III. THE AMAZEMENT OF MARIUS
In a few days, Marius was friends with Courfeyrac. Youth is the season when bones are swiftly mended and wounds rapidly healed. Marius breathed freely by Courfeyrac’s side, a fairly new sensation for him. Courfeyrac did not ask him any questions. He did not even think to. At that age faces say it all right away. Words are pointless. There is a kind of young man you could describe as having a face that talks. One look and you know each other.
One morning, though, Courfeyrac suddenly shot him this question: “By the way, do you have any political views?”
“Really!” said Marius, almost offended by the question.
“What are you?”
“A Bonapartist democrat.”
“Ah, a nice gray shade of mousy,” said Courfeyrac.
The next day, Courfeyrac introduced Marius to the Café Musain. Then he whispered in his ear with a smile: “I must gain your admission to the revolution.” And he took him to the room of the Friends of the ABC. He introduced him to the other comrades, adding in an undertone this simple word that Marius did not quite get: “A novice.”
Marius had fallen into a mental hornet’s nest. But, although quiet and grave, he was just as quick on his feet and just as ready to sting as the best of them.
Till then solitary and given to monologues and private asides out of habit and inclination, Marius was a bit scared by this flock of young men flapping all around him. All these diverse initiatives demanded his attention and pulled him in all directions at once. The tumultuous give-and-take of all these minds at liberty and at work set his ideas in a whirl. Sometimes, in the confusion, they floated off so far away from him that he had trouble catching up with them again. He heard talk of philosophy, literature, art, history, religion, in the most unexpected ways. He glimpsed things from strange angles; and, as he could not put them into perspective, he wasn’t sure whether he wasn’t looking at chaos. In shrugging off the opinions of his grandfather to don the opinions of his father, he thought he was set; he now suspected, anxiously and without daring to admit it to himself, that he was not. The point from which he viewed all things was shifting once more. A certain oscillation was shaking up all the horizons of his brain. A bizarre inner commotion. It almost hurt him physically.
It looked like nothing was sacred to these young men. Marius had to listen to the most peculiar talk on every issue and this upset his still-timid mind.
A theater poster turned up, emblazoned with the title of a tragedy from the old, so-called classical, repertoire. “Down with tragedy, so dear to the bourgeois!” yelled Bahorel. And Marius heard Combeferre reply: “You’re wrong, Bahorel. The bourgeoisie love tragedy and they should be left alone on that score. Bewigged tragedy has its raison d’être and far be it from me to challenge its right to exist, as some do in the name of Aeschylus. There are rough drafts in nature; there are, in creation, ready-made parodies. A beak that is not a beak, wings that aren’t wings, fins that aren’t fins, paws that aren’t paws, a cry of pain that makes you want to laugh—there you have the duck in a nutshell. Now, since the domestic fowl exists alongside the bird, I can’t see why ‘classical’ tragedy should not exist in the face of antique tragedy.”
Another time, Marius happened to be going down the rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau between Enjolras and Courfeyrac.
Courfeyrac took his arm.
“Be careful. This is the rue Plâtrière, now called the rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau because of an odd couple that lived here about sixty years ago. That was Jean-Jacques and Thérèse. From time to time, little creatures would be born there. Thérèse brought them into the world, Jean-Jacques booted them out into the world.”
Enjolras then savaged Courfeyrac. “Silence in front of Jean-Jacques! I admire the man. He disowned his own children, admittedly; but he adopted the people.”
None of these young men spoke the word emperor. Jean Prouvaire alone sometimes said Napoléon; all the others said Bonaparte. Enjolras pronounced it Buonaparte.
Marius was vaguely amazed. Initium sapientiae.
IV. THE BACK ROOM OF THE CAFÉ MUSAIN
One of the conversations these young men had, conversations that Marius sat in on and sometimes took part in, was a real eye-opener for Marius and shook him up quite badly.
It happened in the back room of the Café Musain. Just about all the Friends of the ABC were there that night. The oil lamp had been solemnly lit. They talked about this and that, noisily, passionlessly. Except for Enjolras and Marius, who kept silent, everyone joined in the aimless ranting. Talk among friends sometimes reaches this quietly tumultuous pitch. It was more random banter than conversation. Words were tossed around and caught. The talk was coming from all sides.
No woman was admitted into this back room except Louison, the café dishwasher, who passed through from time to time on her way from the laundry to the “laboratory.”
Grantaire, perfectly plastered, was deafening everyone in the corner he’d taken possession of. He reasoned and raved at the top of his lungs, shouting: “I’m thirsty. Mortals, I have a dream: that the Heidelberg tun has an attack of apoplexy and that I am among the dozen leeches they apply to it. I want to drink. I want to forget life. Life is a hideous invention of who knows who. It doesn’t last two ups and it’s not worth two ups. You break your neck trying to stay alive. Life is a stage set where nothing much actually works. Happiness is an old theater flat painted on one side only. Ecclesiastes says: ‘All is vanity.’ I couldn’t agree more with the poor bastard, if he ever existed. Zero, not wishing to get around in the nude, decked itself out in vanity. O vanity! The tarting up of everything in grand words! A kitchen is a laboratory, a dancer is a professor, an acrobat is a gymnast, a boxer is a pugilist, an apothecary is a chemist, a wigmaker is an artiste, a plasterer’s helper is an architect, a jockey is a sportsman, a wood louse is a pterygobranchiate. Vanity has a back and a front: The front is stupid, it’s the nigger decked out in his glass baubles; the back is silly, it’s the philosopher in rags. One makes me cry and the other makes me laugh. What are called honors and dignities, and even real honor and dignity, are generally fake gold. Kings make a mockery of human pride. Caligula made a horse a consul; Charles II made a sirloin steak a knight. So now you can drape yourselves between the consul Incitatus and the baronet Roastbeef. As for people’s intrinsic worth, that’s hardly any more respectable. Listen to the sort of praise a person heaps on their neighbor. White attacking white is ferocious; if the lily could talk, it’d make mincemeat of the dove! A bigot who tells tales about someone devout is more poisonous than an asp or a blue viper. It’s a pity I’m an ignoramus or I would cite a whole host of examples for you, but I know nothing. For instance, I’ve always been a bit of a wit; when I was studying under Gros, the painter, instead of mucking about daubing piddling little paintings, I spent my time pilfering apples; rapin—dauber—is the masculine of rapine—plunder. So much for me; as for the rest of you, you’re as bad as I am. I don’t give a fig for your perfections, excellences, and good qualities. Every good quality ends in a defect; the man who looks after his money verges on the miser, the generous man borders on the wastrel, the brave man is pretty close to the braggart; when you say very pious you say holier-than-thou; there are just as many vices in virtue as there are holes in Diogenes’ mantle. Who do you admire, the one killed or the killer, Caesar or Brutus? Generally people are for the killer. Long live Brutus! He killed. That’s virtue for you. Virtue? Very well, but madness too. Those great men, there, have some very strange blemishes. The Brutus who killed Caesar was in love with the statue of a little boy. This statue was made by the Greek sculptor Strongylion, who also sculpted the figure of an Amazon called Beautiful Legs, Euknemos, which Nero took with him on his jaunts. This Strongylion has left only two statues that Brutus and Nero agreed about; Brutus was in love with one of them and Nero was in love with the other. The whole of history is just one long rehash. One century plagiarizes another. The battle of Marengo copies the battle of Pydna; Clovis’s Tolbiac and Napoléon’s Austerlitz are as alike as two drops of blood. I don’t hold much store by victory. What could be stupider than winning? The real glory is in winning over. But just you try and prove anything! You’re satisfied with succeeding—what mediocrity! And with conquering—how pathetic! Alas, nothing but vanity and cowardice everywhere you turn. Everything bows down before success, even grammar. Si volet usus, says Horace. And so I despise the human race. Shall we descend from the whole to the part? Would you like me to admire the peoples of the world? Which particular people, if you please? Do you mean Greece? The Athenians, those Parisians of bygone days, killed Phocion, or Coligny as we might say, and crawled to the tyrants to the point where Anacephoras said of Pisistratus: ‘His urine attracts bees.’ The most important man in Greece for fifty years was the grammarian Philetas, who was so tiny and thin that he was forced to put lead in his shoes so he didn’t blow away in the breeze. In the biggest square in Corinth there was a statue sculpted by Silanion and catalogued by Pliny. This statue represented Episthates. What did Episthates do? He invented the wrestling move known as tripping someone up. That about sums up the glory of Greece. Let’s move on to other peoples. Shall I admire England? Shall I admire France? France? What for? Because of Paris? I’ve just told you what I think of Athens. England? What for? Because of London? I hate Carthage. Then again, London, metropolis of luxury, is the capital of destitution. Every year, in the parish of Charing Cross alone, a hundred people die of starvation. So much for Albion. I add, to cap it off, that I once saw an Englishwoman dancing with a crown of roses and blue spectacles. So, a big hiss and a boo for England! If I don’t admire John Bull, am I then to admire Brother Jonathan? I’m not too keen on this slave-owning brother. Take away ‘time is money’ and what’s left of England? Take away ‘cotton is king’ and what’s left of America? Germany is lymphatic; Italy is full of bile. Should we go into raptures over Russia? Voltaire admired it. He also admired China. I grant that Russia has its good points, among others a strong despotism; but I feel sorry for despots. Their health is delicate. An Alexis decapitated, a Peter stabbed, a Paul strangled, another Paul stomped on and kicked to death by jackboots; sundry Ivans have had their throats cut, several Nicolases and Basils have been poisoned—all this indicates that the palace of the emperors of Russia was a flagrantly insalubrious place. All civilized peoples offer the thinker this little detail for his admiration: war. Now, war, civilized war, sums up and exhausts all forms of banditry, from the armed robbery of the Catalan bands in the gorges of Mount Jaxa to the marauding of the Comanche Indians in Doubtful Pass. Bah, you’ll say to me, Europe is still better than Asia, surely? I agree that Asia is a joke; but I don’t really see what you can afford to laugh about in the Great Lama, you peoples of the West who have blended with your fashions and your elegant ways all the ornate filth of majesty, from the dirty chemise of Queen Isabella to the dauphin’s commode. Messieurs of the human race, I say: screw the lot of you! In Brussels they drink the most beer, in Stockholm the most eau-de-vie, in Madrid the most chocolate, in Amsterdam the most gin, in London the most wine, in Constantinople the most coffee, in Paris the most absinthe; that’s it for all the most useful notions. In a word, Paris wins hands down. In Paris, even the rag-and-bone merchants are sybarites; Diogenes would have been just as happy as a rag-and-bone man in the place Maubert as he was as a philosopher in Piraeus. And there’s something else you should know: The rag-and-bone-men’s cabarets are called bibines, watering holes where they serve cheap booze; the most famous are the Casserole and the Abattoir. And so, O open-air cafés, gin shops, little Lyon eateries, seedy dives, greasy spoons, pothouses, sleazy dance halls, smoky fleapit groggeries with your zink counters, dishwater bars of the rag-and-bone merchants, caravanserai of the caliphs, I swear to you I am a voluptuary, I eat at Richard’s at forty sous a head, and I need a Persian carpet to roll Cleopatra up in, naked! Where is Cleopatra? Ah! It’s you, Louison. Hello.”
And so the words streamed out of Grantaire, in his corner of the back room of the Café Musain as he buttonholed the dishwasher on her way past, Grantaire being more than drunk by then.
Bossuet put out his hand and tried to shut him up but Grantaire started up again even louder: “Aigle de Meaux, mitts off. You don’t impress me, imitating the gesture of Hippocrates when he rejected Artaxerxes’s hodgepodge. I exempt you from calming me down. Besides, I’m sad. What do you want me to say? Man is bad, man is deformed; the butterfly is a success, man is a botched job. God bungled that particular animal. A crowd offers you a choice of ugliness. The first man that comes along is a miserable bastard. Femme rhymes with in-fam-y. Of course, I’m suffering from spleen, complicated with melancholy, nostalgia, plus hypochondria, and I rant and rage and yawn and bore myself, I bore myself to tears, I bore myself to death! God can go to hell!”
“Well, then, shut up, capital R!” said Bossuet, who was discussing a point of law with the company at large and was up to his neck in legal jargon, his closing remarks going like this: “As for me, although I’m barely a jurist, at best an amateur attorney, I maintain this: that according to the custom of Normandy, every year at Michaelmas, a token sum must be paid for the benefit of the seigneur, unless others are entitled, by each and every title-holder, whether by lease or right of succession, and this, for all long leases, allodiums, private estate and state contracts, mortgages and mortgagees—”
“Echo, plaintive nymph,” hummed Grantaire.
Right next to Grantaire, at an almost silent table, a sheet of paper, an inkwell, and a plume between two small glasses announced that a vaudeville sketch was being drafted. This very serious matter was being tackled by two people talking in low voices with their heads together: “Let’s start by finding the names. When we have the names, we have the subject.”
“Right you are. You dictate. I’ll write.”
“Monsieur Dorimon?”
“Man of means?”
“Of course.”
“His daughter, Célestine.”
“—tine. Next?”
“Colonel Sainval.”
“Sainval’s a bit tired. I’d say Valsin.”
Alongside these vaudeville aspirants, another group, which was also taking advantage of the racket to whisper together privately, was discussing a duel. An old-timer, thirty years old, was advising a young whippersnapper, eighteen years old, about the adversary he was dealing with.
“Christ! Be careful. He’s a beautiful sword. He plays clean. He’s got attack, no wasted feints, good wrist action, real sparkle, lightning fast, good parry, accurate cut and thrust, heavens! And he’s left-handed.”
In the corner opposite Grantaire, Joly and Bahorel were playing dominoes and talking about love.
“You’re a happy man, you are,” Joly was saying. “You’ve got a mistress who never stops laughing.”
“That’s a mistake on her part,” replied Bahorel. “A man’s mistress is wrong to laugh. It only encourages you to be unfaithful to her. Seeing her so gay takes away any remorse; if you see her sad, it pricks your conscience.”
“Ungrateful bastard! A woman who laughs is a treasure! And you never ever fight!”
“That’s because we’ve made a pact when we formed our little Holy Alliance. We drew lines we never cross. Anything on the wintry side belongs to Vaud, on the windy side to Gex.16 Hence the peace.”
“Peace is happiness digesting.”
“But what about you, Joly? Where are you up to in your falling-out with what’s-her-name—you know the one I mean?”
“She’s still sulking—it’s shocking how long she can sulk.”
“Yet you’re so lovesick you’re wasting away.”
“Alas!”
“If I were you, I’d dump her.”
“Easy to say.”
“Easy to do, too. Doesn’t she call herself Musichetta?”
“Yes. Ah, my poor Bahorel! She’s a wonderful girl, very literary, tiny feet, tiny hands, dresses well, white, plump; eyes of a fortune-teller. I’m mad about her.”
“My dear man, in that case you have to sweep her off her feet, be elegant, bowl her over. Get yourself a pair of doeskin pants run up at Staub’s. They stretch.”
“How much are they?” cried Grantaire.
The third corner was in the throes of a poetry discussion. Pagan mythology was going head-to-head with Christian mythology. The subject was Olympus, whose side Jean Prouvaire took, out of sheer romanticism. Jean Prouvaire was only timid at rest. Once he got excited, he erupted, a sort of gaiety accentuated his enthusiasm and he was both laughing and lyrical: “Let’s not insult the gods,” he was saying. “The gods have not perhaps left us. Jupiter doesn’t strike me as being dead yet. The gods are mere dreams, you say. Yet now, when all these dreams have flown, the grand old pagan myths are still with us, even in nature, such as it is today. A mountain like Vignemale, for instance, which looks like a fortress from the side, is still, for me, Cybele’s headdress; it has not, to my mind, been proven that Pan doesn’t come out at night to blow in the hollow trunk of a willow, stopping the holes with his fingers one by one; and I’ve always thought that Io had a hand in the waterfall of Pissevache.”
In the last corner they were talking politics. They were pulling apart the Charter that had just been granted. Combeferre was limply defending it. Courfeyrac was energetically demolishing it. There was an unfortunate copy of the famous Touquet Charter on the table in front of them, and Courfeyrac grabbed it and was waving it around, supporting his arguments with the rustling of that sheet of paper.
“First, I want no kings. I’ll have none of that, if only for economic reasons. A king is a parasite. Kings don’t come free. Listen to this:—The High Cost of Kings. At the death of François I, the public debt in France was thirty thousand livres in revenue; at the death of Louis XIV, it was two billion six hundred million, at twenty-eight livres a mark, which, according to Desmarets, was equivalent to four billion five hundred million in 1760, which is equivalent to twelve billion today. Second, whether Combeferre likes it or not, granting charters is not something civilization should resort to. To ease the transition, smooth the passage, dampen the shock, make the nation’s shift from monarchy to democracy imperceptible through the spinning of constitutional fictions—these are all despicable justifications! No! No! We must never light the people’s way with false daylight. Principles wither and fade in your constitutional cave. No bastardization. No compromise. No grant from the king to the people. In all such grants there is an Article 14. Alongside the hand that feeds there is the claw that takes it all back. I reject your charter outright. A charter is a mask; underneath it is the lie. A nation that accepts a charter abdicates. Rights are only rights when they are whole. No! No charter!”
It was wintertime; two logs were crackling in the fireplace. It was tempting and Courfeyrac could not resist. He crumpled the poor Touquet Charter in his hand and tossed it on the fire. The paper caught fire. Combeferre watched philosophically as Louis XVIII’s masterpiece burned and all he said was: “The charter has gone up in flames.”
And the sarcastic gibes, the sallies, the taunts, the thing the French call wit and the English call humor, good taste and bad, good reasoning and bad, all the wild projectiles of repartee, flared up all at once and crossfired from all points of the room, creating a sort of joyous bombardment overhead.
V. THE HORIZON EXPANDS
The wonderful thing about the clash of young minds is that you can never predict the spark or foresee the lightning flash of the explosion it sets off. Anything could erupt at any moment. You have no idea what. A burst of laughter starts out as tender emotion. During a bout of buffoonery, seriousness makes its entrance. Stimulus is provided by the slightest chance word. The verve of each is at its peak. A quip is enough to open the field up to the unexpected. This is the kind of talk that takes sharp turns where the perspective suddenly changes completely. Chance is the scene-shifter in such conversations.
A harsh thought, oddly emerging from the clatter of words, suddenly pierced through the verbal free-for-all in which Grantaire, Bahorel, Prouvaire, Bossuet, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac were chaotically clashing swords.
How does a single phrase stand out in the middle of a conversation? How does it manage to suddenly stop everyone in their tracks? As we just said, nobody knows. In the middle of the din, Bossuet ended whatever he had been saying to Combeferre with this date: “June 18, 1815: Waterloo.”
At the mention of Waterloo, Marius, who was leaning on the table beside a glass of water, took his hand away from under his chin and began to study the room in earnest.
“God Almighty!” cried Courfeyrac (Good Lord was by then falling into disuse). “The number eighteen strikes me as odd. It’s Bonaparte’s fatal number. Put Louis in front and Brumaire behind and you have the man’s entire destiny, with this amazing peculiarity, which is that the end follows hot on the heels of the beginning.”
Enjolras, who had not said a word till then, broke his silence and addressed Courfeyrac: “You mean atonement follows hot on the heels of the crime.”
That word crime exceeded the limits of what Marius could endure, deeply stirred as he already was by the sudden evocation of Waterloo.
He got up, walked slowly over to the map of France spread out on the wall, at the bottom of which you could see an island in a separate box, and he stuck his finger on this box and said: “Corsica. A tiny island that has made France truly great.”
This was like a blast of arctic air. Everyone broke off—you could have heard a pin drop. Something was clearly about to take off.
Bahorel, about to retort to Bossuet, had been taking up a favorite pose. He dropped it to listen.
Enjolras, whose blue eyes were not fixed on anyone, seemingly staring into space, answered without looking at Marius: “France doesn’t need any Corsica to be great. France is great because it is France. Quia nominor leo.”
Marius did not feel even the vaguest desire to retreat; he turned toward Enjolras and he spoke in a voice ringing with emotion: “God forbid that I should diminish France! But it is not diminishing it by assimilating Napoléon to it. All right, so let’s talk. I’m new here, but I have to confess you amaze me. Where are we at? Who are we? Who are you? Who am I? Let’s be clear about the emperor. I hear you say Buonaparte, emphasizing the u the way the royalists do. I warn you that my grandfather goes one better still, he says Buonaparté. I thought you were young men. So where are you putting your enthusiasm, then? And what are you doing with it? Who do you admire if you don’t admire the emperor? And what more do you need? If you don’t want anything to do with that great man, what great men do you want? He had everything. He was complete. He had every human faculty in his brain—to the nth degree. He drew up codes like Justinian, he ruled alone like Caesar, when he talked he mixed Pascal’s lightning wit with the thunder of Tacitus, he made history and he wrote it, his bulletins are Iliads, he combined Newton’s mathematics with Mohammed’s metaphors, he left behind him in the Orient words as great as the pyramids; at Tilsit he taught majesty to emperors, at the Académie des Sciences he had answers for Laplace, at the Council of State he held his ground with Merlin, he gave soul to the geometry of some and and to the chicanery of others, he talked law with attorneys and the stars with astronomers; like Cromwell, blowing out alternate candles, he took himself off to the Temple to haggle over a curtain tassel; he saw everything, he knew everything, but that didn’t stop him from laughing with joy like an ordinary man at his little baby’s cradle; and all of a sudden Europe sat up and listened, armies went on the march, artillery parks rolled along, pontoon bridge trains stretched out over the rivers, clouds of cavalry galloped in the whirlwind, shouts, trumpets, everywhere the tottering of thrones, the borders of kingdoms wobbling on the map, you could hear the swoosh of a superhuman broadsword sliding out of its sheath, you could see him, the man himself, standing tall on the horizon with a blaze in his hand and a resplendent light in his eyes, deploying his two wings—the Grande Armée and the Old Guard—amid all the thunder, and there he was, the archangel of war!”
No one spoke. Enjolras hung his head. Silence always acts a bit like assent—or backing someone into a corner. Marius, almost without pausing for breath, went on with added exuberance: “Let’s be fair, my friends! To be the empire of such an emperor—what more splendid destiny for a nation, when that nation is France and when its genius is added to the genius of the man! To come out of nowhere and take the reins, to march and to triumph, to have all the capitals of Europe as stops along the way, to take his grenadiers and turn them into kings, to decree the downfall of dynasties, to change the face of Europe as you charge on, for people to feel, when you threaten them, that you have your hand on the hilt of the sword of God, to follow Hannibal, Caesar, and Charlemagne in the person of one man, to be the nation of a man who greets you every dawn with the glorious announcement of a battle won, to have the cannon of the Invalides as your alarm clock, to hurl into the endless light mighty words that blaze out for all time, Marengo, Arcola, Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram! At every instant to cause constellations of victories to come out in the zenith of the centuries, to offer the French empire as a counterpart to the Roman empire, to be the grand nation that gives birth to the Grande Armée, sending its legions flying over the face of the earth the way a mountain sprays its eagles in all directions, to vanquish, dominate, crush, to be Europe’s golden nation, ablaze with glory, to sound a Titanic fanfare down through history, to conquer the world twice over, by force of arms and by dazzlement—all this is sublime; what could possibly be greater?”
“To be free,” said Combeferre.
It was Marius’s turn to hang his head. That simple, chilling word had cut through his epic effusion like a steel blade and he felt it fall away inside him. When he raised his eyes, Combeferre was no longer there. Satisfied no doubt with pulling the rug from under Marius just as he reached his grand finale, he had simply left and everyone except Enjolras had followed suit. The room had emptied; Enjolras, left alone with Marius, looked at him gravely. Marius, though, having made an effort to rally his ideas, did not consider himself defeated; there was still something bubbling away inside him that would no doubt translate into syllogisms deployed against Enjolras. Then, all of a sudden, someone could be heard singing on the stairs as they went away. It was Combeferre, and this is what he sang:
If Caesar had offered me
Glory and war,
But I had had to give up
My mother’s love,
I would say to great Caesar:
Take back your scepter and your chariot,
I love my mother more, hey nonny!
I love my mother more.
The tender and savage tone in which Combeferre was singing gave this verse a sort of strange grandeur. Marius, pensive and with his eyes on the ceiling, repeated almost mechanically: “My mother—”
At that moment, he felt Enjolras’ hand on his shoulder.
“Citizen,” said Enjolras, “my mother is the Republic.”
VI. RES ANGUSTA
That soirée left Marius deeply shaken, with a sad darkness in his soul. He felt what the earth perhaps feels as it is being dug into by iron for seeds of wheat to be sown; it feels only the wound; the bursting of the wheat germ into life and the thrill of the wheat only come later.
Marius was forlorn. He had only just acquired a faith; did he have to reject it already? He told himself no. He resolved not to doubt, but he started to have doubts just the same. To be between two religions, one you have not yet emerged from, the other you have not yet embraced, is unbearable; and such gloomy half-light only appeals to batlike souls. Marius was open-eyed and he needed real light. The crepuscular light of doubt hurt him. Whatever his desire to stay put and to hold out, he was invincibly compelled to move on, to advance, to examine, to think, to go one step further. Where was all that going to lead him? He feared, after having taken so many steps that had drawn him closer to his father, to take steps now that would take him away from him. His uneasiness grew with every thought that came to him. High walls hemmed him in on all sides. He did not fit in with either his grandfather or his friends; he was reckless according to the one, backward according to the others; and he recognized that he was doubly cut off—from the old and from the young. He stopped going to the Café Musain.
In this troubled state of mind, he barely gave a thought to certain serious aspects of existence. But the realities of life do not let themselves be forgotten. They suddenly came and gave him a sharp nudge.
One morning the hotelkeeper sailed into Marius’s room and said: “Monsieur Courfeyrac has vouched for you.”
“Yes.”
“But I need money.”
“Ask Courfeyrac to come and speak to me,” said Marius.
Courfeyrac came, the host left them to it. Marius now told him what he had not thought of telling him before this, which was that he was all alone in the world, not having any relatives.
“What’s going to become of you?” said Courfeyrac.
“I have no idea,” Marius replied.
“What are you going to do?”
“I have no idea.”
“Have you got any money?”
“Fifteen francs.”
“Would you like me to lend you some?”
“Not on your life.”
“Have you got any clothes?”
“What you see.”
“Any jewelry?”
“A watch.”
“Silver?”
“Gold. Here it is.”
“I know a secondhand-clothes dealer who’ll take your redingote and a pair of pants.”
“That’s good.”
“You’ll only have one pair of pants, a waistcoat, a hat, and a morning coat left.”
“And my boots.”
“What! You mean you won’t go barefoot? What luxury!”
“It’ll do me.”
“I know a watchmaker who’ll buy your watch.”
“That’s good.”
“No, it’s not good. What are you going to do after that?”
“Whatever I have to—that’s honest, at least.”
“Do you know English?”
“No.”
“Do you know German?”
“No.”
“Too bad.”
“Why?”
“It’s just that one of my friends is a bookseller and he’s doing a sort of encyclopedia and you could have translated articles from German or English for it. It’s badly paid but you can live on it.”
“I’ll learn English and German.”
“And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime, I’ll eat my clothes and my watch.”
They sent for the clothes dealer. He bought the castoffs for twenty francs. They went to the watchmaker’s. He bought the watch for forty-five francs.
“That’s not bad,” said Marius to Courfeyrac on returning to the hotel. “With the fifteen francs I already have, that comes to eighty francs.”
“What about the hotel bill?” observed Courfeyrac.
“Ah, yes! I forgot,” said Marius.
“Christ!” went Courfeyrac. “You’ll eat up five francs while you’re learning English and five francs while you’re learning German. You’ll either have to swallow a language pretty fast or a hundred-sou piece pretty slowly.”
Meanwhile Aunt Gillenormand, who was pretty good underneath it all in a crisis, wound up unearthing Marius’s hideout. One morning, as Marius was coming back from the law school, he found a letter from his aunt and those “sixty pistoles,” that is, six hundred francs, in gold, in a sealed box.
Marius sent the thirty louis back to his aunt with a respectful letter declaring he had the means to support himself and that he could now provide for all his needs on his own. At that point he had three francs left.
The aunt did not inform the grandfather about this rejection for fear of exasperating him further. Besides, hadn’t he said: “Never speak to me of that bloodsucker again!”
Marius left the Hôtel de la Porte Saint-Jacques, not wanting to run up a debt there.