Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  In less than a month little Cosette, in her solitude off the Rue de Babylone, was not merely one of the prettiest women in Paris, which is saying a great deal, but one of the best dressed, which is saying even more. She wished that she could meet that man in the street again, just to ‘show him’ and hear what he had to say. The truth is that she was ravishing in all respects and wonderfully able to distinguish between a hat by Gérard and one by Herbaut. And Jean Valjean observed this transformation with the utmost misgiving. He who felt that he could never do more than crawl, or at the best walk, watched while Cosette grew wings.

  It may be added that any woman glancing at Cosette would have known at once that she had no mother. There were small proprieties and particular conventions which she did not observe. A mother would have told her, for instance, that a young girl does not wear damask.

  The first time Cosette went out in her dress and cape of black damask and her white crèpe hat, she clung to Jean Valjean’s arm in a pink glow of pride. ‘Do you like me like this?’ she asked, and he answered in a tone that was almost surly, ‘You’re charming.’

  During their walk he behaved much as usual, but when they were back home he asked:

  ‘Are you never going to wear the other dress and hat again?’

  They were in Cosette’s bedroom. She turned to the wardrobe where her school clothes were hanging.

  ‘Those old things! Father, what do you expect? Of course I shall never wear them again. With that monstrosity on my head I looked like a scarecrow!’

  Jean Valjean sighed deeply.

  From then on he found that Cosette, who had hitherto been quite content to stay at home, now constantly wanted to be taken out and about. What is the good, after all, of having a pretty face and delightful clothes if no one ever sees them? He also found that she had lost her fondness for the cottage and the back-yard. She now preferred the garden, and it did not displease her to stroll by the wrought-iron gate. Valjean, always the hunted man, never set foot in the garden. He stayed in the back-yard, like the dog.

  Cosette, knowing herself to be beautiful, lost the grace of un-awareness: an exquisite grace, for beauty enhanced by innocence is incomparable, and nothing is more enchanting than artless radiance that unwittingly holds the key to a paradise. But what she lost in this respect she gained in meditative charm. Her whole being, suffused with the joy of youth, innocence, and beauty, breathed a touching earnestness.

  It was at this point that Marius, after a lapse of six months, again saw her in the Luxembourg.

  VI

  The battle begins

  Cosette in her solitude, like Marius in his, was ready to be set alight. Fate, with its mysterious and inexorable patience, was slowly bringing together these two beings charged, like thunder-clouds, with electricity, with the latent forces of passion, and destined to meet and mingle in a look as clouds do in a lightning-flash.

  So much has been made in love-stories of the power of a glance that we have ended by undervaluing it. We scarcely dare say in these days that two persons fell in love because their eyes met. Yet that is how one fells in love and in no other way. What remains is simply what remains, and it comes later. Nothing is more real than the shock two beings sustain when that spark flies between them.

  At the moment when something in Cosette’s gaze of which she was unaware so deeply troubled Marius, she herself was no less troubled by something in his eyes of which he was equally unconscious, and each sustained the same hurt and the same good.

  She had noticed him long before and had studied him in the way a girl does, without seeming to look. She had thought him handsome when he still thought her plain, but since he took no notice of her she had felt no particular interest in him. Nevertheless she could not prevent herself from noting that he had good hair, fine eyes, white teeth, and a charming voice when he talked to his friends; that although he carried himself badly, if you cared to put it that way, he walked with a grace peculiar to himself; that he seemed to be not at all stupid; that his whole aspect was one of gentle simplicity and pride; and finally that he looked poor but honest.

  On the day when their eyes met and at length exchanged those first wordless avowals that a glance haltingly conveys, Cosette did not at once understand. She returned pensively to the house in the Rue de l’Ouest where Jean Valjean, as his custom was, was spending six weeks; and when, next morning, she awoke and remembered the strange young man who after treating her for so long with perfect indifference seemed now disposed to take notice of her, she was by no means sure that she welcomed the change. If anything she was inclined to resent the condescension. With something like defiance astir within her she felt, with a childlike glee, that she was about to take her revenge. Knowing that she was beautiful she perceived, however indistinctly, that she was armed. Women play with their beauty like children with a knife, and sometimes cut themselves.

  We may recall Marius’s hesitation, his tremors and uncertainties. He stayed on his bench and did not venture to approach. And this provoked Cosette. She said to Valjean, ‘Let us walk that way for a change.’ Seeing that Marius did not come to her, she went to him. Every woman in these circumstances resembles Muhammad’s mountain. And besides, although shyness is the first sign of true love in a youth, boldness is its token in a maid. This may seem strange, but nothing could be more simple. The sexes are drawing close, and in doing so each assumes the qualities of the other.

  On that day Cosette’s gaze drove Marius wild with delight, while his gaze left her trembling. He went away triumphant while she was filled with disquiet. From that day on they adored each other.

  Cosette’s first feeling was one of confused, profound melancholy. It seemed to her that overnight her soul had turned black, so that she could no longer recognize it. The whiteness of a young girl’s soul, compound of chill and gaiety, resembles snow: it melts in the warmth of love, which is its sun.

  Cosette did not know what love was. She had never heard the word spoken in an earthly sense. In the volumes of profane music which were admitted into the convent it was always replaced by some scarcely adequate synonym such as ‘dove’ or ‘treasure trove’, which had caused the older girls to puzzle over such cryptic lines as ‘Ah, the delights of treasure trove’ or ‘Pity is akin to the dove’. But Cosette when she left had been still too young to ponder these riddles. She had, in short, no word to express what she was now feeling. Is one the less ill for not knowing the name of the disease?

  She loved the more deeply because she did so in ignorance. She did not know if what had happened to her was good or bad, salutary or perilous, permitted or forbidden; she simply loved. She would have been greatly astonished if anyone had said to her: ‘You don’t sleep at nights? But that is against the rules. You don’t eat? But that’s very bad! You have palpitations of the heart? How disgraceful! You blush and turn pale at the sight of a figure in a black suit in a green arbour? But that is abominable!’ She would have been bewildered and could only have replied: ‘How can I be at fault in a matter in which I am powerless and about which I know nothing?’

  And it happened that love had come to her in precisely the form that best suited her state of mind, in the form of worship at a distance, silent contemplation, the deification of an unknown. It was youth calling to youth, the night-time dream made manifest while still a dream, the longed-for ghost made flesh but still without a name, without a flaw and making no demands; in a word, the lover of fantasy given a shape but still remote. Any closer contact at that early stage would have frightened Cosette, half plunged as she still was in the mists of the convent. She had a child’s terrors and all the terrors of a nun, and both still assailed her. The spirit of the convent, in which she had been bathed for five years, was only slowly evaporating from her person, and setting all the world outside aquiver. What she needed in this situation was not a lover or even a suitor but a vision. It was in this sense that she loved Marius, as something charming, dazzling and impossible. And since utmost innocence goes ha
nd-in-hand with coquetry she smiled quite openly at him.

  She looked forward throughout their walks to the moment when she would see Marius; she had a sense of inexpressible happiness; and she believed she was truly expressing all that was in her mind when she said to Jean Valjean: ‘How delightful the Luxembourg Garden is!’

  Those two young people were still sundered, each in their own darkness. They did not speak or exchange greetings. They did not know each other. They saw each other, and like stars separated by the measureless spaces of the sky, they lived on the sight of one another.

  Thus did Cosette gradually grow into womanhood, beautiful and ardent, conscious of her beauty but ignorant of her love. And, for good measure, a coquette by reason of her innocence.

  VII

  Sickness and added sadness

  All situations produce instinctive responses. Eternal Mother Nature obscurely warned Jean Valjean of the approach of Marius, and he trembled in the depths of his mind. He saw and knew nothing precise, but was yet fixedly conscious of an encroaching shadow, seeming to perceive something in process of growth and something in process of decline. Marius, no less on his guard, and warned according to God’s immutable law by that same Mother Nature, did his best to hide from the ‘father’. Nevertheless it happened now and then that Valjean caught a glimpse of him. Marius’s demeanour was anything but natural, he was awkward in his concealments and clumsy in his boldness. He no longer walked casually past as he had once done, but stayed seated at a distance from them with a book which he pretended to read. For whose benefit was he pretending? At one time he had worn his everyday clothes but now he always wore his best. It looked even as though he had had his hair trimmed. His expression was strange and he wore gloves. In short, Jean Valjean took a hearty dislike to the young man.

  Cosette, for her part, was giving nothing away. Without knowing precisely what was happening to her, she knew that something had happened and that it must be kept secret. But her sudden interest in clothes, coming at the same time as the young man’s suddenly improved appearance, was a coincidence that struck Valjean. It was pure accident, no doubt – indeed, what could it be but accident? – but it was none the less ominous. For a long time he said nothing to her about the stranger, but eventually he could restrain himself no longer, and in a kind of desperation, like the tongue that explores an aching tooth, he remarked: ‘That looks a very dull young man.’

  A year previously Cosette, still an untroubled child, might have murmured, ‘Well, I think he looks rather nice,’ and a few years later, with the love of Marius rooted in her heart, she might have said, ‘Dull and not worth looking at. I quite agree.’ But at that particular moment in her life and in the present state of her feelings, she merely replied, with surpassing calm, ‘You mean, that one over there?’ as though she had never set eyes on him before. Which caused Jean Valjean to reflect on his own clumsiness. ‘She’d never even noticed him,’ he thought. ‘And now I’ve pointed him out to her!’

  The simplicity of the old and the cunning of the young! … And there is another law applying to those youthful years of agitation and turmoil, those frantic struggles of first love against first impediments: it is that the girl never falls into any trap and the young man falls into all of them. Jean Valjean opened a secret campaign against Marius which Marius, in the spell of his youthful passion, quite failed to perceive. Valjean devised countless snares. He changed the time of their visits, changed the bench, came to the garden alone, dropped his handkerchief; and Marius was caught out every time. To every question-mark planted under his nose by Valjean he responded with an ingenuous ‘yes’. Meanwhile Cosette remained so solidly fenced in with apparent indifference and un-shakeable calm that Valjean ended by concluding, ‘The young fool’s head over heels in love with her, but she doesn’t even know he exists!’

  Nevertheless he was acutely apprehensive. Cosette might at any moment fall in love. Do not these things always start with indifference? And on one occasion she let slip a word that frightened him. He rose to leave the bench, where they had been sitting for well over an hour, and she exclaimed: ‘So soon?’

  Still he did not discontinue their visits to the Luxembourg, not wishing to do anything out-of-the-way and fearing above all things to arouse her suspicions; but during those hours which were so sweet to the lovers, while Cosette covertly smiled at Marius, who in his state of entrancement saw nothing in the world except her smile, he darted fierce and threatening glances at the young man. He who had thought himself no longer capable of any malice now felt the return of an old, wild savagery, a stirring in the depths of a nature that once had harboured much wrath. What the devil did the infernal youth think he was up to, breaking in upon the life of Jean Valjean, prying, peering at his happiness, seeming to calculate his chances of making off with it?

  ‘That’s it,’ thought Valjean. ‘He’s looking for an adventure, a love-affair. A love-affair! And I? I who have been the most wretched of men am to be made the most deprived. After living for sixty years on my knees, suffering everything that can be suffered, growing old without having ever been young, living without a family, without wife or children or friends; after leaving my blood on every stone and every thorn, on every milepost and every wall; after returning good for evil and kindness for cruelty; after making myself an honest man in spite of everything, repenting of my sins and forgiving those who have sinned against me – after all this, when at last I have received my reward, when I have got what I want and know that it is good and that I have deserved it – now it is to be snatched from me! I am to lose Cosette and with her my whole life, all the happiness I have ever had, simply because a young oaf chooses to come idling in the Luxembourg!’

  At these moments a strange and sinister light shone in his eyes, not that of a man looking at a man, or an enemy facing an enemy, but of a watchdog confronting a thief.

  We know what followed. Marius continued to act absurdly. He followed Cosette along the Rue de l’Ouest, and the next day he spoke to the porter, who spoke to Jean Valjean. ‘There’s a young man been asking about you, Monsieur.’ It was on the day after this that Valjean gave Marius the cold glance which even he could not fail to notice, and a week later he moved out of the Rue de l’Ouest, swearing never again to set foot in that street or in the Luxembourg. They returned to the Rue Plumet.

  Cosette uttered no complaint. She said nothing, asked no questions, seemed not to wish to know his reasons; she was at the stage when our greatest fear is of discovery and self-betrayal. Jean Valjean had had no experience of those particular troubles, the only attractive ones and the only ones he had never known. That is why he did not grasp the true gravity of Cosette’s silence. But he did see that she was unhappy, and this perturbed him. It was a case of inexperience meeting with inexperience.

  He tried once to sound her. He asked:

  ‘Would you like to go to the Luxembourg?’

  A flush rose on her pale cheek.

  ‘Yes.’

  They went there but Marius was not to be seen. Three months had passed, and he had given up going there. When on the following day Valjean again asked if she would like to go there Cosette said sadly and resignedly, ‘No.’

  He was shocked by her sadness and dismayed by her submissiveness. What was going on in her heart, that was so young but already so inscrutable? What changes were taking place? Sometimes instead of sleeping Valjean would sit for hours by his truckle-bed with his head in his hands; he would spend whole nights wondering what her thoughts might be, what they could possibly be. At these times his own thoughts went back despairingly to the convent, that sheltered Eden with its neglected blossoms and imprisoned virgins, where all scents and all aspirations rose straight to Heaven. How he now longed for it, that Paradise from which he had voluntarily exiled himself; how he now regretted the mood of self-abnegation and folly which had prompted him to bring Cosette out into the world! He was his own sacrificial offering, the victim of his own devotion, and he thought to himself as
he sat pondering, ‘What have I done?’

  But none of this was disclosed to Cosette, never the least illhumour or unkindness. For her he wore always the same gentle, smiling countenance. If there was any change to be discerned in him it took the form of greater devotion.

  And Cosette languished. She missed Marius as she had rejoiced in the sight of him, in her own private fashion, without being fully aware of it. When Valjean changed the order of their daily walk, deep-seated feminine instinct suggested to her that if she displayed no particular interest in the Luxembourg Garden he would perhaps take her there again. But he seemed to accept her tacit consent, and as the weeks became months she regretted it. But too late. When at length they returned to the Luxembourg Marius was no longer there. It seemed that he had vanished from her life. That tale was over and there was nothing to be done. Could she hope ever to see him again? There was a weight in her heart that every day grew heavier, so that she no longer knew or cared whether it was winter or summer, rain or shine, whether the birds still sang, whether it was the season of primroses or dahlias, whether the Luxembourg was any different from the Tuileries, whether the laundry brought by the washerwoman was well or badly ironed, whether Toussaint had conscientiously done the day’s shopping. She had become indifferent to all everyday matters, her mind occupied with a single thought, as she gazed about her with lack-lustre eyes that saw only the emptiness from which a presence had vanished.

  But of this nothing was apparent‘ to Jean Valjean except her pallor. Her manner towards him was unchanged. But the pallor worried him, and now and then he would ask, ‘Are you not well?’ and she would answer, ‘I’m quite well, father.’ Then there would come a pause, and feeling his own unhappiness she would ask, ‘But you. Are you quite well?’ and he would answer, ‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’