Kabanata Kabanata 174 · THE CONSEQUENCES OF HAVING MET A WARDEN

Where it was that Marius went will be disclosed a little further on.

Marius was absent for three days, then he returned to Paris, went

straight to the library of the law-school and asked for the files of

the _Moniteur_.

He read the _Moniteur_, he read all the histories of the Republic and

the Empire, the _Memorial de Sainte-Hélène_, all the memoirs, all the

newspapers, the bulletins, the proclamations; he devoured everything.

The first time that he came across his father’s name in the bulletins

of the grand army, he had a fever for a week. He went to see the

generals under whom Georges Pontmercy had served, among others, Comte

H. Church-warden Mabeuf, whom he went to see again, told him about the

life at Vernon, the colonel’s retreat, his flowers, his solitude.

Marius came to a full knowledge of that rare, sweet, and sublime man,

that species of lion-lamb who had been his father.

In the meanwhile, occupied as he was with this study which absorbed all

his moments as well as his thoughts, he hardly saw the Gillenormands at

all. He made his appearance at meals; then they searched for him, and

he was not to be found. Father Gillenormand smiled. “Bah! bah! He is

just of the age for the girls!” Sometimes the old man added: “The

deuce! I thought it was only an affair of gallantry. It seems that it

is an affair of passion!”

It was a passion, in fact. Marius was on the high road to adoring his

father.

At the same time, his ideas underwent an extraordinary change. The

phases of this change were numerous and successive. As this is the

history of many minds of our day, we think it will prove useful to

follow these phases step by step and to indicate them all.

That history upon which he had just cast his eyes appalled him.

The first effect was to dazzle him.

Up to that time, the Republic, the Empire, had been to him only

monstrous words. The Republic, a guillotine in the twilight; the

Empire, a sword in the night. He had just taken a look at it, and where

he had expected to find only a chaos of shadows, he had beheld, with a

sort of unprecedented surprise, mingled with fear and joy, stars

sparkling, Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre, Camille,

Desmoulins, Danton, and a sun arise, Napoleon. He did not know where he

stood. He recoiled, blinded by the brilliant lights. Little by little,

when his astonishment had passed off, he grew accustomed to this

radiance, he contemplated these deeds without dizziness, he examined

these personages without terror; the Revolution and the Empire

presented themselves luminously, in perspective, before his mind’s eye;

he beheld each of these groups of events and of men summed up in two

tremendous facts: the Republic in the sovereignty of civil right

restored to the masses, the Empire in the sovereignty of the French

idea imposed on Europe; he beheld the grand figure of the people emerge

from the Revolution, and the grand figure of France spring forth from

the Empire. He asserted in his conscience, that all this had been good.

What his dazzled state neglected in this, his first far too synthetic

estimation, we do not think it necessary to point out here. It is the

state of a mind on the march that we are recording. Progress is not

accomplished in one stage. That stated, once for all, in connection

with what precedes as well as with what is to follow, we continue.

He then perceived that, up to that moment, he had comprehended his

country no more than he had comprehended his father. He had not known

either the one or the other, and a sort of voluntary night had obscured

his eyes. Now he saw, and on the one hand he admired, while on the

other he adored.

He was filled with regret and remorse, and he reflected in despair that

all he had in his soul could now be said only to the tomb. Oh! if his

father had still been in existence, if he had still had him, if God, in

his compassion and his goodness, had permitted his father to be still

among the living, how he would have run, how he would have precipitated

himself, how he would have cried to his father: “Father! Here I am! It

is I! I have the same heart as thou! I am thy son!” How he would have

embraced that white head, bathed his hair in tears, gazed upon his

scar, pressed his hands, adored his garment, kissed his feet! Oh! Why

had his father died so early, before his time, before the justice, the

love of his son had come to him? Marius had a continual sob in his

heart, which said to him every moment: “Alas!” At the same time, he

became more truly serious, more truly grave, more sure of his thought

and his faith. At each instant, gleams of the true came to complete his

reason. An inward growth seemed to be in progress within him. He was

conscious of a sort of natural enlargement, which gave him two things

that were new to him—his father and his country.

As everything opens when one has a key, so he explained to himself that

which he had hated, he penetrated that which he had abhorred;

henceforth he plainly perceived the providential, divine and human

sense of the great things which he had been taught to detest, and of

the great men whom he had been instructed to curse. When he reflected

on his former opinions, which were but those of yesterday, and which,

nevertheless, seemed to him already so very ancient, he grew indignant,

yet he smiled.

From the rehabilitation of his father, he naturally passed to the

rehabilitation of Napoleon.

But the latter, we will confess, was not effected without labor.

From his infancy, he had been imbued with the judgments of the party of

1814, on Bonaparte. Now, all the prejudices of the Restoration, all its

interests, all its instincts tended to disfigure Napoleon. It execrated

him even more than it did Robespierre. It had very cleverly turned to

sufficiently good account the fatigue of the nation, and the hatred of

mothers. Bonaparte had become an almost fabulous monster, and in order

to paint him to the imagination of the people, which, as we lately

pointed out, resembles the imagination of children, the party of 1814

made him appear under all sorts of terrifying masks in succession, from

that which is terrible though it remains grandiose to that which is

terrible and becomes grotesque, from Tiberius to the bugaboo. Thus, in

speaking of Bonaparte, one was free to sob or to puff up with laughter,

provided that hatred lay at the bottom. Marius had never

entertained—about _that man_, as he was called—any other ideas in his

mind. They had combined with the tenacity which existed in his nature.

There was in him a headstrong little man who hated Napoleon.

On reading history, on studying him, especially in the documents and

materials for history, the veil which concealed Napoleon from the eyes

of Marius was gradually rent. He caught a glimpse of something immense,

and he suspected that he had been deceived up to that moment, on the

score of Bonaparte as about all the rest; each day he saw more

distinctly; and he set about mounting, slowly, step by step, almost

regretfully in the beginning, then with intoxication and as though

attracted by an irresistible fascination, first the sombre steps, then

the vaguely illuminated steps, at last the luminous and splendid steps

of enthusiasm.

One night, he was alone in his little chamber near the roof. His candle

was burning; he was reading, with his elbows resting on his table close

to the open window. All sorts of reveries reached him from space, and

mingled with his thoughts. What a spectacle is the night! One hears

dull sounds, without knowing whence they proceed; one beholds Jupiter,

which is twelve hundred times larger than the earth, glowing like a

firebrand, the azure is black, the stars shine; it is formidable.

He was perusing the bulletins of the grand army, those heroic strophes

penned on the field of battle; there, at intervals, he beheld his

father’s name, always the name of the Emperor; the whole of that great

Empire presented itself to him; he felt a flood swelling and rising

within him; it seemed to him at moments that his father passed close to

him like a breath, and whispered in his ear; he gradually got into a

singular state; he thought that he heard drums, cannon, trumpets, the

measured tread of battalions, the dull and distant gallop of the

cavalry; from time to time, his eyes were raised heavenward, and gazed

upon the colossal constellations as they gleamed in the measureless

depths of space, then they fell upon his book once more, and there they

beheld other colossal things moving confusedly. His heart contracted

within him. He was in a transport, trembling, panting. All at once,

without himself knowing what was in him, and what impulse he was

obeying, he sprang to his feet, stretched both arms out of the window,

gazed intently into the gloom, the silence, the infinite darkness, the

eternal immensity, and exclaimed: “Long live the Emperor!”

From that moment forth, all was over; the Ogre of Corsica,—the

usurper,—the tyrant,—the monster who was the lover of his own

sisters,—the actor who took lessons of Talma,—the poisoner of

Jaffa,—the tiger,—Buonaparte,—all this vanished, and gave place in his

mind to a vague and brilliant radiance in which shone, at an

inaccessible height, the pale marble phantom of Cæsar. The Emperor had

been for his father only the well-beloved captain whom one admires, for

whom one sacrifices one’s self; he was something more to Marius. He was

the predestined constructor of the French group, succeeding the Roman

group in the domination of the universe. He was a prodigious architect,

of a destruction, the continuer of Charlemagne, of Louis XI., of Henry

IV., of Richelieu, of Louis XIV., and of the Committee of Public

Safety, having his spots, no doubt, his faults, his crimes even, being

a man, that is to say; but august in his faults, brilliant in his

spots, powerful in his crime.

He was the predestined man, who had forced all nations to say: “The

great nation!” He was better than that, he was the very incarnation of

France, conquering Europe by the sword which he grasped, and the world

by the light which he shed. Marius saw in Bonaparte the dazzling

spectre which will always rise upon the frontier, and which will guard

the future. Despot but dictator; a despot resulting from a republic and

summing up a revolution. Napoleon became for him the man-people as

Jesus Christ is the man-God.

It will be perceived, that like all new converts to a religion, his

conversion intoxicated him, he hurled himself headlong into adhesion

and he went too far. His nature was so constructed; once on the

downward slope, it was almost impossible for him to put on the drag.

Fanaticism for the sword took possession of him, and complicated in his

mind his enthusiasm for the idea. He did not perceive that, along with

genius, and pell-mell, he was admitting force, that is to say, that he

was installing in two compartments of his idolatry, on the one hand

that which is divine, on the other that which is brutal. In many

respects, he had set about deceiving himself otherwise. He admitted

everything. There is a way of encountering error while on one’s way to

the truth. He had a violent sort of good faith which took everything in

the lump. In the new path which he had entered on, in judging the

mistakes of the old regime, as in measuring the glory of Napoleon, he

neglected the attenuating circumstances.

At all events, a tremendous step had been taken. Where he had formerly

beheld the fall of the monarchy, he now saw the advent of France. His

orientation had changed. What had been his East became the West. He had

turned squarely round.

All these revolutions were accomplished within him, without his family

obtaining an inkling of the case.

When, during this mysterious labor, he had entirely shed his old

Bourbon and ultra skin, when he had cast off the aristocrat, the

Jacobite and the Royalist, when he had become thoroughly a

revolutionist, profoundly democratic and republican, he went to an

engraver on the Quai des Orfévres and ordered a hundred cards bearing

this name: _Le Baron Marius Pontmercy_.

This was only the strictly logical consequence of the change which had

taken place in him, a change in which everything gravitated round his

father.

Only, as he did not know any one and could not sow his cards with any

porter, he put them in his pocket.

By another natural consequence, in proportion as he drew nearer to his

father, to the latter’s memory, and to the things for which the colonel

had fought five and twenty years before, he receded from his

grandfather. We have long ago said, that M. Gillenormand’s temper did

not please him. There already existed between them all the dissonances

of the grave young man and the frivolous old man. The gayety of Géronte

shocks and exasperates the melancholy of Werther. So long as the same

political opinions and the same ideas had been common to them both,

Marius had met M. Gillenormand there as on a bridge. When the bridge

fell, an abyss was formed. And then, over and above all, Marius

experienced unutterable impulses to revolt, when he reflected that it

was M. Gillenormand who had, from stupid motives, torn him ruthlessly

from the colonel, thus depriving the father of the child, and the child

of the father.

By dint of pity for his father, Marius had nearly arrived at aversion

for his grandfather.

Nothing of this sort, however, was betrayed on the exterior, as we have

already said. Only he grew colder and colder; laconic at meals, and

rare in the house. When his aunt scolded him for it, he was very gentle

and alleged his studies, his lectures, the examinations, etc., as a

pretext. His grandfather never departed from his infallible diagnosis:

“In love! I know all about it.”

From time to time Marius absented himself.

“Where is it that he goes off like this?” said his aunt.

On one of these trips, which were always very brief, he went to

Montfermeil, in order to obey the injunction which his father had left

him, and he sought the old sergeant to Waterloo, the inn-keeper

Thénardier. Thénardier had failed, the inn was closed, and no one knew

what had become of him. Marius was away from the house for four days on

this quest.

“He is getting decidedly wild,” said his grandfather.

They thought they had noticed that he wore something on his breast,

under his shirt, which was attached to his neck by a black ribbon.