|
MARIUS POOR
It is the same with wretchedness as with everything else.
It ends by becoming bearable.
It finally assumes a form, and adjusts itself. One vegetates,
that is to say, one develops in a certain meagre fashion, which
is, however, sufficient for life.
This is the mode in which the existence of Marius Pontmercy
was arranged:
He had passed the worst straits; the narrow pass was opening
out a little in front of him.
By dint of toil, perseverance, courage, and will, he had managed
to draw from his work about seven hundred francs a year. He had
learned German and English; thanks to Courfeyrac, who had put
him in communication with his friend the publisher, Marius filled
the modest post of utility man in the literature of the publishing
house. He drew up prospectuses, translated newspapers, annotated
editions, compiled biographies, etc.; net product, year in and
year out, seven hundred francs.
He lived on it.
How?
Not so badly. We will explain.
Marius occupied in the Gorbeau house, for an annual sum of
thirty francs, a den minus a fireplace, called a cabinet, which
contained only the most indispensable articles of furniture.
This furniture belonged to him.
He gave three francs a month to the old principal tenant to
come and sweep his hole, and to bring him a little hot water every
morning, a fresh egg, and a penny roll.
He breakfasted on this egg and roll.
His breakfast varied in cost from two to four sous, according
as eggs were dear or cheap.
At six o'clock in the evening he descended the Rue Saint-Jacques
to dine at Rousseau's, opposite Basset's, the stamp-dealer's,
on the corner of the Rue des Mathurins.
He ate no soup.
He took a six-sou plate of meat, a half-portion of vegetables
for three sous, and a three-sou dessert. For three sous he got
as much bread as he wished.
As for wine, he drank water.
When he paid at the desk where Madam Rousseau, at that period
still plump and rosy majestically presided, he gave a sou to the
waiter, and Madam Rousseau gave him a smile. Then he went away.
For sixteen sous he had a smile and a dinner.
This Restaurant Rousseau, where so few bottles and so many
water carafes were emptied, was a calming potion rather than a
restaurant. It no longer exists.
The proprietor had a fine nickname:
he was called Rousseau the Aquatic.
Thus, breakfast four sous, dinner sixteen sous; his food cost
him twenty sous a day; which made three hundred and sixty-five
francs a year.
Add the thirty francs for rent, and the thirty-six francs
to the old woman, plus a few trifling expenses; for four hundred
and fifty francs, Marius was fed, lodged, and waited on. His clothing
cost him a hundred francs, his linen fifty francs, his washing
fifty francs; the whole did not exceed six hundred and fifty francs.
He was rich.
He sometimes lent ten francs to a friend. Courfeyrac had once
been able to borrow sixty francs of him. As far as fire was concerned,
as Marius had no fireplace, he had "simplified matters."
Marius always had two complete suits of clothes, the one old,
"for every day"; the other, brand new for special occasions.
Both were black.
He had but three shirts, one on his person, the second in
the commode, and the third in the washerwoman's hands. He renewed
them as they wore out.
They were always ragged, which caused him to button his coat
to the chin.
It had required years for Marius to attain to this flourishing
condition. Hard years; difficult, some of them, to traverse, others
to climb. Marius had not failed for a single day.
He had endured everything in the way of destitution; he had
done everything except contract debts. He did himself the justice
to say that he had never owed any one a sou. A debt was, to him,
the beginning of slavery.
He even said to himself, that a creditor is worse than a master;
for the master possesses only your person, a creditor possesses
your dignity and can administer to it a box on the ear.
Rather than borrow, he went without food. He had passed many
a day fasting.
Feeling that all extremes meet, and that, if one is not on
one's guard, lowered fortunes may lead to baseness of soul, he
kept a jealous watch on his pride. Such and such a formality or
action, which, in any other situation would have appeared merely
a deference to him, now seemed insipidity, and he nerved himself
against it.
His face wore a sort of severe flush. He was timid even to
rudeness.
During all these trials he had felt himself encouraged and
even uplifted, at times, by a secret force that he possessed within
himself. The soul aids the body, and at certain moments, raises
it. It is the only bird which bears up its own cage.
Besides his father's name, another name was graven in Marius'
heart, the name of Thenardier.
Marius, with his grave and enthusiastic nature, surrounded
with a sort of aureole the man to whom, in his thoughts, he owed
his father's life,--that intrepid sergeant who had saved the colonel
amid the bullets and the cannon-balls of Waterloo. He never separated
the memory of this man from the memory of his father, and he associated
them in his veneration.
It was a sort of worship in two steps, with the grand altar
for the colonel and the lesser one for Thenardier.
What redoubled the tenderness of his gratitude towards Thenardier,
was the idea of the distress into which he knew that Thenardier
had fallen, and which had engulfed the latter. Marius had learned
at Montfermeil of the ruin and bankruptcy of the unfortunate inn-keeper.
Since that time, he had made unheard-of efforts to find traces
of him and to reach him in that dark abyss of misery in which
Thenardier had disappeared.
Marius had beaten the whole country; he had gone to Chelles,
to Bondy, to Gourney, to Nogent, to Lagny. He had persisted for
three years, expending in these explorations the little money
which he had laid by.
No one had been able to give him any news of Thenardier:
he was supposed to have gone abroad. His creditors had also
sought him, with less love than Marius, but with as much assiduity,
and had not been able to lay their hands on him.
Marius blamed himself, and was almost angry with himself for
his lack of success in his researches.
It was the only debt left him by the colonel, and Marius made
it a matter of honor to pay it. "What," he thought,
"when my father lay dying on the field of battle, did Thenardier
contrive to find him amid the smoke and the grape-shot, and bear
him off on his shoulders, and yet he owed him nothing, and I,
who owe so much to Thenardier, cannot join him in this shadow
where he is lying in the pangs of death, and in my turn bring
him back from death to life!
Oh!
I will find him!" To find Thenardier, in fact, Marius
would have given one of his arms, to rescue him from his misery,
he would have sacrificed all his blood. To see Thenardier, to
render Thenardier some service, to say to him: "You do not
know me; well, I do know you!
Here I am.
Dispose of me!" This was Marius' sweetest and most magnificent
dream.
|
