2.M.3.6. 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-Helene, 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 Caesar. 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 Orfevres 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 Geronte 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 Thenardier. Thenardier 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.