Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  He added, turning to his sister:

  ‘A priest must never speak to protect himself against other men. Men do as God allows them to do. We may only pray to Him when we feel ourselves to be in danger, and we must pray, not for ourselves but for our brother, lest through us he fall into sin.’

  However, episodes such as this occurred only rarely. We report those of which we have knowledge; but in general he spent his life doing the same things at the same time, and a month of his year resembled an hour of his day.

  As to what became of the riches of Embrun Cathedral, it is a matter on which we prefer not to be questioned. They were very handsome objects, very tempting, very suitable for stealing for the good of the poor. Besides, they had already been stolen. Half the business had been done, and it only remained to alter the course of the theft, just to redirect it a little way. We will not comment ourselves on the matter; but later a somewhat cryptic note was found among the bishop’s papers which may have had some bearing on it. It ran: ‘The problem is to decide whether this should be returned to the cathedral or to the hospital.’

  VIII

  A philosopher in his cups

  The senator of whom mention has already been made was a determined man who had pursued his career with a single-mindedness that ignored such hindrances as conscience, good faith, justice, and duty, achieving his ends without ever deviating from the path of his own interests. He was a former public attorney mellowed by success, a man without malice prepared at any time to do what he could for his sons and sons-in-law, his relatives and even his friends, having wisely elected to take the easy way through life and profit by every chance that offered. To do otherwise would have seemed to him absurd. He was intelligent and sufficiently well-educated to consider himself a disciple of Epicurus, although he probably owed more to such lesser writers as Pigault-Lebrun. He laughed as readily and amiably at the eternal truths as at the eccentricities of ‘our excellent bishop’, sometimes in the presence of the bishop himself.

  It happened that on the occasion of some semi-official ceremony this senator, the Comte de —, and M. Myriel dined with the prefect. Over the dessert the senator, somewhat flushed with wine but still urbane, exclaimed:

  ‘Let us talk, Monseigneur. It is hard for a senator and a bishop to look each other in the eye without winking. We are both oracles. I will confess to you that I have my own philosophy.’

  ‘And rightly so,’ said the bishop. ‘A man’s philosophy is the bed he lies on. Yours, Monsieur le Comte, is a bed of purple.’

  ‘But let us talk like plain men.’

  ‘Plain devils, if you would rather.’

  ‘I will say at once that I do not regard writers such as the Marquis d’Argens, Pyrrho, Hobbes and M. Naigeon as charlatans. I have a row of philosophers on my shelves, in gilt-edged editions.’

  ‘Like yourself, Monsieur le Comte.’

  The senator continued: ‘I detest Diderot. He’s an ideologue, a demagogue, and a revolutionary who in his heart believes in God. He’s more bigoted than Voltaire. Voltaire made fun of Needham’s attempt to reconcile the theory of spontaneous generation with the concept of God the Creator, and Voltaire was wrong, because Needham’s eels prove that God is unnecessary. A drop of vinegar in a spoonful of dough replaces the fiat lux. Imagine the drop and the spoon to be that much larger and you have the world. Man is the eel. So where does the Eternal Father come in? My dear bishop, I find the Jehovah theory very tedious. It produces nothing but lean men with empty heads. I want none of the great All, which irritates me; I prefer the great Nothing, which leaves me untroubled. Between ourselves, and talking candidly as though you were my confessor, I will declare to you that I am a man of plain sense. I am not in love with your Jesus, who went about preaching renunciation and self-sacrifice – a miser’s advice to beggars. Renunciation for what reason, sacrifice to what end? I have never heard of a wolf sacrificing itself for the good of another wolf. Let us stick to nature. We who are the top should have a higher philosophy. What is the use of being at the head of affairs, if you see no further than the end of the next man’s nose? Let us live happily. Life is all we have. That man has any future life, above or below or anywhere else, is something that I flatly disbelieve. You urge upon me the need for sacrifice and renunciation. I am to ponder my every action, rack my brains with the problems of good and evil, justice and injustice, fas and nefas. Why? Because later I shall be called to account. And when? After my death. What fantasy! It will take a cunning judge to catch me after my death – a ghostly finger stirring a handful of dust. We must acknowledge the truth, we initiates who have peered under the skirts of Isis. There is neither good nor evil but only growth. We must look for reality, discard all else, get to the bottom of things, mustn’t we? We need to have a nose for truth, to burrow in the earth for it and seize hold of it. To do so is glorious, it is to grow strong and rejoice. I stand four-square, my lord bishop. The immortality of man is a daydream, a soothing promise which you may believe if you choose. How pleasant to be Adam – to be pure spirit, an angel with blue wings on one’s back! Was it not Tertullian who said that the blessed will travel from one star to another? Splendid. We are to be the grasshoppers of the firmament. And we are to see God. Well, well – what nonsense it all is. God is a grotesque humbug. I would not say that in print, mark you, but I will whisper it among friends over the wine. To renounce the things of this earth for Paradise is to throw away the substance for the shadow.’ To be the dupe of the Infinite – that doesn’t suit me! I am nothing. I am Count Nothing, senator. Did I exist before my birth? No. Shall I exist after my death? No. What am I but an organized handful of dust? What am I to do on earth? I have a choice. I can suffer or enjoy. Where will suffering end? In oblivion, and I shall have suffered. Where will enjoyment end? Also in oblivion, but I shall have enjoyed. I have made my choice. One can eat or be eaten, and I would sooner eat. It is better to be the teeth than the grass. That’s the way I look at it. In the end, whatever you do, the grave is waiting, the Pantheon for some of us, the same limbo for us all. Finis. Total liquidation, the vanishing point; death is dead, believe me. It makes me laugh, the idea that there may be someone waiting there with something to say to me. An old-wives’ tale, a bogeyman for the kids, Jehovah for grown man. No, our tomorrow is only darkness. Beyond the tomb lie equal limbos, and it makes no difference whether you are Sardanapalus or Vincent de Paul. That’s the truth of it. The only thing to do is live, use yourself while you have yourself. I have my philosophy, bishop, and my philosophers, but I do not let myself be fooled by make-believe. But that is not to say that there aren’t some who need it, the poor, the under-fed, the down-and-outs. We give them myths to feed on, fairy-tales – the soul, immortality, Paradise, the stars … And they swallow it. They butter their dry bread with it. The man who has nothing else has God. It’s better than nothing and I’ve no objection, but for myself I stick to realism. God is for the masses.’

  The bishop clapped his hands.

  ‘An admirable discourse!’ he exclaimed. ‘What a splendid thing that kind of materialism is. Not everyone can achieve it. But the man who has it can’t be fooled; he isn’t going to let himself be exiled like Cato, or stoned to death like Stephen, or burned alive like Joan of Arc. He has all the joys of irresponsibility, the feeling that he can encompass everything with an easy mind – places, sinecures, dignities, power however gained, profitable recantations, useful betrayals, comforting adjustments of conscience – and go to his grave having stomached them all. How pleasant for him! I am not rebuking you, Monsieur le Senateur; I cannot refrain from congratulating you. As you say, you great men have your own philosophy, subtle, refined, accessible only to the rich, suited to all occasions, an admirable seasoning for the pleasures of life. It is a philosophy distilled from the depths by those who specialize in such matters. But you are a good-hearted man, you do not grudge the masses their belief in God, any more than you grudge them their goose stuffed with chestnuts while you have your turkey and
truffles.’

  IX

  A sister’s account of her brother

  To give an impression of the domestic life of the Bishop of Digne, and the way in which the two devoted women subordinated their actions, their thoughts, even their timorous feminine instincts to his habits and purposes, without his needing to express them in words, we cannot do better than transcribe a letter written by Mlle Baptistine to the Vicomtesse de Boischevron, her lifelong friend.

  Digne, 16 December 18—

  My dear Madame,

  Not a day passes without our speaking of you. It is a habit, but now I have an added reason. In dusting and scrubbing the walls and ceiling, Mme Magloire made a discovery, and today our two bedrooms, with their old whitewashed wallpaper, would do no discredit even to a château as splendid as your own. Mme Magloire stripped away the paper and found something underneath. My sitting-room, in which there is no furniture since we use it only for hanging up the washing, is fifteen feet high and eighteen feet square. The ceiling, which was at one time painted gold, has beams like yours, but these were covered with canvas when the house was used as a hospital. There is also wainscoting dating from our grandmothers’ time. But my bedroom is the one you should see. After stripping away ten layers of paper Mme Magloire came upon wall-paintings, which, if they are not very good, are at least tolerable. There is a picture of Telemachus receiving knightly honours from Minerva, and another of him in some garden of which I forget the name, but it is where the Roman ladies passed a single night. I cannot describe it all. I have Roman lords and ladies [here an illegible word] with their retainers. Mme Magloire has scrubbed it all clean and this summer she is going to repair the blemishes and re-varnish it, so that my room will be a positive museum. She also found two old wooden consoles in the attic. To have had them re-gilded would have cost six francs apiece and it is better to give the money to the poor; but anyway they are ugly and I would far rather have a round mahogany table.

  I am as happy as ever. My brother is so good. He gives everything he has to the sick and needy. We never have enough. The winter is hard in these parts, and we have to do what we can for those in need. At least we are fairly well warmed and lighted, and that is a great comfort.

  My brother has his foibles. If he mentions them, it is to say that that is how a bishop should be. Would you believe it, our door is never locked. Anyone who chooses can walk straight into my brother’s room. He is afraid of nothing, even at night. That is his kind of courage, he says.

  He does not allow Mme Magloire and me to worry about him. He runs all kinds of risks and we are not supposed even to notice. One has to learn to understand him. He goes out in the rain, tramps through the puddles, travels in winter. He is not afraid of darkness or unsafe roads or chance encounters.

  Last year he went alone into a part of the country where there were robbers. He would not take us with him. He was away a fortnight and we thought him dead, but he came back unharmed and said, ‘Let me show you how I have been robbed,’ and he opened a box containing all the jewels stolen from Embrun Cathedral, which the thieves had given him. I had gone with a few friends to meet him some miles along the road, and this time I could not help scolding him a little, although I did it only when the carriage was making a noise so that no one else could hear.

  At one time I used to think, ‘No danger will ever deter him, he’s terrible.’ But I have grown used to it. I make signs to Mme Magloire not to vex him. He runs what risks he pleases. I bear Mme Magloire off and go to my room and pray for him and then go calmly to sleep, knowing that if anything should happen to him it would be the end of me too and I should go to God with my brother and my bishop. Mme Magloire found it harder than I to accustom herself to what she calls his rashness. But now she has accepted the situation and we pray together and tremble together and go to sleep. If the devil walked into the house no one would prevent him. And after all, in this house what have we to fear? There is always Someone with us who is stronger. The devil may visit us, but God lives here.

  And that is enough. My brother need no longer say a word to me. I understand him without words and we trust in Providence. That is how it must be with a man so great in spirit.

  I asked him for the particulars you wanted concerning the family of Faux. As you are aware, he knows everything of this kind and remembers everything, for he is still a strong royalist. It seems that they are a very old Norman family from the region of Caen. There are records five hundred years old of a Raoul de Faux, a Jean de Faux and a Thomas de Faux, all gentlemen, of whom one was Seigneur de Rochefort. The last of the line was Guy-Etienne-Alexandre, who was a colonel and held a command in the Breton light cavalry. His daughter, Marie-Louise, married Adrien-Charles, the son of Duc Louis de Gramont, colonel of the French Guards and lieutenant-general of the army. The name is spelt Faux, Fauq, or Faoucq.

  I trust, dear Madame, that you will commend us to the prayers of your saintly relative, the cardinal. As for your dear Sylvanie, she was quite right not to waste the little time she spends with you in writing to me. It is enough for me to know that she is well and working as you would wish, and that she still loves me. I am happy to have news of her through you. My health is fairly good although I grow thinner every day. And now my paper is running out. A thousand affectionate thoughts.

  Baptistine.

  P.S. Your sister-in-law is still here with her young family. Your greatnephew is charming. Do you know that he will soon be five? Yesterday he saw a horse wearing knee-pads and he asked, ‘What’s the matter with its knees?’ His small brother drags an old broom round their apartment pretending it is a carriage and shouting, ‘Hup!’

  It will be seen from this letter that the two women, with that especial feminine genius which understands a man better than he understands himself, had learned to adapt themselves to the bishop’s mode of being. Beneath that air of gentle candour that never belied itself, the Bishop of Digne performed great and sometimes gallant actions without seeming to be conscious of the fact. The women shivered but acquiesced. Mme Magloire might sometimes venture to remonstrate with him before the event, but never during or after it. Nothing, not so much as a gesture, was allowed to distract him while the action was in progress. At times, without his needing to say it or even perhaps being fully aware of it, such was his simplicity, they perceived that he was wholly the bishop and themselves no more than shadows in his house. They served him as the occasion required, and if the best obedience was to vanish from his sight they did so. With the admirable delicacy of instinct they knew that some forms of solicitude can be an encumbrance. And so, responsive to his nature if not fully understanding his thought, they did not seek to protect him even when they believed him to be at risk. They entrusted him to God.

  As Baptistine said, her brother’s end would be her own. Mme Magloire did not say it, but she knew it.

  X

  The bishop confronted by a strange light

  Not long after the writing of the letter we have quoted, the bishop performed an act which, if the talk in the town is to be believed, was even more perilous than his excursion into the bandit country.

  There was a man living in solitude not far from Digne whom we will call G—. Not to beat about the bush, he was an ancien conventionnel, that is to say, a former member of the Revolutionary Convention.

  The narrow world of Digne referred to him with a kind of horror. A member of the Convention – think what that meant! It had been a world in which every man addressed his fellow as ‘tu’, and called him ‘citizen’. This man was little better than a monster. He had not voted in fact for the death of the king, but in principle he had done so, so that he was a quasi-regicide and infamous. Why then had he not been brought to trial when the legitimate monarchy was restored? They might not have cut off his head – it is right that clemency should be exercised – but surely he should have been banished for life, if only to serve as an example. Besides which, he was an atheist, like all those people. And so on … Thus the geese cackled r
ound the vulture.

  But was G— really a vulture? He was, if one might judge by the wildness of his isolation.

  Not having voted for the death of the king he had not figured in the decrees of exile and had been able to remain in France. He lived in a desolate valley about three-quarters of an hour from the town, with no road or habitation near it. Here, it was said, he tilled a plot of land and had contrived for himself a primitive dwelling like a beast’s lair. No one went near him. Since he had gone to live there the pathway leading to the valley had vanished in the undergrowth. The place was known as le maison du bourreau, the hangman’s house.

  But the bishop, now and then glancing towards a clump of trees on the horizon which marked the edge of the valley, reflected, ‘There lives a lonely soul.’ Behind this thought lay another – ‘I owe him a visit.’

  It must be confessed, however, that the idea, natural enough at first glance, upon consideration seemed to him strange and impossible, even repellent. For in his heart the bishop shared the general feeling, and, without his fully realizing it, the former revolutionary inspired in him the kind of repugnance, bordering on hatred, which is best expressed by the word ‘estrangement’. Should the shepherd recoil from the sick sheep? Assuredly not. But this was a villainous sheep. The bishop was in two minds. He started several times to visit the man but turned back.

  Then one day it was learned in the town that the country boy who ran errands for G— had come in search of a doctor. The old monster was dying; he was partly paralysed and would not live through the night. ‘A good thing too,’ said some people. The bishop took his stick and putting on his cloak – partly to hide his worn cassock, but also because the evening breeze would be chilly – set out.