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THE GRANDFATHER
Basque and the porter had carried Marius into the drawing-room,
as he still lay stretched out, motionless, on the sofa upon which
he had been placed on his arrival.
The doctor who had been sent for had hastened thither.
Aunt Gillenormand had risen.
Aunt Gillenormand went and came, in affright, wringing her
hands and incapable of doing anything but saying:
"Heavens! is it possible?" At times she added:
"Everything will be covered with blood." When her
first horror had passed off, a certain philosophy of the situation
penetrated her mind, and took form in the exclamation: "It
was bound to end in this way!"
She did not go so far as: "I told you so!" which
is customary on this sort of occasion. At the physician's orders,
a camp bed had been prepared beside the sofa. The doctor examined
Marius, and after having found that his pulse was still beating,
that the wounded man had no very deep wound on his breast, and
that the blood on the corners of his lips proceeded from his nostrils,
he had him placed flat on the bed, without a pillow, with his
head on the same level as his body, and even a trifle lower, and
with his bust bare in order to facilitate respiration. Mademoiselle
Gillenormand, on perceiving that they were undressing Marius,
withdrew.
She set herself to telling her beads in her own chamber.
The trunk had not suffered any internal injury; a bullet,
deadened by the pocket-book, had turned aside and made the tour
of his ribs with a hideous laceration, which was of no great depth,
and consequently, not dangerous.
The long, underground journey had completed the dislocation
of the broken collar-bone, and the disorder there was serious.
The arms had been slashed with sabre cuts. Not a single scar
disfigured his face; but his head was fairly covered with cuts;
what would be the result of these wounds on the head? Would they
stop short at the hairy cuticle, or would they attack the brain?
As yet, this could not be decided.
A grave symptom was that they had caused a swoon, and that
people do not always recover from such swoons.
Moreover, the wounded man had been exhausted by hemorrhage.
From the waist down, the barricade had protected the lower
part of the body from injury.
Basque and Nicolette tore up linen and prepared bandages;
Nicolette sewed them, Basque rolled them.
As lint was lacking, the doctor, for the time being, arrested
the bleeding with layers of wadding. Beside the bed, three candles
burned on a table where the case of surgical instruments lay spread
out.
The doctor bathed Marius' face and hair with cold water.
A full pail was reddened in an instant. The porter, candle
in hand, lighted them.
The doctor seemed to be pondering sadly.
From time to time, he made a negative sign with his head,
as though replying to some question which he had inwardly addressed
to himself.
A bad sign for the sick man are these mysterious dialogues
of the doctor with himself.
At the moment when the doctor was wiping Marius' face, and
lightly touching his still closed eyes with his finger, a door
opened at the end of the drawing-room, and a long, pallid figure
made its appearance.
This was the grandfather.
The revolt had, for the past two days, deeply agitated, enraged
and engrossed the mind of M. Gillenormand.
He had not been able to sleep on the previous night, and he
had been in a fever all day long. In the evening, he had gone
to bed very early, recommending that everything in the house should
be well barred, and he had fallen into a doze through sheer fatigue.
Old men sleep lightly; M. Gillenormand's chamber adjoined
the drawing-room, and in spite of all the precautions that had
been taken, the noise had awakened him.
Surprised at the rift of light which he saw under his door,
he had risen from his bed, and had groped his way thither.
He stood astonished on the threshold, one hand on the handle
of the half-open door, with his head bent a little forward and
quivering, his body wrapped in a white dressing-gown, which was
straight and as destitute of folds as a winding-sheet; and he
had the air of a phantom who is gazing into a tomb.
He saw the bed, and on the mattress that young man, bleeding,
white with a waxen whiteness, with closed eyes and gaping mouth,
and pallid lips, stripped to the waist, slashed all over with
crimson wounds, motionless and brilliantly lighted up.
The grandfather trembled from head to foot as powerfully as
ossified limbs can tremble, his eyes, whose corneae were yellow
on account of his great age, were veiled in a sort of vitreous
glitter, his whole face assumed in an instant the earthy angles
of a skull, his arms fell pendent, as though a spring had broken,
and his amazement was betrayed by the outspreading of the fingers
of his two aged hands, which quivered all over, his knees formed
an angle in front, allowing, through the opening in his dressing-gown,
a view of his poor bare legs, all bristling with white hairs,
and he murmured:
"Marius!"
"Sir," said Basque, "Monsieur has just been
brought back. He went to the barricade, and . . ."
"He is dead!" cried the old man in a terrible voice.
"Ah!
The rascal!"
Then a sort of sepulchral transformation straightened up this
centenarian as erect as a young man.
"Sir," said he, "you are the doctor.
Begin by telling me one thing. He is dead, is he not?"
The doctor, who was at the highest pitch of anxiety, remained
silent.
M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with an outburst of terrible
laughter.
"He is dead!
He is dead!
He is dead!
He has got himself killed on the barricades!
Out of hatred to me!
He did that to spite me!
Ah!
You blood-drinker! This is the way he returns to me! Misery
of my life, he is dead!"
He went to the window, threw it wide open as though he were
stifling, and, erect before the darkness, he began to talk into
the street, to the night:
"Pierced, sabred, exterminated, slashed, hacked in pieces!
Just look at that, the villain!
He knew well that I was waiting for him, and that I had had
his room arranged, and that I had placed at the head of my bed
his portrait taken when he was a little child! He knew well that
he had only to come back, and that I had been recalling him for
years, and that I remained by my fireside, with my hands on my
knees, not knowing what to do, and that I was mad over it!
You knew well, that you had but to return and to say: `It
is I,' and you would have been the master of the house, and that
I should have obeyed you, and that you could have done whatever
you pleased with your old numskull of a grandfather! you knew
that well, and you said:
"No, he is a Royalist, I will not go!
And you went to the barricades, and you got yourself killed
out of malice!
To revenge yourself for what I said to you about Monsieur
le Duc de Berry. It is infamous!
Go to bed then and sleep tranquilly! he is dead, and this
is my awakening."
The doctor, who was beginning to be uneasy in both quarters,
quitted Marius for a moment, went to M. Gillenormand, and took
his arm. The grandfather turned round, gazed at him with eyes
which seemed exaggerated in size and bloodshot, and said to him
calmly:
"I thank you, sir.
I am composed, I am a man, I witnessed the death of Louis
XVI., I know how to bear events.
One thing is terrible and that is to think that it is your
newspapers which do all the mischief. You will have scribblers,
chatterers, lawyers, orators, tribunes, discussions, progress,
enlightenment, the rights of man, the liberty of the press, and
this is the way that your children will be brought home to you.
Ah!
Marius!
It is abominable!
Killed!
Dead before me! A barricade!
Ah, the scamp!
Doctor, you live in this quarter, I believe?
Oh!
I know you well.
I see your cabriolet pass my window.
I am going to tell you.
You are wrong to think that I am angry.
One does not fly into a rage against a dead man. That would
be stupid.
This is a child whom I have reared. I was already old while
he was very young.
He played in the Tuileries garden with his little shovel and
his little chair, and in order that the inspectors might not grumble,
I stopped up the holes that he made in the earth with his shovel,
with my cane. One day he exclaimed:
Down with Louis XVIII.! and off he went. It was no fault of
mine.
He was all rosy and blond.
His mother is dead.
Have you ever noticed that all little children are blond?
Why is it so?
He is the son of one of those brigands of the Loire, but children
are innocent of their fathers' crimes.
I remember when he was no higher than that.
He could not manage to pronounce his Ds. He had a way of talking
that was so sweet and indistinct that you would have thought it
was a bird chirping.
I remember that once, in front of the Hercules Farnese, people
formed a circle to admire him and marvel at him, he was so handsome,
was that child! He had a head such as you see in pictures.
I talked in a deep voice, and I frightened him with my cane,
but he knew very well that it was only to make him laugh.
In the morning, when he entered my room, I grumbled, but he
was like the sunlight to me, all the same. One cannot defend oneself
against those brats.
They take hold of you, they hold you fast, they never let
you go again.
The truth is, that there never was a cupid like that child.
Now, what can you say for your Lafayettes, your Benjamin Constants,
and your Tirecuir de Corcelles who have killed him?
This cannot be allowed to pass in this fashion."
He approached Marius, who still lay livid and motionless,
and to whom the physician had returned, and began once more to
wring his hands.
The old man's pallid lips moved as though mechanically, and
permitted the passage of words that were barely audible, like
breaths in the death agony:
"Ah! heartless lad!
Ah! clubbist!
Ah! wretch!
Ah!
Septembrist!"
Reproaches in the low voice of an agonizing man, addressed
to a corpse.
Little by little, as it is always indispensable that internal
eruptions should come to the light, the sequence of words returned,
but the grandfather appeared no longer to have the strength to
utter them, his voice was so weak, and extinct, that it seemed
to come from the other side of an abyss:
"It is all the same to me, I am going to die too, that
I am. And to think that there is not a hussy in Paris who would
not have been delighted to make this wretch happy!
A scamp who, instead of amusing himself and enjoying life,
went off to fight and get himself shot down like a brute!
And for whom?
Why?
For the Republic! Instead of going to dance at the Chaumiere,
as it is the duty of young folks to do!
What's the use of being twenty years old?
The Republic, a cursed pretty folly!
Poor mothers, beget fine boys, do!
Come, he is dead.
That will make two funerals under the same carriage gate.
So you have got yourself arranged like this for the sake of General
Lamarque's handsome eyes!
What had that General Lamarque done to you? A slasher!
A chatter-box! To get oneself killed for a dead man! If that
isn't enough to drive any one mad!
Just think of it! At twenty!
And without so much as turning his head to see whether he
was not leaving something behind him!
That's the way poor, good old fellows are forced to die alone,
now-adays. Perish in your corner, owl!
Well, after all, so much the better, that is what I was hoping
for, this will kill me on the spot.
I am too old, I am a hundred years old, I am a hundred thousand
years old, I ought, by rights, to have been dead long ago.
This blow puts an end to it. So all is over, what happiness!
What is the good of making him inhale ammonia and all that
parcel of drugs?
You are wasting your trouble, you fool of a doctor!
Come, he's dead, completely dead. I know all about it, I am
dead myself too.
He hasn't done things by half.
Yes, this age is infamous, infamous and that's what I think
of you, of your ideas, of your systems, of your masters, of your
oracles, of your doctors, of your scape-graces of writers, of
your rascally philosophers, and of all the revolutions which,
for the last sixty years, have been frightening the flocks of
crows in the Tuileries!
But you were pitiless in getting yourself killed like this,
I shall not even grieve over your death, do you understand, you
assassin?"
At that moment, Marius slowly opened his eyes, and his glance,
still dimmed by lethargic wonder, rested on M. Gillenormand.
"Marius!" cried the old man.
"Marius!
My little Marius! my child! my well-beloved son!
You open your eyes, you gaze upon me, you are alive, thanks!"
And he fell fainting.
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