





When M. Gillenormand lived in the Rue Servandoni, he had frequented
many very good and very aristocratic salons. Although a bourgeois, M.
Gillenormand was received in society. As he had a double measure of
wit, in the first place, that which was born with him, and secondly,
that which was attributed to him, he was even sought out and made much
of. He never went anywhere except on condition of being the chief
person there. There are people who will have influence at any price,
and who will have other people busy themselves over them; when they
cannot be oracles, they turn wags. M. Gillenormand was not of this
nature; his domination in the Royalist salons which he frequented cost
his self-respect nothing. He was an oracle everywhere. It had happened
to him to hold his own against M. de Bonald, and even against M.
Bengy-Puy-Vallée.

About 1817, he invariably passed two afternoons a week in a house in
his own neighborhood, in the Rue Férou, with Madame la Baronne de T., a
worthy and respectable person, whose husband had been Ambassador of
France to Berlin under Louis XVI. Baron de T., who, during his
lifetime, had gone very passionately into ecstasies and magnetic
visions, had died bankrupt, during the emigration, leaving, as his
entire fortune, some very curious Memoirs about Mesmer and his tub, in
ten manuscript volumes, bound in red morocco and gilded on the edges.
Madame de T. had not published the memoirs, out of pride, and
maintained herself on a meagre income which had survived no one knew
how.

Madame de T. lived far from the Court; “a very mixed society,” as she
said, in a noble isolation, proud and poor. A few friends assembled
twice a week about her widowed hearth, and these constituted a purely
Royalist salon. They sipped tea there, and uttered groans or cries of
horror at the century, the charter, the Bonapartists, the prostitution
of the blue ribbon, or the Jacobinism of Louis XVIII., according as the
wind veered towards elegy or dithyrambs; and they spoke in low tones of
the hopes which were presented by Monsieur, afterwards Charles X.

The songs of the fishwomen, in which Napoleon was called _Nicolas_,
were received there with transports of joy. Duchesses, the most
delicate and charming women in the world, went into ecstasies over
couplets like the following, addressed to “the federates”:—

Refoncez dans vos culottes
Le bout d’ chemis’ qui vous pend.
Qu’on n’ dis’ pas qu’ les patriotes
Ont arboré l’ drapeau blanc?20


There they amused themselves with puns which were considered terrible,
with innocent plays upon words which they supposed to be venomous, with
quatrains, with distiches even; thus, upon the Dessolles ministry, a
moderate cabinet, of which MM. Decazes and Deserre were members:—

Pour raffermir le trône ébranlé sur sa base,
Il faut changer de sol, et de serre et de case.21


Or they drew up a list of the chamber of peers, “an abominably Jacobin
chamber,” and from this list they combined alliances of names, in such
a manner as to form, for example, phrases like the following: _Damas.
Sabran. Gouvion-Saint-Cyr_.—All this was done merrily. In that society,
they parodied the Revolution. They used I know not what desires to give
point to the same wrath in inverse sense. They sang their little _Ça
ira: _—

Ah! ça ira ça ira ça ira!
Les Bonapartistes à la lanterne!


Songs are like the guillotine; they chop away indifferently, to-day
this head, to-morrow that. It is only a variation.

In the Fualdès affair, which belongs to this epoch, 1816, they took
part for Bastide and Jausion, because Fualdès was “a Buonapartist.”
They designated the liberals as f_riends and brothers_; this
constituted the most deadly insult.

Like certain church towers, Madame de T.’s salon had two cocks. One of
them was M. Gillenormand, the other was Comte de Lamothe-Valois, of
whom it was whispered about, with a sort of respect: “Do you know? That
is the Lamothe of the affair of the necklace.” These singular amnesties
do occur in parties.

Let us add the following: in the bourgeoisie, honored situations decay
through too easy relations; one must beware whom one admits; in the
same way that there is a loss of caloric in the vicinity of those who
are cold, there is a diminution of consideration in the approach of
despised persons. The ancient society of the upper classes held
themselves above this law, as above every other. Marigny, the brother
of the Pompadour, had his entry with M. le Prince de Soubise. In spite
of? No, because. Du Barry, the god-father of the Vaubernier, was very
welcome at the house of M. le Maréchal de Richelieu. This society is
Olympus. Mercury and the Prince de Guémenée are at home there. A thief
is admitted there, provided he be a god.

The Comte de Lamothe, who, in 1815, was an old man seventy-five years
of age, had nothing remarkable about him except his silent and
sententious air, his cold and angular face, his perfectly polished
manners, his coat buttoned up to his cravat, and his long legs always
crossed in long, flabby trousers of the hue of burnt sienna. His face
was the same color as his trousers.

This M. de Lamothe was “held in consideration” in this salon on account
of his “celebrity” and, strange to say, though true, because of his
name of Valois.

As for M. Gillenormand, his consideration was of absolutely first-rate
quality. He had, in spite of his levity, and without its interfering in
any way with his dignity, a certain manner about him which was
imposing, dignified, honest, and lofty, in a bourgeois fashion; and his
great age added to it. One is not a century with impunity. The years
finally produce around a head a venerable dishevelment.

In addition to this, he said things which had the genuine sparkle of
the old rock. Thus, when the King of Prussia, after having restored
Louis XVIII., came to pay the latter a visit under the name of the
Count de Ruppin, he was received by the descendant of Louis XIV.
somewhat as though he had been the Marquis de Brandebourg, and with the
most delicate impertinence. M. Gillenormand approved: “All kings who
are not the King of France,” said he, “are provincial kings.” One day,
the following question was put and the following answer returned in his
presence: “To what was the editor of the _Courrier Français_
condemned?” “To be suspended.” “_Sus_ is superfluous,” observed M.
Gillenormand.22 Remarks of this nature found a situation.

At the Te Deum on the anniversary of the return of the Bourbons, he
said, on seeing M. de Talleyrand pass by: “There goes his Excellency
the Evil One.”


M. Gillenormand was always accompanied by his daughter, that tall
mademoiselle, who was over forty and looked fifty, and by a handsome
little boy of seven years, white, rosy, fresh, with happy and trusting
eyes, who never appeared in that salon without hearing voices murmur
around him: “How handsome he is! What a pity! Poor child!” This child
was the one of whom we dropped a word a while ago. He was called “poor
child,” because he had for a father “a brigand of the Loire.”


This brigand of the Loire was M. Gillenormand’s son-in-law, who has
already been mentioned, and whom M. Gillenormand called “the disgrace
of his family.”







Any one who had chanced to pass through the little town of Vernon at
this epoch, and who had happened to walk across that fine monumental
bridge, which will soon be succeeded, let us hope, by some hideous iron
cable bridge, might have observed, had he dropped his eyes over the
parapet, a man about fifty years of age wearing a leather cap, and
trousers and a waistcoat of coarse gray cloth, to which something
yellow which had been a red ribbon, was sewn, shod with wooden sabots,
tanned by the sun, his face nearly black and his hair nearly white, a
large scar on his forehead which ran down upon his cheek, bowed, bent,
prematurely aged, who walked nearly every day, hoe and sickle in hand,
in one of those compartments surrounded by walls which abut on the
bridge, and border the left bank of the Seine like a chain of terraces,
charming enclosures full of flowers of which one could say, were they
much larger: “these are gardens,” and were they a little smaller:
“these are bouquets.” All these enclosures abut upon the river at one
end, and on a house at the other. The man in the waistcoat and the
wooden shoes of whom we have just spoken, inhabited the smallest of
these enclosures and the most humble of these houses about 1817. He
lived there alone and solitary, silently and poorly, with a woman who
was neither young nor old, neither homely nor pretty, neither a peasant
nor a bourgeoise, who served him. The plot of earth which he called his
garden was celebrated in the town for the beauty of the flowers which
he cultivated there. These flowers were his occupation.

By dint of labor, of perseverance, of attention, and of buckets of
water, he had succeeded in creating after the Creator, and he had
invented certain tulips and certain dahlias which seemed to have been
forgotten by nature. He was ingenious; he had forestalled Soulange
Bodin in the formation of little clumps of earth of heath mould, for
the cultivation of rare and precious shrubs from America and China. He
was in his alleys from the break of day, in summer, planting, cutting,
hoeing, watering, walking amid his flowers with an air of kindness,
sadness, and sweetness, sometimes standing motionless and thoughtful
for hours, listening to the song of a bird in the trees, the babble of
a child in a house, or with his eyes fixed on a drop of dew at the tip
of a spear of grass, of which the sun made a carbuncle. His table was
very plain, and he drank more milk than wine. A child could make him
give way, and his servant scolded him. He was so timid that he seemed
shy, he rarely went out, and he saw no one but the poor people who
tapped at his pane and his curé, the Abbé Mabeuf, a good old man.
Nevertheless, if the inhabitants of the town, or strangers, or any
chance comers, curious to see his tulips, rang at his little cottage,
he opened his door with a smile. He was the “brigand of the Loire.”


Any one who had, at the same time, read military memoirs, biographies,
the _Moniteur_, and the bulletins of the grand army, would have been
struck by a name which occurs there with tolerable frequency, the name
of Georges Pontmercy. When very young, this Georges Pontmercy had been
a soldier in Saintonge’s regiment. The revolution broke out.
Saintonge’s regiment formed a part of the army of the Rhine; for the
old regiments of the monarchy preserved their names of provinces even
after the fall of the monarchy, and were only divided into brigades in
1794. Pontmercy fought at Spire, at Worms, at Neustadt, at Turkheim, at
Alzey, at Mayence, where he was one of the two hundred who formed
Houchard’s rearguard. It was the twelfth to hold its ground against the
corps of the Prince of Hesse, behind the old rampart of Andernach, and
only rejoined the main body of the army when the enemy’s cannon had
opened a breach from the cord of the parapet to the foot of the glacis.
He was under Kléber at Marchiennes and at the battle of Mont-Palissel,
where a ball from a biscaïen broke his arm. Then he passed to the
frontier of Italy, and was one of the thirty grenadiers who defended
the Col de Tende with Joubert. Joubert was appointed its
adjutant-general, and Pontmercy sub-lieutenant. Pontmercy was by
Berthier’s side in the midst of the grape-shot of that day at Lodi
which caused Bonaparte to say: “Berthier has been cannoneer, cavalier,
and grenadier.” He beheld his old general, Joubert, fall at Novi, at
the moment when, with uplifted sabre, he was shouting: “Forward!”
Having been embarked with his company in the exigencies of the
campaign, on board a pinnace which was proceeding from Genoa to some
obscure port on the coast, he fell into a wasps’-nest of seven or eight
English vessels. The Genoese commander wanted to throw his cannon into
the sea, to hide the soldiers between decks, and to slip along in the
dark as a merchant vessel. Pontmercy had the colors hoisted to the
peak, and sailed proudly past under the guns of the British frigates.
Twenty leagues further on, his audacity having increased, he attacked
with his pinnace, and captured a large English transport which was
carrying troops to Sicily, and which was so loaded down with men and
horses that the vessel was sunk to the level of the sea. In 1805 he was
in that Malher division which took Günzberg from the Archduke
Ferdinand. At Weltingen he received into his arms, beneath a storm of
bullets, Colonel Maupetit, mortally wounded at the head of the 9th
Dragoons. He distinguished himself at Austerlitz in that admirable
march in echelons effected under the enemy’s fire. When the cavalry of
the Imperial Russian Guard crushed a battalion of the 4th of the line,
Pontmercy was one of those who took their revenge and overthrew the
Guard. The Emperor gave him the cross. Pontmercy saw Wurmser at Mantua,
Mélas, and Alexandria, Mack at Ulm, made prisoners in succession. He
formed a part of the eighth corps of the grand army which Mortier
commanded, and which captured Hamburg. Then he was transferred to the
55th of the line, which was the old regiment of Flanders. At Eylau he
was in the cemetery where, for the space of two hours, the heroic
Captain Louis Hugo, the uncle of the author of this book, sustained
alone with his company of eighty-three men every effort of the hostile
army. Pontmercy was one of the three who emerged alive from that
cemetery. He was at Friedland. Then he saw Moscow. Then La Bérésina,
then Lutzen, Bautzen, Dresden, Wachau, Leipzig, and the defiles of
Gelenhausen; then Montmirail, Château-Thierry, Craon, the banks of the
Marne, the banks of the Aisne, and the redoubtable position of Laon. At
Arnay-Le-Duc, being then a captain, he put ten Cossacks to the sword,
and saved, not his general, but his corporal. He was well slashed up on
this occasion, and twenty-seven splinters were extracted from his left
arm alone. Eight days before the capitulation of Paris he had just
exchanged with a comrade and entered the cavalry. He had what was
called under the old regime, _the double hand_, that is to say, an
equal aptitude for handling the sabre or the musket as a soldier, or a
squadron or a battalion as an officer. It is from this aptitude,
perfected by a military education, which certain special branches of
the service arise, the dragoons, for example, who are both cavalry-men
and infantry at one and the same time. He accompanied Napoleon to the
Island of Elba. At Waterloo, he was chief of a squadron of cuirassiers,
in Dubois’ brigade. It was he who captured the standard of the
Lunenburg battalion. He came and cast the flag at the Emperor’s feet.
He was covered with blood. While tearing down the banner he had
received a sword-cut across his face. The Emperor, greatly pleased,
shouted to him: “You are a colonel, you are a baron, you are an officer
of the Legion of Honor!” Pontmercy replied: “Sire, I thank you for my
widow.” An hour later, he fell in the ravine of Ohain. Now, who was
this Georges Pontmercy? He was this same “brigand of the Loire.”


We have already seen something of his history. After Waterloo,
Pontmercy, who had been pulled out of the hollow road of Ohain, as it
will be remembered, had succeeded in joining the army, and had dragged
himself from ambulance to ambulance as far as the cantonments of the
Loire.

The Restoration had placed him on half-pay, then had sent him into
residence, that is to say, under surveillance, at Vernon. King Louis
XVIII., regarding all that which had taken place during the Hundred
Days as not having occurred at all, did not recognize his quality as an
officer of the Legion of Honor, nor his grade of colonel, nor his title
of baron. He, on his side, neglected no occasion of signing himself
“Colonel Baron Pontmercy.” He had only an old blue coat, and he never
went out without fastening to it his rosette as an officer of the
Legion of Honor. The Attorney for the Crown had him warned that the
authorities would prosecute him for “illegal” wearing of this
decoration. When this notice was conveyed to him through an officious
intermediary, Pontmercy retorted with a bitter smile: “I do not know
whether I no longer understand French, or whether you no longer speak
it; but the fact is that I do not understand.” Then he went out for
eight successive days with his rosette. They dared not interfere with
him. Two or three times the Minister of War and the general in command
of the department wrote to him with the following address: _“A Monsieur
le Commandant Pontmercy.” _ He sent back the letters with the seals
unbroken. At the same moment, Napoleon at Saint Helena was treating in
the same fashion the missives of Sir Hudson Lowe addressed to _General
Bonaparte_. Pontmercy had ended, may we be pardoned the expression, by
having in his mouth the same saliva as his Emperor.

In the same way, there were at Rome Carthaginian prisoners who refused
to salute Flaminius, and who had a little of Hannibal’s spirit.

One day he encountered the district-attorney in one of the streets of
Vernon, stepped up to him, and said: “Mr. Crown Attorney, am I
permitted to wear my scar?”


He had nothing save his meagre half-pay as chief of squadron. He had
hired the smallest house which he could find at Vernon. He lived there
alone, we have just seen how. Under the Empire, between two wars, he
had found time to marry Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The old bourgeois,
thoroughly indignant at bottom, had given his consent with a sigh,
saying: “The greatest families are forced into it.” In 1815, Madame
Pontmercy, an admirable woman in every sense, by the way, lofty in
sentiment and rare, and worthy of her husband, died, leaving a child.
This child had been the colonel’s joy in his solitude; but the
grandfather had imperatively claimed his grandson, declaring that if
the child were not given to him he would disinherit him. The father had
yielded in the little one’s interest, and had transferred his love to
flowers.

Moreover, he had renounced everything, and neither stirred up mischief
nor conspired. He shared his thoughts between the innocent things which
he was then doing and the great things which he had done. He passed his
time in expecting a pink or in recalling Austerlitz.

M. Gillenormand kept up no relations with his son-in-law. The colonel
was “a bandit” to him. M. Gillenormand never mentioned the colonel,
except when he occasionally made mocking allusions to “his Baronship.”
It had been expressly agreed that Pontmercy should never attempt to see
his son nor to speak to him, under penalty of having the latter handed
over to him disowned and disinherited. For the Gillenormands, Pontmercy
was a man afflicted with the plague. They intended to bring up the
child in their own way. Perhaps the colonel was wrong to accept these
conditions, but he submitted to them, thinking that he was doing right
and sacrificing no one but himself.

The inheritance of Father Gillenormand did not amount to much; but the
inheritance of Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder was considerable.
This aunt, who had remained unmarried, was very rich on the maternal
side, and her sister’s son was her natural heir. The boy, whose name
was Marius, knew that he had a father, but nothing more. No one opened
his mouth to him about it. Nevertheless, in the society into which his
grandfather took him, whispers, innuendoes, and winks, had eventually
enlightened the little boy’s mind; he had finally understood something
of the case, and as he naturally took in the ideas and opinions which
were, so to speak, the air he breathed, by a sort of infiltration and
slow penetration, he gradually came to think of his father only with
shame and with a pain at his heart.

While he was growing up in this fashion, the colonel slipped away every
two or three months, came to Paris on the sly, like a criminal breaking
his ban, and went and posted himself at Saint-Sulpice, at the hour when
Aunt Gillenormand led Marius to the mass. There, trembling lest the
aunt should turn round, concealed behind a pillar, motionless, not
daring to breathe, he gazed at his child. The scarred veteran was
afraid of that old spinster.

From this had arisen his connection with the curé of Vernon, M. l’Abbé
Mabeuf.

That worthy priest was the brother of a warden of Saint-Sulpice, who
had often observed this man gazing at his child, and the scar on his
cheek, and the large tears in his eyes. That man, who had so manly an
air, yet who was weeping like a woman, had struck the warden. That face
had clung to his mind. One day, having gone to Vernon to see his
brother, he had encountered Colonel Pontmercy on the bridge, and had
recognized the man of Saint-Sulpice. The warden had mentioned the
circumstance to the curé, and both had paid the colonel a visit, on
some pretext or other. This visit led to others. The colonel, who had
been extremely reserved at first, ended by opening his heart, and the
curé and the warden finally came to know the whole history, and how
Pontmercy was sacrificing his happiness to his child’s future. This
caused the curé to regard him with veneration and tenderness, and the
colonel, on his side, became fond of the curé. And moreover, when both
are sincere and good, no men so penetrate each other, and so amalgamate
with each other, as an old priest and an old soldier. At bottom, the
man is the same. The one has devoted his life to his country here
below, the other to his country on high; that is the only difference.

Twice a year, on the first of January and on St. George’s day, Marius
wrote duty letters to his father, which were dictated by his aunt, and
which one would have pronounced to be copied from some formula; this
was all that M. Gillenormand tolerated; and the father answered them
with very tender letters which the grandfather thrust into his pocket
unread.






Madame de T.’s salon was all that Marius Pontmercy knew of the world.
It was the only opening through which he could get a glimpse of life.
This opening was sombre, and more cold than warmth, more night than
day, came to him through this skylight. This child, who had been all
joy and light on entering this strange world, soon became melancholy,
and, what is still more contrary to his age, grave. Surrounded by all
those singular and imposing personages, he gazed about him with serious
amazement. Everything conspired to increase this astonishment in him.
There were in Madame de T.’s salon some very noble ladies named Mathan,
Noé, Lévis,—which was pronounced Lévi,—Cambis, pronounced Cambyse.
These antique visages and these Biblical names mingled in the child’s
mind with the Old Testament which he was learning by heart, and when
they were all there, seated in a circle around a dying fire, sparely
lighted by a lamp shaded with green, with their severe profiles, their
gray or white hair, their long gowns of another age, whose lugubrious
colors could not be distinguished, dropping, at rare intervals, words
which were both majestic and severe, little Marius stared at them with
frightened eyes, in the conviction that he beheld not women, but
patriarchs and magi, not real beings, but phantoms.

With these phantoms, priests were sometimes mingled, frequenters of
this ancient salon, and some gentlemen; the Marquis de Sass****,
private secretary to Madame de Berry, the Vicomte de Val***, who
published, under the pseudonym of _Charles-Antoine_, monorhymed odes,
the Prince de Beauff*******, who, though very young, had a gray head
and a pretty and witty wife, whose very low-necked toilettes of scarlet
velvet with gold torsades alarmed these shadows, the Marquis de C*****
d’E******, the man in all France who best understood “proportioned
politeness,” the Comte d’Am*****, the kindly man with the amiable chin,
and the Chévalier de Port-de-Guy, a pillar of the library of the
Louvre, called the King’s cabinet, M. de Port-de-Guy, bald, and rather
aged than old, was wont to relate that in 1793, at the age of sixteen,
he had been put in the galleys as refractory and chained with an
octogenarian, the Bishop of Mirepoix, also refractory, but as a priest,
while he was so in the capacity of a soldier. This was at Toulon. Their
business was to go at night and gather up on the scaffold the heads and
bodies of the persons who had been guillotined during the day; they
bore away on their backs these dripping corpses, and their red
galley-slave blouses had a clot of blood at the back of the neck, which
was dry in the morning and wet at night. These tragic tales abounded in
Madame de T.’s salon, and by dint of cursing Marat, they applauded
Trestaillon. Some deputies of the undiscoverable variety played their
whist there; M. Thibord du Chalard, M. Lemarchant de Gomicourt, and the
celebrated scoffer of the right, M. Cornet-Dincourt. The bailiff de
Ferrette, with his short breeches and his thin legs, sometimes
traversed this salon on his way to M. de Talleyrand. He had been M. le
Comte d’Artois’ companion in pleasures and unlike Aristotle crouching
under Campaspe, he had made the Guimard crawl on all fours, and in that
way he had exhibited to the ages a philosopher avenged by a bailiff. As
for the priests, there was the Abbé Halma, the same to whom M. Larose,
his collaborator on _la Foudre_, said: “Bah! Who is there who is not
fifty years old? a few greenhorns perhaps?” The Abbé Letourneur,
preacher to the King, the Abbé Frayssinous, who was not, as yet, either
count, or bishop, or minister, or peer, and who wore an old cassock
whose buttons were missing, and the Abbé Keravenant, Curé of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés; also the Pope’s Nuncio, then Monsignor Macchi,
Archbishop of Nisibi, later on Cardinal, remarkable for his long,
pensive nose, and another Monsignor, entitled thus: Abbate Palmieri,
domestic prelate, one of the seven participant prothonotaries of the
Holy See, Canon of the illustrious Liberian basilica, Advocate of the
saints, _Postulatore dei Santi_, which refers to matters of
canonization, and signifies very nearly: Master of Requests of the
section of Paradise. Lastly, two cardinals, M. de la Luzerne, and M. de
Cl****** T*******. The Cardinal of Luzerne was a writer and was
destined to have, a few years later, the honor of signing in the
_Conservateur_ articles side by side with Chateaubriand; M. de Cl******
T******* was Archbishop of Toul****, and often made trips to Paris, to
his nephew, the Marquis de T*******, who was Minister of Marine and
War. The Cardinal of Cl****** T******* was a merry little man, who
displayed his red stockings beneath his tucked-up cassock; his
specialty was a hatred of the Encyclopædia, and his desperate play at
billiards, and persons who, at that epoch, passed through the Rue
M***** on summer evenings, where the hotel de Cl****** T******* then
stood, halted to listen to the shock of the balls and the piercing
voice of the Cardinal shouting to his conclavist, Monseigneur Cotiret,
Bishop _in partibus_ of Caryste: “Mark, Abbé, I make a cannon.” The
Cardinal de Cl****** T******* had been brought to Madame de T.’s by his
most intimate friend, M. de Roquelaure, former Bishop of Senlis, and
one of the Forty. M. de Roquelaure was notable for his lofty figure and
his assiduity at the Academy; through the glass door of the neighboring
hall of the library where the French Academy then held its meetings,
the curious could, on every Tuesday, contemplate the Ex-Bishop of
Senlis, usually standing erect, freshly powdered, in violet hose, with
his back turned to the door, apparently for the purpose of allowing a
better view of his little collar. All these ecclesiastics, though for
the most part as much courtiers as churchmen, added to the gravity of
the T. salon, whose seigniorial aspect was accentuated by five peers of
France, the Marquis de Vib****, the Marquis de Tal***, the Marquis de
Herb*******, the Vicomte Damb***, and the Duc de Val********. This Duc
de Val********, although Prince de Mon***, that is to say a reigning
prince abroad, had so high an idea of France and its peerage, that he
viewed everything through their medium. It was he who said: “The
Cardinals are the peers of France of Rome; the lords are the peers of
France of England.” Moreover, as it is indispensable that the
Revolution should be everywhere in this century, this feudal salon was,
as we have said, dominated by a bourgeois. M. Gillenormand reigned
there.

There lay the essence and quintessence of the Parisian white society.
There reputations, even Royalist reputations, were held in quarantine.
There is always a trace of anarchy in renown. Chateaubriand, had he
entered there, would have produced the effect of Père Duchêne. Some of
the scoffed-at did, nevertheless, penetrate thither on sufferance.
Comte Beug*** was received there, subject to correction.

The “noble” salons of the present day no longer resemble those salons.
The Faubourg Saint-Germain reeks of the fagot even now. The Royalists
of to-day are demagogues, let us record it to their credit.

At Madame de T.’s the society was superior, taste was exquisite and
haughty, under the cover of a great show of politeness. Manners there
admitted of all sorts of involuntary refinements which were the old
régime itself, buried but still alive. Some of these habits, especially
in the matter of language, seem eccentric. Persons but superficially
acquainted with them would have taken for provincial that which was
only antique. A woman was called _Madame la Générale. Madame la
Colonelle_ was not entirely disused. The charming Madame de Léon, in
memory, no doubt, of the Duchesses de Longueville and de Chevreuse,
preferred this appellation to her title of Princesse. The Marquise de
Créquy was also called _Madame la Colonelle_.

It was this little high society which invented at the Tuileries the
refinement of speaking to the King in private as _the King_, in the
third person, and never as _Your Majesty_, the designation of _Your
Majesty_ having been “soiled by the usurper.”


Men and deeds were brought to judgment there. They jeered at the age,
which released them from the necessity of understanding it. They
abetted each other in amazement. They communicated to each other that
modicum of light which they possessed. Methuselah bestowed information
on Epimenides. The deaf man made the blind man acquainted with the
course of things. They declared that the time which had elapsed since
Coblentz had not existed. In the same manner that Louis XVIII. was by
the grace of God, in the five and twentieth year of his reign, the
emigrants were, by rights, in the five and twentieth year of their
adolescence.

All was harmonious; nothing was too much alive; speech hardly amounted
to a breath; the newspapers, agreeing with the salons, seemed a
papyrus. There were some young people, but they were rather dead. The
liveries in the antechamber were antiquated. These utterly obsolete
personages were served by domestics of the same stamp.

They all had the air of having lived a long time ago, and of
obstinately resisting the sepulchre. Nearly the whole dictionary
consisted of _Conserver, Conservation, Conservateur; to be in good
odor_,—that was the point. There are, in fact, aromatics in the
opinions of these venerable groups, and their ideas smelled of it. It
was a mummified society. The masters were embalmed, the servants were
stuffed with straw.

A worthy old marquise, an _emigrée_ and ruined, who had but a solitary
maid, continued to say: “My people.”


What did they do in Madame de T.’s salon? They were ultra.

To be ultra; this word, although what it represents may not have
disappeared, has no longer any meaning at the present day. Let us
explain it.

To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the sceptre in the name of
the throne, and the mitre in the name of the altar; it is to ill-treat
the thing which one is dragging, it is to kick over the traces; it is
to cavil at the fagot on the score of the amount of cooking received by
heretics; it is to reproach the idol with its small amount of idolatry;
it is to insult through excess of respect; it is to discover that the
Pope is not sufficiently papish, that the King is not sufficiently
royal, and that the night has too much light; it is to be discontented
with alabaster, with snow, with the swan and the lily in the name of
whiteness; it is to be a partisan of things to the point of becoming
their enemy; it is to be so strongly for, as to be against.

The ultra spirit especially characterizes the first phase of the
Restoration.

Nothing in history resembles that quarter of an hour which begins in
1814 and terminates about 1820, with the advent of M. de Villèle, the
practical man of the Right. These six years were an extraordinary
moment; at one and the same time brilliant and gloomy, smiling and
sombre, illuminated as by the radiance of dawn and entirely covered, at
the same time, with the shadows of the great catastrophes which still
filled the horizon and were slowly sinking into the past. There existed
in that light and that shadow, a complete little new and old world,
comic and sad, juvenile and senile, which was rubbing its eyes; nothing
resembles an awakening like a return; a group which regarded France
with ill-temper, and which France regarded with irony; good old owls of
marquises by the streetful, who had returned, and of ghosts, the
“former” subjects of amazement at everything, brave and noble gentlemen
who smiled at being in France but wept also, delighted to behold their
country once more, in despair at not finding their monarchy; the
nobility of the Crusades treating the nobility of the Empire, that is
to say, the nobility of the sword, with scorn; historic races who had
lost the sense of history; the sons of the companions of Charlemagne
disdaining the companions of Napoleon. The swords, as we have just
remarked, returned the insult; the sword of Fontenoy was laughable and
nothing but a scrap of rusty iron; the sword of Marengo was odious and
was only a sabre. Former days did not recognize Yesterday. People no
longer had the feeling for what was grand. There was some one who
called Bonaparte Scapin. This Society no longer exists. Nothing of it,
we repeat, exists to-day. When we select from it some one figure at
random, and attempt to make it live again in thought, it seems as
strange to us as the world before the Deluge. It is because it, too, as
a matter of fact, has been engulfed in a deluge. It has disappeared
beneath two Revolutions. What billows are ideas! How quickly they cover
all that it is their mission to destroy and to bury, and how promptly
they create frightful gulfs!

Such was the physiognomy of the salons of those distant and candid
times when M. Martainville had more wit than Voltaire.

These salons had a literature and politics of their own. They believed
in Fiévée. M. Agier laid down the law in them. They commentated M.
Colnet, the old bookseller and publicist of the Quay Malaquais.
Napoleon was to them thoroughly the Corsican Ogre. Later on the
introduction into history of M. le Marquis de Bonaparte,
Lieutenant-General of the King’s armies, was a concession to the spirit
of the age.

These salons did not long preserve their purity. Beginning with 1818,
doctrinarians began to spring up in them, a disturbing shade. Their way
was to be Royalists and to excuse themselves for being so. Where the
ultras were very proud, the doctrinarians were rather ashamed. They had
wit; they had silence; their political dogma was suitably impregnated
with arrogance; they should have succeeded. They indulged, and usefully
too, in excesses in the matter of white neckties and tightly buttoned
coats. The mistake or the misfortune of the doctrinarian party was to
create aged youth. They assumed the poses of wise men. They dreamed of
engrafting a temperate power on the absolute and excessive principle.
They opposed, and sometimes with rare intelligence, conservative
liberalism to the liberalism which demolishes. They were heard to say:
“Thanks for Royalism! It has rendered more than one service. It has
brought back tradition, worship, religion, respect. It is faithful,
brave, chivalric, loving, devoted. It has mingled, though with regret,
the secular grandeurs of the monarchy with the new grandeurs of the
nation. Its mistake is not to understand the Revolution, the Empire,
glory, liberty, young ideas, young generations, the age. But this
mistake which it makes with regard to us,—have we not sometimes been
guilty of it towards them? The Revolution, whose heirs we are, ought to
be intelligent on all points. To attack Royalism is a misconstruction
of liberalism. What an error! And what blindness! Revolutionary France
is wanting in respect towards historic France, that is to say, towards
its mother, that is to say, towards itself. After the 5th of September,
the nobility of the monarchy is treated as the nobility of the Empire
was treated after the 5th of July. They were unjust to the eagle, we
are unjust to the fleur-de-lys. It seems that we must always have
something to proscribe! Does it serve any purpose to ungild the crown
of Louis XIV., to scrape the coat of arms of Henry IV.? We scoff at M.
de Vaublanc for erasing the N’s from the bridge of Jena! What was it
that he did? What are we doing? Bouvines belongs to us as well as
Marengo. The fleurs-de-lys are ours as well as the N’s. That is our
patrimony. To what purpose shall we diminish it? We must not deny our
country in the past any more than in the present. Why not accept the
whole of history? Why not love the whole of France?”


It is thus that doctrinarians criticised and protected Royalism, which
was displeased at criticism and furious at protection.

The ultras marked the first epoch of Royalism, congregation
characterized the second. Skill follows ardor. Let us confine ourselves
here to this sketch.

In the course of this narrative, the author of this book has
encountered in his path this curious moment of contemporary history; he
has been forced to cast a passing glance upon it, and to trace once
more some of the singular features of this society which is unknown
to-day. But he does it rapidly and without any bitter or derisive idea.
Souvenirs both respectful and affectionate, for they touch his mother,
attach him to this past. Moreover, let us remark, this same petty world
had a grandeur of its own. One may smile at it, but one can neither
despise nor hate it. It was the France of former days.

Marius Pontmercy pursued some studies, as all children do. When he
emerged from the hands of Aunt Gillenormand, his grandfather confided
him to a worthy professor of the most purely classic innocence. This
young soul which was expanding passed from a prude to a vulgar pedant.

Marius went through his years of college, then he entered the law
school. He was a Royalist, fanatical and severe. He did not love his
grandfather much, as the latter’s gayety and cynicism repelled him, and
his feelings towards his father were gloomy.

He was, on the whole, a cold and ardent, noble, generous, proud,
religious, enthusiastic lad; dignified to harshness, pure to shyness.






The conclusion of Marius’ classical studies coincided with M.
Gillenormand’s departure from society. The old man bade farewell to the
Faubourg Saint-Germain and to Madame de T.’s salon, and established
himself in the Marais, in his house of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.
There he had for servants, in addition to the porter, that chambermaid,
Nicolette, who had succeeded to Magnon, and that short-breathed and
pursy Basque, who have been mentioned above.

In 1827, Marius had just attained his seventeenth year. One evening, on
his return home, he saw his grandfather holding a letter in his hand.

“Marius,” said M. Gillenormand, “you will set out for Vernon
to-morrow.”


“Why?” said Marius.

“To see your father.”


Marius was seized with a trembling fit. He had thought of everything
except this—that he should one day be called upon to see his father.
Nothing could be more unexpected, more surprising, and, let us admit
it, more disagreeable to him. It was forcing estrangement into
reconciliation. It was not an affliction, but it was an unpleasant
duty.

Marius, in addition to his motives of political antipathy, was
convinced that his father, _the slasher_, as M. Gillenormand called him
on his amiable days, did not love him; this was evident, since he had
abandoned him to others. Feeling that he was not beloved, he did not
love. “Nothing is more simple,” he said to himself.

He was so astounded that he did not question M. Gillenormand. The
grandfather resumed:—

“It appears that he is ill. He demands your presence.”


And after a pause, he added:—

“Set out to-morrow morning. I think there is a coach which leaves the
Cour des Fontaines at six o’clock, and which arrives in the evening.
Take it. He says that here is haste.”


Then he crushed the letter in his hand and thrust it into his pocket.
Marius might have set out that very evening and have been with his
father on the following morning. A diligence from the Rue du Bouloi
took the trip to Rouen by night at that date, and passed through
Vernon. Neither Marius nor M. Gillenormand thought of making inquiries
about it.

The next day, at twilight, Marius reached Vernon. People were just
beginning to light their candles. He asked the first person whom he met
for “M. Pontmercy’s house.” For in his own mind, he agreed with the
Restoration, and like it, did not recognize his father’s claim to the
title of either colonel or baron.

The house was pointed out to him. He rang; a woman with a little lamp
in her hand opened the door.

“M. Pontmercy?” said Marius.

The woman remained motionless.

“Is this his house?” demanded Marius.

The woman nodded affirmatively.

“Can I speak with him?”


The woman shook her head.

“But I am his son!” persisted Marius. “He is expecting me.”


“He no longer expects you,” said the woman.

Then he perceived that she was weeping.

She pointed to the door of a room on the ground floor; he entered.

In that room, which was lighted by a tallow candle standing on the
chimney-piece, there were three men, one standing erect, another
kneeling, and one lying at full length, on the floor in his shirt. The
one on the floor was the colonel.

The other two were the doctor, and the priest, who was engaged in
prayer.

The colonel had been attacked by brain fever three days previously. As
he had a foreboding of evil at the very beginning of his illness, he
had written to M. Gillenormand to demand his son. The malady had grown
worse. On the very evening of Marius’ arrival at Vernon, the colonel
had had an attack of delirium; he had risen from his bed, in spite of
the servant’s efforts to prevent him, crying: “My son is not coming! I
shall go to meet him!” Then he ran out of his room and fell prostrate
on the floor of the antechamber. He had just expired.

The doctor had been summoned, and the curé. The doctor had arrived too
late. The son had also arrived too late.

By the dim light of the candle, a large tear could be distinguished on
the pale and prostrate colonel’s cheek, where it had trickled from his
dead eye. The eye was extinguished, but the tear was not yet dry. That
tear was his son’s delay.

Marius gazed upon that man whom he beheld for the first time, on that
venerable and manly face, on those open eyes which saw not, on those
white locks, those robust limbs, on which, here and there, brown lines,
marking sword-thrusts, and a sort of red stars, which indicated
bullet-holes, were visible. He contemplated that gigantic sear which
stamped heroism on that countenance upon which God had imprinted
goodness. He reflected that this man was his father, and that this man
was dead, and a chill ran over him.

The sorrow which he felt was the sorrow which he would have felt in the
presence of any other man whom he had chanced to behold stretched out
in death.

Anguish, poignant anguish, was in that chamber. The servant-woman was
lamenting in a corner, the curé was praying, and his sobs were audible,
the doctor was wiping his eyes; the corpse itself was weeping.

The doctor, the priest, and the woman gazed at Marius in the midst of
their affliction without uttering a word; he was the stranger there.
Marius, who was far too little affected, felt ashamed and embarrassed
at his own attitude; he held his hat in his hand; and he dropped it on
the floor, in order to produce the impression that grief had deprived
him of the strength to hold it.

At the same time, he experienced remorse, and he despised himself for
behaving in this manner. But was it his fault? He did not love his
father? Why should he!

The colonel had left nothing. The sale of big furniture barely paid the
expenses of his burial.

The servant found a scrap of paper, which she handed to Marius. It
contained the following, in the colonel’s handwriting:—

“_For my son_.—The Emperor made me a Baron on the battle-field of
Waterloo. Since the Restoration disputes my right to this title which I
purchased with my blood, my son shall take it and bear it. That he will
be worthy of it is a matter of course.” Below, the colonel had added:
“At that same battle of Waterloo, a sergeant saved my life. The man’s
name was Thénardier. I think that he has recently been keeping a little
inn, in a village in the neighborhood of Paris, at Chelles or
Montfermeil. If my son meets him, he will do all the good he can to
Thénardier.”


Marius took this paper and preserved it, not out of duty to his father,
but because of that vague respect for death which is always imperious
in the heart of man.

Nothing remained of the colonel. M. Gillenormand had his sword and
uniform sold to an old-clothes dealer. The neighbors devastated the
garden and pillaged the rare flowers. The other plants turned to
nettles and weeds, and died.

Marius remained only forty-eight hours at Vernon. After the interment
he returned to Paris, and applied himself again to his law studies,
with no more thought of his father than if the latter had never lived.
In two days the colonel was buried, and in three forgotten.

Marius wore crape on his hat. That was all.




REVOLUTIONIST


Marius had preserved the religious habits of his childhood. One Sunday,
when he went to hear mass at Saint-Sulpice, at that same chapel of the
Virgin whither his aunt had led him when a small lad, he placed himself
behind a pillar, being more absent-minded and thoughtful than usual on
that occasion, and knelt down, without paying any special heed, upon a
chair of Utrecht velvet, on the back of which was inscribed this name:
_Monsieur Mabeuf, warden_. Mass had hardly begun when an old man
presented himself and said to Marius:—

“This is my place, sir.”


Marius stepped aside promptly, and the old man took possession of his
chair.

The mass concluded, Marius still stood thoughtfully a few paces
distant; the old man approached him again and said:—

“I beg your pardon, sir, for having disturbed you a while ago, and for
again disturbing you at this moment; you must have thought me
intrusive, and I will explain myself.”


“There is no need of that, Sir,” said Marius.

“Yes!” went on the old man, “I do not wish you to have a bad opinion of
me. You see, I am attached to this place. It seems to me that the mass
is better from here. Why? I will tell you. It is from this place, that
I have watched a poor, brave father come regularly, every two or three
months, for the last ten years, since he had no other opportunity and
no other way of seeing his child, because he was prevented by family
arrangements. He came at the hour when he knew that his son would be
brought to mass. The little one never suspected that his father was
there. Perhaps he did not even know that he had a father, poor
innocent! The father kept behind a pillar, so that he might not be
seen. He gazed at his child and he wept. He adored that little fellow,
poor man! I could see that. This spot has become sanctified in my
sight, and I have contracted a habit of coming hither to listen to the
mass. I prefer it to the stall to which I have a right, in my capacity
of warden. I knew that unhappy gentleman a little, too. He had a
father-in-law, a wealthy aunt, relatives, I don’t know exactly what
all, who threatened to disinherit the child if he, the father, saw him.
He sacrificed himself in order that his son might be rich and happy
some day. He was separated from him because of political opinions.
Certainly, I approve of political opinions, but there are people who do
not know where to stop. Mon Dieu! a man is not a monster because he was
at Waterloo; a father is not separated from his child for such a reason
as that. He was one of Bonaparte’s colonels. He is dead, I believe. He
lived at Vernon, where I have a brother who is a curé, and his name was
something like Pontmarie or Montpercy. He had a fine sword-cut, on my
honor.”


“Pontmercy,” suggested Marius, turning pale.

“Precisely, Pontmercy. Did you know him?”


“Sir,” said Marius, “he was my father.”


The old warden clasped his hands and exclaimed:—

“Ah! you are the child! Yes, that’s true, he must be a man by this
time. Well! poor child, you may say that you had a father who loved you
dearly!”


Marius offered his arm to the old man and conducted him to his
lodgings.

On the following day, he said to M. Gillenormand:—

“I have arranged a hunting-party with some friends. Will you permit me
to be absent for three days?”


“Four!” replied his grandfather. “Go and amuse yourself.”


And he said to his daughter in a low tone, and with a wink, “Some love
affair!”







Where it was that Marius went will be disclosed a little further on.

Marius was absent for three days, then he returned to Paris, went
straight to the library of the law-school and asked for the files of
the _Moniteur_.

He read the _Moniteur_, he read all the histories of the Republic and
the Empire, the _Memorial de Sainte-Hélène_, all the memoirs, all the
newspapers, the bulletins, the proclamations; he devoured everything.
The first time that he came across his father’s name in the bulletins
of the grand army, he had a fever for a week. He went to see the
generals under whom Georges Pontmercy had served, among others, Comte
H. Church-warden Mabeuf, whom he went to see again, told him about the
life at Vernon, the colonel’s retreat, his flowers, his solitude.
Marius came to a full knowledge of that rare, sweet, and sublime man,
that species of lion-lamb who had been his father.

In the meanwhile, occupied as he was with this study which absorbed all
his moments as well as his thoughts, he hardly saw the Gillenormands at
all. He made his appearance at meals; then they searched for him, and
he was not to be found. Father Gillenormand smiled. “Bah! bah! He is
just of the age for the girls!” Sometimes the old man added: “The
deuce! I thought it was only an affair of gallantry. It seems that it
is an affair of passion!”


It was a passion, in fact. Marius was on the high road to adoring his
father.

At the same time, his ideas underwent an extraordinary change. The
phases of this change were numerous and successive. As this is the
history of many minds of our day, we think it will prove useful to
follow these phases step by step and to indicate them all.

That history upon which he had just cast his eyes appalled him.

The first effect was to dazzle him.

Up to that time, the Republic, the Empire, had been to him only
monstrous words. The Republic, a guillotine in the twilight; the
Empire, a sword in the night. He had just taken a look at it, and where
he had expected to find only a chaos of shadows, he had beheld, with a
sort of unprecedented surprise, mingled with fear and joy, stars
sparkling, Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre, Camille,
Desmoulins, Danton, and a sun arise, Napoleon. He did not know where he
stood. He recoiled, blinded by the brilliant lights. Little by little,
when his astonishment had passed off, he grew accustomed to this
radiance, he contemplated these deeds without dizziness, he examined
these personages without terror; the Revolution and the Empire
presented themselves luminously, in perspective, before his mind’s eye;
he beheld each of these groups of events and of men summed up in two
tremendous facts: the Republic in the sovereignty of civil right
restored to the masses, the Empire in the sovereignty of the French
idea imposed on Europe; he beheld the grand figure of the people emerge
from the Revolution, and the grand figure of France spring forth from
the Empire. He asserted in his conscience, that all this had been good.
What his dazzled state neglected in this, his first far too synthetic
estimation, we do not think it necessary to point out here. It is the
state of a mind on the march that we are recording. Progress is not
accomplished in one stage. That stated, once for all, in connection
with what precedes as well as with what is to follow, we continue.

He then perceived that, up to that moment, he had comprehended his
country no more than he had comprehended his father. He had not known
either the one or the other, and a sort of voluntary night had obscured
his eyes. Now he saw, and on the one hand he admired, while on the
other he adored.

He was filled with regret and remorse, and he reflected in despair that
all he had in his soul could now be said only to the tomb. Oh! if his
father had still been in existence, if he had still had him, if God, in
his compassion and his goodness, had permitted his father to be still
among the living, how he would have run, how he would have precipitated
himself, how he would have cried to his father: “Father! Here I am! It
is I! I have the same heart as thou! I am thy son!” How he would have
embraced that white head, bathed his hair in tears, gazed upon his
scar, pressed his hands, adored his garment, kissed his feet! Oh! Why
had his father died so early, before his time, before the justice, the
love of his son had come to him? Marius had a continual sob in his
heart, which said to him every moment: “Alas!” At the same time, he
became more truly serious, more truly grave, more sure of his thought
and his faith. At each instant, gleams of the true came to complete his
reason. An inward growth seemed to be in progress within him. He was
conscious of a sort of natural enlargement, which gave him two things
that were new to him—his father and his country.

As everything opens when one has a key, so he explained to himself that
which he had hated, he penetrated that which he had abhorred;
henceforth he plainly perceived the providential, divine and human
sense of the great things which he had been taught to detest, and of
the great men whom he had been instructed to curse. When he reflected
on his former opinions, which were but those of yesterday, and which,
nevertheless, seemed to him already so very ancient, he grew indignant,
yet he smiled.

From the rehabilitation of his father, he naturally passed to the
rehabilitation of Napoleon.

But the latter, we will confess, was not effected without labor.

From his infancy, he had been imbued with the judgments of the party of
1814, on Bonaparte. Now, all the prejudices of the Restoration, all its
interests, all its instincts tended to disfigure Napoleon. It execrated
him even more than it did Robespierre. It had very cleverly turned to
sufficiently good account the fatigue of the nation, and the hatred of
mothers. Bonaparte had become an almost fabulous monster, and in order
to paint him to the imagination of the people, which, as we lately
pointed out, resembles the imagination of children, the party of 1814
made him appear under all sorts of terrifying masks in succession, from
that which is terrible though it remains grandiose to that which is
terrible and becomes grotesque, from Tiberius to the bugaboo. Thus, in
speaking of Bonaparte, one was free to sob or to puff up with laughter,
provided that hatred lay at the bottom. Marius had never
entertained—about _that man_, as he was called—any other ideas in his
mind. They had combined with the tenacity which existed in his nature.
There was in him a headstrong little man who hated Napoleon.

On reading history, on studying him, especially in the documents and
materials for history, the veil which concealed Napoleon from the eyes
of Marius was gradually rent. He caught a glimpse of something immense,
and he suspected that he had been deceived up to that moment, on the
score of Bonaparte as about all the rest; each day he saw more
distinctly; and he set about mounting, slowly, step by step, almost
regretfully in the beginning, then with intoxication and as though
attracted by an irresistible fascination, first the sombre steps, then
the vaguely illuminated steps, at last the luminous and splendid steps
of enthusiasm.

One night, he was alone in his little chamber near the roof. His candle
was burning; he was reading, with his elbows resting on his table close
to the open window. All sorts of reveries reached him from space, and
mingled with his thoughts. What a spectacle is the night! One hears
dull sounds, without knowing whence they proceed; one beholds Jupiter,
which is twelve hundred times larger than the earth, glowing like a
firebrand, the azure is black, the stars shine; it is formidable.

He was perusing the bulletins of the grand army, those heroic strophes
penned on the field of battle; there, at intervals, he beheld his
father’s name, always the name of the Emperor; the whole of that great
Empire presented itself to him; he felt a flood swelling and rising
within him; it seemed to him at moments that his father passed close to
him like a breath, and whispered in his ear; he gradually got into a
singular state; he thought that he heard drums, cannon, trumpets, the
measured tread of battalions, the dull and distant gallop of the
cavalry; from time to time, his eyes were raised heavenward, and gazed
upon the colossal constellations as they gleamed in the measureless
depths of space, then they fell upon his book once more, and there they
beheld other colossal things moving confusedly. His heart contracted
within him. He was in a transport, trembling, panting. All at once,
without himself knowing what was in him, and what impulse he was
obeying, he sprang to his feet, stretched both arms out of the window,
gazed intently into the gloom, the silence, the infinite darkness, the
eternal immensity, and exclaimed: “Long live the Emperor!”


From that moment forth, all was over; the Ogre of Corsica,—the
usurper,—the tyrant,—the monster who was the lover of his own
sisters,—the actor who took lessons of Talma,—the poisoner of
Jaffa,—the tiger,—Buonaparte,—all this vanished, and gave place in his
mind to a vague and brilliant radiance in which shone, at an
inaccessible height, the pale marble phantom of Cæsar. The Emperor had
been for his father only the well-beloved captain whom one admires, for
whom one sacrifices one’s self; he was something more to Marius. He was
the predestined constructor of the French group, succeeding the Roman
group in the domination of the universe. He was a prodigious architect,
of a destruction, the continuer of Charlemagne, of Louis XI., of Henry
IV., of Richelieu, of Louis XIV., and of the Committee of Public
Safety, having his spots, no doubt, his faults, his crimes even, being
a man, that is to say; but august in his faults, brilliant in his
spots, powerful in his crime.

He was the predestined man, who had forced all nations to say: “The
great nation!” He was better than that, he was the very incarnation of
France, conquering Europe by the sword which he grasped, and the world
by the light which he shed. Marius saw in Bonaparte the dazzling
spectre which will always rise upon the frontier, and which will guard
the future. Despot but dictator; a despot resulting from a republic and
summing up a revolution. Napoleon became for him the man-people as
Jesus Christ is the man-God.

It will be perceived, that like all new converts to a religion, his
conversion intoxicated him, he hurled himself headlong into adhesion
and he went too far. His nature was so constructed; once on the
downward slope, it was almost impossible for him to put on the drag.
Fanaticism for the sword took possession of him, and complicated in his
mind his enthusiasm for the idea. He did not perceive that, along with
genius, and pell-mell, he was admitting force, that is to say, that he
was installing in two compartments of his idolatry, on the one hand
that which is divine, on the other that which is brutal. In many
respects, he had set about deceiving himself otherwise. He admitted
everything. There is a way of encountering error while on one’s way to
the truth. He had a violent sort of good faith which took everything in
the lump. In the new path which he had entered on, in judging the
mistakes of the old regime, as in measuring the glory of Napoleon, he
neglected the attenuating circumstances.

At all events, a tremendous step had been taken. Where he had formerly
beheld the fall of the monarchy, he now saw the advent of France. His
orientation had changed. What had been his East became the West. He had
turned squarely round.

All these revolutions were accomplished within him, without his family
obtaining an inkling of the case.

When, during this mysterious labor, he had entirely shed his old
Bourbon and ultra skin, when he had cast off the aristocrat, the
Jacobite and the Royalist, when he had become thoroughly a
revolutionist, profoundly democratic and republican, he went to an
engraver on the Quai des Orfévres and ordered a hundred cards bearing
this name: _Le Baron Marius Pontmercy_.

This was only the strictly logical consequence of the change which had
taken place in him, a change in which everything gravitated round his
father.

Only, as he did not know any one and could not sow his cards with any
porter, he put them in his pocket.

By another natural consequence, in proportion as he drew nearer to his
father, to the latter’s memory, and to the things for which the colonel
had fought five and twenty years before, he receded from his
grandfather. We have long ago said, that M. Gillenormand’s temper did
not please him. There already existed between them all the dissonances
of the grave young man and the frivolous old man. The gayety of Géronte
shocks and exasperates the melancholy of Werther. So long as the same
political opinions and the same ideas had been common to them both,
Marius had met M. Gillenormand there as on a bridge. When the bridge
fell, an abyss was formed. And then, over and above all, Marius
experienced unutterable impulses to revolt, when he reflected that it
was M. Gillenormand who had, from stupid motives, torn him ruthlessly
from the colonel, thus depriving the father of the child, and the child
of the father.

By dint of pity for his father, Marius had nearly arrived at aversion
for his grandfather.

Nothing of this sort, however, was betrayed on the exterior, as we have
already said. Only he grew colder and colder; laconic at meals, and
rare in the house. When his aunt scolded him for it, he was very gentle
and alleged his studies, his lectures, the examinations, etc., as a
pretext. His grandfather never departed from his infallible diagnosis:
“In love! I know all about it.”


From time to time Marius absented himself.

“Where is it that he goes off like this?” said his aunt.

On one of these trips, which were always very brief, he went to
Montfermeil, in order to obey the injunction which his father had left
him, and he sought the old sergeant to Waterloo, the inn-keeper
Thénardier. Thénardier had failed, the inn was closed, and no one knew
what had become of him. Marius was away from the house for four days on
this quest.

“He is getting decidedly wild,” said his grandfather.

They thought they had noticed that he wore something on his breast,
under his shirt, which was attached to his neck by a black ribbon.






We have mentioned a lancer.

He was a great-grand-nephew of M. Gillenormand, on the paternal side,
who led a garrison life, outside the family and far from the domestic
hearth. Lieutenant Théodule Gillenormand fulfilled all the conditions
required to make what is called a fine officer. He had “a lady’s
waist,” a victorious manner of trailing his sword and of twirling his
moustache in a hook. He visited Paris very rarely, and so rarely that
Marius had never seen him. The cousins knew each other only by name. We
think we have said that Théodule was the favorite of Aunt Gillenormand,
who preferred him because she did not see him. Not seeing people
permits one to attribute to them all possible perfections.

One morning, Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder returned to her
apartment as much disturbed as her placidity was capable of allowing.
Marius had just asked his grandfather’s permission to take a little
trip, adding that he meant to set out that very evening. “Go!” had been
his grandfather’s reply, and M. Gillenormand had added in an aside, as
he raised his eyebrows to the top of his forehead: “Here he is passing
the night out again.” Mademoiselle Gillenormand had ascended to her
chamber greatly puzzled, and on the staircase had dropped this
exclamation: “This is too much!”—and this interrogation: “But where is
it that he goes?” She espied some adventure of the heart, more or less
illicit, a woman in the shadow, a rendezvous, a mystery, and she would
not have been sorry to thrust her spectacles into the affair. Tasting a
mystery resembles getting the first flavor of a scandal; sainted souls
do not detest this. There is some curiosity about scandal in the secret
compartments of bigotry.

So she was the prey of a vague appetite for learning a history.

In order to get rid of this curiosity which agitated her a little
beyond her wont, she took refuge in her talents, and set about
scalloping, with one layer of cotton after another, one of those
embroideries of the Empire and the Restoration, in which there are
numerous cart-wheels. The work was clumsy, the worker cross. She had
been seated at this for several hours when the door opened.
Mademoiselle Gillenormand raised her nose. Lieutenant Théodule stood
before her, making the regulation salute. She uttered a cry of delight.
One may be old, one may be a prude, one may be pious, one may be an
aunt, but it is always agreeable to see a lancer enter one’s chamber.

“You here, Théodule!” she exclaimed.

“On my way through town, aunt.”


“Embrace me.”


“Here goes!” said Théodule.

And he kissed her. Aunt Gillenormand went to her writing-desk and
opened it.

“You will remain with us a week at least?”


“I leave this very evening, aunt.”


“It is not possible!”


“Mathematically!”


“Remain, my little Théodule, I beseech you.”


“My heart says ‘yes,’ but my orders say ‘no.’ The matter is simple.
They are changing our garrison; we have been at Melun, we are being
transferred to Gaillon. It is necessary to pass through Paris in order
to get from the old post to the new one. I said: ‘I am going to see my
aunt.’”


“Here is something for your trouble.”


And she put ten louis into his hand.

“For my pleasure, you mean to say, my dear aunt.”


Théodule kissed her again, and she experienced the joy of having some
of the skin scratched from her neck by the braidings on his uniform.

“Are you making the journey on horseback, with your regiment?” she
asked him.

“No, aunt. I wanted to see you. I have special permission. My servant
is taking my horse; I am travelling by diligence. And, by the way, I
want to ask you something.”


“What is it?”


“Is my cousin Marius Pontmercy travelling so, too?”


“How do you know that?” said his aunt, suddenly pricked to the quick
with a lively curiosity.

“On my arrival, I went to the diligence to engage my seat in the
coupé.”


“Well?”


“A traveller had already come to engage a seat in the imperial. I saw
his name on the card.”


“What name?”


“Marius Pontmercy.”


“The wicked fellow!” exclaimed his aunt. “Ah! your cousin is not a
steady lad like yourself. To think that he is to pass the night in a
diligence!”


“Just as I am going to do.”


“But you—it is your duty; in his case, it is wildness.”


“Bosh!” said Théodule.

Here an event occurred to Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder,—an idea
struck her. If she had been a man, she would have slapped her brow. She
apostrophized Théodule:—

“Are you aware whether your cousin knows you?”


“No. I have seen him; but he has never deigned to notice me.”


“So you are going to travel together?”


“He in the imperial, I in the coupé.”


“Where does this diligence run?”


“To Andelys.”


“Then that is where Marius is going?”


“Unless, like myself, he should stop on the way. I get down at Vernon,
in order to take the branch coach for Gaillon. I know nothing of
Marius’ plan of travel.”


“Marius! what an ugly name! what possessed them to name him Marius?
While you, at least, are called Théodule.”


“I would rather be called Alfred,” said the officer.

“Listen, Théodule.”


“I am listening, aunt.”


“Pay attention.”


“I am paying attention.”


“You understand?”


“Yes.”


“Well, Marius absents himself!”


“Eh! eh!”


“He travels.”


“Ah! ah!”


“He spends the night out.”


“Oh! oh!”


“We should like to know what there is behind all this.”


Théodule replied with the composure of a man of bronze:—

“Some petticoat or other.”


And with that inward laugh which denotes certainty, he added:—

“A lass.”


“That is evident,” exclaimed his aunt, who thought she heard M.
Gillenormand speaking, and who felt her conviction become irresistible
at that word _fillette_, accentuated in almost the very same fashion by
the granduncle and the grandnephew. She resumed:—

“Do us a favor. Follow Marius a little. He does not know you, it will
be easy. Since a lass there is, try to get a sight of her. You must
write us the tale. It will amuse his grandfather.”


Théodule had no excessive taste for this sort of spying; but he was
much touched by the ten louis, and he thought he saw a chance for a
possible sequel. He accepted the commission and said: “As you please,
aunt.”


And he added in an aside, to himself: “Here I am a duenna.”


Mademoiselle Gillenormand embraced him.

“You are not the man to play such pranks, Théodule. You obey
discipline, you are the slave of orders, you are a man of scruples and
duty, and you would not quit your family to go and see a creature.”


The lancer made the pleased grimace of Cartouche when praised for his
probity.

Marius, on the evening following this dialogue, mounted the diligence
without suspecting that he was watched. As for the watcher, the first
thing he did was to fall asleep. His slumber was complete and
conscientious. Argus snored all night long.

At daybreak, the conductor of the diligence shouted: “Vernon! relay of
Vernon! Travellers for Vernon!” And Lieutenant Théodule woke.

“Good,” he growled, still half asleep, “this is where I get out.”


Then, as his memory cleared by degrees, the effect of waking, he
recalled his aunt, the ten louis, and the account which he had
undertaken to render of the deeds and proceedings of Marius. This set
him to laughing.

“Perhaps he is no longer in the coach,” he thought, as he rebuttoned
the waistcoat of his undress uniform. “He may have stopped at Poissy;
he may have stopped at Triel; if he did not get out at Meulan, he may
have got out at Mantes, unless he got out at Rolleboise, or if he did
not go on as far as Pacy, with the choice of turning to the left at
Évreus, or to the right at Laroche-Guyon. Run after him, aunty. What
the devil am I to write to that good old soul?”


At that moment a pair of black trousers descending from the imperial,
made its appearance at the window of the coupé.

“Can that be Marius?” said the lieutenant.

It was Marius.

A little peasant girl, all entangled with the horses and the postilions
at the end of the vehicle, was offering flowers to the travellers.
“Give your ladies flowers!” she cried.

Marius approached her and purchased the finest flowers in her flat
basket.

“Come now,” said Théodule, leaping down from the coupé, “this piques my
curiosity. Who the deuce is he going to carry those flowers to? She
must be a splendidly handsome woman for so fine a bouquet. I want to
see her.”


And no longer in pursuance of orders, but from personal curiosity, like
dogs who hunt on their own account, he set out to follow Marius.

Marius paid no attention to Théodule. Elegant women descended from the
diligence; he did not glance at them. He seemed to see nothing around
him.

“He is pretty deeply in love!” thought Théodule.

Marius directed his steps towards the church.

“Capital,” said Théodule to himself. “Rendezvous seasoned with a bit of
mass are the best sort. Nothing is so exquisite as an ogle which passes
over the good God’s head.”


On arriving at the church, Marius did not enter it, but skirted the
apse. He disappeared behind one of the angles of the apse.

“The rendezvous is appointed outside,” said Théodule. “Let’s have a
look at the lass.”


And he advanced on the tips of his boots towards the corner which
Marius had turned.

On arriving there, he halted in amazement.

Marius, with his forehead clasped in his hands, was kneeling upon the
grass on a grave. He had strewn his bouquet there. At the extremity of
the grave, on a little swelling which marked the head, there stood a
cross of black wood with this name in white letters: COLONEL BARON
PONTMERCY. Marius’ sobs were audible.

The “lass” was a grave.






It was hither that Marius had come on the first occasion of his
absenting himself from Paris. It was hither that he had come every time
that M. Gillenormand had said: “He is sleeping out.”


Lieutenant Théodule was absolutely put out of countenance by this
unexpected encounter with a sepulchre; he experienced a singular and
disagreeable sensation which he was incapable of analyzing, and which
was composed of respect for the tomb, mingled with respect for the
colonel. He retreated, leaving Marius alone in the cemetery, and there
was discipline in this retreat. Death appeared to him with large
epaulets, and he almost made the military salute to him. Not knowing
what to write to his aunt, he decided not to write at all; and it is
probable that nothing would have resulted from the discovery made by
Théodule as to the love affairs of Marius, if, by one of those
mysterious arrangements which are so frequent in chance, the scene at
Vernon had not had an almost immediate counter-shock at Paris.

Marius returned from Vernon on the third day, in the middle of the
morning, descended at his grandfather’s door, and, wearied by the two
nights spent in the diligence, and feeling the need of repairing his
loss of sleep by an hour at the swimming-school, he mounted rapidly to
his chamber, took merely time enough to throw off his travelling-coat,
and the black ribbon which he wore round his neck, and went off to the
bath.

M. Gillenormand, who had risen betimes like all old men in good health,
had heard his entrance, and had made haste to climb, as quickly as his
old legs permitted, the stairs to the upper story where Marius lived,
in order to embrace him, and to question him while so doing, and to
find out where he had been.

But the youth had taken less time to descend than the old man had to
ascend, and when Father Gillenormand entered the attic, Marius was no
longer there.

The bed had not been disturbed, and on the bed lay, outspread, but not
defiantly the great-coat and the black ribbon.

“I like this better,” said M. Gillenormand.

And a moment later, he made his entrance into the salon, where
Mademoiselle Gillenormand was already seated, busily embroidering her
cart-wheels.

The entrance was a triumphant one.

M. Gillenormand held in one hand the great-coat, and in the other the
neck-ribbon, and exclaimed:—

“Victory! We are about to penetrate the mystery! We are going to learn
the most minute details; we are going to lay our finger on the
debaucheries of our sly friend! Here we have the romance itself. I have
the portrait!”


In fact, a case of black shagreen, resembling a medallion portrait, was
suspended from the ribbon.

The old man took this case and gazed at it for some time without
opening it, with that air of enjoyment, rapture, and wrath, with which
a poor hungry fellow beholds an admirable dinner which is not for him,
pass under his very nose.

“For this evidently is a portrait. I know all about such things. That
is worn tenderly on the heart. How stupid they are! Some abominable
fright that will make us shudder, probably! Young men have such bad
taste nowadays!”


“Let us see, father,” said the old spinster.

The case opened by the pressure of a spring. They found in it nothing
but a carefully folded paper.

_“From the same to the same,”_ said M. Gillenormand, bursting with
laughter. “I know what it is. A billet-doux.”


“Ah! let us read it!” said the aunt.

And she put on her spectacles. They unfolded the paper and read as
follows:—

“_For my son_.—The Emperor made me a Baron on the battlefield of
Waterloo. Since the Restoration disputes my right to this title which I
purchased with my blood, my son shall take it and bear it. That he will
be worthy of it is a matter of course.”


The feelings of father and daughter cannot be described. They felt
chilled as by the breath of a death’s-head. They did not exchange a
word.

Only, M. Gillenormand said in a low voice and as though speaking to
himself:—

“It is the slasher’s handwriting.”


The aunt examined the paper, turned it about in all directions, then
put it back in its case.

At the same moment a little oblong packet, enveloped in blue paper,
fell from one of the pockets of the great-coat. Mademoiselle
Gillenormand picked it up and unfolded the blue paper.

It contained Marius’ hundred cards. She handed one of them to M.
Gillenormand, who read: _Le Baron Marius Pontmercy_.

The old man rang the bell. Nicolette came. M. Gillenormand took the
ribbon, the case, and the coat, flung them all on the floor in the
middle of the room, and said:—

“Carry those duds away.”


A full hour passed in the most profound silence. The old man and the
old spinster had seated themselves with their backs to each other, and
were thinking, each on his own account, the same things, in all
probability.

At the expiration of this hour, Aunt Gillenormand said:—“A pretty state
of things!”


A few moments later, Marius made his appearance. He entered. Even
before he had crossed the threshold, he saw his grandfather holding one
of his own cards in his hand, and on catching sight of him, the latter
exclaimed with his air of bourgeois and grinning superiority which was
something crushing:—

“Well! well! well! well! well! so you are a baron now. I present you my
compliments. What is the meaning of this?”


Marius reddened slightly and replied:—

“It means that I am the son of my father.”


M. Gillenormand ceased to laugh, and said harshly:—

“I am your father.”


“My father,” retorted Marius, with downcast eyes and a severe air, “was
a humble and heroic man, who served the Republic and France gloriously,
who was great in the greatest history that men have ever made, who
lived in the bivouac for a quarter of a century, beneath grape-shot and
bullets, in snow and mud by day, beneath rain at night, who captured
two flags, who received twenty wounds, who died forgotten and
abandoned, and who never committed but one mistake, which was to love
too fondly two ingrates, his country and myself.”


This was more than M. Gillenormand could bear to hear. At the word
_republic_, he rose, or, to speak more correctly, he sprang to his
feet. Every word that Marius had just uttered produced on the visage of
the old Royalist the effect of the puffs of air from a forge upon a
blazing brand. From a dull hue he had turned red, from red, purple, and
from purple, flame-colored.

“Marius!” he cried. “Abominable child! I do not know what your father
was! I do not wish to know! I know nothing about that, and I do not
know him! But what I do know is, that there never was anything but
scoundrels among those men! They were all rascals, assassins, red-caps,
thieves! I say all! I say all! I know not one! I say all! Do you hear
me, Marius! See here, you are no more a baron than my slipper is! They
were all bandits in the service of Robespierre! All who served
B-u-o-naparté were brigands! They were all traitors who betrayed,
betrayed, betrayed their legitimate king! All cowards who fled before
the Prussians and the English at Waterloo! That is what I do know!
Whether Monsieur your father comes in that category, I do not know! I
am sorry for it, so much the worse, your humble servant!”


In his turn, it was Marius who was the firebrand and M. Gillenormand
who was the bellows. Marius quivered in every limb, he did not know
what would happen next, his brain was on fire. He was the priest who
beholds all his sacred wafers cast to the winds, the fakir who beholds
a passer-by spit upon his idol. It could not be that such things had
been uttered in his presence. What was he to do? His father had just
been trampled under foot and stamped upon in his presence, but by whom?
By his grandfather. How was he to avenge the one without outraging the
other? It was impossible for him to insult his grandfather and it was
equally impossible for him to leave his father unavenged. On the one
hand was a sacred grave, on the other hoary locks.

He stood there for several moments, staggering as though intoxicated,
with all this whirlwind dashing through his head; then he raised his
eyes, gazed fixedly at his grandfather, and cried in a voice of
thunder:—

“Down with the Bourbons, and that great hog of a Louis XVIII.!”


Louis XVIII. had been dead for four years; but it was all the same to
him.

The old man, who had been crimson, turned whiter than his hair. He
wheeled round towards a bust of M. le Duc de Berry, which stood on the
chimney-piece, and made a profound bow, with a sort of peculiar
majesty. Then he paced twice, slowly and in silence, from the fireplace
to the window and from the window to the fireplace, traversing the
whole length of the room, and making the polished floor creak as though
he had been a stone statue walking.

On his second turn, he bent over his daughter, who was watching this
encounter with the stupefied air of an antiquated lamb, and said to her
with a smile that was almost calm: “A baron like this gentleman, and a
bourgeois like myself cannot remain under the same roof.”


And drawing himself up, all at once, pallid, trembling, terrible, with
his brow rendered more lofty by the terrible radiance of wrath, he
extended his arm towards Marius and shouted to him:—

“Be off!”


Marius left the house.

On the following day, M. Gillenormand said to his daughter:

“You will send sixty pistoles every six months to that blood-drinker,
and you will never mention his name to me.”


Having an immense reserve fund of wrath to get rid of, and not knowing
what to do with it, he continued to address his daughter as _you_
instead of _thou_ for the next three months.

Marius, on his side, had gone forth in indignation. There was one
circumstance which, it must be admitted, aggravated his exasperation.
There are always petty fatalities of the sort which complicate domestic
dramas. They augment the grievances in such cases, although, in
reality, the wrongs are not increased by them. While carrying Marius’
“duds” precipitately to his chamber, at his grandfather’s command,
Nicolette had, inadvertently, let fall, probably, on the attic
staircase, which was dark, that medallion of black shagreen which
contained the paper penned by the colonel. Neither paper nor case could
afterwards be found. Marius was convinced that “Monsieur
Gillenormand”—from that day forth he never alluded to him otherwise—had
flung “his father’s testament” in the fire. He knew by heart the few
lines which the colonel had written, and, consequently, nothing was
lost. But the paper, the writing, that sacred relic,—all that was his
very heart. What had been done with it?

Marius had taken his departure without saying whither he was going, and
without knowing where, with thirty francs, his watch, and a few clothes
in a hand-bag. He had entered a hackney-coach, had engaged it by the
hour, and had directed his course at hap-hazard towards the Latin
quarter.

What was to become of Marius?




