Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)
Page 38
To sum up, it is beyond question that the victor at Waterloo, the power behind Wellington which brought to his aid every field-marshal’s baton in Europe (including, it is said, that of the Maréchal de France), which inspired the building of that mound of earth and bones on which was set the lion triumphant, which urged Blücher on to sabre the fleeing army, and which from the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean hung over France like a bird of prey, this power was the counter-revolution. This was the power that murmured the infamous word ‘dismemberment’: but then, arrived at Paris, seeing the crater at its feet and realizing its peril, counter-revolution hastily revised its views and fell back upon babble about a charter.
We must read into Waterloo no more than it truly represented. There was no intention of liberty. The counter-revolution involuntarily turned liberal just as Napoleon, by a parallel phenomenon, involuntarily turned revolutionary. On 18 June 1815, that Robespierre-on-horseback was unseated.
XVIII
Revival of divine right
Dictatorship was ended, and with it a European system collapsed.
The Napoleonic empire dissolved in a darkness resembling the last days of Rome, and chaos loomed as in the time of the barbarians. But the barbarism of 1815, which must be called by its proper name of counter-revolution, was short-winded and soon stopped for lack of breath. The Empire, be it said, was mourned; tears were shed for it by heroic eyes. If glory be the sword turned sceptre, then the Empire was the embodiment of glory. It had diffused all the light that tyranny can shed, a sombre light, and worse, an obscure light which, compared with the true light of day, is darkness; and the ending of this darkness was like the ending of an eclipse.
Louis XVIII returned to Paris, and the dancing in the streets on 8 July effaced the enthusiasm of 20 March. The exile was back on the throne, a white banner flew from the Tuileries and the pinewood table from Hartwell was placed in front of the fleur-de-lis-embroidered chair of Louis XIV. Bouvines and Fontenoy were the happenings of yesterday, while Austerlitz had faded from sight. Altar and throne majestically clasped hands, and one of the least contested forms of nineteenth-century social health became established in France and throughout the Continent. Europe adopted the white cockade. The device non pluribus impar, ‘not least among the many’, reappeared in the stone sunburst decorating the barracks on the Quai d’Orsay. The Arc du Carrousel, with its tale of ill-famed victories, uncomfortable amid so much novelty and perhaps a little ashamed of Marengo and Arcola, saved its face with a statue of the Duc d’Angoulême. The cemetery of the Madeleine, the public graveyard in 1793, was covered over with marble and jasper, since within its dust lay the bones of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. A funeral monument rose amid the ramparts of Vincennes to commemorate the fact that the Due d’Enghien had died in the month in which Napoleon had been crowned. Pope Pius VII, who had performed the ceremony, blessed the downfall as serenely as he had blessed the coronation. In the Palace of Schönbrunn, outside Vienna, there lingered the shadowy figure of a four-year-old boy whom it was seditious to refer to as the King of Rome. And all this happened – the kings returned to their thrones, the master of Europe was caged, the ancien régime became the new régime, and all the darkness and light in the world changed places – because on a summer afternoon a shepherd had said to a Prussian general in a wood, ‘Go this way and not that way.’
That autumn of 1815 was like a melancholy spring. Old, poisonous realities changed their outward appearance, lies were wedded to the year 1789, divine right hid behind a charter, fictions became legal truths, prejudice, superstition, and moral dishonesty, taking Article 14 to heart, acquired the gloss of liberalism, all snakes sloughed their skins.
The stature of mankind had been at once heightened and diminished by Napoleon. The ideal, in that reign of splendid materialism, was given the strange name of ideology, a grave miscalculation on the part of the great man, making a mock of the future. But the people, that cannon-fodder that so loved the gunner, sought him everywhere. Where was he and what was he doing? ‘Napoleon is dead,’ a man shouted to a crippled survivor of Marengo and Waterloo … ‘Him dead!’ the soldier shouted back. ‘That’s how well you know him!’ Imagination deified the fallen despot and for a long time after Waterloo the heart of Europe was overcast in the enormous emptiness left by his passing.
The kings took it upon themselves to fill this vacuum, and Europe used it for its own re-shaping. The Belle Alliance before Waterloo became the Holy Alliance.
Confronted by this reorganization of ancient Europe, the outlines of a new France began to emerge. The future which the Emperor had mocked made its appearance, bearing on its forehead the star of Liberty. Young eyes looked ardently towards it, but, a strange paradox, they were in love both with the future, which was Liberty, and with the past, which was Napoleon. The defeated gained stature in defeat and Bonaparte fallen appeared greater than Napoleon erect. England placed him in the charge of Hudston Lowe and France appointed Montchenu to keep an eye on him. His folded arms were the terror of thrones, and Alexander called him, ‘My sleepless nights.’ This fear was due to the force of revolution that was in him, and it explains and justifies Bonapartist liberalism. The exiled spirit still shook the old world and the kings reigned uneasily, seeing the rock of St Helena on the skyline.
That was Waterloo.
But in the eye of eternity what did it amount to? Tempest and thundercloud, the war and then the peace, not all that turmoil could for an instant trouble the gaze of the immense all-seeing eye wherein a grasshopper jumping from one blade of grass to the next equals the flight of an eagle between the towers of Notre-Dame.
XIX
The battlefield at night
Our story requires us to return to the battlefield.
The 18th of June 1815 was a night of full moon. The light favoured Blücher’s savage pursuit of the routed army, disclosing the paths of its flight, putting the demoralized troops at the mercy of the ferocious Prussian cavalry and assisting the massacre; thus does night sometimes lend its countenance to disaster.
With the firing of the last shot the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean be-came deserted. The English moved into the French encampments, it being by custom an assertion of victory to sleep in the bed of the defeated. They set up their bivouacs beyond Rossomme. The Prussians careered onward on the heels of the retreat. Wellington sat down in the village of Waterloo to write his report to Lord Bathurst.
Never has the Virgilian sic vos non vobis* been more applicable than it is to that village of Waterloo, which was a couple of miles distant from the scene of operations. Mont-Saint-Jean was bombarded; Hougomont, Papelotte, and Planchenoit were set afire; La-Haie-Sainte was carried by assault and La-Belle-Alliance was the meeting place of the victorious armies. Those names are scarcely remembered, whereas Waterloo, which played no part in the battle, has reaped all the glory.
We are not among those who sing the praises of war; we tell the truth about it when the need arises. War has tragic splendours which we have not sought to conceal, but it also has its especial squalors, among which is the prompt stripping of the bodies of the dead. The day following a battle always dawns on naked corpses.
Who are the despoilers, the tarnishers of victory, the furtive hands ransacking the pockets of glory? Certain philosophers, Voltaire among them, maintain that they are precisely the men who created the glory. The same men. The living rob the fallen; the hero of the day becomes the scavenger of the night; and surely he is entitled to do so, since he is responsible for the corpse he robs.
For our part, we do not believe it. We find it inconceivable that the same hands can gather laurels and drag the boots off the feet of the dead. True though it is that the victor is normally followed by the ghoul, we acquit the soldier, and especially the present-day, soldier, of this charge.
Every army has its camp-followers and it is to these that we must look, to the bat-like creatures, half-ruffian, half-servant, engendered by the twilight of war, wearers of uniform who do no fightin
g, malingerers, venomous cripples, sutlers riding in small carts, sometimes with their women, who steal what later they sell, beggars offering their services as guides, rogues and vagabonds of all kinds. These were what every army in the past – we do not speak of the present day – dragged in its train. No army and no country owned them; they spoke Italian and followed the Germans, or French and followed the English. Looting was born of looting. The abominable maxim ‘live on the enemy’ fostered the disease, which only strict discipline could quell. Certain military reputations are misleading; there are generals, even great ones, whose popularity it is not easy to account for. Turenne was adored by his men because he tolerated looting; evil condoned wears the mask of benevolence. The number of pillagers following in the wake of an army varied according to the severity of the commander. Hoche and Marceau had none; Wellington – we gladly do him that justice – had very few.
Nevertheless, the bodies of the dead were robbed during that night of 18-19 June. Wellington was uncompromising: any person caught in the act was to be shot forthwith. The looters preyed on one end of the battlefield while they were being executed at the other.
The moon shed a sinister light over the plain.
At about midnight a man prowled, or better, clambered, near the sunken lane of Ohain. From the look of him he was one such as we have described, neither English nor French, peasant nor soldier, less a man than a ghoul, drawn to the scene by the smell of the dead. Dressed in a sort of hooded cape, he moved warily and boldly, looking behind him as he advanced. As to who he was, the night probably knew him better than the day. He carried no bag but evidently had large pockets under his cape. Now and then he paused and after looking about him bent down and fumbled with what lay silent and motionless at his feet, then straightened and hurried on. His cautious posture and rapid, mysterious movements caused him to resemble the twilight beings that haunt ruins and in old Norman legends are known as Alleurs. Certain nocturnal stilt-birds of the marshes have a similar appearance.
An eye capable of penetrating the darkness might have discerned not far away from him, stationary and seemingly hidden behind the ruined building on the Nivelles road at the bend between Mont-Saint-Jean and Braine-l’ Alleud, a small sutler’s cart with a tarred wicker roof, to which was harnessed a half-starved horse browsing on nettles through its bit, and in which what seemed to be a female figure was seated on a pile of boxes and bundles. There was perhaps some connection between the cart and the prowler.
The night was wonderfully calm, without a cloud in the sky. In the meadows the branches of trees broken by gunfire but still hanging swayed gently in the breeze. A breath that was almost a sigh stirred the hedgerows, and a tremor ran over the grass like the passing of souls.
Distant sounds could be heard of patrols scouring the countryside and sentries in the English lines going their rounds. Hougomont and La-Haie-Sainte were still burning, casting a glare into the night from which the lights of the English campfires extended in a semicircle like a necklace of rubies.
We have told of the disaster of the sunken lane. All was now silence in that place where so many men had died. There was no longer any declivity. The wide, deep ditch was heaped to the brim, like an honest measure of barley, with the bodies of men and horses rising to the level of the ground on either side. On top were the bodies of the dead and at the bottom a river of blood which seeped through to the Nivelles road, where it formed a pool at the point where a barricade of trees had been erected, a place still shown to sightseers. It was here that the cuirassiers had met with disaster. The layer of the dead varied in depth according to the depth of the lane, and was less deep at the centre, over which Delord’s division had passed.
This was the direction taken by our night prowler as he searched that immense hecatomb, peering at God knows what unspeakable sights and walking with his feet in blood.
He stopped suddenly. A few yards away, at a place where the bodies were less densely heaped, a hand protruded from the tangled mass of men and horses. The moonlight drew a gleam from some-thing shining on one finger, a gold ring. The man bent down and for a moment crouched, and when he rose the ring was no longer there.
He did not rise to a standing position but stayed kneeling with his hands on the ground, in the posture of the jackal he resembled, while he looked cautiously about him. Finally, deciding that all was well, he got to his feet.
As he did so he started, feeling something tug him from behind. Swinging round, he saw that it was the hand he had robbed, which now clutched the hem of his cape.
An honest man would have been appalled, but this one laughed.
‘Only the dead,’ he said. ‘Better a ghost than a gendarme.’
The hand relaxed its grip and fell back, having exhausted its strength.
‘Is he alive after all?’ the prowler wondered. ‘Better see.’
Bending down again, he contrived to extricate the now unconscious body and drag it clear of its fellows. It was that of a cuirassier, an officer of fairly high rank; a gilt epaulette was visible above his breastplate. He wore no helmet and a sabre-cut had so disfigured his face that it was scarcely visible through the clotted blood. But he seemed to have no broken bones. By a fortunate chance, if the word fortunate may be used in this context, other bodies had formed an arch above him which had prevented him from being crushed. His eyes were closed. He wore on his breastplate the silver cross of the Légion d’honneur.
The prowler removed the cross, which vanished into one of the receptacles beneath his cape, and then, searching the officer’s pockets, helped himself to a watch and a purse. While he was engaged in this act of mercy the officer opened his eyes, having been restored to consciousness by the roughness with which he was handled, the chill of the night and the fact that he could now breathe freely.
‘Thank you,’ he said weakly.
The prowler did not answer but looked up sharply, hearing a distant sound of footsteps, probably those of a patrol.
The officer murmured in the same dying voice:
‘Who won the battle?’
‘The English,’ said the prowler.
‘Look in my pockets,’ the officer said. ‘You’ll find a purse and a watch.’
The prowler made a pretence of doing so and said: ‘There’s nothing there.’
‘Then I have been robbed. I’m sorry. I wanted you to have them.’
The patrol was drawing nearer.
‘Someone’s coming,’ said the prowler, starting to move away. The officer painfully raised his arm and held him back.
‘You saved my life. Who are you?’
The prowler muttered hurriedly: ‘I was in the French army like you. I’ve got to leave you. They’ll shoot me if they catch me. I’ve saved your life. You must look after yourself now.’
‘What’s your rank?’
‘Sergeant.’
‘And your name?’
‘Thénardier.’
‘I shall not forget that name,’ the officer said. ‘And you must remember mine. My name is Pontmercy.’
Book Two
The Ship Orion
I
No. 24601 becomes No. 9430
JEAN VALJEAN had been re-captured.
We may pass over the painful details and confine ourselves to reproducing two newspaper reports which appeared a few months after the events in Montreuil-sur-mer. The first, from the Drapeau Blanc, is dated 25 July 1823.
A district in the Pas-de-Calais has recently been the scene of a remarkable occurrence. A newcomer to the département named Madeleine had in the course of a few years, by the use of a new process, resuscitated an ancient local industry, the manufacture of jet beads and black glasswork. He made a fortune for himself and, it must be added, for the district, and in recognition of his public services was appointed mayor. The police presently discovered that this Monsieur Madeleine was none other than an ex-convict in breach of parole, sentenced for theft in 1796, whose name was Jean Valjean. He was re-imprisoned. It seems that befor
e being arrested he contrived to withdraw from the banking house of M. Laffitte the sum of over half a million francs which he had placed there on deposit and which, it appears, he had acquired quite legitimately in the course of his trade. Where Jean Valjean concealed this money, before being sent back to the prison at Toulon, is not known.
The second report, which is rather more detailed, is taken from the Journal de Paris of the same date.
A released ex-convict named Jean Valjean was recently tried at the Assize Court of Var in circumstances worthy of attention. This rogue had succeeded in eluding the vigilance of the police. He had changed his name and contrived to get himself elected mayor of a small town in the north of the province where he had established an industrial enterprise of some importance. Eventually, thanks to the indefatigable zeal of the police authorities, he was exposed and arrested. He had a concubine, a woman of the town who died of shock on learning of his arrest. Thanks to his Herculean strength the villain was able to escape, but the police again laid hands on him in Paris three or four days later, when he was in the act of entering one of the small conveyances which run from the capital to the village of Montfermeil (Seine-et-Oise). It seems that he had profited by his period of liberty to withdraw a large sum of money deposited by him with one of our leading bankers, a sum of between six and seven hundred thousand francs. According to the prosecution he hid the money in a place known only to himself and the police have been unable to find it. However this may be, Jean Valjean was charged at the Assize Court of Var with an act of armed highway robbery committed some eight years ago on the person of one of those honest youngsters who, in the immortal lines of the Patriarch of Ferney,*