Les Misérables, v. 3

CHAPTER IV

M. MABŒUF

On the day when M. Mabœuf said to Marius, "I certainly approve of political opinions," he expressed the real state of his mind. All political opinions were a matter of indifference to him, and he approved of them all without distinction, that they might leave him at peace, just as the Greeks called the Furies – "the lovely, the kind, the exquisite" – the Eumenides. M. Mabœuf's political opinion was to love plants passionately and books even more. He possessed, like everybody else, his termination in ist, without which no one could have lived at that day; but he was neither Royalist, Bonapartist, Chartist, Orleanist, nor Anarchist, – he was a botanist.

He did not understand how men could come to hate each other for trifles like the charter, democracy, legitimacy, monarchy, the republic, etc., when there were in the world all sorts of mosses, grasses, and plants which they could look at, and piles of folios, and even 32mos, whose pages they could turn over. He was very careful not to be useless: his having books did not prevent him reading them, and being a botanist did not prevent him being a gardener. When he knew Colonel Pontmercy, there was this sympathy between them, that the Colonel did for flowers what he did for fruits, M. Mabœuf had succeeded in producing pears as sweet as those of St. Germain; it is one of those combinations from which sprang, as it seems, the autumn Mirabelle plum, which is still celebrated, and no less perfumed than the summer one. He attended Mass more through gentleness than devotion, and because, while he loved men's faces but hated their noise, he found them at church congregated and silent; and feeling that he must hold some position in the State, he selected that of churchwarden. He had never succeeded in loving any woman so much as a tulip bulb, or any man so much as an Elzevir. He had long passed his sixtieth year, when some one asked him one day, "How is it that you never married?" "I forgot it," he said. When he happened to say, – and to whom does it not happen? – "Oh, if I were rich!" it was not when ogling a pretty girl, like Father Gillenormand, but when contemplating a quarto. He lived alone with an old housekeeper; he was rather gouty, and when he slept, his old chalk-stoned fingers formed an arch in the folds of the sheets. He had written and published a "Flora of the Environs of Cauteretz," with colored plates, – a work of some merit, of which he possessed the plates, and sold it himself. People rang at his door in the Rue Mézières two or three times a day to buy a copy; he made a profit of about two thousand francs a year by the book, and that was nearly his whole fortune. Although poor, he had contrived by patience and privations, and with time, to form a valuable collection of all sorts of rare examples. He never went out without a book under his arm, and frequently returned with two. The sole ornaments of his four rooms on the ground-floor, which, with a small garden, formed his lodging, were herbals and engravings by old masters. The sight of a musket or a sabre froze him, and in his life he had never walked up to a cannon, not even at the Invalides. He had a tolerable stomach, a brother a curé very white hair, no teeth left in his mouth or in his mind, a tremor all over him, a Picard accent, a childish laugh, and the air of an old sheep. With all he had no other friend among the living than an old bookseller at the Porte St. Jacques of the name of Royol; and the dream of his life was to naturalize indigo in France.

His maid-servant was also a variety of innocence. The good woman was an old maid, and Sultan, her tom-cat, who might have meowed the Allegri Miserere in the Sistine Chapel, filled her heart, and sufficed for the amount of passion within her. Not one of her dreams had ever gone so far as a man, and had not got beyond her cat; like him, she had moustaches. Her glory was perfectly white caps, and she spent her time on Sunday, after Mass, in counting the linen in her box, and spreading on her bed the gowns which she bought in the piece, and never had made up. She knew how to read, and M. Mabœuf had christened her Mother Plutarch.

M. Mabœuf had taken a fancy to Marius, because the young man, being young and gentle, warmed his old age without startling his timidity. Youth, combined with gentleness, produces on aged people the effect of sun without wind. When Marius was saturated with military glory, gunpowder, marches and counter-marches, and all the prodigious battles in which his father gave and received such mighty sabre-cuts, he went to see M. Mabœuf, who talked to him about the hero in his connection with flowers.

About the year 1830 his brother the curé died, and almost immediately after, as when night arrives, the entire horizon became dark for M. Mabœuf. The bankruptcy of a notary despoiled him of ten thousand francs, all he possessed of his brother's capital and his own, while the revolution of July produced a crisis in the book trade. In times of pressure the first thing which does not sell is a Flora, and that of the Environs of Cauteretz stopped dead. Weeks passed without a purchaser. At times M. Mabœuf started at the sound of the house bell, but Mother Plutarch would say to him sadly, "It is the water-carrier, sir." In a word, M. Mabœuf left the Rue Mézières one day, abdicated his office as churchwarden, gave up St. Sulpice, sold a portion, not of his books, but of his engravings, for which he cared least, and installed himself in a small house on the Boulevard Montparnasse, where, however, he only remained three months, for two reasons, – in the first place, the ground-floor and garden cost three hundred francs, and he did not dare set aside more than two hundred francs for rent; and secondly, as he was close to the Fatou shooting-gallery, he heard pistol-shots, which he could not endure. He carried off his Flora, his copper-plates, his herbals, port-folios, and books and settled down near the Salpêtrière, in a sort of hut, in the village of Austerlitz, where he rented for fifty crowns a year three rooms, a garden enclosed by a hedge, and a well. He took advantage of this removal to sell nearly all his furniture. On the day when he entered his new house he was in very good spirits, and drove in with his own hands the nails on which to hang the engravings; he dug in his garden for the rest of the day, and at night, seeing that Mother Plutarch had an anxious look and was thoughtful, he tapped her on the shoulder and said with a smile, "We have the indigo!" Only two visitors, the publisher and Marius, were allowed admission to his hut of Austerlitz, – a rackety name, by the way, which was most disagreeable to him.

As we have remarked, things of this world permeate very slowly brains absorbed in wisdom, or mania, or, as often happens, in both at once, and their own destiny is remote from them. The result of such concentrations is a passiveness which, were it of a reasoning nature, would resemble philosophy. Men decline, sink, glide out, and even collapse, without exactly noticing, though this always ends with a re-awaking, but one of a tardy character. In the mean while it appears as if they are neutral in the game which is being played between their happiness and misery; they are the stakes, and look on at the game with indifference. It was thus that M. Mabœuf remained rather childishly but most profoundly serene, in the obscurity that was enveloping him gradually, and while his hopes were being extinguished in turn. The habits of his mind had the regular movement of a clock, and when he was once wound up by an illusion he went for a very long time, even when the illusion had disappeared. A clock does not stop at the precise moment when the key is lost.

M. Mabœuf had innocent pleasures, which cost but little and were unexpected, and the slightest accident supplied him with them. One day Mother Plutarch was reading a novel in the corner of the room; she was reading aloud, for she fancied that she understood better in that way. There are some persons who read very loud, and look as if they were pledging themselves their word of honor about what they are reading. Mother Plutarch read her novel with an energy of this nature, and M. Mabœuf listened to her without hearing. While reading, Mother Plutarch came to the following passage, relating to a bold dragoon and a gushing young lady: —

"La belle bouda, et Le Dragon – "

Here she broke off to wipe her spectacles.

"Bouddha and the dragon," M. Mabœuf repeated in a low voice; "yes, that is true; there was a dragon, which lived in a cavern, belched flames, and set fire to the sky. Several stars had already been burned up by this monster, which had tiger-claws, by the bye, when Bouddha went into its den and succeeded in converting the dragon. That is an excellent book you are reading, Mother Plutarch, and there cannot be a finer legend."

And M. Mabœuf fell into a delicious reverie.

CHAPTER V

POVERTY A GOOD NEIGHBOR TO MISERY

Marius felt a liking for this candid old man, who saw himself slowly assailed by poverty and yet was not depressed by it. Marius met Courfeyrac and sought M. Mabœuf – very rarely, however – once or twice a month at the most. Marius's delight was to take long walks alone, either on the external boulevards at the Champ de Mars, or in the least frequented walks of the Luxembourg. He often spent half a day in looking at a kitchen-garden, the patches of lettuce, the fowls on the dungheap, and the horse turning the wheel of the chain-pump. Passers-by looked at him with surprise, and some thought his dress suspicious and his face dangerous, while it was only a poor young man thinking without an object It was in one of these walks that he discovered the Maison Gorbeau, and the isolation and the cheapness tempting him, he took a room there. He was only known by the name of M. Marius.

Some of his father's old generals and old comrades invited him to come and see them, when they knew him, and Marius did not refuse, for there were opportunities to speak about his father. He called thus from time to time upon Count Pajol, General Bellavesne, and General Fririon at the Invalides. There was generally music and dancing, and on such evenings Marius put on his best suit; but he never went to such parties except on days when it was freezing tremendously hard, for he could not pay for a vehicle, and he would not go unless his boots were like looking-glasses. He would say at times, though not at all bitterly, "Men are so constituted that in a drawing-room you may have mud everywhere except on your boots. In order to give you a proper reception only one irreproachable thing is expected from you – is it your conscience? No, your boots."

All passions, saving those of the heart, are dissipated in reverie. The political fever of Marius had vanished, and the revolution of 1830 had aided in this, by satisfying and calming him. He had remained the same, except in his passion; he still held the same opinions, but they were softened down. Properly speaking, he no longer had opinions, but sympathies. To what party did he belong? To that of humanity. For humanity he selected France; in the nation he chose the people; and in the people, woman, and his pity was mainly given to her. At the present time he preferred an idea to a fact, a poet to a hero, and he admired a book like Job even more than an event like Marengo; and when after a day of meditation he returned along the boulevard and saw through the trees the illimitable space, the nameless gleams, the abyss, shadow, and mystery, all that was only human seemed to him infinitely little. He believed that he had – and probably he had – reached the truth of life and of human philosophy; and ended by gazing at nothing but the sky, the only thing which truth can see from the bottom of her well.

This did not prevent him from multiplying plans, combinations, scaffolding, and projects for the future. In this state of reverie, any eye which had seen into Marius's interior would have been dazzled by the purity of his mind. In fact, if our eyes of the flesh were allowed to peer into the consciences of our neighbor, a man could be judged far more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks. There is a volition in thought, but there is none in a dream, and the latter, which is entirely spontaneous, assumes and retains, even in the gigantic and the ideal, the image of our mind. Nothing issues more directly and more sincerely from the bottom of our soul than our unreflecting and disproportioned aspirations for the splendors of destiny. The true character of every man could be found in these aspirations far more certainly than in arranged, reasoned, and co-ordinated ideas. Our chimeras are the things which most resemble ourselves, and each man dreams of the unknown and the impossible according to his nature.

About the middle of the year 1831 the old woman who waited on Marius told him that his neighbors, the wretched Jondrette family, were going to be turned out. Marius, who spent nearly his whole time out of doors, scarce knew that he had neighbors.

"Why are they turned out?" he asked.

"Because they do not pay their rent, and owe two quarters."

"How much is it?"

"Twenty francs," said the old woman.

Marius had thirty francs in reserve in a drawer.

"Here are twenty-five francs," he said to the woman; "pay the rent of the poor people, give them five francs, and do not tell them where the money comes from."

CHAPTER VI

THE SUBSTITUTE

Accident decreed that the regiment to which Théodule belonged should be quartered in Paris. This was an opportunity for Aunt Gillenormand to have a second idea; her first one had been to set Théodule watching Marius, and she now plotted to make him succeed him. In the event of the grandfather feeling a vague want for a youthful face in the house – for such rays of dawn are sometimes sweet to ruins – it was expedient to find another Marius. "Well," she thought, "it is only a simple erratum, such as I notice in books, for Marius read Théodule. A grand-nephew is much the same as a grandson, after all, and in default of a barrister you can take a lancer."

One morning when M. Gillenormand was going to read something like the Quotidienne, his daughter came in and said in her softest voice, for the interests of her favorite were at stake, —

"Papa, Théodule is coming this morning to pay his respects to you."

"Who's Théodule?"

"Your grand-nephew."

"Ah!" said the old gentleman.

Then he began reading, thought no more of the grand-nephew, who was only some Théodule, and soon became angry, which nearly always happened when he read. The paper he held, a Royalist one we need hardly say, announced for the morrow, without any amenity, one of the daily events of Paris at the time, that the pupils of the schools of law and medicine would assemble in the Place du Panthéon – to deliberate. The affair was one of the questions of the moment, the artillery of the National Guard, and a conflict between the war minister and the "Citizen Militia," on the subject of guns parked in the courtyard of the Louvre. The students were going to "deliberate" on this, and it did not require much more to render M. Gillenormand furious. He thought of Marius, who was a student, and who would probably go, like the others, "to deliberate at mid-day in the Place du Panthéon."

While he was making these painful reflections lieutenant Théodule came in, dressed in mufti, which was clever, and was discreetly introduced by Mlle. Gillenormand. The lancer had reasoned thus: "The old Druid has not sunk all his money in annuities, and so it is worth the while to disguise one's self as a pékin now and then." Mlle. Gillenormand said aloud to her father, —

"Théodule, your grand-nephew."

And in a whisper to the Lieutenant, – "Assent to everything."

And she retired.

The Lieutenant, but little accustomed to such venerable meetings, stammered, with some timidity, "Good-morning, uncle," and made a bow which was composed of the involuntary and mechanical military salute blended with a bourgeois greeting.

"Ah, it's you, very good, sit down," said the ancestor, and after saying this he utterly forgot the lancer. Théodule sat down, and M. Gillenormand got up. He began walking up and down the room, with his hands in his pockets, talking aloud, and feeling with his old irritated fingers the two watches which he wore in his two fobs.

"That heap of scamps! so they are going to meet in the Place du Panthéon! Vertu de ma mie! little ragamuffins who were at nurse yesterday! if you were to squeeze their noses the milk would run out! And they are going to deliberate to-morrow! Where are we going? Where are we going? It is clear that we are going to the abyss, and the descamisados have led us to it. The citizen artillery! deliberate about the citizen artillery! go and chatter in the open air about the squibs of the National Guard! And whom will they meet there? Just let us see to what Jacobinism leads. I will wager whatever you like, a million against a counter, that there will be only liberated convicts and pickpockets there; for the Republicans and the galley-slaves are like one nose and one handkerchief. Carnot used to say, 'Where do you want me to go, traitor?' and Fouché answer, 'Wherever you like, imbecile!' That is what the Republicans are."

"That is true," said Théodule.

M. Gillenormand half turned his head, saw Théodule, and went on, —

"And then to think that that scamp had the villany to become a Republican! For what have you left my house? To become a Republican! Pest! In the first place, the people do not want your republic, for they are sensible, and know very well that there always have been kings, and always will be, and they know, after all, that the people are only the people, and they laugh at your republic, do you hear, idiot? Is not such a caprice horrible, – to fall in love with Père Duchêne, to ogle the guillotine, to sing romances, and play the guitar under the balcony of '93? Why, all these young men ought to be spat upon, for they are so stupid! They are all caught, and not one escapes, and they need only inhale the air of the street to go mad. The 19th century is poison; the first-comer lets his goat's beard grow, fully believes that he is a clever dog, and looks down on his old parents, – for that is republican, it is romantic. Just be good enough to tell me what that word romantic means? Every folly possible. A year ago they went to see Hernani. Just let me ask you —Hernani! antitheses, abominations, which are not even written in French. And then there are cannon in the court-yard of the Louvre; such is the brigand-age of the present age."

"You are right, uncle," said Théodule.

M. Gillenormand continued, —

"Guns in the court-yard of the Museum! what to do? Cannon, what do you want of me? Do you wish to fire grape-shot at the Apollo Belvidere? What have serge-cartridges to do with the Venus de Medici? Oh, the young men of the present day are ragamuffins, and this Benjamin Constant is not much! And those who are not villains are gawkies! They do all they can to make themselves ugly; they dress badly, they are afraid of women, and they have an imploring air about a petticoat that makes the wenches burst out laughing; on my word of honor, you might call them love's paupers, ashamed to beg. They are deformed, and perfect it by being stupid; they repeat the jokes of Tiercelin and Potier; they wear sack-coats, hostlers' waistcoats, trousers of coarse cloth, boots of coarse leather, and their chatter resembles their plumage, – their jargon might be employed to sole their boots. And all these silly lads have political opinions, and it ought to be strictly prohibited. They manufacture systems, they remodel society, they demolish the monarchy, upset all laws, put the garret in the place of the cellar, and my porter in the place of the king; they upset Europe from one end to the other, build up the world again, and their amours consist in looking sheepishly at the legs of the washerwomen as they get into their carts. Ah, Marius! ah, scoundrel! to go and vociferate in the public square! to discuss, debate, and form measures – they call them measures. Great gods! why, disorder is decreasing and becoming silly. I have seen chaos and I now see a puddle. Scholars deliberating about the National Guard! Why, that could not be seen among the Ojibbeways or the Cadodaches! The savages who go about naked, with their noddles dressed like a racket-bat, and with a club in their paw, are not such brutes as these bachelors, twopenny-halfpenny brats, who dare to decree and order, deliberate and argue! Why, it is the end of the world; it is evidently the end of this wretched globe; it wanted a final shove, and France has given it. Deliberate, my scamps! These things will happen so long as they go to read the papers under the arcades of the Odéon; it costs them a son, and their common sense, and their intelligence, and their heart, and their soul, and their mind. They leave that place, and then bolt from their family. All the newspapers are poison, even the Drapeau Blanc, and Martainville was a Jacobin at heart. Ah, just Heaven! you can boast of having rendered your grandfather desperate!"

"That is quite plain," said Théodule.

And taking advantage of the moment during which M. Gillenormand was recovering breath, the lancer added magisterially, —

"There ought to be no other paper but the Moniteur, and no other book but the Army List."

M. Gillenormand went on, —

"It is just like their Sièyes, – a regicide who became a senator! for they always end with that. They scar themselves with citizen familiarity, that they may be called in the long run Monsieur le Comte. Monsieur le Comte with a vengeance! slaughterers of September! The philosopher Sièyes! I do myself the justice of saying that I never cared any more for the philosophy of all these philosophers than I did for the spectacles of the grimacers at Tivoli. One day I saw the Senators pass along the Quay Malaquais, in violet velvet cloaks studded with bees, and wearing Henri IV. hats; they were hideous, and looked like the apes of the tigers' court. Citizens, I declare to you that your progress is a madness, that your humanity is a dream, that your Revolution is a crime, that your Republic is a monster, that your young Virgin France emerges from a brothel; and I sustain it against you all. No matter whether you are journalists, social economists, lawyers, and greater connoisseurs of liberty, equality, and fraternity, than the cut-throat of the guillotine! I tell you this plainly, my good fellows."