Les Misérables, v. 2

The man raised his eyes.

"What is the meaning of this?"

Thénardier answered respectfully, —

"It means, sir, that I am going to take Cosette back!"

The child started, and clung to the man. The latter answered, looking fixedly at Thénardier and leaving a space between each word, —

"You – take – Cosette – back?"

"Yes, sir, I do: and I must tell you that I have reflected. The truth is, that I have no right to give her to you. Look you, I am an honest man: the little one does not belong to me, but to her mother, who intrusted her to me, and I can only give her back to her mother. You will say to me, 'Her mother is dead.' Good. In that case, I can only surrender Cosette to a person who brings me a written authority from her mother. That is clear enough."

The man, without answering, felt in his pocket, and Thénardier saw the portfolio with the bank-notes reappear. He gave a start of joy.

"Good," he thought; "I have him, he is going to bribe me."

Before opening the portfolio the traveller looked around him; the place was utterly deserted, and there was not a soul in the wood or the valley. The man opened the pocket-book and took out, not the handful of bank-notes which Thénardier anticipated, but a simple sheet of paper, which he opened and handed to the landlord, saying, —

"You are right: read."

Thénardier took the paper and read: —

    "M. sur M., March 25, 1823.

"MONSIEUR THÉNARDIER, – You will hand over Cosette to the bearer, who will pay up all little matters.

    Yours respectfully,
    FANTINE."

"Do you know the signature?" the man continued.

It was really Fantine's, and Thénardier recognized it, and had no reply. He felt a double annoyance – first, at having to renounce the bribery which he expected; and secondly, that of being beaten. The man added, —

"You can keep that paper as your discharge."

Thénardier folded it up neatly, and growled, —

"The signature is tolerably well imitated. Well, be it so."

Then he attempted a desperate effort.

"So far, so good, sir, since you are the bearer; but the expenses must be paid, and there is a heavy sum owing me."

The man rose, and said, as he dusted his threadbare cuff, "Monsieur Thénardier, in January the mother calculated that she owed you 120 francs; in February you sent in an account of 500 francs; you received 300 at the end of that month, and 300 more early in March. Since then nine months have elapsed at the agreed-on price of fifteen francs, which makes 135 francs. You had received 100 francs too much, so this leaves 35 francs owing you, and I have just given you 1500."

Thénardier felt just like the wolf when it is caught by the leg in a steel trap.

"Who in the fiend's name is this man?" he thought.

He behaved like the wolf: he shook himself: impudence had carried him through before now.

"Monsieur, I don't know your name," he said boldly, and, putting off his respectful manner, "if you do not give me 3000 francs I shall take Cosette back."

The stranger said quietly, "Come, Cosette." He took the child by his left hand, and with the right picked up his stick. Thénardier noticed the hugeness of the stick and the solitude of the spot; the man buried himself in the wood, leaving the landlord motionless and confounded. As he walked away Thénardier regarded his broad shoulders and enormous fists, then his eye fell on his own thin arms. "I must have been a fool," he said, "not to bring my gun, as I was going to the chase."

Still the tavern-keeper did not give in. "I will know where he goes," he said, and began following them at a distance. Two things remained in his hands, – irony in the shape of the scrap of paper signed "Fantine," and a consolation in the 1500 francs. The man led Cosette in the direction of Bondy; he walked slowly, with drooping head and in a pensive attitude. Winter had rendered the wood transparent, and hence Thénardier did not lose sight of them, while keeping some distance off. From time to time the man turned round and looked to see whether he were followed, and suddenly perceived Thénardier. He drew Cosette into a clump of trees, in which they both disappeared. "Confusion!" said Thénardier, as he doubled his pace. The closeness of the trees compelled him to draw nearer to them, and when the man was at the thickest part he turned round and saw Thénardier, although the latter tried to conceal himself in the branches. The man gave him a restless glance, then tossed his head and continued his walk. Thénardier followed him; but after going some two hundred yards the man turned and looked at him so menacingly that the landlord thought it "useless" to go any farther, and turned back.

XI

NO. 9430 REAPPEARS, AND COSETTE WINS IT IN THE LOTTERY

Jean Valjean was not dead.

When he fell into the sea, or rather when he threw himself into it, he was, as we have seen, without irons. He swam in the trough of the sea alongside a vessel at anchor, to which a skiff was made fast. He managed to conceal himself in this skiff until evening. When night came he entered the water again and reached the shore at a short distance from Cape Brun. There, as he had no lack of money, he was able to provide himself with clothes. An inn in the suburbs of Balaguier was then the dressing-room of escaped convicts, – a profitable line of business. Then, Jean Valjean, like all these unhappy runaways who try to guard against the law and chance meetings, followed a track both obscure and winding. He found his first shelter at Pradeux near Beausset. From there he journeyed toward Grand-Villard, near Briançon, in the Upper Alps, – a groping and restless flight, a mole-track with unknown branches. Later, some trace of his passage could be found at l'Ain, in the district of Civrieux, in the Pyrenees at Accons, at a place called Grange-de-Doumecq, near the hamlet of Chavailles and in the suburbs of Périgueux, at Brienne, in the Canton of Chapelle-Gonaguet. He reached Paris. We have just seen him at Montfermeil.

His first care, on reaching Paris, had been to buy mourning robes for a little girl of seven or eight years, then to find a lodging-place. That done, he made his appearance at Montfermeil.

It will be remembered that once before at the time of his former escape he had made there a mysterious journey of which justice had had some information.

However, he was thought to be dead, and this thickened the obscurity which surrounded him. While in Paris there fell into his hands a journal which recorded the fact. He felt reassured, and almost as much at peace as if he really were dead.

On the very evening of the day on which Jean Valjean saved Cosette from the clutches of Thénardier he came back to Paris. He re-entered the city at nightfall with the child, through the Barrière Monceaux. There he jumped into a cab which brought him to the esplanade of the Observatory. Here he got out, paid the driver, took Cosette by the hand, and they both took their course in the dark night through the deserted streets near the Oursine and the Glacière toward the Boulevard de l'Hôpital.

The day had been strange and full of emotions for Cosette. They had dined behind hedges on bread and cheese bought at unfrequented cook-shops; they had frequently changed carriages, and made part of the journey on foot. She did not complain, but she was tired, and Jean Valjean felt it by his hand, on which she hung more and more as she walked. He took her on his back; Cosette, without letting go of Catherine, laid her head on his shoulder and fell asleep.

BOOK IV

THE GORBEAU TENEMENT

I

MASTER GORBEAU

Forty years ago the solitary walker who ventured into the lost districts of the Salpêtrière, and went up the boulevard as far as the Barrière d'Italie, reached a quarter where it might be said that Paris disappeared. It was not solitude, for there were passers-by; it was not the country, for there were houses and streets; it was not a town, for the streets had ruts as large as those in the high-roads, and grass grew in them; and it was not a village, for the houses were too lofty. What was it then? It was an inhabited place where there was nobody, a deserted spot where there was somebody; it was a boulevard of the great city, a street of Paris, more ferocious at night than a forest, more gloomy by day than a cemetery. It was the old quarter of the Marché-aux-Chevaux. The rambler, if he risked himself beyond the tottering walls of the market, if he even consented to pass the Rue du Petit-Banquier, reached the corner of the Rue des Vignes St. Marcel, a but little known latitude, after leaving on his right a garden protected by high walls; next a field in which stood tan-mills resembling gigantic beaver-dams; next an enclosure encumbered with planks, tree-stumps, sawdust, and chips, on the top of which a large dog barked; then a long low wall, all in ruins, with a small, decrepit back gate, covered with moss, which burst into flower in spring; and lastly, in the most desolate spot, a hideous and decrepit building, on which could be read in large letters, "Stick no Bills." Here, close to a foundry, and between two garden walls, could be seen, at the time of which we write, a poor house, which, at the first glance, seemed small as a cottage, but was in reality large as a cathedral. It turned its gable end to the public thoroughfare, and hence came its apparent smallness; nearly the whole house was concealed, and only a door and a window could be perceived.

This house was only one story high. On examining it, the first fact that struck you was that the door could never have been other than that of a low lodging-house, while the window, had it been carved in stone instead of made of stucco, might have belonged to a mansion. The door was nothing but a collection of worm-eaten planks, clumsily held together by roughly-planed cross-beams. It opened immediately on a steep staircase, muddy, dirty, and dusty, of the same width as itself, which could be seen from the street mounting steep as a ladder, and disappearing in the gloom between two walls. The top of the clumsy opening in which the door stood was masked by a thin deal plank, in which a triangular hole had been cut. On the inside of the door a brush dipped in ink had clumsily traced No. 52, while over the skylight the same brush had painted No. 50; so people hesitated. Dust-colored rags hung like a drapery over the triangular skylight. The window was wide, tolerably lofty, filled with large panes of glass, and protected by Venetian shutters; but these panes had various wounds, at once concealed and betrayed by an ingenious bandage of paper, and the Venetian shutters, broken and hanging from their hinges, threatened passers-by more than they protected the inhabitants. The horizontal screen-boards were wanting here and there, and these places had been filled up with boards nailed on perpendicularly; so that the affair began by being a Venetian screen, and ended by being a shutter. This door, which had an unclean look, and this window, which looked honest, though fallen in the world, produced the effect of two beggars walking side by side with two different faces under the same rags, the one having always been a mendicant, while the other had once been a gentleman. The staircase led to a very large building, which resembled a shed which had been converted into a house. This building had, as its intestinal tube, a long passage, upon which opened, right and left, compartments of various dimensions, habitable at a pinch, and more like booths than cells. These rooms looked out on the dreary landscape around. The whole was dark, wearisome, dull, melancholy, and sepulchral, and traversed, according as the cracks were in the roof or the door, by cold sunbeams or sharp draughts. An interesting and picturesque peculiarity of houses of this description is the enormous size of the cobwebs. To the left of the door, on the boulevard, and at about six feet from the ground, a bricked-up window formed a square hole filled by passing lads with stones. A portion of this building has been recently demolished, but what still remains will allow an idea to be formed of what it was. The whole affair is not more than a century old; one hundred years are the youth of a church and the old age of a human abode. It seems as if the house of man shares his brief tenure, and the House of God His eternity. The postman called this house No. 50-52, but it was known in the quarter by the name of Maison Gorbeau. Let us state whence this title came.

The collectors of things not generally known, who make anecdotal herbals, and prick fugacious dates into their memory with a pin, know that there were in Paris, about the year 1770, two advocates at the Châtelet of the names of Corbeau and Renard, – two names foreseen by Lafontaine. The opportunity was too good to be neglected, and ere long the following parody, in rather halting verse, was in everybody's mouth: —

"Maître Corbeau, sur un dossier perché,
Tenait dans son bec une saisie exécutoire;
Maître Renard, par l'odeur alléché,
Lui fit à peu près cette histoire:
Eh, bonjour," etc.

The two honest lawyers, who were unable to hold their heads up under the outbursts of laughter that followed them, resolved to get rid of their names, and for that purpose appealed to the king. The petition was handed to Louis XV. on the very day when the Papal Nuncio kneeling on one side, and Cardinal de la Roche Aymon on the other, were drawing the slippers on to the bare feet of Madame du Barry, who had just left her couch. The king, who was laughing, continued to laugh, gayly passed from the two bishops to the two lawyers, and forgave them their names, or nearly so. By royal authority Master Corbeau was allowed to add a tail to his initial letter and become Gorbeau; but Master Renard was less fortunate, – he could only obtain leave to place a P before his R, and call himself Prenard, so that the second name was nearly as significant as the first. Now, according to local tradition, Master Gorbeau had been owner of the building numbered 50-52, on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital, and was even author of the grand window. From this has this tumble-down place the name of Maison Gorbeau. Opposite the house there stands, amid the boulevard trees, an elm which is nearly three parts dead; a little farther on is the Rue de la Barrière des Gobelins, – a street at that time without houses, unpaved, planted with badly-growing trees, and which ran straight down to the city walls. A copperas smell issues in puffs from the roof of an adjacent manufactory. The barrier was close by, and in 1823 the city walls were still in existence. The barrier itself cast a gloom over the mind, for it was on the road to Bicêtre. Under the Empire and the Restoration men condemned to death returned to Paris through it on the day of their execution. Here was committed, about the year 1829, that mysterious assassination called "the murder of the Barrière de Fontainebleau," – a frightful problem which has never been elucidated, a mournful enigma which has never been solved. A few steps farther on you come to the fatal Rue Croulebarbe, in which Ulbach stabbed the woman who looked after the Ivry goats, to the sound of thunder, as in a melodrama. A few more steps and you reach the abominable pollard-elms of the Barrière St. Jacques, that philanthropic expedient concealing the scaffold, the paltry, disgraceful Place de Grève of a shop-keeping society, which has recoiled before the penalty of death, though not daring to abolish it with grandeur or keep it up with authority. Thirty-seven years ago, and leaving aside this place St. Jacques, which was, as it were, predestined, and has always been horrible, the gloomiest point perhaps of all this gloomy boulevard was that where No. 50-52 stood. Tradespeople did not begin to brood there till five-and-twenty years later. The place was morose, for you felt yourself between La Salpêtrière, whose dome was just visible, and Bicêtre, whose barrier you could touch; that is to say, between male and female mania. As far as the eye could reach, nothing was visible save the slaughter-houses, the city wall, and a few rare frontages of foundries, resembling barracks or monasteries. Everywhere were sheds and rubbish, old walls black as coffins, new walls white as winding-sheets; everywhere parallel rows of trees, buildings standing in rows, long odd lines, and the gloomy sadness of right angles. There was not a diversity of the soil, not a single architectural whim; the ensemble was freezing, regular, and hideous. Nothing makes the heart so heavy as symmetry, because symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the basis of mourning, a yawning despair. It is possible to imagine something more horrible than an Inferno in which people suffer; it is one in which they are ennuyés. If such an Inferno existed, this section of the Boulevard de l'Hôpital might be its avenue.

At nightfall, at the moment when light disappears, and before all in winter, at the hour when the evening breeze is tearing from the elms their last rusty leaves, when the darkness is profound and starless, and when the moon and the wind make rents in the clouds, this boulevard became really terrifying. The black outlines were lost in the gloom, and the passer-by could not refrain from thinking of the countless gallows traditions of the spot. This solitude, in which so many crimes had been committed, had something awful about it; traps could almost be foreseen in the darkness, all the confused shapes of the darkness appeared suspicious, and the long, hollow squares noticed between the trees seemed graves. By day it was ugly, in the evening lugubrious, and at night sinister. In the summer twilight a few old women might be seen sitting under the elms upon raw, rotted benches; these worthy old ladies had a partiality for begging. Even at the time of which we write, however, this quarter, which looked more superannuated than ancient, was striving to transform itself, and any one who wished to see it was obliged to make haste, for each day some detail disappeared from the ensemble. For the last twenty years the Orleans railway station has been by the side of the old faubourg, and has worked it up; for wherever a station is built on the skirt of a capital it is the death of a suburb and the birth of a town. Round these centres of popular movement, at the rolling of these mighty machines, under the breath of these monstrous horses of civilization which devour coal and snort fire, the earth trembles, and opens to swallow up the old abodes of men and bring forth new ones; the old houses crumble away, and new ones rise in their place.