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MARIUS, EMERGING FROM CIVIL WAR, MAKES READY FOR DOMESTIC
WAR
For a long time, Marius was neither dead nor alive.
For many weeks he lay in a fever accompanied by delirium,
and by tolerably grave cerebral symptoms, caused more by the shocks
of the wounds on the head than by the wounds themselves.
He repeated Cosette's name for whole nights in the melancholy
loquacity of fever, and with the sombre obstinacy of agony.
The extent of some of the lesions presented a serious danger,
the suppuration of large wounds being always liable to become
re-absorbed, and consequently, to kill the sick man, under certain
atmospheric conditions; at every change of weather, at the slightest
storm, the physician was uneasy.
"Above all things," he repeated, "let the wounded
man be subjected to no emotion."
The dressing of the wounds was complicated and difficult,
the fixation of apparatus and bandages by cerecloths not having
been invented as yet, at that epoch. Nicolette used up a sheet
"as big as the ceiling," as she put it, for lint.
It was not without difficulty that the chloruretted lotions
and the nitrate of silver overcame the gangrene. As long as there
was any danger, M. Gillenormand, seated in despair at his grandson's
pillow, was, like Marius, neither alive nor dead.
Every day, sometimes twice a day, a very well dressed gentleman
with white hair,--such was the description given by the porter,--
came to inquire about the wounded man, and left a large package
of lint for the dressings.
Finally, on the 7th of September, four months to a day, after
the sorrowful night when he had been brought back to his grandfather
in a dying condition, the doctor declared that he would answer
for Marius.
Convalescence began.
But Marius was forced to remain for two months more stretched
out on a long chair, on account of the results called up by the
fracture of his collar-bone. There always is a last wound like
that which will not close, and which prolongs the dressings indefinitely,
to the great annoyance of the sick person.
However, this long illness and this long convalescence saved
him from all pursuit.
In France, there is no wrath, not even of a public character,
which six months will not extinguish.
Revolts, in the present state of society, are so much the
fault of every one, that they are followed by a certain necessity
of shutting the eyes.
Let us add, that the inexcusable Gisquet order, which enjoined
doctors to lodge information against the wounded, having outraged
public opinion, and not opinion alone, but the King first of all,
the wounded were covered and protected by this indignation; and,
with the exception of those who had been made prisoners in the
very act of combat, the councils of war did not dare to trouble
any one. So Marius was left in peace.
M. Gillenormand first passed through all manner of anguish,
and then through every form of ecstasy.
It was found difficult to prevent his passing every night
beside the wounded man; he had his big arm-chair carried to Marius'
bedside; he required his daughter to take the finest linen in
the house for compresses and bandages. Mademoiselle Gillenormand,
like a sage and elderly person, contrived to spare the fine linen,
while allowing the grandfather to think that he was obeyed.
M. Gillenormand would not permit any one to explain to him,
that for the preparation of lint batiste is not nearly so good
as coarse linen, nor new linen as old linen.
He was present at all the dressings of the wounds from which
Mademoiselle Gillenormand modestly absented herself. When the
dead flesh was cut away with scissors, he said:
"Aie! aie!" Nothing was more touching than to see
him with his gentle, senile palsy, offer the wounded man a cup
of his cooling-draught. He overwhelmed the doctor with questions.
He did not observe that he asked the same ones over and over
again.
On the day when the doctor announced to him that Marius was
out of danger, the good man was in a delirium.
He made his porter a present of three louis.
That evening, on his return to his own chamber, he danced
a gavotte, using his thumb and forefinger as castanets, and he
sang the following song:"Jeanne est nee a Fougere "Amour,
tu vis en elle;
Vrai nid d'une bergere;
Car c'est dans sa prunelle
J'adore son jupon,Que tu mets ton carquois.
Fripon.
Narquois!
"Moi, je la chante, et j'aime, Plus que Diane meme, Jeanne
et ses durs tetons Bretons."[61][61] "Jeanne was born
at Fougere, a true shepherd's nest; I adore her petticoat, the
rogue.
"Love, thou dwellest in her; For 'tis in her eyes that
thou placest thy quiver, sly scamp!
"As for me, I sing her, and I love, more than Diana herself,
Jeanne and her firm Breton breasts."
Then he knelt upon a chair, and Basque, who was watching
him through the half-open door, made sure that he was praying.
Up to that time, he had not believed in God.
At each succeeding phase of improvement, which became more
and more pronounced, the grandfather raved.
He executed a multitude of mechanical actions full of joy;
he ascended and descended the stairs, without knowing why.
A pretty female neighbor was amazed one morning at receiving
a big bouquet; it was M. Gillenormand who had sent it to her.
The husband made a jealous scene.
M. Gillenormand tried to draw Nicolette upon his knees.
He called Marius, "M. le Baron." He shouted:
"Long live the Republic!"
Every moment, he kept asking the doctor:
"Is he no longer in danger?" He gazed upon Marius
with the eyes of a grandmother.
He brooded over him while he ate.
He no longer knew himself, he no longer rendered himself an
account of himself.
Marius was the master of the house, there was abdication in
his joy, he was the grandson of his grandson.
In the state of joy in which he then was, he was the most
venerable of children.
In his fear lest he might fatigue or annoy the convalescent,
he stepped behind him to smile.
He was content, joyous, delighted, charming, young.
His white locks added a gentle majesty to the gay radiance
of his visage.
When grace is mingled with wrinkles, it is adorable.
There is an indescribable aurora in beaming old age.
As for Marius, as he allowed them to dress his wounds and
care for him, he had but one fixed idea:
Cosette.
After the fever and delirium had left him, he did not again
pronounce her name, and it might have been supposed that he no
longer thought of her.
He held his peace, precisely because his soul was there.
He did not know what had become of Cosette; the whole affair
of the Rue de la Chanvrerie was like a cloud in his memory; shadows
that were almost indistinct, floated through his mind, Eponine,
Gavroche, Mabeuf, the Thenardiers, all his friends gloomily intermingled
with the smoke of the barricade; the strange passage of M. Fauchelevent
through that adventure produced on him the effect of a puzzle
in a tempest; he understood nothing connected with his own life,
he did not know how nor by whom he had been saved, and no one
of those around him knew this; all that they had been able to
tell him was, that he had been brought home at night in a hackney-coach,
to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; past, present, future were
nothing more to him than the mist of a vague idea; but in that
fog there was one immovable point, one clear and precise outline,
something made of granite, a resolution, a will; to find Cosette
once more. For him, the idea of life was not distinct from the
idea of Cosette. He had decreed in his heart that he would not
accept the one without the other, and he was immovably resolved
to exact of any person whatever, who should desire to force him
to live,--from his grandfather, from fate, from hell,--the restitution
of his vanished Eden.
He did not conceal from himself the fact that obstacles existed.
Let us here emphasize one detail, he was not won over and
was but little softened by all the solicitude and tenderness of
his grandfather. In the first place, he was not in the secret;
then, in his reveries of an invalid, which were still feverish,
possibly, he distrusted this tenderness as a strange and novel
thing, which had for its object his conquest.
He remained cold.
The grandfather absolutely
wasted his poor old smile.
Marius said to himself that it was all right so long as he,
Marius, did not speak, and let things take their course; but that
when it became a question of Cosette, he would find another face,
and that his grandfather's true attitude would be unmasked.
Then there would be an unpleasant scene; a recrudescence of
family questions, a confrontation of positions, every sort of
sarcasm and all manner of objections at one and the same time,
Fauchelevent, Coupelevent, fortune, poverty, a stone about his
neck, the future.
Violent resistance; conclusion:
a refusal. Marius stiffened himself in advance.
And then, in proportion as he regained life, the old ulcers
of his memory opened once more, he reflected again on the past,
Colonel Pontmercy placed himself once more between M. Gillenormand
and him, Marius, he told himself that he had no true kindness
to expect from a person who had been so unjust and so hard to
his father. And with health, there returned to him a sort of harshness
towards his grandfather.
The old man was gently pained by this. M. Gillenormand, without
however allowing it to appear, observed that Marius, ever since
the latter had been brought back to him and had regained consciousness,
had not once called him father. It is true that he did not say
"monsieur" to him; but he contrived not to say either
the one or the other, by means of a certain way of turning his
phrases.
Obviously, a crisis was approaching.
As almost always happens in such cases, Marius skirmished
before giving battle, by way of proving himself.
This is called "feeling the ground."
One morning it came to pass that M. Gillenormand spoke slightingly
of the Convention, apropos of a newspaper which had fallen into
his hands, and gave vent to a Royalist harangue on Danton, Saint-Juste
and Robespierre.--"The men of '93 were giants," said
Marius with severity.
The old man held his peace, and uttered not a sound during
the remainder of that day.
Marius, who had always present to his mind the inflexible
grandfather of his early years, interpreted this silence as a
profound concentration of wrath, augured from it a hot conflict,
and augmented his preparations for the fray in the inmost recesses
of his mind.
He decided that, in case of a refusal, he would tear off his
bandages, dislocate his collar-bone, that he would lay bare all
the wounds which he had left, and would reject all food.
His wounds were his munitions of war.
He would have Cosette or die.
He awaited the propitious moment with the crafty patience
of the sick.
That moment arrived.
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