Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Victor Hugo

  Then, throwing down the pen:

  “There are no mistakes in spelling. You can look. We have received an education, my sister and I. We have not always been what we are. We were not made—”

  Here she stopped, fixed her faded eye upon Marius, and burst out laughing, saying in a tone which contained complete anguish stifled by complete cynicism:

  “Bah!”

  And she began to hum these words, to a lively air:

  J‘ai faim, mon père.

  Pas de fricot.

  J’ai froid, ma mere.

  Pas de tricot.

  Grelotte,

  Lolotte!

  Sanglote,

  Jacquot. dq

  Hardly had she finished this stanza when she exclaimed:

  “Do you ever go to the theatre, Monsieur Marius? I do. I have a little brother who is a friend of some artists, and who gives me tickets sometimes. Now, I do not like the seats in the galleries. You are crowded, you are uncomfortable. There are sometimes coarse people there; there are also people who smell bad.”

  Then she looked at Marius, put on a strange manner, and said to him:

  “Do you know, Monsieur Marius, that you are a very pretty boy?”

  And at the same time the same thought occurred to both of them, which made her smile and made him blush.

  She went to him, and laid her hand on his shoulder: “You pay no attention to me, but I know you, Monsieur Marius. I meet you here on the stairs, and then I see you visiting a man named Father Mabeuf, who lives out by Austerlitz, sometimes, when I am walking that way. That becomes you very well, your tangled hair.”

  Her voice tried to be very soft, but succeeded only in being very low. Some of her words were lost in their passage from the larynx to the lips, as upon a key-board in which some notes are missing.

  Marius had drawn back quietly.

  “Mademoiselle,” said he, with his cold gravity, “I have here a packet, which is yours, I think. Permit me to return it to you.”

  And he handed her the envelope, which contained the four letters.

  She clapped her hands and exclaimed:

  “We have looked everywhere!”

  Then she snatched the packet, and opened the envelope, saying:

  “Lordy, Lordy, haven’t we looked, my sister and I? And you have found it! on the boulevard, didn’t you? It must have been on the boulevard? You see, this dropped when we ran. It was my brat of a sister who made the stupid blunder. When we got home we could not find it. As we did not want to be beaten, since that is pointless, since that is entirely pointless, since that is absolutely pointless, we said at home that we had carried the letters to the persons, and that they told us: Nix! Now here they are, these poor letters. And how did you know they were mine? Ah, yes! by the writing! It was you, then, that we knocked against last evening. We did not see you, really! I said to my sister: Is that a gentleman. My sister said:—I think it is a gentleman!”

  Meanwhile she had unfolded the petition addressed “to the beneficent gentleman of the church Saint Jacques du Haut Pas.”

  “Here!” said she, “this is for the old fellow who goes to mass. And this too is the hour. I am going to carry it to him. He will give us something perhaps for breakfast.”

  Then she began to laugh, and added:

  “Do you know what it will be if we have breakfast to-day? It will be that we shall have had our breakfast for day before yesterday, our dinner for day before yesterday, our breakfast for yesterday, our dinner for yesterday, all that at one time this morning. Yes! zounds! if you’re not satisfied, die, dogs!”

  This reminded Marius of what the poor girl had come to his room for.

  He felt in his waistcoat, he found nothing there.

  The young girl continued, seeming to talk as if she were no longer conscious that Marius was there present.

  “Sometimes I go away at night. Sometimes I do not come back. Before coming to this place, last winter, we lived under the arches of the bridges. We hugged close to each other so as not to freeze. My little sister cried. How chilly the water is! When I thought of drowning myself, I said: No; it is too cold. I go all alone when I want to, I sleep in the ditches sometimes. Do you know, at night, when I walk on the boulevards, I see the trees like gibbets, I see all the black houses as large as the towers of Notre Dame, I imagine that the white walls are the river, I say to myself: Here, there is water there! The stars are like spotlights, one would say that they are smoking, and that the wind is blowing them out, I am confused, as if I had horses panting in my ear; though it is night, I hear hand-organs and spinning wheels, I don’t know what. I think that somebody is throwing stones at me, I run without knowing it, it is all a whirl, all a whirl. When one has not eaten, it is very queer.”5

  And she looked at him with a wandering eye.

  After a thorough exploration of his pockets, Marius had at last got together five francs and sixteen sous. This was at the time all that he had in the world. “That is enough for my dinner to-day,” thought he, “to-morrow we will see.” He took the sixteen sous, and gave the five francs to the young girl.

  She took the coin eagerly.

  “Good,” said she, “there is some sunshine!”

  And as if the sun had had the effect to loosen an avalanche of argot in her brain, she continued:

  “Five francs! a shiner! a monarch! in this piolle! it is chendtre! You are a good mion. I give you my palpitant. Bravo for the fanandels! Two days of pivois! and of viandemuche! and of frictomar! we shall pitancer chenument! and bonne mouise!”

  She drew her chemise up over her shoulders, made a low bow to Marius, then a familiar wave of the hand, and moved towards the door, saying:

  “Good morning, monsieur. It is all the same. I am going to find my old man.”

  On her way she saw on the bureau a dry crust of bread mouldering there in the dust; she sprang upon it, and bit it, muttering:

  “That is good! it is hard! it breaks my teeth!”

  Then she went out.

  4 (5)

  THE PROVIDENTIAL SPYHOLE

  FOR FIVE YEARS Marius had lived in poverty, in privation, in distress even, but he perceived that he had never known true want. True want he had just seen. It was this phantom which had just passed before his eyes. In fact, he who has seen the misery of man only has seen nothing, he must see the misery of woman; he who has seen the misery of woman only has seen nothing, he must see the misery of childhood.

  When man has reached the last extremity, he comes, at the same time, to the last expedients. Woe to the defenceless beings who surround him! Work, wages, bread, fire, courage, willingness, all fail him at once. The light of day seems to die away without, the moral light dies out within; in this gloom, man meets the weakness of woman and childhood, and puts them by force to ignominious uses.

  Then all horrors are possible. Despair is surrounded by fragile partitions which all open into vice or crime.

  Health, youth, honour, the holy and passionate delicacies of the still tender flesh, the heart, virginity, modesty, that epidermis of the soul, are fatally disposed of by that blind groping which seeks for aid, which meets degradation, and which accommodates itself to it. Fathers, mothers, children, brothers, sisters, men, women, girls, cling together, and almost grow together like a mineral formation, in that dark promiscuity of sexes, of relationships, of ages, of infancy, of innocence. They crouch down, back to back, in a kind of fate-hovel.dr They glance at one another sorrowfully. Oh, the unfortunate! how pallid they are! how cold they are! It seems as though they were on a planet much further from the sun than we.

  This young girl was to Marius a sort of messenger from the night.

  She revealed to him an entire and hideous aspect of the darkness.

  Marius almost reproached himself with the fact that he had been so absorbed in his reveries and passion that he had not until now cast a glance upon his neighbours. Paying their rent was a mechanical impulse; everybody would have had that impulse; but he, Marius
, should have done better. What! a mere wall separated him from these abandoned beings, who lived by groping in the night without the pale of the living; he came in contact with them, he was in some sort the last link of the human race which they touched, he heard them live or rather breathe beside him, and he took no notice of them! every day at every moment, he heard them through the wall, walking, going, coming, talking, and he did not lend his ear! and in these words there were groans, and he did not even listen, his thoughts were elsewhere, upon dreams, upon impossible glimmerings, upon loves in the sky, upon infatuations; and all the while human beings, his brothers in Jesus Christ, his brothers in the people, were suffering death agonies beside him! agonising uselessly; he even caused a portion of their suffering, and aggravated it. For had they had another neighbour, a less chimerical and more observant neighbour, an ordinary and charitable man, it was clear that their poverty would have been noticed, their signals of distress would have been seen, and long ago perhaps they would have been gathered up and saved! Undoubtedly they seemed very depraved, very corrupt, very vile, very hateful, even, but those are rare who fall without becoming degraded; there is a point, moreover, at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confounded in a single word, a fatal word, Les Miserables; whose fault is it? And then, is it not when the fall is lowest that charity ought to be greatest?

  While he thus preached to himself, for there were times when Marius, like all truly honest hearts, was his own monitor, and scolded himself more than he deserved, he looked at the wall which separated him from the Jondrettes, as if he could send his pitying glance through that partition to warn those unfortunate beings. The wall was a thin layer of plaster, upheld by laths and joists, through which, as we have just seen, voices and words could be distinguished perfectly. None but the dreamer, Marius, would not have perceived this before. There was no paper hung on this wall either on the side of the Jondrettes, or on Marius’ side; its coarse construction was bare to the eye. Almost unconsciously, Marius examined this partition; sometimes reverie examines, observes, and scrutinises, as thought would do. Suddenly he arose, he noticed towards the top, near the ceiling, a triangular hole, where three laths left a space between them. The plaster which should have stopped this hole was gone, and by getting upon the bureau he could see through that hole into the Jondrettes’ garret. Pity has and should have its curiosity. This gap made a kind of spyhole. It is lawful to look upon misfortune like a betrayer for the sake of relieving it. “Let us see what these people are,” thought Marius, “and to what they are reduced.”

  He climbed upon the bureau, put his eye to the crevice, and looked.

  5 (6)

  THE WILD MAN IN HIS LAIR

  CITIES, like forests, have their dens in which hide all their most evil and terrible monsters. But in cities, what hides thus is ferocious, unclean, and small, that is to say, ugly; in forests, what hides is ferocious, savage, and large, that is to say, beautiful. Den for den, those of beasts are preferable to those of men. Caverns are better than the wretched holes which shelter humanity.

  What Marius saw was a hole.

  Marius was poor and his room was poorly furnished, but even as his poverty was noble, his garret was clean. The den into which his eyes were at that moment directed, was abject, filthy, fetid, infectious, gloomy, sordid. All the furniture was a straw chair, a rickety table, a few old broken dishes, and in two of the corners two indescribable pallets; all the light came from a dormer window of four panes, curtained with spiders’ webs. Just enough light came through that loophole to make a man’s face appear like the face of a phantom. The walls had a leprous look, and were covered with seams and scars like a face disfigured by some horrible malady; a putrid moisture oozed from them. Obscene pictures could be discovered upon them coarsely sketched in charcoal.

  The room which Marius occupied had a broken brick pavement; this one was neither paved nor floored; the inmates walked immediately upon the old plastering of the ruinous tenement, which had grown black under their feet. Upon this uneven soil where the dust was, as it were, incrusted, and which was virgin soil in respect only of the broom, were grouped at random constellations of socks, old shoes, and hideous rags; however, this room had a fireplace; so it rented for forty francs a year. In the fireplace there was a little of everything, a chafing-dish, a kettle, some broken boards, rags hanging on nails, a bird cage, some ashes, and even a little fire. Two embers were smoking sullenly.

  The size of this garret added still more to its horror. It had projections, angles, black holes, recesses under the roof, bays, and promontories. Beyond were hideous, unfathomable corners, which seemed as if they must be full of spiders as big as one’s fist, centipedes as large as one’s foot, and perhaps even some unknown monsters of humanity.

  One of the pallets was near the door, the other near the window. Each had one end next the fireplace and both were opposite Marius. In a corner near the opening through which Marius was looking, hanging upon the wall in a black wooden frame, was a coloured engraving at the bottom of which was written in large letters: THE DREAM. It represented a sleeping woman and a sleeping child, the child upon the woman’s lap, an eagle in a cloud with a crown in his beak, and the woman pushing away the crown from the child’s head, but without waking; in the background Napoleon in a halo, leaning against a large blue column with a yellow capital adorned with this inscription:

  MARINGO

  AUSTERLITS

  IENA

  WAGRAMME

  ELOTds

  Below this frame a sort of wooden panel longer than it was wide was standing on the floor and leaning at an angle against the wall. It had the appearance of a picture set against the wall, of a frame probably daubed on the other side, of a pier glass taken down from a wall and forgotten there while waiting to be hung again.

  By the table, upon which Marius saw a pen, ink, and paper, was seated a man of about sixty, small, thin, livid, haggard, with a keen, cruel, and restless air; a hideous harpy.

  Lavater, if he could have studied this face, would have found in it a mixture of vulture and shyster; the bird of prey and the con man rendering each other ugly and complete, the con man making the bird of prey ignoble, the bird of prey making the con man horrible.

  This man had a long grey beard. He was dressed in a woman’s chemise, which showed his shaggy chest and his naked arms bristling with grey hairs. Below this chemise were a pair of muddy trousers and boots from which the toes stuck out.

  He had a pipe in his mouth, and was smoking. There was no more bread in the den, but there was still tobacco.

  He was writing, probably some such letter as those which Marius had read.

  On one comer of the table was an old odd volume with a reddish cover, the size of which, the old duodecimo of series of books, betrayed that it was a novel. On the cover was displayed the following title, printed in huge capitals : GOD, THE KING, HONOUR AND THE LADIES, BY DUCRAY DUMINIL,1814.

  As he wrote, the man talked aloud, and Marius heard his words:

  “To think that there is no equality even when we are dead! Look at Père Lachaise! The great, those who are rich, are in the upper part, in the avenue of the acacias, which is paved. They can go there in a carriage. The low, the poor, the unfortunate, they are put in the lower part, where there is mud up to the knees, in holes, in the wet. They are put there so that they may rot sooner! You cannot go to see them without sinking into the ground.”

  Here he stopped, struck his fist on the table, and added, gnashing his teeth:

  “Oh! I could eat the world!”

  A big woman, who might have been forty years old or a hundred, was squatting near the fireplace, upon her bare feet.

  She also was dressed only in a chemise and a knit skirt patched with pieces of old cloth. A coarse tow apron covered half the skirt. Although this woman was bent and drawn up into herself, it could be seen that she was very tall. She was a kind of giantess by the side of her husband. She had hideous hair, light red sprin
kled with grey, that she pushed back from time to time with her huge shining hands which had flat nails.

  Lying on the ground, at her side, wide open, was a volume of the same appearance as the other, and probably of the same novel.

  Upon one of the pallets Marius could discern a sort of slender little wan girl seated, almost naked, with her feet hanging down, having the appearance neither of listening, nor of seeing, nor of living.

  The younger sister, doubtless, of the one who had come to his room.

  She appeared to be eleven or twelve years old. On examining her attentively, he saw that she must be fourteen. It was the child who, the evening before, on the boulevard, said: “I cavalé, cavalé, cavalé!”

  She was of that sickly species which long remain backward, then pushes forward rapidly, and all at once. These sorry human plants are produced by want. These poor creatures have neither childhood nor youth. At fifteen they appear to be twelve; at sixteen they appear to be twenty. To-day a little girl, to-morrow a woman. One would say that they leap through life, to have done with it sooner.

  This being now had the appearance of a child.

  Nothing, moreover, indicated the performance of any labour in this room; not a loom, not a spinning wheel, not a tool. In one corner a few dubious-looking scraps of iron. It was that gloomy idleness which follows despair, and which precedes the death-agony.

  Marius looked for some time into that funereal interior, more fearful than the interior of a tomb; for here were felt the movements of a human soul, and the palpitation of life.

  The garret, the cellar, the deep ditch, in which some of the wretched crawl at the bottom of the social edifice, are not the sepulchre itself; they are its antechamber; but like those rich men who display their greatest magnificence at the entrance of their palace, death, who is close at hand, seems to display his greatest wretchedness in this vestibule.

  The man became silent, the woman did not speak, the girl did not seem to breathe. Marius could hear the pen scratching over the paper.