Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  Seeing the sister, Javert’s first impulse was to withdraw. But on the other hand he had a duty to perform which also admitted of no denial. So on second thoughts he stayed, resolved to hazard at least one question.

  And there knelt Sister Simplice, who in all her life had never told a lie. Javert knew this and held her in especial veneration because of it.

  ‘Sister,’ he asked, ‘are you the only person in this room?’

  There ensued a terrible instant during which the trembling servant thought that she would faint. The sister looked up.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Javert, ‘if I ask you one thing more. Have you seen anyone this evening, a man? He has escaped from the prison and we are searching for him – the man called Jean Valjean. Have you seen him?’

  ‘No,’ replied the sister.

  A second lie. She had lied twice, promptly and without hesitation, in an act of sacrifice.

  ‘I apologize,’ said Javert, and bowing deeply he withdrew.

  Sister Simplice! The saintly woman has long since departed this life to join her brothers and sisters in the radiance of Heaven. May she be credited there for her falsehood!

  Her denial was to Javert so conclusive that he did not even notice the fact that a taper, recently blown out, still stood smoking on the table.

  An hour later a man on foot might have been seen amid the trees and mists, heading rapidly away from Montreuil-sur-mer in the direction of Paris. It was Jean Valjean. The testimony of two or three carters whom he passed on the road subsequently established that he was carrying a bundle and wearing a smock. Where he had obtained this was not certainly known, but an old workman had died in the hospital infirmary a few days before, and the smock may have been among the garments he left behind.

  A last word about Fantine. We all have a common mother, the earth, and it was to this mother that she was restored.

  The curé thought it well to retain, for the benefit of the poor, as much as possible of the money left behind by Jean Valjean. Perhaps he was right. After all, what were the persons directly concerned? – a criminal and a woman of the town. So he limited the funeral to the barest essentials, consigning Fantine to a pauper’s grave in the free corner of the cemetery. Mercifully, God knows where to look for our souls. Her mortal remains were laid to rest, in company with other unconsidered bones, in a public grave resembling her own bed.

  PART TWO

  COSETTE

  Book One

  Waterloo

  I

  Seen on the road from Nivelles

  ON A FINE May morning last year (that is to say, in the year 1861) a traveller, the author of this tale, walked from Nivelles in the direction of La Hulpe. He followed a wide tree-lined road through a countryside where the small hills succeeded one another like waves of the sea. After passing Lillois and Bois-Seigneur-Isaac he saw to the west the belfry of Braine-l’ Alleud, shaped like an inverted vase. He had left behind him a wood on the crest of a hill and, at a crossroad, a worm-eaten post inscribed, ‘Former toll-gate No. 4’, beside which was a drinking-place with the sign ‘Au Quatre Vents. Échaleau, privately owned café’.

  A little further on he came to a small valley with a stream running under small bridges built into the road embankment. The copse of bright-leaved trees which covered one side of this valley was dispersed on the other side amid fields, to dwindle in graceful disorder in the direction of Braine-l’ Alleud. By the roadside, on his right was an inn with a four-wheel farm-wagon standing at its door, a bundle of hop-poles, a plough, a heap of brushwood, a lime-pit, and a ladder lying beside an old barn. A girl was working in a field in which a large yellow poster, probably to do with some local fair, flapped in the wind. Beyond the house was a rough pathway running past a duck-pond and vanishing amid thickets. He followed it.

  After going a hundred yards and passing a fifteenth-century wall overhung by a steep tiled gable, he came to a wide, arched doorway, its square pillars in the formal style of Louis XIV adorned with carved medallions. A wall ran at a right angle to the austere façade encompassing this doorway, and on the patch of grass in front of it lay three abandoned harrows through which wild flowers were growing. The shabby double doors, one with a rusty knocker, were closed.

  The sunshine was delightful, the foliage gently astir, more from the activity of birds than from the breeze. One gallant little bird, doubtless lovelorn, was singing his heart out at the top of a tall tree.

  The traveller stooped to examine a depression on the ground, a fairly large circular crater near one of the stone door-pillars, and as he was doing so the door opened and a country-woman emerged. Seeing what he was looking at she said:

  ‘That was made by a French cannon-ball.’ She went on: ‘And that hole up there in the door, that was made by a bullet from a biscayen, a gun firing canister-shot. It didn’t go right through.’

  ‘What is the name of this place?’ the traveller asked.

  ‘Hougomont,’ she said.

  The traveller walked on a little further and, gazing over hedges and between trees, saw on the skyline something resembling a lion.

  He was on the battlefield of Waterloo.

  II

  Hougomont

  Hougomont. It was a fateful place, the beginning of disaster, the first obstacle encountered at Waterloo by the great tree-feller of Europe whose name was Napoleon, the first knot to resist his axe.

  It had been a manor house but is now only a farm. The origin of the name is Hugomons. The house was built by Hugo the squire of Somerel, he who endowed the sixth chaplaincy in the Abbey at Villiers.

  The traveller pushed open the door, brushed past an old carriage standing in the porch and entered the courtyard. The first thing he noticed was a sixteenth-century doorway suggesting an arcade, of which the surrounding masonry had collapsed. Ruins often acquire the dignity of monuments. In the wall adjoining this arcade was an arched gateway with Henri IV keystones affording a view of trees in an orchard. Within the yard were a midden, some spades and mattocks, one or two carts, an old well-head with an iron superstructure, and a lively colt. There was also a chapel with a small belfry, and a pear-tree in blossom growing on a lattice on one side. This was the courtyard which Napoleon had sought to conquer, the plot of land whose possession might have given him the world. Hens were scratching in the dust. A low growl came from a large dog which was baring its teeth as though it represented the English.

  The English in that place had fought most gallantly. For seven hours four companies of Guards under Cooke had defied the furious assault of an army.

  Seen on the map, Hougomont with its yards and outbuildings forms a rough rectangle of which one corner has been lopped off. The south gate is at this corner, protected by a wall from which it can be covered at point-blank range. There are two main entrances, the south gate, which was the doorway of the original manor house, and the north gate, the entrance to the farm. Napoleon entrusted the assault to his brother Jerome. The divisions of Guilleminot, Foy, and Bachelu were flung against Hougomont; nearly the whole of Reille’s corps was brought in, and the bullets of Keller-mann’s command spattered in vain against those heroic walls. They were never forced from the north and only breached from the south, without being taken.

  The farm buildings occupy the southern flank of the main yard. A portion of the original north gate, shattered by the French, still hangs from the wall – four planks nailed to two cross-pieces bearing the scars of battle. This north gateway, in which a makeshift door has been installed, was like any other farm entrance, wide double doors attached directly to a wall made of stone in its lower part and brickwork above. The struggle for it was particularly violent, and the imprints of bloodstained hands were for a long time to be seen on the surrounding masonry. It was here that Bauduin was killed.

  The fury of battle still lingers in that main yard; its horrors are still visible, its violence graven in stone, the life and death of yesterday. The breached and crumbling wa
lls, their holes like gaping wounds, cry out in agony. It was more built-up in 1815 than it is today. Structures now demolished afforded buttresses and recesses, cover for the marksman.

  The English had barricaded themselves within it; the French broke in but could not hold their ground. Beside the chapel is a shattered and gutted wing of the residence, all that remains of the manor house of Hougomont. The house itself served as a castle keep, the chapel as a strongpoint. It was a battle of extermination on both sides. The French, sniped at from all directions, from attic and cellar, from every window and peep-hole, every gap in the stone, brought faggots and set fire to buildings and men; musket fire was answered with flame.

  Through the barred windows of the ruined wing of the house the remains of living-rooms are to be seen; a spiral staircase, pitted from top to bottom, looks like the interior of a broken shell. This staircase served two floors. The English, driven back upon it and clinging to the upper part, demolished the lower treads, and their broad stone tiles still lie in a heap among the nettles. A dozen treads still cling to the wall, the topmost carved with the design of a trident. Three upper treads are solidly embedded; the rest of the staircase is like a toothless jaw. Two old trees stand there, one dead, the other damaged at the foot; but it still puts out leaves in April and since 1815 has grown up through the staircase.

  The chapel was a scene of massacre. Its interior, now silent, gives a strange impression. No mass has been said there since the carnage, but the altar remains, a rough wooden altar against a backing of raw stone. Four whitewashed walls, a door opposite the altar, two small arched windows, a big wooden crucifix on the door and above it a square air-vent blocked with a truss of straw, a shattered window-frame on the ground – such is the chapel. Near the altar is fixed a wooden statue of St Anne, dating from the fifteenth century, the head of the Infant Jesus has been carried away by a bullet. The French, dislodged from the chapel after holding it for a short time, set fire to it. The place became a furnace; door and roof were burnt down, but the wooden Christ was not burnt. The flames devoured his feet, leaving only the charred stumps, but here they stopped. A miracle, the country-people say. The beheaded Infant Jesus was less fortunate than Christ.

  The walls are covered with graffiti. Near the feet of the Christ one may read the name Henguinez. And there are others – Conde de Rio Maior; Marques y Marquesa de Almagro (Habana). There are French names with exclamation marks, expressions of rage. The walls were re-whitewashed in 1849, having been used for the exchange of national insults. It was by the door of the chapel that a corpse was picked up still grasping an axe in its hand. The body was that of sub-lieutenant Legros.

  On the left, as one leaves the chapel, is a well, one of two in the courtyard. But why has this one no bucket or hoisting-gear? Why is water never drawn from it? Because it is filled with skeletons.

  The last person to draw water from this well was Guillaume Van Kylsom, a peasant who lived in Hougomont, where he worked as a gardener. His family fled on 18 June 1815, to take refuge in the woods. For several days and nights the forest around the Abbey of Villiers harboured the scattered local populace. Traces of their makeshift encampments, such as half-burned tree-trunks, are still to be found amid the thickets.

  Guillaume Van Kylsom, who had stayed at Hougomont ‘to guard the house’, hid in a cellar. The English found him there and by beating him with the flat of their sabres forced him into their service. They were thirsty and he fetched them water from the well. For many it was their last drink. The well from which so many of the dead had drunk was destined itself to die.

  After the battle there was a pressing need to dispose of the corpses. Death tarnished victory in its own fashion, bringing pestilence on the heels of triumph. Typhus lurks in the shadow of glory. The well was a deep one, and so it became a tomb. Three hundred dead were flung into it, perhaps too hurriedly. Were they all dead? Legend says not, and that on the night following the burial voices were heard calling for help.

  The well stands by itself in the middle of the yard, enclosed on three sides by walls of stone and brick resembling a square turret; there is a jagged hole in one of them, probably made by a shell. The fourth side is open, and it was here that the water was drawn. The turret had a roof, of which only the timbers remain. The metal brace on one wall is in the shape of a cross. Leaning over, one peers into a deep brick cylinder lost in darkness. Nettles grow at the foot of the walls.

  The large blue flagstone which serves as an approach to all Belgian wells is lacking from this one. It has been replaced by half a dozen gnarled and knotted wooden trunks like huge bones. Bucket, chain, and windlass, are all gone; but the stone overflow-trough remains, and birds from the surrounding woods alight to drink from it after rain, and fly away.

  Amid the ruins one building, the farmhouse, is still inhabited, its door open on to the courtyard. Beside the handsome gothic lock is a spoon-shaped iron handle sloping downwards. As a Hanoverian lieutenant named Wilda grasped this handle to take shelter in the house, a French sapper cut off his hand with an axe.

  The gardener Van Kylsom, long since dead, was the grandfather of the family now living in the house. A grey-haired woman tells you: ‘I was there. I was three years old. My sister, who was older, was frightened and she was crying. We were taken into the woods. I was in my mother’s arms. We listened with our ears to the ground and I imitated the cannon-fire – boom, boom, boom.’

  A gateway from the courtyard, as we have said, leads to the orchard. This is a terrible place.

  It is divided into three parts, one may almost say, three acts. The first part is a garden, the second is the orchard proper, and the third part is a copse. The three parts are enclosed by the house and farm buildings on one side, a hedge on the left, a wall on the right, and at the far end another wall. The right-hand wall is brick and the far wall is stone. The garden, which slopes downwards and is planted with fruit bushes now overgrown with weeds, runs from a formal terrace with a balustrade of curved stone pillars. It was once a lord’s garden in the French style preceding Lenôtre; today it is all ruin and brambles. The pillars were topped with stone globes like cannon-balls. Forty-three are still standing; the rest lie in the grass. Nearly all are scarred with musket-fire. One damaged pillar is leaning on its pedestal like a broken arm.

  It was in this garden, which is on a lower level than the orchard, that six voltigeurs of the First Light Infantry, having penetrated thus far and being unable to get out, like trapped bears in a pit, did battle with two companies of Hanoverians, one of which was armed with carbines. The Hanoverians, ranged along the balustrade, were firing from above. The voltigeurs, returning fire from below, with no other cover than the gooseberry bushes, six gallant men against two hundred, took a quarter of an hour to die.

  One goes up a few steps from the garden to the orchard. There in those few roods of land, fifteen hundred men fell in less than an hour. The wall, with its thirty-eight loopholes pierced at uneven heights by the English, looks ready to renew the battle. Two flat granite tombstones, marking English graves, lie under the sixteenth loophole. There are loopholes only in this southern wall, against which the main attack was directed. It is screened on the outside by a thick hedge, and the French, thinking they had only the hedge to contend with, burst through to come up against the wall with the English Guards entrenched behind it, thirty-eight loopholes blazing disciplined volleys, a storm of musketry that broke Soye’s brigade. That was how Waterloo began.

  Nevertheless the orchard was taken. Having no scaling ladders, the French clawed their way over the wall with their finger-nails and there was hand-to-hand fighting under the trees. All that grass was soaked in blood. A battalion from Nassau, seven hundred men, was wiped out. The far side of the wall, on which two of Kellermann’s batteries concentrated, is pitted with grapeshot.

  The orchard is as responsive as any other to the stir of May. It has its buttercups and daisies, the grass grows thick, farm horses graze there, washing-lines are strung b
etween the trees, causing the visitor to bend his head. Walking through the greenery you stumble over mole-hills. There is a fallen, moss-grown tree-trunk against which Major Blackman lay dying, and under a tall tree near by the German General Duplat fell, a member of a French family exiled by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Close by it is a bent, sick apple-tree bandaged with straw and clay. Nearly all the apple-trees are dying of old age, and there is not one that does not bear the marks of musket or mortar-fire. The skeletons of dead trees abound in that orchard. Crows fly amid its branches, and beyond it is a copse filled with violets.

  Bauduin killed, Foy wounded, fire, slaughter, carnage, a stream of English, German, and French blood furiously mingled, a well filled with corpses, the Nassau regiment and the Brunswick regiment wiped out, Duplat killed, Blackman killed, the English Guards savaged, twenty French battalions decimated out of Reille’s corps of forty-three thousand, men done to death in that farm-plot of Hougomont with bullet and bayonet, fire and the sword: all this so that a yokel today may say to the traveller, ‘For three francs, Monsieur, I will tell you the story of Waterloo.’

  III

  18 June 1815

  We must use the privilege of the chronicler to turn back to the year 1815, to the period shortly preceding the events related in the first part of this book.

  Had it not rained in the night of 17–18 June 1815, the future of Europe would have been different. A few drops of water, more or less, were what decided Napoleon’s fate. Providence needed only a downpour of rain to make Waterloo the retort to Austerlitz. An unseasonably clouded sky sufficed to bring about the collapse of a world.