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THE CONSEQUENCES OF HAVING MET A WARDEN
Where it was that Marius went will be disclosed a little
further on.
Marius was absent for three days, then he returned to Paris,
went straight to the library of the law-school and asked for the
files of the Moniteur.
He read the Moniteur, he read all the histories of the Republic
and the Empire, the Memorial de Sainte-Helene, all the memoirs,
all the newspapers, the bulletins, the proclamations; he devoured
everything.
The first time that he came across his father's name in the
bulletins of the grand army, he had a fever for a week. He went
to see the generals under whom Georges Pontmercy had served, among
others, Comte H. Church-warden Mabeuf, whom he went to see again,
told him about the life at Vernon, the colonel's retreat, his
flowers, his solitude.
Marius came to a full knowledge of that rare, sweet, and sublime
man, that species of lion-lamb who had been his father.
In the meanwhile, occupied as he was with this study which
absorbed all his moments as well as his thoughts, he hardly saw
the Gillenormands at all.
He made his appearance at meals; then they searched for him,
and he was not to be found.
Father Gillenormand smiled.
"Bah! bah! He is just of the age for the girls!"
Sometimes the old man added: "The deuce!
I thought it was only an affair of gallantry, It seems that
it is an affair of passion!"
It was a passion, in fact.
Marius was on the high road to adoring his father.
At the same time, his ideas underwent an extraordinary change.
The phases of this change were numerous and successive.
As this is the history of many minds of our day, we think
it will prove useful to follow these phases step by step and to
indicate them all.
That history upon which he had just cast his eyes appalled
him.
The first effect was to dazzle him.
Up to that time, the Republic, the Empire, had been to him
only monstrous words.
The Republic, a guillotine in the twilight; the Empire, a
sword in the night.
He had just taken a look at it, and where he had expected
to find only a chaos of shadows, he had beheld, with a sort of
unprecedented surprise, mingled with fear and joy, stars sparkling,
Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre, Camille, Desmoulins,
Danton, and a sun arise, Napoleon.
He did not know where he stood.
He recoiled, blinded by the brilliant lights. Little by little,
when his astonishment had passed off, he grew accustomed to this
radiance, he contemplated these deeds without dizziness, he examined
these personages without terror; the Revolution and the Empire
presented themselves luminously, in perspective, before his mind's
eye; he beheld each of these groups of events and of men summed
up in two tremendous facts: the Republic in the sovereignty of
civil right restored to the masses, the Empire in the sovereignty
of the French idea imposed on Europe; he beheld the grand figure
of the people emerge from the Revolution, and the grand figure
of France spring forth from the Empire. He asserted in his conscience,
that all this had been good. What his dazzled state neglected
in this, his first far too synthetic estimation, we do not think
it necessary to point out here. It is the state of a mind on the
march that we are recording. Progress is not accomplished in one
stage.
That stated, once for all, in connection with what precedes
as well as with what is to follow, we continue.
He then perceived that, up to that moment, he had comprehended
his country no more than he had comprehended his father.
He had not known either the one or the other, and a sort of
voluntary night had obscured his eyes.
Now he saw, and on the one hand he admired, while on the other
he adored.
He was filled with regret and remorse, and he reflected in
despair that all he had in his soul could now be said only to
the tomb. Oh! if his father had still been in existence, if he
had still had him, if God, in his compassion and his goodness,
had permitted his father to be still among the living, how he
would have run, how he would have precipitated himself, how he
would have cried to his father:
"Father!
Here I am!
It is I!
I have the same heart as thou!
I am thy son!"
How he would have embraced that white head, bathed his hair
in tears, gazed upon his scar, pressed his hands, adored his garment,
kissed his feet!
Oh!
Why had his father died so early, before his time, before
the justice, the love of his son had come to him?
Marius had a continual sob in his heart, which said to him
every moment:
"Alas!"
At the same time, he became more truly serious, more truly
grave, more sure of his thought and his faith.
At each instant, gleams of the true came to complete his reason.
An inward growth seemed to be in progress within him.
He was conscious of a sort of natural enlargement, which gave
him two things that were new to him--his father and his country.
As everything opens when one has a key, so he explained to
himself that which he had hated, he penetrated that which he had
abhorred; henceforth he plainly perceived the providential, divine
and human sense of the great things which he had been taught to
detest, and of the great men whom he had been instructed to curse.
When he reflected on his former opinions, which were but those
of yesterday, and which, nevertheless, seemed to him already so
very ancient, he grew indignant, yet he smiled.
From the rehabilitation of his father, he naturally passed
to the rehabilitation of Napoleon.
But the latter, we will confess, was not effected without
labor.
From his infancy, he had been imbued with the judgments of
the party of 1814, on Bonaparte.
Now, all the prejudices of the Restoration, all its interests,
all its instincts tended to disfigure Napoleon. It execrated him
even more than it did Robespierre.
It had very cleverly turned to sufficiently good account the
fatigue of the nation, and the hatred of mothers.
Bonaparte had become an almost fabulous monster, and in order
to paint him to the imagination of the people, which, as we lately
pointed out, resembles the imagination of children, the party
of 1814 made him appear under all sorts of terrifying masks in
succession, from that which is terrible though it remains grandiose
to that which is terrible and becomes grotesque, from Tiberius
to the bugaboo.
Thus, in speaking of Bonaparte, one was free to sob or to
puff up with laughter, provided that hatred lay at the bottom.
Marius had never entertained-- about that man, as he was called--any
other ideas in his mind. They had combined with the tenacity which
existed in his nature. There was in him a headstrong little man
who hated Napoleon.
On reading history, on studying him, especially in the documents
and materials for history, the veil which concealed Napoleon from
the eyes of Marius was gradually rent.
He caught a glimpse of something immense, and he suspected
that he had been deceived up to that moment, on the score of Bonaparte
as about all the rest; each day he saw more distinctly; and he
set about mounting, slowly, step by step, almost regretfully in
the beginning, then with intoxication and as though attracted
by an irresistible fascination, first the sombre steps, then the
vaguely illuminated steps, at last the luminous and splendid steps
of enthusiasm.
One night, he was alone in his little chamber near the roof.
His candle was burning; he was reading, with his elbows resting
on his table close to the open window.
All sorts of reveries reached him from space, and mingled
with his thoughts.
What a spectacle is the night!
One hears dull sounds, without knowing whence they proceed;
one beholds Jupiter, which is twelve hundred times larger than
the earth, glowing like a firebrand, the azure is black, the stars
shine; it is formidable.
He was perusing the bulletins of the grand army, those heroic
strophes penned on the field of battle; there, at intervals, he
beheld his father's name, always the name of the Emperor; the
whole of that great Empire presented itself to him; he felt a
flood swelling and rising within him; it seemed to him at moments
that his father passed close to him like a breath, and whispered
in his ear; he gradually got into a singular state; he thought
that he heard drums, cannon, trumpets, the measured tread of battalions,
the dull and distant gallop of the cavalry; from time to time,
his eyes were raised heavenward, and gazed upon the colossal constellations
as they gleamed in the measureless depths of space, then they
fell upon his book once more, and there they beheld other colossal
things moving confusedly.
His heart contracted within him. He was in a transport, trembling,
panting.
All at once, without himself knowing what was in him, and
what impulse he was obeying, he sprang to his feet, stretched
both arms out of the window, gazed intently into the gloom, the
silence, the infinite darkness, the eternal immensity, and exclaimed:
"Long live the Emperor!"
From that moment forth, all was over; the Ogre of Corsica,--
the usurper,--the tyrant,--the monster who was the lover of his
own sisters,--the actor who took lessons of Talma,--the poisoner
of Jaffa,--the tiger,--Buonaparte,--all this vanished, and gave
place in his mind to a vague and brilliant radiance in which shone,
at an inaccessible height, the pale marble phantom of Caesar.
The Emperor had been for his father only the well-beloved captain
whom one admires, for whom one sacrifices one's self; he was something
more to Marius.
He was the predestined constructor of the French group, succeeding
the Roman group in the domination of the universe. He was a prodigious
architect, of a destruction, the continuer of Charlemagne, of
Louis XI., of Henry IV., of Richelieu, of Louis XIV., and of the
Committee of Public Safety, having his spots, no doubt, his faults,
his crimes even, being a man, that is to say; but august in his
faults, brilliant in his spots, powerful in his crime.
He was the predestined man, who had forced all nations to
say: "The great nation!"
He was better than that, he was the very incarnation of France,
conquering Europe by the sword which he grasped, and the world
by the light which he shed.
Marius saw in Bonaparte the dazzling spectre which will always
rise upon the frontier, and which will guard the future.
Despot but dictator; a despot resulting from a republic and
summing up a revolution. Napoleon became for him the man-people
as Jesus Christ is the man-God.
It will be perceived, that like all new converts to a religion,
his conversion intoxicated him, he hurled himself headlong into
adhesion and he went too far.
His nature was so constructed; once on the downward slope,
it was almost impossible for him to put on the drag.
Fanaticism for the sword took possession of him, and complicated
in his mind his enthusiasm for the idea. He did not perceive that,
along with genius, and pell-mell, he was admitting force, that
is to say, that he was installing in two compartments of his idolatry,
on the one hand that which is divine, on the other that which
is brutal.
In many respects, he had set about deceiving himself otherwise.
He admitted everything. There is a way of encountering error
while on one's way to the truth. He had a violent sort of good
faith which took everything in the lump. In the new path which
he had entered on, in judging the mistakes of the old regime,
as in measuring the glory of Napoleon, he neglected the attenuating
circumstances.
At all events, a tremendous step had been taken.
Where he had formerly beheld the fall of the monarchy, he
now saw the advent of France. His orientation had changed.
What had been his East became the West. He had turned squarely
round.
All these revolutions were accomplished within him, without
his family obtaining an inkling of the case.
When, during this mysterious labor, he had entirely shed his
old Bourbon and ultra skin, when he had cast off the aristocrat,
the Jacobite and the Royalist, when he had become thoroughly a
revolutionist, profoundly democratic and republican, he went to
an engraver on the Quai des Orfevres and ordered a hundred cards
bearing this name: Le Baron Marius Pontmercy.
This was only the strictly logical consequence of the change
which had taken place in him, a change in which everything gravitated
round his father.
Only, as he did not know any one and could not sow his cards
with any porter, he put them in his pocket.
By another natural consequence, in proportion as he drew nearer
to his father, to the latter's memory, and to the things for which
the colonel had fought five and twenty years before, he receded
from his grandfather.
We have long ago said, that M. Gillenormand's temper did not
please him.
There already existed between them all the dissonances of
the grave young man and the frivolous old man. The gayety of Geronte
shocks and exasperates the melancholy of Werther.
So long as the same political opinions and the same ideas
had been common to them both, Marius had met M. Gillenormand there
as on a bridge.
When the bridge fell, an abyss was formed. And then, over
and above all, Marius experienced unutterable impulses to revolt,
when he reflected that it was M. Gillenormand who had, from stupid
motives, torn him ruthlessly from the colonel, thus depriving
the father of the child, and the child of the father.
By dint of pity for his father, Marius had nearly arrived
at aversion for his grandfather.
Nothing of this sort, however, was betrayed on the exterior,
as we have already said.
Only he grew colder and colder; laconic at meals, and rare
in the house.
When his aunt scolded him for it, he was very gentle and alleged
his studies, his lectures, the examinations, etc., as a pretext.
His grandfather never departed from his infallible diagnosis:
"In love!
I know all about it."
From time to time Marius absented himself.
"Where is it that he goes off like this?" said his
aunt.
On one of these trips, which were always very brief, he went
to Montfermeil, in order to obey the injunction which his father
had left him, and he sought the old sergeant to Waterloo, the
inn-keeper Thenardier.
Thenardier had failed, the inn was closed, and no one knew
what had become of him. Marius was away from the house for four
days on this quest.
"He is getting decidedly wild," said his grandfather.
They thought they had noticed that he wore something on his
breast, under his shirt, which was attached to his neck by a black
ribbon.
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