He fell on his knees in front of her, and bending down, kissed the foot that showed beneath the hem of her skirt. She made no response. There are moments when, like a saddened and resigned goddess, a woman silently accepts the gestures of love.
‘Don’t cry,’ he said.
‘But if I’ve got to go away and you can’t come too…’
‘Do you love me?’
She answered him with the divine word that is never more moving than when spoken amid tears:
‘I adore you.’
His voice as he spoke again was the gentlest of caresses.
‘Then don’t cry. Do that much for me - stop crying.’
“Do you love me?’ she asked.
He took her hand.
‘Cosette, I have never given anyone my word of honour because it frightens me to do so. I feel my father watching me. But I give you my most sacred word of honour that if you leave me I shall die.’
These words were uttered with so much quiet solemnity that she trembled, feeling chilled as though at a ghostly touch, terrifying but true. She stopped crying.
‘Now listen,’ he said. ‘Don’t expect me here tomorrow.’
‘Why not?’
‘Not until the day after.’
‘But why?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘A whole day without seeing you! But that’s dreadful!’
‘We must sacrifice a day for the sake of our whole lives.’ And Marius murmured, half to himself: ‘He won’t change his habits. He never sees anyone except in the evening.’
‘Who are you talking about?’ asked Cosette.
‘Never mind.’
‘But what are you going to do?’
‘Wait until the day after tomorrow.’
‘Must I really?’
‘Yes, Cosette.’
She took his head in her hands and, rising on tiptoe, sought to read his secret in his eyes.
‘While I think of it,’ said Marius, ‘you must have my address in case you need it. I’m living with this friend of mine, Courfeyrac, at 16, Rue de la Verrerie.’
He got a penknife out of his pocket and scratched it on the plaster of the wall - 16, Rue de la Verrerie.
Cosette was intently watching him.
‘Tell me what you’re thinking. Marius, you’re thinking of something. Tell me what it is, or how shall I sleep tonight?’
‘I’m thinking this – that God can’t possibly mean us to be separated. I shall be here the evening after tomorrow.’
‘But what am I to do until then? It’s all very well for you, you’ll be out and about. You’ll be doing things. Men are so lucky! But I shall be all alone. I shall be so wretched. Where are you going tomorrow evening?’
‘I’m going to try something.’
‘Well, I’ll pray for you to succeed and I’ll never stop thinking about you. I’ll ask no more questions because you don’t want me to. You’re the master. I’ll spend tomorrow evening singing the music from Euryanthe that you like so much– you listened to it once outside the window. But you must be here in good time the day after tomorrow. I shall expect you at nine o’clock exactly. Oh, two whole days is such a long time! Do you hear me? At exactly nine o’clock I shall be waiting in the garden!’
‘I shall be there.’
And without further speech, prompted by the same impulse, the electric current that unites lovers in their every thought, passionate even in their sorrow, they fell into each other’s arms, unconscious that their lips were joined while their tear-filled eyes looked upward at the stars.
By the time Marius left the street was deserted. Éponine had just departed to follow the robber band as far as the boulevard.
While he had stood reflecting with his face against the tree-trunk, Marius had had an idea - one that alas he himself thought hopeless and impossible. He had taken a drastic decision.
VII
Old heart versus young heart
Monsieur Gillenormand had now passed his ninety-first year. He was still living with his daughter in the old house which he owned in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. He was, we may recall, one of those veterans cast in the antique mould who await death upright, burdened but not softened by age, and whom even bitter disappointment cannot bend.
Nevertheless for some time Mlle Gillenormand had been saying, ‘My father is failing.’ He no longer cuffed his servants or so vigorously rapped the banister on the landing with his cane when Basque was slow in opening the door. His fury at the July Revolution had lasted barely six months, and his calm had been scarcely ruffled when in the Moniteur he had come upon that monstrous conjunction of words, ‘Monsieur Humblot-Conte, Peer of France’. The truth is that the old man was filled with despair. He did not give way to it, he did not surrender, since it was not in his physical or moral nature to do so; but he was conscious of an inner weakening. For four years he had sturdily – that is the right word – awaited Marius’s return, convinced that sooner or later the young scamp would knock at his door; but now there were melancholy moments when he reflected that if the boy did not come soon… It was not the approach of death that he found unbearable, but the thought that he might never see Marius again. Until quite recently this thought had never entered his head, but now it haunted and terrified him. Absence, as happens always in the case of true and natural feeling, had served only to increase his affection for the graceless boy who had deserted him. It is in the dark and cold December nights that we most ardently desire the sun. Monsieur Gillenormand, the grand-father, was wholly incapable - or thought he was - of making any move towards reconciliation with his grandson - ‘I would rather die,’ he thought. Although aware of no fault in himself, he thought of Marius with the profound tenderness and silent desolation of an old man on the threshold of the grave.
He was beginning to lose his teeth, which added to his unhappiness.
Without confessing it to himself, for the avowal would have made him furious and ashamed, Monsieur Gillenormand had never loved any of his mistresses as well as he loved Marius. He had had hung in his bedroom, facing the end of his bed so that it was the first thing he saw when he awoke, an old portrait of his other daughter, the one now dead who had become Madame Pontmercy, which had been painted when she was eighteen. He gazed at it constantly, and on one occasion remarked:
‘I think he’s like her.’
‘Like my sister?’ said Mlle Gillenormand. ‘Yes, he is.’
‘Like him, too,’ the old man said.
Once, when he was sitting huddled with his knees together and his eyes half-closed in a posture of dejection, his daughter ventured to say:
‘Father, are you still so angry with -’ She broke off, afraid to say more.
‘With whom?’
‘With poor Marius.’
He looked up sharply, thumped with his old, wrinkled fist on the table, and cried in a voice ringing with fury:
‘Poor Marius, indeed! That gentleman is a worthless scoundrel without heart or feeling or gratitude, a monster of conceit, a villainous rogue.’ And he turned away his head so that she should not see the tears in his eyes.
Three days after this he broke a silence that had lasted four hours to say without preliminaries to his daughter:
‘I have already requested Mademoiselle Gillenormand never to mention that subject agan.’
After this Aunt Gillenormand gave up the attempt, having arrived at the following conclusion - ‘Father never greatly cared for my sister after she made a fool of herself. Clearly, he detests Marius.’ By ‘made a fool of herself’ she meant marrying the colonel.
Apart from this, as the reader will have surmised, Mlle Gillenormand had failed in her attempt to find a substitute for Marius. Lieutenant Théodule had not brought it off. Monsieur Gillenormand had disdained him. The ravaged heart does not so readily accept palliatives. And for his part, Théodule, while interested in the possible inheritance, had disliked the business of ingratiating himself. The old man had bored the cavalry officer, and t
he cavalry officer had exasperated the old man. Théodule was cheerful but over-talkative, frivolous but commonplace, a high-liver but in shabby company; it was true that he had mistresses and that he talked about them, but he talked badly. All his virtues were flawed. Monsieur Gillenormand was outraged by his tales of casual encounters near the barracks in the Rue de Babylone. And then again, he sometimes turned up in uniform, his cap adorned with a tricolour cockade. This alone ruled him out. It had ended with the old gentleman saying to his daughter: ‘I’ve had enough of Théodule. You can see him if you like, but I don’t much care for peacetime warriors. I’m not sure that I don’t prefer adventurers to men who simply wear a sword. The clash of blades in battle is a less depressing sound than the rattle of a scabbard on the pavement. And then, to parade oneself as a fighting man and be titivated like a woman, with a corset under one’s cuirasse, is to be fatuous twice over. A real man avoids display as much as he does effeminacy. You can have your Théodule, he’s neither one thing nor the other.’
His daughter’s argument that Théodule was his great-nephew was unavailing. Monsieur Gillenormand, it seemed, was a grandfather to his finger-tips, but not in the least a great-uncle. Indeed, the comparison being forced on him, Théodule had served only to make him miss Marius the more.
An evening came - it was the 4th of June, but that did not prevent him from having a fire blazing in the hearth - when Monsieur Gillenormand, having dismissed his daughter, was alone in his room with its pastoral tapestries, seated in his armchair with his feet on the hob, half-enclosed in his nine-leafed screen, with two green-shaded candles on the table at his elbow and with a book in his hand which, however, he was not reading. According to his habit he was dressed in the fashion of the incroyables and looked like an old-style portrait of Garat, the Minister of Justice at the time of the execution of Louis XVI. This would have caused him to be stared at in the streets, but whenever he went out his daughter saw to it that he was enveloped in a sort of bishop’s cloak which hid his costume. At home he never wore any sort of house-gown except in his bedroom. ‘They make you look old,’ he said.
He was thinking of Marius with both affection and bitterness, and, as usual, bitterness came uppermost. His exacerbated tenderness always ended by boiling up into anger. He was at the point where we seek to come to terms with a situation and to accept the worst. There was no reason, after all, why Marius should ever come back to him; if he had been going to do so he would have done so already. There was no more hope, and Monsieur Gillenormand was trying to resign himself to the idea that all was over, and that he must go to his grave without ever seeing ‘that gentleman’ again. But he could not do so; his whole being recoiled from the thought, his every instinct rejected it. ‘What – never! He’ll never come back? Never again?’ His bald head had sunk on to his chest, and he was gazing with grievous, exasperated eyes into the fire.
And while this mood was on him his old man-servant Basque entered the room and asked:
‘Will Monsieur receive Monsieur Marius?’
Monsieur Gillenormand started upright, ashen-faced and looking like a corpse revived by a galvanic shock. All the blood seemed to have been drained out of his body. He stammered:
‘Monsieur - who?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Basque, alarmed by his master’s appearance.
‘I haven’t seen him. Nicolette says that a young man has called and I’m to tell you that it’s Monsieur Marius.’
Monsieur Gillenormand said in a very low voice:
‘Show him in.’
He waited, quivering, with his eyes fixed on the door until at length it opened and the young man entered. It was Marius.
He stood uncertainly in the doorway, as though waiting to be invited in. The shabbiness of his clothes was not apparent in the half-darkness of the room. Nothing of him was clearly visible but his face, which was calm and grave but strangely sad.
Monsieur Gillenormand, in the turmoil of his stupefaction and delight, was incapable for some moments of seeing anything but a sort of glimmer, as though he had been visited by an apparition. He was near to swooning. He saw Marius through a haze. But it was really he; it was Marius!
At last! After four years! When at length he was able to look him over he found him handsome, noble, distinguished, grown into a whole man, correct in bearing and agreeable in manner. He wanted to open his arms and summon him to his embrace; his whole being cried out to him… until finally this surge of feeling found expression in words springing from the harsh underside of his nature, and he asked abruptly:
‘What have you come for?’
Marius murmured in embarrassment:
‘Monsieur…’
Monsieur Gillenormand had wanted him to rush into his arms. He was vexed both with Marius and with himself. He felt that he had been too brusque and that Marius’s response was too cold. It was an intolerable exasperation to him that he should be so tenderly moved inside and outwardly so hard. His bitterness revived. He cut Marius short, saying:
‘Well, why are you here?’
The significance of that ‘Well -’ was, ‘if you have not come to embrace me’. Marius stared at the old man’s face, whose pallor gave it a look of marble.
‘Have you come to apologize? Do you now see that you were wrong?’
Hard though the words sounded, they were intended to be helpful, to pave the way for the ‘boy’s’ surrender. But Marius shivered. He was being asked to disavow his father. He lowered his eyes, and said:
‘No, Monsieur.’
‘Well then,’ the old man burst out in an access of pain and anger, ‘what do you want of me?’
Marius clasped his hands, and moving a step towards him said in a low and trembling voice:
‘Monsieur, I ask you to have pity on me.’
The words touched Monsieur Gillenormand. Had they been spoken sooner they would have melted him, but they came too late. The old man rose to his feet and stood white-lipped, leaning on his stick with his head swaying on his shoulders, but by his taller stature dominating Marius, whose eyes were still cast down.
‘Pity indeed! A youth your age asking pity of a man aged ninety-one! You’re beginning life and I’m leaving it. You go to the theatre, the dance, the café, the billiard-hall; you’ve got wits and looks to attract the women - while I huddle in midsummer spitting into the fire. You have all the riches that matter while I have all the poverty of age, infirmity, and loneliness. You have all your teeth and a sound digestion, a clear eye, health, strength, and gaiety and a good crop of dark hair, while I haven’t even any white hairs left. I’ve lost my teeth, I’m losing the use of my legs and I’m losing my memory. I can’t even remember the name of the streets round this house. Rue Chariot, Rue du Chaume, Rue Saint-Claude, I’m always muddling them up. That’s the state I’m in. You have the whole world at your feet, bathed in sunshine, but for me there’s nothing but darkness. You’re in love, it goes without saying, but nobody on earth loves me. And then you come here asking for pity. That’s something even Molière didn’t think of. If it’s the kind of joke you lawyers crack in the courts, I congratulate you! You’re a waggish lot.’ Then he said impatiently but more seriously, ‘Well, and what is it you really want?’
‘Monsieur,’ said Marius, ‘I know that I am not welcome here. I have come to ask for only one thing, and then I will go away at once.’
‘You’re a young fool,’ the old man said. ‘Who said you were to go away?’
It was the nearest he could get to the words that were in his heart - ‘Ask my forgiveness! Fling yourself into my arms!’ He realized that Marius was on the verge of leaving, driven away by the coldness of his reception; he knew all this and his unhappiness was sharpened by the knowledge; and since, with him, unhappiness was transformed instantly into rage, so did his harshness increase. He wanted Marius to understand, but Marius did not understand, and this made him more angry still.
‘You deserted me, your grandfather! You left my house to go God knows whe
re. You almost broke your aunt’s heart. I’ve no doubt you found a bachelor life very much more pleasant - aping the young man-about-town, playing the fool, coming home at all hours, having a high old time. And not a word to us. You’ve run up debts, I suppose, without even asking me to pay them. You’ve joined in demonstrations, no doubt, behaved like a street hooligan. And now, after four years, you come back to me, and this is all you have to say!’
This rough attempt to evoke in Marius a display of affection simply had the effect of reducing him to silence. Monsieur Gillenormand folded his arms, a particularly lordly gesture as he used it, and concluded bitterly:
‘Well, let’s get to the point. You say you’ve come to ask for something. What is it?’
‘Monsieur,’ said Marius, with the expression of a man about to jump off a precipice, ‘I have come to ask your consent to my marriage.’
Monsieur Gillenormand rang the bell and Basque appeared.
‘Will you please ask my daughter to come here.’
The door was again opened a few moments later. Mlle Gillenormand showed herself in the doorway but did not enter the room. Marius was standing dumbly with his arms hanging, looking like a criminal. Monsier Gillenormand was pacing up and down. He glanced at his daughter and said:
‘A trifling matter. Here, as you see, is Monsieur Marius. Bid him good day. He wants to get married. That’s all. Now go away.’
The terse, harsh tone of the old man’s utterance conveyed a strange fullness of emotion. Aunt Gillenormand darted a startled glance at Marius, seeming scarcely to recognize him, and then, without speaking or making any gesture, scuttled away from her father’s fury like a dead leaf in a gale of wind. Monsieur Gillenormand resumed his place in front of the hearth.
‘And so you want to get married - at the age of twenty-one. You’ve arranged it all except for one trifling formality – my consent. Please be seated, Monsieur. There has been a revolution since I last had the privilege of seeing you, and the Jacobins came off best. You must have been highly gratified. No doubt you’ve become a republican since you became a baron. The two things go together. The republic adds savour to the barony, does it not? Were you awarded any July decorations? Did you help to take the Louvre, Monsieur? Quite near here, in the Rue Saint-Antoine, opposite the Rue des Nonnains-d’Hyères, there’s a cannon ball lodged in the third storey of a house wall, bearing the inscription, 28 July 1830. You should go and look at it, it is most impressive. They do such charming things, these friends of yours. They’re putting up a fountain, I believe, in place of the statue of the Duc de Berry. And so you want to get married? Would it be indiscreet to ask to whom?’
Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774) Page 103