Book 2: The Great Bourgeois (Les Misérables – Volume 3: Marius) – Audiobook

LES MISERABLES Volume 3 MARIUS Book II. The Great Bourgeois by Victor Hugo. Narrated by Peter Silverleaf. CHAPTER I. NINETY YEARS AND THIRTY-TWO TEETH In the Rue Boucherat, Rue de Normandie, and the Rue de Saint-Anne, there still exist a few ancient inhabitants who have preserved the memory of a worthy man named M. Gilles Normand, and who mention him with complacence. This good man was old when they were young. This silhouette has not yet entirely disappeared, for those who regard with melancholy that vague swarm of shadows which is called the past. From the labyrinth of streets in the vicinity of the Temple, to which, under Louis XIV., the names of all the provinces of France were appended exactly as in our day. The streets of the new Tivoli quarter have received the names of all the capitals of Europe, a progression by the way in which progress is visible. M. Gilles Normand, who was as much alive as possible in 1831, was one of those men who had become curiosities to be viewed, simply because they have lived a long time, and who are strange because they formerly resembled everybody, and now resemble nobody. He was a peculiar old man, and in very truth a man of another age, the real, complete, and rather haughty bourgeois of the eighteenth century, who wore his good old bourgeoisie with the air with which marquises wear their marquisettes. He was over ninety years of age, his walk was erect, he talked loudly, saw clearly, drank neat, ate, slept, and snored. He had all thirty-two of his teeth. He only wore spectacles when he read. He was of an amorous disposition, but declared that for the last ten years he had wholly and decidedly renounced women. He could no longer please, he said. He did not add, I am too old, but I am too poor. He said, if I were not ruined, he—all he had left, in fact, was an income of about fifteen thousand francs. His dream was to come into an inheritance and to have a hundred thousand-leave income for mistresses. He did not belong, as the reader will perceive, to that puny variety of octgeneries, who, like Monsieur de Voltaire, have been dying all their life. His was no longevity of a cracked pot. This jovial old man had always had good health. He was superficial, rapid, easily angered. He flew into a passion at everything, generally quite contrary to all reason. When contradicted, he raised his cane, he beat people as he had done in the great century. He had a daughter, over fifty years of age and unmarried, whom he chastised severely with his tongue when in a rage, and whom he would have liked to whip. She seemed to him to be eight years old. He boxed his servants' ears soundly and said, Ah, carogne! One of his oaths was, By the pontouflage of the pontouflageard. He had singular freaks of tranquillity. He had himself shaved every day by a barber who had been mad and who detested him. He became jealous of M. Gilles Normand on account of his wife, a pretty and coquettish barbdress. M. Gilles Normand admired his own discernment in all things, and declared that he was extremely sagacious. Here is one of his sayings, I have in truth some penetration. I am able to say when a flea bites me from what woman it came. The words which he uttered the most frequently were, The sensible man and nature. He did not give to this last word the grand exceptation which our epoch has accorded to it, but he made it enter after his own fashion into his little chimney-corner satires. Nature, he said, in order that civilization may have a little of everything, gives it even specimens of its amusing barbarism. Europe possesses specimens of Asia and Africa on a small scale. The cat is a drawing-room tiger, the lizard is a pocket crocodile. The dancers at the opera are pink female savages. They do not eat men, they crunch them, or, magicians that they are, they transform them into oysters and swallow them. The Caribbeans leave only the bones, they leave only the shell. Such are our morals. We do not devour, we gnaw, we do not exterminate, we claw. CHAPTER II Like Master, Like House He lived in the Marais, rue des Filles du Cavalier, No. 6. He owned the house. This house has since been demolished and rebuilt, and the number has probably been changed in those revolutions of numeration which the streets of Paris undergo. He occupied an ancient and vast apartment on the first floor, between streets and gardens, furnished to the very ceilings with great goblins and Beauvais tapestries representing pastoral scenes, the subjects of the ceilings and the panels were repeated in miniature on the armchairs. He enveloped his bed in a vast nine-leaved screen of coromandel lacquer. Long full curtains hung from the windows and formed great broken folds that were very magnificent. The garden situated immediately under his windows was attached to that one of them which formed the angle, by means of a staircase twelve or fifteen steps long, which the old gentleman ascended and descended with great agility. In addition to a library adjoining his chamber he had a boudoir of which he thought a great deal, a gallant and elegant retreat, with magnificent hangings of straw, with a pattern of flowers and fleurs-de-lis made on the galleys of Louis XIV., and ordered of his convicts by M. de Vivonne for his mistress. M. Gilles Normand had inherited it from a grim maternal great-aunt who had died a centenarian. He had had two wives. His manners were something between those of the courtier, which he had never been, and the lawyer, which he might have been. He was gay and caressing when he had a mind. In his youth he had been one of those men who are always deceived by their wives and never by their mistresses, because they are, at the same time, the most sullen of husbands and the most charming of lovers in existence. He was a connoisseur of painting. He had in his chamber a marvellous portrait of No One Knows Whom, painted by Georgien, executed with great dashes of the brush, with millions of details, in a confused and haphazard manner. M. Gilles Normand's attire was not the habit of Louis XIV., nor yet that of Louis XVI. It was that of the Incroyable of the Directory. He had thought himself young up to that period, and followed the fashions. His coat was of lightweight cloth with voluminous rivets, a long swallow-tail, and large steel buttons. With this he wore knee-breaches and buckle-shoes. He always thrust his hands into his fobs. He said authoritatively, The French Revolution is a heap of laggards. CHAPTER III. Luc Esprit. At the age of sixteen, one evening at the opera, he had the honour to be stared at through opera glasses by two beauties at the same time. Ripe and celebrated beauties, then, and sung by Voltaire, the Camargo, and the Salle. Caught between two fires, he had beaten a heroic retreat towards a little dancer, a young girl named Naoyi, who was sixteen like himself, obscured as a cat, and with whom he was in love. He abounded in memories. He was accustomed to exclaim, how pretty she was, that Guimois, Guillaumardini, Guillaumardinette. The last time I saw her at Longchamp, her hair curled in sustained sentiments, with her common sea of turquoises, her gown of the colour of persons newly arrived, and her little agitation muff. He had worn in his young manhood a waistcoat of Nain-Landrin, which he was fond of talking about effusively. I was dressed like a Turk, of the Levant, Levantine, said he. Madame de Bouffler, having seen him by chance when he was twenty, had described him as a charming fool. He was horrified by all the names which he saw in politics and in power, regarding them as vulgar and bourgeois. He read the journals, the newspapers, the gazettes, as he said, stifling outbursts of laughter the while. Oh! said he, what people these are, Corbiere, Humain, Casimir, Perrier! There's a minister for you, I can imagine this in a journal. Monsieur Gilles Normand, minister! That would be a farce. Well, they are so stupid that it would pass. He merrily called everything by its name, whether decent or indecent, and did not restrain himself in the least before ladies. He uttered coarse speeches, obscenities, and filth with a certain tranquillity and lack of astonishment which was elegant. It was in keeping with the unceremoniousness of his century. It is to be noted that the age of periphrase, in verse, was the age of prudities in prose. His godfather had predicted that he would turn out a man of genius, and had bestowed on him these two significant names, Luc Esprit. CHAPTER IV. THE CENTENARIAN ASPIRANT. He had taken prizes in his boyhood at the college of Moulin, where he was born, and he had been crowned by the hand of Duc de Névernay, whom he called the Duc de Nevers. Neither the convention nor the death of Louis XVI, nor the Napoleon, nor the return of the Bourbons, nor anything else had been able to efface the memory of this crowning. The Duc de Nevers was, in his eyes, the great figure of the century. What a charming grand seigneur, he said, and what a fine air he had with his blue ribbon. In the eyes of M. Gilles Normand, Catherine II had made reparation for the crime of the partition of Poland by purchasing for three thousand roubles the secret of the elixir of gold from Bestuchef. He grew animated on this subject. "'The elixir of gold,' he exclaimed, "'the yellow dye of Bestuchef, General Lamotte's drops. In the eighteenth century this was the great remedy for the catastrophes of love, the panacere against Venus, at one Louis the half-ounce phial. Louis XV sent two hundred phials of it to the Pope. He would have been greatly irritated and thrown off his balance had anyone told him that the elixir of gold is nothing but the perchloride of iron. M. Gilles Normand adored the Bourbons, and had a horror of 1789. He was forever narrating in what manner he had saved himself during the Terror, and how he had been obliged to display a vast deal of gaiety and cleverness in order to escape having his head cut off. If any young man ventured to pronounce an eulogium on the Republic in his presence he turned purple and grew so angry that he was on the point of swooning. He sometimes alluded to his ninety years and said, "'I hope that I shall not see ninety-three twice.' On these occasions he hinted to people that he meant to live to be a hundred." CHAPTER V. Basque and Nicolette. He had theories. Here is one of them. When a man is passionately fond of women, and when he has himself a wife for whom he cares but little, who is homely, cross, legitimate, with plenty of rights perched on the code, and the jealous at need, there is but one way of extricating himself from the quandary and of procuring peace, and that is to let his wife control the purse-strings. This abdication sets him free. Then his wife busies herself, grows passionately fond of handling coin, gets her fingers covered with verdigris in the process, undertakes the education of half-share tenants and the training of farmers, convokes lawyers, presides over notaries, harangues scriveners, visits limbs of the law, follows lawsuits, draws up leases, dictates contracts, feels herself the sovereign, sells, buys, regulates, promises and compromises, binds fast and annuls, yields, concedes and retrocedes, arranges, disarranges, hoards, lavishes. She commits follies, a supreme and personal delight, and that consoles her. While her husband disdains her, she has the satisfaction of ruining her husband. This theory M. Gilles Normand had himself applied, and it had become his history. His wife, the second one, had administered his fortune in such a manner that, one fine day when M. Gilles Normand found himself a widower, there remained to him just sufficient to live on by sinking nearly the whole of it in an annuity of fifteen thousand francs, three-quarters of which would expire with him. He had not hesitated on this point, not being anxious to leave a property behind him. Besides, he had noticed that patrimonies are subject to adventures and, for instance, become national property. He had been present at the avatars of consolidated three percents, and he had no great faith in the great book of the public debt. "'All that's the rule, com-com-quoi?' he said. His house in the rue Fille-du-Clavert belonged to him, as we have already stated. He had two servants, a male and a female. When a servant entered his establishment, M. Gilles Normand re-baptized him. He bestowed on the men the name of their province—Nimois, Comtois, Point-Tavin, Picat. His last valet was a big, founded, short-winded fellow of fifty-five, who was incapable of running twenty paces, but as he had been born at Bayon, M. Gilles Normand called him Basque. All the female servants in his house were called Nicolette, even the manon, of whom we shall hear more farther on. One day a haughty cook, a cordon bleu of the lofty race of porters, presented herself. "'How much wages do you want a month?' asked M. Gilles Normand. "'Thirty francs. What is your name?' "'Olympe.' "'You shall have fifty francs, and you shall be called Nicolette.'" CHAPTER VI. IN WHICH MANON AND HER TWO CHILDREN ARE SEEN With M. Gilles Normand, sorrow was converted into wrath. He was furious at being in despair. He had all sorts of prejudices and took all sorts of liberties. One of the facts of which his exterior relief and his internal satisfaction was composed was, as we have just hinted, that he had remained a brisk spark and that he passed energetically for such. This he called having royal renown. This royal renown sometimes drew down upon him singular windfalls. One day there was brought to him in a basket, as though it had been a basket of oysters, a stout, newly born boy, who was yelling like the deuce and duly wrapped in swaddling clothes, which a servant maid dismissed six months previously attributed to him. M. Gilles Normand had at that time fully completed his eighty-fourth year. Indignation and uproar in the establishment! And whom did that bold hussy think she could persuade to believe that? What audacity! What an abominable calumny! M. Gilles Normand himself was not at all enraged. He gazed at the brat with the amiable smile of a good man who is flattered by the calumny, and said in an aside, "'Well, what now? What's the matter? You are finally taken aback, and really you are excessively ignorant, M. le Duc d'Angoyem, the bastard of his Majesties Charles IX, married a silly jade of fifteen when he was eighty-five, M. Virginel Marquis d'Aloy, brother of the Cardinal de la Sourdie, Archbishop of Bordeaux, had at the age of eighty-three, by the maid of Madame le Président Jacquin, a son, a real child of love, who became a chevalier of Malta and a councillor of States, one of the great men of this century. The Abbé Taboureau is the son of a man of eighty-seven. There is nothing out of the ordinary in these things, and then the Bible. On that I declare that this little gentleman is none of mine. Let him be taken care of. It is not his fault." This manner of procedure was good-tempered. The woman whose name was Magnon sent him another parcel in the following year. It was a boy again. Thereupon M. Gilles Normand capitulated. He sent the two brats back to their mother, promising to pay eighty francs a month for their maintenance, on the condition that the said mother would not do so any more. He added, I insist upon it that the mother shall treat them well. I shall go to see them from time to time. And this he did. He had had a brother who was a priest, and who had been a rector of the Academy of Poitiers for three-and-thirty years, and had died at seventy-nine. I lost him young, said he. This brother, of whom but little memory remains, was a peaceable miser, who, being a priest, thought himself bound to bestow alms on the poor whom he met. But he never gave them anything except bad, or demonetized sou, thereby discovering a means of going to hell by way of paradise. As for M. Gilles Normand, the elder, he never haggled over his almsgiving, but gave gladly and nobly. He was kindly, abrupt, charitable, and if he had been rich, his turn of mind would have been magnificent. He desired that all which concerned him should be done in a grand manner, even his rogueries. One day, having been cheated by a businessman in a matter of inheritance, in a gross and apparent manner, he uttered this solemn exclamation. "'That was indecently done. I am really ashamed of this pilfering. Everything has degenerated in this century, even the rascals. More bleu! This is not the way to rob a man of my standing. I am robbed as though in a forest, but badly robbed. Sylva, Sint, Consul, Digny!' He had had two wives, as we have already mentioned. By the first he had had a daughter, who had remained unmarried, and by the second another daughter who had died at about the age of thirty, who had wedded, through love or chance or otherwise, a soldier of fortune, who had served in the armies of the Republic and of the Empire, who had won the Cross of Austerlitz, and had been made Colonel at Waterloo. "'He is the disgrace of my family,' said the old bourgeois. He took an immense amount of snuff, and had a particularly graceful manner of plucking at his lace ruffle with the back of one hand. He believed very little in God." CHAPTER VII. RULE. Receive no one except in the evening. Such was M. Luc Esprit-Gillenormand, who had not lost his hair, which was grey rather than white, and which was always dressed in dog-ears. To sum up, he was venerable in spite of all this. He had something of the eighteenth century about him, frivolous and great. In 1814, and during the early years of the Restoration, M. Gillenormand, who was still young, he was only seventy-four, lived in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Rue Saint-Vendanny, near Saint-Sulpice. He had only retired to the Marais when he quitted society, long after attaining the age of eighty. And, on abandoning society, he had immured himself in his habits. The principle one, and that which was invariable, was to keep his door absolutely closed during the day, and never to receive any one whatever except in the evening. He dined at five o'clock, and after that his door was open. That had been the fashion of his century, and he would not swerve from it. "'The day is vulgar,' said he, "'and deserves only a closed shutter. Fashionable people only light up their minds when the zenith lights up its stars.' And he barricaded himself against every one, even had it been the King himself. This was the antiquated elegance of his day. CHAPTER VIII. TWO DO NOT MAKE A PAIR. We have just spoken of M. Gillenormand's two daughters. They had come into the world ten years apart. In their youth they had borne very little resemblance to each other, either in character or countenance, and had also been as little like sisters to each other as possible. The youngest had a charming soul which turned towards all that belongs to the light, was occupied with flowers, with verses, with music, which fluttered away into glorious space, enthusiastic, ethereal, and was wedded from her very youth in ideal to a vague and heroic figure. The elder had also her chimera. She espied in the zeur some very wealthy purveyor, a contractor, a splendidly stupid husband, a million-made man, or even a prefect, the receptions of the préfecture and usher in the ante-chamber, with a chain on his neck, official balls, the harangues of the town-hall, to be madame la préfète—all this had created a whirlwind in her imagination. Thus the two sisters strayed, each in her own dream, at the epoch when they were young girls. Both had wings, the one like the angel and the other like a goose. No ambition is ever fully realized, here below at least. No paradise becomes terrestrial in our day. The younger wedded the man of her dreams, but she died. The elder did not marry at all. At the moment when she makes her entrance into this history which we are relating, she was an antique virtue, an incombustible brood, with one of the sharpest noses and one of the most obtuse minds that it is possible to see. A characteristic detail, outside of her immediate family, no one had ever known her first name. She was called mademoiselle Gilles Normande, the elder. In the matter of Kant, mademoiselle Gilles Normande could have given points to amiss. Her modesty was carried to the other extreme of blackness. She cherished a frightful memory of her life. One day a man had beheld her garter. Age had only served to accentuate this pitiless modesty. Her guimpe was never sufficiently opaque and never ascended sufficiently high. She multiplied clasts and pins where no one would have dreamed of looking. The peculiarity of prudery is to place all the more sentinels in proportion as the fortress is the less menaced. Nevertheless, let him who can explain these antique mysteries of innocence, she allowed an officer of the Lancers, her grand-nephew, named Théodule, to embrace her without displeasure. In spite of this favoured Lancer, the label prude under which we have clasped her suited her to absolute perfection. Mademoiselle Gilles Normande was a sort of twilight soul. Prudery is a demi-virtue and a demi-vice. To prudery she added bigotry, a well-assorted lining. She belonged to the Society of the Virgin, wore a white veil on certain festivals, mumbled special horizons, revered the Holy Blood, venerated the Sacred Heart, remained for hours in contemplation before a Rococo-Jesuit altar in her chapel, which was inaccessible to the rank and file of the faithful, and there allowed her soul to soar among little clouds of marble and through great rays of gilded wood. She had a chapel friend, an ancient virgin like herself, named Mademoiselle Vauvoie, who was a positive blockhead, and beside whom Mademoiselle Gilles Normande had the pleasure of being an eagle. Between the Agnes d'Ely and Ave Maria, Mademoiselle Vauvoie had no knowledge of anything except of the different ways of making preserves. Mademoiselle Vauvoie, perfect in her style, was the ermine of stupidity without a single spot of intelligence. Let us say it plainly, Mademoiselle Gilles Normande had gained rather than lost as she grew older. This is the case with passive natures. She had never been malicious, which is relative kindness, and then years wear away the angles and the softening which comes with time had come to her. She was melancholy with an obscure sadness of which she did not herself know the secret. There breathed from her whole person the stupor of a life that was finished, and which never had a beginning. She kept house for her father, M. Gilles Normande had his daughter near him, as we have seen that M. Bienvenu had his sister with him. These households, comprised of an old man and an old spinster, are not rare, and always have the touching aspect of two weaknesses leaning on each other for support. There was, also in this house, between this elderly spinster and this old man, a child, a little boy, who was always trembling and mute in the presence of M. Gilles Normande. M. Gilles Normande never addressed this child except in a severe voice, and sometimes with uplifted cane. "'Here, sir, rascal scoundrel, come here. Answer me, you scamp. Just let me see you, you good-for-nothing,' etc., etc. He idolized him. This was his grandson. We shall meet with this child again, later on."