 Chapter 1-4 of Book 1 of Les Miserables, Volume 3, by Victor Hugo. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Caitlin Foley. Les Miserables, Volume 3, by Victor Hugo. Translated by Isabelle Florence Hapgood. Book 1. Paris Studied in its Atom. Chapter 1. Parvellous. Paris has a child, and the forest has a bird. The bird is called the sparrow. The child is called the gammon. Couple these two ideas, which contain—the one all the furnace, the other all the dawn—strike these two sparks together—Paris, childhood—their leaps out from them a little being. Omuncio, Plautus would say. This little being is joyous. He has not food every day, and he goes to the play every evening if he sees good. He has no shirt on his body, no shoes on his feet, no roof over his head. He is like the flies of heaven, who have none of these things. He is from seven to thirteen years of age. He lives in bands, roams the streets, lodges in the open air, wears an old pair of trousers of his father's, which descend below his heels. An old hat of some other father, which descends below his ears. A single suspender of yellow listing. He runs, lies in wait, rummages about, wastes time, blackens pipes, swears like a convict, wants the wine-shops, knows thieves, calls ye women thou, talks slang, sings obscene songs, and has no evil in his heart. This is because he has in his heart a pearl, innocence, and pearls are not to be dissolved in mud. So long as man is in his childhood, God wills that he shall be innocent. If one were to ask that enormity, what is this? She would reply, it is my little one. CHAPTER II Some of his particular characteristics. The gammon, the street-arab, of Paris is the dwarf of the giant. Let us not exaggerate, this cherub of the gutter sometimes has a shirt, but in that case he owns but one. He sometimes has shoes, but then they have no souls. He sometimes has a lodging, and he loves it, for he finds his mother there. But he prefers the street, because there he finds liberty. He has his own games, his own bits of mischief whose foundations consists of hatred for the bourgeois, his peculiar metaphors, to be dead is to eat dandelions by the root. His own preoccupations, calling hackney-coaches, letting down carriage-steps, establishing means of transit between the two sides of a street in heavy rains, which he calls making the bridge of arts, crying discourses pronounced by the authorities in favour of the French people, cleaning out cracks in the pavement. He has his own coinage, which is composed of all the little morsels of worked copper which are found on the public streets. This curious money, which receives the name of Lux, Rags, has an invariable and well-regulated currency in this little bohemia of children. Lastly he has his own fauna, which he observes attentively in the corners. The ladybird, the deft's head plant-loves, the daddy long legs, the devil, a black insect which menaces by twisting about its tail armed with two horns. He has his fabulous monster, which has scales under its belly but is not a lizard, which has pustules on its back but is not a toad, which inhabits the nooks of old lime kilns and wells that have run dry, which is black, hairy, sticky, which crawls sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, which has no cry but which has a look and is so terrible that no one has ever beheld it. He calls this monster the deft thing. The search for these deft things among the stones is a joy of formidable nature. Another pleasure consists in suddenly prying up a paving-stone and taking a look at the wood-lice. Each region of Paris is celebrated for the interesting treasures which are to be found there. There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of Ursuline, there are millipedes in the pantheon, there are tadpoles in the ditches of the chandumars. As far as sayings are concerned, this child has as many of them as tolerant. He is no less cynical but he is more honest. He is endowed with a certain indescribable, unexpected joviality. He upsets the composure of the shopkeeper with his wild laughter. He ranges boldly from high comedy to farce. A funeral passes by. Among those who are accompanying the dead, there is a doctor. Hey, there, shouts some street-arab, how long has it been customary for doctors to carry home their own work? There is in a crowd a grave-man adorned with spectacles and trinkets, turns round indignantly. You're good for nothing, you've seized my wife's waist. I, sir, search me. Chapter III. He is agreeable. In the evening, thanks to a few Sue, which he always finds means to procure, the Amuncio enters a theatre. On crossing that magic threshold he becomes transfigured. He was the street-arab. He becomes the titi. Theaters are a sort of ship turned upside down with the keel in the air. It is in that keel that the titi huddles together. The titi is to the gammon what the moth is to the larva, the same being endowed with wings and soaring. It suffices for him to be there, with his radiance and happiness, with his power of enthusiasm and joy, with his hand clapping, which resembles a clapping of wings, to confer on that narrow, dark, fetid, sorted, unhealthy, hideous, abominable keel, the name of paradise. Bestow on an individual the useless and a privam of the necessary, and you have the gammon. The gammon is not devoid of literary intuition. His tendency, as we say it, with the proper amount of regret, would not constitute classic taste. He is not very academic by nature. Thus, to give an example, the popularity of Mademoiselle Mawse, among that little audience of stormy children, was seasoned with a touch of irony. The gammon called her Mademoiselle Mouche, hide yourself. This being balls and scoffs and ridicules and fights, has rags like a baby and tatters like a philosopher. Fishes in the sewer, hunts in the cesspool, extracts mirth from foulness, whips up the squares with his wit, grins and bites, whistles and sings, shouts and shrieks, tempers alleluia with mantarte allugat, chants every rhyme from the defundest to the jack-pudding, finds, without seeking, knows what he is ignorant of, is a Spartan to the point of thieving, is mad to wisdom, is lyrical to filth, would crouch down on Olympus, wallows in the dung-hill and emerges from a covered with stars. The gammon of Paris is rabbley in his youth. He is not content with his trousers unless they have a watch-pocket. He is not easily astonished. He is still less easily terrified. He makes songs on superstitions. He takes the wind out of exaggerations. He twits mysteries. He thrusts out his tongue of ghosts. He takes the poetry out of stilted things. He introduces caricature into epic extravaganzas. It is not that he is prosaic, far from that, but he replaces the solemn vision by the farcical phantasmagoria. If Adamastor were to appear to him, the street-arab would say, Hi there, bug-aville! Chapter 4 He may be of use. Paris begins with the lounger and ends with the street-arab, two beings of which no other city is capable. The passive acceptance, which contents itself with gazing, and the inexhaustible initiative. Pour-tom and pour-eux. Paris alone has this in its natural history. The whole of the monarchy is contained in the lounger, the whole of anarchy in the gammon. This pale child of the Parisian farbogues, lives and develops, makes connections, grows supple and suffering, in the presence of social realities and of human things, a thoughtful witness. He thinks himself heedless, and he is not. He looks and is on the verge of laughter. He is on the verge of something else also. Whoever you may be, if your name is prejudice, abuse, ignorance, oppression, iniquity, deptism, injustice, fanaticism, tyranny, beware of the gaping gammon. The little fellow will grow up. Of what clay is he made, of the first mud that comes to hand, a handful of dirt, a breath, and behold, Adam, it suffices for a god to pass by. A god has always passed over the street-arab. In labours at this tiny being, by the word fortune we mean chance, to some extent. That pig-meme needed out of common-earth, ignorant, unlettered, giddy, vulgar, low—will that become an Ionian or Brothian? Wait! Curitrota, the spirit of Paris, that demon which creates the children of chance and the men of destiny, reversing the process that the Latin potter makes of a jug, an amphora. End of Book 1, chapters 1 through 4. CHAPTER V and 6 of Book 1 of Les Miserables, Volume 3, by Victor Hugo. This is a LibreVox recording. All LibreVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibreVox.org. Recording by Caitlin Foley. Les Miserables, Volume 3, by Victor Hugo. Translated by Isabel Florence Hapgood. Book 1. Paris Studied in its Atom. Chapter 5. His Frontiers. The gammon loves the city. He also loves solitude, since he has something of the sage in him. Herbus Amator, like Fuscus. Rurus Amator, like Flakus. To roam thoughtfully about—that is to say, to lounge—is a fine employment of time in the eyes of the philosopher, particularly in that rather illegitimate species of campaign, which is tolerably ugly, but odd and composed of two natures, which surrounds certain great cities, notably Paris. To study the suburbs is to study the amphibious animal. End of the trees, beginning of the roofs. End of the grass, beginning of the pavements. End of the furrows, beginning of the shops. End of the wheel-ruts, beginning of the passions. End of the divine murmur, beginning of the human uproar. Hence an extraordinary interest. Hence, in these not very attractive places, indelibly stamped by the passing stroller with the epithet melancholy—the apparently objectless promenades of the dreamer. He who writes these lines has long been a prowler about the barriers of Paris, and it is for him a source of profound souvenirs, that close-shaven turf, those pebbly paths, that chalk, those pools, those harsh monotonies of waste in fallow lands, the plants of early market garden suddenly springing into sight in a bottom, that mixture of the savage and the citizen, those vast desert nooks where the garrison drums practice noisily, the produce a sort of lisping of battle. Those hermits by day and cut-throats by night, that clumsy mill which turns in the wind, the hoisting wheels of the quarries, the tea gardens at the corners of the cemeteries, the mysterious charm of great somber walls, squarely intersecting immense vague stretches of land inundated with sunshine and full of butterflies—all this attracted him. There is hardly any one on earth who is not acquainted with those singular spots, the gassière, the cunette, the hideous wall of Grinnell, all speckled with balls. Monts-Parnasse, the fausse, a loup, a bière, on the bank of the marne, Monts-sur-Y, the tout-missoir, the pierre-plat de Chantillon, where there is an old exhausted quarry which no longer serves any purpose except to raise mushrooms, and which is closed on a level with the ground by a trap-door of rotten planks. The campagne of Rome is one idea, the banlieu of Paris is another. Debeau-Horde nothing but fields, houses, or trees, in what a stretch of country offers us, is to remain on the surface. All aspects of things are thoughts of God. The spot where plain affects its junction with the city is always stamped with a certain piercing melancholy. Nature and humanity both appeal to you, at the same time there. All originalities there make their appearance. Anyone who, like ourselves, has wandered about in these solitudes contiguous to our farborgs, which may be designated as the limboes of Paris, has seen here and there, in the most desert spot, at the most unexpected moment, behind a meager hedge, or in this corner of a lugurious wall, children grouped tumultuously, fetid, muddy, dusty, ragged, disheveled, playing hide-and-seek, and crowned with cornflowers. All of them are little ones who have made their escape from poor families. The outer boulevard is their breathing space, the suburbs belong to them. There they are eternally playing truant, there they innocently sing their repertory of dirty songs. There they are, or rather there they exist, far from every eye, in the sweet light of May or June, kneeling round a hole in the ground, sapping marbles with their thumbs, crawling over half-barlings, irresponsible, volatile, free, and happy. And no sooner do they catch sight of you than they recollect that they have an industry, and that they must earn their living, and they offer to sell you an old woollen stocking filled with cock-chafers or a bunch of lilacs. These encounters with strange children are one of the charming and, at the same time, poignant graces of the environs of Paris. Sometimes there are little girls among the throngs of boys, or they're their sisters, who are almost young maidens, thin, feverish, with sunburned hands, covered with freckles, crowned with poppies and ears of rye, gay, haggard, barefooted. They can be seen devouring cherries among the wheat. In the evening they can be heard laughing. These groups, warmly illuminated by the full glow of midday, or distinctly seen in the twilight, occupy the thoughtful man for a very long time, and these visions mingle with his dreams. Paris, Centre, Banlieu, circumference. This constitutes all the earth to those children. They never venture beyond this. They can no more escape from the Parisian atmosphere than fish can escape from the water. For them, nothing exists to leagues beyond the barriers. The universe ends there. Chapter 6 A Bit of History At the epic, nearly contemporary by the way, when the action of this book takes place, there is not, as there is today, a policeman at the corner of every street, a benefit which there is no time to discuss here. Stray children abounded in Paris. The statistics give an average of two hundred and sixty homeless children picked up annually at that period by the police patrols in unenclosed lands, in houses in process of construction and under the arches of the bridges. One of these nests, which has become famous, produced the swallows of the bridge of Arcola. This is, moreover, the most disastrous of social symptoms. All crimes of the man begin in the vagabondage of the children. Let us make an exception in favour of Paris, nevertheless. In a relative measure, and in spite of the souvenir which we have just recalled, the exception is just. While in any other great city the vagabond child is a lost man, while nearly everywhere the child left to itself is, in some sort, sacrificed and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in the public vices which devour in him honesty and conscience. The street boy of Paris, we insist on this point, however defaced and injured on the surface, is almost intact on the interior. It is a magnificent thing to put on record, and one which shines forth in the splendid probity of our popular revolutions, that a certain incorruptibility results from the idea which exists in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water of the ocean. To breathe Paris preserves the soul. What we have just said takes away nothing of the anguish of heart which one experiences every time that one meets one of these children, around whom one fancies that he beholds floating the threads of a broken family. In the civilisation of the present day, incomplete as it still is, it is not a very abnormal thing to behold these fractured families pouring themselves out into the darkness, not knowing clearly what has become of their children and allowing their own entrails to fall on the public highway. Hence these obscure destinies. This is called, for the sad thing has given rise to an expression, to be cast on the pavements of Paris. Let it be said, by the way, that this abandonment of children was not discouraged by the ancient monarchy. A little of Egypt and Bohemia in the lower region suited the upper spheres, and encompassed the aims of the powerful. The hatred of instruction for the children of the people was a dogma. What is the use of half-lights? Such was the counter-sign. Now the airing child is the corollary of the ignorant child. Besides this, the monarchy sometimes was in need of children, and in that case it skimmed the streets. Under Louis XIV, not to get any further back, the king rightly desired to create a fleet. The idea was a good one. But let us consider the means. There can be no fleet, if, beside the sailing-ship, that plaything of the winds and for the purpose of towing it, in case of necessity, there is not the vessel which goes where it pleases, either by means of oars or of steam. The galleys were then to the marines what steamers are to-day. Therefore galleys were necessary. But the galleys moved only by the galleys' slave—hence, galleys' slaves were required. Colbert had the commissioners of provinces and the parliaments make as many convicts as possible. The magistracies showed a great deal of complacence in that matter. A man kept his hat on in the presence of a procession. It was a Huguenot attitude. He was sent to the galleys. A child was encountered in the streets, provided that he was fifteen years of age and did not know where he was to sleep. He was sent to the galleys. Grand reign, grand century. Under Louis the fifteenth, children disappeared in Paris. The police carried them off for what mysterious purpose no one knew. People whispered with terror monstrous conjectures as to the king's baths of purple. Babier speaks ingenuously of these things. It sometimes happened that the exempts of the guard, when they ran short of children, took those who had fathers. The fathers in despair attacked the exempts. In that case the parliament intervened and had someone hung. Who? The exempts? No. The fathers. Chapter 7-9 of Book 1 of Les Miserables, Volume 3 by Victor Hugo. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Les Miserables, Volume 3 by Victor Hugo. Translated by Isabel Florence Hapgood. Book 1. Paris Studied in its Atom. Chapter 7. The Gamma should have his place in the classifications of India. The body of street Arabs in Paris almost constitutes a caste. One might almost say, not everyone who wishes to belong to it can do so. This word gamma was printed for the first time and reached popular speech through the literary tongue in 1834. It is in a little work entitled Claude Goua that this word made its first appearance. The horror was lively. The word passed into circulation. The elements which constitute the consideration of the gamma for each other are very various. We have known and associated with one who was greatly respected and vastly admired because he had seen a man fall from the top of the tower of Notre Dame. Another because he had succeeded in making his way into the rear courtyard where the statues of the dome of the Anvalide had been temporarily deposited and had prigged some lead from them. A third because he had seen a diligence tip over. Still another because he knew a soldier who came near putting out the eye of a citizen. This explains that famous exclamation of a Parisian gamma, a profound epiphanema which the vulgar herd laughs at without comprehending. Dear, dear, what ill luck I do have to think that I have never yet seen anybody tumble from a fifth-story window. I have pronounced I have and fifth pronounced fifth. Surely this saying of a peasant is a fine one. Father so and so your wife has died of formality. Why did you not send for the doctor? What would you have, sir? We poor folks die of ourselves. But if the peasant's whole passivity lies in this saying, the whole of the free thinking anarchy of the brat of the faux-bore is, assuredly, contained in this other saying. A man condemned to death is listening to his confessor in the tumble. The child of Paris exclaims, he is talking to his black cap over the sneak. A certain audacity on matters of religion sets off the gamma. To be strong-minded is an important item. To be present at executions constitutes a duty. He shows himself at the guillotine, and he laughs. He calls it by all sorts of pet names. The end of the soup, the growler, the mother in the blue, the sky, the last mouthful, etc. In order not to lose anything of the affair, he scales the walls, he hoists himself to balconies, he ascends trees, he suspends himself to gratings, he clings fast to chimneys. The gamma is born a tyler, as he is born a mariner. A roof inspires him with no more fear than a mast. There is no festival which comes up to an execution on the Place de Clèves. Samson and the Abbey Mont are the truly popular names. They hooted the victim in order to encourage him. They sometimes admire him. Last nair, when a gamma, on seeing the hideous dottin die bravely, uttered these words which contain a future. I was jealous of him. In the Brotherhood of Gamma, Voltaire is not known, but Papa-Voin is. Politicians are confused with assassins and the same legend. They have a tradition as to everybody's last garment. It is known that Toleron had a fireman's cap, Avril an otter cap, Los Velle a round hat, that old teleport was bald and bare-headed, that Castin was already and very handsome, that Burri had a romantic small beard, that Jean-Martin kept on his suspenders, that Lecouf and his mother quarreled. Don't reproach each other for your basket, shouted a command to them. Another in order to get a look at Derbacar, as he passed, and being too small in the crowd, caught sight of the lantern on the quay and climbed it, a Jean-Darm stationed opposite frowned. Let me climb up, monsieur le Jean-Darm, said the Gamma, and, to soften the heart of the authorities, he added, I will not fall. I don't care if you do, retorted the Jean-Darm. In the Brotherhood of Gamma, a memorable accident counts for a great deal. One reaches the height of consideration if one chances to cut oneself very deeply to the very bone. The fist is no mediocre element of respect. One of the things that the Gamma is fondest of saying is, I am fine and strong, come now. To be left-handed renders you very enviable. A squint is highly esteemed. Chapter 8. In which the reader will find a charming saying of the last king. In summer he metamorphoses himself into a frog, and in the evening, when night is falling, in front of the bridges of Austerlitz and Jena, from the tops of coal wagons in the washer-women's boats, he hurls himself headlong into the sand, and into all possible infractions of the laws of modesty and of the police. Nevertheless, the police keep an eye on him, and the result is a highly dramatic situation which once gave rise to a fraternal and memorable cry. That cry, which was celebrated about 1830, is a strategic warning from Gamma to Gamma. It scans like a verse from Homer, with a notation as inexpressible as the Elysiac chant of the Panathenaea, and in it one encounters again the ancient Ivo. Here it is. Oei, ti-ti, oei, here comes the bobby, here comes the police. Pick up your duds and be off, through the sewer with you. Sometimes this nat, that is what he calls himself, knows how to read. Sometimes he knows how to write. He always knows how to dobb. He does not hesitate to acquire, by no one knows what mysterious mutual instruction, all the talents which can be of use to the public. From 1815 to 1830 he imitated the cry of the turkey. From 1830 to 1848 he scrawled pears on the walls. One summer evening, when Louis Philippe was returning home on foot, he saw a little fellow, no higher than his knee, perspiring and climbing up to draw a gigantic pear and charcoal on one of the pillars of the gate of Noïe. The king, with that good nature which came to him from Henry IV, helped the Gamma, finished the pear, and gave the child a Louis, saying, the pear is on that also. The Gamma loves uproar, a certain state of violence pleases him. He execrates the cures. One day, in the rude l'université, one of these scamps was putting his thumb to his nose at the carriage gate of No. 69. Why are you doing that at the gate, a passerby asked? The boy replied, there is a cure there. It was there, in fact, that the papal nuncio lived. Nevertheless, whatever may be the Volterianism of the small Gamma, if the occasion to become a chorister presents itself, it is quite possible that he will accept, and in that case he serves the mass civilly. There are two things to which he plays tantalus and which he always desires without ever attaining them, to overthrow the government and to get his trousers sewed up again. The Gamma, in his perfect state, possesses all the policemen of Paris and can always put the name to the face of any one which he chances to meet. He can tell them off on the tips of his fingers. He studies their habits, and he has special notes on each one of them. He reads the souls of the police like an open book. He will tell you fluently and without flinching. Such and one is a traitor. Such another is very malicious. Such another is great. Such another is ridiculous. All these words, traitor, malicious, great, ridiculous, have a particular meaning in his mouth. That one imagines that he owns the pulm neuf, and he prevents people from walking on the corners outside the parapet. That other has a mania for pulling person's ears, et cetera, et cetera. Chapter 9 The Old Soul of Gaul There was something of that boy in Pauclin, the son of the fish market. Beaumarché had something of it. Gamminrey is a shade of the Gaelic spirit. Mingled with good sense, it sometimes adds force to the latter, as alcohol does to wine. Sometimes it is a defect. Homer repeats himself eternally, granted. One may say that Voltaire plays the gamma. Camille de Moulin was a native of the Faux-Bourg, championé who treated miracles brutally, rose from the pavements of Paris. He had, when a small lad inundated the porticoes of Saint-Jean-de-Bauvais and of Saint-Ethienne-du-Mont, he had addressed this shrine of Saint-Jean-Viev familiarly to give orders to the file of Saint-Januarius. The gamma of Paris is respectful, ironical, and insolent. He has villainous teeth because he is badly fed and his stomach suffers, and handsome eyes because he has wit. If Jehovah himself were present, he would go hopping up the steps of paradise on one foot. He is strong on boxing. All beliefs are possible to him. He plays in the gutter and straightens himself up with a revolt. His effrontery persists even in the presence of Grape-shot. He was a scape-grace. He is a hero. Like the little Theban, he shakes the skin from the lion. Barra, the drummer-boy, was a gamma of Paris. He shouts forward as the horse of Scripture says Va, and in a moment he has passed from the small brat to the giant. This child of the puddle is also the child of the ideal. Measure that spread of wings which reaches from Molière to Barra. To sum up the whole, and in one word, the gamma is a being who amuses himself because he is unhappy. End of book 1, chapters 7 through 9. Chapters 10 and 11 of book 1 of Les Misérables volume 3 by Victor Hugo. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Adam Rengath. Les Misérables volume 3 by Victor Hugo. Translated by Isabelle Florence-Hapgood. Book 1st, Paris, studied in its Adam. Chapter 10, Ecce Paris, Ecce Homo. To sum it all up once more, the Paris gammon of today, like the Greculis of Rome in days gone by, is the infant populous with the wrinkle of the old world on his brow. The gammon is a grace to the nation, and at the same time a disease, a disease which must be cured how? By light. Light renders healthy. Light kindles. All generous social irradiations spring from science, letters, arts, education. Make men. Make men. Give them light that they may warm you. Sooner or later, the splendid question of universal education will present itself with the irresistible authority of the Absolute Truth. And then, those who govern under the superintendence of the French idea will have to make this choice. The children of France, or the gammons of Paris. Flames in the light, or will of the wisps in the gloom. The gammon expresses Paris, and Paris expresses the world. For Paris is a total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. The whole of this prodigious city is a foreshortening of dead manners and living manners. He who sees Paris thinks he sees the bottom of all history, with heaven and constellations in the intervals. Paris has a capital, the town hall, a parthenon, Notre-Dame, a Mount Avantine, the Faux-Bourg Saint-Antoine, an Ascenarium, the Sorbonne, a Pantheon, the Pantheon, a Via Sacra, the Boulevard des Italiens, a Temple of the Winds, Opinion, and it replaces the Gammonii by Ritikule. Its major is called Therode. Its transvestarin is the man of the Faux-Bourgs. Its Hamal is the market porter. Its Lazarone is the peggre. Its cockney is the native of Ghent. Everything that exists elsewhere exists at Paris. The fishwoman of Dumarse can retort on the herb cellar of Eurypides. The disco balls of a Janus lives again in the Forioso, the tightrope dancer. Theropontagonus Miles could walk arm in arm with Vaudboncourt, the Grenadier. Damasipus, the second-hand dealer, would be happy among brook-a-brack merchants. Vonsen could grasp Socrates in its fist as just as Agora could imprison Diderot. Grimo de la Reignière discovered larded roast beef as Kurtillus invented roast hedgehog. We see the trapeze which figures in Plautus reappear under the vault of the Arc of Letoil. The sword-eater of Poicillus encountered by Apuleus is a sword-swallower on the Pont Neuf. The nephew of Rameau and Cerculio the Parasite make a pair. Urgasolus could get himself presented to Combeseres by D'Agrufe. The four dandies of Rome, Alcus Simarchus, Vodromus, Diabolus, and Argarippus descend from Creti in Labitu's posting shades. Alcus Galeus would halt no longer in front of Congrio than would Charnaudier in front of Puccinello. Marto is not a Tigris, but Partilisca was not a dragon. Pantolabus, the wag, jeers in the café anglais at nomen tainus the fast liver. Hermogenus is a tenor in the Champs-Élysées, and round him, Thracius the beggar, clad like Bobecce, takes up a collection. The boar who stops you by the button of your coat in the tularies makes you repeat after a lapse of 2,000 years Vesprian's apostrophe. Quis pro porantum me prehendet palio. The wine on Sirene is a parody of the wine of Alba. The red border of De Soghe forms a balance to the great cutting of Bellatro. Per Lachaise exhales beneath nocturnal rains some gleams at the Escoliae, and the grave of the poor bought for five years is certainly the equivalent of the slave's hived coffin. Seek something that Paris has not. The vat of Trafonius contains nothing that is not in Mesmer's tub. Urgaphilus lives again in Cagliostro. The Brahmin Vesafanta becomes incarnate in the Comp de Saint-Germain. The cemetery of Saint-Medard works quite as good miracles as the mosque of Umumi at Damascus. Paris has an asop, mayu, and a canidia, mademoiselle la Normande. It is terrified like Delphos at the fulgurating realities of the vision. It makes tables turn as Dodona did tripods. It places their grisette on the throne as Rome placed the courtesan there, and taking it all together. If Louis XV is worse than Claudian, Madame Duberie is better than Messalina. Paris combines in an unprecedented type, which has existed and which we have elbowed, Grecian nudity, the Hebraic ulcer, and the Gascon pun. It mingles Diogenes, Job, and Jack Pudding, dresses up a spectre in old numbers of the Constitutional, and makes Chaudruc du Clos. Although Plutarch says the tyrant never grows old, Rome, under Silla as under Domitian, resigned itself and willingly put water in its wine. The tyber was a leaf, if the rather doctrinaired eulogium made of it by Veris Fibiscus is to be credited. Peres drinks a million litres of water a day, but that does not prevent it from occasionally beating the general alarm and ringing the toxin. With that exception, Paris is amiable. It accepts everything royally. It's not too particular about its venus. This calipige is hot and taut, provided that it is made to laugh it condones. Ugliness cheers it, deformity provokes it to laughter, vice diverts it, be eccentric, and you may be an eccentric. Even hypocrisy, that supreme cynicism, does not disgust it. It is so literary that it does not hold its nose before Basil, and is no more scandalised by the prayer of Tartuffe than Horus was repelled by the hiccup of Priapus. No trait of the universal face is lacking in the profile of Peres. The Balmobile is not the polimnia-dance of the Janiculum, but the dealer and ladies wearing a peril there devours the laurette with her eyes exactly as the procurus stifila lay in wait for the virgin Planissium. The Periaire du Cambin is not the Colosseum, but people are as ferocious there as those Caesar were looking on. The Syrian hostess has more grace than Mother Sagoye, but if a Virgil haunted the Roman wine shop, Thévi-Dinger, Balzac, and Charley have sat at the tables of Parisian taverns. Paris reigns, geniuses flash forth there, the red-tails prosper there. Adonai passes on his chariot with its twelve wheels of thunder and lightning. Silenus makes his entry there on his ass. For Silenus read Rampano. Paris is the synonym of Cosmos. Paris is Athens, Sibirus, Jerusalem, Pontain. All civilizations are there in an abridged form. All barbarisms also. Paris would greatly regret it if it had not a guillotine. A little of the Place de Greve is a good thing. What would all that eternal festival be without this seasoning? Our laws are wisely provided, and thanks to them the blade drips on this shrove Tuesday. Chapter 11. To scoff. To reign. There's no limit to Paris. No city has had that domination which sometimes derides those whom it subjugates. To please you, O Athenians, exclaimed Alexander. Paris makes more than the law, it makes the fashion. Paris sets more than the fashion, it sets the routine. Paris may be stupid if it sees fit. It sometimes allows itself this luxury. Then the universe is stupid in company with it. Then Paris awakes, rubs its eyes, says, how stupid I am, and bursts out laughing in the face of the human race. What a marvel is such a city. It is a strange thing that this grandiose-ness and this burlesque should be amicable neighbors. That all this majesty should not be thrown into disorder by all this parody, and that the same mouth can today blow into the trump of the judgment day, and tomorrow into the reed flute. Paris has a sovereign joviality. Its gaiety is of the thunder, and its farce holds a scepter. Its tempest sometimes precedes from a grimace. Its explosions, its days, its masterpieces, its prodigies, its epics go forth to the bounds of the universe, and so also do its cock-and-bull stories. Its laugh is the mouth of a volcano which spatters the whole earth. Its jests are sparks. It imposes its caricatures as well as its ideal on people. The highest monuments of human civilization accept its ironies and lend their eternity to its mischievous pranks. It is superb. It has a prodigious 14th of July, which delivers the globe. It forces all nations to take the oath of tennis. Its night of the 4th of August dissolves in three hours a thousand years of feudalism. It makes of its logic the muscle of unanimous will. It multiplies itself under all sorts of forms of the sublime. It fills with its light, Washington, Kosciuszko, Bolivar, Bozeris, Riego, Benz, and them, Manon, Lopez, John Brown, Garibaldi. It is everywhere where the future is being lighted up. At Boston in 1779, at the Ile de Leon in 1820, at Pest in 1848, at Palermo in 1860, it whispers the mighty counter-sign, liberty, in the ear of the American abolitionists grouped about the boat at Harper's Ferry, and in the ear of the patriots of Ancona assembled in the shadow, to the arch-eye before the go-see-in on the seashore. It creates cannery. It creates quiroga. It creates pissecan. It irradiates the great on earth. It was while proceeding wither its breath urged them that Byron perished at Misolonghi, and that Mazat died at Barcelona. It is the tribune under the feet of Mirabeau and a crater under the feet of Robespierre. Its books, its theater, its art, its science, its literature, its philosophy are the manuals of the human race. It has Pascal, Renier, Cornet, Descartes, Jean-Jacques, Voltaire for all moments, Molière for all centuries. It makes its language to be talked by the universal mouth, and that language becomes the word. It constructs in all minds the idea of progress, the liberating dogmas which it forges are for the generation's trusty friends, and it is with the soul of its thinkers and its poets that all heroes of all nations have been made since 1789. This does not prevent vagabondism, and that enormous genius which is called Paris, while transfiguring the world by its light, sketches in charcoal Bujignet's nose on the wall of the temple of Theseus, and writes Credville the Thief on the pyramids. Paris is always showing its teeth. When it is not scolding, it is laughing. Such is Paris, the smoke of its roofs forms the ideas of the universe, a heap of mud and stone if you will, but above all a moral being. It is more than great, it is immense. Why? Because it is daring. To dare, that is the price of progress. All sublime conquests are, more or less, the prizes of daring. In order that the revolution should take place, it is not suffice that Montesquieu should foresee it, that Diderot should preach it, that Beaumarchais should announce it, that Condorcet should calculate it, that Erué should prepare it, that Rousseau should premeditate it. It is necessary that D'Anton should dare it. To cry audacity is a fiat lux. It is necessary for the sake of the forward march of the human race, that there should be proud lessons of courage permanently on the heights. Daring deeds dazzle history, and are one of man's great sources of light. The dawn dares when it rises. To attempt, to brave, to persist, to persevere, to be faithful to oneself, to grasp fate bodily, to astound catastrophe by the small amount of fear that it occasions us, now to affront unjust power, again to insult drunken victory, to hold one's position, to stand one's ground. That is the example which nations need, that is the light which electrifies them. The same formidable lightning proceeds from the torch of Prometheus to Cambrone's short pipe. End of Book 1, Chapter 11, Recording by Adam Rengath. Les Misérabes, Volume 3, by Victor Hugo, Translated by Isabelle Florence Hapgood. Book 1, Paris, Studied in its Adam. Chapter 12, The Future, Latent in the People. As for the Parisian populace, even when a man grown it is always the street Arab. To paint the child is to paint the city, and it is for that reason that we have studied this eagle in this errant sparrow. It is in the faux-burgs, above all we maintain, that the Parisian race appears. There is the pure blood, there is the true physiognomy, there this people toils and suffers and suffering and toil are the two faces of man. There exists there immense numbers of unknown beings, among whom swarm types of the strangest, from the porter of Lavrape to the knacker of Mont-Faucan. Fecs Urbus exclaims Cicero. Mob adds Burke, indignantly, rabble, multitude, populace. These are words and quickly uttered, but so be it. What does it matter? What is it to me if they do go barefoot? They do not know how to read, so much the worse. Would you abandon them for that? Would you turn their distress into a malediction? Can not the light penetrate these masses? Let us return to that cry, light, and let us obstinately persist therein, light, light. Who knows whether these opacities will not become transparent? Are not revolutions transfigurations? Come philosophers, teach and lighten, light up, think aloud, speak aloud, hasten joyously to the great sun, fraternize with the public place, announce the good news, spend your alphabets lavishly, proclaim rites, sing the marcellases, sow enthousiasms, tear green boughs from the oaks. Make a whirlwind of the idea. This crowd may be rendered sublime. Let us learn how to make use of that vast conflagration of principles and virtues which sparkles, bursts forth, and quivers at certain hours. These bare feet, these bare arms, these rags, these ignorances, these abjectnesses, these darknesses may be employed in the conquest of the ideal. Gaze past the people, and you will perceive truth. Let that vile sand which you trample underfoot be cast into the furnace. Let it melt and see the there. It will become a splendid crystal, and it is thanks to it that Galileo and Newton will discover stars. CHAPTER XIII LITTLE GEVROSCH Eight or nine years after the events narrated in the second part of this story, people noticed on the boulevard du temple, and in the regions of the Chateau d'Eau, a little boy eleven or twelve years of age, who would have realized with tolerable accuracy that ideal of the gammon sketched out above, if, with a laugh of his age on his lips, he had not had a heart absolutely somber and empty. This child was well muffled up in a pair of man's trousers, but he did not get them from his father, and a woman's chemise, but he did not get it from his mother. Some people or other had clothed him in rags out of charity. Until he had a father and a mother, but his father did not think of him, and his mother did not love him. He was one of those children most deserving of pity, among all, one of those who have father and mother, and who are orphans nevertheless. This child never felt so well as when he was in the street. The pavements were less hard to him than his mother's heart. His parents had dispatched him into life with a kick. He simply took flight. He was a boisterous, pallid, nimble, wide-awake, jeering lad with a vivacious but sickly air. He went and came, sang, played at hopscotch, scraped the gutters, stole a little, but like cats and sparrows, gaily laughed when he was called a rogue, and got angry when called a thief. He had no shelter, no bread, no fire, no love. But he was merry because he was free. When these poor creatures grow to be men, the millstones of the social order meet them and crush them. But so long as they are children, they escape because of their smallness. The tiniest hole saves them. Nevertheless, abandoned as this child was, it sometimes happened, every two or three months, that he said, Come, I'll go and see mama. When he quitted the boulevard, the cirque, the port Saint-Martin, descended to the queues, crossed the bridges, reached the suburbs, arrived at the sol-patrière, and came to a halt, where? Precisely at that double number, fifty-fifty-two, with which the reader is acquainted, at the Gourbaud-hovel. At that epic, the hovel fifty-fifty-two, generally deserted and eternally decorated with the placard chambers-to-let, chanced to be a rare thing, inhabited by numerous individuals who, however, as is always the case in Paris, had no connection with each other. All belonged to that indigent class which begins to separate from the lowest of the petty bourgeoisie in straightened circumstances, and which extends from misery to misery into the lowest depths of society down to those two beings in whom all the material things of civilisation end, the sewer-man who sweeps up the mud, and the rag-picker who collects scraps. The principal lodger of Jean-Valjean's day was dead, and had been replaced by another exactly like her. I know not what philosopher has said, old women are never lacking. This new old woman was named Madame Bourgogne, and had nothing remarkable about her life except a dynasty of three periquets who had reigned in succession over her soul. The most miserable of those who inhabited the hovel were a family of four persons, consisting of father, mother, and two daughters, already well-grown, all four of whom were lodged in the same attic, one of the cells which we have already mentioned. At first sight this family presented no very special feature except its extreme destitution. The father, when he hired the chamber, had stated that his name was Jean-Drette. Sometime after his moving in, which had borne a singular resemblance to the entrance of nothing at all to borrow the memorable expression of the principal tenant, this Jean-Drette had said to the woman who, like her predecessor, was at the same time portraits and stair-sweeper. Mother so-and-so, if anyone should chance to come and inquire for a pole or an Italian or even a Spaniard perchance, it is I. This family was that of the merry barefoot boy. He arrived there and found distress and, what is still sadder, no smile, a cold hearth and cold hearts. When he entered, he was asked, whence come you? He replied, from the street. When he went away, they asked him, where there are you going? He replied, into the streets. His mother said to him, what did you come here for? This child lived in this absence of affection, like the pale plants which spring up in cellars. It did not cause him suffering, and he blamed no one. He did not know exactly how a father and mother should be. Nevertheless, his mother loved his sisters. We forgot and to mention that on the boulevard de Tumple, this child was called Little Gavrache. Why was he called Little Gavrache? Probably because his father's name was Gendrette. It seems to be the instinct of certain wretched families to break the thread. The chamber which the Gendretts inhabited in the Gorbo Havel was the last at the end of the corridor. The cell next to it was occupied by a very poor young man who was called Monsieur Marius. Let us explain who this Monsieur Marius was. End of chapter 13 of Book 1 of Les Misérables, volume 3, recording by Adam Ringuth. Chapter 1 of Book 2 of Les Misérables, volume 3, by Victor Hugo. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Greg Bellman. Les Misérables, volume 3, by Victor Hugo, translated by Isabelle Florence Hepgood. Book 2, The Great Bourgeois. Chapter 1, 90 Years and 32 Teeth. In the Rue Bouchera, Rue du Normandy, and the Rue du Saint-Ange, there still exist a few ancient inhabitants who have preserved the memory of a worthy man named Monsieur Gilles Normand, and who mentioned him with complacence. This good man was old when they were young. This silhouette has not yet entirely disappeared. For those who regard with melancholy, that vague swarm of shadows which is called the past, from the labyrinth of streets in the vicinity of the temple to which, under Louis XIV, the names of all the provinces of France were appended exactly as in our day, the streets of the new Tivoli quarter, have received the names of all the capitals of Europe. A progression, by the way, in which progress is visible. Monsieur Gilles Normand, who was as much alive as possible in 1831, was one of those men who had become curiosities to be viewed, simply because they have lived a long time, and who are strange because they formerly resembled everybody and now resemble nobody. He was a peculiar old man, and in very truth, a man of another age, the real, complete, and rather haughty bourgeois of the 18th century, who were his good old bourgeoisie with the error with which Marquis is where their Marquis ate. He was over 90 years of age. His walk was erect, he talked loudly, saw clearly, drank neat, ate, sleep, and snored. He had all 32 of his teeth. He only wore spectacles when he read. He was of an amorous disposition, but declared that for the last 10 years, he had wholly and decidedly renounced women. He could no longer please. He said, he did not add, I am too old, but I am too poor. He said, if I were not ruined, all he had left, in fact, was an income of about 15,000 francs. His dream was to come into an inheritance and to have 100,000 lever income for mistresses. He did not belong, as the reader will perceive, to that puny variety of octogenaries who, like Monsieur de Voltaire, have been dying all their life. His was no longevity of a cracked pot. This jovial old man had always had good health. He was superficial, rapid, easily angered. He flew into a passion at everything, generally quite contrary to all reason. When contradicted, he raised his cane, he beat people as he had done in the great century. He had a daughter over 50 years of age and unmarried, whom he chastised severely with his tongue when in a rage, and whom he would have liked to whip. She seemed to him to be eight years old. He boxed his servant's ears soundly and said, ah, caronia! One of his oaths was by the pantaflosh of the pantafloshad. He had singular freaks of tranquility. He had himself shaved every day by a barber who had been mad and who detested him. Being jealous of Monsieur Gilles Normand, on account of his wife, a pretty and coquettish barberess, Monsieur Gilles Normand admired his own discernment at all things and declared that he was extremely sagacious. Here's one of his sayings. I have in truth some penetration. I am able to say when a flea bites me from what woman it came. The words which he uttered the most frequently were the sensible man in nature. He did not give to this last word of the grand acceptation which our epoch has accorded to it, but he made it enter, after his own fashion, into his little chimney corner satires. Nature, he said, in order that civilization may have a little of everything, gives it even specimens of its amusing barbarism. Europe possesses specimens of Asia and Africa on a small scale. The cat is a drawing room tiger. The lizard is a pocket crocodile. The dancers at the opera are pink female savages. They do not eat men, they crunch them, or magicians that they are. They transform them into oysters and swallow them. The caribbeans leave only the bones, they leave only the shell. Such are our morals. We do not devour, we gnaw. We do not exterminate, we claw. Chapter two, like master, like house. He lived in the madre. Rude figa du calvair. Number six, he owned the house. This house has since been demolished and rebuilt, and the number has probably been changed in those revolutions of numeration which the streets of Paris undergo. He occupied an ancient and vast apartment on the first floor, between street and gardens, furnished to the very ceilings with the great goblin and bervet tapestries representing pastoral scenes. The subjects of the ceilings and the panels were repeated in miniature on the armchairs. He enveloped his bed in a vast, nine-leaved screen of coromandel lacquer. Long, full curtains hung from the windows and formed great broken folds that were very magnificent. The garden situated immediately under his windows was attached to that one of them which formed the angle by means of a staircase 12 or 15 steps long, which the old gentleman ascended and descended with great agility. In addition to a library adjoining his chamber, he had a boudoir of which he thought a great deal, a gallant and elegant retreat with magnificent hangings of straw with a pattern of flowers and fleur de lis made on the galleys of Louis XIV and ordered of his convicts by Monsieur de Vivon for his mistress. Monsieur Gilles Normand had inherited it from a grim maternal great-hant who had died a centenarian. He had had two wives. His manners were something between those of a courtier which he had never been and the lawyer which he might have been. He was gay and caressing when he had a mind. In his youth, he had been one of those men who were always deceived by their wives and never by their mistresses because they are at the same time the most sullen of husbands and the most charming of lovers in existence. He was a connoisseur of painting. He had in his chamber a marvelous portrait of no one knows whom, painted by Dourdan's, executed with great dashes of the brush with millions of details in a confused and haphazard manner. Monsieur Gilles Normand's attire was not the habit of Louis XIV nor yet that of Louis XVI. It was that of the incroyables of the directory. He had thought himself young up to that period and had followed the fashions. His coat was of lightweight cloth with voluminous reverse, a long swallowtail and large steel buttons. With this, he wore knee-bridges and buckle shoes. He always thrust his hands into his fobs. He said authoritatively, the French Revolution is a heap of black guards. Chapter III. Luc Esprit. At the age of sixteen, one evening at the opera, he had had the honor to be stared at through opera glasses by two beauties at the same time. Ripe and celebrated beauties then and sung by Voltaire, the Camargo and the Salle. Caught between two fires, he had beaten a heroic retreat towards a little dancer, a young girl named Nonry, who was sixteen like himself, obscure as a cat and with whom he was in love. He abounded in memories. He was accustomed to exclaim how pretty she was that Guimardini, Guimardinette. The last time I saw Edlonchon, her hair curled in sustained sentiments with her common sea of turquoises, her gown of the color of persons newly arrived, and her little agitation muff. He had worn in his young manhood a waistcoat of Neine Lodrin, which he was fond of talking about effusively. I was dressed like a Turk of the Levantine, said he, Madame Bufla, having seen him by chance when he was twenty, had described him as a charming fool. He was horrified by all the names which he saw in politics and in power, regarding them as Volcker and Bourgeois. He read the journals, the newspapers, the gazettes, as he said, stifling outbursts of laughter the while. Oh, he said, what people these are, corbiere, human, casimir perrier. There's a minister for you. I can imagine this in a journal. Monsieur Jean Normand, minister. That would be a farce. Well, they are so stupid that it would pass. He merrily called everything by its name, whether decent or indecent, and did not restrain himself in the least before ladies. He uttered coarse speeches, obscenities and filth with a certain tranquility, and lack of astonishment, which was elegant. It was in keeping with the unceremoniousness of his century. It is to be noted that the age of paraphrase in verse was the age of crudities in prose. His godfather had predicted that he would turn out a man of genius and had bestowed on him these two significant names, Luc Esprit. Chapter four, a centenarian aspirant. He had taken prizes in his boyhood at the College of Moulin, where he was born, and he had been crowned by the hand of the Duke de Nivernais, whom he called the Duke de Nevers. Neither the convention nor the death of Louis XVI, nor the Napoleon, nor the return of the Bourbons, nor anything else had been able to efface the memory of this crowning. The Duke de Nevers was in his eyes the great figure of the century. What a charming grand-senieur, he said, and what a fine air he had with his blue ribbon. In the eyes of Michel Gilles Normand, Catherine II had made reparation for the crime of the partition of Poland by purchasing for 3,000 rubles the secret of the elixir of gold from Bestechef. He grew animated on this subject. The elixir of gold, he exclaimed, the yellow dye of Bestechef. General Le Mans drops in the 18th century. This was the great remedy for the catastrophes of love, the panacea against Venus. At one Louis the half-ounce file, Louis XV sent 200 files of it to the Pope. He would have been greatly irritated and thrown off his balance, had anyone told him that the elixir of gold is nothing but the perchloride of iron. Mr. Gilles Normand adored the Bourbons and had a horror of 1789. He was forever narrating in what manner he had saved himself during the terror and how he had been obliged to display a vast deal of gaiety and cleverness in order to escape having his head cut off. If any young man ventured to pronounce a eulogium on the Republic in his presence, he turned purple and grew so angry that he was on the point of swooning. He sometimes alluded to his 90 years and said, I hope that I shall not see 93 twice. On these occasions, he hinted to people that he meant to live to be a hundred. End of Book Two, Chapter Four, Recording by Greg Bowman. Chapters five through eight of Book Two of Les Miserables, Volume Three, by Victor Hugo. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Greg Bowman. Les Miserables, Volume Three, by Victor Hugo. Translated by Isabel Florence Hepgood. Book Two, Great Bourgeois, Chapter Five, Bask and Nicolette. He had theories. Here's one of them. When a man is passionately fond of women and when he himself has a wife for whom he cares but little, who is homely, cross, legitimate, with plenty of rights perched on the code and jealous at need, there is but one way of extricating himself from the quandary and of procuring peace. And that is to let his wife control the purse strings. This abdication sets him free. Then his wife busies herself, grows passionately fond of handling coin, gets her fingers covered with vertigree in the process, undertakes the education of half-share tenants and the training of farmers, convokes lawyers, presides over notaries, harangs, scriveners, visits limbs of the law, follows lawsuits, draws up leases, dictates contracts, feels herself the sovereign, sells, buys, regulates promises and compromises, binds fast and annals, yields, concedes and retrocedes, arranges, disarranges, hordes, lavishes, she commits follies, a supreme and personal delight, and that consoles her. While her husband disdains her, she has the satisfaction of ruining her husband. This theory, Monsieur Gienoman, had himself replied and it had become his history. His wife, the second one, had administered his fortune in such a manner that one fine day when Monsieur Gienoman found himself a widower, there remained to him just sufficient to live on by sinking nearly the whole of it in an annuity of 15,000 francs, three-quarters of which would expire with him. He had not hesitated on this point, not being anxious to leave a property behind him. Besides, he had noticed that patrimonies are subject to adventures and, for instance, become national property. He had been present at the avatars of consolidated 3%, and he had no great faith in the great book of the public debt. All that's the Rue Quinquempois, he said. His house in the Rue Fiat du Clavère belonged to him, as we have already stated. He had two servants, a male and a female. When a servant entered his establishment, Monsieur Gienoman rebaptized him. He bestowed on the men the name of their province, Nimois, Comptoir, Potevine Picard. His last valet was a big, founded short-winded fellow of 55 who was incapable of running 20 paces. But, as he had been born at Bayonne, Monsieur Gienoman called him Basque. All the female servants in his house were called Nicolette, even the mignon, of whom we shall hear more farther on. One day, a hotty cook, a cordon bleu of the rough lofty race of porters, presented herself. How much wages do you want a month, as Monsieur Gienoman? 30 francs. What is your name? Olympie. You shall have 50 francs, and you shall be called Nicolette. Chapter 6, in which Mignon and her two children are seen. With Monsieur Gienoman, Sara was converted into wrath. He was furious at being in despair. He had all sorts of prejudices, and took all sorts of liberties. One of the facts of which his exterior relief and his internal satisfaction was composed, was, as we have just hinted, that he had remained a brisk spark, and that he passed energetically for such. This he called having royal renown. This royal renown sometimes drew down upon him singular windfalls. One day there was brought to him in a basket, as though it had been a basket of oysters. A stout newly born boy who was yelling like the deuce, and duly wrapped in swaddling clothes, which a servant made, dismissed six months previously, attributed to him. Monsieur Gienoman had at the time, fully completed his 84th year, indignation and uproar in the establishment, and whom did that bold hussy think she could persuade to believe that? What audacity! What an abominable calamity! Monsieur Gienoman himself was not at all enraged. He gazed at the brat with the amiable smile of a good man who was flattered by the calamity, and said in an aside, well, what now? What's the matter? You are finally taken aback, and really, you are excessively ignorant. Monsieur Le Duc de Agilin, the bastard of his Majesty Charles IX, married a silly jade of 15 when he was 85. Monsieur Virginale Marquis de Allure. Brother to the Cardinals de Sordis, Archbishop of Bordeaux had, at the age of 83, by the maid of Madame Le Président Joaquin, a son, a real child of love, who became a chevalier of Malta, and a counselor of state, one of the great men of this century. The Abitabaral is the son of a man of 87. There is nothing out of the ordinary in these things. And then, the Bible. Upon that, I declare that this little gentleman is none of mine. Let him be taken care of, it is not his fault. This manner of procedure was good tempered. The woman, whose name was Mignon, sent him another parcel in the following year. It was a boy again. Thereupon, Monsieur Jean Normand capitulated. He sent the two brats back to their mother, promising to pay 80 francs a month for their maintenance on the condition that the said mother would not do so any more. He added, I insist upon it, that the mother shall treat them well. I shall go to see them from time to time. And this he did. He had had a brother who was a priest and who had been rector of the Academy of Poitiers for three and thirty years, and had died at 79. I lost him young, said he. This brother of whom but little memory remains was a peaceable miser, who, being a priest, thought himself bound to bestow alms on the poor whom he met. But he never gave them anything except bad or demonetized sews, thereby discovering a means of going to hell by way of paradise. As for Monsieur Jean Normand, the elder, he never haggled over his almsgiving, but gave gladly and nobly. He was kindly, abrupt, charitable, and if he had been rich, his turn of mind would have been magnificent. He desired that all which concerned him should be done in a grand manner, even his rogueries. One day, having been cheated by a businessman in a manner of inheritance, in a gross and apparent manner, he uttered this solemn exclamation. That was indecently done. I am really ashamed of this pilfering. Everything has degenerated in this century, even the rascals, more bleu. This is not the way to rob a man of my standing. I am robbed as though in a force, but badly robbed. Sylvacint Consul Digné He had had two wives, as we have already mentioned, by the first he had a daughter, who had remained unmarried, and by the second, another daughter, who had died at about the age of thirty, who had wedded, through love or chance or otherwise, a soldier of fortune who had served in the armies of the republic and of the empire, who had won the cross at Austerlitz and had been made a colonel at Waterloo. He is the disgrace of my family, said the old bourgeois. He took an immense amount of snuff and had a particularly graceful manner of plucking at his lace ruffle with the back of one hand. He believed very little in God. Chapter Seven Rule Receive no one, except in the evening. Such was Michel-Luc Esprit Gienormand, who had not lost his hair, which was gray rather than white, and which was always dressed in dog's ears. To sum up, he was venerable in spite of all this. He had something of the eighteenth century about him, frivolous and great. In 1814 and during the early years of the restoration, Michel-Gienormand, who was still young, he was only seventy-four, lived in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Rousseur Vendoni, Nussain-Soupisse. He had only retired to the Marais when he quitted society, long after attaining the age of eighty. And on abandoning society, he had emurred himself in his habits. The principal one, and that which was invariable, was to keep his door absolutely closed during the day and never to receive anyone whatever, except in the evening. He dined at five o'clock, and after that his door was open. That had been the fashion of his century, and he would not swerve from it. The day is vulgar, said he, and deserves only a closed shutter. Fashionable people only light up their minds when the zenith lights up its stars, and he barricaded himself against every one, even had it been the king himself. This was the antiquated elegance of his day. Chapter eight. Two do not make a pair. We have just spoken of Miss Georgie Normand's two daughters. They had come into the world ten years apart. In their youth, they had borne very little resemblance to each other, either in character or countenance, and had also been as little like sisters to each other as possible. The youngest had a charming soul which turned towards all that belongs to the light, was occupied with flowers, with verses, with music, which fluttered away into glorious space, enthusiastic ethereal, and was wedded from her very youth, an ideal to a vague and heroic figure. The elder also had her camera, which she aspired in the Azure, some very wealthy purveyor, a contractor, a splendidly stupid husband, a million-made man, or even a prefect, the receptions of a prefecture, and usher in the antechamber with a chain on his neck, official balls, the harangs of the town hall, to be Madame La Praffite. All this had created a whirlwind in her imagination. Thus the two sisters strayed, each in her own dream at the epic when they were young girls. Both had wings, the one like an angel, the other like a goose. No ambition is ever fully realized, here below at least. No paradise becomes terrestrial in our day. The younger wedded the man of her dreams, but she died. The elder did not marry at all. At the moment when she makes her entrance into this history, which we are relating, she was an antique virtue, an incombustible prude with one of the sharpest noses and one of the most obtuse minds that it is possible to see. A characteristic detail, outside of her immediate family, no one had ever known her first name. She was called Madame Oiseaux Jean Normand, the elder. In the matter of Kant, Madame Oiseaux Jean Normand could have given points to a miss. Her modesty was carried to the other extreme of blackness. She cherished a frightful memory of her life. One day a man had beheld her garter. Age had only served to accentuate this pitiless modesty. Her glimps was never sufficiently opaque and never ascended sufficiently high. She multiplied clasps and pins where no one would have dreamed of looking. The peculiarity of prudery is to place all the more sentinels in proportion as the fortress is the less menaced. Nevertheless, let him who can explain these antique mysteries of innocence. She allowed an officer of the Lancers, her grand-nephew named Theodual, to embrace her without displeasure. In spite of this favorite Lancer, the label Prude, under which we have clasped her, suited her to absolute perfection. Madame Oiseaux Jean Normand was a sort of twilight soul. Prudery is a demi-virtue and a demi-vice. To prudery she added bigotry, a well-assorted lining. She belonged to the Society of the Virgin, wore a white veil on certain festivals, mumbled special orisons, revered the holy blood, venerated the sacred heart, remained for hours in contemplation before Rococo Jesuit altar in a chapel which was inaccessible to the rank and file of the faithful. And there allowed her soul to soar among little clouds of marble and through great rays of gilded wood. She had a chapel friend, an ancient virgin like herself, named Madame Oiseaux Vabois, who was a positive blockhead, and beside whom Madame Oiseaux Jean Normand had the pleasure of being an eagle. Beyond the Agnudet and Ave Maria, Madame Oiseaux Vabois had no knowledge of anything except of the different ways of making preserves. Madame Oiseaux Vabois, perfect in her style, was the ermine of stupidity without a single spot of intelligence. Let us say it plainly, Madame Oiseaux Jean Normand had gained rather than lost as she grew older. This is the case with passive natures. She had never been malicious, which is relative kindness. And then years wear away the angles and the softening which comes with time had come to her. She was melancholy with an obscure sadness of which she did not herself know the secret. There breathed from her whole person the stupor of a life that was finished and which had never had a beginning. She kept house for her father. Monsieur Jean Normand had his daughter near him as we have seen that Monsignor Bienvenue had his sister with him. These households comprised of an old man and an old spinster are not rare. And always have the touching aspect of two weaknesses leaning on each other for support. There was also in this house between this elderly spinster and this old man, a child, a little boy who was always trembling and mute in the presence of Monsieur Jean Normand. Monsieur Jean Normand never addressed this child except in a severe voice and sometimes with uplifted cane. Here, sir, rascal, scoundrel, come here. Answer me, you scamp. Just let me see you, you good for nothing, et cetera, et cetera. He idolized him. This was his grandson. We shall meet with this child again later on. End of book two, chapter eight, recording by Greg Bowman. Chapter one of book three of Les Miserables, volume three by Victor Hugo. This is the LibuVox recording. All LibuVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibuVox.org. Recording by Kali Ostra. Les Miserables, volume three by Victor Hugo. Translated by Isabel Florence Hapkut. Book three, The Grandfather and the Grandson. Chapter one, an ancient salon. When Monsieur Jean Normand lived in the Russe in Vendoni, he had frequented many very good and very aristocratic salons. Although he bourgeois, Mr. Jean Normand was received in society as he had double measure of wit in the first place, that which was born with him, and secondly, that which was attributed to him. He was even sought out and made much of. He never went anywhere except in condition of being the chief person there. There are people who will have influence at any price and who will have other people visit themselves over them. When they cannot be oracles, they turn wags. Monsieur Jean Normand was not of this nature. His domination in the royalist salons, which he frequented, cost his self-respect nothing. He was an oracle everywhere. It had happened to him to hold his own against Monsieur de Bonald and even against Monsieur Benji Puyvalet. About 1817, he invariably passed two afternoons a week in a house in his own neighborhood in the Rue Féroux with Madame la Baron de Té, a worthy and respectable person, whose husband had been ambassador of France, Berlin, and the Louis XVI. Baron de Té, for during his lifetime, had gone very passionately into ecstasy and magnetic visions, had died bankrupt during the emigration, leaving as his entire fortune some very curious memoirs about Mesmer and his tub in ten manuscript volumes bound in red Morocco and gilded on the edges. Madame de Té had not published the memoirs out of pride and maintained herself on a mega income which had survived no one knew how. Madame de Té lived far from the court, a very mixed society, as she said, in a noble isolation, proud and poor. A few friends assembled twice a week about her widowed health and these constituted a purely royal salon. They sit tea there and added groans or cries of horror at the sentry, the Charter, the Bonapetiste, the prostitution of the Blue Ribbon, or the Jacobinism of Louis XVIII, according as the wind veered towards Elegis or ditherans, and they spoke in low tones of the hopes which were presented by monsieur afterwards charged the tenth. Songs of the fish women in which Napoleon was called Nicola was received there with transports of joy. Duchesses, the most delicate and charming woman in the world, went into ecstasies over couplets like the following, addressed to the Federits. Refonsez l'oroculate le bout de Chemaise qui vous dépend. There, they amused themselves with puns which were considered terrible, with innocent plays upon words, which they supposed to be venomous, but quad-trained with statistics even. Thus, upon the Dessau ministry, a moderate cabinet of which monsieur Descasses and the Serres were members. Pour affirmir le trône ébranlé sur sa base, il faut changer de sol et de Serres et Descasses, or they drew up a list of the chamber of piers in abominably Jacobean chamber, and from this list they combined the lines as names in such a manner as to form, for example, phrases like the following, Damas, Sabran, Gouvion-Sensir. All this was done merrily, in that society they parodied the revolution. They used, I know not what desire, to give point to the same rough in inverse sense. They sang their little Serres, Ah Serres, Serres, Serres, L'Ébo d'apartiste à la lanterne, no. Songs that like the guillotine, they chop away indifferently. Today, this head, tomorrow that, it's only a variation. In the Fuelles Affaires, which belongs to this epoch, 1816, they took part of Bastille and Jusion because Fuelles was a Buona Partiste. They designated the liberals as friends and brothers, this constituted the most deadly insult. Like certain church towers, Madame de Thé Salon had two cocks. One of them was Monsieur Gilles Normand, the other was Count de la Morte-Valois, of whom it was whispered about with a sort of respect. Do you know that is the motto of the Affaire of the Necklace? These singular amnesties do occur in parties. Let's add the following. In the Bourgeoisie, one at situations decay through two easy relations. One must beware whom one admits. In the same way that there is a loss of caloric in the vicinity of those who are cold, there is a diminution of consideration in the approach of the spied persons. The ancient society of the upper classes held themselves above this law, as above every other. Marinier, the brother of the Pompadour, had his entry with Monsieur le Prince de Soubise. In spite of, no, because. Du Barry, the godfather of the Vaud-Bernier, was very welcome at the house of Monsieur le Maréchal de Richelieu. This society is Olympus. Mercury and the Prince of Guiménée are at home there. A thief is admitted there, provided he be a god. The Count de la Morte, who in 1815 was an old man 75 years of age, had nothing remarkable about him, except his silent and sententious air, his golden angular face, his perfectly polished manners, his coat buttoned up to his cravat, and his long legs always crossed in the long, flabby trousers of the hue of burnt sienna. His face was the same colour as his trousers. This Monsieur de la Morte was held in consideration in this salon on account of his celebrity and strange to say, though true, because of his name of Valois. As for Gilles Normand, his consideration was absolutely first-rate quality. He had, in spite of his levity, and without its interfering any way with his dignity, a certain manner about him, which was imposing, dignified, honest, and lofty, in a bourgeois fashion. And his great age added to it. One is not a century with impunity. The years finally produce round ahead a venerable dishevelment. In addition to this, he set things which had the genuine sparkle of the old rock. Thus, when the king of Prussia, after having restored Louis XVIII, came to pay the latter a visit under the name of the Count de Ripin, he was received by the descendant of Louis XIV, somewhat as though he had been the Marquis de Brandebourg, and with the most delicate impertinence. Monsieur Gilles Normand approved. All kings who were not the king of France, said he, are provincial kings. One day, the following question was put and the following answer returned in his presence. To what was the editor of the Gourier Français content to be suspended? Sassus Perthus observed Monsieur Gilles Normand. Remarks of this nature found a situation. At the Tédéum on the anniversary of the return of Bourbons, he said, on seeing Monsieur de Talleyrand pass by, there goes his excellency, the evil one, Sir Gilles Normand, was always accompanied by his daughter, the tall mademoiselle, who was over 40 and looked 50, and by a handsome little boy of seven years, white, rosy, fresh, with happy and trusting eyes who never appeared in that salon without hearing voices murmuring around him. How handsome he is, what a pity, poor child. This child was one of whom we dropped the word a while ago. He was called poor child because he had for a father a brigand of the Loire. This brigand of the Loire was Monsieur Gilles Normand's son-in-law who has already been mentioned and whom Monsieur Gilles Normand called as his grace of his family. End of book three, chapter one, recorded by Caliostra. Chapter two of book three of Les Miserables, volume three by Victor Hugo. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Bruce Peary. Les Miserables, volume three by Victor Hugo. Translated by Isabelle Florence Hapgood. Book three, The Grandfather and the Grandson. Chapter two, one of the red spectres of that epoch. Anyone who had chance to pass through the little town of Vernal at this epoch, and who had happened to walk across that fine monumental bridge, which will soon be succeeded, let us hope, by some hideous iron cable bridge, might have observed had he dropped his eyes over the parapet, a man about fifty years of age wearing a leather cap and trousers and a waistcoat of coarse grey cloth to which something yellow which had been a red ribbon was sewn, shod with wooden sabbows, tanned by the sun, his face nearly black and his hair nearly white, a large scar on his forehead which ran down upon his cheek, bowed, bent, prematurely aged, who walked nearly every day, whole and sickle in hand, in one of those compartments surrounded by walls which abut on the bridge and border the left bank of the sen, like a chain of terraces. Charming enclosures full of flowers of which one could say were they much larger, these are gardens, and were they a little smaller, these are bouquets. All these enclosures abut upon the river at one end and on a house at the other. The man in the waistcoat and the wooden shoes of whom we have just spoken inhabited the smallest of these enclosures and the most humble of these houses about eighteen, seventeen. He lived there alone and solitary, silently and poorly, with a woman who was neither young nor old, neither homely nor pretty, neither a peasant nor bourgeois, who served him. The plot of earth which he called his garden was celebrated in the town for the beauty of the flowers which he cultivated there. These flowers were his occupation. By dint of labour of perseverance of attention and of buckets of water he had succeeded in creating after the creator and he had invented certain tulips and certain dailies which seemed to have been forgotten by nature. He was ingenious. He had forestalled Soulange Baudin in the formation of little clumps of earth of heath mould for the cultivation of rare and precious shrubs from America and China. He was in his alleys from the break of day in summer, planting, cutting, hoeing, watering, walking amid his flowers with an air of kindness, sadness, and sweetness, sometimes standing motionless and thoughtful for hours, listening to the song of a bird in the trees, the babble of a child in a house, or with his eyes fixed on a drop of dew at the tip of a spear of grass of which the sun made a carbuncle. His table was very plain and he drank more milk than wine. A child could make him give way and his servant scolded him. He was so timid that he seemed shy. He rarely went out and he saw no one but the poor people who tapped at his pain and his curee, the Abbey Mabouf, a good old man. Nevertheless, if the inhabitants of the town or strangers, or any chance comers, curious to see his tulips, rang at his little cottage, he opened his door with a smile. He was the brigand of the Loire. Anyone who had at the same time read military memoirs, biographies, the Monetaire, and the bulletins of the Grand Army would have been struck by a name which occurs there with tolerable frequency, the name of Georges Paul Mercier. When very young, this Georges Paul Mercier had been a soldier in Saint-Ange's Regiment. The revolution broke out. Saint-Ange's Regiment formed a part of the Army of the Rhine, for the old regiments of the monarchy preserved their names of provinces even after the fall of the monarchy and were only divided into brigades in 1794. Paul Mercier fought at Speer, at Worms, at Neustadt, at Turckheim, at Olsay, at Mayance, where he was one of the two hundred who formed Houchard's rearguard. It was the twelfth to hold its ground against the core of the Prince of Hessa behind the old rampart of Andernac and only rejoined the main body of the Army when the enemy's cannon had opened a breach from the cord of the parapet to the foot of the glacé. He was under Claibé, at Marchin, and at the battle of Mont-Palicelle, where a ball from a bisquet amp broke his arm. Then he passed to the frontier of Italy one of the thirty Grenadiers who defended the Col de Tonde with Joubert. Joubert was appointed as adjutant general in Paul Mercier's sublutinent. Paul Mercier was by Berthier's side in the midst of the great shot of that day at Lodi, which caused Bonaparte to say, Berthier has been canineer, cavalier, and grenadier. He beheld his old general Joubert fall at Novi at the moment when, with uplifted saber, he was shouting forward. Having been embarked with his company in the exigencies of the campaign on board a penace which was proceeding from Genoa to some obscure port on the coast, he fell into a wasp's nest of seven or eight English vessels. The Genoese commander wanted to throw his cannon into the sea to hide the soldiers between decks and to slip along in the dark as a merchant vessel. Paul Mercier had the colors hoisted to the peak and sailed proudly past under the guns of the British frigates. While he leagues further on, his audacity having increased, he attacked with his penace and captured a large English transport which was carrying troops to Sicily and which was so loaded down with men and horses that the vessel was sunk to the level of the sea. In 1805 he was in that mollardivision which took Gunsburg from the Archduke Ferdinand. At Weltingen he received into his arms beneath a storm of bullets, Colonel Mopetit mortally wounded at the head of the Ninth Dragoons. He distinguished himself at Osterlitz in that admirable march in echelons affected under the enemy's fire. When the cavalry of the imperial Russian guard crushed a battalion of the fourth of the line, Paul Mercier was one of those who took their revenge and overthrew the guard. The Emperor gave him the cross. Paul Mercier saw Wormser at Mantua, Mela, and Alexandria, Macet-Om made prisoners in succession. He formed a part of the eighth corps of the Grand Army which commanded and which captured Hamburg. Then he was transferred to the 55th of the line which was the old regiment of Flanders. At Elow he was in the cemetery where, for the space of two hours, the heroic Captain Louis Hugo, the uncle of the author of this book, sustained alone with his company of eighty-three men every effort of the hostile army. Paul Mercier was one of the three who emerged alive from that cemetery. He was at Freedland, then he saw Moscow, then La Messina, then Lutsen, Bautzen, Dresden, Wachau, Leipzig, and the defiles of Galenhausen, then Montmirai, Chateau Thierry, Croix-en, the Banks of the Marne, the Banks of the Inn, and the redoubtable position of Laon. At Arnais Le Duc, being then a Captain, he put ten Cossacks to the sword and saved not his general but his corporal. He was well slashed up on this occasion and twenty-seven splinters were extracted from his left arm alone. Eight days before the capitulation of Paris he had just exchanged with the comrade and entered the cavalry. He had what was called under the old regime the double hand, that is to say an equal aptitude for handling the sabre or the musket as a soldier, or a squadron or a battalion as an officer. It is from this aptitude perfected by a military education which certain special branches of the service arise, the dragoons, for example, who are both cavalrymen and infantry at one and the same time. He accompanied Napoleon to the island of Elba. At Waterloo he was chief of a squadron of Quiraciers in Dubois's brigade. It was he who captured the standard of the Lunenburg Battalion. He came and cast the flag at the emperor's feet. He was covered with blood. While tearing down the banner he had received a sword cut across his face. The emperor, greatly pleased, shouted to him, you are a colonel, you are a baron, you are an officer of the Legion of Honor. Paul Merci replied, Sire, I thank you for my widow. An hour later he fell in the ravine of Ohain. Now, who was this George Paul Merci? He was this same Brigand of the Loire. We have already seen something of his history. After Waterloo Paul Merci who had been pulled out of the whole road of Ohain, as it will be remembered, had succeeded in joining the army and had dragged himself from ambulance to ambulance as far as the cantonments of the Loire. The restoration had placed him on half pay, then had sent him into residence, that is to say under surveillance at Vernon. King Louis XVIII, regarding all that which had taken place during the hundred days as not having occurred at all, did not recognize his quality as an officer of the Legion of Honor, nor his grade of Colonel nor his title of Baron. He, on his side, neglected no occasion of signing himself, Colonel Baron Paul Merci. He had only an old blue coat and he never went out without fastening to it his rosette as an officer of the Legion of Honor. The attorney for the crown had him warned that the authorities would prosecute him for illegal wearing of this decoration. When this notice was conveyed to him through an officious intermediary Paul Merci retorted with a bitter smile, I do not know whether I no longer understand French or whether you no longer speak it, but the fact is that I do not understand. Then he went out for eight successive days with his rosette. They dared not interfere with him. Two or three times the minister of war and the general in command of the department wrote to him with the following address, a monsieur le commandant, Paul Merci. He sent back the letters with the unbroken. At the same moment Napoleon at St. Helena was treating in the same fashion the missives of Sir Hudson Low addressed to General Bonaparte. Paul Merci had ended, may we be pardoned the expression, by having in his mouth the same saliva as his emperor. In the same way there were at Rome Carthaginian prisoners who refused to salute Flaminius and who had a little of Hannibal's spirit. One day he encountered the district attorney in one of the streets of Vernau, stepped up to him and said, Mr. Crown Attorney, am I permitted to wear my scar? He had nothing save his meager half-pay as chief of squadron. He had hired the smallest house which he could find at Vernau. He lived there alone, we have just seen how. Under the empire between two wars he had found time to marry mademoiselle Gilles Normand. The old bourgeois thoroughly indignant at bottom his consent with a sigh saying, the greatest families are forced into it. In 1815 madem Paul Merci, an admirable woman in every sense by the way, lofty in sentiment and rare and worthy of her husband died, leaving a child. This child had been the colonel's joy in his solitude but the grandfather had imperatively claimed his grandson declaring that if the child were not given to him he would disinherit him. The father had yielded in the little one's interest and had transferred his love to flowers. Moreover he had renounced everything and neither stirred up mischief nor conspired. He shared his thoughts between the innocent things which he was then doing and the great things which he had done. He passed his time in expecting a pink or in recalling osterlets. Monsieur Gilles Normand kept up no relations with son-in-law. The colonel was a bandit to him. Monsieur Gilles Normand never mentioned the colonel except when he occasionally made mocking allusions to his baronship. It had been expressly agreed that Paul Merci should never attempt to see his son nor to speak to him under penalty of having the latter handed over to him disowned and disinherited. For the Gilles Normand's Paul Merci was a man afflicted with the plague. They intended to bring up the child in their own way. Perhaps the colonel was wrong to accept these conditions but he submitted to them thinking that he was doing right and sacrificing no one but himself. The inheritance of father Gilles Normand did not amount to much, but the inheritance of mademoiselle Gilles Normand the elder was considerable. This aunt who had remained unmarried was very rich on the maternal side and her son was her natural heir. The boy, whose name was Marius, knew that he had a father but nothing more. No one opened his mouth to him about it. Nevertheless in the society into which his grandfather took him whispers, innuendos, and winks had eventually enlightened the little boy's mind. He had finally understood something of the case and as he naturally took in the ideas and opinions which were so to speak the heir he breathed out of infiltration and slow penetration he gradually came to think of his father only with shame and with a pain at his heart. While he was growing up in this fashion the colonel slipped away every two or three months, came to Paris on the sly like a criminal breaking his ban and went and posted himself at Saint-Soupice at the hour when Aunt Gilles Normand led Marius to the mass. There trembling lest the aunt should turn around, concealed behind a pillar motionless, not daring to breathe he gazed at his child. The scarred veteran was afraid of that old spinster. From this had arisen his connection with the curée of Vernon, Monsieur la baie m'abauf. That worthy priest was the brother of a warden of Saint-Soupice who had often observed this man gazing at his child and the scar on his cheek and the large tears in his eyes. That man who had so manly like a woman had struck the warden. That face had clung to his mind. One day having gone to Vernon to see his brother he had encountered Colonel Paul Merci on the bridge and had recognized the man of Saint-Soupice. The warden had mentioned the circumstance to the curée and both had paid the colonel a visit on some pretext or other. This visit led to others. The colonel who had been extremely reserved at first ended by his heart and the curée and the warden finally came to know the whole history and how Paul Merci was sacrificing his happiness to his child's future. This caused the curée to regard him with veneration and tenderness and the colonel on his side became fond of the curée. And moreover when both are sincere and good no men so penetrate each other and so amalgamate with each other as an old priest and an old soldier. At bottom the man is the same. The one has devoted his life to his country here below the other to his country on high that is the only difference. Twice a year on the first of January and on Saint George's Day Marius wrote duty letters to his father which were dictated by his aunt and which one would have pronounced to be copied from some formula. This was all that Monsieur Gilles Normand tolerated and the father answered them with very tender letters and the grandfather thrust into his pocket unread. End of book 3, chapter 2