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THE TWO OLD MEN DO EVERYTHING, EACH ONE AFTER HIS OWN FASHION,
TO RENDER COSETTE HAPPY
Everything was made ready for the wedding.
The doctor, on being consulted, declared that it might take
place in February. It was then December.
A few ravishing weeks of perfect happiness passed.
The grandfather was not the least happy of them all.
He remained for a quarter of an hour at a time gazing at Cosette.
"The wonderful, beautiful girl!" he exclaimed.
"And she has so sweet and good an air! she is, without
exception, the most charming girl that I have ever seen in my
life.
Later on, she'll have virtues with an odor of violets.
How graceful! one cannot live otherwise than nobly with such
a creature.
Marius, my boy, you are a Baron, you are rich, don't go to
pettifogging, I beg of you."
Cosette and Marius had passed abruptly from the sepulchre
to paradise. The transition had not been softened, and they would
have been stunned, had they not been dazzled by it.
"Do you understand anything about it?" said Marius
to Cosette.
"No," replied Cosette, "but it seems to me
that the good God is caring for us."
Jean Valjean did everything, smoothed away every difficulty,
arranged everything, made everything easy.
He hastened towards Cosette's happiness with as much ardor,
and, apparently with as much joy, as Cosette herself.
As he had been a mayor, he understood how to solve that delicate
problem, with the secret of which he alone was acquainted, Cosette's
civil status.
If he were to announce her origin bluntly, it might prevent
the marriage, who knows?
He extricated Cosette from all difficulties.
He concocted for her a family of dead people, a sure means
of not encountering any objections. Cosette was the only scion
of an extinct family; Cosette was not his own daughter, but the
daughter of the other Fauchelevent. Two brothers Fauchelevent
had been gardeners to the convent of the Petit-Picpus. Inquiry
was made at that convent; the very best information and the most
respectable references abounded; the good nuns, not very apt and
but little inclined to fathom questions of paternity, and not
attaching any importance to the matter, had never understood exactly
of which of the two Fauchelevents Cosette was the daughter. They
said what was wanted and they said it with zeal.
An acte de notoriete was drawn up.
Cosette became in the eyes of the law, Mademoiselle Euphrasie
Fauchelevent.
She was declared an orphan, both father and mother being dead.
Jean Valjean so arranged it that he was appointed, under the
name of Fauchelevent, as Cosette's guardian, with M. Gillenormand
as supervising guardian over him.
As for the five hundred and eighty thousand francs, they constituted
a legacy bequeathed to Cosette by a dead person, who desired to
remain unknown.
The original legacy had consisted of five hundred and ninety-four
thousand francs; but ten thousand francs had been expended on
the education of Mademoiselle Euphrasie, five thousand francs
of that amount having been paid to the convent. This legacy, deposited
in the hands of a third party, was to be turned over to Cosette
at her majority, or at the date of her marriage. This, taken as
a whole, was very acceptable, as the reader will perceive, especially
when the sum due was half a million.
There were some peculiarities here and there, it is true,
but they were not noticed; one of the interested parties had his
eyes blindfolded by love, the others by the six hundred thousand
francs.
Cosette learned that she was not the daughter of that old
man whom she had so long called father.
He was merely a kinsman; another Fauchelevent was her real
father.
At any other time this would have broken her heart.
But at the ineffable moment which she was then passing through,
it cast but a slight shadow, a faint cloud, and she was so full
of joy that the cloud did not last long. She had Marius.
The young man arrived, the old man was effaced; such is life.
And then, Cosette had, for long years, been habituated to
seeing enigmas around her; every being who has had a mysterious
childhood is always prepared for certain renunciations.
Nevertheless, she continued to call Jean Valjean:
Father.
Cosette, happy as the angels, was enthusiastic over Father
Gillenormand. It is true that he overwhelmed her with gallant
compliments and presents.
While Jean Valjean was building up for Cosette a normal situation
in society and an unassailable status, M. Gillenormand was superintending
the basket of wedding gifts.
Nothing so amused him as being magnificent.
He had given to Cosette a robe of Binche guipure which had
descended to him from his own grandmother.
"These fashions come up again," said he, "ancient
things are the rage, and the young women of my old age dress like
the old women of my childhood."
He rifled his respectable chests of drawers in Coromandel
lacquer, with swelling fronts, which had not been opened for years.--"Let
us hear the confession of these dowagers," he said, "let
us see what they have in their paunches."
He noisily violated the pot-bellied drawers of all his wives,
of all his mistresses and of all his grandmothers. Pekins, damasks,
lampas, painted moires, robes of shot gros de Tours, India kerchiefs
embroidered in gold that could be washed, dauphines without a
right or wrong side, in the piece, Genoa and Alencon point lace,
parures in antique goldsmith's work, ivory bon-bon boxes ornamented
with microscopic battles, gewgaws and ribbons-- he lavished everything
on Cosette.
Cosette, amazed, desperately in love with Marius, and wild
with gratitude towards M. Gillenormand, dreamed of a happiness
without limit clothed in satin and velvet. Her wedding basket
seemed to her to be upheld by seraphim. Her soul flew out into
the azure depths, with wings of Mechlin lace.
The intoxication of the lovers was only equalled, as we have
already said, by the ecstasy of the grandfather.
A sort of flourish of trumpets went on in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.
Every morning, a fresh offering of bric-a-brac from the grandfather
to Cosette.
All possible knickknacks glittered around her.
One day Marius, who was fond of talking gravely in the midst
of his bliss, said, apropos of I know not what incident:
"The men of the revolution are so great, that they have
the prestige of the ages, like Cato and like Phocion, and each
one of them seems to me an antique memory."
"Moire antique!" exclaimed the old gentleman.
"Thanks, Marius. That is precisely the idea of which
I was in search."
And on the following day, a magnificent dress of tea-rose
colored moire antique was added to Cosette's wedding presents.
From these fripperies, the grandfather extracted a bit of
wisdom.
"Love is all very well; but there must be something else
to go with it.
The useless must be mingled with happiness.
Happiness is only the necessary.
Season that enormously with the superfluous for me.
A palace and her heart.
Her heart and the Louvre. Her heart and the grand waterworks
of Versailles.
Give me my shepherdess and try to make her a duchess.
Fetch me Phyllis crowned with corn-flowers, and add a hundred
thousand francs income. Open for me a bucolic perspective as far
as you can see, beneath a marble colonnade.
I consent to the bucolic and also to the fairy spectacle of
marble and gold.
Dry happiness resembles dry bread. One eats, but one does
not dine.
I want the superfluous, the useless, the extravagant, excess,
that which serves no purpose. I remember to have seen, in the
Cathedral of Strasburg, a clock, as tall as a three-story house
which marked the hours, which had the kindness to indicate the
hour, but which had not the air of being made for that; and which,
after having struck midday, or midnight,-- midday, the hour of
the sun, or midnight, the hour of love,-- or any other hour that
you like, gave you the moon and the stars, the earth and the sea,
birds and fishes, Phoebus and Phoebe, and a host of things which
emerged from a niche, and the twelve apostles, and the Emperor
Charles the Fifth, and Eponine, and Sabinus, and a throng of little
gilded goodmen, who played on the trumpet to boot.
Without reckoning delicious chimes which it sprinkled through
the air, on every occasion, without any one's knowing why. Is
a petty bald clock-face which merely tells the hour equal to that?
For my part, I am of the opinion of the big clock of Strasburg,
and I prefer it to the cuckoo clock from the Black Forest."
M. Gillenormand talked nonsense in connection with the wedding,
and all the fripperies of the eighteenth century passed pell-mell
through his dithyrambs.
"You are ignorant of the art of festivals.
You do not know how to organize a day of enjoyment in this
age," he exclaimed. "Your nineteenth century is weak.
It lacks excess.
It ignores the rich, it ignores the noble.
In everything it is clean-shaven. Your third estate is insipid,
colorless, odorless, and shapeless. The dreams of your bourgeois
who set up, as they express it: a pretty boudoir freshly decorated,
violet, ebony and calico. Make way!
Make way! the Sieur Curmudgeon is marrying Mademoiselle Clutch-penny.
Sumptuousness and splendor.
A louis d'or has been stuck to a candle.
There's the epoch for you.
My demand is that I may flee from it beyond the Sarmatians.
Ah! in 1787, I predict that all was lost, from the day when
I beheld the Duc de Rohan, Prince de Leon, Duc de Chabot, Duc
de Montbazon, Marquis de Sonbise, Vicomte de Thouars, peer of
France, go to Longchamps in a tapecu! That has borne its fruits.
In this century, men attend to business, they gamble on 'Change,
they win money, they are stingy.
People take care of their surfaces and varnish them; every
one is dressed as though just out of a band-box, washed, soaped,
scraped, shaved, combed, waked, smoothed, rubbed, brushed, cleaned
on the outside, irreproachable, polished as a pebble, discreet,
neat, and at the same time, death of my life, in the depths of
their consciences they have dung-heaps and cesspools that are
enough to make a cow-herd who blows his nose in his fingers, recoil.
I grant to this age the device: `Dirty Cleanliness.'
Don't be vexed, Marius, give me permission to speak; I say
no evil of the people as you see, I am always harping on your
people, but do look favorably on my dealing a bit of a slap to
the bourgeoisie.
I belong to it.
He who loves well lashes well.
Thereupon, I say plainly, that now-a-days people marry, but
that they no longer know how to marry.
Ah! it is true, I regret the grace of the ancient manners.
I regret everything about them, their elegance, their chivalry,
those courteous and delicate ways, that joyous luxury which every
one possessed, music forming part of the wedding, a symphony above
stairs, a beating of drums below stairs, the dances, the joyous
faces round the table, the fine-spun gallant compliments, the
songs, the fireworks, the frank laughter, the devil's own row,
the huge knots of ribbon.
I regret the bride's garter.
The bride's garter is cousin to the girdle of Venus. On what
does the war of Troy turn?
On Helen's garter, parbleu! Why did they fight, why did Diomed
the divine break over the head of Meriones that great brazen helmet
of ten points? why did Achilles and Hector hew each other up with
vast blows of their lances? Because Helen allowed Paris to take
her garter.
With Cosette's garter, Homer would construct the Iliad.
He would put in his poem, a loquacious old fellow, like me,
and he would call him Nestor. My friends, in bygone days, in those
amiable days of yore, people married wisely; they had a good contract,
and then they had a good carouse.
As soon as Cujas had taken his departure, Gamacho entered.
But, in sooth! the stomach is an agreeable beast which demands
its due, and which wants to have its wedding also. People supped
well, and had at table a beautiful neighbor without a guimpe so
that her throat was only moderately concealed. Oh! the large laughing
mouths, and how gay we were in those days! youth was a bouquet;
every young man terminated in a branch of lilacs or a tuft of
roses; whether he was a shepherd or a warrior; and if, by chance,
one was a captain of dragoons, one found means to call oneself
Florian.
People thought much of looking well. They embroidered and
tinted themselves.
A bourgeois had the air of a flower, a Marquis had the air
of a precious stone.
People had no straps to their boots, they had no boots.
They were spruce, shining, waved, lustrous, fluttering, dainty,
coquettish, which did not at all prevent their wearing swords
by their sides.
The humming-bird has beak and claws.
That was the day of the Galland Indies.
One of the sides of that century was delicate, the other was
magnificent; and by the green cabbages! people amused themselves.
To-day, people are serious.
The bourgeois is avaricious, the bourgeoise is a prude; your
century is unfortunate.
People would drive away the Graces as being too low in the
neck.
Alas! beauty is concealed as though it were ugliness.
Since the revolution, everything, including the ballet-dancers,
has had its trousers; a mountebank dancer must be grave; your
rigadoons are doctrinarian.
It is necessary to be majestic. People would be greatly annoyed
if they did not carry their chins in their cravats.
The ideal of an urchin of twenty when he marries, is to resemble
M. Royer-Collard. And do you know what one arrives at with that
majesty? at being petty.
Learn this: joy is not only joyous; it is great.
But be in love gayly then, what the deuce! marry, when you
marry, with fever and giddiness, and tumult, and the uproar of
happiness!
Be grave in church, well and good.
But, as soon as the mass is finished, sarpejou! you must make
a dream whirl around the bride.
A marriage should be royal and chimerical; it should promenade
its ceremony from the cathedral of Rheims to the pagoda of Chanteloup.
I have a horror of a paltry wedding.
Ventregoulette! be in Olympus for that one day, at least.
Be one of the gods.
Ah! people might be sylphs. Games and Laughter, argiraspides;
they are stupids.
My friends, every recently made bridegroom ought to be Prince
Aldobrandini. Profit by that unique minute in life to soar away
to the empyrean with the swans and the eagles, even if you do
have to fall back on the morrow into the bourgeoisie of the frogs.
Don't economize on the nuptials, do not prune them of their
splendors; don't scrimp on the day when you beam.
The wedding is not the housekeeping. Oh! if I were to carry
out my fancy, it would be gallant, violins would be heard under
the trees.
Here is my programme:
sky-blue and silver. I would mingle with the festival the
rural divinities, I would convoke the Dryads and the Nereids.
The nuptials of Amphitrite, a rosy cloud, nymphs with well
dressed locks and entirely naked, an Academician offering quatrains
to the goddess, a chariot drawn by marine monsters. "Triton
trottait devant, et tirait de sa conque Des sons si ravissants
qu'il ravissait quiconque!"[65]
--there's a festive programme, there's a good one, or else
I know nothing of such matters, deuce take it!"
[65] "Triton trotted on before, and drew from his conch-shell
sounds so ravishing that he delighted everyone!"
While the grandfather, in full lyrical effusion, was listening
to himself, Cosette and Marius grew intoxicated as they gazed
freely at each other.
Aunt Gillenormand surveyed all this with her imperturbable
placidity. Within the last five or six months she had experienced
a certain amount of emotions.
Marius returned, Marius brought back bleeding, Marius brought
back from a barricade, Marius dead, then living, Marius reconciled,
Marius betrothed, Marius wedding a poor girl, Marius wedding a
millionairess.
The six hundred thousand francs had been her last surprise.
Then, her indifference of a girl taking her first communion
returned to her.
She went regularly to service, told her beads, read her euchology,
mumbled Aves in one corner of the house, while I love you was
being whispered in the other, and she beheld Marius and Cosette
in a vague way, like two shadows. The shadow was herself.
There is a certain state of inert asceticism in which the
soul, neutralized by torpor, a stranger to that which may be designated
as the business of living, receives no impressions, either human,
or pleasant or painful, with the exception of earthquakes and
catastrophes. This devotion, as Father Gillenormand said to his
daughter, corresponds to a cold in the head.
You smell nothing of life. Neither any bad, nor any good odor.
Moreover, the six hundred thousand francs had settled the
elderly spinster's indecision.
Her father had acquired the habit of taking her so little
into account, that he had not consulted her in the matter of consent
to Marius' marriage.
He had acted impetuously, according to his wont, having, a
despot-turned slave, but a single thought,--to satisfy Marius.
As for the aunt,--it had not even occurred to him that the
aunt existed, and that she could have an opinion of her own, and,
sheep as she was, this had vexed her. Somewhat resentful in her
inmost soul, but impassible externally, she had said to herself:
"My father has settled the question of the marriage without
reference to me; I shall settle the question of the inheritance
without consulting him."
She was rich, in fact, and her father was not.
She had reserved her decision on this point. It is probable
that, had the match been a poor one, she would have left him poor.
"So much the worse for my nephew! he is wedding a beggar,
let him be a beggar himself!"
But Cosette's half-million pleased the aunt, and altered her
inward situation so far as this pair of lovers were concerned.
One owes some consideration to six hundred thousand francs,
and it was evident that she could not do otherwise than leave
her fortune to these young people, since they did not need it.
It was arranged that the couple should live with the grandfather--
M. Gillenormand insisted on resigning to them his chamber, the
finest in the house.
"That will make me young again," he said. "It's
an old plan of mine.
I have always entertained the idea of having a wedding in
my chamber."
He furnished this chamber with a multitude of elegant trifles.
He had the ceiling and walls hung with an extraordinary stuff,
which he had by him in the piece, and which he believed to have
emanated from Utrecht with a buttercup-colored satin ground, covered
with velvet auricula blossoms.--"It was with that stuff,"
said he, "that the bed of the Duchesse d'Anville at la Roche-Guyon
was draped."-- On the chimney-piece, he set a little figure
in Saxe porcelain, carrying a muff against her nude stomach.
M. Gillenormand's library became the lawyer's study, which
Marius needed; a study, it will be remembered, being required
by the council of the order.
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