Виктор Мари Гюго
Les Misérables, v. 4
CHAPTER VII
AN OLD HEART AND A YOUNG HEART FACE TO FACE
Father Gillenormand at this period had just passed his ninety-first birthday, and still lived with his daughter at No. 6, Rue des Filles-de-Calvaire, in the old house which was his own property. He was, it will be remembered, one of those antique old men whose age falls on without bending them, and whom even sorrow cannot bow. Still, for some time past his daughter had said, "My father is breaking." He no longer slapped the servants, or rapped so violently with his cane the staircase railing where Basque kept him waiting. The Revolution of July had not exasperated him for more than six months, and he had seen almost with tranquillity in the Moniteur this association of words, M. Humblot-Conté, Peer of France. The truth is, that the old man was filled with grief; he did not bend, he did not surrender, for that was not possible either with his moral or physical nature; but he felt himself failing inwardly. For four years he had been awaiting Marius with a firm foot, – that is really the expression, – with the conviction that the wicked young scape-grace would ring his bell some day; and now he had begun to say to himself, when depressed, that Marius might remain away a little too long. It was not death that was insupportable to him, but the idea that perhaps he might not see Marius again. This idea had never occurred to him till one day, and at present it rose before him constantly, and chilled him to death. Absence, as ever happens in natural and true feelings, had only heightened the grandfather's love for the ungrateful boy who had gone away like that. It is on December nights, when the thermometer is almost down at zero, that people think most of the sun. M. Gillenormand was, or fancied himself, utterly incapable of taking a step toward his grandson; "I would rot first," he said to himself. He did not think himself at all in the wrong, but he only thought of Marius with profound tenderness, and the dumb despair of an old man who is going down into the valley of the shadows. He was beginning to lose his teeth, which added to his sorrow. M. Gillenormand, without confessing it to himself, however, for he would have been furious and ashamed of it, had never loved a mistress as he loved Marius. He had hung up in his room, as the first thing he might see on awaking, an old portrait of his other daughter, the one who was dead, Madame de Pontmercy, taken when she was eighteen. He incessantly regarded this portrait, and happened to say one day, while gazing at it, —
"I can notice a likeness."
"To my sister?" Mlle. Gillenormand remarked; "oh, certainly."
The old man added, "And to him too."
When he was once sitting, with his knees against each other, and his eyes almost closed in a melancholy posture, his daughter ventured to say to him, —
"Father, are you still so furious against – " She stopped, not daring to go further.
"Against whom?" he asked.
"That poor Marius."
He raised his old head, laid his thin wrinkled fist on the table, and cried, in his loudest and most irritated accent, —
"Poor Marius, you say! That gentleman is a scoundrel, a scamp, a little vain ingrate, without heart or soul, a proud and wicked man!"
And he turned away, so that his daughter might not see a tear which he had in his eyes. Three days later he interrupted a silence which had lasted four hours to say to his daughter gruffly, —
"I had had the honor of begging Mademoiselle Gillenormand never to mention his name to me."
Aunt Gillenormand gave up all attempts, and formed this profound diagnostic: "My father was never very fond of my sister after her folly. It is clear that he detests Marius." "After her folly" meant, "since she married the Colonel." Still, as may be conjectured, Mademoiselle Gillenormand failed in her attempt to substitute her favorite, the officer of lancers, in Marius's place. Théodule had met with no success, and M. Gillenormand refused to accept the qui pro quo; for the vacuum in the heart cannot be stopped by a bung. Théodule, on his side, while sniffing the inheritance, felt a repugnance to the labor of pleasing, and the old gentleman annoyed the lancer, while the lancer offended the old gentleman. Lieutenant Théodule was certainly gay but gossiping, frivolous but vulgar, a good liver but bad company; he had mistresses, it is true, and he talked a good deal about them, it is also true, but then he talked badly. All his qualities had a defect, and M. Gillenormand was worn out with listening to the account of the few amours he had had round his barracks in the Rue de Babylone. And then Lieutenant Théodule called sometimes in uniform with the tricolor cockade, which rendered him simply impossible. M. Gillenormand eventually said to his daughter, "I have had enough of Théodule, for I care but little for a warrior in peace times. You can receive him if you like, but for my part I do not know whether I do not prefer the sabrers to the trailing of sabres, and the clash of blades in a battle is less wretched, after all, than the noise of scabbards on the pavement. And then, to throw up one's head like a king of clubs, and to lace one's self like a woman, to wear stays under a cuirass, is doubly ridiculous. When a man is a real man he keeps himself at an equal distance from braggadocio and foppishness. So keep your Théodule for yourself." Though his daughter said to him, "After all, he is your grand-nephew," it happened that M. Gillenormand, who was grandfather to the end of his nails, was not a grand-uncle at all; the fact is, that as he was a man of sense and comparison, Théodule only served to make him regret Marius the more.
One evening, it was the 4th of June, which did not prevent Father Gillenormand from having an excellent fire in his chimney, he had dismissed his daughter, who was sewing in the adjoining room. He was alone in his apartment with the pastoral hangings, with his feet on the andirons, half enveloped in his nine-leaved Coromandel screen, sitting at a table on which two candles burned under a green shade, swallowed up in his needle-worked easy-chair, and holding a book in his hand, which he was not reading. He was dressed, according to his mode, as an "Incroyable," and resembled an old portrait of Garat. This would have caused him to be followed in the streets; but whenever he went out, his daughter wrapped him up in a sort of episcopal wadded coat, which hid his clothing. At home he never wore a dressing-gown, save when he got up and went to bed. "It gives an old look," he was wont to say. Father Gillenormand was thinking of Marius bitterly and lovingly, and, as usual, bitterness gained the upper hand. His savage tenderness always ended by boiling over and turning into indignation, and he was at the stage when a man seeks to make up his mind and accept that which lacerates. He was explaining to himself that there was no longer any reason for Marius's return, that if he had meant to come home he would have done so long before, and all idea of it must be given up. He tried to form the idea that it was all over, and that he should die without seeing that "gentleman" again. But his whole nature revolted, and his old paternity could not consent. "What," he said, and it was his mournful burden, "he will not come back!" and his old bald fell on his chest, and he vaguely fixed a lamentable and irritated glance upon the ashes on his hearth. In the depth of this reverie his old servant Basque came in and asked, —
"Can you receive M. Marius, sir?"
The old man sat up, livid, and like a corpse which is roused by a galvanic shock. All his blood flowed to his heart, and he stammered, —
"M. Marius! Who?"
"I do not know," Basque replied, intimidated and disconcerted by his master's air, "for I did not see him. It was Nicolette who said to me just now, 'There is a young man here; say it is M. Marius.'"
Father Gillenormand stammered in a low voice, "Show him in."
And he remained in the same attitude, with hanging head and eye fixed on the door. It opened, and a young man appeared; it was Marius, who stopped in the doorway as if waiting to be asked in. His almost wretched clothes could not be seen in the obscurity produced by the shade, and only his calm, grave, but strangely sorrowful face could be distinguished. Father Gillenormand, as if stunned by stupor and joy, remained for a few minutes seeing nothing but a brilliancy, as when an apparition rises before us. He was ready to faint, and perceived Marius through a mist. It was really he, it was really Marius! At length, after four years! He took him in entirely, so to speak, at a glance, and found him handsome, noble, distinguished, grown, a thorough man, with a proper attitude and a charming air. He felt inclined to open his arms and call the boy to him, his bowels were swelled with ravishment, affectionate words welled up and overflowed his bosom. At length all this tenderness burst forth and reached his lips, and through the contrast which formed the basis of his character a harshness issued from it. He said roughly, —
"What do you want here?"
Marius replied with an embarrassed air, —
"Sir – "
Monsieur Gillenormand would have liked for Marius to throw himself into his arms, and he was dissatisfied both with Marius and himself. He felt that he was rough and Marius cold, and it was an insupportable and irritating anxiety to the old gentleman to feel himself so tender and imploring within, and unable to be otherwise than harsh externally. His bitterness returned, and he abruptly interrupted Marius.
"In that case, why do you come?"
The "in that case" meant "if you have not come to embrace me," Marius gazed at his ancestor's marble face.
"Sir – "
The old gentleman resumed in a stern voice, —
"Have you come to ask my pardon? Have you recognized your error?"
He believed that he was putting Marius on the right track, and that "the boy" was going to give way. Marius trembled, for it was a disavowal of his father that was asked of him, and he lowered his eyes and replied, "No, sir."
"Well, in that case," the old man exclaimed impetuously, and with a sharp sorrow full of anger, "what is it you want of me?"
Marius clasped his hands, advanced a step, and said, in a weak, trembling voice, —
"Take pity on me, sir."
This word moved M. Gillenormand; had it come sooner it would have softened him, but it came too late. The old gentleman rose, and rested both hands on his cane; his lips were white, his forehead shook, but his lofty stature towered over the stooping Marius.
"Pity on you, sir! The young man asks pity of an old man of ninety-one! You are entering life, and I am leaving it; you go to the play, to balls, to the coffee-house, the billiard-table; you are witty, you please women, you are a pretty fellow, while I spit on my logs in the middle of summer; you are rich with the only wealth there is, while I have all the poverty of old age, infirmity, and isolation. You have your two-and-thirty teeth, a good stomach, a quick eye, strength, appetite, health, gayety, a forest of black hair, while I have not even my white hair left. I have lost my teeth, I am losing my legs, I am losing my memory, for there are three names of streets which I incessantly confound, – the Rue Charlot, the Rue du Chaume, and the Rue St. Claude. Such is my state; you have a whole future before you, full of sunshine, while I am beginning to see nothing, as I have advanced so far into night. You are in love, that is a matter of course, while I am not beloved by a soul in the world, and yet you ask me for pity! By Jove! Molière forgot that. If that is the way in which you lawyers jest at the palais, I compliment you most sincerely upon it, for you are droll fellows."
And the octogenarian added, in a serious and wrathful voice, —
"Well; what is it you want of me?"
"I am aware, sir," said Marius, "that my presence here displeases you; but I have only come to ask one thing of you, and then I shall go away at once."
"You are a fool!" the old man said. "Who told you to go away?"
This was the translation of the tender words which he had at the bottom of his heart. "Ask my pardon, why don't you? and throw your arms round my neck." M. Gillenormand felt that Marius was going to leave him in a few moments, that his bad reception offended him, and that his harshness expelled him; he said all this to himself, and his grief was augmented by it, and as his grief immediately turned into passion his harshness grew the greater. He had wished that Marius should understand, and Marius did not understand, which rendered the old gentleman furious. He continued, —
"What! you insulted me, your grandfather; you left my house to go the Lord knows whither; you broke your aunt's heart; you went away to lead a bachelor's life, – of course that's more convenient, – to play the fop, come home at all hours, and amuse yourself; you have given me no sign of life; you have incurred debts without even asking me to pay them; you have been a breaker of windows and a brawler; and at the end of four years you return to my house and have nothing more to say to me than that!"
This violent way of forcing the grandson into tenderness only produced silence on the part of Marius. M. Gillenormand folded his arms, – a gesture which with him was peculiarly imperious, – and bitterly addressed Marius, —
"Let us come to an end. You have come to ask something of me, you say. Well, what is it? Speak!"
"Sir," said Marius, with the look of a man who feels that he is going to fall over a precipice, "I have come to ask your permission to marry."
M. Gillenormand rang the bell, and Basque poked his head into the door.
"Send my daughter here."
A second later the door opened again, and Mlle. Gillenormand did not enter, but showed herself. Marius was standing silently, with drooping arms and the face of a criminal, while M. Gillenormand walked up and down the room. He turned to his daughter and said to her, —
"It is nothing. This is M. Marius; wish him good-evening. This gentleman desires to marry That will do. Be off!"
The sound of the old man's sharp, hoarse voice announced a mighty fury raging within him. The aunt looked at Marius in terror, seemed scarce to recognize him, did not utter a syllable, and disappeared before her father's breath like a straw before a hurricane. In the mean while M. Gillenormand had turned back, and was now leaning against the mantel-piece.
"You marry! at the age of one-and-twenty! You have settled all that, and have only a permission to ask, a mere formality! Sit down, sir. Well, you have had a revolution since I had the honor of seeing you last; the Jacobins had the best of it, and you are of course pleased. Are you not a republican since you became a baron? Those two things go famously together, and the republic is a sauce for the barony. Are you one of the decorated of July? Did you give your small aid to take the Louvre, sir? Close by, in the Rue St. Antoine, opposite the Rue des Nonaindières, there is a cannon-ball imbedded in the wall of a house three stories up, with the inscription, 'July 28, 1830.' Go and look at it, for it produces a famous effect. Ah! your friends do very pretty things! By the way, are they not erecting a fountain on the site of the Duc de Berry's monument? So you wish to marry? May I ask, without any indiscretion, who the lady is?"
He stopped, and before Marius had time to answer, he added violently, —
"Ah! have you a profession, a fortune? How much do you earn by your trade as a lawyer?"
"Nothing," said Marius, with a sort of fierceness and almost stern resolution.
"Nothing? Then you have only the twelve hundred livres which I allow you to live on?"
Marius made no reply, and M. Gillenormand continued, —
"In that case, I presume that the young lady is wealthy?"
"Like myself."
"What! no dowry?"
"No."
"Any expectations?"
"I do not think so."
"Quite naked! And what is the father?"
"I do not know."
"And what is her name?"
"Mademoiselle Fauchelevent."
"Mademoiselle Fauchewhat?"
"Fauchelevent."
"Ptt!" said the old gentleman. —
"Monsieur!" Marius exclaimed.
M. Gillenormand interrupted him, with the air of a man who is talking to himself, —
"That is it, one-and-twenty, no profession, twelve hundred livres a year, and the Baroness Pontmercy will go and buy two sous' worth of parsley at the green-grocer's!"
"Sir," Marius replied in the wildness of the last vanishing hope, "I implore you, I conjure you in Heaven's name, with clasped hands I throw myself at your feet, – sir, permit me to marry her!"
The old man burst into a sharp, melancholy laugh, through which he coughed and spoke, —
"Ah, ah, ah! you said to yourself, 'I'll go and see that old periwig, that absurd ass! What a pity that I am not five-and-twenty yet! how I would send him a respectful summons! Old fool, you are too glad to see me; I feel inclined to marry Mamselle Lord-knows-who, the daughter of Monsieur Lord-knows-what. She has no shoes and I have no shirt; that matches. I am inclined to throw into the river my career, my youth, my future, my life, and take a plunge into wretchedness with a wife round my neck – that is my idea, and you must consent:' and the old fossil will consent. Go in, my lad, fasten your paving-stone round your neck, marry your Pousselevent, your Coupelevent, – never, sir, never!"
"Father – "
"Never!"
Marius lost all hope through the accent with which this "never" was pronounced. He crossed the room slowly, with hanging head, tottering, and more like a man that is dying than one who is going away. M. Gillenormand looked after him, and at the moment when the door opened and Marius was about to leave the room he took four strides with the senile vivacity of an impetuous and spoiled old man, seized Marius by the collar, pulled him back energetically into the room, threw him into an easy-chair, and said, —
"Tell me all about it."
The word father which had escaped from Marius's lips produced this revolution. Marius looked at M. Gillenormand haggardly, but his inflexible face expressed nought now but a rough and ineffable goodness. The ancestor had made way for the grandfather.
"Well, speak; tell me of your love episodes, tell me all. Sapristi! how stupid young men are!"
"My father!" Marius resumed.
The old gentleman's entire face was lit up with an indescribable radiance.
"Yes, that is it, call me father, and you'll see."
There was now something so gentle, so good, so open, and so paternal in this sharpness, that Marius, in this sudden passage from discouragement to hope, was, as it were, stunned and intoxicated. As he was seated near the table the light of the candles fell on his seedy attire, which Father Gillenormand studied with amazement.
"Well, father," said Marius.
"What!" M. Gillenormand interrupted him, "have you really no money? You are dressed like a thief."
He felt in a drawer and pulled out a purse, which he laid on the table.
"Here are one hundred louis to buy a hat with."
"My father," Marius continued, "my kind father. If you only knew how I love her! You cannot imagine it. The first time I saw her was at the Luxembourg, where she came to walk. At the beginning I paid no great attention to her, and then I know not how it happened, but I fell in love with her. Oh, how wretched it made me! I see her now every day at her own house, and her father knows nothing about it. Just fancy, they are going away; we see each other at night in the garden; her father means to take her to England; and then I said to myself, 'I will go and see my grandfather and tell him about it.' I should go mad first, I should die, I should have a brain fever, I should throw myself into the water. I must marry her, or else I shall go mad. That is the whole truth, and I do not believe that I have forgotten anything. She lives in a garden with a railing to it, in the Rue Plumet: it is on the side of the Invalides."
Father Gillenormand was sitting radiantly by Marius's side: while listening and enjoying the sound of his voice he enjoyed at the same time a lengthened pinch of snuff. At the words "Rue Plumet" he broke off inhaling, and allowed the rest of the snuff to fall on his knees.
"Rue Plumet! Did you say Rue Plumet? Only think! Is there not a barrack down there? Oh yes, of course there is: your cousin Théodule, the officer, the lancer, told me about it – a little girl, my dear fellow, a little girl! By Jove! yes, Rue Plumet, which used formerly to be called Rue Blomet. I remember it all now, and I have heard about the petite behind the railings in the Rue Plumet. In a garden, a Pamela. Your taste is not bad. I am told she is very tidy. Between ourselves, I believe that ass of a lancer has courted her a little; I do not exactly know how far matters have gone, but, after all, that is of no consequence. Besides, there is no believing him; he boasts. Marius, I think it very proper that a young man like you should be in love, for it becomes your age, and I would sooner have you in love than a Jacobin. I would rather know you caught by a petticoat, ay, by twenty petticoats, than by Monsieur de Robespierre. For my part, I do myself the justice of saying that, as regards sans-culottes, I never loved any but women. Pretty girls are pretty girls, hang it all! and there is no harm in that. And so she receives you behind her father's back, does she? That's all right, and I had affairs of the same sort, more than one. Do you know what a man does in such cases? He does not regard the matter ferociously, he does not hurl himself into matrimony, or conclude with marriage and M. le Maire in his scarf. No, he is, although foolish, a youth of spirits and of good sense. Glide, mortals, but do not marry. Such a young man goes to his grandfather, who is well inclined after all, and who has always a few rolls of louis in an old drawer, and he says to him, 'Grandpapa, that's how matters stand;' and grandpapa says, 'It is very simple; youth must make and old age break. I have been young and you will be old. All right, my lad, you will requite it to your grandson. Here are two hundred pistoles; go and amuse yourself, confound you!' That is the way in which the matter should be arranged; a man does not marry, but that is no obstacle: do you understand?"
Marius, petrified and incapable of uttering a word, shook his head in the negative. The old gentleman burst into a laugh, winked his aged eyelid, tapped him on the knee, looked at him in both eyes with a mysterious and radiant air, and said with the tenderest shrug of the shoulders possible, —
"You goose! make her your mistress!"
Marius turned pale; he had understood nothing of what his grandfather had been saying, and this maundering about the Rue Blomet, Pamela, the barracks, the lancer, had passed before Marius like a phantasmagoria. Nothing of all this could affect Cosette, who was a lily, and the old gentleman was wandering. But this divagation had resulted in a sentence which Marius understood, and which was a mortal insult to Cosette, and the words, Make her your mistress, passed through the pure young man's heart like a sword-blade. He rose, picked up his hat which was on the ground, and walked to the door with a firm, assured step. Then he turned, gave his grandfather a low bow, drew himself up again, and said, —
"Five years ago you outraged my father; to-day you outrage my wife. I have nothing more to ask of you, sir; farewell!"
Father Gillenormand, who was stupefied, opened his mouth, stretched out his arms, strove to rise, and ere he was able to utter a word, the door had closed again, and Marius had disappeared. The old gentleman remained for a few minutes motionless, and as if thunderstruck, unable to speak or breathe, as though a garroter's hand were compressing his throat. At length he tore himself out of his easy-chair, ran to the door as fast as a man can run at ninety-one, opened it, and cried, —
"Help! help!"
His daughter appeared, and then his servants; he went on with a lamentable rattle in his throat, —
"Run after him! catch him up! How did I offend him? He is mad and going away! Oh Lord, oh Lord! this time he will not return."
He went to the window which looked on the street, opened it with his old trembling hands, bent half his body out of it, while Basque and Nicolette held his skirts, and cried, —
"Marius! Marius! Marius! Marius!"
But Marius could not hear him, for at this very moment he was turning the corner of the Rue St. Louis. The nonagenarian raised his hands twice or thrice to his temples with an expression of agony, tottered back, and sank into an easy-chair, pulseless, voiceless, and tearless, shaking his head and moving his lips with a stupid air, and having nothing left in his eyes or heart but a profound and gloomy rigidity which resembled night.
