[1] Le dernier Jour d'un Condamné.
[2] "You will find in that tittle-tattle a multitude of reasons why I should take my liberty."
Slang is the language of the dark. Thought is affected in its gloomiest depths, and social philosophy is harassed in its most poignant undulations, in the presence of this enigmatical dialect, which is at once branded and in a state of revolt. There is in this a visible chastisement, and each syllable looks as if it were marked. The words of the common language appear in it, as if branded and hardened by the hangman's red-hot irons, and some of them seem to be still smoking; some phrases produce in you the effect of a robber's fleur-de-lysed shoulder suddenly exposed, and ideas almost refuse to let themselves be represented by these convict substantives. The metaphors are at times so daring that you feel that they have worn fetters. Still, in spite of all this, and in consequence of all this, this strange patois has by right its compartment in that great impartial museum, in which there is room for the oxydized sou as well as the gold medal, and which is called toleration. Slang, whether people allow it or no, has its syntax and poetry. It is a language. If, by the deforming of certain vocables, we perceive that it has been chewed by Mandrin, we feel from certain metonyms that Villon spoke it. That line so exquisite and so celebrated,—
"Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?
(But where are the snows of yester-year?)"
is a line of slang. Antan, ante annum, is a slang word of Thunes, which signified the past year, and, by extension, formerly. Five-and-thirty years ago, on the departure of the great chain-gang, in 1827, there might be read in one of the dungeons of Bicêtre this maxim, engraved with a nail upon the wall by a king of Thunes condemned to the galleys, "Les dabs d'antan trimaient siempre pour la pierre du Coësre," which means, "The kings of former days used always to go to be consecrated." In the thought of that king, the consecration was the galleys. The word décarade, which expresses the departure of a heavy coach at a gallop, is attributed to Villon, and is worthy of him. This word, which strikes fire, contains in a masterly onomatopœia the whole of Lafontaine's admirable line,—
"Six forts chevaux tiraient un coche."
From a purely literary point of view, few studies would be more curious or fertile than that of slang. It is an entire language within a language, a sort of sickly grafting which has produced a vegetation, a parasite which has its roots in the old Gaulish trunk, and whose sinister foliage crawls up the whole of one side of the language. This is what might be called the first or common notion of slang, but to those who study the language as it should be studied, that is to say, as geologists study the earth, slang appears like a real alluvium. According as we dig more or less deeply, we find in slang, beneath the old popular French, Provençal, Spanish, Italian, Levantine, that language of the Mediterranean ports, English, and German, Romanic,—in its three varieties of French, Italian, and Roman,—Latin, and finally, Basque and Celtic. It is a deep and strange formation, a subterranean edifice built up in common by all scoundrels. Each accursed race has deposited its stratum, each suffering has let its stone fall, each heart has given its pebble. A multitude of wicked, low, or irritated souls who passed through life, and have faded away in eternity, are found there almost entire, and to some extent still visible, in the shape of a monstrous word.
Do you want Spanish? The old Gothic slang swarms with it. Thus we have boffette, a box on the ears, which comes from bofeton; vantane, a window (afterwards vanterne), from vantana; gat, a cat, from gato; acite, oil, from aceyte. Do you want Italian? We have spade, a sword, which comes from spada, and carvel, a boat, which comes from caravella. From the English we have bichot, the bishop; raille, a spy, from rascal, rascalion, roguish; and pilche, a case, from pitcher, a scabbard. Of German origin are caleur, the waiter, from kellner; hers, the master, from herzog, or duke. In Latin we find frangir, to break, from frangere; affurer, to steal, from fur; and cadène, a chain, from catena. There is one word which is found in all continental language with a sort of mysterious power and authority, and that is the word magnus: Scotland makes mac of it, which designates the chief of the clan, Mac Farlane, Mac Callumore, the great Farlane, the great Callumore; slang reduces it to meck, afterwards meg, that is to say, the Deity. Do you wish for Basque? Here is gahisto, the devil, which is derived from gaiztoa, bad, and sorgabon, good-night, which comes from gabon, good-evening. In Celtic we find blavin, a handkerchief, derived from blavet, running water; ménesse, a woman (in a bad sense), from meinec, full of stones; barant, a stream, from baranton, a fountain; goffeur, a locksmith, from goff, a blacksmith; and guédouze, death, which comes from guenn-du, white and black. Lastly, do you wish for history? Slang calls crowns "the Maltese," in memory of the coin which was current aboard the Maltese galleys.
In addition to the philological origins which we have indicated, slang has other and more natural roots, which issue, so to speak, directly from the human mind. In the first place, there is the direct creation of words, for it is the mystery of language to paint with words which have, we know not how or why, faces. This is the primitive foundation of every human language, or what might be called the granite. Slang swarms with words of this nature, immediate words created all of one piece; it is impossible to say when, or by whom, without etymologies, analogies, or derivatives,—solitary, barbarous, and at times hideous words, which have a singular power of expression, and are alive. The executioner, le taule (the anvil's face); the forest, le sabri (cudgels); fear or flight, taf; the footman, le larbin; the general, prefect, or minister, pharos (head man); and the devil, le rabouin (the one with the tail). Nothing can be stranger than these words, which form transparent masks; some of them, le rabouin, for instance, are at the same time grotesque and terrible, and produce the effect of a Cyclopean grimace. In the second place, there is metaphor, and it is the peculiarity of a language which wishes to say everything and conceal everything, to abound in figures. Metaphor is an enigma in which the robber who is scheming a plot, or the prisoner arranging an escape, takes the refuge. No idiom is more metaphorical than slang; dévisser (to unscrew) le coco (the cocoa-nut), to twist the neck; tortiller (to wind up), to eat; être gerbé (sheaved), to be tried; un rat, a stealer of bread; il lansquine, it rains,—an old striking figure, which bears to some extent its date with it, assimilates the long oblique lines of rain to the serried sloping pikes of the lansquenets, and contains in one word the popular adage, "It is raining halberts." At times, in proportion as slang passes from the first to the second stage, words pass from the savage and primitive state to the metaphorical sense. The devil ceases to be le rabouin, and becomes "the baker," or he who puts in the oven. This is wittier but not so grand; something like Racine after Corneille, or Euripides after Æschylus. Some slang phrases which belong to both periods, and have at once a barbarous and a metaphorical character, resemble phantasmagorias: Les sorgueurs vont sollicer des gails à la lune (the prowlers are going to steal horses at night). This passes before the mind like a group of spectres, and we know not what we see. Thirdly, there is expediency: slang lives upon the language, uses it as it pleases, and when the necessity arises limits itself to denaturalizing it summarily and coarsely. At times, with the ordinary words thus deformed and complicated with pure slang, picturesque sentences are composed, in which the admission of the two previous elements, direct creation and metaphor, is visible,—le cab jaspine, je marronne que la roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabri, (the dog barks, I suspect that the Paris diligence is passing through the wood); le dab est sinve, la dabuge est merloussière, la fée est bative, (the master is stupid, the mistress is cunning, and the daughter pretty). Most frequently, in order to throw out listeners, slang confines itself to adding indistinctly to all the words of the language, a species of ignoble tail, a termination in aille, orgue, iergue, or uche. Thus: Vouziergue trouvaille bonorgue ce gigotmuche? (Do you find that leg of mutton good?) This was a remark made by Cartouche to a jailer, in order to learn whether the sum offered him for an escape suited him. The termination in mar has been very recently added.
Slang, being the idiom of corruption, is itself quickly corrupted. Moreover, as it always tries to hide itself so soon as it feels that it is understood, it transforms itself. Exactly opposed to all other vegetables, every sunbeam kills what it falls on in it. Hence slang is being constantly decomposed and re-composed; and this is an obscure and rapid labor which never ceases, and it makes more way in ten years than language does in ten centuries. Thus larton (head) becomes lartif; gail (horse) gaye; fertanche (straw) fertille; momignard (the child) momacque; fiques (clothes) frusques; chique (the church) l'égrugeoir; and colabre (the neck) colas. The devil is first gahisto, then le rabouin, and next "the baker;" a priest is the ratichon, and then the sanglier; a dagger is the vingt-deux, next the surin, and lastly the lingre; the police are railles, then roussins, then marchands de lacet (handcuff dealers), then coqueurs, and lastly cognes; the executioner is the taule, then Charlot, then the atigeur, and then the becquillard. In the seventeenth century to fight was to "take snuff;" in the nineteenth it is "to break the jaw;" but twenty different names have passed away between these two extremes, and Cartouche would speak Hebrew to Lacenaire. All the words of this language are perpetually in flight, like the men who employ them. Still, from time to time, and owing to this very movement, the old slang reappears and becomes new again. It has its headquarters where it holds its ground. The Temple preserved the slang of the seventeenth century, and Bicêtre, when it was a prison, that of Thunes. There the termination in anche of the old Thuners could be heard: Boyanches-tu? (do you drink?); il croyanche (he believes). But perpetual motion does not the less remain the law. If the philosopher succeeds in momentarily fixing, for the purpose of observation, this language, which is necessarily evaporating, he falls into sorrowful and useful meditations, and no study is more efficacious, or more fertile and instructive. There is not a metaphor or an etymology of slang which does not contain a lesson.
Among these men "fighting" means "pretending:" they "fight" a disease, for cunning is their strength. With them the idea of man is not separated from the idea of a shadow. Night is called la sorgue and man l'orgue: man is a derivative of night. They have formed the habit of regarding society as an atmosphere which kills them, as a fatal force, and they speak of their liberty as one speaks of his health. A man arrested is a "patient;" a man sentenced is a "corpse." The most terrible thing for the prisoner within the four stone walls which form his sepulchre is a sort of freezing chastity, and hence he always calls the dungeon the castus. In this funereal place external life will appear under its most smiling aspect. The prisoner has irons on his feet, and you may perhaps fancy that he thinks how people walk with their feet; no, he thinks that they dance with them, hence, if he succeed in cutting through his fetters, his first idea is that he can now dance, and he calls the saw a bastringue. A name is a centre, a profound assimilation. The bandit has two heads,—the one which revolves his deeds and guides him through life, the other which he has on his shoulders on the day of his death; he calls the head which counsels him in crime, the sorbonne, and the one that expiates it the tronche. When a man has nothing but rags on his body and vices in his heart, when he has reached that double moral and material degradation which the word gueux characterizes in its two significations, he is ripe for crime; he is like a well-sharpened blade; he has two edges, his distress and his villany, and hence slang does not call him a gueux but a réguisé. What is the bagne? A furnace of damnation, a hell, and the convict calls himself a "fagot." Lastly, what name do malefactors give to the prison? The "college." A whole penitentiary system might issue from this word.
Would you like to know whence came most of the galley songs,—those choruses called in the special vocabularies the lirlonfa? Listen to this:
There was at the Châtelet of Paris a large long cellar, which was eight feet below the level of the Seine. It had neither windows nor gratings, and the sole opening was the door; men could enter it, but air not. This cellar had for ceiling a stone arch, and for floor ten inches of mud; it had been paved, but, owing to the leakage of the water, the paving had rotted and fallen to pieces. Eight feet above the ground, a long massive joist ran from one end to the other of this vault; from this joist hung at regular distances chains, three feet long, and at the end of these chains were collars. In this cellar men condemned to the galleys were kept until the day of their departure for Toulon; they were thrust under this beam, where each had his fetters oscillating in the darkness and waiting for him. The chains, like pendant arms, and the collars, like open hands, seized these wretches by the neck; they were riveted and left there. As the chain was too short, they could not lie down; they remained motionless in this cellar, in this night, under this beam, almost hung, forced to make extraordinary efforts to reach their loaf or water-jug, with the vault above their heads and mud up to their knees, drawn and quartered by fatigue, giving way at the hips and knees, hanging on by their hands to the chain to rest themselves, only able to sleep standing, and awakened every moment by the choking of the collar—some did not awake. To eat they were compelled to draw up their bread, which was thrown into the mud, with the heel all along the thigh to their hand. How long did they remain in this state? One month, two months, sometimes six months; one man remained a year. It was the antechamber of the galleys, and men were put in it for stealing a hare from the king. In this hellish sepulchre what did they? They died by inches, as people can do in a sepulchre, and sang, which they can do in a hell; for when there is no longer hope, song remains,—in the Maltese waters, when a galley was approaching, the singing was heard before the sound of the oars. The poor poacher Survincent, who passed through the cellar-prison of the Châtelet, said, "Rhymes sustained me." Poetry is useless; what is the good of rhymes? In this cellar nearly all the slang songs were born, and it is from the dungeon of the Great Châtelet of Paris that comes the melancholy chorus of Montgomery's galley: Timaloumisaine, timoulamison. Most of the songs are sad, some are gay, and one is tender:—
"Icicaille est le théâtre
Du petit dardant."[1]
Do you what you will, you cannot destroy that eternal relic of man's heart, love.
In this world of dark deeds secrets are kept; for secrets are a thing belonging to all, and with these wretches secrecy is the unity which serves as the basis of union. To break secrecy is to tear from each member of this ferocious community something of himself. To denounce is called in the energetic language of slang "to eat the piece," as if the denouncer took a little of the substance of each, and supported himself on a piece of the flesh of each. What is receiving a buffet? The conventional metaphor answers, "It is seeing six-and-thirty candles." Here slang interferes and reads camoufle for candle; life in its ordinary language takes camouflet as a synonym for a box on the ears. Hence, by a sort of penetration from bottom to top, and by the aid of metaphor, that incalculable trajectory, slang ascends from the cellar to the academy, and Poulailler saying, "I light my camoufle" makes Voltaire write, "Langleviel la Beaumelle deserves a hundred camouflets." Searching in slang is a discovery at every step, and the study and investigation of this strange idiom lead to the point of intersection of regular with accursed society. The robber has also his food for powder, or stealable matter in you, in me, in the first passer-by, the pantre (pan, everybody). Slang is the word converted into a convict. It produces a consternation to reflect that the thinking principle of man can be hurled down so deep that it can be dragged there and bound by the obscure tyranny of fatality, and be fastened to some unknown rivets on this precipice. Alas! will no one come to the help of the human soul in this darkness? Is it its destiny ever to await the mind, the liberator, the immense tamer of Pegasuses and hippogriffs, the dawn-colored combatant, who descends from the azure sky between two wings, the radiant knight of the future? Will it ever call in vain to its help the lance of the light of idealism? Is it condemned always to look down into the gulf of evil and see closer and closer to it beneath the hideous water the demoniac head, this slavering mouth, and this serpentine undulation of claws, swellings, and rings? Must it remain there without a gleam of hope, left to the horror of this formidable and vaguely smelt approach of the monster, shuddering, with dishevelled hair, wringing its arms, forever chained to the rock of night, a sombre Andromeda white and naked in the darkness?
As we see, the whole of slang, the slang of four hundred years ago, as well as that of the present day, is penetrated by that gloomy symbolic spirit which gives to every word at one moment a suffering accent, at another a menacing air. We see in it the old ferocious sorrow of those mumpers of the Cour des Miracles, who played at cards with packs of their own, some of which have been preserved for us. The eight of clubs, for instance, represented a tall man bearing eight enormous clover leaves, a sort of fantastic personification of the forest. At the foot of this tree could be seen a lighted fire, at which three hares were roasting a game-keeper on a spit, and behind, over another fire, a steaming caldron from which a dog's head emerged. Nothing can be more lugubrious than these reprisals in painting upon a pack of cards, in the face of the pyres for smugglers, and the caldron for coiners. The various forms which thought assumed in the kingdom of slang, singing, jests, and menaces, all had this impotent and crushed character. All the songs of which a few melodies have come down to us were humble and lamentable enough to draw tears. The pègre (thief) calls himself the poor pègre; for he is always the hare that hides itself, the mouse that escapes, or the bird that flies away. He hardly protests, but restricts himself to sighing, and one of his groans has reached us: Je n'entrave que le dail comment meck, le daron des orgues, peut atiger ses mômes et ses momignards, et les locher criblant sans être agité lui même. (I do not understand how God, the Father of men, can torture His children and His grandchildren, and hear them cry, without being tortured Himself.) The wretch, whenever he has time to think, makes himself little before the law and paltry before society; he lies down on his stomach, supplicates, and implores pity, and we can see that he knows himself to be in the wrong.
Toward the middle of the last century a change took place; the person, songs, and choruses of the robbers assumed, so to speak, an insolent and jovial gesture. The larifla was substituted for the plaintive maluré, and we find in nearly all the songs of the galleys, the hulks, and the chain-gangs, a diabolical and enigmatical gayety. We hear in them that shrill and leaping chorus which seems illumined by a phosphorescent gleam, and appears cast into the forest by a will-o'-the-wisp playing the fife:—
"Mirlababi surlababo
Mirliton ribonribette
Surlababi mirlababo
Mirliton ribonribo."
They sang this while cutting a man's throat in a cellar or a thicket. It is a serious symptom that in the eighteen century the old melancholy of three desponding classes is dissipated, and they begin to laugh; they mock the great "meg" and the great "dab" (governor), and Louis XV. being given they call the King of France the Marquis de Pantin. The wretches are nearly gay, and a sort of dancing light issues from them, as if their conscience no longer weighed them down. These lamentable tribes of darkness no longer possess the despairing audacity of deeds, but the careless audacity of the mind; this is a sign that they are losing the feeling of their criminality, and finding some support, of which they are themselves ignorant, among the thinkers and dreamers. It is a sign that robbery and plunder are beginning to be filtered even into doctrines and sophisms, so as to lose a little of their ugliness, and give a good deal of it to the sophisms and the doctrine. Lastly, it is a sign of a prodigious and speedy eruption, unless some diversion arise. Let us halt here for a moment. Whom do we accuse? Is it the eighteenth century? Is it all philosophy? Certainly not. The work of the eighteenth century is healthy and good; and the Encyclopædists with Diderot at their head, the physicists under Turgot, the philosophers led by Voltaire, and the Utopists commanded by Rousseau, are four sacred legions. The immense advance of humanity toward the light is due to them, and they are the four advance guards of the human races, going toward the four cardinal points of progress,—Diderot toward the beautiful, Turgot toward the useful, Voltaire toward truth, and Rousseau toward justice. But by the side of and below the philosophers were the sophists,—a venomous vegetation mingled with a healthy growth, a hemlock in the virgin forest. While the hangman was burning on the grand staircase of the Palace of Justice the grand liberating books of the age, writers now forgotten were publishing, with the royal privilege, strangely disorganizing books, which were eagerly read by the scoundrels. Some of these publications, patronized, strange to say, by a prince, will be found in the "Bibliothèque secrète." These facts, profound but unknown, were unnoticed on the surface; but at times the very obscurity of a fact constitutes its danger, and it is obscure because it is subterranean. Of all the writers, the one who perhaps dug the most unhealthy gallery at that day in the masses was Restif de la Bretonne.
This work, peculiar to all Europe, produced greater ravages in Germany than anywhere else. In Germany, during a certain period, which was summed up by Schiller in his famous drama of The Robbers, robbery and plunder were raised into a protest against property and labor. They appropriated certain elementary ideas, specious and false, apparently just, and in reality absurd, wrapped themselves up in these ideas, and to some extent disappeared in them, assumed an abstract name, and passed into a theoretical state, and in this way circulated among the laborious, suffering, and honest masses, without even the cognizance of the imprudent chemists who prepared the mixture, and the masses that accepted it. Whenever a fact of this nature is produced it is serious. Suffering engenders passion; and while the prosperous blind themselves, or go to deep, the hatred of the unfortunate classes kindles its torch at some sullen or ill-constituted mind which is dreaming in a corner, and sets to work examining society. The examination of hatred is a terrible thing. Hence come, if the misfortune of the age desires it, those frightful commotions, formerly called Jacqueries, by the side of which purely political commotions are child's-play, and which are no longer the struggle of the oppressed with the oppressor, but the revolt of want against comfort. Everything is overthrown at such a time. Jacqueries are the earthquakes of nations.
The French Revolution, that immense act of probity, cut short this peril, which was perhaps imminent in Europe toward the close of the eighteenth century. The French Revolution, which was nothing but the ideal armed with a sword, rose, and by the same sudden movement closed the door of evil and opened the door of good. It disengaged the question, promulgated the truth, expelled the miasma, ventilated the age, and crowned the people. We may say that it created man a second time by giving him a second soul,—justice. The nineteenth century inherits and profits by its work, and at the present day the social catastrophe which we just now indicated is simply impossible. Blind is he who denounces it, a fool who fears it, for the Revolution is the vaccine of Jacquerie. Thanks to the Revolution, the social conditions are altered, and the feudal and monarchical diseases are no longer in our blood. There is no middle age left in our constitution, and we are no longer at the time when formidable internal commotions broke out; when the obscure course of a dull sound could be heard beneath the feet; when the earth thrown out from the mole-holes appeared on the surface of civilization; when the soil cracked; when the roof of caverns opened, and monstrous heads suddenly emerged from the ground. The revolutionary sense is a moral sense, and the feeling of right being developed, develops the feeling of duty. The law of all is liberty, which ends where the liberty of another begins, according to Robespierre's admirable definition. Since 1789 the whole people has been dilated in the sublimated individual. There is no poor man who, having his right, has not his radius; the man, dying of hunger, feels within himself the honesty of France. The dignity of the citizen is an internal armor; the man who is free is scrupulous, and the voter reigns. Hence comes incorruptibility; hence comes the abortiveness of unhealthy covetousness, and hence eyes heroically lowered before temptation. The revolutionary healthiness is so great, that on a day of deliverance, a 14th of July, or a 10th of August, there is no populace, and the first cry of the enlightened and progressing crowds is, "Death to the robbers!" Progress is an honest man, and the ideal and the absolute do not steal pocket-handkerchiefs. By whom were the carriages containing the wealth of the Tuileries escorted in 1848? By the rag-pickers of the Faubourg St. Antoine. The rag mounted guard over the treasure. Virtue rendered these ragged creatures resplendent. In these carts, in barely closed chests,—some, indeed, still opened,—there was, amid a hundred dazzling cases, that old crown of France, all made of diamonds, surmounted by the royal carbuncle and the Regent diamonds, worth thirty millions of francs; barefooted they guarded this crown. Hence Jacquerie is no longer possible, and I feel sorry for the clever men; it is an old fear which has made its last effort, and could no longer be employed in politics. The great spring of the red spectre is now broken. Everybody understands this now. The scarecrow no longer horrifies. The birds treat the manikin familiarly, and deposit their guano upon it, and the bourgeois laugh at it.
[1] The archer Cupid.
This being the case, is every social danger dissipated? Certainly not. There is no Jacquerie, and society may be reassured on that side; the blood will not again rush to its head, but it must pay attention to the way in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer to be apprehended, but there is consumption, and social consumption is called wretchedness. People die as well when undermined as when struck by lightning. We shall never grow weary of repeating, that to think first of all of the disinherited and sorrowful classes, to relieve, ventilate, enlighten, and love them, to magnificently enlarge their horizon, to lavish upon them education in every shape, to offer them the example of labor, and never that of indolence, to lessen the weight of the individual burden by increasing the notion of the universal object, to limit poverty without limiting wealth, to create vast fields of public and popular activity, to have, like Briareus, a hundred hands to stretch out on all sides to the crushed and the weak, to employ the collective power in opening workshops for every arm, schools for every aptitude, and laboratories for every intellect, to increase wages, diminish the toil, and balance the debit and credit, that is to say, proportion the enjoyment to the effort, and the satisfaction to the wants,—in a word, to evolve from the social machine, on behalf of those who suffer and those who are ignorant, more light and more comfort,—is, and sympathetic souls must not forget it, the first of brotherly obligations, and, let egotistic hearts learn the fact, the first of political necessities; And all this, we are bound to add, is only a beginning, and the true question is this, labor cannot be law, without being a right. But this is not the place to dwell on such a subject.
If nature is called Providence, society ought to call itself foresight. Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than natural amelioration; knowledge is a viaticum; thinking is a primary necessity, and truth is nourishment, like wheat. A reason fasting for knowledge and wisdom grows thin, and we must pity minds that do not eat quite as much as stomachs. If there be anything more poignant than a body pining away for want of bread, it is a mind that dies of hunger for enlightenment. The whole of our progress tends toward the solution, and some day people will be stupefied As the human race ascends, the deepest strata will naturally emerge from the zone of distress, and the effacement of wretchedness will be effected by a simple elevation of the level. We would do wrong to doubt this blessed solution. The past, we grant, is very powerful at the present hour, and is beginning again. This rejuvenescence of a corpse is surprising. It seems victorious; this dead man is a conqueror. Behold him advancing and arriving! he arrives with his legion, superstitions; with his sword, despotism; with his barrier, ignorance; and during some time past he has gained ten battles. He advances, he threatens, he laughs, he is at our gates. But we have no reason to despair; let us sell the field on which Hannibal is encamped. What can we, who believe, fear? A recoil of ideas is no more possible than it is for a river to flow up a hill. But those who desire no future ought to reflect; by saying no to progress they do not condemn the future, but themselves; and they give themselves a deadly disease by inoculating themselves with the past. There is only one way of refusing to-morrow, and that is, by dying. We wish for no death,—that of the body as late as possible, and that of the soul never. Yes, the sphinx will speak, and the problem will be solved; the people sketched by the eighteenth century will be finished by the nineteenth. He is an idiot who doubts it. The future, the speedy bursting into flower of universal welfare, is a divinely fatal phenomenon. Immense and combined impulsions pushing together govern human facts, and lead them all within a given time to the logical state, that is to say, to equilibrium, or in other words, to equity. A force composed of earth and heaven results from humanity and governs it; this force is a performer of miracles, and marvellous denouements are as easy to it as extraordinary incidents. Aided by science, which comes from man, and the event, which comes from another source, it is but little frightened by those contradictions in the posture of problems which seem to the vulgar herd impossibilities. It is no less skilful in producing a solution from the approximation of ideas than in producing instruction from the approximation of facts, and we may expect anything and everything from the mysterious power of progress, which, on fine days, confronts the East and the West in a sepulchre, and makes the Imams hold conference with Bonaparte in the interior of the Great Pyramid. In the meanwhile, there is no halt, no hesitation, no check, in the grand forward march of minds. Social philosophy is essentially the source of peace; it has for its object, and must have as result, the dissolution of passions by the study of antagonisms. It examines, scrutinizes, and analyzes, and then it recomposes; and it proceeds by the reducing process, by removing hatred from everything.
It has more than once occurred, that a society has been sunk by the wind which is let loose on men. History is full of the shipwrecks of peoples and empires; one day, that stranger, the hurricane, passes, and carries away manners, laws, and religions. The civilizations of India, Chaldæa, Persia, Assyria, and Egypt have disappeared in turn; why? We are ignorant. What are the causes of these disasters? We do not know. Could those societies have been saved? Was it any fault of their own? Did they obstinately adhere to some fatal vice which destroyed them? What amount of suicide is there in these terrible deaths of a nation and a race? These are unanswerable questions, for darkness covers the condemned civilizations. They have been under water since they sank, and we have no more to say; and it is with a species of terror that we see in the background of that sea which is called the past, and behind those gloomy waves, centuries, those immense vessels,—Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, and Rome,—sunk by the terrific blast which blows from all the mouths of the darkness. But there was darkness then, and we have light; and if we are ignorant of the diseases of ancient civilizations, we know the infirmities of our own, and we contemplate its beauties and lay bare its deformities. Wherever it is wounded we probe it; and at once the suffering is decided, and the study of the cause leads to the discovery of the remedy. Our civilization, the work of twenty centuries, is at once the monster and the prodigy, and is worth saving; it will be saved. To aid it is much, and to enlighten it is also something. All the labors of modern social philosophy ought to converge to this object; and the thinker of the present day has a grand duty to apply the stethoscope to civilization. We repeat it, this auscultation is encouraging; and we intend to finish these few pages, which are an austere interlude in a mournful drama, by laying a stress on this encouragement. Beneath the social mortality the human imperishableness is felt, and the globe does not die because here and there are wounds in the shape of craters and ringworms in the shape of solfatari and a volcano which breaks out and scatters its fires around. The diseases of the people do not kill the man.
And yet some of those who follow the social clinics shake their heads at times, and the strongest, the most tender, and the most logical, have their hours of dependency. Will the future arrive? It seems as if we may almost ask this question on seeing so much terrible shadow. There is a sombre, face-to-face meeting of the egotists and the wretched. In the egotist we trace prejudices, the cloudiness of a caste education, appetite growing with intoxication, and prosperity that stuns, a fear of suffering which in some goes so far as an aversion from the sufferers, an implacable satisfaction, and the feeling of self so swollen that it closes the soul. In the wretched we find covetousness, envy, the hatred of seeing others successful, the great bounds of the human beast toward gorging, hearts full of mist, sorrow, want, fatality, and foul and common ignorance. Must we still raise our eyes to heaven? Is the luminous point which we notice there one of those which die out? The ideal is frightful to look on thus lost in the depths, small, isolated, imperceptible, and brilliant, but surrounded by all those great black menaces monstrously collected around it; for all that, though, it is in no more danger than a star in the yawning throat of the clouds.
The reader has of course understood that Éponine, on recognizing through the railings the inhabitant of the house in the Rue Plumet, to which Magnon sent her, began by keeping the bandits aloof from the house, then led Marius to it; and that after several days of ecstasy before the railings, Marius, impelled by that force which attracts iron to the loadstone, and the lover toward the stones of the house in which she whom he loves resides, had eventually entered Cosette's garden, as Romeo did Juliet's. This had even been an easier task for him than for Romeo; for Romeo was obliged to scale a wall, while Marius had merely to move one of the bars of the decrepit railing loose in its rusty setting, after the fashion of the teeth of old people. As Marius was thin, he easily passed. As there never was anybody in the street, and as Marius never entered the garden save at night, he ran no risk of being seen. From that blessed and holy hour when a kiss affianced these two souls, Marius went to the garden every night. If, at this moment of her life, Cosette had fallen in love with an unscrupulous libertine, she would have been lost; for there are generous natures that surrender themselves, and Cosette was one of them. One of the magnanimities of a woman is to yield; and love, at that elevation where it is absolute, is complicated by a certain celestial blindness of modesty. But what dangers you incur, ye noble souls! You often give the heart and we take the body; your heart is left you, and you look at it in the darkness with a shudder. Love has no middle term: it either saves or destroys, and this dilemma is the whole of human destiny. No fatality offers this dilemma of ruin or salvation more inexorably than does love, for love is life, if it be not death; it is a cradle, but also a coffin. The same feeling says yes and no in the human heart, and of all the things which God has made, the human heart is the one which evolves the most light, and, alas I the most darkness. God willed it that the love which Cosette encountered was one of those loves which save. So long as the month of May of that year, 1832, lasted, there were every night in this poor untrimmed garden, and under this thicket, which daily became more fragrant and more thick, two beings composed of all the chastities and all the innocences, overflowing with all the felicities of heaven, nearer to the archangels than to man, pure, honest, intoxicated, and radiant, and who shone for each other in the darkness. It seemed to Cosette as if Marius had a crown, and to Marius as if Cosette had a glory. They touched each other, they looked at each other, they took each other by the hand, they drew close to each other; but there was a distance which they never crossed. Not that they respected it, but they were ignorant of it. Marius felt a barrier in Cosette's purity, and Cosette felt a support in the loyalty of Marius. The first kiss had also been the last; since then Marius had never gone beyond touching Cosette's hand or neck-handkerchief, or a curl with his lips. Cosette was to him a perfume, and not a woman, and he inhaled her. She refused nothing, and he asked for nothing; Cosette was happy and Marius satisfied. They lived in that ravishing state which might be called the dazzling of a soul by a soul; it was the ineffable first embrace of two virginities in the ideal, two swans meeting on the Jungfrau. At this hour of love, the hour when voluptuousness is absolutely silenced by the omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, the pure and seraphic Marius, would have sooner been able to go home with a street-walker than raise Cosette's gown as high as her ankle. Once in the moonlight Cosette stooped to pick up something on the ground, and her dress opened and displayed her neck. Marius turned his eyes away.
What passed between these two lovers? Nothing; they adored each other. At night, when they were there, this garden seemed a living and sacred spot. All the flowers opened around them and sent them their incense; and they opened their souls and spread them over the flowers. The wanton and vigorous vegetation quivered, full of sap and intoxication, around these two innocents, and they uttered words of love at which the trees shivered. What were these words? Breathings, nothing more; but they were sufficient to trouble and affect all this nature. It is a magic power which it would be difficult to understand, were we to read in a book this conversation made to be carried away and dissipated like smoke beneath the leaves by the wind. Take away from these whispers of two lovers the melody which issues from the soul, and accompanies them like a lyre, and what is left is only a shadow, and you say, "What! is it only that?" Well, yes, child's-play, repetitions, laughs at nothing, absurdities, foolishness,—all that is the most sublime and profound in the world! the only things which are worth the trouble of being said and being listened to. The man who has never heard, the man who has never uttered these absurdities and poor things is an imbecile and a wicked man. Said Cosette to Marius,—
"Do you know that my name is Euphrasie?"
"Euphrasie? No, it is Cosette."
"Oh, Cosette is an ugly name, which was given me when I was little; but my real name is Euphrasie. Don't you like that name?"
"Yes; but Cosette is not ugly."
"Do you like it better than Euphrasie?"
"Well—yes."
"In that case, I like it better too. That is true, Cosette is pretty. Call me Cosette."
Another time she looked at him intently, and exclaimed,—
"You are handsome, sir; you are good-looking; you have wit; you are not at all stupid; you are much more learned than I; but I challenge you with, 'I love you.'"
And Marius fancied that he heard a strophe sung by a star. Or else she gave him a little tap when he coughed, and said,—
"Do not cough, sir; I do not allow anybody to cough in my house without permission. It is very wrong to cough and frighten me. I wish you to be in good health, because if you were not I should be very unhappy, and what would you have me do?"
And this was simply divine.
Once Marius said to Cosette,—
"Just fancy; I supposed for a while that your name was Ursule."
This made them laugh the whole evening. In the middle of another conversation he happened to exclaim,—
"Oh! one day at the Luxembourg I felt disposed to finish breaking an invalid!"
But he stopped short, and did not complete the sentence, for he would have been obliged to allude to Cosette's garter, and that was impossible. There was a strange feeling connected with the flesh, before which this immense innocent love recoiled with a sort of holy terror. Marius imagined life with Cosette like this, without anything else,—to come every evening to the Rue Plumet, remove the old complacent bar of the president's railings, sit down elbow to elbow on this bench, look through the trees at the scintillation of the commencing night, bring the fold in his trouser-knee into cohabitation with Cosette's ample skirts, to caress her thumb-nail, and to inhale the same flower in turn forever and indefinitely. During this tune the clouds passed over their heads; and each time the wind blows it carries off more of a man's thoughts than of clouds from the sky. We cannot affirm that this chaste, almost stern love was absolutely without gallantly. "Paying compliments" to her whom we love is the first way of giving caresses and an attempted semi-boldness. A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil, and pleasure puts its sweet point upon it, while concealing itself. In the presence of the delight the heart recoils to love more. The cajoleries of Marius, all saturated with chimera, were, so to speak, of an azure blue. The birds when they fly in the direction of the angels must hear words of the same nature, still, life, humanity, and the whole amount of positivism of which Marius was capable were mingled with it It was what is said in the grotto, as a prelude to what will be said in the alcove,—a lyrical effusion, the strophe and the sonnet commingled, the gentle hyperboles of cooing, all the refinements of adoration arranged in a posy, and exhaling a subtle and celestial perfume, an ineffable prattling of heart to heart.
"Oh!" Marius muttered, "how lovely you are! I dare not look at you, and that is the reason why I contemplate you. You are a grace, and I know not what is the matter with me. The hem of your dress, where the end of your slipper passes through, upsets me. And then, what an enchanting light when your thoughts become visible, for your reason astonishes me, and you appear to me for instants to be a dream. Speak, I am listening to you, and admiring you. Oh, Cosette, how strange and charming it is; I am really mad. You are adorable, and I study your feet in the microscope and your soul with the telescope."
And Cosette made answer,—
"And I love you a little more through all the time which has passed since this morning."
Questions and answers went on as they could in this dialogue, which always agreed in the subject of love, like the elder-pith balls on the nail. Cosette's entire person was simplicity, ingenuousness, whiteness, candor, and radiance; and it might have been said of her that she was transparent. She produced on every one who saw her a sensation of April and daybreak, and she had dew in her eyes. Cosette was a condensation of the light of dawn in a woman's form. It was quite simple that Marius, as he adored, should admire. But the truth is, that this little boarding-school Miss, just freshly turned out of a convent, talked with exquisite penetration, and made at times all sorts of true and delicate remarks. Her chattering was conversation; and she was never mistaken about anything, and conversed correctly. Woman feels and speaks with the infallibility which is the tender instinct of the heart. No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep. Gentleness and depth, in those things the whole of woman is contained, and it is heaven. And in this perfect felicity tears welled in their eyes at every moment. A lady-bird crushed, a feather that fell from a nest, a branch of hawthorn broken, moved their pity, and then ecstasy, gently drowned by melancholy, seemed to ask for nothing better than to weep. The most sovereign symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable. And by the side of all this—for contradictions are the lightning sport of love—they were fond of laughing with a ravishing liberty, and so familiarly that, at times, they almost seemed like two lads. Still, even without these two hearts intoxicated with chastity being conscious of it, unforgettable nature is ever there, ever there with its brutal and sublime object; and whatever the innocence of souls may be, they feel in the most chaste tête-à-tête the mysterious and adorable distinction which separates a couple of lovers from a pair of friends.
They idolized each other. The permanent and the immutable exist,—a couple love, they laugh, they make little pouts with their lips, they intertwine their fingers, and that does not prevent eternity. Two lovers conceal themselves in a garden in the twilight, in the invisible, with the birds and the roses; they fascinate each other in the darkness with their souls which they place in their eyes; they mutter, they whisper, and during this period immense constellations of planets fill infinity.
Cosette and Marius lived vaguely in the intoxication of their madness, and they did not notice the cholera which was decimating Paris in that very month. They had made as many confessions to each other as they could; but they had not extended very far beyond their names. Marius had told Cosette that he was an orphan, Pontmercy by name, a lawyer by profession, and gaining a livelihood by writing things for publishers; his father was a colonel, a hero, and he, Marius, had quarrelled with his grandfather, who was very rich. He also incidentally remarked that he was a baron; but this did not produce much effect on Cosette. Marius a baron? She did not understand it, and did not know what the word meant, and Marius was Marius to her. For her part, she confided to him that she had been educated at the convent of the Little Picpus; that her mother was dead, like his; that her father's name was Fauchelevent, that he was very good and gave a great deal to the poor, but was himself poor, and deprived himself of everything, while depriving her of nothing. Strange to say, in the species of symphony which Marius had lived in since he found Cosette again, the past, even the most recent, had become so confused and distant to him that what Cosette told him completely satisfied him. He did not even dream of talking to her about the nocturnal adventure in the garret, the Thénardiers, the burning, the strange attitude and singular flight of her father. Marius momentarily forgot all this; he did not know at night what he had done in the morning, where he had breakfasted, or who had spoken to him; he had a song in his ears which rendered him deaf to every other thought, and he only existed during the hours when he saw Cosette. As he was in heaven at that time, it was perfectly simple that he should forget the earth. Both of them bore languidly the undefinable weight of immaterial joys; that is the way in which those somnambulists called lovers live.
Alas! who is there that has not experienced these things? Why does an hour arrive when we emerge from this azure, and why does life go on afterwards?
Love almost takes the place of thought. Love is, indeed, an ardent forgetfulness. It is absurd to ask passion for logic; for there is no more an absolute logical concatenation in the human heart than there is a perfect geometric figure in the celestial mechanism. For Cosette and Marius nothing more existed than Marius and Cosette; the whole universe around them had fallen into a gulf, and they lived in a golden moment, with nothing before them, nothing behind them. Marius scarce remembered that Cosette had a father. It was blotted from his brain by his bedazzlement. Of what did these lovers talk? As we have seen, of flowers, swallows, the setting sun, the rising moon, and all the important things. They had told themselves everything except everything; for the everything of lovers is nothing. Of what use would it be to talk of her father, the realities, that den, those bandits, that adventure? And was it quite certain that the nightmare had existed? They were two, they adored each other, and there was only that, there was nothing else. It is probable that this unconsciousness of death behind us is inherent to the arrival in Paradise. Have we seen demons? Are there any? Have we trembled? Have we suffered? We no longer know, and there is a roseate cloud over it all.
Hence these two beings lived in this way, very high up, and with all the unverisimilitude which there is in nature; neither at the nadir nor at the zenith, but between man and the seraphs, above the mud and below the ether, in the clouds. They were not so much flesh and bone, as soul and ecstasy from head to foot, already too sublimated to walk on earth, and still too loaded with humanity to disappear in ether, and held in suspense like atoms which are waiting to be precipitated; apparently beyond the pale of destiny, and ignorant of that rut, yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow; amazed, transported, and floating at moments with a lightness sufficient for a flight in the infinitude, and almost ready for the eternal departure. They slept awake in this sweet lulling; oh, splendid lethargy of the real over-powered by the ideal! At times Cosette was so beautiful that Marius closed his eyes before her. They best way of gazing at the soul is with closed eyes. Marius and Cosette did not ask themselves to what this would lead them, and looked at each other as if they had already arrived. It is a strange claim on the part of men to wish that love should lead them somewhere.
Jean Valjean suspected nothing; for Cosette, not quite such a dreamer as Marius, was gay, and that sufficed to render Jean Valjean happy. Cosette's thoughts, her tender preoccupations, and the image of Marius which filled her soul, removed none of the incomparable purity of her splendid, chaste, and smiling forehead. She was at the age when the virgin wears her love as the angel wears its lily. Jean Valjean was, therefore, happy; and, besides, when two lovers understand each other, things always go well, and any third party who might trouble their love is kept in a perfect state of blindness by a small number of precautions, which are always the same with all lovers. Hence Cosette never made any objections; if he wished to take a walk, "Very good, my little papa," and if he stayed at home, very good, and if he wished to spend the evening with Cosette, she was enchanted. As he always retired at ten o'clock at night, on those occasions Marius did not reach the garden till after that hour, when he heard from the street Cosette opening the door. We need hardly say that Marius was never visible by day, and Jean Valjean did not even remember that Marius existed. One morning, however, he happened to say to Cosette, "Why, the back of your dress is all white!" On the previous evening Marius in a transport had pressed Cosette against the wall. Old Toussaint, who went to bed at an early hour, only thought of sleeping so soon as her work was finished, and was ignorant of everything, like Jean Valjean.
Marius never set foot in the house when he was with Cosette; they concealed themselves in a niche near the steps so as not to be seen or heard from the street, and sat there, often contenting themselves with the sole conversation of pressing hands twenty times a minute, and gazing at the branches of the trees. At such moments, had a thunderbolt fallen within thirty feet of them, they would not have noticed it, so profoundly was the revery of the one absorbed and plunged in the revery of the other. It was a limpid purity, and the houses were all white, and nearly all alike. This species of love is a collection of lily leaves and dove's feathers. The whole garden was between them and the street, and each time that Marius came in and out he carefully restored the bar of the railings, so that no disarrangement was visible. He went away generally at midnight, and went back to Courfeyrac's lodgings. Courfeyrac said to Bahorel,—
"Can you believe it? Marius returns home at present at one in the morning."
Bahorel answered,—
"What would you have? There is always a bombshell inside a seminarist."
At times Courfeyrac crossed his arms, assumed a stern air, and said to Marius,—
"Young man, you are becoming irregular in your habits."
Courfeyrac, who was a practical man, was not pleased with this reflection of an invisible Paradise cast on Marius; he was but little accustomed to unpublished passions, hence he grew impatient, and at times summoned Marius to return to reality. One morning he cast this admonition to him,—
"My dear fellow, you produce on me the effect at present of being a denizen of the moon, in the kingdom of dreams, the province of illusion, whose chief city is soap-bubble. Come, don't play the prude,—what is her name?"
But nothing could make Marius speak, and his nails could have been dragged from him more easily than one of the three sacred syllables of which the ineffable name Cosette was composed. True love is luminous as the dawn, and silent as the tomb. Still Courfeyrac found this change in Marius, that he had a beaming taciturnity. During the sweet month of May, Marius and Cosette knew this immense happiness,—to quarrel and become reconciled, to talk for a long time, and with the most minute details, about people who did not interest them the least in the world,—a further proof that in that ravishing opera which is called love, the libretto is nothing. For Marius it was heaven to listen to Cosette talking of dress; for Cosette to listen to Marius talking politics, to listen, knee against knee, to the vehicles passing along the Rue de Babylone, to look at the same planet in space, or the same worm glistening in the grass, to be silent together, a greater pleasure still than talking, etc.
Still various complications were approaching. One evening Marius was going to the rendezvous along the Boulevard des Invalides; he was walking as usual with his head down, and as he was turning the corner of the Rue Plumet, he heard some one say close to him,—
"Good-evening, Monsieur Marius."
He raised his head and recognized Éponine. This produced a singular effect; he had not once thought of this girl since the day when she led him to the Rue Plumet; he had not seen her again, and she had entirely left his mind. He had only motives to be grateful to her, he owed her his present happiness, and yet it annoyed him to meet her. It is an error to believe that passion, when it is happy and pure, leads a man to a state of perfection; it leads him simply, as we have shown, to a state of forgetfulness. In this situation, man forgets to be wicked, but he also forgets to be good, and gratitude, duty, and essential and material recollections, fade away. At any other time Marius would have been very different to Éponine, but, absorbed by Cosette, he had not very clearly comprehended that this Éponine was Éponine Thénardier, and that she bore a name written in his father's will,—that name to which he would have so ardently devoted himself a few months previously. We show Marius as he was, and his father himself slightly disappeared in his mind beneath the splendor of his love. Hence he replied with some embarrassment,—
"Ah, is it you, Éponine?"
"Why do you treat me so coldly? Have I done you any injury?"
"No," he answered.
Certainly he had nothing against her; far from it. Still he felt that he could not but say "you" to Éponine, now that he said "thou" to Cosette. As he remained silent, she exclaimed,—
"Tell me—"
Then she stopped, and it seemed as if words failed this creature, who was formerly so impudent and bold. She tried to smile and could not, so continued,—
"Well?"
Then she was silent again, and looked down on the ground.
"Good-night, Monsieur Marius," she suddenly said, and went away.
The next day—it was June 3, 1832, a date to which we draw attention owing to the grave events which were at that moment hanging over the horizon of Paris in the state of lightning-charged clouds—Marius at nightfall was following the same road as on the previous evening, with the same ravishing thoughts in his heart, when he saw between the boulevard trees Éponine coming toward him. Two days running,—that was too much; so he sharply turned back, changed his course, and went to the Rue Plumet by the Rue Monsieur. This caused Éponine to follow him as far as the Rue Plumet, a thing she had never done before; hitherto, she had contented herself with watching him as he passed along the boulevard, without attempting to meet him: last evening was the first time that she ventured to address him. Éponine followed him, then, without his suspecting it: she saw him move the railing-bar aside and step into the garden.
"Hilloh!" she said, "he enters the house."
She went up to the railing, felt the bars in turn, and easily distinguished the one which Marius had removed; and she muttered in a low voice, and with a lugubrious accent,—"None of that, Lisette!"
She sat down on the stone-work of the railing, close to the bar, as if she were guarding it. It was exactly at the spot where the railings joined the next wall, and there was there a dark corner, in which Éponine entirely disappeared. She remained thus for more than an hour without stirring or breathing, absorbed in thought. About ten o'clock at night, one of the two or three passers along the Rue Plumet, an old belated citizen, who was hurrying along the deserted and ill-famed street, while passing the railing, heard a dull menacing voice saying,—
"I am not surprised now that he comes every evening."
The passer-by looked around him, saw nobody, did not dare to peer into this dark corner, and felt horribly alarmed. He redoubled his speed, and was quite right in doing so, for in a few minutes six men, who were walking separately, and at some distance from each other, under the walls, and who might have been taken for a drunken patrol, entered the Rue Plumet: the first who reached the railings stopped and waited for the rest, and a second after, all six were together, and began talking in whispered slang.
"It's here," said one of them.
"Is there a cab [dog] in the garden?" another asked.
"I don't know. In any case I have brought a bullet which we will make it eat."
"Have you got some mastic to break a pane?"
"Yes."
"The railings are old," remarked the fifth man, who seemed to have the voice of a ventriloquist.
"All the better," said the second speaker; "it will make no noise when sawn, and won't be so hard to cut through."
The sixth, who had not yet opened his mouth, began examining the railings as Éponine had done an hour ago, and thus reached the bar which Marius had unfastened. Just as he was about to seize this bar, a hand suddenly emerging from the darkness clutched his arm; he felt himself roughly thrust back, and a hoarse voice whispered to him, "There's a cab." At the same time he saw a pale girl standing in front of him. The man had that emotion which is always produced by things unexpected; his hair stood hideously on end. Nothing is more formidable to look at than startled wild beasts. Their affrighted look is hideous. He fell back and stammered,—
"Who is this she-devil?"
"Your daughter."
It was, in truth, Éponine speaking to Thénardier. Upon her apparition, the other five men, that is to say, Claquesous, Gueulemer, Babet, Montparnasse, and Brujon, approached noiselessly, without hurry or saying a word, but with the sinister slowness peculiar to these men of the night. Some hideous tools could be distinguished in their hands, and Gueulemer held a pair of those short pincers which burglars call fauchons (small scythes).
"Well, what are you doing here? What do you want? Are you mad?" Thénardier exclaimed, as far as is possible to exclaim in a whisper. "Have you come to prevent us from working?"
Éponine burst into a laugh and leaped on his neck. "I am here, my little papa, because I am here; are not people allowed to sit down on the stones at present? It is you who oughtn't to be here; and what have you come to do, since it is a biscuit? I told Magnon so, and there is nothing to be done here. But embrace me, my good little papa, it is such a time since I saw you. You are out, then?"
Thénardier tried to free himself from Éponine's arms, and growled,—
"There, there, you have embraced me. Yes, I am out, and not in. Now be off."
But Éponine did not loose her hold, and redoubled her caresses.
"My dear papa, how ever did you manage? You must have been very clever to get out of that scrape, so tell me all about it. And where is mamma? Give me some news of her."
Thénardier answered,—
"She's all right. I don't know; leave me and be off, I tell you."
"I do not exactly want to go off," Éponine said with the pout of a spoiled child; "you send me away, though I haven't seen you now for four months, and I have scarce had time to embrace you."
And she caught her father again round the neck.
"Oh, come, this is a bore," said Babet.
"Make haste," said Gueulemer, "the police may pass."
The ventriloquial voice hummed,—
"Nous n'sommes pas le jour de l'an,
A bécoter papa, maman."
Éponine turned to the five bandits:—
"Why, that's Monsieur Brujon. Good-evening, Monsieur Babet; good-evening, Monsieur Claquesous. What, don't you know me, Monsieur Gueulemer? How are you, Montparnasse?"
"Yes, they know you," said Thénardier; "but now good-night, and be off; leave us alone."
"It is the hour of the foxes, and not of the chickens," said Montparnasse.
"Don't you see that we have work here?" Babet added.
Éponine took Montparnasse by the hand. "Mind," he said, "you will cut yourself, for I have an open knife."
"My dear Montparnasse," Éponine replied very gently, "confidence ought to be placed in people, and I am my father's daughter, perhaps. Monsieur Babet, Monsieur Gueulemer, I was ordered to examine into this affair."
It is remarkable that Éponine did not speak slang; ever since she had known Marius that frightful language had become impossible to her. She pressed Gueulemer's great coarse fingers in her little bony hand, which was as weak as that of a skeleton, and continued,—"You know very well that I am no fool, and people generally believe me. I have done you a service now and then; well, I have made inquiries, and you would run a needless risk. I swear to you that there is nothing to be done in this house."
"There are lone women," said Gueulemer.
"No, they have moved away."
"Well, the candles haven't," Babet remarked; and he pointed over the trees to a light which was moving about the garret. It was Toussaint, who was up so late in order to hang up some linen to dry. Éponine made a final effort.
"Well," she said, "they are very poor people, and there isn't a penny piece in the house."
"Go to the devil," cried Thénardier; "when we have turned the house topsy-turvy, and placed the cellar at top and the attics at the bottom, we will tell you what there is inside, and whether they are balles, ronds, or broques [francs, sous, or liards]."
And he thrust her away that he might pass.
"My kind M. Montparnasse," Éponine said, "I ask you, who are a good fellow, not to go in."
"Take care, you'll cut yourself," Montparnasse replied.
Thénardier remarked, with that decisive accent of his,—
"Decamp, fairy, and leave men to do their business."
Éponine let go Montparnasse's hand, which she had seized again, and said,—
"So you intend to enter this house?"
"A little," the ventriloquist said with a grin.
She leaned against the railings, faced these six men armed to the teeth, to whom night gave demoniac faces, and said in a firm, low voice,—
"Well, I will not let you!"
They stopped in stupefaction, but the ventriloquist completed his laugh. She continued,—
"Friends, listen to me, for it's now my turn to speak. If you enter this garden or touch this railing I will scream, knock at doors, wake people; I will have you all six seized, and call the police."
"She is capable of doing it," Thénardier whispered to the ventriloquist and Brujon.
She shook her head, and added,—
"Beginning with my father."
Thénardier approached her.
"Not so close, my good man," she said.
He fell back, growling between his teeth, "Why, what is the matter?" and added, "chienne."
She burst into a terrible laugh.
"As you please, but you shall not enter; but I am not the daughter of a dog, since I am the whelp of a wolf. You are six, but what do I care for that? You are men and I am a woman. You won't frighten me, I can tell you, and you shall not enter this house because it does not please me. If you come nearer I bark; I told you there was a dog, and I am it. I do not care a farthing for you, so go your way, for you annoy me! Go where you like, but don't come here, for I oppose it. Come on, then, you with your stabs and I with my feet."
She advanced a step toward the bandits and said, with the same frightful laugh,—
"Confound it! I'm not frightened. This summer I shall be hungry, and this winter I shall be cold. What asses these men must be to think they can frighten a girl! Afraid of what? You have got dolls of mistresses who crawl under the bed when you talk big, but I am afraid of nothing!"
She fixed her eye on Thénardier, and said,—"Not even of you, father."
Then she continued, as she turned her spectral, bloodshot eyeballs on each of the bandits in turn,—
"What do I care whether I am picked up to-morrow on the pavement of the Rue Plumet stabbed by my father, or am found within a year in the nets of St. Cloud, or on Swan's Island, among old rotting corks and drowned dogs?"
She was compelled to break off, for she was attacked by a dry cough, and her breath came from her weak, narrow chest like the death-rattle.
She continued,—
"I have only to cry out and people will come, patatras. You are six, but I am the whole world."
Thénardier moved a step toward her.
"Don't come near me," she cried.
He stopped, and said gently,—
"Well, no; I will not approach you; but do not talk so loud. Do you wish to prevent us from working, my daughter? And yet we must earn a livelihood. Do you no longer feel any affection for your father?"
"You bore me," said Éponine.
"Still we must live; we must eat—"
"Burst!"
This said, she sat down on the coping of the railings and sang,—
"Mon bras si dodu,
Ma jambe bien faite,
Et le temps perdu."
She had her elbow on her knee, and her chin in her hand, and balanced her foot with a careless air. Her ragged gown displayed her thin shoulder-blades, and the neighboring lamp lit up her profile and attitude. Nothing more resolute or more surprising could well be imagined. The six burglars, amazed and savage at being held in check by a girl, went under the shadow of the lamp and held council, with humiliated and furious shrugs of their shoulders. She, however, looked at them with a peaceful and stern air.
"There's something the matter with her," said Babet; "some reason for it. Is she fond of the cab? It's a pity to miss the affair. There are two women who live alone, an old cove who lives in a yard, and very decent curtains up to the windows. The old swell must be a sheney, and I consider the affair a good one."
"Well, do you fellows go in," Montparnasse exclaimed, "and do the trick. I will remain here with the girl, and if she stirs—"
He let the knife which he held in his hand glisten in the lamp-light. Thénardier did not say a word, and seemed ready for anything they pleased. Brujon, who was a bit of an oracle, and who, as we know, "put up the job," had not yet spoken, and seemed thoughtful. He was supposed to recoil at nothing, and it was notorious that he had plundered a police office through sheer bravado. Moreover, he wrote verses and songs, which gave him a great authority. Babet questioned him.
"Have you nothing to say, Brujon?"
Brujon remained silent for a moment, then tossed his head in several different ways, and at length decided on speaking,—
"Look here. I saw this morning two sparrows fighting, and to-night I stumble over a quarrelsome woman: all that is bad, so let us be off."