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THE 16TH OF FEBRUARY, 1833
The night of the 16th to the 17th of February, 1833, was a
blessed night. Above its shadows heaven stood open.
It was the wedding night of Marius and Cosette.
The day had been adorable.
It had not been the grand festival dreamed by the grandfather,
a fairy spectacle, with a confusion of cherubim and Cupids over
the heads of the bridal pair, a marriage worthy to form the subject
of a painting to be placed over a door; but it had been sweet
and smiling.
The manner of marriage in 1833 was not the same as it is to-day.
France had not yet borrowed from England that supreme delicacy
of carrying off one's wife, of fleeing, on coming out of church,
of hiding oneself with shame from one's happiness, and of combining
the ways of a bankrupt with the delights of the Song of Songs.
People had not yet grasped to the full the chastity, exquisiteness,
and decency of jolting their paradise in a posting-chaise, of
breaking up their mystery with clic-clacs, of taking for a nuptial
bed the bed of an inn, and of leaving behind them, in a commonplace
chamber, at so much a night, the most sacred of the souvenirs
of life mingled pell-mell with the tete-a-tete of the conductor
of the diligence and the maid-servant of the inn.
In this second half of the nineteenth century in which we
are now living, the mayor and his scarf, the priest and his chasuble,
the law and God no longer suffice; they must be eked out by the
Postilion de Lonjumeau; a blue waistcoat turned up with red, and
with bell buttons, a plaque like a vantbrace, knee-breeches of
green leather, oaths to the Norman horses with their tails knotted
up, false galloons, varnished hat, long powdered locks, an enormous
whip and tall boots. France does not yet carry elegance to the
length of doing like the English nobility, and raining down on
the post-chaise of the bridal pair a hail storm of slippers trodden
down at heel and of worn-out shoes, in memory of Churchill, afterwards
Marlborough, or Malbrouck, who was assailed on his wedding-day
by the wrath of an aunt which brought him good luck.
Old shoes and slippers do not, as yet, form a part of our
nuptial celebrations; but patience, as good taste continues to
spread, we shall come to that.
In 1833, a hundred years ago, marriage was not conducted at
a full trot.
Strange to say, at that epoch, people still imagined that
a wedding was a private and social festival, that a patriarchal
banquet does not spoil a domestic solemnity, that gayety, even
in excess, provided it be honest, and decent, does happiness no
harm, and that, in short, it is a good and a venerable thing that
the fusion of these two destinies whence a family is destined
to spring, should begin at home, and that the household should
thenceforth have its nuptial chamber as its witness.
And people were so immodest as to marry in their own homes.
The marriage took place, therefore, in accordance with this
now superannuated fashion, at M. Gillenormand's house.
Natural and commonplace as this matter of marrying is, the
banns to publish, the papers to be drawn up, the mayoralty, and
the church produce some complication.
They could not get ready before the 16th of February.
Now, we note this detail, for the pure satisfaction of being
exact, it chanced that the 16th fell on Shrove Tuesday.
Hesitations, scruples, particularly on the part of Aunt Gillenormand.
"Shrove Tuesday!" exclaimed the grandfather, "so
much the better. There is a proverb:
"`Mariage un Mardi gras
N'aura point enfants ingrats.'[66]
[66] "A Shrove-Tuesday marriage will have no ungrateful
children."
Let us proceed.
Here goes for the 16th!
Do you want to delay, Marius?"
"No, certainly not!" replied the lover.
"Let us marry, then," cried the grandfather.
Accordingly, the marriage took place on the 16th, notwithstanding
the public merrymaking.
It rained that day, but there is always in the sky a tiny
scrap of blue at the service of happiness, which lovers see, even
when the rest of creation is under an umbrella.
On the preceding evening, Jean Valjean handed to Marius, in
the presence of M. Gillenormand, the five hundred and eighty-four
thousand francs.
As the marriage was taking place under the regime of community
of property, the papers had been simple.
Henceforth, Toussaint was of no use to Jean Valjean; Cosette
inherited her and promoted her to the rank of lady's maid.
As for Jean Valjean, a beautiful chamber in the Gillenormand
house had been furnished expressly for him, and Cosette had said
to him in such an irresistible manner:
"Father, I entreat you," that she had almost persuaded
him to promise that he would come and occupy it.
A few days before that fixed on for the marriage, an accident
happened to Jean Valjean; he crushed the thumb of his right hand.
This was not a serious matter; and he had not allowed any one
to trouble himself about it, nor to dress it, nor even to see
his hurt, not even Cosette.
Nevertheless, this had forced him to swathe his hand in a
linen bandage, and to carry his arm in a sling, and had prevented
his signing.
M. Gillenormand, in his capacity of Cosette's supervising-guardian,
had supplied his place.
We will not conduct the reader either to the mayor's office
or to the church.
One does not follow a pair of lovers to that extent, and one
is accustomed to turn one's back on the drama as soon as it puts
a wedding nosegay in its buttonhole.
We will confine ourselves to noting an incident which, though
unnoticed by the wedding party, marked the transit from the Rue
des Filles-du-Calvaire to the church of Saint-Paul.
At that epoch, the northern extremity of the Rue Saint-Louis
was in process of repaving.
It was barred off, beginning with the Rue du Pare-Royal. It
was impossible for the wedding carriages to go directly to Saint-Paul.
They were obliged to alter their course, and the simplest way
was to turn through the boulevard.
One of the invited guests observed that it was Shrove Tuesday,
and that there would be a jam of vehicles.--"Why?" asked
M. Gillenormand--"Because of the maskers."-- "Capital,"
said the grandfather, "let us go that way.
These young folks are on the way to be married; they are about
to enter the serious part of life.
This will prepare them for seeing a bit of the masquerade."
They went by way of the boulevard.
The first wedding coach held Cosette and Aunt Gillenormand,
M. Gillenormand and Jean Valjean. Marius, still separated from
his betrothed according to usage, did not come until the second.
The nuptial train, on emerging from the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire,
became entangled in a long procession of vehicles which formed
an endless chain from the Madeleine to the Bastille, and from
the Bastille to the Madeleine. Maskers abounded on the boulevard.
In spite of the fact that it was raining at intervals, Merry-Andrew,
Pantaloon and Clown persisted. In the good humor of that winter
of 1833, Paris had disguised itself as Venice.
Such Shrove Tuesdays are no longer to be seen now-a-days.
Everything which exists being a scattered Carnival, there is no
longer any Carnival.
The sidewalks were overflowing with pedestrians and the windows
with curious spectators.
The terraces which crown the peristyles of the theatres were
bordered with spectators.
Besides the maskers, they stared at that procession--peculiar
to Shrove Tuesday as to Longchamps,-- of vehicles of every description,
citadines, tapissieres, carioles, cabriolets marching in order,
rigorously riveted to each other by the police regulations, and
locked into rails, as it were. Any one in these vehicles is at
once a spectator and a spectacle. Police-sergeants maintained,
on the sides of the boulevard, these two interminable parallel
files, moving in contrary directions, and saw to it that nothing
interfered with that double current, those two brooks of carriages,
flowing, the one down stream, the other up stream, the one towards
the Chaussee d'Antin, the other towards the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
The carriages of the peers of France and of the Ambassadors, emblazoned
with coats of arms, held the middle of the way, going and coming
freely.
Certain joyous and magnificent trains, notably that of the
Boeuf Gras, had the same privilege.
In this gayety of Paris, England cracked her whip; Lord Seymour's
post-chaise, harassed by a nickname from the populace, passed
with great noise.
In the double file, along which the municipal guards galloped
like sheep-dogs, honest family coaches, loaded down with great-aunts
and grandmothers, displayed at their doors fresh groups of children
in disguise, Clowns of seven years of age, Columbines of six,
ravishing little creatures, who felt that they formed an official
part of the public mirth, who were imbued with the dignity of
their harlequinade, and who possessed the gravity of functionaries.
From time to time, a hitch arose somewhere in the procession
of vehicles; one or other of the two lateral files halted until
the knot was disentangled; one carriage delayed sufficed to paralyze
the whole line.
Then they set out again on the march.
The wedding carriages were in the file proceeding towards
the Bastille, and skirting the right side of the Boulevard.
At the top of the Pont-aux-Choux, there was a stoppage.
Nearly at the same moment, the other file, which was proceeding
towards the Madeleine, halted also.
At that point of the file there was a carriage-load of maskers.
These carriages, or to speak more correctly, these wagon-loads
of maskers are very familiar to Parisians.
If they were missing on a Shrove Tuesday, or at the Mid-Lent,
it would be taken in bad part, and people would say:
"There's something behind that.
Probably the ministry is about to undergo a change."
A pile of Cassandras, Harlequins and Columbines, jolted along
high above the passers-by, all possible grotesquenesses, from
the Turk to the savage, Hercules supporting Marquises, fishwives
who would have made Rabelais stop up his ears just as the Maenads
made Aristophanes drop his eyes, tow wigs, pink tights, dandified
hats, spectacles of a grimacer, three-cornered hats of Janot tormented
with a butterfly, shouts directed at pedestrians, fists on hips,
bold attitudes, bare shoulders, immodesty unchained; a chaos of
shamelessness driven by a coachman crowned with flowers; this
is what that institution was like.
Greece stood in need of the chariot of Thespis, France stands
in need of the hackney-coach of Vade.
Everything can be parodied, even parody.
The Saturnalia, that grimace of antique beauty, ends, through
exaggeration after exaggeration, in Shrove Tuesday; and the Bacchanal,
formerly crowned with sprays of vine leaves and grapes, inundated
with sunshine, displaying her marble breast in a divine semi-nudity,
having at the present day lost her shape under the soaked rags
of the North, has finally come to be called the Jack-pudding.
The tradition of carriage-loads of maskers runs back to the
most ancient days of the monarchy.
The accounts of Louis XI. allot to the bailiff of the palace
"twenty sous, Tournois, for three coaches of mascarades in
the cross-roads." In our day, these noisy heaps of creatures
are accustomed to have themselves driven in some ancient cuckoo
carriage, whose imperial they load down, or they overwhelm a hired
landau, with its top thrown back, with their tumultuous groups.
Twenty of them ride in a carriage intended for six.
They cling to the seats, to the rumble, on the cheeks of the
hood, on the shafts.
They even bestride the carriage lamps.
They stand, sit, lie, with their knees drawn up in a knot,
and their legs hanging.
The women sit on the men's laps. Far away, above the throng
of heads, their wild pyramid is visible. These carriage-loads
form mountains of mirth in the midst of the rout.
Colle, Panard and Piron flow from it, enriched with slang.
This carriage which has become colossal through its freight, has
an air of conquest.
Uproar reigns in front, tumult behind. People vociferate,
shout, howl, there they break forth and writhe with enjoyment;
gayety roars; sarcasm flames forth, joviality is flaunted like
a red flag; two jades there drag farce blossomed forth into an
apotheosis; it is the triumphal car of laughter.
A laughter that is too cynical to be frank.
In truth, this laughter is suspicious.
This laughter has a mission. It is charged with proving the
Carnival to the Parisians.
These fishwife vehicles, in which one feels one knows not
what shadows, set the philosopher to thinking.
There is government therein. There one lays one's finger on
a mysterious affinity between public men and public women.
It certainly is sad that turpitude heaped up should give a
sum total of gayety, that by piling ignominy upon opprobrium the
people should be enticed, that the system of spying, and serving
as caryatids to prostitution should amuse the rabble when it confronts
them, that the crowd loves to behold that monstrous living pile
of tinsel rags, half dung, half light, roll by on four wheels
howling and laughing, that they should clap their hands at this
glory composed of all shames, that there would be no festival
for the populace, did not the police promenade in their midst
these sorts of twenty-headed hydras of joy. But what can be done
about it?
These be-ribboned and be-flowered tumbrils of mire are insulted
and pardoned by the laughter of the public. The laughter of all
is the accomplice of universal degradation. Certain unhealthy
festivals disaggregate the people and convert them into the populace.
And populaces, like tyrants, require buffoons. The King has
Roquelaure, the populace has the Merry-Andrew. Paris is a great,
mad city on every occasion that it is a great sublime city. There
the Carnival forms part of politics.
Paris,--let us confess it--willingly allows infamy to furnish
it with comedy. She only demands of her masters--when she has
masters--one thing: "Paint me the mud."
Rome was of the same mind.
She loved Nero. Nero was a titanic lighterman.
Chance ordained, as we have just said, that one of these shapeless
clusters of masked men and women, dragged about on a vast calash,
should halt on the left of the boulevard, while the wedding train
halted on the right.
The carriage-load of masks caught sight of the wedding carriage
containing the bridal party opposite them on the other side of
the boulevard.
"Hullo!" said a masker, "here's a wedding."
"A sham wedding," retorted another.
"We are the genuine article."
And, being too far off to accost the wedding party, and fearing
also, the rebuke of the police, the two maskers turned their eyes
elsewhere.
At the end of another minute, the carriage-load of maskers
had their hands full, the multitude set to yelling, which is the
crowd's caress to masquerades; and the two maskers who had just
spoken had to face the throng with their comrades, and did not
find the entire repertory of projectiles of the fishmarkets too
extensive to retort to the enormous verbal attacks of the populace.
A frightful exchange of metaphors took place between the maskers
and the crowd.
In the meanwhile, two other maskers in the same carriage,
a Spaniard with an enormous nose, an elderly air, and huge black
moustache, and a gaunt fishwife, who was quite a young girl, masked
with a loup,[67] had also noticed the wedding, and while their
companions and the passers-by were exchanging insults, they had
held a dialogue in a low voice.
[67] A short mask.
Their aside was covered by the tumult and was lost in it.
The gusts of rain had drenched the front of the vehicle, which
was wide open; the breezes of February are not warm; as the fishwife,
clad in a low-necked gown, replied to the Spaniard, she shivered,
laughed and coughed.
Here is their dialogue:
"Say, now."
"What, daddy?"
"Do you see that old cove?"
"What old cove?"
"Yonder, in the first wedding-cart, on our side."
"The one with his arm hung up in a black cravat?"
"Yes."
"Well?"
"I'm sure that I know him."
"Ah!"
"I'm willing that they should cut my throat, and I'm
ready to swear that I never said either you, thou, or I, in my
life, if I don't know that Parisian."
[pantinois.]
"Paris in Pantin to-day."
"Can you see the bride if you stoop down?"
"No."
"And the bridegroom?"
"There's no bridegroom in that trap."
"Bah!"
"Unless it's the old fellow."
"Try to get a sight of the bride by stooping very low."
"I can't."
"Never mind, that old cove who has something the matter
with his paw I know, and that I'm positive."
"And what good does it do to know him?"
"No one can tell.
Sometimes it does!"
"I don't care a hang for old fellows, that I don't!"
"I know him."
"Know him, if you want to."
"How the devil does he come to be one of the wedding
party?"
"We are in it, too."
"Where does that wedding come from?"
"How should I know?"
"Listen."
"Well, what?"
"There's one thing you ought to do."
"What's that?"
"Get off of our trap and spin that wedding."
"What for?"
"To find out where it goes, and what it is.
Hurry up and jump down, trot, my girl, your legs are young."
"I can't quit the vehicle."
"Why not?"
"I'm hired."
"Ah, the devil!"
"I owe my fishwife day to the prefecture."
"That's true."
"If I leave the cart, the first inspector who gets his
eye on me will arrest me.
You know that well enough."
"Yes, I do."
"I'm bought by the government for to-day."
"All the same, that old fellow bothers me."
"Do the old fellows bother you?
But you're not a young girl."
"He's in the first carriage."
"Well?"
"In the bride's trap."
"What then?"
"So he is the father."
"What concern is that of mine?"
"I tell you that he's the father."
"As if he were the only father."
"Listen."
"What?"
"I can't go out otherwise than masked.
Here I'm concealed, no one knows that I'm here.
But to-morrow, there will be no more maskers. It's Ash Wednesday.
I run the risk of being nabbed.
I must sneak back into my hole.
But you are free."
"Not particularly."
"More than I am, at any rate."
"Well, what of that?"
"You must try to find out where that wedding-party went
to."
"Where it went?"
"Yes."
"I know."
"Where is it going then?"
"To the Cadran-Bleu."
"In the first place, it's not in that direction."
"Well! to la Rapee."
"Or elsewhere."
"It's free.
Wedding-parties are at liberty."
"That's not the point at all.
I tell you that you must try to learn for me what that wedding
is, who that old cove belongs to, and where that wedding pair
lives."
"I like that! that would be queer.
It's so easy to find out a wedding-party that passed through
the street on a Shrove Tuesday, a week afterwards.
A pin in a hay-mow! It ain't possible!"
"That don't matter.
You must try.
You understand me, Azelma."
The two files resumed their movement on both sides of the
boulevard, in opposite directions, and the carriage of the maskers
lost sight of the "trap" of the bride.
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