Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER I—THE LARK’S MEADOW
2200 words | Chapter 307
Marius had witnessed the unexpected termination of the ambush upon
whose track he had set Javert; but Javert had no sooner quitted the
building, bearing off his prisoners in three hackney-coaches, than
Marius also glided out of the house. It was only nine o’clock in the
evening. Marius betook himself to Courfeyrac. Courfeyrac was no longer
the imperturbable inhabitant of the Latin Quarter, he had gone to live
in the Rue de la Verrerie “for political reasons”; this quarter was one
where, at that epoch, insurrection liked to install itself. Marius said
to Courfeyrac: “I have come to sleep with you.” Courfeyrac dragged a
mattress off his bed, which was furnished with two, spread it out on
the floor, and said: “There.”
At seven o’clock on the following morning, Marius returned to the
hovel, paid the quarter’s rent which he owed to Ma’am Bougon, had his
books, his bed, his table, his commode, and his two chairs loaded on a
hand-cart and went off without leaving his address, so that when Javert
returned in the course of the morning, for the purpose of questioning
Marius as to the events of the preceding evening, he found only Ma’am
Bougon, who answered: “Moved away!”
Ma’am Bougon was convinced that Marius was to some extent an accomplice
of the robbers who had been seized the night before. “Who would ever
have said it?” she exclaimed to the portresses of the quarter, “a young
man like that, who had the air of a girl!”
Marius had two reasons for this prompt change of residence. The first
was, that he now had a horror of that house, where he had beheld, so
close at hand, and in its most repulsive and most ferocious
development, a social deformity which is, perhaps, even more terrible
than the wicked rich man, the wicked poor man. The second was, that he
did not wish to figure in the lawsuit which would insue in all
probability, and be brought in to testify against Thénardier.
Javert thought that the young man, whose name he had forgotten, was
afraid, and had fled, or perhaps, had not even returned home at the
time of the ambush; he made some efforts to find him, however, but
without success.
A month passed, then another. Marius was still with Courfeyrac. He had
learned from a young licentiate in law, an habitual frequenter of the
courts, that Thénardier was in close confinement. Every Monday, Marius
had five francs handed in to the clerk’s office of La Force for
Thénardier.
As Marius had no longer any money, he borrowed the five francs from
Courfeyrac. It was the first time in his life that he had ever borrowed
money. These periodical five francs were a double riddle to Courfeyrac
who lent and to Thénardier who received them. “To whom can they go?”
thought Courfeyrac. “Whence can this come to me?” Thénardier asked
himself.
Moreover, Marius was heart-broken. Everything had plunged through a
trap-door once more. He no longer saw anything before him; his life was
again buried in mystery where he wandered fumblingly. He had for a
moment beheld very close at hand, in that obscurity, the young girl
whom he loved, the old man who seemed to be her father, those unknown
beings, who were his only interest and his only hope in this world;
and, at the very moment when he thought himself on the point of
grasping them, a gust had swept all these shadows away. Not a spark of
certainty and truth had been emitted even in the most terrible of
collisions. No conjecture was possible. He no longer knew even the name
that he thought he knew. It certainly was not Ursule. And the Lark was
a nickname. And what was he to think of the old man? Was he actually in
hiding from the police? The white-haired workman whom Marius had
encountered in the vicinity of the Invalides recurred to his mind. It
now seemed probable that that workingman and M. Leblanc were one and
the same person. So he disguised himself? That man had his heroic and
his equivocal sides. Why had he not called for help? Why had he fled?
Was he, or was he not, the father of the young girl? Was he, in short,
the man whom Thénardier thought that he recognized? Thénardier might
have been mistaken. These formed so many insoluble problems. All this,
it is true, detracted nothing from the angelic charms of the young girl
of the Luxembourg. Heart-rending distress; Marius bore a passion in his
heart, and night over his eyes. He was thrust onward, he was drawn, and
he could not stir. All had vanished, save love. Of love itself he had
lost the instincts and the sudden illuminations. Ordinarily, this flame
which burns us lights us also a little, and casts some useful gleams
without. But Marius no longer even heard these mute counsels of
passion. He never said to himself: “What if I were to go to such a
place? What if I were to try such and such a thing?” The girl whom he
could no longer call Ursule was evidently somewhere; nothing warned
Marius in what direction he should seek her. His whole life was now
summed up in two words; absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable
fog. To see her once again; he still aspired to this, but he no longer
expected it.
To crown all, his poverty had returned. He felt that icy breath close
to him, on his heels. In the midst of his torments, and long before
this, he had discontinued his work, and nothing is more dangerous than
discontinued work; it is a habit which vanishes. A habit which is easy
to get rid of, and difficult to take up again.
A certain amount of dreaming is good, like a narcotic in discreet
doses. It lulls to sleep the fevers of the mind at labor, which are
sometimes severe, and produces in the spirit a soft and fresh vapor
which corrects the over-harsh contours of pure thought, fills in gaps
here and there, binds together and rounds off the angles of the ideas.
But too much dreaming sinks and drowns. Woe to the brain-worker who
allows himself to fall entirely from thought into reverie! He thinks
that he can re-ascend with equal ease, and he tells himself that, after
all, it is the same thing. Error!
Thought is the toil of the intelligence, reverie its voluptuousness. To
replace thought with reverie is to confound a poison with a food.
Marius had begun in that way, as the reader will remember. Passion had
supervened and had finished the work of precipitating him into chimæras
without object or bottom. One no longer emerges from one’s self except
for the purpose of going off to dream. Idle production. Tumultuous and
stagnant gulf. And, in proportion as labor diminishes, needs increase.
This is a law. Man, in a state of reverie, is generally prodigal and
slack; the unstrung mind cannot hold life within close bounds.
There is, in that mode of life, good mingled with evil, for if
enervation is baleful, generosity is good and healthful. But the poor
man who is generous and noble, and who does not work, is lost.
Resources are exhausted, needs crop up.
Fatal declivity down which the most honest and the firmest as well as
the most feeble and most vicious are drawn, and which ends in one of
two holds, suicide or crime.
By dint of going outdoors to think, the day comes when one goes out to
throw one’s self in the water.
Excess of reverie breeds men like Escousse and Lebras.
Marius was descending this declivity at a slow pace, with his eyes
fixed on the girl whom he no longer saw. What we have just written
seems strange, and yet it is true. The memory of an absent being
kindles in the darkness of the heart; the more it has disappeared, the
more it beams; the gloomy and despairing soul sees this light on its
horizon; the star of the inner night. She—that was Marius’ whole
thought. He meditated of nothing else; he was confusedly conscious that
his old coat was becoming an impossible coat, and that his new coat was
growing old, that his shirts were wearing out, that his hat was wearing
out, that his boots were giving out, and he said to himself: “If I
could but see her once again before I die!”
One sweet idea alone was left to him, that she had loved him, that her
glance had told him so, that she did not know his name, but that she
did know his soul, and that, wherever she was, however mysterious the
place, she still loved him perhaps. Who knows whether she were not
thinking of him as he was thinking of her? Sometimes, in those
inexplicable hours such as are experienced by every heart that loves,
though he had no reasons for anything but sadness and yet felt an
obscure quiver of joy, he said to himself: “It is her thoughts that are
coming to me!” Then he added: “Perhaps my thoughts reach her also.”
This illusion, at which he shook his head a moment later, was
sufficient, nevertheless, to throw beams, which at times resembled
hope, into his soul. From time to time, especially at that evening hour
which is the most depressing to even the dreamy, he allowed the purest,
the most impersonal, the most ideal of the reveries which filled his
brain, to fall upon a notebook which contained nothing else. He called
this “writing to her.”
It must not be supposed that his reason was deranged. Quite the
contrary. He had lost the faculty of working and of moving firmly
towards any fixed goal, but he was endowed with more clear-sightedness
and rectitude than ever. Marius surveyed by a calm and real, although
peculiar light, what passed before his eyes, even the most indifferent
deeds and men; he pronounced a just criticism on everything with a sort
of honest dejection and candid disinterestedness. His judgment, which
was almost wholly disassociated from hope, held itself aloof and soared
on high.
In this state of mind nothing escaped him, nothing deceived him, and
every moment he was discovering the foundation of life, of humanity,
and of destiny. Happy, even in the midst of anguish, is he to whom God
has given a soul worthy of love and of unhappiness! He who has not
viewed the things of this world and the heart of man under this double
light has seen nothing and knows nothing of the true.
The soul which loves and suffers is in a state of sublimity.
However, day followed day, and nothing new presented itself. It merely
seemed to him, that the sombre space which still remained to be
traversed by him was growing shorter with every instant. He thought
that he already distinctly perceived the brink of the bottomless abyss.
“What!” he repeated to himself, “shall I not see her again before
then!”
When you have ascended the Rue Saint-Jacques, left the barrier on one
side and followed the old inner boulevard for some distance, you reach
the Rue de la Santé, then the Glacière, and, a little while before
arriving at the little river of the Gobelins, you come to a sort of
field which is the only spot in the long and monotonous chain of the
boulevards of Paris, where Ruysdael would be tempted to sit down.
There is something indescribable there which exhales grace, a green
meadow traversed by tightly stretched lines, from which flutter rags
drying in the wind, and an old market-gardener’s house, built in the
time of Louis XIII., with its great roof oddly pierced with dormer
windows, dilapidated palisades, a little water amid poplar-trees,
women, voices, laughter; on the horizon the Panthéon, the pole of the
Deaf-Mutes, the Val-de-Grâce, black, squat, fantastic, amusing,
magnificent, and in the background, the severe square crests of the
towers of Notre Dame.
As the place is worth looking at, no one goes thither. Hardly one cart
or wagoner passes in a quarter of an hour.
It chanced that Marius’ solitary strolls led him to this plot of
ground, near the water. That day, there was a rarity on the boulevard,
a passer-by. Marius, vaguely impressed with the almost savage beauty of
the place, asked this passer-by:—“What is the name of this spot?”
The person replied: “It is the Lark’s meadow.”
And he added: “It was here that Ulbach killed the shepherdess of Ivry.”
But after the word “Lark” Marius heard nothing more. These sudden
congealments in the state of reverie, which a single word suffices to
evoke, do occur. The entire thought is abruptly condensed around an
idea, and it is no longer capable of perceiving anything else.
The Lark was the appellation which had replaced Ursule in the depths of
Marius’ melancholy.—“Stop,” said he with a sort of unreasoning stupor
peculiar to these mysterious asides, “this is her meadow. I shall know
where she lives now.”
It was absurd, but irresistible.
And every day he returned to that meadow of the Lark.
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