3.V.3.12. THE GRANDFATHER
BASQUE and the porter had carried Marius into the drawing-room,
as he still lay stretched out, motionless, on the sofa
upon which he had been placed on his arrival. The doctor
who had been sent for had hastened thither. Aunt Gillenormand
had risen.
Aunt Gillenormand went and came, in affright, wringing
her hands and incapable of doing anything but saying:
"Heavens! is it possible?" At times she added: "Everything
will be covered with blood." When her first horror
had passed off, a certain philosophy of the situation penetrated
her mind, and took form in the exclamation: "It was
bound to end in this way!" She did not go so far as: "I told
you so!" which is customary on this sort of occasion. At
the physician's orders, a camp bed had been prepared beside
the sofa. The doctor examined Marius, and after having
found that his pulse was still beating, that the wounded man
had no very deep wound on his breast, and that the blood on
the corners of his lips proceeded from his nostrils, he had him
placed flat on the bed, without a pillow, with his head on the
same level as his body, and even a trifle lower, and with his
bust bare in order to facilitate respiration. Mademoiselle
Gillenormand, on perceiving that they were undressing
Marius, withdrew. She set herself to telling her beads in her
own chamber.
The trunk had not suffered any internal injury; a bullet,
deadened by the pocket-book, had turned aside and made the
tour of his ribs with a hideous laceration, which was of no
great depth, and consequently, not dangerous. The long,
underground journey had completed the dislocation of the
broken collar-bone, and the disorder there was serious. The
arms had been slashed with sabre cuts. Not a single scar
disfigured his face; but his head was fairly covered with cuts;
what would be the result of these wounds on the head? Would
they stop short at the hairy cuticle, or would they attack the
brain? As yet, this could not be decided. A grave symptom
was that they had caused a swoon, and that people do not
always recover from such swoons. Moreover, the wounded
man had been exhausted by hemorrhage. From the waist
down, the barricade had protected the lower part of the body
from injury.
Basque and Nicolette tore up linen and prepared bandages;
Nicolette sewed them, Basque rolled them. As lint was lacking,
the doctor, for the time being, arrested the bleeding with
layers of wadding. Beside the bed, three candles burned on a
table where the case of surgical instruments lay spread out.
The doctor bathed Marius' face and hair with cold water. A
full pail was reddened in an instant. The porter, candle in
hand, lighted them.
The doctor seemed to be pondering sadly. From time to
time, he made a negative sign with his head, as though replying
to some question which he had inwardly addressed to
himself.
A bad sign for the sick man are these mysterious dialogues
of the doctor with himself.
At the moment when the doctor was wiping Marius' face,
and lightly touching his still closed eyes with his finger, a
door opened at the end of the drawing-room, and a long, pallid
figure made its appearance.
This was the grandfather.
The revolt had, for the past two days, deeply agitated,
enraged
and engrossed the mind of M. Gillenormand. He had
not been able to sleep on the previous night, and he had been
in a fever all day long. In the evening, he had gone to bed
very early, recommending that everything in the house should
be well barred, and he had fallen into a doze through sheer
fatigue.
Old men sleep lightly; M. Gillenormand's chamber adjoined
the drawing-room, and in spite of all the precautions that had
been taken, the noise had awakened him. Surprised at the
rift of light which he saw under his door, he had risen from
his bed, and had groped his way thither.
He stood astonished on the threshold, one hand on the
handle of the half-open door, with his head bent a little
forward and quivering, his body wrapped in a white dressing-gown,
which was straight and as destitute of folds as a winding-sheet;
and he had the air of a phantom who is gazing into a tomb.
He saw the bed, and on the mattress that young man,
bleeding, white with a waxen whiteness, with closed eyes and
gaping mouth, and pallid lips, stripped to the waist, slashed
all over with crimson wounds, motionless and brilliantly
lighted up.
The grandfather trembled from head to foot as powerfully
as ossified limbs can tremble, his eyes, whose corneae were
yellow on account of his great age, were veiled in a sort of
vitreous glitter, his whole face assumed in an instant the
earthy angles of a skull, his arms fell pendent, as though a
spring had broken, and his amazement was betrayed by the
outspreading of the fingers of his two aged hands, which
quivered all over, his knees formed an angle in front, allowing,
through the opening in his dressing-gown, a view of his poor
bare legs, all bristling with white hairs, and he murmured:
"Marius!"
"Sir," said Basque, "Monsieur has just been brought back.
He went to the barricade, and . ."
"He is dead!" cried the old man in a terrible voice. "Ah!
The rascal!"
Then a sort of sepulchral transformation straightened up
this centenarian as erect as a young man.
"Sir," said he, "you are the doctor. Begin by telling me
one thing. He is dead, is he not?"
The doctor, who was at the highest pitch of anxiety,
remained
silent.
M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with an outburst of
terrible laughter.
"He is dead! He is dead! He is dead! He has got himself
killed on the barricades! Out of hatred to me! He did that
to spite me! Ah! You blood-drinker! This is the way he
returns to me! Misery of my life, he is dead!"
He went to the window, threw it wide open as though he
were stifling, and, erect before the darkness, he began to talk
into the street, to the night:
"Pierced, sabred, exterminated, slashed, hacked in pieces!
Just look at that, the villain! He knew well that I was waiting
for him, and that I had had his room arranged, and that I
had placed at the head of my bed his portrait taken when he
was a little child! He knew well that he had only to come
back, and that I had been recalling him for years, and that I
remained by my fireside, with my hands on my knees, not
knowing what to do, and that I was mad over it! You knew
well, that you had but to return and to say: 'It is I,' and
you would have been the master of the house, and that I
should have obeyed you, and that you could have done whatever
you pleased with your old numskull of a grandfather!
you knew that well, and you said:
"No, he is a Royalist, I will not go! And you went to the
barricades, and you got yourself killed out of malice! To
revenge yourself for what I said to you about Monsieur le Duc
de Berry. It is infamous! Go to bed then and sleep tranquilly!
he is dead, and this is my awakening."
The doctor, who was beginning to be uneasy in both
quarters,
quitted Marius for a moment, went to M. Gillenormand,
and took his arm. The grandfather turned round, gazed at
him with eyes which seemed exaggerated in size and bloodshot,
and said to him calmly:
"I thank you, sir. I am composed, I am a man, I witnessed
the death of Louis XVI., I know how to bear events. One
thing is terrible and that is to think that it is your newspapers
which do all the mischief. You will have scribblers,
chatterers, lawyers, orators, tribunes, discussions, progress,
enlightenment, the rights of man, the liberty of the press, and
this is the way that your children will be brought home to you.
Ah! Marius! It is abominable! Killed! Dead before me!
A barricade! Ah, the scamp! Doctor, you live in this quarter,
I believe? Oh! I know you well. I see your cabriolet pass
my window. I am going to tell you. You are wrong to think
that I am angry. One does not fly into a rage against a dead
man. That would be stupid. This is a child whom I have
reared. I was already old while he was very young. He
played in the Tuileries garden with his little shovel and his
little chair, and in order that the inspectors might not
grumble, I stopped up the holes that he made in the earth
with his shovel, with my cane. One day he exclaimed:
Down with Louis XVIII.! and off he went. It was no fault
of mine. He was all rosy and blond. His mother is dead.
Have you ever noticed that all little children are blond? Why
is it so? He is the son of one of those brigands of the Loire,
but children are innocent of their fathers' crimes. I remember
when he was no higher than that. He could not manage to
pronounce his Ds. He had a way of talking that was so sweet
and indistinct that you would have thought it was a bird
chirping. I remember that once, in front of the Hercules
Farnese, people formed a circle to admire him and marvel at
him, he was so handsome, was that child! He had a head
such as you see in pictures. I talked in a deep voice, and I
frightened him with my cane, but he knew very well that it
was only to make him laugh. In the morning, when he
entered my room, I grumbled, but he was like the sunlight to
me, all the same. One cannot defend oneself against those
brats. They take hold of you, they hold you fast, they never
let you go again. The truth is, that there never was a cupid
like that child. Now, what can you say for your Lafayettes,
your Benjamin Constants, and your Tirecuir de Corcelles who
have killed him? This cannot be allowed to pass in this
fashion."
He approached Marius, who still lay livid and motionless,
and to whom the physician had returned, and began
once more to wring his hands. The old man's pallid lips
moved as though mechanically, and permitted the passage
of words that were barely audible, like breaths in the death
agony:
"Ah! heartless lad! Ahi! clubbist! Ah! wretch! Ah!
Septembrist!"
Reproaches in the low voice of an agonizing man, addressed
to a corpse.
Little by little, as it is always indispensable that
internal
eruptions should come to the light, the sequence of words
returned, but the grandfather appeared no longer to have the
strength to utter them, his voice was so weak, and extinct,
that it seemed to come from the other side of an abyss:
"It is all the same to me, I am going to die too, that I
am.
And to think that there is not a hussy in Paris who would not
have been delighted to make this wretch happy! A scamp
who, instead of amusing himself and enjoying life, went off
to fight and get himself shot down like a brute! And for
whom? Why? For the Republic! Instead of going to
dance at the Chaumiere, as it is the duty of young folks to
do! What's the use of being twenty years old? The Republic,
a cursed pretty folly! Poor mothers, beget fine boys,
do! Come, he is dead. That will make two funerals under the
same carriage gate. So you have got yourself arranged like
this for the sake of General Lamarque's handsome eyes!
What had that General Lamarque done to you? A slasher!
A chatter-box! To get oneself killed for a dead man! If
that isn't enough to drive any one mad! Just think of it!
At twenty! And without so much as turning his head to see
whether he was not leaving something behind him! That's
the way poor, good old fellows are forced to die alone, now-a-days.
Perish in your corner, owl! Well, after all, so much
the better, that is what I was hoping for, this will kill me on
the spot. I am too old, I am a hundred years old, I am a hundred
thousand years old, I ought, by rights, to have been dead
long ago. This blow puts an end to it. So all is over, what
happiness! What is the good of making him inhale ammonia
and all that parcel of drugs? You are wasting your trouble,
you fool of a doctor! Come, he's dead, completely dead. I
know all about it, I am dead myself too. He hasn't done
things by half. Yes, this age is infamous, infamous and that's
what I think of you, of your ideas, of your systems, of your
masters, of your oracles, of your doctors, of your scape-graces
of writers, of your rascally philosophers, and of all the
revolutions
which, for the last sixty years, have been frightening the
flocks of crows in the Tuileries! But you were pitiless in
getting yourself killed like this, I shall not even grieve
over your death, do you understand, you assassin?"
At that moment, Marius slowly opened his eyes, and his
glance, still dimmed by lethargic wonder, rested on M.
Gillenormand.
"Marius!" cried the old man. "Marius! My little Marius!
my child! my well-beloved son! You open your eyes, you gaze
upon me, you are alive, thanks!"
And he fell fainting.