Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  No ambition is ever wholly fulfilled, at least here on earth. No paradise becomes terrestrial in the age in which we live. The younger sister had married the man of her dreams, but she had died. The elder had never married at all.

  At the time when she appears in our story she was an ageing pattern of virtue, an unshakeable prude with the sharpest nose and the dullest wits that ever a man came across. It was characteristic of her that outside her immediate family circle no one had discovered her Christian name; she was simply known as Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder.

  In the matter of prim hypocrisy Mlle Gillenormand could have given points to an English miss. She carried prudishness to the point of imbecility. Her life was haunted by a terrible memory: a man had once seen her garter.

  This implacable modesty had increased with age. The front of her dress was never thick enough or high enough; she added pins and fastenings to places where no one would have thought of looking. It is the quality of prudishness that the less the fortress is threatened the more the garrison is strengthened. Nevertheless – and let who will explain this mystery of innocence – she accepted without displeasure the kisses of a young cavalry officer who was her great-nephew and whose name was Théodule. Except in this particular instance the label ‘prude’ which we have attached to her suited her entirely. Mlle Gillenormand was what may be termed a twilight spirit. Prudery is half a virtue, half a vice.

  To prudishness she added religious bigotry, a suitable lining. She belonged to the Confrérie de la Vierge, wore a white veil on certain fast-days, mumbled special prayers, revered ‘the Holy Blood’, venerated ‘the Sacred Heart’, and passed hours in contemplation before a rococo Jesuit altar in a chapel closed to less privileged believers, letting her soul soar amid the small marble clouds and panels of gilded wood.

  She had a chapel friend, an elderly virgin like herself named Mlle Vaubois, totally witless, compared with whom Mlle Gillenormand could feel herself to be an eagle of intelligence. Apart from the agnus dei and ave Maria, Mlle Vaubois’s only interest was in the making of preserves. She was perfect of her kind, her mind a blank without a single flaw.

  It may be added that in growing old Mlle Gillenormand had rather gained than lost. This is the case with passive natures. She had never been malicious, which is a negative form of goodness, and the years as they passed had smoothed off the asperities, bringing the softness of age. She was sad with an obscure sadness of which she herself did not know the secret. Her whole person expressed the stupor of a life that has ended without ever having begun.

  She kept house for her father, and was to Monsieur Gillenormand what his sister had been to the old bishop, Monseigneur Bienvenu. These households consisting of an old man and an elderly daughter are not uncommon; they have a touching aspect, that of two weaknesses, each sustaining the other.

  There was another member of the household besides those two, a little boy who always approached Monsieur Gillenormand in fear and trembling. Monsieur Gillenormand never addressed him except in harsh terms and sometimes with a raised stick: ‘Come here, sir! Do you hear me, you young good-for-nothing? Answer me, can’t you! Come here, you scamp, and let me look at you.’ And so on. The fact is, he adored him.

  The boy was his grandson, of whom we shall be hearing more.

  Book Three

  Grandfather and Grandson

  I

  An old-time salon

  WHEN MONSIEUR Gillenormand lived in the Rue Servandoni he had frequented a number of very distinguished salons. Bourgeois though he was, he was received. Indeed he was honoured and even sought after, for he possessed a twofold wit – the wit that was really his own, and the wit that others attributed to him. He went nowhere where he did not stand out. There are men who must attract notice at any price: where they cannot appear as oracles they must be clowns. But this was not Monsieur Gillenormand’s style. His eminence in the royalist salons he visited made no demands on his self-respect. He was an oracle everywhere, outfacing such notables as Monsieur de Bonald and even Monsieur Bengy-Puy-Vallée.

  In 1817, or thereabouts, he had invariably called on two afternoons a week at the home of a near neighbour, the Baronne de T—, a highly-respected lady whose husband had been French ambassador in Berlin under Louis XVI. The late Baron de T—, who had been passionately interested in hypnosis and the phenomena of magnetism, had died in exile a ruined man, leaving nothing behind him except ten manuscript volumes, handsomely bound in morocco leather with gilt inscriptions, of a highly curious memoir concerning Friedrich Mesmer, his magnets and his healing séances. Madame de T— had thought it beneath her to publish these and subsisted on a small income that had somehow survived the wreck of their fortunes. She lived far removed from court circles – in a decidedly mixed world, as she said – a life of dignified poverty and isolation. But a few friends gathered twice a week round her widowed hearth, and there constituted a purely royalist salon. They drank tea and joined in loud laments, elegiac or dithyrambic according to the current set of the wind, concerning the times they lived in – the Charter, the Buonapartists, the debasement of the cordon bleu by its bestowal on persons of inferior rank, the Jacobinism of Louis XVIII – and in whispered hopes concerning Monsieur, who later became Charles X.

  They were enchanted by the ribald ditties in which Napoleon was referred to as Nicolas, or ‘old Nick’. Duchesses and ladies of the utmost refinement took a delight in verses such as the following:

  Renfoncez dans vos culottes

  Le bout d’chemis’ qui vous pend

  Qu’on n’ dis pas qu’ les patriotes

  Ont arboré l’drapeau blanc!*

  Execrable puns, harmless word-plays thought to be devastating, were much in vogue in these ultra-royalist coteries. Lists were compiled of the members of the Chamber of Peers – ‘the abominably Jacobin chamber’ – with the names appropriately distorted. From some innate desire to reverse the tide of fury they parodied the Revolution itself, and they had their own version of the revolutionary song.

  Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!

  Les Buonapartist’ à la lanterne!

  Songs are like the guillotine, indifferently lopping off the heads of either side.

  In the Fualdès affair, which occurred in 1816, they sided with Bastide and Jausion because Fualdès was a ‘buonapartist’. They referred to the liberals as ‘the brothers and friends’ and there could have been no greater insult.

  Like some church towers Mme de T—’s salon had two weathercocks, of whom one was Monsieur Gillenormand and the other the Comte de Lamothe-Valois. It was whispered of the latter in somewhat awed tones: ‘You know who he is? He’s the Lamothe of the Necklace Affair.’ Partisans are singularly inconsistent.

  We may add that among the bourgeoisie positions of honour are diminished by being too easy of access. One has to be careful whom one receives. Just as there is a loss of warmth in the presence of cold-natured persons, so there is a loss of esteem in the presence of persons who are despised. The old world considered itself to be above this law as it was above all others. Marigny, the brother of Mme Pompadour, had the entry to the Prince de Soubise because of the relationship, not in spite of it. Guillaume du Barry, who bestowed his name on the woman Vaubenier, was warmly received by the Maréchal de Richelieu. That world is like Olympus – even a thief is accepted in it if he is also a god.

  There was nothing remarkable about the Comte de Lamothe-Valois, an old man of seventy-five in 1815, except his taciturn, portentous bearing, his cold, angular countenance, flawless manners, coat buttoned to his stock and the long legs encased in trousers the colour of burnt sienna which he invariably crossed when seated. His face was the same colour. Nevertheless he counted for something in that salon because of his ‘celebrity’ and also, strangely enough, because of the name of Valois.

  As for Monsieur Gillenormand, he was valued for himself alone, a person of authority because he was authoritative. Without his habitual gaiety of manner being in any way affected, he cont
rived by his dignified bearing to give an impression of bourgeois honesty and high-mindedness. One is not the embodiment of a century for nothing. The passing of the years had endowed him with a halo of venerability.

  Moreover his comments had often a decided ring of the old brigade. When, for example, the King of Prussia, having restored Louis XVIII, came to visit him informally under the name of Graf Ruppin, he was received by the descendant of Louis XIV rather as though he had been the Marquis of Brandenburg. Monsieur Gillenormand approved highly of this. ‘All kings who are not the King of France,’ he said, ‘are mere provincials.’ Again, someone asked in his presence what sentence had been passed on the editor of the Courier français. The reply was that he had been suspended. ‘Suspendu,’ said Monsieur Gillenormand. ‘The first syllable is one too many. He should he pendu’ – that is to say, hanged. Remarks of this kind make reputations.

  Monsieur Gillenormand as a rule visited Mme de T— accompanied by his tall, lean daughter, who was then over forty but looked fifty, and also by a pretty, bright-eyed little boy of seven who never entered that drawing-room without hearing the voices murmur around him, ‘How good-looking he is. Poor child, what a shame.’ This was the grandson we have already mentioned. He was referred to as ‘poor child’ because his father had been one of the ‘brigands of the Loire’, the name bestowed on Davout’s army, which after the fall of Paris in 1815 had withdrawn beyond that river.

  The brigand in question was the son-in-law we have also mentioned, whom Monsieur Gillenormand described as a disgrace to the family.

  II

  One of the red spectres of that time

  Anyone walking through the little town of Vernon in those days, and crossing the beautiful stone bridge which, let us hope, will soon be replaced by some hideous construction of cables and girders, might have seen, if he looked down over the parapet, a man of about fifty wearing a leather cap, trousers and a jacket of grey homespun to which a faded ribbon had once been stitched, and wooden sabots. The man’s skin was so sunburnt as to be almost black, his hair was almost white, and a deep scar ran from his forehead down over his sunken and prematurely aged cheek. He passed nearly all the day with a spade or hoe in his hands in one of the walled plots of land adjoining the bridge which form as it were a string of terraces along the left bank of the Seine, delightful enclosures filled with flowers which one might call gardens if they had been a great deal larger, or bouquets if they had been smaller. All these plots have the river on one side and a house on the other. In 1817 the man in the jacket and sabots occupied the humblest of the houses with the narrowest of the plots. He lived alone, in quiet solitude, except for a housekeeper who was neither young nor old, beautiful nor ugly, town – nor country-woman. The plot of ground which he called his garden was celebrated in the town for the beauty of the flowers he grew in it. Flowers were his sole occupation.

  By dint of care and toil and watering he had added to the Creator’s creation, having developed varieties of tulip and dahlia which Nature seemed to have overlooked. He was imaginative, having forestalled Soulange Bodin in the use of peat for the cultivation of certain rare shrubs from America and China. From daybreak in summer he was out on his garden-paths, weeding, clipping, hoeing and watering, busy amid his flowers with an air of gentle melancholy, sometimes passing an hour on end in motionless meditation listening to the song of a bird in a tree or the prattle of a child in a near-by house, or simply with his eyes intent on a drop of dew at the end of a blade of grass which the rays of the sun had turned into a jewel. He kept a scanty table and drank more milk than wine. A child could do what it liked with him and his housekeeper scolded him. He was shy to the point of unsociability, seldom going anywhere or seeing anyone except the poor who tapped on his window, and his curé, the Abbé Mabeuf, a good old man. But if any of the townspeople, or strangers for that matter, asked to see his tulips and roses he admitted them smiling. This was the ‘brigand of the Loire’.

  Any student of the military history of the period, memoirs, biographies, the Moniteur or the bulletins of the Grande Armée, might have been struck by the frequency with which the name of Georges Pontmercy occurred in them. As a young man Georges Pontmercy had been an infantryman in the Saintonge regiment, which after the Revolution formed part of the Army of the Rhine; for the old regiments under the monarchy still bore the names of their provinces and were not incorporated in brigades until 1794. Pontmercy fought at Spire, Worms, Neustadt, Turkheim, Alzey, and Mayence, where he was one of the two hundred composing Houchard’s rearguard. He was one of the twelve men who held out against the entire corps of the Prince of Hesse behind the old ramparts of Andernach, only falling back when they were breached by enemy cannon-fire. He served under Kléber at Marchiennes and at Mont-Palissel where he had his arm broken by grapeshot. Then he was transferred to the Italian front, and he was one of the thirty grenadiers who defended the Col de Tende under Joubert. Joubert was promoted adjutant-general and Pontmercy became a sub-lieutenant. He was at Berthier’s side under the cannonade at Lodi, after which Bonaparte said: ‘Berthier was a gunner, a cavalryman, and a grenadier, all three.’ He saw his old general, Joubert, fall at Novi at the moment when, with sword upraised, he was giving the order to charge. Having embarked with his company in a pinnace for transport from Genoa to a small port along the coast he sailed into a wasps’-nest of seven or eight English vessels. The Genoese captain wanted to push the guns overboard, hide the troops under the half-deck and pass himself off as a harmless merchantman; but Pontmercy hoisted the tricolour and sailed coolly through the fire of the British guns. Some fifty miles further on, his audacity increasing, he attacked and captured with his pinnace a large English transport bound with troops for Sicily and so heavily loaded with men and horses that she was down to the scuppers. In 1805 he was one of the Malher division which captured Gunzburg from the Archduke Ferdinand. At Wettingen, under a hail of bullets, he had consoled the last minutes of Colonel Maupetit, mortally wounded at the head of the 9th Dragoons. He had distinguished himself at Austerlitz in that admirable march in echelon formation under enemy fire. When the cavalry of the Russian Imperial Guard overran a battalion of the 4th Regiment of the Line, Pontmercy had been one of the force that counter-attacked and threw back the Russians. The Emperor had awarded him a cross. Pontmercy had seen Wurmser taken prisoner in Mantua, Mélas in Alexandria and Mack in Ulm. He had been in the eighth corps of the Grande Armée which under Mortimer’s command had captured Hamburg. Then he had transferred to the 55th Regiment of the Line, the former Flanders Regiment. He had been in the cemetery at Eylau where the heroic Captain Louis Hugo, uncle of the present writer, had for two hours held out against the utmost efforts of the enemy with a company of eighty-three men, and he was one of the three who had come out of that holocaust alive. He had fought at Friedland. He had seen Moscow, the Beresina, Lützen, Bautzen, Dresden, the Wachau, Leipzig and the mountain passes of Gelenhausen; later Montmirail, Château-Thierry, Craon, the banks of the Marne and the Aisne and the formidable entrenchments of Laon. At Arnay-le-Duc, being then a captain, he had sabred ten Cossacks and saved the life not of his general but of his corporal. He was blown up on that occasion and twenty-seven splinters were extracted from his left arm alone. Eight days before the capitulation of Paris he had exchanged with a comrade and joined the cavalry. To use an old expression, he was ‘two-headed’, that is to say, equally apt at handling the sabre or musket of a common soldier, or, as an officer, at commanding a squadron or battalion. It is this especial gift, perfected by training, which has brought certain specialist units into being, such as the dragoons, which are both horsemen and infantrymen. He had gone with Napoleon to Elba, and at Waterloo had commanded a squadron of cuirassiers in Dubois’s brigade. It was he who had captured the Colours of the Luneburg battalion and, covered with blood, had flung the flag at Napoleon’s feet, having sustained a sabre-cut across his face. The Emperor in high satisfaction had cried: ‘You are hence-forth a colonel, a baron, and an officer of
the Légion d’ honneur.’ To which Pontmercy had replied: ‘I thank you, Sire, on behalf of my widow.’ An hour later he had fallen in the sunken lane of Ohain … That was Georges Pontmercy, now a ‘brigand of the Loire’.

  We have heard something of his story. After being extricated by Thénardier from the sunken lane he had managed to rejoin the French army and had eventually been conveyed in a series of ambulances to the Loire encampment. The Restoration had put him on half-pay and he was sent to live under surveillance at Vernon. King Louis XVIII, who chose to regard the events of the Hundred Days as non-happenings, had refused to recognize his rank as a colonel and officer of the Légion d’honneur or his title of baron. Nevertheless he missed no opportunity of signing himself ‘Colonel Baron Pontmercy’, and never went out without affixing the rosette of the Légion d’honneur to the old blue jacket which was the only one he possessed. The Procureur du Roi served him notice that he might be prosecuted for ‘the illegal wearing of a decoration’. To the official bearing this missive he said with an acid smile, ‘I don’t know whether it is because I no longer understand French or you no longer speak it, but I don’t understand a word.’ He then went out eight days in succession wearing his rosette, but no one dared to interfere. When he received letters from official sources addressed to ‘Major Pontmercy’ he returned them unopened. Napoleon at the time was treating letters addressed by Sir Hudson Lowe to ‘General Bonaparte’ in the same fashion. Pontmercy had come to have the same bitter taste in his mouth as his Emperor. One morning, meeting the representative of the Public Prosecutor in the street, he went up to him and said: ‘Monsieur, am I allowed to wear my scar?’

  He had nothing but his very meagre major’s half-pay, and the cottage he rented in Vernon was the smallest he had been able to find. He lived alone, as we have seen. He had found time, between two campaigns under the Empire, to marry Mlle Gillenormand. Her outraged parent had eventually consented to the match, saying with a sigh, ‘Even the greatest families have to put up with it.’ In 1815 Mme Pontmercy, in all respects an admirable wife and worthy of her husband, had died leaving one child. The boy might have been the consolation of Colonel Pontmercy’s solitude, but his grandfather had imperiously claimed him, saying that otherwise he would disinherit him. The father had accepted this for his son’s sake and had devoted himself to flowers.