answered: 'Wherever you like, fool!' That is what republicans
are."

It is true," said Theodule.

Monsieur Gillenormand turned his head half around, saw Theodule, and continued.

"Only to think that this rogue has been see wicked as to turn carbonarol Why did you leave
my hone? To go dna and be a re-publican. Fish! in the first place the people do not want
your republic, they do not want it, they have go. ,en-e, they know very well that there
always have been kings and that there always will be, they know very well that the people,
after all, i, nothing but the people, they laugh at your republic, do you understand,
idiot? Is not that caprice of yours horrible? To fall in love with Pere Duchesne, to cast
sheep's eyes at the guillotine, to sing ditties and play the guitar under the balcony of
'93; we must spit upon all these young folks, they are so stupid! They are all in a heap.
Not one is out of it. It is enough to breathe the air that blows down the street to make
them crazy. The nineteenth century is poison. The first blackguard you will meet wears his
goat's beard, thinks he is very clever, and discards his old relatives. That is republican,
that is romantic. What is that indeed, romantic? have the kindness to tell me what that
is! Every possible folly. A year ago, you went to Hernani. want to know, Hernani! antitheses!
abominations which are not written in French! And then they have cannon in the court of
the Louvre. Such is the brigandage of these things."

"You are right, uncle," said Theodule.

Gillenormand resumed:

"Cannon in the court of the Museum! what for? Cannon, what do von want? Do you want to shoot
down the Apollo Belvedere? What have cartridges to do with Venus de' Medici? Oh! these vot-
ing folks nowadays, all scamps! What a small affair is their Benjamin Constant! And those
who are not scoundrels are boobies! They do all they can to be ugly, they are badly dressed,
they are afraid of women, they appear like beggars about petticoats, which makes the wenches-
burst out laughing; upon my word, you would say the poor fellows are ashamed of love. 'they
are homely, and they finish themselves off by being stupid; they repeat the puns of Tiercelin
and Pother, they have sackcoats, horse-Jockeys' waistcoats, coarse cotton shirts, coarse
cloth trousers, coarse leather boots, and their jabber is like their feathers. Their jargon
would serve to sole their old shoes with. And all these foolish brats have political opinions.
They ought to be strictly forbidden to have any political opinions. They fabricate systems,
they reform society, they demolish monarchy, they upset all laws, they put the garret into
the cellar, and my porter in place of the king, they turn Europe topsy-turvy, they rebuild
the world, and the favours they get are sly peeps at washer-women's legs when they are
getting into their carts! Oh! Marius! Oh! you beggar! going to bawl in a public place! to dis-
cuss, to debate, to take measures! they call them measures, just gods! disorder shrinks and
becomes a ninny. I have seen chaos, I see a jumble. Scholars deliberating about the National
Guard, you would not see that among the Ojibways or among the Cadodaches! The savages
who go naked, their pates looking like shuttlecocks, with clubs in their paws, are not so wild as
these bachelors. Fourpenny monkeys! they pass for learned and capable! they deliberate and
reason! it is the world's end. it is evidently the end of this miserable terraqucous globe.
It needed some final hiccough, France is giving it. Deliberate, you rogues. Such things will
happen as long as they go and read the papers under the arches of the Odeon. That costs
them a sou, and their good sense, and their intelligence, and their heart, and their soul, and
their mind. They come away from there, and they bring the camp into their family. All these
journals are a pest; all, even the Drapean Blanc! at bottom Martainville was a Jacobin. Oh!
just heavens! you can be proud of having thrown your grandfather into despair, you can!"

"That is evident," said Theodule.

And taking advantage of M. Gillenormand's drawing breath, the lancer added magisterially:
"There ought to be no journal but the Afonneur and no book but the Annuaire Militaire

M. Gillenormand went on.

"He is like their Sieyes! a regicide ending off as a senator; that is always the way they end.
They slash themselves with thee-and-thouing, and citizen, so that they may come to be called Mon-
sieur the Count, Monsieur the Count as big as my arm, the butchers of September. The philosopher
Sieyes! I am happy to say that I never made any more account of the philosophies of all these
philosophers than of the spectacles of the clown of Tivoli. I saw the senators one day passing
along the Quai Malaquais in mantles of violet velvet sprinkled with bees. and hats in the style
of Henri IV. They were hideous. You would have said they were the monkeys of the tiger court.
Citizens, I tell you that your progress is a lunacy, that your humanity is a dream, that your
revolution is a crime, that your republic is a monster, that your young maiden France comes
from the brothel, and I maintain it before you all, whoever you are, be you publicists, be you
economists, be you legists, be you greater connoisseurs in liberty, equality, and fraternity than
the axe of the guillotine! I tell you that, my goodmen

"Zounds," cried the lieutenant, "that is wonderfully true."

M. Gillenormand broke off a gesture which he had begun, turned. looked the lancer Thdodule
steadily in the eyes, and said:

"You are a fool."




BOOK SIXTH
THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO STARS



I. THE NICKNAME: MODE OF FORMATION OF FAMILY NAMES



MARIUS was now a fine-looking young man, of medium height, with heavy jet black hair, a high
intelligent brow, large and passionate nostrils, a frank and calm expression, and a indescr-
ibable something beaming from every feature, which was at once lofty, thoughtful and innocent.
His profile, all the lines of which were rounded, but without loss of strength, possessed that
Germanic gentleness which has made its way into French physiognomy through Alsace and Lorraine,
and that entire absence of angles which rendered the Sicambri so recognisable among the Romans,
and which distinguishes the leonine front the aquiline race. He was at that season of life at
which the mind of men who think, is made up in nearly equal proportions of depth and simpli-
city. In a difficult situation he possessed all the essentials of stupidity; another turn of
the screw, and he could be-' come sublime. His manners were reserved, cold, polished, far from
free. But as his mouth was very pleasant, his lips the reddest and his teeth the whitest in
the world, his smile corrected the severity of his physiognomy. At certain moments there was
a strange contrast between this chaste brow and this voluptuous smile. His eye was small, his
look great.

At the time of his most wretched poverty, he noticed that girls turned when he passed, and
with a deathly feeling in his heart he fled or hid himself. He thought they looked at him on
account of his old clothes, and that they were laughing at him; the truth is, that they looked
at him because of his graceful appearance, and that they dreamed over it.

This wordless misunderstanding between him and the pretty girls he met, had rendered him hos-
tile to society. He attached himself to none, for the excellent reason that he fled before all.
Thus he lived without aim--like a beast, said Courfeyrac.

Courfeyrac said to him also: "Aspire not to be a sage (they used familiar speech; familiarity
of speech is characteristic of youthf friendships). My dear boy, a piece of advice. Read not
so much in books, and look a little more upon the Peggies. The little rogues are good for thee,
O Marius! By continual flight and blushing thou shalt become a brute."

At other times Courfeyrac met him with: "Good day, Monsieur Abbe."

When Courfeyrac said anything of this kind to him, for the next week Marius avoided women,
old as well as young, more than ever, and especially did he avoid the haunts of Courfeyrae.

There were, however, in all the immensity of creation, two women from whom Marius never fled,
and whom he did not at all avoid. Indeed he would have been very much astonished had anybody
told him that they were women. One was the old woman with the beard. who swept his room, and
who gave Courfeyrac an opportunity to say: "As his servant wears her beard, Marius does not
wear his." The other was a little girl that he saw very often, and that he never looked at.

For more than a year Marius had noticed in a retired walk of the Luxembourg, the walk which
borders lers the parapet of the Pepiniere, a man and a girl quite young. nearly always sit-
ting side by side, on the same seat, at the most retired end of the walk. near the Rue de
l'Ouest. Whenever that chance which controls the promenades of men whose eye is turned with-
in, led Marius to this walk, and it was almost every day, he found this couple there. The man
might be sixty years old; he seemed sad and serious; his whoIe person presented the robust
but wearied appearance of a soldier retired from active service. Had he worn a decoration.
Marius would have said: it is an old officer. His expression was kind, but it did not invite ap-
proach, and he never returned a look. He wore a blue coat and pantaloons and a broad-brimmed
hat, which always appeared to be new: a black cravat, and Quaker linen. that is to say, bril-
liantly white, but of coarse texture. A grisette passing near him one day, said: There is a
very nice widower. His hair was perfectly white.

The first time the young girl that accompanied him sat down on the seat which they seemed
to have adopted, she looked like a girl of about thirteen or fourteen, puny to the extent of
being almost ugly, awkward, insignificant. yet priimising, perhaps, to have rather fine eyes.
But they were always looking about with a disagreeable assurance. She wore the dress at
once aged and childish. peculiar to the convent school-girl, an ill-fitting garment of coarse
black merino. They appeared to be father and daughter.

For two or three days Marius scrutinised this old man, who was not yet an aged man, and this
little girl. not yet a woman; then he paid no more attention to them. For their part they did
not even seem to see him. They talked with each other peacefully, and with indifference to all
else. The girl chatted incessantly and gaily. The old man spoke little, and at times looked
upon her with an unutterable expression of fatherliness.

Marius had acquired a sort of mechanical habit of promenading on this walk. He always found
them there.

It was usually thus:

Marius would generally reach the walk at the end opposite their .scat, promenade the whole
length of it, passing before them, then return to the end by which he entered, and so on. He
performed this turn five or six times in his promenade, and this promenade five or six times
a week, but they and he had never come to exchange bows. This man and this young girl, though
they appeared, and perhaps because they appeared, to avoid observation, had naturally excited
the attention of the five or six students, who, from time to time, took their promenades along
the Pepiniere; the studious after their lecture, the others after their game of billiards.
Courfeyrac, who belonged to the latter, had noticed them at some time or other, but finding
the girl homely, had very quickly and carefully avoided them. He had fled like a Parthian,
launching a nickname behind him. Struck especially by the dress of the little girl and the
hair of the old man, he had named the daughter Mademoiselle Lanoire [Black) and the father
Monsieur Leblanc [White]; and so, as nobody latew them otherwise, in the absence of a name,
this surname had become fixed. The students said: "Ah! Monsieur Leblanc is at his seat!" and
Marius, like the rest, had found it convenient to call this un-known gentleman M. Leblanc.

We shall do as they did, and say M. Leblanc for the convenience of this story.

Marius saw them thus nearly every day at the same hour during laic first year. He found the
man very much to his liking, but the girl rather disagreeable.



II. LUX FACTA EST



The second year, at the precise point of this hisiory to which the reader has arrived, it so
happened that Marius broke off this habit of going to the Luxembourg, without really knowing why
himself, and there were nearly six months during which he did not set foot in his walk. At last
he went back there again one day; it was a serene summer morning, Marius was as happy as one
always is when the weather is fine. It seemed to him as if he had in his heart all the bird
songs which he heard, and all the bits of blue sky which he saw through the trees.

He went straight to "his walk," and as soon as he reached it, he saw, still on the same seat,
this well known pair. When he came twat them, however, he saw that it was indeed the same man,
but it seemed to him that it was no longer the same girl. The woman whom he now saw was a noble,
beautiful creature, with all the most bewitching outlines of woman, at the precise moment at
which they are yet combined with all the most charming graces of childhood,--that pure and
fleeting moment which can only be translated by these two words: sweet fifteen. Beautiful chest-
nut hair, shaded with veins of gold, a brow which seemed chiselled marble, cheeks which seemed
made of roses, a pale incarnadine, a flushed whiteness, an exquisite mouth, whence came a smile
like a gleam of sunshine, and a voice like music, a head which Raphael would have given to Mary,
on a neck which Jean Goujon would have given to Venus. And that nothing might be wanting to
this ravishing form, the nose was not beautiful, it was pretty; neither straight nor curved. neither
Italian nor Greek; it was the Parisian nose; that is, something sprightly, fine, irregular, and pure,
the despair of painters and the charm of poets.

When Marius passed near her, he could not see her eyes, which were always cast down. He saw only
her long chestnut lashes, eloquent of mystery and modesty.

But that did not prevent the beautiful girl from smiling as she listened to the white-haired man who
was speaking to her, and nothing was so transporting as this maidenly smile with them: downcast eyes.

At the first instant Marius thought it was another daughter of the same man, a sister doubtless of
her whim he had seen before. But when the invariable habit of his promenade led him for the sec-
ond time near the seat, and he had looked at her attentively, he recognised that she was the same.
In six month, the little girl had become a young woman; that was all Nothing is more frequent than
this phenomenon. There is a moment when girls bloom out in a twinkling, and become roses all at
once. Yesterday we left them children, today we find them dangerous.

She had not only grown: she had beconie idcah.ed. A.; three April days are enough for certain trees
to put on a covering of dower,, so six months had been enough for her to put on a mantle of beauty.

We sometimes see people, poor and mean, who seem to awaken, pass suddenly from indigence to lux-
ury, incur expenses of all sorts, and become all at once splendid, prodigal. and magnificent. That
comes from interest received; yesterday was pay-day. The young girl had received her dividend.

And then she was no longer the school-girl with her plush hat, her merino dress, her shapeless
shoes, and her red hands; taste had come to her with beauty. She was a woman well dressed, with
a sort of simple and rich elegance without any particular style. She wore a dress of black damask,
a mantle of the same, and a white crape hat. Her white gloves showed the delicacy of her hand
which played with the Chinese ivory handle of her parasol, and her silk boot betrayed the small-
ness of her foot. When you passed near her, her whole toilet exhaled the penetrating fragrance
of youth.

As to the man, he was still the same.

The second time that Marius came near her, the young girl raised her eyes; they were of a deep
celestial blue, but in this veiled azure was nothing yet beyond the look of a child. She looked
at Marius with indiffernce, as she would have looked at any little monkey playing under the syc-
amores, or the marble vase which cast its shadow over the bench; and Marius continued his prome-
nade thinking of something else.

He passed four or five times more by the seat where the young girl was, without even turning his
eyes towards her.

On the following days he came as usual to the Luxembourg, as usual he found "the father and daugh-
ter" there, but he paid no attention to them. He thought no more of this girl now that she was
handsome than he had thought of her when she was homely. He passed very near the bench on which
she sat, because that was his habit.



III. EFFECT OF SPRING



ONE day the air was mild, the Luxembourg was flooded with sunshine and shadow, the sky was as
clear as if the angels had washed it in the morning, the sparrows were twittering in the depths
of the chestnut trees, Marius had opened his whole soul to nature, he was thinking of nothing,
he was living and breathing, he passed near this seat, the young girl raised her eyes, their
glances met.

But what was there now in the glance of the young girl? Marius could not have told. There was
nothing, and there was everything. It was a strange flash. She cast down her eyes, and he con-
tinued on his way.

What he had seen was not the simple, artless eye of a child; it was a mysterious abyss, half-
opened, then suddenly closed.

There is a time when every young girl looks thus. Woe to him upon whom she looks.

This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like the dawn in the sky. It is
the awakening of something radiant and unknown. Nothing can express the dangerous. chasm of
this unlooked-for gleam which suddenly suffuses adorable mysteries, and which is made up of
all the innocence of the present, and of all the passion of the future. It is a kind of irres-
olute lovingness which is revealed by chance, and which is waiting. It is a snare which Inno-
cence unconsciously spreads, and in which she catches hearts without intending to, and without
knowing it. It is a maiden glancing like a woman.

It is rare that deep reverie is not born of this glance wherever it may fall. All that is pure,
and all that is vestal, is concentrated in this celestial and mortal glance, which more than the
most studied ogling of the coquette, has the magic power of suddenly forcing into bloom in the
depths of a heart, this flower of the shade full of perfumes and poisons, which is called love.

At night, on returning to his garret, Marius cast a look upon his dress, and for the first time
perceived that he had the slovenliness, the indecency, and the unheard-of stupidity, to prome-
nade in the Luxembourg with his "every day" suit, a hat broken near the band, coarse teamsters'
boots, black pantaloons shiny at the knees, and a black coat threadbare at the elbows.



IV. COMMENCEMENT OF A GREAT DISTEMPER



THE next day, at the usual hour, Marins took from his closet his new coat, his new pantaloons,
his new hat, and his new boots; he dressed himself in this panoply complete, put on his glove's,
prodigious prodigality, and went to the Luxembourg.

On the way, he met Courfeyrac, and pretended not to see him. Courfeyrac, on his return home, said
to his friends:

"I have just met Marius' new hat and coat, with Marius inside. Probably he was going to an exam-
ination. He looked stupid enough."

On reaching the Luxembourg. Marius took a turn round the fountain and looked at the swans; then
he remained for a long time in contemplation before a statue, the head of which was black with
moss, and which was minus a hip. Near the fountain was a big-bellied bourgeois of forty, hold-
ing a little boy of five by the hand to whom he was saying: "Beware of extremes, my son Keep
thyself equally distant from despotism and from anarchy." Marius listened to this good bourgeois.
Then he took another turn around the fountain. Finally, he went towards "his walk;" slowly, awl
as if with regret. One would have said that he was at once compelled to go and prevented from go-
ing. lie was unconscious of all this, and thought he was doing as he did every day.

When he entered the walk he saw M. Leblanc and the young girl at the other end "on their seat."
He buttoned his coat, stretched it down that there might be no wrinkles, noticed with some com-
plaisance the lustre of his pantaloons, and marched upon the seat. There was something of attack
in this march. and certainly a desire of conquest. I say, then, he marched upon the seat, as I
would say: Hannibal marched upon Rome.

Beyond this, there was nothing which was not mechanical in all his movements. and he had in no
wise interrupted the customary preoccupations of his mind and his labour. He was thinking at
that moment that the Manuel du Baccalaureat was a stupid book, and that it must have been
compiled by rare old fools, to give an analysis, as of masterpieces of the human mind; of
three tragedies of Racine and only one of Moliere's comedies. He had a sharp singing sound
in his car. While approaching the seat, he was smoothing the wrinkles out of his coat, and
his eyes were fixed on the young girl. It seemed to him as though she filled the whole ex-
tremity of the walk with a pale, bluish light.

As he drew nearer, his step became slower and slower. At some distance from the seat, long
before he had reached the end of the walk, he stopped, and he did not know himself how it
happened, but he turned back. He did not even say to himself that he would not go to the
end. It was doubtful if the young girl could see him so far off, and notice his fine appear-
ance in his new suit. However, he held himself very straight, so that he might look well,
in case anybody who was behind should happen to notice him.

He reached the opposite end and then returned, and this time he approached a little nearer
to the seat. He even came to within about three trees of it, but there he felt an indescri-
bable lack of power to go further, and he hesitated. He thought he had seen the young
girl's face bent towards him. Still he made a great and manly effort, conquered his hesita-
tion, and continued his advance. In a few seconds, he was passing before the seat, erect
and firm, blushing to his ears, without daring to cast a look to the right or the left, and
with his hand in his coat like a statesman. At the moment he passed under the guns of the
fortress, he felt a frightful palpitation of the heart. She wore, as on the previous day,
her damask dress and her crape hat.: He heard the sound of an ineffable voice, which might
belief voice She was talking quietly. She was very pretty. He felt it, though he made no
effort to see her. "She could not, however," thought he, "but have some esteem and consid-
eration for me, if she knew that I was the real author of the dissertation on Marcos Obre-
gon de Ia Ronda, which Monsieur Francois de Neurchateau kis put, as his own, at the begin-
ning of his edition of Gil Blas!"

He passed the seat, went to the end of the walk, which was quite near, then turned and
passed again before the beautiful girl This time he was very pale. Indeed, he was experi-
encing nothing that was not very disagreeable. He walked away from the seat and from the
young girl, and although his back was turned, he imagined that she was looking at him,
and that made him stumble.

He made no effort to approach the scat again, he stopped midway of the walk, and sat down
there--a thing which he never did--casting many side glances, and thinking, in the most
indistinct depths of his mind that after all it must be difficult for persons whose white
hat and black dress lie admired, to be absolutely insensible to his glassy pantaloons and
his new coat.

At the end of a quarter of an hour, he rose, as if to recommence his walk towards this seat,
which was encircled by.a halo. He, however, stood silent and motionless. For the first time
in fifteen months. he said to himself, that this gentleman, who sat there every day with
his daughter, had undoubtedly noticed him, and probably thought his assiduity very strange.

For the first time, also, he felt a certain irreverence in designat-ing this unknown man,
even in the silence of his thought, by the nickname of M. Leblanc.

He remained thus for some minutes with his head down tracing designs on the ground with a
little stick which he had in his band.

Then he turned abruptly away (roan the seat, away from Monsieur Leblanc and his daughter,
and went home.

That day he forgot to go to dinner. At eight o'clock in the evening he discovered it, and
as it was too late to go down to the Rue Saint Jacques. "No matter," said he, and he ate a
piece of bread.

He did not retire until he had carefully brushed and folded his coat.



V. SUNDRY THUNDERBOLTS FALL UPON MA'AM POUGON



NEXT day, Ma'am Bougon,--thus Courfeyme designated the old portress-landlady of the Gor-
beau tenement.-Ma'am Bougon--her name was in reality Mamie Bougon, as we have stated.
This this terrible fellow Courfeyrac respected nothing.--Ma'am Bougon was stupefied with
astonishment to see Monsieur Marius go out again with his new coat.

He went again to the Luxembourg, but did not get beyond his seat midway of the walk. He sat
down there as on the day previous. gazing from a distance and seeing distinctly the white
hat, the black dress, and especially the bluish light. He did not stir from the seat. and did
not go home until the gates of the Luxembourg were shut. He did not see Monsieur Leblanc
and his daughter retire. He concluded from that that they left the garden by the gate on
the Rue de l'Ouest. Later, some weeks afterwards, when he thought of it, be could not remem-
ber where he had dined that night.

The nex day, for the third time. Ma'am Bougon was thunderstruck. Marius went out with his
new suit. "Three days running!" she exclaimed.

She made an attempt to follow him. but Marius walked briskly and with immense strides; it
was a hippopotamus undertaking to catch a Sunnis. In two minutes she lost sight of him, and
came back nut of breath. three quarters choked by her asthma, and furious. "The silly fel-
low." she muttered, "to put on his handsome clothes and make people run like that!"

The young girl was there with Monsieur Leblanc. Marius approached as near as he could, seem-
ing to be reading a book, but be was still very far off, then he returned and sat down on
his seat, where he spent four hours watching the artless little sparrows as they hopped a-
long the walk; they seemed to him to be mocking him.

Thus a fortnight rolled away. Marius went to the Luxembourg, no longer to promenade, but to
sit down, always in the same place, and without knowing why. Once there he did not stir. Ev-
ery morning he put on his new suit, not to be conspicuous, and he began again the next morn-
ing.

She was indeed of a marvelous beauty. The only remark which could be made, that would resem-
ble a criticism, is that the contradiction between her look, which was sad, and her smile,
which was joyous, gave to her countenance something a little wild, which pro-duced this ef-
fect, that at certain moments this sweet face became strange without ceasing to be charming.



VI. TAKEN PRISONER



ON one of the last days of the second week, Marius was as usual sitting on his seat, holding
in his hand an open book of which he had not turned a leaf for two hours. Suddenly he trem-
bled. A great event was commencing at the end of the walk. Monsieur Leblanc and his daughter
bad left their seat, the daughter had taken the arm of the father, and they were coming slow-
ly towards the middle of the walk where Marius was. Marius closed his book, then he opened it,
then he made an attempt to read. He trembled. The halo was coming straight towards him. "0
dear!" thought he, "I shall not have time to take an attitude." However, the man with the
white hair and the young girl were advancing. It seemed to him that it would last century,
and that it was only a second. "What are they coming by here for?" he asked himself. "What!
is she going to pass this plate; Are her feet to press this ground in this walk, but a step from
me? He was overwhelmed, he would gladly have been very handsomely would gladly have worn
the cross of the Legion of Honour. He heard the gentle and measured sound of their steps ap-
proaching. He imagined that Monsieur Leblanc was hurling angry looks upon him. "Is he going
to speak to me?" thought he. He bowed his head; when he raised it they were quite near him.
The young girl passed. and in passing she looked at him, She looked at him steadily, with
sweet and thoughtful look which made Marius tremble from head to foot. It seemed to him that
she reproached him for having been so long without coming to her, and that she said: "It is
I who come." Marius was bewildered by these eyes full of flashing light and fathomless abysses.

He felt as though his brain were on fire. She had come to him, what happiness! And then, how
she had looked at him! She seemed more beautiful than she had ever seemed before. Beautiful
with a beauty which combined all of the woman with all of the angel, a beauty which would have
made Petrarch sing and Dante kneel. He felt as though he was swimming in the deep blue sky.
At the same time he was horribly disconcerted. because he had a little dust on his boots.

He felt sure that she had seen his boots in this condition.

He followed her with his eyes till she disappeared, then be began to walk in the Luxembourg
like a madman. It is probable that at times he laughed, alone as he was, and spoke aloud. He
was so strange and dreamy when near the child's nurses that every one thought be was in love
with her.

He went out of the Luxembourg to find her again in some street.

He met Courfeyrac under the arches of the Odeon. and said: "Come and dine with me." They went
to Rousseau's and spent six francs. Marius ate like an ogre. He gave six sous to the waiter.
At dessert he said to Courfeyrac: "Have you read the paper? What a fine speech Audry de Puyra-
veau has made!"

He was desperately in love.

After dinner he said to Courfeyrac, "Come to the theatre with me." They went to the Porte
Saint Martin to see Frederick in L'Auberge des Adrets. Marius was hugely amused.

At the same time he became still more strange and incomprehensible. On leaving the theatre,
he refused to look at the garter of a little milliner who was crossing a gutter, and when
Courfeyrac said: "I would not object to putting that woman in my collection," it almost hor-
rified him.

Courfeyrac invited him to breakfast next morning, at the Cafe Voltaire. Marius went and ate
still more than the day before. He was very thoughtful, and yet very gay. One would have
said that he seized upon all possible occasions to burst out laughing. To every country-fel-
low who was introduced to him he gave a tender embrace. A circle of students gathered round
the table, and there was talk of the flummery paid for by the government, which was retailed
at the Sorbonne; then the conversation fell upon the faults and gaps: in the dictionaries and
prosodies of Quicherat. Marius interrupted the discussion by exclaiming:

"However, it is a very pleasant thing to have the Cross."

"He is a comical fellow!" said Courfeyrac, aside to Jean Prouvaire.

"No," replied Jean Prouvaire, "he is serious."

He was serious, indeed. Marius was in this first vehement and fascinating period which the
grand passion commences.

One glance had done all that.

When the mine is loaded, and the match is ready, nothing is simpler. A glance is a spark.
It was all over with him. Marius loved a woman. His destiny was entering upon the unknown.
The glances of women are like certain apparently peaceful but really formidable machines.
You pass them every day quietly, with impunity, and without suspicion of danger. There comes
a moment when you forget even that they are there. You come and go, you muse, and talk, and
laugh. Suddenly you feel that you are seized! it is done. The wheels have caught you, the
glance has captured you. It has taken you, no matter how or where, by any portion whatever of
your thought which was trailing, through any absence of mind. You are lost. You will be drawn
in entirely. A train of mysterious forces has gained possession of you. You struggle in vain.
No human succour is possible. You will be drawn down from wheel to wheel, from anguish to an-
guish, from torture to torture. You, your mind, your fortune, your future, your soul; and you
will not escape from the terrible machine, until, according as you are in the power of a mal-
evolent nature, or a noble heart, you shall be disfigured by shame or transfigured by love.



VII. ADVENTURES OF THE LETTER U ABANDONED TO CONJECTURE



Isolation, separation from all things, pride, independence, a taste for nature, lack of ever-
yday material activity, life in one's self, the secret struggles of chastity, and an ectasy
of goodwill towards the whole creation, had prepared Marius for this possession which is call-
ed love. His worship for his father had become almost a religion, and, like all religion, had
retired into the depths of his heart. He needed something above that. Love came.

A whole month passed during which Marius went every day to the Luxembourg. When the hour
came, nothing could keep him away. "He is out at service," said Courfeyrac. Marius lived in trans-
ports. It is certain that the young girl looked at him.

He finally grew bolder, and approached nearer to the seat. However he passed before it no
more, obeying at once the instinct of timidity and the instinct of prudence, peculiar to lovers.
He thought it better not to attract the "attention of the father." He formed his combinations
of stations behind trees and the pedestals of statues, with consummate art, so as to be seen as
much as possible by the eoung gid and as little as possible by the old gentleman. Sometimes he
would stand for half an hour motionless behind some Leonidas or Spartacus with a book in his
hand, over which his eyes, timidly raised, were looking for the young girl, while she, for her part,
was turning her charming profile towards him, suffused with a smile. While yet talking in the
most natural and quiet way in the world with the white-haired man, she rested upon Marius
all the dreams of a maidenly and passionate eye. Ancient and immemorial art which Eve knew
from the first day of the world, and which every woman knows from the first day of her life! Her
tongue replied to one and her eyes to the other.

We must, however, suppose that M. Leblanc perceived something of this at last, for often when
Marius came, he would rise and begin to promenade. He had left their accustomed place. and had
taken the scat at the other end of the walk, near the Gladiator, as if to see whether Marius
would follow them. Marius did not understand it. and committed that blunder. "The father" began
to be less punctual and did not bring "his daughter" every day. Sometimes he awe alone. Then
Marius did not stay. Another blunder.

Marius took no note of these symptoms. From the phase of timidity he had passed, a natural and
inevitable progress, to the phase of blindness. His love grew. He dreamed of her every night.
And then there came to him a good fortune for which he had not even hoped, oil upon the fire,
double darkness upon his eyes. One night, at dusk, he found on the seat. which "M. Leblanc and
his daughter" had just left, a handkerchief, a plain handkerchief without embroidery, but white,
fine, and which appeared to him to exhale ineffable odours. He seized it in transport. This
handkerchief was marked with the letters U. F: Marius knew nothing of this beautiful girl,
neither her family, nor her name, nor her dwelling; these two letters were the first thing he
had caught of her, adorable initials upon which he began straightway to build his castle. It
was evidently her name, Ursula, thought he, what a sweet name! He kissed the handkerchief,
inhaled its perfume, put it over his heart, on his flesh in the daytime, and at night went to
sleep with it on his lips.

"I feel her whole soul in it!" he exclaimed.

This handkerchief belonged to the old gentleman, who had simply let it fall from his pocket.

For days and days alter this piece of good fortune. he always appeared at the Luxembourg
kissing this handkerchief and placing it on his heart. The beautiful child did not understand
this at all, and indicated it to him by signs, which he did not perceive.

"Oh, modesty!" said Marius.



VIII. EVEN THE INVALIDES MAY BE LUCKY



SINCE, we have pronounced the word modesty, and since we conceal nothing, we must say that once,
however, through all his ecstasy, "his Ursula" gave him a very serious pang. It was upon one of the
days when she prevailed upon M. Leblanc to leave the seat and to promenade on the walk. A brisk
north wind was blowing,. which swayed the tops of the plane trees. Father and daughter, arm in arm,
had just passed before Marius' seat. Marius had risen behind them and was following them with his
eyes, as it was natural that he should in this desperate situation of his heart.

Suddenly a gust of wind, rather more lively than the rest, and probably intrusted with the little
affairs of Spring, flew down from La Pepiniere, rushed upon the walk, enveloped the young girl in a
transporting tremor worthy of the nymphs of Virgil and the fauns of Theocritus, and raised her
skirt, this skirt more sacred than that of Isis, almost to the height of the garter. A limb of ex-
quisite mould was seen. Marius saw it. He was exasperated and furious.

The young girl had put down her dress with a divinely startled movement, but he was outraged none
the less. True, he was alone in the walk. But there might have been somebody there. And if any-
body had been there! could one conceive of such a thing? what she had done was horrible! Alas,
the poor child had done nothing; there was but one culprit, the wind; and yet Marius in whom all
the Bartholo which there is in Cherubin was confusedly trembling, was determined to be dissatis-
fied, and was jealous of his shadow. For it is thus that is awakened in the human heart, and im-
posed upon man, even unjustly, the bitter and strange jealousy of the flesh. Besides, and throwing
this jealousy out of consideration, there was nothing that was agreeable to him in the sight of
that beautiful limb; the white stocking of the first woman that came along would have given him
more pleasure.

When "his Ursula," reaching the end of the walk, returned with M. Leblanc, and passed before the
seat on which Marius had again sat down, Marius threw at her a cross and cruel look. The young
girl slightly straightened back, with that elevation of the eyelids, which says "Well, what is the
matter with him?"

That was "their first quarrel."

Marius had hardly finished this scene with her when somebody canm down the walk. It was an Inva-
lide, very much bent, wrinkled and pale with age, in the uniform of Louis XV., with the little
oval patch of red cloth with crossed swords on his back, the soldier's Cross of Saint Louis, and
decorated also by a coat sleeve in which there was no arm, a silver chin, and a wooden leg. Mar-
ius thought he could discern that this man appeared to be very much pleased. It seemed to him
even that the old cynic, as be hobbled along by him, had addressed to him a very fraternal and
very merry wink, as if by some chance they had been put into communication and had enjoyed some
dainty bit of good fortune together. What had he seen to be so pleased, this relic of Mars? What had
happened between this leg of wood and the other? Marius had a paroxysm of jealousy. "Per-
haps he was byrsaid he; "perhaps he saw!" And he would have been glad to exterminate the
Invalide.

Time lending his aid, every point is blunted. This anger of Marius against "Ursula," how-
ever just and proper it might be, passed away. He forgave her at last; but it was a great
effort; he bolted at her three days.

Meanwhile, in spite of all that, and because of all that, his passion was growing, and was
growing mad.



IX. AN ECLIPSE



WE have seen how Marius discovered, or thought he discovered, that her name was Ursula.

Hunger comes with love. To know that her name was Ursula had been much; it was little. In
three or four weeks Marius had devoured this piece of good fortune.

He desired another. He wished to know where she lived.

He had committed one blunder in falling into the snare of the seat by the Gladiator. He had
committed a second by not remaining at the Luxembourg when Monsieur Leblanc came there
alone. He committed a third, a monstrous one. He followed "Ursula."

She lived in the Rue de Muest, in the least frequented part of it, in a new three-story house,
of modest appearance.

From that moment Marius added to his happiness in seeing her at the Luxembourg. the happiness
of following her home.

His hunger increased. He knew her name. her first name, at least, the charming name, the
real name of a woman; he knew where sby lived; he desired to know who she was.

One night after he had followed them home, and seen them disappear at the porte-cochere, he
entered after them, and said boldly to the porter:-

"Is it the gentleman on the first floor who has just come in?"

"No," answered the porter. "It is the gentlesman on the third."

Another fact. This success made Marius still bolder.

"In front?" he asked.

"Faith!" said the porter, "the house is only built on the street."

"And what is this gentleman?"

"He lives on his income, monsieur. A very kind man, who does a great deal of good among the
poor. though not rich."

"Wkat is his name?" continue:I Marius

The porter raised his head, and said

"Is monsieur a detective?"

Marius retired, much abashed, but still in great transports. He was getting on.

"Good," thought he. "I know that her name is Ursula, that she is the daughter of a retired gentle-
man, and that she lives there, in the third story, in the Rue de l'Ouest."

Next day 'Monsieur Leblanc and his daughter made but a short visit to the Luxembourg; they went
away while it was yet broad daylight. Marius followed them into the Rue de l'Ouest, as was his cus-
tom. On reaching the porte-cochere, Monsieur Leblanc passed his daughter in, and then stopped, and
before entering himself, turned ' and looked steadily at Marius. The day after that they did not
come to the Luxembourg. Marius waited in vain all day.

At night fall he went to the Rue de l'Ouest, and saw a light in the windows of the third story. He
walked beneath these windows until the light was put out.

The next day nobody at the Luxembourg. Marius waited all day. and then went to perform his night duty
under the Windows. That took him till ten o'clock in the evening. His dinner took care of itself.
Fever supports the sick man, and love the lover.

He passed a week in this way. Monsieur Leblanc and his daughter appeared at the Luxembourg no more.
Marius made melancholy conjectures; he dared not watch the porte-cochere during the day. He limited
himself to going at night to gaze upon the reddish light of the windows. At times he saw shadows
moving, and his heart beat high.

On the eighth day when he reached the house, there was no light in the windows. "What!" said he,
"the lamp is not yet lighted. But yet it is dark. Or they have gone out?" He waited till ten o'clock.
Till midnight. Till one o'clock in the morning. No light appeared in the third story windows, and
nobody entered the house. He went away very gloomy.

On the morrow--for he lived only from morrow to morrow; there was no longer any to-day, so to speak,
to him--on .the morrow be found nobody at the Luxembourg, he waited; at dusk he went to the house.
No light in the windows; the blinds were closed; the third story was entirely dark.

Marius knocked at the porte-eochere; went in and said to the porter:--

"The gentleman of the third floor?"

"Moved," answered the porter.

Marius tottered, and said feebly:

"Since when?"

"Yesterday."

"Where does he live now?"

"I don't know anything about it."

"He has not left his new address, then:" wiN07

And the porter, looking up, recognised Marius.

"What! it is you!" said he, but decidedly now, "you do keep a bright look-out."




　　BOOK SEVENTH--
PATRON MINETTE



I. THE MINES AND THE MINERS



EVERY human society has what is called in the theatres a third sub-stage. The social soil is mined e-
verywhere, sometimes for good, sometimes for evil. These works are in strata; there are upper mines
and lower mines. There is a top and a bottom in this dark sub-soil which sometimes sinks beneath civ-
ilisation, and which our indifference and our carelessness trample underfoot. The Encyclopedia, in the
last century, was a mine almost on the surface. The dark caverns, these gloomy protectors of primitive
Christianity, were awaiting only an opportunity to explode beneath the Caesars, and to flood the human
race with light. For in these sacred shades there is latent light. Volcanoes are full of a blackness,
capable of flashing flames. All lava begins at midnight. The catacombs, where the first mass was said,
were not merely the cave of Rome; they were the cavern of the world.

There is under the social structure, this complex wonder of a mighty burrow,--of excavations of every
kind. There is the religious mine, the philosophic mine, the political mine, the economic mine, the rev-
olutionary mine. This pick with an idea, that pick with a figure, the other pick with a vengeance. They
call and they answer from one catacomb to another. Utopias travel under ground in the passages. They
branch out in every direction. They sometimes meet there and fraternize. Jean Jacques lends his pick to
Diogenes, who lends him his lantern. Sometimes they fight. Calvin takes Socinios by the hair. But nothing
checks or interrupts the tension of all these energies towards their object. The vast simultaneous act-
ivity, which goes to and fro, and up and down, and up again, in these dusky regions, and which slowly
transforms the upper through the lower, and the outer through the inner; vast unknown swarming of workers.
Society has hardly a suspicion of this work of undermining which, without touching its surface, changes
its substance. So many subterranean degrees, so many differing labours, so many varying excavations.
What comes from all this deep delving? The future.

The deeper we sink, the more mysterious are the workers. To a degree which social philosophy can rec-
ognise, the work is good; beyond this degree it is doubtful and nixed; below, it becomes terrible. At
a certain depth, the excavations become impenetrable to the soul of civilisation, the respirable limit
of man is passed; the existence of monsters becomes possible.

The descending ladder is a strange one; each of its rounds corresponds to a step whercupon philosophy
can set foot, and where we discover some one of her workers, sometimes divine, sometimes monstrous.
Below John Huss is Luther; below Luther is Descartes; below Descartes is Voltaire; below Voltaire is
Condorcet; below Condorcet is Robespierre; below Robespierre is Marat; below Marat is Babeuf. And that
continues. Lower still, in dusky confusion, at the limit which separates the indistinct from the invis-
ible, glimpses are caught of other men in the gloom, who perhaps no longer exist. Those of yesterday are
spectres; those of tomorrow are goblins. The embryonary work of the future is one of the visions of the
philosopher.

A fetus world in limbo, what a wonderful profile!

Saint Simon, Owen, Fourier, are there also, in lateral galleries.

Indeed, although an invisible divine chain links together all these subterranean pioneers, who almost
always believe they are akin, yet are not, their labours are very diverse, and the glow of some is in
contrast with the flame of others. Some are paradisaic, others are tragic. Nevertheless, be the contrast
what it may, all these workers, front the highest to the darkest, from the wisest to the silliest have one
thing in common, and that is disinterestedness. Marat, like Jesus, forgets himself. They throw self aside;
they omit self; they do not think of self. They see something other than themselves. They have a light
in their eyes, and this light is searching for the absolute. The highest has all heaven in his eyes; the
lowest, enigmatical as he may be, has yet beneath his brows the pale glow of the infinite. Venerate
him, whatever he may do, who has this sign, the star-eye.

The shadow-eye is the other sign.

With it evil commences. Before him whose eye has no light, reflect and tremble. Social order has its
black miners.

There is a point where undermining becomes burial, and where light is extinguished.

Below all these mines which we have pointed out, below all these galleries, below all this immense under-
ground venous system of progress and of utopia, far deeper in the earth, lower than Marat, lower than
Babeuf, lower, much lower, and without any connection with the upper galleries, is the last sap. A fear-
inspiring place. This is what we have called the third substage. It is the grave of the depths. It is the
cave of the blind Inferi.

This communicates with the gulfs.



II. THE LOWEST DEPTH



THERE disinterestedness vanishes. The demon is dimly rough-hewn; every one for himself. The
eyeless I howls, searches, gropes, and gnaws. The social Ugolino is in this gulf.

The savage outlines which prowl over this grave, half brute, half phantom, have no thought
for universal progress, they ignore ideas and words, they have no care but for individual
glut. They are almost unconscious, and there is in them a horrible defacement. They have
two mothers, both stepmothers, ignorance and misery. They have one guide, want; and their
only form of satisfaction is appetite. They are voracious as beasts, that is to say fero-
cious, not like the tyrant, but like the tiger. From suffering these goblins pass to crime;
fated filiation, giddy procreation, the logic of darkness. What crawls in the third sub-stage
is no longer the stifled demand for the absolute, it is the protest of matter. Man there be-
comes dragon. Hunger and thirst are the point of departure Satan is the point of arrival.
From this cave comes Lacenaire.

We have just seen, in the fourth book, one of the compartments of the upper mine, the great
political, revolutionary, and philosophic sap. There, as we have said, all is noble, pure,
worthy, and honourable. There, it is true, men may be deceived and are deceived, but there
error is venerable, so much heroism does it imply. For the sum of all work which is done
there, there is one name: Progress.

The time has come to open other depths, the depths of horror.

There is beneath society, we must insist upon it, and until the day when ignorance shall be
no more, there will be, the great cavern of evil.

This cave is beneath all, and is the enemy of all. It is hate universal. This cave knows no
philosophers; its poniard has never made a pen. Its blackness has no relation to the sublime
blackness of script. Never have the fingers of night, which are clutching beneath this asphyx-
iating vault, turned the leaves of a book, or unfolded a journal. Babeuf is a speculator to
Cartouche; Marat is an aristocrat to Schinderhannes. The object of this cave is the ruin of
all things.

Of all things. Including therein the upper saps, which it execrates. It does not undermine,
in its hideous crawl, merely the social order of the time; it undermines philosophy, it under-
mines science, it undermines law, it undermines human thought, it undermines civilisation, it
undermines revolution, it undermines progress. It goes by the naked names of theft, prostitu-
tion, murder, and assassination. It is darkness, and it desires chaos. It is vaulted in with
ignorance.

All the others, those above it, have but one object--to suppress it. To that end philosophy and
progress work through all their organs at the same time, through amelioration of the real as
well as through contemplation of the absolute. Destroy the cave Ignorance, and you destroy
the mole Crime.

We will condense in a few words a portion of what we have just said. The only social peril
is darkness.

Humanity is identity. All men are the saute clay. No difference. here below at least, in
predestination. The same darkness before, the same flesh during, the same ashes after life.
But ignorance, mixed with the human composition, blackens it. This incurable ignorance pos-
sesses the heart of man, and there becomes Evil.



III. BABET, GUEULEMER, CLAQUESOUS, AND MONTPARNASSE




A QUARTETTE of bandits, Claquesous, Guculeiner, Babet, and Montparnasse, ruled from 1830 to
1835 over the third sub-stage of Paris.

Guenlemer was a Hercules without a pedestal. His cave was the Arche-Marion sewer. He was six
feet high, and had a marble chest, brazen biceps, cavernous lungs, a colossus' body, and a
bird's skull. You would think you saw the Farnese Hercules dressed in duck pantaloons and a
cotton-velvet waistcoat. Gueulemer, built in this sculptural fashion, could have subdued mon-
sters; he found it easier to become one. Low forehead, large temples, less than forty, the
foot of a goose, coarse short hair, a bushy cheek, a wild boar's beard; from this you see
the man. His muscles asked for work, his stupidity would have none. This was a huge lazy force.
He was an assassin through nonchalance. He was thought to be a creole. Probably there was a
little of Marshal Brown in him, he having been a porter at Avignon in 1815. After this he
had become a bandit.

The diaphaneity of Babet contrasted with the meatiness of Guculezner. Babet was thin and
shrewd. He was transparent, but impenetrable. You could see the light through his bones, but
nothing through his eye. He professed to be a chemist. He had been bar-keeper for Bobeche,
and clown for Bobino. He had played vaudeville at Saint Mihiel. He was an affected man, a great
talker, who italicised his smiles and quoted his gestures. His business was to sell plaster busts
and portraits of the "head of the Government" in the street. Moreover, he pulled teeth. He
had exhibited monstrosities at fairs, and had a booth with a trumpet and this placard: "Babet,
dental artist, member of the Academies, physical experimenter on metals and metalloids,
extirpates teeth, removes stumps left by other dentists. Price: one tooth, one franc fifty
centimes; two teeth, two francs; three teeth, two francs fifty centimes. Improve your op-
portunity." (This "improve your opportunity," meant: "get as many pulled possible.") He
had been married, and had had children. What had become of his wife and children, he did
not know. He had lost them as one loses his pocket-handkerchief. A remarkable exception in
the obscure world to which he belonged, Babet read the papers. One day, during the time he
had his family with him in his travelling booth, he had read in the Messenger that a woman
had been delivered of a child, likely to live, which had the face of a calf, and he had ex-
claimed: "There is a piece of good luck! My wife hasn't the sense to bring me a child like
that." Since then, he had left everything, "to take Paris in hand." His own expression.

What was Claquesous? He was night. Before showing himself. he waited till the sky was daubed
with black. At night he came out of a hole, which he went into again before day. Where was
this hole? Nobody knew. In the most perfect obscurity, and to his accomplices, he always turn-
ed his back when he spoke. Was his name Claquesous? No. He said: "My name is Nothing-at-all."
If a candle was brought he put on a mask. He was a ventriloquist. Babet said: "Claquesous is
a night-bird with two voices." Claquesous was restless, roving, terrible. It was not certain
that he had a name, Claquesous being a nickname; it was not certain that he had a voice,
his chest speaking of oftener than his mouth; it was not certain that he had a face, nobody
having ever seen anything but this mask. He disappeared as if he sank into the ground; he
came like an apparition.

A mournful sight was Montparnasse. Montparnasse was a child; less than twenty, with a pret-
ty face, lips like cherries, charming black locks, the glow of spring in his eyes; he had all
the vices and aspired to all the crimes. The digestion of what was bad gave him an appetite
for what was worse. He was the gamin turned vagabond. and the vagabond become an assassin.
He was genteel, effeminate, graceful, robust, weak, and ferocious. He wore his hat turned
upon the left side, to make room for the tuft of hair, according to the fashion of 1829. He
lived by robbery. His coat was the most fashionable cut, but threadbare. Montparnasse was a
fashion-plate ing in distress and committing murders. The cause of all the crimes of this
young man was his desire to be well dressed. The first grisette who had said to him: "You
are handsome," had thrown the stain of darkness into his heart, and had made a Cain of this
Abel. Thinking that he was handsome, he had desired to be elegant; now the first of elegances
is idleness: idleness for a poor man is crime. Few prowlers were so much feared as Montpar-
nasse. At eighteen, he had already left several corpses on his track. More than one travel-
ler lay in the shadow of this wretch, with extended arms and with his face in a pool of
blood. Frizzled, pomaded, with slender waist, hips like woman, the bust of a Prussian offi-
cer, a buzz of admiration about him from the girls of the boulevard, an elaborately-tied
cravat, a sling-shot in his pocket, a flower in his button-hole; such was this charmer of
the sepulchre:



COMPOSITION OF THE BAND



These four bandits formed a sort of Proteus, winding through the police and endeavouring
to escape from the indiscreet glances of Vidocq "under various form, tree, flame, and fountain,"
lending each other their names and their tricks, concealing themselves in their own shadow,
each a refuge and a hiding-place for the others, throwing off their personalities, as one takes
off a false nose at a masked ball, sometimes simplifying themselves till they are but one, some-
times multiplying themselves till Coco Lacour himself took them for a multitude.

These four men were not four men: it was a sort of mysterious robber with four heads preying
upon Paris by wholesale; it was the monstrous polyp of evil which inhabits the crypt of soc-
iety.

By means of their ramifications and the underlying network of their relations, Babet, Gueu-
lemer. Claquesous, and Montparnasse, controlled the general lying-in-wait business of the De-
partment of the Seine. Originators of ideas in this line, men of midnight imagination came to
them for the execution. The four villians being furnished with the single draft they tool;
charge of putting it on the stage. They worked upon scenario. They were always in condition
to furnish a company proportioned and suitable to any enterprise which stood in need of aid,
and was sufficiently lucrative. A crime being in search of arms, they sublet accomplices to
it. They had a company of actors of darkness at the disposition of every cavernous tragedy.

They usually met at nightfall, their waking hour, in the waste grounds near La Salpetriere.
There they conferred. They had the twelve dark hours before them they allotted their employ.

Patron Minette, such was the name which was given in subterranean society to the association
of these four men. In the old, popular, fantastic language, which nuw is dying out every day,
Patron Minette means morning, just as entre chien et loup (between dog and wolf ), means night.
This appellation. Patron-Minette probably came from the hour at which their work ended, the dawn
being the moment for the disappearance of phantoms and the separation of bandits. These four
were known by this title. When the Odd Judge of the Assizes visited Lacenaire in prison, he
questioned him in relation to some crime which Lacenaire denied. "Who did do it?" asked the
judge. Lacenaire made this reply, enigmmatical to the magistrate, but clear to the police:

Sometimes a play may be imagined front the announcement of the characters: so, too, we may
almost understand what a band is from the list of the bandits. We give, for these names are
preserved in the documents, the appellations to which the principal subordinates of Patron-
Minette responded:

Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille.
Brujon. (There was a dynasty of Bryjons; we shall say something about it hereafter.)
Boulatruelle, the road-mender, already introduced.
Laveuve.
Finistere.
Homer Hogu, negro.
Mardisoir.
Depethe.
Fauntleroy, alias Bouquetiere.
Glorieux, a liberated convict.
Barrecarrosse, alias Monsieur Dupont.
L'esplanade-du-Sud.
Poussagrive.
Carmagnolet.
Kruideniers, alias Bizarro.
Mangedentelle.
Les-pieds-en-l'air.
Demi-liard, alias Deux-milliards.
Etc., etc.

We pass over some of them, and not the worst. These names have faces. They express not only be-
ings, but species. Each of these names answers to a variety of these shapeless toadstools of the
cellars of civilisation.

These beings, by no means free with their faces, were not of those whom we see passing in the
streets. During the day, wearied out by their savage nights, they went away to sleep, sometimes
in the parget-kilns, sometimes in the abandoned quarries of Montmartre or Montrouge, sometimes
in the sewers. They burrowed.

What has become of these men? They still exist. They have always existed. Horace speaks of them:
Ambubaiarson collegia, pharmacopoele, mendici, mimoe; and so long as society shall be what it
is, they will be what they are. Under the dark vault of their cave, they are for ever reproduced
from the ooze of society. They return, spectres, always the same; but they bear the same name no
longer, and they are no longer in the same skins.

The individuals extirpated, the tribe still exists.

They have always the same faculties. From beggar to the prowler the race preserves its purity,
They divine purses in pockets, they scent watches in fobs. Gold and silver to them are odorous.
There are simple bourgeois of whom you might say that they have a robable appearance. These men
follow these bourgeois patiently. When a foreigner or a countryman passes by they have spider
thrills.

Such men, when, towards midnight, on a lone boulevard, you meet them or catch a glimpse of them,
are terrifying. They seem not men, but 'forms fashioned of the living dark; you would say that
they are generally an integral portion of the darkness, that they are not distinct from it, that
they have no other soul than the gloom, and that it is only temporarily and to live for a few
minutes a monstrous life, that they are disaggregated from the night.

What is required to exorcise these goblins? Light. Light in floods. No bat resists the dawn.
Illuminate the bottom of society.