Виктор Мари Гюго
Les Misérables, v. 1
CHAPTER VIII
THE DEATH OF A HORSE
"It is a better dinner at Édon's than at Bombarda's," Zéphine exclaimed.
"I prefer Bombarda," Blachevelle declared; "there is more luxury: it is more Asiatic. Just look at the dining-room with its mirrors: look at the knives, they are silver-handled here and bone at Édon's; now, silver is more precious than bone."
"Excepting for those persons who have a silver chin," Tholomyès observed.
He was looking at this moment at the dome of the Invalides which was visible from Bombardas window. There was a pause.
"Tholomyès," cried Fameuil, "just now, Listolier and I had a discussion."
"A discussion is good," replied Tholomyès; "a quarrel is better."
"We discussed philosophy; which do you prefer, Descartes or Spinoza?"
"Désangiers," said Tholomyès.
This judgment rendered, he continued, —
"I consent to live: all is not finished in the world. Since men can still be unreasonable, I return thanks to the immortal gods. Men lie, but they laugh: they affirm, but they doubt: and something unexpected issues from the syllogism. This is grand: there are still in the world human beings who can joyously open and shut the puzzle-box of paradox. This wine, ladies, which you are drinking so calmly, is Madeira, you must know, grown at Coural das Freiras, which is three hundred and seventeen toises above the sea level. Attention while drinking! three hundred and seventeen toises, and M. Bombarda, the magnificent restaurateur, lets you have these three hundred and seventeen toises for four francs, fifty centimes."
Tholomyès drained his glass and then continued:
"Honor to Bombarda! he would be equal to Memphis of Elephanta if he could ladle me up an Almeh, and to Thygelion of Cheronea if he could procure me an Hetæra! for, ladies, there were Bombardas in Greece and Egypt, as Apuleius teaches us. Alas! ever the same thing and nothing new: nothing is left unpublished in the creation of the Creator. 'Nothing new under the sun,' says Solomon: amor omnibus idem, and Carabine gets into the St. Cloud fly-boat with Carabin, just as Aspasia embarked with Pericles aboard the Samos fleet. One last word: Do you know who Aspasia was, ladies? Although she lived at a time when women had no soul, she was a soul: a soul of a pink and purple hue, hotter than fire, and fresher than the dawn. Aspasia was a creature in whom the two extremes of woman met. She was a prostituted goddess: Socrates plus Manon Lescaut."
Tholomyès, when started, would hardly have been checked, had not a horse fallen in the street at this very moment. Through the shock, cart and orator stopped short. It was a Beauce mare, old and lean and worthy of the knacker, dragging a very heavy cart. On getting in front of Bombarda's, the beast, exhausted and worn out, refused to go any further, and this incident produced a crowd. The carter, swearing and indignant, had scarce time to utter with the suitable energy the sacramental word, "Rascal!" backed up by a pitiless lash, ere the poor beast fell, never to rise again. Tholomyès' gay hearers turned their heads away on noticing the confusion, while he wound up his speech by the following sad strophe, —
"Elle était de ce monde où coucous et carrosses,
Ont le même destin,
Et, rosse, elle a vécu ce que vivent les rosses,
L'espace d'un: Mâtin!"
"Poor horse!" Fantine said with a sigh; and Dahlia shouted, —
"Why, here is Fantine beginning to feel pity for horses: how can she be such a fool!"
At this moment, Favourite crossed her arms and threw her head back; she then looked boldly at Tholomyès, and said, —
"Well, how about the surprise?"
"That is true, the hour has arrived," Tholomyès answered. "Gentlemen, it is time to surprise the ladies. Pray wait for us a moment."
"It begins with a kiss," said Blacheve.
"On the forehead," Tholomyès added.
Each solemnly kissed the forehead of his mistress: then they proceeded to the door in Indian file, with a finger on their lip. Favourite clapped her hands as they went out.
"It is amusing already," she said.
"Do not be long," Fantine murmured, "we are waiting for you."
CHAPTER IX
THE JOYOUS END OF JOY
The girls, when left alone, leaned out of the windows, two by two, talking, looking out, and wondering. They watched the young men leave the Bombarda cabaret arm in arm; they turned round, made laughing signs, and disappeared in that dusty Sunday mob which once a week invaded the Champs Élysées.
"Do not be long," Fantine cried.
"What will they bring us?" said Zéphine.
"I am certain it will be pretty," said Dahlia.
"For my part," Favourite added, "I hope it will be set in gold."
They were soon distracted by the movement on the quay, which they could notice through the branches of the lofty trees, and which greatly amused them. It was the hour for the mail-carts and stages to start, and nearly all those bound for the South and West at that time passed through the Champs Élysées. Most of them followed the quay and went out by the Passy barrier. Every moment some heavy vehicle, painted yellow and black, heavily loaded and rendered shapeless by trunks and valises, dashed through the crowd with the sparks of a forge, the dust representing the smoke. This confusion amused the girls.
"What a racket!" exclaimed Favourite; "one might say a pile of chairs was flying about."
One of these vehicles, which could hardly be distinguished through the branches, stopped for a moment, and then started again at a gallop. This surprised Fantine.
"That is strange," she said; "I fancied that the diligence never stopped."
Favourite shrugged her shoulders.
"This Fantine is really amazing, and is surprised at the simplest things. Let us suppose that I am a traveller and say to the guard of the stage-coach, "I will walk on and you can pick me up on the quay as you pass." The coach passes, sees me, stops and takes me in. That is done every day; you are ignorant of life, my dear."
Some time elapsed; all at once Favourite started as if waking from sleep.
"Well," she said, "where is the surprise?"
"Oh yes," Dahlia continued, "the famous surprise."
"They are a long time," said Fantine.
Just as Fantine had ended this sigh, the waiter who had served the dinner came in; he held in his hand something that resembled a letter.
"What is that?" Favourite asked.
The waiter answered, —
"It is a paper which the gentlemen left for you, ladies."
"Why did you not bring it to us at once?"
"Because the gentlemen," the waiter went on, "ordered that it should not be delivered to you for an hour."
Favourite snatched the paper from the waiter's hands; it was really a letter.
"Stay," she said; "there is no address, but the following words are written on it: THIS IS THE SURPRISE." She quickly opened the letter and read (she could read): —
"WELL-BELOVED, – Know that we have relatives: perhaps you are not perfectly cognizant what they are; it means fathers and mothers in the civil, puerile, and honest code. Well, these relatives are groaning; these old people claim us as their own; these worthy men and women call us prodigal sons. They desire our return home, and offer to kill the fatted calf. We obey them, as we are virtuous; at the hour when you read this, five impetuous steeds will be conveying us back to our papas and mammas. 'We decamp,' as Bossuet said; "we are going, gone." We are flying away in the arms of Laffitte and on the wings of Gaillard. The Toulouse coach is dragging us away from the abyss, and that abyss is yourselves, pretty dears. We are re-entering society, duty, and order, at a sharp trot, and at the rate of nine miles an hour. It is important for our country that we should become, like everybody else, Prefects, fathers of a family, game-keepers, and councillors of state. Revere us, for we are sacrificing ourselves. Dry up your tears for us rapidly, and get a substitute speedily. If this letter lacerates your hearts, treat it in the same fashion. Good-by. For nearly two years we rendered you happy, so do not owe us any grudge.
(Signed)
BLACHEVELLE.FAMEUIL.LISTOLIER.FELIX THOLOMYÈS.
"P.S. The dinner is paid for."
The four girls looked at each other, and Favourite was the first to break the silence.
"I don't care," she said, "it is a capital joke."
"It is very funny," Zéphine remarked.
"It must have been Blachevelle who had that idea," Favourite continued; "it makes me in love with him. So soon as he has left me I am beginning to grow fond of him; the old story."
"No," said Dahlia, "that is an idea of Tholomyès. That can be easily seen."
"In that case," Favourite retorted, "down with Blachevelle and long live Tholomyès!"
And they burst into a laugh, in which Fantine joined.
An hour later though, when she returned to her bed-room, she wept: this was, as we have said, her first love; she had yielded to Tholomyès as to a husband, and the poor girl had a child.
BOOK IV
TO CONFIDE IS SOMETIMES TO ABANDON
CHAPTER I
TWO MOTHERS MEET
There was in the first quarter of this century a sort of pot-house at Montfermeil, near Paris, which no longer exists. It was kept by a couple of the name of Thénardier, and was situated in the Rue du Boulanger. Over the door a board was nailed to the wall, and on this board was painted something resembling a man carrying on his back another man, who wore large gilt general's epaulettes with silver stars; red dabs represented blood, and the rest of the painting was smoke, probably representing a battle. At the bottom could be read the inscription: THE SERGEANT OF WATERLOO.
Though nothing is more common than a cart at a pot-house door, the vehicle, or rather fragment of a vehicle, which blocked up the street in front of the Sergeant of Waterloo, one spring evening in 1818, would have certainly attracted the attention of any painter who had passed that way. It was the forepart of one of those wains used in wood countries for dragging planks and trunks of trees; it was composed of a massive iron axle-tree, in which a heavy pole was imbedded and supported by two enormous wheels. The whole thing was sturdy, crushing, and ugly, and it might have passed for the carriage of a monster gun. The ruts had given the wheels, felloes, spokes, axle-tree, and pole a coating of mud, a hideous yellow plaster, much like that with which cathedrals are so often adorned. The wood-work was hidden by mud and the iron by rust. Under the axle-tree was festooned a heavy chain suited for a convict Goliath. This chain made you think, not of the wood it was intended to secure, but of the mastodons and mammoths for which it would have served as harness; it had the air of a cyclopean and superhuman bagne, and seemed removed from some monster. Homer would have bound Polyphemus with it, and Shakespeare, Caliban.
Why was this thing at this place in the street? First, to block it up; secondly, to finish the rusting process. There is in the old social order a multitude of institutions which may be found in the same way in the open air, and which have no other reasons for being there. The centre of the chain hung rather close to the ground, and on the curve, as on the rope of a swing, two little girls were seated on this evening, in an exquisite embrace, one about two years and a half, the other eighteen months; the younger being in the arms of the elder. An artfully-tied handkerchief prevented them from falling, for a mother had seen this frightful chain, and said, "What a famous plaything for my children!" The two children, who were prettily dressed and with some taste, were radiant; they looked like two roses among old iron; their eyes were a triumph, their healthy cheeks laughed; one had auburn hair, the other was a brunette; their innocent faces had a look of surprise; a flowering shrub a little distance off sent to passers-by a perfume which seemed to come from them; and the younger displayed her nudity with the chaste indecency of childhood. Above and around their two delicate heads, moulded in happiness and bathed in light, the gigantic wheels, black with rust, almost terrible, and bristling with curves and savage angles, formed the porch of a cavern, as it were. A few yards off, and seated in the inn door, the mother, a woman of no very pleasing appearance, but touching at this moment, was swinging the children by the help of a long cord, and devouring them with her eyes, for fear of an accident, with that animal and heavenly expression peculiar to maternity. At each oscillation the hideous links produced a sharp sound, resembling a cry of anger. The little girls were delighted; the setting sun mingled with the joy, and nothing could be so charming as this caprice of accident which had made of a Titanic chain a cherub's swing. While playing with her little ones, the mother sang, terribly out of tune, a romance, very celebrated at that day, —
"Il le faut, disait un guerrier."
Her song and contemplation of her daughters prevented her hearing and seeing what took place in the street. Some one, however, had approached her, as she began the first couplets of the romance, and suddenly she heard a voice saying close to her ear, —
"You have two pretty children, Madame."
" – à la belle et tendre Imogène,"
the mother answered, continuing her song, and then turned her head. A woman was standing a few paces from her, who also had a child, which she was carrying in her arms. She also carried a heavy bag. This woman's child was one of the most divine creatures possible to behold; she was a girl between two and three years of age, and could have vied with the two other little ones in the coquettishness of her dress. She had on a hood of fine linen, ribbons at her shoulders, and Valenciennes lace in her cap. Her raised petticoats displayed her white, dimpled, fine thigh; it was admirably pink and healthy, and her cheeks made one long to bite them. Nothing could be said of her eyes, except that they were very large, and that she had magnificent lashes, for she was asleep. She was sleeping with the absolute confidence peculiar to her age; a mother's arms are made of tenderness, and children sleep soundly in them. As for the mother, she looked grave and sorrowful, and was dressed like a work-girl who was trying to become a country-woman again. She was young; was she pretty? Perhaps so; but in this dress she did not appear so. Her hair, a light lock of which peeped out, seemed very thick, but was completely hidden beneath a nun's hood; ugly, tight, and fastened under her chin. Laughter displays fine teeth, when a person happens to possess them; but she did not laugh. Her eyes looked as if they had not been dry for a long time; she had a fatigued and rather sickly air, and she looked at the child sleeping in her arms in the manner peculiar to a mother who has suckled her babe. A large blue handkerchief, like those served out to the invalids, folded like a shawl, clumsily hid her shape. Her hands were rough and covered with red spots, and her forefinger was hardened and torn by the needle. She had on a brown cloth cloak, a cotton gown, and heavy shoes. It was Fantine.
It was difficult to recognize her, but, after an attentive examination, she still possessed her beauty. As for her toilette, – that aerian toilette of muslin and ribbons which seemed made of gayety, folly, and music, to be full of bells, and perfumed with lilacs, – it had faded away like the dazzling hoar-frost which looks like diamonds in the sun; it melts, and leaves the branch quite black.
Ten months had elapsed Bince the "good joke." What had taken place during these ten months? We can guess. After desertion, want. Fantine at once lost sight of Favourite, Zéphine, and Dahlia, for this tie broken on the side of the men separated the women. They would have been greatly surprised a fortnight after had they been told that they were friends, for there was no reason for it. Fantine remained alone when the father of her child had gone away – alas! such ruptures are irrevocable. She found herself absolutely isolated; she had lost her habit of working, and had gained a taste for pleasure. Led away by her liaison with Tholomyès to despise the little trade she knew, she had neglected her connection, and it was lost. She had no resource. Fantine could hardly read, and could not write; she had been merely taught in childhood to sign her name, and she had sent a letter to Tholomyès, then a second, then a third, through a public writer, but Tholomyès did not answer one of them. One day Fantine heard the gossips say, while looking at her daughter, "Children like that are not regarded seriously, people shrug their shoulders at them." Then she thought of Tholomyès who shrugged his shoulders at her child, and did not regard the innocent creature seriously, and her heart turned away from this man. What was she to do now? She knew not where to turn. She had committed a fault, but the foundation of her nature, we must remember, was modesty and virtue. She felt vaguely that she was on the eve of falling into distress, and gliding into worse. She needed courage, and she had it. The idea occurred to her of returning to her native town M. sur M. There some one might know her, and give her work; but she must hide her fault. And she vaguely glimpsed at the possible necessity of a separation more painful still than the first; her heart was contracted, but she formed her resolution. Fantine, as we shall see, possessed the stern bravery of life. She had already valiantly given up dress; she dressed in calico, and had put all her silk ribbons and laces upon her daughter, the only vanity left her, and it was a holy one. She sold all she possessed, which brought her in 200 francs; and when she had paid her little debts, she had only about 80 francs left. At the age of two-and-twenty, on a fine Spring morning, she left Paris, carrying her child on her back. Any one who had seen them pass would have felt pity for them; the woman had nothing in the world but her child, and the child nothing but her mother in her world. Fantine had suckled her child; this had strained her chest, and she was coughing a little.
We shall have no further occasion to speak of M. Félix Tholomyès. We will merely say that twenty years later, in the reign of Louis Philippe, he was a stout country lawyer, influential and rich, a sensible elector, and a very strict juror, but always a man of pleasure.
About mid-day, after resting herself now and then by travelling from time to time, at the rate of three or four leagues an hour, in what were then called the "little vehicles of the suburbs of Paris," Fantine found herself at Montfermeil, in the Ruelle Boulanger. As she passed the Sergeant of Waterloo, the two little girls in their monster swing had dazzled her, and she stopped before this vision of joy. There are charms in life, and these two little girls were one for this mother. She looked at them with great emotion, for the presence of angels is an announcement of Paradise. She thought she saw over this inn the mysterious HERE of Providence. These two little creatures were evidently happy! She looked then, and admired them with such tenderness that at the moment when the mother was drawing breath between two verses of her song, she could not refrain from saying to her what we have already recorded.
"You have two pretty children, Madame."
The most ferocious creatures are disarmed by a caress given to their little ones. The mother raised her head, thanked her, and bade her sit down on the door bench. The two women began talking.
"My name is Madame Thénardier," the mother of the little ones said; "we keep this inn."
Then returning to her romance, she went on humming, —
"Il le faut, je suis chevalier,
Et je pars pour la Palestine."
This Madame Thénardier was a red-headed, thin, angular woman, the soldier's wife in all its ugliness, and, strange to say, with a languishing air which she owed to reading romances. She was a sort of lackadaisical male-woman. Old romances, working on the imaginations of landladies, produce that effect. She was still young, scarce thirty. If this woman, now sitting, had been standing up, perhaps her height and colossal proportions, fitting for a show, would have at once startled the traveller, destroyed her confidence, and prevented what we have to record. A person sitting instead of standing up – destinies hang on this.
The woman told her story with some modification. She was a work-girl, her husband was dead; she could get no work in Paris, and was going to seek it elsewhere, in her native town. She had left Paris that very morning on foot; as she felt tired from carrying her child, she had travelled by the stage-coach to Villemomble, from that place she walked to Montfermeil. The little one had walked a little, but not much, for she was so young, and so she had been obliged to cany her, and the darling had gone to sleep, – and as she said this she gave her daughter a passionate kiss, which awoke her. The babe opened her eyes, large blue eyes like her mother's, and gazed at what? Nothing, everything, with that serious and at times stern air of infants, which is a mystery of their luminous innocence in the presence of our twilight virtues. We might say that they feel themselves to be angels, and know us to be men. Then the child began laughing, and, though its mother had to check it, slipped down to the ground with the undauntable energy of a little creature wishing to run. All at once, she noticed the other two children in their swing, stopped short, and put out her tongue as a sign of admiration. Mother Thénardier unfastened her children, took them out of the swing, and said, —
"Play about, all three."
Children soon get familiar, and in a minute the little Thénardiers were playing with the new-comer at making holes in the ground, which was an immense pleasure. The stranger child was very merry; the goodness of the mother is written in the gayety of the baby. She had picked up a piece of wood which she used as a spade, and was energetically digging a grave large enough for a fly. The two went on talking.
"What 's the name of your bantling?"
"Cosette."
For Cosette read Euphrasie, for that was the child's real name; but the mother had converted Euphrasie into Cosette, through that gentle, graceful instinct peculiar to mothers and the people, which changes Josefa into Pépita, and Françoise into Sellette. It is a species of derivation which deranges and disconcerts the entire science of etymologists. We know a grandmother who contrived to make out of Theodore, Gnon.
"What is her age?"
"Going on to three."
"Just the same age as my eldest."
In the mean time the children were grouped in a posture of profound anxiety and blessedness; an event had occurred. A large worm crept out of the ground, and they were frightened, and were in ecstasy; their radiant brows touched each other; and they looked like three heads in a halo.
"How soon children get to know one another," Mother Thénardier exclaimed; "why, they might be taken for three sisters."
The word was probably the spark which the other mother had been waiting for; she seized the speaker's hand, looked at her fixedly, and said, —
"Will you take charge of my child for me?"
The woman gave one of those starts of surprise which are neither assent nor refusal. Fantine continued, —
"Look you, I cannot take the child with me to my town, for when a woman has a baby, it is a hard matter for her to get a situation. People are so foolish in our part. It was Heaven that made me pass in front of your inn; when I saw your little ones so pretty, so clean, so happy, it gave me a turn. I said to myself, "She is a kind mother." It is so; they will be three sisters. Then I shall not be long before I come back. Will you take care of my child?"
"We will see, said Mother Thénardier.
"I would pay six francs a month."
Here a man's voice cried from the back of the tap-room, —
"Can't be done under seven, and six months paid in advance."
"Six times seven are forty-two," said the landlady.
"I will pay it," said the mother.
"And seventeen francs in addition for extra expenses," the man's voice added.
"Total fifty-seven francs," said Madame Thénardier; and through these figures she sang vaguely, —
"Il le faut, disait un guerrier."
"I will pay it," the mother said; "I have eighty francs, and shall have enough left to get home on foot. I shall earn money there, and so soon as I have a little I will come and fetch my darling."
The man's voice continued, —
"Has the little one a stock of clothing?"
"It is my husband," said Mother Thénardier.
"Of course she has clothes, poor little treasure. I saw it was your husband; and a fine stock of clothes too, a wonderful stock, a dozen of everything, and silk frocks like a lady. The things are in my bag."
"They must be handed over," the man's voice remarked.
"Of course they must," said the mother; "it would be funny if I left my child naked."
The master's face appeared.
"All right," he said.
The bargain was concluded, the mother spent the night at the inn, paid her money and left her child, fastened up her bag, which was now light, and started the next morning with the intention of returning soon. Such departures are arranged calmly, but they entail despair. A neighbor's wife saw the mother going away, and went home saying, —
"I have just seen a woman crying in the street as if her heart was broken."
When Cosette's mother had gone, the man said to his wife, —
"That money will meet my bill for one hundred and ten francs, which falls due to-morrow, and I was fifty francs short. It would have been protested, and I should have had a bailiff put in. You set a famous mouse-trap with your young ones."
"Without suspecting it," said the woman.
