บทที่ บทที่ 349 · 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

tête-à-tête 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

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 régime 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

Parc-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 nowadays. 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, tapissières,

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 downstream, the other upstream, the one

towards the Chaussée 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 Bœuf 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 Mænads 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 Vadé.

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 crossroads.” 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. Collé, 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.

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 Rapée.”

“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.